Facing Our Demons
i wrote a paper about my demon and related issues. it's kinda long, but i'm wondering your opinions on these topics. i guess i just don't hear these things discussed much.
Facing Our Demons
Last summer, in 2004, my world turned inside out. I questioned my sanity as my mind contacted forces I couldn’t rationally explain. Now, over a year later, I’m still trying to explain what happened and how to interpret and incorporate what I’ve learned from the experience into ‘standard’ daily life. I’m referring to my month-long haunting by a Native American demon in the San Juan Islands. I’m not going to document the events of that month, mostly because I think the story must be told verbally in person, but I’ll describe what lead me to this plateau of complete disorientation and spiritual questioning, and what’s happened since.
I’ve been obsessed with the culture of the 1960s since my childhood. My parents went to Michigan and Berkeley, lived in the San Francisco area, and raised me with folk music in a politically liberal environment. Instead of the standard adolescent rebellion, I already had freedom from former counterculture parents (where I could openly discuss sex and drugs), and I soon adopted their generation as my own, seemingly trapped in an era long before my own birth. The music and the politics resonated deep within me-Bob Dylan and the Beatles, Civil Rights and anti-war movements, tie-dyed shirts and sandals-yet, I seemed to be lacking something: I didn’t feel any connection to the spiritual awakening that seemed so pervasive from that era.
And then I realized a fundamental part of the culture I’d been missing: psychedelic drugs. I’d read about Acid Tests, Don Juan and shamans, and the Beatles’ experimentation with LSD, but I’d yet to take the trip, scared at the possibilities I’d read about. During Winter Break at the end of 2003, I ate a small amount of mushrooms at a friend’s cabin where I experienced blissful euphoria, paralyzing fear of death, loss of time, mirror reflections talking back independently, and speed-thoughts sweeping through my head. I had stepped into the pool of awareness and finally felt the water, which was both frightening and wonderful, and I soon began looking for that mystery in everyday life.
When I returned home again over the summer, I took the full plunge. I’ve never written about this experience before, but like the demon (which would happen about a month later), its memory has been so ingrained that I’ve never needed to document it; life-changing moments have their own place without words. Also, there’s a taboo when discussing drugs and demons: it contradicts many people’s belief systems and they don’t want to listen. Anyway, I ingested a large dose of mushrooms and entered a forest near Seattle. The most significant part of this 8-hour trip in the nighttime forest lasted about 20 minutes. I had become an explorer, wandering a strange land and noticing every detail around me, feeling energies from certain trees. As I noticed my own thoughts, the words dissolved. I stood in the darkness and shed my identity (couldn’t recall my name or familiarity with my body) and could not think anymore. A bright orange-pink glow seemed to come down from the stars, wrapping around me and carrying me off, and I heard a voice say inside of me, which I’ll never forget, “This is what’s really going on, always and forever, if you stop looking for something else.” The next day, everything around me seemed fresh and unique.
So, about a month later, I went off to work at a summer camp in the San Juan Islands, excited to live in the trees, hike trails, and build fires on the beaches. The mushroom trip had destroyed any sense of self-importance at the time (and I fought it from slowly building afterwards) and the new people I met at camp all had the ‘bright orange-pink glow’ inside them if I paid enough attention. But one of the guys working there, Michael, gave off a strange energy (he would also chop an axe dangerously close to my campers). One night, we were talking down on the beach, and he brought up his Cree Indian heritage. I’ve always been interested in Native traditions, but when I asked him to elaborate on his family history of the supernatural, he refused and warned me not to ask again. I kept pressing him, my curiosity building, and then he looked deep into my eyes, smirked, and laughed loud. He asked if I was ready and then told me about a particular demon-what it looked like, where it appears, and how it haunted him and his family-and then warned to never think of it again, to forget everything immediately.
I didn’t believe it. I thought he was interesting, but insane. A year earlier, I had been fairly confident in my after-life scenario: our whole existence lies in the brain, and when that stops working, we simply turn off, similar to our consciousness before our birth. When we die, we decompose in the ground and that’s all. What had slightly altered my confidence in this, however, happened earlier that summer, when I found out about my friend’s haunted house. I’d never really spent time at his house, but as I sat in his living room, I felt the room change, like some sudden presence, cold and surrounding. When I told him about my discomfort, he told me about the history of the house and how the former owner had been buried in the backyard and now acts almost like a guardian. This scared the hell out of me and we got out of there. I couldn’t explain it, I just felt it.
Still though, while my understanding of the explainable world had been shaken-by the mushroom trips and the experience in the haunted house-Michael’s demon story seemed like too much. But over the next month, things started happening. I’m not going to tell the whole story here, because I feel it needs the personal voice to really communicate the events, but here are a few strange coincidences that happened exactly when I thought of the demon’s name-circling footsteps and cracking branches in an open field, circling footsteps around the tipi, power outage when I look in the mirror, cloud of a hundred crows sweeping in front of my bike, dying seals at our campsite, dream catcher exploding in a dream and immediately waking up to hear screeching from the woods.
When we biked to Watmough Bay, the site of a tribal massacre (not my first choice), my campers slept under the drooping branches of the “Spirit Tree,” where the Samish tribe used to hang dead enemies. My campers woke up in the middle of the night recalling the same dream in the same three colors. Another camper woke up and saw a glowing-green Indian women singing from the beach. I slept far away from these kids and heard about it in the morning, when they promised to stop talking about it. They were scared. The whole camp had been talking about the demon-either disbelieving it or acknowledging it and sharing their own private encounters with the supernatural.
I thought I’d lost my mind; that I was in some dream that wouldn’t end. I was mostly pissed off at Michael for cursing me. I tried to dismiss it with scientific explanations, but things kept happening that I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t ignore that something bad was around me. I would’ve attributed it to an “active imagination,” but it happened outside of my own head with other people who could corroborate: power outage, screeching from the woods, crows in front of us, dying seals, campers’ dreams, etc. I had been susceptible to scaring myself, but too many things kept adding up.
The exposure to such an overwhelming and otherworldly force wiped out my earlier notions of souls and death and, basically, everything beyond the material world. I’m always cautious of sounding too self-absorbed when retelling this experience because I don’t want to sound like I’m “so aware” and that I’ve tapped into something beyond the common person, because I honestly have no idea what really went on that month or the rules of the spirit world or anything like that. I just know what I felt and how my logic collapsed. And as I read about shamans and the mystical religions of the world, there seems to be an underlying thread connecting my demon to these teachings.
Along with my obsession of the 1960s culture, I’d turned to Eastern philosophy like many icons of the era-the Beatles, Beat poets, Timothy Leary in his interpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, etc-and started reading Hermann Hesse before diving into Taoist and Buddhist texts. And when I could read these mysterious riddles from Chinese sages through the mind of my forest mushroom trip, my body would tingle and my head would collapse. And this is how I would eventually overcome the demon.
I didn’t know what this demon wanted. And I had trouble accepting that simply thinking of its name could cause real physical actions around me. But eventually, after enough traumatizing, I had to stop it-I wasn’t getting much sleep (because of intense disorienting dreams) and couldn’t watch my campers with my mind so distracted and frantic throughout the day. I started questioning reality.
I realized that many levels of reality exist simultaneously around us. I had been perceiving through lower levels for most of my life. And, while I’d attempted to climb higher through meditation, I couldn’t maintain the discipline and eventually took the shortcut through psychedelic drugs. The demon, however, seemed to exist on an entirely different level, yet still influenced the lower physical levels, and I couldn’t escape it. But I felt that if I could somehow climb past the “spirit/demon level” to some higher level, then it could generate a stronger influence, affecting the demon level and the lower ones as well. But without something higher than that spirit/demon world, I remained trapped.
I had to remember the lessons I’d learned from the forest mushroom trip. That moment had stripped away my entire notion of myself. Throughout our lives, we’re constantly seeking to better ourselves, to win awards, get good grades, make money, earn respect, have people like us and approve and love us. We build a personality that we strive to maintain. And it’s controlled through our words and thoughts and ideas. Once I lost that self-defense inner-monologue that maintained my identity, I merged with the ‘orange-pink glow’ and (I know this sounds cliché, but) I could simply be. I realize that the moment probably lasted a little less than 20 minutes (in the physical lower-level world), but it was an eternity on the higher level.
I’ve realized that fear thrives in the lower levels. The lower levels seem to value a raw evolutionary model with the physical fight for survival. Basically, fear serves selfish needs because we feel afraid when our self-interest seems threatened. Therefore, my fear of this Native American demon existed because I held so tightly to my own well-being. If I could leave myself behind and just be, then I would have nothing to fear; no antagonistic force could penetrate the simple act of existing. And if I died, then I would welcome that new realm of consciousness. The best self-defense in this situation was to let go of my self-defense.
On our bike trip during the height of the haunting, I’d been reading Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East, where he says to “throw your baggage overboard and sail on.” I finished the book on our way to another historically Native American campsite on Lopez Island. As we set up camp, two rainbows appeared above us, intertwined like a double helix, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. All of my campers took pictures. The higher level dominated the fear of the demon.
It’s been almost a year and a half since that Summer of Consciousness. I’ve avoided psychedelics and returned to a more natural and permanent development process through meditation-sitting, walking, and through music. My psychology class has fueled this healthy development and reaffirmed the realizations I’d had last summer-that there is more lying below the surface of ‘standard’ daily life than what we think we see, that we can rise above the physical world to new realms of consciousness, and that our self-interest often chains us down for a fleeting pleasure. We don’t have everything figured out, and when something rattles us, we learn from it and float on.
I had been searching for a new vocabulary to describe these experiences, to share them with others and not hide my most life-changing moments, and I’ve found an amazing similarity in the writings of the esoteric religions. I’d been fighting the memory of the demon, but have recently learned its valuable teachings, much like Hermann Hesse advises: “I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.” I’ve learned that it requires risk and danger and mental exhaustion to give up our hold on ourselves and everything around us. And while I’ve only glimpsed this, I can see the pure joy that comes from realizing one’s own existence in this mysterious world.
Facing Our Demons
Last summer, in 2004, my world turned inside out. I questioned my sanity as my mind contacted forces I couldn’t rationally explain. Now, over a year later, I’m still trying to explain what happened and how to interpret and incorporate what I’ve learned from the experience into ‘standard’ daily life. I’m referring to my month-long haunting by a Native American demon in the San Juan Islands. I’m not going to document the events of that month, mostly because I think the story must be told verbally in person, but I’ll describe what lead me to this plateau of complete disorientation and spiritual questioning, and what’s happened since.
I’ve been obsessed with the culture of the 1960s since my childhood. My parents went to Michigan and Berkeley, lived in the San Francisco area, and raised me with folk music in a politically liberal environment. Instead of the standard adolescent rebellion, I already had freedom from former counterculture parents (where I could openly discuss sex and drugs), and I soon adopted their generation as my own, seemingly trapped in an era long before my own birth. The music and the politics resonated deep within me-Bob Dylan and the Beatles, Civil Rights and anti-war movements, tie-dyed shirts and sandals-yet, I seemed to be lacking something: I didn’t feel any connection to the spiritual awakening that seemed so pervasive from that era.
And then I realized a fundamental part of the culture I’d been missing: psychedelic drugs. I’d read about Acid Tests, Don Juan and shamans, and the Beatles’ experimentation with LSD, but I’d yet to take the trip, scared at the possibilities I’d read about. During Winter Break at the end of 2003, I ate a small amount of mushrooms at a friend’s cabin where I experienced blissful euphoria, paralyzing fear of death, loss of time, mirror reflections talking back independently, and speed-thoughts sweeping through my head. I had stepped into the pool of awareness and finally felt the water, which was both frightening and wonderful, and I soon began looking for that mystery in everyday life.
When I returned home again over the summer, I took the full plunge. I’ve never written about this experience before, but like the demon (which would happen about a month later), its memory has been so ingrained that I’ve never needed to document it; life-changing moments have their own place without words. Also, there’s a taboo when discussing drugs and demons: it contradicts many people’s belief systems and they don’t want to listen. Anyway, I ingested a large dose of mushrooms and entered a forest near Seattle. The most significant part of this 8-hour trip in the nighttime forest lasted about 20 minutes. I had become an explorer, wandering a strange land and noticing every detail around me, feeling energies from certain trees. As I noticed my own thoughts, the words dissolved. I stood in the darkness and shed my identity (couldn’t recall my name or familiarity with my body) and could not think anymore. A bright orange-pink glow seemed to come down from the stars, wrapping around me and carrying me off, and I heard a voice say inside of me, which I’ll never forget, “This is what’s really going on, always and forever, if you stop looking for something else.” The next day, everything around me seemed fresh and unique.
So, about a month later, I went off to work at a summer camp in the San Juan Islands, excited to live in the trees, hike trails, and build fires on the beaches. The mushroom trip had destroyed any sense of self-importance at the time (and I fought it from slowly building afterwards) and the new people I met at camp all had the ‘bright orange-pink glow’ inside them if I paid enough attention. But one of the guys working there, Michael, gave off a strange energy (he would also chop an axe dangerously close to my campers). One night, we were talking down on the beach, and he brought up his Cree Indian heritage. I’ve always been interested in Native traditions, but when I asked him to elaborate on his family history of the supernatural, he refused and warned me not to ask again. I kept pressing him, my curiosity building, and then he looked deep into my eyes, smirked, and laughed loud. He asked if I was ready and then told me about a particular demon-what it looked like, where it appears, and how it haunted him and his family-and then warned to never think of it again, to forget everything immediately.
I didn’t believe it. I thought he was interesting, but insane. A year earlier, I had been fairly confident in my after-life scenario: our whole existence lies in the brain, and when that stops working, we simply turn off, similar to our consciousness before our birth. When we die, we decompose in the ground and that’s all. What had slightly altered my confidence in this, however, happened earlier that summer, when I found out about my friend’s haunted house. I’d never really spent time at his house, but as I sat in his living room, I felt the room change, like some sudden presence, cold and surrounding. When I told him about my discomfort, he told me about the history of the house and how the former owner had been buried in the backyard and now acts almost like a guardian. This scared the hell out of me and we got out of there. I couldn’t explain it, I just felt it.
Still though, while my understanding of the explainable world had been shaken-by the mushroom trips and the experience in the haunted house-Michael’s demon story seemed like too much. But over the next month, things started happening. I’m not going to tell the whole story here, because I feel it needs the personal voice to really communicate the events, but here are a few strange coincidences that happened exactly when I thought of the demon’s name-circling footsteps and cracking branches in an open field, circling footsteps around the tipi, power outage when I look in the mirror, cloud of a hundred crows sweeping in front of my bike, dying seals at our campsite, dream catcher exploding in a dream and immediately waking up to hear screeching from the woods.
When we biked to Watmough Bay, the site of a tribal massacre (not my first choice), my campers slept under the drooping branches of the “Spirit Tree,” where the Samish tribe used to hang dead enemies. My campers woke up in the middle of the night recalling the same dream in the same three colors. Another camper woke up and saw a glowing-green Indian women singing from the beach. I slept far away from these kids and heard about it in the morning, when they promised to stop talking about it. They were scared. The whole camp had been talking about the demon-either disbelieving it or acknowledging it and sharing their own private encounters with the supernatural.
I thought I’d lost my mind; that I was in some dream that wouldn’t end. I was mostly pissed off at Michael for cursing me. I tried to dismiss it with scientific explanations, but things kept happening that I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t ignore that something bad was around me. I would’ve attributed it to an “active imagination,” but it happened outside of my own head with other people who could corroborate: power outage, screeching from the woods, crows in front of us, dying seals, campers’ dreams, etc. I had been susceptible to scaring myself, but too many things kept adding up.
The exposure to such an overwhelming and otherworldly force wiped out my earlier notions of souls and death and, basically, everything beyond the material world. I’m always cautious of sounding too self-absorbed when retelling this experience because I don’t want to sound like I’m “so aware” and that I’ve tapped into something beyond the common person, because I honestly have no idea what really went on that month or the rules of the spirit world or anything like that. I just know what I felt and how my logic collapsed. And as I read about shamans and the mystical religions of the world, there seems to be an underlying thread connecting my demon to these teachings.
Along with my obsession of the 1960s culture, I’d turned to Eastern philosophy like many icons of the era-the Beatles, Beat poets, Timothy Leary in his interpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, etc-and started reading Hermann Hesse before diving into Taoist and Buddhist texts. And when I could read these mysterious riddles from Chinese sages through the mind of my forest mushroom trip, my body would tingle and my head would collapse. And this is how I would eventually overcome the demon.
I didn’t know what this demon wanted. And I had trouble accepting that simply thinking of its name could cause real physical actions around me. But eventually, after enough traumatizing, I had to stop it-I wasn’t getting much sleep (because of intense disorienting dreams) and couldn’t watch my campers with my mind so distracted and frantic throughout the day. I started questioning reality.
I realized that many levels of reality exist simultaneously around us. I had been perceiving through lower levels for most of my life. And, while I’d attempted to climb higher through meditation, I couldn’t maintain the discipline and eventually took the shortcut through psychedelic drugs. The demon, however, seemed to exist on an entirely different level, yet still influenced the lower physical levels, and I couldn’t escape it. But I felt that if I could somehow climb past the “spirit/demon level” to some higher level, then it could generate a stronger influence, affecting the demon level and the lower ones as well. But without something higher than that spirit/demon world, I remained trapped.
I had to remember the lessons I’d learned from the forest mushroom trip. That moment had stripped away my entire notion of myself. Throughout our lives, we’re constantly seeking to better ourselves, to win awards, get good grades, make money, earn respect, have people like us and approve and love us. We build a personality that we strive to maintain. And it’s controlled through our words and thoughts and ideas. Once I lost that self-defense inner-monologue that maintained my identity, I merged with the ‘orange-pink glow’ and (I know this sounds cliché, but) I could simply be. I realize that the moment probably lasted a little less than 20 minutes (in the physical lower-level world), but it was an eternity on the higher level.
I’ve realized that fear thrives in the lower levels. The lower levels seem to value a raw evolutionary model with the physical fight for survival. Basically, fear serves selfish needs because we feel afraid when our self-interest seems threatened. Therefore, my fear of this Native American demon existed because I held so tightly to my own well-being. If I could leave myself behind and just be, then I would have nothing to fear; no antagonistic force could penetrate the simple act of existing. And if I died, then I would welcome that new realm of consciousness. The best self-defense in this situation was to let go of my self-defense.
On our bike trip during the height of the haunting, I’d been reading Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East, where he says to “throw your baggage overboard and sail on.” I finished the book on our way to another historically Native American campsite on Lopez Island. As we set up camp, two rainbows appeared above us, intertwined like a double helix, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. All of my campers took pictures. The higher level dominated the fear of the demon.
It’s been almost a year and a half since that Summer of Consciousness. I’ve avoided psychedelics and returned to a more natural and permanent development process through meditation-sitting, walking, and through music. My psychology class has fueled this healthy development and reaffirmed the realizations I’d had last summer-that there is more lying below the surface of ‘standard’ daily life than what we think we see, that we can rise above the physical world to new realms of consciousness, and that our self-interest often chains us down for a fleeting pleasure. We don’t have everything figured out, and when something rattles us, we learn from it and float on.
I had been searching for a new vocabulary to describe these experiences, to share them with others and not hide my most life-changing moments, and I’ve found an amazing similarity in the writings of the esoteric religions. I’d been fighting the memory of the demon, but have recently learned its valuable teachings, much like Hermann Hesse advises: “I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.” I’ve learned that it requires risk and danger and mental exhaustion to give up our hold on ourselves and everything around us. And while I’ve only glimpsed this, I can see the pure joy that comes from realizing one’s own existence in this mysterious world.