GoKawiilThere was a morning when I could not eat a bowl of granola at a normal speed.
I was at a long table with other people who had been up all the same night. There was fruit. There was tea nobody was drinking. And there was a bowl in front of me, and I was lifting the spoon, and the lifting was taking a very long time, and I was aware of it taking a very long time and could not make it go any faster.
One of the guides came and sat near me and watched this for a while. Then she leaned in, warmly, the way you do when you think you are witnessing something, and asked whether I was finding some wisdom in the granola.
I told her the truth, which was: no, I'm just really high right now.
I was not being modest. I was reporting. It had been an ayahuasca ceremony, and whatever came through it had not finished going through me, and my whole system was still ringing. The slowness she was watching was a body that could not currently run its ordinary programs. Interesting in the specific way a fever is interesting.
What brought me down was a bath.
Later that morning they poured flower water over me, outside, a bucket at a time, and it was cold, and somewhere around the second or third pour I came back into my body the way a foot comes back after you have been sitting on it. Water on skin. That was the whole intervention. Not insight. Not integration circle. Water.
I have thought about that morning for a long time, and about the guide's question, which was kind and completely wrong, and I have come to think it contains the answer to something you asked me.
The Question You Asked
You read the last essay and you wanted more. You wanted to go further in: past the ego, past the personality, past the whole apparatus of name and history. What is the Self, actually? What's there beyond the body and the mind?
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