The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 110 of 125
I am everything I behold
“People may sense internal organs and physiological processes usually kept out of consciousness.” That was exactly what had just happened to me when I felt I was seeing the internal structure of the eye. Then I began to wonder whether the same mechanism couldn’t have been behind my experience earlier in the trip (and behind the identical and equally electrifying insight the previous summer) that “I had become everything.” At the time I had interpreted this, in a distinctly woolly minded way, as meaning that I had become one with everything in some “mystical” nondual sense. Now I began to wonder whether the experience couldn’t be interpreted differently. Bear with me a moment. So far as I understand it, it is a commonplace of scientific thought that “the world” is in fact generated in our brains from data the objective nature of which we are, strictly speaking, almost entirely unaware; and that is then projected by us collectively as a solid three-dimensional world “out there.” Could what happened to me last summer have been that I suddenly glimpsed this processing at work? When I said “I am everything I behold,” the remark had been perfectly accurate, because my brain and the world are inseparably interrelated. “Processes usually kept out of consciousness” were abruptly laid bare. I was creating the trees, the bracken, the path—the holly bush under which I sheltered—just as surely as they were creating me. I was the world, and the world was me. This was objective “scientific” fact, there was nothing mystical about it. But what was it that had seen this? Bowled over by the intensity of the experience, I had entirely overlooked the nature of the experiencer. Had I always been a “witness” or “pure consciousness”—or a soul, or Love itself, if that sits better with you—entirely independent of the physical body, as though all my life I’d had my eye so tightly pressed to the sensory keyhole through which I was peering that I had long forgotten there was a keyhole there at all? Could I step back from the keyhole, back from the lock, from the door . . . and finally realize that I was something else entirely? Were we a qualitatively different entity that did not so much separate from the physical body at death as realize that it had never been one with it in the first place?