Who Am I?
Let me begin by telling you a story…
It’s a story about something extraordinary that happened to me when I was eleven years old. That was in 1961, during what economists call the Long Boom, when the American people as a whole achieved the highest level of affluence in recorded human history. It was the time of hula hoops and the coonskin cap, of Annette Funicello and the Mouseketeers, American Bandstand and Mad Magazine. Television was still new. We watched Leave it to Beaver, The Donna Reed Show and Father Knows Best.
PC’s and the Internet had not even been thought of. It was the time before the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of JFK. Long before Vietnam. These were the Eisenhower years; all but forgotten now but still looming large in the American psyche, for this is the era that folks think they are thinking of when they talk about making America great again.
I was living with my family in a small, quiet Pennsylvania town nestled in the Allegheny mountains and was just beginning to navigate the currents of adolescence; not quite on the cusp of puberty, a typical young lad of the time, although a voracious reader. It was one night during summer vacation. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened that day, nor during the days preceding. I was lying in my bed, beginning to drift off into sleep when, suddenly, out of nowhere, a thought emerged into my awareness:
Who am I?
It seemed almost as if I heard a voice asking the question inside my head, although at the same time, in some sense it seemed to be I who was asking it. Suddenly, horribly, it was like falling off a cliff. I was plunged into an abyss of absolute, unutterable terror.
Who am I?
Never in my life had I experienced anything remotely like this. Not in nightmare, not in waking life. I cannot to this day describe to you the nature of the fear that was engendered by this seeming simple phrase, let alone its terrible, all-encompassing power that seemed to unhinge my world from its very foundations.
Who am I?
The closest I can come to describing it was that I felt utterly and completely alone. It was as if the very underpinnings of my life, the world itself, had suddenly ceased to exist, leaving me terrifyingly isolated and alone in something like a vast emptiness.
Who am I?
In panic, I struggled desperately to reconstitute my world, to re-establish a sense of familiarity and order, but the question remained: insistent, irresistible, demanding, driving me deeper and deeper into that place of terror.
Who am I?
I could do nothing. Would this never end? Would I be lost in this horrifying void forever? But then, slowly, gradually, to my immense relief, the world began to take on its accustomed, familiar contours; the panic and terror and fear began to subside. Whatever it was, I felt I was coming out of it to become my normal self again, Kirk, lying in my bed in the room I shared with my brother as I always did, just before sleep.
I drifted off.
The next day I had forgotten the incident entirely. I went about my normal affairs until night began to cast her mantle over the world, and as I prepared myself for sleep once more in my bed, what had happened came back to me. Yes, I thought, that was really strange last night; the thing that had happened to me when that question came into my mind the way it did, of who am I, but…
Who am I?
And it happened again, exactly as before: the all-encompassing fear, the terrible, terrifying panic as my entire world became loosed from its moorings, leaving me lost, alone, in an unutterable emptiness that had no name or form. Again the seemingly endless struggle to find something to grasp, some sense of stability upon which to ground myself; again, finally, the sense of returning to normal reality at last; again the enormous sense of relief as the world re-constituted itself once more around me.
The next day, however, I remembered. As the long shadows of dusk threw themselves across the yard outside my window, I knew with absolute certainty that it was going to happen again. Then a thought came: what if I can just somehow manage to hold on; ride it out, let the fear happen, but not give in to it, not let it take me?
I decided to try it, and firm resolution swiftly followed decision. I lay in my bed, took a deep breath ,and uttered the words that invoked the spell:
Who am I?
Once more it came, the terrifying sense of the world falling away, leaving me utterly alone in a vastness that had no name or form, nothing whereby to orient myself. But this time it was different. I refused to surrender to the panic. Instead I just focused on being myself, letting the fear wash over me, as if I were an island of selfdom, holding myself to myself amidst the terrifying emptiness. The experience took its course until finally, just as on the preceding two nights, it finally subsided and the world returned.
I lay in my bed and thought: Well, I made it. And then: Actually, that wasn’t so bad.
Indeed, it hadn’t been. Now that I had survived, now that I had taken the measure of the experience, I realized it had actually been rather thrilling, almost enjoyable, like a good roller-coaster ride or shooting white-water rapids.
So the next day, when night came, I did not look forward to it with trepidation, but rather anticipation. I lay in my bed, prepared myself, and then uttered the words. Only now, where I had once desperately struggled in panic to return to some semblance of reality, now I rode the waves with assurance, thrilling to the feelings that surged through me, of the vast emptiness.
And so in this way, for about a week, each night before sleep I amused myself by surfing the Abyss. But the spell gradually wore off; the words lost their power. I shrugged and went on my life, but I never forgot.
And so that’s the story.
Now, here’s the commentary…
It was a “Spiritual Experience.”
The first point I wish to make is that what happened to me on that night in 1961 was what is usually described as a “spiritual experience,” although I certainly did not recognize it as such at the time. It was only many years later that I came to recognize it for what it was. But my second point is that, in a sense, there was really nothing “spiritual” about it at all, at least in the way that word is usually understood. In philosophical terms, my experience was pure. No context came along with it. No god or angel appeared; there was no revelation, no moral imperative. I was being raised as a Roman Catholic, yet it never occurred to me that I should associate anything having to do with religion with this experience. Not once.
This was one of the most powerful experiences I have ever had in my life yet, in a sense, it had no meaning. There was only I, the Question, and the Fear. The Question was sourceless; it had come from nowhere, and there was no higher or deeper meaning behind it, only the void, the absolute emptiness, that had so filled me with terror.
And who was it that asked the question? Was it I asking the question of myself, or something else asking it of me?
I suppose a good way to describe my lifelong engagement with philosophy, art, science and mysticism is as an attempt to answer the Question. And is it not true to say that this is what all of these fields are attempting to do – answer the question of who we are?
This experience has colored the whole way I have approached these issues: as something unfathomable, ineffable. It is why I felt such a surge of recognition and resonance when I first read this from the Rig Veda, speaking to me from out of thousands of years of our past:
Who truly knows? Who shall here proclaim it – whence they were produced, whence this creation? The gods arose with the creation of this physical reality, to which the gods belong; then who can know whence it came into being, whether it was established or whether not – perchance only he who rules it from the highest heaven, perchance only he alone knows, or perchance even he does not know. (X.129.6-7) [emphasis mine]
They are universal and primordial to us as a species
The Question arose in me spontaneously, out of nowhere. It had no context. Because of this, I have increasingly come to regard such experiences as natural to us as a species.
Beginning in the 19th century, and especially with the triumph of Darwinism, there has been much talk in the West of “uniting science and religion.” But it usually focuses on physics and cosmology rather than biology. But what if spiritual influence does not come down to us from on high, but rather rises out of the earth along with us? What if it came from the action of the sun, the constant stream of photons upon the primeval oceans of the planet whose mass the sun had captured and formed with its gravity - matter born in the heart of another star and launched outward in the explosive ecstasy of a supernova? The light-stream bringing forth life through that influence, adapting, evolving, plant and animal inextricably linked together, until one day there evolved an ape who looked up at the stars and uttered a sound that had meaning, and she understood that it had meaning, and so came upon the wonder of her own self-awareness. And that was the first “spiritual experience.” Did she feel fear and terror as I did? Who am I?
Perhaps she did. Consider this passage from the Bṛihadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad:
In the beginning there was the Self alone in the form of a person (puruṣa). Looking around, he saw nothing but his Self…He feared, and therefore anyone who is lonely fears. He thought, “As there is nothing but myself, why should I fear?” Thence his fear passed away. For what should he have feared? Verily fear arises from a second only ( 4 Br.I.4.1-2).
This is not exactly what I experienced when I was eleven, but note the common elements: the self, a sense of being alone, fear, and resolution of the fear. Could it be that what happened to me is not an isolated event but a specific type of experience, one common to members of our species?
You probably have had such experiences yourself, or others that have the same uncanny quality of taking you out of your ordinary world. Due to the nature of my own, I think they are part of our biological heritage as a primate species, and are at the root of why we create contexts to try and share and explain them.
They are never what we say and think they are.
Another way in which my youthful experience has profoundly effected me is that I have never fully given myself over to any system of belief. One of the most powerful inner experiences of my life had no form, no source: it was and remains ultimately mysterious. So I have never accepted the blandishments of the various religions and systems of belief at the face value their adherents place on them and urge for them: of conveying universal and absolute truth. You see, deep down I have always just known better, because of what happened to me when I was eleven. We clothe these experiences in structures of thought and forms of beauty in order to attempt to recapture them; to describe them to ourselves and others. But words and forms can never do this. They are useful tools, nothing more (and nothing less). So in my Work and Journey it is I who rule over systems and words, not the other way around. As Roger Zelazny writes:
No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him. He looks upon the great transformations of the world, but he does not see them as they were seen when man looked upon reality for the first time. Their names come to his lips and he smiles as he tastes them, thinking he knows them in the naming (32-33).
There was no such thing as religion before the emergence of civilization, but there have been human beings on this planet for over 200,000 years. They were like us, with brains like ours, and with the same inner yearnings of the heart as ours. And surely, many of them looked upon the Mystery. Yet they founded no great religions, no great systems. Each Shaman, each woman of knowledge, entered her own individual world of the spirits and each of these was different, just as each of us has different dreams. Religion only came with cities and agriculture, temples and palaces, priests and kings. The great doctrines and systems were created to provide guidance (and governance) for whole peoples, and finally to empires. And they have done their work well.
But as all the greatest teachers have reminded us, doctrines and systems can be a barrier rather than a gateway. And, at their worst, they can serve as excuses for us to inflict our cruelties upon other human beings (“Deus vult!” cried the crusader knights as their bloody swords rose and fell, slaughtering the infidel women and children: “God wills it!”).
But this is nothing more or less than the most advanced systems of spirituality – what we western scholars call the “tantric” - say about themselves. Here, for example, is Longchenpa:
Rely on the meaning, not on the words; rely on the teaching, not on the personality of the teacher; rely on the real meaning, not on the provisional meaning; and rely on primordial awareness, not on judgmental perceptions (6).
And yet, although forms and systems always fail to reach their ultimate goal of encompassing and understanding the Mystery, they are still touched by It in the attempt. And so it is through these forms and systems, especially the forms of beauty and the systems of thought, that the Mystery can begin to pervade. For the human heart makes beauty in order to recapture and remember what it has known, and that beauty recaptures a whisp, a suggestion of what we truly know, and so even though this beauty belongs to time, it is still visited by Eternity.
But the purpose of form and system is always to lead us beyond themselves. As Wittgenstein famously put it at the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
My words will make things clear only to she who finds them meaningless after she has used them to rise above them (she must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after she has climbed up on it). She must transcend these words, then she will see the world aright (6.54).
No spiritual tradition will survive the planetary crisis unscathed, any more than any other of our institutions. We are essentially in the trouble we are in because we are not willing to kick away the ladder. But the earth itself is kicking it away and, foolish tree-apes that we are, we are holding onto it for dear life as it falls into the abyss, instead of just embracing the fear and letting go, trusting that we may be lifted, like Gandalf letting himself fall from the pinnacle of Isengard, on the wings of eagles.
Notes
For the Long Boom, see John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State. .
Readers of Frank Herbert’s Dune will doubtless note the similarity of my procedure on the third night to the Litany Against Fear. Perhaps this is more evidence for the universality of this kind of experience.
Zelazny, Roger. Lord of Light. Wilder Publications, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Longchenpa. You Are the Eyes of the World. Shambhala. Kindle Edition.
I paraphrase Santayana: This divine beauty is evident, fugitive, impalpable, and homeless in the world of material fact; yet it is unmistakably individual and sufficient unto itself, and although perhaps eclipsed is never extinguished: for it visits time, but belongs to eternity. (RB 153-154)
Scholars of Wittgenstein will doubtless find my translation somewhat unusual, but I believe the scope of the German allows it. I’ve also taken the liberty of changing the pronouns to the one I prefer.
