an excerpt from the Dream Dialectic, The Little Death, released in March 2014. You can grab a copy either in person or by sending me an email. More information about the book is available here.
Sitting on top of an RV on top of a mountain outside of Brattleboro in southern Vermont I stare up at the night sky and become completely unnerved as stars swirl like galaxies above my tiny insignificant head. The feeling drops like a brick to my gut and I shiver with new found consciousness shocking light down my spinal cord in quick painful succession. The old ego dies. Its back breaks in two. I feel it. A quick snap and I am thrown through a wandering black hole of infinite nothingness heavy with the weight of a thousand stars. My hands legs and feet all fall out from beneath me. I tirelessly grapple with the sleeping bag trying to block out this insane vision of vivid reality. Sweat runs down my brow. I am cold sober and yet I am having the first purely hallucinogenic experience of this lifetime.
I am nothing. And therefore I am everything.
The Little Death often creeps up on the spectator like a ghost under frozen water. His density is the same as the blackest sun in the galaxy. His potency is as soluble and possibly more explosive than McKenna’s fabled “hero dose”. To some the Little Death is an actual life ender. To everyone a response of absolute fear is most likely. There are very many who exit this space of the mind insane and very few who come out with a full understanding of this wholly singular moment. But everyone who experiences the Little Death is forever changed.
In those stars I see my own insignificance. They are infinite and I am only one. I have never seen stars like those. So many. So pure. Eternal flames burning longer than time. Circling around each flame an even more infinite number of planets just like ours. Or drastically different. Life forms the human mind cannot comprehend. Life styles the human being was never meant to understand. Dimensions parallel and tangential. Everything is infinite. And I experience the ego shudder back in horror as it realizes its own lack of significance. It literally turns white with fear. A coward by nature. It sees its own death of importance and then goes on and actually dies. I an empty shell am left there for a multitude of moments without a single thought. No inner voice. Nothing.
And that is when the beauty starts.
The Little Death is the great life bringer. Out of the ash grows a truer soul. Once the ego is peeled back and discarded reality opens up like a flower. One experiences a connection with their own values and from this a better understanding for the workings surrounding them. For once they are allied with the earth the heavens and the hells in a counterbalance of various flat lines and linear meanings. They are no longer alone. They have infinite being in front of them. And behind them lies only more greener infinity. Past lives past traumas past confusions suddenly seem all that more wonderful in their dissolution. One and everything. The dreamer awakens and realizes his visions of extraordinary are finite and yet everlasting. One with everything. No other truer self than the self that stands allied with all that surrounds him.
In the dark the stars continue to swirl and a close by stream continues to trickle. Other than this there is absolute silence. The fear lies in the silence for at any moment something monstrous should come out and rip the boy to shreds. But it does not come. The boy lays there waiting and with each waking moment he feels lighter and lighter. With his own insignificance comes a release from all guilty delusion and bad tide. A final surrender to the flow that is his nature. He is nothing by pure calculation, and yet the ratio that briefs his untimely end is a golden ratio. He burns bright in the night like those innumerable stars. A star himself finding his own gravitation. For the first time everything is transparent. Nothing and everything. He shines brighter. The ego is long dead. The night consumes him. And he shines brighter.
We are all stars in a great sea of stars shining brighter than the universe ever saw possible.
The Life and Works of Marshall James Kavanaugh 