“Existential crisis” is one of those non-expressions that hints at much but says little, for it means something different to everyone and those who have truly had a crisis will find it hard to express the internal gravity of what it entailed. Crisis, I think, is a default state of existence for some and a periodic interlude of thought for others, and thoughts always appear more substantive in the dark cavern of the mind—once they are released to daylight as a whisper into a trusted ear or a shout into the forest, they become weightless, body-less, and seemingly less real than they once were when held in mental captivity.
There’s something about the written word that gives those thoughts more form, at least in passing. At times I feel writing is the highest intellectual pursuit, the tail of consciousness setting off in search of its exact identity despite knowing the seeker will never catch up to the sought after. At others the attempt to give experience a body—to claim, this is what’s real—seems futile, for reality is almost always interpretive, constructed with the distortions of the mind and not something that can be witnessed independently.
Google says reality is (n.) the world or the state of things as they actually exist. But reality typically belongs to the perceiver; we live far from the no man’s land unclouded by conditioning and judgment. We live in the world of pattern recognition, induction and deduction, and I think and I wonder what he thinks and oh god, what does he think I think, rather than the world in which we are. We may share the grass beneath our feet and the sun that colors our skin, but my reality will necessarily diverge from yours; we’re lucky for our worlds to cross but they will never meet in alignment.
Psychedelics are one thing that remind me just how subjective reality is. They remind me how the cover of ‘truth’ I’ve meticulously woven all my life, stitch by stitch with reason to a fault, is just a cover. A tab of LSD slashes through the restrictive fabric of default perception to reveal a layer in which sensory processing is associative and the heavy gravitational force of ego loosens its grip—I think becomes I am, and if I’m lucky I am becomes I with a dotted line or maybe no I at all.
In June I went on a weeklong silent meditation retreat that turned out to be unexpectedly similar to a small dose of shrooms. I started to feel that shrooms were… true. And if mindfulness and little magical mushrooms were both true, then perhaps my average waking reality was less real than I thought.
Behind meditation theory is the thoroughly meta idea that we spend our lives living inside a consciousness we inherit, peering out at the world through the glass, yet hardly any time studying the lens that refracts everything we see. Day after day we collect our thoughts as they float past the window and weave them into a story we objectively call identity.
After a few days of sitting I started to notice, first, that I was not in control of my own thoughts. I noticed how erratic—like completely off the rails, more prone to malfunction than not—my brain was, and how hard it was to think about what I’d set out to think about for even a minute, let alone five. I noticed how every thought arose in the imagination before reason latched on to give it structure, and by extension how I was not the thinker of my thoughts at their source but the observer witnessing them secondhand. My sense of ‘self’ became much less solid, more a cloud of awareness floating through detached experiences in space and time than a concrete ball of existence snowballed up over the continuum of a life. I noticed how thoughts slowly turned from opaque to translucent before scattering like air, and how in the absence of thoughts to hold onto the I became rather weak, an NPC slipping away into the background to reveal no Player One in command.
Our relationship to our thoughts is as obvious and deeply profound as remembering the window is made of glass. Reality is as real as what we can see outside, while backing up to inspect the glass reveals large patches that are cloudy where they were assumed to be clear. That may also explain why thoughts are at once so seemingly real and not, buried forces of physics that barely scratch the surface, changing nothing and everything.