Edinburgh

March 1980, Arthur’s Seat overlooking the city at 2 am.

I come here often, striding the massive hill at all hours of the night. These days I am sleeping only every other day because I crave the fugue state that overtakes me on my nights awake. This night, I have been reading Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man and am captivated by his idea of the noosphere, a kind of global consciousness transcendent and integrative of ordinary, unitary consciousness. I feel I am on to something big, sensing insights just across the divide waiting for me to reach out and bring them home.

I stand with my chin out, gaze upward at the sky, stretch my arms out and back, my feet planted firmly at the crest of the hill, the wind whispering through my wild hair and beard. As I stand there, sending my mind out into the universe, I am carried aloft, a rushing torrent of energy surging upward through my body from the earth out into infinite sky. And I see, I hear, I know things that can never be contained by words. I sense the ever-growing tide of consciousness, the universe seeking to know itself, a kind of coagulation of awareness that drives the coalescence of order out of chaos, the evolution and ascendance of life and the mind.

I know in this moment that our understanding of life, of ourselves, of consciousness is a trivial shard of the grand whole. I have been given a glimpse of the whole, and I feel it is up to me to deliver this vision to the world.

Later, I encounter a friend and struggle to communicate what I have seen. I give up without much of an effort – it seems pointless, and I feel a deep, aching pain.

Philadelphia

October 1980, a West Philly row home

Back at Penn, I find myself isolated, unable to accept the pre-professional, materialistic culture that surrounds me. The coming year is difficult, painful, and challenging. I take a class in neuropsychology, and others in creative writing. I’m living in a co-op with some granola-chomping activists with whom I don’t feel much in common. My old friends seem distant and unable to understand me. I feel desperate and unsure of my future. It feels like a cruel joke, to have been given this grand vision of reality with no way to squeeze it into the common dross of everyday life and everyday people.

My sister comes to visit, and is freaked out by my rejection of Catholicism and my talk of saving the world. Later, my parents come for a visit, and want to take me to visit a psychiatrist. I agree with a wry, self-confident smile. I am clever enough to talk about my experiences with a droll sense of humor, wink-winking at my shared membership with the doctor in the elite-intellectual club, and do not show the deep pain I feel. He gives me a clean bill of mental health. I feel a strange separation from myself, watching my parents drive away.

High, low, and again

Vignettes like the one above were repeated countless times throughout my twenties and early thirties. I chose the first moment because it seems more than any other to have been the initiation into the deep cycling of the pattern. The extreme nature of that transcendent, noetic state intensified my already-existing belief that no one would ever be able to understand me, setting up a deep and abiding loneliness. The second moment could have been selected from any of dozens of abject low points, and I could just as easily have selected from dozens of other highs as well.

(Excerpt from a book draft written in 2007.)