An Exhalation of Exultation

An Exhalation of Exultation

(Editors Note: I'm a sophomore at the University of Miami and this post was originally written for my freedom of expression class, and the assignment was to simply write a blog post about whatever was on your mind. Psychedelics and my frustrations with the whole idea of college where on my mind on this day)

This post is one that lacks a certain point. It’s not about a current event, and its not aimed at swaying your beliefs. Rather , I am merely trying to help you open your eyes to a different paradigm or view on life itself, specifically college.

Why are you here? And by here I mean college, at the highly esteemed and world renowned University of Miami. Is it to obtain a higher education, a degree of some sort, or maybe even to launch you into graduate school? Is it to pursue your dreams? Maybe your here because you envision yourself “living the life” some several dozen or so years post graduation, fulfilling all your materialistic fantasies. Buying that car you’ve always wanted , settling down , starting a family, building your dream house and so on ad infinitum.

I, for one, am not here for any of those reasons, and quite honestly I am not too sure why I am here at all. I came into my freshman year of college here wide- eyed and naive , enthusiastically counting down the days until I could finally satiate the hungry anticipation of the “college experience” that lied ahead. If only I would have taken the “lies ahead” part more literally. I fully embraced the scene, the clubs, the hot weather and the even hotter woman that wade around the UM campus like some empty headed ibises, with Prada shades to boot. Things couldn’t be better.

But sometime around second semester of last year, I tired of it all. It was a simultaneous combustion of the accumulation of the synthetic , materialistic lifestyle taking its toll on a kid from a comparatively tame, suburban Upstate New York town, and the realization that the promise of a truly “higher education” was a hoax. So far, I’d just gotten higher. It all seemed fake, or like some artificial game or large scale social experiment, constructed by some evil scientists peering overhead, laughing at us in unison. It was beginning to feel as if each student is a lab rat, running relentlessly around and around a hamster wheel, err, campus , blindly pursuing degrees (the cheese) in the predetermined niches and fields that society has conveniently carved out for us; doctors, lawyers, journalists, scientists, talking heads and suits each in our own separate yet similar relentless pursuit of the almighty dollar. Everyone seemed like they’re just vying for first place in the rat, I mean, human race. An overwhelming feeling of “being had” had swept over me , a feeling that still resides to this day.

All of my friends here are all caught up in this game, in this pursuit for salvation through salary is I like to call it, and whenever I try to explain my view on college, (what I said in the above paragraph), I am greeted with skepticism , tuned out or the conversation is quickly diverted to a safer, more comforting topic , like the score of the latest Miami Heat game. I found solace in knowing that author Daniel Pinchbeck, author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl and editorial director of Reality Sandwich.com and Evolver.Net also shared my viewpoint on college and maturity. In his “2012″ book , Pinchbeck mused, “By the time I went to college I realized to my horror that “maturity ” meant accepting constraints and being bound to a limited career path, rather than blossoming into a deeper dimension of possibility and wonder.”

Later on, sometime early second semester, I had my first experiences with psychedelic drugs, mainly psilocybin mushrooms twice and acid once. I mention these experiences only because they have had a profound impact on my life, and have been a catalyst for a much needed change in it. It felt as if they had lifted a long dormant veil off of my mind, albeit briefly, and led me to question the existence of free will while also completely rearranging and suddenly forming my own new perspectives on life , reality, nature, and our human consciousness and many other realms of thought that I had never even stopped to think about or question before.

I would love to divulge on my own perspective of the experience of “tripping” but I think what Daniel Pinchbeck said in his book , Breaking Open The Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, does the job. “Ecstasy that is also humiliating sobriety , an apt description of tripping- can awaken individuals by snapping him or her out of the monotonous trance of modern life.”

Before I ventured into the mystical realm of psychotropic drugs, (which I have since deemed unnecessary in my life now that I am somewhat awakened and in tune to what that I believe their message is, or as philosopher Alan Watts said about psychedelics, “Once you get the message, hang up the phone”), I was leading life like a race horse; blinders strapped to the head, keeping its vision forward, never knowing anything but the straight path that lay directly in front, completely lacking the power to question what existed to either the left or right of what I “saw” , or what I thought I knew. Psychedelics took those suckers off for good. And I see now that a vast majority of Americans live “blind”, not just in the sense that they haven’t popped some mushrooms, but in the sense that their thoughts are molded and shaped by the media, government and many other nefarious factions.

Psychedelics helped me tremendously in taking the first giant step to cleanse my mind of notions and ideas that were always inherently alien to it, or all the ideas and thoughts that I have consumed and digested throughout my life, and incited within me a new found ability to question what I had always taken for fact, rather then just regurgitating whatever was force fed down my throat in school or on the news. I began to search for truths that had been lacking in many facets of my life; such as the utter castration of any legitimate sense of spirituality within it, a byproduct of the overtly preachy dogma of my Catholic upbringing, one which substitutes true spirituality and any sense of nature with an artificial super-naturalism, or as Watts puts it in his essay Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen,”a politically ordered cosmology, and technology, with its imperialistic mechanization of a natural world from which man himself seems strangely alien… reflecting a psychology in which man is identified with a conscious intelligence and will standing apart from nature to control it, like the architect-God in whose image this vision of man is conceived.”

I began to see my life in a different light, and it was a sobering reality to suddenly see escapism through entertainment and diversions through a deluge of media , popping up in all sorts of places that I used to find comfort and solace in. My previous obsession of football and sports in general had been tempered. Video games finally seemed like what they always were, which is a mindless waste of time. My previous daily ritualistic-like workout routine seemed like a futile attempt at impressing the empty headed bombshells on campus , permanently blinded from reality by their over sized sunglasses and falsely inflated sense of self worth through material possessions and VIP tables, trying their damnedest to keep up with the Kardashians. Facebook and other forms of social networking seemed like a dimly lit facade meant to help corporations profit while you are kept distracted, continuously displaying your ego, your flattered self , that is in a constant and dire need of attention and validation through the form of wall posts and “likes”.

I started reading more, watching less. Picked my real guitar back up, buried Guitar Hero into the depths of some dumpster. I began to disassociate myself from all the things that I was now realizing were merely ideals that were completely abstract from my true inner self, and that these things have been indoctrinated within us all in order to get us to associate and accept these escapes and distractions within our life with, well , the real “living”, or the validation of putting up with a monotonous, insipid job , like being a lawyer or working a 9 to 5 job.

The foremost interpreter of Eastern philosophy for the West, Alan Watts puts it perfectly when he said, “To keep up with this so called standard of living most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist in doing jobs that are a bore , earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure…These intervals are supposed to be the real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work.”

The “intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure” part is one that became glaringly obvious to me once I came to Miami. Sure, in high school there were house parties, but those were about to seem like distant memories of my less privileged partying past compared to the high end clubbing that the neon lights of South Beach advertised. First semester, I dove headfirst into the scene of excess and overindulgence , spending my weekdays waiting till Friday night would come again. This cycle went on until I dabbled in psychedelics. Post-mushrooms, I felt like the past semester that I’d spent drowning my liver and draining my wallet was really just a ” consumerist substitute for true feeling or communion… a pursuit of altered states in a destructive way,” as Pinchbeck put it in “2012″.

I believe that there is indeed a very important message to be received from psychedelics, a message highly unique to each individual in the form of its delivery, yet ultimately the same in the transfer of one of its many messages; reality, as we have come to know it , is a lie, a fabrication that has been stitched into the very fabric of our being through many different methods of indoctrination (television, advertising, school, religion, etc.) and whose overarching goal is to shape and mold our beliefs and ideals, with the end result aimed towards their best interest, which is turning people into commodities, mindless robots, dumb and docile, continuously distracted and constantly desiring more and more unneeded shit, perpetually increasing their bottom line while ensuring that everybody’s singing along to whatever’s on iTunes top 10.

I came into college as a writer, pursuing lofty journalistic dreams of making a difference in the world through the use of words. I have since changed my major to creative writing, since have I realized that I would never survive in the news industry, nor would I want too, as my tolerance for the constant bullshit that they feed society and spin as essential, pertinent information, which is by and large highly useless and inessential, is far too low. We must all realize that breaking news is what it says it is; broken. The daily news has transformed into a daily noose for the masses; chocking off their intellect, castrating their consciousness, while they devour mostly mindless facts about random people/events in their local community and national society that corporations deem need to know info.

My naivete has since been slayed , to an extent, since there are many things that I now know that a college degree cannot and will not ever teach me. I have lately become rather disinterested in many of my classes, not because I am either lazy or unmotivated, rather, anything that professors preach and stand for seems empty and hollow , as if they are puppets on a string doing the same dance that virtually everyone else around me is doing. Which is the never-ending dance towards the dollar. People seem pushed along, driven by this monetary vehicle while they sit blindfolded in the back seat, praying that it takes them where they so desperately want to be. This blind, heedless pursuit for the one thing that they believe will truly bring them that lasting sense of internal happiness or satisfaction is one that I see all around me, one where people old and wise, young and naive, get hooked on the notion that money can buy a sense of happiness, joy, euphoria, while failing to realize the fleeting, transient nature of all of these feelings.

Pema Chodron is an American Buddhist nun whose goal of her work is to apply Buddhist teachings in everyday life. In the book Hooked! Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire and the Urge to Consume , she wrote an essay on shenpa, the Tibetan word for hooked or attachment. “Shenpa thrives on the underlying insecurity of living in a world that is constantly changing. We experience this insecurity as a background of slight unease or restlessness. We all want some relief from this unease , so we turn to what we enjoy- food , alcohol, sex, drugs, work, shopping… In moderation what we enjoy might be delightful, but when we empower it with the idea that it will remove our unease, we get hooked.” This hooked feeling is what a capitalist based economy preys on, like a leech constantly sucking the life force out of the masses, offering us only temporary satisfaction through the fostering of addictions and a chronic state of frustration, in exchange for our hard earned cash. We have each become like a fiending drug addict, constantly in a blind pursuit of the next high , the next thrill , that isn’t snorted or smoked but instead bought and bartered.

I have since watching the habits of my old self , the shenpas, the urges, the desires to consume, slowly slip away as I have been practicing meditation and have since benefited greatly from it. This post is far too long for this class, and if you’ve stuck it through this far, well here’s a prize for resisting the urge to check your Facebook profile about 12 paragraphs ago. Below is a list of many of the authors of the books that have helped transform my paradigm from one that was naive, credulous, all consuming and in the end destructive to the nature of my own well being, to one that is now slowly on the long path to becoming more balanced with the true nature of my inner self, one that is spiritually vibrant, aware, mindful, and conscious to the world that I create and the world that we all inhabit.

Here is a list of material covering the grounds of the nature of human consciousness, spirituality, shamanism, nature, philosophy, Buddhism, Taoism and meditation. I’m not trying to lay my trip on you as much as I am simply urging you to just pick up a new book and see if anything that they have to say either challenges or changes your beliefs and views on a particular subject. It is far to easy to look at a finger pointing the way and suck it for comfort rather than follow it.

Alan Watts- The Spirit of Zen; The Wisdom of Insecurity; Nature, Man, and Woman ;Beat Zen Square Zen and Zen;This Is It;”Essential Alan Watts; Om: Creative Meditations ; Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion; Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking

Ram Dass- Remember, Be Here Now; The Only Dance There Is; Grist for the Mill; Journey of Awakening: A Meditator’s Guidebook; Be Love Now

Daniel Pinchbeck- Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism; 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl; Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age

Huxley- Brave New World;Island ;The Perennial Philosophy; The Doors of Perception; Heaven and Hell

Also check out books by Stanislav Grof, Robert Monroe, Rudolf Steiner, Rumi, P.D Ouspensky,Terrence McKenna, K.T Suzuki and Gurdjeiff. I’d love to list the names of their books and even more authors, but I don’t want to ruin the surprise of individual discovery.

The point of this post, I guess, is to hopefully enlighten whoever reads this article to a certain extent. To open up your eyes, and no, I am not saying go drop a ton of acid and the meaning of life will suddenly reveal itself to you, but what I am saying is that it will fumigate your mind, if you will, and it will allow you to see things for what they really are. They “cleanse the doors of perception,” but once cleansed, it is up to you to keep them as such. Shake up your life a little bit, meditate, breath, open your mind to new ways of seeing the world, and god forbid, check out some books by the authors listed above. You never know, you just might learn something. I am not afraid to say that I haven’t a clue in the world what I am going to be doing in two, five or ten years, what career path I am going to take (if one at all) or even whether or not I’ll stay in college. Life in itself is its own drama, its own production and you should let it play out accordingly. Don’t get to caught up in living in the past, as they’re only memories, or the future, as its only an expectation. Take in the moment. And “Remember, be here now.”

Anthony Scarpulla