Real Real

It complicates matters to say I came to Christianity via ayahuasca, although it is part true, as many things are. I would not recommend the stuff, or disrecommend it, but in the months after my sister died it felt like something I had to work with. It showed me holocausts and torture dungeons, snake beings and pyramids of blood sacrifice, which were either metaphors or projections, or truths from another plane that became metaphors and projections on this one. One night, in a teepee in upstate New York with two Jewish friends and a half-Jewish shaman, I spent an hour in a vision of the Trinity, a triangle pulsing with truth lying in the dirt as holy wars swept the Continent for two thousand years—the small living Truth, waiting for anyone to pick it up and bring it close amid the eternal gory disputation. Then a fiery Jesus entered the scene, and maybe Buddha, or I made that part up later. I came to and asked, “Do I have to be Christian now?” The Jews hoped I was joking.

I have not yet joined a church, though I find Orthodoxy beautiful. I have dabbled in everything else—drugs and aliens, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism. I wear a Maltese cross, containing an Indo-Scythian coin, and Rudraksha beads. These two quotes, one Hindu and one Christian, are suggestive:

If we are religious-minded, perhaps we will see the gods who inhabit this world. Beings, forces, sounds, lights, and rhythms are just so many true forms of the same indefinable, but not unknowable, Essence we call “God”; we have spoken of God, and made temples, laws or poems to try to capture the one little pulsation filling us with sunshine, but it is as free as the wind on foam-flecked shores. …

At the extreme summit of the overmind, there only remain great waves of multi-hued light, says the Mother, the play of spiritual forces, which later translate—sometimes much later—into new ideas, social changes, or earthly events, after crossing one by one all the layers of consciousness and suffering a great distortion and loss of light in the process. There are some rare and silent sages on this earth who can wield and combine these forces and draw them down onto the earth, the way others combine sounds to write a poem. Perhaps they are the true poets. Their existence is a living mantra precipitating the Real upon earth.

—Satprem, Sri Aurobindo, or the Adventure of Consciousness

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’.

—C. S. Lewis, letter to Arthur Greeves

And, after I say that what interests me is truth and beauty, which is to say reality, maybe I should add a third, from Werner Herzog: “Facts do not constitute truth.”