The last house on the block

Interview with “A” - Part 1

Thank you to “A” for sharing their story. 

“I think that suffering has played a big part in my life path. There’s a sense that I was always trying to figure out, ‘what’s gonna make me feel ok?’ ‘What’s gonna make me feel happy?’”

“I started running through all the things most people my age were doing that were making them happy. I was going down the list and checking things off and seeing, ‘well, that’s not gonna do it.’ Becoming a doctor, an accountant, or whatever seemed to be doing it for them. And I kept seeing, ‘that’s not gonna do it.’ At the same time, I was also seeing that my mind was taking me places where I was being controlled by my mind; as opposed to being able to control and direct it.”

“One of the big ones for me was being in love, finding the right person. ‘Ah, that’s gonna satisfy this deep feeling that something’s missing. That’s gonna do it.’ And then seeing that that’s not gonna do it either. And then there was a lot of hopelessness at one point.”

“Then I ran across ideas of spirituality and enlightenment - ideas that show you you are everything, that there’s nothing wrong, that you’re not broken - that these ideas about being broken are a misidentification. So I started thinking maybe there’s a solution there. And so spirituality was the last house on the block. I was hoping it would do something.”

“I had a psychedelic experience in college, a unity experience you could say, on mushrooms. The feeling of me being separate fell away. I didn't know who I was, and for an hour or two everything was gone. The first memory I had coming back was that there was this one big organism that was all me, and slowly as the drugs wore off I noticed that there were people in that one big organism, and that these people are all connected. It was an experience I’d never had before. It showed me there are other ways to be, to experience the world, to experience life. That gave me hope. That there was something beyond the misery I was feeling at the time.”

“I went on Erowid’s website where people would share their experiences about being on different substances. And there was this ‘mystical’ section that I got to as I continued to research. ‘What is this? What is this?’ I kept asking myself. Then all of a sudden Ramana Maharshi popped up and I realized this isn’t something you can just experience on drugs. There’s a final answer. There’s a solution. There’s a solution out of misery.”

Part 2 of A’s story to come.