The jungle is so loud at night. Through a series of increasingly poor decisions, I found myself stranded on a ledge in the darkness, high up in the wilds of Mt. Intanon, the highest mountain in Thailand. Alone and ill-prepared, I had lost my way back to the trailhead and run out of daylight. It was drizzling and my shorts and shirt were soaked through. I had no jacket. My phone battery was dead. Welts from hornet stings throbbed on my calf and elbow, and I itched everywhere from bush mite bites. I wrapped myself in some old plastic sheeting I had scavenged and prepared to shelter overnight. The temperature had dropped into the teens which made the wind on my wet clothes feel even colder. I knew if I could stay awake, I wouldn’t have to worry about rolling off the ledge or being surprised by predators, and that I could find my way out by the light of dawn. What makes this story worth sharing is not how I got myself in or out of this predicament, but the way in which I was able to be at peace throughout and avoid the kind of panic that often dooms lost hikers.
People freak out when they get lost. They make bad choices. They walk in circles. In the jungle everything looks the same and the canopy makes dead reckoning impossible. So people just keep going, often in the wrong direction. Very few including me, choose to stay put, which is usually the best survival strategy.
As I decided to quit my 8 km hike midway through, after hours of hacking through brush once I ran out of trail, I knew I had to come back across two rivers. The first crossing was deep in a rocky ravine. The second offered a shallow bed that ran more or less flat, so I jumped in and started wading through it, hoping to avoid the brambles and vines that had been entangling me all afternoon. While it saved me time bush-wacking, I became cold and felt I was heading deeper into unfamiliar terrain. So as darkness fell, I scrambled up an embankment and made my way toward a dense ridgeline where I thought I would be able to catch site of the village where I started out.
I could indeed begin to see the twinkling lights of Royal Project greenhouses in the distant Hmong village, but they were at least 500 meters below. In a desperate scramble against the descending darkness, I down-climbed the steep hillside onto what turned out to be the edge of a sheer wall. Water pipes gurgling in some nearby brush led down from an impassable waterfall. I knew there had to be a legacy trail made by the team of villagers who did this irrigation work, but by then it was too dark to go further and risk falling.
In the last moments of fading light, I edged my way down to a small pool just beside the waterfall and filled my water bottle for what was going to be a sleepless night. Everything was wet. I shivered beneath the plastic sheeting and began to regret not bringing even basic survival gear in my backpack. I thought of my wife and daughter, worried at home and having no way to contact me. Gazing out over the distant greenhouses illuminated in the valley below, I began to feel a sense of relief that at least I wasn’t far from people and hadn’t sustained any life-threatening injuries. All I had to do was wait out the night.
As the moon rose through intermittent clouds, the jungle came alive with sounds, all of them new to me and none comforting. The startling chirps, hoots and screeches drew my thinking to how little I knew about where I was. I made two promises to myself: that I wouldn’t sleep or look at my watch. This gave me the whole night alone with just my thoughts. While the the first hour I dwelled on all the things I would have done differently and how I would a formulate a safe descent, my fatigue began to catch up with me. I stood gazing at the moon, rocking to keep my feet from going numb. I hummed to myself.
At some point, I felt a presence. It was subtle and distant, but discernable. At first I thought in my exhaustion I was imagining things, or dreaming of rescue. But this was something in the background, and I heard it comforting me, as a parent would an injured child. This voice was mine, but it wasn’t coming from me.
I had experienced such a voice before, coming down off an intense LSD trip. While the rational explanation is that this voice is a hallucination, an audible unconscious thought hoping to make sense of what just happened or self-soothe, it defies the way in which thoughts occur. We normally experience our mind as generative, making thoughts that our ego processes in terms of self-perception. This gurgling spring of unconscious thoughts bubble into the conscious mind, where the self forms ideas and beliefs around them. We pay attention to thoughts that reinforce who we perceive ourselves to be, then act in a way that’s congruent with this interpretation. If we act to the contrary or have an errant impulse, the mind corrects us by advising, “This isn’t you.” This process serves to keep us safe in our routines, protecting us from perceived danger, failure and humiliation, like getting lost in the jungle.
In ill-conceived organizational brainstorming sessions, participants are often encouraged to “Think outside the box”, to somehow defy the constraints of our own thinking. But if all we have ever known is our own box, we also don’t know what we don’t know and struggle to conceive of possibilities outside of it. I believe we must first acknowledge that because it’s we ourselves who define the box, we are also free to redefine it. We can move the box or deconstruct it entirely. In other words, there is no box.
The self believes it is always acting in our own best interest. It pays attention to things of perceived value, and interprets them in ways that prop up the walls of our box. Acting in congruence with who we believe ourselves to be is key to framing our reality and understanding how to navigate within it. The unknown world beyond is scary and overwhelming, so our minds are designed to constrain our perceptions accordingly.
You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the ocean in a drop.
Rumi
Since beginning my psychedelic journey last year, I’ve come to realize that I am the box. This box is boundless and nameless, without time or distinction. I am one myriad reflection of the undifferentiated self. Nothing is happening to me because I am everything that’s happening.
At this point you may be asking, Chris, if you’ve managed to raise your consciousness to such a degree, why are you freezing your ass off, lost at night on a mountain? Fair question. The universe is an infinite game and I enjoy playing it. Keeping the game in play means finding yourself and occasionally, losing yourself. It’s a never-ending game of hide and seek. This is opposed to finite games whereby we create win-lose rules that keep us in a state of constant competition with ourselves and others.
The voice that assured me I had nothing to fear and would be guided to safety, might seem like it was just me comforting myself. And indeed, I had been reminding myself how lucky I’d been, having found my way to relative protection. But this voice came into my mind rather than from it, and spoke with a tone of relaxed confidence, as if already having witnessed my extrication. I believe this is Aldous Huxley’s Mind at Large, the unfiltered perception of wider planes of reality outside of our box.
We’re connected to the Mind at Large, but normally unable to perceive it. Pychedelics, deep meditative states and life-threatening moments shut down the brain’s default mode network and open the ‘Reducing Valve‘ that constrains our awareness. We may experience a boundless state of being in which we become indistinguishable from everything else. From my own explorations, there is an overwhelming feeling of being loved; that the universe is on our side and is helping us in ways we cannot understand.
Shivering in the dark up on that mountain, I began to quiet my mind and listen. In the moment that fear had subsided and I had stopped problem-solving, I felt the loving embrace of the universe. I remembered a future where I was safe and lived in abundance.
The night passed so quickly, I was confused when dawn arrived. I thought it might have been a lucid dream, but then decided that I was actually observing daybreak. I looked at my watch and confirmed it was morning. I refilled my water bottle and began gingerly traversing the thick brush at the bottom of the wall. I soon discovered a water pipe running along the hillside, revealing an overgrown footpath. I followed it down, constantly entangling myself in wait-a-minute vines as I had the day before. I was walking away from the village but down the mountain, so I pressed on. The path hooked around, across a swampy ravine dense with banana trees, and onto a forested trail toward the greenhouses below. 30 minutes later I stepped off the terraced hillside and through the farms to the entrance of the village. I bought a bag of salted peanuts and a sports drink from a mom & pop store and charged my phone while I watched village children in lavender uniforms alight from pickup trucks and cross the street to school. I smiled at the simple beauty of it all.
You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.
Sam Harris, Free Will