In Pursuit of the Ideal

Have you ever imagined what sort of a person you could be if you truly went all in on the life with which you have been gifted? If you stripped away once and for all the deadwood that hinders you? What would that look like? Just how meaningful could your life be? Just what sort of transformative effect could you have on the world?

I was recently given a glimpse of that person, the person I could become, the person I have been piecing together as the ideal toward which I am trying to orient my life.

It was a beautiful Monday morning in the colorful mid-October of Cambridge, MA when my brother and I each ingested about 3 grams of psilocybin mushrooms. We found a secluded wooded area next to a lake that would provide the perfect setting for our trip. Sitting with our backs against a tree, overlooking the lake, we put on our headphones as the effects were starting to hit us and pressed play on the music playlist I had curated for our trip.

There is a certain intense anxiety that one must be mindful of going into a trip, lest one get pulled too far into it. It’s the anxiety that comes from being freed to a boundless potential, faced with an infinite number of choices to choose from. I was aware of such a profound freedom at the beginning of the trip, the freedom to experience any emotion I wanted, to be anyone I wanted to be, to go anywhere I wanted to go. And yet as freeing as this was, there were no constraints by which to inform my decision; hence the anxiety. The only thing one can do in that situation is surrender control, at which point the anxiety that would otherwise divide you among the possible futures gives way to a whole engagement with the present, however that present happens to present itself.

The wholeness of the present is a familiar place to be, yet only distantly so. The far reaches of the past from which we once came into being come rushing back, and one recalls the playful attitude that characterizes the child. In a sense, one is re-membered, made whole. The tireless pull of past and future, the sense that I am never quite where I need to be, that there’s somewhere always I need to go that is never here—all of that fades away, and all the existential questions of meaning are in some way answered just in being wholly present. This is the whole point of it all. Of course it is. What more could there possibly be? It was the same peace I had felt during my trip two months prior. It seemed there was nothing that needed to be done, nowhere to go, no imperative other than to engage fully wherever I was in that moment. 

If I had to contrast this trip with my previous two trips, it would be that this trip was uniquely not self-focused, meaning that there wasn’t any specific sense I had that I was the one who needed to heal. I was instead much more concerned for my brother and wanted him to have the sort of healing experience I had had two months prior. But I soon began to realize as things started to ramp up that I was going to experience what I was going to experience, and that the same was true for him, and that our experiences were not necessarily going to be the same. I was on my journey and he on his. There was no controlling where things were going to go, and that was okay.

I sat against the tree and began to think about the various troubles that I am confronted by regularly: the existential questions that have plagued humanity throughout its history, the people close to me who are also wrestling with such questions, the suffering that they have endured and continue to endure. How can I help them? How can I help?

I wasn’t thinking so much as I was wrestling with the things they were wrestling with. There was a sense that there were no final solutions for any of it, that all I could ever do was just to wrestle with the truth, and to enter into the struggles of other people and wrestle alongside them. In the same way that one enters into the world of a hurt child and elucidates to the child the truth of what it is they’re experiencing—there is no magic solution to the child’s suffering other than the child coming to a sense of being known and understood. By granting the child the safety to accept the truth of their suffering, the suffering is overcome.

I got up and began walking around pensively, thinking, but thinking more in poetic terms and imagery than in normal life, and in a manner that was radically integrated with my emotions and the posture of my body. I was looking down at the ground and treading softly on the forest floor, a certain grace and sorrow expressed in my posture and in my face, an expression that extended outward to encompass the whole earth. My posture reflected my attitude and my thoughts, and my thoughts and attitude reflected my posture. I was one thing, a whole being, a unified mind and body.

I continued to walk through the trees, circling, weaving, tracing out the pattern of my thoughts on the forest floor. There was a vivid fractal shape to my imagination. I could traverse from the most particular element of one tiny branch of the fractal out to the general whole, and the traversal was fluid, continuous. The particulars were the messy details of people’s lives, the general the full picture of the ever-unfolding web of life on earth, the former a microcosm of the latter. There was nothing that didn’t have a context to it, nothing out of place. The particular was contextualized with the general, part with whole, and the whole contextualized through its various parts, and all of it dynamically unfolding around me.

I was imagining I was talking to a group of people, a crowd, thinking out loud and teaching the crowd at the same time, weaving through this fractal structure and articulating whatever it was I found along the way. And all with a posture of grace and a clear and patient understanding. Of course. I’m a teacher. That’s what I want to do.

This dynamically unfolding fractal structure reached deep into the psychological depths of other people, and I could follow the structure into those depths to the point where I could see the source of whatever it was a person happened to be expressing in that moment. And regardless of what was being expressed, I had the sense that the person expressing it was right. Indeed, everyone was right, for what was expressed was simply what followed from the otherwise unseen depths of who they were. Even those who would take issue with the idea that everyone could be right; these people too were right. Through all the ideological division, all the interpersonal quarrels, the trivial quibbles of everyday life—everyone was right; both sides, all sides.

I imagined myself home at the dining room table, in the midst of a family gathering, witnessing a division break out between family members, and I could see precisely why, the true root of the division. And I took on the role of peacemaker, not in the sense of suppressing the conflict, but elucidating it. I simply spoke to the source of why each member of the family was expressing the things they were expressing, given who they were, how their perception and participation with the world had been shaped by their past. And the abounding grace in my heart was clear in the words I spoke. There was a clarity to what I said despite the vast complexity of the individual lives involved. And ultimately the conflict resolved itself through everyone coming to truly see everyone else.

But then what exactly was truth? How could everyone be ‘right’? There seemed to be a relativity to everything. Yet even the non-relativists were right. How could this be?

The sense of truth I had in those moments was something much deeper than our everyday notions of truth. It reached into the innermost parts of every person, parts that I could actually see in those moments, such that truth as facts about reality was inseparable from truth as a way of being that leaves no fact about reality hidden. My sense of truth came from a place of being completely whole, where nothing and no one could possibly be shut out, lest it divide the world and myself. Two things were taken for granted: the intimate connectedness of all people and all things, and the impossibility of severing any of those connections. To sever the connection would be to lie, to attempt to deceive by putting up a dividing wall between one part of reality and another.

My sense that what would normally be considered a falsehood was somehow ‘right’ appeared to be rooted in the sense that the falsehood spoke of a deeper truth about the person uttering it, and to simply dismiss the utterance as a falsehood would be to miss the opportunity to elucidate the deeper truth about that person that thus far had remained hidden, which would be to act falsely myself. In ordinary life, the falsehoods that people express come from their own severed connection to the unfolding Agapeic dance, from their brokenness as people. To simply dismiss these people as wrong would be to shut them out even further, to put up more walls and more division. What we as broken people need is to see the truth about ourselves, the source of our falsehoods, which are the dividing walls within us that twist the fabric of reality in an attempt to alleviate our pain. It is when we encounter the truth fully that we are set free.

I continued to bring into my trip the deep questions that I wrestle with on an ongoing basis. There was, in one sense, no clear place for God within the fractal unfolding of what I was experiencing, simply because my worldview in ordinary life does not include an explicitly articulated God. And yet at the same time there was a sense of being unified with something god-like, something like the spirit of our collective ancestral past, the Jungian archetypal father that exists in the collective unconscious of humanity. Like my trip two months prior, there was the figure of the sage to which I could relate, a father figure which would draw me into himself, at which point I would become that figure, seeing the world and other people through his eyes. There was generally throughout the trip a kind of fluidity to my sense of self, such that it wasn’t entirely clear at any given moment whether the people I encountered were people I was relating to, or if I was those people.

My unification with the heroic wisdom of the past was most notably a unification with the greatest minds of the past: the great philosophers, theologians, scientists, and poets of history. My wrestling with questions of God, truth, free will, with the paradoxes of reality—I was no longer wrestling with them on my own and for my own sake. I was now wrestling alongside these great figures of the past, wrestling with the deepest questions humanity has ever had, and I was doing so on behalf of the whole world and across all time, with a sense of ultimate responsibility for the world.

If in ordinary life I exist at the center of the circle of human knowledge and wisdom, occasionally peering through the multitude of libraries out into the expanse of human ignorance, and always with trepidation and a concern about how I’m being perceived by the people around me, now I was right at the edge of that circle, leaning out into the vastness of ignorance, with the whole of humanity on my shoulders, and the great visionaries of the past alongside me helping to carry the load, all of us peering into the void, together with a deep sense of humility and ignorance, standing on the unspoken recognition that we are all in this together, that we are brothers across time and circumstance searching for answers to help redeem a broken world. We were asking each other questions about what the world needs going forward in this century, questions regarding God and our relationship to the truth. There was no clear answer, only an ongoing wrestling with the questions in intimate community with one another, which seemed to be its own kind of answer as to the proper relationship to Truth.

It struck me at this moment during my trip that ordinarily I would have a self-conscious concern with whether or not I had any right to be placing myself up here alongside the greatest minds of history, a concern with how that might be perceived by other people. It tickled me, from my elevated state, the idea that of course there was a part of me that would love to be long-remembered as a great thinker of history; I am but a status-seeking human after all. But that this part of me was right then subsumed into an infinitely greater whole, a whole which was only concerned with a world in great need, and a sense of ultimate responsibility toward that world. The trivial social concerns of everyday life were encompassed by something immeasurably greater, and an authentic relationship to the truth worth any reputational sacrifice.

In ordinary life, my default seems to be to live well within the walls that separate knowledge from ignorance, far from the greater transcendent truth that is forever beyond us. While it is intellectually stimulating to peer out from well within the safety of that inner sanctuary of knowledge, it’s far too frightening to seriously venture toward its edge. It’s as if I’m too concerned with trivialities regarding how I’m perceived by the social world around me to risk doing so. Because the closer you get to that edge the stranger you become to the world, the wilder your thoughts, the more you flirt with madness. Yet that ‘edge of chaos,’ if you can manage to maintain the courage and competence to be there—that is where things are most meaningful. It’s where the truth is most vivid, and one’s relationship to it most authentic. Yet it’s also a place of maximal responsibility, and if you’re to go there, you have to carry the whole world on your shoulders.

As Jordan Peterson says, the most meaningful life would be a life in which everything you did mattered. Nothing could possibly make for a more meaningful life than that. Yet with such a life comes a great burden, a burden so great that it would seem we are unable to bear the full weight of it. If everything I do, including everything I think, say, and act out, truly affects the whole world in a way that actually matters, then in a sense the weight of the whole world is mine to bear. Everything that happens in the world, for good or for ill—that’s my responsibility. Who could possibly take up this burden and not be utterly crushed by it?

Surely, only the fullest realization of Joe could manage such a thing. And who is that person? What does he look like? He is an ideal whose posture toward the world is one of immeasurable grace and sorrow, of a peace that surpasses all understanding, of a love for the world that is indistinguishable from being the world. For him, the world’s brokenness is his own brokenness. His tears are shed for every tear shed by the world, and for every tear left unshed. For him, everyone and everything matters, deeply. Every person, every action, every thought, every happening—there is the most profound significance to it all. And yet simultaneously he holds everything so lightly, as if it were all just a passing thing, like a summer breeze or ocean swell, almost as if none of it mattered at all. He gifts an infinite patience and freedom to the world, never feeling the need to control anyone or anything, nor ever being out of control. Everything in its time, he says. His relationship to truth is impossible to compromise, nor is it ever complete; he remains deeply ignorant, vividly aware of his ignorance, and always moving outward into his ignorance. For him, all that is to be done is to elucidate the truth, which entails going into every dark place and shining a light, thereby setting free those who had been previously lost in the dark. He is nothing short of the embodiment of Truth itself, the Logos made flesh.

It felt as if I underwent a lifetime (or more) of maturation and growth in a span of only about two hours. During those two hours I moved from attempting to imitate the heroes of the past, the ideal I have set before me, to actually being those heroes, being that ideal. I was struck by the fact that positing and subsequently attempting to imitate an ideal, however poorly done at the outset, is indeed the path to becoming that ideal, that in some sense we are all just clumsily stumbling forward as best we can, and that that’s all that is ever asked of us.

I took many things away from this trip (as one might imagine). One is something I already knew but hadn’t experienced directly: that the answers to our deepest existential questions come to us not in the form of explicit propositional knowledge, but rather in a certain way of relating to the world and to other people. The closer we move toward embodying that way of being, the truth can’t help but be revealed to us, not as a proposition to be grasped intellectually, but in an intrinsic beauty and meaningfulness to our lives. At the deepest level there seems to be a certain aesthetic to Truth, one that is rich, dynamic, and utterly inexhaustible.

Of course, much of it fades after the trip. But I have nonetheless been left with a flag marking that ideal, that sense of ultimate responsibility and authenticity in relationship to the truth, a flag I can recognize when I encounter it again and learn to draw closer to in ordinary life. And as I came down from the trip I was left with a revelation of the importance of patience. Patience is not something I have thought much about. Courage, humility, responsibility—these are certainly virtues, things I have held as such for some time now. But patience had eluded my view until now. I was thinking about the fact that I was going to come down from this trip and return to being an ordinary Joe (haha), and trying to make peace with that. And patience seemed to be the answer, the patience to allow myself to grow and mature in the course of things, and not to rush my own development, nor beat myself up for not being stronger, more courageous, or more responsible than I am right now. The ideal to which I strive is surely a judge, yet an immeasurably gracious judge, such that a sure-fire marker of my growth toward the ideal is the grace I have for myself on that very journey.

So I focus on the day, picking up the heaviest cross I can currently bear, going to the darkest places I can currently brave, and in doing so redeem some small part of the world, even if today that is only some small part of me. And I maintain a trust that in the course of things, I will gain the strength and courage to carry an ever-heavier burden, to encourage others to do the same, and to lighten the load of those around me who carry too much. This is all that is asked of me.