(The G train especially. Even before my recent experiences with ayahuasca in the Peruvian Amazon, I always thought Ye Olde Crosstown Local cut a particularly beautiful route through Brooklyn. On principle alone, I love a train that doesn't feel the need to service ever-throbbing, insatiable Manhattan, a train that quietly defies The Alpha Borough's cocksure edict, "None shall pass without entering Me first! Bridge or Tunnel, Local or Express, you're still mine, Bitch." The stubby little G's no serf masochist like that; it knows the E, R, and J give way more than they get. On its own terms, too, the much-maligned G does good work. I love its inauspicious Gowanus beginnings -- even if it could do even more benefit starting farther south in Kensington at Church Avenue, freeing up my old friend, the harried and overburdened F-train, to save some time and brake fluid via the semi-secret express track under Prospect Park & Windsor Terrace. I love, too, how the G rides the F's coattails contentedly for a while through BoCoCa before making a sudden and major 'big boss move', as my brother would say: veering sharply Eastward and pulling up suavely alongside the A/C line (outbound, no less) at the underrated Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop (name-dropped memorably by Jeru the Damaja in "You Can't Stop The Prophet", 1994), forming this crafty clandestine triangle between Jay, Bergen, and Hoyt, which makes for some fun weekend role-reversal hijinx when there's construction on the go. Then it actually cross-cuts the Fultonian A/C, takes lovely Lafayette through majestic Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, into heroic Bed-Stuy just so far, before making a sharp 90º, this time a left, up Marcy/Union, straight through the heart of Satmar Jewville before meeting the L at Lorimer in hipster Williamsburg, where a different kind of pale scruff is the (T)radition(!). Then a last borscht bolt through Greenpoint for good measure, and finally a handshake across the water to Queens, just to be inclusive -- when bucking a crime boss like Manhattan, it's good to have allies.
Point is, great train. And today, my bounty of fall vegetables between my arms, it seemed an even greater thing, this swerving little underground engine. Kind and considerate, even. It wanted me to get from Point A to Point B with velocity and elegance. It was 4/7 the size of a regular train, but there was plenty of room for me and my week of imminent dinners. I could have hugged it, but it had places to be. Stand clear of the closing doors please.)
So yes, this foul-tasting brew called ayahuasca has left me intermittently giddy. Intermittently giddy, and constantly appreciative. Even when I was nearly stripped of the ability to move by some heavy altitude sickness two nights ago in Cúzco, I could feel my body doing what it needed to do to put the past 10 days in context and integrate all the heights (figurative and, most recently, literal; we'd climbed a fairly drastic little mountain called Putucúsi (see below), Machu Picchu's younger cousin, earlier that day, and it had soundly and assuredly kicked my ass like a game-winning field goal by a star kicker who makes it look easy.) I didn't take it personally, the strangely heatless fever, the loss of appetite, the insomnia, the all-over ache. I didn't enjoy it, either, but I recognized it as a friend of some kind.
Landing at JFK at 7:10 this morning after a daylight-long yesterday layover in Líma, I felt welcomed back, even by the border guards of whom I've become accustomed to think as adversaries. One of my nicest and most welcome insights while on ayahuasca was that my whole immigration problem isn't a problem. Or, it is, but only in the most strictly pragmatic sense of that word. It's a problem like a Soduku puzzle is a problem, or like a child trying to eat an ice cream cone while tying his shoes has a problem to figure out. It is not a problem painted in dramatic colours and symbols. "The what's-so" (one of my favourite expressions from the Landmark Education lexicon, meaning Just The Facts, Sans Interpretation Or Colour Commentary) is that I'm a Canadian who wants to live and create in the U.S. ongoingly. I'm ready to create now; I'm not (and, somewhat crucially, my girlfriend is not) yet ready to procreate, which could, admittedly, game that part of the system. The what's-so also is that I need certain things to happen, involving press recognition of my work, before I can petition for an O-1 Visa, and that if I can get said recognition, the Visa should pose little problem. That's all. No one's trying to stop me from doing anything. No one is knocking on my door, or making any plans to knock on my door. (It's not even my door, it's my girlfriend's landlords' door, which she rents from them and I, in a way, sublet with various kinds of currency.)
And that's the whole deal. There's some things to do, some results to produce. Period. No drama, no big chase scene, no interrogation room.
(As Werner Erhard, the broad-minded wisdom collector who had an epiphany on the Golden Gate Bridge and founded EST to try to communicate it to others -- and is thus is to Landmark Education as Abraham is to the Jews and as KRS-ONE is to "conscious" hip-hop -- as Erhard used to say: "Once you get to just What's So, the other side of that is: So What?")
I guess you could say I realized I'd been sitting in a red-painted room for so long it looked neutral, wondering why I felt surrounded by hostility and heat. I also realized I was holding the paintbrush, and that the paint was covering walls that were really transparent glass.
(Another very likely possibility is, you could come up with a much more elegant metaphor.)
Is any of this really new? I knew these sorts of insights about the hidden power of context, had had them many times. Hell, I try to teach them, in settings both semi-official (introductions to the Landmark Forum) and unofficial (conversations with friends and strangers.) I knew that any loss of power in the face of circumstance was just a symptom of something gumming up the gears of possibility, and that the responsibility was/is/always will be mine, if I choose to adopt a responsible viewpoint. I knew, and I knew that I knew. I knew until it became a fact, a belief, an item, a unit of knowledge, a thing in pocket -- useful when accessed, forehead-slappingly curseworthy when misplaced. Sometimes it was more like, "Fine, I know that already. It's true, yup. What else you got?"
Ayahuasca gave me a glimpse at a different kind of knowing. I didn't just know it, I saw it, richly. I was offered it, unhurriedly. It was handed to me, pure and unspun like fleece, like truth.
Now, to be truthful, this kind of knowing is not entirely brand new, either. Every major breakthrough I've ever had, via whatever modality, usually something to do with Landmark, happens not intellectually but perceptually. It had just been a while, is all. And this particular "issue" had escaped the alchemical gaze of transformation, maybe because it looked so obviously valid AS an issue. "Man Against the INS. Creativity vs. Bureaucracy. In A World..."
Plus, one thing ayahuasca has that no Western system of understanding can touch is a profoundly physical component. The knowledge is IN YOUR BODY. It's in your gut and your blood. The dream-making DMT (dimethyltriptamine) in your brain, busy urban cousin to the mystic, eccentric, country-fed DMT in the plant medicine, must record the imported knowledge, xeroxes it, morphs to upgrade itself so that it can remain more than a memory when the country cousin goes back to the jungle. More than just a snapshot of a passing thought or momentary fact; a living entity of its own with growth potential to spare.
Again, that expansive aspect is true of any real transformation, no matter the source. You don't have to pay for an ontological seminar (à la Landmark) or, alternatively, sit in a dark hut in the jungle and drink a hallucinogen 'til you see things and vomit. Those just happen to be the two paths I've found to be, for me, so far (and by far) the most efficacious.
Ask me again in a few days.
So? It's been a few days...
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