An Excerpt from How To Be God

I stand hopelessly on the sidewalk, annoyed and tired. That quadrangle is supposed to be there! I feel self-conscious, out of myself, lost somewhere strange and threatening. Oh my God – I’m tripping on acid! Am I crazy?

That’s when The Voice finds me.

The Voice is not a hallucination. It’s me, but not me. It sounds a lot like the friend that’s spoken to me throughout my life, during my darkest moments, coaching me in hesitant steps along the broken road, pointing me forward. But right now it’s clearer somehow, infinitely trustworthy, coming from outside rather than inside of me.

The Voice tells me: Andrew, be here.

But I’m tired!

Be. Here.

I was supposed to be sitting in some beautiful tree-lined courtyard right now.

If you’re tired, then sit fucking down.

The Voice, in spite of its salty language, is not angry or scolding, but firm, even kindly. It is friendly, commanding, authoritative. It sounds like a mashup of the closest friend I could have, a therapist, a rabbi, a parent, and something more still. It is me, but me but beyond me.

I turn and see a bench. Not an extravagant or particularly beautiful bench, just a bench. A small bench next to a bus stop along a road. A bench I can sit on.

The Voice counsels me. This bench is your life. It’s perfectly nice. There are some nice trees, a breeze, some sunlight. It’s not perfect. But if this is what your life is mostly like, you’re pretty fucking lucky.

That’s when I begin to cry. Hysterical, uncontrollable sobbing.

I’ve been searching for a quadrangle that existed only in my mind, but reality is right in front of me. Every day, I leave the moment, in search of the metaphorical quadrangle that always seems just out of reach. On a normal day, this insight would be pat, ordinary, cliched. Be here. Haven’t we all heard that a million times in our mindfulness apps and pop songs? But now, I have inhabited the cliché, or maybe it has inhabited me.

I have the uncanny sense that I’m not quite in Santa Cruz anymore. I’m viewing the world as if on a movie screen. I’m in a class, Enlightenment 101, and the teacher is a sixth-degree Zen master.

I can’t help but marvel at this new friend I seem to have made – lysergic acid diethylamide. Acid seems such a strange name for this drug I’ve taken. It’s chemically accurate, but the word sounds aggressive and cutting, like it’s eroding the very foundations of my rational brain. What I feel is quite the opposite: a deep quietness. The Buddhists have a word for this: sunyata, or emptiness. Not emptiness in the materialistic sense of something missing, but a spaciousness, a lack of spiritual clutter.

From a scientist’s perspective, LSD shut down my brain’s default node network. This is the “editor” part of my brain, taking the news of the world, curating it, and selectively publishing it on the Front Page of Me. My hard-working analytical brain is a super-intelligent chimpanzee, and right now it’s sleeping. I tiptoe so as not to wake it.

I ramble on in this way through the afternoon, then find a set of benches overlooking the ocean. Through the fizz of this new world, I take out The Book and page through it. I’m present enough to make some sense of this thing I’d just spent the better part of the decade writing. My marvelous intellectual journey had answered my key research question, and it had something to do with “nonduality.” But today, I’m climbing the same mountain but up a different trail, and instead of seven years it’s taken about three hours. I “get” the thing in a way that’s deep in my bones, not in my head but in my heart and deeper. I am here, rather than thinking about being here.

Everything takes on meaning. Everything seems like a metaphor. Each park bench I pass – one with a commanding view of the sun descending over the Pacific Ocean, another next to a wafting port-a-potty – represents a moment of life. Most are good; some exhilarating; a few just shitty.

It's all clear now. Where have I been? What have I been doing? What have I been missing? I’m seeing – for the first time, really – the film that separates me from here, a film I didn’t even know existed before today.

I put on a pair of headphones, and the day takes on a whole new color. Music has always been deeply tied to my journey through the world, and I’ve got 4,053 carefully curated songs on this little device in my pocket. A song comes up on shuffle I don’t remember ever adding. An eerie electronic beat begins, and then Michael Stipe’s unmistakable voice. He’s singing words so simple, almost cliched, that they seem to have been crafted for this moment.

No time for love like now.

But why that song? Why those words? I’ll save that question for later.