Ego Death, Faith Deconstruction, and the Building Blocks of Reality.

Is this burger?

The richest man on earth is rumored to be addicted to ketamine. He's making sweeping judgements on government efficiency, speaking at the white house, and offering millions of dollars to voters in key races. Put these together and you have my mildly left of center father asking his "adventurous" son what ketamine is about. Trying to explain reality altering experiences to a layman presents a series of issues. It's incredibly difficult to understand something you have never experienced, and equally difficult to explain something that is detached from reality in nature.

Ketamine is a dissociative. It detaches you from reference points. In my years of seasoning my brain for a solid crust when frying, I've found dissociatives to be the most consistent in replicating the fabled "ego death". Now that's a hot button term that gets thrown around in psychedelic culture consistently. And frankly, nobody really completely agrees on what it is exactly. Psychonautwiki defines it as "complete suppression of short and long term memory". A common phrase I see used is that there is no "I" to experience the experience. Simply experience itself. That checks out with psychonautwiki's attempt to make it sound more scientific. The brain is simply in the moment with no reference to its other faculties to make sense of it. It's a bit paradoxical. It's somehow nothing and everything simultaneously. It simply is. This in and of itself (being being) is quite tranquil. Simple. Perfect. Where it becomes a whole slew of issues is the point leading up to this experience and the point of coming back from this experience. This is where we get into the concept of both faith deconstruction and reconstruction. These terms are typically associated with religion as religion is a more blatant demonstration of faith. That being said, it's all faith. At least philosophically. Yeah, science is a good way of testing for an objective reality, but inherently is under the faith umbrella. Deconstruction is what it sounds like. You're breaking apart preconceived notions, chipping away at "truth", meticulously evaluating the source of your reality. My first serious encounter with faith deconstruction happened as a child, disillusioned by religious dogma held in my family. I was a curious kid. I held thought experiments with myself to test to what extent I could know something in fear of eternal damnation.

Most of the other children in my church were either homeschooled or went to the local private christian school. My parents being public educators however insisted we went to public school. This created a rather large rift between what my Sunday school teachers taught and what I would learn in school. One dealt in the abstract of being while other focused on the physical. I was presented with two seemingly incongruent realities that led to a tumultuous road of self discovery. As a preteen I tried to marry the two. I tried to make my religious beliefs explainable by science. Creationism satiated this desire briefly. Our church was visited by a creationist who gave a month's long presentation on Sundays that seemed to use science to explain the incongruencies I was battling with. I bought the man's entire DVD set. I fell asleep to them nightly. I found comfort in my reality being explainable. But then I got older. I remained curious. I was learning more advanced concepts. This paired with good old fashioned teenage rebellion became the catalyst for blowing up the entirety of my ideology. The timer on my self destruction had begun. Drugs. A lot of them too. I managed to avoid the real heavy hitters like meth and heroin, but I was in my prime for the world of designer drugs. Phenethylamines, tryptamines, analogues of analogues, shit your hippy aunt was completely unaware of in the 70's. I was challenging every notion of reality I had. I built a flimsy structure of half baked ideas and was screaming their validity from the top floor with dilated pupils. I was a problem. I was loud. I was what I thought it was. Then it happened. Not even a week after being kicked out of my parent's house. A gaggle of young boys on top of a mountain faced with the complete destruction of everything they are. I had challenged God and he responded. That flimsy structure collapsed under the weight of my hubris. I watched what I was be ripped apart, wither away, and thrown into non existence. That day is a long story and I'm going to spare you the details, but what's important is I and my belief system had been completely deconstructed. I had found rock bottom and learned that there is no more solid a foundation from which to build yourself upon. This place, this experience, this being was simply what was there, what is there, and what will be there eternally. When I was removed from myself, all that remained was being. This being I called "it". It could be anything. It is everything. It is nothing. It simply is what it is. I desperately wanted to know if people got it. It felt so groundbreaking. Like if people could see it, it would fix everything. Surely someone before me had found it. Had a name for it. A community that knows it.

I began googling. "it is what it is." "It is the beginning, end, and everything in between." And how ironic it is to have the search results be the first declarations of faith in the world's major religions. Do you know God's name? YHWH. In Hebrew it translates to "I am that I am", or "existence existing". Hinduism has "Brahman". The absolute ground from which reality is built. A principle great saying from the Vedic texts is "Tat Tvam Asi" or "I am that." All that remains when all is deconstructed is that which is. I am.