Let There Be Light

I thought it might be fitting, on Halloween, to describe a personal experience that I once had of Hell:

It happened when I was a young man, of twenty-one or twenty-two years of age. This was a period of my life when I was experimenting with drugs. I think that it is safe for me to admit this, given that decades have now since passed, and also because even U.S. Presidential candidates have admitted to using drugs in the days of their youth. And for me, at that time, “experimenting” is the appropriate phrase to use. I was never addicted to any particular drug, but was fascinated by the effects that drugs had upon the mind. Some affected mood, others bolstered self-confidence and induced more spontaneous, self-expressive behavior, while others seemed to alter perception itself, tempting the user to believe that he or she was encountering profound, enlightening insights. And, given my propensity for an analytical frame of mind, I actually recorded, in a notebook, the various effects of different drugs upon me. I did not do this dispassionately: In my youth I suffered from a painful shyness, which persisted into adulthood, and, even though I had passed out of my teens, the lingering effects of adolescence only magnified the angst that I felt because of it. I wondered if there was some perfect combination of drugs that might make me more comfortably assertive, spontaneous, and expressive. It really was a sort of “Jekyll and Hyde” experiment that I was engaging in: a “personality dialectic”, in which I hoped to release those elements of my personality which had been suppressed, and which only emerged intermittently, generally as the result of a unique combination of social circumstances and/or mood-altering substances.

After several trials, with several different drugs, I finally decided upon a specific “cocktail” of drugs: a combination which I felt would produce the desired effect. My plan was to ingest these at home, and then travel to a nightclub which was about a half hour’s drive from my home. All went according to plan, at least up to the point where I arrived at the club. I sat down at the bar and waited, excitedly, for the drugs to take full effect.

But then something horribly wrong began to happen. I noticed it first when I realized that the music playing in the background no longer seemed to have any rhythm or recognizable, coherent melody. And a bartender who was speaking to me was completely incomprehensible, as if he were speaking in a foreign language. Then I noticed that the bottle of beer that I had ordered was lying horizontally on the bar. I managed to set the bottle upright (I think), but immediately retreated outside to the parking lot, and headed back to the van that I had driven to get there.

What happened next almost defies description. There was blackness, just blackness. Only gradually did I become aware of the fact that I even existed. But I had no idea where I was. I could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing. Even worse, I had no idea what I was. I was this entity, in the middle of nowhere, that didn’t know who it was, what it looked like, what its history was, or how to even find answers to any of these questions. In this empty void, I tried to convince myself that there was something out there beside myself, although there was no evidence to support this belief. I cried out, in a language without words, to this “thing”, begging it to make itself known, and to tell me who – or at least what – I was. But there was only silence, and the void. Words cannot convey the terror that I felt, and the lonely isolation. I was a being with no identity, no history, no belonging, and no connection.

I don’t know how long I was in this state, because there was no standard by which to judge the passage of time. In desperation, I tried to conjure up a memory: if not of myself, then at least of some other being that had known me, and had interacted with me. I reasoned that if I could remember such a being, than through that being’s reactions, I could surmise who or what I was. Finally, a recognizable image appeared in my mind. It was the image of my mother. And, seeing what she looked like, I began to piece together what I might look like: a human being, with a face, two arms, and two legs. The images of friends then began to follow, and memories soon returned in their wake. I remembered the name that I had been called by these others, and soon was able to reconstruct, in my mind, a complete image of myself, and a history of what I had been.

Not long after this restoration of identity had been completed, I was able to restore my sense of perception as well, and locate myself within my van, within the parking lot of that nightclub. After another stretch of time, I found the strength and willpower to position myself on the driver’s seat, start the van, drive back home, and get into bed.

It took me a couple of weeks before I was completely back to normal (during that time I experienced difficulties with both sleeping and “taking in” the world around me), but eventually was able to restore a normal sense of equilibrium to my life. The irony was that I really had succeeded in what I had set out to do that night: I had managed to destroy the personality that seemed so awkward and ill-suited to me at the time, but in its absence there was apparently nothing left to replace it with.

And the experience also left me with a revelation of what a real “hell” would be like: a state of existence that is completely separate and unconnected from anything or anyone else. Hell, I realized, is separation –total isolation; no communion with any other sentient being.

As I have reflected on this nightmarish experience, in the many years since it happened, I have occasionally wondered: isn’t this the supposed goal of many “enlightened” spiritual practices - to annihilate the self? But upon further reflection, I realized that this is not, in fact, what had happened to me. It was not the “self” that was annihilated, but rather any and all connections that this self had with any external reality. It was left completely and utterly alone and isolated, without even the consolation of memories of connectedness to ground its being. Enlightenment traditions, on the other hand, seem to counsel a sort of dissolution of the self, along with a merging with some greater reality. In my own personal experiences of meditation, when I have managed to quiet the mind, and attain a quiescent state in which distracting trains of thought subside, leaving only a sort of empty, non-reflective awareness of the world, the ensuing feeling of peaceful bliss does not arise from having severed my connections with everyone and everything around me. Rather, it stems from feeling more grounded and connected, with everything, and less wedded to an abstract concept of the self. And yet, no matter how far into this meditative state I have gone, I have never lost a sense of who I was, or of my own personal history, or of where I was at the moment. And so I can only conclude that what I experienced, during that altered, drug-induced state so many years ago, was a sort of anti-enlightenment: the opposite of what it is that so many spiritual, meditative disciplines exhort us to attain.

But I have also wondered: wouldn’t God have experienced something like what I had during that great stretch of time (an eternity, in fact), before the universe was created: a sense of being an entity in a void, with no identity, no past, and no connection with anything else? And during this infinite stretch of complete, empty solitude, how would an entity know that it even had the power to change this situation? After all, if things had been this way for an eternity, what evidence would there be that anything different was even possible? To me, such an existence would not only be unbearably lonely, but unbearably terrifying as well. I recently put this question to a friend of mine, and he replied that such a scenario would not present a problem or a difficulty to God, since God is perfect. Now, such an answer is rather trite, but I have to confess that there is a certain logic in it. After all, any being that perceived a sense of lack in its existence could surely not be perfect.

And yet, there was – according to so many religious traditions – a moment when a perfect, supreme being willed the universe into existence, a moment when the Creator declared, in the words of the Old Testament, “Let there be light”. It seems unthinkable that such an act would occur without an underlying need or desire to perform it, but “need” or “desire” are verbs that would be entirely incongruent with an uncaused First Cause, or unmoved Prime Mover. One can understand, when confronting this puzzle, why the Gnostics believed that the “god” that created this universe, and who identified himself as the “creator”, was in fact created by some higher, more sublime Being. Perhaps the Kabbalists are closer to the truth with their theory that Godhood manifests itself through a series of emanations, called “sefirot”, which arise from a primordial source know as “Ein Sof”, a word which has been interpreted to mean “nothingness”, but also “without end or limit”.

In the year preceding the one during which I performed my terrifying experiment, I had written the following poem, which I titled “In the Beginning. . .”:

In the beginning there was Change.
God created Change in his
own image . . .

And yet God remained a static
force during an eternity before
Change.

There was no change of time
nor change of place
No change of mind
nor change of face

In Change there was a
Beginning.

I suppose that it is unthinkable – maybe even blasphemous – to imagine that a Supreme Being once experienced the horrifying loneliness of being an isolated entity with no history, and no self-concept, as I did during that bad drug experience. All that I can conclude is that such an experience, if permanent, would truly be an unimaginable hell for any ordinary conscious being. And, as an ordinary, conscious being, I am now permanently grateful that I am not alone in this huge universe, and will leave the question of how this existence came about to greater minds than my own.