The frat year
When I was 20, I did a study abroad year at the University of California, San Diego. Desperate for a fully immersive "American" experience, I joined a fraternity. On paper, and for plenty of people in reality, that's the key to an epic time at university: frat parties, like-minded guys, loads of girls. It seemed like a great idea.
Maybe not for everyone.
I'm naturally introverted, and in my early adulthood I suffered from debilitating social anxiety. So despite going to up to three parties a week all year, I didn't make a single lasting friendship and had very few romantic or sexual encounters with the sorority girls. I spent most parties wandering around in a state of dissociation, striking up shallow conversations so I wouldn't feel like a total loser zoning out by himself.
In hindsight, that year felt like a wasted opportunity to improve my social skills, meet women, and have an unforgettable time.
That said, it wasn't totally wasted.
Enter Alan Watts
Despite my failed attempts at becoming "alpha", I developed a burning, no, INSATIABLE desire to understand spiritual enlightenment.
Why?
Alan Watts.
One day in the library, I was listening to an artist I liked on Spotify when a long sample of a wise-sounding man describing the state of the world came in. It wasn't a brief soundbite. It was a good two or three minutes of monologue over an ambient breakbeat. I looked him up and found he had loads of content freely available on YouTube, despite having died decades ago.
Turns out Alan Watts was quite influential. Coming out of the Beat scene, and already a lecturer and writer on Eastern philosophy, he brought Buddhism and Hindu yoga to Western audiences in a way that was profound, funny, entertaining, and deeply understanding. I'd never heard anyone touch the ineffable mysteries of life with such wit, and I still haven't.
So began a continuing, blossoming fascination with everything beyond the material world I was taught about at school.
But why did his gospel resonate so deeply?
Throughout my teens, I had a creepy, near-constant feeling that there was something inescapable about the mind. The idea that no matter what you did, you could never escape it, shook me to my core. When you grow up with intrusive thoughts and real difficulty feeling calm, you wish you could escape your own psyche.
That culminated in a night that traumatised me so profoundly I lost touch with reality for months.
Bristol, age 18
Everything I loved felt insubstantial
I'd just left for university in Bristol at 18. I'd always been a sheltered child, and being sent to a strange city to live alone for the first time unsettled me more than I expected. A month in, my friends from back home and I arranged to go to a rave in Manchester, where we all grew up. For those who don't know, a UK rave almost always involves some kind of party drug. In our case it was MDMA, or so we thought.
I'd taken MDMA before, but this time there was no euphoria. It felt speedy and tweaky, with nothing uplifting about it. Even so, one of my friends insisted we go back to his place to end the night. We started smoking weed, which I've always hated but smoked out of peer pressure.
Drifting out of the conversation, I opened my laptop to work on some music. I was producing electronic music on the side of my studies, hoping to make something of it one day. The stimulant seemed to help for a while, and my mates loved what I was making.
And then it happened.
A strange feeling came over me. My friends started fading into the distance. I stood up, looked in the mirror, and saw my face: eyes fully dilated, lips chewed up and swollen (uncontrollable jaw tension is a common side effect of these drugs). What tipped me over the edge was the feeling that I'd seen this exact scene, me in the mirror looking exactly like that, in a dream two weeks earlier.
I lost my shit. I panicked, and my friends had to take me upstairs to calm me down. The only thing I could feel, the only thing I KNEW, was that EVERYTHING (my friends, my family, my life) was a figment of my imagination. It was all a dream, or more accurately a nightmare. No matter how much my friends reassured me, one of them literally prodding my arm and saying "I'm real, mate", I couldn't believe it. Everything I loved felt insubstantial. I was condemned to be a forever isolated, ephemeral being with god-level loneliness.
After hours of relentless horror, I gave up and tried to sleep.
The months that followed were a daze. I was fighting the loneliness of being back in my university town, along with constant déjà vu. Even psychedelic music would freak me out. I didn't know how to escape my mind.
San Diego, age 20
The dread had become hope, bliss, and beauty.
Fast forward two years. I'm at UCSD, in the library, discovering Alan Watts while I studied. He was the balm I needed to heal my PTSD. Hearing him explain how Hindu yogis and Tibetan Buddhists saw life as the "dream of god" soothed me the way only a loving parent could. Before, the whole "life is a dream" idea had upset me so much. Now I knew it was a conclusion reached by enlightened saints millennia ago.
It scratched an itch I'd had my whole life. Something had always felt incomplete in the explanations of reality I'd been given by school and organised religion, even if that missing piece had been unrelenting existential dread. Now the dread had become hope, bliss, and beauty.
Think of it from my point of view: until then I'd been an eternally lonely consciousness stuck in a mind maze. Now I was special. I saw the seeds of Buddhahood. I was invigorated by the possibility of enlightenment. The answer to the fragmented picture of the universe I'd been taught had arrived, in a form seekers had pursued for centuries, and it was nothing to be afraid of.
The seed
For the rest of the year after discovering him, I felt far less guilty about not engaging with the fraternity. I took refuge in the pursuit of something greater than my earthly hang-ups and aspirations: the chance to grow my seed of divine light into a beautiful flower. That's what it felt like, the start of something so deep it would change my life forever. And it did.
My inner spiritual energy had entered its adolescence. I may have been naive to think I knew everything, but the doubt never stopped me eagerly writing all my new insights and revelations in my journal. I even thought about starting my own religion! Turns out I didn't need to. I'd find my tribe of like-minded hippy types soon enough, when I went backpacking ten years later (wow, getting old!).
You see, Alan's ideas were drawn from several Eastern religions, like Buddhism, Hinduism and Daoism, along with the more mystical strands of the "Western" Abrahamic faiths. He tied in non-dual philosophy (the idea that all of reality is made of inseparable opposites), consciousness as the primary substrate of reality, and the universe as a constant play (called Lila) in which it discovers and then forgets itself in an endless cycle of shifting forms. Frankly, it's the most beautiful "explanation" of reality I've ever found, not that reality could or should ever be explained, personal and ineffable as it is.
He also talked about how the Dao (the way of the universe) is immanent. I loved this. The universe, which is your own consciousness, is right there in front of you, and all explanation of it is secondary. So the only way to understand the fundamental nature of reality is through direct personal experience, usually in altered states of consciousness.
Imagine that. An altered state where all the pieces come together. Where you see the thing for what it is. Where you become one with god, not just conceptually but actually, in the roots and core of your being. What a feeling that must be. It would surely be elating, contemplative and orgasmic all at once.
The irony
Here's the irony of it all. The realisation I was having was exactly the same one I'd had that night at 18. It was all just a dream. It IS just a dream. Only this time, it wasn't an eternal nightmare. Sure, I've felt down at times since, for all sorts of reasons, but the lasting knowledge that I'm playing some fundamental role in this reality, as the dreamer of it, has left me with a warm feeling inside that carries me through the lows.
So thank you Alan. You saved my life. You saved my soul.