Like all important and life-changing events, I can well remember my final night as a human.
It was in the June of 1983. I was nineteen years old. I was sitting in a brown easy-chair in the finished basement of a house in Newport, Rhode Island. A gentle rain was falling outside.
I was a committed “born-again” Christian. I also had long hair and played drums in a heavy metal band. I drank. I smoked.
I had long been interested to the point of obsession in learning the true nature of reality. Like many (or all?) people, I had a deep down, inescapable feeling that something was wrong with the world.
I had been raised in an atheist household. Then, when I was about 12 years old, my father decided to murder a bunch of strangers. Long story, but the end result was that he became a fundamentalist Christian. He gave his heart to Jesus and informed us that we needed to do the same. So we did. And that’s why that feeling of wrongness made sense to me. It was the Fall of Man. The Devil’s doing. The punishment inflicted on us all by God because of what some dude six-thousand years ago did in some garden with a talking snake.
I did not at the time understand that this religion, with it’s sinning and with it’s hell-fire was a mental trap. Just believe everything in the Bible is true. That God loves you dearly. That mankind is His special creation. That He gave us the gift of Free Will. We do have the option of not believing any of this. But if you don’t, God will stop loving you and then He will burn your soul forever.
How can you not love a god like that?
I firmly believed all this as I sat in that chair. In that basement. I was a lousy Christian though. I was really into hermetic philosophy and quantum physics. I studied witchcraft and told myself I needed to know the ways of The Enemy. And I was proud of all this.
Immensely proud.
So proud, that one night I inscribed a protective circle with a pentagram on the floor of my bedroom, stood inside of it and addressed a prayer to Satan himself. A challenge. I looked him right in the metaphorical eye and boasted, “You can never break my Faith. Go ahead. Hit me with your best shot!”
So then he did.
Lucifer the Light-bearer Illuminated me the following night. In that basement. In that chair.
As I sat there, I was furiously trying to figure out the relationship between Good and Evil. I decided that those words were too nebulous and settled instead on Order versus Chaos. I defined Order as being the tendency to create forms and patterns and Chaos as sheer randomness. As I analyzed and compared the relationship between these two incompatible concepts, it dawned on me that these two states were actually two parts of a single thing. This combined “thing” was a scale. Ultimate Order and Ultimate Chaos were opposing ends of this scale and any position along it could only have meaning in comparison to another point on the scale. One point cannot exist without the other.
It was as if some mental log-jam had started to break apart in my head. It wasn’t just that Good could not exist without Evil. It was that they were the same thing.
My mind was off and running. How about Light and Dark? Same thing. Life and Death. The same. Matter and Energy, Fear and Love, Knowledge and Ignorance, Truth and Lies, Reality and Illusion. Everything and Nothing.
Furthermore, each of these now unified pairs comprised a single pole of a different duality. For example, the Love/Fear pair is, when recognized to be one single unit, one pole of the Passion/Indifference scale.
And so on…
Absolutely everything was relative.
In the alchemical language that I was so familiar with, I had found the Universal Solvent. So what did I do with it? I dissolved everything.
Layer by layer until all that was left was me and the Void.
(Now when I say “Void”, I don’t mean Nothing. And I don’t mean Everything. It was both… AND it was neither.)
Then I applied the Solvent one more time and saw that me and the Void were also the same thing.
The next step was terrifying. Could it really be that I didn’t exist as a separate creature? To take the next step could result in the annihilation of what I had always thought of as myself. It would be spiritual suicide.
But I just had to fucking know.
And there it was that I found The Philosopher’s Stone. Right there. In the Center. Not an object of course, but a piece of Knowledge. A state of Understanding that dwells in perfect potential between all things. At the very heart of all paradox.
Here’s where language begins to fail. The thoughts and experiences I try to describe beyond this point cannot be understood by another person unless they also do the leg-work. They must themselves think hard on these things before they can understand the concepts that I can only describe symbolically. One cannot truly understand something that one has not experienced.
Suddenly, I was free from a cage that I didn’t even know I was in. A cage I had built myself. I could see that words were just labels we juggle in our heads. Indeed, even the very thoughts that lie behind the words are like bricks in a wall that only serves to block out the Light that has always been there. The Light of pure Being. In other words, I had gotten back the innocence and clarity I had lost by entering this world.
This Stone is the goal of all philosophy. It is the finest treasure in existence. It bestows the god-like power to redefine your reality in any way you choose. Need to open a Door? Apply the Stone. Break some Chains? Stone. Transform something ugly into something beautiful? Stone. Want to believe in something unbelievable?
Stone.
And there was something else too. An amazing ability to use the Stone to comprehend anything. To Understand all Mysteries. To realize that our true identity is the Consciousness behind all things. We are all God. Always have been. Always will be.
Not “co-creators”, but Creator.
The Philosopher’s Stone is a real thing. It really does grant the ability to turn dross into gold and It really does give (the awareness of) eternal life.
My prayer to The Devil had been answered. He did indeed hit me with his best shot.
Just before he disappeared forever.