I'm having a hard comprehending whats happening.

This past week I opened the Dharma Artist Collective and already over 100 artists have joined and I find myself softly crying at some point everyday.

I write to learn what I think. Something big is happening and I'm going to use this newsletter to figure it out.

Part 1 - Insanity

I first found the word Dharma in the Bhagavad Gita circa 2010. In the midst of my college psychosis, the result of too frequent and too intense psychedelic use, the idea of a dharma - a life's task we each are born to fulfill - was the beginning of my recovery.

Krishna, the God of Gods, tells Arjuna that he has a dharma, a sacred task only he can perform in this life, and that the path of grace is found in giving one's self whole to this sacred labor, without regard for the fruit that comes from that labor.

I wrote that quote down and repeated it to myself everyday for more than a year. I still have that notecard tucked away in a sacred box.

But the reason that book and it's message stuck with me was because of the scene where Krishna reveals his true form to Arjuna.

It's what my psychosis felt like.

For many chapters, Krishna tries to explain the wisdom of Dharma to our hero Arjuna. Arjuna balks and resists. So Krishna decides to reveal his true form as the Lord of Lords so Arjuna gets who the fck he's talking to.

The translation I read goes like this:

Krishna opens his mouth, and Arjuna sees a universe of stars and galaxies. As Arjuna peers, his consciousness is drawn into the vast holy of holies. The glory is too glorious and his mind starts to break apart. The dissolution lets the mysterium tremendum into him.

THE ALL, in it's equal parts terror and rapture, fill every in-between space of Arjuna's being with an annihilating ecstasy that brings the Warrior Prince to his knees weeping, screaming, as he bows to Lord Krishna, begging that he conceal his true form once again.

Nothing I have ever read since touches me the way this mythic image does. Psychedelics are a powerful tool, but through my recklessness, I, a child trespassing in a flaming cathedral, stumbled into a room I was not ready to enter.

Like a vessel receiving liquid too hot, the part of my mind that could crack, cracked.

Arjuna's weeping was the first story that told the terrified little boy I was as a 20 year old that he wasn't alone. That this had happened before and that there was a way through it.

So with a kind of blind grasping, I clung to the driftwood that was this word Dharma.

If Dharma was the beginning of my recovery, dedicating my life to art has been the practice of maintaining that recovery.

I remember exactly when and where I was when I dedicated my life to art.

I had just graduated college, and decided to spend the first hours of my first day of freedom reading Sigmund Freud's Civilization and it's Discontents.

Freud wrote this book after World War II decimated his culture and exiled him from his country. His jaw was also riddled with cancer.

He wasn't in a good mood when he wrote that book.

I feasted on it until midday then went for a long hike on the one modest hill my central Texas city offered. As a graduation present, I ate some psychedelic mushrooms. By the time I got to the top of the hill, a part of me I had been feeding throughout college came forward and tried to kill me.

In hindsight, I call this part Anubis. He is the shadow side of my intellect. He is the judge that finds everything lacking. He is the part that gorged on the scientific literature that highlighted humanity's blindspots, our mass stupidities, that our memories are fictions, that we lie to ourselves about our motivations, and that free will is the ultimate fiction, the magnum opus of how humans lie to themselves. No will is free. We are trapped in the cage of our instincts and genetic drives.

His argument that afternoon on the hill was something like this:

"Consciousness is an accident of evolution. That this universe has physical laws that allow for spacetime is a product of randomness. The universe is a game of blind chance and all your stories of meaning and purpose are how you protect yourself from the madness and psychosis you'd fall into if you had the capacity and the courage to accept the truth. And the truth is your stories that keep you from killing yourself are illusions you can't let go of because you're too weak and too cowardly."

I had danced with this part of myself throughout college but he had never been this intense before. His volume was eardrum busting. I think it was a combination of having just read Freud's most pessimistic work multiplied by the fear of the great unknown life I'd have to navigate post college. Oh yeah, and mushrooms.

And I don't feel like I can take any credit for how I responded to Anubis.

I was balancing on a log when I felt Anubis's attack come. It felt like he was trying to convince me to suicide my soul.

As much as Anubis didn't feel like me, an equally 'other' part came forward in me to respond to him.

This part felt like an old master's spirit coming through the form of my inner child.

This part shrugged in response to Anubis and said matter-a-factly:

"Maybe you're right, but if you are, it means 8 billion others share this tragedy. So I'm going to be an artist. I'm going to make art that will help ease the suffering we all share here."

And in the way psychedelic experiences can be sometimes...it was just done.

Whatever happened was finished. I, ego Erick, didn't feel he had started it, participated in it, completed it, or closed it.

But I got to witness it.

I stepped off the rotting trunk I had been balancing on, changed.

Before that climb, my identity was a brutally earnest skeptic.

My identity after was a naively earnest artist.

Part 2 - Apprenticeship at the End of the World

For the last 13 years, I have given at least an hour (often up to four) of my mornings to studying, writing, and articulating the ideas that feed my soul.

I call it my 'dharma practice,' and I did it when I got my first job after graduating college (wrapping burritos at Chipotle). I did it when I worked at an insurance agency call center. I did it when I got my dream job at Onnit. I did it today. I hope to do it the day I die.

Any attempt to explain it that doesn't invoke religious feelings would be a lie. My dharma practice is how I pray.

But somehow, more than prayer, it is a kind of soul-directed fitness training.

Since my first 'lucid' moments in college, I live with a constant atmosphere of clarity about my incompetence.

As a child born into an American monocropped culture, a son raised on cable television and Walmart food, I can see that I've been retarded. That most of us have been retarded.

If that word triggers you, lets learn some science. In chemistry, a retardant is a fabric or substance that prevents or inhibits. To retard something is to inhibit it's movement, growth or development.

My waking up moment in college was when I realized, as a 20 year old man, that I didn't know how to do almost anything useful.

I didn't know how plumbing, electricity, or the gas-powered water-heater worked. I didn't know how to make a fire or kill an animal. I didn't know what kind of berries I could eat or how to dress a wound. I didn't understand taxes and on and on and on.

So my dharma practice has always been some combination of studying something scientifically rigorous, deliberately practicing some skill (mostly writing), and honing my capacity for articulating the truth about my life.

So my prayer has three parts:

1. Study something true
2. Deliberately practice a craft
3. Do scary shit and tell the truth about what happened

Only with hindsight can I notice that this was a kind of self-initiated apprenticeship. It has been an apprenticeship to my whisper.

For me, the whisper almost never communicates in words. I've never had a vision of my higher self where it told me something directly. That's not how my psyche seems to work.

It talks to me through my artistic taste. My artistic intuition. There is a subtle quality of mind that feels like something outside of me, that loves me, is giving me little hints, the way an attentive parent with knowledge of how children best develop would nudge a child in play, not by force but by invitation.

This subtle nudging has been my Ariadnic thread.

It brought me out of poverty. It brought me out of sexual shame. It brought me out of imposter syndrome.

And it has placed me in a life that is more fulfilling than I had the imagination to ask for.

Through a path I couldn't see until after I traveled it, this apprenticeship has brought me to whatever is starting to happen with the Dharma Artist Collective.

Part 3 - A Journeyman in a Schizophrenic Renaissance

The older I get, the more I'm able to admit to myself how bad my psychosis was, how much pain I was in, how close I was to loosing it, and how lucky I was to have somehow made my way out of it.

I owe my life to chance, podcasts, Robert Anton Wilson, Julia Cameron, and Carl Jung.

They all came together to help me create my Dharma Practice, and that practice became my religion.

My intensity to this practice has ended a lot of relationships and has hurt people I care about.

No, I don't want to drink.

No, I don't want to come out tonight.

No, I don't want you to stay the night.

No, I don't have time to get coffee.

No, I don't want to give you my email or my phone number.

Not because I don't love you, but because I've made a vow to the thing that saved my life, and that vow asks of me to show up to my artistic practice everyday.

So you can imagine how bad of a friend I've been at times (if your criteria of friendship is how quickly they respond to a text or email).

One of the great pains of my life has been my inability to get any of my close friends to commit to creating their own dharma practice.

My only friend in 10 years that saw what I saw, started doing it with the reverence I do, and then reaped the grace it produces has been my friend Graham.

And this is the part where I start crying. Tears are landing on the table beneath my glasses as I type this;

Somehow I have stumbled into co-creating a space that is exactly what my 20 year old needed. A space where artists with the same kind of intensity he had, can gather to do deep work together.

I cry because DAC is helping artists. I'm getting to see this every day on our calls.

I actively struggle to comprehend that this is real.

And the core practice; the daily dharma sprint game, is a simple one.

You could do it today.

1. Pick a time you want to join a dharma sprint.
2. Join the zoom call.
3. Share your intention for the 90 minutes of deep work.
4. Do the work. Don't task switch. Just stay with the one thing.
5. Share your experience afterwards and listen to other's experience.

And thats it.

And I'm watching it set people on fire.

I feel I have something in my hands in this moment that is both incredibly tender, and already beyond my control.

I feel both a gratitude so big that it reaches into the realms of religiosity, and a sense of responsibility so...precious...that I feel just the slightest twinge of fear.

Is my character such that I can steward whatever big thing is coming through the Dharma Artist Collective? Will I become another footnote in the history of corrupted leaders? Am I in a delusion of grander, the narcissistic child of a sick culture, thinking he is doing something meaningful, but in actuality is just dithering with his friends while Rome burns?

I don't know, but I know I'm going to wake up tomorrow morning at 6:13 AM. I'm going to ice bath. I'm going to get into DAC and start a zoom call at 7am. 30 or 40 artists will meet me there. We will all commit to give the next 90 minutes to deepening our creative craft. And I will start writing until I find the words that release the tears.

And as the desk beneath these eyes wet with my tears, I will know I am where I am suppose to be, doing what I'm suppose to be doing.

And I will be in the slipstream of calm lucid rapture. I will blink and 90 minutes will have passed. I will look up from my writing and see 30 to 40 friends.

And I'll try to not cry as I call on the first person to share what their sprint had been like.

-- -- --

Quote I'm Enjoying

The following quote needs some preamble. This is a quote of a voice Buckminster Fuller heard in his head right before he was about to kill himself via drowning in Lake Michigan.

As he began walking into the frigid water, he heard;

Good luck pretending you don't know what that voice is.

PS. DAC closes in 3 weeks. Come join us. You gotta see what is happening here.