No, I am absolutely not kidding about this. This past week has been the strangest and spiritually most transformative of my life. I've had a rendezvous with the eternal timelessness of the present moment; it will be interesting to see how things unfold from here, but I feel like the gods have generously handed me a big, fat, very unexpected recompensation check that has more than rewarded me for all those (imagined) long years of self doubt, self hate, disorientation and depression which had made up such a big part of my adult life. As some of you might have noticed, I have not been active at all on this forum during the past four months; the reason being that, following a particularly profound LSD experience in early October of last year, I subsequently fell into a black hole of existential weariness that didn't quite feel like a run-of-the-mill depression but had many of the same characteristics. In retrospect I now realise that this was a sort of preparation phase for what was about to come, a time of emotional purging which paved the way for the strange rite of passage which I had no idea was awaiting me. During this time, I sometimes sat around on the beach all by myself holding my head between my hands, feeling sad and helpless like a little boy that has been deserted by all of his friends, quietly whimpering words like „Please, I don't know what to do anymore, please, I cannot go on anymore, please, I have no strenght left anymore, please, I just don't have the power to sustain myself anymore, please please please please...“ - Some time in late January, I had started to read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and the creature's description of itself as a poor and miserable wretch that knew nothing, had no skills and no friends, had no idea where it came from and never been taught how to look after itself made a big impression upon my mind; its words echoed my own woeful inner state, and I could deeply identify and empathize with this godforsaken creature. It is also worth mentioning that I kept up my meditation pratice during these months of silent desperation, but at this point much more out of habit than real conviction; calling my entire being into question, I had also begun to wonder if all this meditating that I had been doing continuously for four years now had any effect whatsoever -- after all, here I was, feeling more clueless and miserable than ever before. Wasn't I just completely wasting my time with all this sitting around on my bed and semi-successfully (at best!) trying to become present? Cut to last Saturday, one week ago from the time I am writing down these words. I had already felt a little dizzy for two days and kind of suspected that I might be getting sick; and when I went to bed in the evening, I had the feeling that I probably would be getting very little in the way of sleep... and sure enough, I didn't sleep a single second that night (I think I slept perhaps eight to ten hours during this entire week). The first 48-72 hours of my strange Covid trip have by now already blurred into a uniform cloud of cronologically unlocatable memory fragments, so I'll just describe them here in the form of a single stream of consciousness: I am lying in bed, tossing and turning. I lie on my left side, I lie on my back, I lie on my right side, fetal position, streched out, right arm tucked under my head, no posture seems to be tolerable for more than two minutes. I start to sense a pulsating pain in my neck that nearly kills me and makes my head spin everytime I lift my head from the pillow. A feverish surge begins to wash over me that somehow at the same time clouds and hightens my senses. --- Okay, try to go into meditation mode, maybe it will help you to calm down a bit and eventually fall asleep. Relax, breathe, become present, become aware of the sounds around you, feel your body. Am I ever going to become better at meditation? You're trying too hard, that's the problem. Meditation is not about trying, it's about letting go. But how? How do you let go? How how how how how? For god's sake, four years of regular meditation, and you still suck absolute balls at this! In fact, you don't know how to do anything, and you also don't know how to NOT do anything. It is truly sad. You are completely, totally, utterly worthless. A sheer waste of space. Come on, focus again, observe the breath. It is impossible, my thoughts are too loud. They're SO goddamn loud, they drown out everything else. It seems that instead of becoming quieter, my mind is on the contrary becoming louder and louder and louder with every passing week. Is this the way it's supposed to work? Oh my god, it's just always the same thought loops over and over and over again, welcome to hell. I think I will just quit meditation and spirituality altogether, just absolutely forget that I ever heard about this fucking nonsense. I'm no good at this shit. And even if I succeed, what then? Getting rid of your ego, is this really what you want? Are you crazy? Oh yeah, it sounds so goddamn nice on paper, but really think this through now. What else do you have besides your ego? Face it, it's the only thing you got in this lonely life, there's nothing else. It is literally my only friend. - Dude, are you going to meditate now or not?! The problem is that I don't know what I want. I don't know anything, I am good for nothing, I am totally useless. I am a little stupid child that is completely lost in the dark. I have no friends, I have no skills, I don't have anything at all. I have literally NOTHING to give to others! All I have is my wretched, whiny, miserable ego. It is my only friend, my only friend, my only friend! If I get rid of my ego, then I will be left with literally nothing, zero, zip. Please, don't leave me. Don't leave me. Don't leave me. Don't leave me. I don't want to be alone, no no no no, I DON'T WANT to be alone, the very thought of god's eternal loneliness horrifies the shit out of me! Oh god, this is all so terrible!! --- But wait. Wait. Wait a second. Am I not already all alone? Of course I am. I already am alone. Here I am, existing all by myself. All alone. All alone. I am the ego, and I am all alone. So the ego and God are one. Of course... God's aloneness is my aloneness . God's aloneness is my aloneness. God's aloneness is my aloneness. GOD'S ALONENESS IS MY ALONENESS! Oh Christ, why could I not see this before? That's it! I AM GOD! Of course, of course, of course, of course! I am alone because I am already God! Haaaaaahahahahaha, that's it! You hit the jackpot! You just recognized yourself as God! This is it! This is it! THIS IS IT!! THIS IS ENLIGHTENMENT!! ------- What you just read is a grossly simplified and condensed version of a very long and meandering psychological process that unfolded gradually over the course of several days; it involved me coming directly face to face with my wounded and scared inner child, and then healing that child by reuniting it with God. It also involved two glimpses into Nonduality that occurred during two different nights; both of these are imprinted in my memory as amorphous islands of timelessness somehow interrupting the linear stream of chronological time (which itself is of course nothing but a mental construction born out of the timeless here and now). I have absolutely no way of telling how long I was gone during these glimpses – maybe five seconds, maybe five hours (again, time isn't real anyhow and the past aka memory is nothing but what you make of it, so who the eff cares, right?). I also could not say if I was awake of asleep while they happened - of course, I was neither since „I“ was not there anymore -; I only remember lying awake in bed before and after in the same position. The first of those glimpses was not very unlike what I had previously experienced during N'N DMT trips, the characteristic feature being a sensation of existential dread in the face of God's absolute & eternal aloneness. The second glimpse came very close to pure Nirvana aka. the No-State of No-Self (I have yet to try 5-Meo Dmt, so I do not have any kind of reference for this); much has been written about this state, and all descriptions are true and yet utterly miss the mark, so I won't bore you with yet another futile attempt of describing the indescribable. Suffice to say that it was nothing like I had imagined it, that it is both profoundly ordinary and profoundly shocking, that it made me realise that „enlightenment“ as something to be somehow attained through effort is a total hoax and that the story of birth and death which we tell ourselves is nothing but a fiction. The day after I had this second non-dual glimpse, I could sense myself very gradually „coming back to Earth“ even though it still all felt slightly feverish and trippy. The mental chatter that was continuing just like it always had was now happening very prominently on the surface of consciousness, so to speak, and I perceived it like one would hear the obtrusive roar of a creaking 1920's jukebox that is standing somewhere in a corner, stubbornly refusing to shut up even after the guests of the dance party have long left. The next day however, things were quietening down; I had undeniably re-entered the stratosphere and was more or less my old self again when all of a sudden, in a moment of completely sober and „non-trippy“ clarity, I realised the very simple and utterly obvious fact that there exists nothing outside of the here and now, that past and future are nothing but mental constructs and that this very moment is in fact eternal. It was incredibly strange. Nothing at all had changed; I saw reality in just the same old way that I had seen it for all my life, except that I now saw that it is (and always "had been") eternal. That's all. The obvious finally becoming obvious. As I am writing this, I feel that there is still a strong remnant of egoic energy present; I can physically feel it in my throat. But I feel very calm, very light, very grounded and very present. My body energy, which seems to be slightly increased, is floating through my limbs in soft and warm waves. It is a nice sensation. My mental chatterbox is still continuing its same old monologue, its though patterns are still revolving around the same old "I" thought. But I let it ramble on; just get it off your chest, old friend, just let it all out until there is nothing left to say. - Will it stay this way? I have absolutely no idea. In fact, I feel like I don't know anything anymore, and I also really don't care. The one thing I do know is that existence is strange and wonderful, and that God truly works in mysterious ways. I guess you could say that I have died from Covid and found out that there is no death. Thank you so much for reading this. I love you. Peace.