Meet Me in the Mushroom – Anne Dutton episode 3
Anne: In the Zen tradition, you write these poems right before you die, they’re called your death poem and it’s a reflection of the deepest truth that you know, that you want to impart on your deathbed. And he wrote a poem that’s in very colloquial language. It’s kind of rough colloquial language and it’s addressed to young people and he says, “hey youngsters, hey young people, are you really disturbed by the thought of your death? Well, my advice to you is just die now, and then you’ll never have to die again.” Something like that. It’s really similar to the epigraph on St. Paul’s monastery. So I think that’s it, that’s it right there, whether you’re using psychedelics or whether you’re meditating, you know, it’s the surrender. What do you think? Cathy: I’m in complete agreeance with you, it’s the level of surrender. And I think with time with all of these processes, it also is cultivating a deep sense of trust. It’s almost like you trust completely in the divine plan in whatever it is, that’s about to come that you trust completely within the process. And the more you surrender into things, in every level from the somatic to the mental plane, to the spiritual plane, it is the golden key, I guess for moving into better, more alignment and deeper sense of wholeness and connection and all of those beautiful things that wait on the other side of very difficult experiences. Even, you know, we speak about the silent meditation retreats like a vipassana, having to sit and surrender into that posturing for so many days and you go through delayerings of death and, you know, these concepts that make you more resilient, make you stronger, bring you greater control of your mind and of your spirit. And I think that’s the thing with the psychedelic experience. It’s the letting go. And for me, with my first psychedelic experience, I remembered that was one of the most challenging things. BecauseI I’d never had to let go to that degree and that’s where the resistance and the body and the tension and the mind and the racing… And once you find that blissful, like “ha” then everything just shifts. Yeah. So I’m in complete agreeance with you there.