How do I get rid of this anxiety and be whole and peaceful?

[cdc9855]

I'm having a hard time letting this huge anxious feeling go. I keep trying to plunge myself into it and feel it out, but am having a hard time surrendering to it. Help!

The background of the story is this:

I took acid for the first time at age 19, and had a perfect death-rebirth experience. I stayed mellow, I reverted into a fetus, then all of this wonderful tension got released and I was reborn into an universe of infinite interconnection. I felt fully present and at one with everything-- one of those great "everything I know is wrong" experiences. It changed my life for the absolute better. Naturally, I was very excited to do it again, but my 2nd trip was not like my first. There was a "snag," a "problem." The second trip I remember saying "oh I can't do that." Since then the few times I've come close to "letting go" were quickly met with feelings of going insane. Then I'd go back to walking around and "not being able to feel" it. Classic Grof right? My rational brain was desperate to stay in control, and managed to keep my "self" intact. During that phase, I took acid may be 10-15 times (one of them a heroic dose), each time trying to get back to that first trip, to let myself go and to let go of my fear; open myself to love and be complete and whole in present.

It didn't happen. I kept hitting this snag, despite my best efforst to "let go". Most of my trips would be me tossing and turning in bed, frustrated. Talking to myself. Antagonized by these feelings that just wouldn't go away; wouldn't leave me along.

Fast forward 10 years. I've lived out of the country for a long time, doing all sorts of stuff. During this time my inner world has maintained this level of bifurcation. The anxiety -- "the feeling that cannot go" -- is ever-present (albeit in manageable doses, I'm a very optimistic/social person in general). The entire time I've been obsessed with the idea of just "letting it go" and rediscovering that wholeness and that presence that I know is there.

I'm moving back to the US soon, and part of me really really wants to eat a few doses of LSD again and see if over the last 10 years things have softened up enough to let this feeling pass. Another part of me is scared that I'm just a puppy chasing its own tail, and that I've cooked up this crazy situation in my head and really there is no way for me to transcend this state. Maybe that's just the way I'll always be? Who ever said there was an easy way to get rid of your anxiety? Just buck up and be a man/deal with your emotions-- all those feelings.

What do you guys think I should do? I thought I'd discovered a beautiful thing in my life, but recently I'm feeling maybe not. Or maybe its just different than I thought it was? At any rate, I'm not sure what context I need to put this feeling in to make it just float by and make myself light and unencumbered again. A wholesale embrace of insanity? I wish I had an experienced sitter

I mean, how did all those hundreds of thousands of dead-heads all manage to be happy and peaceful and free, and I'm this hung-up freak? How do you guys let all the fear go and find that cosmic space?

Thanks for any input!
-All bound up,
Dilbert

 

[transitionsynth]

You remind me a lot of Constantin Constantius, the narrator of Kierkegaard's book Repetition. Constantius is an experimental psychologist who is studying the concept of repetition--is it possible to repeat an event exactly the way it happened before? What is the significance of repetition? And does one gain or lose in repeating? In the book he endeavors unsuccessfully to repeat things in his life that he has enjoyed. In one lengthy passage Constantius takes a second trip to Berlin in order to repeat the first trip, but he finds that he cannot accomplish it. He does all the "same" things under a certain superficial description as he did on his previous trip: he stays at the same hotel, goes to the same restaurants, the same theater, and so on. But throughout there remains some kind of "snag": either external circumstances change, or he finds himself in a different mood than before, or the "same" turns out not to be the same at all.

The book Repetition, of course, is written as a metacommentary on Constantius' attempts to find repetition. What we learn in the book is that Constatntius is seeking the wrong kind of repetition. In trying to repeat the same as the same, he is stuck in a loop. Constantius concludes that there is no repetition; but what we learn in reading of his attempts is that he actually has experienced repetition, though he cannot see it. This is because authentic, genuine repetition is repetition in difference and of difference. It's a kind of resonance of the past with the current experience, a bringing forward the past into the future with you, and this is possible only because the future is not "the same" as the past.

Think of it this way: imagine you fall in love with a beautiful woman. Your first date is something out of a perfect romance novel. Things cannot stay that way. If you try to repeat that first date the same way over and over, the relationship will wither away and die. Furthermore you can't just stop doing anything, or again your relationship will die. Being in love must be repeatedly maintained, though in difference: different circumstances will occur that call for differences in the way the relationship is dealt with, but these very differences can be the things that allow you to bring that love with you into the future, precisely by resonating that love within those different circumstances.