The Night My Mind Disappeared

It was 2002. I was 20 years old, living in Belgium, and life was going well. I was in high spirits, just looking to have fun.

By then I had been experimenting with psychedelics for five years already. Mushrooms first, then Salvia. MDMA came at 17, around the same time electronic music took me and I started DJing. At 18, I tried LSD for the first time. My brother and I had become a Psychedelic Trance DJ duo. Music and psychedelics were my two great passions. But nothing could have prepared me for what would happen next.

One day my friend F told me his parents were going to be away for a couple of weeks. He had the whole house to himself, a beautiful old Belgian cottage farmhouse, and he invited me over for a psychedelic journey. F and I had grown close at university, where we studied cinematography together. He wanted to invite a third person that night, someone called L, who I didn't know very well at the time. L would become one of my best friends in the years that followed. He drowned about fourteen years ago. I love him dearly. He was a beautiful person.

We had some new acid for the night. Timothy Leary blotters, twelve by twelve, his face in profile on every tab. I still have one in my fridge. I've always loved collecting good trips over the years.

That evening we decorated the house with psychedelic art and turned on the blacklights. F had two massive speakers, and I set up my music gear. The whole night was going to be filled with music. I was the DJ for the night, responsible for the music choice, something I have always loved doing. We smoked some weed and took one tab of acid around six in the evening.

And off we went.

We were enjoying the night, talking and traveling into this special and rare type of experience. Venturing into a psychedelic dimension with friends is an extremely beautiful and courageous thing to do. We listened to psychedelic trance: Psycraft, Infected Mushroom, Mystery of The 13 Crystal Skulls, Hallucinogen. Slowly the acid began to take hold, and auditory and visual hallucinations started to creep into my awareness.

At some point F and L started talking about a book they had borrowed from a friend. The book was called The Book of Nothing by Osho. They were saying things like "thoughts are not real," "mind is an illusion," "there is no future or past except in your mind." These were concepts that were completely new to me. I believed in fairies and elves, in magic, mushrooms, and nature. But spirituality as a concept, as a teaching, as a subject, was new to me.

I couldn't join the conversation. I had nothing to say on the matter. So I became an observer. When F spoke, something inside me agreed: what he said felt true. But when L spoke, I felt there was a mistake or a fault in his reasoning. In my mind, I was sorting the whole conversation into right and wrong, true and false, into duality.

And then, suddenly, F turned his head, looked me straight in the eyes, and said: "Ha, K, AAAUuuuuum."

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Let me pause and fill you in for a moment. Aum is that Indian symbol that looks like a 30, the one I would always see at the Psytrance parties we went to. I drew it everywhere: on my books, on paper, on my desk at school, on walls, on the back of the seat in front of me on the bus. I would make little drawings of mushrooms and the Aum symbol. But when F turned his head, looked me in the eyes, and said "Aum," I heard him. I heard the word. And yet my mind had to admit that in reality, it did not know what Aum actually meant.

It was as if my mind got caught being an imposter. A generator of thoughts that could not actually understand what the thing was. It humbled itself to reality.

And then, in a split second, the greatest experience of my life happened.

My mind sank. It went through the middle of my skull, down my spine, into my heart, and there it exploded into infinite space. It disappeared completely into the vast ocean of being.

In that moment, three things happened that I can still remember as if they happened yesterday.

First, I felt like I had woken up from a dream. And that my entire life up to that point had been a dream.

Second, I had an inner sense that said: "It is so simple." If you don't have any thoughts, you don't have any problems, and everything is peaceful.

Third, I felt that F was my guru, because he seemed to have revealed this universal secret to me. Guru was a concept I had never heard of or felt before, but it seemed as if I understood what it meant from the deepest core of my being.

I was bathing in the deepest silence and bliss I had ever known. The hallucinations were powerful. Kaleidoscopic Buddhas and Shivas were twirling in front of my eyes. Lotus flowers were growing out of the speakers and crawling over the ceiling. Colors were dripping from the furniture and the sofa. And yet I felt so light, so fresh, so clear-headed. It was as if I had been drunk all my life and had suddenly become sober.

I sank into the silence, closed my eyes, and surrendered to it completely.

I don't know how long it had been, but at some point a thought was born in my heart. I could feel it travel up my spine, into my head, and from there it got projected out into space. I saw it as if I were watching a movie screen outside my skull.

The thought said: "THIS IS ENLIGHTENMENT."

Another concept that was new to me. I looked at the thought and said: "No. What I am experiencing is not enlightenment, because enlightenment is just a word, and no word could ever capture this."

The thought folded back into my brain, traveled back down to my heart, and disappeared into infinity.

And that was it. Just this silence. Just this beauty.

I didn't say a word for the rest of the evening. I simply couldn't. Any intention I had collapsed straight into the silence. Looking back, I realize that many people have glimpses like this, but it is rare to not comment on it, to let your mind truly die in that moment. I feel lucky it happened to me.

Honestly, after this, nothing can really be said. When the mind is gone, you cannot formulate any experience. If anything, all I can say is: silence. Every sound, every sample in the music, every hallucination was a confirmation of the experience and of silence itself. There was only one meaning pervading all of existence. I can only get close to it by calling it "beingness." Everything is. Everything exists. And this is what we are.

The rest of the night was pure bliss, total synesthesia, deep peace. I didn't speak, I didn't communicate. I asked for food once, and F was very happy to help me in the kitchen. I had a sandwich, went back to my seat, and disappeared again.

Later in the evening I went to bed. I didn't say anything when I did. I glided into sleep and disappeared even more, even deeper. I woke up in the same silence. The whole world looked beautiful and peaceful and new. The colors were vivid. Sunlight was pouring through the window. I was just so peaceful. Everything was so beautiful.

I went downstairs and saw my two friends sitting at the breakfast table. They looked dumbfounded, confused. In that moment I felt compassion for them, because they had no idea why I wasn't speaking anymore.

With all my power, I tried to create a thought. I tried and tried, and suddenly I said:

The silence broke when I spoke. But it didn't leave. For weeks and months afterwards, the world looked like a theater, a play. I would watch people speak, and it was as if everyone was just living inside their own little dream world. There was no real connection in what they were saying. I could see straight through it. It was bizarre. It took many months to come back to anything like a normal state.

I wanted to tell everyone what had happened. I ran into L the day after, while driving. But it wasn't possible to explain. It was so mind-blowing, so total, that no words could carry it. That moment changed my whole life. Literally changed my whole life. It started a search that took twenty years and brought me everywhere in this world. Every step afterwards was directed by that night. Seeking and searching. Suffering and joy. Love and bliss and suicide. Everything.

What happened after needs a whole book to tell.

I took more acid. I took more drugs. I dove deep into shamanism. I traveled to Peru and drank Ayahuasca for months in the jungle. I went to India and sat at the feet of many gurus and spiritual teachers, trying to understand, and hopefully experience again, what I had experienced that night. You wouldn't be surprised if I told you I went through hell and back searching for this.

I gave up all desire for success. I gave up relationships. I even found myself on the brink of suicide at one point, after I lost my connection with inner silence when I developed tinnitus from playing loud music for so many years.

Now I live in a beautiful country, and I have a guru, Ganga Mira, whom I love very much. She is totally part of my life. She finally released me from the search. I have come to accept that what I saw and experienced that night was always there. It always has been. It always will be. It is the silent background upon which all of this creation is playing out and manifesting. It is the true nature of our reality.

We do not need to look for it anywhere, or in any substance. It is what we are, and what everything is.

Enlightenment, or Nirvana, is accepting all as it presents itself. Silence or noise. It doesn't matter. This life is a dream. Make the best of it. You'll return to silence one day or the next.

I wish you love and peace.