We are What Is This

A memory flashed before my eyes.

I’m sitting in a tent high on psychedelics with my best friend and his girlfriend, deep into the middle of the night, taking a brief respite from the calamity of a music festival in the middle of nowhere. Our time in that tent was richly delicious like fresh fruit over a dark chocolate souflee. At some point he suggested we rejoin the party from what I sensed was a feeling of lack or missing out. I clumsily said in my psychedelic state where the structure of sentences disintegrate like the boundaries between you and everything else, “We are what is this”. We laughed at the profundity of what was encased perfectly in my incoherent grammar.

His proposal to rejoin the collective exaltation in the sea of consciousness merged though sound and dance, brought my mind “over there” and it felt feint compared to where we were in that relatively calm and quiet tent. In his mind, I presume, it was like our souls were out there on the abstract square of space claimed as our groups, with our other friends and we had to go over there for the body to be ensouled. That is not what I saw. I felt so deeply present, so wholly possessed, so fully complete in the immediacy of the current experience, that I fumbled out that stupid statement, which resonated to all of us, and caused an eruption absurd laughter, what seemed to be the deepest truth existence had to offer: We are - what is this.