I have to respect a tradition whose founder’s first teaching is one of the most obvious facts of existence: In life, we suffer. We all suffer, every last one of us. Nobody gets through this life intact. This isn’t just a universal truth, but somehow, it’s the first and foremost Noble Truth—one of the four truths seen by the spiritually noble.
I’ve learned the hard way that this truth only seems obvious. It took a lot for me to realize that by stating it in the declarative, the universal, I gave myself a subtle and hidden out. “Life” is abstract. “My life” is less so. Without correction, my mind tells me I’m an exception, that I shouldn’t have to suffer. To go from “In life, we suffer” to, “In my life, I suffer” brings the gut-punch of existence right to my own gut. It’s a truth I couldn’t be taught by doctrine or a list. It’s a truth I could only be taught by experience.
Why, though, is this the first teaching? For all the potential great answers to that, many of which I’ve read in books greater than anything I’ll ever write, I have to start with the one that arose from my own life: because suffering is not an abstract concept. It’s real. One can only be in touch with the real insofar as one has turned to face their own suffering and then the suffering of others.
Suffering backed me into a corner with no escape. It first appeared to me in the form of trauma—developmental yes, especially as a queer, Latino, and neurodivergent person growing up in hostile territory, but specifically at once losing my housing, being displaced to a city I’d never lived in before, the deterioration of a romantic relationship leading to the experience of abandonment, and afterwards six months of homelessness. It’s not that I never suffered before that, it’s that I never suffered in such a way that I was so immersed and overtaken by it that its nature as the architecture of existence was made plain.
The reason suffering is presented first, before all other truths in the Buddhist system, is really quite simple, even if it’s a truth so obvious it’s hidden: it’s not just that we suffer, it’s that suffering is the very architecture of our lives. Our perceptions, beliefs, and motivations all arise out of our response to suffering. We cling to what gives us pleasure, and we reject that which gives us pain. What I’d failed to notice until this crisis is that this constant, incessant, reflexive, unthinking, utterly exhausting push and pull of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is the engine that drives my entire life. It takes on such enormous importance that without dramatic reconditioning and transformation, not one of us could ever conceive of a life not written in this exact grammar.
That’s where I was—truly seeing how suffering had shaped my entire life to the point where I found myself. That turn didn’t give me wisdom so much as it stripped away my excuses. In the face of that suffering, desperation was the first door I could walk through. I never imagined that I’d find myself in such a situation in life that, absent mental healthcare access and an adequate support system, I’d resort to “drugs” for help. But, I was desperate, and the term “drugs” is a wide net that catches tuna and dolphins alike. A 4-gram pack of mushrooms was my last-ditch resort to save me from myself as I descended into the throes of PTSD. I had them stored in a wooden box after a stray whim urged me to buy them from a woman in San Francisco’s Dolores Park. What I didn’t realize was that this move would be the first step in my own path. I sought relief and grounding. I got, instead, truth. And I’m glad I did.
As this website unfolds, what I will likely keep coming back to when I reference that decision isn’t merely the content of that experience or its impact on my life, but how the conditions leading up to and surrounding it aligned so as to catalyze a direct encounter with the ground of awareness itself. I don’t want to say that mushrooms are going to be that for everybody, but that the traditional psychonautic wisdom of “set and setting” goes far deeper than the immediate environment of a trip. “Set” also includes one’s needs, openness, and mental configuration; “setting” also means broad life circumstances and conditions. Taken together, they’re about existential and psychological readiness. It’s also important that a 4-gram dose, especially for my first-ever encounter with psilocybin, was massive—I honestly had no idea how much I was supposed to take.
In those circumstances, dosage, and my intention, I began to face my own suffering. It wasn’t a “bad” trip. But after that night, I could never approach suffering in the abstract, third person ever again.
Leave a Reply