I spent most of that first post-5-Meo night sitting up in bed (Nancy slept on and off beside me), helplessly absorbed in extremely gripping, three-dimensional replays of the horror I had experienced, now and then trying to comfort myself with the thought that this wouldn't, couldn't, last for more than a few nights. The waves of rembrance did not come gently. I was throbbing, shaking, struggling to find some semblance of calm in the psychospiritual riptides that were tossing me about like a piece of shore-bereft driftwood. A hellride minus an offramp.

Hour after hour I endured, feeling as though I would never return from the madness that was infiltrating me. Finally, just before dawn, I fell asleep and very soon found myself in a lucid dream.

I had often had such dreams, frequently using them as portals for all kinds of adventure and experimentation. As such, they were normally quite pleasing to be in; I would know that the body I "had" in the dream was not my actual physical body, and so could then freely engage in activities that would mean disaster or even Death in the "waking" state. If I was afraid in a regular dream and then became lucid during it, I coudl usually face the fear, interacting with it's dream-form until some kind of resolution or integration occured.

But not now. Yes, I knew I was dreaming, but I could not work with the fear therein. The dream was saturated with an enormous, otherworldly terror which was coupled with savagely hallucinatory disorientation. In the midst of this I stood, my dreambody but a ghostly sieve for its surroundings. I knew that if I left the dream, I would still be in the very same state.

At last, I let myself go fully into the dream, despite my conviction that I very likely would not return. Now I was completely inside it, utterly lost, immersed in an edgeless domain of look-alike, spike-headed waveforms, each one sentient and subtly scaly, moving protoplasmically in endless procession in all directions. Just like my 5-Meo setting, but without the speed.

Suddenly, I was overcome by a completely unexpected, rapidly expanding compassion. All fear vanished. A few moments later, I somehow cut - or intended - a kind of porthole in the bizarre universe that enclosed me, as cleanly round as the shrinking aperture of my consciousness at the onset of my 5-Meo journey.

Through this opening the countless alien forms spontaneously came streaming, immediately metamorphosing into flowers, birds, trees, humans: Earthly life in all its wonder and heartbreaking fecundity. Then the dream faded, and I lay radiantly awake, deeply moved, feeling as though the hardest part was now over.

It had, however, just begun.

-Robert Augustus Masters, Darkness Shining Wild, pp.22-24

Opening to our fear is an act of intimacy, a courageous welcoming of the disfigured and outcast into the living room of our being. Opening thus is also an act of surrender. As such, it is not a dissolution - or collapsing - or personal boundaries, as in submission, but rather an expanding of them.

In submission, we deaden ourselves, sinking into the shallows; in surrender, we enliven ourselves, dying into a deeper Life. In surrender we may lose face, but we do not lose touch. Submission flattens the ego; surrender transcends it. Submission is passive, but surrender is dynamic.

The sense of being somebody special (a legend in our own mind!) helps immunize “I” against the bare facticity of its own mortality, here-and-now instability, and innate insubstantialness.

Even when “I” dreams of transcending itself - as in those programs that have (or advertise) as their central agenda the eradication of ego - it is still an “I” who has now achieved the incomparable goal of self-transcendence! “Look, Ma, no ego!” we announce as we unicycle past our rapt inner audience, too proud to notice our pride, forgetting that self-conceit persists well into advanced transpersonal stages of development.

In our craving to be somebody special - and don't forget that we may find our specialness through being “nobody” - we bypass exploration of that very craving, committing far more of our passion to fulfilling our dreams than to actually awakening from them.

-Robert Augustus Masters, Darkness Shining Wild, p.58

Opening to our fear is an act of intimacy, a courageous welcoming of the disfigured and outcast into the living room of our being. Opening thus is also an act of surrender. As such, it is not a dissolution - or collapsing - or personal boundaries, as in submission, but rather an expanding of them.

In submission, we deaden ourselves, sinking into the shallows; in surrender, we enliven ourselves, dying into a deeper Life. In surrender we may lose face, but we do not lose touch. Submission flattens the ego; surrender transcends it. Submission is passive, but surrender is dynamic. - Robert Augustus Masters, Darkness Shining Wild, p. 30-31

“Ego” as a concept has negative connotations for many spiritual seekers, for whom it is simply an impediment, an obstacle in need of eradication…Ego could be said to be a cult of one (or a self-enclosed coalition of survival-oriented habits that automatically refers to itself as “I”). This does not mean that this is evil or in need of annihilation, but rather that it's centered and unquestioningly governed by its own ideology…What is needed is not the elimination, but rather the illumination, of ego. DSW, p41