Life on the Dead Sea Part 2

I was in Metsokeh.

We were in Metsokeh.

I sat with my friend Alex on the salty earth and stared behind us at the hills and cliffs surrounding the dead sea. We had dosed already—200 micrograms each of LSD, dropped on unmarked but very potent mints, and then re-dosed a couple of hours in with a tab Alex procured from the depths of his wallet. He told me it had been gifted to him by a fellow hippy hiker in Yosemite, and that he’d traveled with it for over a year. It started with visual hallucinations. 

“The hills,” I kept saying. “The hills have eyes”. Every nook and cranny, every crevice and shadow, became an unblinking eye before me. 

While strange and enchanting, it was nothing compared to what happened when the peaks of the two doses combined, at which point we smoked a spliff. There was a space of time in which I saw something that comes to mind every time I reflect on the best moments of my life. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Alan Watts would call it ‘the beatific vision’ which I think is an appropriate name. 

Behold, before me was visual proof of the cliches and platitudes I had held onto so tightly in my darkest hours! The world as one object, flowing and swirling into itself like a Van Gogh painting. No borders, no separation, just a massive swirling blissful mess. As everything in my field of vision bled into each other, aspects of myself— the most fundamental building blocks of who I am—did too. 

I wept openly, which is not something I think I had done in front of a friend before—certainly not out of sheer awe. 

After I had wiped the tears from my eyes and smoked a joint while watching the overwhelming stillness of the Dead Sea, we spent a while playing in the sand, floating on the water, and marveling at the colorful hallucinations. I felt that I could see every color within every color. I kept saying it: I can only see one color! It's every color! Every-color-in-a-color! Every-color-in-a-color! 

We walked toward the water and I gestured towards it, exclaiming naively “nothing bad could ever come of this!”. The electric charged-up love that acid offers extended to every particle, every mote of sand, every hair on the back of my neck. I turned to face my buddy, to take him in as best I could. 

He looked the way I had once seen myself in a mirror, on a similar dose; glowing, radiant, and powerful. Freckles streamed across his face in astonishingly complex tribal patterns. I told him he was beautiful. I could tell that he believed me. There was a distinct, strong sense that we were inhabiting each other's minds, such was the sensitivity we felt for each other's state of being.

Then we lost our minds. 

“How many times have we done this?” He asked me. “How many times have you reminded me that I fell into it, and how many times have I remembered to come back?” I knew it was my friend Alex asking me this question, but it felt like more than that—it felt like the universe itself was asking the question. It felt like he was asking the question to me, like I was asking the question to him, like we were asking it to ourselves, like humanity was asking it to no one in particular.

We were on our stomachs, hugging the salty earth beneath us like it was the only way we could keep our souls in our bodies. The laughter had hit us —The Laughter— not the reactionary laughter that comes from a good joke. This was the kind of laughter that comes from the ground. It was as if we had camped out atop a natural geyser of pure, distilled laughter, which was now exploding forth out of the salt, launching us into the sky with each new surge of hysterical guffaws. 

There was a cycle to it. It would surge up through us loudly and escalate into the silent but deadly kind of laughing that can feel like the muscles in your chest are ripping themselves off of the bone, like your lungs are tearing at the seams, as it tunnels your vision in an overdose of joy. 

It was cathartic for a timeless period. Then we started reaching for ways to move on to the next thing and give our aching torsos a break. My suggestion was to “let Uncle Alan explain the game”. I kept saying it, and every time I did, it was the funniest goddamn thing I ever said, and we would again rocket off into peals of uncontrollable laughter.

The high was still climbing. While my friend lay prone on his back atop the buoyant salty water, I walked up and down a length of the shore. Every step was orgasmic, in every physical way an orgasm is pleasurable, without any sexual arousal. The pleasure was so shockingly consistent; every step, an orgasm. 

Every time my foot sunk into the sound, waves of it spread up my body and out of my mouth. I turned after a series of blissful paces and aligned myself with the shore, one foot in the sea, one in the sand. I stared for some time, and the words I had read from Uncle Alan on the bus to the sea became an experience:

“The Second characteristic [of the psychedelic experience], I will call Awareness of Polarity. This is the vivid realization that states, things, and events that we ordinarily call opposite are interdependent, like back and front, or the poles of a magnet. By polar awareness one sees that things which are explicitly different are implicitly one: self and other, subject and object, left and right, male and female, and then, a little more surprisingly, solid and space, figure and background, pulse and interval, saints and sinners, police and criminals, in-groups and out-groups. Each is definable only in terms of the other, and they go together transactionally, like buying and selling, for there is no sale without a purchase and no purchase without a sale. As this awareness becomes increasingly intense, you feel that you yourself are polarized with the external universe in such a way that you imply each other. Your push is its pull, and its push is your pull — as when you move the steering wheel of a car. Are you pushing it or pulling it?”

Uncle Alan explains the game like no one else can, I thought. I wanted Alex to hear him do it, so I called him out of the water and we set up the speaker, nestled our asses in the sand, and prepared ourselves. But before we were ready, the laughter began. And so for a stretch of timelessness long enough for the sun to set and the stars to come out, we laughed, and it was bliss. 

Then, in the span of a moment, Everything was shattered by an incredibly bright light, pure white in the center, and a rainbow of every-color-in-a-color beaming out and around it. 

It arrived alongside a gigantic noise that threatened to shred apart the fabric of reality. For a moment we just stared, like deer in the headlights of a car the size of the moon, completely entranced and overwhelmed, our hearts not daring to beat, our lungs not daring to expand or contract, just frozen still in the tractor beam of indescribably bright light and an unbearably loud sound.

Slowly it dawned on us as the light moved that it was attached to something and that something was a military helicopter: black, angular, gigantic, loud, and sinister. Protruding from its face was a spotlight, shining directly into our corneas. It was the single most overwhelming, terrifying, astonishing thing we had ever experienced. It hovered there, circling us, ripping the air into pieces. I turned slowly to my buddy, meeting his eyes, and said the first thing that came into my head: 

“Don’t Panic.”

And then, we panicked. Hard. 

Our next drug-addled instinct was to hide, like mice from a cosmic hawk. We ducked under a crevice of salty mud and then immediately realized that this was not ample shelter from an object that could move and hover in the air. 

Our next drug-addled instinct was to run, which we did, for ten whole paces, before realizing we were leaving all our belongings behind us on the salt flats. Our next drug-addled instinct was to remember we were running for our lives which were more important than our belongings. The helicopter started making bigger circles, and the spotlight moved onward, leaving us in the blessed cursed dark. I grabbed my buddy by the shoulders. 

“Ok man. Here we go. We just surfed the waves of laughter for a couple of hours, we died into it and came out the other side. Now we're going to play a similar game. It's going to be more intense though. We are going to surf waves of the fear of death. We are going to lose ourselves to it. And we are going to come out on the other side”. He nodded. We spun around and took off running across the salt flats towards where we remembered our tent to be. 

That's when the ground opened up underneath me and I fell into a sinkhole. 

I could hear chunks of earth hitting water, somewhere vaguely beneath me. I dived into the fear and came out the other side. I scrambled out of the hole and scooted out. My friend and I traded and matched expressions of disbelief, manic terror, and excitement, then took off again, this time angling towards the beach. 

My buddy lost a sandal in the quicksand-like salty mud at some point, which we yelled about briefly and then pressed on. It soon dawned on us that we were lost. The night and the double dose of LSD had transformed the once-familiar landscape into something completely unrecognizable, and we could still hear the helicopter, somewhere. 

After twenty to forty breathless minutes of searching for the trail leading to the hill our tents were on by smartphone-light, we found a tent. I approached and found a couple enjoying their dinner. “Hi, so… my friend and I, we took a lot of acid and we’re quite lost. Can you… do you maybe know where the hill with the tents is?”. They laughed and pointed the way back. 

I heard myself say loudly to Alex “Ok buddy, we're gonna be ok. It's just gonna be a little bit more of an adventure than we thought.” I recall thinking to myself that I sounded like Morty from Rick and Morty. Several unseen tents around us erupted in giggles. We didn't mind, we were just relieved to be alive.

Getting to our tent turned out to be far more complicated than we thought. We kept getting thrown off by new tents that had been pitched in our absence, and Alex was vividly hallucinating armed soldiers with rifle barrels pointed in our direction. We ducked under a bush and tried to gather our wits. I tried to convince Alex that we were not in physical danger anymore, that people there were friendly, that the army was gone. 

He was not convinced. 

I took out my phone, thinking the GPS might help orient us. This turned out to be a decision with horrifying consequences. The GPS must have been thrown off by the cliffs, or the Dead Sea’s unique microclimate, or maybe the satellites and the space around them had not fully recovered from melting into a beautiful Salvador Dali painting before my eyes. Regardless, they informed us that we were 50 miles away from our original location, which did not improve the vibe. I decided that the GPS was wrong. Alex was not convinced. He heard a nearby tent’s conversation, which happened to be in Spanish, and immediately concluded we were in a different country. I disagreed. He was not convinced.

Eventually, I decided to try to ask for directions again. We turned a corner into a clearing of the trees and found a full Friday night Sabbath meal, just like the ones from my childhood, on the ground, surrounded by singing campers, and rows of candles suspended from branches. That's what I saw. That's what was there. What Alex saw was rows of rifles with flashlights attached to barrels, in the hands of columns of soldiers. He decided to hang back for a while while I asked for directions. I got them, and we finally found our tent. 

We ducked into the opening and took in the interior of our home for the night. Two black sleeping bags lay before our feet like body bags had been thoughtfully arranged for us at the end of our terrifying night. We zipped ourselves into them eagerly. I set up our speaker and played some Uncle Alan. This time, a guided meditation. I died into it as fully as we had the laughter, the fear, and the salty sinkhole that appeared beneath me as I ran for my life. And I came out on the other side. Alex did too. 

We unzipped our body bags, smiled like freshly escaped prisoners, and stepped out into the night.

Before us was the beginnings of a campfire. But it was Shabbos. We had forgotten that was the case, what with the reality-melting drugs and near-death experiences. Alex and I had briefly discussed this earlier in the trip. It was his intention to keep shabbos while we camped, and I respected that. What I did not respect quite as much was his mumbled defense of white-knuckle religiosity in comparison to the unfathomable wonder of the experience we were having, and he didn't either. 

He had trailed off halfway through and stared into the dead sea. Either way, that left preparing the fire to me, which I got to right away. I gathered the branches and kindling but all I could find was a moldy dried-up Hebrew book. It had no cover, its pages were slightly illegible, and it looked like the bibles we had used in middle school together. I ripped out a few pages and crumpled them up beneath a teepee of branches and got a small fire going while we marveled at how present, calm, even holy we felt. 

At some point, I noticed Alex had been feeding the fire pages and branches for a few minutes. I noted this and he said very calmly “I don't feel any less holy.” It was at that moment that Alex’s grip on fundamentalist faith fully relaxed. Yahweh wasn't there, but the smoke, the dirt, the trees, the stars, our conversations— all remained holy. 

We survived the helicopter and its holy ray of brilliant terrifying light. We survived the sinkholes. We survived being lost in what we briefly thought was Spain. The only casualty of that blissful, horrifying, lovely night was inherited faith in a God we forgot to ask for help when we thought we were going to die. 

Eventually, we got back into our body bags and died into sleep.

The next morning we trekked over to the other side of the beach and asked our friends if they had seen the massive helicopter and its brilliant multi-colored spotlight of terror, and they laughed. They told us someone had been bitten by a snake, and the coast guard had been called. We laughed too.

We were in Metsokeh.