THE VISION IS A PLACE | ✓ {complete}

Chapter 38 | what happens

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They say when you die your brain floods with DMT; the same chemical that helps you dream. But, if the amount your brain releases at night is only a drop, the amount released when you die would be more like an ocean.

I knew a guy who said he lived with a shaman in the Peruvian Amazon. 'A real one', he'd say, 'not one of the weekend actors from Lima who slips LSD in your drink'. He said the first time he drank Ayahuasca with him, he experienced a spiritual death. That's the only way he knew how to describe it.

Heath says if you take an experience like that, and multiply the intensity of it by a thousand, you might then come close to the euphoric rush that happens when you die. He says that's the part of dying we perceive as spiritual, and where some say the afterlife lives; inside of that rush.

He says you can drink, smoke, or shoot as much DMT as you want, but our bodies stop absorbing it long before we reach, what he says Kent named, 'The Forbidden Level'. Forbidden because biology has reserved the experience for only those at the time of their true death. Maybe to protect us. Maybe to stop us from seeing too much. Or maybe to save the world from too many prophets.

Finding a way to reach this forbidden level, without dying, was Kent's obsession. It was the thing that led him to study what he did, teach what he did, and stay at Trinity for as long as he did. It's why he bought the farm and enlisted Heath. His obsession is why The Aura exists. It's his way of reaching the afterlife without actually dying; it's his way through that barrier, to the forbidden level.

Kent doesn't believe in a universal afterlife. He says what happens to us when we die is dependant on two things: our truest, deepest beliefs of what we think will happen, and our physical location in the universe at the time of our death. He believes there are infinite heavens and infinite hells; some of which are always open, while others are only accessible during certain windows of time. Just like how the monks in Jai's story believed that a certain alignment of stars would unlock their Nirvana, the Shangrinns believed that being under the moon's shadow during a total solar eclipse is what unlocks their afterlife: the afterlife Kent would later refer to only as The Vision.

To get to The Vision during an eclipse, you must first know it exists. Second you must have a burning desire to go there. Thirdly, you can't go alone. You need a group of people, all connected to each other through love. It can't be fake and it can't be forced. It has to be real.

That's where we come in.

The year was 1977. Kent was a student at Trinity; the same university he would later teach at. At the time, he was majoring in Anthropology. For his fourth-year thesis, he wanted to write a modern day ethnography, focused around the new spiritualist movement that had sprung up on campus. Classmates of his were starting raw food diets, meditation circles replaced games of frisbee on the lawn, ecstatic dance workshops were being held in the cafeteria, and organic cafes were popping up next to busy bars.

Strictly as an outsider, Kent was fascinated. He was determined to find a group he could join and write about. After a few weeks of drifting around, he hadn't yet found a group extreme enough for the kind of story he was trying to write. The people he talked to were more like hobbyists; groups of friends who enjoyed a little yoga here and there, pretending it meant more to them than it did. Kent was looking for something more serious, and farther outside his realm of normal life. He wanted to document a group that fully inhabited some aspect of this new wave, beyond just the aesthetic of it. But he was discovering that a group like that might not exist in the way he'd naively imagined...not in the circles he had access to, anyway.