Journey to Self: The Path Down the Rabbit Hole

Journey to Self

The Path Down the Rabbit Hole

What I’m about to share is perhaps not meant for the world... When I say this, I don’t mean it in a lofty or vain way but in a way that is in fact meant to express the opposite. There is a reason that the epic journey of self-discovery can not be completed in a day, far less in the few minutes it will take you to read through what has taken me a lifetime to experience, and continues even now as I write this. However, is any one of us different or unique in this regard? This is what I mean by not being ‘meant for the world’... it is just one story among the multitude and yet it is mine alone. But, if I must share, if you will permit me, then I will implore the reader to take this time-lapsed journey with me, keeping this in mind. I will not waste your time with paltry details, nor bore you with idyllic tropes, but I will attempt to point your attention to the particular path that my feet have followed in getting me to this point; to the spine of the book in which the chapters and pages of my life thus far are hinged. 

I was born in New York City... wait don’t start getting bored yet... this intro is, obviously, a very necessary part of my journey to self, for how else would this narrative be possible? 

So I was born in New York City but I don’t remember a thing about my life there because my parents moved to Trinidad shortly after I was born. They didn’t want me to grow up in that city and decided to move back to my father’s birthplace. My parents had been in the Nation of Islam and then converted to being devout Sunni Muslims somewhere in this early time of my life and so I was raised in a community that practised orthodox Islamic traditions with strict adherence to its laws, etiquettes, taboos etc. 

Though my memory of my early childhood is that of being generally carefree, happy, and well-liked, I recall always being a wanderer. I somehow felt a longing curiosity, as perhaps most children do, about the deeper mysteries of life, a haunting sense of having known more and of consciously being a part of something infinitely bigger, lingering like the faint aftertaste of the most heavenly feast. It was a realisation that eluded me like the melody to a song I really enjoyed but couldn’t recall, one that if I could just find a certain note or turn of phrase, I would remember the whole tune and reconstruct that song to the ecstatic delight of my entire being. I think this is where creative imagination is born. It was in the search for that place of great remembrance, that certain smell that brings back a joyous memory, the few notes that invoke a deep elation in the heart and soul, that my conscious quest, my journey to self – the path down the rabbit hole, began. 

Being a dreamer, I found that I was also a loner in some ways, in that I would go off in my mind pondering the many wonders of my environment. And although I was surrounded by Muslims and religious devotees, I considered myself at a very young age to be a mystic, whatever I understood of that concept at that budding age. I didn’t really believe in anything. But, like most children in the church or mosque, I had no choice in whether or not I participated. Soon, I even looked forward to seeing friends and eating delicious food at the various events the community put together. Then, when I got home, I would drift off to sleep, closing the door of my mind to the outside world. Dark and serene, I would place myself inside a bubble of stars in the midst of which my bed was suspended, and I would dream the most fantastic dreams. 

It was on one such afternoon when I was eight years old, after playing outside on the school grounds where we lived, that I had one of my most unforgettable experiences. It would be the first of many to come but I will never forget the first. It was a typical sunny Trinidadian afternoon, hot, and I came inside to take a nap. I laid on my pallet cozily arranged on the ground with the fan cranking on high and the broken air conditioner on full tilt. With the faithful drone they generated fading into the background, it wasn’t long before I was off to the land of nod. I don’t know how long I was asleep before I woke up with a bit of a start. It could not have been long though, since it seemed like it was still afternoon and as if not much time had passed at all. 

I re-positioned myself a tad just to get more comfortable and hadn’t noticed until the moment I was adjusting myself that the windows were all lower than I was and that, in fact, I was somehow very close to the ceiling looking down at the rest of the room. Yet this didn’t really disturb me, it just struck me as a bit odd. I chalked it up to me being a little disoriented from waking up so suddenly. I decided to sit up and get my bearings when, to my amazement, I saw that I was sitting in mid-air. “Wait, what?! Am I dreaming?! I must be dreaming!”, I thought to myself. “But I’m awake! I’m sure I’m awake! How can I be way up here?!” 

That is when I looked straight down at the floor beneath me and got the shock of my life, although it didn’t happen all at once. As I looked down, I saw a strange figure lying on the ground. For a short time, this figure seemed to be the lifeless or sleeping form of someone I only vaguely recognised, yet there was a nagging familiarity that warranted another look. So, I focused a little harder and slowly it hit me, “That’s me!!!” I recoiled a little at the realisation and had a moment of genuine confusion because not only was I somehow floating on the ceiling but I was also lying there on the ground. Oddly enough, I felt a cold indifference to that figure on the ground that I just realised was me. The thought occurred to me that, ‘maybe I was dead’, which subsequently led me into a sudden panic that rushed over me like a wave of heat at the thought that I might actually be watching my own body lying there “dead”. ‘Ma will be devastated when she finds me’, another thought pinched at my soul, reinforcing my abject panic. 

I think in my shock I was soon jolted “awake” and I sat up with a deep gasp. This time I was back on the ground lying in the same spot where I had, just a second ago, seen my sleeping body lying there from somewhere near the ceiling. I felt myself to make sure I was all there and had to calm myself down. I opted to skip the rest of that nap, needless to say, and wondered about how I could float on the ceiling like a balloon and still be on the ground sleeping peacefully. 

For a child like me, this was the beginning of endless questions and yet I never ventured to tell anyone let alone ask anyone about what that experience might have been, not even my older brother. Like I said, I was kind of a loner in my mind. And besides, who would really listen, far less believe me? Nevertheless, my own questions persisted. “Was I dead?” “Is that what death is like?” “If I was on the ceiling who was on the floor?” “What am I, a body or a body inside a body?” and on and on. This event solidified me as a ‘mystic’ in my own mind. Something in me had been forever changed. 

I would continue to have these experiences off and on as I grew older, becoming more terrifying with age. This is because sometimes it seemed I wouldn’t quite make it out of my body so that I was awake but I felt paralyzed as if someone or something was holding me down, everywhere, at once. All I could manage to do was groan helplessly, stuck and staring in whichever position I had found myself awakened in. For this kind of ‘unusual’ experience alone, one might find it near impossible to avoid a life marked by very deep and pressing existential questions... but there was yet more. 

As I’ve mentioned my parents are very devout Muslims, so they opted to send me to Islamic boarding schools. This is how it happened that at age thirteen I was attending my second boarding school where an African man, who was an Islamic scholar and herbalist, was the headmaster. They wanted me to train to become a leader in the Islamic community and essentially, I was well on my way. Because of my perceived gifts for recitation and the memorisation of the Quran, Islamic doctrine, and whatever quality people were drawn to, within the community, my path was being laid. This scholar was renowned in the local Islamic community not only for his Islamic knowledge but his expertise in herbal healing and with performing certain spiritual rites. He was the instructor for several of my classes and was a good friend of my parents. 

He would sometimes give consultations after school hours when classes were done for the day. Then, most of the non-boarding students went home, leaving the handful of us. On such evenings he would give health consultations and or perform exorcisms... Yes, you read that right! There were a couple of much older students he would ask to help him hold the person down during these exculpatory rites, but during particularly challenging cases he would occasionally call on me. This is how I not only witnessed herbal healing consultations but participated in exorcisms at the ripe age of thirteen; as an incredulous assistant; fighting my feet from taking flight even as my heart tried to show courage, pounding wildly within my ribcage; my hysterical fear induced screams barely contained in my tightening throat. Of course, there was a neat little religious box that perfectly explained the multiple voices that came thundering or even murmuring from one single mouth, in as many languages. And, for the time being, I accepted it. But in the back of my mind, there were more questions still... 

A few years later I moved back to the U.S. and settled in Maryland. My existential quandaries were now buried under the excitement and distraction of my new-found life, “in de cold”, as Trini youth would put it, in our youthful colloquialism. Resting just beneath the veneer of all the conveniences and distractions of this new life, a part of me went to sleep. But maybe somewhere in that sleeping self’s dreams, I acted out vestiges of the qualities it brought to my personality. I learned to wake myself up and shrug off the slow creep of pins and needles in my feet that I now recognised signaled the onset of one of those funny body double episodes. 

Then, college and the music of the Hip-hop era started me reading and researching. And, as a result of a casual invitation by an old friend, I also started to go around the lecture circuit where self-proclaimed metaphysicians would throw around terms like ancestors, deities, spirits, conspiracy, aliens, clones, chakras, and the like, but given my early exposure, some of it struck a chord with me. In all those years I still had not mentioned the body-doubling experience I was having to anyone. Still, underneath all my then-current investigations, those experiences and the unanswered queries from my childhood are what drove me almost obsessively. 

At some point, I decided that I needed to go to Kemet. Just prior to my first trip there, I would frequent a local conscious bookstore often spending hours in the fog of incense and body oil fragrances until my skin and the belongings on my person seemed to produce an effervescent mixture of those scents for days afterward. I came across a rack of magazines near the top of the steps that always caught my attention but, for some reason, I didn’t stop to peruse through them. Maybe it was the fact that the issues I saw had what looked like West African photo images together with hieroglyphs around the edges, and I couldn’t reconcile the two at the time. 

Nevertheless, one day I decided I would pick up a few of them just to see what they were about, not being a magazine person, per se. If it wasn’t a five hundred to a thousand-page book, what could it possibly be saying of any real depth? It would be some time before I would see how wrong and arrogant that thinking was of me on both counts because these were not just any magazines; they were Rising Firefly magazines.