You’re waiting for your bride-to-be at the Arrivals terminal; you’re the paparazzi waiting for Johnny Depp to come out of the club; you’re a sniper waiting for the President’s cavalcade to turn the corner; you’re a soldier waiting for the order to charge; you’re a goalkeeper waiting for the penalty to be taken; you’re a sprinter waiting for the starter gun.
You watch and wait. You are awake and ready. You’re poised. You’re filled with charged expectation. You are in a state of heightened alertness and focus. You don’t daydream or ruminate or look at your phone. Your mind is empty. You are all attention, fully in the here and now.
This quality of attentive, mindful waiting is also present when you wait for a big life event, a birth, a death, a marriage, an important job, an award ceremony, an initiation ceremony. The best preparation for death, and the best preparation for a ceremonial psychedelic journey is to enter as much as possible this kenotic state of expectant waiting. Kenosis comes before a psychedelic ceremony.
Gnosis is the gift of the psychedelic ceremony itself; pistis is the post-trip process of integration; and kenosis is the self-emptied expectant waiting for the next one. For you never know when the next one will be the big one, the breakthrough, the unveiling, the apocalypse.
“Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.” (Matthew 24:42)
the way of the holy mushroom 