The Night Train

A tale of two transcendent experiences — one with Allen Ginsberg in California, and one on a train from Chiang Mai to Bangkok.

Long train rides have historically been ecstatic experiences for me, especially if they’re paired with excellent books or music, and right now, I’m definitely approaching transcendence this night train from Chiang Mai to Bangkok. 

The sun has almost entirely set. Wispy black clouds hang over a pale blue sky. Inside the train’s restaurant car it’s warm and quiet, and Christmas lights glow from above the bar. I am sipping freezing orange juice and reading about the field of energy that connects all of existence. 

In The Power of Intention, Wayne Dyer writes about the idea that every part of our consciousness is actually connected to a field of pure intention. About how everything that grows and everything we are is the product of an initial spark of intention that threw us into being, that coded us with everything that will happen to us, that implemented the melodies sung by the birds and the colors of the flowers and the shape and heft of our planet’s cycle through the sun.

About how that ancient spark is a pure field of unbounded energy. About how we can still access that energy here on Earth, even though it appears we are separate from it.

And I am thinking about how despite all my skepticism about God and manifestation and spiritual woo-woo of all kinds, I know that energy. Have always known it. 

It’s the source of everything I’ve created.

Writing has always made me feel like I was connected to something divine. I can’t take any credit for these words and songs that pour out of me. They come so quickly, as if they’re channeled directly from an ineffable source.

When I hesitate or allow my thinking mind to take over, the message gets warped and garbled and always falters. I have to get out of the way. I simply have to open the channel. Then the pure light of source pours through. It’s always been this way, since I first realized I could put the stories in my head down onto the page.

It’s not permanent. It comes and goes. I don’t take it for granted even for a moment, and I know it could stop at any time. The river has dried up before, though it’s always come back. And when it is with me, I feel what can only be called magic. When I am writing I feel the unmistakable touch of what can only be called God.

More and more, I think it actually is God.

In a different book, I read about how the energy field that teems and swells around and within us is not benevolent or malicious. It’s just energy. We decide what kind of energy we get in contact with based on our thoughts.

By that logic, if we believe in a benevolent source energy that is protecting us, that is the kind of source energy that will appear. If we believe we are unlimited beings accepting from an unlimited source, that is what will manifest in our lives.

I spent most of my life not believing in God, and yet there’s still been limitless evidence that there is a source that is providing for me and protecting me. I’ve just been scared to trust it. Scared to let it in. 

But it’s time to move past the fear. Here on this train, I think it might be time to finally believe.

It’s dark now. Warm winds are pouring through the train car. In my depression treatment program, having tired of retelling stories of my past, I asked my therapist what he though I should do. I looked at him and I know he saw the desperate desire for an answer, for any kind of solace, burning in my eyes.

I think you really need to connect with your higher power, he said. I agree, I said. I realized a while ago that without believing in something higher, none of the rest of this will work.

But I have so much trouble accepting the fact of suffering. And I have so much trouble actually envisioning a benevolent god in a world with so much of it.

There’s nothing to envision, he said. You just believe. 

Just believe.

Maybe the belief is the power. Maybe the belief is God. Maybe God is what we believe in. Maybe we are being believed into existence by God. 

When I was eighteen years old, I had what I now believe was a transcendent experience involving Allen Ginsberg outside the San Francisco apartment where he wrote Howl. Standing on the sloped street near where he’d written the poem that changed my life as a teenager and set me on the path I am walking today, I imagined I saw an avatar of Allen — long-haired, bearded, smiling, clad in white linens and his trademark black glasses — in a green tree. 

You are creating me. I exist only in your mind, and so does the rest of the world, he told me — or my mind told me through the imagined projection of him. In that moment I saw very clearly that I was responsible for creating everything I saw in the world. All that seemed to exist, from the specter of Allen to the tree and the street and my idea of myself and even God, was a projection of my thoughts, filtered through my own judgments and beliefs.

But there was was something else he had to tell me, a second part which he said I was not quite ready for. An implication I’ve slowly been peeling apart nearly a decade after that first insight. An inverse of the first realization.

It’s something like this: I am also creating you. 

Yes, I am creating all I see. But I am in turn also being created by all I see.

Therefore I’m really the creator. I am really God, and I’m also really Allen Ginsberg and everything that ever is and was. The small self that I think is “me” is just a projection, and so is every other apparently individual thing.

We’re all one. 

It’s the simplest idea. Sung out on the radio by U2. Preached by every preacher. We all come to it in different ways. We are all really one. 

For a moment, I knew it.

On the train, in the car with the Christmas lights, I feel it again. I felt it when the thick bamboo needle was digging my new tattoo into my ribs, a symbol for protection and non-duality that will live on my flesh until this flesh decays or burns into nothingness. 

On this train I am making a commitment. I’m going to try. I’m going to believe. I’m going to see if it works. 

I don’t merely want to believe anymore. No more half-hopes marred by doubt. No more clinging to outdated scientific rationalism as if it was some kind of holy truth. Look at quantum physics and how much it reveals we do not know.

All the books and all the science in the world are only attempts at detailing something that cannot be held in words.

But it can be felt, in glimpses, in bursts. On night trains, wind rushing through. Sweetness on my tongue. Different languages intermingling, laughter and the creak of train wheels. 

Then suddenly a uniformed employee shouts at me. You, he says, shaking his hand, startling me, sending me skittering away from the table so other paying customers can sit.

An orange juice can’t buy you more than a half hour of ecstatic communion with the divine, I suppose. But it is enough.

His face bears the insignias of a long life. He must be tired. The last slivers of sun are dissolving. I go back to my windowless bed, leaving the magic behind.

The real art of living is finding the magic when the windows are shut, when the heat is burning you up, when the sun sets, when you have to leave the train car and face the actual music.

So now I am here. Still a bit shaken from my rude awakening. You! But you are me! I am shouting at myself. What a strange carnival. We are shooting at ourselves. We imprison ourselves. When we free ourselves we free everyone, and vice versa. 

And the field remains, or so Wayne Dyer says. Even here in this tiny compartment. 

The train rolls on. Morning will come.

Every heart to love will come — but like a refugee, Leonard Cohen sings in Anthem. And so it is.