Who knew the view from down here could be so beautiful? Maybe that’s why it’s so difficult to recognize even when it’s right in front of our faces. It’s not always the fire and brimstone, hellish images conjured up by ancient Greek mythologies or the Christian tradition.  In fact, I don’t think we go there only after death either. It is an entirely distinct reality, entered willfully or not.

I went to Lightning in a Bottle last weekend, and although I won’t go into the gory details I will talk about this distinct frame of mind that I learned throughout the past few weeks. For those that don’t know, Lightning in a Bottle (LIB) is a 4-day music festival located near Bradley, CA right on Lake San Antonio. It markets itself as a “transformation festival,” complete with yoga classes, tea ceremonies, lectures, stores, food vendors, several stages playing primarily electronic music, and a ton of other activities throughout the day.

I had a truly awesome experience in those 4 days, but to understand my mindset I need to talk about what I’ve been delving heavily into these past few weeks. I’ve been devouring a shitload of lectures and interviews featuring the Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson on Youtube. I initially found him by exploring the Patreon website about a month ago, but since then I must have watched at least 40 hours of his content (including the time I rewatched his entire 3-hour interview on the Joe Rogan Experience). I wasn’t kidding when I said shitload!

It’s not like his content is music that you can just listen to in the background either. It is deep. It is controversial. It is meaningful. He is drawing on decades of practical experience as a clinical psychologist, teaching experience as a professor at Harvard and currently at the University of Torronto, and intellectual experience as an avid learner who enjoys the likes of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Jung, and Piaget. This guy is a force to be reckoned with, and especially recently some groups of people have had to contend with him in response to his controversial stands. If you are interested in learning more, I highly recommend exploring his youtube channel.

One key idea he consistently touches on is that of the underworld. In his view, the underworld is not some hell we enter only after we die. It is an essential part of our current reality that is there whether we recognize it or not. For simplicity, the underworld is chaos. It is a place you don’t understand and can easily get lost in. As a psychologist, he acknowledges that chaos doesn’t have to be a physical place either; it can be a frame of mind. As an example, he talks about a woman that learns her husband has been cheating on her for years. At first, she thought she knew where she was in the relationship and, by partial extension, her life. Once she found that out, however, she was forced to question everything. Her past is not the same, her present situation is not the same, and her future is extremely uncertain. She is in chaos. She is in the underworld.

Bringing this all back to my experience, I basically dove into chaos this past weekend. It was insane! Yeah I could have chosen to simply think that I am at a music festival in an attempt to explain everything, but instead I chose to take in as much as I possibly could with an open mind. Here is where the fun comes in. The idea of the underworld is always seen as a terrible, ugly, painful place right? Most of the time it is, especially when it sneaks up on us. That is far from the full picture. I was flooded by chaos, and although at times I experienced unease and countless terrible temptations surrounding me I witnessed otherworldly beauty and love as well. They were outside the normal bounds of my organized understanding, and by plunging into chaos I expanded my little island of reality a tiny bit farther.

Don’t get me wrong; there are definitely still horrific parts of the underworld that should not be explored lightly. Chaos is not fun for an extended period of time. Based on my experience, however, it is an essential part of learning and growing as a person. Trying things we haven’t before. Seeing things slightly differently. Appreciating this crazy life we find ourselves acting out for a short period of time.