In his book The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen describes “coming down” from a literal high, a two-month pilgrimage in the remote reaches of the Tibetan Himalayas. But the lower in elevation he went and the closer to the world he left behind, the more irritable he became.
In other words, he experienced what every seeker before and after him must eventually come to: the challenge of bringing an expanded state of mind back down into daily life and anchoring it there, integrating and sustaining what the psychologist Abraham Maslow called peak experiences. These are spiritual awakenings, epiphanies, revelations, encounters with transcendence or awe or even infatuation, and highs of any kind, whether mystically or mycologically inspired. As the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield puts it, “After enlightenment, the laundry.”
Anyone can get high, but bringing the wisdom of your highs into ordinary living on Mulberry Street is where the real pick-and-shovel work of growing and evolving happens. This is where we encounter the usual agents of decay and distraction—habit and routine, fixed ideas, and the stubbornness of the ego—which relentlessly conspire to break the spells of enchantment.
Nor are these agents merely waiting for us when we get home. We bring them with us to the mountaintop. Emerson once said of travel,
“At home, I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my........