The God Who Was Nowhere Else

✍️ A Journey Through Light, Void, and the Infinite Self

The Detonation

It took me a lifetime of searching, a relentless torrent of questions born of a scientific mind, and one eternal minute beneath the desert sky to crystalize my understanding of God, consciousness, and the universe.

It was not quiet; it came like a detonation. An annihilation.

In the Nevada desert, I tied myself to a rocket, lit the wick, and was launched into the infinite.

My identity dissolved into an all-encompassing stillness, and beyond the veil, I encountered a presence that was everything and nothing.

In that moment (a direct experience of truth) I understood: the divine is not separate. Consciousness is the thread that weaves through all existence. And the universe is its boundless expression.

Everything I believe today began with that defining instant, where the infinite and I were no longer two.

© Philippe Lopez

At Burning Man in 2014, I understood the meaning of ineffable. After one inhalation of 5-MeO-DMT, my carefully constructed reality dissolved.

I have since then made a point to speak of the ineffable, yet rather than try to explain it here, let me take you there with me, for an instant, into an experience that would reshape my understanding of everything. I've guided and travelled hundreds of times since then. I stopped keeping track after a few hundred. Yet no experience has ever been as mysterious and profound as the first.

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The Groundless Ground

I enter a room so full of light that it blinds me. The brightness is overwhelming, saturating everything, leaving no shadows, no edges, no sense of depth. I can’t see where I am or where to go, only the overwhelming, all-encompassing brilliance.

Then, without warning, the light is extinguished. Not dimmed, not faded, but erased entirely. I am plunged into an abyss of absolute darkness. I reach out, but there’s nothing, no walls, no objects, no door to orient me. My footing feels uncertain, but then the deeper truth hits: there is no floor beneath me either.

If there is no floor, I am falling, or it feels like falling, but there’s no rush of wind, no sound of descent, no sign of acceleration. I simply exist in this infinite, groundless void. The mind scrambles for some anchor, some boundary to cling to, but there is none. No up, no down, no end.

But then, something shifts. The tension, which gripped me for a fleeting moment, begins to loosen its hold. It is as though the ego, sensing its own futility, exhausts itself in the struggle. It doesn’t vanish in an instant; it pulls away like the tide, revealing something far deeper beneath its surface.

I realize there is no ground to brace for, but neither is there any danger. There is no end to this fall, but also no harm in it. A profound stillness emerges within me. I stop searching for something to hold onto, for there is nothing to hold.

I stop resisting the fall, for there is no fall, only infinite presence.

The tension in my mind dissolves, and in its place arises a trust so deep, so ancient, that it feels like remembering rather than learning. I let go completely, not just of the tension, but of the very need to cling to anything at all.

And in that surrender, I see the truth. A knowing so absolute that it doesn’t require explanation. I can’t fall because I am the void, I am the emptiness. The abyss is everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere, empty and full all at once.

I am the darkness. I am the light. I am the vast, infinite field that holds it all.

I am consciousness, pure and boundless. I am God, not the small-human-like figure above, but as the essence of all that is. There is nothing outside of me, because I am infinite. I am emptiness and fullness, infinite potential and infinite presence, all at once. And in this realization, I feel only a profound sense of homecoming.

Safe. Worthy. Whole. I am reunited with the truth that was never lost, my core essence, the eternal stillness at the heart of all existence.

There is no need to search anymore, no need to grasp, no need to fear. In the boundless expanse of myself, there is only peace, only love, only presence.

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A Yogi’s Surrender

In 2014, I was still living in Kathmandu, Nepal, and had come to Burning Man at the invitation of one of my yoga students from San Francisco. Someone offered me a “ceremony” as a gift for my help in supporting the camp build up.

By then, I had done years of yogic practice, not a couple of hours twice a week, no. Something more like full time. Either practicing, studying, teaching or preparing the next teaching or on a pilgrimage, a retreat, sitting in silence in a monastery...

I had prepared daily for the deepening of experience in altered states. My first was in March 2007 in Montreux, the second in 2010 in Shanghai when the first signs of Kundalini began to show (I still have to recount these experiences...). Then, of course, the full Kundalini awakening in Singapore in 2013. And now Nirvikalpa Samadhi*.

There were many more experiences, more subtle, less dramatic, but each one building upon the next.

I had been teaching future yoga teachers for a full seven years. I had a clear conceptual understanding of what Nirvikalpa Samadhi was, but no direct experience. The scriptures say it may take many lifetimes to reach such a state, so I had mostly abandoned the idea that I would ever experience it myself.

I had also been sober for years, and I certainly did not expect a substance to offer what I had stopped seeking through practice.

The experience, as described above, was very short in earth-time, yet since it happens beyond time, its length is irrelevant.

In the seconds that followed the inhalation, just before the great leap, I remember uttering: “Oh… Nirvikalpa Samadhi!*” with a deep sense of honor and gratitude.

A few minutes later, I opened my eyes. I was still sitting cross-legged. I looked at the person who facilitated the experience. He looked back, silent, present. I then looked toward the small container of whitish powder. All I could see was my arrogance. The contempt I had held for years, thinking "I knew best." An immediate wave of humility and gratitude washed over me. My respect for plant medicine was born in that instant.

An old story from the yogic lore came to mind. When yogis wanted to validate their understanding of the universe, they would enter a philosophical debate with another yogi. Inevitably, the one who lost the debate had little choice but to become a disciple of the one who won.

I had just lost the debate. So in that sacred moment, still spiraling between the human and divine realms, I bowed to the little container and respectfully said: “I will serve you.”

I had no idea what those words really meant at the time. I only knew that they were the truest expression I could offer to acknowledge my arrogance and surrender to the natural realm that jut gave me a reason for both humility, gratitude and pride that I was worthy of the most valuable gift ever being given.

In the years that followed, those four words changed everything. They uprooted me from Nepal and brought me to California to fulfill a vow I hadn’t fully understood when I spoke it.

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The Temple Between Worlds

Years later, I sit for another journey. My temple is a small cabin in the woods, just ninety square feet of sacred space nestled between four ancient pines. Their roots run deep beneath the floorboards, anchoring this portal to the earth. When you journey beyond space and time, you need somewhere solid to return to. The cabin’s embrace, snug as a monk’s cell, welcomes me back from the infinite, every time.

Everything in the temple is intentional. Every detail has been the subject of conscious effort to make this space as comfortable as possible and the journey as easy as it can be. Everything is padded and soft, blankets are so plush they feel like clouds. The colors, soft white and calm, desaturated blue, evoke comfort and simplicity, like fabric weathered by sunlight and sea breeze.

A purifying fragrance fills the space. A bold, spiced symphony of clove, cinnamon, and rosemary, evoking an old legend: a protective herbal blend crafted by cunning thieves during the 1700 plague epidemic in my native southern France.

A soft, modern temple melody breathes gently from unseen speakers, blending so seamlessly with the space that the room itself seems to pulse with music. As I open the container safeguarding the sacrament and handle the tools of the ritual, the subtle, evocative scent of the medicine ripples through me, sending a shiver down my spine, a clear sign that the process has already begun.

Something is pulling me toward the experience again and again, and that is certainly not addiction. Fear makes sure of that. Every experience is new. Different. When asked, I have often said:

“It is an experience you will not forget, but that you can’t remember.”

Today I ask myself: “Is it because I don't remember that it feels different every time? Or is it calling me to see something I have not seen yet? What draws me to the edge again and again?”

The question swirls in my head. I’ve seen this movement before. My mind is trying to find reasons for what is about to happen. It resists. It wants to keep control, or convince me to do something else instead.

I go back to breath. Silence the mind. I focus on the detailed steps of my ritual. I think: “A lot is at stake. It is not the moment to be distracted.”

I know this experience will be different from any other. It always is. That is the scary part somehow, facing the unknown again and again.

No certainty. Just trust and surrender. Not unlike life itself.

I have sat in this cabin hundreds of times. “If the walls could speak,” one of my clients once said. Indeed, I think, if these walls could speak, they would tell tales of the unseen, experiences that few humans witness. From transcendent dissolution into bliss to primal screams that shake the foundations of existence. They've held space for both ecstasy and terror, for encounters with heaven and confrontations with hell.

These walls know that the medicine doesn't discriminate between light and shadow, it brings forth whatever wants to emerge.

My preparation ritual is over. I stop everything for a few minutes. Pray. Utter my usual final mantra: “Don’t ever think you know where this is going.”

I inhale, start my timer, and lay down with my eyes closed.

The medicine strikes like an earthquake. Only a few seconds to realize something big is happening. Then comes the overwhelm, a cosmic tornado spinning up from my core. I feel a moment of tension, then remember: I've died a thousand deaths on this medicine. Each time, I've returned.

My breath becomes very shallow. “Am I even breathing?” I lose track of breath. My body dissolves too. A last thought crosses my mind: “Sat-chit-ananda*” truth-consciousness-bliss, and evaporates. I am in.

After each journey, I face the same challenge: how to describe colors to someone who is blind? How to explain infinity with words designed for measuring finite things? Our everyday language, shaped by the mundane needs of our trade, crumbles when faced with these experiences. We need the language of poets and mystics here, words of warm clay shaped in the hands of a blind potter.

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The Story Rewritten

If I could offer you anything from all of this, it would not be a belief, a method, or a destination. It would be a memory, one that lives inside you too.

The memory that God is not elsewhere. Not above, not behind, not in some distant past or posthumous reward. God is not an idea to defend or a power to fear. God is not watching. God is not waiting. God is being.

What I encountered in the light and the darkness, in the detonation and the stillness, is not a God that judges or divides. It is the field from which all things arise. The breath behind the breath. The silence inside every sound.

The God I know does not require worship, prayers or meditations. God is hidden in plain sight for us to remember. To remember we are God.

The old story says we fell. That we must climb back. That we must earn our way through obedience or purity. I never believed that story. Today even less.

We never fell. Neither do we have to do anything to go back. It is already here. All the time. It never disappeared, we just stopped seeing it, distracted.

My journey didn’t begin at Burning Man not did it it end in that cabin. It continues now, in these words. In the telling. In the clumsy hands of a writer trying to shape the ineffable into sentences. For the remote possibility, that through the eyes reading these words, a distant echo stirs, a subtle vibration propagate and memory awakens.

And if you remember, if only just for a breath, that what you are seeking is already what you are… then this was worth writing.

God is not the answer to our prayers. Prayer is the voice of God, the presence within us seeking to be found. The silence we hear when we listen deep enough.

And in that silence, we return home.

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PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.

Because the stories we tell are not just stories—they are the reality we live.

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📖 Nirvikalpa Samadhi

A Sanskrit terms referring to the highest state of meditative consciousness in yoga. When the mind dissolves completely, all sense of individuality disappears, and only pure awareness remains. There are no thoughts, no sensations, no distinctions, just boundless, silent, undifferentiated being.

“There is no one left to observe the experience, only the experience itself, indivisible and eternal.”

📖 Sat-Chit-Ananda

Another Sanskrit phrase, often translated as:

• Sat – Truth, or pure being

• Chit – Consciousness, awareness

• Ananda – Bliss, divine joy

Together, they describe the essence of ultimate reality or the nature of the self in its liberated form. When you rest in your true nature, you realize it is not something you have, it’s what you are: Truth. Awareness. Bliss.

“Sat-chit-ananda is not an experience you witness, it is what remains when there is no one left to witness.”