Integratron!

Integratron! 

This was my second trip to the Integratron. My first was for my birthday, and we went after backpacking up to a secret spot my friend and I found months ago, at the top of a mound of boulders. We call it our special spot, and it’s a place that would be impossible to go unless you stumbled upon it several hundred feet of bouldering and climbing up, as we did, or if you’ve been there before.

But that time to the Integratron, I was super stressed. I was coming off of having backpacked, a bit underfed, and on a Sunday. Most of my thoughts on that day were all the things that I needed to do but hadn’t yet. And you can’t go into a meditative state and expect positive results in such a state of mind. Not to mention I was so wiped from descending from our spot that my body was very down to just pass out on the nice cozy mats.

So this was an exciting opportunity at a redo. I’m very interested in the correlations between science and art and spirituality, and am both a believer and amateur practitioner of crystal healing—but not without scientific and psychological reasoning. Understanding ideas of chakras and the ancient traditions of body alignment and mind-body connection that go with them means also understanding the science of how different parts of our bodies activates brain activity.

Thus, crystal quartz bowls played at such a frequency to correlate to specific chakras incited not only ideas in me of crystal healing but also of psychosomatic impulses. There’s a science to it all, even if we’re not at a place yet of fully understanding how all the pieces connect. And somewhere like the Integratron, I welcome the mystery.

I think such experiences are importantly at a place of suspended disbelief. You can have out-of-body experiences if you give yourself over to it, and then you can have such experiences in psychedelic proportion. Or, at least leave with an elevated sense of body-mind-earth connection. When you feel the connection to the energy that exists over those intersections of electrical fields…yes it’s scientific, but damn does science make me feel some kind of spiritual when it literally resonates in your bones. And in that way, the Integratron becomes an important symbol in the arguments that arise between art and science and science and spirituality. There’s things you feel and can’t explain until maybe later or maybe never—but that doesn’t rob you of the veracity of that experience, and the legitimacy of having had an incredible mind awakening. So call it science, call it spirituality, call it hippie dippy bullshit—I felt moved.

And I can’t even talk about camping afterwards. So much fun. But the lifelong backpacker that I am cringes to think that we left. Cringes. Rained out. I’m an Oregonian. But the times we had and the things we learned about astrophotography…still pretty epic. So it’s ok. But if anyone asks, we stayed the whole night.