Why does anyone research Columbine, anyway? Who knows. I can’t tell you what drove me to read 35,000 pages of documents multiple times, cataloguing the contents, and studying the details. Years ago I would say it was about the children who died and preventing future incidents and all that, but that isn’t the real reason. That was what interested me about the case, but researching Columbine turned out to be the koan that sent me hurdling into reality and out of the dream at breakneck speed against my will.

I didn’t know that’s what was happening until I flew off the cliff into nothingness forever. Whoops. Wrong turn? Not a chance. There are no wrong turns.

Some people would find it morbid to know that some of us have spent more time staring at the shooters’ dead, bloody bodies than we have spent doing homework. No matter. You either understand or you don’t. You can’t convince anyone of an experience they haven’t had, which is why I don’t expect many (if any at all) to understand this post.

Staring at the dead, bloody bodies of the Columbine shooters is one way to launch yourself into an awakening you don’t-know-you-don’t-want-but-can’t-avoid-because-you-have-no-choice. Dead bodies. Blood. Gore. Suicide. Death. Reality. Reality. Reality. Read that again – REALITY.

Huh.

Death is a reality.

“What if Eric had graduated, would he have gone on to become a famous video game designer? Do you think the creators of DOOM would have welcomed him on the team?”

Who cares, he’s dead, lying in a pool of his own blood with the top of his head blown off from a self-inflicted shotgun blast through the roof of his mouth.

Imagine that. You stick a loaded shotgun in your mouth and pull the trigger. Hard to imagine, right? Really. When you look at Eric lying on the ground, put yourself in his position and imagine you’ve just done the unthinkable and you’re done. You’re going to cause your own death. You won’t be opening up the refrigerator tomorrow to look for a can of Coke or a slice of pie. You don’t know where the fuck you’re going or if you’ll even exist. You just know you’re done.

Imagine every detail of pulling the trigger. The initial feeling of blowing your own head off with a shotgun shell traveling through the roof of your mouth, blowing off the top of your head. How long do you feel before your brain cuts off? Everyone says this type of suicide ends a life “instantly,” but how can anyone really know? Nobody knows. Nobody knows anything.

And Dylan. Imagine you’re him, you just witnessed your sort-of best friend blow his head off and now it’s your turn. Do you hesitate? Why? You don’t want to live anymore and you’ve just done the unthinkable. If you don’t kill yourself now, you’ll spend the rest of your life in jail in misery.

Does the biological impulse of survival kick in? Or do you just pull the trigger?

Put yourself in Dylan’s shoes. If you don’t believe he killed himself, set that belief aside for a moment and just think. You’re kneeling in front of your friend who just blew his head off. You’ve got a TEC-DC9M aimed at your left temple. You pull the trigger and fall to the floor. After a brief moment, you roll over onto your back where you cough and drown in your own blood.

Maybe you should have used your shotgun.

What does that feel like? To die so terribly? To have a bullet rip through your brain and not even die right away?

Feel it, imagine you are him and feel every moment of it.

Now do the same with every person they killed that day. Imagine being every single victim and experience dying over and over and over again.

I bet you won’t do it.

Death is too much, too horrific, too… taboo. It’s something to sweep under the carpet and ignore. Yet, people die every day from injuries far worse than what landed Eric and Dylan on that library floor on April 20, 1999.

Death is reality. And you can’t see who you are and where you are without embracing death.

If you want to know what life is all about, carry a laminated copy of their dead bodies with you everywhere you go. You have to invite death to the breakfast table, the movies, your best friend’s birthday party. Stare at the photos every chance you get.

When you stare enough, one day, reality will become obvious. But that’s not where the journey ends. That’s just where it begins.

Once you realize what reality is, there’s an adjustment period.

What can researching Columbine tell you about yourself?

As you read the 11k pages of witness testimony, you’ll see a pattern emerge that shows memory to be faulty. It’s tempting to view discrepancies as some kind of “cover-up,” but that’s a treacherous path that will leads you into the weeds.

Human memory is extremely faulty and vulnerable to suggestion. Research hard enough and you’ll see that witnesses heard similar, but different things and their subsequent interviews began morphing into one snowball of an identical story after they conversed with one another.

Witness testimony is like a game of telephone.

If you’ve noticed this, did you ever stop to question your own memory? Like “wow, maybe my memory isn’t so great. What if things didn’t really happen the way I thought they did when I was in school? Maybe people didn’t hate me as much as I thought they did. Maybe I created a story that morphed over time into something that didn’t actually happen the way I remember…”

What if your narrative of Columbine is inaccurate simply because your memory, along with witness’ memory, is faulty. What if what you believe happened before, during, and after Columbine is not true, but a story woven together by the fabric of thousands of faulty memories, including witnesses, police, victims, parents, and community members?

What if…

Can you question “what really happened” regardless of where it takes you? That what happened is irrelevant?

How many times have you changed your perception or views about Columbine and what happened before, during, and after?

If you haven’t changed your views and been SHOCKED at discovering major truths you can’t believe you missed, you haven’t investigated objectively. You’re stuck in judgment, viewing the case through the lens of your personal bias.

Witness testimony is fodder for stories that will take you further from TRUTH. When you dismantle your stories about Columbine by seeking TRUTH (which cannot be found in witness testimony), it will give you a template by which to investigate your own life, which is really the only thing that matters.

Let the dead bury the dead. You want to wake up from the dream. You want to dissolve your own stories and narratives in your personal life until you reach a point where you see the world differently and more clearly because you’ve realized how many errors you’ve made because of wrong perception and faulty memory.

Researching the details of Columbine serve but one purpose: to facilitate a profound inner transformation. It’s not WHAT you find that matters. It’s the process.

Ultimately, researching Columbine isn’t about what happened that day or what led up to the massacre or where each shell landed and who said what in the library. It’s about you, researching. It’s the invisible, undetected zen koan that life has thrown in your path that you have yet to recognize as the catalyst for personal transformation… your personality is driven with an insatiable need to devour the investigation, but what your soul really wants is to use the process to destroy your own ego (identity).

Given enough time, that’s exactly what it will do… when you’re willing to stare at those bloody, dead bodies lying on the library floor.