The only way to solve your problems is to realize that there are no problems. Our inflamed egos create everything in our perception, and our conscious minds give everything worth, generally good or bad, but often different variations of the same duality, based purely on expectation, which is not something we are born with, but something given to us during our development and helpless defining of our ego, so we believe it to be true, and waste our entire existence chasing something to fix our problems… that only exist in our ego. A rational mind would point out that the ego is a problem to be fixed, to alleviate thinking there are problems to fix, but our ego is our greatest teacher, which in time we learn our greatest lesson from: feel this and let it go until there is no this to feel and no one to feel it.
There is a zen conundrum involving attainment of enlightenment: to be enlightened, one must basically admit that there is some ego to attain enlightenment, thus negating the concept of enlightenment altogether. Id est, there is nothing to attain; you are already it, if you can just get rid of the you that is trying to get it. There is no you, nor is there anything to get.
When you hold on to this ego, with all these problems to solve, you are constantly searching for things to fix these problems, and no matter what you try, where you go, what you get, or who you put this absurdly unnecessary weight upon, you will eventually learn that the only thing you needed to fix the whole time was letting everything go and simply enjoying the journey in this vessel. I see too many people missing out on enjoying their nature because they are spending so much time trying to define what nature is or how it should be experienced based on something outside of themselves.
This vessel and journey are simply here for our consciousness to enjoy, even if our ego’s expectation has decided that it is not enjoyable; especially if our ego has decided that, because that’s where the lesson is. I feel like souls spend too much of their precious energy trying to connect with something that is already spanning time and space. Stop trying to connect with something that has given us the ability to fully experience, with all these beautiful senses, what is right in front of us.
I feel like we are missing out on the experience it gave us; the gift of this life and journey and this silly and fragile human bag of nerve endings; because we are so busy trying to figure out what it is exactly that is experiencing everything. This is the enlightenment equivalent of overstimulated nervous systems who are constantly chasing places and friends and lovers and diets and workouts and jobs and money and every other temporal thing that will never fix what is inside of us, right next to every tool we could ever need to make everything exactly as beautiful as it already is.
You can not enjoy your life as long as you allow so many external things to affect how you enjoy your life, but it is all those external things that your ego has decided IS life, and we are born into this ego, so it is debatable whether we were put here to live this ego in the fullest, for the sake of the universe’s experience (which excuses going on a killing spree because nothing turned out how you decided it should), or whether we are meant to transcend the ego, or be doomed to repeat it. The conundrums go deep and wide here, and even in not being what we think it is, it is still what it’s supposed to be, or we wouldn’t be experiencing it.
What do we do about it, though. Nothing? We know that the perpetual search for happiness outside of us causes nothing but pain and misery because it never lives up to the expectations that were given to us, and that has been very well documented. What has also been very well documented is finding peace and calm in ourselves, while choosing to be happy no matter what “happens” is the secret to happiness, which is something just about no one can wrap their ego around. Meditation teaches us to acknowledge thought and let it go, while practical development teaches us to feel things and let them go.
Enlightenment teaches us that there are no things to feel and no one to feel them, but we are all feeling the same things and having the same experience through different filters and lenses. Regardless of the chaotic paradox that exists in all that, all we can really do is just laugh at all the stupid shit and enjoy this journey, because if we have learned anything from 5,000+ years of the human “soul” being very well documented, it is that nothing changes. None of us is going to make it. All we can do is choose to enjoy it, or wallow in the ego/self inflicted misery.
…and that, ladies and gentlemen, is my review of Bufo (5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine). While I can admit that having to smoke it made me uncomfortable, testament to how removed I am from recreational drug use, as soon as I held that beautiful medicine in my body, I just muttered, “oh,” and everything made perfect sense as I laid back on the cushion in the center of the room, and fell into the cosmic whispers of the universe. I became the drop in the ocean, and the ocean in a drop, which I have read countless times, but didn’t truly understand until that, “oh.” I became a molecule in infinite space and time. This, naturally, raises the greatest ego conundrum: did I feel what I felt because the universe was giving me information, or because they were things I always knew and was finally experiencing?
Will there always be a contradiction and duality as long as ego exists because without ego things would cease to exist? If something is wrong or not good enough, won’t something always be wrong and not good enough, and you just haven’t realized it yet? Is that just life and an overstimulated nervous system, or is that your ego teaching you how to transcend? The biggest thing that I learned, which I didn’t expect, and beautifully embodies the lesson, is that when you are searching for something, specifically “god” or a spiritual experience, things that we read about in the self-help romance novels, you never find it. If you just keep your heart open and stop looking, you will find it everywhere, which ties in to the most confusing and beautiful thing I ever read about Zen and now understand with every fiber of my “oh,” ironically penned by Saint Watts: Stop reading about Zen.
These last couple years have been a bit traumatic, capped off by the last couple months feeling like all the chakras in my body have blasted open, and I have been flailing in an attempt to write it down and/or explain it to people, when at the end of the day there is nothing to explain and there are no people to understand it, so I, of course, once again find myself in a run on sentence, trying to explain the inexplicable to infinite molecular egos in undefinable time and space.
This year I experienced Kambo and Bufo, and a lot have asked about them, but I have been a little vague about everything because I wasn’t quite sure how to articulate what I was feeling. The plan was always to write everything down, obviously, and this is the platform for this part of my journey, but this space seems completely foreign to me, as is evident from my last post being 7 months ago and basically a desperate cry for help that no one could possibly understand. Even this post has kind of been sitting on the shelf because my wife said it was too negative, but I decided to just put it out there and ask you to forgive the negativity of the backstory, which is really just the necessary negativity of evolution.
My life has been intoxicating, in that since I could get my hands on something to numb out, I did those substances as often as I possibly could, because, respectfully, fuck all of this shit. Specifically in this blip of my journey I am referring to alcohol, the antics from which I have documented thoroughly through writing, mostly illegible gibberish, and photographs, none of which I can show anyone. My relationship with alcohol has been unhealthy, at best, both physically and psychologically, as I drifted into the dark “abuser” role during the blackout “gin years” of my second marriage. This relationship, which is as ridiculously legal as natural medicines are ridiculously illegal, was so bad that refusing to touch hard alcohol and only having a six pack a night was basically sober.
I have quit significantly on four occasions. The first was when I went to jail, because I had to. I lit a cigarette as walked out those doors and was taken directly to a liquor store and handed a six pack. The second was when my wife told me that she didn’t want to come home because she was afraid I was going to kill her. That ended the blackout gin phase of my life, and I would ironically accidentally kill someone a month into sobriety, which would have easily ended in prison if not for that. The third was dealing with a girl who was perpetually intoxicated and cheating on me, and working at a bar observing the daily intoxicated chaos, and I really just wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t one of those people.
The last significant quit was when I almost drank myself to death dealing with the girl who was perpetually intoxicated. That was the most significant quit because it coincided with being fired and evicted from a decade long job/home, and being banished to the desert by myself, and as much as I wanted to die, I didn’t want to die, so I started eating better and taking care of myself. I believe that those four events in my story successfully define my relationship with this substance, so there is no need to get into the clusterfuck of decisions made whilst intoxicated to some extent, which was pretty much always.
Anyway, long story longer, as my Uncle Wayne likes to say, a complicated series of events and stories and traumas and friends and lovers and enemies led my soul goddess and I to a second story corner room in a 104 year old downtown Santa Ana building, getting holes burned in our arms and receiving a poisonous secretion of the giant monkey frog, procured by the Katukina Tribe in Brazil. We really had no idea what to expect going in. All we knew were stories of maybe purging, and a kind of cellular reset, some were good, some were bad. We were just open to the experience, and hungry for spiritual growth and healing. We spoke our intentions. Mine were health and strength and family, and we were into it, accidentally sitting last in line, so we got to watch everyone else react to the medicine as we sat in our anticipation. The maybe purging bit should’ve been definite purging, or “getting well,” as we were advised to refer to it.
The instructions were simple: stay hydrated, breathe, don’t get up without help because you might pass out, and let your conscious mind take a passenger seat to the medicine. I did the latter so successfully that I wandered off into another plane of existence, entertained by little films playing out on the back of my eyelids from my past, distant past, and as I heard my name being repeated, the voice in my head assured me that they weren’t talking to me; I followed that voice deeper in. I was perfectly content and happy, wandering deeper into what I figured everyone was experiencing. After a while I heard my wife say I needed to come back, so I gradually wandered back to them dumping water on my head and catching my “getting well” in a bucket that my stiff arms had abandoned.
My eyes were apparently open the whole time, and my body went completely rigid as I slid down the wall I was resting against and began gurgling on my vomit. We jokingly referred to my experience as my having died, if only because I’ve died so many times. At the end of the day I simply passed out because I have low blood pressure, but I was conscious and traveling to wherever it is that people go when that happens, so it was far more significant in my journey than just flopping, which I’ve only gotten close to doing, not actually done.
We floated on our peptides back to the AirBnB and napped for a bit, then went and got some dinner, had some amazingly enlightening talks about the experience and life over tea, then passed out. Did you notice what was missing from my normal routine? I have had no desire to drink since. The ceremony itself required fasting and no alcohol for 48 hours prior, and even that was too long to go without a beer, so we pretended that 24 hours without alcohol was good enough. All I’ve wanted to drink since 4/3/21 has been kombucha, coconut water, and tea. I have learned to appreciate things like ginger beer. Out of curiosity I have had a few beers here and there, with my family in Indiana on my birthday, shared a bottle of a beer with my wife that a friend brewed, and when my son came up for his birthday last week (and naturally brought beer). Each of those ended with the minimal beer required for the event itself. That has never happened. I’ve never just had a beer then been perfectly fine finishing the night with tea or coconut water. I’m still trying to figure this one out, but it is what it is: I have no desire to drink.
That would accidentally evolve into my doing three Kambo sessions in the lunar cycle and Bufo, which I will get into in a later post because I’ve already written too much and I feel like I need to give you a break… and I may or may not still be wrapping my head around that experience. That experience may or may not be wrapping itself around my head. I’ll give you a teaser by saying that Bufo was like getting a hug from the universe, while Kambo is like throwing the universe up, and they both felt amazing. Suffice it to say, I am seeing the world and my life completely different, and have since gone back into my work to find things that I didn’t understand before, to put a kind of bow on it all and leave it in the wilderness for someone else to find.
I have also finally learned to appreciate who the universe gave me. I spent decades complaining about not being able to afford to work with all the souls I wanted to, or not being surrounded by the souls with which others were graced, and being reduced to making the most of what I have, but I was given exactly what I needed, when I needed it, and I can finally be grateful for everything.
