Entangled

 

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.

Dormiveglia

 

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.

The Other Side of Patriarchy

 I am incapable of asking for help in a world that demands I be strong enough to be fine without it. This year has been so hard for so many, and I could easily list out all the reasons why it has destroyed every little bit of my soul, but I would rather acknowledge that maybe it wasn't a soul worth saving?

It's ok to not be strong enough. It's ok to need help. Who cares what the world says when you are a living, breathing part of something infinitely larger? If the Universe wasn't there to help you solve your problems, then she wouldn't have given them to you. Everything you need to know is right in front of you. Don't waste your life away searching for something that you already have.

Happy New Year. May you all use your powers for the good that we deserve.

... To Injury

 We had Papa Bear cremated, but we wanted to say goodbye to his body beforehand, so we had a little viewing, which turned into a number of negligent misunderstandings with the funeral home. They were finally able to get us in on Friday the 13th, with a full moon in scorpio. When we got home I went to upload the photos from the day and my primary photo hard drive no longer worked. I tried to get it recovered, but no go. Every single photo I've taken in the last year and a half are gone. Every photo I've taken with my phone in the last 6 years are gone. Gone. The day we viewed my father's body the universe took it all away. So many times I joked about throwing it all away and starting over. Well, here you go. The few that survived were all that was left in the website, blogs, and dropbox folders. All treated, 60% .jpgs; no digital negatives.

Control.

Alt.

Delete.

Something was meant to be.

Remember, Remember...

 

….. it had to be the fifth of November. We had just spent a week in Nebraska visiting my wife’s family, in this year where I have basically given up my work to connect more with family. Upon our return, I immediately went back to work, and my wife headed down the hill for an optometry appointment, you know, back to real life stuff. I spent the morning finishing up a brewing course that my boss had enrolled me in, so I was floating on that significant achievement and we planned to celebrate when she got home, then I got a call that someone plowed into her car at a stop light.

Suddenly the significance of the day turned to losing Cricket, the tank of a Subaru that made most of our adventures possible over the last five years. When she finally did make it home safe and was on the phone with insurance, I was contacted by my dad’s boss… in a frighteningly urgent way… a knowingly urgent way. My dad hadn’t shown up for work in a couple days and wasn’t returning phone calls, and anyone who knows my father and his amish work ethic can attest that is painfully obvious evidence that he has either quit or died, and he rarely quits anything. My dad’s boss knew this, so he was at his house, saw his car, heard his phone ringing from the dark inside, and told me I needed to come down. I sat with it for a bit while my wife was on the phone, demanding in my mind that he was just really tired, but I knew that he would wake up from a deep sleep, having not slept for days, to answer a SPAM phone call, mumble that he didn’t want to change his cable service, argue for a little bit with them, then hang up and go back to sleep. Still in denial, I called his phone and his voicemail was full, which also happens never.

I began to realize that he was tired, but nothing sleep could fix, so we packed up and drove the hour to his desert condo, already knowing, and gradually coming to terms with what we would find. Our last significant conversation was after my oldest daughter’s wedding. He missed the ceremony, even though he was informed that it had changed places, and spent the reception primarily blank and staring at the table, then left early after wandering aimlessly around like he was lost. I called him a couple days later to see if he was ok, and he opened up to me like he had never done, ever, as if I was the only person who would understand.

There was a ton of shame, and guilt, and remorse, about how he had lived his life and the choices he made, and I completely understood. I told him he could change that in his immediate life and we invited him to our youngest daughter’s birthday a week later. He sat in the corner and didn’t really interact with anyone, to the point that I had to disengage from the party to talk to him and make him more comfortable, and my wife tried to include him by having him hold the piñata rope. He left pretty blank. Something was definitely missing, and I felt it.

What I found on the floor next to his bed was not, in my mind, the body of someone who had a heart attack, or a stroke, or had even died. I couldn’t help but see someone who laid down on the ground and gave up. I saw a soul who had tried for 70 years and was just done. My wife went and sat with him, and I just stood there. What I felt most was abandonment. I felt left behind. When the only person on the planet you knew would always be there for you, no matter what, is gone, it is pretty difficult to not want to give up, too. When we have little souls who are dependent on us, we can’t do that, though, can we?

We have to find a way to fight through all of the feelings and push forward. My family means far too much to me to leave them feeling the abandonment I’m feeling right now, though it is inevitable. I am also feeling the regret and shame that my father seemed to prepare me for in that last significant conversation. I don’t feel like I was a good son, and I know I wasn’t the best friend I could be. That’s my own stuff to look at. It is strange to think that he was about my age when I was displaced from LA to this little mountain town because his work moved to the ass end of the Coachella Valley.

After 30 years of hearing him complain about how miserable he was in the desert, and trying to talk him into heading back home, or anywhere for that matter, his time is finally up. “One day,” he would always say. One day I’ll get an RV and travel like I always wanted to. One day I’ll go back home. He had so many excuses, and he simply ran out of days. He was eating healthier and putting his life in order, like he was ready to get out of here, or maybe he was just finishing things up the best he could because he was done?

What I do know is that I feel something significant missing from my life, and now I can’t call him to talk about it. I know these little memories are supposed to be all butterflies and rainbows, celebrating someone’s life, but I don’t feel like I need to tell anyone what kind of person he was. Everyone who ever met him loved him. He always went out of his way to help, to a fault, and I don’t feel like he was ever truly appreciated, though I know he was by those closest to him, which were few. He never really accomplished anything significant. He just kept going to work. No matter what happened, he would be there getting things done. That is causing me to look at a lot of things, and it is more difficult than I thought it would be.

What am I actually doing, sitting on this mountain that I’ve been trying to escape since I was a teenager, and why does the universe keep giving me beautiful opportunities to keep me here? I feel like I’ve already wasted 20 years of my life sitting here, waiting… for what? All I ever wanted to do was get in my car and drive, and just keep going. I wonder if that was a seed planted by my father? We used to get in the car when I was a kid and just drive around, but we never really went anywhere? There was always work to do.

That joke I always told about my having the soul of a wandering nomad and the mind of an Amish farmer isn’t really funny anymore, because both of those characters have stopped fighting each other, and are staring at a lifeless body on the floor. One day he’ll get up, crack a joke about how tired he was from working so much, and get mad at me for driving all the way down there to check on him, because he’s fine. Then he’ll leave everything holding him back, get in his car, and drive, until he simply can’t anymore.

Any day now.

I think the fact that it has taken me this long to even recount the events of that night is evidence of how much this has affected me, but I really haven't been able to process any of it. My father never really showed much emotion. He just kept going. When asked about my childhood, my father would always joke that I cried a lot. I've always felt like I needed to be stoic like him in order to survive, but I always felt a lot, and I still feel a lot. Now I'm realizing that no one ever showed me what to do with that.

I am always trying to be better, but I am human and I trip over myself a lot. All this work and this blog and this everything seem so pointless now, but I still feel like I should be doing it, so I don't really now what to do anymore but love my family the best I can, and just keep going. For those of you who don't understand the significance of the 299 pin: my father loved bowling, and a perfect game is 300 points. The closest he ever got to that was 299, a strike in every frame except that last "lousy 10 pin." They gave it to him, and he kept it next to his desk in the office of a lumber yard in Thermal where he worked for 30 years. If that doesn't sum up my father's life, I don't know what does. That was his joke: one pin short of a perfect game. Keep driving, papa bear. I'll pack my beautiful little family up in the car and meet you out there...

...one day.