This is the last post I’ll be writing for this blog. Our creativity
is verbing and I am working on creating a new website with room for this year’s
growth. I sincerely thank all of you who have kept up with my writing. For my
last post it’s fitting that it be a trip report. Trip reports have been some of
my most sincere posts, and my favorite because of the sincerity. I love you. Thank
you.
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This last week has been a good one. It’s Sunday night. The
Broncos just beat the Patriots and I’m gliding down from a very enjoyable and
elucidating mushroom trip. A friend is moving out and into a new verse of his
life and a roommate is falling deeper in love with his girlfriend before my
eyes. I’m sitting at my keyboard still softly grinning, ready to share a story.
This morning, like every morning, I went to Barns and Noble
and read. I’ve been reading Freud’s Civilization and It’s Discontent. Freud is
a genius but he’s a pessimistic fellow. The lingering idea I absorbed from the
reading that would carry into the mushroom trip is his perspective on love. He does
not think one should love thy neighbor. He is certain that this kind of
uncritical love of a stranger will leave him exposed to all kinds of slights,
physical and psychological.
I wrote in the margins “he confuses libido love with loving
compassion.” I don’t think we have to love everyone like our family. This would
demand too much of us. We would look the robber in the eye and let him take
what he wants if that were the case. But what we can do is have loving compassion
for everyone. If someone breaks into my house, I can look him in the eye and
have compassion for the life he was born into that molded him into the man
before me, but I can have compassion for him and kill him if my family and
friends were in danger.
After I finished reading, I went home and cleaned. Cleaning
before a trip feels symbolic. I feel like I am tidying up my psyche for the
adventure. After cleaning for a couple of hours, I ate some mushies, dawned a
goofy farming hat I love, and drove to Dana’s peak. I love that little
protrusion of rock. From the top I have a beautiful view of the Texas landscape.
There I sat for an hour or so while the mushrooms metabolized.
While hiking up the hill, I saw my roommate and his girlfriend. They had
ate mushrooms a couple of hours ago and it was a glorious coincidence to meet
them along the way, but our group of friends have become so drenched in synchronicity
we almost take her for granted. Almost. We laughed our laughs and nodded or
nods.
A lot of ideas ebbed and flowed through my frontal cortex on
that peak. The big one, one that almost cracked my sanity a few years ago, and
that I’m still handling now, is how imbedded the human being is in games. Language
is a game. Culture is a game. Politics is a game. How I greet you is a game.
Language is the game that messes with me the most. I have a
very hard time stepping out of the game of language. I can with meditation and
good sex, but my creativity flows through language. As human’s we are animals.
Instincts coarse through us. Language, and I don’t know how or why, is a
computer like program that sits on top of our animal bodies, filtering our
impulses.
I was looking at a butterfly and felt my mind innocently
offer how it looked robotic. This is what it is to be an animal without
language. Most life on this planet is dancing to the song of evolution.
Language has allowed human apes to step off the dance floor and our curiosity
as led us to start messing with the music. Language is to evolution what
Skrillex is to music. Naw, I’m playing. But what I’m trying to convey is that
language is an amazingly mysterious and powerful tool.
There is a term I learned from John C. Lilly called “The
MetaProgrammer.” Our physical body is like the hardware of a computer. Our
Instincts are the electricity and circuitry. Language is our operating system. The
first moment you “wake up,” is when you reach a level of consciousness where
you can see your operating system, and you can see all the programs you’ve been
running on. These programs have been installed by your parents, culture,
schooling, and genetics. The Metaprogrammer is the type of consciousness that
starts to reprogram the computer.
I don’t really know how to do this, but I am going to play
with it.
There was a visual I had during the trip that continues to
resonate. I was watching the sun set, and I kept feeling my attention pulled to
a specific tree to the lower left of my field of vision. The tree was tall and
healthy, stretching out towards the sun. The unsettling aspect was the three
trees around it which were dead looking, coiled around the living tree, like organic shackles.
Mushrooms amplify my urge to see symbolic meaning in things.
My mind quickly offered up the image of a successful or happy person being
clung too by dying, stagnant people. I thought of myself, Freud, and the nature
of using psychology to help people.
I felt like I should have felt fear or disgust towards the
kinds of people that cling. But I heard myself speak from a place that wasn’t
my ego and it asked what good is a healthy tree if it doesn’t help those around it.
This might not make sense on a scientific level (which is just another game we
play), but it resonated with me. I realized I was still debating with Freud’s
perspective on love. I know my answer though.
For reasons maybe too personal for this post, one of my deepest programs is to help people. Our culture is a conglomeration of games and I was born with an unbalanced advantage. The only sense I can make of my disproportionate fortune is to leverage it to help people as much as I can. I'm rambling. To sum, I am grateful, and I don't mind if a few branches need some support.
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The goal this year is to make enough money from my blog so I
don’t have to work a conventional job. I’ve got a book in me waiting to come
but the conscious frequency I live at in order to work 40 hours a week for a corporate
job is not the frequency that will create a book I know I’m capable of. We
shall see how this unfolds.
I love you. Thank you for reading and vibing with me. I love
you. Namaste.