triumvirate

I am my two brothers. My two brothers are who I am. To assign myself an identity that is not a transient construct of culture means a long and difficult journey undertaken to discover who I am. I am the coming forth of two powers.

Within the one always is the two. Dualistically, the one denotes two. Who you are is the coming together of two powers. Within, you have the dark and the light - two brothers who constitute your being. The divine masculine, the two brothers, unites with the divine feminine to bring forth the form within creation. You are a product of two. Always. Within, I have contending masculine forces who constitute my masculine essence, and the expression of my life is derivative of feminine and masculine powers. When I look into a divine mirror, I see reflecting the set of twos - my brothers and my parents. I now see the two from the solitary figure of one. To express this truth, knowing they are always with me, is through the power of three. All life is the relationship of three. Going further to the four, we see who you are is the pair of brothers or sisters coming from the two who hold the four within - mom and dad. An expression of seven denotes the divine truth of you as three and your divine origin of four.

At middle age, I got the bug to figure out this life I had sleep-walked through for forty years. Proverbially, I had wandered through my own Sinai for forty years. The journey of the hero was calling out to me as I was ready as I would ever be. I didn't know I was embarking on the path of the hero; I just figured I'd use my remaining time on earth to try and figure out why I was here and why humanity is so full of hatred and division. I was given a grace period of five years to accumulate knowledge before the intensive phase began. Within a great deal of the knowledge, specifically from ancient Egypt, were the answers I was looking for though I lacked understanding; so, they remained hidden until I reached the point on the journey which would unlock the knowledge.

The search for the Great Goddess was the catalyst to seeking out the master teacher. I remained oblivious to the trajectory of the path I was walking, having no clue the pursuit of the divine feminine would lead me to consciousness altering plants. Of course, I see it now and I see it in the myths of long perished cultures. In year four of my journey, I became obsessed with finding a way to contact the Goddess, knowing from the ancient Egyptian literature such a meeting was possible. Through a series of fortunate events, I found shamanism and a magic potion called Ayahuasca. The journey now entailed leaving the comforts of home and heading off to the dark and mysterious Amazon jungle. The intensive stage of the course was at hand.

Indeed, I found Her upon the first alteration of consciousness. What I had read about the Goddess is all true. She is real. In retrospect, the Goddess was the recruitment officer for the hero's mandatory course. She led me into the jungle and tried to inform me of the coming tribulation. I naively blundered upon the path and stumbled into the classroom of the divine masculine master teacher. I had no defences, no strategy, and no idea what I had signed up for. With a powerful right hook, I was KO'ed in no time. The teacher wasted no time in showing me I was no hero. I was a coward, full of fear. I was a fraud defined by panic and paranoia. I was told to leave and never return. Stop taking up space in the classroom of life. I ran from this. This is not what I wanted and expected. I wanted to walk a comfortable and scholarly path of knowing, not the path of a warrior.

Turns out it doesn't work that way. The teacher follows you home and doesn't let up. I didn't know the class was still in session; I just wanted to get away from this guy. Ultimately, he was teaching me to transform or perish. I enrolled in the course of my own foolish free will, and he was delivering on the lessons. Despite the hardship, I kept going. I had spent five years on the path, had found the Goddess, and wasn't going to let this go. I chose the difficult path of transformation though if I could have skipped this part of the journey I would have.

Transformation involves becoming a warrior through courage, bravery, and perseverance. The sheer act of just repeatedly returning to the intensive classroom lessons was signalling I could do it and my world opened from there. My teacher transformed me into a warrior. I was his son, now the hero and he my proud father; my divine father being the ultimate alpha male. I had my sword, and I continued the path of the hero, climbing the mountain of enlightenment and gathering up as much knowledge as I could hold. Eventually, the knowledge marinated into understanding. I walked that hero's journey and discovered who I am.

It's hard to accept who you are because responsibility comes at a heavy price. I had the knowledge but still didn't want to let go. I wanted to be the good guy and objectify the bad guy. Biblically, I wanted to be Abel and not Cain. This thinking made me feel better about all the suffering in the world.

I earned my transformation. I have balls. I look back and I am stunned at what I did because I see it now. By all accounts, any sane person should have gone insane or at least ran far from this challenge. The challenge to my mind and the obstacles in the path were immense. Not only that, but all the trappings were laid out for me. I didn’t fall for any of them. Being from a long line of fools allowed me to bumble my way through the hero's journey, smiling like the village idiot in times of trouble. I could have used someone to talk to about what I was going through, but I kept to myself. In retrospect, if I had opened up, the journey would have ended. I would have been convinced to stop because the price on my mental health would be too great. That's what I would have been convinced to believe. Now that I'm well beyond the gates, I know the opposite is true. My mind is free, and my foundation is solid. Sure, I may come off as weird and strange but that's because I'm not hypnotized by culture. Do you see it?

I see it. I also see the two brothers within which creates what I call me. I'm kind of nebulous in that I don't exist without them and on the other hand, they don't exist without me. We are in a co-dependent relationship, mostly trying to figure each other out.

desire and liberation

A circle is a continuous on and off pulse with an arc to make it more interesting. The circle defines existence. There’s no beginning nor end. It’s a continuous loop of coming and going. What happens when you tire of the ceaseless coming and going? There is harmony between the circuitous body of the feminine serpent that creates the playground for the masculine jaguar. Without one another, the construct falls apart. One supplies the energy needed for the other to create form. A positive charge and a negative charge that become inactive without each other. There is a natural magnetism between the two that results in energetic form. Is that where ultimately all desire comes from? Is desire the principle of magnetic force and the trick is to draw you in closer to the field of attraction? Is our desire a smaller and nuanced derivative of magnetism? Do hypnosis and spells fall into this paradigm as well?

The dark side of the feminine is energy used in order to manipulate events to be in their favour. Seduction is the main method of enabling the results they desire. A great deal of women do realize this at some point in their coming of age and by being able to take full advantage of this power, they get what they want. Masculine energy seems predestined to fall for the gambit and appears helpless in falling into the trap. They become entranced by the desire for the shiny object and chase the excitation. As with all things, the desire and hypnosis of the moment will pass and then you are left with now what? Eros pulled off another great game! There’s the feeling engendered and enforced by culture that you owe the other person due to the irrational result of the chase. It’s pretty onerous, yet the activity continues as the chase and desire are too strong for the human to control. It works both ways. The feminine is validated by being wanted and the masculine by collecting the object. And on and on it goes. The exciter and attractor of untapped energy.

The master teacher lays this bare on the road towards liberation. The only way you will see it is through experience and taking off the rose-coloured glasses. Fear is what ultimately drives this behaviour as it involves a need to feel safe and secure as well as a need for cultural validation. Contractual bondage due to external pressure fueled by an irrational decision as the result of desire. If you mix in sexual thrills with desire fulfillment then you have the recipe for a great game. It’s pretty clear sexual desire is the magic ingredient to elevate any fetish or rash decision to pathological extremes. The dark web is a catalog of validation for this assertion. Furthermore, marriage is definitively the pathological outcome of desire. Sometimes, I make myself laugh! To be fair, it's an exemplary human construct ideal for creating familiar bonds that are quite extraordinary.

So, am I cautioning entering into or even denouncing relationships? Well no, they're what keeps the circle formed, the world spinning, and engendering a new generation of players of this great game. Whether any player will stop and take a look inward at the guts of this behaviour is fascinating in itself. Ultimately, an all-encompassing point is being ascertained, experimented with, or proven and it is what is stronger? Desire or wanting to be liberated? Desire is the supreme test in the master course; realizing this and wanting to successfully complete the master's degree means coming to terms with its machinations and effects. Temporary liberation gives you a pretty good realization of what it is like to be free while in opposition you see how people are all lit up by desire, which gives them the impetus to move forward in life. The root cause of a lot of suffering involves desire in that a loss of desire leads to depression while not getting what you desire leads to frustration and a feeling of failure. Desire leads to multiple attachments, which will weigh you down. Even family structures are engendered by desire and though familial relationships transcend base desire they still have as their foundation the construct of desire. As I mentioned above, humans do have the capacity to transform behaviours into exemplary social constructs, though the failure rate remains high.

What I think I’m getting at is this: Desire leads to being imprisoned in a jail cell of your own making, often wondering how you got there. Liberation is freeing yourself from these attachments and acting as independently as possible, recognizing the differences between wants and desires. We all got to eat, right? Being conscious of these polarities tempers expectations in that you will never reach the pinnacle of liberation until death nor will you fully sink into your desires without destroying yourself which curiously leads towards liberation through death. So, life’s path stops at the door of liberation. Do we take the path towards liberation now or do we wait until the full stop of death?

Desire is not something to defeat in this go around on the wheel. The class is about mastery. Take the blows but steady the course and remain in charge. Once in charge, the teacher will also tell you to give that up. The path towards liberation leads to the final power boss. The other side of power is liberation and cultivating freedom within one’s life leads towards never being subject to power, chasing it, or being dominated by it ever again. Strength in liberation eclipses power.

otorongocito

It’s all an act. I’m such a good actor I don’t even recognize I am acting so how would I comprehend the masterful dramatic performance of the ultimate actor? I’ve seen the master teacher and marvelled at how he transcends time. How he multiplies coincidences to the point of absurdity. How he wakes me from dreams at his whim to give me food for thought. How he laughs as I curse him and tell him I’m going to destroy him. He then whispers in my ear as I wake, “I’m going to kill you.” He continuously challenges me and watches me fall down. He speaks to me with the voice of a madman, contributing to my psychosis. As with the Goddess, he never has given up on me, though his curriculum is deadly.

He plays multiple roles and wears different costumes; therefore, the subterfuge with the help of cultural indoctrination, originally caused me to identify him as an external entity. He sometimes scares the shit out of me while subsequently appearing as a struggling actor in a vision with the sole purpose of enacting a scene change and hinting at a new lesson plan. He has a recurring role as “god" though a great deal of the new generation are tiring of that one. Sometimes, he is red and has horns.

He’s the great jaguar. I’m so dense that when I transformed into a jaguar during an Ayahuasca ceremony I thought, “shit, I’m such a bad ass and so courageous that I earned it." Instead, the big lesson was you are him. Look. Can’t you see it? You’re just coming home. You’re the son of colossal power. The indescribable, unknowable, and indestructible energy of the universe - the masculine polarity defined as the zoë, underlies all these manifestations and is you too. The master class involves remembering that you are the jaguar.

Therefore, I’m really teaching myself. Teaching myself courage, bravery, and liberation. All this suffering is for liberation and transformation. The mass suffering is done out of a love so deep that it puts us all through hell so we will rise above it. It is the impetus for the hero’s journey. The master class teaches liberation in order to be free of conditions and act of your own choice and accord. If you want to discover whom you really are and the nature of this existence that seems to be an imperative.

After I returned from class in Peru in 2016, I had this very strange dream. I was in the maloca at SpiritQuest during a Huachuma ceremony. I was naked and don Howard poured Huachuma, the consistency of green slime, all over me. I smoked a Mapacho and put it out on the ceremonial floor to which I was chastised by don Howard for my lack of respect. It got even stranger but I’ll leave out those details because they’ll take away from the gist of this tale. Anyway, I have sporadically tried over the ensuing four plus years to figure out the meaning of this dream. It was one of those dreams that I had no trouble recalling the next day as opposed to the majority that just fade away, even while you are in the midst of recalling them. I think I finally figured it out.

In that cycle of work at SpiritQuest, I had succeeded in blowing past my fears and limitations and indeed within an Ayahuasca ceremony I raised my consciousness and transformed into a jaguar. It was a recognition of unlocking that power within and subsequently I have realized that jaguar was freed from deep within my shadow and he was accepting me into his training school. Jaguar training school, the order of the jaguar; I was enrolled!

It’s been a challenge for sure; I’ve skipped class numerous times however at some point I have also studied and learned so much knowledge which I have converted into understanding and wisdom. I get the feeling it’s hard to get kicked out of this school once you are accepted; instead, the heat is just turned up to see what you are made of and to force you to transform or perish. The course will probably last the remainder of my biological life. I’m an attentive student, though at times led away by distractions.

The last phase of the work in 2016 involved a ceremony with the sacred Vilca and my intensive phase of 2016 ended with communing with the curanderos and curanderas of renown. I was told that within I had the ability to heal and my primary method of healing involved the sacred tobacco Mapacho. In retrospect, apparently a magic wand isn't waved and you don’t automatically become an agent of healing. Instead, there is training through the adventure of life. I’ve incorporated Mapacho into my daily ritual and maintained a somewhat respectful attitude towards him while always treating him with reverence. I have repeatedly observed his effects and have definitely noticed that respect negates addiction. That lesson is alone worth the price of tuition. Mapacho can contain up to 20x the nicotine levels of a regular cigarette. I smoke regularly and have no cravings or withdrawal symptoms. I can go days or even months without smoking if it’s unavailable, like during this current pandemic. In other words, addiction to tobacco, the nicotine within the plant, is a result of behaviour that does not respect the plant. Tell that to a scientist or even someone you know. Watch them raise their eyebrow.

The effects of Mapacho involve heightening the senses and an energetic connection to your surroundings. The dosage level is admittedly tough as I enter into this new phase of my teachings. I have to sit down and find a quiet space, he is that intense. However, I can see the energy, I can feel the energetic connection, and I can hear sounds far off into the distance as the clarity envelops me. I have a feeling what this is leading to: Mapacho calls out to the Jaguar to come forth. The forging of consciousness and energy is the new lesson plan.

Anyway, back to the dream - the ceremony was obviously a consecration into the order of the Jaguar which involved taking an oath binding both of us. Don Howard presided over the ceremony and welcomed me into the order. The great Jaguar is the ultimate warrior, the alpha of all alphas, and the cosmic grandfather teaching me the ways of the wise. To Otorongo I earned my place as Otorongocito.