the more things stay the same

The only constant is change. Plato said time is the moving image of eternity. Pretty heady stuff and one of those sayings that is both so profound and kind of puzzling. Eternity is eternal. It’s kind of strange that has to be pointed out and that by corollary to this, time is a byproduct of change as in motion. Because we perceive things on the move and in constant flux we can then pin different events down onto a timeline and then insist on the unassailability of said timeline. The problem is you can’t stop time or back it up. Our trajectory is always forward. Heck we don’t even live in the present. Once you realize you are in the present it is already the past. It’s pretty absurd right? What have you learned about things that are absurd and seem to contradict their own validity? Well I know I’ve learned that it in all likelihood means the concept is false. Time is helpful for sure but at its root it doesn’t really exist. What exists is eternity. Time is a construct within no time that is measured by motion. It’s the old story about the cat on the other side of the fence and we can only see the head so that’s all that exists right? Then the cat slinks out from behind the fence revealing the body and then the tail. It always existed as the complete cat but we didn’t see it until it was revealed to us through perception thus helping us realize the idea that our senses are helping to fool us, give us a sense of time, and keep this game afoot. In other words everything exists in the here and now and as the energy crests and wanes it reveals what is. And what is? The totality of all and you are in it.

Picture omnipotence where you could see and perceive it all. 360 degree vision and some kind of Dolby sound that captures completely what is going on. Nothing would be able to trick your senses or perception and therefore they'd be no measurement of time. Instead everything would be happening now and unfolding as an event.

be the moon

The striving of individuals in the game of life is one big attempt at being the king of the castle (and you're the dirty rascal). We take the games we play as children and adult size them.

Being able to think enables me to never be at a loss for ideas that I can sit with and then expand upon. So I was thinking about the moon and how it reflects the light of the sun and becomes a light in the darkness. It is so profound. The full strength of the light of the sun, if you look at it for any length of time, will blind you as it is a bright spotlight. There is a humbleness to the moon. There are people like the sun that carry this aura about them that is a very powerful presence. The easiest way to explain it is to look at famous people and see how we get star struck in the presence of their greatness. They have reached the top of the mountain and are going to try and stay there as long as possible. They have to fend off the attacks from all the bottom feeders wanting to knock them off the mountain. A good example of this phenomenon is the online troll trying to tear others down. The online troll is on a quest for self-enlightenment on the right hand path that leads to the glorification of self. The psychology behind them is they are trying to get up the mountain and get one up on everyone. However they have realized they will not get up the mountain so instead they knock everyone off of it and in that regard their lowly position will eventually become the most high. It is not easy at the top. Wisdom tells you: "be the moon." Shine a floodlight in the dark and don't play the sun game too long. Being a part of the all star enlightenment team is fleeting and will leave you empty once you are replaced.

Humans like searching. It's a fun game. At some point you have to 'declare'. No one is going to give you a piece of paper declaring you are enlightened or have achieved the prize you were trying to get. You will just know and at that point you know and there's no party. You will find the answer if you keep looking but I sense even though some see it they just choose to look away. It's a little confusing. They just want to stay on the journey of discovery and have something to fall back on when they feel vulnerable or perceive they are failing at life. Is it fear? Accepting what you see and feel leads you to wanting to help others get there as well.

spiritual achiever

My exterior is calm and collected. I'm in control and things seem to always sum even steven. My inner world is one of extreme polarity that vascillates between going all in and being ultra locked down. Self-discipline is not a problem for me if I'm on the path of purification. I learned long ago how to use and control the mind to accomplish those goals. Conversely, when the kids are let out of the cage to play it's hard to get them back in, just like thing one and thing two from Dr. Seuss' Cat in the Hat. They are adventurous, playful, lustful, and bent on self-destruction by living in the moment and not caring for consequences. The future me has to clean up, usually the next morning and then suffer from the lack of sleep from the outpouring of frivolity and lust.

I think it is instructive as a template for life and the spiritual path. We humans tend to go all in on the spiritual path, so much so it sometimes becomes off putting for others to tolerate. Ego gets involved and we embrace the identity of one who is enlightened and will elucidate pearls of wisdom. We assume the pose and start stinking of righteousness or is that incense? There has to be balance. Be spiritual but be a rascal, play, and drop the serious pretence. I've been reminded many times to play while on this path.

The collective consciousness of humankind goes through these same struggles as well and we always manifest the extremes in all of our endeavours. We explore all the way to the edge. Eventually being holy and pure leads to righteousness and then forcing others at the point of a sword to become righteous like yourself. The infidel is not to be tolerated or shown mercy. Going full on into hedonism leads to deviance and is a path to darkness as we can't escape the universal truth that with the high comes the low. Maybe that's why we anthropomorphize these traits as god and devil?

Ram Dass addresses the goal of total purification in spiritual pursuits. He exclaims celibacy, instead of making you pure, just leads to being a horny celibate. Pretty funny and full of truth. This idea can be extended out into pretty much all aspects of our existence and ties in with my point about these extreme polarities that seem to plague us. It goes back to being told while on the spiritual path to remember to play. Seriously you must play! I think the Buddha was getting at something when he talked about the middle way! The pre-Columbian master shamans of the Andes mountains knew about this need for balance and called it tinkuy. They designed their whole construct and Mesa around reconciliation of the opposites and extended it out to the woman and the man in order to bring them together within unity. Unity recognizes differences and harmonizes them. We appreciate all for their differences as that what makes the game interesting.

cosmic ocean

Every sentient being I meet is a reflection of self and a part of my psyche. I assign a judgment value to everything I define and objectify, which is based on my perception and naturally is a reflectional bias of my thinking. It leads into the whole idea of an undeniable unity that we are oblivious too and this creates the illusion of a separate world we are living in. As in it exists but through objectification we see it as irrefutable evidence of a universe made of separate things occurring in a dimension of timeline events. A universe of nouns defined by time, position, and volume.

All this instead of a subjective universe unable to escape the role of us all as observers. A universe that can't exist without you - your energy. There is no universe without you. The universe is the sum of all energy, with no exceptions. You aren't going anywhere when your body dissolves and releases its energy back into the cosmic ocean.

Take advantage of your coming forth by day into the light. It’s on now! Find unity within and because of the separation. When I return to unity and embrace all, will I long for separation? Is that what keeps the wheel turning? To stop the wheel, find the balance point where unity and the self are in harmony.

Where do I find the centre? Look within and you will find it. In a spherical shaped construct where everything goes with everything else, you can't help but be the centre. Through realization you enact the axis mundi. You are sacred. 

laxative

Smoking Mapacho tobacco is like a laxative for the mind. Ever sit down on the toilet, take a good dump, and then afterwards you feel so empty? I feel really good after that because all the food the was taken in over say the previous 24 hours you purge and you start again from zero where of the food you processed you kept the nutrients needed to survive and then there’s a huge amount of the crap that you then eliminate. I have found the same kind of principle at work with Mapacho where if I go out in the morning on a walk with the dog in the woods I’ll take some Mapacho along with me and I’ll stop along the river and I will smoke my Mapacho which quiets my mind like a meditation cheat, unless it is really racing. I have also learned that drinking coffee is not really helpful where it does the opposite and makes your mind race, so if you drank coffee and you go out into the woods with Mapacho you are going to have to smoke a lot of it to get to that point where you can empty out the contents of your mind. Ideally you go out into the woods with your Mapacho and within one maybe two puros, you’ll notice your mind will blank out in a peaceful calmness and you’ll start hearing the birds chirp, the wind through the trees, and the water as it ripples off of branches that are in the river. It’s a cheat but for me I was in that state this morning and I noticed it is the same thing as taking a big crap where I have just emptied out the contents of my mind and I feel really good. I don’t have a thought in my head and I’m just looking around and enjoying being aware, not taking in anything and trying to analyze it or any thoughts coming into my head that I have to do this or that. It is just this peace where I’m like oh yeah I’m getting ready to spend the next 24 hours taking in awareness and spinning it and reading about this and watching that and absorbing all this information and some of it I will keep because it is beneficial and nutritious. I like learning and I love knowledge however I have realized there has to come a point where you have to dump it and use Mapacho as a laxative for your mind.

waking to the mystery

The mystery deepens when you think you are figuring it all out. The final destination of the inveterate seeker leads to looking within after exhausting the search to find the answer in the external world. The search for god only culminates when you look into the mirror. In fact all the gods and goddesses of yore are aspects of what's inside. I like to explore the relationship within between Apollo, the god of logic and reason, with the rascal and joker Dionysos, who makes this game worth the candle sometimes to the detriment of one's well being and invites in the suffering. Suffering, as the Buddhists like to remind us, is the product and result of desire. Cut out desire they say and you will no longer suffer. It's the ultimate koan. Desire not to desire! You know what else besides suffering you can cut out by not desiring? Happiness! We live in a world of duality and everything has its corollary. Once there was good in the world there became bad and we started separating all and objectifying the differences. Light intuits darkness. Suffering entails happiness. The universe is brought into existence by desire so if you want this to all go away then stop desiring. Is happiness worth the suffering? That's an answer I will leave up to you.

I leave for the Amazon in three days to continue my relationship with the plant teachers. This journey will take me into the Andes mountains to the great meeting place of antiquity in pre-Columbian South America where all was reconciled in the temple of the jaguar at Chavín de Huántar. By chance I happened upon a talk given by Gabor Maté, who is a doctor that uses Ayahuasca as part of his treatment of patients with addictions and diseases which are the product of culture and the environment, thus understanding the relationship between mind and body and how it is the major contributor to disease. Anyways towards the end of the talk he relates a story about a woman who came to the Amazon for healing and was upset she wasted her money because all she saw in her visions was a psychedelic elephant. Poor lady had no idea! I have seen this elephant and knew enough that I realized he was Sri Ganesha, the remover of obstacles in your path.

When I conquered fear and had undeniable courage then Ganesha appeared. It was a curious reminder of his influence in my life and a highlight of my time with plant teachers. He always puts me onto the path of where I need to go. We all get lost at times but as long as you maintain your relationship to Ganesha you will find the way back home. For me now SpiritQuest is home.

Last night I had a pretty vivid dream that was pretty fresh in my mind. As the alarm clock for work went off, the story was still unfolding and I was disappointed it didn't get to play out. I dreamt about Mapacho. I was with a fellow traveller and we were in a store that sold different kinds of oddities and we were talking about Mapacho. He went to the back of the store and came back with a case of Mapacho and I was shocked that this place sold it. There was a huge blunt of it and I wondered what the result of smoking that whole cigar would entail? I envisioned a Mapacho coma of a long duration. The store we were in was from my youth; a memorable place called Playtime. I loved that store as I remember it having pretty eclectic candy and toys you wouldn't find anywhere else. You could buy two mojo toffees for a penny.

The fact that Mapacho appeared in my dream is pretty interesting. What I mean is that it is through my relationship with my ally Mapacho that I dream so vividly every night. It is the catalyst for my night time psyche creating worlds of unspeakable complexity that just appear out of nothing. I have no idea how I do it and then I insert myself into the dream. I have adventures and live out fantasies. Playtime. This giant blunt of Mapacho caused me to wonder what would be the effects of smoking the whole cigar? Obviously the answer is where I am now. 

blank slate

Plant teachers are gurus that direct you towards looking within to find your strength. Like any good guru that consistently challenge and flummox you until you give up your folly of looking externally for answers, the guru has subtle ways of misdirecting your gaze. Eventually you look within and find that voice of wisdom, of love, and the one who is the joker. You learn how to access them and when they are speaking to you. You learn how to put the brakes on your mind, become the witness, and just let it flow.

You know what's funny? I drank Ayahuasca four times over the course of a week last March and pretty much every ceremony started off with a vision of a high speed drive along a race track. It was pretty cool. So cool it has taken me about a year to figure out why that vision kept recurring. My intention last year was to meet up with the Goddess and merge with her and I was not as focused on the preparation aspect going into ceremony and did not quiet the mind as well as I know I should have. I was pretty focused in my intention and was confident in navigating the Ayahuasca experience. That was all well and good however I finally realized the high speed chase was Ayahuasca teaching me about how the mind can race and repeating it. Imagine the frustration as I just didn't get it even though it kept repeating. It's the old getting hit in the head repeatedly with a blunt object trick but this time I was so hyper fixated I just shrugged it off. It’s an invaluable teaching moment though as whenever I sit in ceremony now with la Madre and I get this vision it will symbolize the need to become the blank slate. How awesome is that?

As I prepare for the next level of teachings I have made it a mantra this year to just shut the fuck up. I call it STFU - Listening to the Plants. Eventually I do pick up on the lessons and become a good student. It just takes a little extracurricular work sometimes.

balancing act

Why are rock stars, movie stars, and athletes more famous than scientists, doctors, and intellectuals? Well because subconsciously we recognize that life is just a game and a performance, whether tragedy or comedy, and that the divine actor, the sublime stage performer that can move us to tears, is the greatest legend of all time. Dionysos is the greatest of them all. We need Apollo and his reason to push us forward in our evolutionary climb but when it comes down to it, our humanity, our triumphs and sorrow, the need for love and inclusion is from the greatest of them all. Euoi!

Dionysos is present in all of us; most of us just choose to bury him, treat him as an outcast, use him as a scapegoat, all the while occasionally letting him out when we alter our consciousness through our drug of choice or are seduced by the passions of life. Suppressing Dionysos can lead to outbreaks of madness and violence when the lid finally blows off the pot. I know Dionysos is always with me and I have struggled with that my whole life. I’ve told him to leave me alone, go away, I’ve suppressed him on my quest for enlightenment. He never left; he is always there. I say he but he should actually be qualified. He’s more like a he she, hermaphrodite, the all. Unity is darkness. The light separates and gives rise to self. Our deepest and darkest desires come from the darkness and is the impetus that gives rise to self.

I’ve been avoiding something I need to come to terms with for about six years now. When I first went down to the Amazon and drank Ayahuasca I set a couple of intentions for my first foray into the great unknown of self and its correlate no self. I wanted to meet the Goddess who was calling to me and secondly I wanted to face up to my dark side. Two ceremonies later both intentions were realized. The Goddess came to me with Love and forgiveness in the first ceremony and then in the second ceremony I scared myself beyond belief and came face to face with my dark side. It was so unsettling and I have never come to terms with it though I have many times tried to figure out what happened. It was so strange and hypnotic at times. So hypnotic that I can kind of still see it in my mind's eye yet I cannot fully reform it or capture what exactly it was. If you asked me to explain it I couldn’t. So strange. Like being trapped in this weird hell and in subsequent ceremonies this is the darkness that would reappear reminding me to not do this anymore; stay within the false comfort of ordinary consciousness. That darkness stayed with me through all my Ayahuasca ceremonies up until this past visit in March of 2019. The darkness had vacated and my ceremonies contained none of my former struggles.

I know why. First of all through experience I knew now how to navigate the experience. Secondly it is partly because I had levelled up, embraced and became the jaguar, and shunted fear aside but truthfully it’s because in the two and a half years between Ayahuasca ceremonies I came to terms with Dionysos and started reintegrating him back into my life after sending him away. Constant reminders to play such as when I went to Peru in late 2017 on a mission to complete the climb up the mountain with the plant medicine Huachuma were part of it and a deep understanding that he isn’t going anywhere. I’m at a crossroads now where I know I can’t suppress him yet I know that if I give him free reign it will lead to my destruction. Cautionary tales in the life stories of Jim Morrison and Freddie Mercury, though I’m by no means a rock star, are a good indication of where reckless hedonism leads to. I know balance is the key but what about a teacher of that balance? I have found it is either or. I can’t discipline myself without sending him away. I’ve entered into a strong cycle of self-discipline now, one where I’m absolute in my intentions, and it is going to be this way and go on for a while now. I’m afraid of banishing Dionysos away again and seek to integrate. When he comes back he’s going to fuck up my life. I will have to ask him for guidance. 

free will: suffering or service?

I have written about this before but it is in my thoughts again so I am going to try and articulate it in a different way: there is nothing you need to do. You don't have to try and achieve merit in order to be rewarded in the next life. If your motivations are contingent upon a carrot then you are continuing on the hamster wheel of thinking you are not good enough and must earn your rewards, much like we have this impression that we all have to earn a living and that we are not entitled to anything.

If I take an extreme example it would be this: spiritually you are no better off in terms of being rewarded in the afterlife if you are the most enlightened sage of all time versus a mass murderer of vulnerable women and children.

What the hell man? Have you gone mad?

The whole catch to this game of life is it is a game. There is nothing I have to do. I don't have to give back or be of service or strive to be impeccable. I don't have to love others and I can sit in hatred and judgment of them all.

Why is there so much suffering in the world? It's because we have free will and we choose to allow the suffering. We are a smart and resourceful species. We could greatly reduce suffering but we choose not to and end up competing with each other for resources. Where there is profit, gain, and winners there has to be deficit, loss, and losers. It's transactional and a zero sum game. So you see you don't have to unconditionally love and be of service however by not choosing these paths we enable suffering and make the world hell for the downtrodden. The way out of the morass is to choose all those attributes that play well to the spiritual crowd such as love, sharing, and purity. You just have to be aware that this will not lead to any reward; I know now as a human with experience that the threat of eternal damnation or another go round on the wheel of reincarnation having to atone for your misdeeds is incredibly motivating and makes you want to be good. I want to be a good boy. My ego wants me to project into the world that I'm a nice person. Understand though that it is through your choices and actions now that the whole world will be lifted up. To love each other unconditionally and share resources will relieve us of the hell we have created. It's the way to beat the game and reconcile our divisive nature so we can once again reach unity.

I have talked a bit before about plant medicines classes being like the school of hard knocks. This school of life seems like the ultimate challenge where the hard knocks are the suffering. We don't seem to learn the lessons and keep repeating the same actions that divide us up into the have and have nots. When will it end? I don't know but in the meantime I will keep working on myself and trying to lift others up.

I'd also like to address the nagging question. So okay you eliminate suffering in your utopia but what about people who become sick with disease and the pains of aging? What about the child with cancer?

We have an attachment to the body due to cultural conditioning. We revile death due to our conditioning and cling to life at all costs. Chemotherapy is ghastly. Why not celebrate life and also death? When it is time to let the body go then culturally make that a great celebration. Clinging to the body is inviting suffering. How do I know this? Because of the billions of people, heck trillions of life forms, that have spontaneously appeared on this planet, the opposite is true. Eventually, we all die with no exceptions. Maybe it sounds like I am not being realistic and that death really sucks. Okay, but death is an experience and an unavoidable casualty of being born. It's part of the process of life so let's celebrate it with those who are to transition to the next event on the journey of consciousness. In any event, Ram Dass assures us that it's okay because dying is pretty safe. 

pursuit of love

The pursuit of power is based on fear. This fear we need to hide from others lest we be found out a coward. It is an interesting journey into the desire for power as it comes from our depths and hence psychologically the id. The peculiar thing about power is the pursuit of it is out of the closet. When we embark on that path it is no longer something that we keep hidden from others. Instead it is now part of your personality and identity as someone who seeks power. It’s a good study into how we can manifest our deep desires and change our relationship to them. When I looked at the desire for power I knew it had to be connected to control and the need to control our circumstance comes from a deep seated fear that we can keep hidden as long as we have power.

This is most evident and plays out in global politics. National borders are created for security, with fear of others what ultimately underwrites wanting to belong to a country and protect the homeland. So it started out as fear but then once the fear materialized it was transformed into a quest for power. Fear then retreated back into the dark and the quest for power into the light. Fear sometimes bubbles up to the surface in the forms of racism and nationalism. This is not the most altruistic of templates for bringing up feelings and wants from our depths but it is pretty instructive in that this is how it works and how we can transform ourselves.

I wrote a few blog posts back about how the id is a reflection of our lower self and is how we control our deep down desires. We hide them away and we also use this construct to bury love so deep that we will have a difficult time finding it because we don’t even realize we have lumped it in with our desires, pleasures, and fetishes we wish to keep hidden. Once love is discovered, we have to muster the courage to bring love out into the light. First of all that courage we have put away with fear we have to dig down deep and bring to the surface. When I look back on my plant medicine journeys and how they ran me through a gauntlet of fear, incredible love, and then hammering home the need to be courageous it is quite striking the sheer breadth of how these teacher plants know what makes us tick and how to help us get out of the morass. It’s fine to show the student cosmic, unconditional love but without some tools, life lessons, and repeated knocks on the head it is not going to grow within, instead it will have been just a novel experience from when I altered my consciousness.

So the problem or should I say quest is how do I take this love from my depths and transform it? I’ve been listening to a lot of Ram Dass’ lectures lately and he is pretty clear about how to do this. It’s also something that don Howard would talk about a great deal. It’s service. Being unconditionally of service to others without any expectation of a carrot in return. Abundance and love will grow out of being of service.

There’s no need to then follow the fear template and let love retreat back into the shadows. Once the love has manifested and been transformed into service then lift that love up as high as it will go. Express this love in all aspects of life whether it is through the pleasures you get from foods you like, from knowledge, or sexual attraction to another. There is friendship and the caring of family and of others, including your pets and the love of self. There’s is so much love to give and get. 

teachers

Access altered states by changing your vibration. The plant teacher Ayahuasca explained that to me the first time I ever drank that potent brew. The plant teacher Huachuma then physically showed me how this works the second and third time I drank with grandfather. The second time it was vibration overload and a coursing of energy surging throughout my body. The third time I remember sitting in a boat on the Amazon River and my frequency had tuned into the great cosmic love spectrum band. Wow! And then I looked up in the sky and saw this patch of rainbow. It was phenomenal. Huachuma then a few years later gave me an advanced course in the Andes mountains in Ecuador. Grandfather challenged me to do the homework afterwards and figure it out. As I sit here writing, the preparation stage of my upcoming journeys two years later with Ayahuasca and Huachuma have those lessons coming back into my perception and thoughts.

Ram Dass passed away shortly before Christmas. I knew who he was, read his book “Be Here Now,” but that was about it. I haven’t listened to any of his lectures or followed his life until the news that he had died. I guess I lumped him in with Timothy Leary and then Terence McKenna in that he was probably entertaining but ultimately not what I was looking for. I’m at the point in my life now where all the elders I looked up to have passed away. I really wish I had a chance to meet Alan Watts; in fact if I could sit down to dinner with anyone past or present it would be Alan. He passed away when I was a toddler and I didn’t discover him until forty years later but am thankful for the profound impact he has had on my life. I did get to meet don Howard and spend a good deal of time with him. The world also lost his physical presence this year; his voice and gentle teachings live on through media and his family, both immediate and the SpiritQuest family. Just after New Years I happened upon a lecture of Ram Dass in which he talked about the journey of his life, changing consciousness, realizing the power of love, and how changing consciousness is a matter of accessing different levels of vibration and not getting locked into the same one we naturally all tune in to. Bingo. It’s like the homework I was instructed to investigate by grandfather had reached a point where he had to help me because I wasn’t getting very far with it. I now spend the day arranging my schedule so I’ll have an hour or so free to listen to Ram Dass. Of course he just passed away and I have to realize the time is now. Life is a journey and the teachers eventually move on in their spiritual destiny. Who becomes the new teachers? Is this why I have a mirror in my house?

Ram Dass talks about at first getting high and wanting to stay there. He investigated and pursued this goal, finally realizing through his pilgrimage and meeting of his guru Maharajji, that it is a state of consciousness and by trying to access it through LSD or whatever would always result in him coming down. He realized that to live in a state of being high, in other words bliss, meant to cultivate within his life, through love and service, this state of consciousness. Alan Watts would say about the use of consciousness changing substances that once you get the message, hang up the phone. Read into that what you will but one of the messages you may be blessed with receiving is this unconditional love for all. You may have to repeatedly get that message much like Ram Dass did but once you finally grok the message then hang up the phone and go do the work. If you have any knowledge of the plant medicine scene you will know what I mean. People fall in love with ceremony and with getting high. Of course we do! Ceremony and ritual give you a peek at the profundity of life and a glimpse of the mystery. Getting high and feeling the universal sisterhood and brotherhood is awesome. However continually coming back to ceremony without integrating what it is you have been shown or not having made any attempt to try and figure out the message will lead to triviality. Compounding ceremony after ceremony where you get the message over and over but don’t try to understand or put into practice eventually leads to either you tuning it out or the messenger stops giving you the message and the whole experience becomes chasing visions and trafficking in storytelling.

There’s more than one message but I think you get the point. Changing your consciousness through a substance can show you bliss and reveal eternal truths but the homework and integration becomes exploring those truths and cultivating a natural state of consciousness that allows you to remain in bliss as much as possible. 

morbidly famous

The journey to becoming anything is the path of the self. We all walk it; we all have an ego. Remembering who you are and where you came from, by stopping the world and seeing through culture, allows you to become a child again; the time before you were told who you were. Culture tries to make all flowers look the same. Your journey to self is sacred and involves discarding the part where culture tells you who you are, that becomes your ego, and instead you tell you who you are and discover the self.

Love is the fount at the trough of the wave of energy where we all return to and from this embrace we once again come forth as a self. This cyclical vibration being the way. We are unity and we reflect self; then we become the self and reflect unity. The journey never takes pause but is always in motion. We can never define our self completely as either or. Love shines the light on the path of the way back home.

I am at root undefined. I am an event. I can't define or pinpoint unity or separation as they are always changing. Because I come from unity does that mean it is the truth and all else is illusion? Does my coming forth from that unity mean my self is but an illusion? Or is it all one happening and unity implies separation no matter what linguistic tricks you try to deny it with? I will always go with everything and I can’t separate myself from the connection to all. I think that’s where we get hung up.

Why do we seek fame? In a way it is an urge that is the necessary byproduct of developing an ego. It is the expected pathological outcome. Predetermined might be a better word however creativity is best when left to flower on its own so I don’t think it is set in stone we all want to become famous. I do think the quest for fame is a malady but one that results from taking things too far, kind of like you need to eat but then some of us don’t know when to stop so we go too far and become obese. Fame is the same thing as obesity. We need to be recognized in order to survive or you become an afterthought. Dignity does come from recognition. A marginalized out group is easily dismissed and trodden upon hence a drive within us to make sure we don’t suffer the indignities of life by making sure we are known. Like all things, we can then take it too far and become obsessed with recognition, which plays into the ego. At some point in our lives we might want to climb that mountain of appearances and get to the top, get all shiny and enlightened, and be recognized for our accomplishments. It’s kind of a kick in the teeth to finally realize that the spiritual climb is just another iteration of the same game we play in all aspects of life, which is to get to the top and one up everyone else! Is there a way out of the trap?

You don’t need to do it, you are already it, and the all. That’s the way out of the trap. You play it small when you emphasize your individual achievements and aura of renown. You needed everyone else to get there. It’s like you are advertising you haven’t the foggiest idea who you are and where you come from. To be of ultimate service is to lead people to the realization of the fundamental unity of all and that part of this process is cyclically separating from the all and coming forth as a self but never losing the connection. It is lifting each other up and propelling us all on the journey towards the greatness of self and then walking all back home once again. To be recognized as a self and dignifying all others that have come this far, knowing that without each and everyone of us we couldn’t have made it up that mountain of appearances. Without a set of eyes to gaze upon its beauty, the sun doesn't shine in all its radiance as it climbs the mountain in the golden dawn. The sun needs you as much as you need the sun.

Being morbidly famous is an affliction you don’t want.

review

You don’t know what you got until it’s gone or something like that. You don’t appreciate what you have until you have to go without it. We take a lot of things for granted, chief among them health. I haven’t had as bad a flu as what I just recovered from in over a decade. Suffering through the body aches, chills, and fever for four plus days and then the aftermath of low energy and fatigue left me with the sentiment that yes health is everything. All that I like to do was put on hold for a week while I fought and then tried to recover from this malady. In such a short time I was able to witness a low level of depression sink in over the futility of my situation. The fifth night of the body aches and chills left me curled up in the fetal position wondering if I’d ever shake this thing. Getting past that hurdle galvanized me into going for a walk in the woods only to have to prop myself up against a tree to avoid collapsing from exhaustion. The lessons learned are plentiful and obvious, so obvious that it is crazy we don’t think about them until we are faced with the loss of what we take for granted. It’s like my body having a pre-emptive discussion with me, preparing for old age when I can’t take health for granted anymore, “Hey dumb ass! While you are in relatively good health and shape it’s time to take advantage of it and get to fulfilling all your intentions for this life while the going is still good.” I don’t want to get this flu again and I don’t wish it upon anyone else but there did come a pretty good lesson out of it.

Not being at full health really emphasizes the self in that it all starts from the fundamental wholeness of what we call self before we can heal others. The ‘others’ are an extension of self as we are all in this together. It really underscores the concept that in order to heal the world, first start with yourself.

Another calendar year is coming to a close and with it the decade. It’s a cultural marker, the significance of it is highly questionable and dubious, but anyways it provides an opportunity to look back and examine where you are in terms of where you once were in your life and see if that is a positive or a negative. The one thing for sure is we are all older and closer to the grave! I view that as a positive as I have found the more I age and slow down the easier it is to see through the world and into the game and thus have understanding. I am a knowledge junkie and with age comes rewards. The biggest takeaways from this past year have been intention, beliefs, dreams, and self-discipline. I learned that when you connect with the divine and obfuscated parts of self, set an intention, and are sincere about making a reciprocal offering then things will start happening for you. It may be part of a long game and you may have to reach back and gather in some much needed self-discipline but you’ll be walking that path and it’s going to happen for you. I also learned the role of beliefs in the fundamental way we see things and how it shapes our worldview. The truth is slippery and it is beliefs that ultimately create the world we live in and how we want it to be. Ultimately there is suffering in the world because we want there to be suffering. Our work driven society views life as hard and you have to work for your rewards and stresses if you are in an unfortunate situation that’s your fault. It’s clear we created the mess and we can collectively get us out of the quagmire if the will is present. Such responsibility is ours to use and steward wisely, instead of for personal gain at the expense of others. Reciprocity teaches many lessons, chief among them that not giving back causes the divide, the haves and the have nots, and all the strife in the world. It’s pretty simple this reciprocity challenge and as a whole we seem to have developed quite the ability to look the other way, maybe throw the downtrodden in society a bone once in a while but that’s it. I mean we who live comfortable lives work hard for it and damn it I’m going to enjoy the fruits of my toil. To change the world change yourself and envision how you want the world to be. If there is enough of a change in consciousness then we will reach a tipping point. Lastly this was a huge year for understanding dreams. I shed the notion that they are fanciful and nonsensical and saw them for what they are. I’m reflecting my psyche into a world of my own making, using this world to self reflect and to try and come to terms with all that. Because I tend to examine everything, this led down the rabbit hole to the realization that the world we are in now is the product of a dreamer and we are aspects of their psyche. Our world at its core is mental energy. There are a myriad of ways you can try to convince me this is not true and they will all have merit. That’s not how I see it though. To me it is crystal clear!

How about this past decade? Ten years ago I had returned from a trip to Egypt and I was ensconced in learning everything I could about that culture. I was about two years into my obsessive search for the origin of beliefs and I cast a wide net. It would be about another three years until I found traditional plant based shamanism and that opened the floodgates that defined the rest of the decade and gave me all the answers I was determined and had full intention to discover. I was resolute in my searching and this led me to shamanism almost as if the universe was saying okay you’re pretty sincere about this, here you go, walk this path and it will all be revealed. My foray into shamanism gave me the answer to my original question and that plunged me head long into the mystery of self and who I ultimately was. This blog space is a testament to that voyage and the discoveries made along the way. It is by no means over and this decade to come promises as much discovery as I have gained so far. Really big things are just around the corner. Bring it on! 

just believe

So much of our political discourse contains within it a need for conformity and belief in a set of values. For a lot of these ideals then is needed what is called virtue signalling so that people know you are on board with their beliefs. If you have been taking in any of the impeachment hearings going on in the States, it is quite the exercise to listen to both sides of the debate and their cheerleaders. The truth is undefined so instead it becomes a massive propaganda outreach on both sides of the aisle and an attempt to sway opinion through cherry picking sound bites and reporting only on events beneficial to your point of view and beliefs. It sums up what I have been feeling deep down for months now as to me anyway truth seems to be malleable and hard to hang your hat on, like sand slipping through your fingers. Our conception of the universe is the truth until we invariably gather more knowledge and find out more about its structure and function and then we have to revise our theories which then becomes our current truth. Truth is an exercise in consensus. Consensus is derived from the belief of others. Take for instance when we have to make a decision on something. We gather data that helps us make up our minds. Eventually we run out of time and have to make a decision based on the collected data. We could never get to a hundred percent buy in; we'd most likely be dead before that happens. So we move ahead with near certainty and then all the little errors in our thinking and decisions compound with interest and on it goes.

Remember that commercial where 4 out of 5 dentists recommend Trident sugarless gum because it didn't promote tooth decay? That became fact and sugarless gum was the way to go to be more healthy. What about the maligned fifth dentist? They were the real thinker here. They knew chewing sugarless gum wouldn't help, because a sugar addict will just get their fix somewhere else. They understood there had to be a fundamental change in diet in order to prevent tooth decay. But they were silenced, losing out to the majority interest who enforced their beliefs through consensus.

I have often wondered why smart people get sucked into religion. I was educated on this very topic by plant medicines. They have consistently shown me how your beliefs triumph over all. Not only that but the cultural beliefs you are indoctrinated in, whether you believe them or not, will have to be confronted as well and without a hardened counterbalance to these beliefs they will win you over. In Christianity you are saved by faith and not works. All you have to do to be saved is believe in Jesus. Somebody somewhere during that tumultuous time in the classical world knew what's up. By just believing, you give power and currency to the idea.

Ephesians 2:8-9

8 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:

9 Not of works, lest any man should boast.

Psychically you will manifest these beliefs. You will experiences them in dreams, altered states of consciousness, and stress and they will be real. How can you not then believe, regardless of the absurdity?

I will submit myself as exhibit A. I have written previously about my encounters with icons of Christianity in altered states of consciousness; these psychic entities alive within my culture that penetrate and inculcate our individual psychic energy. The only way I moved past this trapping of culture is because I had a stronger belief in a goddess that couldn't be shaken and that allowed me to move past the trap door laid out on my path. If that had not been present there is a good chance I would have fallen for it as well and I’d be currently selling you on the merits of Jesus.

Picture a circle and call the circumference your beliefs. Within that circle is where you will find truth, with the truth always depending on what your fundamental beliefs are. For example, there are 24 hours in a day and at high noon is when the sun is the highest in the sky. This is palpably true. However you have been deceived by motion into thinking that there are cycles and days. Furthermore it is motion that fools you into thinking there are sunrises and sunsets. The sun is shining while hurtling through space. If the earth was hit by an asteroid that knocked us off course then our whole concept of time would change. Our worldview is fundamentally shaped, or may I say clouded, by our beliefs.

Think of the advertising industry that I play a part in. The trick is to get people to believe in or want something. I manipulate people into buying things they don't need through creating wants and desires, all the while appealing to vanity and ultimately ego. It’s a benign way of exploiting the psyche of the human being and it works! Companies and brands spend millions of dollars in order to get people to like and buy their products. The consumer has to think they need the product or want the product regardless of whether it works or will improve their lives. Obviously the best products actually do what they advertise but truth in advertising is a fungible thing. We do have standards but those are co-opted by money, lawyers, and fine print in a small font.

From this you can see the point about my original premise that we can use selective information to propagandize the electorate into believing only one side of the story. It is a story precisely because it is a belief. It’s the old axiom that there are two sides to every story and even though you might not like your opponent’s narrative it is valuable to listen to it. When discussing politics with friends and family invariably if you are not agreeable or a pushover there are arguments. While trying to make counter points I have been accosted with the accusatory “Have you been watching Fox News?“ line more than once in order to shut down any challenging point of view. Actually I try to watch a variety of news in order to shape my beliefs and hopefully develop some kind of understanding. I’m not naive enough to believe I know the truth but I’m smart enough to know when I’m being fed a line. There’s a reason in a courtroom a judge elicits stories from both sides of the aisle. They are trained in bullshit detection and when they see the bullshit coming out of the mouth of one of the litigants then it is game over for them.

I have spent a great deal of the second half of my life searching for answers. I have always been a contrarian, so I had a leg up on most when it came time to shed cultural baggage powered by cultural institutions. I went out looking for answers, thinking I could find them externally. When I discovered conscious altering plants they were an accelerator on the path of finding what it was I was seeking. The altering of consciousness will force you to look inwards and come to terms with all your beliefs and from this you will learn the truth is slippery and beliefs are what powers the universe. If you believe then it is your truth. Do you remember in the movie 'The Matrix’ Neo didn’t believe he was the one? He visited the oracle looking for answers and she said sorry kid but you are not it. It wasn’t until he believed in himself that he did indeed become the one. The truth was waiting on beliefs because without beliefs there can be no truth. 

mimicry and reflection

I think it was in the year 1987 when my girlfriend and I rented the movie Blue Velvet. Up until that time in my life I had been fed a pretty steady diet of Hollywood movies like Top Gun, Basic Instinct, Bad News Bears, and so on. In other words, nothing that made me think too hard. Blue Velvet abrogated my childhood and ushered me into adulthood as it was a very disturbing, yet highly compelling psycho-sexual thriller, that contained many layers that spoke to the hidden parts of ourself that mesh with the dark side of society and culture. It's interesting that the cities and culture we create mimic our psychological lives. Specifically this movie was pointing out the inner conflict and darkness within that we hide, along with the seedy parts of town that we consign to the fringe.

Anyways I have been thinking and writing a great deal lately about our psychological makeup and this movie returned to my radar due to some trivial reference. It's marvellous how sometimes events lineup and synchronize which lead to another train of thought or action. I re-watched it last week and was startled by how it portrayed the human condition and how our ego is tasked with burying the darkness within all of us and when it bubbles to the surface neurotically having to integrate these desires into acceptable society. The use of the closet by masterful director David Lynch to symbolize the perversities the protagonist Jeffrey hides away and then Lynch using the closet to allow Jeffrey to peek at the dark side of life are strokes of genius. When Jeffrey comes out of the closet in context with his dark side he assumes the the dark traits of the antagonist Frank, who is a sadistic bully with a myriad of sexual perversions. This reaches a boiling point when Frank discovers Jeffrey at the apartment of their shared interest Dorothy, and takes him on a joyride. The film coalesces at the point when Frank tells Jeffrey that “you're like me." The character of Jeffrey plays the role of a charming and mysterious young man who attracts the love interest of Sandy, who represents everything that is good and pure about small town life. It's Jeffrey's ego that has him playing this part but his dark side keeps drawing him towards the seedy part of the town and the mystery he wants to solve. Up until this point in his life, the expectations of the town and taking over his father's store had controlled his behaviour, much like the concept of the superego keeps us all in line through rewards and punishments. Jeffrey's desire to explore his own darkness though is too much and ultimately wins out.

The brilliance of the film was a catalyst to a reexamination of my own psyche, especially a doubt that was creeping in concerning my night I spent with Peyote. During that night I accessed a wisdom within that acted as a guide and a dispenser of no-nonsense advice concerning questions I had about my life. I started thinking well wasn't that just my higher self as the superego leading me towards the unattainable masculine quest of being perfect and righteous? It was a good question and one I needed to confront. Yes I do tend to over-examine things and I can't hide anything away or accept at face value. I question everything. It's a good way to be if you are a inveterate seeker of knowledge, though you will never find peace this way. Truth is like grasping a handful of sand and trying to hold onto it. Anyway I sat with this problem in quiet meditation out in the woods before reexamining the three Freudian concepts of id, ego, and superego. Explaining these quickly - the id is our base desires, the ego is the character we play identified as the self, and the superego is the controlling voice that praises and blames and keeps us from devolving into a pure pursuit of pleasure. At birth this voice becomes our parents until as teenagers we break free of this control, only to have the role taken up by culture at large that then praises and blames. I was out with my dog and realized psychologically animals are pretty much stuck at the id stage. By giving our pets a name we define their identity and enable a primitive ego in them and then as their master we assume the role of the superego in their lives, as we constantly praise and blame a dog in order to control it.

Okay so back to the question of Peyote and what was that voice? It troubled me that it could have been the superego just playing along that night. I thought about our conversation and realized my higher self was dispensing wisdom and advice but had no expectations or demands of me. This put me at ease but brought up more questions. The threefold nature of our psychological makeup is a pretty good structure. I mean splitting it into three is dubious but in examining our nature it is a solid construct. Now I was introducing another part of us - the higher self separate from the superego, into the equation. Somehow I realized that the higher self was reflecting back into our lives as an entity we call the superego who then mimicked the ideals of the higher self but turned it into demands and expectations of us, used to control us. I have known for a while that to grasp the mystery is to only look at reflection. The Great Goddess taught me that when I was seeking unity in this lifetime. I gazed into a piece of black obsidian and saw all of nature reflected back through this rock and then later realized I too was part of this unified mirror construct. This wisdom is easily applied to the psychological constructs I have been discussing. Ultimately the psyche that we break down into the three parts: id, ego, and superego are reflections of what we ultimately intuit as being our nature. These are the lower self, self, and higher self but are normally off-limits, as in it's hard for an eye to look at itself without a mirror, unless consciousness is altered and you can bypass the veneer of their reflections. This connects back to the idea of psychic entities I wrote about a few weeks ago that try to gain control of us and they are using mimicry to do this. So from this I was able to differentiate between the ego and the self wherein the ego is what we think of ourself and how others see us and the self, which is how we really feel. The same idea of reflection is present here where what is central to our makeup has a corollary. There is the ideal and then an imitation of it. I then got stuck on the id. This is our desires and wants and I thought well that is pretty cut and dry and was not sure how base desire and pleasure are reflected and then mimicked. I knew that if I meditated on this problem I'd get the answer.

The answer brought me to my knees out in the wilderness. The id is of course desire, pleasure, and the darkness we keep hidden in the closet. However this conception is doing the work of veiling the ultimate thing we keep in the closet. The voice in my head asked me if I know what that is? What is the one thing we all lock away in the depths and don't express as we should? I then knew the answer and started bawling in the midst of the forest. The lower self is not only desire and the pleasures we seek but most of all it is where feelings and love comes from. Love for ourself and for others. When I come home from work my dog, who epitomizes this concept and is free of the need to imprison its feelings, is exuberant and literarily jumping up and down over seeing me, so full of love with no hesitation or reservations in showing it. Imagine if you could live your life that way? That was the lesson and how we buried love and our feelings even deeper than desire and how we use the disparaging terms of dark side, shadow, and closets to further dig a hole where we can bury all this away and caution people against exploring the subconscious depths. The real thing we hide away in the dark are our feelings and abundant love and then use the subterfuge of pleasure, desire, and peculiar fetishes to avoid the whole construct at large and this in turn allows us to stop the discovery of the hidden subconscious realms before we get too far and hit the spigot. There are no goddesses in our religions because we buried her away in these subconscious depths and tell all to avoid going looking in the those dark places.

When I was at SpiritQuest in November of 2017, the last retreat I attended with the maestro don Howard, he talked to me on the walk back from visiting a local tribe about this very thing. My heart was wide open and I was feeling this powerful love for all. He told me it takes courage to bring this out into the world in everyday life and live your life this way. He cautioned me it's not easy. It's the warrior spirit that he was trying to instil in us all. Ultimately the fight is against what has conspired to cause you to bury your feelings and the power of love away. The hero's journey is going deep within and freeing love from the impenetrable castle you have built that locks her away. 

a candy-coloured clown they call the sandman

A dream is a wander in the mind or is it the mind that wanders, and fundamentally is that what reality is - a mental wander? Sometimes, the sandman fucks with my waking consciousness and tailors the dream to expect the resolution of an event at the exact second the waking alarm is to go off. It's a reminder of who is in the driver's seat and to be cognizant of the messages coming up from the subconscious.

The dreaming mind is exploring through the dream all aspects of its psyche. The dark and the light. The good and the bad. The fucked up and the holy. Our world is the subconscious of something else trying to express itself through dreaming into existence what has been suppressed and what needs to be explored and brought to the light. The universe is the psyche of the dreamer - just like at night when we go to sleep we dream and create a universe, maybe not as spectacular as this one we share, but nonetheless we reflect our psyche and create the dream. This is quite the way to look at the world. Everyone I come across, meet, judge, and study is a representative in some way of the psyche of the all and my reaction to them is a reflection of how I view those traits. From the all, I come forth as the quiet mystic and through this lens the psyche gains knowledge of who they are. Looking at all the needless suffering in the world, I know it comes from me. Same for the division and the hatred. It's a unique way to view the world and take responsibility for its condition. And then to be sorry, seek contrition, and try to make amends.

The cosmic dreamer first dealt with our primitive instincts. The sacred masculine energy appeared as the protector and was savage in his existence. He claimed dominance over his surroundings or perished. The sacred feminine aligned with the protector in order to birth her offspring. The psyche dealt with the base traits of self, the masculine and his bloodthirsty nature when not checked and the nurturing aspect of the feminine. Eventually, Homo sapiens appeared in the dream, with the intelligence of the dreamer, and with their appearance the dreamer could then start to realize how they functioned under a myriad of circumstances and stresses in order to psychoanalyze the intelligent self. So, the universe is the ongoing process of psychoanalysis of the dreamer. I go back to the pre-Columbian concept of tinkuy and the idea of first cultivating the sacred feminine and masculine into the best of all the feminine and masculine traits, refining them in fire as you would metals - the feminine into the intuitive loving mother and caring wife and the masculine into the protective warrior, using logic and reason, and then bringing the two back together as one thus completing the sacred alchemical process at the heart of this dream.

Dreams are the portal into the mystery. Through dreams we access what is fundamentally the substance and structure of the universe. This knowledge is obfuscated, purposely made trivial, and off-limits. The guardian at the gate allows you in, he has to because it is fundamental to your nature, but then tears it away before you catch on to the underlying message. We figured out a way in the waking dream to preserve snapshots in time before they disappear. We mastered the art of remembering. We record events using various media. We used to create myths and fairy tales to keep within the collective consciousness an understanding of our environment. The dreamer’s fatal flaw is the recall; the remembering of what just happened. Experiences within the dream vanish in an instance, sometimes recalled by a flash when an event triggers a remembrance.

Plant medicine ceremonies with Ayahuasca bring you to the door of the mystery and allows access to the dreaming consciousness while in a fully awake trance. Ayahuasca visions and dreams are of the same origin. What is hidden within the subconscious depths is dredged up to the surface in ceremony and we can then face, deal, laugh, forgive, and develop courage from confronting the issues and the fear.

It's impractical to live out your life within ceremony nor to function always in your waking dream. The plant medicine ceremony is the catalyst for then beginning the real work of integrating the lessons and decoding the mystery. Every night when I go to sleep is another opportunity to enter into the mystery and the same place Ayahuasca takes me. To penetrate the depths you need an ally that will get you there on a nightly basis. The catalyst for a deep dive into the dream state is the great teacher Mapacho, which is potent jungle tobacco. The befriending of Mapacho has two great benefits. It is a meditative aid which quiets the mind and induces peace and calm. Entered into communion with before bedtime then opens the door to the dreaming world. Entering this universe on a regular basis for the inquisitive leads to many questions and discoveries. First of them is how am I able to create fantastic worlds through my mind? What is this power? And then finally a dawning realization that this cracks the code.

If you are god there has to be proof. It isn't just empty rhetoric. Dreams are your proof. You become the creator and the one, confirming what it is you realized but then were left perplexed and bothered with the question: if I am god then why do I not feel it or feel so small? You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling. 

game play

Baseball is a game we have turned into big business. The outcome really doesn't matter however it does affect the well being of all the fanatics that are emotionally impacted by the result. The interesting observational thing about the game is we assign it meaning and then take it seriously. We love games and if we can make them matter and get a bunch of likeminded people invested in the outcome it becomes an adrenaline rush. Wins and championships and the trophy. We did it! We won the game! We are the greatest of all time! And then the world doesn't stop, the sun rises the next day, the next season starts and someone wants to take my trophy away. The hunter becomes the hunted. 

When players chase dollars instead of loyalty to team and its fans we cry they are only in it for the money and matter of factly state well baseball is just a business. Yeah that one repeats over and over and then a sportswriter gets to write a piece about the player taking the money, maximizing earnings, it’s just a business, and that becomes part of the nature of the game as well. The spellbound fan is the one who suffers. The one taken in by the game, ah the spell, gets to experience all the emotions. Investing in the game brings all the rewards and all the suffering. Oh the game! That's life. No really, that is similar to the game of life we play.

We create the game of life on the grand stage and then invest ourself in it. When you can see it clearly then you can also envision the delicious parallels to all games. We take the game of life and make it serious. What’s the way out of the game? Go off into the forest by yourself and avoid the trappings of culture and find out your truth? You are just playing the hermit game. We can’t avoid playing a game so might as well take control of your game and make it your own as much as possible, instead of letting others decide it for you. We are born into the world and then we follow along and immerse ourselves in the human game. Culture can be fun but it also causes suffering. We humans are pretty smart overall and if you play the game long enough you start to see through it. What do you do then? Try to find meaning? Tell others that it doesn't matter? They don't want to hear your philosophy because that doesn't pay the mortgage. Yeah sure it's a game. Try telling that to me when I'm living on the sidewalk eating no-name granola bars. 

are you me?

It was in December of 2017 at the time I turned 50 that a fundamental change occurred with respect to my journey with plant medicines and the wisdom I accessed. Up until that point the avatars of wisdom I would encounter in ceremony would be external actors or an external voice. At the end of November I spent a week at SpiritQuest going through the Huachuma mesadas which culminated in an ineffable Vilca experience that took me to this realm of love and light and instructed me on my nature and my destiny as one of these beings. Afterwards I headed into the Andes mountains in Ecuador and I participated in two more Huachuma ceremonies which were different than what is experienced at SpiritQuest in a group. These were solo experiences and I noticed for the first time the wisdom I accessed with the plant was no longer an external voice but felt like my own higher self. Since this was new to me I didn’t make any connection at the time, instead just chalked it up to another experience. When I returned to SpiritQuest in March of 2019 to participate in four Ayahuasca ceremonies it was a similar kind of vibe at times where I felt the wisdom was coming from my masculine higher self though definitely the feminine presence was still external and I was aware by now she was my sacred feminine half. The clues were all lined up but I still didn’t put them together, not until I went to Arizona for my overnight with Peyote in September. It was one of the questions I intended to ask Peyote. Are you me?

So a couple months later and how about those questions I had of Peyote? The night I spent with Peyote in the wilderness gave me the answer to one question and with that answer I had the knowledge to figure out the rest of my questions. I wanted to know the identity of the wisdom I access when taking a plant medicine substance. It was pretty clear that night the voice was me and when I had a vision of my feminine self as a black jaguar of the night coming up to me and laying her head on my chest it was also signifying that the fundamental unity of all is the embrace of the sacred feminine and masculine. In this world of separation, we are living in a situation that could be called the great cosmic divorce.

I also wanted to know if my path was leading towards fulfilling my intentions?

Without self-discipline it will be difficult.

Am I awake now in my dream?

Yes you are in a lucid dreaming stage now and you have realized you can alter your dream.

Are you the joker, laughing and playing along with our folly?

I am you and you are me and we are all together.

Did you make it difficult to crack the code so we/you could continue playing? And I have kinda figured out the religious puzzle/riddle haven't I?

Yes grasshopper, you are attentive student.

Have I taken up my power to heal? Is it psychological healing?

Yes cultural constructs can lead to confusion. Teach the beloved to look within to find what it is you seek. Culture has defined the beauty you see in others. Act of your own accord.

Remember the teacher in high school who took an interest in your future and pulled you aside to put you on the correct path? That's Peyote and the direct access to wisdom that is engendered within the experience. There's a tremendous respect for those actors in your life that are underappreciated. If I had to guess I would say don Howard learned his guiding style from Peyote.

Peyote bluntly lays it all out for you. There were no riddles or teachings that were going to take a while to unfold. I just needed to hear the answers because I already was shown and knew the answers but for some reason I was waiting for confirmation and to hear them again. I just have to believe in myself, as it is hard to fathom taking that final step. Here I am now, the path has bifurcated. Time to take the step.

There is a caveat to seeking out the visionary experience; in other words to become infatuated with the visions in a plant medicine ceremony. When you chase the visions you lose sight of the process and the main teaching that is central to all these experiences. The path of the seeker of knowledge leads to looking within and trusting yourself for guidance. A quiet night out in the wilderness, just you, Peyote, and the fire allows you to connect with what it was you have been seeking. They were waiting for you all along and will welcome you home with overflowing love and open arms. 

have a good sleep

We are obsessed with measuring the world and putting it to order. Thinking about why we do this - of course it is curiosity and our quest and thirst for knowledge. However it occurred to me that subconsciously we do this because deep down we know that it just doesn’t make any logical sense. I mean why? Why existence and why is it so mysterious? Why does there have to be anything? It's just peculiar that anything exists. How did the universe just suddenly appear out of nothing? Why when we peer into the fundamental nature of existence it gets fuzzy and sub-atomic particles break down into wavicles and fields powered by mysterious energy? Think about the whole what came first, the chicken or the egg, and how both answers just seem preposterous when you think about it. We want it to make sense. Do dreams make sense? The worlds we create when we dream they just appear and we don’t stop to think while dreaming how it all exists. We just mentally make it happen. Such is the fundamental principle of this universe. It just is and we busy ourselves trying to reverse engineer it but in the end all this speculation is just theory. The actors in my dream are all me. The actors in this dream are all from the great cosmic dreamer. A dreamer so skilled instead of being one avatar in the dream they are them all!

The dream creates the notion of self. Think about that. When you go to sleep at night and dream you are the creator and all the individuals in the dream come from you as the creator and the dreaming activity creates all these individuals who would consider themselves an autonomous self just like we do. Our ability to dream is quite primitive but imagine you had mad skills when it came to dreaming. You would create a world where these characters had free will and just like you they would periodically rest and also dream while resting.

So which came first the chicken or the egg? It's the dreaming mind that came first. The answer to the question is solved. The chickens then appeared, fully formed through mentation, and started doing their thing. It is one of those questions that we should clue into as being a mystery because the sheer logic of the question throws into disarray all we find logical. We spend countless hours and much energy to try and bring logic to the illogical. To try and figure out how it all works; to chart the progression from single cell amoeba to Homo sapiens.

When you dream you experience it first person just like life. Is life not but just a dream? Our dreaming activity during sleep is a clue as well as subterfuge. The clue is that reality can be constructed out of mentation. The subterfuge is that we can differentiate between what we think is reality and what is a dream but we can't do it while ensconced in the dream. While dreaming we are convinced it is reality however once awake we realize it was a dream. You know what else seems to be? It is that bodily death puts an end to our reality and puts an end to any local dreaming activity. Death occurs when our energy is depleted to the point where we no longer function. What then is energy and the source of the energy?

Each new child/creature born is the creation of another universe with the potential to create through mental activity. We are occluded from it as we share consciousness and a consensus reality with others. We can and do create our own universe as a shard of the all consciousness when we dream. When we access that part of us that does the dreaming then we start creating our own worlds. Can we enter into that world? Do I still need the bodily host to dream or can that be discarded and then it's limitless?

So why do we dream? Because all of this mentation of the dreaming mind is recursive. Every sentient being is paradoxically a representative of unity and when we dream we come forth as the mirror image; the whole filtered through a prism and split into many as a reflection of our psyche. Our world is the psyche of the one on the other side of the looking glass. From one perspective we are unity and from the opposite perspective we are separated into the many. When we dream we create worlds and these worlds of seemingly separate beings and objects all come from the one mind doing the dreaming, the single mind always reflecting plurality. The plurality revealing the interconnectedness of all. My experiences are fodder for creating my own world via dreaming as my psyche helps form and direct the drama.

Energy is the product of mental activity. We dream when we redirect our energy from waking consciousness to nocturnal slumber. Along the same line of thought, birth is the entering of more energy into our collective dream to keep it going. The more actors present performing then the dreamer stays asleep. The outpouring of energy is still strong. When there is death then the energy returns to the dreamer and they start to wake up. So what happens when we die? Do we wake up from the dream and return to the dreamer? Or is it when the great cosmic dreamer finally wakes that everything is reconciled? What happens if I ride this ship to the end, figure it all out, and 100% declare I know this is a dream. Does that put an end to the slumber? Like everything in life it seems cyclical. Our dreaming cycle occurs usually once in a twenty four hour period. There are short cycles and long cycles. The dreamer of our universe has been snoring away for quite a long time now. Estimates are over 13.8 billion years.

Am I a dreaming fool? I guess it is obvious now as playing is what I do. I'm on the precipice of realizing this is my dream and I entered into it and tried to hide this from myself. Of course it's me. I went too far and lifted the veil. I tried to scare myself away but it didn't work. Can I still influence it or has it gone too far off the tracks? I am aware I’m the dreamer. I’m aware I’m awake in my own dream. All of the universe and the objects I create are aspects of myself. I’m now awake within the dream; my reality has become a lucid dream. When you finally understand your influence over the dream, things start happening for you instead of to you. The psyche of the cosmic dreamer is the world we live in. The hatred and destruction we witness are aspects of the great self who dreams this world into existence. The love and kindness are aspects as well. We can make a choice on how we want the dream to play out.

Riddle me this: when you are dreaming you are for the most part unaware you are dreaming and buy into the drama. So when you die and you wake from the dream how would you know that you just haven't awakened into another dream? The one giveaway I can think of would be the eternal world would not have a time limit, feeling of transience, or expiration of any sort. However does that even exist or is everything cyclical and subject to periods of this dreaming activity?

Think of the whole idea of the multiverse and how many are asleep, dreaming away, and creating all these different worlds. There are infinite dreamers and an infinite amount of universes, all birthing the potentiality of more universes that would house the ability to create an infinite amount of universes. And on it goes. Have a good sleep.