I'll Be Back

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Life is a journey, and in nearly thirty years mine has been magical, dangerous, mindful, mind-blowing and all over the place. Am I a writer, a podcaster, an academic, a reality TV has-been, an Ayahuasquero, a meditator, or something else? “Something else,” says the creative impulse within me, who has a new direction.

I’ll make this post short, because I’ve already said most of what I wanted to say in my blog, and because I don’t want you to get so entangled in prose that you forget to subscribe ;)

Should you subscribe, you’ll be the first to hear from me when I emerge from the cool confines of my newest creative cave. Should you not, I love you anyway. Here’s to one last go at wielding these dualistic words to tell you about my crossroads.

Covid or Something

I write this as my whole body aches, as a cough repeatedly reminds me of my splitting headache, and as a fever makes me feel chills all over. Throw in the fact that many of my friends here in Vilcabamba are similarly sick and have tested positive for Covid, and it seems overwhelmingly likely that I have the ‘Vid. I was already skeptical of myself — as I strive to always be — and I won’t lie: last night, feeling utterly miserable and nearly delirious, I found myself questioning whether I’m a big dummy for not getting one of those so-called vaccines for Covid. As I’ve alluded to in the last two blog posts, I’m very distrustful of these shots that are unlike any vaccine of the past, lacking any longitudinal data and waning in their effectiveness, necessitating perpetual boosters. Even if they do reduce the severity of Covid, which would be real, real nice right now, I disagree with the paradigm of hopping on an experimental treadmill of mRNA shots. I disagree with the paradigm that we need pharmaceutical companies in lieu of natural remedies, or in lieu of the natural immunity that I’ll soon have. Even stronger than my disagreement with that paradigm is my disagreement with its militant enforcement, and with the governments around the world using it as a justification for tyranny.

And yet, in what’s either a test of my resolve or a resounding bitch-slap from karma’s pimp hand, I now have Covid (or something).

I ultimately stand by what I’ve written previously — namely that I will follow my instincts and live with the consequences — but boy, does personal suffering have a power to make us question ourselves. Freedom is my second-highest value (I’ve actually listed them out — Truth, Freedom, Authenticity, etc.), but it’s amazing how freedom can become meaningless in the face of suffering. Amp up the suffering enough, and just about any value can fall by the wayside; amp up the suffering enough, and all the sufferer wants is to feel better. From the throes of vomiting and night sweats these past few days, to my childhood, to my most harrowing journeys with Ayahuasca, I’ve felt some immensely bad feels in three decades, and I’ve seen how it changes me. It’s humbling, and it dispels any notions my spiritual ego has of being anything more than human. It makes me second-guess myself, which is healthy, and it makes me second-guess what I’ve written.

I’ve called masks “face diapers,” belittling well-intentioned people trying to save others from the pain I’m currently in. I tweeted, “Imagine showing your vaccine passport to be allowed to see a screening of ‘The Matrix’ and believing your mind is free,” which paints with an absurdly broad brush. Painting with a broad brush is the essence of my qualm with the written word in general, and with the abbreviated written characters of the Twitter hivemind in particular. Words are a distillation; they take the abstractions of thought and attempt to condense them into some transference of ideas. Because we all have slightly different understandings of every word, though, and because we interpret words through our personal lenses and biases, the transmission is inherently imperfect. I wrote at length (ironically) about this imperfection in my master’s thesis (which I shared on the blog), but I’ve yet to find a stellar solution to it. Sure, I can try to make words less flawed be writing more of them — by blogging rather than tweeting, and by expounding on and clarifying my views. I did this extensively in the comments section of The Heterarchy, and in the body of The Light Within. I can do more of this clarifying now: Far from being against people who chose to get the Covid “vaccine,” I’m with all of humanity in what I perceive as a spiritual war against dark forces seeking to control us. Far from disrespecting the good intentions of those who wear masks, I question the intentions of those who’ve forced us to wear masks. I view the mask as symbolizing much more than most people realize — sacrifice of healthy breath, submission to tyranny and justification of fear.

Does this clarification help? Do more words overcome the shortcomings inherent to words?

No.

Reiman

This “No” has been hard to swallow, because I love words. I love writing just as I love thinking, because for me the two have always been intertwined. I think as I write, obviously, but I also write as I think. Since early childhood I’ve felt a deep need to express my inner world, and so as moods, vague abstractions and semi-verbal inklings swirled through my mind, I’d force myself to explicitly verbalize what was in my head. This verbalization was only internal and for myself, but it became something of a compulsion. I worried that if my conscious mind couldn’t get a handle on everything bubbling up — if I couldn’t retrace my trains of thought and turn the rumblings of my pre-verbal subconscious into explicit words — then I wouldn’t understand myself.

I was half-right. We are indeed blind to our True Selves, and to the forces driving us, to the extent that our conscious mind is unaware of the subconscious. Yet, the human construction of words is a fundamentally limited bridge to self-understanding.

The construction of words can transmit thoughts in a lossy format, and if used artfully, it can even inspire. It enables me to tell you stories about my spiritual journey, and to share some rationalized version of my heart. Yet, it can never share the whole of my heart, and stories can never convey experience. Experience is primordial. I could write a bunch of words about my experience at the Panditarama Lumbini monastery in Nepal, and I can show you these pictures of bridges I took while trekking through the Himalayas, but neither of those things holds a candle to experience itself. It is folly to conflate words with the experiences to which words point. A picture may be worth a thousand words, and a video may be worth a billion, but experience can’t be reduced to any number of words. Experience is better than that. Writing is stupid.

I love writing. I love thinking, too. Yet, I recognize the limitation inherent to writing and thinking. I’ve always been a headstrong guy with an insanely active mind, but living in my head 24/7 was a hell whose depths I’ve only come to recognize upon meditating, working with plant medicine and coming into my heart. Thinking is a phenomenal tool for the heart-mind, but it’s a toxic pathology for a mind cut off from its heart. Writing is a phenomenal tool as well, but only for what it is — a distillation of linear thought. Writing is the pinnacle of thought, but it can never be a pinnacle of the Real.

The Real

It’s a new day, and while I’m still coughing a bit, I feel better. Yes, I give blog posts something I never gave papers in college — the respect of multiple days’ work. That isn’t to say I’m writing all that well, but hey, I’ve been writing about writing’s limitations, so fuck it.

The creative process has always been about conveying reality. In pre-literate societies like that of the Buddha, the creative process was nothing more than the oral tradition. Then, storytelling migrated to the page (or to the palm leaves, wax and wood), where our ancient ancestors arduously created texts. Then we got paper, and writing enjoyed a heyday nearly two millennia long. Kudos to the universe for having the attention span for two thousand years of pre-Twitter-twat humans who still had attention spans. Ironically, our attentional kryptonite has been a series of incredible leaps forward. We’ve struggled to hold onto our mental health in the technological age, but we’ve also stumbled upon new ways to convey reality more comprehensively than ever: audio recording, video recording, radio, television. These were unfortunately always under the tight control of moguls and social engineers (it’s called TV programming!), but then something monumental happened — a glitch in the matrix that changed the creative process forever: Reality TV.

Reality TV is the most complete conveyance of reality in the history of humanity. Of course, even Reality TV can be (and has been) swiftly ruined, but delusional showrunners like Jeff Probst don’t negate the profundity of the genre. Sleazy networks catering to our basest impulses to see sex and conflict have left nearly all reality shows in a creative gutter, but the genre — the potential — remains profound. And now, thanks to big tech companies running dehumanizing sweatshops, any fool with an iPhone can be a Reality TV producer. As I realized after my first experience with psychedelics (2.8g of hyper-potent mushrooms, which I do not recommend for a first trip), all we need is the thing to which we’re all addicted:

Seriously, if you have the tech to be reading this, you could walk outside right now and create content realer and better than Survivor 41. The soul-sucking tracking devices we willingly carry around with us offer a power to create the likes of which humans have never known. And what do people do with that power? They TikTok (God forgive me for using that as a verb), watch cat videos, play with filters. They crush virtual candy, forward memes, text “LOL” without so much as an IRL chuckle. The only thing most people bother to create is a fake online persona that’ll impress everyone on the gram. I’m certainly guilty of such posturing on social media myself. We create 0.0001% of what Da Vinci created while literally sitting on a creative tool one million times more powerful than anything Da Vinci had. These devilish tools we have at our disposal today, along with computers and editing software, can be used for so much more than we realize — for the “something else” to which my creative impulse is called.

Something else?? A new paradigm of audio-visual content? A new audio-visual frontier of language?

Don’t ask me what it’ll be. I don’t know that. I just know it’ll be Real.