The Divinity Does not Want us to be Plants

The divinity does not want us to be plants.  Plants are unified in purpose only worshiping the divine.  They reach up and receive the sunlight.  Plants are the perfect embodiment of purpose, unity, adoration, and prayer.  We one the other hand are something different.  An alchemical process goes through us and maybe that is our role in reality.  Not to unquestionably follow and adore, but rather to take what does not fit in and through our own alchemical process bring it back into the fold.  We are nature's salvage operation.  For the more difficult experiences that cannot be digested by plants or mushrooms.  Maybe we are the thoughts of Gods that keep them up at night, and our job is to cleanse their mind.  We are the cleansers.

Even if it doesn't make sense, in some uncharted and unfathomable way, we are contributing in ways we can't imagine. That why important to keep up what we are doing.  Respond to what is in front of us and needs doing.

My daughter last night, and her friends gave me a prank call.  This happened over a year ago. 

The Mystery Machine

The Dream:

I was in a service station of some kind.  Then I was in a tent outside of the service station.  I was with a group of people.

I went outside and there was a small runway.   I was in a tent.  I was getting ready for bed.  Then I saw outside what I thought was the mystery machine from scooby doo landing on the run way.  I remember thinking and telling the people that I didn't want to miss this.  So I went outside and ran to where the mystery machine was landing.  Then it landed and it turned around and started to take off again, but then it stopped when it saw me waiving it down.  At first it looked like Fred and the whole gang were inside, but when I got in the van, I realized that the van was kind of ghoulish inside with different people, one of them who was Scott Smo...  Some of the passengers were disfigured.  One of them was missing an eye.   And though one side of the mystery machine looked like that in the TV show, the other side was gutted and dilapidated.   The van drove over to the tent, and I casually mentioned that I would help them find a place to stay, not sure if I was thinking about my home.

Then I looked around and I realized that there was some sort of festival or celebration going on in the service station.   I asked the passengers where Velma and Shaggy and Scooby were.  That is about all I remember.

Nipper highlights of the Year

 Greetings from the western (now eastern) portal.  I believe I recorded this at Nipper some time in June of this year.  

It is only in the offering or the sacrifice that we can separate ourselves from nature and the nature spirits around us.   But this isn't quite right.  There is something magical about the offering itself that recognizes the separateness of the other.  When the separateness is recognized,  the other can be appreciated/understood more.

Life is not what we thought it was.   And I know that you have heard this before.  If for only the briefest second you could step outside your thoughts about what life and death and what it is to be alive are and connect with it through a different passage-- then this reality, this land, this incarnation is vastly different than how we were brought up to think about it.   This is what I see in my psychedelic experiences but just can't face because it is too much.  But when I see it now, I can handle it, because its only for a little bit.    For this is what the ascension is, if we really could transform our view, this entire reality could be seen through for what it was and would disappear like the dream that it is.  This is likely what I can't face.  That everything we have invested so much in and lived is so ephemeral.   But in a way, I am never going to lose something because I never had it, never was it, to begin with.   What it is is something radically different than what you thought about it all along.  

Sarah Lee Turning

 So in this dream, one of the things Shultz had me look up and help him with in Costa Rica was this band that was coming through Springfield that was from Costa Rica.  Or it wasn't clear if I was actually in Costa Rica instead.  The band was called "Sara Lee Turning" and consisted of women in their mid 60s with bee hive haircuts.  Matt was interested in one of the singers, and I talked to her.  They had a very interesting style.  They talked very strange.  They were hysterical, always making wise cracks.  They were either from Bond or  Bond County in Illinois as it turned out.  Their band was called Sara Lee Turning, but their fans (which they had a lot at this place which was kind of like a county store) were called "turners."  They played music with drums.  It turns out they had a guy in the band who was also a scream who kept referring to me as "your honor."  

This all started when I was trying to help Matt write a letter about another band I think.

In real life, I had helped Matt write a letter.  I completely mis-read it.  As far as why I misread it, I must have been possessed by the spirit of the Sara Lee Turning band.  It will be interesting to see how it all turns out for him.

  

Nothing more than a Story

 The other thing I experienced today in mediation was a vision or experience that in a different dimension, there was a story going on, focused either on a spoon or a drumstick between an elder and someone younger.  And the story was my life.  That my entire life was the passing story between them.  And that is what this is.  All of it.  A story in another story.  Infinite stories.  All interwoven in a cosmic tapestry.

This is something like my experience with Ayahuasca.  When I was in this meditative state today, its almost like I had access to this memory.  This experience.  And I remembered that part of the journey with Ayahuasca was the vision that what we were experiencing was all wrong.  There was something else going on that made it disharmonious somehow.  I can't really explain it.  Like people in this story have it all wrong.  Or this other story dimension has it all wrong.  Or that maybe the stories don't really fit together, until they do.

Breathing in to the Magical realm, exhale back to the Body, then Watching the Show.

 This is kind of a two parter.  The first part was last night at 4 am.  I was up per usual, but in a place of negative energy.  Which can also be usual at that time...lol.  Anyway, I had it in my mind that the lack of work at work was going to translate into a change of careers soon.  Which may be true, actually.  But the place it took me to was the story that everything would change, my job, my romantic partner, everything when I did not have a job.  The belief and sensation that I had so much ego invested in my career which defined me in all sort of ways.  Then the fact that I would not be able to go back to sleep and I would be tired and that the magic in my life would disappear and be replaced by a prosaic environment that was lifeless.  The faire spring would dry up.  That is was not real and could not give me solace.  That my imaginative connections with the trees was just a fantasy.  You get the idea.   

But I had a new voice this time.  Of gratitude that I was being shown all of this.  That it would be painful, but necessary to see what I needed to see.

I went back to sleep and dreamt heavily after all.   And I'm not really tired today, but I think I am going to fast because my digestion is off.  In between dreams, my consciousness centered on the back of my head, my spine and my tailbone. This allowed my mind to relax.

The second part occurred at my morning meditation.  The new meditation is breathing in, feeling the consciousness go to the wall, or IN front of me in a ball, or to the squirrel (lol), hold, exhale and come back to the body.  Feeling the separation between inside me and outside me.  Then connect with everything.  Well after a while, my attention goes again to the back of my body.  And the stillness there.  And how I had a choice to either stay in the stillness, or go back to the show of the mind and all the river of outflow there.  Like being at the sluice, I suppose.  And I'm not talking about that old restaurant in Spearfish South Dakota near the cabin.  Its too bad we don't still have that cabin by the way.  That would have been very cool.  I didn't appreciate it at the time. 

Intentions are Like Assholes

So I guess I revisited the whole issue of intentions this morning.  Sure, its sort of encouraged before you to psychedelics to articulate why you are doing them.  Makes sense at a certain level.  I mean if you have a specific problem you are addressing (e.g. addiction, chronic disease, PTSD, and the ilk), the idea of why you are going to do this sort of is an easy question to answer.  

I've always resisted the idea.  Maybe because I don't really have an intention.  I have plenty of ideas about why I'm doing it, but they are experiential.    Like the fact  I've always been into meditation since I was a kid and books about meditation or mystical experiences started falling off the library bookshelves when I walked by, and from then, its sort of a natural progression to psychedelics.  Makes sense, but doesn't really answer the question.  And I'm not really much of an explorer.  I'm more of a chicken.  So exploration and curiosity are also not part of my intention/motivation for doing it.  In short, I'm not really sure why.  I sort have have always been drawn to them, in a chickenish sort of way.

Then there is the idea that whatever bullshit intention I could come up with before I took ayahuasca would be immediately circumvented by the actual experience and whatever meager intention I came up with would go out the window as soon as I'm on the journey.  This is because the universe and what is going on is vastly more interesting than any idea I have about what is really going on.  So my intentions have always been a little open ended I suppose to allow for the universe to show me something rather than having a preconception about what the psychedelic experience is like.   The intention I initially used is for psychedelics "to show me what I need to see."  I guess I sorta still go with that.  

However today, I had the follow up insight that when I'm taking psychedelics, I have the reoccurring experience that I am always doing it, always repeating the cycle and in some ways wishing that I didn't.   

More to the point, why am I meditating?.  Why do I do these little funny rituals I do around the farm house.  What is going on?  Am I obsessed ? I mean every now any then I get some breakthroughs, but still, there is  the desire now to cut through the bullshit and just get down to it.  That is the deeper koan.  What is going on.  It feels like I'm doing this in all aspects of my life in some ways.  Am I avoiding something by this little dance. 

The real intention i feel sometimes is to connect.  With what I'm not sure.  I'm not sure how.  But to not be separate.  That is all....lol 

Opening and closing until you get the frequency you want.

 So....by way of an update, i'm into wands now.  Or at least I was until the fairies from the fairy spring out front took the crystal one I had away.  Not surprising.  I think they are encouraging me to create my own wand the nearby trees.  Or one of the sycamore's at the eastern/western portal at Nipper.

So the wands help me focus.  Like I point them down and my attention and perception goes down in the earth.  And I can get grounded.   Which of course is not a bad thing.  So these days, when I go on forest walks (which by the way have now included crossing the street and finding another portal--but that is another story) I take at least one wand with me.  And as soon as I get my sycamore ones made, I'll be a bad ass because they are kinda like clubs--one in each hand.

So the wands not only ground me by focusing and opening up the ground, but they can also focus and open up whatever they are pointed at or circle.    Which makes sense.  Where your attention flows is what and where you are at whatever level you want to take that.

So then there is this whole thing about meditating into the bodies of animals and trees.  The mediation is not just based on thought, but is encouraged by all the senses.  This is very much of a work in progress, encouraged by David Abram's book "Becoming Animal" or something like that.  I wonder if that Indian gentleman on the trial the other day appreciated the fact that I was meditating into a squirrel the other day.   And darned if that little critter was almost coming up to me when we were interrupted during our communion.  And no Mr. Indian gentlemen, I was not watching my dog, did you see a dog? lol.  

So back to the wands and the animals.  The other gift is the whole idea of opening and closing.  Something like the mediation practice I remember of bowing when you go into every room you enter.  Its related to that.   Closing the chapter of what you just did and opening the other one.  Its cleaner that way, don't you think? And there is not the energetic residue coming with you to your new activity.  In fact the more you open and close when you go from one thing to another, you create your own kind of vibration.  For isn't that we do at every level, open and close, expand and contract with every level?  Opening and closing until you get the frequency you want?  

So I guess that is all.

The Orange Theory Theory. Well, its not really a theory, and I suppose that is one of the points.

 Ok, so I'm in Orange Theory, and for once this is not a dream.  But at lunchtime today.  And no I wasn't taking a nap.  And Richard is giving me shit, he's always giving me shit.   But this time is was not necessarily directed at me.  It was at the class in general.  And he says: "don't move like you have no purpose."

And I retort:  "But that's how I live my live--that's the story of my life."  Then he looks at me thoughtfully, and then it fades to that look where he doesn't know what to say.  So he says:  "good to know." 

And this is an important point.  I have this belief, that if I could form the correct intention to this life, something magical would happen.  Its almost like I've been put here to remember something, or experience something.   And in the meantime, I'm kind of going through the motions like I don't have a purpose.  Or a porpoise.  Now that would be a great spirit animal.  In other words,  what is it that i'm really wanting to achieve with all this "spiritual" stuff that I do.  I know I want to achieve transcendence I suppose.  To connect with that state that I've been to before.  But it seems like there is something more beyond that.  And its not a word or an idea or a concept.  It is an experience of an energy, where you open up into something new, like a plant pushing up from the underground for the first time into the sunlight.  An experience beyond any prior imagination.  Of course, in some ways, the imagination or vision is central to it.  But its still something different.  Am I making sense?  lol

More to the point, when I have those bad trips, and I go to that place its a very common these that I am trying to find transcendence or I feel like I must get beyond this world, and that this is the chance.  That I must go to the light.  And that the people around me are holding me back.  And of course, at some level, people generally want something from you.  So its not surprising that I would pick up on something like that in that situation.  And maybe there is something to that.  That I should reduce the effect that this sort of energy has in my life.  And to not get drawn into other people's drama.  I know I have never drawn the Hermit card in my archetype draw, but maybe I should.  

I mean, i'm already on that road.  Sleeping alone. Talking to trees.   Reading books to trees. Making offerings to the house and the nearby enchanted glen.   I'm just waiting to see the fairies that keep moving my hexagrams near the "spring" in the enchanted glen....lol

And as far as that other place that I go to on the bad trip.  That place where I am stuck between two places and that I don't want to be there, maybe that also is related to this.  That I am stuck between this world and the next.   Still, I'm always trying to get back to my old life when I reach this point.  And upset that I have used psychedelics again.  So I'm not sure how that all fits in.  That is the confusion, literally and physically.

But I feel I am not going to engage with this energy directly.  I have to do it obliquely.  Like Perseus and the Medusa.  I must not gaze at the gorgon directly.  But use a mirror to throw my spear into the beast.  Does anyone have a mirror I can use?