Affirmational Incantation: First Door

As the last vision rests perfectly and easily within me like that fire which cleanses yet does not burn, my feelings turn toward the first door filled with light in this new life. I am awestruck standing before this bright and shining door now taking a moment to reflect with gratitude upon such a miraculous opportunity bestowed by this life that is after all a gift from God. I center myself before moving toward this door. The feeling is of being in the presence of something possessing genuine Holiness: feelings of reverence and awe. In order to get to this door, I had to delve into the darkest recesses of self and open the blackest doors I found full of horrific pain. I have paid the price in darkness many times over for this light. I know now that each door hereafter will open from light to light to more light still. I dare to imagine what in this physical place wherein my spirit resides, has yet been unimaginable: love and joy and peace fearlessly and freely shining like the sun on this perfect summer's day. Opening the door merely a sliver releases white light so powerful that it is blinding and takes my breath away for a moment. It is whiter than white and brighter than bright. No, Friends, no - it is not TIDE. Don't be silly. It is love.

Beauty and the Beast, poem by David Sky

The Beast -
The Beast, always the Lonely One, The Sad One
Waiting for someone or anyone or no one at all to stop
 And say, “Hello In There!”
Waiting to be utterly and truly startled by recognition
Imagining what that would be like but also afraid, very afraid,
For The Beast who is so Fearsome to The Others is … is …
As terrified in his Mighty Heart as any tiny, helpless bird
He is, after all, only a left brain thing, only words, thoughts, language -
The One Who Hears and Speaks and Writes
Yet who has never seen one single, solitary, Vision in his whole life

The Beauty -
She who is as pristine as morning dew on a rose
She of perfect measure, perfect balance, perfect porcelain skin
Whose movements flow like some thoughtless, happy waters
Her long, artistic fingers fluttering effortlessly over the Beast
Over the still surface of the seas, over the mountains, the sky
And when she turns around to look at him with those eyes
She does not look into his eyes but deeply into his soul
For Beauty sees everything resplendent within each thing!
After all, she is only a right brain thing, only feelings, perceptions,
The One Who Puts Her Arms Gracefully Around Everything
Who has never felt the sword like penetration of a hard, cold thought

The Beauty & The Beast -
Made for each other, well, yes, sure, exactly, right on, obviously -
Already perfectly aligned within one energy body in “that greater reality”
Where the Beauty and the Beast already reside as husband and wife
Physical union speeding at the fantastical speeds of some astral train
Soon to impact cosmically like two planets fusing one into another
In full blown manifestation here and now upon this dense earthly plane

Short Story: The Universe

(been working this story over a lot getting close here maybe) I cannot account for what others do with their life's energy and I mean this literally because I am more than a little on the Aspergers spectrum. I perceive some people much as I perceive a dog in terms of any true grasp I can manage in understanding of their inner consciousness that is only vaguely, really, having some basic idea what a dog may be interested in, you know? Or, maybe you don't know and you're thinking, “what the hell is this guy talking about?”. Not to cast aspersions but maybe you're a little Aspy, too, man? I think it's a lot more common than people think, myself. The vast majority of us are not so far down the scale as Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory nor so smart … and I think the two do go hand in hand, Aspergers Syndrome and intelligence. Often quirky, savant stuff that weird uncle of whom everyone is always thinking, “why the hell doesn't he go on a game show with his trivia knowledge, he'd make a million!” The Tell is a little nervous tic in lack of social skills or perhaps not even that obvious just random gaps in ability to process certain social interactions properly that to “Normals” are so innate as to lay below the level of conscious thought. You know, when you miss something, you don't know that you miss it? If there's anything that frightens me, it's just that blind thought: “what am I missing!” Not of bodily assault or even cancer but that blind side, man, that blind side that can harbor the next truck that is about to strike me. And I hate being hit by a truck so hard that I don't even think to get the license number. Anyway, I was always looking for God myself. I mean that is what I was interested in and what I was doing mostly. Well, that and romantic love and sure I mixed the two up no bones about it. Goddess worship could not come more naturally to me. I never was much up for sports. I tried to get it up for politics but damn just can't do it I mean I'd rather be poked in the eye with a sharp stick than watch another minute of cable TV News. All that to emphasize that I would have never in a million years figured that The Universe was a “male” entity. But it is what it is.

I found The Universe drinking heavily late one cold winter's afternoon in a dive bar about half way between Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico near the Rio Grande River. Now of course The Universe is not God but I decided to work my way up the hierarchy, as it were. God in all due time , mind you. It's process. The sunlight outside is preposterously bright but the air is so cold that a half inch of old snow doesn't melt off the cactus even in the full light of the afternoon sun. Inside the bar is dark heated by a wood stove and the air is so bone dry that your nose hairs start to burn after a while and you it's quiet – which I it never is! - you can hear your own skin crinkling up. Anyone who lives here for any length of time ends up with skin looking like worn out leather. The Universe is sitting at the small bar alone big German looking guy mid thirties, I'd guess, running big, bony fingers through his thinning, dirty blonde hair when I first set eyes on Him. I can tell he's not a resident because his skin is smooth as a baby's butt. I set next to Him and introduce myself and The Universe nods and smiles politely, says hello, but does not identify Himself. I tell the bartender to bring two of what He is having and The Universe smiles and overs up a toast, “to you, Mate”. Good thing for me in this one case that I know my alcoholics. The Universe is a morose alcoholic who passes through a euphoric phase, I determine, and I hoped that he was still in the euphoric phase. I was already thinking that when He hit that morose phase, I want to be miles away from this place. After our drinks come, a single malt Scotch, I discover, neat, I ask of Him as casually as I can manage, “so You do a Walk In, did You?” His drink stopped half way up to His lips. I could see calculation flash across His face for just a beat then He said, also non nonchalantly as you please, “suicide case” downing the rest of His drink and slamming it on on the counter, “load me up,” He said to the barkeep in a cheerful, friendly tone. No hint of German in his voice. California, I guessed. I knew then that I had to jump in for The Universe would cross that threshold from euphoria to morose any time now if indeed He hadn't already - “I want to know about God,” I asked, “anything You can tell me?”. He started laughing then coughing so hard that I thought He might throw up then after this paroxysm settled down said, “don't we all, Mate, don't we all”, still apparently amused by my question. “Seriously?” I insisted. Without looking at me then, The Universe said matter of factly, “the closest thing to what you humans conceive of as a “God” is light. Insofar as I could answer such preposterous question, the answer is light. All that you is light. The truth is light just light passing through light, on and on – do you see?” Turning to look at me with those eyes as he asked, “Do you see?” So I asked without missing a beat, “to be clear then, you are not actually saying that light IS God or that God IS light?”. The Universe downed another glass and it hit the thick, wood bar with an empty bang. He just crossed that threshold and I left forthwith, man. I left Him there in the growing shadow cast by the canyon walls around that little dive bar and I hauled as up a short cut I knew on a jeep road that climbed two thousand feet in elevation over a relatively few miles up the eastern escarpment of the canyon where the cold, winter sun now dropping low into the western sky still shown bright. “The closest thing to what you humans conceive of as a God, is light” … it made sense in some way to me that was as of yet far beyond articulation?

Poem Caye Caulker, Belize - 5/26/2015

"Island Paradise" On the outside all light Light surrounding more light Guarded by angels on the outside Blessed by God on the outside On the inside dark and quiet Troubled on the inside and brooding Roiling metamorphic dreaming Eyes closed for the light is blinding!

Trinty Site, New Mexico - Mushrooms and National Monuments

New Mexico? New Mexico? Where the hell do I even start? Such a weird place overall just gives off these Alien vibes, man, very strangle energy I think this is the energy that makes the big haired dude's hair on that Ancient Alien cable show stand up like it does? If a flying saucer were to rise up over a near hill, it'd almost seem like it belonged there ... hard to explain but you stand around alone out in that high desert for a while and you'd see what I mean, man. So I'll start here kind of zoom in past wilderness as sublimely beautiful as any location on earth to the south central area of the state a vast high desert with little standing higher than large bush where to this very day there are precious few humans as you drive for hours sometimes before noticing a driveway leading to a human habitation. Nine inches of rain out here man is all that standing between life in death for an entire ecosystem. Maybe an ecosystem is like an organ in our Great Gaia Mother. So yeah there's that its own rugged beauty I'll give you grudgingly really this place wore on me in ways I never would have anticipated. Walking out anywhere meant coming into contact with a flora and fauna always to me appearing on the verge of death and it made me nervous, man, I'm not gonna lie period. It made me look up at the sky expectantly even though I knew that it had not rained in a month or more and likely wouldn't be raining for another month or so yet. “Dammit man, hang in here, Everybody, it's got to rain eventually” I'd often think like some nervous tic incantation, “Everybody” an inclusive handle covers a lot of ground like every living thing. But I made some peace moved up to 7,000 on the eastern side of the 12,000 Sierra Blanca mountain on a steep mountain in pine forest an oasis of life to me only 130 miles north of the Mexican border. The various mountain ranges would rise here and there throughout the state high enough in elevation to break through the desert climate generation enough moisture to support a predominantly pine forest looking to me at times as tiny islands of life in a vast sea of nearly dying all the time but not cool like the Painted Desert just scrub full of lizards, snakes of all kinds. So off on a road trip from home in Ruidoso, New Mexico to Trinity Site now a nuclear National Historic Landmark, while a very interesting trip geographically, don't get me wrong, it's still through this high desert where much to the lament of my sensibilities is always upon the very lip of death. Driving northwest away from the 12,000 Sierra Blanca meant losing 3000 vertical in elevation over about twenty miles when you can look back up to the top of the mountain back within the one million acre Lincoln National Forest. It looks like something worth of worship there under the nearly always sunny auspices of a New Mexico sun. Here below some hedonist maniacs with tons of cash have built a sprawling suburban infrastructure of streets with electricity and wells and are trying to sell the lots for preposterous sums for land that the BLM can't honestly give away, man. “You get a 20 acre lot!” 20 acres all gasping their last gasp practically just sayin. About l5 minutes from the gate to this Trinity Site Nuclear National Monument, I asked my wife Jana' who is driving if she could pull over. I took out of my shirt pocket 3 dried grams of Psilocybin mushrooms. “I'm going to take this now, OK?” “Seriously?” Jana' asks. “I told you about this last week, Jana'. It's a dirty job but by God it's got to be done. We'll be at the gate in fifteen minutes and I won't start tripping for 40 and it's a small dose, anyway. Not like I'll flip out and embarrass you,” I said as reassuringly as I could trying to exude confidence, never easy for me. “So what then you can through some alchemy or something turn all the negative energy from that bomb into positive … it's that fantasy we're talking about, just to be clear?” “That's the one” I said a little indignantly. “It's a fair plan of noble intent, my Love”. So I ate the three grams as Jana' drives on toward the gate. The government only opens this monument twice a year for the day for public viewing of the site. It was my wife's idea to see the place and in spite of the radiation, I was in immediately. O shit, I thought, THAT sounds really WEIRD! Let's do it! “This is one of the more insane things, Babe,” says Jana' driving. “You get that, right … I hope you do, honestly, Babe, at least appreciate the insanity of it all – are you still with me? “I am here and now more even but here's the thing I know insanity been there, done that, chemical induced by our vaunted psychiatric doctors of medicine but insanity nonetheless. This, this is not insanity at all, Jana'. This is destiny.” By this time the gate came into view my first thought, Damn, you ain't getting into that place. The second that the place was locked up tight and dead empty. Not a soul in sight only lots of very ominous, threatening signs and lots of cameras. “Shit” said Jana' – it must have been yesterday, sorry about that, I had the dates wrong. “No problem, let's go down to the Rio Grande I think there's a nice little place to eat only thirty minutes more off the main road.” Suffice it to say that it hit me in a nice little restaurant in middle of no where along the Rio Grande River, New Mexico. I cried a little, “damn, could have done a lot of good with that energy”. “There there, Babe, it'll be okay” said my wife sincerely reassuring me.

Belizean Magic

I sit and stare a lot at this scene which so far never gets old. Sunlight dances across the sea as it moves overhead from east to west the two of them, sun and sea, endlessly creative in their complex physical interplay. If someone were to ask me, “what are you doing there in Belize?” I would not begin to know how to answer that?

Mostly nothing at all which is what seems to need doing. Mostly just staring at the dancing sun and sea. And I hope healing with this "Belizean Magic" I have heard so much about from those that have benefited from it over their years here. I don't know about you but I can use all the healing I can get, friends.

Believe that.

Caye Caulker, Belize - Morning Coffee

The sun rises behind low clouds every morning that hug the horizon so I don't see the suns orb until it's up a half hour from my perch here about 60 feet from the waters edge and twenty feet up. Our two bedroom apartment is over the Braisas del Mar restaurant. Out front the restaurant has seven tables half with umbrellas for diners on the sand below several coconut palm trees whose fronds rattle under the delightful cudgels of a const...ant sea breeze. I get up early and benefit from the shade provided by the palms until eventually the sun rises high enough to shine directly into my eyes whereupon I retreat having consumed enough coffee by then to ambulate. By about 1:30PM the sun passes through its tropical zenith nearly straight overhead and the eve of the house casts the deck here into a cool, afternoon shade. After walking around the island and returning here, I feel that by luck I have stumbled upon the coolest part of the island here on the windward side facing almost due east into the Caribbean Sea.

I can see the water taxi from here as it makes it's first run of the morning and underneath me on “1st Street” - just a path in the sand mostly trodden barefoot or in sandals with an occasional golf cart – young lovers stroll hand and hand heading toward the Water Taxi each carrying an enormous backpack with snorkeling gear, kite boards and various other paradisiacal paraphernalia.

Calgon, Take Me Away!

(little adventures in Belize)
Calgon, Take Me Away!!!

On the rare morning I stay asleep long enough, the hopper flight from Corozal Town airport out to the Islands in the Caribbean sea wakes me at 7:34AM as it tears off so close over the house sounds like it's crashing.

Good Morning Belize! I snap awake. Another day above ground, another victory.

"In your face, Reaper!"

Tomorrow we'll be on that flight razing the tile roof of the Maya Hotel winging our way out to Caye Caulker for a month. Just flying to San Pedro then taking the water taxi to Caulker. I'm really looking forward to seeing the lay of the land from the low flying hopper plane. I'll have the camera ready I know it's gonna go by fast !

Hunter S. Thompson, "Buy the ticket, take the ride".

Belize - First Impressions

My first month rent a little one bedroom apartment in the back of the Maya Hotel owned by a proud Belizean woman who is also a savvy business owner. I got what to me was a super low price talking her down from $500 to only $425USD. Slapped myself on the back for that one, you know. A day later we're working out details and she mentions that there will be a $75 dollar fee for cleaning at the end of the stay. I don't protest but smile. Touché'. At $75 dollar lesson in living in Belize the first of many such lessons – the learning curve here can be hell. Somehow I possess the right attitude feeling that I'm in this for the long run so not counting every loss as a defeat rather more as an educational fee. $500 is still good considering I get an air conditioner in the room and a kitchen I can cook in both saving money and easing my anxiety from being recently dismissed from my marriage since I like to cook as well as being newly expatriated in a third world country in central America. I would be lying if I said it wasn't a little intimidating even if also exhilarating and probably just the thing I need to help take my mind off of my marriage problems.

I don't like so much cooking for myself but do it anyway for I know now that as well as learning to live as an expat in Belize is only ½ of my new lesson book with the other being learning to live whole in myself, alone. The Belize half is a piece of cake compared to the second half of that deal. I don't like being alone. My mom once not long before she died confided that all she had ever wanted was a man to love her and a family of her own, crying hard as she said it, bitter and forsaken.

“Is that so much to ask, David”.

I am crying shaking my head, “no Mom it is not so much to ask” and then I hold her as she sobs deep, wracking sobs against my body, “I didn't want power, wealth, fame or fortune … only to be loved!” She who had abandoned me many times and who had abandoned my half siblings years earlier. I feel very sorry for her and I understand because married myself at that time for over a decade, I feel exactly the same thing. I realize then that although Mom had never said it, her father, my grandfather, had sexually molested her, ruining her forever and dooming her to a life of seeking that love from abusive alcoholics while unconsciously and unerringly rejecting any decent, loving man that came her way in life. I keep this knowledge to myself and never mention it and then dies leaving me, I think, the only human left alive who knows this terrible secret.
I think sometimes, “well, thank God that bastard had a penchant for little girls or I'd be really fucked up”.

So when people here explain sometimes in detail and I file that information away gratefully how difficult it can be for expats in Belize, I take it with a grain of salt and keep my thoughts to myself which run along the lines of, “Belize ain't even close to 'difficult'. Difficult is that shit in between your own ears that won't let you go back to sleep when you wake up at 3AM.”
What so far is the hardest thing to deal with is the abject poverty. The dogs wobbling along literally skin and bones and I think that if I bought dog food and gave it to those folks, they would probably eat it themselves. Then I walk on and hate myself because I don't. The guys laying passed out in the grass at 9AM and the way I have learned so quickly now not to be alarmed because I understand they are not sick, just passed out drunk. The bum who comes up to me every single day whose name I know who knows my name and says, “David, can you help me out” and I say, “No” and walk on because I cannot for I am afraid for my own welfare here on so little funds it is irresponsible by any rational measure. How could I possible explain to this person that I would go broke if I gave money to every person who asked, fed every enfeebled dog I came across? And already there is a kind of guilt but nothing I had not felt in my America now full of hopeless indigents Herself. This is without question the worst aspect of Belize so far.

But yet after years of looking over that internet fence that I know many others have looked over and are still looking over, I find in general that Belize is much as I expected Her to be which is a good thing. I walk at night down the road along the seawall along Corozal Bay in Corozal Town looking at the stars overhead feeling that breeze and respite from the hundred degree heat of the day and I breath in deeply thanking God for the opportunity to be here in this place.
“I ain't leavin unless they throw me out,” I smile.

Following the Mushroom Path, Chapter One

02/25/07 –Breakthrough Experience

Snow had been falling outside the large bedroom windows all morning. It was about 10am and I sat in bed alone enjoying the snow and eating five grams of dried psilocybin mushrooms that I had grown myself. I chewed them slowly and thoroughly and it took a while to get the whole five grams down. Let them sit in my mouth as long as I could absorbing sublingually. Tasted earthy and a little nutty. I felt positive. (A fairly rare feeling for me) ...It was the perfect day for my first high dose experiment. Good set, good setting. I felt very open. These mushrooms were from a third flush of fruiting of a strain called Creepers. Early on in my experiments with plant teachers I had made a decision not to beat drums or wave feathers around. I had to except the fact that I was a suburban white man and not a South American Shaman. My ceremony consisted simply of sincerely focusing on healing and just being as open to the experience as I possibly could. I sat back and read some from Richard Evans Schulte’s, Ethnobotony: Evolution of a Discipline. Of course, I went immediately to the chapters dealing with Ayahausca. This was the point just after consuming the mushrooms when I usually felt the most fear and this morning was no exception. In fact, since this was the largest dose that I had yet tried, I sat on an underlying terror this beautiful, snowy morning. Reading has always been a panacea for me emotionally. Even though my wife was in the living room, I felt totally alone. I had evolved a little mind trick such that after ingesting the mushrooms, I tried to forget that I had just ingested them and force my mind to concentrate on something else. If I could pull this off then when I started coming on forty or more minutes later, it would come almost as a surprise. This particular morning I was definitely only partly successful and while I read could not but help thinking: “five grams, Oh man this is scary”.
It’s hard to describe this feeling after I’ve eaten them – I’ve never skydived but maybe it’s like what a skydiver feels after just leaving the plane: total commitment now, no going back. Then I felt it coming on about forty minutes in and looked out at the snow: wow, how beautiful, I thought. I would have to call it a bright and snowy day. I took off my glasses and put the big, book down and lay on my back with my eyes closed, systems check. I felt a little sick, chilled as if with fever, stomach a little upset, and I pulled up onto my left side with the covers up to my shoulder. This way I could see out the window to where the snow accumulated on a big green leaved boxwood. I tried to relax and just be open. I had felt this chill before but not so strongly as today. I suddenly felt a vibration. Perhaps this vibration was the beating of my own heart but I felt that an elephant was coming, thump, thump, thump, it’s massive and ponderous steps getting

stronger as it closed upon me. I knew then without a doubt that the elephant was here to sit on my chest. My fear sort of lunged and bucked, kicking up beyond all possible expectations. I knew that I could not move. My mind “was squirming like a toad” and it took a few moments to calm myself down enough to even think – I could not run, I did not want to run, I had tried too hard for too long to get to this point to run. I felt that I could not catch my breath so I started counting breath and deep breathing, trying to just empty my mind except for the counting. I concentrated on bringing air first deep into my diaphragm then slowly allowing it to rise up and then breathing out starting at the top of my diaphragm and pushing the air out so that the last air came again from the very bottom of my diaphragm and it seemed to help. I may have helped by giving my something neutral to think about.
I felt nauseas suddenly, balled up in the fetal position, making myself as small as possible, drawing inward, still counting breath but the elephant was upon me now. He sat on my chest and I couldn’t breath. This is it, I am going to die, I thought. I gave myself to it because I understood that at the deepest level, I had no choice in the matter.
My wife was out in the living room and she knew what I was doing. My request was to just leave me alone until I came out of the bedroom. As the elephant crushed the life out of me, some little part of me considered calling out for help. Another part of me asserted itself strongly then right through the fear and firmly dismissed that idea and I just died.
“Be here, be now”, I told myself repeatedly, continuing to breath deep and count breaths to belay the fear. This little mantra and the deep breathing turned out to be my only trick in all this. At some point the elephant left, quickly and without fanfare, the fear leaving with it. It was truly anticlimactic. The fear of death is worse than death itself, I noted.
A soothing calm seemed to slip into the emotional space the fear had left just as easily as breath: breathing in, breathing out. I considered myself an agnostic if not an atheist but I felt as if I were engaged now in prayer and the prayer was only this, “come”. Not ‘come mushrooms’ or ‘come God’ or ‘come anything’ but just, “come” and I lay there as flayed wide open as I could possibly be.
Come.
I want to say that I “saw my self” on the bed from a few feet away and that “I” was positioned up toward the ceiling looking down but it happening so fast that I cannot say that it was “real” but clearly I understood that I was inhabiting my soul now and that I was outside my body. This happened in a second’s time and left me thinking, “what the hell!?” Left me thinking, “was that real” and yet made a huge impression on me since I had not known that I possessed a soul until that very instant. Quite a revelation for a borderline atheist perhaps as you could imagine. As soon as I had a moment to reflect upon my soul, I felt myself shoot off to
the south. Somehow I was fully conscious but at the same time my body definitely lay unconscious on our bed. Really, I felt my new soul body pulled off to the south at fantastic speed and a second later I was at the office in Springfield, Virginia where I had worked now for twenty years – or, rather I was in a “soul office” rendition of the real office where I had worked for twenty years. So hard to put into the words? This place appeared to be a reality connected to our own physical reality through our soul body – a soul world. I tried to wrap my mind around it but the only way I could make sense of it was to think of the soul world as a mirror world to our own. It was almost as if when we waved our hand in this physical reality, our soul hand also waved. But that was not quite right, either. This soul world did not exist as a simple reflection of our own. It also was alive just as was our physical world. This soul world was also intimately connected to our physical world and our physical self and ego. It is as if the soul world does not exist as a separate location but exists as an aspect of our normal physical reality. Also, everything seemed to be emotionally supercharged in this soul world, the emotion the same that I had dealt with my entire life only magnified in intensity a million fold such that a little sadness was like a purgatory. Everything in this “soul world” was amplified compared to our normal, physical world.
The soul world is intense. (At this time I did not comprehend the full implications in terms of positive feelings being enhanced in the soul world but later I would “feel” beauty by connecting with this soul world and feel beauty as a real physical ecstasy, a warmth suffusing my chest)
At my actual work we were either kicked back doing nothing but shooting the shit, usually in the most unprofessional manner imaginable; or, we were thrashing around in a sort of fog-of-war trying to keep a handle on an exploding concrete dispatch department, one of the biggest on the east coast. No matter how well you might prepare; no matter how many plans you might make, a point came inevitably – and the inevitability of it all really wore on me – when it all would come tumbling down. I recall hearing a study wherein rats are given a negative stimulus of a random shock through the wire mesh of their cage. Another control group is given shocks at exactly the same intervals only the control group can jump on a switch which stops the shock. The group that could jump on the switch got really good at doing just that and the group with no control switch basically went insane. The point being that even the perception of control over our environment can be life saving. We were in this office of course the group with no switch to stop the shock – just random and constant negative reinforcements over which we had no control whatsoever. Surely, many others experience similar negative feelings about their work life. Sometimes I had to wonder if we were not all secretly involved in some cruel but fascinating sociology experiment. I always thought of it as humpty dumpy falling off the wall. Shit, here goes humpty dumpy, again.
The customers were actually less of a nuisance than my own company. I suspect that this is a fairly common theme in the workplace. It is seldom the job that is so stressful as it is the social machinations of the place. I never made my peace with the corporate bureaucracy that consistently used a vast amount of resources to make a difficult job far more difficult than it had to be. Again, this surely must be a common theme in our work places, especially with corporations getting larger and more impersonal all the time. I understood that our corporation did not exist in a vacuum and that our three stooges environment was only a microcosm of the rest of the corporate world – indeed, the rest of the world in general. Under various conditions I learned over and over the hard lessons that bad leaders teach.
I had no feelings about concrete whatsoever. I often wondered at how I had gotten myself in the concrete business. Again, I am sure that I am not alone in this sentiment. Freud is much in disfavor now I know but he said life was about two things, work and love. In that I think he had a point. If you are doing what you really love, you are fortunate indeed. In real life and in this soul world my workplace very much became a microcosm of society at large. It took a while to sink in just how profoundly true it was that this work place was the way of the world not an isolated incident. It gave me a whole new perspective on history: how the hell did we make it this far? It was so frustrating for me after two decades there seeing answers and solutions everywhere but having no power in this corporate setting to effect any meaningful change whatsoever. Every day I would watch Humpty
Dumpy fall off of the wall. Every single day we would spend so much of our time picking up Humpty Dumpy and putting him back together. Every day I would think how unnecessary this was - how whatever problem we were dealing with could have been solved twenty years ago rather easily and inexpensively. The entire system was geared for one thing: financial profit. Was it any wonder that this place was a soul killer?
Now why does that recall so much my entire society?
So work went on in this soul workplace for what seemed like thousands of years. It was no different at all than it normally was only as I said sort of supercharged emotionally. I wandered back and forth perhaps more in a daze than I might have in reality. I understood completely that I was here to learn something and I believed myself to “be having a bad trip”. I had been prepared for a bad trip. I had fully expected a bad trip. I wanted healing and knew what a mess I was and I fully expected the mushrooms to shake me like an old penny jar. In the midst of the chaos of this soul workplace I was asking myself again and again, “now what does this mean, what is all this teaching me?” It was a kind of hell and I was aware that I was in a soul world hell workplace. I believed from my readings of so many other peoples experiences with plant teachers that “bad trip” was simply a means of spiritual growth and healing. That a bad trip was the mushrooms way of resetting your clock. After a while I began to feel frustrated that I
could not “figure it out”. I could not understand no matter how hard I tried in exactly what manner this was suppose to be helping me. The dysfunctional nature of my relationship with virtually everything there, some having worked with me for twenty years, really weighed upon me. My God, I wondered painfully, this is what I’ve been giving my life force to all these years?
I then began to feel both weary and stuck in this soul work place. Weary and stuck had been a theme of mine for decades, what I had been trying to break away from. I sort of decided to “go home sick”, basically giving up on understanding and just leaving, but then I could not find the door out of this hell work place. Here again a real panic set in. I do not pretend to understand how it was possible but while my body lay unconscious miles away I was quite myself and quite conscious in this hell and it was completely and right now frighteningly real to me. The moment that I realized that I was trapped, the hell of the place became more real than ever. How to put in words? I have never had a lucid dream but perhaps it was like lucid dreaming? The thought that I may be stuck in this hell workplace forever was horrifying. My mind searched desperately like a man stumbling around in a pitch black room arms flailing out in an effect to orient himself to something else in the empty darkness.
Finally, I realized that this horrible place was teaching me nothing. It was only annoying me and distracting me from my life. There is nothing to learn here, I thought inside the experience. I have been trying to conform myself into this horrible, shallow façade of reality for twenty years and for twenty years it was as though every day I had made a decision to crush my humanity. This was simply not what I was meant to do. As if that simple insight were the key to open the door, I seemed to zip instantly back into my physical body still curled up on the bed with the snow still accumulating on the boxwood outside the window. Opening my eyes I found myself then fully conscious and feeling completely lucid. I thought that the experience over – in the vernacular, that “I was down”.
Wow, I thought, without moving a muscle except my eyes that were focusing clearly on the snowy scene out of the window, that was amazing. A soul, eh? My atheistically leaning agnosticism obviously had to be forsaken or seriously modified!
I felt also very peaceful. I felt like the snow drifting softly down upon the earth. It was not lost on me the parallel between my real life experience at work and this soul experience. It was so real – I, or my soul, had been in this soul workplace just a moment before and now I was back in my body in our bedroom. The lesson about my work was clear. I recalled some saying that mushrooms address your most serious issues first. I thought of this because I was sure that I had far more serious personal emotional issues to deal with than my work – I felt and still do that the truth dear Brutus is not in the stars but in ourselves. This all served to really make it
sink in right there just how negative my work had been for me all these years. I did not know what time it was because the clock was behind me but I assumed a couple hours had gone by, the experience had seemed to go on for so long. The diffuse light of the cloudy day didn’t give any hint as to the time. I was certain that the experience was over. For some reason, the thought of actually moving, even enough to turn and look at the nightstand clock, never occurred to me. I felt peaceful and calm and very, very happy. I had tried it seemed so many times and nothing had happened but finally this time it had worked, my God it had worked in spades! I cannot say if at this moment I was even able to move because I did not try. Just as soon as I sort of came to terms with what had just happened to me, having rolled it all around in my conscious mind a little, I felt my head spinning again and closed my eyes – the spinning continued upward even with my eyes closed and I thought, “it’s not over,” the second biggest surprise of the morning!
Then I felt a counterclockwise spinning again and still without moving a muscle my eyes glanced up into the spinning and my lucidity faded. What was really weird was that there was an UP at all. In the just ended soul experience, I had a strong sense of directionality, that this soul world was directly connected to our physical world somehow. But now I shot straight up, rising faster and faster until my new soul just sort of tore away finally and I thought, wow, so my soul is no more what "I" am than is my body - my soul is also just a vehicle and the vehicle just sloughed off into space the way a rocket might slough off it’s bottom, expended fuel tank. I had just discovered my soul - stupid like discovering your belly button - but I was kind of enamored with my soul already. I sort of lamented my souls loss. Nevertheless, I continued soulless on straight upwards at fantastic speed through the earth’s atmosphere and off into space and I felt a slight tug - what was that? That was language, I thought, which apparently had been connected to earth by means of a really long umbilical cord and before it snapped it very gently tugged as the cord reached its end before breaking. Wow, so that was language and now it is gone, I wondered. But I couldn't help but notice that I wondered this with language - and this made me laugh, sailing up through space laughing, laughing and laughing about this loss of language.
In any case, I assumed then and assume now that after leaving my soul behind what was left was “the real self” or perhaps some would call it the higher self, or highest self? The amazing thing is that I was still me.
This was the beginning of what I call my abandonment experience where the mushrooms cured my lifelong abandonment fear by abandoning me in some Nether Region of reality for a billion years. The giddy laughter was over soon enough. I continued shooting up into space at a fantastic speed and language was really finally and completely gone and I just felt – angry at the mushrooms for abandoning me. I was again totally aware of
what was happening. Clearly, the mushrooms were responsible for all of this. On the other hand, I knew why they were doing it. Another part of me found it kind of humorous and I could imagine the mushrooms saying, “hey, got your abandonment right here!” As in the first experience, I understood at the deepest level that whatever was happening was for my own good. My angry side became very annoyed at the part of me which could see the humor of it all and after some time this angry side sort of won out. By some time here I mean a billion years. My being spread out for light years and I became an anger-being spreading out so far as to be just a vague, disembodied cloud of energy drifting through vast and vacant distances of space, hardly corporeal at all. I felt as though each of my molecules were light years apart. I seemed to be a as spread out as I could possibly be and still exist at all. Anger and everything else inside me bleed out into these cold reaches of space over eons of time until finally what I was, was nothing, nothing at all.
I was a cold, disembodied nothing drifting vaguely through empty space.
I knew the mushrooms had abandoned me for my own good. I was very aware of my abandonment issues. This abandonment fear was the bane of my emotional life, maybe the root of all evils for me. How could I be at all authentic if I were so afraid of being “alone” at this heart level? Not only that, but this abandonment kept me feeling separate from everything when in fact it was clear to me that everything was one - my personal, emotional abandonment issue had taken on cosmic proportions. I knew that I was only pretending without authenticity. As I drifted trans-emotional through eons of space time, I thought of how I was stewing in my own proverbial juices. This part is very important, I think. I existed in this state for a billion years. Now to say a billion years is simply to try and put into language what defies language. It seems that this is the transformative power which the mushrooms possess, among others, that they can impart direct experience. This experience was as real, or more real, than any experience in my conscious life. Because the experience was as real as an actual life experience, it had the power to change me. By imparting direct reality the mushrooms facilitate change. In this way the mushrooms gave me a gift beyond words – no amount of advice – words – coming from another person no matter how wise or holy could equal this transformative experience. How else could one actually experience a billion years of abandonment? Not think of it or imagine it - but actually experience one billion years of abandonment?
From this I also took away a profound sense of time, especially a sense of the immensity of time involved in our DNA life and Its diversity here on the planet. So unfathomably much can happen in a billion years. A billion years is a long time – hey, I know! As alone and isolated as I have felt all of my adult life, that was nothing compared the utter and complete
abandonment I felt. As “time” stretched out into the unfathomable reaches of space, the depth of my abandonment feeling reached what I can only describe as cosmic proportions. It is so hard to find the language for this but after eons and eons of time I began to kind of lose focus on my anger and then finally on the abandonment feeling and I began to experience other feelings and then no feelings.
Wow, look at how beautiful it is out here. I can see infinity. Wow, it is so good to be alive, I thought – a thought that would seldom come to my normal self.
Then I felt as if you might feel when you are very uptight and someone massages your neck. I really began to stretch out into my disembodied form and to feel the immensity of myself, discovering that I was far larger than I had thought; in fact, as I sort of relaxed my muscles and really stretched it out, I realized that there was no end to what I was.
I am eternity.
Again, a billion years is an unimaginably long period of time. I thought about things as we all do. I thought about history, philosophy, my relationships, books that I’ve read, everything and anything. I had literally all the time in the world to think about things. Realities existed all around spread out before me like stars in the night sky. I saw and understood that the physical reality we inhabit here on earth is only one reality of an infinite number of realities. I understood also that the concept of singular and plural was only peculiar to our physical earth reality and that we our true self exist beyond singular and plural, space and time, life and death. We exist in more than one reality at a time is the clunky language to describe it that doesn’t really describe it all. I really could spend the rest of my life just writing about this “billion years” but little of it was particularly profound and much of it would be only of interest to me, and then much of it was so far beyond articulation. At some point I discovered that my abandonment feelings were gone. How can I be alone when I am a part of everything and everything is a part of me? How can I be alone when I am everything? How can I be alone when I am eternity? Much like in my first soul workplace experience, this “realization” seem to bring me back to my body still curled up on the bed in our bedroom. The journey back into the body did not seem so smooth or quick as from the soul work place and I had a sense of time and distance as well as a vague sense of returning to this planet, our earth, almost more than of returning to my own individual body.
Again I opened my eyes but did not move. Snow still falling. The diffuse, snowy light again betraying nothing of the time of day. I felt that I must have been “out” for hours and that it was probably late afternoon.
This time I knew that my “trip” was over. I managed to move for the first time and saw to my surprise that a mere hour and a half had passed approximately since I had first felt it coming on. This really surprised me. It seemed to me as though days had past, or years. I sat up on the side of the
bed testing my mobility, also surprised to find myself fully ambulatory. First of all, it sure seemed like longer than an hour and a half. Second, there was a deeper level of reality experienced within the “second”, abandonment experience that seemed more real than either my normal consciousness or the other tripping consciousness that I just left. This part only came to me as I sat up in bed and it took my breath away, a flash of vision of God raising His right hand and the glint of light off of his sword and I cringed there sitting on the bed just thinking of it as the full scope of it all washed over me, maybe because of the change of blood pressure in my head from sitting up on the side of the bed from the prone position? I actually cringed and ducked as I was sitting there on the edge of the bed, fearing God’s sword would come down on my head.
The abandonment experience was much deeper than the soul experience – beyond the soul, I guess. My God it was like a spiritual hall of mirrors. In this yet deeper level that now came to me, it was like a dream within the psilocybin experience – a mushrooms dream. But it was no dream. Not like any dream I ever had. This part was so very, very far beyond words such that I almost don’t know how to explain it? The only way is to use words straight out and they will be like hollow, paper renditions of the real experience, like watching a puppet rendition of reality as opposed to the actual flesh and blood of life itself. I was part of a spiritually connected group of entities who were storming heaven in an attempt to Kill God. Our group mantra rang out: God must die! We fought a horrendous battle and lost, my last memory was that I was not injured and that I was helping my group retreat with dead and wounded. The defeat was horrible again beyond words but we all had the sense that we had lost a battle not a war and that we would be back. We may have been beaten badly but we were still totally committed to the war, to killing God. This convinced me that we operate on multiple levels of reality at once – perhaps an infinite level of realities at once. My persona here in this reality was completely different from my conscious, “normal self”. My self in this deepest level of reality was true warrior full of a pure, unadulterated rage and completely fearless. When God Almighty’s sword came crashing down, the very wraith of God, my warrior self did not even flinch. Just the memory of this sitting there on the side of the bed made me cringe bodily with fear, almost causing me to bring up my arm in a protective manner in front of my face – like some kind of mushroom inspired Post Traumatic Stress behavior. This part of the experience would weigh on me heavily and it is almost all I thought of the rest of that Sunday – I felt as though I had abandoned “my people” and I wanted desperately to get back to this battle, to my fellow entities. It is probably a good thing that I had no more mushrooms. I would have taken any amount to return to my comrades. Of all the amazing things that had happened to me that last one and a half hours, this horrific battle with God blossomed in my consciousness into a
terrible and unnatural flower.
Storming heaven and killing God? I had no idea where that came from or what exactly it meant. But I brought back a determination to accept it all no matter how strange or unfathomable. Some months later I came to feel as if it were a significant dream, fading a little. The other aspects of the experience remained as strong and clear as any important, actual experience that I had in my life. But the mushroom dream pulled with an unusual power upon every aspect of my being from my toes to my psyche. Just the way a powerful dream will tend to do.
As I sat on the side of bed, I began to recall of yet another reality and how I had been crawling along the inside the sphere of a huge red ball. I did not think so much about all those realities that I did not make it to, but about all those realities where I did, even though only handful. I wondered if someone more spiritually advanced would have been able to operate on countless more realities than a hand full? Maybe on an infinite number? Over there on the other side, I was the only limit. Maybe enlightenment meant being able to operate on all levels at once synergistically. The thought of this really intrigued me.
I knew that crawling around inside this sphere represented dealing with some greater reality sort of surrounding our conscious reality and I was attempting to get through the veil separating the two which had taken on the form of the inside of this sphere. This part happened as I was “coming down” and I think is my higher self desperately trying to get back to the kill God reality as the levels of psilocybin deceased in my body. I crawled along the inside of this ball trying desperately trying to punch a way through the “veil”. I punched it with my fist, rammed it with my shoulder and as I continued to crawl along even head butted the hard rubbery veil that I knew separately my conscious reality from the greater reality around me. Finally I managed to punch through with my right hand up to the shoulder. Even though I could not get through completely, I managed to get the Tiger by the tail and managed to bring the Tiger’s Tail back through the veil into this reality.
“I have The Tiger by the tail, now” I thought very seriously.
I knew I would not be letting go any time soon. What is The Tiger’s tail exactly? Everything.
Everything apparently is an elusive little thing.
The Tigers tail thrashed me around but I held on tight, not about to let go. The Tiger would thrash me around pretty good over the next few months but I did not let go. In a way, that is all I “did” and really all I have to write about - holding on to the Tigers tail.
I think while most others would have let go of the Tigers tail thinking that it was all crazy, all mushroom inspired madness, I thought instead that I had a hold of something important and I wasn’t about to let go no matter how weird it was or even how weird it was to become.

Dream 3/5/2015

(I would say that I don't feel this has anything to do with "the world" merely is a very accurate and truthful assessment of my own deepest feelings about the world as I do not believe that our unconscious "lies" but rather presents a childlike, unfiltered, if symbolic representation of our emotional status. I cracked myself up on the side of the bed this morning at the only escape exit being "the beach" with all other exits blocked "because I don't have a card to open those doors". The depth of my disgust for what my America has become is obvious. I make note of how desperate my feelings are and how weary I am also an accurate,  inner description)

Dream (3-4-15)

I'm in the bowels of a gigantic building that is a microcosm of the country I'm in with the basement area I am in constituting some combination of a prison and a slum. I am there with other artist types and we are half dead from starvation. The conditions are sort of like living inside a big garbage bin. I dream of escape but it seems an impossible dream. At some point a lone assassin type arrives dressed in black and starts killing those of us in there. Somehow, I manage to kill him and I take his clothing, gear that includes weapons and pass cards of the type that you use to open hotel rooms. I make me way up in an elevator to some upper level of the megalithic building to the level that constitutes the living quarters of this killer I am now impersonating to make my escape. The pass cards will only open the way back to his quarters – of course! Or I would just leave the building.

His level is like a high end department store with aisles of goods and well dressed clerks and somehow I make my way through this to what is the bunk area for this killers elite death squad unit in what is a futuristic fascist regime of some kind. I keep sunglasses on which everyone else is wearing and my concern is that these others, his comrades, will recognize me. I am very desperate and am thinking only of escape my mind racing now trying to figure out the layout of this place. I haven't eaten or slept in days and I am going a bit buggy from lack of sleep. I do not even know where in the world this building is located and escape still seems a fantastic pipe dream but then I managed to make it out of the basement so I hold some slight hope.

When I enter the bunk area for these death squad soldiers, another soldier dressed in civilian clothing approaches, not wearing sunglasses, puts his hand on my shoulder, “man, how'd it go, buddy, you look wasted, are you okay?” He is very loving in that way that soldiers love one another.

I cry a little, starting to crumble emotionally, terrified that he will now recognize that I am a fraud and not his friend but somehow he doesn't. “I'm not okay. They were just a bunch of artists, man. Do you understand? Living in the sub basement in abject filth and poverty barely alive hell man I guess I did them a favor wasting em”.

He hugs me and says, “Don't mean nothing, Brother, just say fuck it and drive on”. He says, come on let's get you to the bunk, you look like you need a shower and some sleep”.

For this I am grateful because I don't know where the bunks are and if I ask, it would give me away, I think, for sure. Once there, I say, “I need to eat something in the worst way”.

“No problem,” says my brother in arms, “let's go to the commissary,” and we walk over to a cafeteria area. I am stunned by the food, the order, the cleanliness of it all. These fucking bastards, I think, they live like this while we live like animals, looking around at it all in amazement. Off to one side I see an area that opens onto a patio and there is a beach and the ocean and soldiers are laughing and going out there with swim shorts on, carrying mixed drinks. So we're on an ocean, I think. At least I have some idea of where I am now?

The dream ends I don't eat but head back to the bunks I'm almost delirious from lack of sleep but my mind is racing desperately trying to put together an escape plan. I realize that it will not be as easy as I thought. Once I leave this building, and the only way I've seen to do that is to go out into the ocean R & R area, I will be an AWAL soldier. Also, I have no idea where in the world I am! As the dream ends, I am coming to the conclusion that I must play along at least long enough to get some sleep and eat something to build up my strength. I am telling myself to calm down and play it cool. Part of me wants to run out that door into the R/R ocean which is the only way out I've seen since my pass cards only open doors leading from where my mission was in the basement back to my quarters area here. But I need to rest and build up strength in order to effect a successful escape. These people around me are all death squad elite military killers for the fascist regime and it makes me feel ill to be among them and my instinct is to race out that door but I know that would be folly. I have to stay also and figure out more of the routines and layout in order to successfully escape this place. My last thought before waking chills me to the bones as I realize that at some point I don't know when because I don't know how much down time a soldier here gets before their next mission but at some point I will be called upon to go on another mission and that may only be a matter of days? Perhaps I should go on the mission, I think, and escape from there, assuming that the mission is somewhere outside the building itself?