Freedom

We live outside of the garden of eden because our minds are broken. We are humans, freed from the confines of an animalistic consciousness. We now live in a mindset which is at constant odds with itself. One side constantly seeking comfort, the other... freedom. How do we find who we really are between the two? The confusion blinds us and, if we are not careful, binds us to things we can see, never realizing that we should never bind ourselves as we are free. What we see, is never the big picture.

We are born to be free. We have the gift to break free. Nothing is too big, too overwhelming, too binding. We give in, give up, and glue together pieces of things that we can wrap our minds around then call the gluey result "me", never realizing it is merely an idea.

Where do we go? Who do we turn to? Which way is up? Where are we? Where am I? Who am I?

Do not use your environment as your compass, only as a sign. Do not use others as your compass, only as guides. You are already free. You are adrift in an infinite beautiful sea. You do not need shelter. You do not need fear. We choose these things to feel secure. But you do not need that either. You already have it without trying. When insecurity has convinced you that you need security, you are lost. When you let go, you are free.

Be like a bird on the wind, a fish in a current, a flame within fire, and a worm within dirt. Be Free.

The Grand Illusion

It turns out a few of my very old videos that I made are still online. For those of you who dont know I used to have a rather significant youtube channel and produced a few of my own videos with found materials. Heres one I recently found :D


Disclose.tv - The Grand Illusion... Video

I'm Addicted to Addiction, But I can quit when I want to...

Wait.. Werent we taught about addiction in school? The police officer came to my third grade class and showed us a bunch of drugs and we were told how bad they were. We were shown videos of signs of violent drug users. Told to keep an eye out for people who have fists while they walk. So we can glimpse a little at the addictive qualities certain chemicals have but we were never told why a person chooses this. Why is the truth so alluding?

An intriguing place to start is with the notion that people can become addicted to emotions. We sometimes forget we are made up of trillions of cells and view the world through chemicals.

Emotions can be viewed psychologically, spiritually, and an infinite array of perceptions. To view them as their chemical states seems to be a key to understanding our addiction to them. It seems true that a person may persist in one state of perception, causing particular emotions to exist, and thus a particular chemical to be produced. Over time a state of normality develops and we become more comfortable hanging around one set of chemicals than another. We develop a dependency on them.

With this in mind it starts to be quite easy to see why people become addicted to, well, anything. Someone may have an unending urge to play video games, read books, or talk. They all get a certain sense of themselves from doing so and chemicals are released and comfort develops. I personally dont think we are meant to live in one state for a long period of time. It seems to be quite damaging. "Everything in moderation" seems to apply even to something as immaterial as emotions even though we tend not to think of thoughts and emotions as things, but rather we see them as "I", when this is really not the case.

When people go through withdraw of a hard drug it can sometimes take weeks to overcome; a lot of time that is full of sweating and fighting an internal struggle of letting go. They used to use LSD to release people of such afflictions and the simple - heavy sessions therein would cure people of their addiction all together. High doses of LSD were given, the patient would then lay on the couch and would face the inner spaces of who they were and their relationship with reality. Supposedly they wouldn't need to go through the lengthy withdraw phase. This is because the user would have to face the aspects of themselves during their session; which were the root causes for their addiction.

After many years of study I still find it quite fascinating that all drugs mimic what is already in the human body. The drug could not work if the body did not already have the ability to use it. For instance THC from Marijuana forces the brain to produce an excess of normal happy chemicals thus making you "high". If you became very very happy without the drug you would feel the same way. I myself have been this happy and I did feel high and others asked me if I was. I was high on life.

I think if a balance in ones life is not attained, then, obviously, ones will naturally seeks ways to balance. In modern society it seems as if we do not know how to do that very well so we turn to sensations as a means to deliver us from what ails us. We in fact, more times than not, choose new ways to comfort ourselves. We cannot seem to put our finger on what ails us beyond comforts. I think ignorance is the culprit to this undeveloped mindset. We persistently deny the truth every time we choose comfort over the truth. "The truth hurts" is quite a famous and even cliche saying but if honestly considered, its undeniably true.

Buddha struggled with the notion of human suffering. It was in fact his life's work to find a solution to it. In the end enlightenment was the answer. This moment contains it all. If you learn to see suffering for what it is, and let it be as it must, then you have an opportunity to use it for what its meant for rather than let it use you until you become sick from trying to look away. We are far more responsible for our addictions than we like to think and until we learn to mature properly we will always live in immature attachment.

Healing the Preemptive Strike

A few years ago there was a lot of talk on the news about "preemptive strikes". These referred to war, and more specifically, striking the enemy before they strike you. I used to get sick a lot more than I do these days. From the food I eat, to the exercise I get, to the healthy mentality I cultivate, my health requires my undying attention and intrigue.

I remember, a few years ago now, getting the flu right around Christmas. I remember eating soup for weeks and weeks but I was still sick. A lot later I realized that I had not been feeding my body anything good to help heal itself. The soup I had been eating had a few good veggies in it and even meat but it was mostly broth, otherwise I wasn't really giving my body much to work with. At the same time my mental state was one of self-conscious depression. Not only for having to be sick, but also for having been layed off recently and attempting to start my freelance career. Its times like these that ignorance becomes clear. My limitations at that point made me ill and I did not have the wisdom to heal myself well, nor prevent the illness from taking over my body completely.

This can be a touchy subject because I find most people don't feel responsible for their sickness. They blame the flu or whatever is ailing them as the culprit. As if the virus itself is going around making people sick without their having anything to do with it. If this were the case then everyone would be sick and the human race would most likely have died off a very long time ago. Our bodies always contain virus's but they must wait until the immune system lets them in. I think this is a system we don't fully understand. Doctors have a great understanding of it but even some of them suffer the same delusions of responsibility as everyone else. The energy we put in our body (food), the energy our body participates in (internal and external environment, thoughts and relationships), and the energy we express (exercise, creativity, love), all help to serve our balance and well being as bodies of energy. This is not a spiritual thought mind you, though it does serve that also, I mean this all quite literally and scientifically. We are intimately responsible for our bodies but its something we need to learn about. Going to the doctor can be helpful but people don't typically attempt to understand it themselves. They would rather "leave it to the professionals". Which is like saying “I don't want to deal with what I do with my money, Ill go to a banker to tell me what I do with it”. Its a broken way of living.

A year later the onset of sickness was here again. I remember the stress of the time and yet I did not stop to rest. I kept pushing myself until I became sick. I realized I had done this so I switched my mentality from one of ambition to one of nurturing. I decided to nurture my body because I love my body. This switch in mentality vastly improved my situation. I did not look at the sickness as something to loath or hate, but as a sign of being out of balance. Its a very clear signal that people tend to treat like a neuscense. You can look at the stop light as if it is telling you that you need to slow down and come to a stop because you are in danger, or you can look at it as if its slowing you down and getting in your way. I fed my body great food; fruit, veggies, water, garlic, onions, etc. All sorts of good healing foods so my body had a healthy supply of nutrients and water to move them around with. My mentality was nurturing which felt like I was mothering myself. It felt like love and it felt right. I was happy and I rested. I slept, and made peace. And I was over my sickness before it really started.

It is true that doctors call cancer the "martyrs disease". A martyr, by definition, is someone who suffers. They take in the pain and they hold it which causes internal suffering. This is the first clear sign of a dis-ease. Having had a step father who past away when I was 12 from cancer, I had many years to ponder the truth of this idea. And true it is. Roy was a great man but he lived with much internal stress and pain. He slaved away for a boss who always paid him late, he made due with what little we had, he had a divorced wife and a daughter he could only see on rare occasions, a father he never really got to know, and friends who's lives were full of negativity, struggle and sickness. Roy had leukemia for 3 or 4 years but, in the end, died of a heart attack. He simply could not keep up the fight with his own dis-ease, no matter how large a heart he had. Like an mental pain, dis-ease starts as a seed and takes over the whole system. In the end the host believes without a shadow of doubt that they are the dis-ease, and there is no way to beat it. They believe this so much in fact that they believe the only way to overcome this painful position is to fight.

This is like fighting fire with fire. Its like fear handing you a sword to fight with, and you fight, never realizing you fight because you are afraid. Fear completely tricked you because you had no idea who YOU really were.

We live in a society that is disconnected. Our spirit does not feel connected to reality. I would blame scientific thinking for this completely but I think its too simple to do that, however true it may be, there are far too many other things to help this also. I think we live in a society that caters to distracting ones self from their connection to reality. We are raised ignorantly and continue to nurture our own ignorance of who and what we are. We let others convince us of false ideas and migrate to unhealthy ways of thinking of ourselves and the world. Instead of seeing ourselves as reality, connected completely as energy to all energy we relate with and trying to see that we in fact are not bound to skin and bone but are in fact infinite. Instead we reinforce the idea that we are separate, that we do not believe in "god", that we are machine like. We forget truths that were discovered by our ancestors and passed down through the generations simply because we feel we are smarter than them. We discount their ideas because we are told they are simpletons who believe in mythology and magic.

I read recently that multitasking makes people stupider. They cannot focus on one thing at a time anymore yet somehow we convince ourselves that we are very good at doing more than one thing at a time. When in fact we cannot do either thing particularly well. So maybe this is the challenge of the future. We are destined to face sickness, death, pain, suffering, and all the other negative aspects of a detached self until we learn our lesson. This does not just apply to us as a whole, but individually as well. Though this is true it does not have to be true in a larger sense. If we begin to learn from the small pains, and sickness's, and suffering, then they do not need to grow into a full blow organism. If we do not do the work however, then we will, through ignorance, end up nurturing one dis-ease or another, until it grows big and strong.

Nowadays I practice preemptive strikes however I don't fight the pain. I accept it as my own. I realize "yes, i feel stress in my chest and I can see that i feel it when I think about money that I owe, or the person who bothers me, or the thing I need to do next week. I can see now that I am out of balance and I remember that I am one with god, right now, in this moment. Although money, people, and possibilities exist, are real, and are in my life, they does not govern my well being if I don't let them. Debt is temporary, money is temporary, people and life are temporary, I will die, so fearing any of it is silly and only serves to hurt my body and life. I am safe and free." These are the types of revelations I attempt to make. When I feel pain, sickness, and depression, I try to wake up to the truth and let go, rather than hold on. I don't throw on the TV and go to sleep more. I accept these conditions as signs. Remember who I really am, and move through the suffering.

Balance is key to a healthy life. Its an eastern idea that seems to be penetrating the western mindset slowly. I like to remember a simple easter pearl of wisdom: "When I am hungry, I eat. When I am thirsty, I drink. When I am tired, I sleep. When I feel like dancing, I dance."

As far as I know, all of our bodies die of something or another. A long life has much to give and teach, I hope all the best to you and yours.

Too blind to see God

After watching a short interview with Richard Dawkins and Ben Stein talk about God I began to think on this subject again. How can a scientist, someone who is identified with the rigger and mechanical thinking of science, ever truly see God? There are ways that could make it possible but this is not an intellectual exercise. In fact it has nothing to do with the intellect. It seems that, as is anyone trying to understand something they are closed minded to, they are identified with a certain way of thinking and anything beyond this thinking is literally beyond them. Richard Dawkins is well known for trying to put down ideas of God and I find it amazing because he makes no effort to really relate to ideas presented. He resists this thinking the whole time. So instead of letting bygons be bygons he is actually uncomfortable with his lack of knowledge within himself and attempts to reinforce his own way of thinking.

So how does a Scientist begin to see God? I think its like seeing the forest for the trees. The truth is that there are many scientists that believe in God. And not a god that is some white dude in the sky that created us and filters his prayer emails. God as reality, existence.

You are introduced to new parts of yourself through your life and thus the relationship between you and yourself develops. This is also quite psychological. When you are faced, internally or externally, with that new part of yourself you either resist it or you have a relationship with it and it within yourself. I think this is hard to grasp because we lack confidence in being open to all ideas and truths, we tend to gravitate to one identification of self or another, making any openness foggy if not completely closed. This happens because we are fearful, because we feel separate from reality, as if we are on the outside looking in. And in that case you would be. When you have experienced that relationship, you may look inward. Then all outward experiences are also internal ones.

It seems to be that people just have problems with ideas. Even now as I write this, it is my way of working out my issues with ideas. I see god in a way that I see God. Its infinite, expansive, omnipotent, conscious, and loving. Someone else will see God as a being to worship and to fear, and others will imagine many other forms. This does not make any of them false. Scientists like to believe they have the truth. But truth is relative. Facts are not. The fact is you cannot discount one mans internal truth over another without limiting your own potential to discover something new within your internal experience of reality. I think scientists like Dawkins are actually evangelical scientists. They believe there is no other truth but science truth. That there is no better way to exist in society than as a scientifically minded person. Personally I think its extremely important and normal to live spiritually. Its the way its been done since humans could think. Spirituality to me means we cultivate the ability to relate to reality as life, which it is. As we move into the future in this scientific society/environment our minds are changing. Science is helping people to disconnect from life and thus everyone is beginning to feel broken and lost. Depression is at an all time high. Take back what was already yours.

I feel that if the only reality you are willing to accept is one that you can repeat in a lab then Im afraid you are too uptight about life. I met a woman the other day who insisted imagined thoughts were not real. This is the same line of ignorant thinking. She needs to limit what she can accept as real and true in order to feel secure and comfortable in reality. If those thoughts werent real, then how can they exist?

What Salvia Has Taught Me

It was brought to my attention that it would be in mine and others good fortune for me to speak about my experiences with the legal sage plant called Salvia Divinorum. After having many experiences with the plant and then subsequently giving the experience to others and hearing their findings from their "trips" I have come to the conclusion that most other people dont seem to have the means to convey what they experience, or, they simply dont have any context to put anything into words. So they simply cant talk about it because they dont even know what happened. To them it seems to be like a wild blur.

I dont think that I am special and that others are broken but rather I do think I may be sensitive in ways the regular non psychedelic user would be. I had a heavy, and I mean heavy, experience on LSD which seems to have enhanced my experiences by many times thus making me more sensitive to altered states of consciousness. I dont do much when it comes to drinking or drugs, and never really have, because the chemicals naturally running through my body have become quite intense. Again I think simply the act of taking LSD did not make me "special" but rather it altered my perception making my awareness of my internal workings much more clear.

I first came to know of Salvia after hearing Terence Mckenna speak about it. He said "it takes you far beyond what DMT and LSD can do". And in a way he is right. "Its cheap, its legal, its completely natural, and it is the only psychedelic that works the way it does on the brain". Most involve altering serotonin levels but this one does not. I researched it after hearing about Mckennas admiration of the sage. I read that Mazatec Indians would use this plant to speak to spirits. It is also considered an anti depressant, which I have a theory of why that I will go in to later. I really liked the idea of speaking to spirits. This was all in the middle of my big awakening in life. So I tried it initially with the intention of speaking to spirits directly, not just to trip out and have fun, though that is a part of the experience.

Each experience was new and different and to this day each one is unfamiliar and new. Its like entering a whole new dream each time. During one of my first experiences I got my wish and spoke to spirits. I had turned off the lights in my room, turned on my black light, and all that was lit up were the white objects in the room and the rest were just shadows. As I smoked the leaves and exhaled the smoke into the warm purple glow of what light there was, I began to feel as if the shadows in the room were changing. They soon began to take on a presence of beings. They knew I was there and I knew they were there. Then in my minds eye I met more beings, more spirits. They began to tell me that I had opened a window into their world and they could communicate with me now. They told me that I needed to know I am always surrounded by them and that they love me. To put it more simply, I was reminded that I am always surrounded by love but normally I am blind to this fact. I accepted this and was very happy for them telling me. Then they began to put on a show for me. They laughed at me, not in a demeaning way, but in a loving way. It was happiness itself. Then I laughed at them, with them, simply because I was happy. Love gave birth to joy. This, amongst other more random and fun experiences, was one of the gifts given to me from the use of Salvia. It helped me to see life in a whole new way.

Some people think that these "hallucinations" are false because they are in the mind. So they should be discounted. I think thats a very sick way to experience life. All of life is important and it is all a part of something bigger than you. When you experience the world around you while you are sober, you are experiencing it through chemicals inside your body. Because you, in the end, are not just a single person. You are trillions of cells experiencing life at the same time. When the chemicals in your body change, lets say you become happier, your experience of life changes in that moment, but it does not make it less true. it may be only your truth because it is your experience, but none the less it is real and true and a gift. So throwing another chemical into the mix does not make it false. They say that all the chemicals you can consume only work (make you trip out or feel different) because they mimic what is already inside of you. This means that you already have the capacity to experience life in an infinite number of ways. All meant to give you more depth and wisdom about who you are and what your here to do and be.

The second experience I would like to mention happened only a few months ago. I felt a tremendous pressure on my body and in simple terms, we would call it stress. I did not understand where my stress was coming from but the fact is that it was there and it did not feel good. I decided to smoke some Salvia and give myself an altered state which is a break from the norm that develops. When the experience came on I began to see all the objects around me extend and multiply into oblivion. I soon began to realize that I was being shown the life of each object in the room. Each one came from some where, will go some where, is claimed by someone, was made from something, so on and so on. At this realization I knew that each object was causing me this pressure in my life. I felt a responsibility for it all and that this feeling was only brought to the surface after smoking salvia. Normally, it is a subconscious understanding and something we do not see easily. My house is full of these objects and calling any of them mine is a pressure that is damaging. Yet here we are all doing this.. We get a sense of self from the things in our lives because it seems to give our lives purpose. Without it people tend to feel lost. I think this happens because people are normally quite detached from who they truly are. They are not taught when they are young to cultivate spiritual ideas. Its something I was taught a little but ended up needing to give it to myself, which is all of our responsibility.

I let go of the objects and my stress went away, even if it was for just a few days. I realized they can live with me during their lives but that doesnt mean I need them. A part of me likes the feeling of this attachment that it doesnt want the feeling to end. But if I am willing to see the truth then I will see that this type of thinking is causing me, as a whole, more harm than good.

A similar experience happened during my next session but the concept I received was executed quite differently. This time I was laying on my bed and I could feel some stress. It had been a few months since my last Salvia experience. When the experience came on and I was right in the thick of it I realized I felt no stress. I could see the walls were constructed by infinite beings. Not that they were built by them, but built of them. This time taking on the appearance of a small anime character, not any particular one. But I could tell thats what it was. It repeated infinitely. The movement in the room felt like a roadway. Like a busy street. I was in the middle of a crowded area. My whole room was alive and had turned into an English countryside, at least it felt this way. There was intention moving all about the room. I felt the presence of beings claiming ownership of other things, themselves constructed of other beings, and I noticed that I was doing nothing while all this was going on. None of these beings even cared I was here. Though I did get the distinct feeling that they all knew it too. I was now a fly on the wall and nothing in the room, or world for that matter, was my responsibility anymore. All of the responsibility was taken away from me and my job was simple; watch, observe and be free.

The concepts are similar. I am being shown that I develop attachments to things in my world and daily life. The inevitable effect of these attachments, I like to call "normalizing". We become normalized in our daily lives and we need to break the chains that come with them from time to time otherwise we forget that we are free. Some would even say that our trouble is we become attached in the first place. If I have learned anything it is that we as a society teach it to ourselves. We have been grown and developed to be attached and only those who really wish to be free from these feelings that pin us down will seek and find the truth.

Antidepressants and other pharmaceutical drugs are, believe it or not, derived from psychedelic plants and chemicals. All of them effect each patient differently. The problem with these drugs is that they are not used to heal. They are used to cope. So the effect is not noticed. It only dulls the senses enough that a person can live in the same pain without truly going beyond it by becoming more aware of it. As cliche as it may be, companies prey on the ignorance of the masses. Our whole society has moved away from looking at life as life and now looks at it as a machine. If the machine is broken, the parts must be broken, denoting some sort of permanent unfix-able problem. Why there is so much trust put into a system like this baffles me. As far as I can tell its 100% ignorance. People dont want to learn through these types of experiences because they are scared. They were not raised to do so. While thousands of years ago, and even currently in some areas of the world, learning through shamanism and spiritual experiences by controlled drug induced altered states, awakenings and healing go hand in hand.

Salvia should not be taken lightly but then again I am not sure many people experience what I do on it. I dont smoke extract. Some people smoke 5x, 10x, 100x, etc. I only smoke the leaves. I have chewed it before but its the most god awful taste in the world and you cant swallow it for 20 minutes. You must chew it and mush up the leaves and grind them with your teeth for 20 minutes without swallowing. The chemical Salvinorum A is secreted through your saliva glands in your mouth. This is the way it was originally consumed. If you wish to smoke it tho, make sure you have dry leaves, pack a bowl in a water-bong tightly, inhale a good amount then hold it as long as you can. Do not cough. If you know your going to cough then slowly breath out. Take another and repeat if you can. Then when your vision blurs, set down the bong and relax. Let the experience take hold. Please share your experiences with me if you remember them!

My last thought I want to talk about in regards to salvia is its properties as an anti depressant. Depression, to me, is a disconnection from "God". We lose ourselves in normality and no longer feel we have a place in reality. We feel lost and without purpose. When you smoke salvia, and you experience spirits and beings as I have described, you cannot help but reconnect with your true self and with life itself. If your experience is anything like mine, then you meet beings in undescribable amounts. So many in fact that it is more so a feeling of uncalcuable numbers than anything. And they all love you. This alone brings anyone out of depression. You can tell a depressed person you love them and that they are not alone but they do not "know" it. When you experience the same thing in an altered state you know it because you become it. Love touches you deeply and the connection is made.

I believe we, as humans, are meant to live life as we will while periodically consuming compounds that produce positive spiritual experiences, breaking out of any norms we fall in to.

Change Your Relationship With the Word

In the beginning there was the word, and it was good. Then over time, it went bad, and nobody seems to want to say it anymore because it is now a dirty word. The word is God.

It was a revelation (another tainted word) to me when I finally realized the only thing sour about the word God and what it meant was my relationship with it. As a child in the 80's and 90's God already was tainted. And maybe it has been for a few hundred years if not more. As I grew up it seemed to be a word that everyone wanted to tiptoe around. Afraid to hurt someones feelings or beliefs, the word took on new meaning and became a dirty word. Now no one knows what God you are talking about. So more specific words are used.

In my youth God meant, some guy in heaven, which is a place i had no conception of where it was located, who could watch you all the time and after you died would read your life's sins to you as he slowly shut the gate to you. It seemed rather bleak from the onset and thus I became an atheist. I turned my back on that no good God in search for something that felt better.

Doesn't that seem crazy though? Why would you need to leave God to find something better? This is how you can tell its been bastardized. As a child i went to churches. All kinds of different ones. And maybe, just maybe, the ancient way of delivering the truth of God had begun to fail.

Through the years I moved on into other realms of study, science, philosophy, oneness, conspiracy theory. None of which were truly fulfilling. Then one day it dawned on me. I had a bad relationship with the word God. I hated when people said it and used it. But why should I? Its just a word. I realized that I had a specific identification of myself that I had developed with it. Which is just a relationship. So i started over, gave God another chance. No longer was some strange unknown figure lurking in the shadows of my mind but now it was literally everything, everyone, no one, and nothing. It was me, and you, and everyone. It began to take form as conscious existence itself. But it only took this form when I decided I wanted a real relationship with life. And in the end, its called God.

Now I can revisit the stories in the bible and see the truth in them. God loves us, heaven is right now, hell is right now, if I SIN, right now. Its like I was lost in some ancient translation and the only way out was to abandon the handed down ways of understanding divinity. Which is very akin to what Jesus experienced himself. A man born into a word feeling separate from an established way of doing things. Lost in his own sea of translation and watching as those who preached their words were just as lost, if not more. Lost in a swamp of identification of self through a sense of authority.

If you want to know God more, let go of everything you know about it, and learn from direct experience with it.