Toned down for mortal consumption

I just can't do it. The thoughts come so fast that I have been guzzling beer in an attempt to slow things down, but the practiced tolerance of drinking for 2008 (for honest, I have averaged, AVERAGED, 7 alcoholic drinks per day - I can drink two bottles of wine and then wake up and do it again the next day, hangovers are non-existant and somehow I can still eat one full meal throughout the day, keeping my weight at the sultry 125lbs.) has left my attempts flat on the brain lag and too expensive to continue without more income.

So the last couple of days, playing The Financier have left me face to face with the fear that i have wasted the last 8 years of my life trying to learn the game that rules the world; and now that I have no upward option but to get back into finance and accounting and making money from numbers; I can see the future: it involves me drooling in a straight jacket. Have you seen the movie Quill? All I want is ink and a pen. All I have is a calculator and a new haircut.

The desire of my soul is to dive into psychology. The bent of my mind is to think of philosophy. But the skill of my training is the opposite of these.

I thought I could reconcile all opposites in myself by playing along with them but have found I am only human, though I don't seem to have a human mind, for it dreams of things that are not in this world. How can I have ideas that are not compatible with the present situation of the world? Do the dreams that drive me mad tumble into the psychic compost for more determined minds to grow from? Is my role that of the pioneer and then to be forgotten? What do I care if it is? I won't be making it out of here alive, be it in a coffin or legends, its death all the way down.

I don't want to reproduce because I could never give possibility to these sorts of pains in the heart and head. I have seen that most people admire my ability to think, but can I tell you what a curse it is? This seeing the extremes of all these worlds that make up our variance; this obsession to explain the feelings that posess this damned body of mine. And the knowledge that there are things worth this pain and rewards worth the troubles, but from this troubled mindstate, I can easily discard them to make room for more of the sharpest feelings that I know, those of the extremest of extremes. Sometimes a loving hug draws me, but in truth its no more interesting to me (although to my biology is another story entirely) than a funny tv show...so says the downside.

How i've tried to speak with professional mind-explainers and verify that I am human, but to my chagrin i know more about the mind than those who have received papers saying they know more about the mind. Its not like I am a genius because I don't know how to apply all these marvelous thoughts I live for, but there is undoubtedly some intelligence that is beyond the normal, or at least, habitual, human comprehension - leaving me to rot under the glory of my imaginings.

(I will likely regret posting this later, but its not stopping me...)

Piscean

...Beach of Canoa












[As I sit to write all this in my journal, I have put on this George Harrison album, Brainwashed, which I have never tasted, the first song has hooked me:
"If you don't know where you are going
Any road'll take you there"]

I headed into the ocean with my backpack and shirt and sunscreen underneath and stood for ten mental minutes at least, bandanna'd and all; allowing the motions of all other beachgoers to wash away from me as the waters waved across my ankles, slipping the sand out from under the feet and my heels sank into the sand much quicker than the fronts of my feet as I gave my time and legs to the sea. It lapped across my decisive steadfastness, sampled my flesh and footmind; things were whetted and wetted and like sinking into the sand, my mind sinks into my inclinations and past -- into my depths.

[As I am writing this in my journal, George Harrison is singing
"I’m a Pisces fish and the river runs through my soul
I’m a Pisces fish and the river runs through my soul

And I’ll be swimming until I can find those waters
That’s the one unbounded ocean of bliss
That’s flowing through your parents, sons and daughters
But still an easy thing for us to miss

Sometimes my life it feels like fiction
Some of the days it’s really quite serene
I’m a living proof of all life’s contradictions
One half’s going where the other half’s just been

I’m a Pisces fish and the river runs through my soul
I’m a Pisces fish and the river runs through my soul"]

The Ocean wants me Today, Mr. Waits.

I strip down to my swimmies, stow my pack and wade into the shallows. This is the smoothest beach i've been to, so few shells and rocks and things to confound my feet into feeling the old fears; feet, the awarest part of the Piscean body (Pisces signs: Sun, rising, Mercury and Venus...sorry I was late being born mom, but I had to time it right!) I dig deep into the stillness in my depths and see that under the crashing craziness of the uppermost ocean is a deep stillness I can feel with my feet. I lift them from the seabed with bouyancy and armstrokes. I speed the swimming as a wave comes at my face, and I dive down into the realm of Neptune's mysteries. Coming back up beyind the wave shows me an oceanfull of them. I start catching them with my body, kicking quickly to grab something beyond hold -- to be grabbed by the velocities of the waters caught up in the wave -- and am churned and flipped. My bouyancy acting as insitgator of lost upness. Not even the Mindfolding i've done has prepared me for this type of unseeing.

I have swallowed water many times, but this time was to the chagrin of my lungs and I had to take a breather from holding my breath. But, even with a stomach of salty waters I re-commit to riding The Waves with El Capitan coming into the water late in his latest shorts concoction of sewing the legs of his pants up underrolledneath. We fought the waves by standing strong and even punching palmfulls of energyballs into overhead crashing waters that could crush us at wrong angles. We body-surfed the flows, and many times I had to duck out early as I was too far up the crest of the wave for fear of going over with the foam, into the crashings. But this fear is a real, rational fear that I am kinesthetically determining in the moment; not the fear i've been carrying over the last 10 years or so...that of the Deeps as exhibited by me quavering at just the idea of frolicking in rivers and lakes even, let alone Mother Ocean, anywhere I could not see my feet, is the best way I can calssify it; imagining the beasties and creepy crawlie feelings to be snakes, nibbling animals and the most marvelous of all, Sharks. This was the way I both pushed away my Piscean nature and feared for its existence against the jaws of the deep.

I am floating on my back, laughing as a child- receiving flashes of my life's pleasures and committing a re-orientation of mind via this delicious Buoyancy, my body's disengaging from the gravity, even if ever so slightly and the power of the ocean's waves, goodness and my o my...
I have Rode the Shark into the deep beyond. My path is clear (not determined, but open), my self is reunified, my mind has folded and Grace is salty and floats me with immense swells where the sky opens up and drops away suddenly, and I shudder and sometimes there is a crash and I may get upended with sand in my caw; but I am healing in tune to the pulsings of the worldflow.

I felt little difference as the change occurred within me, because it wasn't an immediate flip of a switch, but the culmination of times spent, most recently with El Capitan Rogue Therapizing me into Mindfolding the falls of Mindo, the waves, the spent slick surfaces of bubbles finally making their energies' way to the shore of this beautiful town, to wash my feet, my piscean pleasure and pain of fear of the Ocean's deeps. My deeps getting released from the dam behind which i've trapped some of the more powerful methods of living I could incorporealate. The change completes into my soul. So the simple act of bringing this all into focus with the every of my senses brought my soul back to me. I find surprise in how recognizable this integration feels.


["You've got me between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" comes on David's ipod. George Harrison is in the room with me. This is beyond me. Even I am at awe at this concretization of thoughticles; and Teilhard de Chardin laughs from the corner of the Noosphere]


When we got back to David sitting by the coconut cart where they will hack a coconut to just the right spot where a straw can be stuck into the milkhole, 50 centavos for the freshest and most nutritious drink on earth, El Capitan saw he had missed a phone call on his cell so he needs to get his computer to the internet.

Later, at a beachfront 'staurant just behind the ramadas, my face burns, though the rest of me seems to have absorbed the sunblock properly. El Capitan is servicing a client in the States from an internet cafe just down the road from this beach. I am staring at this magnificent ocean that I have walked along a thousand times as a thousand different people, and here it is the same ocean as Always.

My's elf & mind & soul all folded together today.

We met in the waters of the Ecuadorian pacific and put the past behind me. For so long now i've proclaimed my greatest fear to be Sharks and the devils of the deep blue sea; in fact many times i've said it is my Only Fear.
So if i've broken through this fear...will others rush in to fill me?
Am I washed free of fear?
Is my acceptance of the world's deep an increase of the complexity of integration into the psychic matrix of Being nearering my soul to the centrality of eternal Love and heartRending bliss through the immersion in the fires of my own fear?
Will this meta-fear, into which I've poured all my urgings away-from-harm, burst open as a pinata and scatter all the little fearlings of my soul into the world again?

I care not as I am with the Sea again.


[a note on the usage of the word Psyche (and its derivatives such as Psychic or other words I makeupify using it as the root)
"The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends."--CG Jung
"The deeper 'layers' of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat further and further into darkness. . . . they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality. . . . Hence 'at bottom' the psyche is simply 'world.'"--CG Jung
Just so you know I'm not talking about mind-reading...more like Mindfulliving]

Manta in the Morning

[Insert gratuitous awesome photo of self El Capitan took in Quito at the International Phenomenon called Shooters.]

El Capitan and I are on the bus to Bahia waiting for it to leave the gate. We've been here for 1/2 hour between buses and i'm strung out from riding the sharkbus all night without even knowing we had gotten on it.

It all started at the Quito station when I was concerned my big bag would not make it into the luggage storage so I kept pestering the employees for to stow my luggage. It was finally time and as retribution for me being a worried gringo making their midnight shift that much more buggy, they had me carry my own bag from where they had set it down earlier and stow it myself. Fine, so long as it is on the same bus as I am.

We all clamored on the bus and organized into assigned seats. El Capitan is saying "this is the nicest bus i've been on in Ecuador, i feel funny," as he is maneuvering his carry-on bag so the juice in one mesh pocket and the vodka in the other side's mesh pocket won't slide out over the 9 hour ride. I got the window this time, and since we are driving all night, its not for the scenery, but to lean up against while sleeping; we try the seats reclining and they lie almost completely flat, so sleeping appears it will be much easier to achieve than i had first feared.
[I am in a place called the Surf Shack, where i can get both coffee & whiskey and internet along with breakfast. There are a couple townies working the place, cooking my sausage and eggs, and smoking and singing with the Beatles; one gringo just walked in with a waterproof ipod and grabbed his surf board that was sitting against the wall behind me. Almost unplugged my laptop with one of the fins. He turned to apologize and saw my face below the bandanna and realized that I was pretty easygoing. His smile turned to a laugh as he saw the half-finished whiskey shot yet to be poured into the coffee. Pretty neat town. Let's get back on the bus...]

I get to situating ipod, in the left pocket, thread the phones under the warming shirt and up to the ear holes, bandanna off-gulp-because the knot presses into the back of my head so i can't lay back, Mindfold onto the forehead, 2.5mg of Melatonin sublingual under the tongue and curl up El Capitan's sweater into a tube to be my neck pillow so the head doesn't roll with every bump and turn, I slip my earplugs into my right pocket, next to the change purse, for ease of access if the ipod doesn't work its minimagic.

Selecting the pre-made Chill playlist of Eno's smoothest, The Habibiyya, Moby's Ambient and the like, I find that the most relaxing of these sounds have no way to drown out the roar of the bus engine which, even though these windows don't open, roars and rumbles into my ears past the phones and garbling the fragile ambient musics of my favorites. So I crank up the volume, which is a paradox to the floaty sounds drifting among my ears.

This is working for the first short while until we pass the city toll booth and exit Quito, where the television comes on and without lifting my fold I determine it is some sort of Knight Riderish action flick that contains untold thrilling car chase scenes judging by the routine tire squeals and minimal dialogue I can't make out, or truly, don't want to pay any attention to; focusing the slivers of my mind that are still awake towards the magic album "If Man but Knew" which I have moved onto infinite looping. The mideastern acoustic has enough waves of sound to pierce thru the surrounding rumbles enough to make it followable thru the night's churning sonic juttings from the beast's engine, brakes and televised inanity. I settle into the slow groove they are digging out of the communal psyche's malleable thoughtstuff; I let my eyes weigh heavier and heavier.

But the action flick is stunning me at intermittent blasts and I am forced to turn the tunes up again. El Capitan is back from trying to take the empty pair of seats behind us when we stop outside of town for the last batch of riders. So we're back to bumping elbows and knees. I can tell we leave the paved road when the bus - heavier than my last mental image of God - is hopping along the riveted road as if we were on the moguled slopes of the Andes, not the muddy roads. Its all downhill from Quito's 9500' to the port city. The momentum behind us makes the curves around the mountain sides full with gravitation. With the switchbacks hidden from us riders by the driver's cabwall, the movements occur as sudden jerks and we are all swaying in our varieties of sleep. I am teetering with a feather's smoothness on the edge of dreamdom so i don't want to tense to fight the convoluted spirals we take around these mountainsides. I suggest to the mind awake that we are on a roller coaster and letting my body go limp around the center of my being is the interest gathered from all the Chi work i've invested into me.

The melatonin is kicking in and my brain thinks my brain is telling my brain its time for my brain's thoughtwaves to settle into sleep sinking synchronization into the spaces of time being taken to arrive each swerve of the bus at its condition of physicality, the feelings become less and thicker, slower. Adjusting the ipod brought a second trickle of sense into curve with the bus' swervature helping to line mind with the body's predicament.

Walking the line between waking and sleep for 7 clock hours means i have been absorbing the Habibiyya's one album something like ten times through. A fleeting connection between this notion and the time mother walked in on her teenage son lying asleepish on his bedroom floor with White Rabbit on repeat, and her illustrating confusion at my preferences and my confusion from being roused by the outside world from my inner respite merged into that oddness where one can't follow another into Life -- swings the line i'm walking like a tightrope into awareness. Sensations come rushing in to fill the higher crest of brainwareness amplitude with swimming, swaying sensations, but overall the total darkness held deeper sway. Changing from The Habibiyya to Songs of Green Pheasant (as introduced to me by the Illuminated Mar-Mar), though it lasted only a single listen through after the sweet sublimation of drone of the lasting night that Man almost Knew settled the curves into the brain's creases. I needed an album that was entrancing enough to drift sleep along this rocky road but sharp enough to cut through the myriad of busship noises as we rolled thru the moon's night. The answer came from the Deep Forest. First of the glorious albums of my musical youth. My original Morpheus.

Awakening in a foreign town after an entire night of off-road bussing up and down the Andes just short of the ocean was one of the least noticeable most extreme experiences i've had.

Into the Fold

Once at Shooters I seemed to have stepped into a voidhole and fell into myself. Deepression and ignoring everybody all night except to order a drink or two. Even when folks were referencing me or speaking to me directly I was ignoring. I was feeling not thrilled being in Quito after the idyllic Mindo, but after a couple of hours of this deep silence something clicked in the back of my head or somewhere near the back of the head and I decided to move into interaction.

Just a bit ago when I was writing the outcome of the JW Marriot escapade at the bar here, one of the patrons tried to speak with me as I was writing. I ignored the words because my head is already full of them and that's why i'm writing can't you see that? So I got to the end and the click and I said,
"thank you for your patience, Atlanta and No."
Like I said I had gotten to the end of writing at that moment but faked it a bit more to let her mull it over. Yeah, I'm a player, but its an entirely different game i'm into.
"Wait, oh, let's see...where are you from and, wait, no hmmm. I can't remember the second question."
"I set down my pen, removed my glasses and was rubbing the bridge of my nose..."
"Uhm" she's had many beers at this beyond midnight point "oh yeah, are you tired?"
"Correct." And I pull the Mindfold down from my bandanna over my eyes.

The world shrinks as the majority of my sensory intake is reduced to a vast black (with the rare faulty pinprick of light from the nose area that needs to be revisited by the manufacturer; might just have to buy the whole company to fix this issue) not a complete eradication, mind you, for when the eyes are open within the fold they are still active and the brain portals they feed are still open accepting the darkness as if it were the picture of the world currently surrounding the mind. The initial urge is to fall into this security and act upon it as if it were truthed. But in this instance the dispellation of such comfort was in the shape of a crowd's roar at something I mentally picturated as a whisp of draft by my cheek that did make me reflexively jerk my neck and head back a half an inch.
"The bartender's sister just tried to kiss you." El Capitan is chuckling and probably rolling that 50 centavo piece across his knuckles while standing behind the bar.

I sat on this for a moment trying to imagine why the initial gambit into this Mindfold was for a stunningly gorgeous girl to sneakify me in such an abrupt manner. We certainly have not exchanged any meaningful words across the language barrier; now you can see why my theory of how stunning I look in this attire is brewing! So I realize I need to play this one cool and I turn to the asker of drunken smalltalk questions, and say "can you tell her to try again?" I sit back with a lilt to my head and stroke my chinwig. She starts "por favor," and I jump in both hands on the bar "I didn't say please" and flash that looney smile that I can't hold back at times. If they are going to be introduced to the Mindfold I ought to make sure its memoric. Too many beers girl swings her voice hole towards my unseeing sound receptors and I focus in on her head which says "it doesn't translate without the Please." I could care less, I've made the ruckus, now I settle into listening for silent movements and am rousing laughters with my dodgings that most times were for nothing, surely not kisses.

The girls of the bar enjoyed this and similar sillinesses narrated by El Capitan's experienced Seership over the situation. So much so that they invited us to go dancing. Which is when the following Mindfolded recordation of the conversation on the previous page of my journal captured the hilarity of the night's merciless pouring of darkness into the Mindfolded open to receive such nonlumination. The next day the sightless writing was easy enough to make out because it took up the whole page.
"Wanna go dancing with us?"
"I didn't even go dancing with my wife."
"You have a wife?"
"Not anymore, I wouldn't go dancing with her."

For pete's sake, its Reggaetone. Have you ever had to listen to that schlop?