Pedaling into the hill

Packs loaded with food

Plastic crate and copper ties

First night, a helping hand

The purge

and wolves in the distance as I look to the stars

Body is calm, the mind is racing

Solitary

I wrote:

Perception – Index to thumb

Suggested Perception – Middle to thumb

Storyline – Ring to Thumb

Direct Experience – Pinky to thumb

The breath is the link to the direct experience

When storylines overwhelm

the body is a safe place for the mind,

The breath can bring one to the body and to the moment.

But sometimes we float away

Mind hoping from place to place,

friend to relative, relative to stranger

Monkey mind.

Learning how to focus, self is the root.

Ones work can bring focus.

What are we working on?

How best to fallow your own light?

After a night with my knife in hand

Animal noises in the woods,

or were they in my head,

Uncertainty.

A sharpened pointy stick,

A few practice jabs

I wonder how much force it takes to stick a predators body.

Fear.

The mind chatters.

Who’s voice?

Who’s voice is that?

Back to the breath

Breath and sound are now

But the brain is making things up,

Back to the breath.

A circle of stones

By the fire as darkness surrounds,

The mind races

then slows.

I gaze into the flame

primal and ancient.

A squeaky plastic version of NOW pops in and out of my head,

In and out as I maintain a solitary presence in this wooded ravine,

My NOW is covered in ashes, My NOW is these woods,

And still the plastic world pops in and out of my brain.

What pulls at my mind as danger lurks outside my ring of light.

What penetrates my thoughts so violently with its demands for attention.

I thought to burn off the plastic trophy coating that covers my skin

So I can feel the raw nerves of natures reality telling me how numb I can be

white body and skin

What is fear for if not these moments.

The suburban world can feel

so fake,

so controlled.

I am thankful for a roof, a place to stay

Grandad’s home

Inherited, Shared

Family provides and allows a lot for me

but the games that are played in the ethereal mind of that suburb

distortions, disturbing

Or perhaps its just life, perhaps that is just the way my life feels right now.

Crazy?

A hospital, a rehab center, and a handful of voyeuristic somebodies may say so.

“His play game world is no world at all,

a play game reality for the taking,

he holds no truth to our might of minds!”

Friend or Foe?

The cul-de-sac, A dreadful headful of wonderment, the true, the amazing and the unreal.

Age and wisdom, what to carry forward?

Stuck between realities like a permaculture golf course.

Blissed out on the island till the strange ripples on the distant water spoke of danger

Now here in this wooded ravine

The fear prompted preparedness

I got scared, I got ready.

I got so ready that I could not sleep all night.

So ready that I thought to lie down with a bike helmet on, so no mountain lions would slash at my skull

So ready that I had my front bike tire in the tent to use as a shield,

prepared to jab through the spokes with my small stainless steel knife.

The truth and falsity of my presence in those woods,

A trip to Shambala, a grand story-line

My actual living body, no story-line,

all story-lines droped

Throbbing, pulling tension on my kneck and brain

Pressures on my lungs and chest.

A presence felt

Like people passing through my body

Glancing at my thoughts, peering through my eyes

No matter the feeling, numb, raw, surreal or imagined.

The dirt forest floor spoke of time

The same earth as its been for all of humanity

All the stone monuments,

All the bodies covered in ash,

All events to ever take place.

Everything seems possible and nothing needs to be done.

here am I, in this wooded ravine.

I return to the breath,

Save the existential conundrum for a time when I’m less appealing as a meal

After all, in the wilderness,

Alone,

Came out here to be alone and to think,

To meditate and climax spiritually

So far, heaps of fear peppered with my own fluff

Remnants of an anxious hypochondriac

and a mind jumping from place to place.

Somtimes a chorus of berating voices like miffed house wives,

unhappy with my sooted hands, whiskey flask and loosly rolled spliff.

Who set up this journey?

Who writes this story?

I feel like a stuffed picnic basket,

filled with all the necessary mind meals from town,

each to nibble on while living for a while without walls.

The fear helps the realness of the moment into my experience,

The only thing to fear is fear itself….

Working with fear to move through fear.

A fearful lens, a perception of fear

and the possibility of a mortal animal attack…

The possibility that I am a mindless zombie,

plugged into The Borg,

force fed a game-ish goulash of pleasantries and fallacies

while regurgitating a brain scrambling bravado of boastful numb-skullery.

What do I know.

Back to the breath.

Lyrics from a Greatful Dead song come to mind

“When Life looks like easy street…

There is danger at your door.”

In they came, upon my shores

This space here, this is your head? What do you do here?

Prove it while we watch

We love to watch.

Sometimes ahead,

Sometimes behind,

Back to the breath

The breath is now

Fearful nights turn into the next days journey

I pedal and walk,

experiencing mind and body

Body in the environment,

Bliss, pain and the wilderness

Strange Meditations,

Strange body feelings,

Thinking,

Moments when it felt like internally something was pulling two minds apart

separating them into one of each

moments of crazy

moments of phase change

My brain popping in and out of connection

 with the other human brains

The bio-electric circuitry of the human organism

A shifting of perception

As if walking in someone else’s shoes.

The sun goes down again…

Did I just hear something

Coyote?

Coyote is fine

Wolves and Bears,

Ill get loud

Lion, no Mountain Lion

No big cat please

Did I just yell into the woods at nothing

Will that attract a predator?

Shit, where’s my knife

I’ve been watched by them before,

You can feel it when you might just be their prey

Sounds like Bears in the distance

A male and a female in the woods

Belowing to one another

Distant, one in each ear

as I lay in the wide open meadow

The experience of vision snapping into and out focus

different focuses

something races

something terrifies

something hurts

something loves

something is felt

I let something in, only because I have no barriers

Something passes through me, something stays

Sometimes a feeling of a strong energy

or presence passing through the body

Ancient we are

The mysteries of the human body and the experience of consciousness

There is so much to it

This business of being

All that has happened is unknowable

All that is, is impermanent

What is constant through all the change?

Natures way

Life until death

The most ridiculous accounts of the strange and bizarre

Experienced

Shared and interpreted

Even the most logical person has experienced the unexplainable

Experience beyond the logic of science and the faith of religion

The truth of process, perception, self and other

Mortal, eternal, cosmic and auspicious

The mind moves like water

Thoughts like weather.

Impermanent.

How different ones brains perception can be from another. How different the forms of communication can be. The heights and depths of the mind and how our brains touch once another. Some navigating with intellect, others with feeling, the visceral, the intellectual how they can champion and neglect each other so. Best when they work together, issues get resolved, problems get solved.

How different the story lines can be, how beautiful the droping of the story line and the return to the breath. Grasping at strands of thought in the mind only to miss and find oneself embodied, holding on to nothing, a chance to glimpse direct experience, many times repeated, the practice of a meditative mind.

No matter who you are or where your from, the breath is the universal link to our bodies, and a return to the breath points one to the present moment, sharpening observation of ones surroundings, a focus on ones intentions, actions and the observation of the mind.

Roosevelt Nation Park, via Rist Canyon Road. Mind and body, searching for each other as I pedaled, bike loaded with, food and inherited gear, plastic milk crate tied down with copper wire to the back, a bike I built myself out of used and recycled materials, and my old backpack that I’ve since taken all the way around the world. I had planned a trip to Shambala like this years ago, although not exactly like this.

Before I went to South East Asia, I visited Shambala Mountain Center near Red Feather. I had been reading some books by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche author, artist, founder of Naropa University, Shambala and meditation master.

I’ve never been a religious person, but I have always been drawn to the ancient, the cosmic and the spiritual, appreciative of temples, natures beauty, outdoors with no shoes on, beer in one hand, spliff in the other, gazing at the stars, enjoying the natural beauty of the world. The plants, the mushrooms. Observation, self discipline, stillness, movement, vegetarian diet. Buddhism has always appealed to me because of the ancient and undying wisdom that is conveyed via the art, architecture, philosophy and the practice of meditation. Buddhism like Science is most interested in the nature of reality, and focuses on our relationship to consciousness, nature, matter and the universe. Four years ago, I traveled to the Stupa, placed my grandfathers harmonica on the pedestal of offerings and entered the structure. 

I sat in the corner and peered up at the two story tall golden Buddha, a painted mandala on the ceiling, and on all the walls decorated with intricate geometric designs and rich pastels colors. New to meditation I sat uncomfortably and worried about all my short comings, habits and inadequacies in front of the venerable and dignified figure of the Buddha. He did not care about my nerosis, he laughed, and asked me to learn to laugh at myself. I was on my way to Hawaii and then S.E. Asia, all the way west I was saying to myself. I told myself that once I went all the way around the world, my phase of this journey would end at Shambala, here again, in front of the Buddha. 

After a food tour of Thailand, a short Monastery stay at Tam Wua Forest Monastery, walking for miles and miles through Myanmar, Submitting a 20,000 foot peak near the base camp of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas (We got lost in a thick fog that night, stuck at 17,000 ft, exposed to the elements, 32 degrees Fahrenheit and falling, in a survival huddle with my good friend and travel partner), and then visiting the birthplace of the Buddha in Lumbini, Nepal. I returned home 3 days before devastating earthquakes hit Kathmandu.

I’ve been back in Colorado for a few years, and this past fall I was hospitalized after experiencing an insomnia event that lasted a week. A franticness took hold of me, chaos. Since then things have been strange. Body and mind in and out of sync and my self directed momentum pulled this way and that. A new awareness, unexplained body feelings, and energetic shifts in my brain. I turned to nature, I walked, a lot, reflecting through drawing and by writing, frustrated with the way my mind was working. Even if nothing ever becomes of it, the process of creation helps to recreate self, through process, and to think with intention and work with the subconscious.

The result is not the only focus. Like writing it out on paper we write on our own minds, and on the minds of others, with our words, our actions, exchanges, and creativity. Whether by choice or not, my identity has ebbed and flowed due to what I’ve experienced, what I’ve been learning about the circuitry brain, the mind body connection, and how we are all interconnected. With whatever comes up, while remaining present and focused. Fear, joy, pain, anger, memories, excitement, direct experience.

As I have worked to keep my mind free from invasive presences, I remind myself about working

Opening to the power of the human mind. Great beauty, benevolence, hatred and destruction. Learning of respect for the mind. I am one brain, one body, feeling, sensing, thinking and a part of the mind, a group mind, the earth mind, learning, thinking, feeling together.

After a recent seasonal position at Gullie Greenhouse ended, I loaded up my bike with the same old backpack I took to Asia, and set off last week to finish my trip as I had said I would, by returning to Shambala to find what I would. This decisions came this past week to go up to the Mountain Center because of the internal turmoil and external confusion I’d been experiencing in relationship to my own experience and the problems of our world, our environment, our plastic waste problems, energy, social dynamics and responsibilities.

Urgency calls to my mind, there is a perceived demand for action, but recklessness is the enemy of progress. Chaos is necessary, unavoidable, but ones response to chaos can be the deciding factor between a step forward and a step back. Crisis can be a dangerous opportunity. My personal experience has been extremely strange, feelings of bodily in-habitation, while sitting alone, experiencing something dehumanizing and objectifying. A watchtower of the mind, controlling and judgmental. Hard to describe, something ominous, and invasive. Perhaps my own body and mind are trying to tell me about unseen danger, perhaps something unreal. I’m a creative person, I have believed past logic to investigate realms of experience, but I’m also a logical person, standing on a sturdy base of scientific and worldly understanding. These experiences I’m trying to describe are surreal. It is difficult to measure the individual experience. Many have occurred while free of substance, many with psychedelics, drinking and smoking ganja. Forms of communication seem to transcend barriers of space and time in order to maintain relations and to be true to nature. Even if one spends a lot of time not speaking, they are still communicating with the world, body, sensation, mind, reaction and resistance. The experience became a dive into contemplation, sometimes free form, sometimes focused, experimenting with my body and mind and digesting all my findings through the same mind I was experimenting on. While looking inside, I noticed all else. Life is an experiment and an experience, locating natural and social boundaries is part of that experiment and is part of understanding the extents of personal freedom, our interconnection, entanglement, and the karmic cause and effects of exercising our freedom, our individualism. We can act as free as we want, but we are intertwined, connected, we begin to push and pull on each other, on our minds, brains and bodies. Our actions effect our environment, our friends and families, the animals and the biosphere. Mindfulness and intentional action is the practice of recognizing that we are all connected, and we are always acting within an interconnected environment. Recognition of this can be paralyzing and awkward as well as incredibly beneficial and can lead to compassionate action and humble strength. I’ve been reaching out more recently, but there is defiantly something valuable in spending long periods of time alone, in nature or in our spaces, not speaking, just listening, looking.

The challenge of direct experience is to navigate uncertainty.

 I spent the past year meditating every morning, and sitting every evening, without TV, without much input other than some podcasts and music, feeling, sensing and thinking. Its amazing how much of the outer world one can pick up on when they are still and aware, focusing internally. Sounds crazy I know but its been a very real experience for me. Distracting story lines of games, zodiac signs, shape shifting, voices and auditory hallucinations, something guiding beyond logic, is it the earth that speaks to us, through us, over the past year I’ve experienced the amazing, the bizarre, the untrue, the misleading, the creative and the destructive. As is life, but I’m thankful for it as an experience, it has made me stronger and provided as one who is interested in the operations of the mind and the benefit of the group, I’m trying to honestly convey aspects of the experience in hopes that there is useful or beneficial information for anyone who is interested or whom it might help with understanding of their own mind. Insights and direction towards mental health. In the group mind, brains chasing threads often get intertwined and sometimes knotted. Communication can help us untie and untangle, clarify and connect. Through direct experience, communication occurs instantly, we perceive it naturally, the languages of body and voice. The shared experience of sensation. The languages of now, sight, sound and feeling. The process of honest reflection, feeling and thinking, working together to paint a beautiful and accurate picture of ones relationship to humanity and the earth system. 

Moments of personal terror, all night meditations, contemplation of mortality and the edge of life on my mind, feeling like I was on the edge of a cliff, death at the bottom, a mass of people getting pushed back, people falling off the cliff with nowhere to go, hopelessly scrambling as they get pushed off the edge and into oblivion. The true travel of day to night, and those pushed from the cliffs edge fall into the reality of death, never to wake. These illusions and voices of distraction and hate. Get them gone, this deceptive reality! Is this systemic, is this mental affliction a form of mind control, is this the nature of things, is this an oppressive force evading the mind?

The interesting thing about reality is 14 out of 15 people make it up. If 14 out of 15 agree that we will never run out of fossil fuels or that climate change is not real, than the 1 who disagrees will be displaced, and the 14 others will live as if there is no problem. There is a problem. Our minds, our bodies, our climate. Care for each other and care for the truth about how our world is, our environment, our creations.

I know that I am not alone in this feeling, this paranoid search for truth beyond the vail of mass confusion, through our suffering. Although I know not all is well, for the sake of my being and my sanity, I find my seat each morning, I look at my mind, what is me, what is forced upon me, I sit with pain and fear, and sometimes I find relief and protection. I sit, I breathe. The breath is never a lie.

In the evening I sit with a beer, and a spliff. Still, compassionate, meditative and slightly buzzed. Less of a focus on maintaining a frame of mind and more a focus on the flow of things. Often the angry voices come piping in the networks of my mind, my daily life, the people I know, the connections I make. Straight into my head, the voices of the world. My brain aches many days, processing, processing, processing. Good or bad, it is irrelevant, it seems to be happening in my reality. Sometimes collaborations of thought, sometimes arguments, sometimes i’m berated for my choices, and for how I enjoy my free time, or who I choose to think with. My understanding of self being tested moment to moment.

Is all this interconnectedness the nature of the human mind, all of us together, shaping the human organism in a direction that will empower future generations, protect the environment and bring sanity to our minds, or is this a colossal human ego trip, a group experience, the american god minds in the atmosphere, bearing down upon the earth, bearing down on all existence, a blissed-out existence as we devour our resources and destroy the biodiversity of earth. I ask out of honesty, and I’m not trying to be negative, just realistic about what I perceive in the world around me. Positive, negative or neutral, the truth of how we effect each other and the earth is not an opinion.

My practice and my time spent alone provided a mind bending incite into what is real, what is important and what is not. Now how to communicate, how to reintegrate with trust and confidence in my experience, on my own as my own.

If one can not be themselves, spliff in one hand, beer in the other and say “I think a better world is that way“, then how can all those beer handed folks start moving from what suppresses us to what empowers us, what allows us to make the decisions about the future, our climate, where our food comes from, how its grown, how we talk about and bring attention to the issues, how we make noise about it, how we live and work together, how our built environment effects us all and how commerce and consumerism shapes our minds and habits until we are unable to function without.

Where can we work towards it endlessly, without burning out, without being forced to the floors of the mind and of society, what progress can be made if divides exist in the mind so deep and cavernous that all is broken down into us and them. It is a sign of troubled times when power is wielded to turn the people against themselves, and to skew all perceptions of friend and foe. What is a game and what is real? The suburban world around me is peaceful and yet I sit at the heart of something, tensions ebb and flow, pushing, pulling, feeling and freedom. I have gained knowledge from both the generations past and those coming up the trail behind me. As Neil Young said, “old enough to repay but young enough to sell” Where do I go next?

I’ve gotten to know them these feelings of pain and fear. I do not want to feel or to be treated this way, but since it continues to happen, I find ways to work with it and my own reaction to it. Sometimes I can remain calm, sometimes I feel a need to get away. Sometimes I drink and smoke. Sometimes I stick with it, sober, stoic and busy.

I write it all down to shake it off, then scrap it, or save a file hoping to get back to it, seldom do I put it out there. A creative release has consequences, words have power, process is important, and honesty is king. The process of writing reminds me of what is real about how I feel and if its real enough to share or help others understand there own shit. Solidarity in suffering. I know what my practice does for me and what it means to me and perhaps in sharing my less than shiny side I can convey just how the practice of meditation helps me, and whats real about it and what is mythology and fluff.

I wanted to explain something of my experience to the world, through uncertainty, my recent experience. Such strange and personal happenings, unexplained in my perception, alone but in connection with, feelings of in-habitation, visitors to my lonely body, guides and guest, gaukers and ghosts. I’m learning about transmission, attuned communication, the neuroscience of the brain. Something to help explain this phenomenon. The neuroscience behind how our brains write and are written, ideas, habits, thoughts and communications etched into our grey matter. We are bio-electric vehicles of soulful expression, heads like power station, wielding electric and magnetic energy. What we feed our bodies and how we attract and how we repel, how we push past comfort zones, in our minds, in our brains and bodies, and in our environment to help each other solve problems and move forward. Sometimes stillness is required. Forward at the wrong time or suddenly lurching in a direction can set everything back.

Consumption of alcohol seems to decrease ones awareness of the phenomenon of being manipulated and it seems to increase the possibility of being written upon, meaning ones brain function, when intoxicated is more susceptible to mimicking the resonant frequencies of other brains more active or powerful within the environment, but how to remain flexible to the flow. flow Therefore, one who maintains low and constant brain activity can be biologically manipulated, if there are no defenses in place against other brains and the intentions of individuals. To wonder, is to fight brain to brain to become rigid, specialized, combative, to remain plasticized is to be adaptable, changing with the situations and being fluid, and constant to change.

The rigidity of the ego and the fluidity of the egoless. Frameworks are designed via experience and the process of learning, brain shapes of knowledge and understanding, compatibility, how to work, whose to lead, who is to fallow, and who to partner with, in work and life, natural processes.

Interconnected brains, chasing patterns, building and deconstructing monuments of thought, exchanging information, wielding power, teaching, learning and sharing in love and kindness, the vail between individual and the group waxes and wains. Hope and confusion, understanding and exchanges, competition and harmony, lies, deceit, deception and resolve, all in the mind, all in the brain. Disputes and issues, discussions and games. We together think and feel the world and our environment. Thoughts become actions, actions become reality and our creativity shapes the ecosystem, each other and the things we build and create together.

Aiming for love, hoping for peace, my mind my perception as it is, contemplative, creative and meaning no harm. Imagination and truth, and the flexibility of investigation and the openness of curiosity, I invite honesty, ask for forgiveness from any harm caused, we can sometimes step on each others toes without realizing it, and sometimes we dance in circles, foot upon foot until friendships build, through the bumps and exchanges, as minds learn of other peoples ways, and a place of discussion can be found, a truthful place of progress.

The neuroscience of the brain, paths of understanding etched upon our gray matter. All music, all media, spoken word, and thoughts, shaping and growing, leading or misleading our brains. 

         I had to go to my spiritual places, nature and those beautiful structures of Buddhism that I found here at Shambala and all over Myanmar, Nepal, and Thailand. Spiritual and turbulent this trip brought me into the heart of fear, stretched my mind and body apart and slapped me back together, duct taped and wholesome. The truth of Enlightenment, illusion, that which is real and that which is not, my investigation has me in a place, experiencing the old and the new at the same time, versions of me colliding, separate and whole, hoping and heaving, lifting, living and dying, writing a new story with the old pen I found on an ancient dirt trail, the savior and the sad sack, destruction, creation, the heart and the mind, 

From shelter, to a mind wide open, my fathers trails, my mothers presence, my need for balance, and the beacon of consistency that is the middle path. The darkness of feeling less than human, where does the balance lie between abundance and scarcity? How confident should I be in my good fortune? How to approach issues of who has and who has not? To build ones self up, to break oneself down, to look at all the pieces and reassemble ones mind. What is it to have the ego dis-empowered, be flooded by the world of minds and begin to rebuild ones mind with all the information. The depths of mindful existence, natures beauty, the truth of the plants, the soil and the water that we collect and share, refreshing growth, nurturing and evolving. I still push and pull on those around me, neutral for moments, fluid, then rushing, static then over the waterfalls edge. Like the grass growing through the river of asphalt , confident in uncertainty, pushing through towards the sun is the way I’m suppose to go.

I don’t wanna do harm for money.