When I was 18, through about 22, I was a highly conscious individual, but inoperable in every other way. A spacey recluse bound for a cabin in the woods.
The books of Carlos Castañeda, and the accompanying experimentation that went with it, swept me into an parallax of awareness. My otherwise mundane and damaged upbringing made it easy to alter my consciousness because there wasn’t much to solid ground to fall back on and I figured what the hell why not go ahead and push the boundaries what I’m capable of.
It worked wonders, I tell you. But even Steve Jobs moved on and joined the world. Why can’t I?
(Writing about these things really help me understand why I’m not some current or former hotshot because the truth is — I checked out for awhile and I’ve been coming back since then.)
Now I feel the need to return. Return to absolute truth…beauty. But not nearly in the same way as before — no, that’s brutal and terrifying — but in perhaps the way it was intended: as warrior who operates multiple bandwidths: the body, the heart, the mind; then intuition, happiness & lovingkindness, wealth & prosperity; then the other realms I suppose.
The difference from then and now is that I’m fully accountable for myself and responsible for others. My family is a small but important group and I love them dearly. But I have more to give on a larger scale. And this is the precipice I’m at now—I can support a family working on my own but there’s not much pono between us and within us, and the ship is turbulent, and any kind of external change doesn’t do anything.
The question is — who am I?