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Getting Back Up Again


Arch

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Hey, I'm posting to rejoin the community here as I went off for a hiatus, in that time I relapsed but also went on an adventure to Peru and Mexico in the last six months. 

I know I can overcome my gaming addiction as I've done it before.

I'm currently staying at my older brother's place to redo my 90 day detox. He's recently had a baby and they're both stressed with a lack of sleep so I thought I'd help out with the baby. Last year I read a book called The Boy Crisis and it talked about how important fathers and male role models are to growing a boy. So I want to contribute in what way I can that this boy has a better trajectory than I did. I've come across the concept of Dharma and think maybe he's a part of it somehow.

Anyways gotta go to work on building back a stable sleeping routine, buenas noches.

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So I started not gaming again last Saturday and now it's Wednesday - 5 days. Man... I'm remembering how time goes so slow again when you stop gaming, in the best way possible - I have so much time now.

I'll say what happened on the last episode of Arch. I went to Peru to do Ayahuasca. My intention was to heal myself taking the medicine as I had read online that people would take it and see Serpents and Jaguars, and learn things about themselves in revelatory ways. I was intrigued and felt this as potentially a way out of my feeling of loneliness in this world by figuring out what it is that I needed to fix. Before I left I said to myself "If I don't find a message or direction with the help of Ayahuasca, then I'll take that as the teaching and stop seeking."

At the same time I was thinking of my future as well so I decided to do a TEFL course to teach English because I didn't want to get back to painting when I came back to New Zealand. The Painting industry was filled with people doing a lot of self-gratifying habits. The main person I was working with was an alcoholic who would drink in the morning, morning tea, lunch and just before or after finishing work depending on what he could get away with and I just turned a blind I. Why? He was one of the few people who gave the time of day to teach me things and he was one of, if not the best painter in our team. I was getting paid and I just wanted to sift through the few remaining months keeping my head down waiting for the escape to a strange land near the Amazon. 

I respect something which I believe to be true and that's "You are the average of the 5 closest people next to you" and I could foresee myself going down a dark path if I stayed just another 2,3 or a few years more in painting. My consciousness for being aware of what is right and wrong is generally good but I think even if I stayed, given time, I would start drinking casually, cut corners around work and business as usual. I learnt a bit of confidence by working in trades and found it quite an honourable job but found myself not cut out for this line of work.

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So fast forward my Ayahuasca experience. I had drunken 1 full shot glasses several times in the first week and toward the end of the 2nd week, I raised my concerns that I felt kinda scammed and asked for 2 glasses and at the last ceremony I had 2 and 1/2. For reference, 1 glass is enough for most. I took part in 8 ceremonies over 2 weeks. I didn't learn too much. There were a few factors for this.

1. Potentially the brew we were drinking was weak as I had several other journeyers go past the centre and take part in ceremonies and they each had mild effects similar to me. 

2. I had done around a significant amount of introspective use of Psilocybin Mushrooms to prod my ego, learn about my weaknesses, ask myself tough questions and look at life from a different perspective. So it may have been that I had gained a lot of self-development where I didn't need more, and this is what Aya was telling me, without telling me. I hadn't taken any other Psychs for over a year so I don't believe I had any high tolerance grow.

3. The Shaman there sensed that I had a spirit of Cannabis clinging on me and said that this spirit doesn't work well with Ayahuasca so he spent the beginning of the 2nd week 'extracting' this spirit using direct chanting to it, to draw it out. He said he was successful but still I didn't experience the grand things I had read online of life-changing revelation.

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ONE THING I DID EXPERIENCE:

One great thing I did experience akin to the eye-opening accounts was the one and only time I did purge, which is an important part of the medicines work. You basically throw up which the shamans say is the toxins and bad shit you keep inside coming out, spirits, thoughts, etc. What caused me to purge was when I was thinking about my relationship with my Dad, which I think is at the core of many of my problems. Me and him have generally been quite distant and during the ceremony I thought to myself "I will only show affection or hug my dad if he fits the expectation of what I see in a dad" That... thought made me puke in disgust at exited my mouth as if it was sheer nonsense on an atomic level. I didn't exactly expect the medicine to point this out to me as I was expecting a kaleidoscope of visions.

I think in western society, and I am guilty of this myself, is that we are taught to believe that getting ONE thing will suddenly improve your life. I call this "Pill Society", pop the pill in and tummy's all better. I went to the Amazon doing this exact thing and I think Aya was teaching me that maybe there is nothing wrong with me at all, and all this searching was the problem. As cliche as that sounds, I'm starting to realise a lot of cliches seem to be rooted in a bit of truth.

What I found even more impactful on my mental wellbeing than the Aya experience itself was actually the environment. In modern society we live in unnatural environments, cars go whizzing by, dumpster tracks signal for rubbish collection, aircrafts fly overhead and we are on a constant schedule of GO and GO! Haven't got time for this activity? Spent less time on something else to be more efficient. Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. Don't have time to cook? Buy takeout. So what goes at the cost of this efficiency and speed? I think it's appreciation. And what are the effects of an unappreciative society? No enjoyment, self-hate turned into agitation and anger at others, stress, stress eating and an endless list of self-gratifying habits that replicate 'The world is finite and shit, so I better get mine!' And where does that lead? The destructive world we live in today.

I was taken aback by how I had time to just be with myself as there was no rush to go anywhere, no person to work for. I lived simple days and was fed a bland diet of simple food - no sugar, no salt, no oil, no meat, no sex. Nothing that would spike my senses in any given direction. This diet grounded me at it left my mental state clean from cravings and I could read clearly and write my thoughts down with more clarity and sense. There were days that were 30-33 degrees in the jungle with moderately high humidity and it made me appreciate the few days that were windy and able to cool my body. I also experienced a thunderstorm there which was insane, it felt like the gods were little babies in the skies clashing sticks against each other and we were little ants feeling their wake.

Another journeyer said what was at the heart of why he was there was to build a permaculture ecosystem around the centre with abundant fruit and animals. This stuck out for me as I think this tied back to my appreciation point. Growing a garden takes months, or years to nurture and harvest fruit. Sometimes they don't and are ravaged by disease, natural disasters and the sort. Nothing is exactly a given and the grower needs to pay close attention to nurturing that garden. In this process it teaches the grower to learn to be patient and hence appreciative of what it takes for good things to become. This is what is desperately missing in our society that is at the core of what is rotting us to kill each other and our planet. We don't have a value of life so it is disposable. Anyways I'm talking about this because now I want to start on a garden to learn this myself.

Here's beautiful sounds of the nature I recorded whilst there

Edited by Arch
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