St. Lucia provided a brilliant backdrop for a series of experiences one day that stated with journaling. The combination of the tropical “at home” feeling that I was getting combined with a section of a Graham Hancock book that I was reading where he was discussing his Ayahuasca journeys got my mind moving. Some of his quotes both resonated and activated something within me. A recognition that reality is a series of layers starting with gross primal substrate and moving up into spiritual realms. We each experience a particular level that is associated with the moment in which we find ourselves psychologically, but we also influence each of those moments. One may find themselves in a powerful enlightened state for an instance, then due to patterned, learned or fearful thinking, find themselves in a more primal state of mind a moment later that is influenced by selfishness, confusion, or fear.

I expected that St. Lucia would provide me with experiences keyed to my current path through the realms. My smaller mind was concerned with going into the unknown but also curious. The Caribbean Islands is of course the place where voodoo shamanism manifests. I quickly realized that it was no coincidence that the random location where my current Graham Hancock bookmarked located was bringing me toward these thoughts in this place at this time.

Last week while chatting with Jan and brother-Brian, I realized the connection between Brian’s interest in near-death-experiences (NDEs), Jans current dream studies and my focus on psilocybin journeys. Our brains may be providing a containment system for our small individualized allocation of the consciousness that permeates the universe. When we sleep, a part of this containment system goes offline, and we are free to experience levels of consciousness outside of ourselves. When someone experiences a severe mental trauma or near-death event, the brain stops containing the conscious mind and we are able to have an out-of-body experience. When one takes a plant-fungal medicinal, a specific part of the brain, the default mode network is shut down, allowing us to explore further reaches of consciousness. All of this is consistent with the idea that we are not this material body. The further that we detach from this idea, the more expansive our experience. The greater that one attaches to the body and the objects that it gathers, the more primal the experience and awareness. From this perspective, reincarnation and spiritual afterlife start to make more sense.

We have yet to figure out how life comes out of matter. Science is only looking at existence as a machine. The intention to live, sprout, grow, give birth, reach toward the sun, those are all consciousness. One conscious entity begets the next. There is no evidence of spontaneous conscious life out of inert ingredients. While science views the idea that matter coming out of consciousness as fantasy, the real fantasy is the equation Matter => Life. The only evidence that we have is that Life (consciousness) => Matter. Occam’s Razor…this is the simplest answer, but it frightens most everyone because it means that the mystery of our existence and experience is a lot more complicated under this framework than we are able to wrap our still developing and limited minds around. A fear there is something beyond our reality which we cannot see, test, observe or know from the limits of our normal waking conscious experience. The idea of altering one’s consciousness frightens most people, despite the fact that they do just that when they drink alcohol, smoke, have coffee, dream and more. They don’t realize they have brainwashed themselves into a limited and limiting perspective.

Prayer, devotion, love, meditation, and enlightenment all use our normal waking state to alter our state of consciousness. We find value and meaning in these things. We organically aspire to gain more awareness. And yet we cling to our material reality. We don’t want to let go. The irony is that releasing our attachment to the material world does not make it go away or take us out of our material experience. The material world is playing an integral role in this earthly experience that our consciousness is participating in. Where we get caught up is the desire, focus, and effort that we put into acquiring and maintaining all our stuff. We want more. We don’t want to lose any of it. While in St. Lucia my travel companion and I mutually put energy and effort into seeking out property here. We wanted a house in St. Lucia, despite the fact that this place is always going to be here, and we can visit any time that we want. The experiences are taking place in our minds and can be had anywhere. We just need to build an awareness, recognition, belief, memory, and practice to activate this awareness. Granted, we do actually do this everywhere we travel as part of an active fantasy to envision what it would be like to live in a foreign location, but there is an element in the back of my mind that is pretty serious about actually wanting to do it.

I recently learned a very lovely concept. That we are not material beings attempting a spiritual experience, but rather we are spiritual beings having a material experience. By flipping this around, it allows one to envision infinite possibilities and takes the pressure off seeking out your “true purpose.” For just your presence and participation is a true enough purpose, as you expand and evolve awareness that this is more likely what is occurring.

It is far easier to live in a world of matter. Where life springs from matter. It absolves us from the responsibility for the things that “happen” to us. It gives us a false perception of greater ease and comfort, but this is all built as a house of cards. Any event can topple that house such as divorce, disease, death of a loved one, accident, natural disaster, theft, or loss. These types of events cause immense amounts of pain for most people. Pain is self-inflicted. Even physical pain, which is an electro-chemical signal put in place to bring to awareness a danger to the body, is often made far worse by what it represents, which is loss. Lost mobility, youth, pride, freedom, and a degraded self-perception. We are reminded of this loss with a continual stream of pain. Awareness of the pain and each thought-feeling-emotion cycle generated from the pain/loss perpetuates and enhances that pain. It is quite possible that the miraculous healing that people experience stems from raising oneself into a higher state of consciousness where a detachment from the loss takes place, allowing the pain to dissipate and healing to accelerate.

The bigger challenge for most people is to accept that matter comes from consciousness and that their awareness is prime. The irony is that it is far easier to let go than to cling to the material world. Fear is the only thing that holds one back. Once one lets go, redirects focus and generates acceptance, everything begins to magically fall into place. Not that we all get what we want, but that we recognize appreciation for what we have and what does come our way. This results in contentment that generates gratitude. All of this elevates one into the higher emotions on a more consistent basis. This new state of mind generates awareness when one falls out for a brief moment of anger, road rage, confusion, or fear.

Acceptance that you injured yourself, missed a flight, got into a car accident or any number of loss moments, that there is an experiential lesson to be had is very hard medicine to swallow. We then expend an enormous amount of energy fighting, lamenting, and punishing. Forgive yourself and others. Move on. Allow things to unfold. Learn and experience. It takes energy to punish yourself and others. It takes only awareness to forgive and move forward.

One’s attitude and outlook will influence all experiences. A restaurant worker charged me $1,000 EC Dollars more than the amount due for dinner. It was quite possible that it was intentional. She was being smarmy and activating mostly from her low emotional mind and body, even going so far as to blame a young woman working behind the bar when she had to call the owner to come down to void the charge, even though I watched her do it. I forgave her and was gracious. The owner, Shaheed and I talked for 45 minutes about both being from California with lots in common, including non-revenue stand-by free flying his whole life as a child of Delta. “Bad” things are always going to happen. They are going to challenge us. Will we remember to stay elevated in our higher selves or will we fall into our lower emotions, patterned thinking and learned ways. Which energy we infuse into the moment is going to affect the outcome, and thus the next series of potential events.

Once one moves through these fields of awareness and spends more time in the world of higher emotions, one begins to innately recognize that we all have additional subtle energy powers. Auric energy fields are just such subtle energies. What energy one is putting off while encountering a person, or a situation is going to directly impact what the experience. Energy that is loving, kind, compassionate and adventurous is going to have a very different effect than nervous, guarded, combative, or concerned energy. If the gate agent that I approach with my ticketing issue is floating in low emotions, they are going to present as unfriendly and not very helpful. If I am able to maintain my higher state of emotional awareness, then I can partially defuse their energy and influence part of the outcome. Dropping down into their energy field is likely going to result in a poor outcome, or at minimum make the experience more unpleasant than it needs to be. This is challenging for all of us, but it comes to the core of why our consciousness became entangled within this human brain to begin with.

Human life is clearly an enormous challenge in this regard, where we are being tested every single moment. Stubbing our toe, opening a challenging piece of mail, thinking about our financial struggles, and that doesn’t even begin to consider interactions with other humans. Pursuing “enlightenment” might seem like a daunting personal challenge, but generating characteristics that help to elevate one’s own experience into lighter and higher emotional states clearly has a higher energy field. Everything in the universe is energy, including the human body, and all energy vibrates at different frequencies. A climb toward living in the higher set of emotions feels good to oneself and to those around them.

Afterword

As I finished journaling the above, I felt a wave of internal energy as my personal realization of this innate knowledge surfaced and more dots became connected. I was sitting on the back porch facing a hillside of tropical greenery. A wall of coconut trees backed by another wall of bamboo with a thick band of tropical trees behind that. It was slightly breezy, but just as I closed the circle of my thoughts with the last words in my journal, a gust of wind came through and all that tropical greenery, in unison, bent forward in my direction with a massive nod perfectly timed with the spurt of my heightened energy. It was a powerful moment.

Brother-Brian recently said that he saw me creating two books. I discounted it immediately falling into my lower emotional mind. I questioned, of what credentials or experience do I have to write about? Rhonda picked St. Lucia after I vetoed Turks & Caicos, and I remained open to this travel plan, wondering what signs and messages I might get while on a small tropical island in the Caribbean. Funny how the two things just came together with the answer that it was to be my own internal set of personal discoveries. I was provided with this material human body to contain my slice of universal consciousness just like everyone else. I accept the challenge for what that might mean, and I am going to explore the shit out of it. I am going to keep opening my mind. I am going to keep practicing how to remember what I truly am. I am going to keep thinking, conversing, and writing my experiences, observations, theories, and discoveries. If someone wants to read them, so be it. Brother-Brian only said that he saw a path in which I write. He didn’t say anyone was going to read what I wrote. So, with that, I am going to take the sign and keep doing what I started in the Fall of 2022. It is immensely useful to organize my experiences with my throughs as part of my education.

Maybe this island just helped me to do that voodoo that you do. A West African / Caribbean shamanistic priest was central to my very first mushroom journey. I have always had a deep fascination with voodoo as a paganistic belief system, but not from a morbid perspective. I looked him in the eye, and I saw myself. The long silent encounter left me wondering the meaning. It was an incredibly vivid and meaningful experience. One connection is the use of shamanistic methods for helping people break the spell of their disassociation with their spirit-self. Another possibility is a reflection of a past life experience. Being on a Caribbean Island definitely feels comforting and natural, as is being on the edge of the Caribbean in the Florida Keys. My mind seems to be more open, free, and philosophical. In any case, this combination of elements definitely activated something.

White Doves

Two days ago, Rhonda and I were driving to the Pitons and came across two white doves. A very rare site that I don’t think I have seen in nature. The meaning we looked up when we got home: Peace, Hope, Purity, and Love. A sign that you have taken the right decision and are headed on the right path as it relates to peace.

Jungle Hike

After a fruitful morning of journaling, my mind was set in motion in a very positive way. I set out from the house in my right-side driving car constantly reminding myself to stay on the left-hand side of the road toward a mountainous jungle area for a five-hour hike. I drove there thinking about what I wrote. Positive energy will at minimum help reduce conflict and on the positive side of an encounter with someone enhance the exchange. The universe handed me a confirmation that I was on the right path.

I hiked the jungle trail of Anse La Verdine to a waterfall. After driving up the long, lonely road out of the village to the farthest point that I could drive before the road narrowed to a 3 ft. wide bridge, I parked, got out and started my hike. Along the way I encountered a Rastafarian man, two foragers, a hunter, a farmer, and a Rastafarian farm laborer. All amazing people.

The Rasta had blue eyes and long dreads. He carried a bag of something harvested on his back and a giant shiny machete. He was very friendly, asked where I was headed and pointed me in the right direction. Then he walked off toward the village.

The two foragers appeared shortly after I started the hike in the forest. They were digging out wild yams that appeared to be growing at the base of coconut trees. One showed me an example. They were hacking and digging with machetes, which I figured was where the Rasta had come from, until I learned differently later. The one up on a steep hill yelled down a question to me after I said hello. I had a hard time understanding him and eventually realized that he was asking if I had any food, which he kept calling “yum-yums.” I figure that he may only know how to speak Creole and some odd bits of English. I said no and wondered if it was the universe testing me. I had a half bag of pita chips in my bag that I really wanted for later. Then I realized that he was working in a grove of coconut trees with a machete and had access to hundreds of coconuts with all the food and drink he could want.

I hiked for hours alone until my next encounter. The hunter was named Marcel and was also super friendly. He was a large bald guy that was hunting wild pigs with his brother and some friends. I saw him twice. First was a short greeting where we introduced ourselves with fist bumps, then he said he would see me on my way back along the path. An hour later I found him sitting on a log with a handgun on top of his bucket of supplies. We talked. I sat. He showed me photos of the two huge male hogs that they shot last week. His brother had the rifle this time because Marcel just had eye surgery and better to have good eyes for the shot. They hunted using dogs to flush out the pigs, and just as he mentioned the dogs, a scrappy little dog appeared eyeing me suspiciously. Marcel said that the dog was helping him earlier that day, but they got separated and the dog just now caught up with him. We had a mutually good time talking and meeting. He made a point to say that he could SEE that I was a very nice person the moment that we met. That he really likes meeting friendly people and talking. He fist-bumped me three times during our interaction, which is the island way of shaking hands, then he high-fived our connection once, which seemed like a more intimate move than a bump. This was extremely validating to my morning writing and to the intentional state of mind I put myself into during the drive.

The farmer came after the hunter and his name was Mack. He was overly excited to see me and talkative. Introduced me to his equally friendly wife. They were working on pruning and cultivating more cocoa trees. They had some but were expanding the grove. They had harvested a large pile and showed me the color of ripe, unripe, and post-ripe. US$ 1.15 per pound of seeds is the current rate on the world market. In the over-ripe pod that I opened earlier, I got the impression that it might take six pods average for a pound, and their pile had about 75 pods piled up. I got the impression from Mack that not too many people take the hike to the falls, and he knew exactly where my car was parked miles away, and was equally curious about me as I was of him.

Further down the trail as I was finishing my day of hiking, I met my last encounter, the Rasta helper, Maurice. He was a beautiful human, inside and out. A flawless 21-year-old man that came around the corner wearing a Soviet-style workers uniform and carrying a machete. I was turning the car around and as he approached, I asked if he wanted a ride. We were at least a mile from the village, so I thought it made sense to offer him the empty seat. “Yes! I would very much like to have a ride” he exclaimed. He got in, all smiles, with a brown stylish cannabis cigarette rolled in brown paper. He had perfect skin and perfect teeth. He was tall and thin. He said that he worked for the Rastas that he described as older men all with dreads that had a compound up the valley where they operated a “planation” that grew all types of vegetables and herbs, but mostly cannabis, which was the section that he mostly worked in. He said that cannabis was technically illegal in St. Lucia, but that it was decriminalized recently up to one ounce per person. He said that what you did in life was between you and God, as long as you were not hurting anyone. He talked about us humans as all being one entity with God being the single-source connection, no matter black or white or where you came from. Again, he was a beautiful person in all respects, and I am so grateful for having had that experience. It could not have been more poignant toward the events of the day. Maurice strongly suggested that I use cannabis as a medicine. He said to use it as a tea, and not to smoke it. Smoking it was very bad. I called him out on his smoking, and he chuckled that we are only human, and we all have our vices. Then he asked me if I wanted to take a joint with me. I respectfully declined, we fist bumped, and I drove off forever changed by that amazing set of encounters.

Besides those human connections, the tropical jungle was incredible. There were so many huge, lush flowers up in trees, wrapped along trunks and popping out of every other bush along the way that it looked like it was planted, planned, and fake. Exactly how a Disney themed adventure park would look. The falls were equally unique, pure, and lovely. I would venture to say that this day could maybe be the most meaningful day of my life so far, and a clear turning point.

St. Lucia definitely provided! The island motto happens to be “Let her inspire you.” I thought it a bit grandiose when I got off the plane surrounded by newlyweds and tourists. Boy, was I wrong.