A Faint-Hearted Overture
A Faint-Hearted Overture
Confessions Of Falling Down Dizzy With Health And Other Ego-Expectations
The Re-Opening of An Intermezzo is Transformed Into An Overture: Opening to What, Though?!
This ‘overture’ began a few weeks ago as an ‘intermezzo’, my intention to provide an update in substack following my unexpected and verbal long absence from there. And that intermezzo, which I thought well-started at the time, now several weeks ago, was subsequently interrupted by vertigo, fainting and ultimately hospitalisation.
Update: even though the hospitalisation and associated follow-up lab costs here are very reasonable, what I was charged has cleaned out my savings and now I’m close to being insolvent.
If you would like to help me, I have set up a donation page at
A Request for Monetary Help
So, that intermezzo became this overture, an introduction to my having become transhuman in late July. And perhaps, a door opening into greater self-understanding with my discovery of Mara-ego-expectations hiding itself in plain sight in front of nose, eyes, thought and heart.
As of this writing I sit now at my cabaña-home on recovery day ten. Around me is lots of nature and very little wifi. This essay is a look into the process and some preliminary ideas about the consequences or thoughts on having become transhuman. I intend to go a bit deeper in my next essay: something like “Life Saving Hospitalised Transhumanisation As Alchemical Alembic: Heart Heat-Pressure To Create Changed Awareness”. And maybe, just maybe with this, has come to me a change of life. For certain, even now ten days later, my voice has changed and seems uninterested to change back to an expression of the old me.
Today’s amazing playlist! Built over many days and now has become very long! Enjoy its dizzy diversity.
Spotify
Youtube Music.
YouTube Talk.
On August 2nd I began to transcribe into my simple rtf editor the text from my first pen and paper scripted substack essay.
I confess that I really enjoyed the tangible feel of putting ink to paper! Following surgery I decided to stay off the smartphone and computer for fifteen days. And when the desire to essay became strong enough, pen and paper it was. And it was great fun! I loved it!
After all that scribbling perhaps you would enjoy buying me a coffee. Just click on the coffees/matcha. With gratitude.
🙏 All the best with what is changing. Everything changes. Peace, respect, love and exuberant joy. 🙏
I have mostly honoured the electronic fast. Yoshiko has been my secretary interface to check, reply and message those people best informed about my state of health, process of recovery and intention. And this transcription and the associated playlist are being done on the computer. So not a total device fast. And that fast-relaxation was okayed by PS-RAP (Psyche-Somatic Awareness Process, my refined version of ‘muscle testing’). PS-RAP included the gentle intention to publish this on the 2nd, even though that seemed, and was confirmed, to be a stretch. It didn’t happen. I finished the transcription and initial substantial edits late on the third. Late on the fifth I finished the near-final edits and began the process of putting it into substack. Publication was to be early on Tuesday the 6th and drifted into the early afternoon.
The transcription typing has been a bit of a challenge because it strained my left wrist and fingers. On August third they were still feeling weak, albeit much stronger than the days before. Their weakness was a consequence to a very hard fall on my shoulder when I fell into a dead faint two weeks ago here in the cabaña’s solid tile-over-cement floor. With my daily set of Noh theatre (能, Nō) and other exercises the wrist, and most other parts of my body-in-recovery as well, have seen huge improvements.
I Dismissed Buddhist Suffering and Reflect on Group and Christian Morality as Deadly
It seems astounding to me that my last substack post is already a full three months old! At the time I finished it I was keen to continue my delightful and fun examination of how a moral society is ultimately antithetical to a healthy society. ‘Healthy’ loosely meaning one that is ‘naturally’ able for its citizenry to comfort all those other difficult humans also populating the society. Our existence is in a physical world that naturally and necessarily suffers beginning with the astoundingly forceful processes of human insemination, gestation and bodily birth. That is then continued with the necessity of our extended ingestion of killed life, all of which is accompanied by the surprise terminations of life around us as the everythings and everyones we know and encounter become the death that eventually, albeit quickly, includes ourselves.
When I was in my mid twenties I casually dismissed that great Buddhist observed truth — slightly mis-phrased or mistranslated imo — ‘life is suffering’ as pessimistic denialism of the ‘real’ possibility that nirvana can be made manifest if only and when we have the right mind-set and liberating mantras. Right is might turns out to be a clever form of dualistic bullshit moralism. Now I see that I had been deluded into egoist blind stupidity to what actually is Life by the New Age denialism of the reality of the transitory transits of life-experience that are the state of being and flux in a somatic expression in the material world.
I am thinking that moralism is an extreme form of group (sangha) elevation that embraces gloatingly or smugly or arrogantly a pernicious disrespect for the individual. I wonder what might Jordan Peterson, with his advocacy of the value of Christian morals, think of that? He argues frequently that Christian morals created all the good ideas and social structures of western enlightenment and human liberation. However he has conveniently overlooked how those same morals were the cornerstone or foundational energy of the various morally justified tyrannies and -cides across millennia. Does he ascribe to those organised killings moralistic baby-footstep oopsies, a kind of morality learning process rather than the natural consequence of moralism?
Although, perhaps the moralists have in fact been learning from those ostensible moral failures — do we not learn best from our failures rather than our successes? And with those lessons perhaps the highest functioning moralists have amassed the moral skills, power and authority that enabled and empowered the latest and truly global tyrannical enactment, one so huge that Peterson himself, the intellectual tyranny guru, didn’t recognise it: the convid as an ultimate morality gambit of the group’s health at the expense of everything and everyone individual. This is the exact opposite of Peterson’s teachings that follow closely C.G. Jung’s vociferous advocacy of the sacredness and power of the individual to transform humanity and society.
For Jung it is only the ‘true’ individual who is able to overcome group identity, live outside it and by doing so become a nearly archetypal hero or villain. In Jung’s observations group identity is always and everywhere an almost overwhelming threat to the individual and the challenging path into personal individuation that is largely comprised, I now see, of beginning to trust him/herself enough to express Life without deference to opinion, obeisance to the sangha. This is exactly what Gautama said on his death-bed to Ananda 2500 years ago: trust yourself, you are an island, pay no regard to the opinions of others. (My paraphrase.)
For the curious, here is my last essay:
Morality is Reason’s Schismogenetic Superstitious Raison d’Etre.
🙏 If this essay gives you some pleasure, and/or an ‘aha’ benefit, extend our intimacy and become a paid subscriber. 🙏
🙏 All the best with what is changing. Everything changes. Peace, respect, love and exuberant joy. 🙏
Becoming a Man? And Introducing Marycruz and the Rise of Falling Down Vertigo
Well, it turned out that the month of May was one that foreshadowed a mayhem and manifest madness that July became! Even the foreshadowing became a kind of initiation or somewhat gentle hazing in the best of possible ways, meaning its discomfort accelerated some kind of psyche-somatic turning point that had begun dizzily about two months earlier. In April the faint feelings of dizziness became significantly stronger with my having begun to do 30-60 minute saunas with strong cleansing herbs added to the vapour that preceded Marycruz’s — my energy healer’s — massage and reflexology touch practices. The saunas were initiated as part of her deep cleansing processes. I had begun seeing this astonishing energy healer in the fall of last year. Marycruz uses reflexology, massage and eventually sauna as her official gateway methods to deliver something from within herself that is much much more powerful than any of these officially recognised processes combined.
With Marycruz’s treatments my lymphatic and endocrine systems have been cleared into an extraordinary ease of flow. My blood circulation has been powerfully, sensorily and visibly extended into my extremities. My testosterone level has tangibly improved by measure of my muscles having increased in mass, strength and resilience. And, most recently, my almost completely bald pate has seen a resurgence of hair growth. A full head of hair? No, not yet. And yet so much more than the nothing that existed at the start of this year. As to the muscles, by what measure? My once snug clothes no longer fit my still thin body and Marycruz’s fingers are no longer able to touch each other when she puts her hands around my calves. No, I didn’t change my exercise routine. And for diet I added the infusion of horsetail weed and created, kind of by accident, a rub that began as homemade African soap that included horsetail weed and tobacco. That has felt incredibly invigorating on my skin and seems to have been helping wake up the sleeping hair follicles in my scalp.
Is it possible that at the relatively young age of 63 I am actually moving in the direction of the man I had the potential to grow into before, as an infant and child, I fragmented and feminised my Self of mind, unconscious and body in order to survive the misandristic narcissism of my mother as well as, I have recently discerned, my two grandmothers? This Self, I have been discovering with my expanding awareness of what I have experienced, is remarkably both fragile, in the way that Buddhist-Yogi scholar Michael Stone describes in “Buddha’s Last Words” and yet at the same time so amazingly resilient: those devouring mothers supported by socially condoned misandry and schismogenesis didn’t quite kill me because somehow my Self as child provided the means to survive with enough power that has me here writing today about a July mayhem, the return of testosterone, various recoveries and a vertiginous trust-fall on the unforeseen path of becoming transhuman in yet another crazy resilience story as homage to the power of Life-energy!
Creeping in on Cat Paws Vertigo Foreshadow July Mayhem And Falling Down Dizzy
So all of this obviously is so, so great! And yet and yet. ‘Despite’ my high ego-expectations for immanent ‘perfect’ health that would bless me just after the next Marycruz treatment, into me crept slowly, so slowly on cat paws feet, more frequent and stronger experiences of dizziness. And they were perhaps most noticeable after I commenced to take the saunas Marycruz directed me to do before her touch-somatic-energy process. They weren’t too bad, initially. And her presence was expansive and calming.
Then along came April. Mid-month I stepped off the bus onto the sidewalk along the Pan Pacific Highway to walk up the hill to my appointment with Marycruz. It was a beautiful day, although still in the drought. I felt great stepping off the bus until my foot touched the sidewalk. Instant high velocity and intense vertigo! I quickly grabbed the chain link fence and woke up a few scores of seconds later laying on the sidewalk beside a cement utility pole. I stood up, a little dazed and confused. I began to walk and realised that I wasn’t seeing clearly. I returned to the pole to recover my eye glasses. And dizziness made walking difficult.
How Lucky I Am! No Skin or Bones Broken and I Taxi On Home
At the time I considered just how ‘lucky’ I was: 1) I didn’t wake up in an ambulance or hospital — likely because the downfall was short-lived, missed the actual roadway of the highway, and no one came across me; 2) no broken bones or contusions; 3) my (expensive) eyeglasses were unscathed. I was not completely unscathed, though! In one of those life has a wicked sense of humour moments I had that morning chosen to wear my best almost new pants. That was rare for me and when I looked down at the left knee there was a large ‘L’-shaped tear that included a rent in my skin.
The fifteen minute walk to Marycruz took twenty-five minutes that early afternoon. It was slowed with frequent stops to sit where I could. I bought mineral water. The vertigo was strong.
She was very concerned, of course. She worked gently that day and even so it took another thirty minutes of sitting in her office after the treatment before I felt stable enough to walk down the stairs to the sidewalk. However, once on the sidewalk I wasn’t able to walk more than three or four steps before fall-down vertigo quickly rose up. I rushed to place one of my knees on the sidewalk to avoid a body drop fall. It became clear that I wouldn’t be able to walk to the bus. I messaged Marycruz to call for me a taxi, which is relatively expensive because of how far outside the city centre I live. Full recovery at home took more than two days.
Superficial Comfort with Ego-Expectation Blindness and The Error of the Spiritual Ask
And I didn’t associate that faint or extended dizziness with solely a physical-bodily issue, let alone ‘just’ my heart. I did PS-RAP that, in response to my questions, made it clear that the dizziness and fainting were a ‘spiritually-sourced’ problem/challenge/issue. It was not a physically sourced one, a ‘spiritual’ energy blockage that was being expressed in and through the body. Nor was fainting a necessity. Both would naturally clear when I resolved my ’spiritual’ indigestion/blockage/constipation. [Headshake.] Ego-expectation creates stupidity-blindness, which is the inability to see, it is the unconscious opting out of seeing, which precludes asking any, let alone, ‘correct’ questions. Correct questions and questioning are predicated on seeing that Mara is here creating our superficially comfortable delusions. Gautama’s ‘I see you, Mara’ sounds simple and yet is perhaps the hardest part of being alive as a human with sangha-rooted ego-mind-centric samskaras.
And now I again find my Self laughing at my innocent naïveté! Ego-expectation stupidity again. What is it, what does it mean, that huge open and essentially meaningless catch-all word, ‘spirituality’? On hindsight my failure to even consider what that flaccid word might mean was Mara-stupidity-blindness extraordinaire. The other day I became angry with Yoshiko because of my inability to make myself understood with her. With that anger I scrawled it out in big red letters: “I WAS STUPID BLIND!”
We don’t see what our unconscious and Mara have decided, for whatever reason, to keep us blind to. It is amidst collapse and mayhem that the opportunity to see the obscured arises. That begins, perhaps, with the heart asking the questions ‘why’ or ‘wtf’? Seeing the hidden is deferred whenever we blame or complain.
The Clue of Synchronistic Overlap
In one of those peculiar synchronistic overlaps I had given myself a clue to my ego-expectation stupidity blindness two days ago — as of this writing — when I told Yoshiko the story of the Art of Living architect who was asked by the AoL founder, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, to design and build a covered hallway to the toilets at the AoL’s recently, at the time, purchased Montreal Ashram. At the time the build was asked for the toilets were isolated from the main building so that getting to them required a walk outside. Shankar approved the build five times, and had the actual build torn down four times. Why? It was explained to us, during our Art of Living Happiness Teacher Training course, that the architect had come into this design and build with ego-expectation (my phrase), or what Shankar calls an ego-pinch. The construction-tear down was to help him tear down the ego-expectation-pinch that was gripping and locking him into seeking some kind of commendation and praise. Shankar’s goal was to help the architect learn to build solely for the love of building, to act with true seva. (Seva is to act/do without expectation of reward, return, acknowledgment, gratitude or visibility — simply doing an action from the nothingness that is appropriate and eccentric in that moment. Seva is the appropriate eccentric action that gracefully extends compassion and reduces struggle and suffering in some, even tiny, ways.) Was the architect able to enjoin the build as seva and so be able to give the build away freely, liberated from the ego-pinch of being enslaved to good-opinion-seeking (or bad-opinion avoidance)?
This anecdote is a preview into my experienced late July and I am still not yet done May’s prelude to the objects of distraction-overture that kept me from May’s essay writing. Back then, in May, the Universe, or whatever this life-intelligent flux-energy-dynamic thing is, confirmed through PS-RAP, that not writing was appropriate for me at that time-point despite my early 2023 commitment to professionally contribute a weekly essay. Okay, back to the rough time-line.
Someones Like Me, They Say They Really Like Me! Do They Even Know Me?
In late April two people far from me expressed their interest/desire to spend time with me. Yay! Somebodies like me, they really like me! Well, I didn’t actually consciously think that and yet, as events unfolded, to what extend was that opinion-loving Mara blinding me to the actuality of me inappropriately liking them wanting to join me here?
The first is Yoshiko, my partner since 2018. She has been living in Japan since February of 2023 and said she wanted to return in late May. She has been for various reasons a powerful person on my ‘spiritual’ journey. Our settled plan for May was for us to meet in Cancun to visit again our friend Maria and in Puerto Morelos to visit our yogi friend Ramón and his family and to snorkel again the beautiful coral reefs there.
The second person stressed several times that she was coming to Oaxaca specifically to be near me. She was coming from India via a family reunion and a Charles Eisenstein group-meeting in the USA. When she mentioned that she would be visiting the USA I suggested to her that that was a good opportunity to visit me in Oaxaca, since she was going such a long way. She described how that out of the blue idea really resonated with her and so, unlike the score or more other people I have invited here, she jumped at it. She is a new-to-me friend that for this essay I give the pseudonym Sunny. I met her through Tessa Lena, an early substack voice critical of robots and then all things convid — which I think can be understood loosely as a kind of imposed robotafication / zombification programme.
Osho Trifecta and A Strange Sunny Foreshadowing
Sunny came to me with a peculiar synchronicity because she is an Osho sannyasin who lived with Osho at ‘the ranch’ and in India. Sunny provided me with references to a few of Osho’s discourses that I have found interesting, surprising, powerful and valuable. (For example, ‘Christianity, The Deadliest Poison and Zen, the Antidote to All Poisons’.) And by doing that she completed for me an Osho trifecta that was secondarily begun by another American Oaxaca friend who I met in 2023 and before that my three-day silence course attendee. And I laugh a little at this, because this Osho trifecta was required to pierce the opinioned dismissal of Osho by my sister, someone whose opinion I generally respect. My sister strongly cautioned me against all things Osho and sannyasins in particular. In some, or perhaps a large part, that caution came because she had had a very powerfully negative experience of sannyasins in Alberta Canada shortly after Osho died.
In a very strange way Sunny foreshadowed July’s jack-boot to the heart jamboree, with her strange to me comment about whether or not Yoshiko would be upset with her being here — was that a hint suggestive of my sister’s concern about the disruptive nature of sannyasins? Again I didn’t follow-up on that hint and went total ego-expectation blind because her presence became the exact opposite of what I thought would happen. Well, in actuality, the experience was far worse than I was capable of imagining. [Headshake and belly laughter.] More faint-hearted stupidity-blindness! (And I will revisit this a bit later with my sister’s comment about Sunny on our July Zoom meeting.)
What? In Busy May I Had Actually Begun Writing — Thrice Including More Morality Reflections
I did actually begin my next morality tale immediately after completing ‘A Moral By Any Other Name Would Stench as Foul’. I had the sharp intention to share my recently expanded understanding of how pernicious are morals, the elevation of morality and their society’s delirious advocacy and worship of them by looking at the clear tell that moralists lack the humour to love life. Think ‘Spanish Inquisition’ or even today’s ‘simple’ court judges who embody/incorporate into society our enacted moral codes — everything is deadly serious. Even people like Peterson don’t embody anything close to the feeling of humour — funny or humorous does not come to mind when thinking of him. The working title is ‘Moralists and their Morals are Humourless’. And maybe it didn’t go because I was taking the subject too seriously! Moralising on morals! Omg, how to laugh at this? (The playlist is under construction here.) And when that brilliantly started e.scribbling didn’t seem to be going anywhere fast, the various women in my life telling me who I was prompted me to begin another essay. I’ve called that one ‘What Kind of Man Am I?’ (Its playlist is also under construction, here.) And I had also begun a pre-vertigo collapse of this essay that I called, at the time, ‘A Short Intermezzo’. It was to at least put something new into my stack. Heart events and sundry stopped that too until this week when I transformed it into an overture into my somatic experience of faint-hearted transhumanism.
The rest of May up to the 21st is a blur. Certainly I was busy with Marycruz and yoga-sitting-breathing practices. And of course those increasing bouts of unremembered dizziness coming and going. I had a client stay with me for a three day dive into mind-body health practices and recovery from his stressed life in the USA. That was in early May. And we kept ourselves very busy for six days in total with various activities after our shared intensive. They included my giving him three Ayurvedic Marma sessions and our day visit to the magical weaving centre of Oaxaca, Teotitlán de Valle.
Soon after the client left Oaxaca I had a nearly instantaneous dizzy-faint fall to the floor while doing dishes in the kitchen here at the cabaña. I quickly regained consciousness. Nothing was broken, although I bruised my shoulder and somehow put a black permanent stain on a favourite shirt.
And finally, with the help of a friend I found Sunny a newly constructed rental not far from the cabaña in San Andrés Huayapam.
Terminal Confusion Becomes Powerful Taxi Driver Synchronicity
On the 21st I jumped into a plane and was flown to Cancun to meet Yoshiko. That day I remember clearly and well because every step of it was the encounter of another incredible synchronicity. Four in total, with the fourth being astounding.
Cancun is a very large international airport with several terminals. I arrived around noon at the domestic terminal. And with my relative paucity of international travel experience I did not see that domestic and international are going to be in different places at the airport. Blithely and comfortably ignorant I bought something to drink and enjoyed the afternoon until Yoshiko would join me early in the evening. When she arrived we didn’t see each other! After the source of the disconnect was determined the solution was for me to go to her terminal. It was distant, too far to comfortably walk, especially since the bus to Cancun was scheduled to leave from her terminal in about 20 minutes. The wait for the free shuttle was too long and so taxi it was to be. The taxi co-ordinator connected me up, after we agreed on a fee, with a driver who spoke fluent English. Now that I was paying for an inter-terminal taxi to take me to a bus, I thought that taking a bus didn’t really make financial sense: the cost savings of a bus had largely been eliminated and I confirmed that the additional cost to taxi to Cancun and our AirBnB would be marginally higher than the taxi to terminal, bus to Cancun, and then taxi to the AirBnB. Thus it was that my ignorance-sourced gaff brought us to meet VTTD, an American ex-physician who is likely in his fifties, driving a taxi in Mexico.
Once Yoshiko and bags and I were collected and comfortably ensconced in the taxi and on the road north to Cancun we found ourselves curious about how an American gringo came to be driving a taxi here. The conversation was astonishing because we learned that early in the convid he had developed a successful covid protocol, following standard pre-convid methodologies extant for scores of years, as had other (now excoriated and vilified) doctors who similarly developed covid protocols. And similarly to those now cancelled doctors, when VTTD (the driver) took the protocol he developed to his fellow doctors he was castigated and effectively shunned and ostracised for going rogue — now that with convid independence and doctoral integrity had become anti-group villainy — by going against the CDC’s and FDA’s imposed and ineffective or even pernicious tyrannically imposed protocols. So he quit being an American physician. The disgust and anger in his voice was clear.
As the conversation continued to expand he shared his awareness of many other so-called ‘conspiracies’ that with the test of time have been confirmed as truths, such as 9/11 being a deep state theatre of death, central banking as manipulated organised thievery, Hollywood as an evil misopaedic (child-hating) organisation, etc. Wow! And our meeting VTTD by bizarre ‘chance’ followed three other equally remarkable interpersonal synchronicities that day: two at the Oaxaca airport and one on the flight.
Vacation?
Cancun and Puerto Morelos were great!
Perhaps something close to a standard of true ‘vacation.’ And was accompanied by some dietary flexibility when by circumstance, hunger and a PS-RAP okay on the first night, I ate a little ham at a funny junk food hot dog shop that was one of the few open food places within walking distance of our AirBnB after 9pm. That vacation was busy and did not provide easy space to write. Nor did I have a strong internal push to make writing space. We enjoyed the beach, the food at Maria’s, conversation with the new German friend — synchronicity #2 at the Oaxaca Airport — and snorkelling the coral reef in Puerto Morelos. Our timing was off though, and we didn’t connect with our friend Ramón.
Return to the Cabaña and Ego-Expectations Begin to Bite My Ass and Squeeze my Heart
It was about a week later, after we had been back at the cabaña outside of Oaxaca City for two or three days, that ‘my things’ got very ‘interesting’. Yoshiko aggressively questioned in a moralist and condemning manner my PS-RAP process as unhealthy self-destructive addiction. That truly puzzled me and, I confess, hurt me. The history of my experience of PS-RAP has been the complete opposite! At the same time I could also see that at a very high level, at a truly enlightened level, maybe, there is some truth to her criticism. When I become completely immersed in the stream, as Gautama calls it, the act of asking through my body what the stream is guiding me towards would be unnecessary. I’m not there yet! Is that the addict in me rationalising my behaviour! OMG! Endless opinion dependence and lack of Self trust. For now I’ll trust my process while remaining open to ‘everything changes’. For me, for now at this time-moment, PS-RAP is abetting me and my decision making. When it ceases to function I will let it go. And I have still more to learn from it and how to use it, as my failure to use it properly with bradycardia suggests. For example, this essay confirms that I was struggling with a spiritual problem. It isn’t the fault of the PS-RAP that I wasn’t asking the correct question, or even open enough to consider more deeply.
I was slow to see that my being hurt by Yoshiko’s opinion was ego-expectation dependency on her good opinion of me! And I now see that, very likely unconsciously to her, she attacked PS-RAP directly knowing that her opinion would be enough to help smallify me, to contract or even stop my growth on my path by undermining a big part of my life, the part that most directly connects me to the energy of Life. And, as I write that, I am beginning to see that her unkind condemnation is a continuation of those condemnations I received from my mother, my grandmothers and my ex. Wow! I hadn’t seen that coming. At some point Yoshiko added that she had stopped trusting my method(s), my words and my actions. My paraphrase. As the dog whisperer has said ‘No trust, no respect: no relationship.’
It took me several days before I was even able to begin with almost lame meekness, not anything close to manliness, stand up for my self — well, maybe as high as being on my knees — and mumble softly that for now I trusted my Self and how my Self was expressing its Self through my body with this process. I think that there is enough truth in that to go forward. I allowed my ego-expectation for her good opinion to rattle my house, like a gentle earthquake. Yet I can feel that it wasn’t strong enough to crack my foundation — this time.
Blackness Falls, Again, on the Sunny Side of My Life
The second ego-expectation to explode my heart was that I thought that Yoshiko would be open to befriend my friend Sunny. By her many stories Yoshiko has a great openness to meet people in her travels. She has participated in many remarkable encounters with amazing people in interesting places and with ‘perfect’ timing. The Sunny-hateful high-pitched volcanic angry vitriol that Yoshiko spewed astonished me. And, again, I confess, this really hurt me! And that I did my best to deny the hurt in a faux-spiritual equanimity, a kind of pretence at being nice to her ‘feelings.’ And so I was yet again the most unmanly of doormats! Hurt by her opinion, in denial of the hurt, and being unable to laugh at the ostensible craziness, I didn’t and perhaps even couldn’t, speak my heart. So it was there came to me another arrow of ego-expectation and co-dependency — to her opinion yet again! That was about a week before Sunny was scheduled to arrive in the first week of June.
The stupidly blinded by ego-expectations me didn’t actually take seriously what felt like a black hatred towards this unknown-to-her person. Wow! Was her verbal vomit an echo of my ex’s hatred-filled black letter that condemned my friend to hell in 2010! The ex’s bile was strong enough that, a few months later, I found myself crying uncontrollably to Springstein’s album Tunnel of Love while painting white the master bedroom that I was barred from sleeping in. I think yes, there is a connection. The ex’s black hatred began the deep heart-realisation that the respect for being alive I was dependent on receiving from her would not ever be coming. With Yoshiko I think that maybe at one time she had a little respect for me. Yet now whatever orts of respect had been there were evaporated. Absence gave space for the heart to grow distant and unkind? And we seem to be each speaking a version of English the other no longer well understands. I believe that from my heart I respect her, albeit I see now that it very likely was frequently accompanied with the heaviness of ego-expectation dependency that can make respect cloying, repulsive and indigestibly nauseating.
And if that lesson hadn’t been learned — and at the time it hadn’t been! — my blind stupidity was deepened when, the day before Sunny’s arrival, Yoshiko visited with me Sunny’s rental to confirm it’s readiness. Yoshiko was calm and seemed to enjoy it and meeting my friend SF who had done the finishing work there.§ And that became a huge, giant even, head-heart psyche-out. Why? Because the next day I ‘innocently(??)’ — stupidly! — asked Yoshiko if she would like to come with me to the airport to meet Sunny and to help her get to her rental in San Andrés Huayapam. The fire of her ire was almost equally extraordinary as the volcanic eruption some days earlier. And so I went alone and significantly heart broken and heart distressed. Another ego-expectation had been completely kick-faced into the mire, or jack-booted into unrecognisable shards after having been puffed up. And this makes clear, to me, how that all parallels the architect anecdote.
§The reason for her calmness was revealed to me some weeks later. She hadn’t understood that the visit was to Sunny’s rental! She misunderstood that this was the home of my friend SF. Now, to me that just adds to the subtle nature and depth of humour of the Life-Energy ‘thing’ that is looking to wake us into who we could become.
My sister made an astounding-to-me observation that added a bizarre twist to Yoshiko’s reaction and Sunny’s strange ‘won’t Yoshiko mind’ comment, that Sunny made before leaving the USA. During the Zoom meeting I had with sis on the Thursday in July before I was to go completely unconscious in the afternoon, she said that Sunny had come to me to be my girlfriend! WTF? ‘No!’ I exclaimed, ‘that is loco!’ ‘Ask Yoshiko,’ she calmly replied. OMG! Yoshiko had gone crazy with Sunny coming here. Was sis right? Was Yoshiko’s extreme reaction simply fierce jealousy? Was Sunny’s comment a subtle manipulative hook to an ego-expectation stupidly blind male naïvely falling prey to feminine wiles to interlope? Hmmmm.
And wouldn’t that be just like the Universe’s wicked sense of humour?! Wack a guy across the head with two women fighting over him with all parties unconscious of what was actually going on. If so, to what purpose? There are no accidents, no random events and the Universe has our back. So sitting here, now, it looks likely that that could well have been at least a goal because the depth and rigidity of this samskara in me wasn’t going to be easily displaced. What kind of energy was required to tear down my hidden and well-constructed ego-expectations of health, ‘friendship/partnership’ and the false-integrity of my heart-mind still reliant on opinion? Wow! Something BIG! [Roll on the floor laughing, and into a near-death faint!]
Fragility and Resilience: Gautama’s Last Words are Trust Your Self to Tread the Path With Care
Now I find I am laughing at this. A couple of days ago I listened, again, to Michael Stone’s discourse ‘Buddha’s Last Words’. He relays Gautama’s death-bed guidance to lifelong companion Ananda to ’tread the path [of life] with care’. Stone extrapolates on Gautama’s words to suggest that Gautama inferred that our human lives, and even life itself, is fragile. I, on the other hand, see that fragility as complementary to life-energy being extraordinarily resilient. For example, after serious scientific predictions of decades of barrenness life returned very quickly to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, the Bikini Atoll and other places of significant human and/or natural disaster.
So my ‘fragile’ heart was again ‘shattered’ and in that place came to be awash in an irreconcilable state of a tension between opposites: how to honour my word now in conflict between two women? And at the same time how was I to become the man I was born to be when besotted by opinion seeking? Was that transformation into adult manhood the tension’s tertium quid?
Which, of course, at the core, the heart of the matter, is in reality my ego-expectation-desire to keep the good opinion of both Yoshiko and Sunny at the expense of my own male-embodied Self. [Headshake.] I still didn’t see that for Yoshiko that the opinion-ship had since sailed: crazy stupid blind to impossibility! And blind to my being, still, the emotional football to the opinions of others. Especially, it would seem, when those opinions are embodied in women.
More Evidence of my Ego-Expectation Stupidity Blindness and Doormat Tendency
Now for a slight back-track. On Friday May 31st I rejoined Tessa Lena’s substack philosophy club Zoom call. I had missed the previous two — intuitively protecting my Self from Yoshiko? I attended this one in no small part because Sunny asked me to. In Sunny’s opinion the group was in jeopardy of collapse and she said that my presence would help resuscitate and enrich it. Wow! What a lovely ego-boosting opinion to puff me up to a greater or lesser extent. And at the same time that kind of praise was likely a subtle unconscious way to keep me small by feeding my addiction to opinion. Hmmmm. Anyway, shortly after the call started Yoshiko began a forced laughter towards me/it filled with a kind of mock hysteria that edged towards contempt then became clearly derisive. Initially I chose to ignore it — actually I think, more accurately, I had disassociated myself from the bile she was directing towards me and what I was doing. (What would Petruchio have done?)
A little while later her derisive laughter transformed itself into out and out shouting/screaming at or near the top of her lungs: “KINDERGARTEN MASTURBATION CRAP!!!” She paced all the corners of the terrace, all corners of the cabaña to make sure that the world around me heard her including, possibly the group, depending on how well the background noise suppression system worked. (No one commented on it so… maybe they are too polite or didn’t hear her. I don’t know. And I won’t ask.)
And so she screamed to the world, and me-in-denial of it, her absolute total contempt for what I was doing, meaning, of course, me. And I did nothing! I said nothing! Instead I took it like a doormat — not a man! — and keep my mouth ‘nicely’ shut; and because I had, years earlier, vowed to honour her opinion I didn’t laugh or cry as my heart once again was breaking behind my self-stupidity-blindness, a blindness deepened with my unbalanced, hence false, sense of personal honour to my word. Had I the spirit of Petruchio! Or Gautama or Sri Sri Ravi Shankar or even Osho, then perhaps I would have eased or even completely deflected from my self the heart attack by having kept my Self free of the ego-expectations that were compounded by an inappropriate samskara of unseen hence unexpressed anger. And so ego-expectations took me back to my absolute doormat days of the co-dependency entanglement of twenty years ago.
A few weeks later I eventually retaliated with my own yelling: I shouted back at her her words and with that I confirmed to her, she said, my own innate hypocrisy because when I’d received her shit and stuffed it into my mouth I ate it instead of spitting it back at her at the time. Hmmmm. An interesting way to look at my being a doormat covered with her excrement.
Timelines and Timestamps and the Tough Experience of Clearing Stuck Energy
With this exploration I see how these events timestamp a big step in my heart’s movement into deeper bradycardia.
Shortly after we got to Oaxaca from Cancun I introduced Yoshiko to Marycruz. At first Yoshiko was amazed and described Marycruz as the best healer she had ever experienced, of many in her lifetime. The third treatment triggered a huge physical and psychic explosion into extreme discomfort in Yoshiko, especially of her body. During that treatment Marycruz had cautioned Yoshiko that the stagnant energy she felt stuck in Yoshiko’s abdomen would be very uncomfortable when touched to begin its clearing. ‘Go ahead,’ Yoshiko said. With that began a week of torturous symptoms of extreme somatic discomfort that had her moving, twitching and moaning, among other symptoms, and being almost completely unable to sleep or eat.
When we returned to Marycruz the depth and duration of the symptoms surprised her. Her treatment helped Yoshiko to a great extent. At the end of it Marycruz said that during the treatment that she had determined that there was something else beyond just energy that had been triggered in Yoshiko’s psyche-somatic system. She asked Yoshiko to see another type of energy healer the next day. Yoshiko agreed. (And my PS-RAP concurred.) Because this was an emergency Marycruz was able to get Dra. Maris to come to MaryCruz’s office the next evening just for Yoshiko. Although I would also receive a treatment.
Dra. Maris is also an amazing and fascinating healer with a completely different energy modality. She uses a detailed diagnostic chart and a sophisticated placement of magnets using the pendulum form of muscle testing to guide their placement, orientation and number. I won’t elaborate on her absolutely fascinating and even shocking diagnosis for Yoshiko. Her first treatment fully restored sleep and cleared most of the extremely distressing physical symptoms, including headache and lack of appetite. The second Dra. Maris treatment helped clear almost all of those other distressing somatic symptoms. After that Yoshiko decided to stop treatment and to heal herself. ‘I am not a patient,’ she said. She meant that she does not want to become co-dependent with the healer on being healed — my slight paraphrase. This announcement of intent came via a Japanese anecdote she had listened to about someone’s healing experience. And to me, funnily enough, her intention displayed Yoshiko’s co-dependency on anecdotes of the healing power experienced by people who manage to completely let go of their ego-expectations. There is certainly a balance between taking responsibility to seek help and taking responsibility to eschew all help. I’m not sure how that balance is determined, especially since balance is actually a moving state and not a static one.
In a strong way Yoshiko’s refusal to continue treatment has, imo, a strong flavour of many who find initial relief with their beginning a serious practice of yoga or breath or diet, of which the initial health-burst of vegan eating is a great example. All can bring near instant healing, with often/usually the restoration of sleep and/or digestion and/or relative calmness and/or improved familial or work relationships and/or weight loss. And the experience can be so joyful that it stops the deeper work that is usually extant in the mind-body system resting in deep samskaras and dark shadows. The initiates unconsciously turn away from the doors to what are the shadow-blocks to true freedom from ego-expectations and the opinions of others. Michael Stone puts it well: after about 6-8 years of a serious yoga practice the disciple becomes aware of the deep change being demanded by the practice. The practice wants total freedom for the student. That demand freaks most people out and they turn away from their hearts in order to become mindfully dedicated to some difficult or obscure part of their practice. To officially remain part of the sangha. From that the next samskara is created from which they can with ‘true’ dedicated intention and study humourlessly moralise truth. In her time in Japan Yoshiko has become a huge fan of two serious deep dive Buddhist scholars. She listens to one or both of them every day and often several times a day. As I’ve described above, a thread of her heart attacking me has been from a distinctly humourless yogic-Buddhist ideological morality. To what extent has she become a humourless buddhistic moralist?
Gautama’s Island Statement and Another Confession to Being Ego-Expectation Stupid-Blind
I confess to being slow to see that! I certainly didn’t see that at the time and this only became clear, really clear, as I was transcribing my hand scrawled words and editing them. Even after all the above expressions of contempt, disregard and disrespect, I was still clinging like a frightened five year old to the idea that Yoshiko and I were sharing our samskara-shadow clearing, perhaps even some kind of enlightenment path. Seriously! Co-dependency, anyone?
After reading this far, I’m sure you would love your own coffee of matcha. Perhaps you would love to buy me one too? Just click on the coffees/matcha. With gratitude.
🙏 All the best with what is changing. Everything changes. Peace, respect, love and exuberant joy. 🙏
When I next visited Marycruz and Dra. Maris it was without Yoshiko. They both had seen immediately how I had given away my centre, my energy, my voice and my life to Yoshiko who was devouring it and me. Marycruz stated, sadly, that I had become a shadow of the man she had seen me become. Dra Maris, who hadn’t seen me before Yoshiko’s arrival, saw that I had become weak with co-dependency and loss of integrity and centre. Now I will add that I had allowed me, through my ego-expectations of Yoshiko’s good opinion, to shrink my heart connection to Life-energy’s expressing me. Hmmmm.
Oops! [Belly laugh.] I was still rejecting by heart the full implication of Gautama’s death-bed statement to Ananda ‘you are an island.’ Perhaps I can elaborate on that by suggesting that a significant implication of being an island is when ‘you are liberated and alive while in the Life-stream having had the realisation that you are an island free from the opinions of others.’
By his excluding any reference to the third treasure of Buddhism, the sangha, Michael Stone infers that Gautama understood that all groups (sanghas) break down and fail. And that that includes Gautama’s Buddhist sangha. I am interpolating that a significant part of the break down has roots in ego-expectations of opinion that become an ossified morality where the value of the group has more weight than that of the individual who is ostensibly being supported by the group towards that individual’s process of individuation. Individuation by its nature of personal liberation creates personal independence from the group and thus is inherently antithetical to the continued existence of the group/sangha, even when that group may have initially helped clear ego-expectation opinion seeking.
It Is Time for Some Jung, Don’t You Think?
Of course this aligns absolutely with C.G. Jung’s many cautions agains the group.
For example:
Just as the psychic and social life of mankind at the primitive level is exclusively a group life with a high degree of unconsciousness among the individuals composing it, so the historical process of development that comes afterwards is in the main collective and will doubtless remain so. That is why I believe convention to be a collective necessity. It is a stopgap and not an ideal, either in the moral or in the religious sense, for submission to it always means renouncing one's wholeness and running away from the final consequences of one's own being.
To develop one's personality is indeed an unpopular undertaking, a deviation that is highly uncongenial to the herd, an eccentricity smelling of the coenobite, as it seems to the outsider. Small wonder, then, that from earliest times only the chosen few have embarked upon this strange adventure. Had they all been fools, we could safely dismiss them as idiotai, mentally "private" persons who have no claim on our interest. But, unfortunately, these personalities are as a rule the legendary heroes of mankind, the very ones who are looked up to, loved, and worshiped, the true sons of God whose names perish not. They are the flower and the fruit, the ever fertile seeds of the tree of humanity. This allusion to historical personalities makes it abundantly clear why the development of personality is an ideal, and why the cry of individualism is an insult. The greatness has never lain in their abject submission to convention, but, on the contrary, in their deliverance from convention. They towered up like mountain peaks [Gautama’s islands out of the ocean] above the mass that still clung to its collective fears, its beliefs, laws, and systems, and boldly chose to go their own way. To the man in the street it has always seemed miraculous that anyone should turn aside from the beaten track with its known destinations, and strike out on the steep and narrow path leading into the unknown. Hence it was always believed that such a man, if not actually crazy, was possessed by a daemon or a god; for the miracle of a man being able to act otherwise than as humanity has always acted could only be explained by the gift of daemonic power or divine spirit. How could anyone but a god counterbalance the dead weight of humanity in the mass, with its everlasting convention and habit? From the beginning, therefore, the heroes were endowed with godlike attributes.
Jung, C.G. "The Development of Personality," CW 17. Cited in The Essential Jung: Selected Writings, edited by Anthony Storr, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 198-9.
As in this example, Jung was of the opinion that the individual was key and the exception that often threatened the ‘integrity’ of the group. Jung also cautioned against any kind of group therapy because the weight of humanity’s group mind will usually come to dominate over the individual. It was with one-to-one exploration between individuals of their shadows, with the courage to expand their individuation and liberation from their shadows and the group adherences to conformity, that created the Self trusted enough as an island rising out of the ocean of unconsciousness. (Robert Pirsig does a great job of exploring the value of the individual in his pair of books Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Morals and Lila: An Inquiry into Morals.)
Can two people be a group that suppresses individuation? LoL! Of course! It is called co-dependency in its various guises. And I guess with our many elements of co-dependency Yoshiko and I and our various psychic fragments were more a sangha of personality pieces than two individuals respectfully seeing the other clearly enough to be able to go mano a mano without the false and destructive power of opinion that breaks our hearts. Hmmmm.
On second thought, I suspect that my actions, at this moment anyway, aren’t quite able to hurt significantly her heart: she has too little respect and too much contempt for me, what I am saying and what I am doing. And my experience of her at this time is that she has largely withdrawn into a kind of mechanical Buddhist head space focused on obscure and/or alternative looks at the Pali Canon. She has complained at how exhausted she is with her having been my caregiver during my complete descent into debilitation and now recovery from surgery. That is actually distinct from heart break and is more a sign of the enervation of the co-dependency energy often core to unbalanced caregiving. (I did PS-RAP on this observation and it concurs.)
Accelerating Vertigo and an Ignored Slow Pulse Clue
And so June and July saw a significant acceleration of the frequency and strength of my feelings of dizziness. (LoL! Stuck in Tommy Rosen’s frequency of addiction!) So much so that simple walking was becoming more and more difficult and for most of July I lost my ability to walk up the mountain side to the cabaña. I resorted to taking a Moto-Taxi. And still I thought, I ego-expected, to go into perfect health without even looking at my delusion of health independence.
After one particularly strong episode while on my way to a session with Marycruz, she felt my pulse for the first time and was shocked at how slow it was. With that Marycruz gave me a truly somatic clue, the first direct link between having a slow heartbeat and dizziness. And I pretty much — no, I totally blew that off as a non-event. And clearly points to some of my behaviours of inattention to my health that justifiably puzzled and stressed Yoshiko out!
I didn’t pursue slow heart beat in any way: no PS-RAP, no I Ching§, nor even the idea of doing on-line medical research. Was I a co-dependent patient, waiting for some kind of Marycruz or Dra. Maris deus ex machina to save me? Or was I ‘simply’ completely blinded by the healing glittering gold of Mara’s ego-expectation that my energy practices were going to cure me, with MaryCruz’s and/or Dra. Maris’s and, later, the family therapist Dra. Ana’a, help? All the while I was refusing to listen to what my heart was telling me. I blind stupidly thought that the dizziness would fall away without my needing to examine how those same energy practices were not being able to keep my heart beating! Really?! [Headshake.] Delusion knows no bounds and is always the other person’s problem.
§ I cast the I Ching on line for the first time, with the question - ’Is my understanding of ego-expectation and my slow heart beat correct?’ The result was #22, Grace. An interesting result that confirms the accuracy of my thinking.
Devouring Mother Energy and Group Foundations
Furthermore, I was unwilling to see, hear, or feel my heart as it was being squeezed, constricted and broken by my obstinately remaining unconsciousness to it still being footballed by the opinions of people close to me. Two of whom were (are?) looking to circumscribe my life into their ideas/ideals of what is an appropriately expressed me for their good-intentioned malevolence. That is what subtle devouring mother-energy is and provides anecdotal evidence of its broad existence despite a friend’s general denial or rejection of its significant enervating presence in our society as an energiser of malevolent group identity.
Among other aspects of the devouring mother energy, Jasun Horsley explores how the tyranny of the convid was one of a ‘mothering’ gynocracy: take the needle for the other, for the good of the group otherwise you are being selfish to the health needs of the sangha/community. See Big Mother: The Technological Body of Evil. For the archetype of the mother energy, benevolent and malevolent, see The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, by Erich Neumann and translated by Ralph Manheim.)
A Start to Closing the Overture with an Introduction to Family Constellation Therapy Before Total Collapse
In early July Marycruz determined that my psyche-soul-health progress required more than what she has to offer with her somatic energy practices. Psycho-therapy! She directed me to a Family Constellation Therapist. Wow! Speaking of the wicked humour of Life! My friend Sunny is a certified Family Constellation Therapist who trained with its developer, Bert Hellinger! And my sister considers FCT to be one of the most powerful and effective therapies. She practices it herself and my sister-in-law, a long time certified psychotherapist, is in the final stages of being certified in it. I’ve had two session with my sister that startled me awake from particularly deep somnambulism with my ex.
PS-RAP confirmed FCT to be appropriate and that day Marycruz had her uncle drive us to Dra. Ana for an initial consultation.
That was fascinating with many significant ideas, including how my five year old self had expanded its energy and was squeezing the life out of me — my paraphrase. Later I spend time thinking about being five years old and was surprised that I’d forgotten the familial craziness of that time — six adults and ten children ages 2-14 living in a small unfinished two bedroom house without running water. And perhaps it is significant that while I was reflecting on that time I had strong feelings of near fainting dizziness.
With Dra. Ana the figure of an anthropomorphic black bee sitting on her desk fell over twice during the consultation. Dra. Ana said that the black bee was me, the black sheep of the family, the family ‘reject’ who is looking to stop the downward generational flow of the energy of the family’s intergenerational traumas. Stacking rocks, she said, is recreating my mother energy. Really?!
Dra. Ana prefers the use of toy figures to real people and wanted me to bring in a toy for our first full session scheduled for the following week. I don’t have toys and she confirmed I could bring something else. Perhaps some of the rocks I stack. I wound up bringing the oddly found and shaped gemstone of unknown type that feels significant to me.
During the consultation the glass sleeve on her candle spontaneously and loudly cracked and a side of it fell to the floor with a tinkle.
I had my first full session on Tuesday the 16th. The gemstone was rich with images and faces I hadn’t noticed before! I was very surprised that my father’s parents spoke. To me they were mostly nonentities in my life, especially the grandfather who died a few months after I turned six and before I went to elementary school. Wow! It is just now, writing that, that I see this as connected to my five year old experience of life!
And on the few occasions my paternal grandmother subsequently visited us I felt her contempt for me and especially for Claude. She spoke openly and disrespectfully in front of his children about her son’s laziness and inadequacy and the extraordinary wonder that Terry was as a human mother who could be his wife too. I remember so little, and yet the feeling of contempt from her to him and me is as sharp as the smell of burning at a garbage dump.
It may also be significant that my paternal grandfather’s death in 1967 — I have snippets of memory of going to Willowbunch Sask for the funeral — is near the time my maternal grandparents and my mother’s brother’s family were thinking of or had begun to leave the cramped living quarters that spanned most of my five year old life. The session with my paternal grandparents provided some great surprises with so many Secrets and Lies. (A reason perhaps, that I loved that movie?!) And so much pain. My grandmother didn’t love her husband and felt sex with him was a form of rape. She loved other men and had their children, not her husband’s, because he was sterile. I’ve not heard that spoken of and so this was certainly a secret from me and, I suspect, the rest of the family too. In the session, through Dra. Ana and the figures, they both confessed to having imparted pain and restriction in me and said that they would take that back now. There was more, most of which resonated strongly at the time although I’ve now forgotten much of it subsequent to the events of the upcoming weekend.
The next session was on Wednesday. At it my mother’s parents spoke. More fascinating stuff.
That grandfather claimed that my high uric acid levels were a ‘gift’, a kind of marker from him to tell me that he was there in my life. (Really? Uric acid! And the associated gout that has been chronic in my life!? I am so tempted, now, to say simply ‘Fuck you!’) It is interesting to note that at a relatively young age he had a pacemaker installed as a result of having poisoned himself with mercury vapour while boiling it off to recover gold. I don’t know if that is true or not — that is the family story I remember in a family fraught with secrets, lies, and malevolent intra-familial actions, words and gossips. For sure he had gold fever and I spent many long childhood hours with him scouring the rivers in remote areas of the Cariboo and learning his secrets of gold and terrain and spending time with old timer placer miners in their one-room log cabins where I learned to play cribbage and solitaire to the sound and light of kerosene lamps. Of his nine grandchildren proximal to him in Quesnel I was the only one he took with him. In this session he said he would take from me the uric acid. (Since getting back from the hospital I’ve been peeing an extraordinary amount: losing my uric? Hmmmm.)
My grandmother, said through Dra. Ana and the toy representing her, that she did not want to be alive for her entire life. Hmmmm. That is a feeling I lived with strongly until 2018 or so. And she did not (could not?) experience the feeling of love towards anyone or anything in her life and that that lack or void of love she transferred into me as irregular shaped and sized blood cells. And with bringing to me difficult women. With this reveal I see how she has become clearly a fascinating anecdotal confirmation of my idea that moralists lack humour: my experience of her was that of a dead moralising hypocrite without her own opinion. She said that she now has taken that back from me. It will be interesting to see how my blood cells have changed, or not, when I go for a blood test preceding my hospital check-up at the end of the month. And what about women? Hmmmm. At this time I would be happy to be free of intimacy with women. At least for a while. (Yoshiko has announced her intention to return to Japan as soon as she sees I am returned to some form of self-sufficiency.)
Final Overture Closing: Collapse, Unconsciousness, Urination and Defecation Ante-Hospitalisation
Getting to the sessions had been difficult because my heartbeat by that time was stuck between slow and deadly slow. Yoshiko says my travelling to those sessions, which were a two bus trip south of El Centro, freaked her out because my state of health had become, in her eyes, horrific. Would I collapse and die? Or faint into traffic and be injured or killed? She felt that I had a good chance of dying. And fears were well justified and in lots of ways she was correct! The inability to walk with ease is certainly significant. And I was still ego-expectation blind that my health practices were going to be the physical cure-all via some kind of vague ‘spiritual’ purification with which I was engaged. I wonder though, if my resting at home would have changed significantly the eventual outcome. At rest it is very unlikely that that would include my changing out of the Mara ego-expectations that had become an extreme tension of opposites between continuing to honour my false-words or of coming around to honour my heart-self that I had chosen to ignore.
The next day, Thursday, I remember a noon Zoom meeting with my sister; and being happy for Yoshiko who, after a couple false starts, successfully connected with the garbage truck down the hill. (That is a surprisingly complicated process, here, because the cabaña is so far out from town.) On hindsight I see that sometime during the meeting with my sister I had gone into a state of total unconsciousness. I don’t remember ending the zoom call. And from Yoshiko’s description something or somebody was talking on my behalf and moving my body that afternoon! I remember the first part of the Zoom meeting — including some Trump assassination attempt talk and the power of Family Constellation Therapy and a discussion of my five year old self. And I remember her arguing for the need for morality to help the sangha who lack self-awareness. And that is, of course, exactly what Jung argued in the quotation above, for example. Her Sunny as girlfriend comment was there too. And then nothing else.
As the days progressed towards Monday, I had periods of ostensibly lucid conversations with Yoshiko, my friend MW, Marycruz and her uncle. I have absolutely no remembrance of any of that. Nor of having been mean and yelling at Yoshiko that she didn’t respect me enough to listen to me. In the third or fourth day after returning to the cabaña I repeated those same words also with some force and anger.
MW and Marycruz and her uncle came up to the cabaña at Yoshiko’s request for help. Initially they didn’t see anything, or perhaps enough wrong with me to help. Even though, with MW, Yoshiko describes how I kept repeating every few minutes, like a child or someone absent of all short term memory, that my left hand had stopped working. (That was a consequence of one of my dead faints Yoshiko experienced on her own. My hand is almost 100% now.) Late Sunday MW saw me faint. That was his call to action and from that he contacted a friend who put him in contact with the person who ultimately took me to the hospital and very possibly, even likely, saved my life.
What did Yoshiko experience, beyond my shouting at her? From the Thursday to the Sunday I fainted many times; I stopped breathing often and received mouth-to-mouth from Yoshiko; I pissed my pants five times and shit my pants once; and I generally terrified Yoshiko that my death was immanent.
With MW’s call the friend of his friend, who has now become a new friend, came to the cabaña on Monday morning to pick me up and drive me, with Yoshiko, to emergency. In emergency I almost immediately got a temporary pacemaker. I remember tiny snippets of the drive and of the surgery on my artery and the pushing into my body the leads of the pacemaker. Once that was installed I have pretty good memory of the following hospital days and sharing the room with the other ‘clients’. I confess that my stay there was a truly great experience created by the hospital staff and the other people there. And I remember that the temporary pacemaker’s leads would too easily fall out of the machine resting on my chest and that eventually they were taped into place after my body did an extreme bradycardia freak out.
On the 24th, Wednesday morning, I went into surgery and that installed a pacemaker. And with that I have been transformed to transhuman. I remember the details of that very clearly, the cutting and pressure of it being pushed under the pectoral muscle, the stitching and the removal of the temporary pacemaker. On Thursday, with good vital signs, instruction and medical prescriptions, I was released from the hospital and we were driven by our new friend to the cabaña after stopping at a pharmacy and a lovely new to us restaurant with particularly delicious food and coffee. Since then I have been at home, doing light exercises and, except for creating a playlist and transcribing my hand written substack, been off the computer and phone.
Yoshiko has kindly been my secretary and on my behalf, with my dictation, informed the key people about the condition I am in and my choice to stay off the pc and phone until August 9th. (Which I have well respected, except for transcribing and posting this essay and creating the playlist for it.)
Who Am I? Who Was I?
Now I wonder: who was it in my body that was talking to everyone? I, by memory, wasn’t there, whoever that I is. Was. I think maybe part of that unremembered I was the five year old. (PS-RAP confirms that.) Although I suspect that there was more to my unconsciousness than just that. Time will or will not reveal that as I go forward into this present. And in the present I allow the past to fall away with the letting go of what isn’t anymore. And what will Dra. Ana and her toys reveal next?
And my voice has significantly changed without any hint of it wanting to return to the old one.
Termino. Hasta la próxima vez desde la cabaña, Las Salinas.
Today’s amazing playlist! Built over many days and now has become very long! Enjoy its dizzy diversity.
Spotify.
Youtube Music.
YouTube Talk.
🙏 If this essay gave you some pleasure, and/or an ‘aha’ benefit, extend our intimacy and become a paid subscriber. 🙏
🙏 All the best with what is changing. Everything changes. Peace, respect, love and exuberant joy. 🙏
Or perhaps buy me a coffee instead. Just click on the coffees/matcha. With gratitude.
🙏 All the best with what is changing. Everything changes. Peace, respect, love and exuberant joy. 🙏
Today’s closing ‘Song’ isn’t a song. It is some poetry disguised as a theatrical statement. Edward de Vere’s (aka Shakespeare’s) take on ‘the quality of mercy’, from a woman disguised as a man, from The Merchant of Venice (this link is to the full play). And, following that, an English translation of the Buddhist Heart Sutra.
Portia [to court and shylock disguised as (male) lawyer] The quality of mercy is not strained; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes: 'T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown: His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; But mercy is above this sceptred sway; It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God himself; And earthly power doth then show likest God's When mercy seasons justice. The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene I
Now for an English translation, by Buddhist Thich Naht Hahn, of The Heart Sutra and adapted by me (Andrés-Maru/Guy).
Avalokiteshvara, while practicing deeply with the Insight that brings us to the Other Shore, suddenly discovered that all of the five Skandhas§ are equally empty. With this realisation he overcame all ill-being. “Listen Sariputra, this Body itself is Emptiness. And Emptiness itself is this Body. This Body is not other than Emptiness and Emptiness is not other than this Body. The same is true of Feelings, Perceptions, Mental Formations, and Consciousness [the five skandhas]. “Listen Sariputra, all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness; their true nature is the nature of no Birth no Death, no Being no Non-being, no Defilement no Purity, no Increasing no Decreasing. “That is why in Emptiness, Body, Feelings, Perceptions, Mental Formations and Consciousness are not separate self entities. The Eighteen Realms of Phenomena which are the six Sense Organs, the six Sense Objects, and the six Consciousnesses, are also not separate self entities. The Twelve Links of Interdependent Arising and their Nonexistence are also not separate self entities. Ill-being, the Causes of Ill-being, the End of Ill-being, the Path, insight and attainment, are also not separate self entities. Whoever can see this no longer has anything to reach for. Bodhisattvas who practice the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore see no more obstacles in their mind. And because there are no more obstacles in their mind, fear fades away like fog in sun. They see through all mis-perceptions and realise being Perfect in this moment. “All Buddhas in the past, present and future, by practicing the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore, are all poised and ready to be Authentic and Perfect in this moment. “Therefore Sariputra, it is to be known that the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore is a Great Mantra. It is the most illuminating mantra, the highest mantra, a mantra beyond compare. It is the True Wisdom that has the power to placate and ameliorate every kind of suffering. Therefore let us proclaim with full true voice, to praise this mantra, And to praise with the mantra this Insight that empowers us to step Fearlessly to the Other Shore that resides No where else other than in me, now. Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha! Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha! Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha! §Note: The five skandhas are the components that make up our individual self or being. They are: form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. The Sanskrit word skandha literally means “heaps,” and the skandhas are also known as the five aggregates. This reflects the central Buddhist teaching that the individual or illusory self has no permanent soul or essence and is merely an aggregate, or “heap,” of different parts that inevitably disintegrate. Five Skandhas. Buddhist Heart Sutra translated by Thich Nhat Hahn (slightly edited by Andrés-Maru/Guy.) Heart Sutra Chanted — not English. Spotify. Youtube.
Welcome back 🙏
First, Guy, I'm so sorry you've gone through this physical and emotional trauma. But glad you came back from it healed and transhuman ;-)
Second, Yoshiko has transcribed this essay with all the hurtful things about her?
Third, did 'Sunny' visit and did she want to be your girlfriend?