Harvest of Gems - One

But this is all leading to a very important point. Actually it's really important. So let me get on this now. The longer I was in the cabin the more I saw my mind go through these loops. It's like I would think about this person or that thing and it would carry me onward to something connected to it. Then I would get sort of sad and crazy. This would go on for awhile and then peter out. That is until it started kicking through once more at a later date. This process was endless. I felt there was sort of a cyclic dimension to all this.

The more alone I was, the more intense it got. It was like going to the movies. And you were the double-feature. This was strange. These movies would eventually speed up until it felt like you were being reborn and dying on a second by second basis. Pretty far out if you could stand it. This guy who I was reading like to always talk about something called the EGO. Don't ask me what it is because after all these years I'm still not sure about it. The guy said that this EGO hated to be alone. That it always needed an audience. Well, let me tell you here out in the boonies there was no audience. If I had an EGO it was probably suffering bad.

It's like we all have an inner conflict; and we don't know what to do with it nor how to get a handle on it. We just project it out and turn it into this outer conflict. I did a lot of this and what started to occur was that there was nobody out there to get hit by these projections. They kinda bounced off the wall and came back to me. This was weird. I then realized that my problems were really my own and nobody else's. I became pretty fascinated by them. The guy in the book said to just watch these projections like a cloud show. But I liked following them around instead of just letting them go. I'm a screwy guy when it comes to following something. I could have been a private detective.

I did it again! I said I was gonna just talk about my fasting and that was paragraphs ago. This is really embarrassing. It's hard for me to stay on a subject for long. Anyway, the fasting made my dreams pretty vivid. Like technicolor. I almost got lost in them and felt this was way better than any mushrooms. The rains now were pouring hard. My body ached from all the fasting. When I started eating. I ate too much food and had a backache. Then to make matters worse, I ate some mushrooms and started just reeling on the floor. This was some party. I thought I was dying and prayed to the almighty to save me. Pretty weird now considering the fact that I didn't believe in
him.

Society doesn't really care for madmen. It actually thinks they're pretty wacko. But the more I thought about it, the mind itself was what was really wacko. I mean just try to follow any train of thought for just one minute. It's almost impossible. The mind's flying in all kinds of fucking directions.
It really is. And a lot of these thoughts are just memory. Like it's all in the past. It's all dead already. But then it was back to the mind with all it's hungers. The therapy group congregated around the doc and we started to say goodbye to each other. There was also this cute psycho-therapist who had
the face of an angel. She definitely was interested; and it wasn't hard not to be interested in her. I mean she had it all. But something inside me said, " WHOE, BOY! " It's like my desires were going to really kill my spiritual quest and I didn't want this. But another part of me said, " Go for it, Fool! " I
was getting confused. I was at war with myself. The mind had won. FUCK!

The doc and I had a private session and he strongly urged me to tell my dad to have surgery. I was surprised by this remark, but I accepted it.

" You mean he should have surgery? " I asked.
" Yep! " he answered.
" But he wants to really cure his body with his mind, " I pleaded.
The doc sat back in his chair and just put his fingers to his mouth. He was quiet for a minute.
Then he said: " I think he's a foolish man. He's fighting with something he doesn't even understand. " He said this with such conviction that he scared the shit out of me and made me real quiet. I mean QUIET.

" But his illness is making him start a spiritual journey, " I added.
" He's going to have a spiritual journey, regardless of whether he has surgery or not, " he intoned. " I think he should cut out, what can be cut out; and employ every mental resource he's got afterward. This business is going to force him to draw on everything he's got anyway."

He finished our interview with a flourish. Yep, it was a really sobering interview. As far as I was concerned, the doc then said: I should face my phobias head on. That it was always unwise to project my internal divisions outward; and that I needed to relax into all my psyches and to welcome all challenges. Boy, what a mouthful!

The doc also said I had this gift for integrating large chunks of information quickly and that my gift was coated with this great feeling-intellect. He said it was pretty rare too. The doc emphasized as usual, the expansion of awareness, not the exaggeration of the intellect. He urged us all not to run away from our psyche; and to not split it by going to war against it. He wanted us to really claim our entire psyche. Not to disown any of it.

The doc was something of an anarchist. I just love anarchists! But the doc was a sweet one. He had this laugh which came from deep inside his heart. He really cared about me. The doc could be often really blunt. Like he said I had this tendency to retreat into myself when people imposed their shit on me.

It was a strong defense mechanism to hide my vulnerabilities. This was OK to a point, but ultimately this over-protection led to a gloomy isolation. Which was no good. It really wasn't. The doc also said I had a tendency to get pretty lazy; and that it took a lot to move me. Like a disaster, maybe?

My dad was off the wheat-grass and into his laetrile phase. He would go off to Baja and take me along sometimes. I didn't like going to these clinics because they all looked kind of sleezy and the people inside looked pretty desperate. I mean it was like fantasy island. Serums, these gas and heat treatments. I don't think any of this stuff was documented well enough. So I wasn't that confident it would make a difference. I just wasn't. But my dad was totally against any surgery. There was no changing his mind. PERIOD.

My dad was also consulting a lot of psychics. They were all members of these spiritualist churches. One of them became good friends with me. He was an English fellow who liked to talk about spiritual laws. I came to him for guidance. He was the only person who made me calm, really. One of the first things he said was that my third book would be this gift from the heavens. That it would be the BIG ONE. I thought this was a bit odd at the time because I wasn't really planning on writing another book anytime soon. I had already written two and they had been rejected by three publishers.

This English psychic also told me that the struggle between the inner and outer needed to be harmonized or I would lose my balance and end up in a really bad way. He felt worrying would be no good at all. The material crisis I found myself in was leading to a spiritual search. The market was teaching me lessons that I needed to understand and digest. But he didn't even see me, being in the markets in the distant future. Some sort of karma still needed to be worked off. Tension was the way to do this. I meekly accepted it.

I called this tantric guy and asked for an initiation. He was living somewhere in Orange county and it took a bit of time to find him. But I finally found him and got initiated into the cobra breath. This guy had some power. I actually saw a little cobra as he initiated me. I didn't know it then, but the breathing method he taught me was highly potent and I was also doing it wrong. I pumped in large amounts of energy from the universe, but didn't know how to recycle it. My emotions were also amplified and I grew really fearless.

This was all pretty new to me. The tantric guy told me not piss away my energy by telling other people what I was doing. This kind of made sense and it kind of didn't. I mean what if there was a problem and he wasn't available? And believe me according to this guy's code he wasn't supposed to stay in one place for very long. So there were definitely some problems here. But I wanted
to really do this cobra breath. I wanted more energy. The market stress simply demanded it.

The tantric guy told me that, what I wanted to do was open up my brain to higher level of awareness. We talked a lot about something called kundalini, but he told me it didn't really reside at the base of the spine. It actually was inside your brain somewhere and after it was triggered only then could you harness it down your spine and open the CHAKRAS---these powerful energy centers. This was kind of new to me. I had heard that you had to start at bottom and work your way up. He said this was possible, but that it was really hard work and kind of dangerous. Like swimming upstream without a paddle. This sort of made some sense, but like I say. I wasn't really in the know about all this stuff.