Two Weeks

 June 15, 2024

I’m leaving Christchurch in two weeks today. It’s a bit of a funny feeling. I feel pretty restless. 

I’ll be back in Toronto on July 19. I’ll have been away for one year and eight months. I thought it was one year and 6 months. 

The part that feels strangest is that this ‘trip’ is coming to and end. This great big experience. It’s been so enough that I almost don’t notice it anymore. It’s just become normal. It feels like it’s been happening for so long. 

I’m really excited but also a bit worried. I remember feeling very excited and optimistic about coming to New Zealand. I ended up working most of the time. And a lot of it was work that I didn’t like. 

That’s what makes me nervous about going back. I’m worried that I’ll have to move into another room I don’t like. Then I’ll have to find another job I don’t really like.

I love working with Jayne and Mark. It’s the customer service/manual labour stuff that feels a bit soul crushing at times. 

I want to live somewhere that I feel comfortable recording music. This house is so tiny. I don’t know when my roommates are sleeping. Sometimes they sleep really early and sometimes they sleep-in really late. I can be pretty loud when I’m recording. 

I’m super excited for July. Each week will be somewhere different. One week in Australia, a week in Argentina, four days in Toronto and then Montreal. That will be interesting. 

It just feels strange that this chapter is ending. Not enough time has passed for me to see it properly. I’m still in it. I can’t grasp the impact of it just yet. I think the memories are going to be enormous. 

It’ll be like when I look back on the Mexican boat trips. They just seem so massive and life changing. This past year and a half might leave a similar impression. 

There’s been some really amazing moments. I think I’ve felt some of the highest highs of my life. I remember when I first started solo travelling. It was so intoxicating. Walking around Brisbane with my camera felt so cool. I didn’t know anyone. I’d wanted to do something like that for a while.

There were also some really dark moments. Those are the memories that really seem to come to mind. They’re mostly alcohol related. The fact that I started drinking has given this chapter a certain darkness. It’s added a certain dimension that is interesting. I don’t really regret anything. I guess it just adds a level of intensity to the memories. 

The time spent drinking was actually extremely tiny. Probably like 10% of the trip. It’s amazing the amount of dark and messy situations I managed to squeeze into that time.

A lot of it wasn’t even outwardly dark things. It was an inner darkness. Moments of wanting to be dead. Moments of feeling empty and bored. 

I never felt like that when I was sober. I sometimes felt bored and unfulfilled, but never hopeless and apathetic. 

Dolus

  June 9, 2024

        Dreams 

I was in an airplane. There was a problem. We were flying very low. I was terrified that we were about to crash. Suddenly the plane seemed to get caught in some cables. The pilot came out from the cabin. He told us that there was a problem. He didn’t know how much longer these cables would hold us up. There was a river beneath us. 

    We had to go into the underside of the plane to fix it. We had to go quickly because of the threat of being flooded. 

We ran through the inside of the plane. I was running down a hallway. I opened a door and found myself in the house in Toronto. I walked into my bedroom. After a while I realized I didn’t have to worry about the room flooding. I seemed to be safe. 

I was walking to the house in Toronto. My shoes and feet were soaking wet. I couldn’t wait to get home.

I opened the door and found the house filled with people. Liam had apparently invited all of his friends over. I went to my room. There were six or seven people there. A girl told me that she was going to sleep in my bed with her boyfriend. I told her no, but she wouldn’t listen. 

    I told some other guys that I didn’t want them in my room. 

I kept apologizing to them for being rude. I also kept telling them I didn’t want them there. I felt guilty and angry at the same time. I guess I felt powerless. 

The dream ended in tremendous relief. I can’t remember whether because I woke up and realized I was alone, or if the people in the room disappeared and I was finally alone. It was one of the two. 

Dolus the deceiver has been with me for some time. 

I had a dream that I was at Dimitri’s restaurant. The family was yelling at me. I was making souvlaki’s on the floor for some reason. They were yelling and telling me to stand up.

I felt that they hated me. They seemed to think I was dumb. I felt humiliated, embarrassed and ashamed. I pulled myself out of the dream, trying to escape.

I woke up in bed. I immediately realized it was the ‘the deceiver’. He had tricked me into believing that I was hated. 

I identified him immediately. I had fallen for his lie. I fell back to sleep. 

I feel like I’m going through one of those shifts that happen every so often. It’s always exciting when it begins. It often seems to happen during transition periods. 

The last big one was when I arrived in Christchurch. That’s when I was reading Initiation. Now my time in Christchurch is coming to an end. I’m discovering Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. They’re helping me in a big way. I’ve been interested in looking inwards for years now. But the exploration has occasionally felt vague, like I’m just feeling my way around in the dark.  

These two guys are on some level encouraging me to identify the thoughts and emotions and to assign mythic identities to them. That’s been helpful. 

The one that is really interesting me is the trickster/deceiver. 

Jung is encouraging me to see my thoughts as not being the self. I’ve already been familiar with this, but for some reason it’s now taken on a more practical dimension.

I’ve always known to practise identifying with the awareness, not the contents of the mind. 

But now I’m seeing the contents as actual entities. Other conscious entities. And the one that seems to be constantly present is this trickster figure. 

I asked ChatGPT to recommend books, myths or legends that include a trickster figure. The one that resonated with me was the Coyote from Native American Folklore. 

    The Coyote was described as 'A trickster figure who appears in many Native American stories, known for his clever and often humorous antics.’

That resonated because of the humours aspect. There’s something in me that is constantly telling me jokes and making me laugh. 

But it also has a dark side. It seems to convince me of negative things. It tells me things that aren’t true, and I end up feeling self-conscious. It creates doubts and insecurities.

Bloody Lovely

 June 6, 2024 

The dream ended with a flash. I was thrown back into a pile of rubrics cubes. This riddle has puzzled me for years.

I ran up a spiral staircase. I took those steps three at a time. The turn was tight. I became dizzy. Higher and higher I ascended. Small amounts of lights entered through slits in the walls. Everything was made from stone. 

My breathing became heavy. I started to hallucinate. I saw my great grandmother ahead of me. I’d never met her. Somehow I knew who she was.

My late uncle was chasing me. He came up behind and quickly over took me. He continued ahead of me, like a train. 

Everything was moving. I couldn’t remember what was real. I was overwhelmed. I let go and began to fall. 

I descended quickly. Everything became dark. The space around me was humming. I was aware of a chanting noise coming from inside myself. I began to vibrate with a tremendous power. My chest burst wide open. 

The cosmos took me into her lap. I was ready to start over. I asked for her forgiveness. She gave me a reassuring smile and stroked my head. I told her that I was guilty. She told me to sleep.

I awoke three years later. The sun had shifted its position in the sky. 
I walked towards the river. I found a friendly wizard. He was fishing in the stream. 

“Have you caught anything?“ I asked.
“Ah good morning!” Exclaimed the wizard. “Yes I have! I’ve caught catfish and a trout!”
“Sounds bloody lovely,” I said as my tummy began to growl. 
“Why don’t you join me for lunch!” Offered the wizard. “We can go back to my temple and cook up a feast!” 

I happily agreed and offered to carry the floundering sea creatures. 

The wizards hut was small and dark. It smelt of pine. I saw the eyes of a cat. 
“Are you afraid of the dark? Asked the wizard, a mischievous look in his eye.
“I’m not afraid of much,” I admitted. “I’ve been to the abyss. I’ve faced the shadow.”
The wizard placed a tiny pipe to his lips. “Did you find something?”

“I saw the baby. I felt an urgency coming from the darkness. Like there was a tremendous energy just about to burst.”

The wizard began to masturbate quietly in the shadows. I became nervous. I threw myself into a self-induced psychosis.

He Calms Me

  June 5, 2024 

I dreamt that I was attending a play. My friends had invited me. They’d also bought my ticket.
The mass of people began moving into the building. I immediately became separated from my group. I couldn’t meet them at my seat, as I didn’t know where I was sitting. My friends held my ticket. 

I began walking in the opposite direction of the crowd. I came upon a tiny church. It was in the middle of the hallway. I had to crouch to get inside. I took a seat.

   

    There was a priest at the front. He was giving some kind of prayer. He repeatedly put his palms to his face and seemed to weep. 

I remember seeing a girls arm. It was so skinny. I could see all of her bones. I was extremely repulsed. I looked at my own arm. It looked just like hers.

    I was so quick to judge the girl for her body. Meanwhile mine was the same. I felt somewhat guilty. 

I’m reading Carl Jung’s autobiography. It’s really affecting me in a pretty strong way. I’m only 100 pages in. I can’t quit believe how much I can relate to what he talks about. 

I often feel that there’s a part of me and of reality that I can’t talk about with people. It completely falls apart as soon as I put it into words. I feel like that thing is so obvious. It’s everything and everywhere and always was. 

I hear and read people talk about reality and philosophy and those types of things. I often get so frustrated and annoyed. I get the sense that any mental idea of the that ineffable thing is always like a shadow of the real thing. It’s fine to talk and to write about it, so long as you don’t actually expect to arrive to the truth through thoughts and words. 

It’s an experiential thing. 

    I get annoyed when I feel that people believe that it can arrived at through words or thoughts. They get all worked up about it.

I feel lucky to have come across meditation so early in life. Direct, firsthand experience is so fundamental to those Vipassana courses. I feel lucky that I didn’t spend years going through a mirage of philosophy. I think it’s fine to listen to those conversations, as long as it’s not being listened to with the expectation of arriving at the truth. 

Yesterday I had in interesting meditation. I was visualizing myself in infinite whiteness. Everything was there. If I moved left and right it made no difference. Again, it’s hard to explain. But it felt so calming. 

    Then I was visualizing this interesting thing. There was an infinite chasm below me. It was amazing and calming. But I couldn’t stay in that calm state. I would get like ‘hardened’. It was like my awareness would get sticky and stuck. 

I placed my attention on a ball that was suspended above the chasm. Suddenly I could sustain the flow. It was like this trifecta. My awareness had to experience the chasm indirectly. I was observing a ball which seemed to represent a point of collapsed matter, or collapsed awareness. Through this I could indirectly experience the chasm without becoming sticky.

    It reminds me of how it’s easier to see the stars by looking right besides them. 

Legend Of Mince

Jun 3, 2024

I’ve been working lots. Today was a public holiday so it’s pay and a half. I worked from 10:30 until just after 5. So I made over $200 today.

Only two weeks of the restaurant job to go. The last few days there have been good. 

    I feel guilty for complaining about the job. Despina let me make a souvlaki to take home for dinner the other night. It was nice of her. They were also talking about how they’ll miss me and stuff. 

Even George has been particular nice to me lately. He seems different. 

I’m going to go up the hill again tomorrow. I’m not sure which path yet. I’ll go straight to Mark and Jayne’s afterwards. It’s Alpha night. That means there’ll be a big dinner. 

I’m a little stressed because of all these money related things. I’m having trouble setting up my new debit card. The app is saying that the 3-digit pin on the back is wrong. I’ll stop by the bank tomorrow.

I’m also having trouble with the money transfer app. I’m trying to transfer $20 to my Australian bank and $1100 to TD. Both of the payments have been sent, but Wise is saying it hasn’t received anything. I’ve been wondering if it’s something to do with the holiday weekend here in New Zealand? 

I’ve been trying to listen to new music lately. I tried listening to some albums that are considered the best of the 2010’s. I got bored so quick. I know that there’s new music out there that I’d like. I just have to dig for it. Most of the recent albums that are critically acclaimed seem to bore me. 

So I’m doing the same thing but for the 60’s. I seem to prefer 60’s and 70’s stuff. I’ve already listened to a lot of those albums, but not everything. 

I listened to In The Court of the Crimson King yesterday. It was cool. It was jazzy. I’ve heard it before, but not since I was like 17. Today I’m listening to Let It Bleed. 

I recently listened to Odyssey and Oracle by The Zombies. There were a few songs on there I really liked. There was also a lot that I didn’t enjoy. 

That album is pretty consistently near the top of album lists. I’m not sure I’d agree with that. 

I also listened to Pet Sounds on the way home today. I’ve heard that one quite a few times. It’s been a while since I listened all the way through.