In a drug-induced stupor on a night of power, I distilled the Juice. I named it The Uncertainty Principle, that we can not be wise enough to know where to seek that knowledge we most need to find. I gave notice at the golf course (Sonoma Golf Club), prepared my van for the road, and closed my bank account on the way out of town. I set out to research my third novel, The Uncertainty Principle, about a philosopher who sets out in a van to research a hypothesis named The Uncertainty Principle. I thought it was clever. I had written myself into the plot because I wanted to bring more realism into my fiction...
By miraculous circumstance, I landed on a mountain in the Land of Oz. I left some time later emotionally hammered, trapped in a story too good to tell. A near perfect leap.
Data analysis /data collection / data analysis...
I still had a book to write. I gave notice at the golf course (Napa Valley Country Club), prepared my trusty steed, and closed my bank account on the way out of town. My plans were to camp at free campgrounds up through Northern California, Oregon, around the Washington Peninsula and back down the coast. I spent one weekend at a campground west of Tahoe with a couple of friends, and one of them asked me why I was doing this. I told him I was searching for wisdom, having long lost the capacity to explain to others what I was trying to do with my life.
I wound my way up through gold country, staying out back in some campgrounds that were both breathtaking and empty. And then came a day when I had finished one book and went looking for another. I found something I had bought a couple years before, named "The Tao of Health, Sex, and Longevity" (*Note 2014 - Highly Recommended with no financial or personal connection). I had liked the title, and was curious about what the Eastern folks had to say. I had probably flicked right to the sex and gotten as far as ejaculation control. For whatever reason, there it had sat until I had the time. I started with the preface and stumbled straight into Lao Tzu's marker...
"The word that can be spoken is not the true word." (*Note 2014 - From The Tao Te Ching)
I worked my way north, reading and becoming more interested in this Taoism stuff all the time. I loved the way they approached a problem; I loved their solutions. I couldn't believe I had never heard of these guys, they had turned up some very good stuff. I tried to put the health philosophy to work right away. I was wrung out from the long inner emotional battle; I was bloated and stiff. Somewhere outback in Washington I did a ten day fast, dropping thirty pounds in the process. I started breathing exercises. I was stretching, trying to put my body, my mind, my Universe back on center; preparing for the return.
I landed back on The Mountain (Mendocino), living in a tent hidden deep in the woods.
There were bears, mountain lions, rattlesnakes. Fifty feet behind my tent a deer gave birth, and every day they would pass on their way to the pond. There was a creek at the bottom of a steep ravine, a thousand private feet of paradise. Four months of soup and rice, beans and pasta. I drank from a spring, swam in the creek, dug a new hole every day. And I read.
I had picked up some alchemical texts along the way, because it sounded like a different version of the same game. I was highly motivated to stay alert, and they had an algorithm for becoming more present (*Note 2014 - Ancester Lu's 100 Character Tablet, Taoist Breath Meditation). It began with "stop thought." I would have never thought of that; so simple, so direct. Once I tried, I got the point immediately. It was difficult. Why should that be? I began to check out what I was doing instead, what I found more important than staying alive. I watched the progression of trivia and heroic fantasy, the cramped little universe I had constructed. I was trapped in a cage of lies.
A lot of weird stuff happened in here. There was a night, when, with tears streaming down my face, I realized I didn't exist, that there was no substance in my mind, it was all bullshit, luck piled improbably high. With total sincerity and great emotion, I surrendered my empty existence into the service of Reality. Lights out...
Cold-boot. Felt strange in the morning. Went to work and stopped at the comer to drop in. The corner was a spot on the property with a great view down valley, and "dropping in" was a game I invented to practice mindlessness. I borrowed the term from surfing, the point where you commit to a wave. I had started to think of time as a wave in space, the Now was in motion, and the object was to match speeds, to tune in the present. Surf the Now?
I implemented by going to touch, by becoming the data until it passes through you, and you're in! It felt strange, like I was opening up feeling in my body. The thought to drop in must become the act of dropping in, you must rip yourself away from whatever fantasy you are spinning and thrust into touch; become the data. It is a very physical action: a quick snap of attention SHIFT. Once you have caught it, you go soft, so that the data gets louder and you pick up more subtlety. There are volume knobs.
One day I grasped that I had accessed raw data, that reality was "out here", what I was feeling while I was feeling it, and everything else was manufactured data manifesting in the holodeck. I had only been taking brief, blurred, glances at the data stream, I was missing almost all the real motion because I had gotten sucked into watching fiction on a movie screen. I had forgotten there was a real thing. Most particularly, I was missing the dynamic interaction that occurs when you are gathering the real thing in real time.
I was seeing connections in everything, observing objects as waves moving in time, and I began projecting conceptually forward and backward, expanding my time-window. Suddenly I understood why I had been so lost. I had mistaken the holodeck for reality!
Then came a day I stopped at the corner, dropped in, and opened my eyes. My jaw hit the dirt. Crisp clarity, vibrant living color, a weird three dimensionality, a feeling of consciously occupying space. It was completely unmistakable, and thereafter, only as far away as remembering to drop in.
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