Roamers Blog

[roamer]

My Journal ling skills are seriously lacking now but here is a start to my log from the previous week.


5/23
 Hit the road today, leaving behind both my 3 year job working in the oilfield and a touchy relationship with my dairy farming girlfriend.  I don’t have a concrete plan, all I know is I need to reorient and regroup. My lifes actions have become mechanical, stressed, short of meaning.  I’ve grown depressed, restless, and feel despite a trend towards a normally orientated life that I am wasting precious time not being able to access the spiritual life in depth.
 
The first leg of the days drive my mind gravitated towards meaning.  I had lost contact with meaning in the previous years but how?  Previous to my 3 year stint in the oil field to get out of debt and build a nest egg for homesteading, I had a couple of random gigs, no apartment, no girlfriend but I had no shortage of intrinsic meaning.  I was connected at the time through a steady intuitive stream, I felt deeply plugged in.  It seems I lost this intrinsic meaning in trying to do the daily life balance.  What then is the fundamental nature of meaning?  Is it about connections?  People generally report kids, career achievements, passable works of art as giving great meaning.  All of which project them and their life's work or insights forward to the future.  Tentatively I think my falling out with meaning had to do with becoming disconnected from my meditative and contemplative work.  Though I had the semblance of a stable life going I had lost the chord with my work and my ability to project it forward into time.
 
Even with this insight I still feel heartbreak over and failure over leaving my relationship with my girlfriend.  It feels hard to escape the label of being a sort of Peter Pan non commital character who chases joy and bliss.
 
During the later half of the days drive I listened to a podcast of one of my favorite health scientists , Arthur Devany http://tim.blog/2017/05/12/art-de-vany/  The podcast was how to use the concepts of evolutionary fitness to fend of aging.  My favorite concept is the idea of intentionally switching between anabolic and catabolic states and excercising mtor and FOXO pathways.  This concept really taps into the ancient yin yang creation destruction patterns imbedded in life.  Modern diet high in carb and IGF1 induction has us chronically stuck in mtor pathways.  The consequences of this are profound.  The heart of of life, DNA replication is about information encoding and decoding and basically when stuck in mtor pathways we accumulate significant errors and never let the evolved FOXO autophagy mechanisms clean up the mistakes.
 
Following this podcast I listened to a couple on AI, blockchain and IoT.
 
I meditated for 1 hr before going to bed at a rest stop.  The session had periods of non verbal absorption and some surges of energy.  But also lots of leaking from the subconscious concerning future oriented thoughts and worries.  My energy system isn’t quite primed.  Usually kundalini surges initiate a sustained burst into higher octave consciousness.  Currently if a surge happens it is just sort of damped out quickly. 
 
5/24
Another day of driving.  I reached the beartooth mountains in montana by nightfall.  I fasted the day and my physical energy was rather low.   My mind was still moving like a crazy monkey.  I ruminated over the thought that the the global economy could be modeled as a metabolic system and that the current global economic system has cancer.  Perhaps decentralization in blockchain will enable more optimal resource distribution needed to thwart.  I also spent much of my thinking time ruminating over what neurological correspondences and various meditative states and phenomena.
 
5/25
Sometimes the right move is to fake it till you make it.  I am not saying fake anything big, on the contrary fake the small things as they are the most consequential.  Develop a narrative around the mundane task that involves your decision making, observation and all faculties.  Prepare a meal as though it was for a most extraordinary guest, again not in actual course but in attention to detail. 
 
Spent the day on small day hikes and probably 4 + hrs meditating.  The bulk of my reflection for the day was around the forces of creation and destruction on macro and micro levels.  I’m marrying my hunter gather surplus and fasting routines to these concepts and coupling more intense fasting periods with a natural focus towards death.
 
5/26
Finally started to hit some depth in meditation, noted that depth is proportional to dispassion.  But dispassion is maybe not even the right word, its a good one though.  Had a heavy fasted workout and hike.  Picked up a drone for photography in a nearby town. And spent the night camping over beartooth pass montana.  My nightly meditation session awoke some energy and concentration.  I had a natural fast intense breathing session followed by sort of cobra snake like rollings of the spine.  The energy stabilized and concentration remained noteably more intense and stable.
 
5/27
Awoke at 4 am to something of an altitude headache.  Drove to beautiful spot to launch my drone for some morning footage but discovered I needed wifi before I could actually launch. 
Ended up driving to gardner montana before I was able to get the drone going.  I backpacked meditated and shot some footage of the beartooths.  However upon getting a wifi connection at a coop in bozeman i discovered that 4k footage overwhelmed my laptop and wasn’t able to view it.  I am not certain what my intentions with the drone are.  I bought it knowing that i could learn something that will keep my techy monkey mind busy on the trip and that ultimately I could sell it for not much less barring i don’t crash it when I am done.  Though I have some savings I have to operate very lean and it was a big ol splurge. The model is a mavic pro and is small enough i can backpack with it, but without power I only have ~20 min worth of footage that I can catch.  I’d like to capture some footage over a few remote spots in the bob marshall and give them as a gift to my father who in has become diabetic and unable to hike into this favorite spot of his.
I think the fasting and meditation are both kicking in.  I am carrying some degree of absorption as I type, my mind is getting clearer and I am observing what feels like inner clouds being burned away.
 
 
 
 

[roamer]

5/28
I dealt with frustration and anger much of the day.  In part I am frustrated at myself.  I have it feels always kept one foot in and one foot out of what I have done in life.  I got a degree in engineering, but rather than pursue a career fully I immediately sought ways to get out, to protect myself from becoming.  There are so many subtle reasons why none of my endeavors have felt right, but all of them boil down to a deeply ill society and culture.  I have come to view society in a dysfunctional way myself.  Rather than engage in it, I find high return gigs work briefly and than rectract and regroup. 
 
I am not a committed contemplative either.  Both of my meditation sessions ended in a stable deep level of absorption, right on the edge of the non material.  But I was clinging and that clinging was just sort of a “why am I doing any of this” semi nihilistic malaise. 

 
It bounced me back to the question of what would a meaningful life for myself look like?  Something of this nature came back to me “ I want to be an off grid introspective scientist and researcher focusing on the intersection of metabolism, neurology, and meditative practices.   I’d also like to explore developing integrated low impact solar infrastructure from the perspective of metabolism. 
 
Oh yeah was able to recall an OOBE from previous night of working with a former coworker.  We were assembling and setting up downhole telemetry equipment.  He was asking intuitively where things went and I was just sort of nodding and telepathically showing.  He was very happy and at how easily everything was going together and was very thankful of my help.
 
Oddly that morning he texted me on a worksite to ask if I had seen a worknotebook of his.  I told him where I last saw it and he found it and we chatted.
 
My feeling is that those experiences are happening in my sleep more often than I recall and it is only when I have the time and space to unwind that I can synch up with them.
 
Also worth note from the day is I am practicing an extended autophagy strategy.  I am not exactly fasting.  I am using multichain triglycerides in 100 cal shots ~500 cal/day and BCAA up to 10g to maintain energy but remain in prolonged ketogenic state.  Plan to go three days this way and then plan to have intense sprint and weighlifting wo.


Have yet to get much footage or any editing done on my drone footage, but have uploaded some test snippets of beautiful sunny montana.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByI0raHiDOYXNmdIbHF3cmpRVTA/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByI0raHiDOYXTHFWVFdSTVB3TUk/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByI0raHiDOYXR3Uza0NEVjVGNjg/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByI0raHiDOYXQUdWUUpGbHhZaWc/view?usp=sharing

[Jhanananda]

As I experienced in my spiritual journey the challenge is to maintain a fruitful contemplative life, while gainfully employed and raising children.  I found it takes discipline.

Thanks for the beautiful drone footage.  If we can organize a GWV retreat this summer, and you can attend it, then perhaps we could include some of your drone footage into one or more of the retreat videos.

[roamer]

You are right Jhanananda there is no progress without discipline and concentration.  This is hard, our society is just a series of increasingly atomized thoughts vying for our attention. Also  One might have discipline but be devoted to a clever fool and also make no progress

I have not found the way to hold together a family life whilst doing this nor do I know if I want to.
 
I don't know what direction I am going to take next in my life, but if I am feee for the retreat I'd gladly bring the drone along for photography.

[roamer]

I spent the majority of the last month tenting at a relatives house in rural northwestern montana while redecking, reroofing and building a porch.  I stumbled into the project innocently enough while visiting.  They had tarps over their roof and the weather was nice so at the urging of family I committed to doing it.  I discovered that the reason the handbuilt log cabin had remained unroofed was do to an idealistic perfectionist streak in my uncle, coupled with a lack of focus.  I completed 75% of the work, which included tearing old roof off building 2' roof extensions, tearing off old decking, building new valleys, framing porch and starting underlayment.  I did all that I could do solo at which point I needed assistance from an uncle or other laborer and could not get it.  I grew horridly tired of listening to libertarian BS and other politics.  I left the job with 150 very hard man hours into it and all the difficult work complete as I simply could not work with my uncle and had no support and did not wish to waste anymore time camping in squalor without any solitude there.  It was the most work for $600 I could ever recall doing and I guess I learned the hard way family are really not to be counted on for much.

That whole construction fiasco threw my state of mind into a tailspin.  I almost got into a fight with my uncle on several occasions and left after one quarrel that really provoked me.  I was being condescendingly told how to do a project which was screwed up from the start by him and then expected to do it out of kindness and repayment to my family.  I realized in this situation how little my father and my family have ever taught me, how hollow their values, their politics, how poorly they guided me into the future insisting they knew.  The sad thing is my family is probably less dysfunctional than most.  Our culture is largely screwed.

I spent the last few days of June hiking in the cascades of oregon.  I found a homestead caretaker position on the south west coast of oregon that I am currently checking out.   The position seems like a good fit, in exchange for being in the remote property daily and an hour of chores I get room and a small stipend in a little cabin.  I'll see how it works out.

Nothing of note has happened at the contemplative level, I am hung up on anger and feel failed by society and now even family.  I fear I am turning into an angry recluse.  I dont have compassion for us as a species.  I feel like largely we deserve a few plagues to humble us....but being a human myself I don't really want to be around when it happens.   


 

[Jhanananda]

I am sorry to read of your difficulties; however, I still stumble across issues of dysfunctional family of origin.  I no realize that I would have been far better off if I left my family long, long ago, an never made contact with them, nor returned any attempt to contact me.