Day 11 - Floods of Ideas

I'm feeling much better now. My fever has subsided and I'm back to my cheery, energetic self. I originally spared you the details of the disease but I'll have to explain them now in order to tell a story. In addition to the high fever, hallucinations, and recurring nightmare world, I've had a painful sore throat and a serious mouth infection. The gums behind my lower wisdom teeth somehow became infected and swollen. They kept getting bigger and bigger and started to grow back over my wisdom teeth, almost overtaking them completely. It's excruciatingly painful. I met some new friends yesterday and the topic came up and Dave had the same thing happen to him with the fever, hallucinations and everything. When I started describing what my dreams were like, his girlfriend said that she has been having the exact same recurring bad dream for the last two weeks. She described the chaotic nature, no way to navigate the world, nothing making sense, feeling confused, meeting new people she'd never met and hanging out in places she'd never been.

I've been learning more about the astral world, which is the subconscious plane of existence. Carl Jung, a well known Swiss psychologist, theorized about three planes of consciousness. The conscious world is the world we experience while we are awake. The subconscious world is experienced while we sleep and the super-conscious deals with "collective consciousness," which is for another post entirely. Many people have reported visiting real astral worlds, either in dreams or during meditation. The book I'm reading about indigo children talks about children visiting each other in astral worlds while they sleep. Of course I have no way to tell for sure, but I feel like I was being brought to a real astral world in my nightmares. The girl didn't report it to the terrible place that I did but then again, I was struggling against the chaos and trying to force my way through it. Chaos is actually quite fun as long as you don't mind what happens or where you end up. Even if everything around you erupts in chaos, you can still keep serenity in your mind. Nothing can take that from you.

Here is a clip from Waking Life. He talks about dreaming and entering the astral land of the dead. Even though I've only mentioned a chaotic world and a death world, several astral worlds exist of a calm, peaceful, and positive nature as well.
The whole clip, and the whole movie for that matter, is excellent but if you'd like to skip right to the point I'm referring to, it's at 6:17. If you haven't seen the movie and don't want to hit a spoiler, stop watching at 7:10.
Waking Life - Astral Land of the Dead

I've decided to carry the giving spirit of Burning Man to this traveler lifestyle. I make strong connections with really cool people, only to part ways days later. I've gifted away some of the things I've had and most of the charms I received at Burning Man (not the aroma therapy though Wayne, I love that). Rather than buying things to give away, I've decided to learn how to make things out of hemp twine and a couple girls at camp are going to teach me how to do it. I went to my favorite crystal shop and the nice lady who helped me yesterday was there again. I thought of specific people and their personalities and picked out stones specific to them. I'm going to incorporate them into the bracelets, ankles, and necklaces that I make and hopefully the energies of the stones will help to strengthen their weaknesses.

Like I said before, I know diddily about crystals. I haven't yet had any major experiences with them to prove their validity to me but at this point, I've come into so many subjects with doubt or careful skepticism that have eventually proven themselves extremely valuable, that I'm willing to trust in the power of crystals without wasting time waiting for personal proof to come into my life.

I used to think all of this stuff was a hoax. You hear about the Miss Cleo scam and dodgy gypsy people trying to get money away from you so they don't have to get real work and all that other negative spin the media puts upon topics of this sort. It certainly makes you want to stay away because nobody wants to get ripped off. Rather than go off the words of others, I decided to explore myself. After studying a few topics such as astrology, tarot and the I Ching, I found that I had picked up loads of misconceptions and false information and I ended up discovering a tremendous amount of value. Now that I have found the truth in it, I'm fighting the same misconceptions from other people that I once held myself. If you're not into it or don't believe in it, don't knock it and at least be open minded towards it. Closing off to anything only keeps you from missing opportunities. To each his own, yes?

I'm still waiting to develop some of the other ideas that I've mentioned because new ones keep rushing right in. Byron Bay has a lot of spirit and is very creative in that sense. I'm doing quite well and I'm very excited for the time when I'll be at full health once again. I'm being fairly physically inactive to conserve energy, which is giving me lots of time to think about all the cool things I want to do once I am able. Peace my friends. I love each and every one of you.

Finch