There are just so many interesting and strange and beautiful and ugly things in life.

Enjoy.

The type of meaning that resides in the natural world is honest and straightforward, even when deception is involved.

The kind of meaning that resides in manmade things is much more confusing.

Imagine, if you will, a field of roses. Beautiful, you say. Then, let’s imagine that someone takes all of those roses and creates a garden sculpture. Still beautiful, if a little bit contrived. But now, let’s imagine that this garden sculpture is of a big dick. That’s right, a penis. And not an artsy one, but just a plain ol’ cock.

Still with me?

Notwithstanding some people’s ideas of worshipping the phallus, to modern sensibilities this is pretty tasteless. So what’s the true meaning, where’s the true value? Do you appreciate the beauty of the flowers? Or do you recoil at the frat-boy joke? Unfortunately, they’re quite inseparable in this instance.

The conflation of symbol and reality is at the heart of my confusion.

Recently I’ve stumbled across the concept of hyperreality, which, according to Wikipedia,

characterizes the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, especially in technologically advanced postmodern cultures. Hyperreality is a means to characterize the way consciousness defines what is actually “real” in a world where a multitude of media can radically shape and filter the original event or experience being depicted.

Some fascinating examples:

For example, a viewer watching pornography begins to live in the non-existent world of the pornography, and even though pornography is not an accurate depiction of sex, for the viewer, the reality of “sex” becomes something non-existent. Some examples are simpler: the McDonald’s “M” arches create a world with the promise of endless amounts of identical food, when in “reality” the “M” represents nothing, and the food produced is neither identical nor infinite.

Baudrillard in particular suggests that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more.

Interacting in a hyperreal place like a casino gives the subject the impression that one is walking through a fantasy world where everyone is playing along. The decor isn’t authentic, everything is a copy, and the whole thing feels like a dream. What isn’t a dream, of course, is that the casino takes your money in exchange for chips, which you are more apt to give them when your consciousness doesn’t really understand what’s going on. In other words, although you may intellectually understand what happens at a casino, your consciousness thinks that gambling money in the casino is part of the “not real” world. It is in the interest of the decorators to emphasize that everything is fake, to make the entire experience seem fake. The casino succeeds in turning money itself into an object with no inherent value or inherent reality.

These are good examples of what I’m talking about: the gap between the real and the unreal, combined with the ambiguity and uncertainty regarding how to distinguish. You tend to default either to accepting everything as real, or believing everything is unreal, but deep down you’re never really sure.

(Jean Baudrillard, incidentally, is a postmodern philosopher I found out about through an obscure reference in the movie The Matrix. How apt.)

More examples of the uber-deception of the hyperreal:

• A magazine photo of a model that has been touched up with a computer.
• Films in which characters and settings are either digitally enhanced or created entirely from CGI (e.g.: 300, where the entire film was shot in front of a blue/green screen, with all settings super-imposed).
• A well manicured garden (nature as hyperreal).
• Any massively promoted versions of historical or present “facts” (e.g. “General Ignorance” from QI, where the questions have seemingly obvious answers, which are actually wrong).
• Professional sports athletes as super, invincible versions of the human beings.
• Many world cities and places which did not evolve as functional places with some basis in reality, as if they were creatio ex nihilo (literally ‘creation out of nothing’): Disney World; Dubai; Celebration, Florida; and Las Vegas.
• TV and film in general (especially “reality” TV), due to its creation of a world of fantasy and its dependence that the viewer will engage with these fantasy worlds. The current trend is to glamorize the mundane using histrionics.
• A retail store that looks completely stocked and perfect due to facing, creating a world of endless identical products.
• A life which cannot be (e.g. the perfect facsimile of a celebrity’s invented persona).
• A high end sex doll used as a simulacrum of a bodily or psychologically unattainable partner.
• A newly made building or item designed to look old, or to recreate or reproduce an older artifact, by simulating the feel of age or aging.
• Constructed languages (such as E-Prime) or “reconstructed” extinct dialects.
• Second Life. The distinction becomes blurred when it becomes the platform for RL (Real Life) courses and conferences, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings or leads to real world interactions behind the scenes.

This line of exploration seems affirming, but in another sense it’s not so different from what religions have taught for a long time, for instance the concept of maya. And those old religions differ from this intellectual, postmodern, deconstructionist approach in the use of actual practice.

Ken Wilber, in comparing deconstructionism with genuine mystical practice (in this case, Buddhist), said:

The basic aim of deconstruction is to work with language, and while in the waking state or gross realm, attempt to come to a certain type of understanding about the ambiguity, instability, and paradoxicality of signifiers. The aim of Buddhist meditation is to strengthen consciousness so that it can give bare attention to all the phenomena that arise in the waking state AND the dream state AND the deep sleepless state, so that one awakens to an all-pervading consciousness or Buddhamind that is present in all three states—waking, dreaming, sleeping—and thus gain a great liberation from all transient states of being, high or low, sacred or profane.

… If one merely stays with deconstruction, then one will not take up the arduous practice of yoga, of zen, of meditation, which will transform consciousness beyond the verbal mind altogether—in fact, beyond waking, dreaming, and sleeping, which is something deconstruction not only cannot do, but does not even imagine is possible. But until you are pursuing a yoga in which you remain conscious through the waking state, the dream state, and the deep sleep state, then you are merely identified with the superficial, surface, waking state, and you manipulate linguistic signifiers in that state and imagine that this “deconstruction” is somehow deconstructing samsara, whereas it is merely manipulating a rather surface consciousness and not getting into the deep causes of suffering, such as the attachment to the waking state itself. Deconstruction is something the ego does in the waking state in order to hold onto the ego.

I suppose this points back to what I already know, which is that some sort of direct practice in order to pierce through the maya is the necessary factor.

Still, to attempt to do this in the midst of the flood of symbol and simulacra is intensely overwhelming. Ancient Hindus and Buddhists didn’t have to contend with a world awash in sophistcated use of glitz, glamor, and subliminal marketing to sway, influence, and tempt a person before they’re even aware of it. This world is hard to pierce through, with endless layers of meaningless stuff.

My whole problem is that the mystical practices are not specifically targeted toward preparing and conditioning my fragile energy body for the violent assault of coarse energy that pervades even simple social interactions in this simulation-saturated world. In some ways it’s the opposite, that an opening to the subtle meaning of life then works against me when I have to deal with the numbness and destructiveness of simple things in the mundane world.

I need way to bridge that gap.

Rolling Thunder often repeated, “We do so many unnatural things, we don’t know what’s natural anymore.” One day he and I were sitting on the ground out in the desert … Suddenly he said, “You people don’t even know what a human being is! … You can look right at someone’s empty body and think that you’re lookin’ at the person when they’re not even there. Time and again, you people speed to the scene of an accident, pick up an empty body and take it down the highway at eighty miles an hour, leaving ht eperson miles behind, not knowing what the heck is going on!” …

As an example, he then described to me an episode in which he went into the hospital to assist a young lady—a friend of friends—who had been in a head-on collision and was a long time in a coma. “I agreed to go in there,” he said, “not knowin’ what I was gonna have to do, not understanding completely what was wrong with her. We went in during visiting hours, and I told one of my people to look up the hall and another to watch down the hall, ’cause I didn’t want some nurse or doctor walkin’ in on me. But the moment I took a good look at her body, I could see she wasn’t even there. I had to find her—go get her—and she was way out in the field where the car’d flipped over the cliff, and she was sittin’ on a rock. Her friend who was driving was killed. And this one sittin’ on the rock, she didn’t even know where she was. But, boy, she was determined to stay there. She was totally disoriented. I had to pull her, nearly force her back. Only time we can do that is when we know their own will isn’t working—otherwise we always leave it up to their own choice.

“Well, in the early days, most everyone could tell when a person wasn’t in their body. That was just natural to see that. That’s been lost now, mostly. Only thing I can say is, until he learn to understand these things, you should never, never move an unconscious body. Unconscious means the person is not in there. So treat the body on the scene and never, never move it. Not until you learn how. People can’t find their own way back to their body—not when they’ve been pulled loose that way by some accident or something. Time and time again, traumatized people get abandoned that way. Time and time again, people die in a coma because of that. You oughta put the cases together—figure it out for yourselves.”

Some time later, I happened to be talking with the person who had been watching down the hall. Somehow, the subject had come up, and when he learned that I knew about that particular event, he shared his own impression. He told me that he had been posted just inside the room to watch out through the doorway to his left, but as soon as he realized Rolling Thunder was sound asleep and snoring in the chair, he himself came in and sat down, seeing no purpose in his being a lookout. “But Rolling Thunder must have done something,” he said. “Maybe he does it in his sleep. Because when he woke up, she woke up. They opened their eyes at the same time. Rolling Thunder looked at her and she just looked at the ceiling.”

Occasionally I shared with others who knew Rolling Thunder this episode that he had shared with me. Once, when I had told the story to a group of friends in California, one of them spoke up in a surprised tone of voice. “I never heard it that way before. I never knew it. I knew her real well, but I never heard about that. But now it all makes sense. Let me tell you what she told me—because I talked to her, right there in the hospital, before she got out. She remembered the whole thing like a vivid dream—but only up to the part where Rolling Thunder came. She just said something pulled her away. She felt the impact of the crash and then she passed out, and she dreamed she was floating in the field—she and her friend. They saw the car upside down and smashed, but they couldn’t connect any meaning to it. They just floated through the field. It’s like people would walk on the moon, she told me. But then her friend went higher and higher and she couldn’t get up that high. So she called, ‘Wait for me,’ but her friend kept going up. And her friend said, ‘I can’t wait. You stay, I’m leaving.’ So she sat down on a rock, because she couldn’t follow, and she shouted out she would wait right there. The friend was almost out of sight and she called down, ‘Don’t wait for me. When I come back I will have changed my clothes, and you won’t even recognize me.’ She waited for a long, long time. She couldn’t figure out anything. The only thing in the world she knew was her friend and that rock she was sitting on. After a long time—she didn’t know how long—something pulled her off that rock. Something pulled her through space until she woke up from her dream.

Found this system of classification on the blog of fantasy author Steven Brust:

I spent a delightful morning hanging out with Neil Gaiman, and, as usual, we talked about Stuff. If the following makes you go, “Splendid! Brilliant! Insightful!” then Neil gets the credit, because it was his metaphor. On the other hand, if it makes you go, “Lame! Stupid! Strained!” then blame me, because I stretched it to the breaking point.

Books can be broken down into four classes: popcorn, steak, caviar, and celery.

Popcorn is pretty obvious. Anyone here enjoy The Destroyer novels by Sapir and Murphy as much as me? gobble gobble gobble Steak is the stuff you can bite into, chew, swallow, and gain sustenance from. Some of us use spices on our steak, or do interesting things with it by stir-frying it, adding ginger and various vegetables, and so on. In my case, paprika. But at the end of the day, it is steak. Niel writes particularly good steak–range fed, the spicing is different every time, always delectable, and some of it obviously comes from places where cattle are not indigenous, making you go, “Wow. How did they ever think of doing that?” as you go for the next bite.

Gene Wolfe and John M. “Mike” Ford write caviar. It is a lot of work to get to. You have to open the can, you have to make sure the refrigeration is exactly perfect. You have to have the right atmosphere, and you have to approach it with the proper reverence if you’re going to get anything out of the experience. But if you do, my god, is it worth it!

Celery is that stuff you have to chew and chew and chew and, by the time you’re done, you’ve gotten even less nutritional value from than the popcorn. I won’t name any names.

Some turn up their noses at popcorn. Well, that’s okay. Just don’t bring ‘em to a ball game. Most of us like steak, in one form or another. Some object to caviar because they have just never got into the glories of eating–into food that is worth the work. For them, the payoff just isn’t there.

The interesting thing, to me, is that there really are people out there who like the celery because it is so hard to chew, and the fact that there’s nothing of substance there doesn’t bother them.

Okay, so, probably not as deep as I’m making it sound. But fun to think about.

I hate celery, of course. But I’m not much for caviar either. Gene Wolfe I tried and just can’t take. I’m in for steak and popcorn, or something in between.

There’s so much else in my life that I take really heavily, that is so complex and deep and full of meaning, etc., etc. I like my music and my books to not be so much hard work.

My experience is also that the world is filled with forces that threaten to take my life or life-energy.

These things combine to form a world that acts deceptively with the purpose of robbing me of power and life.

This means that my activities quickly come to cross-purposes. On the one hand, there is a constant process of decoding and translating that has to occur in order to make sense of the world. On the other hand, there’s a constant need to evade and defend in order to deal with anti-life forces that assault me. It’s even worse when these processes are embedded in the same thing, like, for instance, a hostile patient who both requires my diagnostic acumen and implies great unhappiness if results are not obtained quickly.

It’s like the strike team who has to break into the lab where some team members provide cover and stand guard while the scientist or programmer does their thing. Not fun.

This is the herd of deer that must graze and watch out for hidden predators simultaneously

These are the forces that I feel swirling around in the outside world.

I create ritual spaces to insulate myself from those forces. I like it indoors in my own house. There are boundaries I can identify as safe. There are elements that I can manipulate and have a degree of sovereignty over. Being at home is being in a space that is consecrated with my own energy, that is to some degree free of those mysteries and free of those threatening forces.

The problem is that those mysteries are the same things that enchant the world. So the indoors becomes a stale place, silent of intriguing voices. But the outside becomes filled with mysterious voices that hold the potential to threaten.

The only way to build a bridge is to understand the nature of that world, which is one of deception and ambiguity, and sometimes of violence.

This ambivalence is inherent in the term that I use so often, “Great Mystery.” A mystery describes something whose truth is obscured. The Great Mystery is something that is never fully knowable. So one could say that the nature of reality is that it can never fully be known by the ordinary human mind.

Nothing wrong with that, and nothing evil about it, in and of itself. Mystery is a neutral thing, just a shadow over the full truth. But there’s a difference between the kind of mystery that’s like, “Who invented glass?” and the kind of mystery that involves a deer blending in with the woods. One is a factual question. The other is an activity that’s born from need—the need to evade life-threatening forces.

There are, then, these activities that can allow you participation in the mysteries and voices while protecting yourself.

There’s the path of creation, of constructing ritual spaces and barriers that are strong and well-built enough to buffer you from the punishment of those forces.

Then there’s the path of deception, which allows you to hide amidst those forces.

The path of creation is like going out into the woods and building a formidable fortress to come home to every night, and gathering a group of strong warriors to protect you.

The path of deception is like the lone coyote stalking in the woods.

The former is more impregnable. But the target you make yourself is also much bigger, and the energy expenditure so much greater. That kind of thing is not really sustainable. No wonder that this is not a strategy favored in nature.

The latter is ubiquitous in the natural world. Insects masquerading as leaves and bark, rabbits and mice that blend into the soil, birds whose coloring is that of the trees they favor. The theme is intimacy, a close connection with the forces of life—and an intimate closeness with the potential for death.

The way I’ve learned, though, is the first way. You go in and you wage a big war, you make a lot of noise, you build high walls. With this method you don’t need sensitivity, you don’t need awareness, you don’t need refined strategy or tactics. You need big guns. And with big guns and high walls you get a lot of security.

But the cost is, in the long run, much greater.

No. This is not the way of blending with the Dao. This is a way of resistance, and no wonder I’m worn down by it.

All things deceive, in order to attain intimacy with the harmony and beauty of the One. Deception is the norm, not the exception. Adaptation, blending, harmonizing—these are all more uplifting ways of saying that everything distorts, manipulates, and lies to some extent. Everything reshapes what is nonessential in themselves in order to preserve what is essential. They do this because it’s easier and less expensive. They do it because it works.

This is the way of nature.

The Demiurge of the Gnostics, ruler of this plane of existence, likewise is said to have fooled people into thinking that he is God.

The concept of Maya, in Buddhist and Hindu philosophy, holds that the world is but an illusion, with no genuine reality to it.

The Kabbalah says that the material world arises from a series of emanations that progressively mask and hide the light of God from ordinary consciousness.

The common theme is one of deception.

At first glance this looks to be a bleak vision of the world. It certainly feels that way to me. I feel like I have clawed and fought my way to a place of relative clarity and centeredness, and I feel a profound distaste for that which is deliberately and maliciously obscured. Moreover, to a certain point it’s a disempowering orientation to hold, to imagine that the world is filled with lies. It has been far more potent to hold close to my heart that experience that all things are an expression of Divine beauty.

And yet, at a certain point this begins to ring false. Not that this timeless truth concerning Divine beauty does not actually hold true, but that in order to appreciate its truth it is necessary to perceive how the Divine shines differently through each speck and mote in existence. And in order to do that it’s necessary and inevitable to notice that some things are darker than others, some things stand more in shadows, some things masquerade or morph, some things are ambiguous or ambivalent. In a very real sense, reality is dishonest.

We can look to the world of nature for easy examples—nature, which is lionized and exalted by many, abounds with examples of deceit, deception, and betrayal. Though I believe it is true in a grander, more “cosmic” sense that there is a fundamental cooperation among all living things to maintain the healthy and balanced flow of life, this does not mean that at local levels, again and again, we do not see competition, struggle, and conflict that is savage and vicious and ends repeatedly in injury and death. That this cycle of warfare is a sublime and enduring part of nature’s beauty (beauty in the Divine sense that it has deep meaning) does not contradict the fact that it is also tremendously and viscerally violent and lethal.

So in this shading between Divine love and Divine light, and the gritty and grimy violence of daily interactions—here is where the mitigating influences enter in, which primarily take the form of deception.

Deception is not the exception. Deception is the norm. To live in this world is at least to understand this, and to have a minimal proficiency in it.

In some senses, to master life in this world is to master deception.

More to come.

I’m adequate enough to come across well in public speaking. I think I could be a lot better at it, if I practiced. With my many goals in life, I’m not sure that it’s something I want to spend my time on. But I could, at some point.

Just for fun, here’s a brief history of my public speaking career:

• The Great Compromise. I suppose this was more acting than public speaking, but in third grade I had the lead in a school play about the Constitutional Convention. I was Benjamin Franklin, and I had by far the most lines—tons of monologue about ratifying votes and such. I was pretty good, I think.
• D.A.R.E. Through my Boy Scout troop, I took a Toastmasters class. (I never understood the name.) I don’t remember why I took it, but it was fun and casual. The teacher was a lawyer with a bad eye who taught us about projecting our voices, not fidgeting while speaking, etc. All in all it was a pretty good class.

  Later, an essay I wrote in praise of the D.A.R.E. program (don’t ask) was chosen to be read aloud, so I did it. I employed the things I was taught in the Toastmasters class. Except no one told me that you don’t need to project so much if you’re talking into a microphone. I think I hurt some ears with that speech.

• The Spelling Bee. I coulda been a contender! I spelled well enough to get to the county spelling bee. It was very anxiety-producing. I remember being so proud when, during a break, the father of another competitor stopped me and asked if I was the kid who spelled “chrysanthemum.”

  I made it all the way to finals, and got knocked down on “camouflage” (spelling it “camoflauge”). Still remember the bright lights on the lonely stage, the huge audience, the television news cameras.

• Benjamin Franklin. I must have had a Ben Franklin thing going, because in middle school American History class I picked him to do a presentation on. You were supposed to give a speech as if you were him. So I did it, I didn’t dress up like Ben Franklin like a lot of people did, but I did it in a British accent, which probably sucked but it took some balls. Plus I was pretty compelling. I got applause at the end of my speech, where no one before me had gotten applause.

  I also remember that later, in sophomore English class, we were taking turns reading out of a Shakespeare play, and I again employed the English accent. By this time I should have known better. I think that time it was more that I was making a fool out of myself and no one wanted to be the one to tell me.

• Jamboree Interview. I attended a National Scout Jamboree in Virginia, and at one point was pulled aside along with a fellow troop member and a Scoutmaster, for a TV interview.

  Later, Johnny, a good friend of mine back at home in Kansas, said that the family was watching the news and saw that they were starting to mention the Jamboree. His mother said, “Didn’t David go to that?” and then Johnny yelled, “There he is!” as my interview started. Ah, fame.

  Incidentally, that Scoutmaster who was also interviewed, he used to be mayor of my Kansas hometown. And, recently, I found out that he stole some money and spent time in prison, and is working hard to restore himself and his reputation (as chronicled in the news). You know, I still think kindly of him.

• The Jamboree Speech. After sophomore year of high school, I went to a World Scout Jamboree in the Netherlands. (A different Jamboree.) When I came back, I attended a Court of Honor with my regular troop. A Court of Honor was a periodic get-together where the kids bring their parents and we all have dinner together and give out awards and ranks. Well, at this Court of Honor I was invited to get up and give some anecdotes about the World Jamboree, since I was one of the few people in the troop who went.

  So I was nervous, but I thought, okay, I’ll talk about something that some of the other kids in my Jamboree troop thought was pretty funny. Here’s what had happened.

  Each troop was allotted a squarish plot of land to set up their camp. The plots were side by side, in many rows. Our camp had a water-filled ditch behind it, and another row of campsites was beyond the ditch.

  For some reason, Scouts have this thing about asking permission to enter camp. You always gotta ask permission. People were always going through our camp without asking permission, though, and some of us were getting pissed about it. (I don’t think I really cared, but that wouldn’t quite explain what happened.)

  So, on our last day of camp, we were literally packing everything up to go home when a rolled-up sleeping bag sailed into our campsite. We looked over and two guys were about to jump across the ditch and into our campsite en route somewhere. I looked around. I was the closest one to the sleeping bag, and I either sensed or imagined I sensed grumbling from my fellow Scouts. So I had a duty to do.

  I still cringe when I think of this. I picked up the sleeping bag, as the owner leaped over the ditch and came to claim his property, all friendly smiles. I, being the voice of my troop, said, “Don’t come in our camp.” And I threw the sleeping bag back over to the other side of the ditch.

  Well, that was idea, anyway. I was never the best at sports. The sleeping bag landed square in the middle of the ditch, which was, well, full of water.

  The kid gave me the most hurt expression I could imagine and he and his friend slunk back across the ditch and away.

  I felt horrible. I felt like such a jerk. And you know what happened? My Assistant Senior Patrol Leader came over and shook my hand, and everyone was laughing with me. Evidently I had done something cool. I thought, wow.

  So when the time came to share, I told that story.

  Yup. In front of all these kids and their parents.

  The outcome was predictable. Crickets chirping, except for, bless his heart, one guy’s dad who quickly perceived what was going on and start belly-laughing to save me the embarrassment.

  My mother was justifiably enraged at the meanness of her son, but at that point it was impossible to tell her that I really had felt horrible about it.

  That was probably my most embarrassing public speaking moment, and the one I’m still ashamed of.

• High School Debate and Forensics. This was where I got lots of experience in arguing with people while being judged for it. This practice valued speed and quick logic so I was never that great at it, but I was better than other people, enough to occasionally place in some minor tournaments. Unfortunately the style also cultivated a sense of arrogance and superiority, and a worship of those who could destroy others with cutting words, which then led to this incident, another low in my moral history.

  It also gave me a false sense that this style of speaking was superior, which made awkward the few times I participated on the school’s Heritage Panel, where people of different ethnic persuasions talk candidly about their experiences.

• High School Graduation. I was valedictorian, so I got to give the valedictory speech. I was starting to get kind of anti-authoritarian at this point, though; plus I knew that the day would be filled with many overblown speeches and that everybody just wanted to get out of there. So my speech couldn’t have been over a minute long. I thanked three random people, who insisted that I include their names in my speech. Then I said, “I don’t have anything inspiring to say, so you’ll all have to go inspire yourselves.”
• Best Man. I was the best man at my good friend Paul’s wedding (here, in the chronology of this blog). I cribbed a few jokes from the Internet and added some personal stuff, and overall it went off really well, though I screwed up one joke and wasn’t able to project my voice loud enough to fill the huge banquet room. I had a little girl come up to me later and tell me it was a good speech, which made me feel all good inside.
• Teaching Drum Interview. I was interviewed, along with my friends, for a Wisconsin public television show that was doing a segment on the Teaching Drum yearlong program. Watch it here.
• Massage School Graduation. I must have thought I was on a roll with the high school graduation speech, because I did something similar when I graduated from massage school. A bunch of people shared memories, some sang songs. I was the last one. I got up there, and I said,

  “Well … It’s been all right.”

  Dramatic pause.

  Then I left the stage.

  This was actually quite well-received.

• Acupuncture School. I had to give two or three oral presentations in acupuncture school, which always made me nervous. The first one was a faux-marketing speech, which made me especially nervous. So I decided that since I was already nervous, I would use the opportunity to face my worst public speaking fear: a tough audience. So my scenario was that I was speaking to a crowd of skeptics, and I presented scientific evidence in favor of acupuncture. That went pretty well, under the circumstances. It helped that the audience pretending to be skeptical were all students of Chinese medicine.

  Later, in the push to get patients for clinic at my acupuncture school, I gave a talk at the local public library. It made me extremely anxious, not least because I didn’t actually feel qualified to be talking about acupuncture. It’s hard to get patients when you know that you don’t know as much as you should know. So I was nervous as hell, but I had a flashy PowerPoint presentation and a nice tie, and my wife and two fellow students showed up for support, so it ended up going great. I got two patients out of that talk.

• Acupuncture School Graduation. I had attended the graduation ceremonies of two of the previous classes at my school. As rituals, they sucked. Ritual is supposed to make you feel the importance and significance of the moment. No one in the school knew that. They went through the motions without recognizing what a ceremony is for. So it was just a bunch of people who got up and talked and handed out pieces of paper, the end.

  As our class got close to graduating, the topic of which graduating student would speak for our class at the ceremony came up, and initially the consensus was basically, Groan Let’s not have anyone speak, it’s going to suck anyway. So that was the decision.

  As the date came closer, though, I realized more and more that I thought I could do better. I didn’t really want to bring it up if no one wanted one of us to speak. But the topic did get brought up again, and someone actually suggested me, based on my previous successes giving talks in class. That was seconded, and I expressed interest. So it was decided.

  I worked hard on the speech, in the middle of finishing clinic hours and studying for my boards.

  Graduation was totally as expected. The speakers were all adequate, but far from able to convey any sense of the magic of the moment to the two hundred people in the crowd who had traveled from all over the country to celebrate. I could feel the boredom and unrest. And then it was my turn.

  And, if I do say so myself, I gave a phenomenal speech. I had complete strangers coming up to me afterward telling me things like how their cheeks hurt so much from laughing and that I really saved the day for them.

  So that was really nice.

• Marketing Myself. So today I gave my first speech as a professional. And you know what? I feel less and less nervous about giving speeches. It helps that I know what I’m doing now and that I’m licensed. And I was still in fight-or-flight. But I was actually fine up until this morning, whereas in the past I’d be tossing and turning all night, possibly for several nights in a row.

  I fidget less, I stammer less, I don’t speak with nervous speed. I don’t have to rely on my notes all the time, I can do off-the-cuff more and more easily.

  And I even gave a couple of demonstrations. Helped one lady with her shoulder pain by doing needles in the ankle. Then another woman had menstrual pain, which I shifted with needles in the arm; of course, that turned out to be a mistake because menstrual pain comes from the body not wanting to move qi and blood, so if you move qi and blood you aren’t necessarily doing a favor … but that turned out okay, after she had some rest and food. I’m just glad most everyone had left by the time she had that reaction!

Don’t know if anyone’s actually interested in this catalogue. I just know that it’s been an interesting journey for me to be more and more of a public persona. I now look back on some of those old situations and think how much more smoothly they would go if I had to go through them now, even as I knew that ultimately I’d do fine today.

Again, I don’t know if this is something I’ll cultivate, but it’s a useful skill to have, and I’ve had some memorable experiences speaking in public.

I came across a conversation where a guy described this problem.

About a year ago my dad was diagnosed with arachnoiditis after a doctor fucked up on his back surgery. He can no longer walk, and is in near constant pain (howling in pain randomly in the night, etc). He also went deaf at the same time and developed Bell’s Palsy which messes with his eyes, causing them to dry out and him to sleep with his eyes open sometimes.

… The only thing they can do for him is give him pain medications. They’re also thinking about putting in an electric shocker device in his back to help with the painful cramping – think charlie horse x 1000.

Then I innocently asked if he had considered trying acupuncture or any other form of alternative medicine. This was his response:

No, they don’t work. Acupuncture has been repeatedly shown to be nothing more than a placebo effect, and I’ve never come across any sort of homeopathic cure that could stand up to any scrutiny. In my opinion, the people that push these cures are scum. Not only are they taking money from vulnerable, sick, and often gullible people, but they’re causing people to move away from the medicines that we have been scientifically working towards for hundreds of years.

Homeopathy to me means “bullshit.” Any “homeopathic” cure that does work gets incorporated into mainstream medicine and thus hippies no longer trust it, which is why just about 100% of the crap you’ll find on those stores do 0% good. I trust a pharmacist who’s spent years and years studying medicine, chemistry and physiology slightly more than a drastically over or underweight woman (usually seems to be the case, not sure why) with a crystal necklace who’s spent hours and hours studying crap medicine from the internet.

Sorry for the longwinded reply, I just seriously hate those people.

This sort of attitude just kind of blows me away, with its juxtaposition of blind ignorance with a stance of worldly knowledge.

First of all, it’s confusing that this person doesn’t know that “homeopathy” is a specific system of medicine. In reading many of these kinds of discussions, it’s become apparent to me that many people use the word “homeopathy” as a generic term referring to all forms of medicine considered “alternative” in the West. But that just obscures the issue.

Mainly, I guess what blows me away is that, to me, there’s much more complexity to be explored, and these issues are quite readily available to the inquiring mind. Sure, some people think Chinese medicine works and have their reasons, and some people don’t and have their reasons. This back-and-forth is worthy of looking into. Instead the door slams shut before it’s even been opened.

There are many problems in the interface between the mainstream Western mind and Chinese medicine, of course. But why a person whose family member is at such a severe dead-end would not consider these alternatives, and would in fact remain hostile to them and staunchly allied with conventional interests and misconceptions, is beyond me.

I decided to change it, because obviously this is not quite accurate.

While it’s true that I’m constantly and deeply searching for magic and meaning in the mundane world, what makes this quest significant is that the mundane world is not an inert thing to me. The “mundane” is, in fact, a repository of difficulty, suffering and violence, and this is not to be lightly swept aside with simplistic New Age characterizations, or minimized by compressing it all into the word “mundane.”

On the other hand, “magic and meaning” is a phrase that also quickly sounds trite and clichéd. Instead, I’ll use the term “Great Mystery,” since it more closely matches the vastness of what I look for. Not any easy answers or pretty things, not the easy “love and light,” but a Beauty and an experience of Grace or Divinity so powerful that too much of it could incinerate your skin and obliterate your innards. The kind of Divine Light that requires profound dedication and preparation in order to glimpse. That’s what I’m searching for.

Nothing small, though they may be found in the smallest of things. The positive and negative poles of the cosmos in every cell, and in every moment.

And why initiation? Because the process of constantly walking that boundary is the process of constant initiation. Death and rebirth, with all of the pain and joy that accompany them, never cease.

That just about covers it.

A couple months ago, it started happening again, so I had to stop using it. Lately I’ve thought about getting it repaired or replaced. Both of those cost a lot of money though.

Then I finally did some hunting around online. Found an obscure blog post by somebody who had this exact problem with this exact computer, and fixed it by doing something called flashing the bios. So I flashed the bios, which basically consisted of downloading a little program, which took a few seconds, and running it, which took a couple of minutes. The most nerve-wracking part was running that bios update program. It was nerve-wracking because I had read all these warnings about how if the bios update is interrupted, it could render the computer completely unusable. I was afraid that the computer would overheat and shut down while the bios update was running, so I packed bags of frozen vegetables all around it while it was running.

It got done a lot sooner than I thought it would, for such a nerve-wracking procedure.

And it fixed the computer!

Fully functioning computer, repaired for free!

That’s it. No big spiritual insight. Just pleased with myself.