The big antenna - the major "upgrade" I received - (and it's not all good news)...

Happy Monday! I am getting used to this western world habit again as there are no week-ends or week days in the jungle so the days are all the same.

I have been talking here about organizing a conference as I love connecting people and showcasing the best speakers on particular topics which I loved in the past as I was curating LeWeb. I also shared that my partner Magdalena is pregnant of my 4th son due end of November.

After more thoughts it doesn’t seem reasonable to me to start working now full-on organizing a big event before our son arrives. So the conference will be for later.

I have therefore decided to do an experiment - write this newsletter as my main and only “work” focus.

I quoted many times Jon Kabat-Zinn “Meditate as if your life depended on it” so I meditate daily and just added “Write my Newsletter as if your my depended on it” to my two must-do’s of the day.

I decided I cannot let a day pass without these two actions accomplished.

Like spending so much time in the jungle alone, this is an experiment. I thank you for reading it, grateful for all your feedback (I read all) and invite you with me in this experiment. You are part of it reading it, commenting or emailing me as much as me writing it, otherwise I would just write my personal journal. I love reading your feedback please just forgive me

I also decided to focus on “one teaching I received a day” - not only from indigenous but also western conscious leaders, friends, my cat, anyone and anything that teaches me something important.

Sharing this “teaching of the day” might help others as much as it helped me, this is why I share.

Here is today’s teaching. A little longer than usual but worth it I think.

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The “Big Antenna”

When I prepared for my most recent work in the jungle, the Muka dieta and its unusual requirements, I asked my teacher (Peù Yawanawà here in the back, all avatar painted dark blue, the “naneuh” dieta which I did twice too) a very simple question.

“What will Muka do to me?”

The answer was always “You will see, it cannot be explained”.

I got even more excited by the mystery.

During the 3 months isolation there is -one- obvious change I noticed: I started feeling more and receiving constantly more information. I talked to Peù about it and he said:

“You are starting to see one of the first benefits of Muka, you now have a big antenna and it will grow constantly as a plant growing inside of you”.

We all have an antenna. I am not special.

Some traditions call it “the third eye”. I have always been impressed how many friends, especially women, seem to feel and receive much more than I do or did. Some have it naturally “more open” or “more receptive” than others. Information comes during dreams and all day long if you learn to see (read Carlos Castaneda’s work in “seeing” non ordinary signs of consciousness). A friend gave me once “voir” in French then I listened to “The teachings of Don Juan” in audio books, it’s fascinating and started to open my mind to this. We can all open it if we want to.

Meditation is the most important tool but there are many others. No need for a secret plant - but that specific plant seems to exponentially open my antenna. At least this is what I am feeling.

Here are a few ways observations.

Food, drinks and sex

I cannot eat for one year sugar, fruits or sugary tasting food, red meat, salt (as little as possible), pure water (only some teas), of course alcohol (I stopped for life) and many other things. I cannot eat either large quantities as I used to.

This started as a rule to observe and now my body just tells me.

After I came back I ate once two plates of paella with some fish and got sick. I ate a dish with too much salt in it and felt bad. This morning I had two slices of bread and stopped after eating the first as I felt bad from too much bread too. If I eat anything “heavy” with too much oil or fat I get sick. I love cheese and it’s authorized in the dieta. My mother brought me about 30 different cheeses from France for my 50th birthday and I loved it thinking there was nothing wrong with that. I can’t eat much of it or I feel bad.

This is where the “antenna” comes. I used to be blind to how my body receives food.

In the jungle only one woman also in dieta was authorized to cook for me and was bringing me food every day in my hut. Very little. Now I am “free” in the world so it’s much harder as I could break the dieta anytime (I won’t) or I can eat lots of what’s authorized if I want but I immediately feel the bad consequences.

I have never felt so good and light. I can hike in a way I have never before without the excess weight. I discovered how my body feels better with just the appropriate amount of food it needs and no more.

The challenge is culture programming or “conditioning”.

I generally don’t eat dinner anymore or I slowly adapt to this habit (with all its consequences when the social exchanges with friends happen in Europe mostly at dinner). In the same way, I was doing it in the jungle because they told me to not eat anything after 3 or 4pm but now I see what it does by myself - I sleep much better and I can recall many precious vivid dreams most morning as I wake-up. A single dinner can remove my dreams for days.

Without sugar, salt, water, alcohol and sex - my emotions are more intense

When we eat some chocolate, we feel better and happier, same with sex. As I removed all (the baby did not come from immaculate conception, the last time happened before I left for Muka, so about 5 months ago) I can now feel everything much stronger. I something annoys me or upsets me it comes really fast. If I feel “down” it also comes really fast and much stronger than before.

Nothing seems to reduce or slow down the effect of negative thoughts or experiences. They hit me full-on.

This is the challenge I am learning to deal with as I came back in the world. With more information and stronger emotions I need to self-regulate and calm much more. I see less people and don’t go much with rare exceptions to dinners or concerts. I’m going to listen to Sufi artists tonight though since I have read The Mysticism of Sound and Music I cannot wait.

More information comes constantly and the challenge of human-made “noise”

I was for months by myself only with animals and nature. All I could hear was parrots singing, trees moving with the wind or the rain. The only humans I talked to were indigenous teaching me songs and prayers. I had most of the time for myself just listening and connecting to nature. I was offline for 3 months, no phone except to say I was alive every two weeks.

I only started singing a few years ago and I am 50. One day I was singing in the trees by myself and a bird landed on the tree right in front of me.

That beautiful bird started singing beautifully (it was a delight to hear birds all day long and many indigenous songs were created from the songs of birds).

For some reason I started to sync my voice to the bird singing, or at least it felt this way. Sure, I was taking some powerful plants in the forest so I was in special states of consciousness. Music, songs, voices, movements of nature turned into a magical experience.

I have been seeing music or “synesthesia" for a few years now, even without plants. I saw it once and it stayed forever. The plants are like wearing magical sunglasses that reveal much more information that I learned to see without the glasses, it’s much harder though.

I have learned to sing to the waves of colors I can “see” and not from what I hear.

What I have “seen” with the sounds of nature and plants I cannot unsee. I “see” more and more all the time and without the use of any plants.

Beautiful, right? Here is the bad news.

I came back and started to absolutely dislike pretty much any sound human made (apart from spiritual songs or music). It could be a plane in the sky or someone doing a conference call or receiving a beep when a text message hits his phone twice a minute at the table next to mine in a restaurant. Everything started to “trigger” me to the point of feeling absolutely off-balance. I got more used to it now but when I was in any place with many people around (I was mostly alone for 3 months with no touch and no eye contact) the “energy” I feel was overwhelming.

I felt like a baby just out of the womb discovering everything with new eyes and ears.

I seem to be perceiving much more not only from the words of everyone but also from the tone of voice, the equivalent to the melody of a song. What’s the melody of the person or the vibrations I receive? I can listen to someone talking in a language I do not understand and easily feel how that person feels - stress, happiness, anxiety, strength, weakness…

Can you feel that too? Sure you can. I have also felt some in the past too, but not to the point of being overwhelmed.

Here is the good news - that’s the teaching. If it’s hard it forces my brain to adapt to this new information and it will.

After a conversation with my friend Gino Yu I decided to start treating any “human made” information and stimulation as important as from nature. We had a fun time noticing together planes in the sky, birds singing, people talking, babies screaming while we were talking. We changed room and talked about “recalibrating” as our environment changed. At each sentence we were saying we were noticing any “interruption” from the “universe” no matter what it was, pointing fingers at it (Gino talks with his hands a lot which makes it even more fun). I often see weird stuff and got used to it. In Gino’s hand and fingers below I saw a snake head and tongue - I told him and asked him to stop sending me energy this way, I could see what he was doing with his fingers.

We joked. Of course I said it as a joke but it was me talking Heyoka as I actually did see that.

Weird but fun at the same time. If you meet with Gino look at his hands - they say more than what he says.

I try to see everything as a synchronicity or a message. I try to observe everything including during conversations. I observe myself observing, too.

As in meditation work I try to dissociate with myself. I am not that body here, I am that consciousness who has this body currently observing what I believe is reality but there is much more information than what my eyes see and my ears can ear.

What is there? What is real? Who is Gino? Is he the body I can see? The voice I can hear? How can that be? Gino can’t even see himself how I see it (we can only see ourselves in a mirror which isn’t how we look like to others). At best all I can see through my experience is what “shows up to me as a body named Gino”, but it’s much more than that.

Observe everything constantly is the teaching. Receive and process more information. “See” what the eyes cannot see.

We have all seen the Matrix and similar dream/reality movies. Living in a simulation or an alternate reality will be my next newsletter.

I leave you with this quote from Alan Watts that I tweeted this morning (thanks Rikard).

“If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.” - Alan Watts

Any recommendations on links, books to read, videos to watch? I am going to read this. Thanks!