Retreat Conclusion

I have returned from my retreat. I learned a great deal, mostly on a subconcious level, and came to several conclusions which I will try to elaborate upon.

Isolation and Focus

The most obvious details I noticed pertained to isolation.  In my time alone, I had free time beyond my dreams even though I still spent nine hours a day at work, and with that free time came a level of freedom that I do not often experience.  I got the opportunity to write code, play, read, and meditate that my normal life normally crowds out.  I used them thoroughly.  Sometimes I did so unwisely, and sometimes I used them quite well.

I also noticed that I really do value small group interactions, possibly above all others.  I frequently do not want one-on-one time, especially if all of my interactions for a couple of weeks involved only one person.  Even more frequently, large group time completely overwhelms me.

I think of it as focus.  I can maintain extreme focus only for so long.  Eventually I need to get more diffuse.  But I discovered some weeks ago that if I go out to a big event, so many things vie for my focus that I have no hope of making sense of anything.  Further, parties run at their own speed.  If I want to really participate, I must hook into that speed  The one party that I attended had some dynamic that I was unable to participate in because I was so accustomed to both being alone and to choosing my own speed.

I need to continue to spend a lot of time alone.  I came to understand this last summer, but putting it into practice was difficult.  Changing habits always is.  After a month, I spend time alone easily.

Diet

As I have said before, I spent twenty-one days on a cleanse.  Generally, this required a very restricted diet and a set of supplements that theoretically helped clean out excess fatty tissue and any toxins that dissolved in them.  As we all know, anything fat-soluble may end up living in the body for years.

I saw two immediately visible effects and my nutritionist saw one.  I saw my weight drop rapidly back down to my ideal.  I also saw the piercings that I got back in October very suddenly heal.  Those piercings had been struggling to heal for months, making some progress forward and then slipping back, and then they suddenly came to almost fully healed in the last twenty-one days.  I will remember that and may even go on this cleanse again in autumn when I go back to get some more holes poked in me.

My nutritionist noticed that I slimmed down a bit in several places.  I do not see it when I look at the pictures that I have been taking, but I do know that I have to wear the utility belt tighter than I ever have before.

Invisibly, I learned about cravings.  Three days in, with the cravings starting to take up my mind, I discovered that my biggest and most urgent craving was for fat.  The source did not matter.  I would have been as happy whether it came from candy, chocolate, pizza, or the cream in my coffee.  Much later, I learned ways to work around this craving by eating some foods that provided some of the taste involved with fatty foods, but without actually providing any significant amount of fat.  I discovered sweet potatoes, which were allowed in the cleanse, and I fried them in a small amount of olive oil, which was also allowed on the cleanse.  Everything suddenly became much easier until I was able to add in lentils, and then the rest of the cleanse went very well.

Except for the day that I attended a party.  I ended up leaving after just a couple of hours because I got severely overwhelmed, both by all of the foods that I could not eat, and by the number and loudness of the people.  A mere ten people overwhelmed me.  See my comments about isolation.  The food tempted me so much that I left, had a single fortune cookie (which first tasted very pleasing, and then rather bitter), and then I felt unhappy for the rest of the evening.  I railed against this specialized diet that I forced myself to go through and the tenacity with which I would finish it out.  And then I felt better in the morning, went to work, and continued on through the rest of the cleanse with a few more bumps.

Cravings exert a great hold over me.  I think that food has a more direct influence on my experience than anything else.  I sometimes find that only magnificent sex can satisfy me as well as a decent bar of chocolate or a good cup of coffee.  Considering the coffee that I buy and brew, I spend more of my time drinking coffee than having sex.

Spiritual Matters

A long, long time ago, somebody was trying to tell me that being able to go into an out-of-body experience really deserves little more than “so what”.  I did not get it at the time, even though e explained it all very well.  I thought I got it, but I really did not.

I figured it out, I think for real this time, over the last month.  Go out of body, raise  consciousness to see the big picture, lower conciousness to more directly touch the world, then Come Back And Do Something With That.  Just experiencing does little good until I turn that experience into knowledge anduse that knowledge Right Here and Right Now.

The book I read, On Becoming an Alchemist, by Catherine MacCoun, described alchemy from a Christian alchemy.  As I came to understand, “Christian”, “Buddhist”, “Islamic” (or Sufi), and others simply show different perspectives on the same set of truths, helping the alchemist understand the process through a familiar religious framework.  Use what works, choose the perspective that resonates.  Read the documents of the alchemists of all traditions and understand my own biases in terms of what perspective I use.  The book resonated with me and made so much sense to me that even now, after processing on it for several weeks, I find that I must resist parroting what the book said.  I am internalizing all of it, reformulating it into an understanding which will be uniquely my own.  Ironically, I still do not know what religious filters I put on this, so I have work to do there.

I can still describe the broad picture as I understand it today.

First, the Alchemist, by which I now mean me, seeks self-transformation.  I seek this transformation so that I can draw the energies of my body and the energies of my mind together at my heart.  Once I have done this, I have created a Philosopher’s Stone, my heart, and can direct those energies outward from me, influencing the world around me in loving and helpful ways when the alignment is complete and when I see the world as it exists, not as delusion would have me believe.  This process brings my spirit and my soul back together, though they technically never parted except in perspective.

At the time of my creation, my soul jumped into the horizontal world, splitting into my physical body and my subtle body.  My spirit held back.  At this time in my life, I have no real conciousness of my spirit.  I have very little awareness of my subtle body or those of the people around me, though I have spent much of the last three years working on cultivating that awareness.

I exist here and now in the “horizontal” realm where I have full freedom of movement within the realm.  If I can become lighter or more abstract in my conciousness, I can rise upward into the realms of thoughts and ideals to get a glimpse of the bigger picture or to commune with those spirits and angels who live at those levels or who have descended to those levels.  If I can become heavier in my thoughts, I can descend into the emotional realms, into more intense physicality, and communicate with the elementals and so-called demons who live there.  All of this communication benefits everyone.  I learn from them.  They learn from me.  What they learn depends on what I can teach and what they need.  Further, these heavier beings can help me heal from wounds that my physical body remembers even though I do not.  Ultimately, they can help me transmute the physical emotions which drain me into similar emotions that help to energize me.

The experience bears importance only insofar as I put it to use.  Pure experience does not help.  Translating that into understanding helps, especially if I can communicate that understanding to others.  Putting that understanding into active use helps much more, helping me to be most effective in the world towards… what?

I read that I can undertake much of the path through my own efforts and the aid of the spirits, elements, and other human teachers may speed me along significantly.  In fact, I believe that these spirits and teachers really wish to render such aid, and that I will wish to render the same aid when I understand enough to usefully provide it.  The book gives guidelines and ideas mostly for how to develop my own methods of transformation, but the final stage is out of my hands.  Somewhere, sometime, if I remain intently on this path, the final stage will occur when I suddenly, with full knowledge of what I can do, give up all power I may have created to obey the dictates of the universe.  Ms. MacCoun says “God” here and describes that transformation as the shift from arbitrary magick (the power of the individual to choose and create amazing change) to sacred magick (the power of the God to operate through the individual when the individual steps aside).  What I call it will depend on what I believe when I reach that point.

For now, I meditate regularly just to focus my mind.  Watching how my mind works reveals so much, and yet I have difficulty describing that knowledge.  I have no vocabulary to describe what I see, but I can create analogies for what I feel.

Importantly, I must check and recheck everything.  I can test every experience and insight here in the horizontal realm.  I must discard insights which do not stand up under testing.  Perhaps I mistranslated the experience.  Either way, I must not get so caught up with looking upward that I forget to verify my experiences.  Incarnation here gives me the opportunity to run such tests.

What Changed?

My perspective changed.  My habits changed.  I wanted this, and in one month I learned what I want to change now and got a good start on beginning it.

• I am meditating regularly, but not quite regularly as I wish.
• I have retained most of my diet from the cleanse.  I have incorporated several foods that were forbidden, but I am adventuring through re-creating some of my favorite foods in healthier ways.
• I have slowed down my life dramatically.
• I have re-learned the joy of solitude.
• I have a roadmap… for now

I do not really know how I will integrate back into the normal world.  I suspect that, as I described above, I will need to remain very careful about how I distribute my time amongst people, and I will need to guard my alone time carefully.

Public Service Announcement

I understood that  Gryphynkit created a Livejournal RSS feed for me (known as savannirss), but I did not until a few days ago understand that commenting was possible on that feed.  So, I apologize for never replying to those comments.  I did not ignore you, I simply did not know you were posting comments.

Now you can post comments directly on this website.  I will try to ensure that you do not need to keep track of a login or some such sillyness in order to do so, but I also reserve the right to shut comments down if I get too much spam.

Transitions

Yes, there was a huge change in the last day.  I decided to switch to a Wordpress blog, just because.  Since I am clearly not going to push my own blog/wiki/<deity of all pkm management software> any time soon, it was time to start using something that somebody else created and is complete.

I will shortly import everything from my old blog.  Probably in the morning after I’ve gotten some sleep.

Besides, I have things to say to you.  Sort of a wrap-up of the last month.

More updates

Two items of importance, really.

First, my cleanse ends on the 21st. On the 22nd I will want to celebrate. I have the celebration very clear in my head, and it is very simple.

I want to meet with anywhere from one to three other people and sit down to enjoy the most magnificent coffee I can find and the most magnificent bar of chocolate I know how to get. The chocolate is very clear to me, and it is something that I cannot finish even when my sweet tooth is in overdrive. The coffee will be either something at Dominican Joe’s, or something I brew at home. Both can be pretty magnificent.

Email me if you are interested. I hope to see a few people.

Also, one of my friends sent out a link to a conference that is going to get me out of my retreat early. I really need to network with some other programmers and maybe find a free software project or some such to join. Or just some other Haskell programmers to work with. But I am now signed up for the conference and we shall see what I learn.

Progress Report

So far tonight I have spent the evening browsing OKCupid and making both a lentil soup and a mashed turnip. The turnip did not turn out so well. I think I dislike turnips. The lentil soup was amazing, and was wonderful to have today.

The cleanse goes on. The lentil soup was something I promised myself I would have as soon as the cleanse allowed it. I also tried a mashed turnip and discovered that I do not particularly like turnips.

The cleanse has actually been very challenging, but I found a few things that helped significantly in the last few days. One was the addition of lentil soup tonight. Another was finally separating in my sense of taste a sweet potato from the mushed sweet potato STUFF that is served at family dinners. I chopped half a sweet potato into thin disks and fried them in a bit of olive oil with rosemary. OMG TASTY!!! And it sat in my stomach like a very heavy rock. As Guen pointed out to me, I’ve spent nine days eating lots of foods that were mostly water. Gotta treat potatoes a bit differently.

I am continuing to process. I know that I need to make a quick grocery run tonight, and a more significant one tomorrow, and I shall continue to process about that. I have quite a lot to work on, too. The stuff around romance is starting to congeal, finally. I also finished a book on Alchemy, and I am shocked at how much of it resonated. I am convinced that a lot of the information in here dovetails rather nicely with the work in Angel Tech.

Romance, Cleanse, and Felines

First, the feline.

Mr. Washburn, though skittish, has started exploring the storm drains. Or maybe he just hangs out in the storm drain right outside of my house. Either way, he went down there Sunday during the day and refused to come back out. Through a very stressful Sunday evening and Monday evening, I tried various techniques to coax him out. I could get him to come out for catnip and for food, but even the slightest approach from me caused him to run right back down into the storm drain. I was truly fearing that he had gone feral.

Then, this morning he comes to the back door and starts meowing at around 6:30. I’m sleeping downstairs against this possibility, so I let him in. He ate a bit, then meowed quite a lot, then fell silent. I should have been suspicious, but instead I had gone back to sleep. Later, I got up and found a trail of small dried leaves in my kitchen. In my workroom, I found Washburn lying, quite happily, in the midst of the scattered full contents of a bag of catnip that I had left on my desk.

Well, that explains the silence.

Cleanse

As part of my retreat, I have gone on a food cleanse. This is the Standard Process 21-day cleanse. I am in relatively good health, so I am hoping that 21 days on this will help purge some excess toxins that I have picked up over my life, help out with the little roll of fat around my belly that I cannot explain and rather dislike, reduce some of the unexplained weight gain from the last year, and instill in me some better eating habits.

Interestingly, former co-worker and his wife just finished the cleanse last Saturday, for the third time. Apparently the results they get from it are pretty incredible, so they redo it every six months or so. They also warned me about some really negative reactions (headaches, nausea) that can happen in the first few days, but so far I have experienced only mild headaches. And that was at the end of the first day.

So far, the primary result has been Fresh Food Overdose. Geez… However, last night I made a decent soup out of a tomato, a stick of celery, salt, pepper, cumin, and garam masala. The garam masala probably was the wrong flavor. Tonight I took my chickpeas in ginger sauce recipe and stripped out the chickpeas to make it compliant with the cleanse. It was quite tasty, but quite sweet, as well. A little unexpected. But, I have leftovers for tomorrow evening, so no need to spend hours in the kitchen then. Technically, I am supposed to be eating only fresh food or very lightly cooked food, and I am doing a good job of that, but it is damned cold and I want something savory.

There is a protein shake that I am supposed to drink 2 – 3 times per day. Actually, it’s make a shake out of fresh fruits and vegetables, add the protein powder to it. Until day 11 (which will be February 11th), I have almost no other protein source. Yes, I could get protein from avocado, but I rather despise avocado. Anyway, the protein powder adds a rather undesireable flavor, but I figured out tonight that what I find most disgusting is the thick foam that forms as part of running the blender. So tomorrow I’m going to try just fresh juices, no or minimal blending, and see what happens.

I seem to be craving fat now, because even the microwaved breaded fish dinner that somebody did for lunch smelled really, really, really, really good. Of course, if I am craving fat then that means I am probably also metabolizing my stores.

Romance (and gender)

This is actually something I wrote in an email last week to several people. I am reposting it here largely unchanged, but it is a matter for me to process. Several days after this email I attended a workshop on Romantic Theatre and I have notes that need processing, and then they need to be integrated into the stuff here.

I plan to attend on Saturday a workshop on romance in what sounds to me like a highly ritualized form that derives from highly spiritual traditions. On the other hand, it also sounds like it originates from those spiritual traditions that strongly emphasize the masculine/feminine split in a very heteronormative, two-gendered way.

I plan to attend in part to prove to myself that I rebel against the two-gender system with my eyes open and that my rebellion has not yet blinded me. I also hope to learn something valuable, but I fear that I may have difficulty assimilating it.

I have met the teacher several times. Interestingly, I suspect that I may ultimately be a lot like him in about twenty years. I see a lot in him that feels really familiar.

A few days ago, Crow described to me a “date” that this guy recently conducted with a friend he has known for a great many years. Second-hand description, and I shall elide almost all of the details. She described an event in which he took his friend out to a nice restaurant and conducted the entire date, setting the stage, ensuring the wait staff stayed out of the way, and generally everything that goes into a perfectly masterfully orchestrated romantic evening.

Okay, all well and good, except that I perceive a great act, one that the man must carry out and that the woman gets to judge.

I may be over perceiving the gender split. I do not think so, but I may be.

Maybe sometimes it is not?

I once had no problems figuring out what was expected of me for a romantic evening. But, I also have to say that it always felt both forced and fake when I did it. Now it feels even worse. I try on occasion, but I feel a constant pressure to “perform” when I do try it, and I do not enjoy that. The best I get is dressing nicely and taking somebody to Casa de Luz, which is not a fancy restaurant, where there are no attendants to take care of every little thing, the environment is comfortable, and where I do not feel that every action I take is being judged. Or maybe I take someone who is judging me and I just fail to care.

Obviously, all of this stuff eats at me. Several contradictory identifiable ideas feed this confusion, but I do not yet know which ones are true…

• I may discover that the gender split is real and that I cannot possibly be an androgyne
• If I’m a man I will always be the one expected to perform flawlessly
• Why am I still in circumstances where this is important enough to throw me into this much conflict
• Why is it that when spiritualists talk about “meeting” women (not initial meeting, but relating on the same level), it sounds more to me like “worshipping”?
• ???

There’s a lot more here, but I have kinda run out of words. Clearly I am experiencing a lot of turmoil about all of this…

When (if) I get some resolution, I will post more here.

Retreat

Just so you all know, I will be spending the entire month of February in retreat. This will make me highly inaccessible to just about everyone until I emerge in the beginning of March.

On the other hand, I may be posting more here. Not that I usually post much of consequence, or that there is really any one reading it.

I hope to emerge with two things….

1. A reasonable map of my spirituality
2. A couple small but useful pieces of code

The pieces of code are largely optional, though there is one that I really want to have written as part of a super-secret project. I really want a reasonable map of my spirituality and a bunch of new habits around it and around my overall health.

Freezing but dry

And I managed the ride to work. A stiff headwind slowed my progress considerably. Except for my hands, I managed to dress just right to be comfortable for almost the entire trip. I will attempt to buy some thicker gloves on the way home.

Magical bike moments

Friday night, I went to a party. It was a going away party for a former lover and her boyfriend as they move out to the west coast. They are probably half-way there by now. The party was close to my house, so in my excitement over the new bike, I cycled there. Not quit five miles, but the route is dark with very little traffic and I was totally surrounded by trees for much of it.

At about 1:30 in the morning I got a text message letting me know that my lovers from Dallas were about fourty miles out, so I said my goodbyes, jumped on my bike, and started the trek home. Understand that with my bike, I am now in a position where I can Truly See the sky. I’m used to being hunched forward and unable to see all that much… now I get to sit back.

So, on the trip home, I turned north onto a very dark road entering my subdivision, and in the midst of the darkness got to see a brilliant meteor come down. It was very bright, had a beautiful green tinge to it, and lasted a good two seconds. Maybe as long as three. This was around two on Saturday morning.

This is the second meteor of true beauty that I have ever seen, and is the kind of thing that really stands out in my memory forever. And there is something about cool weather that makes the skies even more distinctive in my mind.

I have worn a tektite since 2001. I did not know about the energetic influences such a stone exerts until 2008, but even before that I liked wearing a stone that was so closely associated with space and with falling stars.

Incidentally, here are some pictures of my new bike. I will get pictures of me on it soon.

Programming language exploration crash

Total crash on the programming language front. I thought Clojure was pretty darn cool, but I was really uncomfortable wandering around in yet another “dynamically typed” language. Read “dynamically typed” as “duck typed” or “run time typing”.

I just spent multiple hours today tracking down a type error. It amounted to me passing a number in a very complex data structure where a string was required. I ultimately figured it out by printing out the value of the field that was causing the exception five modules deep. That is just not how to write world class code.

In my opinion, type errors should be found at compile time. Always. Never at run time. A language that waits until run time to find type errors is broken.

So, my choices are C, Java, Haskell, and Ocaml. Here’s my analysis of the problems of each…

• C — uber-primitive. Polymorphism amounts to void *
• Java — carpal tunnel
• Haskell — advanced monad issues in big applications, and a lack of library support, and the parser library is dog slow
• Ocaml — screwed syntax

However, of the four, Haskell and Ocaml are the two that I am really thinking of the most. I have to decide on one of them. I think I can get over the advanced monad issues, but I am not sure how to deal with lack of support libraries in Haskell other than to hope that other programmers decide to write stuff.

sigh