Its been a while (
) since I posted this and after signing back in for the first time in a minute (laugh), I realize this is my first time seeing
The Observer's reply.
To me, this whole practice of experimenting with consciousness is part of a process of exactly this, reconnecting with Nature, both internally and externally. Becoming a student of the Natural World and all its treasures, animal, vegetable, and mineral. Learning the wisdom of humbly submitting to our place in that Natural World - before the reckless activity of our own lower natures destroys that world. Polishing the mirror of consciousness to be a fitting medium to embrace the ineffable Source.
The process is an Alchemical one and generally only happens with immense patience and perseverance.
Plant teachers can be a lovely part of that process.
That said, I've always lived in one of the worlds larger cities with its correspondingly gargantuan metropolitan area: Chicago. [See attached map.] See the orange blob surrounding Chicago? Even when I started this thread way back when I had already began to recognize some of the facts of life here in the western world. [Map credit:
America 2050 national transportation infrastructure planning and policy consortium]
Fact: I haven't traveled enough to speak for the other blobs, but within the orange blob surrounding Chicago, there sometimes seems to be a certain amount of pollution in the environment that can "come up" and assert itself perceptually during researches with plant teachers and altered states of consciousness in general. At least for me, a lot of this "pollution" has always seemed to be electromagnetic.
As I've aged here in the big city, power outages have been increasingly rare (knock on wood) particularly since the 1990's. But even back then I had already begun to notice that when the power goes out for blocks and blocks in every direction, there is a definite change in my perception of the "feel" of the environment. The humming of all the devices we habitually surround ourselves with - ceases. I feel a certain "flow" to the environment that is normally absent. It feels as though a huge weight has been lifted from my back and shoulders, but a weight that was there for so long I didn't even realize I was carrying it.
Experiments with psychedelics confirmed this: I realized that I often felt significantly better turning off every unnecessary humming or net-connected device in the house. It led me to realize that, for better or for worse, I am quite sensitive to electromagnetic fields - especially while "altered."
So it didn't take long for me to begin to experiment with leaving my comfort zone. By the time I made this post 7 years ago, I was already becoming increasingly aware of something like a "pressure gradient" surrounding the "megaregion" I live within. Over decades of normal everyday driving around and exploring, I started to notice it could take anywhere from 50 miles to over 150 miles to begin to sense a lessening of this "pressure" depending on my direction of travel. This confirmed for me something I had already intuitively sensed, which is just how much better I felt when I traveled far, far away, not only from the city, but from most of anything directly connected with the Interstate Highway System in general.
Also, having formerly been a bit of a hacker back in the day, while sitting in an IRC chatroom on EFnet "altered" one day, I started to ponder the well known phenomenon of just how many network connections our computers make behind the scenes from the moment you turn it on. Whether its device drivers silently phoning home, or the OS constantly leaking who knows what kind of data back to Microsoft, a simple execution of "netstat -a" from the command line shows just how many network connections are made to unknown points around the globe just from keeping the computer turned on and connected to the net.
And smart phones and smart TV's are no different. A "netstat" snapshot of your smart TV's network activity before it even shows an image on the screen might shock you.
Analyzing the Network Traffic of a Smart TVI realized that some of the "enturbulation", "pollution", or "massiness" I felt while "altered" seemed to correlate with the density of these network connections. I shut off my cablemodem and immediately felt less "external vectors" "impinging" upon my personal space and my aura.
I realize I could go on and on about this, but the fact is, it didn't take long for me to realize just how much better I felt when altered after shutting off EVERY unnecessary electronic device in my house. And I already knew just how much better I felt whenever I'd up and leave. Even "bicycle day" celebrations pedaling around the numerous bike trails in my city and surrounding county's forest preserves (still well within the orange blob) felt far better than sitting at home.
But I can only flee my environment for so long before I have to return.
In the great work of Transformation, the Alchemist must work with what he is given.
We already know that genuine work-on-self can clean and purify the internal environment. Can our efforts be directed to purify and restore the external environment? I think most of us here would answer in the affirmative. Central to the lifestyle changes necessary to begin lessening our impact on the environment is to change how we spend money. Whatever you may think about voting in an election, the real voting occurs day by day, purchase by purchase. With every dollar we spend we contribute our support to otherwise faceless enterprises and supply chains, lurking in the shadows. We need something like a non-partisan "Web of Trust" for retail stores and UPC barcodes, something that can tell us what it is we are really supporting by buying such-and-such a product, or shopping in such-and-such a store. Which political policies, which corporate philosophies, which globe-spanning supply chains are benefiting from those dollars we spend? Perhaps we can even free ourselves even further from the trap of even needing to use Federal Reserve Notes... but that's a topic for another discussion.
So yeah, while I'm not quite a pharmaceutical rep, I am certainly guilty of being all-too-slow in my own personal transformation. Even though I tend to eat only organic, my own vegetable garden is still but a dream. It's taken far too long to even begin to seriously consider leaving my urban mega-opolis, let alone to gather the necessary resources to do so. Too many solid 40 hour weeks passed between 2002 and 2012 before I even realized how little I had traveled my own country, let alone the rest of the globe.
But even before then I realized the need to escape the urban death maze more often. Since 2006 or so I've managed to visit U.P. Michigan, Upstate New York, West Virginia, Pennsylvania. Colorado, Wyoming, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan, and yes even Indiana. I also managed to squeeze in Tijuana, Slovenia, and Peru. And ya know what? Of all the places I've traveled, I seem to like the more "remote" and even "desolate" locations the best. As long as you stay on the Interstates the most you'll find is what I would call "rural" - you can't really be free of the Electromagnetic Grid without going far, far from the interstates in most areas.
Note also that just west of the Mississippi is the dividing line between the hyper-colonized US "East", and the still largely wide-open map of the "West". Below please see two fascinating images from a very enlightening article, "An Economic Geography of the United States: From Commutes to Megaregions":
PLOS ONE: An Economic Geography of the United States: From Commutes to MegaregionsThe first image shows the US divided into areas based on the start and destination points of peoples workplace commutes. The second image outlines the distinct cultural and economic regions that result from further processing the data that produced the first image.
I remain hopeful I will eventually find a "sweet spot" here in the US where I might be able to relocate, plant a household-sized garden and live as close to nature as possible while still not being more than 50 miles away from the nearest Aldi's, Trader Joes, CostCo, or most importantly for my culinary tastes, an Asian market with both Szechuan and Korean vegetables and hopefully some Unagi! And if I can't find it in the US I may just have to forego the niceties of Aldi's and instead get myself lost in the jungles of South America... the closest I've been to paradise on Earth thus far.
stimoceiver attached the following image(s):
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