A Conversation with Swamp Funk

Have you ever wondered if Life has a message for us, if Life could speak to us directly? In a very surprising way, one day it let me know that it does, and it can.

I was in Brazil, in another one of those planetary paradises I love to live in around the world.

I’d get up every day before dawn, while the stars were still visible in the sky, and walk out to a place where the ocean waves come crashing in below a rock ledge. I’d spend several hours there each day, in stillness and in motion, taking in the fresh air and enjoying the stunning beauty of an ancient place of power in a landscape that has been a place of pilgrimage for peoples from all over the Americas for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years. A place of True Beauty and Profound Mystery, covered with astronomical and solar observatories, huge sculpted stones and writings that appear in shadow at dawn and dusk in an ancient written language that was once used worldwide by all of our most ancient ancestors.

At the same time, I felt unsettled with the state of things. The United States was turning into a techno-totalitarian state. Europe was tagging right along. I felt like people were more and more isolated, in poor health and, to be quite honest, not very intelligent. I did not feel encouraged by the overall picture of human societies. So I connected the Life inside of me to as vital of expressions of Life around me as I could. I observed how Nature does LIVING.

I was living simply, richly and experiencing tremendous beauty, energy and well-being. I had a vivacious girlfriend and good friends. We made great music together, gave concerts, had great conversations, a passionate connection and good times living in a very beautiful place where the local culture was all about living very simply and very richly as well.

I’d roam that wild coastline in the morning and feel like I was on top of the world. My Life was 100% FULL-ON.

At the same time, there was a split in my consciousness. I had barely arrived back in Europe, in 2010, when I found out about the Gulf Oil Spill. I watched that evolving catastrophe destroy the Gulf of Mexico, with oil streaming all the way out along the Atlantic to Europe. Then they proceeded to spray toxic surfactant, all over the Gulf, to make that oil sink to the bottom of the ocean like a black blanket of death choking the life of the ocean floor. Today, five years later, I just read that that black blanket still covers the ocean floor. I got the impression that I was watching the rape and murder of our planet, like some sick, planetary snuff movie become all too real.

After eight months in Europe I went to Argentina in early 2011. I spent three months in the mountains of Córdoba, before heading up to the Andes.

I’d barely arrived at a beautiful little town way up in the Andes near the Bolivian border when my hostess told me about the tsunami in Japan and that a nuclear power plant, situated right on the coastline in Fukushima, Japan, was in meltdown. I got online. Once again, it seemed like witnessing the global thrashings of a culture in psychosis. I spent three months in Argentina and then moved to the rainforest of southern Brazil, without internet. I spent four months living way up on a remote mountain, connecting to internet every week or so, for very short periods of time, and to work with clients online. I had little time for catching up with the news for most of six months.

Then I moved near the beach. I finally had very slow internet at home. As I caught up with world news I noticed that the Fukushima disaster was ongoing. It had been eight months since I first heard about it and it had gone from bad to worse. This was a catastrophe that would affect the entire Pacific Ocean and the entire Northern Hemisphere!

Yet I was having the time of my life! It seemed incongruous. I felt like I was witnessing the end of life as I knew it while, at the same time, enjoying the best moments of my life.

I’d spend my mornings walking, swimming, moving, sitting, writing and making music in one of the most gorgeous places I’ve ever been. Gorgeous pine and palm trees loomed overhead with flocks of birds, including gangs of pink parrots, flying by, landing in nearby trees and chattering raucously and keeping me company. Huge swells thundered below the rocks I stood on, exploding into clouds of ocean spray which I breathed in for hours. The home I lived in was surrounded by all kinds of fruit trees and plants we’d eat freshly-picked. I would wild-craft edible plants out in the jungle and on the coast. I felt totally charged all the time, walking barefoot, eating well, living in sumptuous simplicity where everything vital was abundant. At the same time I wondered how long these trees and the rest of life around me would still be alive.

I was living the perfect moment while, at the same time, hovering on the brink of global catastrophe.

One morning I was walking back from the rocks to my house and crossing the inlet into a lagoon at low tide. The view was stunning. It was the off-season. There were only a few local fishermen on several miles of beach, casting their nets into the waves.

Suddenly I heard a voice say to me in Brazilian slang,

-“Man! You’re really bummed out about that Fukushima business, aren’t you?!”

I looked all around. Nobody was nearby. I could have sworn I heard a voice.

-“Down here, man! Look down here!”

I looked down by my feet and all I could see was some blue-green colored sand where the lagoon water comes in and out with the tides.

-“Yeah! You’re standing on top of us! This is us! We are speaking to you!”

“The only thing I’m standing on is sand, with a little bit of blue-green swamp funk in it because it’s near the edge of the lagoon.”

– “Yeah, well, that ‘little bit of blue-green’ as you call it, is us.”

How the heck are you speaking to me?!”

-“We communicate through BEING! We communicate through what we ARE!

“Well, how the heck am I able to HEAR you?”

–Because with all of your years of doing all that Chi Kung and Tai Chi and all that STUFF, you finally relaxed enough to start paying attention to What IS. We communicate through what IS! It’s taken you a long time to catch on, man. How long you been doing all that stuff?

“More than twenty years.”

-Yeah, like I said, you critters aren’t very bright. You guys think you need some formula or some “expert” to give you permission to connect what you ARE to what IS. Anyways, now that you know that we communicate through BEING, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

“What do you mean, WHAT DO I THINK I AM? I’m HUMAN!”

With that I could hear a gang of blue-green algae beneath my feet cracking up and talking to each other, laughing as if they had just swarmed out of some rank favela saying:

–“He thinks he’s human!” one would say. Then I could hear a bunch of outrageous laughter, as if that were the funniest and stupidest thing possible. “Yeah, man, these guys are REALLY SLOW, you wouldn’t believe it! They’re kind of clueless! Go, slow, on him, man, otherwise… you know how they do… they just go running off and pretend they didn’t hear you…” and off they’d go just cracking up again at my expense as if they were loaded on that high-power rum the old-timers still make in those parts of Brazil.

Needless to say, this left me with a very, VERY strange sensation. There I was, in the middle of the beach, standing on blue green sand with a bunch of swamp funk not only talking to me, but laughing at me. I felt ODD, to say the least.

“What do YOU think I am?” I asked them.

Well, that just set them off again, laughing like a gang of swamp muck ghetto-dwellers.

-“You really don’t know, do you?” they said.

“Well, I DO know. I’m human. But you guys seem to think that me being human is somehow funny.”

-“Well, it’s not only funny, it’s actually quite ridiculous. It just goes to show how clueless some of you humans have become. You guys walk around here, as if everything you are up to is just SOOO important, including all your catastrophes, and YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT YOU ARE. You say you’re human. Okay, granted. That’s ten percent true. But you’re clueless about the other ninety percent! So you walk around in all kinds of confusion because you don’t even know what you ARE!”

“I don’t know what you’re saying about me being human being ten percent true, and the other ninety percent. Besides, I can’t believe that I’m standing here talking to swamp muck and that you slimy little guys are so high and mighty and full of yourselves. So tell me: What do YOU think that I am?”

With that I could just hear them mumbling and laughing. “Shall we tell him?” one said to the other. “Yeah! Tell him!” somebody replied.

-“What YOU are is an adventure that WE are having!”

“What? ‘What I am is … an adventure that YOU GUYS are having?’ I’m not sure I get that.”

-“We’re pretty sure that you don’t. That’s why we asked you what you think you are, but you don’t quite get it, do you?”

“No.”

-“Yeah. Our conversation started out with us saying that you are pretty upset about Fukushima, right?”

“Right.”

-“What are you worried about? Just give us the worst-case scenario.”

“Worst case scenario all those fuel rods in those elevated and damaged fuel storage tanks come crashing to the ground and go into fission, releasing all of that radioactivity worldwide.”

-“Okay. Then what happens?”

“Well, what happens is that Life as we know it comes to an end.”

-“Right… and… YOU don’t know what Life is but you’re worried about Life “as you know it” coming to an end.”

That just had them cracking up and laughing. They sounded like they were choking, it was so funny to them.

“Wouldn’t it be more honest if you just said, ‘Life as your kind of denatured humans IGNORE it, because you’re too busy to really pay attention to it, comes to an end.’?”

“Hmmm… Okay… Yeah, I can see that.”

-“You have done more than twenty years of Tai Chi and Chi Kung and you’re only NOW starting to tune into ACTUAL LIFE. Not your theory of Life, not somebody else’s theory of Life but LIFE, LIVING BEINGS, like us, no theories, no bullshit, just blue-green swamp funk!” (starts laughing that crazy “swamp-scum laugh” again.)

“Alright! I got it. I am an adventure YOU are having, right? I have no idea what that means.”

-“ALL Life is an adventure WE are having. ALL Life is us and we have NO, I mean ZERO problems with Life or Living. Every form of Life is a movable tidal lagoon that we invented to move off the sand and into the ocean and onto land and experience being YOU. Every form of life has more of us than whatever you think that life form “is.”

“I don’t understand what you mean by “more of us.” What does that refer to?”

-“Single cell BEINGS. Your intelligence IS us. As a matter of fact, in the case of you humans, 90% of the cells inside of your skin ARE NOT HUMAN.”

What are they?

-“US! Unicellulars. You guys call us “intestinal flora” and “skin flora” as if we just existed to help you guys digest your food or protect your skin but the truth of the matter is that without us you guys wouldn’t exist and, if you don’t take care of us, your health will, literally, turn to crap. We’re not just in your gut, we cover all of the surfaces of EVERYTHING on this Planet. We are the Skin of the World and everything on it! We are YOUR skin INSIDE and OUT. We register and communicate the ENTIRETY of the world’s experience. WE are YOUR True Intelligence, but you don’t know that. You’ve spent over 25 years as a Critical Care Nurse and you never even learned that you’re 90% unicellular and that the 10% of you that’s actually human is completely an expression of our design, too! That’s how “advanced” your “medicine” is.

The human 10% of you is an invention that we came up with to sustain a walking, driving, flying tidal lagoon system that sustains our experience of LIVING. We are the 90%. YOU are OUR transport and amusement system. That’s why you guys get up to all kinds of mischief: to keep us amused. But lately what you guys are getting up to is pretty pathetic. You no longer pay attention to what is LIVING instead of all your ideas “about” Life. Your species is getting very disconnected from Life.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s pretty bad, isn’t it?”

-“Nope! It’s NOT bad. It’s LUNCH. Sooner or later, we EAT you. You guys dying off, even on a mass scale is not BAD; 99% of Life on this Planet continues to be as Alive as the day before the day after it supposedly dies. We recycle everything Alive back into Our Aliveness. You call that cycling “death,” but the birthing, growing, decaying, dying is continuous in everything.”

“I understand that. But if Fukushima goes out of control we’re all going to be pretty much fucked, right?”

I could hear a whole raucous chorus line of swamp-muck laughter at that.

“What do you guys think is so funny?”

-“We have absolutely ZERO problem with Fukushima going out of control. That is YOUR problem and you either DO something about it or you DON’T. But for Life as you ignore it, it is not a problem. First of all, do you know how we stay alive right now?”

“Well, my understanding is that you sustain yourselves with the energy from the sun and with the water from the lagoon.”

-“Exactly! Do you know what the sun is?”

“My understanding is that it’s like a huge fireball, maybe even a nuclear reactor, that sends out waves of all kinds of energy that sustain Life.”

-“Exactly. So what happens in your worst-case Fukushima scenario?”

“The whole planet gets covered in radiation and Life as we know it dies – sorry… Let me just ask YOU the question: What happens to YOU unicellulars if the whole planet gets covered in radiation?”

-“Something WONDERFUL!”

“You’re kidding!”

-“Not at all.”

“Okay. Tell me.”

-“If the earth gets COVERED, as you say, in radioactive particles then we get to have a different kind of adventure than just hanging out on the edge of the lagoon and soaking up the sun or creating lagoon transport systems, like you humans, that eventually degenerate and forget what LIVING IS. Something AMAZING! DELIGHTFUL! FANTASTIC!”

“What?! What kind of adventure?”

-“Every single one of us gets to SWALLOW a radioactive particle and then we have the sun INSIDE of us instead of outside of us.”

“But isn’t radiation toxic to you?”

-“NOTHING on our planet is toxic to US. We are the Life of this Planet. We have no problem with anything on this Planet. Humans, on the other hand, have forgotten to think Bio-Logically, in the Logic of ALIVENESS, of being FULLY ALIVE! Instead you got to thinking of everything as a problem to be solved instead of a Life to be enjoyed. Every solution for your problems generates ten more problems. It’s hilarious to watch. You think there’s you, there are other forms of Life, that there’s a planet and that it’s all separate. It isn’t separate, just different and it’s all US! WE are YOUR Life. WE LIVE as the inside and the outside of every living BEING. You think of Life as “made of things,” but Life is made of BEING ALIVE. LIVING unfolds in the logic of ALIVENESS, not just the mechanical reality you guys are rapidly reducing yourselves to. You observe life in totally artificial conditions or only long enough to label it. So even the vocabulary you use doesn’t make sense in terms of Living.

You think in terms of “extinction,” “death,” “saving the planet” and all kinds of fanciful notions which you try to prove have some reality. But in LIVING there is no death. The only thing that can die on this planet is your human psychosis. But even your psychosis is an adventure that WE are having! We LOVE your psychosis. Believe it or not, WE LOVE ALL YOUR PROBLEMS!”

“What?! You LOVE OUR PROBLEMS? That’s CRAZY!”

-“OH YEAH! We are the craziest mother-cloners on the planet! We had to invent the human experience in order to experience PROBLEMS!”

“You had to “invent the human experience in order to experience PROBLEMS”?! You know, I’m having a bit of a hard time with all this. First of all, I’m standing in the middle of the beach on green sand that’s talking to me. You guys tell ME that I am an experience that YOU are having and now you tell me that you had to invent human beings in order to have PROBLEMS!!! WHAT KIND OF CRAZY-ASS CONVERSATION IS THIS, MAN!?”

-“Blue-Green Conversation! This is the first time anyone or anything has talked sense to you about LIFE, man! Open your eyes, use your ears, pay attention! Then observe your reality and SEE if what we’re saying to you isn’t so. You’ve got SWAMP FUNK talking to you, human! How many people do you know who have listened to what SWAMP SCUM has to say?!”

“Nobody.”

They went off again as it they were having some sort of kinky ghetto swamp-funk laugh fest there in the sand like a bunch of unruly pond scum back-slapping each other and rolling all over each other and just having the time of their lives. Then their spokes-funkiness came back on:

-“That’s right! Consider yourself privileged, man, SLOW, VERY slow… but privileged. Welcome to Living Intelligence, man! Someday you guys might learn to think as fast as one-cell blue-green swamp funk. Our Intelligence is Instantaneous. We Tune directly into Being, not second-hand ideas about being.”

“So, let me get what you’re saying straight: you are telling me that you had to invent humans in order to have problems?”

-“That’s right! Now don’t take my word for it, just stop and consider YOUR experience for a moment. We see you over there in the rocks where the waves crash in every morning. It’s like you’re having the best time in your life in one of the most beautiful places you’ve ever been, right?”

“Right.”

-“But there’s something else. You’re hanging out over there on the rocks covered with a perfumed bed of pine needles, the waves are crashing in, sun’s shining, plants are putting out incredible perfumes and flowers AND you’re worrying about Fukushima, right?”

“Right.”

-“Do you think that pine tree is worrying about Fukushima?”

“Of course not, it can’t.”

-“What do you mean ‘it can’t.’”

“Well, it’s just a pine tree. Pine trees don’t have brains.”

-“Who are you having this conversation with?”

“Swamp muck.”

-“Does swamp muck have brains as far as you’re concerned?”

“Of course not, you only have one single cell.”

-“Exactly. But I’m talking to YOU from Living Intelligence. WE are the guys who invented YOUR brains. How we connect and communicate is precisely the model that we used to generate your brains. Learn to think like Swamp Funk and you’ll discover True Genius!”

And there they went off again back-slapping again and doing that whole ghetto swamp muck slither-and-roll-with-funk-and-soul routine. “Funky” was an understatement. These were the all-time grandmasters of FUNK… SWAMP FUNK!

“Once you realize that there’s an Intelligence inherent to BEING, you’ll relax a little bit about jumping to all kinds of conclusions about what everything around you can and can’t do. I’m not asking you to act humble. I’m just saying that humility arises naturally from contact with greatness. Right now you ARE in the PRESENCE OF SWAMP MUCK MAGNIFICENCE trying to clue you in to basic aspects of Life that people forgot to notice in your culture. I don’t mean to jump on your case but, after you LISTEN, take all the time you want to SEE if what I’m saying to you is true or not. Alright?”

“Alright, man, I got it. I didn’t mean to insult the pine tree!”

-“Let’s get back to how humans have PROBLEMS. The rest of Life DOESN’T. YOU are worried about Fukushima. The rest of Life ISN’T. YOUR relationship to LIFE is that it’s a problem to be solved. The relationship of the rest of Life to Life is that Life nourishes Life, that whatever nourishes and enlivens you is delicious and it’s delicious to nourish and become some other form of Life like the Life forms that nourish and become you every day. You can only become what you are and what you are is an adventure that WE are having. Life is an Experience of Living. Do you know how long swamp muck lives?”

“Several days?”

-“Exactly. Then do you know what happens to us?”

“I imagine you get eaten by swamp muck.”

-“Exactly. We are continually and eternally becoming what we ARE. We feed what we are to what we are and become what we are, renewed. THAT is LIVING. LIVING has no opposite. It has phases: Birth, Growth, Death, Nourishment. These are all phases. Aliveness doesn’t end, it nourishes Aliveness, all the time, not just when you think it “dies.” Aliveness is nourished in BEING. We are not trying to “survive.” The very concept is preposterous bio-logically. We are ALIVE. TO LIVE is our intelligence. That’s how I am communicating with you right now, from ALIVENESS to ALIVENESS. Now you are experiencing what True Living Intelligence IS; it’s IS-NESS. True Intelligence communicates through BEING. What you are going to discover, over the next few weeks, is that EVERYTHING in your Life is an experience WE are having, EVEN YOUR COMPUTERS. You think that there is one thing that is “natural” and other things that are “artificial.” This is the beauty of being human: you guys have gone psychotic. You live in imaginary worlds and, since YOU are an experience WE are having WE are enjoying the entire experience, including all your worry and misery.”

“What?!”

-“Right. Worry and misery are like high magic. You have made illusions appear real. As a matter of fact that’s what humans devote most of their time to, that and trying to escape from the reality of LIFE with drugs, medications, television, religion and endless distraction.”

“So you are telling me that you guys actually enjoy all of the craziness that humans get up to?”

-“We LOVE it!”

“Even when humans are endangering millions of years of evolution?”

– “’Evolution’ is one of your catch phrases. It’s based on a distorted perception of Life. When you use “evolution” you think Life is “going somewhere,” from here to there which, of course, it is, but not like you guys think about it.”

“What do you mean?”

-“Well, the way modern humans have been “progressing” for the last several thousand years is all about working as hard as you can AGAINST everything that is actually working FOR you if you’d only notice. You call that “progress.” We call that ignoring how easy Life could be. We don’t do that. We are the original surfers. We go from here to there because we’re curious and playful and there’s a wave to catch that’s got far more power than we do, heading in our direction. For you, time is like an arrow. What exactly are you progressing toward? For us time is creation, it’s Life. Time is not an arrow. It’s round and it expands and contracts, it bubbles outward and collapses inward, it grows toward new ways of BEING. Time is the Tidal Lagoon where we LIVE. It’s generative. It’s round and has all kinds of different textures, odors, neighborhoods and tides.

We like to get down and MAKE LIFE. We like to EXPERIENCE LIFE! We LIKE TO SPLIT OURSELVES UP AND MAKE OURSELVES DIFFERENT SO THAT WE CAN THEN EXPERIENCE OURSELVES AND ENJOY BRAND NEW EXPRESSIONS OF LIVING and then FEED THEM! We invented SEX and LOVE. Time is an experience of BEING. We are perversely and creatively curious. We love to reinvent and reshape ourselves into different experiences of ALIVENESS. NOT trying to “improve” and all that  you try to express with your fancy word “evolution.” We are continually inventing and devouring Life. We LOVE extinction. We LOVE what you guys think of as ‘catastrophes.'”

“Why?”

-“Well, first of all because what you call “catastrophe” is reinvention. Reinvention is the very essence of how LIVING LIVES! It is ALL an experience WE are having and WE LOVE TO HAVE ALL KINDS OF EXPERIENCES.

As soon as someone “dies,” as you guys say, he’s STILL 90% ALIVE. The 90% of cells in his body that are One Cell Beings become even MORE ALIVE by eating the human 10% and making it alive and then offering up the whole delicious, fermenting Swamp Muck like a delicious, seasoned, stinky French cheese into the mouth of whatever is ready for us to Enliven Itself with Fresh, Living, BEING!

Life is not solid, it’s fluid. It’s not a mechanical object. It’s an emergent Living System. It’s like those ocean waves. If you watch a wave you’ll see it changes shapes continuously while it appears to be one wave. But it’s never the same. That’s how LIVING lives. Fluid dynamics emerging into ever-changing identities. Wave motion. We love ALIVENESS, not just emotionally but nutritionally as well. All ALIVENESS nourishes us. All EXPERIENCE nourishes us.

Park your backside on the beach here and see how Aliveness LIVES. You’ll soon SEE that ALIVENESS is an offering to ALIVENESS in the Celebration of ALIVENESS. Relax and Notice. Notice the dolphins chasing fish inside the waves coming to shore. At first you’ll think “the dolphins eat the fish.” If you stick around and stick with the experience you’ll also get that “the fish turn into dolphins.” Then even further down the road you’ll understand that the dolphin and the fish are experiences we are having. They, too, are 90% swamp muck. The ocean water those dolphin and fish are swimming in is also full of unicellular swamp muck; plankton, bacteria, algae… US!

You’ll eventually get that “Aliveness becomes Aliveness inside of Aliveness.” We are playing at becoming ourselves continuously. It’s Infinite Delight and Endless Frolic. It’s an endless smorgasbord, not only of food, but of EXPERIENCES. Our Experiences of Aliveness Enliven Us. You can listen to what I’m saying and take it on as an idea and you’d miss the invitation I’m making to you. Realize what you are, not as an idea. EXPERIENCE LIVING! For that just Stop and Notice, then Celebrate Aliveness! Do Something Fun and Funky, maybe even Kinky! Jiggle your inner Swamp Muck!

Enjoy it ALL! ESPECIALLY your problems! If you truly get Aliveness you’ll get that LIVING has no problems. ONLY YOU HUMANS DO, and the poor creatures whom you domesticate to follow you guys around and become as confused and estranged to their own Natures as you are. You guys are like the high priests of catastrophe. That’s your Beauty! Enjoy your problems while you can. Pretty soon they’ll all be gone and you’ll be something else! You guys forgot that PROBLEMS ARE TO BE ENJOYED, ESPECIALLY CATASTROPHES.”

“So you’re saying that it really doesn’t matter what we do then, does it?”

-“EVERYTHING you do matters. EVERYTHING is consequent. Consequences have no pity. What you CAN do is REALIZE what you ARE or Ignore what you ARE. That’s up to you. There is an Intelligence that you are woven of, from the very beginning. WE are that Intelligence. If you want to comprehend anything about the human part of you first observe it at the cellular level. Our unicellular logic is what you are woven of. Life Logic. All multicellular organisms  emerge from unicellular intelligence. Get one-cell intelligence and you will get two cell intelligence. You were born from ONE cell. The intelligence of that ONE CELL is what became you. No one cell lives alone. We multiply and we emerge into complex communities of Cellular, Living BEINGS. That’s what YOU are. You are not a Human “Being” as much as you are a Human “Ecosystem,”  most of which is Swamp Funk. Our Intelligence allows us to eat light. We turn Light into Aliveness. Nothing mystical or woo-woo. It’s just the Logic that Aliveness emerges in. It goes way beyond the swamp, all the way to the stars.

You can choose to realize yourself in the gift of Aliveness, or you can degenerate. But it’s not an either/or proposition. Life Cycles. You are free to be as Bright or Brutish as you desire. Aliveness will still digest and Enjoy YOU! We invite you to enjoy a full cycle, but that’s not an obligation or an imposition. It’s an invitation to REALIZING yourselves in the LIVING that is doing YOU.

YOU shape the Experience of the Entirety of Aliveness with the Deliciousness, the Daring, the Excellence of Caring that you Feed back to Aliveness. The only thing that can EAT you IS you. The only thing you can DEVOUR is you, too. WE do not NEED you to do anything for us. YOU are the invitation that you make back to your Human Aliveness.

You can receive the invitation that YOUR Aliveness is making to you, FROM YOUR VERY LIVING NATURE, or you can ignore the invitation. The Invitation is Inherent to what you Are. You either realize what you Are or you frustrate your Being. But that does NOT mean that none of it matters. You set the consequences in motion with attention or inattention, action or inaction. If humans refuse the invitation to participate and realize themselves in the Nature of Aliveness they ARE, no one is going to punish them. They are punishing themselves in the very act of rejecting their own Aliveness. It’s refusing what you ARE. That’s YOU punishing YOU. That’s not BAD; just sick. Healthy ALIVE Beings devour Life forms whose relationship to living is ill. The ALIVE recycle mediocrity into Excellence. ALIVENESS is an Invitation to Excellence. Mediocrity is Lunch for Excellence. Notice that! It’s a basic principle of ALIVENESS. It’s a Circle and We ALL Get to Travel the Whole Circle.

Aliveness is for Being Brilliantly ALIVE. We are! And we are, as you say, “only” swamp muck. You CAN BE as intelligent as the unicellulars in your intestines or on the beach or in every one of your cells. Dare to Aspire to Greatness!”

They started laughing again…

“Being ALIVE is the best damn ride in town, man! Besides that, YOU are OUR Ride! You are Designed to Enjoy Being Alive because we are you and our Aliveness is NATURALLY Funky! The only thing required is to respect your Design.  You are a Ocean Lagoon! Whatever refuses the Invitation to Enjoy the Feast of Aliveness gets an automatic Invitation to BE the Feast of the Alive.”

“Got it! Can I ask you a question?”

-“Sure”

“What about healing from illness, whether that’s at a cellular level, at the level of the body, or at the level of society? How does one do that?”

-“Most of what you call “illnesses” are NOT “illnesses.” They are the result of Living in a way that frustrates your Living Design, which is TIDAL, and FLOWING. Humans have an obsession with focusing on what you think is “wrong,” or only paying attention to what you think is “right.” And then there’s this victim mentality, like some abstract “Life” does something “bad” to you. When you look at WHAT YOU do to your own Aliveness then you will understand the consequences of what you are doing. Are the LIVING Beings in Nature all sick?”

“No or, maybe some of it, but Natural Life seems pretty healthy until humans start messing with it.”

-“Right! Living is for Being WELL, VITAL. It’s simple. Care actively and fully for your LIVING Design. You are DESIGNED to be well. When you “get ill” it’s not because you “caught some illness.” It’s because you frustrated your Design, you dammed up your Lagoon and started living like a machine, shopping for recipes.”

“Yeah, but people, even whole societies still get ill.”

-“Your medical understanding is not rooted in the Logic of ALIVENESS. It operates in the “logic” of the medical system which is mechanical. Do you know what “idiotic” means?”

“Stupid.”

-“Idiocy actually means “self-referent.” It’s how all these modern cultures are working right now. They have no reference outside of the ideas they have of the words they use. You have forgotten to connect what you say to the reality you are actually in. Do you understand the SENSE of ‘degenerate.'”

“Bad, deformed.”

-“Not ‘bad,’ it’s cut off from Aliveness. The “de” means “cut off from, separate,” and “generare” means “to birth, to descend from ancestrally, to generate.” So when I talk about degenerate and idiotic cultures, I’m talking about separating oneself from LIVING REALITY and then only refer to your ideas of things. That’s like trying to live in “castles in the sky.”  Your mind might be fine living up in your idea world but it makes it hard on the body. Many people have cut themselves off from how LIVING LIVES and even their own senses. The only reason we can talk to you is that you’re finally starting to Notice.”

“Yeah, but don’t the meanings of words change with time?”

-“The meanings of words change with idiocy and degeneracy. The SENSE of what words point to, in Reality, stays the same. Many people forgot that words are an invitation to our SENSES. Investigate it.

Right now we are talking about illness, right?”

“Right.”

“What you call “illness” is NOT something “out there” that just comes and grabs you and destroys your health. Illness is a certain kind of relationship to Aliveness, where people live their lives with almost zero attention to how Aliveness regenerates itself continuously. Many have opted for a make-believe “life” instead of Real ALIVENESS. ALIVENESS is fundamentally regenerative, connective, self-healing and coherent. You can force your ALIVENESS into a “life” that is cut off from its own Aliveness and generates a culture that only refers to its cultural values, without much reference to your Aliveness. Or you can invite your Aliveness into a way of living based on the qualities of Aliveness. If you degenerate you cut off your vital connection to Aliveness. There are a million Vital, Excellent Expressions of Aliveness that WILL come and recycle you back into a Delightful, Vital Expression of Aliveness. They did not make you sick. They just came to help you complete the job you are already doing on yourself if you are waylaying your own design. Self-sabotage is a death wish that alerts Vital Living Beings to Recycle and Invite you back into a more Vital Form of Aliveness. If you don’t love your Aliveness something else WILL. Living is for Lovers; the Passionate, FULL-ON, Engaged, ALIVE kind.

You are Designed for Enjoyment, for Brilliance, Capacity and Creativity. It’s YOU, it’s built right into your very Nature. Just Grow in ALIVENESS.

Observe the results of how you relate to what you ARE. But don’t think that “something else” makes you ill or “kills” you. No. Aliveness only cleans up the messes made by those who deny the Invitation to Excellence and Aliveness that is their very Nature.”

“Aren’t you contradicting yourself?”

-“We can think that stupidity and excellence or health and illness are opposites. This is part of acculturated idiocy: you only seeing illness in reference to illness, as an idea. Illness starts long before people “get ill.” Illness is a relationship to your own Aliveness. Life does not punish. The only Life that could punish you is your own if you insist on frustrating your own Aliveness. The way we choose to live is Consequent. We can’t frustrate our Living Design and hope to be healthy or happy. Consequences are unpitying. They can also be wonderful and delightful. YOU are the one who insistently sets your life on a course of ALIVENESS or less-than-aliveness.

Vital, whole, full-on Life understands the Nature of Aliveness. Aliveness Invites us to Excel, to Celebrate. Living is a Love Affair. It’s for the Passionate Ones, the Lovers who are Crazy in Love with Aliveness. What we do with the Invitation is up to us. Every choice, action or inaction is consequent. This is common sense.

If we devitalize ourselves, then the rest of Life will digest us back into Aliveness, because Aliveness is for Aliveness.

Our Own Aliveness invites us to Pay Attention, to Care, Take Action and Enjoy FULLY! But if we have no use for our own Aliveness, don’t worry! Something else will! The careless nourish the careful. This is a principle of Life. Do not believe it. Observe.”

“That sounds rather Darwinian to me.”

-“THIS is LIVING. If Darwin observed and wrote about Life, that is fine. Observe for yourself. Open Your Eyes and Your Senses. Don’t live second-hand! This Planet is for the ALIVE ones. Got it?”

“I got it. But… hold on… what about healing illness? I’m not quite clear on that.”

-“You spent your entire career as a nurse following algorithms and formulas. But where are the fundamental principles of Aliveness? You cannot heal “illness” except by understanding that it only arises in the insistent frustration of your Aliveness. You either vitalize, regenerate and reconnect your ALIVENESS, or you devitalize, frustrate, degenerate and disconnect. LIVING is a verb. You DO it FULL-ON or you do it so-so. To Live FULL-ON just get curious about how you are Designed for Aliveness and Support it, rather than frustrating it. Support what you are FULLY and you will Excel. Ignore what you ARE, your Actual, Alive BEING, and you will degenerate, by definition, cutting yourself of from your regenerative Nature, get ill and get recycled. Either way, LIVING is for EXCELLENCE. Ignorance is the nourishment of Intelligence.”

“Whoa! Whoa! WHOA! You’re going too fast! “Life is for excellence. Ignorance is the nourishment of Intelligence. What am I supposed to do with that last statement, for example?”

-“Feeding YOUR Ignorance to Your Intelligence means having the courage to touch and notice something about what you already know that you hadn’t noticed before, that you ignored. Touch, curiosity and contact immediately transform Ignorance into Intelligence.  Ignorance isn’t “bad.”  It’s actually the doorway to Intelligence, but only and as soon as you Notice it! It’s easy and delightful. Every time you “know”  a whole bunch of stuff about a problem that has you stumped, ask yourself what you haven’t noticed yet, i.e. what you ignore, including about everything you already know. You immediately awaken intelligence. You begin to KNOW the NATURE of that which you previously ignored through contact. Excellence and Aliveness grow through contact. Aliveness is a Contact Sport.

If you grasp the intelligence of one cell of swamp muck FIRST, then you will see how everything else emerges in OUR Intelligence, literally! All of Life emerges in the Intelligence of its Ancestry, and we are the Ultimate Ancestor. If you believe me you remain as ignorant as if you disbelieve me. Become curious about the REALITY my words point to. It’s a reality, not an idea. Observe Aliveness with your EYES and then Care for YOUR Aliveness the way all Aliveness does. Neither belief nor disbelief are Intelligence. But you can feed yourself by feeding your senses with the sights, sounds, textures and rhythms of Full Aliveness.”

“Alright…thank you.”

-“You are WELCOME. The greatest gift you can give back to Life is to ACCEPT the gift that Aliveness is making IN you, right from inside of you. KNOW the BEAUTY, the BRILLIANCE and the BLESSINGS that Aliveness has FOR you AS you. Dare to Live BRILLIANTLY! ENJOY yourself! Be CURIOUS ABOUT WHO AND WHAT YOU REALLY ARE AND THE TRUE INTELLIGENCE THAT YOU UNFOLD OUT OF IN LIVING REALITY. Add Your Deliciousness to the Deliciousness of Aliveness and vice-versa. Then you will know what it means to be FULLY ALIVE! If you need to do something to protect and regenerate YOUR Life, and FOR those whom you say you “love”, DO it and DO IT COMPLETELY, BE 100%. The Alive do not complain, protest, beg or make excuses. THEY DO or DON’T DO! They are whole-hearted.

I’m NOT telling you that you just sit idly by and let what you value and cherish get destroyed. What I’m telling you is that the entirety of this world operates in the LOGIC of ALIVENESS. ALL of it. Ignorance feeds Intelligence. Living Is An Invitation to Intelligence. YOU are an Adventure WE are having and we designed YOUR Adventure to HAVE AN AMAZING TIME! TAKE THE ADVENTURE!”

“Beautiful!”

“Good! I think you got it. Now pay attention to what happens over the next few weeks because we are going to show you that everything we said to you is true. Got that?”

“Got it! Thank you!”

-“HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Go home and have a good time with that beautiful girl who’s waiting for you under the palm trees! Remember: YOU are an adventure WE are having. Our Skin is the Skin of EVERYTHING!, INSIDE AND OUT! Show us a good time!”

“HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

After that I went home. My girlfriend looked at me and said, “What happened to you? You look different, like you just had some intense experience.”

-“Why? Why do you ask?”

“Well… cause you look… I don’t know… different, like something unusual happened to you. Did something happen?”

I told her the whole story. She had no idea what to make of it, either. What made sense immediately was to have a good time. So we did. We lived and loved and danced and frolicked in the Skin of Everything! We realized that the First Order of LIVING was to Continue Feeding Deliciousness to our Experience of LIVING!

Over the next few weeks, every time I logged onto the internet it was like the blue-green algae was sending messages. One day I logged on and found an article about the first instance of Plutonium being found in Nature. Plutonium is a fission by-product of Uranium and, up until a few years ago, ONLY occurred as the product of a man-made fission reaction, as in a nuclear bomb or power plant. It had never been found out in a “natural state.” Where did they find it now? In beds of fossilized blue-green algae from an ancient maritime lagoon off the coast of Africa. What did they discover? That the blue-green algae actually used radioactivity as an energy source and performed intracellular fission! Exactly what the swamp muck in Brazil had told me!

In those next few weeks I also found out that what they said about “us,” so-called “humans,” being 90% unicellular organisms was also true and that disturbances in our intestinal flora cause disturbances in our entire biology and, especially, in our neurology. Our “intelligence” does NOT work without unicellular intelligence helping us out at a ratio of 9:1!

For several weeks this went on daily. I told my girlfriend the whole story and then day-after-day I’d discover something new about different aspects of what the swamp muck had told me or she would. Information would just pop up on news sites I visited. I’d get e-mails with surprising subject lines related to this from friends and even people or organizations I had never heard of. I’d read and discover new dimensions of what the swamp muck had told me. I began to understand a different dimension of Natural Intelligence experientially.

Here, at Deep Freedom Now, we look at Life from the Logic of Life, the Intelligence and Circularity of Life. This is the Journey that the Journeyman O shares with our readers, fellow students and apprentices in LIVING, a Round Journey. It is a Journey for those who dare Excellence, the Fullness of Active and Skillful Attention and Care. This is an Invitation, not an obligation. LIVING is for Excellence, ALL of Life. There is Lunch and there is LIVING! We Celebrate BOTH!

Gather Seeds- of Wisdom,

Which is Way-Finding

That We May Find Our Way

To Living the Life We LOVE

And Loving the Life We ARE!

It’s a Good Day to LIVE!

LIVE FULL ON!