A Childhood Memory and Reflections on Life

I had an interesting memory yesterday that I'd completely forgotten about. I was flying into Lima, Peru yesterday evening and as were descending my ears started to hurt from the change in air pressure, because I was using my computer and had earphones in. So I took them out to let my ears adjust. And that momentary pain of pressure in the head (which wasn't that bad) reminded me of when I was 13 or 14 years old, and my Dad flew my Mom, my brother and I over the Sierra Nevada mountains of California in a tiny 4-seater plane. I remember my brother and I freaking out from the pain then because, of course, there was no adjusted cabin pressure in a tiny plane like that, and we were way above the Sierras.

But here's the part that really trips me out: at the time, my Dad was exactly the same age as I am now, 43. Not only was he married, with two teenage kids, and he'd already finished building our big house in the woods....but he flew his family over the freaking Sierra Nevadas. Definitely puts things in perspective. Especially when you're 43 years old, still single and a traveling backpacker. I definitely chose a different course in life.

Sometimes I certainly wonder what the heck I'm doing and where I'm going. But then at the same time, I feel like it's all just right. I chose a rather roundabout path (to say the least) to get to where I am now. But on some level, it seems like things are working out as planned. I bumbled around a lot, no doubt about that. But all those unique experiences are now providing tremendous creative potential for success doing exactly what I want to be doing. For example, I just passed 30,000 subscribers between my two Youtube channels and am now making enough money from Youtube alone to travel on (if I do it cheap). If you search on Youtube for almost every place that I've been in the past year, you'll find one of my videos on the first page for that search term, which means my travel channel is getting recognized by Youtube as a top travel channel. That is a seriously amazing thing. Potentially no more working the night shift or doing random handyman jobs to make money. Just traveling the world making videos, and it pays for itself. And it can really only go upwards from here.

I wrote my Dad and told him about the memory, and he said he'd forgotten about it too and was glad to be reminded of it. He did some pretty awesome, outside-the-box things with his life as well. Just different things, in a totally different way.

Here's a photo of myself (on the left), my brother Christo, mom Vicki and dad Jim, in front of our house in the woods outside of Willits, California. Looks like I'm around 6 or so, so this would have been late '70s.

Messing Around in Bogota, Colombia

Here I'm in front of an amazingly colorful mural in the beautifully painted Candelaria district of Bogota, capital city of Colombia. If you're curious how I take these photos, see the video posted below.

Here's a montage of some more of my levitating photos, and a video demonstration of how I manage to take them:

The Teal Swan Controversy: Is Teal Swan a Fraud?

Foreword: A brief explanation of who is Teal Swan. Teal is a spiritual teacher, author and public speaker who travels around the world giving workshops seeking to inspire people to face their fears, find greater self-awareness and personal happiness, follow their dreams, heal their past and relationships, and much more.

Teal claims to have been born with extra-sensory abilities, including seeing into the future, seeing people's past lives, traveling out-of-body, perceiving beings in the spirit realms, reading thoughts, sensing the energy vibration of people and physical objects, and much more. And precisely because of these abilities, while living in rural Utah she was targeted by an extreme Mormon cult who considered her abilities to be from the Devil, because she was a girl. She was abducted by them, in a sense (this will be explained further below) at the age of six.

Over the course of her childhood she was then subjected to Satanic rituals including the worst horrors imaginable, which she has discussed in-depth publicly in her various videos, interviews, workshop forums and with the media including an in-depth interview with Fox News. When she was nineteen, after thirteen years of such abuse, she finally managed to escape the cult. She then began a healing journey over the course of the next decade including professional therapy; before eventually beginning to talk about her story with others and step onto the world stage as a well-known spiritual teacher.

Teal Swan, the Spiritual Catalyst

Consciousness vs. Science

The question of consciousness is like a chasm that science will never be able to build a bridge over. Science produces many wonderful things. It has revealed tremendous mysteries, made truly incredible discoveries and led to almost magical inventions. But to whatever extent it seeks to comprehend the real nature of reality, it will ultimately fail. Because understanding the nature of reality can't be relegated to machines and objective observation. What would modern science be without machines? It's like in the Douglas Adams book, in which they invent a machine to tell them the meaning of life. It takes a hundred years for it to calculate the answer. And then, finally, it delivers the answer to those waiting so long for it: 42. The joke is on them.

Science can't tell us the true nature of reality, because the most important revelations that will explain reality lie within the observer, not within the observed universe. Thus, the most important answers will come not from objective observation, but rather from subjective experience: from direct experience within one's own being. The ultimate answers will not be found through endlessly picking apart the universe "out there". They will be discovered through connecting with the nature of reality within one's own conscious awareness; discovering what is really real, and what the true meaning of life is, through one's subjective, individual experience of reality.

Consciousness: the final frontier.

The Camping Trip in Hawaiian Paradise That Wasn't

A few weeks ago I went on a camping trip with a friend (for this story I'll just call her Julia), on the spectacular Na Pali coast of Kauai, Hawaii. It was a trip we'd planned for a month or so. Julia had invited me to fly out to Hawaii from where I was in California at the time, for a work opportunity, to spend some time together and also to do the intense hike out to the Kalalau Valley on the west side of the island, where the cliffs (“pali” in native Hawaiian) are so rugged they couldn't build a road along that section of the coast. I'd already done the 11-mile hike several times before and knew how tough it was.

So after ten days or so of working together on a construction project that Julia was involved in, we had the time off to do the hike, with plans to camp out there for about a week. We packed up our backpacks with our tent, mattresses, thin blankets, skimpy clothes (you didn't need much), food and everything else required for a multi-day backpacking trip, and hit the trail.

Confessions: The Story of a Fight That I Started

This is going to be the story of the one and only fight I've been in in my life.....And I started it. I punched a guy repeatedly, a guy who had been my friend for sixteen years. As you will see, however, there was a lot of context to what ultimately ended up in a physical confrontation, that ended with us both being hurt pretty badly (though he was injured worse than I was).