In Search of Magic

Hongitos en San Jose – Report 6/20

It was a really beautiful, gentle journey. I ate the medicine (surprisingly delicious!) under Árbol la luna and meditated while it was coming on. I felt a lot of internal sensation and emotion begin to arise and began to cry. I was having mild-moderate CEVs but little open-eye visual change throughout the whole journey. It was almost entirely internal. I don’t know how long I cried for, maybe 30 min, maybe an hour? I cried for the grief of my breakup, for my heart and inner child – afraid to be fully present, retreating from the pain of the world. I cried for my uprooted ancestors, for the feeling of contempt within myself. I had an I Ching reading a week ago and ‘Approach’ came up – the book said it was associated with the ‘appropriate contempt’ that a noble has for a lower class person. So I was sitting with and crying for the feeling of this emotion while pondering how it might be appropriate. I’m sure I cried for more reasons, but these were the most salient.

Through all this, I was seeing spirals of mushrooms, caterpillars, beetles, dragons. I saw an Amanita and realized that my ancestors would have had a relationship with this mushroom – something I’d like to investigate further. I saw rainbows – which my mind associated with the protection of Archangel Michael, and I felt a presence of protection. Any time it began to get overwhelming, I could open my eyes and the world appeared normal – perhaps a little extra sparkly.

My mind was tracing a psychological and ancestral lineage of spirit and thought – I don’t know if I fully believe in DNA codes and all that, but that’s the feeling-idea that came to me as the pace quickened. It came to an identification with or even passage through Christ consciousness and something in that scared me. A fear of madness in myself. And a fear of death. I asked the medicine – is there a gentle way to learn this lesson? I looked down at the dead leaves, the worms, the fungus and decomposing earth – this is the gentle way, to see that everything dead becomes new life.

When the meditation came to a close, I hiked down to Cascada Las Nubes – I began to rhyme in Spanish and English and felt my inner child coming out to play. I was thinking about my voice and spoke the mantra Todo es Luz, Todo es Amor, Todo es Perfecto. I shocked myself with the strength and depth of my voice.

Arriving at the waterfall I began to feel… impatient somehow… like I needed to be doing something. But of course, nothing needed to be done, and in that moment I realized how destructive my impatience has been in my life. My dream of the night before, which had confused me all morning, suddenly made sense. In the dream, I had followed some snails, slugs, and worms down a path into an empty house, an empty workshop. In that moment I saw that they were showing me that slowness and patience were the path to consistent creation. In my impatience, the workshop was empty!

I began to do some Qi Gong while facing the waterfall and then began to intuitively dance, feeling the movement of energy and feeling that the expression of dance was a way of speaking truth without speaking. I stayed for a while down by the waterfall, meditating and moving and playing, until I felt it was time to return.

By the time I got back I was in the warm glow of the end of the journey which lingered until I went to sleep. I played guitar for a while, thinking again about the power of patience and slowness. I had dinner by myself, really savouring it, and then spoke with another guest while they ate. I also booked horseback riding the next day on a strange impulse and dreamt of a competition of Knights that evening.

Overall, it was very peaceful, as I had requested. I was able to process a lot of personal and ancestral grief, and had some powerful insights.

Motivation

Where does motivation come from?

Probably what we want to know, when we ask this question is, “how do I direct my motivation towards my chosen goals?” I come up with an idea of something I want, but when it comes to doing it, the energy or focus just isn’t there. A related problem is how to have motivation for things that you don’t feel you want, i.e. “I’m just not motivated to go to the job that I hate.” While the source of this second problem is much clearer, it isn’t necessarily any easier to solve. But for this discussion, we’ll confine ourselves to the first question.

I see (at least) two factors of motivation at play here: intrinsic/extrinsic and instant versus delayed gratification, or what I’ll call slow and fast reward systems.

Intrinsic/Extrinsic Motivation

In our modern society, many of us have been trained for years by school, family, and jobs to be extrinsically motivated. Your assignment is due week 3, finish the reading this weekend, get the ball into the opponents’ goal, come to work so you can support your family, etc. Our metrics for success are pre-defined as are the rewards and punishments that go along with success and failure.

Our society conspires to stop us from either asking ourselves what it is that we truly want in the first place or from having any idea how to get it. And there doesn’t seem to be any system in place that’s actually good at teaching us how to do these things.

So, how do I shift my motivation from extrinsic to intrinsic? We’ll come back to this, but first let’s explore the other system.

Slow and Fast reward pathways in the brain.

I don’t know exactly how the neurotransmitters all interact here (and I suspect it’s fairly complicated), but I like to imagine we’ve got two systems: dopamine and serotonin. Dopamine is the currency of the fast-reward system – of getting things done. You want to focus on something right now? Well, you better hope there’s enough dopamine in the bank for it. Serotonin, on the other hand is the laborer of the slow-reward system – mental infrastructure development. Want to make the dopamine cost of picking up a book lower? You’re gonna have to get your serotonin workers to spend some time building a bookshelf.

It’s no secret that our society loves instant gratification – we love to hook into people’s dopamine systems. It’s great for social control. And in the age of instant-communication, smartphone, internet, snapchat, video games our dopamine banks are absolutely broke. The only thing they can afford is the currently cheapest option. This, unfortunately, causes problems for our slow-reward system because the two systems are inextricably interlinked.

You see, your serotonin workers only build things for you if you pay them in dopamine to spend time doing different activities. So, while it’s the fast reward system that asks “what am I going to do right now?” it’s the slow reward system that’s running in the background tweaking cost and reward values based on the experience you’re having. A well-tuned system can say, “if I make a homemade meal, it will be tastier and I will feel better than if I order McDonald’s.” But if you don’t have enough dopamine in the bank, you will always choose the cheaper option. And if you haven’t invested serotonin-time into cooking, then a) the cost of the serotonin-labor will be higher and b) the dopamine reward of the finished meal will be lower.

Some activities are an investment that will boost our dopamine production long-term and improve our motivation infrastructure, while others are simply going to drain the bank account. We’ll call these slow-reward and fast-reward activities, respectively. If your slow-reward system is in charge, then the pathways are set up so that you have enough quick-reward currency in the bank to focus on whatever you choose (not just the cheapest option), and the cost and reward values of each of the options is aligned with priorities of your own choosing – hopefully ones that create a positive feedback loop of slow-reward activities.

So, now that we’ve discussed these two systems, we can restate our original question, “how do I direct my motivation towards my chosen goals?” as “how do I put my intrinsic, slow-reward system in charge?”

Firstly, take stock of where you are now: where does my quick-reward system currently direct me? Video games, reddit, facebook, pornography? Do I have any slow-reward hobbies in my life? Making music, reading, cooking, rock-climbing?

And along the other axis: do I work better when others tell me what to do or when I set my own goals?

The process of taking control of these systems will be slow and likely involve plenty of missteps or “wasted” time, but it’s important to see these as a learning process and not failures.

The good news is that we can leverage the systems in whatever their current state to make the changes we want.

I’m going to throw out a bunch of pieces of the puzzle here, in no particular order:

Start setting goals for yourself!
If you’re currently more extrinsically motivated, enlist an accountability buddy or a coach. This gives you the advantage of working within your currently extrinsic-dominant system while still strengthening your intrinsic motivation – this works because the goals you’re accomplishing are ones that you’ve chosen!
Start to get curious about your quick-reward system. Meditate and watch where your mind goes, notice how often you’re drawn to different quick-reward and slow-reward activities throughout the day. Keep a journal and reflect on these things. Make small tweaks to your routine and notice how your mind and body react.
Become aware of your self-talk. Berating yourself for a tv binge will only serve to lead you away from attempts to curtail future tv watching (i.e. it’s only a failure to watch a bunch of tv if you were trying not to watch tv). If, instead, you’re gentle with yourself when you fall short of goals, it’ll be easy to set the goal again next week. Maybe this week’s failure is, in fact, an indicator that you set the goal too high for your current reward infrastructure to handle and not an indicator that you’re a piece of shit.
Break goals into small tasks and let yourself feel good for taking each step. It’s so much easier to accomplish the goal of putting on your gym clothes than the goal of going to the gym every day this month.
Recognize that these systems are in flux throughout the day, the week, the month, and your whole life. It’s way easier for me to pack my gym bag tonight before I go to bed when my dopamine bank is relatively full than to do it tomorrow morning before I’ve had my coffee. Just pulling out my clothes now can mean the difference between whether I make it to the gym tomorrow or not. Make things easier for your future self!
Habit-stacking: reward is a great motivator – use the reward from drinking the morning coffee to get to the gym, use the reward from the gym to motivate you to meditate, and use the reward from meditating to take the next step towards your long-term goal.
Start medium. Don’t choose as your first intrinsic goal something that will take five years to accomplish, and don’t choose something you can have done in a week. Aim for something you think may take 3-6 months. This is long enough that you’re building up your motivation systems, but short enough that you can reflect and change course if things aren’t working.

The goal is to teach yourself to find the reward in sustained effort in a world that rewards you for doing nothing and to learn to recognize that those hard-earned rewards are superior. This task is neither quick nor easy, but I think many of us can recognize it’s value when we reflect on the empty feeling we have after bingeing a show on Netflix and and eating junk food all day.

In my mind, the goal is nothing less than the creation and discovery of meaning itself… but we’ll save that discussion for another time.

Top 5 Books of 2019

2019 was a big year of reading for me. I read 45 books! While I wrote a little blurb about every single one, I thought that it might be a little bulky to post all of them, so I decided to post a Top 5 (with a few honorable mentions.) Going forward, I’ll attempt to post them monthly so that it doesn’t get so unwieldy. Anyway, here are my Top 5 Books of 2019.

Dream Land: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones

This book is an eye-opening look into the growing Opiate Epidemic of the last 30 years. It splits its focus between the American medical establishment and the Mexican drug cartels. It shows the way that unethical marketing and medical practices lead to the overprescribing of opiates to many areas of the US, and how this built an enormous market for heroin traffickers from Mexico. It also documents the ingenuity of these heroin traffickers, building their business to be efficient and avoid the heat of the DEA.

If anything, this book doesn’t go far enough in condemning the pharmaceutical industry and medical establishment for causing the opiate epidemic. It does point strongly to them being the problem but doesn’t mount much of an ethical critique of the systems that allowed this to occur and allowed the pharmaceutical billionaires to make off like bandits while countless Mexicans went to jail for taking advantage of the market that was created. I appreciate that this was probably a conscious journalistic choice, but it saddens me that many people will read this and not look deeper into the systemic issues this exposes.

Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

This book probably wins my best fiction (that I read this year) award. Delightfully funny and witty, with an amusing philosophical bent. Tells the story of an unlikely love affair between a princess and an outlaw with principles. Not sure what more to say; I highly recommend it.

Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton

I was turned onto this by a brief mention of it by Slavoj Zizek in one of his talks. This is, nominally, a defense of Christian Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton, but in reality, it’s a very liberal version of orthodoxy which he defends. You see, he isn’t so much defending the orthodox church structures or ideas, as the orthodox philosophies. He makes the case, fairly compellingly, that Christian theology is quite different in nature from the theology of most other world religions. And, in making the comparison, he comes to the conclusion that he prefers the world created by a Christian theology, that he finds in it the most truth.

I can’t say that he’s converted me into a good God-fearing Christian with this book, but he has convinced me that I find certain aspects of Christian theology appealing and compelling. A quote from this book has even become one of my mantras.

The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz

I really liked this one! The essential idea is that embedded in language is the ability to change the world (he calls them spells). As we grow up, people are constantly using this magic on us to tell us about ourselves and the world. We are constantly accepting things people say and making agreements with ourselves about the way the world is. Ruiz wants us to examine all of these agreements and realize that many of them may be making our lives into hell. He proposes four agreements we can make with ourselves to start rewriting our perception of ourselves and reality.

Be impeccable with your word
Take nothing personally
Don’t make assumptions
Always do your best

I read this at the same time I was listening to a series of podcasts on Structuralism in philosophy, and together they rang really true. Our whole reality is structured by language. Only by understanding the way it creates our world, can we begin to change our world for the better.

Trust Me, I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday

This book will make you look at the world differently. You will become skeptical of the worldview the news presents to you and you will begin to see advertising in everything. It documents the way marketers exploit the modern blog-driven media and draws many parallels to the age of the yellow press. I highly recommend this one.

Honorable Mentions:

Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher

Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra

King Warrior Magician Lover by Douglas Gillette and Robert L. Moore

Why is this blog called In Search of Magic?

I created this blog just before I left on a 6-month travel sabbatical two years ago. At that point in my life, I was suffering from chronic back pain and depression. I felt trapped in my life, cursed with low energy, and I wanted to find a way out of that feeling. Therapy and medication had been helping with these things, but I felt something was missing on a deeper level: magic, mojo, meaning.

As a child on long hikes, I would daydream about being an adventurer, a wizard or knight, travelling along dangerous, wild paths throwing fireballs at the various monsters that might approach. I imagined quests that truly mattered to the fate of the world, and amazing powers that could be at my disposal.

Perhaps, in reapproaching the world with this sense of wonder, I could find some meaning for my existence. So, I decided I would open myself to the spiritual and magical. In fact, I would write about my travel experiences, but would add fictional, magical, romantic components to them. I would be lead by spirits through temples in Nepal. I would be seduced by Vampires in Berlin. I would find ancient tomes hidden away in Prague, and discover the energizing magic of the communal spirit of flamenco in Spain. In the Vienna opera house, for one night I would fall in love with a fellow traveler, only to never see her again .

Unfortunately, the curse ran deep, and I spent much of my time travelling simply wandering. I could not bring myself to write consistently nor to connect to local communities or other travelers. I did, however, make some progress on my inward search for magic. I read multiple books about Buddhism, spirituality, and Zen. Something shifted within me and my depression was debilitating no longer. The curse wasn’t lifted, but part of the evil in it had been blocked. It no longer ran so deep in my body, my back pain was much relieved, and I could see my life more positively.

I do not believe that magic is dead or rendered obsolete by science. Magic is simply another lens through which we can understand this chaotic world. I personally believe that magical thinking is sorely lacking in our institutionalized world. The power structures in our modern world would have you believe in your insignificance, in the inevitability of your situation. Alistair Crowley defined Magick as “the science and art of causing change to occur in comformity with the will.” With magic, nothing is impossible. With magic, we can change ourselves and the world against any odds.

Liberals, Democrats, Progressives: Is there Anybody Left?

The indoctrination is complete. Our collective imaginations and memories have been wiped. Not surprising since collectivity has been wiped, too. True individuality has been replaced with a simulation of individuality. If you don’t look too closely, you can’t see the pixels.

Liberals and conservatives — two sides of the same free market transaction. No one carries change anymore. Liberals are all we have left, conservatives are always right or never right. What happened? All these books talk about things that used to exist: socialism, communism, labor, worker’s parties, antiauthoritarians, anarchists, social democrats, progressive labor. Now the books talk about the left . What’s left?

Why do we have an 8-hour work day, 5-day work week, overtime pay, workers comp, child labor laws? Wealth inequality is at an all-time high. Can you even imagine a 3-day work week? It would kill the small businesses. Tell me the last riches-to-rags story you heard. Who’s Saint Monday?

Liberals fight for freedom and equality. Everyone has an equal right to be depressed. Everyone has an equal right to eat at McDonalds and drink Coke. Everyone has an equal right to kill the pain with opiates, for now at least.

Certain possibilities didn’t survive the compression algorithm. With a whimper, I guess. Does anyone remember when solidarity died? Is there anybody left?

2018 Reading List Review

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Kerouac’s tales detail a type of freedom that has been lost in modern America. He hitchhikes around the country (now illegal), stows away in train cars (already illegal, but accepted), and sleeps outside or on whatever couch/bed he can find. People living simpler lives are respected for the hardships they endure. People who don’t fit into the system can at least live unaccosted in the margins. Now we denigrate them. Some may read this book as the chronicles of a homeless cretin, but I really think we should use it to reflect on some of the choices we’ve made as a society in the past 60 years and ask if we really like the direction we’ve moved in.

The Martian by Andy Weir

An enjoyable sci-fi novel based on realistic real-world science. The main character is amusingly snarky and has an inhuman composure in the face of the unlikely odds of survival. I wouldn’t say this was amazing or revolutionary, but it was a fun read. I still need to go watch the movie…

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

A writer finds the diary of a young Japanese-American girl, living in Japan, washed up on the beach and becomes invested in her story. This well-written novel takes a critical look at some aspects of modern Japanese culture, and plays with conceptions of time, both within a single culture and with our expectations as readers. The author doesn’t shy away from difficult topics like sex work and suicide and tells a very moving and compelling story.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin

The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin

A truly amazing fantasy series! Very inventive writing and storytelling with an interesting world and magic system (if you like to nerd out about that kind of thing). Without giving too much away, this world is very geologically unstable and the characters are frequently struggling just to survive the wrath of the earth itself. This book, written by a woman of color, does a great job of centering female characters in a way that male writers often fail to. Also, +1 for bisexual and poly characters. And as a bonus, it’s actually a finished series!

Dharma bums by Jack Kerouac

I was reading The Way of Zen in a park at the beginning of this year, and a man there mentioned this book to me. That’s actually what initially prompted me to read On the Road earlier in the year after researching Kerouac. I finally made it to this one, and it appealed to me in much the same way as On the Road. This one details Kerouac’s friendship with Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder), a much more centered character than Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) from On the Road. With that comes a bit more of Kerouac’s relationship with Buddhism and a bit less of the loose cannon nihilism of Cassady.

If I were going to recommend where to start with Kerouac, I’d probably say On the Road, but I enjoyed this one quite a bit as well.

The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts

Alan Watts delves into some basic Zen metaphysics, stripping away much of the Zen trappings. Being comfortable with insecurity, with chaos and change, leads to an ironically more secure position than someone who focuses solely on bringing security to their lives. I would recommend this in the same way I’d recommend The Power of Now. Stop grasping, be in touch with the world around you and don’t get lost in your fears and anxieties about change.

The Way of Zen by Alan Watts

I wrote about this one when I read it last year. I chose to reread it as I was thinking a lot about the ideas of Zen in the context of my own mental health this year. A bit harder to get through than The Wisdom of Insecurity, it still has some applicable insights.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Another reread, I took this one pretty slowly, reading just a chapter here and there in an effort to digest the material a bit more fully. I think this is going to be a book I return to again and again as intimacy and social anxiety are things I often struggle with. This just has so many good lessons on how to be a friendly and charming person that it feels like refreshing myself from time to time will always be beneficial.

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography

This is probably the (auto)biography I’ve heard recommended the most when people talk about biographies. Franklin was a civic-minded, industrious man, who truly worked from first principles when approaching the question of how to live one’s life.

When reading the sections where he introduces public services, I was struck by how detached our taxes have become from a sense of the common good. Franklin repeatedly sees a concrete problem in his city/neighborhood, then goes to the people affected by the problem and shows them the advantages to be gained from addressing the problem and convinces them to pay a tax to solve it. This is how our government should function, but clearly doesn’t hold up at scale.

When people imagine the “protestant work ethic” as a positive thing, I think they must be talking about his life. But really he just approached his life in a systematic way and had a strong drive to improve himself and the community in which he lived. I think our modern society has been perverted into forgetting about the importance of the community-mindedness of work. We’re divorced from the meaning of work and do so simply for corporate profits. We’ve forgotten that it’s the small, concrete changes we can make that make the biggest difference.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

A book on the art of writing, Lamott delivers advice and mindsets meant to help writers who struggle to get their words down on the page. She is extremely funny and gives the good advice of taking things in small bits. Don’t sit down to write your whole novel, just sit down to describe what could fit in one “picture frame.” I’ve struggled recently to make time for my own writing, and I think rereading this might be a good way to motivate myself to create that time.

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

This is a strange one. Mentioned in a youtube video by Contrapoints, this is a short collection of both written and pictorial essays that make a variety of points about how we see the world. From the way that photography has fundamentally altered our society’s conception of reality, to the way art views women, to the strange similarities between the representation of women and food in advertising, this collection makes us think about the medium of the visual and the ways in which art creates or is created by our reality.

The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida

I’ve been looking for a book for men about how to make romantic and sexual connections with women that doesn’t have any of the trappings of patriarchy or misogyny. I’m working on a writing project to this effect myself, and I wanted to make sure that I was doing the proper research into existing books on this or related topics. This probably comes the closest I’ve seen thus far, though it has a kind of different focus than my own project.

Deida takes a spiritual approach to sexual attraction: speaking of attraction coming from the polarity of masculine & feminine energies. Much of the advice that springs from this point of view will be helpful to many men: dropping neediness, being comfortable with your own energy, recognizing the kind of support your lover needs may be different from what you need, etc. , but I think it also lacks a certain social awareness. Men following this advice could become excellent, confident lovers, but they could also fall into some toxic patterns. I think the spirituality aspect probably does shield many men from falling into those traps, but I think a number could also slip through.

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

Started reading this one along with How to Win Friends and Influence People in an attempt to be thinking about the rules/dynamics of human interaction. I was happily surprised that this book lives up to its hype. Under the guise of being a guide to principles of power dynamics, it contains a treasure trove of historical and fictional stories about human engagements and interactions. I really enjoyed reading this and would recommend it to people just from the writing and storytelling alone.

I will say that I had my reservations about the ethical values of this book. The author makes an argument that, essentially, one can never truly sit apart from the games of power in human relations as it is simply in our nature. From that premise, it is always better to be able to deftly handle power than to be inept and bungle it. I sort of half-accept this argument. Some of the examples, I think, are obviously unethical, but I believe that the author is at least right that it is important to understand how others might be attempting to attain power even if you decline to use all of the strategies yourself.

The Game by Neil Strauss

Another piece of research for my own writing, I had a lot of preconceptions about this book that did not turn out to be accurate. Back when it was first released, there was a lot of controversy around it. This book brought the frequently misogynistic Pick-Up Artist community into the limelight, and it was condemned for doing so. But the book itself doesn’t exactly espouse these misogynistic views as I’d heard. Strauss sees many of the problems his new mindsets cause him and those around him and actively dislikes the more misogynistic, manipulative characters in the community around him.

Strauss’s book is more important than ever in this age of MGTOW, Incels, and Red Pills. Many men in the modern age live in sexual, emotional, and intimate scarcity and only by talking honestly about these issues and bringing these things to light will we be able to heal.

Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley

Huxley writes about his experiences with Mescaline and other psychedelics. He talks about their ability to allow us to access parts of our brains which are normally locked away, and he talks about them in the context of understanding spirituality, madness, and religious experience. Very well-written and short: these were incredibly influential essays when they were written and once again are becoming relevant with the reemergence of psychedelic research for therapeutic purposes. Required reading for anyone interested in psychedelics or psychology.

Travel Reading List

Since I’ve been telling everyone who asks me what I did on my trip that I read a lot, I thought I might as well justify that statement with a list of the books I read during my trip. I decided to also use this as an opportunity to write down a few thoughts about them as both a historical record for myself if I ever go back to these books and a conversation starter for others who have read them. So, enjoy.

TL;DR: Go read Too Loud a Solitude and The Power of Now

Why Work? Various Authors

A great way to start off a sabbatical. This collection of essays delves into the concept of work from both a historical and philosophical standpoint. Ranging from a discussion of the value of not working, to the regimentation and measurement of time, to the value of truly fulfilling work. In my mind, this book does a good job of exposing how unhealthy our culture’s approach to work is and of how we’ve been struggling with this for quite a long time.

Everything is Obvious: *Once you know the answer Watts J.Duncan

A discussion of some logical fallacies regarding our explanation of events in the world around us. Oftentimes, when explaining why something happened, we end up merely explaining what something was. For example, if we say that a movie was successful because it had good character development and cool action scenes, does that really explain why it was successful or merely describe the movie? This book gives some strong evidence that most post-hoc explanation is highly suspect.

Kathmandu Thomas Bell

An interesting look at the city of Kathmandu from a journalist who spent a few years there. This book opened my eyes to the corruption of the Foreign Aid Industry and the problems it causes. It has me wanting to learn more about neocolonialism and investigate further how foreign aid may be serving to maintain the status quo instead of improving things.

A Short History of Nearly Everything Bill Bryson

While a bit overly focused on western science to warrant the title, this book does a fairly good job of running through our current understanding of the science of our earth and universe. Not being personally very interested in geology or paleontology, I thought the book did a good job of making those topics more interesting to me by focusing on the people involved in those sciences. Also, if you suffer from bad anxiety, you may want to steer clear of this book. A sizable portion of the book discusses all the ways that the world could end at any second.

Many Lives, Many Masters Brian Weiss

An interesting account of a psychotherapist performing past-life therapy. I’d be interested to hear about more research into this topic. The author showed a defensiveness of his scientific qualifications that felt insecure. I think a single section addressing this would be reasonable given the topic matter, but it was a recurring theme throughout the book: like the author couldn’t believe his own experiences, which now that I think about it, might have been the point.

Dracula Bram Stoker

We’re all familiar with this classic monster story, but how many of us have actually read it? This book thoroughly exceeded my expectations, doing an amazing job using the diary structure and creating a truly mysterious and suspenseful atmosphere. For some reason I expected it to be a stodgy book whose fame came from its movie and other adaptations, but it’s actually good in its own right! The one thing I will say is that it’s age definitely shows in regards to its treatment of women and foreign cultures.

Too Loud a Solitude Bohumil Hrabal

I cannot recommend this highly enough! This novela details the story of a wastepaper disposer who collects rare and banned books in Soviet-era Prague. I don’t want to say anymore. Go read it!

I Served the King of England Bohumil Hrabal

Another book by Hrabal, this details the life of a waiter throughout the changes in Czechoslovakia post WWII. In this story, it almost feels like the protagonist is being driven by his life instead of the other way around. It follows some interesting changes in his life and ends with him coming to a reckoning with the very fact of his nonagency. Not as powerful as Too Loud a Solitude but still enjoyable.

An Introduction to Political Philosophy Jonathan Wolff

Saw this in a bookstore and realized this was a topic that I wanted to know more about. A big takeaway of this book for me was that unlike other forms of philosophy, which can be safely ignored by most people, political philosophy and politics in general should be topics of interest to everyone. If you don’t take interest in making political decisions, other people will be more than happy to make them for you!

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry Fredrik Backman

A cute, adventurous, and emotionally powerful story of a little girl dealing with the death of her grandmother. Does a really good job of dealing with complex relationships and making authentic characters with strengths and flaws. This is really good!

Britt-Marie Was Here Fredrik Backman

A spinoff story of one of the characters from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, this book explores the transformative power of belonging and community. This author does a really good job with characters, emotions, and relationships, and I definitely recommend this one.

The Power of Now Eckhart Tolle

This book had a profound effect on the way I view myself, time, and reality. Cliche/mainstream as it is, it helped me get a handle on some of the existential problems that plagued me and pointed me towards a new way forward. That said, the most powerful stuff in the book is in the first half. The second half seemed to get a little mystical and hand-wavy. Maybe I’d have a different feeling on a second reading.

You Are Here Thich Nhat Hanh

A good book to pair with The Power of Now, if the two were a good-cop-bad-cop duo, this would be the good cop. Where The Power of Now comes across strong, appealing to the intellect and understanding, this holds your hand and guides you towards strategies of centering and self-love. Perhaps less likely to bring about a radical paradigm shift, I still highly recommend this as a book for building self-compassion and self-love.

The Social Construction of Reality Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann

If all knowledge is socially constructed and any person’s reality is built from the knowledge they have of its workings, then reality itself must be socially constructed. This book presents and then explores the idea that our view of the world is constructed by the society in which we live. It convincingly explores the function of various social institutions within this framework and how they can grow, evolve, and take on a life of their own. While reading this book isn’t necessary, understanding the theory it expounds is more or less essential to understanding the last 50 years of sociology, philosophy, anthropology, critical theory, race and gender studies, and probably 10 other fields I can’t name. This theory is criminally undertaught outside of those fields.

The Way of Zen Alan Watts

It was pretty trippy to be reading this simultaneously with The Social Construction of Reality. Zen deals with the very nature of reality itself and our apprehension of it. 1500 years before sociology understood it, Zen understood that our names for things are not the things themselves. If we understand this, we begin to be able to see through the illusory world we’ve created for ourselves. Alan Watts is famous for making eastern philosophy more understandable and approachable for western audiences. While I have no doubt that some things are lost in translation, I would still highly recommend this book.

The Golden Compass Philip Pullman

I kept seeing ads for Philip Pullman’s new book in bookstores in London, so I thought that I might as well read this fairly popular series. I definitely found some of the ideas interesting but had trouble getting really into it. I can’t say exactly why, but I suspect it would have been more appealing to me when I was younger. I enjoyed it, but wouldn’t say it was amazing.

The Three-Body Problem Liu Cixin

I was impressed by how well this sci-fi book incorporated modern scientific theories into its story. Maybe not quite as deftly as The Forever War handles relativity, but still well. I definitely enjoyed this story but felt like something was off with the pacing. I wonder if this might have to do with stylistic differences between western and Chinese novels? Either way, it has me intrigued to read the sequels and see how this world develops.

The Elegant Universe Brian Greene

While much of this book goes into depth discussing String and M-Theory, I found the real gold to be its overview of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Greene does a good job of explaining those topics in an intuitive way. The sections on String Theory are a bit harder to read, but still interesting, only occasionally getting bogged down by difficult-to-follow details. Overall, I would say this is a good layman’s introduction to the topic.

The Righteous Mind Jonathan Haidt

This book seems to me to have two main parts: first, it posits something called Moral Foundations Theory, basically trying to group moral questions and ideas into five or six main categories, and second, it deals with the purpose of morals in human group formation and cohesion. This book has me feeling divided. The basic premise of Moral Foundations Theory feels strong, but the way it gets fleshed out feels flawed and the conclusions drawn from the research, at least as presented in the book, feel unwarranted. Still, the basic idea of the theory feels useful and important, and the second half of the book concerning “groupishness” is spot on.

Harry Potter

I’ve found a routine that brings me to some semblance of functioning as a normal human being. 400mg Ibuprofen, 1000mg Tylenol, and 30mg Codeine 3 times a day, though I offset them a bit so that I’m always on some kind of pain reliever. If I take the tylenol/codeine right before bed I can actually fall asleep! I also roll out my back on a foam roller twice a day which is beginning to show signs of longer term improvement. Despite all this, I still go most of the day as if I’m walking through a swimming pool.

Robin’s family has come to visit and we went to the Harry Potter Studio Tour and the new Harry Potter play. It’s interesting to see in Harry Potter a combination of a story about magic and a cultural force that for all I know has actual magic behind it with such a large influence on so many people. The sheer number of people and scale of the undertaking necessary to bring the books to life in movie form is unbelievable.

The Studio has many of the sets from the movies still intact and thousands if not millions of props all over the place. The sets are filled with props, small details all over the place. Things that you almost certainly can’t see in the movies. In the dormitory rooms there are wizarding comic books strewn about. Hundreds of potions around in the classrooms. So much detail. I was wondering why all the sets needed to be so elaborate, to have so much detail, and then the tour answered my question. Filling the sets with tons of detail allows the directors and cameramen to shoot the scene from any angle without needing to worry about whether the set will look interesting from that angle. By putting in the extra work in set design, it gives them so much more freedom to find just the right shot when filming.

Throughout the tour I kept thinking about how much fun it would be to work on these things. To imagine other, magical worlds and to bring them into being. I yearn to create art. This is something I’ll prioritize when I return from my travels. Art is a form of magic.

I think for the rest of this post, I’ll just let these pictures speak for themselves:

Edit: Will update with better quality photos when I have a better internet connection

Pain

A demonic rend in my back tortures me. Pain is my whole existence. My body screams: a howling that blocks out my ability to think. These last few days after flying to London have been utter hell. A cold saps my energy and a stomach bug makes me constantly queasy, the combination confining me to our closet-sized hotel room. My eternal wound fills these hours with agony.

The pain has flared up beyond anything I’ve ever known. My back and arm seize in pain and swell to many times their usual size. I am practically carried to the hospital by Robin and a host from our hotel. But the local doctors, as always, have no way to help. In fact, in their view, there’s nothing really wrong with me beyond swelling and that minor detail of excruciating pain. They tell me they can’t even prescribe me pain medication. I need to go to a GP for that.

Eventually I find a clinic that will do something for me. They prescribe some muscle relaxers, and some Codeine-tylenol pills. Codeine, it turns out, is a terrible drug. It does next to nothing for me. In fact, I research this and find out that codeine on top of being an inconsistent vehicle for morphine delivery, has it’s effectiveness reduced by another medication I take. Unfortunately, despite telling them this, the doctors decided to prescribe me a mild-pain-for-a-normal-metabolizer dose of Codeine. Either they are inept or too afraid of the government to prescribe me some proper opiates. Of course, at that point I would’ve taken pretty much anything, so I don’t complain. None of this situation is helped by the fact that I’m an American and not part of their medical system.

My quest lays forgotten for weeks. All I can do is think about my pain and how to reduce it. Robin and others say that I seem like I’m underwater. I can’t hear anything but my pain. Perhaps I am approaching the demon who left me with this unholy wound. Finding it seems the only way to cure this, but how will I ever be able to do so if I am incapacitated by its very presence. I must research these demonic energies so I’ll know what to do when the time comes. And I must start working to strengthen my magic and mind.

The Treatment

I woke up in excruciating pain. My physical therapy exercises only seemed to make things worse. Despite the fact that I could see the demonic wound in my back, I knew that mundane medicine could help relieve the pain in the short term as I’ve had success in the past. A cure is the answer I’m looking for, one of the goals of this trip.

So after a night of pain and restless sleep, Robin and I caught a taxi to the traveler’s clinic in the tourist part of town. It is, in fact, a very highly-respected clinic, so I was hoping they’d be able to help me out. I did not expect the positively medieval treatment I ended up receiving.

The doctors talked to me as if I hadn’t heard it all before. Your pain isn’t really that bad… All you have to do is this one stretch and everything will be okay… Oh? Is it really that easy? Really?!? I nearly punched one of them. However, they agreed to give me a stronger anti-inflammatory and insisted I come back for my last 3 days in Nepal to receive physical therapy treatments. So I showed up later that afternoon for the first.

We walked out of the main building into an adjunct building that might have been a shed in a past life. Inside were a number of gadgets and gizmos pulled from an early 1900s mad-scientist laboratory: Frankenstein or Jekyll and Hyde. It was neither comforting nor homey. He had me lay down on the sterile aluminum table and started by massaging the tight muscles in my back. While doing so, he asked me if I’d ever had dry-needling. I had not. He started telling me about the benefits of it as he began cupping my back and using the cup to massage my agonizingly stiff muscles. His diagnosis was that the only problem was a single muscle that was too tight, despite the fact that my back, neck, lats, and chest were all in quite a bit of pain, as the trapped demonic energy seeped into all of those areas. It wouldn’t be any use, of course, to tell him this.

At this point I was pretty desperate for any pain relief, so I consented to the dry-needling. Now let me paint a picture for you. I lay on a metal table in a small, dimly lit shed filled with questionable medical technology in the middle of a foreign country with not-the-best public health standards. Needles emanated from my back and multiple sets of electrodes connected me to a machine. My needle-strewn back twitched from the shocks as an infrared light heated up the muscles under my skin. I was honestly surprised that he didn’t break out the razors and start bleeding me.

I then repeated this treatment two more times over the next two days. It did seem to successfully loosen that one muscle he was targeting. Unfortunately, that muscle was only part of a larger problem, I was still in a lot of pain, and what little relief the treatments had provided would prove to be short-lived as I boarded my plane for London.