somewhat sober, vaguely vegan and hopefully homeless

an introduction into investigating unadulterated reality

When i drafted this introductory post i was drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and eating potato chips like there was no tomorrow. We have this saying: “do something like there’s no tomorrow”. And we use it to mean “live in the moment”, but that’s not what i was doing then. In fact i was living in the past, hoping that in the future i might actually learn that actually there really is no tomorrow — there is only this moment.

So was i drafting this introductory post, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and eating potato chips because i believed there would be a tomorrow when i could quit all this consumptive over-compensation for the spiritual yearning that comes from my somewhat neglected core of being.

But there is no tomorrow — there is only this moment.

Waiting for tomorrow is an eternal waiting game — if we want to step up to who we are, we have to do so now.

So now i’m drafting this post, knowing that i am not a struggling suburban high-school student with a pot habit and a drinking problem anymore. I am a thriving global traveller with an awareness habit.

I know this, but sometimes i feel otherwise.

I have known this for sometime, with my mind, but i want to feel this knowing with the whole experience of my being. I am tired of reading about spiritual experience, and ready to step into practice in a real way.

I had done this before, many times — binged with the intention of quitting tomorrow and resuming my practice. There’s a Turkish saying for this: “sen bokunu çıkarıyoruz”, which means something like “the binge before the diet” or, according to Google Translate, “you’re taking shit”. But it has never really worked. I am not sure why i felt it would work this time — it’s fools gold, this idea that we can just up and change ourselves immediately, after one last binge.

As it happens, it didn’t work this time — i had a few days off and felt good, but then i arrived in Afroz again and, for some reason, somehow, i thought it would be a good idea to celebrate with a few beers and cigarettes. Nothing drastic, nothing to beat myself up about, but a minor relapse nonetheless — a departure from the sort of purity and cleanliness i want to experience as i plunge into the spiritual path to explore unadulterated consciousness.

But now i’m in Afroz, where i have a supportive environment with the means to do lots of intensive meditation alongside this sort-of documentary project here at Medium, where i’ll be updating as daily as possible in a diary style.

Because i’ve done this before

(in another sense, my whole adolescence was a fifteen-year binge, until in 2013 i spent a whole nine months clean, which i won’t say was the best year of my life, because the years i spent in Melbourne expanding my intellectual and chemical horizons and the years i spent in Southeast Asia expanding my cultural and geographical horizons — they were damn good years as well — but the year i spent in Eden Hills, Adelaide, South Australia, sober as the day i was born — that year was revolutionary),

and it’s time to try something like that again: I’m going somewhat sober, vaguely vegan and hopefully homeless.

What does that mean?, and what are the reasons? Neither of those questions really matters, but because i’m still somewhat attached to that rational part of our experience that thrives on quantifiable, linear understanding of things, i need to document some notes about why i’m doing this and what i’m actually doing.

There are many reasons for this, and many … um, conditions for the … uh, what?, the project?, the experiment? It’s a lifestyle experiment i guess.

Firstly, a circuitous and incomplete outline of the various and ambiguous reasons:

for all those years in my adolescence i was mostly unaware, unconscious, asleep, living as a victim of my conditioning — i was looking outside myself for what i didn’t know was lacking internally.

During that year in Eden Hills and, to some extent, during the last month i spent in Thailand in 2012, i had some experiences of becoming aware of my inner environment and what it lacked. Now in 2014, between Turkey and Greece, i am having experiences that are extensions of those i had between Australia and Thailand in 2012 and 2013.

Somehow, through massive over-indulgence in all things external (drugs, food, sex, literature …), i grew weary of the outward-looking search. There’s a saying from Buddha about this, but i can never find it — i’m not quite sure which way he says is seeking and which way he says is looking, but the point is i grew tired of trying to fill myself up from without, so i started seeking inward.

That’s how i understand it now — at the time, my interest in spirituality was more like a hobby that i decided to pursue in place of my previous hobbies of binge-drinking and eating books and bongs for breakfast. Spirituality was something to replace the behaviour that was clearly making me unwell.

During that year, my interest in spirituality developed into something more real — there’s a few posts about it here, at my other blog, with details i don’t feel compelled to repeat here, for my sake as well as yours.

All that’s relevant here is what i’m starting with now, which brings me to something like the reasons for the conditions, before i actually get to the conditions, perhaps because they are the actual scary part — pontificating about this on Medium is all well and good, but when it comes to implementation i start to freak out and wonder who i am. More about that in later posts, no doubt.

I was hesitant about using the term ‘conditions’ because i have a kind of allergic reaction to things like discipline and regime, things like diets and jogging religiously,

but conditions feels appropriate now, as i write this, because if it was conditioning that contributed to the development of somewhat negative lifestyle decisions, then it is conditioning that will contribute to the development of positive ones.

I guess it’s about reprogramming myself, or subjecting myself to an intensive experience of life through a different filter — the filter of sobriety, of unadulterated reality.

I remember when i was walking around the Garden of Unearthly Delights with my dear friend Lucy one night, sober as a judge because i had already spent my dole queue, and i said to her that actually it was pretty cool to be walking around such an environment sober, because my experience of it was different.

I said something like, “How can i hope to find the truth of reality if i’m stoned or drunk all the time?” She said something like, “Wait, what? Can i please have this on record?”

She’s a naturopath and a bit of a petal when it comes to drugs, so she lives a pretty sober life naturally. I have always had an inexplicably robust constitution, so i’ve been able to brutalise my mind, body and soul with drug and alcohol abuse and not really notice the negative effects — a blessing and a curse.

That moment was formative for me though, and it wasn’t long after this that i began my year at Eden Hills, my first adult experience of living sober, entirely free of mind-altering substances.

After that year i went to Turkey, and shit got a little pear-shaped with regards to sobriety — hence, i was binge drinking in my friend’s apartment while drafting a post about sobriety.

I used to do this all the time — binge-drink and write, alone. If i wasn’t binge drinking and writing, i was binge-smoking weed and reading, alone. I thought it was something i had got passed in that year at Eden Hills, but evidently not.

So i’m trying again, among the Osho community at Afroz on the island of Lesvos, Greece.

I’m including vague veganism in this approach to sobriety, because eating indiscriminately is another way of shutting myself off to feeling reality through the physical senses that could otherwise be so charged and energised if the body wasn’t so busy digesting all sorts of faux meat, oh-so-glutinous dairy products and … meat glue.

I want to explore veganism partly because it seems easier to just cut a lot of the stuff i suspect is causing a blockage in my body awareness, and partly because i’m curious about existing on a light-based diet. These are all things i’ll explore on the Medium blog as i go along.

And the hopefully homeless part in the title refers to the spiritual practice without being too … well, spiritual about it. In Buddhism, the process of monastic ordination is called Going Forth Into Homeless, which has always resonated nicely with me for some reason.

I’m not about to renounce the world and donate my books, bike and computer to some charity, but i have had some experiences recently that helped me understand the immense existential value we can gain from living as though we are ‘poor in spirit’, to take some words from Jesus via Eckhart Tolle.

Blessed are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven

Matthew 5:3

That is officially the first time i have ever quoted Jesus. But i like this idea very much, especially since i experimented with some of the conditions i will enjoy for this project — by experimenting with being poor in spirit, i experienced an upwelling of gratitude that i wrote about here. So that’s what the homeless thing is about.

And it is the homelessness thing that gets me really excited about the conditions of this experiment, so let’s start there on the subject of conditions. For something like a year i will not stay in guesthouses or eat at restaurants — instead, i will couchsurf, camp, prepare my own food, hitch-hike, and generally experience the side of life we miss when we pay for everything to live in (and eat from) boxes.

As for the vegan thing (because let’s work through these backwards from easiest and most fun to hardest and most ego-threatening), the deal there is that i’m going to refrain from animal products as much as i can, but I’M NOT GOING TO GET MILITANT ABOUT THIS and start yelling at people from my new sense of heightened self-righteousness and indignation, which is a self-righteous and indignant thing to say, but hey, this is a work in progress.

Mostly i want to avoid dairy because i suspect it clogs up my respiratory system and i want to start breathing more, which is why i am obviously avoiding cigarettes as well. I’m not going to start bathing in agave syrup or spurning leather, but i want to be more conscious of how animal products effect consciousness and my capacity for breath.

And then there’s the somewhat sober thing, which i describe as the most ego-threatening because in the last few months, something i have really become aware of is that when i take away a lot of the things i have gone to for support in lieu of a healthy inner environment (things like drugs, alcohol, tobacco, food …) i feel meaningless.

That’s the only way i know how to describe it — empty might be another way, purposeless another, but either way, what i have seen recently is that when i take away things like smoking cigarettes from my life, i no longer know what to do with myself. That’s how much i have come to identify with these things, with these potentially damaging external so-called resources — so much so that when i do not have them in my life i feel less like who i am.

Now that is flat out wrong, because in fact who i am is the being i am when i am not clouded up by all these adulterants. So where am i getting this idea that i am a smoker or, shit, i am a hamburger?, to such an extent that when i don’t have these things i feel like i am less. I get this idea from the ego, of course — the ego wants me to think i am these things, because if i think i am just being, the ego dies.

So there needs to be much reprogramming done, and this is the reason for the project, but i was supposed to be getting to the conditions, by which i mean something more like the frightening and actual terms and conditions of this experiment, not so much the nature of conditioning and reprogramming. But already these terms are coming loose, as my first post will demonstrate.

So for now, the terms and conditions of somewhat sober, vaguely vegan and hopefully homeless: investigating unadulterated reality. Grandiose, i know, but what are we here for if not to experience the grandiosity of the universe within?

For approximately one year, minimum, first — the dreaded abstinence, which is now sounding far too much like pestilence for me: no smoking — der; no drugs (alcohol, marijuana, caffeine, psychedelics, synthetics — you name it, i’ll abstain from it); no meat, no animal products (light-based food only); no guesthouses, pensions, hostels, whatever you want to call them; no restaurants (no more cheapening of my relationship with food by just paying the poor bastards who are forced by economic circumstances to serve us dead food in the interests of funding their worthless university degrees); no escape (no mindless mainstream entertainment, no pornography)

In short, without all the verbose aggrandisement: no drugs; no animal products; no exploitation of servitude or state-sanctioned slavery.

In positive terms, without all the self-flagellation: more breathing; more clarity; more lightness; more camping; more nature; more sexuality; more energy; more everything.

Meanwhile, this has been an introduction into what i’m doing here in Greece, at Osho Afroz on the delightful island of Lesvos. I will be posting as daily as possible about all that comes up from this — often it will not be pretty, but often it will be beautiful. And i will adhere to the conditions as well as i am capable of, for reasons that are constantly changing and growing, so don’t expect me to be dishonest and say i’m totally winning at this all the time. I am human, after all — we are divine, but we are trapped in the human form for now.

Until then, stay tuned.