Innerdance’s Weblog

Remember the time we didn’t have to work for food?  We just had to float in maternal fluid, waiting for nutrients to flow into the simple delivery chute we call the umbilical cord. 

 

There is no one precise process to ascending from your dependency on complex physical nutrients towards freer energy. It is not a simple A,B and C process, but rather a zig-zagging labyrinth that will have you cross-eyed and delirious before you even get past the first difficult turns.

 

The labyrinth walk’s origins stem from Mesopotamia, and it is still connected to our digestive system.  The early Persians modeled the first labyrinths from our intestinal tract.  Ironically, maybe that’s why we call it our “guts;” surely, it will take quite a handful of guts to walk the labyrinth we like to call, “life.” 

 

It is easier to get stuck in one particular corner of the labyrinth than to push towards our center.  Whenever we feel our consciousness is about to turn inwards, we look for the next movie or the next friend we can send a text message to, rather than leave our emotional digestive process undistracted.

 

The first challenge to elevating our diets is in putting up with the loneliness and the other discomforts that come up when we begin the inner work in solitude.  This is the stage that follows any kind of awakening.  It is called purgation.  It is almost as if the simple act of focusing our attention on a pinprick of light for but a brief moment can shake up the dust and the darkness that clouds our awareness of our truer reality. 

 

Try just half a day of lightening your diet.  You will feel weak, and you will owe this weakness to your lack of food.  Before shoveling hamburgers into your mouth, you might alternately try to ask yourself if the weakness is due to lack of food, or to the fact that your body has begun to work out a process it hasn’t had much quality time to devote to – healing.

 

Your first real challenge, thus, is to break the thought that you are like an automobile that requires gasoline to run.  You are not a car.  Nor is food your fuel. Place your faith in that you are made of spirit, even as your mind tells you that you are made of physical parts only.  The more physical food comes into your body, the more you become aware of yourself as physical being only. 

 

Think of it this way.  Your enzymes do two important things.  They digest, as well as heal.  When enzymes are digesting your food, they are like janitors and maids inside you, ever cleaning your body of waste material, even as you sleep.  When they aren’t digesting, the same enzymes are like nurses and doctors that go to the parts in your body that needs the most healing.

 

Most living things contain enzymes.  When you expose these to heat, the enzymes die.  Live food such as raw fruits and vegetables contain its own janitors and maids.  It is like eating food that cleans up after itself, leaving your body’s own enzymes free to keep focused on the arduous task of keeping your whole being on the path to higher evolution. 

 

But your mind resists this.  Even with the slightest discomfort, your body balks at the skin rashes that come out, the mental and emotional depression that comes with your physiological withdrawals of the toxins you have accumulated over the years you have spent on Earth.  You cannot stand for the weakness that takes hold of you.  You aren’t trained to allow for this weakness. Ever must you feel strong and in control of mind and body, even as you helplessly watch your soul constantly stray from your futile attempts to grasp it with your will.

 

Myself, I am, by character, weak.  I have many friends who have transitioned their diets through pure will. Rather, I used to be at the mercy of whatever food is placed in front of me. In a way, I was sort of addicted to food.  If you take away what an addict is addicted to, he develops anxiety and looks for whatever it is he is addicted to.

 

When I left my life, first walking around Mindanao, I had to give up most meat, by condition.  When I began to live with poor farming and fishing communities, the universe, at least, controlled the conditions I was in.  These families couldn’t afford meat, and thus, I became a vegetarian, by condition.

 

It was around this time that the universe dropped some readings on my lap, regarding entire communities that subsisted on the simplest foods, such as bananas, raw vegetables, coconuts only.  I remember that light bulb on the top of my head flipping “ON,” as my paradigm of the world inverted itself practically overnight.  Having come from the midst of metropolitan Manila, I had long pondered on why we had to devote our waking life to so much egoistic suffering just to ensure we had our three complex meals a day.

 

But it wasn’t as simple as realizing this.  As I watched myself understanding and believing in this inverted world that subsisted on free energy, I also saw that my body didn’t readily agree with these newfangled concepts.  As my spirit guide kept insisting that I urgently look for the beach I regularly see in my dreams, it wasn’t long until the light bulb illuminated the other parts of me that were still in the dark.

 

If I couldn’t control myself, I could at least control the conditions I lived in.  If I lived in a beach that had no pork chops, and was thousands of kilometers from any McDonald’s Drive-Thru, I had no choice but to eat what was available.

When I finally had a grip on the conditions – finally getting myself stuck in an empty beach, my next problem was vertical.  The food was there, but I had to work to get it.  Being born on the beach and learning to climb coconut trees at the age of 10, while your body is still nimble, is one thing.  Spending most of your life in the city, then one day having to learn how to climb a coconut tree at the age of 28, at the point where you are still transitioning your diet and have constant dizzy weak spells is another thing altogether.

 

The dilemma was in simultaneously doing battle with two (or three) daunting fears.  How could I use my fear of dying of hunger to propel me upwards as I conquered my fear of heights – and fear of falling down from fifty feet high up on a swaying coconut tree that is God knows how far from any decent hospital.

 

At first, I tried to be clever.  I invented contraptions using long branches, rope, and metal things that got washed up on the shore. I tried to lasso coconuts and pull them down, if it would save me from having to go up there to get it.  It was difficult but possible to do this, but every time I succeeded, the coconuts broke open, and I lost most of the juice contained in it. 

      

After a few days of this, I practiced climbing the smallest tree I could find.  In the beginning, even just a few steps upwards can be so overwhelming.  My knees were literally knocking against wood.  My only consolation is that nobody was around to watch me give up countless times, before I was able to inch my way to the top.  But then, this wasn’t the end of the problem.  I didn’t realize just how difficult it is to detach coconuts from the tree, especially those that are old enough to contain meat in it.  Young coconuts that contain only water proved easier to detach, but did strange things to my stomach.

 

There are several tricks to this.  The best, and safest way is also the most difficult and dangerous to learn.  You have to pull yourself through the branches and lift yourself upwards so that you will end up at the top of the tree.  If you are able to do this, you can use your feet to just push the coconuts below you with your feet. 

 

The easier way to learn is also the more dangerous.  While clinging onto the trunk of the tree, you have to rotate the coconut enough to twist the branch that it breaks off.  It seems easy, until you learn often enough that geckos, ants, squirrels, fruit bats, and even snakes can sometimes be found lurking in the branches – the last things you would want to encounter if you’re dangling on one hand with the other twisting a coconut.  Most times, the coconuts grow so thick and are bunched up so tightly that they are difficult to turn even just a few degrees.

 

The previous caretaker of the beach took care of a dog that was brought there years back when the owner of the beach still lived there.  He was aptly named Bilbo. A guy named Etoy also brought me a three-week old kitten from a fishing community at the far end of the large island, called Pulan Bato.  The cat was named Ming-Ming. 

 

These two pets had no choice but to survive on what I was subsisting on.  Bilbo lived on old brown coconuts (niyog), which I would peel and crack open for Bilbo, which he would have the uncanny ability to shred with his teeth.  Ming-Ming doesn’t like old coconuts.  She only ate young coconuts.  Everyday, I would climb a few trees, higher ones as the months passed, to gather a couple for myself, one for Bilbo and another one for Ming-Ming. 

 

The problem was that they knew what I was up to … I fed them on the spot, and so, they knew the careful formula that me climbing tree plus coconuts falling from the heavens is almost certainly equal to food. But they always waited in anticipation right below the tree.  I would have to wait for a few minutes before they get tired of waiting and walk away.  If you are dangling high up there, ants starting to crawl down your shirt, you too wouldn’t be in the best of moods.  I would shout myself hoarse to get them to walk away, but beach pets in the wild like to defy logic rather than to be agreeable.

 

Lastly, given all those challenges, the one thing that can definitely hinder you from gathering a single coconut at any given time, is rain.  One time during my first months in the beach, I was nearing the top of a very wet tree right after a whole night of rain, when I slipped. The only way I could break the fall was to embrace the tree tight to my chest.  I would rather scrape my skin silly for the two feet of breaking gravity than let go and end up on the sand below with two broken legs.  I was scarred for a month, but the lesson stayed with me much longer.  Even in the hottest of days, I learned to be aware at all times, eventually loving the art of climbing trees which once terrified me when I first lived on the island.

 

My good friend Gilda Coredero-Fernando published The Soul Book, a beautiful compendium of our ancient forebears oldest myths. I remember it speaks of surviving legends that describe a long-forgotten time when bountiful food would fall to the ground and we just had to gather them. 

 

Nowadays, we have to clock in hours of putting up with jobs, traveling time, and stress to gather heavily processed food devoid of life-giving enzymes which most of us think we need to survive during this particular stage in our people’s evolution.

 

We think we have cut off the umbilical cord that once had us dependent on our mother for nutrients.  That umbilical cord is now attached to your TV set, your romantic other, your car, your house, your ATM card, and most especially, your breakfast, lunch and dinner.

 

It will not always be this way.  Sure, there will be awesome hindrances blocking our perspectives and right action on nutrition, government, economy and health that makes total wholistic sense.  Indeed, it will be just like climbing a very tall tree. 

 

I haven’t climbed a tree in more than a year now.  I miss the ants, the act of climbing up afraid and later ending up on top of the tree while a heady wind is swaying the pristine world around me.  I remember being on that tree again, looking at the deep Palawan blue.  I have no fears, not even of falling down.  I am making a choice, in between staying on this beautiful island or moving back to the world of people.  I have since then, made the choice and now live with people.  I am making a new choice. I am moving back to the beautiful island one day, but this time, the beautiful island is in my mind, and it will be big enough for the world of people. 

A season would come, when you could wake up and your deserted beach would be filled up with junk.  There is nothing as disconcerting as having just spent the last three months cleaning up the beach and then suddenly finding your piece of paradise strewn with trash washed up from Neverland.

There’s a story in this.  Palawan is so far away from the rest of the Philippines that if you turn on your radio, it would receive frequencies from Malaysia and other South East Asian countries rather than Philippine radio.  Its flora and fauna are unlike those from our country, they are more akin to that of Sabah and Malaysia. 

And as it is with the trash.  As to Shampoo bottles alone, I was able to collect at least seven kinds of Procter and Gamble shampoos that came from Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, difficult as it is to believe.  My prize was a beautiful glass bottle with a Nazi sign at the bottom, but aside from this, there were slippers of every size and shape, Red Bull containers with unfamiliar characters on it, a ton of styrofoam and anything that has the capacity to float from other countries and end up in Kalipay beach. 

I couldn’t throw it back, it would just return with the waves.  So I was stuck with the challenge of getting rid of it without having to burn it.  I decided to create a fence.  A big fence made of junk that surrounded my Flower of Life garden where I planted my dreams and recycled my frustrations at a world gone mad. 

What is outside is inside.  Whenever I cleaned Kalipay, I was cleaning my life.  My morning habit was to pick up all the seaweed strewn on the beach and pile it on a pattern called the Vesica Piscis, where I decomposed all the biodegradable trash I could find.  I became a compost monster, sometimes obsessing about every small leaf I passed along the sandy way.  Coconut husks, especially, took a lot of my spare time, which was all the time I spent in Kalipay.  A free man’s time is all freed up.  I often had to put up with raw or bleeding hands from tearing apart coconut husks to be used as both mulch and compost fillers.  Don’t ask me why; I just felt like it decomposed me inside when I decompsed things outside.

When the leaves, the seaweed, and the coconut husks turned into soil, I was one ecstatic alchemist.  I invented a swing, using bamboo poles, some strong rope and plywood that also washed up on the beach, surrounded by a junk fence that was constructed with materials imported from around the world.  I never felt richer in my whole life. 

We keep thinking that life will fix itself when we do this, do that, take this course, eat this food, read this book, watch this movie or have enough money.  There’s another way.  The opposite way, which is to do nothing, eat nothing, read nothing, watch nothing, buy or sell nothing.  Just nothing. 

It’s like leaving something alone, and finding our life just fixes itself when we fix our inner selves.  It is the natural way, the way of nature.  Decomposition.  Before you know it, after you live in nothingness for a long enough time, manure becomes nutrients.  Death becomes life.  Frustrations become dreams, and seeds are now grown plants that are bearing highly energetic food that can take us to that higher place we call the I AM.

I was a very bad boy, with a good heart.  Few understood me when I used to speak of these things while I functioned in Corporate Manila.  I couldn’t explain why I hated myself and that I had no capacity to change before I learned the gentle art of crawling into the arms of the divine mother and letting go in a beach where junk washing up by seasons is just a part of the great cycle of life.  I’m back in the city, and there are new rules, new falls, and new dreams.  It was my inner junk that drove my frustrations, yet it was the junk that drove me to dream. Was it God via Nealle Donald Walsh that said, we somethimes have to experience Who We Are Not so that we can choose Who We Are? 

I am changing again, and so are you.  Changing and Choosing once again. There is much more to all these than you think, dear Horatios. I know you feel the same way. Thank you for being a part of all this … The Becoming. 

My dad got shot when he was a child. It was World War II. He and his cousin were unsupervised in a room, playing the gun-gun game.  When gun-gun dropped on floor, Mr. Bullet wooshed from Mr. Gun-Gun and slammed straight through my father’s lower jaw and out of his upper eye socket (God help me, my brain has blocked out which eye it was). 

The legend goes that he caught the eye fragments with his hand before he sauntered up to my innocuous grandmother stating the super obvious, “Mama, I lost my eye.”

Thus, my dad’s fleeting momentary encounter with Mr. Gun-Gun and Mr. Bullet literally triggered his having to see life through the one-eye ratio that was left.  As did his wife and children.

I was his second child, but since I was the second in a series of first males, I was bequeathed his name, which was in turn, bestowed upon him by his father. Thus, I was required by law to place three squiggly Roman numeral “I’s” after the words Alberto J. Villaraza to establish that I, I, I was the exact child to fail, fail, fail Math Quizzes 1, 2 and 3, so as not to be confused with the Alberto Villaraza Jr., Math wiz, scientist-extraordinaire, and exceptional poet.  I do not know how well the daunting Alberto Villaraza Sr. was with quadratic equations, but at any rate, pipsqueak-me was too introverted so as to be confused with my intimidating grandfather in any possible way.

Stop . . .

Why is this turning out to be a poignant tale of Sidney Sheldon proportions?  I woke up an hour ago with naught but a yen for quick jaunt to the urinal and a mug of hot Tsai. 

Truth be told?

If it is indeed time, let it be. We shall see what unfolds.

Jesus was once quoted that if your eye is single, your whole body will be full of light.  My father, who wasn’t always Alberto Jr. but more oftentimes nicknamed Bing, had but a single working eye.  The other was a fake one; it was made of smoky glass.

I can’t say if my father proved Jesus right.  But that one working eye must have been a marvel unto its own.  I remember one instance when I needed help with my homework once. I asked him to read two long pages (small print) for his advice.  He took maybe six to eight seconds to read the whole text.  I was sure he was showing off.  So I started to ask him all kinds of things from the text.  He answered them all.  Names, numbers, even qualitative details.  That is one of the few memories of Bing I haven’t blocked out that made me realize that he belonged to the sort of people who had the memory of cameras and Xerox machines. 

There seemed to be other benefits to having one eye.  Bing excelled at sports that required you to keep one eye winked.  Like bowling, billiards, or ironically, shooting a telescoped rifle.   The same applied to science, for his main interest was devoted to biology, where you had to spend all day with one eye shut while another gazes into those old-style microscopes that lets you into the infinitesimal world of cells. 

My own disadvantage with having to live with daddy’s single eye was more Stephen King than Sidney Sheldon.  Before I had learned the art of skepticism, Bing convinced me that one part of him kept awake even as he slept.  His proof was that when he took off his trademark aviator shades as he snoozed, one spooky glass eye always kept open. 

And it was with conviction that my dad said that I must always behave because he was watching me with his smoky-gray eye even while he was taking his morning and afternoon naps. 

As my dad snored away, I was a mouse in a corner, tracing the superheroes in my comic books or transmogrifying my Transformer figurines from car to robot, robot to car, car to robot, and so on. If I had to cut across his room and use his bathroom, I tiptoed. 

When I grew out of my toys, my interests turned towards my dad’s massive collection of books.  For a kid who had to live under the tutelage of my father’s all-seeing eye, the books were my only chance to escape the four walls of my house and later, the safety of our gated subdivision. 

One by one, I devoured whatever paperbacks and hard bounds had attractive enough cover art, not yet developing a sixth sense of filtering what had value and what did not.  Most of the books were acquired in second-hand book shops so you can imagine what was bought for the sake of 50%-off discounts and buy-one-take-one deals, usually partitioned into store shelves because people either didn’t want to buy them in the first place, or they were so mass-produced that one could find maybe a dozen copies in just a single store.  Many of these were either self-help like “How to Quit Smoking in 60 days or “How to clean your house using just vinegar” or just those ratty pulp fiction paperbacks.

I think he bought a small bulk of his library brand new. Most of them were popular Spy-vs.-Spy such as Ludlums, Forsythes, and Flemings, but once in a while, a Sheldon, a Clavell, or even a Richard Bach can be stumbled on.  If I looked hard enough, a Thomas Hardy or a Friedrich Nietzsche might be unearthed. 

Back in those days, there were only three or four channels on television, mostly Marshall Law-programmed at that.  I was often grounded for long stretches of time, for lines of below seventy-five in math and science, and so you can just imagine what it must have been like living in that two-story house with just those books to tell me what sort of life proliferated beyond our well-manicured garden.  

The key was timing.  I was in that moment when I was just beginning to redefine what my own take on Newtonian, Aristotelian and Euclidean parameters of 3-D reality.  There is a certain stage in one’s life when suddenly, the real world expands outward like a lit match underneath a summer-dried pile of leaves.  Without ample warning, your alphabet-soup existence towered over by He-Man, Optimus Prime, Voltes Five, and Voltron-Defender-of-the-Universe falls over, to be replaced by superheroes of a more complex make.  If it wasn’t Frank Hardy, Hugh Hefner, The Brothers Kamarazov or the Mayor of Casterbridge, it was an aspiring seagull named Jonathan Livingston or a Little Prince that travelled across the galaxies in search of a better way of loving a rose. 

My dad’s constant motto was to “minimize the risk.”  He thought that I could live with his books at the same time resonate with the same fears he had of the world.  I didn’t get shot when I was a child.  I wasn’t afraid to fly for I hadn’t yet lived through the falls. 

After puberty, Bing still opted to maintain his strict house rules: 6 pm curfews when I was still 18, having to ask permission to go out at night up to my early 20’s, getting grounded several times for an entire year in high school for failing one subject in two quarters.  It was typical for a teenager like me for the villains in those stories to morph into my father’s face.  He curtailed my freedom, when it was he who also advised me to read my very first novel – Six Against The Rock – the true story of how six inmates tried the only almost successful escape from the most secure prison in the world, Alcatraz Island.

I began to imagine that there was a rabbit hole at the wall directly underneath my air-conditioner.  Every night, I pretended that I snuck out and was Bruce Lee or Axl Rose for a night, carefully replacing the magic hole when I returned from my nocturnal adventures. 

Until the day I learned just how easy it was to put my blanket over some fluffed-up pillows, leave the stereo on, and jump over the fence.  It didn’t take me long to learn the laborious art of pushing the car from the garage to start it a few good block away where my slumbering parents upstairs still think their middle child is dead to the world downstairs. 

When my family bought a townhouse in the city, it became easier when I was awarded the room that had the fire-escape ladder right outside my third-story window.   I watched and danced to many a good band and DJ that way. In college, I drank like a fish and drove drunk like a dervish, lucky to come home unscathed, the car still dent-less.  By my early twenties, I was an expert in opening the squeaky gate and climbing to my room right before the early rays hit my sometimes vomit-stained fenders.     

One of Bing’s favorite books is Dale Carnegie’s best-selling self-help, How to Win Friends and Influence People.  When he was still alive, he neither won nor influenced me in any way he wanted.  Instead, I maintained a rebellion that lasted for more than a decade, the same that eventually drove me into an intense vision quest for personal freedom that lasted long after my father’s strict tenets had no more direct influence on me.