Honor the blurp (with Jodi Lopez)
A majestic moose, courtesy of Encyclopædia Britannica.
With mindfulness, we develop awareness that we turn what we put into ourselves, into ourselves. This manifests as healthier impulses such as improving our diet, reducing our exposure to negative programming, exercising our bodies, and exercising moderation. We become people who, as Marcus says of a mentor, “enjoy and abstain from things that most people find it hard to abstain from and all too easy to enjoy.”
∞
I have mystical experiences where I tune into things that don’t exist in this physical realm. Sometimes, it’s scary, but mostly it just is. Several such experiences were life-changing. Most happen during plant medicine journeys or deep meditation, but some come out of nowhere, especially when I’m out in nature.
During one megavibrant mystical experience, which my wife calls a “blurp,” I was a teenage boy living in an ancient North American community preparing for a ceremonial lunar feast. My wife, a fellow astral traveler, compares blurps to superduper downloads where one moment there’s nothing, and then the next, a tapestry of awareness is instantly there. Some blurps feel like lifetimes, and others like careless whispers. Time stops for me when I’m blurping. Sometimes, only a micro-moment passes in real-time, and sometimes it’s way longer. During my Dark Night, I intermittently blurped out for hours at a time.
On this episode of the blurp zone, I was aware that my people rarely ate meat, and it was usually in a shamanic ceremony when we did. Humans in that world took on the characteristics of the animals we consumed. This resonated with me, as my best friend in this world had an ayahuasca journey where he was a bird person in ancient South America, or someplace like it. Given the size and ferocity of the ice age megafauna inside the blurp bubble, killing them called for a ceremonial feast of commensurate proportions.
I didn’t turn into a terror bird in the blurp. Instead, I was a hesitant hunter on a rite of passage tasked with slaying and slaughtering a megamoose—my totem animal—for the ceremony. I’m neither a hunter nor a carnivore in this three-dimensional experience we’re sharing, and I didn’t love the killing part of the blurp because I felt the majestic moose’s pain.
During the ceremony, which was also painful, I felt the moose’s lifeforce energy enter me, move through my body, and provide strength. I felt my body turning the megameat into muscle and sinew and sensed my DNA recalibrating. The animal’s power and gentleness touched me on a soul level, and I felt cosmic gratitude for its sacrifice that transcends words.
I blast off to different dimensions when I blurp out. On returning to this realm, its roughness often makes blurps seem like hallucinations. With this blurp, real-life re-entry reinforced its rightness. I saw how loads of my brothers and sisters, bless their hearts, resembled the beasts we humans overbreed and overconsume. I sensed the similarities on a soul level, and it was painful.
I’ll honor the blurp by learning more about the dietary intentions of the descendants of ancient Americans. Perhaps I’ll reintegrate meat into my diet and see what happens. Even if I don’t do that, I’m immensely grateful the ancestors deepened my respect for life and moderation.
