Part 2 - Searching for death

This is the second part of my story.

As I was writing I realised - this is a big story.

So this part I have deliberately cut a lot out.

It is about the search for meaning. The oldest trick in the book - if just this happens, then I will be free.

If you haven't read the first part I invite you to.

But this piece stands on its own.​​

​That was 2011.

For the next seven years I kept moving toward everything that scared me.

Ended up taking form as

Backpacking with nothing. Hitchhiking everywhere. I took an oath to never pay for accommodation again - couchsurfing, floor surfing, sleeping in the car, under the stars in my homemade hammock.

Dumpster diving. Table diving. Whatever it took to stay free and keep moving.

And oatmeal. Four years of freaking oatmeal. I got so creative I started making curries out of it.

This Wednesday I was in the water here in Brazil and it hit me - NO MORE OATMEAL - and I laughed out loud at that version of myself.

He was so serious about being free.

What had started as a HELL NO had turned into its own extreme. Self deprivation as identity. As proof. As the new cage wearing the costume of freedom.

The system I had rejected at 18 had just changed its uniform.

Then Kundalini yoga found me.

Something cracked open. Enough that a year later I was invited back to Sat Nam Fest in the US as a group leader. Ticket paid. Wow, Doing it!

I called Nicklas. The same one from the construction site.

He had also started travelling along the way. I like to think my inspirational complaining had something to do with that.

He was in, we left for the US.

US security. Standard questions.

Why are you going?

Yoga festival.

What do you do at a yoga festival?

You look at women, breathe, and eat vegetarian.

His serious demeanor turned into a laugh and he waved me through.

What followed was 6 months I am still processing.

First part - smoking DMT in LA with a friend who made his own - in a hillside house somewhere in Santa Monica

We went to the yoga festival

Nicklas fell in love at the festival and went back to Denmark.

And I kept driving.

Alone through the American southwest. I ended up going to another Kundalini festival and 3 days of white tantra, connected with some friends who I had meet some years before, they invited med for a Peyote ceremoni in Navajo country in Arizona.

Windows down. Learning Spanish from a CD. The desert opened up in every direction. No insurance since 2012. No particular destination except south.

I found a small border crossing into Mexico.

I had heard about a shaman named Pancho. Bufo Alvarius - the toad medicine.

I had my birthday coming. It felt right.

He was supposed to be somewhere in the Sonoran desert. 6 hours south, cross west and then head north for 3 hours.

A town called Punta Chueca on the coast of the Sea of Cortez..

The town felt empty. Mud huts. Plastic everywhere.

A place that reminded me of India, completely outside government support or presence.

One man on the street he seemed crazy, but was nice.

Selling things made of seashells.

I asked for Pancho.

You know when you yell loud because it feels like it don’t make sense what you ask for? PANCHO!!?

He pointed down the street.​Oh.. I thought..

I drove down. Parked. Called out. Nothing. Went into a house - nobody there. Went to the neighbour.

A woman pointed across the street.

I knocked.

A white woman opened the door. She spoke English. Turned out she was from Yugoslavia and had lived here for thirty years.

And then Pancho came out in surf shorts.

I stayed with this Mexican family for seven days.

Smoked Bufo on my birthday.

I won't say much about what happened in those seven days except that by the time I left I was not the same man who had knocked on that door.

I drove south down the Pacific coast. Still carrying the message of the medicine. Still somewhere between one state of being and another. Life felt full.

I pulled over at a beach as the sun was going down.

The beach was full of sandflies and they were biting. I went into the water to escape them.

The Pacific was warm. The moon was rising behind me. The sun was painting the sky ahead in colours I don't have words for.

And I remember thinking

I am free! YESS!

Not as a thought. As a feeling that moved through my whole body and settled there.

This. This was what I had been looking for since Tasmania.

Since the construction site. Since New Year's Eve at 17. Since before I had words for any of it.

This is it.

And then — ZAKK!!!

Something punctured my foot underneath the water..

The pain started pulsating up my leg immediately. I went Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck...! Ran to the car on one foot.

Sandflies still biting. Foot throbbing. Standing there on a random beach in Mexico not knowing anyone - I pissed on the foot. Covered it in olive oil. Hopped in agony down the road to a small police station.

Nobody there.

Turned around - three cops appeared from nowhere.

They treated it. Told me it was a Stingray.

Asked if I wanted painkillers..

I asked if anything bad can happen? ​

She said no.

No painkillers then.

They looked at me with something between concern and amusement.

That ended up being the first out two times I refused painkillers on that trip where I should have just had SAID HELL YES!!

I drove into the Mexican night on my left foot.

Covered the car in a mosquito net. Laid down in the heat telling myself I could sleep through it.

The sandflies found their way in any way.

The foot was still pulsating.

In anger I packed everything up and drove 30 minutes to the nearest town.

I slept in the car in a quiet neighborhood.

Eventually the road led to a mountain in Nayarit.

A Sundance ritual with a tribe I had sat with before.

I will not say much about what happened there.

Except that I ended up dancing. Four days.

Attached to the tree through my chest at one point - looking around the circle thinking Casper. What the hell have you done.

It was the most devotional, beautiful and terrifying thing I had ever done.

I ended up doing Bufo one more time, and smoking Changa in Mexico.. ​Mexico has a lot of magic, a lot of medicine, and i thought I needed to go back to the roots, back to meditation, so I parked the car, and went to India.

I went straight into a ten day Vipassana outside Delhi.

Discovered I could sit for three hours without moving. Discovered what lives underneath three hours of stillness - enormous Nauseating pain, and beyond it, states I had no language for yet.

I found my way to a jungle ashram in South India. A guru named Bhagwan. A lineage of Advaita Vedanta - non duality.

The end of knowledge. The end of practice.

The first few days I called bullshit. The ego is a protective mechanism and I judged everything.

Three days later my heart was full of love.

I stayed. I practiced. I went to Satsang every day and felt something cutting through illusion I had never felt before.

When I left I signed physical papers.

An oath of Brahmacharya. Celibacy (Can barely spell that). No drugs. No lies. No stealing.

I felt the strange sensation of that in the moment of signing.

​But I left knowing exactly what I was doing.​I had unfinished business in Mexico, and when that was done

I was going back to India as soon as possible to dedicate my life to realisation.

To transcend this whole thing once and for all.

It felt tangible.

I flew back to Mexico. Meditated the entire journey. Bhagwan had said jet lag is an illusion.

He was somewhat right.

I felt a raging spiritual fire in my purpose than I had ever felt. Clearer than I had ever been.

About 2 months later

I landed in Denmark.

Needed to make some money for India

I totally isolated myself from life

I had a great job working for myself.

Just working, no talking, no listening to music, nothing that distracted my mind -

And about 2 months in.

I went into depression.

Not dramatically. Quietly.

The way you don't notice water rising until you are already in it.

I had been so close to something.

And now I was back.

I will tell you what happened next in the next part.

It arrived from a pink blue sky.

And it changed everything again.

Casper