After 3 and 1/2 months on the road, the takeaway is this: the whole world is what we make it, and we’re making it every day. We have such a bigger role in the creation of our experience than we typically acknowledge or are even aware of, life is a journey to realize how much we are creating this journey. And it’s a journey of paradoxes. It’s an endless journey, but it does end. Everything that happens happens for a reason, and at the same time it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. There is fate and it’s random. So the only true thing is that both seemingly opposite things are true. I have just been trying to hold onto this paradox loosely, and it’s really stretching my mind.*

What else I can tell you? I am in Ambon, which is kind of a pit, but as a result, it’s really cool between the cracks. The rock and roll is great, the people are wild and screaming and out of their minds, there is no center so there’s nothing not to hold, they live in heaven and have been through hell, and I kind of like it and will be thrilled to leave.

My time in the Malukku Islands has been great. It’s the land that time forgot, mostly due to insurrections and then utterly heinous and retarded religious conflicts that were pretty major and lasted until believe it or not 2006. That’s right. People were slaughtering each other here until 5 years ago. No biggie, on a per capita basis we still do it more up until this very day. But anyway, that’s all over and everybody is like, whoa, what the fuck was that? Can’t we all just get along? So that’s going to stick it seems, so now people are kind of ready to get somewhere good, and rebuild what little they had started and had lost of a tourist infrastructure. It’s only the prettiest place on earth, and at the same time one of the most clueless in terms of what tourists might want or enjoy.

The people are amazing. They think nothing of taking the cell phone you’re reading right out of your hands to show you something they want to see, grabbing you and taking you where they want you to go, getting in your space and in your face and imposing on you in ways that are rude and preposterous. The room service guy will walk into your room and start going over the things on your desk, asking you what they are, how much, etc. I, being me, handle it fine, and enjoy responding in kind, either by grabbing their stuff and asking what it is, or walking into their lives and poking around, or replying at their same decibel level, etc. When I act this way, push back, or just jostle with them in a clear and strong and loving and funny way, they _love_ it. They remark to ea. other about me, and laugh their asses off. For utterly poor people that have been thru the moral equivalent of a civil war, these guys and gals sure do laugh a lot. They think everything, especially me, is hilarious. I guess they are right.

And they won’t think anything of giving me whatever they have. Just as they will expect me to hang with them much longer than I would ever want, and have no ability or interest to check with me about what I want, they will go so much farther than anybody in the US to give me what I want. I was looking for cacao in the market in Saparua, and this beautiful young girl said, “I know! I know cacao! Come with me!” I followed her walking for 20 minutes, then got in a Mobile (how 90% of the people get around, roving minivans you just jump in that kind of have a route and kind of will deviate to get you close to where you want to go) with her for what ended up being an hour, to the village she grew up in. Then on an Ojek (little scooter that gives you a ride) to a neighbor, “permissi!” and into the back yard, mom screams for her daughter, who is told to scramble up a tree and pick me a ripe cacao pod. For real. The inner white goo between the seeds is sweet and citrus-y. Then they just gave me a giant handful of totally raw seeds, then to a friends house for a couple kilos of perfectly natural sun-dried seeds. There is currently no cacao exported from Wipea, the town I was in, and this cacao is so sweet and good, I am going to try to have some of these sent to San Fran.

So it’s been raining and shitty out, so I watched a couple movies, ambled around town, drank some Sopi (the local type of Arak, date palm hooch), got a little sick, rallied today, and now am going to try to go muck diving. Then fly out of Ambon tomorrow and to Bali for a few days of just doing nothing before the hard core return to the USA, March 1. I can’t wait to upload my videos and share this whole time here. And to just be home and in my own bed and house and town. I _almost_ feel like the world is my home, but it’s going to take actually returning to where my personal historical energy and matter cluster is to complete that circuit.

*So the bottom line is that there is no bottom line. It’s never just either / or; it’s always both / and. God exists _and_ doesn’t exist. How can that be true? I don’t know. I know that there is no God, as such, per se, creating meaning for me, etc. There is mind and matter only, but that’s a lot. And it can include God. Even to the extent that it is included by God, simply because once God exists, the positing of such existence, even perfunctorily as a function of matter and mind, need no longer necessarily be temporally subsumed by that initial construct. So it flips in and out. There can’t not be God. It’s there. But not like we think it is. So it’s best to just accept both. Kind of like the best way to play a chess computer is to assume it’s really trying to beat you. That’s what Daniel Dennet calls the Intentional Stance. For us to try to beat the computer by understanding the blue print that runs it would be fruitless (the Design Stance). And to try to beat it by taking apart the machine (the Machine Stance) is not even something we could attempt. So there’s a reason that the most effective way to manage the world is to grant it consciousness. And that reason has to be that it’s close to the truth. So, back to the both / and, if that combined truth (does _and_ doesn’t), if we can wrap our minds around that, we’ve got a more ultimate truth than either of the two poles that most people cleave to. It’s not 1 “or” 2, it’s 1 “and” 2, which is, um, 3. The truth is 3. Not 1. Not 2. Except that if it’s 3, that is, both 1 and 2, then it’s really 4, because 3 as a totality is really a forth thing untio itself: if it’s both, then it’s both that it isn’t both and that it is both. It’s 1 (i.e., yes, God does exist) and 3 (God does and doesn’t exist, which is 2 + the 1 of combining those 2 = 3). And, in insisting that it’s both / and, we’re even letting in as part of the both / and the original either / or. It gets included too. So then it’s both 1, which is a single thing, i.e. the choice you get when you pick either / or) _and_ 2, which is 3 things, each of the components and the result of both / and. Which is 1 + 3, or 4. And that whole truth, which is the combined 1 + 3 = 4, itself is 5, a total inclusion of all. So 5 is the ultimate truth.

This is what happens when you sit on boats and trains and ojeks and mobiles and planes and cars and backs of trucks and other people and other people’s luggage for 3 and a 1/2 months.