The creation of the raft slowly transformed aspects of the raging river of reflections into a sparkling stream of consciousness. The river was still raging, but I slowly began to see it as a sparkling stream. However, this peaceful perspective and mindset was not constant in every moment, but rather simultaneously co-existing with the chaos and confusion in new, uncertain, and unfamiliar moments where I became a lost boy on the raging river in Neverland, yet again. More and more thoughts flooded my mind, bursting out of my brain onto paper (GoogleDocs); I found myself swimming in a sea of confusion as I tried to remember and remind myself of a happy Neverland with a sparkling stream of consciousness as opposed to a dark realm with a raging river of lost memories--something I eventually discovered to be one in the same. Awakening to this illusion of duality between being lost and found allowed me to realize a sublime state (brahmavihāra) of equanimity (Upekkhā).
YouTube videos weren't quick enough to capture the salient parts of my stream of consciousness, so I created Bentime-Stories.com to further organize my thoughts and experiences--particularly trying to make sense of myself, adulthood, and loneliness, while also trying to realize equanimity in happiness and emptiness.
After all, when we look beyond the sparkles and pixie dust, we are all a little bit lost. Even Peter Pan.
It is from this lonely, empty, and lost place in Neverland that we can discover and cultivate imagination, dreams, creativity, and much more. In fact, legends say that the arts were created by the god Pan, after his unsuccessful pursuit of a water nymph. Lonely and sexually frustrated, Pan sat on a river bank, fashioned a pipe from reed and played the blues--a tone and mood that captures the predominant theme of loneliness in music, painting, and literature... My year of travels slowly turned into the beginnings of a spiritual journey of healing, where I eventually discovered and developed deep passions for Zen, Buddhist Philosophy, Individuation, Ego Psychology, Psychological Anthropology, Aesthetics, Astronomy, and American Transcendentalism--ultimately leading to enhanced notions of spiritual well-being in four basic domains: personal, communal, environmental, and transcendental.