Turning to the Sixth Page in the Life
Yesterday, I bought a new motorcycle named Best Classic. Last week, I began a new life. This year, my life has transformed again. Finally.
How it Began
The last four years have been a struggle—a type of struggle I had never before encountered. I rarely tell people the story of my life anymore. I used to, as it seemed like a dream. But for some reason, in 2020, the dream ended, and something else began.
The world is not the same anymore, at least where I lived in the USA. Nor is it the same in Europe or Asia. Mexico was great in certain places, but only in Africa could I find a place where a pre-2020 life still existed across society—where I was happy to live.
I wrote my PhD dissertation in 2021 while living in Zanzibar. It was my very first post on Substack to reflect on the midst of the change:
As for myself, I moved my family to Tanzania, where it is still 2019… Once I understood the creative aspect of embodiment and how important our thoughts and actions are active in creating our reality, there became an impetus to change, to stay that way amidst the world’s open creativity (Gebser 1985). Like the rhizome of change in Deleuze and Guitarri (1980), I took a flight to a place where embodiment still lived in a manner I deemed essential.
And I realized I had started another life within my life. How many lives have I lived so far here?
Ben
The first lasted up till I was around 22. I went by my middle name, Benjamin or Ben, until then. My upbringing was like most of my generation. The parents said to be back by nightfall, and I had the whole town and environs to explore by bike or hike with friends. Every day was an adventure. We moved a lot growing up. I lived in Italy and attended six different grade schools across the western States. I learned quite a bit about letting go and starting over at an early age. I moved to Arkansas for college to experience the South, but then I had to flee (long story— thank goodness there was no internet).
Jerome
The second stage of my life started when I moved to Portland, Oregon, and became Jerome. It was about even more freedom, but now on my own. I traveled all over the States; I have been to all 50 States at least twice. I followed the Grateful Dead in the late 80s, then Environmental activism with Greenpeace and Earth First! Then, the Peace Corps in Africa and Latin America, Americorps, graduate schools in the 90s, and living in Buddhist ashrams abroad and in the States for a few years, just meditating. I lived on the Big Island beaches of Hawaii. I met my soulmate, and we were about to embark on an around-the-world trip.
Work
I remember traveling in India just before 2000, on the cusp of my third life. I thought, ‘This is the life, traveling around like a monk with no responsibilities, and I could do this forever.’ But within a year, I was married and then had a child. I suddenly needed to work.
I’d always worked but never had a real job. My parents didn’t believe in allowances, so my first work, around the age of 11, was noticing the nickles lying by the side of the road in the gutter of Highway 99 (people littered all the time in the 70s) as I walked across it from school to home. I started gathering cans every day that turned into dollars and, eventually, a new skateboard. I did the paperboy route and dishwasher jobs and used to work alongside migrants during the summer picking walnuts. Then I learned to paint in College, worked on farms or in the carnival, or sold peanut butter, honey & banana sandwiches to deadheads after the show. Just whatever job showed up that gave me a bit of money to get by. Now, I needed to get a raise. It's time for a third life.
Internet Star
I’d always had an inkling for politics but avoided it. In the late 1980s, in Arkansas, my best friend was the Young Republican President, and my girlfriend worked on Bill Clinton’s campaign. It wasn’t until 2000, and against Bush that I became a political animal for the Democrats.
I began a community blog, a first in politics, at mydd.com (Due Diligence—it started as a trading blog during the Raging Bull era of online trading, which ultimately landed me in a bit of hot water with the SEC…) and worked on Howard Dean’s Presidential campaign.
This stage of my life was when I struck gold through technology. I just had a knack for seeing what was around the corner. And I entered political campaigning and elections as a sort of Boy Wonder, the Blogfather, with access to the world of DC and Crashing the Gate, my 2006 book. Vox Media, which started as SB Nation and sports blogs, was a passion. I was the CEO and thought it could become a billion-dollar company. It became a sort of cash cow that further transformed my easy life. It all went to my head, so I began to lose.
Around 2009, I started to become disillusioned with Democrats. I’d worked dozens of Senate, Gubernatorial, and Representative campaigns, and a couple at the Presidential level, to change the world, I hoped, but they didn’t follow through at all. And SB Nation grew beyond me into Vox Media. I was never very good at managing people and was shown the door. I did one last campaign the way I wanted. I ran the website and technology for Gary Johnson’s 2012 campaign as a Libertarian. He performed the best for that fledging party that year, but it was an ending for me. I was disillusioned, and to avoid becoming another cynical old guard-washed political consultant in DC at the pig trough (which I had railed against in CTG), I burnt the bridges.
Tai Chi Creature
The following year, I began another life, my fourth if we are counting. I had a passion for yoga and tai chi when I was in my twenties that had not been fulfilled, and so in my 40s, now with a few children, I started working on changing my body. I trained in Hatha, Kundalini, Laughing, Hot, Flow, Therapeutic, and all sorts of lineages. Then, Tai Chi and Qi Gong became my primary practice and training. And I started doing longer Vippasana courses, the 20 and 30 days ones. My embodiment transformed, and I began to strip through mental conditioning, but it started in the physical. One of my teachers called it building the tai chi creature inside our unaware body. But something was missing, and I realized it was having stopped writing.
Writer
I’d always wanted to do a few things with writing, including writing a big generational historical book, getting published in a scholarly manner for technical articles, and getting my PhD. Those also came in the past few years with Calcutta Yoga, articles on Vyayma, and my dissertation on Embodiment.
I thought, ‘OK, this is my new life as a yoga teacher and a writer,’ but something was amiss. I felt it.
In 2019, I had a couple of premonitions materialize that have stuck with me for the last few years and led to this moment and the change I have embraced.
That year, I’d stuck a sticker on my motorbike helmet when I traveled along the Ganges to the Himalayas. It said, ‘If you are losing the game, change the rules.’ I wasn’t losing at the time at all. Life had been a charm, and I had no real reason for having that sticker, so ‘why?’ I wondered.
I was in India half the time during those years, and when I returned to the States in July 2020, I hit a brick wall.
Outsider
It’s a familiar story among a lot of Substackers. Being canceled, suspended, and banned in Google, Facebook, and Twitter land. I was on the frontline over masks and the lockdowns. I’d personally seen the devastation it’d caused to lockdown in India, destroying people’s lives. I knew from my PhD studies that masks debilitated children’s early education and caused a massive CO2 influx that was unhealthy and unsustainable physically. But people were not swayed by factual research. I had always been loved online. I was an internet star.
Ten years later, I came back online to reason with those people. But even my extended family rejected my knowledge, and those people thought I should be imprisoned for posting what I was posting. I’ve been canceled by countless. Facebook censored me, and I left. Twitter suspended me six times before being banned.
My cancelation happened before the mRNA vaccines, which began yet another awakening. They lied about vaccines?!? I felt so duped. What else have they lied about?!? History, Earth, Space, Everything! And so began a phase of re-education, which wasn’t really about learning much new but exposing the lies I did not know were lies.
I wrote a note about this the other day, which resonated with people.
I think I’ve been down about every psyop and rabbit hole and through to the other side. One realization I’ve had after this is that afterwards, you really only feel right when you are with people who have done the same. With everyone else, they don’t want to hear it, and if you tell them anyway, you lose them forever. Maybe that’s just the way it works.
You should go and read the comments.
Farmer
Looking back now, I can see how when each phase of my new life is about to begin, it starts with turmoil in the old life. Conflict arises, and I fight it at first, then adjust and figure out a new life. I asked my wife, in the middle of 2020 to choose someplace in the world for us to go, and she said, ‘howabout Zanzibar?’ We’d been there twenty years prior for a vacation, and after living there a year, I said yes to a new home in Tanzania.
So what am I doing here? There’s a practical angle and, eventually, a transformative priority. I am here as an investor. I own a tropical fruit farm. I raise bees and have dozens of hives from my planted flowers and trees. I had known nothing about the subject a few years ago. I had many failures along the way. But now, I have knowledge and am teaching others here how to do syntropic farming (I’ll have to write a post about that soon). I have 2-3-year-old trees that are taller than myself. I have all sorts of tropical fruits I am already eating from the land. I rarely use technology and do not desire daily social media chemicals to hit my brain.
My new 170 Sky Go bike is from the Philippines and cost me 1,100 dollars brand new. Whoever was the distributor was Hindu, though, so I have a Krishna sticker as my god’s protection that was placed on the bike.
Krishna and I have reconciled, and it is good. I have fallen a few times in previous years and need no more of that to happen.


The bike’s named model is Best Classic. Its name seems apropos for the moment. I’ve gone back in time. To a place I was in the 90s when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa, but this time I am in East Africa. I am learning to speak Swahili, rewiring my brain to live under the lunar cycle alongside the Massai, and raising my food. Six is my lucky number. I have big dreams again. I want a lodge with an elephant pool and export avocados to India. I want to get a high-powered telescope and view the stars, as the celestial nights here along the equator are incredible.
I am still writing every day. I am working on a couple of books. One, Ganga Land, a travelogue along the Ganges, inches closer to completion. And the one about here, Last Free Place, has a rough draft already. I have to write. I have to. And I don’t want to make post after post like I did in the 00s online. That doesn’t interest me at all anymore. I feel that I will continue to write for about a decade more.
Teacher
The transformative part, which I can only sense right now, is probably on the seventh page.
At some point, this place where I live will have people come to transform their bodies and minds, their embodiment. We are going to start doing courses and teaching here alongside others. It makes me thankful now for the past few years of social media madness to have sorted out the foes from the real friends and all the new ones I have connected with, too.
For the following years, though, it’s just about being alone and doing my work. My responsibilities of raising children have ended, and I have retired from my working career. I’ll even get a monthly Social Security check in a few years (yeah, right).
How it Ends
I don’t know what the future holds anymore. I used to think I had my finger on the pulse of America, but since 2020, when I returned from a sort of Rip Van Winkle spell, I don’t get it. Neither am I listening to about the dangers of EMF and how technology is becoming a dystopia-- how the tech body is killing humanity. I am ignored, censored, and banned. What can I do? When I thought about my future in the States, you know what I saw? Prison. And why should I fight anymore?
My family of grandfathers fought in every American war since the Revolution alongside George Washington, up to my brother's in Iraq. And what did fighting gain me over the last four years? Nothing but grief and loneliness. Krishna knows I reject the Bhagavad Gita, telling Arjuna to fight his brother. No. I refuse to comply, and I refuse to await imprisonment. It ends without a fight.
I agree to the terms of being an exile here, an ex-patriot. I have a simple request that I find fulfilled here. I want to be happy, helpful to others and appreciated just a little bit. I had to leave everything behind to find my way again, but that's been the case every step along the changes of my life.
Living the Dream Again
Back in 2019, my best friend Ravi in Varanasi had a shirt he wore all the time that year. It simply said, ‘Why Not?’
‘Sure,’ I accept.
We are here to write a story that will only be remembered briefly. Our life is just a way station for our soul’s journey, so make your life the best story possible, even seemingly impossible, with crazy chances taken and leaving no regrets over unfulfilled passions behind. Make it a dream, so when your eyes open, in some other far-away realm of time and place, you smile upon awakening.
Tanzania
I feel like I struck gold moving to Tanzania. The country was formed the year I was born, in 1964. The Tanzanian flag has four colors: blue and green, representing the elements of water and life, black for the people, and yellow for the gold in this country. It is not just a metaphor but a reflection of the place. It’s a sort of Last Free Place in the world. I can live my best life here.
It's not easy to live here. Electricity is spotty, and water shortages are a problem. There is poverty all around. People beg. Bugs bite. Animals suffer. But everything is real, and technology is barely getting started here.
The Massai, my neighbors, have none of it. Once, my wife pulled out her phone while we were walking by some children, and they all ran for their lives to hide in their house because they thought she was about to take their photo. You should have seen their faces when they saw the phone. It was like they’d seen the devil.
The Hadzabe, who live about a mile down the road, are still hunting and gathering, the same as they have for 40,000 years. They own nothing and are happy. If you give them money, they buy weed with it. They eat from the land and live a difficult life, but you feel strange in their presence. Like an alien. You realize how disconnected you are from where we all used to be. I felt like a lost boy in their presence, especially after they passed around their purchase. Then, one gave me a presentation of their different arrowheads, and afterward, we shot at targets with a bow and arrows.
The many tribes of Tanzania are mostly happy family-farming people. It is very insular here, with little news about the outside world. TV is State-run on the news, with Hindi and Bollywood movies for entertainment. Data plans are costly, even for ex-pats, so hardly anyone does the internet, much less social media. I hope it stays this way as long as possible.
The median age here is around 19, so who knows what the future holds for them or me? I am only here to manifest all the passions and desires of the dream.
What a fascinating man you are. I love the souls who are able to reinvent themselves as their path winds its way forward into the unknown….rooted in such deep self-trust and a companionship with self….asking “why not?” at every turn. ✨🙏🤍
I've just completed 2 weeks of clinic experience with Homeopathy For Health in Africa (based in Moshi). We treated many people older than 19, including in their '70's and '80's (still working) so they are a resilient folk.