On Cannibalism

After all the different threads of coincidences – which I’ve laid out in my previous posts – kept coming together, I started to obsessively pour through my notebooks, making sure I didn’t miss anything. I wondered if I could tie up everything in a neat little bow.

For some reason, one question kept popping up. Why cannibalism?

In Pita Land: An interlude, I wrote about how a conversation about the Donner Party – who, in 1846, were trapped in the Sierra Nevada and resorted to cannibalism to survive – led me down a rabbit hole I’ve been writing about ever since.

But why cannibalism? What started as a random conversation about the Donner Party ended up being the first step in a revelation that was ultimately about how to achieve my dream of becoming a writer, about how to strive against the feeling that I was predestined to fail – and cannibalism, as far as I could tell, had nothing to do with it.

As I dug through my notebooks, I read over the rough drafts for each of my Substack posts. Eventually, something jumped out at me.

In Field of Lucid Dreams, my very first post, I explained how I set aside a copy of Proof of Heaven, a book about near-death experiences, for Marianne – my ex-girlfriend – and she told me that she’d watched a YouTube on near-death experiences that very day. Marianne…

After diving so deeply into the nature of predestination and struggle of chasing your dreams, I completely lost the thread that truly began with her. In fact, in my notes, there was even postscript to Field of Dreams II that I’d cut out in the final draft and completely forgot about:

Postscript:

In The Dreamer, Dave Chappelle said: "You have to be wise enough to know when you are living in your dream, and you have to be humble enough to accept when you're in someone else's."

Marianne had been watching videos on near-death experiences because she wanted, more than anything, a sign from her father, who passed away that year.

At first, I thought these coincidences were all about me, and all about my dreams. But then I realized that I had to be humble enough to accept that this wasn't for me.

It was for her.

Why did I cut that out? Was it because I thought it would make the post too convoluted, the web too tangled to follow? Or was it because I didn’t want to bring up Marianne – and our breakup – too often?

Was it because I didn’t want to ask myself a hard question? Was my project of collecting coincidences part of a genuine spiritual journey? When it brought up themes of free and predestination, was I supposed to treat them as genuine insights into the nature of reality?

Or was I simply playing with these concepts? Was I simply playing with Marianne’s story? And was I manipulating them all for my own personal gain?

In other words, was I cannibalizing these ideas?

Was I cannibalizing Marianne?