Introduction

The Open-Minded Skeptic

This blog is about my experiences and the things I have learned along the way. My name is Travis Wagner for those of you who might read this and don't know me, I have been going through a radical change in mentality, specifically in the last six months or so.

I have been all over the world, I have experienced things that many people can only imagine, and I would like to share these tidbits of experience with anyone who will listen to them.

I am from Fort Myers, Florida, where the education system is notoriously bad. Florida's education system is one of the lowest-rated in the U.S. Furthermore the U.S. education system is one of the lowest-rated in the "civilized" world. I'm pretty sure that that puts us at the bottom of the bottom. I think that the low quality education, paired with my closed-minded, conservative views, severely hindered my intellectual development. I never felt challenged in school and so did not see the point in pursuing a higher education; I joined the Marine Corps pretty much on a whim. And so began my search for who/what I want to be.

The Marine Corps helped me to determine that I am not a very good subordinate; I have a bit of an authority complex, and I get bored with repetition pretty quickly. Neither of these qualities are very helpful in a structured environment where using your own mind is not only unpopular but it is borderline forbidden. I knew after about eight minutes that I was not going to be in the Marine Corps very long.

Ironically enough I returned to Fort Myers and enrolled at Florida Gulf Coast University after five years of "seeing the world" (aka "visiting every shit hole on the planet") and being honorably discharged as a Sergeant (E-5). I started out as an advertising major, thinking that I would be able to reduce the number of shitty commercials that I hate oh so much, but I ended up changing to communication (liberal arts) because it was a more versatile degree that would not lock me onto any particular career path.

At the same time that I had gotten out of the Marine Corps, I started to dabble with marijuana, which I had not done at all up to that point in my life (I was 23 at the time). It was awesome. It was something that I had never experienced before, like a different state of consciousness that helped to open my mind. It also instilled some patience in me, which helped me to get more out of the slow-paced Florida system.

FGCU is a liberal school, and its curriculum emphasizes responsibility for the environment and critical thinking, which were both in line with my own beliefs. Several of the professors that I have had classes with have emphasized the critical evaluation of the structures that build the foundations of our lifestyle here in the United States, and pairing this information with my own experiences in countries that are not so luxurious as ours started to make me question the true nature of our own country. Philosophy started to become very interesting to me. This could also be partly due to my regular consumption of pot.

Philosophy revealed a completely new way of thinking for me, but it was a bit of a mixed blessing; the things that I was learning were enlightening yet depressing. Seeing things from outside of the box is sometimes enraging, especially when there seems to be no way to do anything about it. I kept exploring and learning, especially outside of class in other topics until I got all the way back to the beginning again; I was lost again. What should I do? What am I supposed to do? What CAN I do? All these answers eluded me.

Some friends of mine had told me that the feeling that I had about how marijuana affects me was nothing compared to the mind-opening power of mushrooms. As it turns out, the "dankest" shrooms are indigenous to Southwest Florida, and it is relatively easy to seek them out. I decided to take a "heroic dosage" of mushrooms (enough to ensure that you get to the promised land) and discovered that "heroic" was exactly what this dosage was.

Up until that night I was agnostic, but I can only describe this experience as the ultimate spiritual adventure. It was the worst thing that I could have imagined; I thought about death, life, suicide, God, angels, friends, everything... and when I say that I thought about them, I mean that I thought about these things completely and thoroughly. It is an experience that cannot even be conveyed through words because there are not words that would sufficiently represent the feelings that I had. Jaw-dropping, world-shaking, mind-fucking, life-altering. The sober mind simply cannot access the type of thinking that it can under the influence of mushrooms. I was convinced that I would never do mushrooms again.

After a few days, the things that I had thought about on shrooms began to sink in. I specifically thought a lot about the prophecies of 2012, and I started to investigate to find out what it is really all about. There was a lot of baseless information about the end of the world, but I finally found reputable sources of information that could clearly explain what exactly the Mayans, Nostradamus and Edgar Casey were claiming in their prophecies; it turned out to be quite contrary to the gloom and doom that is so widespread.

Through research and web surfing over about six months, I have discovered that science and religion are beginning to say a lot of the same things. String theory in particular suggests that observation is the basis for reality, which would mean that either 1) there really is a God or 2) we are all "God" (I am now convinced that both are true). Either way it is equally mind-blowing because this means that science has proven the necessity of a creator.

This was obviously a significant discovery for me, being agnostic and having a very strong experience suggesting the existence of a higher being, which is then verified by science (the thing I trust most). I started to look into the various religions for some kind of indication of what I am most inclined to believe. This became another huge discovery; most religions have incredible similarities... many are so similar that it borders on plagiarism! The Bible stories are almost verbatim in line with Egyptian mythology, which is in turn essentially stolen from the Sumerians (what is popularly believed to have been the first civilization of humans). This seems to be more than just coincidence to me. If these stories have been passed through a minimum of three generations of religion, there may be something more to them than we are giving them credit for.

I developed my own theory about the true origin of our species. It involved alien contact with the early humans, so I did more research. It happened that a show called "Ancient Astronauts" was shown on History channel the same day that I decided to look around on the internet for some information about this type of thing, and the arguments were extremely compelling. There are remains of structures in South America that defy any dating methods at our disposal even today. We cannot even use carbon dating to figure it out (we use this method to date dinosaur fossils that are roughly 65 million years old). The blocks used in the structure also show extremely advanced techniques for building, and the material that the blocks are made of is the second densest material on Earth. This means that only diamonds could have been used to cut the stone, but we still lack the craftsmanship to create a structure like this even with our current technology.

After I saw this show, I went online again to find out more info, and this is where the rabbit hole really gets deep. I read about dimensional existence, the Law of One, spirit selves, the Illuminati/Masons and of course aliens. The main problem for me was that this information was all so compelling that I became skeptical. I started talking to a lot of people about what they thought about this (obviously this was kind of weird, but I just had to know). To my surprise when I described all the things I had learned (to the best of my own understanding), my friends mostly agreed that this made a lot of sense and was worth further investigation.

My sister had also told me about a man who was talking about many of the same things that I was talking about, and when I told her my opinion, she said that this was almost the exact information that she had gotten in his lecture. I was beginning to have many sources that all add up to the same conclusion, that everything that I thought I had known was being proven wrong, and all the things I was closed-minded about were actually being proven to be true. Once again I sought out shrooms to get in touch with whatever spirit it was that had started this journey of mine, which I now call my "Spirit Quest," to find out if I am crazy or if I was really finding out the truth, and the results were electrifying, literally.

A couple of friends of mine and I were standing outside, waiting for the shrooms to hit (well I was waiting, but one friend was just "trip sitting" us and the other was already "hit"). There was a bunch of lightning to the east, and we started to talk about how weird it would be to witness your friend being hit by lightning. The shrooms then hit me like a ton of bricks, and I vividly imagined a person being hit by lightning in the vicinity of other people, from a top view as if I was in the clouds. One of my friends snapped me out of my vision, yelling "dude your hair is standing straight up!" I could feel the electricity filling my body, and I remembered that this is what lightning strike survivors claim to feel right before being struck (we have plenty of lightning strikes to reference here in Florida). Both of the people around me were taller than me and on opposite sides of me, I was surrounded by very tall trees and poles, and there would have been no electrical reason for me to have been targeted. Both friends claimed that the electricity was definitely coming from me, since they could see their arm hair being drawn towards me. I ran away and into the house, having the indescribable and undeniable feeling that I had gotten the sign that I was looking for.

For me it is still hard to accept that this is real, and I am definitely skeptical of almost ALL information that I get now, but this entire experience has shown me that being open-minded is the key to real knowledge. Being open minded does not mean that you must accept every opinion, only that you listen to and understand it. I know that this whole thing sounds insane, and I know that people are afraid of radical change, but if you are open-minded enough to look at the information that I post on this blog, it may give you the same liberation that it gave me. It might also put you in a deep state of depression :( I will post information on here that I find interesting, and I will post any opinion editorials that I submit to Eagle News as well.