erowid trip report from the 2018 conscious life expo at the LAX hilton

substances ingested: 1 starbucks coffee and half a chocolate croissant around 3:30pm (4 hours before the event)

yoshi and I arrived at the LAX hilton for the conscious life expo around 6pm after being stuck in major traffic on the way there from venice beach, we listened to 80s music on the radio on the way there in eager anticipation of the night ahead.

we navigated to the sixth floor of the basement parking garage and found a parking spot. we both noted that the parking garage was abnormally hot, we knew this was some kind of omen but were unsure of its meaning. after waiting the longest we’ve ever waited for an elevator to arrive, we piled in, with 5 others clearly also eager to attend the expo.

on the way up the elevator, the elevator stopped at every floor, and other eager attendees looked in and told us they had been waiting for minutes, and were exasperated to see there was no space in our elevator. one old woman literally held the door open and told us the story of her plight, a woman in our elevator said she was sorry we couldn’t help her but she needed to let us go. another man offered that if she paid him 5 dollars he would step out of the elevator and give her his spot. she turned down the deal and we continued our journey upwards.

we found an area with some booths. one woman hawked me from afar saying she liked my energy, it felt weird and i tried to be nice and then asked her for directions to where we could check in.

there was a long line to check in, while in line I talked to an energetic middle aged woman next to us who ran her own intimate healing center in rural california where you go in a machine that vaporizes your plasma in a room with sacred grid geometry. She said she originally came to this conference to meet the inventor of this machine. she also told me she had just bought a 1 ton crystal from another expo which was being shipped to the healing center in a giant truck. she told me that 90% of people i would meet here were seeking some type of spiritual connection outside of themselves and that you could hear the desperation when you talked to them and it was a bit heartbreaking, but that I would also meet incredibly dynamic people who made it all worthwhile. We wished each other well and parted ways, then we reached the end of the line where they told us we were in the wrong line and needed to go to will call upstairs.

We waited there and I picked up a book lying on a table nearby called “Becoming Aware”, it was kind of boring but also had some good advice on an assortment of topics. Yoshi noted we’d done a lot of waiting yet remained with a calm exterior of equanimity. We met N’s mom and she gave us all access gold bands, we felt like kings, we were ready to dive deeper into the core of the hilton.

we entered the main booth area. i went and talked to 2 guys who ran a socially responsible investment fund. they had quit their jobs in finance so the 3 of them (one not there) could start a socially responsible investment fund. i was really interested by this idea and wanted to know more — i asked how they decided what was socially responsible. they said no oil, firearms, tobacco or alcohol. I asked them what they thought about software companies, he said “we love tech, it’s the future”. I said what do you think about google? He said they are ultimately helping humanity scale. i asked what do you think about facebook? He said he doesn’t believe morality is binary. I agreed. i said what do you think about amazon? He said yea i know they are displacing certain sellers but they are also creating new opportunities for new sellers, people who couldn’t have had business otherwise. Yoshi said “yea but it’s how they treat their workers”. I asked do you know about amazon warehouse pickers? They said no, i explained it then one guy was like yea there’s a company that will sell ur dna too. I felt disenchanted and then we left, it reminded me that in the world at large being critical of the tech industry is to many people comparable to being a conspiracy theorist (at least i was in good company, we were planning to go to an ancient aliens panel at 8).

me and yoshi sat in a pyramid structure while holding things that looked like sacred geometry aerobics dumbells and listening to bells in headphones for a free meditation.

i got hawked by another guy who had me stand on one leg and pushed on my arm, then gave me an ionic lance armstrong bracelet and repeated the “test” and told me he could harmonize my EMF waves. i didn’t like it but tried to be friendly and then walked away

we started asking people where the ancient aliens talk was. we ran into a guy who didn’t know but gave us a tangerine and an apple and apologized that he gave yoshi an apple but said he was out of tangerines , we thanked him and continued

we found the line to the ancient aliens panel

it was weird in a number of ways, the whole panel had a strange dynamic. the host spent the first 20 minutes acknowledging friends in the scene who had recently died which was somewhere in between touching sad and strange, right before he started the panel the host said “i am so sad, but i don’t want to be sad, let’s start this panel” and that’s how the panel started.

craziest moment was when he asked how many people in the audience had seen a UFO and ~95% of an audience of a few hundred people all simultaneously raised their hands

four panelists exchanged a range of theories which orbited in and around “the most sophisticated pyramids are the oldest and couldn’tve been made by humans so must be advanced alien spiritual technology. an ascension instrument for celestial travel used by pharaohs. terra hertz of energy created by harmonic resonances of pyramids used to cure disease and levitate rocks”. I felt calm & minorly proud for feeling comfortable in this weird place even when it didn’t resonate. yoshi suggested he thought these theories would be more interesting if they were about how ancient humans were more advanced than we realized , which is an interesting theory but clearly ignores the obvious evidence that what we are looking at here is a spaceport

we left 8 minutes before 9 to avoid the crowd on the way out, and on a whim went to a tent in a corner of the booth area as a last stop, we found a bearded man named keith who explained to us that he makes scents and aromas, he is a chinese herbalist and his partner is an astrologer. he approaches scent from a material perspective and she approaches scent from a conceptual perspective, and together her airiness and his earthiness compliment each other. i told him i didn’t want to buy anything but would like to ask him more questions. he said that’s cool he’s here to hang out, we all sat on the ground and talked about the oldest smells we could remember. another man walked in and sat down. he put a book in front of him on the ground. keith asked him what the book was and he said it was a book of his poems, we asked him to read us a poem he had written. it was very overtly spiritual, but i liked the poem. he offered for us to all drink a cacao drink he had brought which was spicy and good. a girl in the corner went around in a circle and asked each of us what we were creating, which we in turn responded to in different ways. she had written a book about infinity which she passed around, i read the intro and found it interesting. overall it was a earnest and pleasant vibe in the tent, a little stilted but still pretty low key. kurtis (the poet) was very religious. keith was chill. another curtis came later. I had earlier asked yoshi to choose one trinket for me at some point which i would buy , yoshi chose this deck of cards which keith had showed us which had conversation starter questions. I bought the cards and then we said our goodbyes to curtis, kurtis, keith and clarisse and left the conscious life expo to return to our normal lives beyond the hilton walls.

were the pyramids ancient power plants? were my EMF waves misaligned? only time would tell. we were inspired and concerned that capitalism would let this event happen in the hilton. end of trip report, 2/10/18