In her description, she said something like this:

Awakenings like this require a certain style of surrender. You have to give up your own ideas, let go, and trust what’s going to happen, trust that the process has an intelligence that’s going to work out better than your attempt to control things. Something in the feminine polarity makes this… not necessarily easy, but definitely more natural. An available move. For the masculine though, it can be almost impossible — the whole masculine polarity is set up in opposition to surrender, so it can literally feel like dying to let go. And that’s where I’ve seen a lot of men get stuck. To them, letting go feels impossible, it’s like dying. Telling them to let go is like telling them to ignore gravity and start floating.

There was something to what she said, the way that surrender is built in to the feminine polarity and almost an oxymoronic impossibility in the masculine polarity. Men can let go, but they have to have some development of their feminine side first — and in order to develop their feminine side they have to let go… there’s something that can feel like a catch-22 there, especially when the pressure is high (as it is in energetic awakening experiences).

I’ve noticed a complementary dynamic that I have a hard time pointing directly at, so I’m barely gonna try, I’m mostly leaving this here as a mile marker to look back at in the future, or to attract someone to come yell at me and fill in my blind spot/lack of clarity on this.

But it’s something like: Masuline:Surrender::Feminine:Sovereignty.

If letting go, dropping control, trusting in the generative void of uncontrollable Process is uniquely crazy-makingly difficult for the Masculine, since its energetics are ontologically in opposition to that whole thing — then in a complementary way, Feminine energetics are set up in opposition to forcing, drawing fixed lines to contain experience, enacting its own Will onto Reality in accordance with personal, singular Vision.

Which I’m very roughly pointing at with the word “sovereignty” here, even though it’s not quite right. Hopefully gives a flavor though.

I’ve had some similar conversations across gender/polarity lines over the past couple years. These places where it feels like talking in circles with someone.

Luckily, everyone, male or female, contains both Masculine and Feminine polarities, and thus it’s not actually impossible for anyone to lean into their non-dominant.

But sometimes it really feels like it.

With men, some conversations feel like they go round and round and round, where he’s tied himself in a knot that’s shaped like “i could control x if only I could control y, but y is uncontrollable, so how can I control x?” — and all I can say is “you can’t. so let go and find out where things land when you get to the space where you can take control again.”

And it’s like they literally can’t hear that answer. Even when they’re open to letting go, it becomes a matter of “what button do I push to let-go? how do I control that process?”

“… you can’t. Drop control and just let things happen.”

“…???…”

There’s a failure mode here where if they could just let go and be carried to the next place where they can exert control, there wouldn’t be a problem left. Zero crisis. Just the next area to exert Will on, and then let go, and then the next exertion of Will, and the next letting go, etc.

But because they can’t Let Go, they get stuck and spin in circles and become increasingly out of control even of the things they usually are able to exert their Will and Vision on. More and more control is lost, so they cling and cling harder instead of letting go.

(I say “they” — I’ve definitely done this, obviously. It’s just easier to spot when I’m talking to someone else.)

Eventually, they do of course engage their feminine polarity, out of sheer inescapable necessity if nothing else. And after we’ve done that a couple times, it tends to get easier. But it can be a rough ride for folks who are heavily identified with and invested in their Masculine.

The same conversation on the other end of the polarity looks pretty different, but also gives me a Spinning in Circles vibe.

I don’t think this is the only way it looks, but the most striking repeating pattern I’ve seen is something like this:

“I finally had an experience where [someone/something] gave me exactly what I needed in life, a safe, structured, protected space to let life Flow in, and it was amazing. But now that [person/thing/situation] is gone, and I don’t have that space they provided anymore; I feel it’s absence so badly.”

“Wow, that sucks. How about providing that space for yourself?”

“I’m trying, but I can’t find another person/situation that provides it in the same way.”

“…right, but how about developing your ability to do it for yourself? It’s a supportive inner sense that they gave you — which means that it existed inside you, which means it can exist in side you… so you could follow that thread, so that you don’t need to depend on an external source for it?”

“definitely, and I think I’ll finally have the space to provide that for myself once I find someone/something to provide it for me again.”

“…but…”

Again, everyone does have Masculine in them, so they do tend to get this at a certain point, but when someone is quite identified with their Feminine, it can feel like this rut gets circled over and over again before something clicks.

Side note worth bringing in: the above are polarity dynamics, not gender dynamics. There’s definite gendered tendencies in there, but I’ve seen men get stuck in their wounded Feminine patterns and women get stuck in their wounded Masculine patterns, all of it is complex and multifaceted and all these things — I am not trying to be particularly careful or nuanced here, this blog is explicitly my notebook-scribbling place, cut me some charitable reading if you would.

Both of those “going in circles” dynamics above, I’ve seen very real despair on the faces of people caught in them.

For the Masculine stuckness, it’s the despair of “HOW? HOW DO I LET GO? WHAT DO YOU EVEN MEAN?” — Again, it feels almost like telling them “just detach from gravity and float up.” They try and try and cannot find the move, which wounds the sense of Masculine control and competence, which leads to despair and shame and frustration.

In the Feminine stuckness, there’s a flavor of the “HOW???”-despair, but it looks to me more often and more strongly like “WHY???”-despair. There’s more of a sense that, yes, sure, they could provide this inner sense of safety and structure for themselves and their own lives… but there’s almost an existential sense that it’s wrong and unjust that they would have to do so, that the universe couldn’t possibly be so cruel and lonely-making. It wounds the Feminine sense of surrender, trust, and communion, which leads to despair and loneliness and anger.

As far as I can tell, across all of these dynamics, a very annoying rule is at play: once you step on a developmental/spiritual path, needing something seems to repel it.

We can all recognize this dynamic in some relationships: when one person is very needy, it can engage a pattern in the other that wants to avoid them. You need someone, and they pull away. You don’t need them, and there’s room for them to come in closer.

I forget where I saw this, but someone defined charisma as not needing anything from whoever you’re talking to. When you don’t need, both you and the other person are free to simply be, to see where you do or don’t naturally meet each other, without needing to push or pull each other around.

The energetics of reality seem to have some similar stuff going on, and it gets much stronger when you start to live more intentionally.

If you need to take control of whatever situation you’re in, to shape it according to your own Will and Vision — you’re only going to be allowed to do that once you no longer need it; once you’ve proven that you’re capable of and comfortable with surrendering control and allowing Reality to flow and carry you.

If you need to let go into an external person/situation in order to flow freely, to let your aliveness and sensitivity light up the world — you’re only going to be allowed that situation once you no longer need it; once you’ve proven that you’re capable of and comfortable with exerting your own Will and Vision onto your life, providing yourself with the safe, structured space you need.

Okay that’s all I’ve got today. I’m gonna keep ranting about polarities probably, because they’re what’s most active for me and I seem to be trying to figure something out about them. I recognize that this whole topic area can be triggering and contentious, and Iiiiiii am just gonna accept that and hope that god brings me the right responses at the right time to affirm where I’m onto something, point at where I’ve got a blind spot, and serve up information or perspectives I’ve been missing.

Claustrophilia is familiar, it’s how just about everything operates. It’s a love of tight spaces, a love of gripping and clinging, a love of pulling things in.

Agoraphilia is available to most people in moments of open ecstasy and relaxed bliss. It’s a love of open spaces, a love of falling, a carbonated pleasure in the ephemeral vastness of everything, a place where it’s impossible to hold onto anything except by letting it go entirely.

Claustrophilia is being cozy, wrapped up in something tight and warm. It’s a womb. It’s filling your entire mouth with ice cream, letting the sweetness hit every sensory capacity at once. It’s the way you clench and focus during sex, climbing and directing yourself towards climax. It’s the pleasure of craving something, the drive of knowing you can get it if you slither your way towards it in just the right way. It’s a crush — what a great word for the pleasure and the closing off of other possibilities, of holding something so tight; crush. Claustrophilia is the mode of having a crush on every particular thing.

Agoraphilia is luxuriating in open space. It’s the psychedelic dissolve where your bones turn to starlight. It’s skydiving without clenching a single muscle. Having sex from an agoraphilic space doesn’t lead to a climax, it leads to an endless rolling plateau where there would usually be a peak. Breathe deep and open into your belly when you would usually start constricting and climbing, and maybe you’ll find it. Agoraphilia doesn’t do crushes, it does a glittery depth of Love that has no need to go anywhere specific, no need to fill any specific shape or template. It’s an exhale. It’s the moment when you stop fighting against death or change, and release yourself into the body of Time itself.

I don’t think that claustrophilia is evil and agoraphilia is good — I think both of them are appropriate and joyful in different contexts. But I know for myself, and am almost certain for others, that the claustrophilic impulse is an automatic reflex that makes it difficult to find the agoraphilic mode. And that’s a problem.

Any automatic reflex that doesn’t serve you is a problem, and having entire cultures where the claustrophilic muscles are so cramped that they don’t allow the agoraphilic muscles to open — that’s an issue. A big one. And it’s really damn clear, looking out at the world, the way that this impulse towards craving, comfort, crushing, and constricting is doing a lot of harm to all of us.

Not sure I want to get into that. You can see it or you can’t.

Agoraphilia is incredibly intense when we first encounter it. We tend to get a small glimpse that feels like falling from a great height — the weightless tingling in the body as everything opens up into living aurora. From that small glimpse, we tend to clench again, shut down, come back to where we’re familiar.

But it is possible to become as comfortable in that open ecstatic space as we are in the cozy space. It’s possible to feel the frisson of holding on to nothing, and to let it move through you.

And when you can do that, the claustrophilic impulse takes on a new pleasure too — the pleasure of something that’s optional, not forced. We’ve all experienced the bubbly buzz of a crush turn into a crushing constriction, caught in the boa constrictor grip of unrequited desire. The total pain of being unable to let go, unable to relax your awareness around someone or something, unable to drop the craving, even when you paradoxically no longer want them.

I don’t actually have much more to say here. I’ve just been using these two terms over and over and over again to describe inner motions of my psyche and soma and emotions, and it seems like I should probably share the terms so I can check if y’all relate.

I want to stick a capri sun straw into the blazing heart of matter and drink the secret essence of every aching thing,,

I want to drink lightning from the storm,,

I want the existential essence of the downed birch tree to permeate my energy body,,

I want the beetles feeding on sap to yield the amrita of the underworld to me,,

I want to tap your heart like a maple tree and store the blue-gold energy syrup in mason jars,,

I want to crack open stones and slurp down time itself,,

But I am required to be human;; am I? Am I required to be human?

I’m an angel I’m a beast I’m a lichen I’m a breeze,
I’m someplace where the air is thicker I’m someplace where the grass grows quicker.

I was stung by a wasp and the world entered my body in a spike of pain and I chanted to the fire and drank moth blood from a basin.

I knew without a doubt what the world is, and petals as thick as the sky closed over me.

In redolent darkness, I digest ash.

It’s like reality is a sopping wet cloth, and everyone just walks around on it, but my job is to squeeze it and watch every shining droplet wring out.

Reality is soaked, somehow. The nectar is in everything. The blood of God flows through pine bark and subway stations. The wind is your own breath and your own breath is a coiled serpent flexing in your chest.

Evolution is the main character, traceless transformation is the only solid fact in the body of God. Evolution is a shapeshifter, taking every form at once and changing every form in tandem, with vicious play and all-pervading hungerlust.

It is teeth.

It is pressure.

It is the winter between stars.

Am I required to be human? I’m a flower and a microbe and seasonal fluctuations in the foliage.

I’m all three skies and seven suns.

I am soaked, somehow. Squeeze me and the nectar will wring out. Cut me open and the snake will slither away.

I am a redolent darkness. I am an angel in love with a beast, I am lichen in love with a breeze.

I haven’t written anything you’ll know what to do with. I have hopefully written something that makes this fact irrelevant.

I have hopefully written a fecund irrelevance. I have hopefully left nectar within some letters, or in the winter between stars.

Hopefully, even if you don’t buy in to the main type of mantras I’m here to talk about, you’ll at least get some good practice notes or musings out of the larger discussion. This is going to be a bit of a walk, a bit of an amble and a bit of a ramble — don’t take anything too seriously or expect me to either, okay?

Okay, let’s go

Whatcha Mean Mantra?

There are 2 basic things that people hear when I say mantra, and then 2 more minor ones that feel important to mention because I don’t actually hear most people mention them (thanks to Emergent Vibe for the convos that connected them for me). All of these could be called “mantras,” but I’m going to use my own naming system for them to lessen confusion.

1. Mantras: The thing that I refer to as a mantra (the main subject of this chat) is the one that the word mantra originally existed to describe: ancient phrases, syllables, songs, etc that have long been used for spiritual purposes in many languages and cultures, but mostly in Sanskrit. Examples: Om Namah Shivaya, Om Mani Padme Hum, etc.

2. Affirmations: This is what I call the type of “mantra” where it’s a word or phrase in a language you know, meant to help guide your actions and decisions. Examples: “You Only Live Once,” “This Too Shall Pass,” “Progress, Not Perfection,” etc.

3. Pulls: Hard to find a good name for this one, and not everyone has experienced it — but sometimes an insight will spring up in your body, and a phrase attaches to that insight. Your system seems to automatically repeat and repeat and repeat that phrase as a way of PUSHING and/or PULLING the insight into your whole being. To me, it feels like a strong energetic crank trying to dissolve and re-pattern something inside me. What it shares in common with the others is that it involves Effective Language repeating inside you again and again. Examples: I’ll get to that below; this is less familiar and will take some space.

4. Found Pulls: Kind of the reverse of the above. While a “Pull” can originate with a sensation in the body, then become words that help move that energetic sensation more deeply in the body — a “Found Pull” is when words come from outside of you but have a similar effect in you. Example: I’ll give more below, but maybe you’ve had someone say a short phrase to you before, and you immediately felt it light up your body, or shift something inside you? You couldn’t get it out of your head for weeks, and every time it repeated, it felt like some tectonic plate was shifting in your nervous system?

Okay, those are the main types. I’m mostly concerned with number one, and am mostly trying to say some stuff about that. But the others also feel important, and this is as good a place as any to dig into them.

1. Mantras (This Article Exists Cuz I Wanted to Share This Section, Really)

First and foremost: I am a dumb lil weirdo with highly idiosyncratic tendencies in the spiritual realm. I’ve got a lot of experience with a lot of stuff, but all of it is what works for me. I have been shocked semi-often (just last night, in one case!) when talking to other practitioners about things that do or don’t work for them, capabilities that are or aren’t online for them. None of this is one-size-fits-all. I’m just providing some notes on things that seem to be working for me.

Mantra practice is a long and storied tradition with lots of its own rules and ideas about what direction you should face, what colors you should wear, how many repetitions of which mantras are good for which effects, on and on and on. If you want to go deep into mantra practice, go look at a bunch of that.

If you’re already familiar, or don’t care about that and want to hear from some internet guy about things — onward we go.

So first and foremost, yes I believe mantras have power. I always assumed they were just dead ritual, repeating words over and over again for no reason, a cargo cult of some ancient insights. Then I went and practiced with a mantra-based tradition in India, and I saw, felt, and experienced a bunch of stuff that shattered those assumptions.

So yeah, now my operating assumption is that when a culture/tradition charges a set of words with prana and sacred power for centuries or millennia… that power seems to be available to change the lives of those who chant it. And that power seems to work in non-linear and reality-bending ways.

It’s weird. I’m still uncomfortable with believing this. But it seems to keep being true, so. Here we are.

If you’re into mantras or want to try them out, here’s a few things I’ve found helpful practicing with them.

1. Say It Subtle

I learned (there are other ideas I’ve heard) that chanting mantras out loud is fine, but the least effective way to do it. Chanting them silently, with devotion, is more powerful.

While experimenting with this, I found myself leaning more and more towards a technique some of you might recognize immediately, and others might have no idea what I’m talking about: don’t say the mantra with the voice in your head — say it with your subtle body (energy body).

You can practice this outside of mantras: try using your subtle body to say certain commands in your own language, for starters. What’s it like when the subtle energy of your body yells “STOP!” or when it whispers “come here” or “love me”?

Take that feeling, and start bringing it to the syllables of the mantra. Say Om Namah Shivaya silently in your head, and then slowly open up your subtle body to saying it along with the voice in your head — and then let the voice in your head fade.

2. Chant Vastly

When you’ve gotten the hang of chanting the mantra with your subtle body, you can expand our more fully into the vastness of the space around you, of your aura, of the universe. If you’ve done some open awareness meditation, or anything that involves meditating on yourself as a vast being, you might be able to find this pretty easily. (If not, I have some ideas around cultivating the experience, but it’s too much to get into here. Mostly involves throwing on some catchy music and dancing wildly without moving your body — then expanding that dance out into the space around you, the city, the earth, the galaxy, etc. Then chant from that space, once you know how to get there.)

But yeah, basically let your awareness become one with the vastness of endless space, and then let the mantra chant itself from that space, emanating outward.

3. Stop Talking, Start Listening

At a certain point, there’s a flip that starts to feel possible for me, where I’ve chanted the mantra enough that I can feel myself being on its frequency (I hate that I’m using this language, but I don’t know how else to talk about it), and I can kind of just stay on that frequency for awhile without repeating the mantra. At that point, I like to switch from a frame where I’m chanting the mantra and projecting it outward, to a frame where I’m listening intently to the place in the cosmos where the mantra comes from. Where the resonant frequency of its being originates. Where the energy it connects me to is present.

I’m pretty new to mantras, and you shouldn’t take me as any kind of primary source on them. But I’ve been very surprised at how quickly I can feel some of them moving in my body, how effectively I can watch some of them move in my life. I’ve been shocked a couple times by overdosing on a given mantra, being overcome with some of the qualities associated with chanting it. I’ve had sleepless nights, too energized by chanting a mantra too many times in the day. I’ve had full-body roiling energy storms of orgasmic pleasure a couple days after starting a mantra that invokes beauty and sensuous sensitivity in the chanter.

I don’t know why these things work, and it’s a little reality-bending that they do. But I’ve kind of just accepted that they do something at this point. So I wanted to share a couple ways I’ve been playing with them.

Now on to the other 3 categories, for some very short notes.

2. Affirmations

I actually have very little to say on these. Mostly because I think everyone kind of gets them. If you can find a pithy formulation of a principle or feeling you want to live by, it helps to keep it in mind. I got a lot of mileage last year out of reminding myself to ask “where is the natural flow?” in a lot of situations. It helped me orient very quickly towards my sense of where the situation wanted to go, rather than where my ego wanted to push or force it.

I don’t think I have anything new or interesting to say about affirmations, honestly. Except maybe repeating the above point about saying mantras from your subtle body. …I haven’t tried this, but hey, maybe try saying affirmations from your subtle body. Couldn’t hurt.

3. Pulls

Right, so first to explain these a little better maybe. Basically when there’s a somatic-energetic insight that wants to integrate in your body, sometimes you can get them to just move, and they start to pull the rest of your system into a new shape. When this happens, often that somatic-energetic sensation will have words or images land on it, and if you repeat those words or images a lot, it helps to move the insight deeper.

Michael Pollan talks about this in his book on psychedelics, I think. He has a psychedelic vision of a big creepy floating city over a natural scene. It was clear to him that this big brutish city was his ego. Later, when sober, doctors had him in a brainscan machine of some sort, and he told them he wanted to try something. He returned to the image of that city, and then made it float away into the distance. The doctors were shocked looking at his brain, the way that network activations shifted almost immediately.

A week or so ago, I had an experience in my body accompanying an insight that’s hard to put into words, but something like: “the same way athletes bodies adapt to their specific sport, and their body will change a lot if they change sports — in that same way, your emotional body is adapted to certain ways you carry yourself, ways you’ve build yourself to endure pain and soldier on… but that’s all flexible, and you can just change the ‘sport’ your emotional body is playing.”

The insight hit my system really hard, mostly in the chest and solar plexus and the left side of my neck, and the words that accompanied it were “you aren’t required to be built like this.” I repeated those words over and over again internally (actually it felt more like the words repeated themselves, I didn’t have much to do with it except stay out of the way), and on each repetition, the way the insight installed itself in my chest and solar plexus and neck felt like it was cranking itself deeper and deeper, moving further into my tissue, further into the center of my body. It was an odd sensation.

…I don’t think I have much more to say about this type of experience either, except to note that it happens, and to hope I’ve helped a couple of you either to make sense of something that’s already happened to you, or to lean towards something that’s waiting in you.

4. Found Pull

Similar to the above (at least in the inner experience of your body/energy rearranging), except that the trigger comes from the outside. Rather than your system changing on its own, and then words attaching to that process — in a found pull, the words find you, and then start changing your system.

I can think of one of these that has rearranged my system and at least 3 other people I’ve shared it with, when we sat with it:

Forgiveness means giving up the hope for a better past.

Hearing that phrase and sitting with it knocked something loose in my chest. I repeated it to myself dozens of times over the next few days. I felt its signature and movement in my torso. I felt my brain breaking around it. I felt my relationship to my past rearranging around it.

A couple months ago there was a song that had this effect on me. I must have listened to it 40 or 50 times that month, because every time I heard it, I felt like it was pushing and pulling its way through my body, releasing stuck emotions and memories and patterns with every repetition. It was scraping my channels clear, and I had to repeat it over and over and over again while it did its work. Honestly it was unpleasant most of the time. But also immensely pleasurable. There was an ecstatic pain somewhere outside of time, not just hearing the song but feeling it work, tugging my body to pieces and scrubbing my emotional structures with a steel wire brush.

Hm, I’m just noticing there’s an evil twin of this — you might hear something in your youth that makes you feel worthless, insecure, broken, and then you might carry it with you and feel it move through your body every time you think of it, feel it rearranging your system into greater and greater feelings of worthlessness and brokenness.

That sucks. I’m sorry if that’s happened to you. I know there were a couple of those that haunted me for years, I hate to think any of you are with those right now. If you can find them and counteract them with anything I’ve mentioned here, or would like help doing so, feel free to get in touch. These things are always changeable. You’re not required to be built a certain way, you can always start altering how your system works.

Okay, that’s good for today. Words are wild. They do things. Go play with them.

Also, mammals are wild and do things, and you should go play with them too. Good human mammals. Go show them some love, maybe share some good words with them.

You can find more info on it here, and apply to join here. Below, I’ll riff on a core attitude I’m bringing to the ritual work at Mysterium.

The word feral doesn’t just mean “wild.” It means that a domesticated animal that’s made it back into the wild.

Those of us who are finding our way back to Life and Spirit — we’re all at least somewhat feral. We’re descended from generations of domestication; we inherited centuries of lifeless ritual, petty literalizations of truths that can barely be touched by the rational mind; most of us were given translated texts as a stand-in for direct experience and practice.

The project so many of us are working on together, each in our own way, is a project of returning to what is natural to Spirit, what soul-stuff grows in the wild, what the divine looks like when we stop monocropping, stop deadening the soil, and start letting the forest’s wise patterns reclaim the land in our hearts, minds, and souls. When we rediscover the religion that naturally grows from direct embodied experience.

I just spend ten days in nature with a friend, and one part of what we were doing out there was finding and carrying out the ritual work that wanted to happen. It was really damn great.

We may write about it more at some point, but one thing I’d want to point at now is this: we had a shared mission when we agreed to spend that time together — we were hoping to heal a rupture in our friendship. When we came together, we basically just followed our intuitions on what to do next. Some of this was pretty standard (sit across from each other and share our experiences of what had gone wrong), but a lot of it was intuitive oddities, things like

• gathering moss and flowers to lay out as offerings

• sharing a glass of wine with the island

• gathering bark from threshold trees to burn

• chanting mantras to the sun and moon

• smearing ourselves in ash and washing it off in the lake

• imaginal journeying by the lakeshore

Some of these may have felt like they came out of left field, or didn’t add up to a coherent vision, if we examined them with our rational minds. But overall, it was extremely clear what was happening: the central pillar of our friendship is a shared perception of and respect for sacred, energetic reality. By tuning into this reality, and by coming together to give it form and voice, we were touching back in with what connected us in the first place. We were rebuilding our friendship from the place where its roots actually started.

None of this was planned; we just decided to spend some time together with a clear intention of relational repair, and what naturally happened was a lot of ritual work that effected that repair.

That’s kind of how things work, when you allow yourself to set an intention and follow the intuitions that arise.

That’s a lot of what feral ritual looks like to me, and it’s a lot of what will happen at Mysterium. We come in with a shared intention, and allow our instincts to flow along that gradient without over-rationalizing or over-codifying it.

We don’t deny the domesticating effects of the many spiritual traditions we’ve inherited and absorbed by osmosis — but we also aren’t rule by them. We let energy and intuition do the heavy lifting, and we notice afterwards what felt right, what didn’t, what we might want to change, what wants to stay.

Ritual is, at base, about taking shared action in ways that change reality. This usually operates on symbolic, unconscious, and energetic levels. When it comes to our symbols and collective unconscious and energetic patterns, all of us are steeped in domestication. But we also all have access to the Wild Natural Pattern that we arise from — and we can over and over again move back towards that pattern, finding the natural ways that our reality wants to be changed.

We can listen to the ways that relationships want to be repaired, vocations want to be deepened, heartbreaks want to be healed, individuation wants to be quickened, inner spaciousness wants to be stabilized…

I’ve written else where that magic is attuned surrender — and in this frame, ritual is, maybe paradoxically, a type of action we take to surrender more deeply into what’s already happening. This type of surrendered action is deeply personal. You can’t rely on domesticated patterns to do it. You have to go a bit feral to find what’s really yours in both the action and the surrender.

Only when your intention is free to find and follow its own gradient, its own gravitational flow, only in that space can your life force really fall into the path it wants to take.

If you want to explore ferality and surrender with us for a couple weeks in Barcelona, you can find more info here, and apply to join here.

You can find more info on it here, and apply to join here. Below, I’ll look at one of the themes that feels most alive to explore at Mysterium.

TL;DR: at Mysterium, we’re going to explore the relationship between Trust, Control, and Discernment — between surrendering to what wants to happen, and acknowledging that our own thoughts and feelings and actions are a necessary part of what wants to happen.

*

Paradox has snagged me lately. A certain style of embodied paradoxes — they often feel like an internal knot, or a catch 22. Sometimes they just feel like opposing pulls.

The broadest one I’ve been in is something between “masculine” and “feminine.” I’m a man, and earlier this year I became aware of both a deep desire to be more fully in my masculine, and a desire to open up more fully into my feminine.

A more personal paradox lately has been shaped by “Freedom” at one end, and “Integrity” at the other. This sense that I want to be more free, but that doing so risks my sense of integrity — and that I want to be higher integrity, but doing so limits my freedom.

There are a few more of these — ones I’ve felt in myself, and ones that I’ve been helping clients through — and what I’ve mainly learned is that when it comes to paradoxes, one side tends to open the other.

When I allowed myself to unapologetically open into more feminine expression, it opened up a lot of room to expland into more masculine presence. When I opened into more masculine presence, it opened up a lot of room to expand into more feminine expression.

When I allow myself to move through the discomfort of being increasingly Free, I find myself in deeper clarity about my own Integrity. When I let myself stand firm in clearer integrity, it allows me to move with deeper Freedom.

Back and forth we go, back and forth we go.

And when both sides of a paradox open — at a certain point, they open up beyond paradox, into an obvious and unproblematic unity.

One of the core themes of my work — and thus of the Mysterium gathering in September — comes out of the space between the following phrases:

• We’re here to renew the sacred.

• We’re here to wake the gods.

• We’re here to make whole the Goddess.

I’m gonna be totally real with you here, I’m really not sure what those mean most days. Sometimes they clarify in specific situations, showing me very clearly where the work is — other times I just stare at the words and they feel too huge to grip anything.

But one thing that’s become clear over and over again is that this kind of work only takes place inside a field of deep, deep trust.

It’s on me to trust what’s unfolding, to trust the timing, trust my patience, trust my urgency, trust my intuitions and my skepticisms and my sense that even if I’m frustrated and impatient, if it doesn’t feel like the right time then it doesn’t feel like the right time.

The opposite of trust is control. We live in a world that’s heavy on control, malnourished on trust. All of our cultural values revolve around keeping things under control, at every layer of life. Air conditioning to control the climate in our homes; clocks and calendars to control our time; infrastructure to control our access to water, electricity, shelter; monetary systems to control… well, kind of everything; schools and research institutions to get more knowledge so we can get more control; social expectations to control the flow of intimacy and threat; legal codes to control acceptable and unaccepable behaviors; fake buttons at crosswalks to give us a sense of control over when the light turns green.

If our society worships a god, that god is Control — along with its children, Comfort and Convenience.

There’s nothing especially wrong with control, comfort, or convenience — just like there’s nothing wrong with deer or elk. But when an ecosystem gets imbalanced, when the wolves disappear, when the deer start breeding out of control, eating all the shrubs, destroying the ecosystems of smaller mammals and insects, starting a cascade of effects that denude the whole area… then yeah, there’s a problem.

The psychic ecosystem of our world is imbalanced, overrun with an endless drive for Control. Even most of the plans to change, improve, or fix it — to usher in a new golden age — they mostly center on controlling things better or figuring out which new things to control.

There’s a fear most of us have about trust, a fear that to trust is to be naive or dumb or undiscerning. A fear that to trust means to be passive, to accept whatever happens to us, to let the world walk all over us while we try to convince ourselves it’s fine.

This vision of trust is a distortion at best — it’s how trust appears when looked at through a lens of control; the same way that the bright and starry night sky looks like a dozen or so faint dots of light when looked at through an atmosphere of chemical and visual pollution.

Real trust includes, by definition, self-trust.

Trust God, trust the universe, trust the unfolding currents of the Dao, trust the ground of Being — and don’t forget that this divine fabric of existence includes you and your knowledge and skills and failures and intuitions and needs and foibles and skepticisms. Trust doesn’t just mean lying down and letting the tide take you out to sea — it means assessing and honing the trustworthiness of your own being.

At Mysterium, I don’t have a program or a schedule or a curriculum, just some rough guides. And one of the guiding principles is to trust what comes out of the group, and the individuals that comprise it. To trust the desires and suspicions and intuitions and tensions and the energetic Fuck Yeses that come out of the specific group of humans and their specific human senses and relationships, in concert with the deeper trust in existence itself, and what it throws at us.

If you want to explore that trust with us for a couple weeks in Barcelona, you can find more info here, and apply to join here.

You can find more info on it here, and apply to join here. Below, I’ll be tracing out some moments and events in my life that feel close to what I want to build into Mysterium.

Emergent World-Poem

I read about renga last year, and immediately texted my friend “I’m not sure yet what I mean by this, but I think renga gatherings would be a near-perfect format for collective soul-making practice.”

Renga are a bit of a complex topic, so I’ll just summarize what’s relevant: A renga is a poem that multiple people write together. It begins with a '“presenting verse” written by whoever is chosen to be the renga master — you’ll probably recognize the name of these short presenting verses, haiku. The starting haiku sets the tone for what follows, and every successive poet has the duty to both close out the verse shared by the person before them, and to start a new verse that will be finished by the person after them.

There’s also a shared commitment to excellence and fidelity that I found inspiring, reading about these poems. The renga master (and the other participants, but the duty rests with him) can ask someone to re-do their part if it feels lazy, off-topic, or if it doesn’t fit with the way the poem seems to want to unfold. Basically, if you don’t keep attuned to the will of the poem itself, and the rest of the room senses this, you’ll be nudged back in the direction of attunement. Something about this feels to me both uncomfortable, and like an aspirationally awesome level of collective attunement-to-what-wants-to-Be.

Almost immediately after reading up on these types of poetry gatherings, my mind turned towards soul-making practice and some vague intuition of multi-media rengas. Someone sets out a theme and a direction, and the group drops into that current, attuning to what wants to emerge from there, and helping to give it voice, give it body, give it style. Writing poems and essays, painting and drawing and making music, dropping into Presence and conversation and movement, painting rocks and leaving them as gifts for the trees, ducking your head into the ocean and screaming your ancient frozen angers into its currents — anything and everything that comes out of attuning to what’s Present, building on one another’s expressions and attunements. Something feels incredibly sacred and open and awesome about this kind of shared space.

Collective Soul-Making

Last autumn, I attended a close-knit soul-making gathering, just ten of us in the countryside sharing space and running sessions for each other. There was a very minimal structure to it, a general camaraderie where we had a morning circle, ate dinner together, did an evening circle, and somewhere in the day we made room for 2 people to run practices they wanted to share with the group.

I won’t share anyone else’s practices, but I will say they were all extremely unique expressions of each person’s flavor, the rasa of their practice and Being. It was incredibly healing and enlivening to be immersed in. It felt like a good contrast to other things I’ve been at, where the practices are mostly a dozen different versions of either “sit down on a cushion and try out this specific mode of awareness” or “sit in a circle and speak from this specific mode of awareness.”

To give a couple examples just of my own practice sessions I offered:

1. I opened a space where we all visualized our hearts and the energetic veins running out from us and into the world — and how our heart-systems mingled with the heart-systems of the other people in the group. From there, everyone explored that shared heart-space, and did whatever felt right to move, love, appreciate, and heal what they found there. A couple of us stayed seated. Others walked around outdoors, gathering plants and gifting the smell of them to the people there. Someone found a mirror in the barn, set it in front of me and decorated it with plants. Someone else laid in the sun, feeling the warmth and running flowers along their skin. I think I heard someone tapping stones together rhythmically.

2. In another practice, we all started out by deepening into the body, then into spacious awareness, then into heart awareness — and from there, we paired off, silently sharing sensory worlds with the other person. One pair started wandering around like little boys, pointing out cool bugs to each other, excitedly grabbing textures from around the room and dragging the other person’s hand across them. Another pair poured hot wax on each others arms. Another pushed and pulled against each other, exploring the minutiae of each others force. The atmosphere of the room, with all this shared activity and tripartite awareness, felt almost terrifyingly Alive to me.

Other practice sessions involved poetry, music, dance, energy work, and monster stories around the campfire.

Casual Ritual

I was hanging out with K, and it became clear that we wanted to do something to mark this moment in our lives, a transition point for both of us. They asked me what I’d suggest for a ritual, and I said it was best to keep it simple, and to keep it closely related to what we were wanting to mark, and how we were wanting to move forward from it.

So each of us picked up a rock we liked, and carried it around for a couple days while we thought about this moment in our lives. We touched and held the rocks, felt their texture while considering our pasts and futures. We traded rocks for a bit, considering what we’d learned from our friendship. And when the time was right, we bought some candles and took them up to some boulders one night. We lit the candles, let the firelight flicker on the massive stones all around us, and we just talked. We called in the gods, the values, the guides, the atmospheres that felt important to us, and we talked — not just to each other, but to those other Presences we’d invited in. We talked about where we’d been, where we were going, what we were grateful for, what we were pained by, what we could feel emerging and how we hoped it might turn out. We found a rhythm of shaping and surrendering whatever came up. Owning what we wanted, owning the desires that had been given to us, feeling and honing their specificity within ourselves — and then releasing them, knowing that we couldn’t control them.

We watched the candles burn down, said thank you to the stars and stones and Presences. And we walked out of the space. We traded rocks with each other, and when we both moved on to other countries, we buried each others rocks in special places, with an intention to let the other person’s world take root and emerge in the best way possible.

Un-Selfed Devotion

Earlier this year, I spent a couple weeks at an ashram where the schedule was packed with meditation and ritual activity. I don’t want to make Mysterium a place where we’re waking up at 5am to do temple cleaning and aarti, or a place where we’re meditating for 7 hours straight without leaving the mat, or where we’re generally running ourselves ragged with ritual activity. …But there was something about the shared sense of dedication and devotion to something outside of ourselves that felt really good and right.

It wasn’t like a meditation retreat where there’s any focus on getting into particular states, or increasing our own skills at certain mental moves or types of awareness, or building up changes in our neural architecture or moving towards awakening or whatever else. At a certain point, it was just… hey, there’s certain gods present in these mantras and statues and spaces — so we’re going to manage that ritual space in a way that aligns with that. We’ll probably be blessed by doing so, but that’s pretty much beside the point and we’ll largely forget about that within a couple days if we keep the schedule full enough and work on the tasks at hand.

I’m not sure how else to get out of that ego space and into the devotional, don’t-care-what’s-in-it-for-me space… but I’d like to see if there are ways to cultivate that while still having fun and hanging out and not asking everyone to spend hours placing offerings and oil lamps and gathering wood and so on.

(That said, the blessings that came out of that stay were definitely very real and present and shockingly direct, and they feel pretty directly related to the sacrifice/offering of time and effort, so. I don’t know. I haven’t really resolved much of this yet, but it’s on my mind.)

Minimum Structure Gatherings

I’ve been to a few long gatherings the past couple years, gatherings that were very light on structure. There was Medley, a two-month co-working space in Berlin, about 20 people. Portal, a month-long co-working house in Porto, I think there were around 20 people there too. Tree Week, a week-long hangout house in Germany, I wanna say there were 70 or so people at that one? And of course the soul-making retreat, a week in the countryside with 10 people.

One thing I loved about each of these was the serendipity. The minimum viable structure allowed a lot of space to simply bring people together and allow them to cross paths and find what wanted to happen. Some of my closest friendships, my best walk-n-talks, my most destabilizing encounters, my most challenging growth opportunities, and my biggest heart-openings have come out of these serendipities.

Near the end of Medley, someone referred to it as an “interpersonal microwave.” That phrasing stuck with me, and I brought it into Portal where the phrase also resonated and stuck. There’s something about gatherings like this where people kinda fry each other. Where we run into each others projections and shadows and lil frictiony weirdnesses, and people start getting triggered by who-even-knows-what.

I think part of this is good — it unearths a lot of shit that needs to be unearthed, and at least for me it has over and over again showed me where my next few months of work will be.

I also think part of it is simply avoidable unpleasantness — there’s no need for all that unearthed shit to linger in the margins and permeate the whole event. Some way of making room for it, having shared understanding and vocabulary around it, and being able to navigate it together from that feels possible. Not sure I’m the guy who can figure it out, but I’ve got some ideas and some smart, attuned people around me. This seems like a fascinating problem to poke at and I’d love to try some stuff around it. Ideally trying out ways of keeping the growth edge without unnecessary friction and stink.

Nano Gatherings

I’ve done a couple of very small gatherings lately as well, and I have a couple more on my schedule in the next months. By very small, I mean 2 people. Me and one other person, deciding that there’s something we want to work on and that we can best work on by making intentional space together for it.

This format is kinda great. I love it so much. It can also be insanely difficult. I’ve written before about the “Love Dojo” me and Rachel did, organized around the question of “how can we learn to love better?,” and “how can friction and fights bring us closer together rather than creating distance?” That was in many ways a luminous 3 weeks, and in many ways an incredibly difficult 3 weeks. But the shared dedication to a shared intention — to a question that mattered deeply to both of us — made all the difference.

In a much lighter vein, me and Tasshin did a short writing retreat together, organized around an attempt to focus on our writing practices and get something on paper that we’d been meaning to get around to for awhile. Again, the shared intention was a very helpful guide for creating a certain field where the work can happen, and where we can support each others work.

In the coming weeks, I have a couple 2-person containers scheduled around Truth and Deity Yoga, respectively. I’m expecting both of those to be fruitful and challenging, probably in ways that I can’t quite predict.

I have something in my mind about the dyads and triads and so on that can emerge and be encouraged within a larger gathering. If it’s possible to do a 15 person ritual container where within those 15 people, there are a couple of pairs or triads that dedicate themselves to their own shared focus within the larger shared space. Something about that feels powerful to me, and I’d love to be able to support explorations like that. A renga within a renga.

There are more things coming to mind, but I’ll stop here. These are some of the main threads on my mind while I’m mulling on Mysterium. I’d like to pull together a playful, casual event where we can step into sacred mystery, attune to what it wants from us, and share our ways of embodying that attunement through practice, action, art, friendship, and personality.

I hope you’ll join in. You can find the application and other information at these links.

For me, the survival dance involves MY GLORIOUS RANGE OF PRODUCTS AND SERVICES!! PRODUCTS AND SERVICES LIKE:

• DEEP ALIVENESS INTENSIVE!

• 1:1 WAYTENDING!

• 1:1 RITUAL CRAFT!

• SOMATIC RESONANCE COURSE!

• IMAGINAL JOURNEYING COURSE!

• MY ESSAY COLLECTION!

• THIS GIFT LINK WHERE YOU CAN STRAIGHT-UP DONATE!!!

Sorry for yelling. I get excited. I just love products and services so much.

What was I saying?

Oh right, yeah. My survival dance feels outdated and ill-fitting, and I'm not totally sure how to change it — though I'm pretty sure it's gotta change.

I'm not quite sure where to start exploring this. I suppose two things come up that are worth examining:

1. This survival dance is about survival.

2. I have to follow life force on this.

To that first point, I have got to stop giving away so much time and energy for free in this sector of my life. I love to help people, but let's be real — I've been living in developing countries the past several years, in part because those are the only places I can reliably afford to live. If I'm doing my survival dance in a way that doesn't really give me good survival, then I'm... not doing it great.

To the second point: there is still some aspect of my life and soul and interests involved here, because whenever I try to do something that's against what my life force wants to do, it crashes and burns. This has always been true for me in my life, but as I've gotten deeper and deeper on the path, the fuse seems to have shortened a lot. My life force and my reality reeeeaaaally don't put up with me trying to do things that are against the grain of my Being anymore. They're very willing to fuck me up a bit when I try.

So whatever I do next has got to feel like my life force wants it, and has got to fit into the world's needs in a way that lets me survive more adeptly than I have been. My current bar is something like "could I live comfortably in Berlin if I wanted to?" Which feels like a modest bar, honestly. I should probably aim higher, but we’ll start there.

Out of what I'm already doing, my Deep Aliveness work and my Waytending work feel the most aligned with life force. Deep Aliveness is basically my way of teaching the stance that allows people to open up to expansive transformation. Waytending is my way of helping people transform from that open stance, allowing the change to sink into whatever layers are open, reprogramming the unconscious through ritual, image, action, repetition, and symbol.

Those feel clean, and I enjoy doing them. That said, I wouldn't say life force is so much driving that work as it is supporting it. Which is fine, I don't want to get too caught up on only doing THE MOST DIVINELY CRYSTALLINE RESONANT WORK THAT EXISTS, that's kinda how I got into this mess in the first place.

But I am interested in finding work where life force is the driving force, and seeing if there are ways for that to help my survival.

In this case, I'm not sure. I think there's a path to it, but the current version is unlikely to contribute much to my survival.

The project that feels driven by life force is a 2-week pop-up mystery school I'm running in Barcelona later this year. It's kind of a test run, to see what's possible with that format. And the possibilities of that format feel incredibly alive to me.

The working title of the event is MYSTERIUM. One of the core impulses behind it is to defamiliarize spiritual practice so we can experience it afresh. I don't want one more retreat where sitting silently in a room until the timer ends is the norm. And I don't want one more relational container where sitting in a circle and half-whispering things like "I notice that I'm aware that I'm feeling a narrative that you're noticing that you're aware of being angry at me" is the norm.

I'd like to make a space that can support exploration in the same areas those retreats do, but in ways that approach sideways, upside down, cattywampus. I want to drop askew into the sacred. I wanna get a lil animistic and surreal with it. I want to gather together people who can go deep, and who can take each other deeper than they could go on their own. I want to give them the time and the space and the practice stances to go places they've never been before, and bring something back.

This autumn is just a test run, an attempt to see what's possible. But if I could purely follow life force, I'd want to do more of them. I want to mine this direction and find the gold there. I can smell the gold there.

I want to create events, groups, environments where people can live differently for a time, can experience reality differently, can train themselves in ways of being and ways of relating that help to shake off their old habits and notice the deeper currents that want to be embodied. This definitely involves some amount of teaching the methods and techniques and stances that I'm teaching already — but doing so in a relationship-first way, an environment-first way, a lived-experience-first way. Not doing it via calls and recordings and check-ins and scheduled meetings, but via conversation, co-living, co-regulation, and serendipity.

My experiences with containers like this in the past have shown me that magic emerges over and over again from getting people together like this. Places that no individual participant could have gone on their own suddenly get unlocked in combination with the others, in combination with the group field. There's a mystery there, some kind of grace that brings in exactly the right people, and exactly the right wrong people to make the alchemy work. To unlock what needed to be unlocked. To learn things from a person's physical and energetic presence that you could have only glimpsed from their head and shoulders on a zoom call.

Looking at the current set-up, I'd be surprised if I make enough off of MYSTERIUM to do more than cover a month or so of my own living expenses afterwards, while I figure out what's next. But I think a future is bubbling up where events like this could be a part of my survival dance. Where things like deep transformation and relational co-transmutation become desirable and worth investing in, not just with money but with the time and effort it takes to make something like this magical.

That's about all I'm feeling at the moment. I think for now, I probably need to keep honing the parts of my survival dance that are feeling supported and supportive. And I can keep one eye on where life force seems to want to drive me, and keep taking the next step that makes sense towards making that a reality.

But for now, if you're interested in my work, now and in the future, the best starting point is Deep Aliveness. The most personalized way to move into Deep Aliveness and to use it for transformation is with the three Waytending options I keep open. That's mostly where you'll be finding me, dancing survivily.

And somewhere in the middle of that, I had a very simple and casual question put to me: what do you want to be known for?

I had a reflexive answer, of course. All the things I make! I'd love to be known for my Deep Aliveness course, my writings, my 1-on-1 work, my work with Somatic Resonance and Imaginal Journeying! I've put a lot of work into those, please know me for them!

But that thought felt pre-packaged, nowhere near the marrow, so I looked again — and it pretty much all fell apart.

1 - Writing Is Nice, but it Ain't It

I've been a writer and hedge philosopher about as long as I can remember. Really, some of my earliest memories are writing simple little mysteries in my childhood bedroom. I spent a lot of high school scrawling out literary fiction as stiff vehicles for little philosophical ponderings I had.

These days, I've gotten a lot of what I hoped to get out of writing. People who were distant heroic figures just a few years ago have now scheduled meetings with me and told me how much they admire my work. I've sat in sharing circles where multiple thanked me and told me my writing affected the direction of their lives. People send me messages to remind me of an article I wrote a couple years ago, and to tell me it's been a north star for them ever since.

You can't buy that kind of high, for a writer. It's dream-come-true stuff.

And it's not just that I've gotten used to it — it's that being praised for this has shown me just how misguided my whole writing practice has been.

I poured a couple decades of my life-force into getting good at writing, getting good at taking what was inside me and putting it on the page for people to see, to resonate with, to use as a thread they could follow back to me. I was a lonely kid and I just wanted to be seen, I just wanted to be felt by the people around me — but that was impossible, so I learned to craft it on the page, to hope Someone Out There would see it and Recognize me.

And like, to be fair it worked. It worked really well. My life is currently full of close, beloved friends and connections who found me through my writing, or were introduced to me by people who found me through my writing. So like, go me. Yay.

But really, what I wanted, what drove all those hours of practice year after year, was that I just wanted love (duh). I wanted to give and receive love, to be warmly received by the people around me and to warmly receive the people around me.

And honestly, I'm better than that now than I've ever been in my life, by leaps and bounds — and I'm like... okay at it. Kinda mid.

So being known, where I'm known, for my writing is nice in a lot of ways, and has opened up a lot of doors in my life. But also, it's a bit embarassing. It's this big shining badge of the ways that I got confused and poured my skill points into something only mildly related to the thing I really wanted.

The fact that almost everyone else does this too is some comfort, but not a ton.

2 - Not My Survival Dance

Bill Plotkin uses the term "Survival Dance" to note the things we seekers do to stay alive and functional in the world while we continue to practice, evolve, and develop. For some people, the survival dance is software engineering, or consulting, or selling cars; that's how they get their money while deepening their practice and aligning their life with their soul.

For others of us, the survival dance involves showing others what we've learned on the path. Running embodiment workshops, or breathwork weekends, mushroom ceremonies, imaginal journeying sessions, coaching work, etc.

As I mentioned at the beginning, it's very helpful for me to be known for my survival dance — my courses and 1:1 work and such. But one thing that seems to be clarifying for me (I'll probably write something about this later) is that my survival dance is in fact about survival, much more so than Soul or Mission.

Being known for my work on somatic resonance or deep aliveness or the rest of what I'm doing — it's very helpful for marketing reasons — for helping me get by. But honestly, if I woke up tomorrow to some grant or patron or donation that made me financially free — I'd probably do very little of this work. I'd definitely do it in a very different way. The closest thing I can point to is that I'd probably follow the thread I'm chasing with MYSTERIUM much more fully — that feels like my most aligned project at the moment. (And, tellingly, it's a project that I'm likely to make very little money off of.)

Beyond making enough money to pay my rent and my medical bills and such, I don't have a ton of drive to be known for this side of my work. I love running cohorts and I love helping people one on one, but I can always do those. Some of the best work I’ve ever done has been for free in impromptu situations where I just meet someone who it seems like I can help. What my soul really wants to do in my work is something else. Something closer to MYSTERIUM, a multi-week co-creative small-group deepening into Mystery and practice. Something that deepens into aliveness, openness, and enchantment in ways that are far more effective and rewarding, but that are, unfortunately, less reliable on the monetization side (at least for now).

Even if I were able to run events like that reliably and without compromise, I’m not sure they’d be my answer to what I want to be known for. They’d be on a list, but if I was picking one thing, that wouldn’t be the one.

I have an answer now — maybe only a partial answer, and likely not a permanent one — to what I want to be known for. It feels clarifying to have a sense of a deep desire that I couldn’t have articulated until yesterday.

It’s obvious in retrospect — I’ve talked about it a fair bit, oriented whole sectors of my life towards it quietly and not so quietly over the past couple years; but even so, I wouldn’t have noted it as What I Want To Be Known For until yesterday evening, when I managed to hone in on it in my journal.

No, I’m not gonna tell you what it is. Sorry. I’ll keep it in a sealed envelope and maybe tell you in a couple years, when it is in fact something I’m known for.

Until then, I kinda wanna know what you want to be known for. Do you have some obvious answers to that? And if those answers were bullshit… what might your next answer be?

Every other tree in the forest gets cut down, turned into planks and homes and utensils and carvings and whatever else wood gets turned into. But that gnarled, ugly tree gets to live out its life, unfurled under the endless sky.

I’m starting to see the beauty of uselessness. And not only that, I’m starting to see the total functional necessity of uselessness. Ironically: I’m getting a view of why uselessness is so fully fucking useful.

There’s nothing special about meditation, you know. Nothing special about art either. There’s nothing special about embodiment, nothing special about open awareness, nothing special about following the breath or visualizing waterfalls of golden light pouring into your heart chakra.

The main special aspect of any of these is that they are useless.

Or rather, that your habitual enculturated mind sees them as useless. And once you see them as useless, and decide to do them anyway, something inside of you shuts down. The part of you that wants to chase goals, be successful, be rich and powerful and hot and all the other things — it sees that you’re starting up something it knows is useless, so it just nopes out and steps away until you’re done.

There’s a sketching exercise in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain that has you put a picture upside down and then try to sketch it like that. The explanation is that when trying to do such an unintuitive task, your left hemisphere gives up and goes away — leaving your right hemisphere to do the job instead. And the right hemisphere is better at the clear seeing required for sketching, so the sketch tends to turn out better.

A similar dynamic happens when you set a timer to focus on your breath for 45 minutes. What a useless, stupid thing. Everything in you will try to rebel and tell you to go do something else. Go for a run, cook dinner, do your taxes, something, anything, just knock this useless crap off. —When that part of you finally gives up and goes away… that’s when the system is free to move, to get some breathing room.

Anything you can do to get the narrow, limited, goal-fixated part of yourself to give up and go away for a bit, it creates a bit more breathing room, and starts to train you in what it feels like to be outside of that part of yourself.

The problem, you might be starting to see, comes when these activities become useful. When you start to orient towards them as an activity with goals and purposes that you can include on a spreadsheet and fit into your optimization schedule.

Embodiment is useful when the rational mind sees the body as a distant, useless meat-sack it has to drive around in. You start focusing on tiny subtle sensations in your lower gut, and the controlling part of you goes “ugh, call me back when this is done,” and for a brief window, you’re free.

But when your narrow, fixated, controlling part of yourself decides that embodiment is actually a wonderful and socially approved optimization strategy with many listicles to promote its mental and physical benefits… it’s over. For the purposes of The Path, it’s another lifeless strategy that’s not going to take you any closer to where you’re going.

I’m being hyperbolic but not by much. Yes, there are still advantages that creep in to your life, even with such narrowly optimized strategies, that make an eventual opening more possible. It happens. It’s not a total loss.

But good god it’s hard to overstate just how load-bearing the uselessness can be. Or the total unconcern with usefulness.

And good god it’s hard to overstate just how destructive the instrumentalizing mind can be with this stuff.

When a practice becomes the territory of the using mind, its value on the path starts to degrade — and the half-life is sometimes measured in seconds.

Jung talked about Abraxas as the god of effectiveness. And if I’m remembering correctly, he said that unlike all other complementary pairs, Abraxas had no opposite, because the opposite would be ineffective and would have no effect and thus cease to exist.

If my memory is serving, and Jung did in fact say this (Idk I have vivid dreams, he might not have said it), then I’d say it was a blind spot.

It’s not that Abraxas has no opposite. It’s that we live so totally ensconced in Abraxas’s world that we can hardly even imagine his opposite; the very structure of our left-hemisphere reality stops us from perceiving her, the way the structure of our eyes stop us from perceiving light at frequencies outside of our visual range. It’s just not there.

When something becomes useful, it comes into the Abraxas world.

When we manage to wiggle our way into doing something that doesn’t fit into Abraxas-world… it gets bored and leaves us alone, just for a moment — and just for that moment, we might glimpse that Other place.

And that Other place is a whole other half of reality where wholeness is waiting.

And also it’s just like, honestly no big deal. It’s a very natural and open and complementary space. It’s only special the way a nutrient is special when your body is woefully deficient.

I don’t really have a finish here. Um. I think I’ve just been noticing modes of embodiment exercise that feel like they’re missing what is, to me, the most important piece, and it kinda hit me in the sauna today what the shape of it was.

This is just one of those articles where I write until I’m done and then drop it in the middle of a sente

My Lil Odyssey

The way my life has been working, the universe tends to do my scheduling for me.

I got sick, went to the emergency room, got diagnosed with a chronic illness — the next few months were all about recovering and getting back on my feet. In that time, I got invited to a series of events around Europe, and suddenly my schedule was set for the next few months.

By the time I was wrapping up those events, I’d been invited to stay with a friend in Vienna, and told I needed to spend a couple months in India for ayurvedic treatment, so there was the next couple months scheduled.

After India, they told me I needed to go somewhere warm and familiar to recover — Chiang Mai was the obvious choice, so there’s the next month or two, for a nice recovery period.

While in Chiang Mai, I was recommended a stay at a traditional Tantra ashram back in India, and when I looked into it, it ticked exactly all the boxes I’d been looking for all year.

Then it turned out a twitter mutual was finishing retreat at the same time as me in India, so we decided to meet up. There was my next month or so.

When I finished in India, a friend invited me to Singapore for an impromptu writing retreat. And then I went off to Thailand to do an impromptu relational retreat with the same friend from India.

She left a few days ago, and now I’ve got a bit under two months to myself before I start off on the next bout of invitations in July, going from Scandinavia to the Balkans to France to (most likely) Spain… and after that the trail is unclear again, but. I mean, yeah.

Just between what’s already happened (starting at the end of December 2023) and what’s already scheduled (ending mid-October ‘25, with softer plans spanning into January ‘26), that’s already like, almost 2 years where all I’ve had to do is sit back and wait for the next round of invitations to reach me.

All I have to do is follow the trail, be present at each step of the way, and the next step lays itself out right in front of me.

Honestly, this is kinda how my life goes in general

The past couple years has seen a higher intensity of things finding me, but honestly I’ve always had a fair bit of this. When I go out looking for things and trying to make them happen, results are mixed. When I open myself up to things and wait for the space to be filled, weird-good stuff tends to fill the space.

One of the best jobs I ever had, an old boss just reached out to me, asked if I wanted the job, and told me to come in in a couple weeks to start. That was it, I didn’t apply or interview or even know that there was such a weirdly perfect job for me available in the area. I just quit my old job and bummed around for a bit, and suddenly my old boss called.

Most of the more important romantic relationships in my life, I didn’t go out and find them — they just came to me. (And the relationships where I have put myself out there, approached women, done the usual dating thing… those have tended to go various flavors of Not Great.) I wish I could tell you a couple of the truly ridiculous stories here of women just falling out of the sky and into my life, but we have limited space and a couple of them aren’t just my stories to tell publicly, alas.

Even money, I haven’t tended to have the usual relationship with. I’ve never had much of it, but it’s always shown up when I need it. While trying to pay off my student loans in my 20s, I was working in Vietnam, doing these terrible 13-hour days in Hanoi schools and Hanoi traffic, pretty much burning myself out until I collapsed and quit. After a few days of lying quietly on the floor of my apartment, I realized that I hadn’t actually checked my bank balance in months, I had no idea how much money I had. So I went to the bank, checked my balance. I had exactly enough money to finish paying my student loans and then pay another 2 months of rent. So I paid the loans, gave myself two months to recover, and then found another job.

A couple years ago, I was working on my Somatic Resonance course, struggling to pay rent and unable to dedicate real time or effort to this side vocation. Then out of nowhere, a stranger (now my buddy Brent) got in touch and offered to pull together a grant for me, to give me a bit of runway on doing this work without distractions. He pulled it off, and I’ve been doing this work ever since.

A few months later, someone got in touch to say they were going to do a 2-month creative co-working incubator, and would I like to come and have my rent paid while I stayed there? And of course I went and got to finish up the Somatic Resonance course and meet some cool friends and run a cool day retreat and bum around Berlin for a couple months.

Again, I didn’t apply for or ask for any of this, it kinda just showed up to fill a vacuum in my life, a space I’d been wanting filled for awhile.

More stuff like this has been a pattern in my life, but we can stop the examples there. Over and over again, things just kind of come to me, show up when I need them — and this kind of thing accelerates when I stay On The Path of what I’m meant to be doing. When I allow life force to move me.

Something wants to change lately, and when I started this article I had an idea of what I was gonna say about it but now I’m less sure.

When I started writing 20 minutes or so ago, this was my basic attitude:

I’ve been in a wait-and-receive posture ever since my diagnosis, and it keeps working out, but hey, I have things I want to do! I don’t need to just sit and wait for the universe to tell me when to do them, I can put them into the schedule myself! I want to write a book! I can just schedule that in after October, that I’m going to dedicate the next year of my life to writing a book and running a couple more mystery school pop-ups and that’s what I’m doing with that year of my life, hell yeah!

Now, I uh.

I don’t knooooowwww maaaaaaannnn that doesn’t seem to be how my life force works. Whenever I impose myself on the life force, impose my plans and structures and ego desires on the way my life force wants to organize itself… all the energy just dries up.

You know what it is, I’m a natural Radagast. I love this article, “The Sarumans and the Radagasts,” about two different styles of working with power.

Basically, Sarumans are the type of people society wants to mold us all into, it’s the Correct Way To Be. They’re very organized, structured, focused, left-hemisphered; they’re direct and decisive. If a Saruman wants to do something, they tell their life force to get in line and do the thing through sheer force of willpower.

Radagasts, on the other hand, are spontaneous, open, right-hemisphered; they’re non-linear and intuitive. If a Radagast wants to do something… well, realistically he wants to do 12 different things, and he just does all of them in strange and non-linear ways that don’t make sense to Saruman onlookers… but somehow they seem to work out? And sometimes those dozen different projects all kind of seem to… merge? and synergize? and how the hell could they have known and planned in advance that these disparate things would actually work? How could they have known all the ways that good luck would come in and save their asses just when things were about to go wrong?

They couldn’t. They didn’t. But the secret of being a Radagast is to follow the eros and radically trust that it’s going somewhere. Even when there are months and years where it seems like the eros isn’t adding up to anything that will pay the rent or transform the zeitgeist, you keep trusting that it’s all doing what it needs to do, that it will all pay off in some strange flourish of fate.

And weirdly, it just keeps doing so. Not out of any linear, structured determination — but by an endless series of nudges in the right direction, a persistent devotion to the things that want to come through you and into the world. And a faith that if you keep bringing them into the world, they’ll take care of you.

Okay, but I’m frustrated

So I’m a Radagast, yes, and it tends to work out well for me, yes.

Yes, my schedule keeps filling up with the exact opportunities I’d want, often opportunities that I wouldn’t believe even existed until they’re presented to me. And yes, I have a community of beloved friends who care about me and are aligned with my mission in the world. And yes, I have the freedom to bounce around from country to country following these friends and opportunities and whatever feels alive in the moment. And yes, I’ve arranged my life such that if a Tuesday afternoon is particularly beautiful, I can just decide to do no work and instead go sit under a tree and watch squirrels play.

Okay, my life is pretty great. But there are frustrations.

The more I type, the pettier they feel.

You know what, I’m feeling through the frustrations with a bit more distance right now. And they are real, for sure. And some of them are legitimate worries and such. But they basically all come down to resources.

To be perfectly frank, I’m sick of scrambling for money. I love my work, I love what I do, I love the retreats and events and fellowships I get invited to… but I’d really like to be able to say yes to a $1500 month-long invitation without having to pull up all the accounts and see how I can make it work.

My ideal relationship to money isn’t really to have a lot of it — it’s just to never have to think about it. My ideal magic power would be a pocket or a credit card that just always has the amount of money I need waiting for me. I need a $600 plane ticket? Cool, there’s 600 bucks in my pocket. I want to buy a snack on the plane? Nice, there’s 5 bucks in my pocket. I need 2 months deposit and 2 months advance to rent this apartment? Alright, luckily my pocket is stuffed with 8 grand today, nice. …Okay the card is probably more practical.

The fantasy I mentioned above, of taking a year off to write a book and run mystery schools — I’m pretty much certain that I could pull that off if it’s what my life force actually wanted from me. And honestly, I would not be surprised at all if that’s what actually happens. My life seems to be tending in that direction anyways.

But as for the fantasy of it? I think part of what I’m fantasizing about is having the resources to take a year, not only to work on a task that doesn’t pay, but to do events that I would have to pay up front for space and supplies and so on. Part of the fantasy is being able to trust that I can do that reliably, rather than having to scramble and stress and pull resources out of the air to make it happen.

I think I’m also a little frustrated with my life-force, he’s being rude at the moment

The frustrating bit the past few days was that I was trying to come up with some workshops or offerings I can run to make some money. I need to fund these upcoming trips, and also my truly horrifying tax bill (the US does not like the self-employed, let me tell you that). The frustrating bit is that I’ve got a lot of Big Juicy Stuff coming through right now, but none of it is in shape to be shared yet — sharing it or shaping it into something to be shared runs the risk of deforming it before it’s ready.

And at the same time, when I try to pull up older workshops that people found helpful that I might re-run, my life-force mostly just huffs at me and goes “don’t distract yourself, stay on task.”

The “task” in this case mostly being to read widely and look for missing pieces, while also practicing and meditating for much of the day, and while also taking care of my physical body (autoimmune conditions are rough, I am not a fan) — and when I try to explain that we do in fact need to find ways to fund all this food and rent and so on, my life-force kind of just gets exasperated, says “it’ll probably be fine, don’t distract yourself with it.”

…If I’m being perfectly honest, even me writing this article is kind of a passive aggressive act of rebellion at this point. I feel life-force standing behind me, tapping his foot and looking pointedly at his watch. This is the vibe of my experience, the past few paragraphs.

I uh, I find this a little delicious. I’m behaving very badly. lol. lmao. Take that, Me.

Okay, I think I’ve talked myself through something here… where’s that leave me?

So main points so far,

• My life seems to work by staying on the path and allowing incredible opportunities to drop in my lap

• When I try to force opportunities or chase opportunities that are simply what I think are feasible and desirable… the opportunities are more lackluster and my pursuit of them tends to end poorly, even when I do succeed

• I strongly desire more reliable and robust resourcing

• …sooooo maybe I just stay on the path, do my best work, and trust that it will find me when the time is right? Just listen to life-force and stop getting distracted about it?

That feels in keeping with how my life seems to function. It also still leaves me feeling a little tense about the coming months, but I’m used to being a little uneasy when I’m between clarities.

Yeah, this feels cleaner than anything else I can think of. I’ll probably still be a little fidgety about it, but I can keep returning to Trust. I can do that.

In short: the most efficient, beneficial, and beautiful use of magic is what the universe is already doing.

Magic is Simply Reality’s Capacity for Change

I don’t know what magic is and I won’t pretend to have anything more than questions about it, but I do know it’s everywhere and it’s how everything happens. Whatever the universal force is that makes… things… go?; that allows processes to unfold; that makes time and energy interact in ways human minds can barely formulate, let alone try to understand; that makes consciousness an aspect of the universe that changes the universe; that we can glimpse through the direct experience of aliveness and wonder…

Magic is that. I think magic is god, or goddess, or the ground of being, or the tao. We just use the word ‘magic’ to refer to the aspects of it that we can talk to and cultivate and direct in various ways to change the direction of reality’s unfolding.

A lot of magic is just… getting a job and a paycheck so you can make money to make your life more comfortable and raise a family and stuff. That’s a way of harnessing Reality’s unfolding. Other magic is using your words to recruit human energy to a cause you think should have more human energy behind it. Other magic is spilling ox blood on a black stone beneath a full moon and chanting the 71 names of the crossroads goddess to ask for her direction and grace as you navigate a life transition. And some magic is practicing meditation and embodiment deeply until you clear the channels between you and the deep unconscious, giving you access to intuitive knowing that had been blocked before.

All of it’s just… cultivating and directing Reality’s capacity for change. Sometimes in very direct ways, sometimes in non-linear multidimensional ways.

What people *call* magic is simply the collection of the more non-linear and multidimensional attempts to direct Reality’s capacity for change. No one calls it magic when you want an apple & drive down to the store to buy some apples. But if you want to find the love of your life, and you do a series of symbolic rituals and offerings, we definitely call that magic.

Medicine & Magic

There’s a medical analogy here somewhere. I have Hashimoto’s disease — basically, my immune system has decided that my thyroid is foreign tissue; so now my body is trying to destroy my own thyroid.

The usual doctors I went to, their treatment is to give me extra thyroid hormones. That’s the standard. It’s a very simple, direct, brute force approach: “your thyroid is getting eaten away, so it’s making less of its hormones — we’ll just fill in the gaps and give you extra hormones.”

This works fine, kind of (if I get into the nuances, we’ll be here all day). Taking those hormones considerably raises your risk of various cancers, it does nothing about the root causes, and it can be very difficult to dial in the proper amount of the hormones (that dialing-in process can be absolute hell…) but overall, it’s better than having your thyroid out of whack.

What those doctors don’t do is address the root issue: the fact that my immune system is recognizing my thyroid tissue as a threat. Because that task is too hard and complex, and quite frankly western medicine doesn’t actually know almost anything useful about autoimmune diseases right now — a fact I and many others with related conditions have had to learn the hard way, discovering the void of ignorance hiding behind a sea of chatter about different pathways and chemicals and acronyms that all basically add up to a thousand ways to say “we’re not sure what went wrong or how to fix it.”

This type of medicine is analogous to the type of magic that people don’t call magic. The direct and literal connect-the-dots type of magic. Look at the most direct and visible pathways and try to break through them. Want a new car? Save up money, get a loan, exchange money for car. Want a girlfriend? Make yourself look nice, learn a bit of charm, and keep approaching women until something clicks well enough to keep pursuing. Want higher levels of thyroid hormones? Swallow a dose of thyroid hormones.

The other type of magic, the non-linear multi-dimensional magic, is more akin to the other type of medicine, the non-linear multi-dimensional medicine: in my case, Ayurveda.

I started seeing Ayurveda doctors, and even spent a couple months in a hospital in India doing intensive panchakarma treatment. Their concern wasn’t just to raise my thyroid hormone levels. Their focus was looking at the many systems of my body, the symptoms I was experiencing all over (not just the ones directly related to the thyroid), and tying it together into a complex picture of unbalanced processes in my body.

A lot of it made no sense to me. My ear started hurting, and she told me to stop eating sweet potato. I had such intense brain fog that it basically amounted to dementia, and she told me to eat only rice porridge for a couple days, do some calf raises, and listen to music I loved. I was stressed about a recent heartbreak, and she told me to eat more pomegranate and take a medicine that was a mixture of a dozen herbs I’d never heard of.

And of course, it worked. Over and over again, problems that my other doctors has just shrugged at and said “that’s your life now, get used to it,” Ayurveda managed to clear up in a couple months with some precisely-directed non-linear interventions.

The way my doc explained it, what we were doing wasn’t brute-forcing any specific pathways or problems — but using mixtures of different herbs, foods, activities, mental states and the like to gently nudge the unbalanced currents of my body back into balance, nudging first from this direction, then this one, then another. Nudging along many dimensions at once, allowing the body to bring itself back into balance.

This is more or less what magic magic is doing — and why it so often doesn’t work.

(I feel like I’m getting off track from the original focus I stated at the top, but I promise I’m still building towards it — I’m just, er, nudging you towards my conclusion along a couple dimensions at once.)

Why Magic Doesn’t Work (It’s Cuz You Suck At It, You Left-Hemisphere Captured Dingoes)

Depending on what segment of my audience you’re from, the above section on magic being like ayurveda may have been either a “oh nice” lightbulb moment for you, or a “no duh they’re alike, they’re both claptrap” moment for you.

A lot of why magic doesn’t work (when it doesn’t work) comes down to this latter attitude, in a couple ways.

Sometimes, people have this attitude, and they just… never try it. They look at how magic/manifestation/ritual/whatever is supposed to work, they can’t rationally see how it could work — how such an input could possibly affect such an output — and that’s enough of a stop sign for them. Why bother putting in the energy?

Or, they might come to try out magic, but bring the “western medicine”-type view to it. The “take two pills and call me next week” view. The “press a button and a thing either happens or doesn’t” view. They pick up a manual, chant a few words, draw a sigil, bury a seashell in the roots of a tree and decide to sit back and wait for their wished-for lover to come knock on their door.

What’s missing here is a holistic, ayurvedic, right hemispheric, magic approach to the thing.

In my view, magic shapes consciousness, and consciousness shapes reality (I actually happen to think reality is consciousness in certain ways, but you don’t have to entertain that idea for this to be relevant).

The collective unconscious and the individual unconscious, neither of them operates on our familiar verbal language. They operate on the language of image, sensation, impression, repetition, action, and worldview. We can shape the whole way reality unfolds around us by adjusting our unconscious expectations and unconscious libidos, using this language.

This doesn’t happen from pressing a button, from drawing a sigil, from doing a couple of chants one night under a full moon. It happens by approaching it from a multi-dimensional stance. It happens by cultivating deep sensitivity to how reality feels, how your body feels, how the space around you feels. What qualities are present. What resonates with those qualities, what shifts those qualities. And navigating all that like a motherfucker. Being an unapologetic wayfinder of the frequencies of existence you move among. Sailing across the wave-wracked surface of the gods with a grin on your face and a rope in your hand.

In practical terms, that might look like a lot of things, some of them manifestly mundane, others hopelessly weird and seemingly disconnected. Let’s go back to the old classic, love magic, bringing a new lover into your life. Yes, that’s going to mean some glamour magic — which is less about rubbing newts in your hair than it is about honing in on what makes you feel magnetic. Attune to your wardrobe, to the pitch and yaw of your voice when you’re most comfortable in your own skin, when you’re most alive to your own whim. Notice that the lover you’re looking for, when you feel him in your heart, there’s a texture to him, something smooth and strong and yielding, like willow wood. So get yourself a chunk of willow wood and start to carve it, to shape it. Sing love songs while you whittle. Carve hearts into a willow tree. Wake up in the middle of the night with an urge to talk to the moon — walk outside and tell her all about what you want, what you’re trying to do, what steps you’re taking. Tell the moon all about how a guy was chatting you up the other day — he was cute, charming, felt objectively like a good choice — and you turned him down, because your gut felt something was off, and you felt like you needed to keep your life open for who you’re really looking for. Every morning, wake up, make your coffee, and handle your little willow-wood carving. Tune into your longing for someone to share your life with. Feel it in your chest, in the room around you. Notice if it says anything, if it draws you anywhere.

On and on and on. Magic follows the currents of your life and bends them, moves them, non-linearly and multi-dimensionally nudges them such that your life energy (and, at least in my view) the world’s energy flows all start to move into closer alignment to what you’re looking for.

As with ayurveda or other multi-dimensional medical systems (though to a lesser degree, usually) you’re probably going to need expertise and guidance for a lot of this, both when starting out and when undergoing more acute or complex periods. But once you’ve gotten attuned to how things feel, what works, what doesn’t — once you’ve built the basic muscle memory of embodied intuition, a lot of this becomes very manageable on your own.

And more than that, when you start really paying attention, there’s very little to actually do.

Wizards are Lazy (This is a Compliment)

There’s a trope in a lot of fantasy stories, something like “the do-nothing wizard.”

These wizards are often the wisest and most powerful in the land, absolutely legendary. And the other characters are often incredibly disappointed to meet them and find that their advice mostly amounts to “pay close attention to the world, but please don’t do anything.”

The mentor in A Wizard of Earthsea is like this, if I remember correctly. He takes in the main character to train him, and then mostly teaches him about the balance and equilibrium of the universe, and how we ought not disturb it.

In The Poppy War, our main character’s primary mentor is much the same. She impatiently waits through his many lessons about balance and order and pure knowledge of the workings of the magical universe… because she’s waiting for him to give her permission and training to exploit that knowledge for personal gain and prowess in war. Her mentor is horrified and disappointed every time she brings this up.

I think The Kingkiller Chronicles does this too. One of the school’s professors is a batty madman who wanders campus, not teaching much of anything to anyone, but he seems to be casually more powerful than just about anyone, in the few times when we see him use his power. But mostly, he just watches the rhythms of the universe. I don’t remember if or how much this is explicit, but I got the sense that his ethos is against using magic for personal ends.

I increasingly see really good reason for this trope, and it gets surprisingly complex, but a lot of it comes down to what I said up at the start.

It’s not that there’s some hippie dippie, nature is beautiful, praise mother Gaia and leave her pristine kind of ethical white knight thing going on. It’s not a high and mighty purity thing.

It’s just that once a couple of things click into place, it makes no sense to do most of the stuff we’d recognize as magic.

Because, again, the most efficient, beneficial, and beautiful use of magic is what the universe is already doing.

The Body is Magic, Magic is a Body

Just as the most efficient and beneficial and beautiful state of health is what the body naturally tends itself towards. The body wants to be healthy, strong, lithe, intelligent. And if you attune yourself carefully to those desires of the body, you’re increasingly able to keep that equilibrium, to sense when it’s tilting one way or another and fix it. You’re able to sense when something is off before it goes too far, and you can take steps to nudge it back into good, sustainable functioning.

This is… pretty much what magic is for too. You attune yourself to Reality — or, y’know, your corner of it — and you sense where there’s imbalance, where things need or want to be corrected, where they need or want to go in a certain direction. And you do it, in whatever strange, nudging ways feel most alive and natural to you.

Which is where we run into problems. Where humans always run into problems, increasingly over the past decades and centuries.

Because the whole system we’re embedded in has gotten unbalanced and deranged. We so rarely, if ever, get a taste of balanced functioning, so we have only intuitive ancestral blood memory to navigate by when trying to get back to it. Everyone is disembodied, numbed, cut off from their own direct sensing — so even if we did know what balance was supposed to feel like, almost no one could actually feel the qualities of the imbalance, let alone navigate from there.

Modern western diets are a pretty good microcosm of this. People constantly crave foods that unbalance them. They ignore foods that are balancing. Our instincts and desires can’t be trusted.

After about 6 months of a fairly strict ayurvedic diet, I was released to eat mostly whatever I wanted. What I found, pretty quickly, was that a lot of the foods I’d wanted before just didn’t sound good anymore. I’d always been a life-long chocolate fiend — now chocolate felt barely worth considering. Pizza felt sickeningly rich to think about. Most of the center aisles at the grocery store gave me a visceral sense of “none of this stuff is fit for human consumption, how is this 2/3 of the store?”

Magic is a lot like this, including the fact that most people are chaotic and unbalanced about it — but that it is possible to rebalance yourself, bit by bit, domain by domain.

Balancing Magic

Diving in to magic and ritual in order to pursue goals of the ego is… well it’s where basically everyone starts. It’s also pretty weak and misguided magic.

Gah there’s more nuance here than I can actually express. It’s fine, I’ll be clumsy.

All of the things we really want — all the things that consciousness really wants, deep down at the foundations and roots of all of us — all of these things like joy, peace, connection, love for all beings, a world that nurtures everyone, a world where we all feel that we belong, that we are worthwhile, that we are powerful contributors to a shared vision and unfolding — all of these things are what the free flow of magic is already doing — these are already what Reality’s capacity for change is oriented towards.

In other words, and to repeat myself again, the most efficient, beneficial, and beautiful use of magic is what the universe is already doing.

And — this is a key point here — I’m not saying that we just have to sit back and do nothing, that using any magic can or will fuck up the fabric of creation, or wreck your soul, or anything like that.

One of the ways that Reality works its beautiful, powerful magic is through us. I still can’t remember where I heard this phrase, but it’s stuck with me: “God’s will is done — and we’re the ones who do it.” Same idea. Reality does its magic, and it does it through us.

It’s the same way that a well-balanced body feeds itself — which it does through a well-attuned ego. We receive messages, cravings, desires, and intuitions from the body, and we eat in accordance with them.

So much of the work of magic is getting yourself attuned and balanced enough that you can receive the messages, cravings, desires, and intuitions of Reality, and live in accordance with them. This is harder than it seems. Most of our desires and intuitions starting out are the equivalent of sugar cravings and processed salty snack cravings and urges to sit around all day and watch sitcoms.

When we do that kind of magic, when we do ego-magic, magic driven by convenience and craving and control, we’re mostly just taking energy away from the things we really want (love, connection, meaning, etc) to give it to the things our ego craves at the moment (money! sex! a high-status lover to be my high-status proof of worthiness!).

Oh wait, I’m talking about finite & infinite ambition again, aren’t I? Okay, I guess this is finite and infinite magic.

You can either do ego-magic (finite) that’s aimed at recruiting Reality’s capacity for change towards changes that you want at the moment, not knowing if that want comes from a place of balance or a place of chaos, because you’re not attuned to your body, your emotions, your imaginal currents, the world around you,,

Or you can Non-Do reality-magic (infinite) that’s a surrender to the way Reality’s capacity for change wants to move through you — which is already far more powerful and intelligent and effective than anything you could consciously plan or execute. All you have to do is attune yourself, and trust what you’re attuned to.

I never know how far afield I’m going to wander in these In•Star rants. Did I hit my main points? I think I did. I’m pretty sure.

One summary would be that the universe is a hundred-billion-year-long sentient magic spell aimed at the benefit of ALL, and you can either attune yourself to your place in it or try to siphon some off its energy to claw after your clenched little ego desires — and it’s not always going to be clear which is which. (Sometimes the universe really does want you to have a bunch of sex and make a bunch of money! But it’s very easy to trick yourself.)

And also, that life and magic and poetry and ayurveda and a bunch of other things all work best by attuned, multidimensional nudging approaches — only in very specialized cases are the linear connect-the-dots approaches actually the best move. (And usually, those are cases where too many other things have already gone wrong and you just need to short-circuit the whole situation.)

That should be about it. I think I’m done now.

Oh, also, I know some of you want to attune and multidimensionally nudge your Unconscious towards the desires and values that Reality is running through you like an electrical current — and I’ve started doing 1-on-1 work based on exactly that. You can find current details here, and hopefully I’ll have more on my website soon, after I’ve done a few more test runs with early clients.

I’m also doing longer-term and deeper-dive ritual-crafting work. I’ll only take 2 or 3 clients per year for this — it’s a real investment of time, focus, and energy for me, and will require a real investment from you as well, on all counts. If you’re interested, message me and we’ll see if it’s a fit.

Aside from that — have a magical day y’all.

James Hillman wrote "Our ideas about the psyche affect the psyche." This isn't just true on individual levels, but on the levels of community, culture, society, governance, everything. What we believe about the psyche shapes the way we experience the world, which in turn shapes the world itself.

Hillman also said "I’ve come to the conclusion that psychological language does do damage, it isn’t the language of the soul."

The language we use affects the psyche. The concepts we use affect the psyche. The unconscious schemas and assumptions and impressions we absorb affect the psyche.

If we persistently treat Psyche as a clinical problem, as a medicalized object, this is how we will come to relate to ourselves. This is how we think matters of the heart and mind are solved, is in the clinic, via medical procedure and medical personnel.

If we act as if knowledge of the collective psyche is best gained by creating graphs and charts and statistical models, we will come to act more and more like averages. We will come more and more to conform ourselves and reduce ourselves to a set of measurements — to understand ourselves as the type of thing that can be understood by measure.

If we treat people as if they are full of Original Sin, and nothing they've ever done or will ever do is redeemable, and their only hope is to surrender to someone else who did all the work, they will come more and more to see themselves as worthless, to see the world as centered around a handful of special people who are better than them and who can save them without their needing to do much except sit back and feel badly about themselves.

Our ideas about the psyche affect the psyche. These ideas matter.

And this is by no means just "ideas" in the intellectual sense. Under this umbrella also falls embodied schemas, cultural narratives, unconscious tendencies, neurotic patterns, family dynamics, attachment styles, so on and so forth. All these things that shape our relationship to the world and to the psyche. Our stance towards the psyche can shape the way the world operates — either to enforce an existing order, to pull back to an older one, or to create and propagate further ones.

For example: we could take this whole train of thought with a stance that all of this makes the psyche contingent and arbitrary. That human minds will bend towards any pattern they're fed often enough and widely enough, so it doesn't matter which patterns we bend to, we could all just pick a couple of them and get on the same page. Any page will do.

This stance will inevitably drive us into a nihilistic anything-goes doldrums. Even — and this is crucial — even if that stance is used to get everyone on the same page of some kind of perfect love-and-light, community, pulling together, sacred flourishing, everyone rises together type of worldview... even with the best intentions towards the best of contingent worldviews, because of the stance behind it, it will crash and burn and take us all with it.

Any stance that is distanced, mechanical, clinical, statistical — that wants to simply look and measure and poke and optimize — will eat away the soul. And the whole time, we will be told over and over again that we're being silly, there has been no confirmed measurement of any kind of "soul-eating" effect of this line of inquiry.

We could also take this train of thought with a stance that notices certain facts about people, and about our psyches, both individual and collective: namely, that people are, over and over again, driven towards love, beauty, and truth. These drives get distorted and perverted, true — but they are real, and they are deep deep deep in us.

We could also see clearly that there are certain stances towards the psyche, towards our shared humanity, that are more beautiful, and some stances that are more ugly. There are some stances that are more true (rather than merely more measurable), and others that are less true. Stances that are more loving, and stances that are less.

There are certain scents in the psychosphere that draw us in, that compel us — pheromonal pulls towards what nourishes us, towards what drives our growth and evolution, as individuals, as collectives, as species, as consciousness-unfolding-through-cosmos.

It matters that our ideas about the psyche — our implicit schemas and beliefs and impressions about what kind of beings we are, what kind of universe we inhabit — tend towards beauty and truth and love and goodness and the pheromonal draw of what drives consciousness higher.

It matters that we don't believe humans to be lazy or complacent or trapped in the spiderweb of statistical behavioral approximations. It matters that we don't believe our deepest needs are for convenience, ease, and control. It matters that we believe, and that we act and speak in accord with this belief, that the human psyche tends towards the sacred, towards beauty, towards truth and the unfolding aliveness of an evolving universe. That we believe that we are good, that we are enough, that we can do hard things and that our joy comes from attuning to and following the life force that courses through us.

James Hillman wrote another sentence, a very dense one that needs some unpacking, but that I absolutely love. He wrote, "Myths are the metaphors that translates libido into configurations."

Basically, that unpacks to something like "our implicit, embodied beliefs are the deciding factor in how our life energy gets arranged and deployed."

Which, to unpack the implications of that a little bit further: the way that life energy is arranged and deployed is like... the only thing that matters in this life. I'm not sure if I stand by that sentence a hundred percent, but like... idk, 85% no problem. The reason you're reading this article at all right now is because something inside you — something you didn't consciously choose — is telling you that it's somehow worthwhile to do. There's some story, some narrative, some configuration of life-energy inside of you that's telling you this is a worthwhile thing to do. I know that for a fact, because you're still reading this sentence.

This is the only reason you do anything, is because you hold some narrative or schema or libidinal pattern that drives you to expend energy on it. That's why wars are fought, it's why we buy one stapler versus another, it's why people break up or get married or chop down trees or invent new manufacturing protocols or buy Pringles.

So when we realize that our ideas about the psyche affect the psyche, and that the language and metaphors and stances we adopt can either damage the psyche or empower it — and when we notice that all of this is an essential part of how life-energy gets configured, which is THE essential part of how individuals and societies decide what types of actions it makes sense to take or not take in the world...

It matters that our beliefs about the psyche lead to a good, true, and beautiful psyche. It matters that we reject anything that nurtures the impression that the psyche is driven by convenience and power, that the psyche can be reduced to measurements, that the best ways to learn about the psyche are 3rd person methods rather than 1st person experience.

It matters that we know that Psyche is sacred, is beautiful, is powerful and poetic and unfolding towards the north stars we all hear calling us.

Language and magic are close enough bedfellows that they're arguably the same thing. (If you don't believe in magic, or don't know what I'm pointing at with the word here — just insert 'religion' instead and you'll be close enough.)

Sanskrit mantras aren't just prayers to a given god, or statements of devotion to a god — each mantra is that god, the presence of that god shaped into a particular effect.

In the Christian tradition, the Latin language has been heavily important over time. More directly, the hedge Christian tradition (western magic if ya nasty) has always placed a lot of important on both Latin and Greek mantras (spells if ya remain nasty).

The Norse and their runes. The Kabbalistic centrality of the Hebrew alphabet. Daoist talisman-scrolls, with careful calligraphy of powerful characters.

Language is a way of shaping and directing will and life-force, to the point where for most humans in most of history, it was clear that just speaking the right words in the right way could affect the world non-linearly, bending it by illegible cross-systemic means to bring about desired effects.

A couple things feel true to me here. One of them is that it's possible for entire cultures to create and "charge" certain methods of working with language to a particular effect. From my own experience, this resonates closely with why Sanskrit mantras seem to have pretty powerful effects for me, while Latin and Greek based ones don't so much. My woo-brain has an intuition that they can get charged like a battery, for as long as people and cultures are using the words with awareness and reverence and all that... but that the battery winds down when more energy is being taken than given. And in the western traditions, there's been a lot of taking and very little giving for a long time. The batteries just ain't all that charged.

The Sanskrit ones, on the other hand — they're still alive and actively charged in certain corners of their home culture, and many of them are alive and actively charged in a kind of spiritual diaspora. Eg- I've met people from a dozen different cultures who chant "Om Namah Shivaya" and take it pretty seriously. The charge is still there, both stored and active.

The other thing that feels true to me, probably the thing that's like, actually more relevant to the type of people who might be reading this (I always bury the relevant stuff down in the third or fourth section of an essay, remember that; if you think one of my essays is boring and dumb, remember that it's actually great and I'm just withholding from you because I want you to stay — it's sweet, in a way, and annoying in many more ways) — the relevant thing is that the process of language magic is obviously incredibly dynamic.

There's nothing specifically special about Sanskrit, or Latin, or Korean or whatever else, as far as their ability to hold and channel energetic charge, or their ability to shape the world. I don't know exactly what factors affect the process, but a couple factors feel relevant and obvious.

Like your tone and stance. There's a reason people tend to go with an arch, official tone when they drop into like, manifesting or willing something into being. Ask someone to do an impromptu ritual or prayer about something important to them, and they'll tend to fall into a bit of a King James Bible voice, or adopt some linguistic patterns reminiscent of an 1885 translation of the Iliad. The instinct there is to use language that they associate with reverence and seriousness. Good instinct. Taoist prayer petitions were written in the same format as government paperwork. — But I think there's a lot of flexibility that could be used here, where if your prayer/mantra is approached with an attitude that isn't just reverence, that's suitable for particular types of asks. Like idk, if I'm focusing my will towards more directness, aggression, energetic goal-seeking vibes... might be good to go a little less KJV and a little more MMA Announcer. A little less Victorian poetics and a little more drill sergeant.

There's also something here about the way that many ancient mantras were taken from even more ancient cultures, texts, songs, etc. A lot of Sanskrit mantras were taken from Upanishads and Vedas, and didn't start getting used as mantras until the authority and resonance of those texts was extremely established and ubiquitous. They were taking words and tones that were already deeply familiar and resonant to a huge number of people, and simply a) recognizing and b) utilizing the resonance that was already there to shape will in the direction of that resonance.

An intuitive example of this is the line from psalms, "though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." I've seen and heard — both in real life and in movies — people use these words when they need comfort, when they're afraid, when they need to be steadied and feel some trust that they are held by a higher power. That's not like, an invented mantra or effect. It was already there in the words for a lot of them. And the more it got used for that effect, the more it became possible and intuitive to use it for that effect.

The scattering and profusion of culture makes this more intimidating for recent things — we don't really have a shared culture anymore, we have a thousand algorithmic subcultures, where what's unquestionably famous to one person may never have been heard of by a dozen others, and vice versa. But still — there are some definite shared cultural touchstones that can be used. And we can also just accept that subcultural resonances can be a good starting point, even if they don't have the collective heft of like, a religious text whose sacredness is shared by entire generations of an entire society.

Famous song lyrics that have reverberated through a few decades are probably good, if any have an authentic resonance for you. I might use "The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind / The answer is blowing in the wind" from Bob Dylan to focus some energy and will and magic around... how to describe my sense there? Something like summoning in a receptivity to answers about life that are less literal and direct, more right hemisphere-y, more numinous, more felt-sense than concrete.

Poems that have stood the test of time are also great for this, or long-standing proverbs. Walt Whitman is a solid choice. "I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake." Excellent mantra for discovering your habitual mistakes and blindspots. Or Robert Frost, "The woods are lovely, dark and deep. / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep." It feels like there's something there for a mantra towards fortitude, integrity, and not getting distracted or pulled into mere peace and comfort at the cost of your honor.

This feels a bit more nightmarish to me, but uh, slogans almost certainly are ripe for language magic. That's basically what they're made for, is to stick out and constellate human energy in a memorable way. "Just do it." "Have it your way." "What happens in the hungry ghost realm stays in the hungry ghost realm." ...Some tweaks may be necessary sometimes.

What am I even talking about at this point?

Energy and will and life force are real, and the ways that they are constituted and constellated affects our behavior and the world (often in non-linear, trans-rational, magical ways).

Language is a powerful method of shaping energy and will and life force towards particular constellations, which always carries the potential to change behaviors and relationships and the world, even in magical ways.

People who take religion and magic seriously have, throughout history, also tended to take language very seriously in this domain.

We who come after them have tended to follow in their footsteps (repeating the same wording, even to the point of sticking with chanting dead languages for millennia), but it's also possible to play with the principles that led them to take those steps in the first place.

So... play with that? Play with it with all the deep seriousness that is inherent in deep play.

(The background of a lot of this, necessary context, is that I've had recent encounters with mantra-based traditions that made very clear to me that there's much more reality and effectiveness to mantra recitation than I had previously assumed or felt, and I'm still kinda figuring out how that fits into my model of reality to be honest.)

Okay, I think that's it. This is just me processing some new realities and trying to jostle my world-model to see where some stuff fits; stuff that I didn't think was real, and am a bit surprised to be needing to make room for in my world-model. Which is exciting!! It's always cool to fit something new into the world-model and see how it changes the way the whole system works, how the parts interact with each other, etc.

So yeah. Big takeaway is that River had some encounters with mantras that jostled his world and clarified some older experiences with language magic — and now he's taking the world-model apart and putting it back together and trying to see where some pieces fit. Which may involve chanting some Walt Whitman poems for awhile. Which is fine. And kind of great, actually.

if you have a bunch of money, money just continues to flow to you much more easily than to people who need it,, precisely because *needing* is an energy of lack that keeps the thing scarce — whether it's money or love or power or awareness or just about anything else

which is very frustrating in the domains where you do *need* something, and it's just legitimately hard for you to attract more than the bare minimum of it,,

but it can also be helpful to notice:

where are you rich? and how can you get even richer there? and is it possible to leverage that type of wealth into areas where you do have *need*?

a classic example here would be leveraging financial wealth into, for example, emotional wealth, by paying for access to top therapists, coaches, gurus, and whatever else might move the needle for you

another example could be something like being very rich in Presence, but having a *need* for Love;; if you cultivate that Presence and bring it into your search for Love, and are able to simply be Present with the people you meet, to be Present with the feelings and situations and interactions in potential partners, you won’t give off the stink of *need* to the other person, and will have much more success in finding a Loving partnership

or maybe you’re abundant in Friendship, but have a *need* for a better job. it’s easy to make friends when you already have friends, so you can certainly extend your social connections, and be a bit strategic about extending them more and more into the types of connections that can help you get the job you want.

not every type of wealth lends itself to this; not all of the exchange rates are reasonable; but the situation is the situation and there’s gotta be something to be done with the resources you have

the two most important parts seem to be a) reducing the sense of *need* that you give off — it’s not fair that it tends to ward off the exact thing you need, but that’s the situation; and b) using the rich-get-richer mechanic in your favor, noticing where you can get richer with ease, rather than over-focusing on what you lack

In his mid-30s, he “threw a schizophrenia” (his words), and was overcome with visions, with a flood of inner images — to which he later attributed the entirety of the work he is most known for. He said that his time with the inner images was the crucial bit, everything else came from that.

So when we talk and think using concepts like Archetypes, the Collective Unconscious, Active Imagination, the Transcendent Function, enantiodromia… what we’re doing is benefitting from the fruits of Jung’s shamanic initiation. We are taking advantage of the gifts he brought back from his journeys in the other world.

What stands out to me, having read The Red Book (his account of the inner journeys that led to his formation of depth psychology), and his published works is that you might not guess the presence of one from the other. Looking at his published books and intellectual frameworks, you might not guess they were the result of unsettling shamanic visions — and looking at his sequence of shamanic visions, you wouldn’t guess that their biggest effect on the world would come in the form of academic texts and analytic psychology.

The visions are full of conversations with the Soul, full of the spirit of the times and the spirit of the depths, full of Salome and Elijah and the spirit guide Philemon. There are floods and murders and deserts bursting into bloom.

It’s not that the academic work doesn’t contain mythic imagery, but in that context it’s treated much more at a distance. There are very few points where you’d guess that it was written by a man who had journeyed into the land of myth himself.

I’ve been thinking about this largely because I’ve been throwing a schizophrenia of my own. I haven’t talked much about my practice and inner world over the past year, but I’ve talked about the years of somatic meditation and imaginal journeying that led up to the past year (and that probably account for how I’ve been able to navigate my own Red Book situation as it unfolds).

As my own inner weirdness accelerates and blooms, I draw some lessons and some comfort from Jung’s example. Just because weird technicolor schizo-mythic stuff is going on, and just because it seems to be going somewhere and wants to be shared… that doesn’t mean it wants to be shared literally or uncritically. Jung didn’t have to build a system around his spirit guide Philemon, and I don’t necessarily have to write a book about a cosmic bison and the wave patterns in the body of Shiva. It’s fine to simply let the unfolding continue and follow where it goes — and it’s fine if where it ends up bears little resemblance to where it came from.

I may end up with something perfectly intelligible and respectable to share with people, when all is said and done — despite the process itself looking like a red-yarn conspiracy wall about consciousness & the gods & li patterns & attention & embodied myth & the humanities & yin-yang dynamics & worship as attention-craft & & & &

That’s a comforting thought, that this might all end up in a place of simplicity and practicality. Despite all the Pepe Silvie-ing.

There is a lead lining though, to be fair. I wouldn’t sell Jung’s approach as an unmitigated success. He made trade-offs. He knew this. For one, there’s this little tidbit:

Jung wasn’t a fan of the Jungians, it seems. He also said towards the end of the life that he had failed in his mission. His life had been a mission to remind humans that they have souls, and he felt that he had failed in this.

By couching his insights and boons in the frame and language of academic psychology, he successfully gave us all respectable ways to talk about the sacred, mythic currents that underly life and psyche and culture. But he also put these insights in a position to be drained of life, to be turned into bloodless vocabulary that drips from listless podiums at conferences and lecture halls. He took the living, pulsing blood of his journey into cosmic consciousness, and he brought smuggled it in to the home of the intellect, so the intellect could learn to respect it — but he also allowed it to be taken over and manhandled by the exact institutions where intellect is most disconnected from soul, from heart, from body, from humanity.

So there’s a lot to learn from and admire in Jung’s way of processing and spreading the insights of his shamanic initiation. But not all of the lessons I take are positive ones.

I’ve been pulling at a lot of threads, disentangling them from where they usually get knotted up, and weaving some of the disparate threads together again. Some of these threads have to do with things like

• Attention as an art form

• Yin and Yang

• Embodied myth

• Worship as a form of absorbed attention

• the Humanities as a way of training attention

• How attention patterns your soul

And some other stuff I won’t dig too deep into — but one of the more direct side trails that clarified out of all of this was the issue of patronage. I want to explain my view of what patronage is for, but first I have to give some basic rundown of the vision of arts and the humanities that I’m coming from. I’ll try to keep it brief.

The Shamanities

I don’t like that working title and I hope it doesn’t stick, but it does amuse me in a cutesy way, so here we are.

I’ve read a few defenses of the Humanities over the past few years (particularly the Humanities within institutional settings), and I gotta say, they all have the air of being unconvincing and half-hearted attempts that the authors themselves are subconsciously aware are unconvincing and half-hearted.

I just backspaced a section going over their arguments and saying why they don’t land, cuz idk, who wants to read that? I didn’t even enjoy typing it.

The core piece here is that there’s a vision of the Humanities that feels obvious to me, and it only works if the humanities are grounded in the sacred, in the metaphysical substrate of Reality and its inherent beauty, truth, and goodness.

I think I’ll be fleshing out this vision for the foreseeable future, but the broad strokes go something like:

>Giving absorbed, skillful, total attention to something affects your consciousness; it changes the patterns of your consciousness and brings them into closer alignment with the object of attention

>Jeffrey Kripal describes the Humanities as “the study of consciousness encoded in culture”; that is, the study of the ways that cosmic consciousness has been filtered through human consciousness and left its imprint on the many cultural artifacts left to us, whether literature or music or history or art or…

>It’s easy for this study to become a purely intellectual pursuit (like it mostly has in its current forms), so any intellectual study should be accompanied by deep embodied, wholehearted contemplative practice as well; only with this training is it even possible for this kind of deep absorbed attention to fruitfully re-pattern your being

>What we’ve sometimes called “the gods” or “archetypes” are, mostly, li patterns in consciousness — more precisely, they tend to be recognizable and repeating patterns in consciousness that guide human lives and cultures, lead to fruitful lives on individual and collective levels, and that express evolutionary impulses in consciousness on the individual and collective levels.

>Most of the great cultural artifacts the Humanities study are artifacts that carry these patterns, these gods, these archetypes — and by absorbing your attention in them and letting their patterns resonate through you, you contribute both to the unfolding of the being you were meant to be, and to the unfolding of the living culture you participate in. (Side note, but worth saying: a culture is, in this view, a form of intelligence that guides the life of the hyper-organism we are all cells of; so contributing to the unfolding of a living culture is contributing to the aliveness and unfolding of the vaster organism, the vaster Life we’re all part of.)

Okay, so having gone full woo, let’s just re-state the core of the Humanities a little more directly here: The Humanities (or, if I’ve wandered too far for that name to fit, we can go with the Tantric Humanities or the Shamanities for now) — whatever we call them, their purpose is not memorizing or navel-gazing about cultural artifacts like books and music and whatever else. Their purpose is to effect the transformative re-patterning of human consciousness, of human souls, to align them with their longed-for unfolding into the evolutionary impulse of Life itself.

Some of the tools that are useful for that are literature, history, music, art, history, philosophy, etc — but only when they are approached from a place of wholehearted, embodied contemplation and lived experience. Approaching them as an intellectual endeavor divorced from those other qualities is poison. And right now, the institutional Humanities are poisoned. (Honestly, the indie Humanities are poisoned too — they’re mostly a slightly loosened-up and/or sour grapes version of the institutions they take their cues from.)

Okay, hopefully that’s enough on that for the moment.

Onward to patronage.

Patronizing the Patterning of Consciousness

I mentioned the anodyne defenses of the Humanities and Arts up above, and it’s relevant again here. It affects the patronage of the arts, because a lot of people want to patronize something worthwhile, they can sense something possible and vital in the work of the arts and humanities… but they’re held back by this nagging question of whether it’s all just a vanity project, or some attempt at preserving something that’s dying, or some other lightly quixotic quest that’s more of a charity/hobbyist concern than something vital and necessary.

Which, I mean, fair. There’s definitely some value in preservation and in projects that do nothing but create a bit more beauty and interest in the world — but it’s hard to really get pumped about them.

In my view of the Cosmic Humanities, patronage isn’t focused on money, on preservation, on vanity projects — it’s a functional and necessary role in the patterning of evolutionary consciousness.

Gah, even here there’s too much to explain — we’d have to get into li patterns and the gods and the ways that different people are naturally drawn to pattern their souls with different gods/patterns…

For now, I can just say this: some people are Called to pattern their souls in ways that take deep, absorbed attention to particular things — and the way the world works (or their psychology works, or this culture works, or their family history, or or or), it interferes very directly with that Calling.

Two things to note about this:

1. There’s such a thing as Desirable Difficulty — hardships and frictions that force us to face things that need facing, to untangle knots that need untangling, that force us to get rid of what doesn’t work and become skilled at what does. That’s not what I’m talking about here. Not all frictions and difficulties are good like this, some of them just get in the way. Those are the ones I’m talking about removing.

2. The kind of Calling I’m talking about is not, remember, only personal. It’s also collective. What we’re dealing with here are the desires of Consciousness itself. The evolutionary intelligence of Reality itself, guiding each person into alignment with the part of the Pattern they’re here to embody. We are all implicated in this; we are all connected in the fascia of Reality’s body; we are all threads in the single fabric of Buddha-Nature, there’s no way to tug one thread without tugging at the whole fabric — and there’s no way to untangle one thread without smoothing the entire fabric.

Given all of this, the role of patronage emerges, it seems to me, pretty naturally.

Patronage is the act or habit of removing undesirable obstacles to the patterning of consciousness, both for the good of the individual/group in question, and for the good of the entire living fabric of evolving consciousness.

This is especially necessary in cases where there are direct mismatches between the way someone is Called to pattern consciousness, and the way our culture does or doesn’t value that patterning process.

This has long been a habit with monks and other religious institutions, for example. Some monasteries sustained themselves by providing the kind of value (economic value) their societies wanted — making wine, or weaving bamboo mats to sell, or something along those lines — but in large part, those who dedicated their lives to this kind of Calling depended on others to remove their main undesirable obstacles (homelessness, lack of food, etc).

There are many cases where there is no mismatch, and where patronage isn’t much required. For example, if someone’s natural Calling is to put their attention into competitiveness, force, power, strength… our world has plenty plenty plenty of places for that impulse to go and be well taken care of. Those folks are going to be able to pattern their consciousness according to their Calling without worrying about feeding themselves or their families. Or someone whose calling is towards Love, nurturing, intimacy, care, living a life where the people around them flourish — that type of person is also not going to have much trouble finding a place in this world. —There will still be challenges, of course, life isn’t a lazy river for anyone; but their challenges will only more rarely be of the type that patronage can alleviate. (Although… subject for another time, but note to self I do want to dig into cases like this under my new definition of patronage — removing undesirable obstacles to eg- living from love; hmm.)

In other cases, there’s a mismatch, but only for a period of time. There’s a hump that needs to be gotten over, a period where a protective cocoon is needed, or a mama kangaroo’s pouch — or just a ferocious friend to guard the mouth of a cave while you convalesce. Endless are the cases where — to put it one way — an archetype can survive in the world perfectly well, but the transitional form into that archetype cannot.

I think these factors change from culture to culture, and time period to time period — the specific qualities and cracks of different cultures have different sharp edges and abandoned places. We can only really worry about our own, for now. But one problem seems to be that our model of patronage is kind of stuck on the model left over from previous times and cultures.

I ate lunch and lost the thread a bit, but let’s wrap up

I am, as is my habit at In•Star, rambling and uncertain where exactly I’m going with this. I took a food break and now feel like I’ve lost the threads I was toying with, they’ve just fallen apart in my hands.

Anyway, two things come up to finish with.

First, just re-stating: the Humanities, at their best, are about re-patterning human consciousness through absorbed attention — and this re-patterning is an expression of consciousness’s urge to evolve through us. —Patronage, in this framework, is the removal of undesirable difficulties that get in the way of this patterning of consciousness.

Second, I’d love for some more refreshed and refreshing ideas of what patronage looks like. We live in a culture where the economy is our god, and the universal solvent for many many bottlenecks is money, so the tried-and-true method of giving money to those who are patterning consciousness in unique ways is just going to be a big part of the mix, no way around that.

But I want to emphasize that there are many other ways to remove such obstacles and provide space for the unfolding of evolutions in consciousness. I’ll just give a few examples, drawn from my own experience, experiences friends have told me about, and whatever else comes to mind while I type.

• Hype-bending: Even when I can’t patronize someone directly with resources, I can in many cases hype-bend for them a bit. If they write, I can share their writing in places where it might not otherwise be shared. If they make videos, I can send one or two of them to a friend I think they might resonate with. If their Calling has given them a unique skill I think would be useful elsewhere, I might be able to set them up running a workshop for my company, directing them some much-needed rent money. The only limits here are creativity.

• Skill Sharing: One example I see often is contemplatives who run their own business to make ends meet and make time for their Calling — but then the day to day of running a business scatters their time and fractures the attention that is the exact thing they need to be Patterning. A somewhat common form of help I see is people offering help to these folks, help with task management, with marketing, with design work, whatever else. (Note, this is often very beneficial for the skill-patron as well — in order to do these tasks well, they have to have discussions with this person they admire about what is most important and essential in their work, which is often quite clarifying.)

• Socializing: sometimes, a non-obvious bottleneck in someone’s work is that they’re too cooped up, not spending enough time with friends, or not prioritizing making friends. If you’re a gifted social hub of a person, you can literally patronize the unfolding of consciousness by connecting people and helping them get some much needed human interaction and care. The effects on softening up their awareness and making it easier to re-pattern can’t be trivialized.

• Making Space: If you have a guest house or a cabin up north, and someone you admire might benefit from using it for a few weeks, to work on a project or give them a fresh space to think and feel from, or whatever else, try offering the space to them. If you know someone who’s running a residency or a fellowship or a cohort you think someone would be a good fit for, put in a good word for them, see if you can pay for part of their stay, or finagle some aid for them. If there’s any way you can invite someone who’s doing the work of their Calling into a space that would serve that Calling, put a little sweat into seeing if you can make it happen.

• Uhhh, Rubies?: Who doesn’t like rubies? Give them some precious gems and gold coins, go real old school with it you Medici mfer, lean into the vibe.

• Literally just reflect them to themselves: Paths and Callings like this can be challenging and more than a little crazy-making. The self-doubt can hit hard and strong, and it can simmer in the background over time. It’s a lot. And it can constrict consciousness quite a bit. And one thing that loosens it up and allows things to move again… is literally just hearing from people about what they see in you, what they see you doing. It doesn’t have to be high praise or pandering or anything like that — literally just saying “I see you out there doing xyz, and it feels like the right thing for you.” Something that simple can open up someone’s whole month, let them believe a little more in what they’re here to do. (Only partly related, but I’ve been thinking of doing a series of portraits on In•Star, brief personal essays on people I love and people I see doing what they’re here to do in the world, people who I want to share my experience of them with the world. Feels like something I want to try.)

Okay that’s all I’ve got today. The whole New Humanities, re-patterning consciousness, evolutionary intelligence thing is an ongoing concern I’ll be working to clarify, but at least I got some of the clumsier broad strokes out there today, and hopefully this vision of what patronage is and is for makes some sense in light of that.

You’re of course welcome to do a little old school patronage, if you’re into it. If you want to mail me a little sack of rubies, dm me and I’ll get you an address. If you want more info on re-patterning consciousness to align with the evolutionary intelligence of the cosmos, just follow my twitter, I’ll be ranting about it from time to time before it inevitably crystallizes into a couple of smoother essays.

Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with the boundaries themselves.

This quality of finite and infinite games can get tricky.

There’s a move where someone will be playing a finite game, and then move the goalposts outward to some place beyond that finite game. It can be a way of dissociating, or a clever move to avoid the embarrassment of losing — a way of overturning the chess board to avoid a checkmate.

Even if it’s genuine, if you try to play with the boundaries of the game itself (its rules and structures, the way the game is done) from a position of being behind within the finite game… it’s going to look like you’re just avoiding a loss.

The opposite move doesn’t always work either, trying to move beyond the game from a winning position. The more likely criticisms there are along the lines of “you wanna pull the ladder up behind you,” or “of course you can say the game’s rules don’t matter, you already won!”

If you start from within a finite game and try to crack open its boundaries to open up into an infinite one, it will very often leave a bad taste in the mouths of your fellow finite game players.

With, I think, one big exception.

If you’ve been clearly, loudly, exuberantly all about the play the whole time, rather than all about the game… I think you can get away with it.

If you’ve built up a reputation as one of those people who just loves to play the game, whether you win or you lose, and who’s gracious to everyone else whether they win or lose… then it’s easier to take you seriously when you expand from a finite game to an infinite one.

It goes down easier when you stop playing within the boundaries and start playing with the boundaries.

I don’t have a ton of direct applications or advice for this right now, but it feels important.

The importance of play might be more vital than I expected, I think. Centering your life on play in multiple domains, especially domains that are often deadly serious, I think it opens up more futures for you and the people around you.

There’s something deeply important about joyful, exuberant play for the sake of play. Even and especially when you seem crazy, grinning and high fiving even when you’re losing.

It appears to me we're opening up something — if not a new type of shaman, then at least new possibilities and importance for a type of shaman that hasn't had them before.

Shamans are, primarily, for the community. A shaman tends to the wholeness of their folk. That's the job. There's any number of ways they do this, but traditionally, the job is done within their local community (or, in certain cases, in a local community they travel to). They heal the people of their village, propitiate the gods and spirits of the land around them, journey into the ~spirit realms that most closely affect their local land and people. There's certain roles they play in the making-whole of the world-soul, having less to do with their specific local context — but even that work is mostly done from where they are locally situated.

Nowadays, that's still important and vital; we still need people tending to the wholeness of the folk around them. But as the social situation has atomized, as people have gone on the move, become more mobile, become accustomed to fewer social ties and less community connection — as modernity has developed, new possibilities (and necessities) have come up.

I've thought about this a fair amount because I can feel it; my role, as I might expect from a nomadic existence like mine, doesn't seem to have a lot to do with my local surroundings. I admire people who work deeply with their local community, with the land, the patch of earth they find themselves on, and the people they find themselves surrounded by — but that doesn't seem to be my role.

For me, the area of focus is less on any specific people than on a particular frequency. I have to find the frequency, live there, and broadcast from there — and My People are the ones who hear that frequency, who reverberate and resonate with it, and follow it back to me. Those are the folk whose wholeness I'm meant to tend.

This has led to me having a pretty widely distributed global network of friends, allies, clients, and partners who align with me, who can hear the same frequency — but who don't necessarily share much with one another as far as location, demographics, or even the specifics of what wants to be tended to within them.

I think this capacity of the shaman archetype — the ability to find wider audiences and reach the exact people that resonate with their frequency — is a pretty new capacity that's only been starting to wake up the past couple decades or so. Writing opened up a certain amount of it over the past centuries, but not enough for the archetype to really stretch its legs and get to work.

There's something important here that I'm not quite expressing and not quite sure I can express yet.

It's connected to the frame shift necessary for field shamanism to happen in the first place — this frame shift from the people to the frequency. A shift from the local conditions of the field over to the field itself, and the way it's resonating. There's something important and deep happening there; the field harmonics being primary, and the people you tend to being a part of that field and its resonances.

Something about the way that tending to the wholeness of folks is both a method of tending to the field, and a byproduct of tending to the field. There's a unity there. A smoothness. A cleanness of the Work.

This connects to a larger worldview shift wherein a given person's conscious ego is a very very small part of who they are, and arguably a fairly illusory part. This type of wholeness-tending isn't for the ego — it may naturally lead to a more appropriate and balanced ego, but the work exists for the whole, not that one small part of the wholeness.

By having a focus on tending to the field through tending to the people resonating in that field, there's a magic that happens: the conscious ego of both the helper and the helped can fade into the background more. They don't matter so much in this container — and they can accept and even be excited by not mattering so much in the larger process. Which is huge.

In moments of greatest resonance and wholeness, the ego is like a lighthouse keeper on a cliff, looking out at waves the size of mountains — not resenting the sea for not being about this lighthouse or its keeper, but grateful and in awe at the vastness and strength of the world around them, the forces that shape their place in it.

I'm ranting, I'm on a tangent, I'm figuring this out in real time — is there something here? I can feel something I'm touching beneath words, and it matters deeply, but I'm not sure if the words are carrying what they need to carry. I might not know until I revisit this piece in a few days. That's fine, we'll call this a start.

Hey! I increasingly feel like I’m following some very important threads these days, and that as they come together, they’re braiding into something big.

This process is taking time, energy, resources, and unexpected detours. If you’re interested in supporting or patronizing work like this, please either contact me, join my Patreon , or give a one-time gift that feels like a good expression of the value you’ve gotten from my work.

You wouldn’t believe what a difference this makes, truly. Thank you 🙏