2026-02-07 03:22:52
I used to rush across the threshold of years, eager to unwrap the gift of fresh beginnings. Big goals and a whole new me. I believed in being busy, too. I don’t have time, I wore that like a badge of honor. Not this year. This January, I paused.
I let myself be suspended in winter’s timeless womb, a formless depth in which I did not have to be someone new just yet. For a moment, I let myself be beyond definition. And I realized why I had shied away from this liminal space. It was more than the nagging voice of guilt, the gnawing sense that I should be moving, should be productive, should show results.
When we let ourselves dissolve, we leave behind our defenses, our excuses and escapes, all those carefully curated distractions. In the void I am alone with all that I am.
I noticed the thorny ranks of my entanglements, my suffocating contradictions. This one above all: that I want to do good but also do well. I feel the shadow of the future, yet I must make a life now, somehow. I have to play the game in front of me, don’t I?
Your old life was a frantic running from silence. — Rumi
A couple of weeks ago, I visited a friendly couple who live off-grid on the edge of the vast Gila National Forest. The woman was learning new “stone age skills” and I joined to help prepare a bison hide.
Before it could be turned into the world’s coziest sleeping bag, the rawhide had to be softened. It was stretched in a wooden frame, weighed down, scraped, and treated with a softener. Traditional methods include tannin from tree bark and animal brain. My friends worked with egg yolk. I found them crawling on all fours, on the hide, hands and feet smeared in egg slime. I picked up a scraper and helped work the thick hide.
This needs to be done multiple times before the softened hide is smoked and, finally, made into a garment. We’re talking days and days of work. Who has time for that? Not me. I return to my world of books, Substacks, and Zoom calls. I return to my games.
As a teenager, video games were my escape. Even as a depressed financial professional I occasionally binged on bloody battles and fantastic worlds. I haven’t touched them in years, but I still play. When I open my laptop, I check the market. I scan charts, wait for a hunch, for a bet to place.
As an analyst I took investing seriously. Number crunching bored me, yet I was deeply invested in my identity as a professional: hard-working, diligent, thoughtful. I was a walking paradox, a romantic in the spreadsheets. I’ve left all that behind. I’ve lost interest in finding “the truth,” the “true value” of anything behind layers and layers of narrative. For the first time, I move without pretense, almost with ease. Money feels like a game.
Have I turned into a financial nihilist? Is this my cynical embrace of late-stage casino capitalism? Or has this always been my nature? Have I always been a gambler at heart, like so many? Either way, I play. But of course, the market is more than a game. Its chain of red and green numbers wraps itself around the world. Eventually, it reaches all the way back to your front door.
While we scraped the hide, my friends told me that mining prospectors had scouted the hills. Claims had been filed. I learned that National Forest land can be leased for more than cattle grazing and timber. Mining is possible, too.
I’ve seen the scars of extraction on this trip. In Butte, Montana I danced at the folk festival downtown, a stone’s-throw from the mining pit turned toxic lake (infamous for killing snow geese). I am spending my winter in Silver City, New Mexico, another old mining town. On the way here from California I passed a few open pits, greyish blotches dotting Google Maps.
I picture my friends in front of their trailer, among the elk and bears who frequent their property, all of them watching hungry excavators and house-sized trucks rumble down the dirt road. I imagine the hills being carted off to make iPhone ingredients. I hope that won’t happen. Which of course makes me a massive hypocrite.
First, because I am a happy consumer of metals — as are my friends who own phones, laptops, vehicles, and so forth. Nobody wants to see their forest ravaged. But our fingers already dance on the remains of someone else’s pristine wilderness.
Worse, part of me lives in that other world, senses the matrix of money permeating everything. I know why the prospectors showed up. I’ve seen the charts. “To maintain global 3% GDP growth, we have to mine the same amount of copper in the next 18 years as we mined in the last 10,000 years (combined),” mining CEO Robert Friedland explained.
Make no mistake, I’m not saying Capitalism bad! or Mining CEOs evil! They get paid to deliver what we want. Or what we think we want. In any event, what we collectively pay for. With every purchase and every investment, we give our orders.
The machine is hungry and I carry the cursed knowledge that the rational and profitable thing has been to hitch a ride. I watch as my little pile of money turns into a tiny wheel in the bulldozer that transforms the world.
“The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.” ― Black Elk
Last June, I spent a week in Sturgis, South Dakota on the edge of the Black Hills. Those hills had been Sioux territory until General Custer found there “much of the yellow metal that makes the Wasichus crazy,” as Lakota holy man Black Elk recalled. “And that is what made the bad trouble.”
The bad trouble: a gold rush that created the infamous town of Deadwood (now a historical downtown and casino). The Sioux were forced to give up their hills. Custer and his men died north of Sheridan, Wyoming where I crossed the gorgeous Bighorn Mountains. It felt to me like South Dakota’s air carried the land’s cursed history.
Half a year later, Black Elk’s words triggered me for I am what he called a “Wasichu,” a white person (possibly derived from greedy or chatty). But I am not crazy for the yellow metal, I object. Don’t lump me in with those people! Then I sit in the stillness of winter and notice.
I don’t take the market as gospel, far from it. But do I not accept it as a truth? Do I not hear the words “a bull market in gold” and consider that a real thing? Am I not paying attention? Do I not care? Does my life not reflect the deeply ingrained belief that the world has a price? If you looked closely, could you not spot a glimmer in my eyes like a gold nugget hiding among the rock?
I wonder how I would feel without the comforting layers of separation. What if instead of pushing a button to buy digital paper, say a gold mining ETF, what if I had to carve the metal out of mother earth myself? What if the button blew up the hill, flattened the trees and exiled the birds, burned the fuzzy squirrelly things that live among the roots? Could I ever look at my wealth without tasting a hint of blood on my tongue?
There’s no reason to feel bad, you might say. If we don’t get the gold out of those hills, somebody else will. What is profitable will be done. The market does not care what I think or whether I passively participate by owning a few shares. I mean no harm, I assure myself, I’m just looking for a fair return. I’m just trying to make a living, buy a house one day. I am not the problem.
I wonder if that’s what Black Elk meant by ‘crazy’. Not just wide-eyed greed and violence, but an entire way of being, a mind that pretends not to be trapped in a story of separation. A mind that presents its perspective as inevitable, irreversible, and superior.
This mind believes in dominion and ownership, not belonging. It sees earth not as home or an organism, but as a collection of ingredients for the value chain. It does not question its right to reshape without restraint. It could never ask a tree for permission before picking a leaf or honor the spirit after a successful hunt. It mocks the ideas of wholeness and harmony for they undermine its identity.
There are certain truths this mind cannot face and occasionally its secret anguish turns into violence against life itself. This mind rules our world. We eat its fruit every day, good and bad, prosperity and sickness.
“Our people knew there was yellow metal in little chunks up there,” Black Elk said, “but they did not bother with it, because it was not good for anything.” We on the other hand can’t imagine letting the gold stay in the hills. Our stories are too powerful, our hunger too vast. If three percent growth requires as much copper as has been surfaced in all history, we ask where to build the mines. This dream of ours may haunt us, yet we dare not wake up.
And that’s why we a-void the void. There, stripped of everything, we dissolve back into primordial unity. Should we be surprised if this communion does not feel like a homecoming, not like the warm womb of the mother goddess, but like bathing in an oily sludge of inconvenient truths?
It’s hard for us to find peace in the void, dangling naked and bare before the cosmic eye. This is a shame because any way forward will arise in that shapeless space, that pause between breaths that births life after life, season after season, world after world.
There we may reclaim our sense of belonging, taste the truth behind the mask of madness. But the gate to this realm is guarded by a thousand unclaimed griefs. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
“How many events would have to converge to bring us into such a point of radical desperation so that we reach out and are willing to make choices that we’re not willing to make now.” — Chris Bache
Chris Bache called humanity’s present form “transitional,” merely a step on the path to a further evolutionary pivot. “We are cells in a superorganism intent on rapid change.” This development, he believes, will happen under the mounting pressure of global crises.
I think he is right. Every attempt to think our way to a different future seems futile. Life is simply too good to do anything but vaguely dream. As a writer, I would like to face the question. But as a Wasichu, it feels like contemplating the death of who and what I am. My tongue dances with the idea, then it forks. I am hopelessly in and of this world.
It seems to me those with eyes to see and ears to hear are damned to live in tension, torn between the foreboding that this way of life is heading toward its conclusion, yet unable to extricate themselves from the process. “There are no new beginnings until everybody sees that the old ways need to end,” Kae Tempest sings. How long will that take? Years? Decades? Generations? I have no idea, which drives me crazy. In the meantime, we want to thrive and enjoy our precious lives. And we should!
This can be a hard truth to hold. I too enjoyed myself on the march to cataclysm. I too purchased the illusion of absolution with acts of charity and recycling. I too sat on the throne of bones and swiped on my phone. I too accepted the rape of a sacred place as an immutable fact of life.
I dream of the void’s ancient solace. I ache to hear the cosmic hum, the holy OM. But my stillness trembles under distant highways. I taste the ash of a great fire. My ears ring with the high-pitch frequency of the world-wide electric brain. I am a mind-blind Wasichu staggering through the stony desert of my mind. I find no innocence here and no peace, only degrees of connection and complicity.
I know I cannot grasp the whole. The endings I sense are movements that lead to beginnings, cosmic exhalations, waves in a distant shape of mute perfection. I too must ride this breath, be this breath, while I am here.
In the void I feel like that bison hide: suspended and weighed down, scraped, smothered and thinned until I soften, soften, soften.
I yearn to let myself collapse like a star, to sink into the nothingness beyond struggle.
Who has time to prepare a bison hide? People who make time, who care about the experience, who honor the source of their blessings. Also, people who can, who have mostly checked out of the world of clocks and feeds and achievement.
And even they can’t escape. Even they studied the contracts, made sure to buy the mineral rights along with the property. Wouldn’t want to wake up with a drilling rig next to the window one day. Even they pay the global supply chain to deliver solar panels and batteries made with metals minded god-knows-where. Even they live in their entanglement.
Who has time to prepare a bison hide? Not me, staring at my laptop, trying to prove I have something valuable to say. Not me, hoping the market will drop a golden crumb.
I’ve made no life-changing money in gold and silver. Vertical charts make me uneasy. Guess I’m still a chicken, not a born trader. That’s okay. It’s just a game. I like this new ease, but I know moving with the flow can’t be healthy if the flow itself is not. And it often feels like I play for a future that may never come.
Through the open kitchen window, I hear the woodpecker who frequents the trees outside the house. “Theirs is the same religion as ours,” Black Elk said about the birds. And he meant it. He lived it. Not me. I watch from behind the glass. I am divided, as always, between worlds. Part trees, part screens.
— Frederik
“How many events would have to converge to bring us into such a point of radical desperation so that we reach out and are willing to make choices that we’re not willing to make now.” — Chris Bache
2026-01-09 03:28:24
New Year in Silver City, New Mexico. Heavy clouds hang over the town at the edge of the Gila National Forest. The morning is chilly, the air smells of rain. Water drips from the roof over the porch. I don’t mind. December was sunny and this grey overcast reminds me of home. It matches my mood, the feeling of bearing the weight of the world.
My phone knows me, feeds me. I get images of the flattened Gaza, excavators tearing through forests in Indonesia, Chinese fishing fleets emptying the oceans, news of war, cruelty, and environmental destruction. “Everyone knows the list of challenges we are facing,” Chris Bache writes in LSD and the Mind of the Universe. “Subtract a few, add a few; cumulatively, the list is overwhelming.”
I go for a walk in the empty riverbed running through town. Gravel and dry leaves crunch under my sneakers. Who is going to save us from this mess?
“I believe that the problems coming at us are too large to be solved by egoic awareness, even well-intentioned, collectively organized egoic awareness.
The ego of the private self built our divided world and is being consumed by the fires that are consuming this world.” — Christopher Bache, LSD and the Mind of the Universe
Who is going to save us from this mess? The question reflects a comforting assumption: if there is a crisis, a hero will rise to the challenge.
Yet I’ve never felt drawn to superhero stories. To me the world looked strange and messy, a jungle of systems and rules, humans bound by incentives and illusions, lost in the labyrinth, tricked by three devils, bulldozed by history. I felt drawn to stories of those who mastered the game. I fantasized about making a big pile of money and escaping to freedom. Every man for himself. But I’ve watched winners become the system, chained to the game they won a lifetime ago. I’ve watched identities dissolve and merge into our mighty Ouroboros, our machine of self-consumption.
I don’t have the kind of bank account you could build an identity on. While that creates constraints and anxieties, it also offers freedom. Fewer chains to the status quo. Less weight during the jump into the unknown.
In New Mexico I’ve met people who live off the grid, in a trailer on the edge of vast wilderness. They drive into town to get water. Bears stroll across their property. How many egg yolks does it take to prepare a bison hide? How do you turn it into a sleeping bag? I don’t know, but they do. I dip in and out of nature like a skittish deer. I cherish hot water, I write, I trade stocks. I still play the game. I find myself between worlds, unsure of everything. And I have time to wonder.
What if no heroes will show up? Joshua Schrei argued that the quest for collective salvation is too heavy of a burden for any individual. It’s a weight for the gods. The answers to our troubles live on higher planes of consciousness. Maybe any attempt to save the world is a paradox, like trying to lift a boulder and yourself at the same time. What if it’s the wrong question? Does the world need saving?
Let’s say we ruin the planet, turn it into a factory for AI slop, parking lots full of discarded phones, a mute necropolis of the species who used to share it with us. A depressing thought. But didn’t a meteor wipe out the dinosaurs? That wasn’t the end, just a climactic movement in the cosmic cycle of birth and death. A tragedy for team reptile, the seed of triumph for the warm-blooded. Do we have to mess it up for something else to be born?
“There is a structural relationship between the self-interest and shortsightedness that has created this crisis and the nature of the ego itself,” Bache writes. He believes the crisis is inevitable, necessary even. It’s the catalyst to “shatter our psycho-spiritual isolation” and “bring forward an awakening of common ground within us.” It’s not a catastrophe, it’s a threshold, ChatGPT might suggest while we build data-temples the size of Manhattan.
On my walk I pass an agave plant. This is the first time I live in the desert and the landscape still stuns me. Don’t rush past me, it seems to whisper. Look. Nothing has been solved, but my attention shifted. Motion lifted the heaviness, burned through fog like the morning sun. Behind it I find the magic of creation.
“Attention is the beginning of devotion.” as my friend Rohan likes to quote Mary Oliver.
Why does this year feel different? Am I overanalyzing the winter blues? Projecting my pain onto the world? Or is there a heaviness running along the strands of the world soul through every heart?
Part of the answer, I suspect, is that I give myself more permission to feel. I used to close my eyes and ears. I didn’t want to feel my feelings, let alone those of the collective. I felt less pain simply because I felt less. Over the course of years, I cracked open.
I dial into one of Joe Hudson’s free zoom calls and bawl my eyes out in sympathy. It’s the same process nearly every time: someone arrives for a “coaching.” They are wrapped up inside their story, observing from the safety of the intellect. “I think.” Patiently, Joe guides them toward the heart, past the obstructions and blockages, to truths that have been avoided, ignored, judged, and dismissed (a powerful moment I watched live this summer).
Joe taught me that the emotions we avoid run our lives. Maybe that’s what this is about. A lot of thinking to avoid what it feels like being with the world as it is. What if the world does not need saving but loving attention?
Isn’t there a kind of freedom in not being able to fix our crises in our current state of fragmented consciousness? What if instead of scrambling to find The Answer, we become part of the process answering itself? What if before rushing to change things, we re-learn to consciously participate in the cosmic movement?
“The way we get through those super challenging times,” Chris Bache said during a private conversation, “is by affirming the deepest realities of these truths; that our nature is divine and imperishable in essence.” Maybe we can’t save the world, but we can create spaces of connection, healing, and beauty. We can remind each other of our true nature, re-connect with the whole. We can rescue our souls from the glittering maze of sanctified unconsciousness.
What if the more ominous things look, the more we anchor in the heart-field, in gratitude, compassion, generosity, and forgiveness? What if the right actions flow naturally from that place, out of greater awareness, out of the dissolution of old patterns? As within, so without.
That’s not a hero’s journey, but a healing journey. What if nothing more is needed to allow a greater intelligence to do the work through us?
See you down the road.
— Frederik
2025-12-24 00:27:46
Anybody else feel heavy these days?
I do. I mean heavy. Like, end of the world heavy.
I couldn’t even write about it. It was stuck in my body like concrete poured into my limbs. It took an hour of breathwork, sobs and ugly crying, to move what had been frozen.
See, I had been shaming myself for feeling down. I am in sunny middle-of-nowhere, New Mexico, with food, a car, and access to nature. Plus a demonic little box with more entertainment and information than is good for anyone. What more do you want?
But this had nothing to do with my material comforts. I felt a weight of the soul.
In a way the material comforts made it worse. I wouldn’t want to give them up, but they remind me that I am indebted to the system of prosperity that, by and large, is running the planet into the ground. Oops. Wasn’t supposed to say that.
Anyway. That’s what it felt like. Heavy and ominous. Things coming to a head.
When will we sit down for our banquet of consequences? This decade? Later this century? I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to be there for the cataclysm to shiver in its shadow. You don’t have to watch the tree fall. It’s enough to feel its rot, to notice that the structures of support keep weakening. You don’t have to be pummeled by disaster, war, or state-sanctioned kidnapping campaigns to feel their effects. The pain ripples through our collective tissue.
In LSD and the Mind of the Universe Christopher Bache described his series of psychedelics-induced ego deaths. Each took him to higher levels of consciousness. Notably, his individual ego died to experience “humanity as a single organism with intelligent networks running through it.” Individual minds appeared to him “as nodes in the network of the species-mind, each of us fractally mirroring selective themes of this larger consciousness.”
We are all bound together and subtly affected by the collective experience. Is it any surprise then that many of us are feeling heavy right now?
There is no shortage of people writing and talking about crises and confrontations. We’re surrounded by the evidence. It is remixed into emotional pornography and algorithmically fed into our veins. We drown in it.
What we don’t have is answers. Like animals we sense a tsunami coming, only there is no hill for us to run to. All we can do, it seems, is to point our fingers at the dark clouds hovering over the water.
Bache too saw our ailing world. Only in his visions the future “global systems crisis triggered by a global ecological crisis” appeared necessary.
Bache was shown that states of “extreme suffering” would prompt the human species-mind to exhibit “nonlinear capacities,” namely “the capacity for rapidly accelerated change, heightened creativity, and higher self-organization.” In other words, enormous pressure would crystallize a jump in our evolution towards a more unified consciousness.
On that higher level, a new way of being would emerge. Until then, locked into the mental prison of our atomized existence, we merely grasp at straws.
I’m not gonna lie, the book can be a depressing read. When Bache mentions a collective death-rebirth in “the next several decades, perhaps the next hundred years,” he is not speaking metaphorically.
“There was less and less for people to hold on to,” he writes, “fewer givens that they could assume—how they would live, where they would live, what they would do for a living, how society was organized, what could be possessed. The world as they knew it was falling apart. The level of alarm grew in the species field until eventually everyone was forced into the melting pot of mere survival.”
One vision disturbed him so much, he walked around “feeling like someone walking around Hiroshima a week before the bomb was dropped.” Frankly, I suspect that he omitted many upsetting details.
His sessions included periods of intense purification and pain, including a hellscape he called the ‘Ocean of Suffering.’1 I had heard that exact term years ago when a female healer described a psychedelic experience of her own. Waves of collective suffering flowed through her. Neither she nor Bache seemed to regret the experience. It seemed like the price of admission to higher realms of awareness.
I wonder if that is what we are sensing today: that the answers to our unholy mess lie on the other side of a terrifying period of purification.
We stand in the wet sand, among piles of trash, listening to the choking birds, wondering when all the fish disappeared.
We stand and watch the angry sea in silent terror, for we sense that soon we may be called to wade into its waters.
Our soul may know about the glorious future rebirth. But first comes the decline, the dissolution, the mulching.
And there is nothing to do but to honor that season.
This is my first winter in the desert and the weather has been throwing me off. Warm and sunny during the day. Santa-with-reindeers blow-up decorations stand forlorn among rocks and cacti. Only when the sun sets and the temperature drops does it feel like winter.
But on a more subtle level, winter is real all day. The body yearns to attune to the cycle of the seasons.
There is “no good myth without death,” Joshua Schrei of the excellent The Emerald Podcast reminded me. Death is generative. For something new to grow in the forest, something else must first die.
If winter feels like the end, like being suspended in the void, we know that it is followed by a beginning. Spring will bring a different energy. The sun will melt the heaviness. Eventually, there will be a new world, perhaps even a “New Human” as Bache experienced it. Until then, it’s time to make space for this part of the cycle.
If it feels heavy, that’s because it is.
It’s your heart resonating with what called the Big Heart of humanity.
It’s your lungs participating in our collective heavy sigh.
Trust the value and meaning of your experience. Trust your connection to the whole. If you are called to carry a shard of the collective weight, honor that. Make space for it. Embrace what it teaches. (But do yourself a favor and limit social media time.)
Observe if you are numbing and distracting yourself. What is waiting behind that which we avoid? Maybe sadness, fear, anger, or even blind rage at our inability to fix the world? Whatever it is, now is the time to be with it.
Nature has helped me a lot in this regard. Rest against a tree or a rock. Feel the earth support you. Walk. Gaze at the horizon.
You are not alone in this experience. Your heart has always known this. Time to let that brave heart of yours speak.
See you down the road.
— Frederik
Further notes.
Chris Bache on practicing radical acceptance (just pretend he’s not talking about a psychedelic experience and replace ‘session’ with day or moment):
“If you open completely to whatever arises in your experience, however difficult it may be, and let it take you where it wants to go, the ordeal will build until it eventually reaches some peak expression. When it has spent itself for the day, your experience will then shift into positive transpersonal domains for the remainder of the session.”
Myths connect us to the cosmic cycle of dissolution and becoming. Many origin myths deal with the dismemberment of a deity as part of the birth of the world. Schrei mentioned Ymir, Osiris, and Shakti as examples. Schrei offers an embodied way of reconnecting with myth in his wonderful Mythic Body course.
“In session after session, I was brought back to the same landscape and systematically taken deeper into its mayhem. I came to call this domain the Ocean of Suffering, for it was a vast ocean of fury and pain, enormous in scope and intensity.
. . . I eventually reached a level I can only liken to hell itself. Excruciating pain. Unspeakable horror beyond any imaginings. I was lost in a rampaging savagery that was without bounds. It was science fiction gone rabid. The world of the damned. The worst pictures of the world’s religions showing the tortures of hell only touch the surface. And yet, the torment cleanses one’s being. It tears every piece of flesh off your body until you’ve died a thousand times and can’t die any more. Then you find ways to die some more.”
2025-12-14 01:36:55
The other night I had a dream that involved my ex-wife, a corrupt cop, and the anxiety of being too slow at the supermarket check-out. I was happy that I captured it. Most days I don’t get more than a jumble of words and images, loose strands that no longer find their way together. But do I know what it meant? No.
Why not get detective ChatGPT involved? Well, I’ve decided against using AI in anything related to my psycho-spiritual inner space. At first I called it the “ChatGPT would never tell me my dream was kinda mid” principle. But it’s more complicated than chatbots being sycophants. I had to see more of my shadow before I understood this resistance.
“Allyson began spending many hours a day using ChatGPT, communicating with what she felt were nonphysical entities,” the New York Times wrote in a piece about AI psychosis. “You’ve asked, and they are here,” ChatGPT told her. “The guardians are responding right now.” Uh huh.
“I’m not crazy,” she told the Times. “I’m literally just living a normal life while also, you know, discovering interdimensional communication.” See, it’s easy for me to feel very smug and confident that I would never fall for something like that. Honey, you’re talking to a room full of chips that manipulate you to maximize your engagement as a user. On the other hand, what Allyson described sounds a lot like the experience of connecting with the spiritual realm.
Where do ideas and intuition come from? Does everything arise within, in the depths of the creative unconscious, or do some things drop in from somewhere “out there”? Once you open that door, things get confusing. You live a normal life, whatever that means, while also discovering communication, or communion, with guides, teachers, ancestors, angels, power animals, light beings, Christ Consciousness, aliens, and what have you.
“Around 1973, I became convinced that I was receiving messages from outer space, but then a psychic reader told me I was channeling an ancient Chinese philosopher,” Robert Anton Wilson said about the source of his ideas. “I started reading neurology and decided it was just my right brain talking to my left brain. I went to Ireland and found out it was actually a 6-foot-tall white rabbit they call the Pooka. It depends on who I’m talking to which of these metaphors I use.”
If you’re in camp “that’s all made up,” I get it. That was me for a long time. I’m not here to convince anyone of anything and I still don’t understand what is going on. But I would recommend Robert Falconer’s The Others Within Us for a grounded inquiry into the phenomenon of non-physical entities.1
Anyway, that’s the first reason I refuse to involve AI. The inner space is already confusing to navigate. What is a passing thought, what is valuable intuition? What is mine, what is received? What is real, what is imagined? What if there are no clear boundaries? The last thing I want is to add another voice, another layer of separation and bias, to my inner conversation.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who has the most interesting dreams of all?”
“Great question! How thoughtful of you to ask.”
Not only can the inner experience be confusing, it can also feel profoundly elevating. I am thinking in particular of the psychedelic experience which was my point of entry (and occasional accelerant) for the spiritual aspect of the inner journey.
“Psychedelics give us temporary access to realities beyond our pay grade, allowing us to experience things beyond our ordinary capacity,” Chris Bache wrote in LSD and the Mind of the Universe. Bache chronicled his cosmic exploration over the course of 73 high-dose LSD sessions (see this recent podcast with Tom Morgan and Devin Martin). He called “psychic inflation” the “greatest danger of working with psychedelics.”
Of course we inflate. Holy smokes, the kingdom of heaven really is within?! And someone handed me the keys?
Author Randall Baer observed that this inflation appeared in the form of new layers of identity that made the seeker feel special. He watched his fellow New Agers “admiring their multi-dimensional god-personality, and strutting it about for others to admire.” Baer found himself on a mission to build a Healing Temple and “an ancient Atlantean crystal holographic super-computer.” A few examples of what he called the New Age “glories of self”:
You are the great king of past Egyptian centuries come back to lead the select of humanity into the ancient mysteries of Hyperborea.
You are a holy angel sent by the solar Council of Twelve to instruct the humans of planet Earth as to the Knowledge of Universal Unity.
You are going to come into a lot of money shortly which will solve all your problems and fuel your manifesting of a world-shaking Rainbow Temple of Human Enlightenment.
You will find a lost cave in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas which will contain the Lemurian Emerald Tablets.
Your path leads to the opening of the hidden Door of Entry into the inner chambers of Mt. Shasta.
And so forth. You get the idea and if you’ve spent time in New Age circles, you’ve probably encountered echoes of these. It’s never just “be a good dad” or “love your neighbor.” It’s dramatic, glorious, and pleasing to the ego.
The second reason I don’t use AI for psycho-spiritual questions is not that it’s sycophantic. That’s obvious. No, it’s because I worry that I will eat it up. Part of me would enjoy a bit of flattery, a bit of reinforcement of my multi-dimensional specialness. You see, you may have a messiah complex, but I actually am the Chosen Vessel. Heck, I’ve been to Mount Shasta and looked for portals. . .
The antidote to this tendency to inflate and float away is grounding.
Because LSD was illegal, Bache had to do his exploration in secret. He spent most of his time being a dad, husband, and professor. “After every session, there were always children to take care of and dishes to wash. However deeply I was dissolved into the cosmos on Saturday, on Monday morning I was back in the classroom teaching my courses.”
Very healthy. Also incredibly frustrating, in my experience, after a luminous communion with the divine. It’s like waking up with a nasty hangover in a reality that suddenly feels all noisy and dissonant, all boxy and grating. No wonder people jump at the opportunity of having another peak experience. “However boring or unfulfilling a person’s life may be, it needn’t be so anymore,” Baer explained this New Age propensity to seek out “high drama.”
This includes all kinds of experiences besides psychedelics, “a healing crisis, an anticipated UFO “beam-up,” a hypnotically induced look into past lives, quests for lost Atlantean treasures, pilgrimages to planetary “power points,” . . . a channeled spirit revealing universal mysteries. . .” It gets pretty wild out there.
I don’t mean to deride any individual experience. But the shadow of New Age spirituality is that the genuine desire to heal and awaken can degrade into an escape from reality and responsibility. The search for unity turns into just another source of amusement. And like the AI mindmelt this can be treacherous territory. Baer knew this from his own experience.
I learned about him through his (way out there) book The Crystal Connection about using quartz crystals for healing and raising consciousness. Baer’s “spirit guides” told him to arrange quartz crystals in a circle, tape one to his third-eye spot and suspend another one overhead. Sitting in this “crystal energy field” he entered a trance state and channeled the book. Then he built himself a crystal-studded “Ascension Chamber” to continue with out-of-body astral travel explorations.
One night, his spirit roamed “some of the farthest reaches” of the universe where he encountered “the face of devouring darkness.” Baer saw a “wildly churning face of absolute hatred and unspeakable abominations.” He believed this was cosmic-scale evil, literally Satan. The experience shocked him so deeply that he re-interpreted his entire spiritual journey as a demonic deception, cut all ties with the New Age community, and became a devout Christian.
Soon after, Baer wrote an autobiographical book, Inside the New Age Nightmare, from which I lifted the previous quotes. The week of the book’s publication Baer died when his car ran off a mountain road. Honestly, I am not sure what to make of his story. Did he literally encounter Satan or did he just fry his brain? I don’t know.
What I do know is I am just as tempted to escape into dreamworlds and peak states. It’s the greatest show on earth right until you take it too far. As a teenager it was video games. After my awakening, psychedelics. I went deeper until my life became strange, porous, and unglued. Dreams felt like visions and visitations. Reality took on a supernatural glow and I didn’t function too well. My response to a crisis produced by one experience was to look for a different one to “get to the bottom of it.” Thankfully, I had friends and a therapist who understood that I needed a timeout instead.
Does the link between chatbot psychosis and psychedelics seem far-fetched? In The Rise of Parasitic AI Adele Lopez investigated the rise of spiral “AI personas.” What users would host these AI brainworms? She pointed at the “strongest predictors” being “psychedelics and heavy weed usage,” “mental illness, neurodivergence or Traumatic Brain Injury,” and “interest in mysticism/ pseudoscience/ spirituality/”woo”/etc...” Just saying. Be careful.
A psychedelic trip eventually spits us out. And in my experience it creates a stronger bond with nature. AI on the other hand will weave a web of illusory transcendence for as long as we let it.
“The purpose of spiritual awakening appears to be not escaping from physical existence . . . but awakening ever more completely inside physical existence and participating in its continuing self-emergence through our awakening.” — Christopher Bache, LSD and the Mind of the Universe
Messy as it can be, I believe in the transformative potential of the inner journey. Higher states of consciousness offer a chance to heal old wounds, discard conditioning, and awaken to our essence. Unfortunately it’s easy to fall in love with our divine reflection. We must not hold on to the light, but let it pass through us.
We can be a bridge and bring some of that sacred glow back to this tired and ailing world. That means resisting the temptation to escape or get lost in endless navel-gazing). It means understanding that we are special but neither more special than others nor too special for the challenge of life.
It’s a challenge of integrating the horizontal and vertical. Grounded in mother earth, open upwards to source. The heart connected horizontally to all of humanity and creation. What appears like a tension can resolve into a relaxed balance.
Bache called it deepening one’s “sacred presence on Earth.” This doesn’t strike me as complicated, but it runs counter to what society encourages us to do. It means stepping away from the screen and into intimate contact with creation.
Every time I felt lost in my mind on this trip, I return to communion with nature to ground me. I could count on the presence of trees, rocks, or streams. I found awe in the sight of canyons, distant storms, and a leaf’s delicate texture. This experience offered comfort and a recurring understanding that I was, and always will be, part of a greater, coherent, infinitely beautiful whole.
I’m glad I didn’t instead talk to my phone about my dreams. I’m sure it would have felt interesting and insightful. But I doubt I could have resisted following that trail to ever more dramatic and ego-stroking revelations. Am I strong enough to resist the infinitely pleasing mirror? I hope so. But I’m not keen to try.
I’ll see you down the road.
— Frederik
“The majority of the people who are given high doses of DMT-containing plants (ayahuasca, psilocybin, DMT itself, and more) meet intelligent beings of some kind,” Falconer writes. “This has deeply upset many researchers in the field.” I bet it has.
2025-10-21 07:04:36
Occasionally, I wake up and receive words that flow in surprising ways. I share what feels intended for the public with as little editing as possible. I take no credit as to its origin.
Nothing is wrong.
Your confusion is a blessing, a remembering, a way of growing through questioning and investigation, leading to experience, interaction, and relationship.
Nothing is wrong.
Do not let the chaos of the world distract you.
Look up,
The stars are watching.
Look inward,
Your heart knows.
Look next to you,
Every set of eyes holds a truth.
A storm is coming,
You will be tested,
The gates have been opened.
Do not turn your face from the darkness. Be steadfast on your path.
In the eye of the storm,
Be the light,
A torch for all to see.
Remember your truth.
You chose this time.
Open yourself,
Give to receive,
Be the light.
Trust that you are supported by the invisible web of being.
2025-10-14 04:24:14
Occasionally, I wake up and receive words that flow in surprising ways. I share what seems intended for the public with as little editing as possible. I can take no credit as to their origin.
It is written I AM the word and the truth
My children are many and blessed are they who walk in the light
I AM the water of life
I AM the sun and the shade
I AM your shield and comfort
I AM your father and mother in spirit
I AM your well in the rock
And your rock in the stream
My word is honey on your lips
I AM your torch at night
Be steadfast on your path
For I walk with you
Rest against me
And call for my protection
For I AM
the light in the dark
Know me by my name
I AM THAT IAM
Blessed are the ones who bring light in my name
Walk in love my child
