Food, sex, and death / Hot for the moon + knowledge
Is there anything more human than feeding? I think eating is more vulnerable than coming. It’s admitting you have a body, you’re a machine that needs fueling. Pete Holmes says that he thinks there’s nothing sadder than the act of eating alone, someone succumbing to the demands of the system, I have to turn this food into energy so I don’t die, how pathetic.
I have to turn these plants into information. Fascinating. I love the feeling when things that stuck in my consciousness ages ago come back around and start to reveal themselves, like a years-long striptease, so tantalizing, I actually am getting turned on by the fact that the phrase “light information” and that Chad Van Gaalen album lodged themselves in my awareness as important ages ago is starting to make sense as part of some larger framework. Eros awakened by the Gnosis.
Yeah, I really think there’s something to this idea that part of the evolution to the next dimension involves switching from food to light information. And yet. Then we’ll lose the sensory pleasure of eating and drinking, because even if it’s just a symbol for the thing it can be so fun and satisfying, it gives us other kinds of information about place and time — it gives us information about SPACE — humans as bodies in space, Ralph emphasizes it as part of the practice of Tonglen, opening yourself to the awareness of the physical area around and inside and within and behind your matter. And Earth is a place, earth is space and material even as it’s cosmic and astral. Placemaking is how we define ourselves as people — the primary shaper of differences between people and cultures is the physical environment and our adaptations to it, we develop through nature and nurture, the ecosystem and our responses.
It’s all a rehearsal for transcendence, a practice for moving beyond it, but even if it’s just a game, that’s fun, innit? Don’t you kinda love it?
Hot for the Moon and the Calendar
Riordan Regan reflects on their recent experiences with sexuality, existential kink, and spirituality, drawing connections between personal growth, historical events, and cultural influences. They discuss the impact of cacao and chocolate on their sexual desires, the role of pleasure in reducing consumption and violence, and the importance of sensory learning. Regan also explores the historical significance of the Ides of March, drawing parallels to modern societal issues and the desire for dominance. They express a longing to reconnect with pagan practices and the natural world, emphasizing the need for embodied, sensory experiences to ground spiritual knowledge.
Action Items
[] Explore pagan practices and the Wheel of the Year during an upcoming trip to Ireland.
[] Reflect on the concept of "rejection kink" and why the speaker is drawn to missed opportunities.
[] Experiment with using cacao as a way to ground spiritual experiences in the body.
Outline
Exploring the Nature of Worship and Veneration
Speaker 1 discusses the historical context of worshipping entities that couldn't be perceived with the senses, emphasizing the shift from worship to veneration.
Riordan Regan reflects on the concept of veneration, suggesting it involves changing the definition of what is considered sacred.
The conversation touches on the idea of “widening the ‘I’” and the experience of allowing oneself to be sexual.
Riordan Regan shares a personal experience of being sexual for the first time in years and its impact on their mind and body.
Existential Kink and Pleasure
Riordan Regan talks about the existential kink and its connection to a past injury, noting its reemergence.
They mention three separate people bringing up the concept of I, K, S, K, Berlin to them, which they were reading about before an event.
Riordan Regan reflects on the idea that more pleasure in the body would reduce consumption, war, and abuse, and how this influenced their behavior.
They describe their experience of being part of a group and fulfilling others' needs, noting a lack of interest in their own pleasure.
Selfless Sexual Interaction and Cacao
Riordan Regan questions if their recent sexual interaction was the first truly selfless one in their life.
They discuss the role of cacao and chocolate as replacements for sexual sustenance, suggesting a higher expression of the same energy.
Riordan Regan shares their experience of consciously dissociating and engaging with Damiana at the temple, noting the subtle effects.
They reflect on the desire to be part of a group and the feeling of safety, without strong physical attraction.
Cultural and Historical Reflections
Riordan Regan draws parallels between the Ides of March and the assassination of Julius Caesar, noting the Roman calendar's lunar cycles.
They discuss the historical context of March as the beginning of the new year and its subsequent dark reputation.
Riordan Regan reflects on the legacy of Catholic guilt and the impact of social anxiety and awkwardness.
They mention the calendar's influence on their consciousness and the significance of the Ides of March.
Spirituality and Embodiment
Riordan Regan explores the idea of spiritual satisfaction reducing the body's need for sex, questioning if it's denial or bypassing.
They discuss the influence of Catholic guilt and the story of social anxiety, tracing it back to their Irish legacy.
Riordan Regan reflects on the importance of being in alignment with natural cycles and the desire to reconnect with the cosmic cycles.
They express excitement about connecting with pagan practices in Ireland and the vision of themselves as part of the natural world.
Rejection and Existential Kink
Riordan Regan shares their reaction to being rejected from an event, noting the existential kink of rejection and devaluation.
They reflect on the human tendency to want what they can't have and the desire to run naked in the forest.
Riordan Regan discusses the importance of being of service and the potential for research to be another form of consumption.
They emphasize the need for experiential learning and the role of the body in grounding knowledge.
Cacao and Embodiment
Riordan Regan reflects on the importance of cacao in their practice, noting its role in grounding spiritual experiences.
They discuss the challenge of connecting without cacao and the abstract nature of spiritual practices without a somatic component.
Riordan Regan shares their experience of sitting in front of an altar and the need for something to bridge the realms.
They reframe the cacao story, emphasizing its importance in grounding spiritual experiences.
Transhumanism and Embodiment
Riordan Regan discusses the origins of transhumanism and the goal of technology and psychedelics to make humans more human, not less.
They reflect on the importance of embracing the body and the sensory experience in learning and spiritual practices.
Riordan Regan shares their experience of being deprived of senses in the Great Pyramid and the impact on their understanding of transhumanism.
They emphasize the role of trans people as shamans and alchemists, embracing the sexiness of death and decomposition.
The Role of the Body in Knowledge
Riordan Regan reflects on the importance of grounding knowledge in the body for long-term retention.
They discuss the origins of writing and its role in depriving people of their sensory experiences.
Riordan Regan shares their experience of sitting in darkness in the Great Pyramid and the impact on their understanding of transhumanism.
They emphasize the need for experiential learning and the role of the body in grounding knowledge.
Embracing the Sensory Experience
Riordan Regan discusses the importance of making learning sensory and grounding it in the body.
They reflect on the role of the senses in remembering and the impact of depriving people of their senses.
Riordan Regan shares their experience of being in the darkness in the Great Pyramid and the impact on their understanding of transhumanism.
They emphasize the need for experiential learning and the role of the body in grounding knowledge.
LISTEN HERE / DIALOGOS:
THE ANTHROPOLOGIST: “Ancestor worship,” because they couldn't conceive of having a relationship with something you couldn't see or perceive with the senses. Veneration.
They said it was worship. They said we made them deities, but really we just realized they were entities like any other we could communicate
RIORDAN: with beyond the borders and the confines of our minds and bodies, changing the definition of what counts as living, (DIRECTOR’S NOTE: This is fascinating that Otter detects me as switching characters midsentence)
THE ANTHROPOLOGIST: widening the “I” to let more light in. Last night, I allowed myself to be sexual
RIORDAN: for the first time in years, five of them. It's prompted something interesting. It's prompting me getting all nerdy enough in the mind. So is this an escapist tactic to get me out of my body? Because what's still contained there is too painful, maybe. But I've also been calling something in about the existential kink, again, a spiral from around this time when I was injured. It's a little later existential kink coming back in again. So there's something in this for me now I'm trying to listen three separate people brought up i, k, s, k, Berlin to me last night, which I just happened right to be reading. Right before leaving last night, I was reading their manifesto and had an important message, if the body felt more pleasure, we wouldn't do so much consuming. We wouldn't make so much war. We wouldn't have so much abuse. More oxytocin, less serotonin and dopamine. I don't know, but it was in my mind
as I allowed myself to go there, as I allowed myself to open, and then I observed my behavior in the aftermath. And I watched how, after I separated, I watched how, when I was with the group, I was commenting on my experience and noticing, huh, yeah, I guess that feeling of consuming, of needing to consume, something is totally gone now. And in fact, I had really no interest in my own pleasure. It was just nice to be part of a group in feeling us all supporting each other and to be meeting the needs of other people, of the person who asked for regulation after an uncomfortable situation, and the other person who asked for us to fulfill her fantasy of blindfolding and tickling feathers. It was so cute. It felt so good. And in fact, I had an active non desire to be interacted with. I didn't want to get myself off at all. I just wanted to make the other people feel good. And I wonder if maybe it was the first selfless sexual interaction I've ever had in my life, truly. I mean, I don't know I went there with Steven. So, okay, that's not true. That's the story. I went there with Steven a lot, but I've never done it in a conscious, embodied way like that. Before it was cool, it's really beautiful. But yeah, I noticed that as soon as we separated, I started going to the fruit table every time I felt uncomfortable, and later, once the chocolate came out, then it was all over. I just started eating that and didn't even want to try for connection anymore. And there is something to this cacao and chocolate as replacements for sexual sustenance, but it also kind of makes me wonder if maybe that's because cacao is a higher expression of the same energy, and if it's kind of like the idea of spiritual anorexia and light information replacing the need for food. Because, like, I don't know. I consciously dissociated last night.
I sat with a pretty high for me, my burdosa Venita and cacao before leaving the house. And then engaged with Damiana at the temple. It was all like super mild and subtle, but I definitely was observing my own self. I a lot, and it was really interesting because, yeah, I just, I don't know I was, I didn't feel the desire to the point that I was analyzing, and was like, maybe that's just done now. But then I did see that couple, and I felt really drawn to them, and I wanted to be part of what they were doing. And there was, there were a couple groups, so maybe it's just that I wasn't super physically into my people, and they just felt nice and safe. And so I didn't feel very sexual tourism. I don't know it was interesting. I did almost have the feeling it's like, maybe it's because it's, I mean, if sex is the holy longing and the desire for divine reunion, then if I'm getting spiritually satisfied, maybe my body doesn't need as much, but I don't know that might just be denial. It might just be bypassing. It probably is,
all that Catholic guilt in the legacy. I got up in my head and got out of the mood. And the story of social anxiety and being awkward started playing, but I didn't even really believe it. It just was like a tape that started running. It didn't have any more potency. And I can't help but think of the Irish legacy, the tiny violin playing, the sad stories, all that Catholic guilt and shame, giant Irish families where rents were abandoned. So maybe that's where that storyline of social anxiety and awkwardness, fear of being ostracized comes from. How many children died because the church decided pleasure was a sin. Then all of a sudden, the calendar injected itself into my consciousness, inserted itself into my awareness, which is kind of cool. I was drawn to look up the Ides of March, which is about the assassination of Julius Caesar. And here we are, the calendar coming in hot and heavy again. The Roman calendar was based on lunar cycles, which meant it kept getting out of sync with what was really happening? Hot for the moon. That series I was drawn to draw new layers of meaning are now coming into it. The time, keeping the day, keeping Lumination tracking.
Oh yeah, baby, tease me. The moon is sexy. Astronomy and Astrology makes me excited. Divination and cycles, the seasons, the nations, deaths and resurrections are the things that get me off.
Is my sexuality lying fallow and not dead entirely? Or has it been transmuted into something else, now, more abstract, desire for the natural world and the union with its creatures to be returned to the earth? Is this trauma denial, repression, bypassing? Or have I just changed into another thing? Calendars are guiding me, and as the month of March begins today, I looked up the Ides and saw but this was a way of measuring lunar cycles with the halfway point. Usually it's the time when the moon is most full in a given month. It strikes me that the time keepers in the Roman system, where the church fathers and I guess they're always the spiritual leaders, the Church Fathers, always ending up with extra days and having to account for them because they weren't in alignment. Capitalism producing excess is a way to grow an unnatural system. I
There's something in the entwinement of time of spirituality. Being in alignment is important, but we haven't been since we were pagan. March used to be the beginning of the new year, a time of celebration, but after Caesar was assassinated, it got a dark reputation. The eyes meant the first full moon of a month
in 44 BC, he was stabbed 23 times. How's that for numerology? And Caesar was Trump. And I can't help but thinking that we are in the ith of March repeating with what's happening in the American empire as this collapsing around everybody. Caesar was a dictator who reinforced unequal power dynamics, a Trumpian figure who appealed to soldiers and was wealthy who put his likeness on everything, who was really into private property and gave himself the power to accept or reject election results. Sound familiar? Jesus? People said he would make himself a king, and he called himself a dictator for life. That wasn't just a Calvin & Hobbes thing. Trump would do this if he could. Caesar was murdered by a group that called themselves the liberators, who stabbed him 23 times, and there's that high weirdness number, cosmic trigger. They fondled the cosmic trigger and stabbed him to death, but it didn't have the result that they were expecting. Turns out, the people didn't want to be liberated because they liked the tax benefits. So the country became destabilized. It was the end of the Republican, beginning of true empire. Feels like a prediction of where America is heading. The successor, Octavian, became a true emperor, and the dark side rose because people wanted to be dominated. They wanted to give it all away. And after, after Octavian went astray, they believed that Augustus could save them, and they begged for a dictator, because Westerners want to be dominated. We're so hot for it. We want to give it all away to the god, like leader, to our big daddy, whether he's God or Caesar. We act like we're so tough and independent, but really, all we want is to be bent over and to submit, because it's unnatural, because this system that we've created of dominance and oppression and power over is unnatural, and our souls Know It. And so that kink, that shadow, goes somewhere, and it turns into the desire to be spanked like a little baby, which is always, I mean, Trump wearing diapers. Hello. It's always what happens so obvious, so obviously, like it makes me angry we consume, and it's empty because we are disconnected with the earth spirituality, right of sync with the seasons and the cycles, and it makes everyone go crazy hot for the moon means longing to reconnect with the cosmic cycles again. And I'm so excited to go to Ireland and connect with the pagan practices. I really feel like this is going to change things, to plug into the Wheel of the Year. I got a vision of myself in a cave like the Calleach, swaddled in deerskin. Learning through direct experience, without human teachers, my friends, the animals, eating mushrooms and communing with the land and the forest directly embedded and entangled in it, indistinguishable where I ended and it began, just visions of myself as eyes emerging from a nurse log behind a burning fire. I want to get hot and heavy with the humus, decompose my meat, Alchemy, dissolve me and acid and crumble my bones into the stratigraphic layers, make me a deposit sedimentary to pull towards death is not the pull towards death is lust, but not the way the church twisted it, not because lust is wrong, but because it's the same urge As death, the one to disappear completely and dissolve the separate self. And it felt good to make my friend feel good last night and not care about myself. We were her nurse logs of pleasure and dying for her desire.
I'm really sad that we got rejected from breaking convention and I drew the card of the poet who said, it may not seem that others care about your words, but trust that the wind will carry it. When I found out we didn't get it, my first urge was to run back to the jungle. It almost felt liberating this existential kink of rejection, though there's something really potent in that, but I think I have to explore and I think the real medicine is in feeling into that, and in not just dissolving and disappearing again. What is this rejection kink? Why do I love to be devalued? Why do I love to be turned away? Why do I love to miss opportunities? I can't get enough of it. I can't get enough of not putting enough effort into things that I actually do care about, and then getting rejected and it really hurting, and then me acting like I didn't care about it. Anyways. Yeah, always wanting what I can't have. Why is that such a human thing?
I don't know. Maybe there is also just something pure in that, maybe the remix is, but I actually just don't care about the earthly gratification anymore, and I just want to run naked in the forest and be a nobody. But that also makes me feel that I'm not being of service, and then what's the point of existing?
All of a sudden, I feel hot for research. But isn't that just another form of consumption, to swallow the knowledge, and then what do I do with it? Spit it out or turn it into shit. The shit can power the system, if applied appropriately, waste versus compost. Hot for teacher is a thing, because humans like learning, but you got to do something with it, and you got to make it experiential, like Bettina was talking about, if learning is sensory, so we have to learn with the body and not the mind. This is the key. Is hot for research or bypass. Then, is this all of a sudden desire to tickle my mind a good thing, because, like, part of me feels like that's me returning to the world of the forms, but I don't know. I think I've been spending all this time in the astral, and that's still not been in the body or which is interesting, because I felt like sitting in front of the altar time. It's really engaging the spiritual, but if there's no somatic component, I don't know, am I bypassing well, but then I'm not, and I think, okay, so this is why cacao feels so important, because that's the embodiment part of the practice. Because something has to ground, it to the earth. Something has to make it, yeah, lived in my experience, something has to bridge the realms. That's what it fucking is. Holy shit. No wonder cacao feels so important, and no wonder it feels like I can't quite connect without it, because it without it, it's just really abstract. That's so interesting. So the other day when I was sitting and just falling asleep over and over again, and just kind of like caught in the hypnogogic state, because I didn't sit with any medicine. It's because the medicines are bridged between the grounds, and if there's no way to bring it down into this one, and you're just stuck in the world of symbols swimming in the language of the other realm without a cipher. Holy shit. Look at that reframing the cacao story. Finally, they've had so much shame around why do I feel like they need it? Because something has to ground it, and there's other ways to do that in the shamanic journey sometimes has in the past, and that's why I was trying to do that the other day. And who knows why it wasn't working, maybe just so I could Have this realization, because that does feel really important. Thank you. anyway.
Oh, we're just begging for a dictator. We Westerners. We're so hot for Godlike figures, Big Daddy in the sky.
But we're really hot for the moon. We're really hot for teacher. We're really hot for our mother, the one we really learn from. Because true knowledge is somatic. It lives in the body. So if you want someone to remember something, you have to make it sensory. This is what Bettina was saying that I found so fascinating. Learning has to become experiential again. We have to ground it in the body. We have to ground it in the sensory we have to rehabilitate the feeling function. The only way you remember something is if your body holds on to it, because knowledge is somatic, and this is why the stuff from Egypt has been coming through again so hot we wrote it down in our diaries so we wouldn't have to remember it in our bodies. We wrote it down in our diaries so we wouldn't have to remember it in our bodies. We wrote it down in our diaries we wouldn't have to remember it in our bodies. This transmitted to me when we were deprived of our senses in the Great Pyramid when we were sitting in the darkness. And it strikes me that this is the origins of transhumanism. And so of course, that podcast with Carl and Gallimore, I haven't even listened to it, but it just made me think of that whole transhumanist debate, and what he was saying when we were in Egypt, what he says all the time, and what I believe is that the goal of technology and psychedelics and spirituality should be to make us more human, not less, and at the same time, to transcend it, To transcend and include, don't give trans a bad name, dude. Transhumanism meaning leaving our bodies behind. But that's not what trans means. Trans means to bring everything with you as you go to the higher plane. And when we invented writing, that's when we first started leaving our bodies behind, because the system was designed to fix and place a world that was always changing. Change scared us, and we wanted to just become heads floating in space, because the pain of embodiment was too great, the decay and the shape shifting inherent in it was too scary, and this is why trans people are the emergent archetype, the shaman, alchemist, because we embrace this. In fact, it's kind of our whole life. So embrace the sexiness of death and decomposition. Hot for the moon means becoming embodied again, becoming a creature again, becoming sensory again. Death doesn't hurt at all. It's only our resistance. So allow yourself to be dominated by the soul soil and the seasons.
Let the planet be your dominatrix. You just have to find the Safe Word.
**Insight about Stephen relationship while watching Rupert Sheldrake course!
Ideal forms are refections of divine nature
Newton, Einstien, Boyle, all scientists believed in god and thought he was a mathematician > math laws were the laws of nature
STEPHEN IS THE REPRESENTATION OF THIS - oh shit - THIS IS BIG - I can’t let go of him because I’m living out the archetype of civilization that can’t let go of Newtonian physics because it feels grounding, comforting, familiar - !!!
CARD PULL
Archetypes Tarot: The Offering, The Poet, The Castle
Marseilles Tarot: 1o of Swords, 8 of Wands, 2 of Pentacles
"Knowledge is innately tied to the land, it's right there, it's waiting for us to pay attention to it, to guide us, through dreams, through visions, through practice..." (Rick Hill)
REFERENCES
Interview, Bettina Arnold, gender in archaeology and funeral feasting part III, 27 February 2025
“Relational Systems Thinking: That’s How Change Is Going to Come, from Our Earth Mother,” Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change, Volume 1, Issue 1, pp 75-103. 2021, Melanie Goodchild, Turtle Island Institute & Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience
The Way of Tarot, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa
The Archeytpes Tarot, Kim Krans
“You Made It Weird” podcast, Pete Holmes, repeated references, date n.d.
Peruvian cacao from Malde with cinnamon and cayenne, high dose + German bee pollen
Direct experience, download with cacao, bee pollen, and quartz crystal in the Great Pyramid in Giza, Egypt, October 2024 - total sensory deprivation
Aubrey Marcus podcast with Carl H. Smith and Andrew Gallimore, February 2025
History.com, “How Julius Caesar’s Assassination Triggered the Fall of the Roman Republic”
Direct experience and artistic download for series “Hot for the Moon,” February 2025, Berlin, Germany
Direct experience, Mx. Gili’s Conscious Play Temple, 28 February 2025, Urban Healing Unit in Berlin, Germany + Amanita muscaria tincture from Agnieska L., London, UK + Peruvian cacao from Malde, moderate dose
Jupiter + Capricorn / Not all who wander are lost
Cosmological metaphysics: Astrological Jupiter, the New Moon in Capricorn, and the Gregorian transition
Jupiter synchronicities
When things like this happen you can’t help but realize that everything in the universe is in perfect alignment all the time, and you just trip in and out of the flow sometimes
Every single thing that dropped into my awareness and conversation this morning turns out to be represented by astrological Jupiter
I “happened” to be talking with Brian after not doing so for months and letting him into my morning portal bubble which I almost never do with anyone - turned out to be the right kind of vulnerability - and I realized he and I have been helping each other individuate this whole time. walking each other through the COVID bubble - the womb and the tomb - THIS WAS INTUBATION - THE DREAMING CHAMBER OF THE ASCLEPION - but those who didn’t realize what they were entering into emerged more traumatized, while others of us were alchemized and forged a new beginning
this was my Jupiter returning. my Jupiter is in Capricorn, so of course this is activated this new moon
Brian brought up apropos of nothing we said but that was being vibrated by the biggest fucking particle in the cosmos the exaggeration he and I are both prone to - it’s what makes us great showmen and drawn to food and beverage education - this is basically the most Jupiterian thing, teaching people where their food comes from - holy shit!
he mentioned how people have commented on his tendency for hyperbole, how could everything be the best thing ever? and he said that it was to him in that moment, and couldn’t that be enough? I love this way of framing it, it helped shift some things for me, and I shared how Jim had said something similar and I felt shame, and then later recognized it as a positive thing, and branded me the Celebrator, which is a quality I love about myself, and Brian found comfort and honor in this, too.
The Celebrator is Jupiter and he can overwhelm people with his enthusiasm. he just gets so damn excited about everything. maybe this is where being more Saturnian or Capricornian comes in
New moon in Capricorn
The legend of Capricorn is linked to the Flood. Enki, the sea goat, helped create humanity because he wanted to create a servant class - whoa! This actually links to what Ash was sharing about the Gospel of Enoch - Enki’s brother, Elil, got annoyed by the human race because they were making too much noise - so the sea goat sent a flood to wipe them out
the goat, the cloven hooved that later became the Biblical enemy - the satyr, Pan, the Devil
Pan is also archetypal Jupiter!!! dude
the flood of sensory information that came in from the human realm was too much for the divinity so they sent the waters to wash the slate clean - but the key to awakening is not to wipe out the voices, it’s to learn to channel them
for me the work is to turn the volume UP on the ones who aren’t very loud in decibels, the plants and animals and fungi and elements and minerals, and turn DOWN all the static I’m receiving from the human systems that are deafening
Really - it’s all a metaphor for healing > and the answer is conscious dissociation
Pain as perceived by the gabatinurgic system is when the body is receiving a flood of information all at one time and it’s overwhelming > so Amanita works upon this system by mitigating the flood of information so not so much is coming in at once and you can manage it - it forces the observer because you can stand outside it, you know it’s still there but aren’t as bothered by it
discernment - is also what Annabelle was teaching to me in our Kundalini lesson - learning what to tune into and what to dissociate from, to fine-tune the nervous system through somatics, energetic science
Gregorian transition
There’s this concept in the spiritual community that the Gregorian calendar is something foisted upon us, an unnatural conformity to a made-up system, and it kind of is, and it’s come to be associated with starting a new cycle of production in winter, which makes no fucking sense
but originally it was developed, as was the Julian, to get society back in line with the seasons after the Roman calendar got it off balance.
but what is also weird is that the Roman calendar was based on the lunar cycle and so is biodynamic agriculture and this should feel natural
The Julian and Gregorian calendars are lunisolar - they actually combine both the moon and sun
Astrologer Rick Levine is fond of reminding us that our months are derived from lunations—the period between successive new moons (or other phases of the moon), wherein a total of 12 lunations amounts to 354 days or roughly a year—calling them “moonths”
Early peoples tracked the 12 lunations to determine a complete cycle (creating the Wheel?)
Solar calendars like the Gregorian don’t exactly map to that but we still use the “moonth” to honor the past
The Julian calendar was an attempted correction for the Roman calendar, which was probably based off Greek and Babylonian lunar calendars
likely established by Romulus, the founder of Rome, around 738 BC. The original calendar had 10 months and a year of 304 days, with the year beginning in March and ending in December. The remaining 61 1/4 days of the year were ignored, resulting in a gap during winter.
WHOA—so winter was literally the time outside of time—it didn’t exist! hibernation, intubation, the womb and tomb
Is this related to ancient Greek dreaming practices? to the DMT and night world model?
The calendar was later modified by Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, who added January and February to create a 12-month year. He also added 50 days to the calendar and removed one day from each of the 30-day months. January was given an extra day to avoid having an even number, which was considered superstitious.
further modified by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE, who created the Julian calendar to align the calendar with the rotation of the Earth and its orbit around the Sun. The Julian calendar eliminated leap months, which had been used to keep the calendar in sync with the seasons.
Janus was the god, which is just another word for “archetype,” of transitions and thresholds—he is actually TRANS
two faces, one looking to the future and one to the past. but what about the present?
presided over gates and doorways, rites of passage > which we have lost touch with.
beginnings were important to the achievement-oriented Romans and Janus was always invoked first, as a good omen of launching a new venture—so when this month was created the year had to begin there. which was out of sync with every seasonally based calendar
So Gregorian transition IS an instrument of empire—but the meaning behind the calendar itself isn’t empty. look closer
World calendars, Western transitions
probably the key is that you need both for a complete picture - sun and moon, all the principles
HUH - all of a sudden the Dreamspell, the fake Maya calendar, makes more sense as a system - the problem is trying to pass it off as authentic
once again, maybe the way forward IS syncretic - JUST CITE YOUR SOURCES PEOPLE PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD IT’S NOT THAT HARD. why do we have to pretend that either we made it up or it’s some ancient practice? Just be authentic!
Lubo still refuses to give credit where it’s due to the people who actually make the cacao he is building a cult of personality around and it’s maddening. All I can do is try to get the other information out there…
Over time the human measurements made the calendars that started off aligned drift out of sync with reality - how did the Maya stay on track?
The Maya calendar is divinatory—cosmological—encompassing above and below and every direction from the axis/anima mundi, the center, the divine queer. Divining = devising = subtracting, taking away the layers of consensus reality to reveal what has always been there > it’s just OBSERVATION of the natural alignment of heaven and earth, cosmos and psyche.
From Maya Daykeeping: Three Calendars from Highland Guatemala
“The three divinatory calendars presented in this volume are examples of a K’iche’an1literary tradition that includes thePopol Vuh, Annals of the Cakchiquels (Memorialde Solola), and theTitles of the Lords of Totonicapan. Two of the calendars were written in indigenous Kaqchikel or K’iche’ languages, but in European script, sometime before or during the eighteenth century. The third example was written in K’iche’and Spanish in 1854. They demonstrate that although linguistic and literary tradi-tions were still being adhered to, there was at the same time an obvious element of adaptation and acculturation, the use of European script. Calendars such as these continue to be the basis for prognostication or deter-mining the favorable or unfavorable nature of specific periods of time. According to the favor of the days, land may be purchased, sales made in the market, profit accrued, and other economic enterprises pursued. The calendar designates the timefor planting and harvest and other agricultural pursuits. The disposition of the dayscan maintain health and foretell illness or death, influence the naming of children. guide betrothal and marriage. Obligations to the dead are fulfilled on days affiliatedwith the souls of the ancestors. These little-known works appear to have escaped the notice of most scholars. Except for occasional mention of their existence, and an unpublished study of the 1722 calendar by Rudolf Schuller and Oliver La Farge (1934), no further work has been done.”
This is why my scholarship is an important contribution to the field - I am bringing in the FIELD research, the esoteric ethnography - those from the underground, the non-published academics who share in private circles and bootstrapped conferences and build their own platforms. The ethnographies of time and space, of day and night keeping - the systems of the day world, the serotonin system, the solar calendar - and the night world, the DMT model, the lunar calendar, the things that dwell in the dark. The ethnographies of darkness? New Hermetic tablets, hyperdimensional diamonds
All astrology is simply a Hermetic reflection, as above so below, of what is already present - it’s not predictive. Our calendars are the same thing, snapshots of things in the heavens that we try to use to govern our movements down here on earth. but we get separated from them
The Julian calendar was proposed in 46 BC by (and takes its name from) Julius Caesar, as a reform of the earlier Roman calendar, which was largely a lunisolar one.[2] It took effect on 1 January 45 BC, by his edict. Caesar's calendar became the predominant calendar in the Roman Empire and subsequently most of the Western world for more than 1,600 years, until 1582 when Pope Gregory XIII promulgated a revised calendar.
The Celtic New Year starts on Samhain - which is when Ash and I had our rebirthing. So we were aligned to our biological system.
But there are so many different ways to track it, it’s cyclical, a spiral, in the end it doesn’t really matter. The Celtic year is a WHEEL - so you can enter at any point and start going around. Starting at the harvest feels super aligned to me as a creature of the night realm - and honestly it makes sense for the whole human system - it maps to the cycle of gestation - the seed is planted in the dark and takes form in the womb to emerge in the spring as a human, but one that isn’t done cooking yet and needs the support of the village during its second gestation. Each harvest season a little more abundance is gathered until there’s enough abundance to come back and share it.
Heliocentric universe, Cosmos and psyche
When we discovered the Earth revolved around the sun instead of the other way around, it was a massive revelation. It should have made us recognize that we were just tiny players on a cosmic stage, that we were intimately interconnected with a whole web of living beings
but instead it made us narcissists, because psychedelic awareness can overinflate us if we’re not prepared to integrate the knowledge that we are everything—so all of a sudden we thought we were God’s chosen people, the divinity, so special to receive this revelation, but instead of believing that we were just aligning, corresponding, with an everything that is always changing, in an archetypal metaphysics of becoming, we decided that fruit of knowledge made us special, God’s chosen ones, and the language of the early astronomers reflected that. And we elevated the human intellect to Godlike status, and thus the Enlightenment was born, which ironically gave rise to materialist reductionism, where the spiritual was taken out of everything and people started believing we were just meat puppetry.
Cosmology is a big concept for my work - it’s not a framework the consensus West was trained to think within
https://beccatarnas.com/2015/06/07/whitehead-and-archetypal-cosmology/
In 1983 a conference was held at this same university, organized primarily by Catherine Keller and David Ray Griffin. The conference was called “Archetypal Process,” and sought to bring into dialogue the process philosophy of Whitehead and the archetypal psychology of Carl Gustav Jung and James Hillman. As Griffin pointed out, process philosophy and archetypal psychology are both postmodern movements, but postmodern in a different sense from the “relativistic, nihilistic, deconstructive postmodernism” that might better be called “ultramodernism, or mostmodernism.”[1]
Process philosophy and archetypal psychology, in Griffin’s words, are examples of “a constructive, reconstructive, or revisionary postmodernism, in which many of the presuppositions of modernity are challenged and revised.”[2] They are postmodern movements that “both want to return soul and divinity to the world.”[3]
In his talk at the conference, James Hillman spoke of the need for a metaphysics that could support archetypal psychology. Hillman had abandoned Jung’s metaphysics in order to save his psychology. Yet this was not enough. Metaphysics is always operative, whether one acknowledges it or not.
What Hillman sought was a metaphysics of praxis, a metaphysics that supported the practice of psychology, the practice of soul-making—an alchemical metaphysics.
This is what I am creating–a transpersonal methodology for devising our deepest selves through creative expression, ancestral connection, our chosen medicine, self-inquiry and observation–facilitating awakening and trans-formation
Which is reflected on the collective level because above/below, within/without
Hillman spoke in his talk of that word, cosmology: it both “refers to the astronomical order of the heavenly bodies, and it also has a metaphysical meaning, according to Whitehead’s Process and Reality.”[4] As Whitehead says, cosmology is a scheme “of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted
HILLMAN: Let us say that the astronomical bodies (the planets) offer metaphysical bodies (the Gods [or one might say the archetypes]) by means of whom every element of experience can be interpreted. What is beyond in both meanings are the heavenly bodies. These afford some nouns and adjectives, some processes and some realities. The planetary persons fill the void of the beyond with the myths of their bodies and the bodies of their myths. This cosmology is a psychological field—a field because metaphysics is placed in imaginal locations; psychological because the planets are persons with traits, with behaviors, and in relation with one another.
The correspondence of the planets’ transits and the happenings of one’s life, the happenings of the happening that is a human form a sequence of ongoing synchronicities by definition - you just have to tune in
Gregorian + Capricorn transitions
Riordan Regan discusses transitioning from a newsletter to a more personalized approach, focusing on self-healing and integrating various projects. The first installment will explore the concept of medicine, emphasizing intention, preparation, integration, and education. Regan plans to open up his blog and possibly Substack. He reflects on the end of an era as a food and beverage journalist, using food as a metaphor for life cycles. Regan also touches on the importance of energy management, personal growth, and the significance of the Capricorn New Moon. He concludes by reflecting on the Copernican revolution and the need to redefine January's significance.
Outline
Self-Healing and Medicine Series
Riordan Regan discusses the transition from creating a newsletter to focusing on personal life and projects.
The first installment of the self-healing series will explore the concept of medicine, emphasizing intention, preparation, integration, and education.
Riordan plans to present his findings with authority and track his projects through a blog or Substack.
The self-healing series will include Amanita preparatory explorations for Breaking Convention.
This will interweave with the music and psychedelics series—and one on No Bad Substances, maybe one on transpersonal/depth psychology
Join Alcohol and Drugs Society, reconnect with Bradford
Food and Beverage Role
Riordan reflects on the end of an era as a food and beverage journalist and the significance of food as a powerful metaphor.
Food is seen as a tangible representation of life cycles and a medium for illustrating larger concepts and artistic visions.
Riordan plans to conduct gallery exhibitions in cafes, restaurants, and breweries, incorporating psilocybin carefully into personal explorations with food and drink.
The discussion includes the importance of intention and awareness when using substances like psilocybin.
Personal Reflections and Energy Management
Riordan talks about the need to hire Claire to help sort through past work and the clarity gained from conversations with Brian.
The Capricorn New Moon is about protecting energy and being more conscientious about how it is spent.
Riordan reflects on the resolution of a conflict and the need to express discomfort to avoid repeating patterns of dissatisfaction.
The conversation touches on the balance between being alone and living in community, and the importance of setting better boundaries.
Transcending Dualities and Personal Growth
Riordan discusses the concept of transcending and including dualities, using the example of nomadism versus agriculture.
The idea of trans emergence is about integrating seemingly opposing elements, emphasizing conscious association.
Riordan reflects on the influence of astrology and the importance of slowing down to see the patterns behind decisions.
The conversation includes personal anecdotes about overcoming imposter syndrome and the role of inner voices in personal growth.
Gregorian and Capricorn Transitions
Riordan talks about the significance of the Gregorian and Capricorn transitions, emphasizing the need to break down binaries.
The narrative of modern society being flawed is compared to the Puritan narrative, aiming to break free from shame.
Riordan suggests redefining January and aligning with the Celtic calendar, seeing it as a period of gestation and emergence.
The conversation includes reflections on the Copernican revolution and the importance of perceiving oneself as part of a larger cosmos.
Transcript (Listen here):
Well, holy shit. Will you look at that, as usual, letting something go allows it to actually open up. And when I let go of the newsletter and let go of creating anything at all, decided that maybe the B’atz trecena would be about just creating my life, all of a sudden, something just popped in that, I think, is another way to tie things all together, besides the Hackney baths, this modern Aesclepion idea—if the newsletter is a series of ongoing series that come and go, just as I feel they're meant to, without predictable regularity, if they're just ongoing projects I'm exploring and I pop in every once in a while with little installations, yeah, just kind of tag them. It's a way to keep track of what I'm researching and ready to share.
So the first installment on self healing will be this festival welfare thing, and because it makes sense to start with the concept of asking, What does medicine really mean? And in a system where we have to take our own healing into our own hands, and where we're coming from this syncretic lineage, and we're having to learn to navigate how to be alone together, and we're having to learn to navigate how to cite our sources and give each other credit, and we're having to learn how to be respectful.
We're having to change our perspectives. Yeah, in that context, what does medicine need? We need a little help. I Yeah, so that's what this first issue will be, is opening the question of, What does medicine really mean? And I think the pillars and the foundations are intention, preparation, integration and education. Those are the foundations, and actually, and foundation, intention, preparation, integration, education, foundation, the foundation being, yeah, and then it's like, pick your medicine and you'll have a bunch of different ones woven in. So it's time to start speaking with more authority and presenting my own findings and saying, Here's the evidence for something that I'm making a claim about. So that's what I'm going to do with this one. And now this will be the self healing series, and Amanita will be part of that, and the music and psychedelic series will be ongoing as well. And this will be a way for me to track my projects and what I want ready to share with people.
But I do think that maybe I need to, like, open up the blog or make it not password protected. I'm not sure about what to do with the substack portion, or, I don't know, maybe I keep doing what I'm doing and I just, yeah, I don't know, something to talk to Claire about, I think, I think that's part of why that meeting got pushed out. And I don't know it's very interesting the food and beverage role. When I looked at the day that she and I are meeting now, it's 7 N’oj and it's the ending, the ending of some intellectual pursuit and the completion of an intellectual cycle. I just started crying because it is over now, that era of Holly, the food and beverage journalist, and yet I transcend and include and I bring them along with because food is a really powerful metaphor. It still is. It touches everyone, like everyone can understand it, and it encapsulates the whole life cycle of the human of the planet. It really is everything, and I really was onto something then. And as I was saying when I was talking to Prash yesterday, it's really unique in the way that it's one of the few mediums where you're just tangibly aware, you can perceive its ending as inherent in its beginning. I mean, from the moment you take your first bite, it's already over. It's disappearing before your eyes. You consume it, and it becomes something else, but it also dies, even as it gives you life. So it really is the perfect metaphor, and I want to use those to help illustrate larger concepts and artistic visions, and that's why I do want to do my gallery exhibitions in cafes and restaurants breweries. Maybe I don't know ethanol is still a tricky one, and I think, but I also was happy to hear ash talk about psilocybin as being something we can introduce to help us understand other things. So my impulse to bring psilocybin in, if I'm drinking it, was the right one, but you have to be careful and just have the right intention. So if I go in with the intention of help me learn more about this, you have to be careful too, because part of what I've learned in the past is that It's easy to lose yourself. So yeah,
just awareness.
so something's ending, but it's also not, and I think maybe there is still a role for hiring Claire to help me, like sort through some of the stuff that I've worked on up until now. either way, it will be really interesting to talk through it with her. And I find it really interesting too that I get a lot of clarity when I talk to Brian, even though he's the one who used to talk so much I couldn't get a word in, and we've really helped each other grow up. We've walked along the individuation path. We went through the fires of transformation in the caverns of COVID, and I felt so much resentment and sadness, and I actually just Yeah, so part of the Capricorn New Moon for me and 3 Aj today is about going within and protecting my energy. It's about seeing that I have limited energy to devote to things, and I need to be more conscientious about how I spend it. And that maybe part of slipping on the gravestone was, yeah, just needing to spend less time doing things that expend The energy, because it doesn't leave as much creatively.
i also have seen this is so uncomfortable, but how the quote, unquote resolution with Jess ended in it all being my fault? And part of why I expressed what I did was because I already felt a bit unwelcome before that happened. And I think I need to say that, and it's going to be uncomfortable, but I think I have to let it out, because I don't think that's fair. And I think we both are people who say that things are okay, and maybe we really believe it at the moment, but then when we're in it, we realize that we don't want it and we don't know how to get out of it. I know I deal with that, and I think we're worried pretty similarly. and I don't want to repeat the pattern of going for years and things where everyone's dissatisfied and they just need to end. So I'm glad that I'm going to Adam’s. That was a really wise decision, but I need to be brave and bring that up.
And so I see now that part of yesterday's 2 E’ was about feeling like I was caught between mom's and dad's house again, and feeling like I have to manage everyone's feelings, whether or not they're actually asking for it, and feeling like the choices between being alone and living in community, and that it's never that stark, and that I just need to have better boundaries. I always know when I need to be in my own energy, and I actually often don't follow that. And then I think I get into these periods of hermitism, of like isolationism, because I haven't been listening up until then, and the nights it's like, I gotta mainline it. And the idea is that if I can listen in the moments when it's calling and take that time, then I won't have to be so extreme about everything.
Night world versus day world, serotonin versus DMT, Sun versus moon, community versus hermiting, and then if it's in verses, it's all give and take. But also, there are seasons where we lean more into one, and that's okay. We've gotten out of sync, and that's why we keep changing our calendars, because we get out of balance and we try to realign again.
I guess that's what we've always been doing. And the idea that there was some time when we had it perfect is a mythic narrative that actually isn't true. I don't think it's always been changing. It's always been shifting. We've always been rearranging ourselves and our lives to try to align more with what's going on outside. I
nomadism versus agriculture, solar versus lunar, matrilineal versus hierarchical, patriarchal and purple. What if we could transcend and include all of it? What if trans emergence is in taking all of these seeming dualities, transcending and including them? I mean, I know that's what it is, and the key is conscious dissociation, to be able to pull back, slow things down, explode them out, and climb inside them, see where we end and others begin. See all the little patterns behind the scenes. That's been key for me. You think you see the causality. You think there is causality, but nothing's really causality. It's just influencing cosmos and psyche is teaching me, is evidencing this thing I've been feeling, astrology is documenting it. It. It's not causation, but it's reflection and influence. And so I think that I know what's leading from one thing to the next, but if I'm able to slow it down and explode it out so I can see every particle inside the wave that led up to the thing, the fall, the decision, the impulse. Then I see the association that's really behind it, making me unconscious conscious, and it's often something totally different. And I see that actually there are these whole decision trees and possibilities and little universes that begin and end within what I perceive as a split second. And so the manifestation of what's happening might be something actually totally different than what you're perceiving. So one story is that I was on top of the world with this ceremony, and then I stepped out of the ceremony, I got knocked on my face. And that's a victim interpretation, because if I'm real and I climb inside of it, what happened was what happens every time I feel like I've gotten to some new level of awakening or have some moment of expansion, it's immediately followed by not believing in myself. It's immediately followed by imposter syndrome. It's immediately followed by Who the fuck are you to say that it. Is immediately followed by you’re evil. It's immediately followed by, this is the dark sorcery of 13 Kan, it's immediately followed by, you’re Darth Vader, Tyler Durden. Luke Skywalker has been speaking, and I've been reaching him in my IFS meditations. He looks like Kermit the Frog's son who played tiny tim in the Muppet Christmas Carol and speaks with a little voice, but he's got a commanding presence, and he says that he doesn't want to play Leia anymore. He's Luke Skywalker. He wants to be the hero with a story, and he's going to keep talking until someone listens to him. He's little Brian, he's little Holly. He's little Riordan, the Bard and poet of the kings. He's the little hero longing to be seen. And he's looking for his Yoda, and he's looking for his Obi Wan Kenobi, the people to train him along the way. And so sometimes he falls for the gurus. But really, when he can get quiet and get down to his essence, he sees that he is Jesus. He sees that he is the Christ consciousness. He sees that he is the force and the magic is within him, and everything else is a feather, just for pretend.
So this New Moon is about being Luke Skywalker. This new moon and this Gregorian transition is about flipping the calendar and breaking down the binaries and not actually resisting the Gregorian New Year either, but seeing that that was our attempt to get back on track. Bless our hearts as a civilization, we've actually been trying. We've actually been sensing that something was wrong. We've actually been trying to get back on track. And the narrative that we're bad and wrong in modern society is flawed and we're hurtling towards some demise of our own creation is just actually perpetrating the Puritan narrative. Is actually just perpetrating that same, same shame shit that I want us to break free from. So can we transcend and include it? Bring the Gregorian calendar with us? Fuck it. It's what we're already doing. But can we learn to acknowledge that it doesn't have to mean doing. Can we redefine what January means? I'm gonna look back to Amazon. If it's Jupiter, then that's actually a pretty queer, trans archetype, and it's about gestation, and it's about what's starting to emerge, which actually is in alignment with the seasons right now. It's gestating.
This isn't the death phase. We already went through that. And actually, if we align with the Celtic calendar, then the new year started in November, and that actually feels aligned. That felt like the Death period. And then there's the stillness when something's growing below the surface, and you can sense it, but you can't really perceive it yet. And that's definitely the portal I just came through. That's definitely the Amanita journey, is like something's happening, you just don't really know what it is, and then you start to see the signs, and then it starts to emerge in your life. And little by little, you start to see that you're doing things differently. And I think that's the period we're in as humanity. And I think that's the period that we're in in January, and I think I need to share this, and it doesn't matter if it's perfect, it'll resonate with the people that it's meant to.
We can feel like we're falling behind or we're not on time, and 40 revolutions around the sun seems like a lot from one perspective, but from another, is nothing. It takes as long as it takes for us to learn the lessons in an era of so much estrangement, in alienation, where we have to figure so much out for ourselves, I think it's pretty fucking amazing if we can figure anything out at all.
So Happy New Year. I think it's okay to keep celebrating them again and again, because new things are always beginning. Why? Not have a cause for celebration. That's kind of my thing. Who am I to shut down the ceremony?
So happy, happy Gregorian transition, another revolution around something we perceive as the center of the universe. And that's really interesting, isn't it? Oh, my God, of course, of course. Right now I'm reading about the Copernican revolution. Of course. I just love the universe. I knew there was a reason I was being led to read cosmos and psyche right now, and it's talking all about the Copernican revolution is changing everything, because it was when, for the first time, we saw the sun as the center of the universe that the Earth revolved around. But ironically, paradoxically, seeing that we weren't the center of everything made us feel like we were the center of everything, because we were the ones perceiving it. And the enlightenment and the elevation of the human intellect came directly out of this Copernican revelation because we perceived ourselves as so great for observing, we were really just the vessels that happened to show up in that moment, as McKenna says, the lenses for seeing, for analyzing the whole cosmos in a unique way, that feeling special about us as our instrument is finely tuned to collect and gather all the information and experience synthesize across the cosmos and across these things we Call space and time that are really made up.
And I mean, that is a special ability, and that is something we can celebrate. But the real innovation of the Copernican Revolution was supposed to be that were not the thing the universe revolves around. And then that's what happened anyways.
And I think that's part of what feels like, at least for me, a natural resistance to the Gregorian and I guess the Julian calendar systems is orienting around the sun. I don't know. It feels kind of wrong to me, orienting around the doing and the planting. I think maybe because of this cultural shame, though, because if we're orienting around the seasons, that is oriented around the sun, but I personally feel a lot of alignment with the cycles of the moon, yeah, but yet, the Maya calendar system is a Solar one, isn't it? I mean, we need both that can't be an either or, and it's not, and I honor both and I incorporate them, but maybe part of my resistance to the sun in general is the shame that we took what should have been a discovery of interconnection and an opportunity to see ourselves as more embedded in an ecosystem, and instead, we used it to separate us. Instead, we used it to define us as superior. Somehow. So we just need to reframe it and put things in perspective and in context. Freaking cool. Okay. Gracias para la medicina and Happy New Year. You.
<isn’t that funny that today the AI picked up the transmission as ending with YOU? when last time it was WE, and before that I… FASCINATING
Resources
Laurence Hillman, The Hillman School: 10 Archetypes Course, “The Explorer: Astrological Jupiter.”
Laurence Hillman, Planets in Play, “Jupiter”
Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, Introduction
Annabelle Stapleton-Crittendon, personal session, kundalini foundations and 10-body system, 28.12.24
Mark Elmy, Chol Q’ij daily updates
Becca Tarnas, “Whitehead and Archetypal Cosmology”
Methodology: Time-Traveling With the Diamond Needle / Hollow Bone Show notes / PPS 11 Aq’ab’al
Path of the Plumed Serpent Autumn 2024, Ceremony #4: Childhood LHP, 11 Aq’ab’al
This is my childhood left-hand path, the intuitive creative side of my gestation, and the ceremony ended up being time-traveling with the diamond needle to the part of me that cut myself off from all those forking artist’s paths, the ones I got to scared to walk down, where my holy inner trinity came together—as I denied myself three times.
I got into film school at Chapman College in California, a really good one, and I didn’t go, because I had just met Stephen, and fell in love with him, and some part of me became terrified and started screaming that I might never find a love like this again, so I had better cling onto it for dear life.
I got into Cornish College of the Arts for graphic design, after working really hard to put a really good portfolio together, with Stephen helping me, and at the last minute I said that I was never going to make a living that way, and besides, I didn’t want to end up hating art again like I did when my dad made me draw on the grid system, by having to contain my creations within some digital format.
I went to Western as a theatre major, and was applying to the study abroad program at Trinity College in Dublin so I could get my European fix on and explore the homeland, but then that firefighter freaked out again, and started screaming at me that if I was away from Stephen that long, he would leave me (even though, ironically, it might have saved our relationship by giving us both a break from each other), and that if I put my life on the stage it would come back to haunt me again, they’d persecute me for what I said, nobody could handle what was in my head. If I wanted to be an artist I’d have to be alone, because if they saw what I was thinking about them, they would leave me. God forbid I learn to work in metaphor and simile, I thought I had to portray everything so literally, this is probably still a problem I have; I need to gesture at the moon rather than grabbing everyone by the hair and dragging them to the moon and rubbing their faces in it.
But this is what my parts do to me. Once again, during my IFS practice, I connected with the part of self I wanted to talk to, but these firefighters are so hotheaded, they get set off so easily, and then the Higher Self who is doing the questioning gets pushed aside by some other part that jumps out with a gun in its hand and presses it against the firefighter’s temple, screaming: “TALK OR YOU’RE DEAD!!!”
This will be a scene in the play, that’s definitely not the way parts work is supposed to go, Dick Schwartz and Carl Jung are shaking their heads somewhere, saying, no. So one firefighter is threatening to blow the other’s brains out if they don’t tell us everything they know, and the other one is grabbing at the one with a gun screaming back at them that their only function is to keep the things hidden, and they’ll have to pick it out of their spattered brain fragments. None of us getting anywhere with each other. So I had to abandon the mission and calm the whole internal family system down with some ASMR.
I dreamed that night that a part of me was driving a Mack truck off the side of the highway on the route to Ollytaytambo, that Chad VanGaalen song echoing in the chasm of the Sacred Valley between my temples, richocheting off the mountainside as the car sailed gracefully to a crunching metal death miles below. The front of the car was emblazoned with a metal frontpiece in the shape of a Kame skull, the way the illustrations look of the Death Lords in the Popol Vuh. I guess this must be the Unstoppable Death Force, the suicidal impulse that is also the repressed creative force, the Kali Ma who would rather see her children die than live a lie; the mystical divine child who, when denied, becomes the alcoholic.
But here’s the remix. I always had this story, based on the cultural narrative, that the alcoholic was blunting their pain, cutting themselves off from feelings that were overwhelming. But what I realized is that the part of me that drank to blackout every time wasn’t trying to get out—they were looking for something. The thing I buried so deep that even I couldn’t find it.
They were looking for the truth that I had to hide from even myself, so that God and my parents and partners who read my journal and interrogated me in the psychedelic space couldn’t find it; the thing I had to gaslight myself into not knowing, because actually holding that information could destroy me. SO when I drank, I blacked out almost right away, but I had to keep doing it—and this is what is beautiful, to realize that I was going into the darkness over and over not to escape the pain, as in the popular cultural narrative about addiction, but to run headlong towards it. To relentlessly pursue the truth. To find the thing that one part of me who held a candle, who was trapped in the minotaur’s lair all those years ago when I pushed them down, has defended this whole time—I guess that’s the minotaur in the lair, is not the monster trying to kill me, but the truth that I buried. The Unstoppable Death Force is the one driving the Kame car over the edge, the one who starts getting more careless, getting in “accidents” that are really tiptoes toward the death that feels like the safer option than admitting the truth, even though the world and my life and everything in it is different now.
But we’re getting there. Little by little, we’re showing them that we’re safe now.
Artist, Mystic, Alcoholic, Prophet, Psychotic, Divine Child: they are all the same archetype.
The kid and artist without an outlet turns to addiction and burnout; the mystic without a home has to find something to worship; everyone gets stuck at the gate because they believe what they’ve been told, that they aren’t welcome at the temple, and this is the real reason Jesus overturned those tables.
The only difference between Prophet and Psychotic, whether you are deemed the Holy Lord and Savior or the Devil and Betrayer, Whore and Harlot, Scapegoat of Humanity, is whether or not anyone is following you; if they believe your gospel.
They didn’t believe the gospels of Judas and Mary, even though everyone was in on it from the beginning.
This is what my art will convey, telling the truth about these archetypes; letting the holy trinity inside me have their day; helping others go on these artistic and spiritual journeys.
And one day, my inner family may be more reconciled; we will see. One day, if we’re meant to know, the minotaur will be released from its lair, and we will gather around the funerary table, and feast.
Modality / Methodology: Time Traveling With the Diamond Needle
Choose your medicine (cacao, mushrooms, LSD, amanita, MDMA, or something more tame)
Choose a playlist you have built previously with a specific intention or invocation in mind: a storyline you want to deconstruct, a part of self from a particular time in life you want to speak with, an issue you want to tackle, your relationship with a place, etc.
Get out various materials for documentation: voice recorder, computer, phone, camera, art supplies, journal, scraps of paper, etc
Take the medicine, open the ceremony, set your intention, call in the spirits you want to work with through the medicine and music portal
Hit shuffle on the playlist and let the journey carry you
Document whatever is coming through however it wants to come in
Tarot and oracle cards provide guidance and kickstarts along the way.
The hollow bone rehearsal / TRANSCRIPT LISTEN:
Summary:
Holly Regan's Transformation and Self-Discovery
- They discuss their transition from a masculine presentation to performing femininity at age 14, which they associate with putting on a "suit." - They describe their creative period before age 14, where they engaged in various artistic activities like drawing and writing plays. - Holly reflects on how they stopped embodying their true self and started self-gaslighting, trading their authentic identity for a feminine persona. - They emphasize the concept of the "hollow bone" as a channel for artistic and spiritual energies, contrasting it with the idea of being an empty shell.
The Role and Responsibility of the Hollow Bone
- They elaborate on the true meaning of the hollow bone, describing it as a portal for bringing energies and artistic frequencies from one realm to another. - They explain the importance of cultivating practices and traditions to effectively channel the hollow bone's energy. - Holly warns against being too open and not transmuting energies, likening it to being a "slut" or "whore" in a metaphorical sense. - They stress the importance of intentionality and caution in conjuring and working with energies, as they can lead to trances and unintended consequences.
The Aliveness of Bones and Their Conductive Nature
- They challenge the Western cultural view of bones as dead and empty, asserting that bones are alive and imbued with agency and purpose. - They describe bones as conductors of energy, similar to the walls of temples and pyramids, and explain how they vibrate with frequencies. - Holly envisions the animation of bones and their resonance with other structures when played with specific sounds. - They emphasize the importance of being careful with what one conjures and works with, as it can have significant effects on one's being.
The Impact of Performative Gender and Self-Hypnosis
- They recount how they put themself into a trance of performative femininity and gender normativity, which they now see as a form of self-hypnosis. - They reflect on the lack of a clear framework for their trans identity during their youth and the dangers of being openly trans. - Holly acknowledges their ability to hypnotize themself and the process of reclaiming their true identity as a trans person. - They discuss the importance of recognizing one's own power to both hypnotize and de-hypnotize oneself.
Building a Supportive Lineage and Initiation
- They consider the idea of creating a lineage and initiation process to help others avoid the painful journey they experienced. - They reflect on the lack of a clear lineage in their own path and the value of having guidance and support. - Holly envisions a methodology that could make the journey less dangerous and more intentional, reducing the need for multiple "deaths" and losses. - They propose the idea of a "concierge service" to help individuals navigate their spiritual and artistic journeys more safely.
The Methodology of Time Travel and Intentional Playlists
- They introduce the concept of time traveling with "diamond needles" and using intentional playlists to revisit one's past. - They explain how this method involves going back through one's history with music and medicine to gain insights and intentions. - Holly acknowledges the source of this methodology and emphasizes the importance of codifying and giving credit to inspirations.
Action Items:
Codify the methodology of "time traveling with the diamond needle" and building a "syncretic Hermetic lineage" that can provide a "concierge service" to guide people through the process of transformation. (Assignee: Holly Regan)
Give credit to all sources of inspiration for the methodology. (Assignee: Holly Regan)
TRANSCRIPT EXCERPTS:
Recited to: Transfiguration, Your Inner Light by Sandra Ingerman and Byron Metcalf
>and this is when the hollow bone goes from being a channel to just being an empty shell with no meat or marrow. I The true meaning of the hollow bone is to be the portal, the channel, the vessel that brings things from one realm to the next, that allows the energies and ancestors and artistic frequencies to come forth. That is a lightning rod, a diviner, the both between messenger that stands at the threshold of perpetual Twilight and ushers the souls, the archetypes, the ideas, the inspiration, the artistic expression, from one realm to another, from the realm of the formless into the form, from the ethereal dream emotion into physical being, materiality, that's the true role of the hollow bone, the psycho pomp that carries the souls from the under world along the river, sticks into existence. But if you're not cultivating, if you're not practicing, if you're not invoking, if you're not aware, if you're not actually following the traditions, then the hollow bone, then you're simply opening to the astral and letting everything flow in. If you're not actually doing the work, doing the practice. Then you're simply then you are a dumpster
>they call you a slut and a whore, which is because they want to use you up for themselves, but it’s true that you’re too open, letting everything flow through you without transmuting it.
>>This is how the hollow bone goes from being a channel to being an empty shell, devoid of meat and marrow, letting everything flood through it, liberating everything. Walk all over it, letting dogs chew it. This is not the true meaning. Bones are not dead, empty things, as we've been told in Western culture, they are living. Meaning they are imbued with agency and purpose. They are made of quartz crystal. They have minerals that conduct energy in them, just like the walls of the temple, just like the inside of the pyramids, they conduct frequencies that vibrate with the frequencies of other things. The bones are still alive and speaking.
>The bones are not dead. The bones are not empty. The bones have whole stories to tell us. The Hollow bone show means taking what looks like a skeleton and making it sing and dance again. being the channel to guide the psycho pomp, the queer hermetic messenger between the realms. The bones are not dead. They are very much alive. The bones know. The bones are what hold the memory, the vibration of what happened. If the bones are quartz crystal, then of course, they contain the vibration the nervous system conducts the electricity that flows through the bones.
>the bones are what the nervous system sends the signals through, just like the signals go through the walls of the temple and then the body and the pyramid are in resonance frequencies. A frequency is sent through the conductor of the bones, a frequency is sent through the conductor of the temple walls, and they come into resonance when the same sound is played, when a sound is played, when the bones are put inside the temple and the sound is played, then they come into a resonant frequency and can be animated and can be sent to any time or place, and can be aligned to any purpose. So be careful what you're conjuring. Be careful what you're working with. Be very intentional.
Your words are spells, so be careful what you're casting, because you could put yourself into a trance without even realizing what you're doing. And that's what I did when I was a kid. I put myself into the trance of thinking that I was a woman. I put myself into the trance of performance. I put myself into the trance of mono normativity, heteronormativity, gender normativity, I put myself into a trance of performative femininity, and that was never me to begin with. I was always trans, but we didn't have the framework for it back then, but it wasn't safe back then. I was told I would burn for it, so I had to bury it so deep that even I couldn't find it. So I had to hypnotize myself. But this is the transfiguration, this is the transmutation. This is the flipping and reversing. I am such a good shaman that I can even hypnotize myself and forget that I did it. And so the reclamation, the reclamation and the remixing of this storyline is realizing that that's how good I am, realizing that if I could put myself into a trance, I can wake myself up from it. And this is claiming it, and this is realizing it. And I got here, I got here, and I had a lot of help and guidance along the way, and I had help from a whole astral team, but I did it, but I did it, and I didn't have one clear lineage. My lineage was syncretic. My lineage was fuck around it find out. My lineage was do it yourself, which doesn't mean alone. I had a lot of help, but I didn't have an apprenticeship. This is what we're all missing in this culture. And so what if we could build one? Then it could be easier, then it wouldn't have to be so fucking painful for everyone, then they wouldn't have to almost die over and over like I did, though. I mean, the down, almost dying, the dying is part of it, so I don't know, but I do think we can make a lineage and an initiation so that people don't have to flail around so much, so it doesn't have to be so dangerous. It can be easier. Dying is part of it, but it can be easier. The death can be a little. Gentler. Maybe you don't have to also die a million times along the way to the death.
You don't have to get lost on the way to getting lost. Let me at least help put you in the right place so you can safely lose everything. That's the methodology.
Putting Meat on the Hollow Bone
Listen Here / Transmission Transcript:
I document everything, because the antidote to self gaslighting is observation.
But if I never go back and witness what I captured, then it's like it never even happened. So what was the point of doing it to begin with? This is really this is like an act of triple deception, when you deceive yourself, and then you see the truth, and you write it down, and then you forget again.
(Today is 11 Aq’ab’al in the Maya calendar:) Oh, my God, but the reclamation of the childhood left hand power, the reclamation of feeling like I lost myself to performance comes through the 11. No wonder the 11 has been my master number. It is my master number. The 11 brings a possibility of eventual masterythrough devising your own system, which is taken from all the knowledge and experience you have gained while taking so many paths. Holy shit, this is in my path of the plumed serpent that Mark gave me last fall, last winter, the 11 brings the possibility of eventual mastery after restlessness to explore so many different paths within life, becoming the master, becoming the jack of all trades and master of none. I always feel like that. I just said that to someone the other day. That I feel like I never get to mastery. I start things. That's what I started this ceremony by saying, that's so cool.
I started this ceremony by saying that I'm really good at the beginning of things, but I'm not good at finishing. But this is how it actually happens. This is part of the point. The restlessness, the wandering, the exploration of all the different paths, is part of it. That's how you get eventually to your own system. The 11 brings the possibility of eventual mastery through devising your own system, which is taken from all the knowledge and experience you have gained will take in so many paths. Fuck, yes, this is the reclamation of the 11. This is the reclamation of the unseen, unheard children. This is the reclamation of the confusion, the knowing. This is a reclamation. This is what it means to be the hollow bone. Everything's been flowing through you all along, but when you put some meat on it, that starts catching things, but no but eventually the meat starts accumulating. Eventually the meat starts accumulating, and it builds up a residue, and it builds up a framework, and it builds up a system that starts to look like a body, and it builds up something that becomes materiality. This is even a project or an art thing that I see, a bone that things are passing through, and then it builds up and builds up and builds up, and eventually a body builds around it. I can see it in my head, a skeleton that things are flowing around. And eventually it builds up a body around it.
This is what it means to be a hollow bone, not to let everyone walk all over you and use you how they want to,
but to be a conduit. This is, I understand, a new level now of what it means to be a conduit and a channel, not just letting everything wash all over you, not letting yourself get eroded, but to let letting things accumulate on you, letting barnacles build upon you, letting bodies build upon you, not getting tossed in the current, but being in anger for other things that are flowing by to catch onto. This is the hollow bone. The Hollow bone is a rock. The Hollow bone is the coarse crystal on the pyramid. This is what it means to be a hollow bone. This is what it means to be a conductor, an anchor. This is what it means to be a shaman, a channel.
And takes practice and it takes action, and it takes discipline, and it takes creation to make those things happen, and it takes sitting down on the mat and writing and listening. It takes putting things into action. You can't just sit back and expect it all to happen, but like there also is an element of it kind of also just happens when you create the right conditions, but you have to capture, you have to document it. And so my childhood hyper vigilance, wanting to document everything so someone would believe me, turns out to be a skill. Turns out to be part of my shamanistic power and integrity. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the reclamation. Thank you for the medicine. Thank you for the witnessing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Show me what still needs feeling so that I'm not bypassing so that I'm not just jumping to the conclusion without actually doing the work. Thank you for the medicine. And all of a sudden, I don't feel like I have to tell everyone everything. And I realized I've spent my whole life feeling that way. All of a sudden, the witnessing of myself is enough. Thank you for the medicine 11 Aq’ab’al.
Creating personal cosmos of the garden, fall, sin, + redemption
The AI does not identify me. I wonder who is speaking?
AI Summary: The conversation delves into themes of nostalgia, identity, and societal pressures. Speaker 1 reminisces about tangible memories and the ephemeral nature of modern life, using music to time travel. They discuss the complexities of desire, being seen, and the societal expectations placed on women and queer individuals. The speaker critiques the patriarchal system, highlighting the blame placed on women and marginalized groups. They emphasize the need for cunning and illusion to survive, drawing parallels to shamanic practices. The narrative explores the struggle for acceptance, the creation of personal cosmos, and the journey towards healing and witnessing the pain of others.
Action Items: Help the speaker feel the pain that needs to be felt in order to bring about healing and integration.
Outline:
Nostalgia for Analog and Time Travel
Speaker 1 reminisces about holding tangible items and the slower pace of life before digital dominance.
They mention listening to "Terrible Love" by the National, which transports them back to a specific memory in Grogan's living room.
The speaker recalls air drumming to "Mr. November" and feeling observed, a rare sensation of being seen.
They reflect on the nostalgia of analog experiences and how music can evoke strong memories and emotions.
Cheating and Misunderstanding
An unknown speaker discusses that cheating was never about sex but about being seen and witnessed in a relationship.
Speaker 1 talks about feeling unseen in their relationship and seeking validation through brief encounters with other men.
They describe how cis white men often misinterpret signals, seeing women as objects to be taken rather than equals.
The speaker shares their desire to be seen as one of the guys, not for sexual reasons but for acceptance and validation.
Consequences of Misunderstanding
Speaker 1 recounts the physical and emotional consequences of unprotected sex, including HPV and subsequent medical procedures.
They criticize the medical system for focusing on female anatomy and perpetuating blame on women for sexually transmitted diseases.
The speaker describes being called a whore and having their genitals described as dirty and diseased.
They reflect on the societal and personal impact of these experiences, including feelings of shame and unworthiness.
Patriarchal Power Dynamics
Speaker 1 discusses the patriarchal narrative where women and marginalized groups are blamed for societal issues.
They describe how men in power rarely take responsibility, and those in disadvantaged positions must fight back subtly.
The speaker emphasizes the importance of using existing systems against those in power to survive and thrive.
They highlight the need for cunning and strategic maneuvering to navigate a system designed against them.
Double Deception and Survival
Speaker 1 talks about the shaman's trick of making men believe they are loved to gain access to their systems.
They describe the pantaloon narrative, where the protagonist must deceive to survive in a hostile environment.
The speaker emphasizes the importance of illusion and self-deception for survival in a society that doesn't want them to exist.
They reflect on the need to be masters of illusion to protect themselves and others like them.
Gaslighting and Self-Deception
Speaker 1 discusses the concept of gaslighting and how it involves making someone believe their experiences are not real.
They describe the process of self-deception as a survival mechanism to cope with a dangerous environment.
The speaker emphasizes the importance of remembering and waking up from the trance to regain control.
They reflect on the journey of self-discovery and the struggle to separate illusion from reality.
Nervous System Overwhelm
Speaker 1 talks about the impact of a dangerous environment on a child's nervous system, leading to constant overwhelm.
They describe the binary choices of being a narcissist or co-dependent, depending on the environment.
The speaker emphasizes the importance of patience and understanding that everyone experiences both extremes.
They reflect on the concept of quantum observation and how it shapes their understanding of the world.
Desire for Acceptance and Belonging
Speaker 1 discusses their desire to be seen and accepted, leading to complicated relationships and decisions.
They reflect on the desire to create a world where they can be accepted and loved, despite the challenges.
The speaker describes the struggle of creating a world of sin and punishment, where they can share their pain with someone else.
They emphasize the importance of finding joy and ecstasy in shared experiences, even if they become twisted.
Creating Personal Universes
Speaker 1 talks about creating personal universes where they can indulge and be punished, recreating the garden and damnation.
They describe the process of casting spells and creating entire cosmic realms to play out their narrative.
The speaker reflects on the importance of bringing light back and resurrecting souls from damnation.
They emphasize the need to feel the pain of others to bring them home and heal.
Intellectualizing Pain vs. Feeling It
Speaker 1 discusses the challenge of intellectualizing pain and telling stories about it without truly feeling it.
They reflect on the need to feel the pain of others to bring them home and heal.
The speaker emphasizes the importance of feeling the feelings to bring the children home.
They express a desire for help in feeling what needs to be felt to bring about healing and transformation.
TRANSCRIPT HERE / Excerpts:
What's in your hand. It's an album. Remember when we used to be able to actually hold on to something tangible? Remember when things used to be analog. Remember when everything didn't used to be so ephemeral. Remember when it felt like there was something we could hold on to. Remember when it didn't feel like Time was passing quite so fast, because it wasn't because information is doubling at quicker and quicker rates as time goes on, information, data being put in context, data being captured and observed, it's happening faster now, and I listen to terrible love by the National and I'm transported back in time, time traveling with a diamond needle. And all of a sudden I'm there in Groveman’s living room again, and we're air playing air drums to Mr. November, and he's saying how Mark doesn't get it and I'm agreeing and I'm feeling observed. For the first time in a long time, that's always what it was about. Cheating. Was never about sex. I didn't even like it.
It was about being seen by someone for a moment. It was about not feeling witnessed in my relationship, and not being able to do that for myself. And so there were these glimpses with these men, where I felt like I was one of them, but they misinterpreted. They saw a woman, and they saw something that they thought was theirs to take, because the men, the cis white men, have been programs like that, to think that they can just take whatever they want, to think that if there's someone in a female body standing before them, vibing, that they must want to merge with them. No, I didn't want to be with them. I wanted to be them. I wanted to just be witnessed and held by them. I wanted them to just reflect that I was one of the guys. But instead, they saw something for taking, for using, for abusing, for using at the moon, throwing away, just like the fucking condom. Oh, wait, none of them used one. Oh, wait, that's why I ended up in the hospital getting things frozen off my genitals, the fucking Scarlet letters written on my vagina that says you have sinned and you are dirty and you're unworthy, three little letters that he'd throw back at me, Not the ones that are really fucking scary, but scary enough because they can still turn into cancer, HPV, the ones he threw back at me, because they can only detect it in people with female anatomy, they can’t even test for it in men. What kind of fucking bullshit is that? What kind of medical system has these diseases that we can only detect and quote, unquote, women, as if we needed more things to be blamed for? And so he called me a whore. And so he called me dirty.
They always blame the women, the queer and the trans. They never blame the other CIS, white men. Or if they do, it's the ones who they perceive as poor or feminine or less advantaged than they are. The ones in power. Will never give it up. We have to take it from them, but we have to do it secretly.
The shaman’s greatest trick, the greatest act of double deception, making the men believe that we loved them so we can go in through the side door and use their own systems against them. This is the pantaloon narrative. It's a tale as old as time. It's the only way the daughter gets out of her father's house alive. It's the only way the queer kid gets out of their family's homophobic home alive. The greatest act of double deception making assist white men believe that we love them, so we can go in through the side doors and use their own systems against them. That is how we win. That's the only way we stay alive. In a system that was rigged against us, never meant for us to survive.
We have to go in through side doors and use our cunning, we have to be wolves in sheep's clothing, or is it the other way around? Ba, ba, black sheep. We are the priestxs of the syncretic Hermetic tradition, keeping the medicine alive for generations by hiding it in plain sight, right in front of the eyes of those Who would take it from us, but secretly enshrined. These are not the medicines you're looking for. These are not the methodologies you're looking for. These are not the secrets you're looking for. Keep going forward. This is how we win, by being masters of illusion. And we have to, because when you grow up the queer, trans kid in the society that never wanted you to exist to begin with, you have to get so good at the illusion that you fool leaving yourself and forget that it was a game that you were playing in the first place.
The greatest act of double deception is making yourself believe that you're not a shaman. the greatest trick the shaman ever pulled, was convincing the world that they weren't one. The greatest trick the shaman ever pulled was convincing themselves that they weren't one. The greatest spell the shaman ever cast was forgetting that they charmed themselves in the first place. The greatest spell the shamxn ever cast was putting themselves in a trance and forgetting they were charmed in the first place.
Gaslighting. When they tell you the thing that just happened didn't really happen. The greatest act of double deception, when you get so good at running the illusion, you forget that you were doing it in the first place, and you put everyone into such a trance that you hypnotize even yourself in the process. when you get so good at casting the spell that you put everyone into a trance, including yourself, and forget that you were charmed in the first place.
And so the journey is one of remembering, of waking up from the spell that you cast over yourself because you had to survive to stay alive, the only way for a little kid to survive in a home that isn't safe for them is to believe that it's their fault, because if you did it, then you can control it next time. That's how the story goes. If the story is that the world is cold and scary, that your caregivers are actually not trying to protect you, but in fact, want to hurt you, that's too much for a little brain to handle.
You go into nervous system overwhelm. Nervous system overwhelm, always going up or down. Cannot find the middle ground. Too much / not enough kids, guaranteed to flip your lid. You're my world, you’re a piece of shit, narcissist and Codependent. Which one are you gonna be?
Nothing is a binary, in the quantum sea of possibility, which one will be selected depends upon your parents and your environment, but we're going to do all of them, just not in one lifetime. Selecting one possibility to be captured for a moment in a prenda, an ofrenda, offered up to the universe through your vessel, your unique collection of information and experience and sensation captured in a vessel that we call the body for a moment, Quantum observation, witnessing, widening the I narrows the possibilities, widening the I selects from all the combinations that are possible.
I had to play this narrative out to the end. That was, if you have enjoyed, if you have indulged, if you have tasted creation indulgence, then you are in you are automatically made unworthy, that you don't get to desire, that you don't get to enjoy doing that makes you dirty, and So now you must create the hell realm for yourself and go to it, but I never wanted to go alone. That was always the worst pain, that was always the struggle of my entire life and childhood, is I didn't want to go alone. I don't think I would have even minded Hell if I could have taken someone with me, but the fact that I was going to be alone for all eternity was a party couldn't handle. So I had to create a new little heaven and hell. I had to create a whole little cosmic realm where we could go to the garden and indulge and then be punished and damned, all within one little period of a few days, I was recreating the garden in the fall and the damnation over and over again, the Holy Trinity inside of me.
But that's how good a shaman I am. I can cast this spell and charm myself into a trance where I create an entire universe. And we are all gods, creating our own cosmos. I created little universes over and over where the whole cosmic game could play out again and again, but then I got trapped in hell and damnation for so long I forgot that I created the world in the first place. And so the union is to bring my light back, and resurrect all the souls of the damned, to see and witness the unseen, unheard children by feeling their pain.
You cannot escape the illusion
The speaker reflects on a profound spiritual journey, feeling guided by Ram Dass and other spiritual entities. They discuss the transformative power of rituals, medicines, and personal alchemy, emphasizing the unique experiences each person has with these substances. The speaker recounts their travels to significant sites like Petra and Egypt, and ponders the impact of observation on reality. They stress the importance of witnessing and community in making sense of personal experiences, suggesting that shared pain and understanding can lead to a collective alchemical transformation and a new world order.
Action Items
Obtain an "alchemical salt shaker" for transformation. (this is HILARIOUS)
Explore further the concept of how observation and witnessing can change the nature of reality.
Reflect on the importance of witnessing each other's pain and experiences to provide validation and purpose.
Outline
Navigating the Twilight and Seeking Guidance
Speaker 1 describes navigating in the twilight, seeking guidance and illumination for new ideas. - feels the presence of Ram Dass, the crystal Council, animals, energies, medicines, ancestors, and a ritual fire. - can see and feel the warmth of the flames, smell the burning cedar and pine, and see the moonlight on the trees. - emphasizes that the experience is not about the medicine but about tuning in and feeling the presence of the collective.
Personal Alchemy and Dimensional Presence
Speaker 1 discusses the concept of personal alchemy and how different people react to the same stimulants differently - mentions feeling present in all dimensions and describes the calming effect of this experience. = talks about the unique third thing formed when two energies come together and how it affects personal reactions. - asks for illumination and guidance on what dreams to pursue next, mentioning the EDD kid's desire to do everything at once.
Journey to Petra and Dimensional Travel
Speaker 1 recounts a journey to Petra, discovering the Grail legend and feeling like they won the lottery by reaching the temple. - describes traveling through different dimensions and feeling present in various locations, including Ireland and Egypt. - expresses excitement about the alchemical transformation and the changes in their being. - questions what will happen this time and emphasizes the importance of the collection of information, experience, and sensation.
Observation and Alchemy
Speaker 1 explores the concept of observation and how it changes the thing observed, including the impact of witnessing. - Speaker 1 discusses the act of observation turning data into information by placing it in context - Speaker 1 mentions meditation as widening the I to include the whole cosmic thing and the importance of pupil dilation during psychedelic experiences. - emphasizes the role of light information in turning data into information and making someone a concrete being.
Witnessing and Pain Transformation
Speaker 1 talks about the importance of witnessing each other's pain and how it turns it from a swirling amalgamation into something concrete with a purpose. - Speaker 1 mentions the bodhisattva path and the importance of not holding pain alone - Speaker 1 emphasizes the point of witnessing and how it resolves the swirling cloud of possibilities into a new dimensionality. - concludes by stating the importance of feeling the pain together and how it opens the door forward toward a new world order.
TRANSCRIPT HERE / Excerpts:
Oout of the Twilight on 11 Aq’ab’al. I ask for guidance. I ask for illumination of my new ideas. I can feel Ram Dass and the whole crystal Council and all the animals and energies and medicines and ancestors here with me. I can actually feel them. I can actually see them. We're all gathered around the ritual fire. I can see the flames flick layering on their faces. I can feel the warmth under my skin. I can smell the burning cedar. I can smell the pine. I can see the moonlight in Escondido shining on the trees. I can see us all illuminated in the forest. t's not about the medicine. It's about tuning in. I can see it. I can feel it, it's just a conduit.
I am the conduit. I am the channel. I am the mouthpiece. I am a mouthpiece. I'm not the anything. I am a happening. I am a hollow bone, one of many in the body, the collective corpus of humanity, with the number 11 today, so many ideas flowing in from every direction. That's the way I'm always operating. Today actually feels clear. Today. I actually have a clear vision. Today I see us all gathered around a ritual fire, I feel myself present in all the dimensions at once. And it's not overwhelming. It's calming. The stimulant can be focusing for the kid with too much and not enough, it's about your personal alchemy, the way things combine within your body. It's about the unique third thing that's formed when two energies come together. The way I react to a day is not going to be the same as the way you do. The way I react to a medicine is not going to be the same as the way you do because it's all alchemy, personal alchemy, Better Living Through Chemistry.
The ADD kid wants to do everything at once, but the stimulant helps you focus too much, plus too much equals just the right amount
i asked for illumination, like the Grail legend, which they just discovered underneath Petra, they finally excavated the temple in that pink castle that I sat outside of, that I finally got myself to after a lifetime, reveled in a drinking sage tea and meditating with the pink dust on my shoes and my pants and the pink kittens rolling in it and. Looking at the Treasury knowing I'd won the lottery, just because I actually got myself there all by myself. And it was a portal, and I was traveling through all the different dimensions, just like I am right now. Right now I'm in Ireland. I'm a druid. I'm a forest nymph. I'm a pagan priest, ex I'm in Egypt. I'm underneath the light of the moon at Luxor. That trip was really important, and now I'm circling back to it, and I can't wait. I can't wait to see what's in store coming back now with the collection of information, experience and sensation that's in my vessel. I can't wait to see what alchemical transformation happens this time, because it's not the same me.
Hand me that alchemical salt shaker, I need transformation.
The way it's all about alchemy, the way unique combinations of energies interact, the way matter collides when it comes into contact. How does observation change the thing? What is the impact of witnessing? How does simply looking, seeing affirming? Actually change the configuration of atoms, change the way the particles are flowing into waves, change the vibration, alter the frequency. What is it in the seeing? Widening the eye to let more light in. How does the act of observation change the thing?
This is astrology, observing the patterns and alignments of things happening at a unique moment in time. They're just snapshots of happenings, capturings of ephemerality, things coming briefly into existence and then disappearing. What is it in the act of observing that changes the thing? What is it in the act of observing that conjures something into being. What is it in the act of observing that selects the possibility from all of the millions of potentialities and makes it materiality? Is it that observation takes data and makes it into information by giving it a context, because there's someone observing in a place at a time? Can I get a witness? This is it the act of observation that turns something from data into information by placing it in the context of the eye. When you're having a psychedelic experience or a great awakening, your eyes open. Wider to let more light in, light information, that song by Chad VanGaalen, I knew it was important.
Light information, opening the eye to let more light in turn something from data into information. You witnessing me, turns me from a cloud of swirling possibilities into materiality, into a person, into a being with a purpose. When we witness each other's pain, it turns it from just this swirling amalgamation of horror into something that happened for a reason, because it got us here so that we could witness each other in this moment and tell each other You're not crazy. It really happened, and counteract the gas lighting that tells us that the thing that just happened didn't really happen.
We can tell each other it really happened, you're not crazy, and that resolves the confusing swirl of sensation and emotion that we've been waiting through our whole lives into something concrete with a purpose. It made us who we are. It got us where we are right now. The point is so that we could share it together. The point is the witnessing. The point is the witnessing. The point is the witnessing. The point is the bodhisattva path, which says, I am here before you. The point is the witnessing, which says you are not alone, and you don't have to hold this pain by yourself anymore. The point is the witnessing. The point is that it got us to this moment where we're both sitting here looking at each other, saying, I see you and I feel it too. that alchemizes it, and that opens the door and that widens the I, and that resolves the swirling cloud of possibilities into a new dimensionality that opens the door forward toward the whole new world order .
That first few sips feeling / Wrath of the feminine to black heart procession / LISTEN HERE
AI Summary: The conversation explores the concept of addiction, focusing on the initial pleasure and subsequent struggles. Speaker 1 discusses how the first few sips of alcohol provided temporary relief from pain, despite the negative consequences. Holly Regan defines addiction as a reliance on substances to cope with life's challenges. The discussion touches on the distinction between medicine and poison, emphasizing intention and dosage. The speakers also address societal biases, particularly towards women, queer, and trans individuals, highlighting systemic gaslighting and the denial of their historical contributions. The conversation critiques the privileged position of cis white men and the internalized beliefs that hinder marginalized groups.
Transcript
Outline
The Allure of the First Sip
Unknown Speaker discusses the initial pleasure of taking a sip of something, suggesting it always feels right at the beginning.
Speaker 1 reflects on how the first few sips of alcohol provided a temporary escape from pain and loneliness.
Despite the negative consequences, Speaker 1 emphasizes the allure of that first moment of relief.
The conversation touches on the idea of addiction being driven by the initial pleasure rather than the subsequent negative effects.
Debating Addiction and Medicine
Holly Regan questions the definition of addiction, suggesting it is a reliance on something to cope with the pain of being human.
Speaker 1 ponders whether listening to music in headphones constitutes an addiction, highlighting cultural norms and expectations.
The discussion explores the fine line between medicine and poison, emphasizing the importance of dosage and intention.
Unknown Speaker adds that the ceremonial container and the relationship with the substance also play a role in its classification.
The Role of Intention in Substance Use
Speaker 1 reflects on their past addiction, questioning whether they were trying to escape pain or embrace it.
The conversation delves into the differences between various archetypes, such as artist, mystic, and alcoholic, focusing on observation and belief.
Speaker 1 argues that the only difference between a psychotic and a prophet is whether anyone follows them.
The discussion highlights the societal pressures and biases that affect the perception and acceptance of different forms of expression.
Gender and Social Inequality
Speaker 1 discusses the societal pressures faced by women, queer, and trans individuals, emphasizing the lack of confidence and opportunity.
The conversation critiques the privileged position of cis white men in society, who often assume entitlement and control.
Speaker 1 highlights the systemic issues that prevent marginalized groups from achieving success and recognition.
The discussion touches on the internalized beliefs that lead individuals to doubt their worth and potential.
The Impact of Systemic Gaslighting
Speaker 1 describes the concept of gaslighting, where individuals are made to doubt their perceptions and experiences.
The conversation explores how societal norms and expectations contribute to feelings of confusion, sadness, and loneliness.
Speaker 1 emphasizes the historical denial of marginalized groups' contributions and the need to reclaim their legacy.
The discussion highlights the importance of recognizing and challenging systemic gaslighting to achieve true equality and empowerment.
Those first few sips of medicine, you're always going to think you've made the right decision. the first few sips of something, it always feels right in the beginning. If it started off terrible, you'd never do it to begin with. I always was better at starting things than finishing them. Is this the root of addiction? That first few sips feeling,
and it was always what drove me to drinking that first few sips feeling when it first hits your tongue, when it first hits your belly and makes it warm, that alchemical transformation when one thing mixes with yours and it takes you into a state different than where you'd been before, when it takes you out of the pain of being you, when it takes you out of the pain of being small, when it takes you out of The pain of being separate, even for a moment, for that first sip, it was always worth it, no matter how messy it got, no matter how much I threw up, no matter how much I made a fool of myself or a mess in my life or wrecked my car and almost died, no matter how far away for myself, I felt like it took me. It was always worth it for that first few sips, feeling bargaining, taking one day off a week so I could say that I didn't drink every day. I do it with the medicine now today, but the intention is different. The intention is different and the approach is different. So does that make it different, or is it all still addiction?
What does addiction even mean? It's reliance on a medicine to try to cope with something, with the pain of being human, which is overwhelming, and frankly, in this culture that's sick and wrong and terrible, we all need something. This song should be recited along to things go on with mistakes by Brock, black heart procession,
make a note. I'm listening to it in my headphones right now, and I'm speaking along to it, and this is the perfect pacing for it. Does that make it an addiction? If our culture is so sick that we need something just to cope with the day to day of getting up in the morning, if we need to take something if we need to get outside ourselves, just to go drag ourselves into the framework that we were never meant to live in to begin with. Is that really an addiction, or is it medicine? What's the line between a medicine and a poison? It's the dosage
and it's the intention, and it's the ceremonial container. I think it's the way in which you approach it. Is it a relationship? Are you just using it? Are you trying to produce a different feeling in your body?
Are you trying to avoid something? Are you trying to go into it. But see, even with my worst addiction, when I was at the bottom of a bottle every day, I don't know that I was actually trying to get out of the pain. I think I was trying to go into it.
So isn't even an addiction medicine. In that sense, I was always going to the death. I was always trying to hit bottom. And if that's your intention, is there such a thing as misusing? Is there even such a thing as addiction, artist, Mystic, alcoholic, psychotic, Prophet, all the same archetype, the differences, where is that energy going? The difference is, who is witnessing? The observation. The difference is, does anyone believe in what you're saying?
The only difference between the psychotic and the Prophet and the mystic is whether anyone listens to their gospel. The only difference, the only difference between the artist and the alcoholic is whether anyone puts up the paintings that they scrawl on the page when they're at the bottom of the bottle in a gallery, or if they just stay forever locked inside the sketch pad like mine. whether you just write draft after draft on your computer and never publish it, disappearing into the Google Docs ether, or if you get a publisher. That's the only difference between me and Jack Kerouac. I hid myself away, and this is the feminine repression, and this is the feminine and the queer and the trans repression. They tell us that we're not good enough this. Yeah, see, and there were always those statistics that I used to read when I worked in marketing about how men didn't have any shame, about how men would apply for jobs that they weren't qualified for because they had no shame, and women wouldn't even try, because they'd assume that they were never going to get there, And that's not even taking queer and trans people into account. I mean, fuck, we never think we're gonna make it.
We don't even try, because we assume we're never gonna make it because the world wasn't set up for us to begin with. But these fucking cis white men, they have the whole fucking world in the palm of their hand. These motherfucking cis white men, they have the whole world in the palm of their hand, and they just take everything's for them. They just assume everything's for them and everything is for them. Everything is set up for them. Everything fucking caters to them, these fucking cis white men, they just take and take. They assume everything's for them, because everything is for them. They just assume everything's for them. They just assume they can take whatever they want. They just assume that they can fucking touch your body. They just assumed that they could grab your breasts like they belong to them, like they're your property. They just assume that it belongs to them. They just assume that they can have it. They just assume that that space is meant for them. They just assume that they can go there, take that touch, that person. They just assume they can fucking do whatever they want to you. They just do whatever they fucking want to you. They just do whatever they fucking want to you. They grab your breasts without even asking, like they belong to them. They grab your fucking ass. They put you in their bed. They fucking do whatever they want to you. They do whatever the fuck they want to you, and they don't care. They don't listen. If what you're saying is not only not enthusiastic, but is actually a no. That kind of sounds like a yes, because you don't know what else to say, because you assume you're supposed to go along with whatever they want, because you assume that you're their property too, because you believe the fucking lie too. Because you believe the fucking lie to you that they can take whatever they want, even if it's your body, because you believe the fucking lie to you that those spaces aren't for you because you believe the fucking lie to you, you're not welcome in the temple.
So of course you worship the fucking gate, of course you worship the bottle, of course you worship the medicine. That's the only thing that makes you feel better. You believe the temple isn't for you. You were told the temple wasn't for you. You were told the inner temple wasn't for you. You were told you weren't good enough. You were told you weren't pure enough. You were told that you would burn. You were told that you couldn't go into the temple. Of course, we stay at the gate. We were told that we weren't welcome in the temple. Of course, we stay at the gate. We were told we weren't welcome in the temple. Of course, we worship the gate. We don't know what the temple even looks like, because we've never stepped foot inside. Jesus went to the temple and was horrified, and he turned the fucking tables upside down, and he said, What the fuck is this shit? This isn't what I meant. This isn't how it was supposed to be. I used to say that was gonna be the title of my autobiography. This didn't turn out the way I intended. Well, this didn't turn out the way I meant it. I used to say that was going to be my autobiography, and that the sequel was going to be that wasn't what I was trying to say, because I never could decide on anything, because I never could get it out.
Gaslighting is when they tell you the thing that just happened didn't really happen. When they're turning the lights down so slowly, it's almost imperceptible, and you can't tell what's happening, and then they tell you that you're crazy. It's always been this way. We've always had to fumble around in the dark not knowing where we were going. We've always had to be really confused and sad and lonely. We've always been bumping our heads and burning into each other. It's always been this way, you're crazy, you're crazy, you're crazy. This is the way it's always been, nah, nah. They're denying. Our history, our legacy. They're denying the fact that we were the ones in charge in the beginning. They're denying the fact that we used to all live in reciprocity. They're denying the reality. They're denying the reality because they have to keep up a charade to stay in power, because they have to keep up the appearance of control and separation the song just ended. They have to keep pretending. That's the only way it keeps going. And eventually you get so good at you believe this gaslighting so much that you start to gaslight even yourself.
Rap of the Hollow Bone v2 LISTEN >>
AI Summary: The conversation delves into the speaker's inner journey of self-discovery and healing. They discuss the internal conflict between protective parts and those seeking truth, likening it to a game of hide and seek. The speaker recounts personal traumas, including cancer, a life-threatening accident, and experiences of gaslighting and abuse. They explore their identity, reflecting on childhood interests and the suppression of their true self. The speaker emphasizes the importance of making the unconscious conscious, using rituals and ceremonies to integrate hidden parts. They also touch on societal pressures, particularly on queer and trans individuals, and the need for collective healing and recognition of one's inner truth.
Two speakers are identified, neither named. Methodologies: Depth psychology and self-administered IFS
Transcript
Outline:
Unconscious Inner Conflicts and Protective Mechanisms
Speaker 1 discusses the desperate need to pour everything into someone who sees them, seeking reflection and blessing.
Unknown Speaker mentions the wounded inner child relegated to the shadows, a part that developed to protect.
Speaker 1 talks about protective parts that hide things or make one remember, and parts that want to awaken and face the truth.
Unknown Speaker emphasizes that everyone contains multitudes and characters, all needing to be heard and spoken to.
Carl Jung's Concept and Internal Family Dynamics
Speaker 1 references Carl Jung's quote about making the unconscious conscious to avoid it ruling one's life.
Unknown Speaker talks about ignoring internal energies and how they can manifest as diseases or accidents.
Speaker 1 shares personal experiences of cancer and a serious accident, attributing them to internal energies trying to get attention.
Unknown Speaker recounts a cancer diagnosis on the feminine side and a marriage to an abusive partner, despite not listening to internal warnings.
Listening to Inner Voices and Seeking Healing
Speaker 1 describes sitting in the dark and lighting candles, inviting inner voices to gather around the fire.
Unknown Speaker mentions using various methods like medicine, writing, drawing, and playing to communicate with inner voices.
Speaker 1 talks about working with dreams and guides for interpretation and understanding the story of their life.
Unknown Speaker discusses gaslighting and repeating patterns from childhood, growing up in an evangelical church that taught denial of the body.
Exploring Identity and Personal Dreams
Speaker 1 reflects on being called a tomboy in the 90s and the binary system's inability to conceive of being trans.
Speaker 1 shares childhood interests in wolves, nature, and ancient cultures, imagining themselves in different places and times.
Speaker 1 mentions wanting to visit sacred sites and hearing the midnight symphony of the forest, influenced by Indiana Jones.
Speaker 1 talks about the realness of oracles and myths, and the importance of deciphering esoteric codes for universal truths.
Connection to Natural World and Indigenous Wisdom
Speaker 1 discusses the sentient energy in the natural world, according to indigenous and non-dual cosmologies.
Speaker 1 criticizes the capitalist narrative of separation and the need to sell solutions to people.
Speaker 1 reflects on the duality of having to repress truth and the importance of direct experience and listening to the natural world.
Speaker 1 talks about the threat to traditional and indigenous cultures and the loss of direct experience in modern society.
Ceremony and Reciprocity with the Natural World
Speaker 1 describes the process of taking offerings and giving reciprocity to the other realm in ceremonies.
Speaker 1 mentions writing plays and musicals as a way to search for truth and deliver subtle messages.
Speaker 1 identifies as a shaman with an X, carrying the syncretic hermetic lineage and leading souls from one life to the next.
Speaker 1 talks about the importance of deconditioning fears and insecurities imprinted in childhood.
Trauma and the Power of Hiding
Speaker 1 reflects on the need to hide from abuse and the impact of being told to deny one's body and desires.
Speaker 1 discusses the importance of making the unconscious conscious and bringing hidden parts into the fold.
Speaker 1 talks about the power of forgetting and burying parts of oneself to avoid judgment from God.
Speaker 1 mentions the Maya calendar and the significance of the 13th day, relating it to the story of Judas as a betrayer.
Reclaiming Identity and Expression
Speaker 1 talks about the importance of reclaiming identity and expression, despite societal pressures.
Speaker 1 shares experiences of being in relationships where sexuality and identity were blurred and messy.
Speaker 1 reflects on the fear and discomfort of expressing true identity and the need to bury it deeper.
Speaker 1 discusses the importance of making the unconscious conscious and the impact of trauma and gaslighting.
Ceremony and Connection to Greater Consciousness
Speaker 1 talks about the importance of ceremony and channeling archetypes and parts of self.
Speaker 1 mentions the significance of words in creating reality and the use of charms in ceremonies.
Speaker 1 discusses the importance of turning down programming and connecting with greater consciousness.
Speaker 1 reflects on the role of Judas and Mary Magdalene in seeing the truth and being scapegoats of humanity.
Reconciliation and Acceptance
Speaker 1 apologizes for past beliefs of not being worthy and not wanting to be in the body.
Speaker 1 reflects on the need for someone to see and acknowledge the parts of self that were trying to help.
Speaker 1 talks about the importance of recognizing the truth and bringing hidden parts into the light.
Speaker 1 emphasizes the need to listen to inner voices and the importance of ceremony and connection to greater consciousness.
Final Reflections: It All Comes Back to Beer
And through it all, beer keeps coming in to remind me that I am loved and held, always. My last-ever story for Good Beer Hunting, the magazine and community that launched my career as a freelance writer, journalist, armchair anthropologist, that launched me down the forking path to the PhD and back to my artist self that I find myself on now—was about Hildegard, my friends the brewer and the herbalist, whose nanobrewery and apothecary has been a staple of my community and personal healing in the Pacific Northwest corner of my world, and whose namesake is a figure in the psychedelic musical spectacular taking form. I forgot I had even entered it in the NAGBW awards, because I don’t want to be a journalist and I barely even drink alcohol anymore, but something about these things keeps coming back, tapping me on the shoulder, whispering in my ear, and I think the point of it all is to remind me it’s all home, it’s all love. That I don’t have to be an active beer drinker or identify myself with the community or a movement, but I can still hold space in my heart and life for it, because i do still care about it, something does still tug on my heartstrings when I walk past a truly community-oriented craft beer space or a tiny natural wine bar climbing from a reclaimed industrial corner where you can get a cheese plate and a really funky orange while sitting on an overturned barrel or some rough-hewn reclaimed barn door turned into a table.
But most importantly—of course—it’s the people. GBH connected me to some truly beautiful humans, ones who believed in me when I didn’t, who entered me into the NLGJA awards and got me into that cohort that helped me find the confidence to get out of the whole journalism game. Ironically, getting into the “club” made me realize it wasn’t a place I even wanted to be, but I needed to peek my head in the side door to see that i was meant to return, all along, to the life of the artist.
And maybe I still have a book in me. We’ll see.
But what is really cool is that I got a response from my outreach to Avril Corroon, who I only got connected to because of food and beverage journalism, writing an article that connected my tether to more-than-home in Seattle, Zach Pacleb; my ancestral homeland in Ireland; and my little slice of found family in Belfast—and Avril echoed what Lxo had mentioned, and what my friend at ecstatic dance said she was doing for her performance, that the kind of work I was looking at showing and performing was better suited to a nontraditional format anyway. That I should look at food and beverage and industrial space for my work, because thematically it made sense anyway. I instantly thought of Lily and QBP, and thought maybe I should reach out in case they found another space soon, and then I opened my IG and saw that Hildegard and Dave had put me in their stories thanking me, and being grateful for their own honoring, and I was flooded with love, and then I opened my feed and the first post I saw was from Lily and her wife saying that they just bought a brewery.
Folks, that’s what we call a synchronicity. Nothing’s real, and sometimes it’s amazing.
I see a gallery that is a brewery, food that is on the wall and art that is on the table, queering and reclaiming and reframing what all of these spaces and places mean. Making the brewery a sanctuary, a dance floor, a church; bringing the sacred and secular together but separate; maybe the trial run of my immersive psychedelic theatre is actually in their space, or one like it, anyway, found through my network of food and beverage friends; not burning any bridges but continuing to build them. Being grateful for all of them, appreciating all of it, not having to cut anything out but simply opening to the possibilities.
5 N’oj - PPS Ceremony #2 - Conceiving the Intellectual Path
Today is the first officially recognized ceremony of this Path of the Plumed Serpent, given that last time I didn’t even realize I was in one.
It has already been a doozy, but this is the beauty and blessing of the calendar: now there is a framework for holding, I don’t feel like I’m just going crazy, there’s a context to put it in.
But going crazy—that old chestnut—it always goes hand and hand with anything that gets heady for me. It’s both one of my greatest delights and greatest fears, diving into the intellectual sphere. Today, ceremony #2 on the path, brings my conception energy to bear, what I came into this world from: 5 N’oj, the energy of work and the intellect.
It’s also connected to Pawhuatuun, the old man, the Maya god of merchants, travelers, and the ocean, sort of like Hermes and Neptune put together. He is said to enjoy drunkenness. Because of course. The ancient beer is still very much a part of things, I have been hearing this morning. There’s a reason that the cacao synchronicities include the ancient beer crossover in the South American jungles where I awakened, the project that launched me on my nomad path and the road to a PhD; there’s a reason that Gönul, the angel sponsoring my visa and my cacao merchant, is Turkish—because this whole tradition of funeral feasting that includes cacao and beer goes back to Göbekli Tepe.
Artist, mystic, alcoholic, psychotic, and prophet: The only difference is whether or not people believe you.
The witnessing. Someone to tell you: You’re not crazy. It really happened.
Just like trauma healing.
Terence McKenna, Jesus, Judas, Richard Alpert, Tim Leary: raving channelers who received gospels that some people fervently believed in, and others vehemently rejected. Some were deemed the prophets, others the lunatics. Richard Alpert became Ram Dass and amassed a ritual following in Hawaii; Tim Leary was made Nixon’s public enemy #1, and got locked up in prison by the CIA. Jesus took over the world with his gospel; Judas became the scapegoat of humanity. McKenna is an interesting one because he was so fringe, he’s somewhere in the middle. Jung too, they found a way to translate things into languages people could understand at least parts of, but at what personal cost?
It’ll make you go mad, all this channeling, without something to ground you.
I fear the days of both intellect and creativity, the push to make something other people can see and understand overwhelms me. I always feel on the edge of exploding or going crazy. Like nobody is going to understand my ideas or believe me after all the years of gaslighting. I long to let the words go and simply feel. This is the best part of the ceremony and the practice, is just sitting and letting the sound wash over me, bathed in the primal light of only candles, breathing smoke.
Free. Home. An animal.
I fear the digital and often long for a world returned to analog. When I set pen to paper it flows until my pen runs dry. I channel and receive truth there that I later don’t know how to translate to something other people can understand. The spoken word is helpful but it’s so rambling.
I don’t know how it all comes together. But I fear my mind.
That’s where they came for me, after all, with the gaslighting.
The labyrinth is the one in my skull, and a brain kind of looks like one anyway.
My own thoughts are the enemy, the monster knocking around in there.
I love the days when the energy gives me an excuse to just be, days like yesterday where I went to the forest and sat nestled in the pelvis of a tree and translated a poem given to me by that sweet green place, and I took photos of the palaces and temples of humans and the earth in the land around the castle, and then I came home and talked to my soul brother about trying to navigate between the formless and the form, and I did a reading for our relationship that put everything in a framework and perspective that made sense.
Mark Elmy, my calendar teacher, reminded me that when things are meant to happen, they come easily. I wrote that in a marketing story recently, because everything is part of it.
It makes sense when I sit before my altar with my candles, it flows when I journal, but then I pull out my computer and it all seems to fall apart, that’s when I get lost in the labyrinth. I don’t know how to translate it, what I’m even trying to say, what people will understand. I know how to build an altar and make an ofrenda but what is my offering to the world of the mind? My play isn’t even a play, it’s a nightmare of half-formed hallucinations, and not in a good way, most of it makes no sense and there is barely a coherent through-line. It’s just another mass grave of aborted ideas, the beginnings of things that could have gone somewhere interesting, the conceptions of thoughts that feel visionary but I don’t know how to frame them.
I know that they revolve around this idea of the culture of direct experience, humanity’s oldest “religion,” the syncretic Hermetic tradition of esoteric spiritualism, of which I am a priestx, a shamxn, and so are Eric and Jade whether or not they know it. So are the playwrights of the Jeezus musical and the fringe performers at the Cockpit and Dave is an elder channeling shit around the campfire, I can see him in my mind’s eye with long dreads and a bone necklace; his eyes are portals to it. Aww, this is cool. We are around a fire together right now, interdimensionally.
He saw the play as what I conceived but was afraid to move forward: basically me just performing my ceremony in front of people.
It’s about self-gaslighting and channeling.
Everyone keeps telling me to trust the process, and I can do that. But I’m afraid of my own mind taking over and derailing me. Driving me into a corner of the labyrinth where the unstoppable death force can corner me.
Queer community, ceremony, and the stage are the exits through the side door of the labyrinth.
But I feel like my work is only in theory. I talk about the play I’m writing and my book proposal and both are labyrinthine nightmares, fragments of fever dream material. I feel like I just need an editor. Did Jung have one?
How do I bring any of this shit to fruition? It’s all stuck at conception.
What’s real is the ceremony and self-healing. What I can’t seem to get together is the documenting and sharing.
I’m so sick of writing. I just want to talk to people around a fire again.
Yesterday I alchemized it in the forest, I listened to that podcast about Jung on the way to a castle and found myself more enchanted with the palace of green that surrounded it than the thing made by humans. But I also took some amazing photos and realized this was something i was really good at, but I had gaslit myself here too and told myself I wasn’t a photographer. I am going to add these to my online art store. I sat in the crook of a tree that looked like a pelvis and hapé wrapped the forest around me like a blanket and I realized that no matter what we do, we can never be separate, and I didn’t just think it, I felt it, I gnew it, in the core of my being, and that was worth everything.
But according to the world of 3D, yesterday I wasn’t working. I’m behind on all my deadlines. I need to get this newsletter out and I keep avoiding it.
I just find it increasingly hard to do anything that’s not just being, feeling, talking, and listening.
Current research/projects: I’m reading “Psychomagic” by Alexander Jodorowsky after seeing it referenced in Kit’s thesis and it’s totally breaking shit open. This is what I’m doing. But I have skipped the public performance part and gone straight to the self-healing, adding my own flavor and experience. I still want to create stories for the audience but the praxis is this process for the queer, the seeker, the divergent, the artist to witness themselves and heal. But I do think it needs holding by another, which is maybe where my offerings come in and there is some opportunity to support myself financially, I don’t know.
I continue to dive deep into the Maya calendar, informally apprenticed by Mark Elmy, and it’s blowing shit open, and my friends can’t get enough of the readings, and i’m using it as energy exchange for things; as currency, you could say. I must tread carefully here, but it feels super life-giving.
I continue to struggle through the music series for my newsletter, feeling like an imposter, delaying publication of part two so much it’s causing me to completely freeze with anxiety. I don’t even know where to start with the podcast.
The second cacao/beer zine is burning a hole in my consciousness as well and I just don’t want to do it.
I don’t really want to write at all anymore, but I have this fucking newsletter and a thousand half-finished drafts that DO need to be shared…
I’m still finishing Kit’s thesis and have started a thousand books, from Donna Haraway to Gabor Maté’s ADD book, ironically, and Jodorowsky. I need to read Bittersweet as it keeps popping up. There is a book about shamanism from Annabelle as well I need to look up.
LISTEN:
Let's choose to be separate in the forest
The conversation explores the concept of oneness and the integration of self with the universe. It suggests that suicide is a desire to return to a pre-birth state of unity, but that true realization is understanding one is already boundless and inseparable. The speakers emphasize that death would not fundamentally change this, as we are already one with everything. They advocate for embracing life, appreciating sensory experiences, and finding comfort in nature, like sitting in a tree or feeling the environment around us. The message is to cherish being alive and the sensory separation we experience, rather than seeking to escape it.
Outline:
Realization of Oneness and Integration
Unknown Speaker discusses the urge to return to the womb and the oceanic boundlessness, describing it as a form of suicide.
Speaker 1 emphasizes that one is already boundless and one, highlighting that death would only mean realizing this while alive.
The integration is understood as recognizing that one can never be anything but one, and there is no need to go anywhere or do anything.
Speaker 1 explains that we are the trees and every species, with Papa Hapé helping to see this connection while sitting in the forest.
Cure for Derealization and Depersonalization
Unknown Speaker reiterates that we used to be free but are already everything, which is the integration and the cure for derealization and depersonalization.
Speaker 1 elaborates that one couldn't be separate if one tried, and death would only mean missing out on sensory experiences and the support of the environment.
The conversation touches on the sensory experiences of being alive, such as feeling the tree beneath you, hearing bird song, and feeling the moss and cold air.
Unknown Speaker adds that we are always one and can't be separate, emphasizing the continuous presence of the womb-like feeling in the forest.
Choosing to Be Alive
Speaker 1 suggests that it is better to choose to be alive while one has the chance, describing this life as winning the lottery.
The separation in this dimension can be brutal and painful, but finding comfort in the forest, friends, or the city can alleviate loneliness.
Unknown Speaker advises sitting in a tree to feel the womb's presence, acknowledging the responsibilities of this dimension.
Speaker 1 emphasizes that the ability to be separate is a blessing and a gift, urging to choose to stay alive and help each other survive.
Embracing Separation and Survival
Speaker 1 reiterates the importance of choosing to be separate while alive, highlighting the gift of experiencing life's sensory aspects.
The conversation emphasizes the need to help each other survive to enjoy these moments and feel the holding of the environment.
Unknown Speaker concludes by stating that everything will go back to the beginning, reinforcing the cycle of life and death.
The overall message is to appreciate the present and the sensory experiences while acknowledging the interconnectedness of all beings.
Transcript:
Suicide is also the urge to go back to the womb, to drift back into that oceanic boundlessness. But that way, it's kind of beautiful. The integration is realizing that you don't have to go anywhere.
You're already boundless. You're already one. You've never been separate. You can't be, you couldn't be if you tried,
fundamentally nothing all that different would happen if you died, you'd just be realizing what's already here while you're alive.
That's the integration, the realization that you can never be anything but one. You don't have to go anywhere, you don't have to do anything. You're already there. It's already happening. It can't not be happening. Now, I understand what these forest means. We are the trees. We used to be trees. We are the trees still. We are still every species, Papa jape is helping me see as I sit nestled in the arms of this tree held by the mother, floating in the amniotic fluid of The Forest, looking out at the water, softly moving i
Oh, I spit on myself. Shit. Did not aim that. Well, gross.
i keep saying that we used to be trees, and maybe we used to be more literally, but we already are everything. That's the integration, the cure for derealization and depersonalization is to realize that you can't not be one, that we're already everything.
You couldn't be separate if you tried nothing, all that different would happen if you died, except that other people couldn't enjoy you, except then you couldn't feel the support of this tree underneath you. Except then you couldn't feel the holding and the beauty of the forest. Then you couldn't hear with your material this bird song. You couldn't feel the softness of this moss under your thumb. Couldn't feel the cold of the fall air in Scotland
on your skin, taste the bitter earth of happe on your tongue, smell the rainforest as you sit in the temperate one. We're always one. You couldn't be separate if you tried.
So really, it's better to choose to be alive while you've still got the chance this dimension is winning. Winning the lottery, you get to experience the separation through the sensory and the separation can be brutal and painful, and it can feel lonely, but then you come to the forest, or you sit with a friend, or you go to the city even, and you feel the holding of everything around you, but really go Sit in the tree,
and then you'll feel that the womb is always around you. Sure, in this dimension, we have to do things and breathe for ourself and eat
and move our legs. That can feel like a curse, but it's a blessing. It's a gift. We get to be. Separate. So let's choose to be separate while we have the chance. Let's choose to stay alive a little bit longer. Let's choose to help each other survive so we can have these moments and feel this holding. It'll always go back to the beginning.
Transmission transcript: I don’t want to write anymore
Most people avoid meditation and hate it, but there's nothing I'd rather do than sit here in the candle light, Listening to the rain just being
I say suicide is actually the urge to return to the womb, where there's no more thinking or doing. You don't even have to digest for yourself or eat or breathe it's all done for you, the place where you can just let it all go.
But there is the beauty in being separate and having to do these things on your own. And yeah, it's the depth of experience.
But it feels so overwhelming. I think this is what all the artists experience, artist, Mystic, alcoholic, all the same archetype. There's a reason I'm putting them all in the same play. I think, I mean, there is a through line that's this gaslighting. What's the difference between all these things? They're all the same archetype. The difference in their expression is the witnessing is whether someone is telling you it really happened. You're not crazy. When there's no one to see it, or when you don't know how to share it, you go fucking mad. You but the same things expressed to the right crowd will get you the biggest following in the history of the world. Jesus, but then someone else tries to come along and have a vision. Judas, then they get sidelined and scapegoated.
The Trans is the hermetic messenger that brings back direct experience that tears down the gate keeping that says all of this is available to anyone you just have to learn to listen. That's the three line, self healing, direct communication with the plants, the ancestors, the energies. There's nothing special about any of these people. They just learned. They just remembered how to listen. It's something we all have the capability for which so it's about undoing the gaslighting by validating your experience, by witnessing the happenings and the knowings affirming.
This is the practice, and you can do it for yourself, but sometimes you also need someone to hold it and
I guess it's coming together, but the problem is the execution. Something's getting lost there. Something's getting stuck there. Something really important is happening around the calendar.
I'd say it's possessing me, but it feels more joyful than a lot of the other things I'm doing, but theater is so important to you. I mean, after that experience the other night, yeah, I just don't want to write anymore.
One of. Be free of the tyranny of language, and this is something McKenna talks about too. Words create a reality,
but they also entrap us in the net of duality, drawing lines around what things are and aren't supposedly