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
The Transfiguration of Riordan O’Regan
He was really into John Fahey, the legendary American blues guitarist whose music inspired indie-folk artist M. Ward, whose early albums echoed Fahey’s echoing, ethereal empty-room quality. Ward’s album “The Transfiguration of Vincent” was even a play on Fahey’s legendary record “The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death.”
Both are records that haunt me, conjuring the ghosts of all those who sold their souls at the crossroads, like another legendary blues guitarist, Robert Johnson, was said to have done to receive his transcendent abilities.
Because nobody thought a human, especially a Black man in America before the Civil Rights Movement, could just be talented like that—unless they were possessed. It’s a story the dominant culture has put upon all the underrepresented people since the beginning: if it feels good, it must be dirty. If you can heal yourself, without a man or the establishment, it must be witchcraft. It isn’t art unless it’s hard, and it’s only good if you’re suffering. Unless it hurts, it isn’t work, and if you aren’t working, you aren’t worthy.
It’s time we transfigured that story.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but the blues is trans music; no wonder I’ve always loved it.
In Austin, when I had another Saturnian orbit around something resembling my future masculine embodiment, I worked at a bicycle shop, like I did when I was still with him, in college and rediscovering spiritual studies; when I wanted to change my major and focus on religion and then he started sounding like all the rest of them, and told me I needed to get a job and start contributing, so I graduated just when things were getting interesting.
But you can never lose what’s meant for you. It took until I was 39, but I got back again.
They say of Fahey:
“His music has the intriguing quality of having something missing and being wholly complete and self-contained at the same time.”
that is trans-ness: the holon: the thing that is complete in itself, at the micro level, yet is but a fractal of the larger whole; the sub-particle that can exist without the larger organism, but not the other way around.
“Another quality that has helped this music to stay fresh, 60 years on, is the fruitful tension between the traditional and the modern; the use of conventional folk and country melodies and chord progressions, alongside subtly strange melodic left turns that divert into less familiar terrain. Aside from the title of ‘On The Sunny Side Of The Ocean’, which cleverly alters a well-worn phrase to make it unfamiliar, the song is remarkable for how it moves through an array of different melodies, some straightforwardly pretty, others darker and more discomfiting, with a fluidity that means you never quite get a grip on the ‘verse’ or ‘chorus’, or the prevailing mood of the track.”
it’s the essence of Hermeticism, queer alchemy and shapeshifting. I spent my whole life singing the blues, not realizing my very truths were contained within their essence.
but it’s okay. you get it when you’re ready.
I used to think I didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t exist without him.
he was the first person who saw the world that I grew up in for what it really was, who affirmed my reality, who was that empathetic witness we all need to heal from trauma:
the one to tell us: “It really happened. You’re not crazy.”
he was the first person who affirmed what was happening with my body, who acknowledged its desires as something pure that could be trusted, even the ones for other women and thruples and permeable borders.
but then he took it back, the narrative changed on me, suddenly I was a bad baby again, living in sin.
so I buried it.
I buried the truth
and I buried it down so deep that even I couldn’t find it, along with the memories of whatever happened to me in the beginning
and I spent the next 15 years sleepwalking.
but in the middle of the night, I went walking in my sleep, through the jungles of doubt to the river so deep
I drank until I lost consciousness and then my body enacted a shamanic ritual without someone to guide it, possessed by dark and archetypal forces, a zombie looking for its host
but eventually, it found me
it wouldn’t let me stay in all those dead-end lives that weren’t meant for me, where I was grasping at masculinity and creativity subconsciously
marketing and bike shops and starting my own business, beer writing and food and beverage education
paired with really challenging relationships
they all helped me learn skills I needed but in order to transcend and include them I had to burn the ships, as Don Fornes said
leave no escape plan and only smoldering wreckage so I couldn’t return to any of it
thank you Holly Regan, the one pretending to be a woman, you deserve a fucking Oscar
the wound they tried to paint you scarlet with has now become a power
the GIFT of double deception, convincing everyone you were that person and wanted the same things they did,
when really, you were a fucking shamxn
casting spells, and you’re so good that you put everyone into a trance, including yourself,
and forgot that you were charmed to begin with.
you’re not a sinner or a little brat or naughty girl or evil witch,
you’re a psychopomp, baby, a pied piper; a transdimensional messenger,
leading the souls between worlds and playing Jedi tricks on those in power
with your skills of shapeshifting and altering states of perception
going in through the side door and making them believe it was their idea to begin with.
* * *
This is the transfiguration of Riordan O’Regan,
the one who claims their name in Gaelic and their sacred lineage,
who takes their bones home to the places they remember, where the quartz crystal vibrates across dimensions,
and does the hard fucking work of healing that ripples up and down through generations,
who only makes deals at the crossroads if they will benefit everyone,
if they will set us all free and we can have some fun,
assuming our roles upon the stage and entering into the play
alone together, dissociating consciously.
I didn’t think this entry was going to be about him, but it’s what came out, so I guess some part of that masculine identity was still clinging to him, believing I couldn’t cross the threshold without him. And he did help re-enchant me; he reintroduced me to the animals and land, I had become a hardened city creature except for the times I would go to the zoo and see a cute animal and it would break my heart in two. He helped me get comfortable with the bittersweet; he sat with me in the nonduality and together we tried to hold the overwhelming nature of the thing so beautiful it rips your heart in two, and we tried to keep our relationship alive like a little bird that hit a window and was gasping to survive, bandaging its wings with Scotch tape and holding it together with safety pins.
It didn’t hold for long, and we tried vaguely to resurrect it after it was gone, but it was beautiful while it lasted.
Thank you for being my bird.
But I can fly now.
According to AI, "The Transfiguration of Jesus is a New Testament event where Jesus' appearance changed to reveal his heavenly glory:
Event
Jesus took his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, up a mountain where his face shone like the sun and his clothes became dazzling white.
Significance
The Transfiguration revealed Jesus' true identity and glorified his body. The appearance of Moses and Elijah confirmed that Jesus was the one spoken of in the law and prophets.
Other details
A cloud appeared and a voice spoke from it, telling those present to not tell anyone about the event until Jesus rose from the dead.
In Christian art
The Transfiguration is often depicted with Christ's robes in brilliant white, a golden-yellow halo, and a bright blue sky.
In Lutheran churches
The Feast of the Transfiguration is celebrated on the last Sunday after the Epiphany.”
I’m not calling myself Jesus, except for in the sense that we’re all Christ consciousness. And we can all transfigure ourselves to become something more divine.
It’s why they call psychedelics “entheogens”: it’s an ancient Greek term meaning “that which awakens the divine within.” Because we are the medicine, and everything else is just a magic feather. If we’re all just vehicles and containers for spirit possession anyway, hollow bones ready to be inhabited, then of course the medicine dwells within us, just waiting to be activated. We ARE the mushroom, the mushroom takes US, because we are just the vehicles, the messengers, the psychopomps—if we learn to listen, to receive, to tune into the subtle energies; I feel the Tarot permeating my being like it did for Jodorowsky as I’ve studied it, sat with the images, held them on my altar and in my body, the prenda.
This is what it means that we used to be trees; that things turn into other things. The energies are inherent to the cosmos, floating around assembling and scattering, configuring and transfiguring, waving and particle-ing. Little specks of things only appearing solid when they come together and strike a pose for a moment. Forming a jeweled net constantly in motion and cast over the Kosmos, like capillaries, a neural network, a galaxy, or a root system—as we approach the trecena of K’at, of course, the net. The question is, what are you gathering versus getting tangled up in?
I wrote the line “the hollow bone needs some meat on it,” but I didn’t know it might be literal. Our bones know what we need and where to go and how to transdimensionally travel. I’m calling in bone medicine, but I hope it doesn’t have to mean eating animals. He’d never forgive me.
I receive the learnings in phrases and mantras that I now realize are titles of chapters or plays. I see a scene unfolding in my mind, the set of the Nutcracker being wheeled out; the title card displaying in the Wes Anderson movie.
‘Act V: Rehabilitation of the Feeling Function’
I just emerged from a portal of my evolving process, the alchemical cauldron I’m developing through this program:
fucking with time, which means slowing down and exploding out the thought patterns, memories and associations, to open them up and crawl around inside of them and observe what’s actually happening between when I have a thought or think I’m making a decision and taking the next action.
fuck around and find out, which means trusting my gut, trying to discern craving from calling and medicine from ego knowing I will sometimes get it wrong, fusing the Shulgin method with Shamanism and a Hunter S. Thompson-esque radical subjectivity, gonzo autoethnography and psychedelic autotheory.
music is the medicine, choosing the tracks that spark memories to dive into the feeling realm or diving into live sound immersion.
the body coming back online, taking an intention into ecstatic dance and letting body parts guide me, speaking their stories; rehabilitating the feeling function, leaning into the sense memories and following the physical sensations to climb inside the narratives and pull them back into conscious awareness.
checking my directions, following my map home and integrating at my altar, calling in the guides and consulting the oracles and cards.
and don’t forget to close the door. I kept forgetting to close the ceremony, which is a really bad idea when you’re opening yourself to the energies of the whole cosmos.
Riordan O'Regan reflects on his emotional and physical journey, emphasizing the need to explore and understand his feelings and body. He discusses his fear of anger and the body, his realization of self-forgiveness, and the importance of direct communication with his body. Riordan explores his ancestral connections, particularly between African and Irish cultures, and his desire to reconnect with his Irish heritage. He also touches on the significance of archetypes, spirit possession, and the role of plants in his healing process. Riordan concludes with a vision of integrating his past traumas and embracing his nomadic identity.
Outline
Rehabilitation of the Feeling Function
Riordan Regan discusses the need to explore feelings deeply, similar to how he explores thoughts.
He mentions an essay by Marie von Franz about rehabilitating the feeling function.
Riordan reflects on the fear associated with exploring anger and the body.
He compares the experience of exploring feelings to exploring thoughts with amanita, emphasizing the need to dissolve the illusory nature of space and time.
Realization and Direct Communication with the Body
Riordan shares a humbling realization about not fully understanding his body's messages after breaking his pelvis, admitting to not directly asking his body why it was trying to communicate with him.
During a dance session, Riordan cradles his pelvis and tailbone, realizing his fear of standing up straight and bearing his own weight.
He acknowledges his fear of putting weight on his glutes and the numbness in his toes, which he attributes to the pelvis.
Riordan recalls a hospital incident where he tried to kill himself to get attention, leading to a realization about the need to forgive himself for trying to kill his body for many years.
He emphasizes the importance of direct communication with his body to understand its messages.
Exploring Ancestral Connections and Cultural Identity
Riordan talks about his ancestral connection to Ireland and the conflict between his English and Irish heritage.
He reflects on the impact of colonialism on his identity and the need to research the connection between African and Irish cultures.
Riordan discusses the contradictory duality within himself, represented by his father (the intuitive, generative side) and his mother (the conquerors and colonists).
He mentions the importance of reclaiming his ancestral indigeneity and the significance of his Irish name.
The Role of Archetypes and Spirit Possession
Riordan explores the concept of archetypes and spirit possession, comparing it to his work with Amanita and cacao.
He discusses the demonization of death medicines and the role of corporations in stripping them of their spiritual significance.
Riordan reflects on the universal resonance of ancient cultures and the importance of working with the energies present.
He emphasizes the need to trust the flow and the messages from his bones, which are calling him home to Ireland.
Dreams and Masculinity
Riordan shares a dream about a bike shop farm in Greece, which symbolizes his masculinity and sense of belonging.
He reflects on the objectification he experienced and the importance of feeling like part of a brotherhood.
Riordan discusses the challenges of living in the US and the desire to live in Europe.
He emphasizes the importance of saying no to what doesn't serve him and living authentically.
The Journey of Transformation and Emergence
Riordan talks about his journey of transformation and the importance of integrating his rejected parts.
He reflects on the significance of the Prodigal Son and the need to welcome home all emotions and experiences.
Riordan discusses the importance of working with the energies of anger and other emotions.
He emphasizes the need to trust the flow and the messages from his bones, which are guiding him on his journey.
The Role of Bone Medicine and Synchronicity
Riordan explores the concept of bone medicine and its potential benefits for his health.
He reflects on the synchronicity of people around him talking about bone work and the importance of attuning to that frequency.
Riordan discusses the challenges of eating animals and the potential of working with marrow and bone broth.
He emphasizes the importance of researching bone medicine and deer medicine to understand their impact on his health.
The Transfiguration of Riordan O'Regan
Riordan reflects on the transfiguration of his identity and the importance of embracing his journey.
He discusses the significance of the Trecena and the day of the most ancestors, calling in bone medicine and transfiguration.
Riordan emphasizes the importance of living for cheap or free without having to move around all the time.
He reflects on the importance of trusting the flow and the messages from his bones, which are guiding him on his journey.
Listen / Transcript:
I'm being presented repeatedly with the invitation to go all the way into a feeling similar to how Amanita is helping me explode out and climb inside my thought process. I must do the same with feelings. This is act five, rehabilitation of the feeling function. There's an essay by the same name by Marie von Franz about it which isn’t that interesting, but the title sure is compelling. I have to do the same thing with feelings, to explode out and climb inside them. What's happening in my body that one's harder. There is fear present around anything related to the body. Exploring anger of course, is the invitation. It's a scary one. It's never about what you think it's about, actually, because anger is like a layer of emotion, a protector that stands in between you and the exiled scared little kid behind it, but in Amanita, the conscious dissociation, it helps, it helps to get close To the scary feelings in the body, because you can, yeah, it's like this crazy function of Amanita to explode things out, open them up, slow down time. I mean, I've that has happened with LSD as well. And just climb inside what's happening like to dissolve this illusory nature of space time, particleize things a bit more, though I’m starting to wonder about this whole quantum framework altogether.
I had the humbling realization at dance last night that even after the whole saga of breaking my pelvis, I don't think I had actually really gotten close to it. I don't think I had really ever fully asked it what it was trying to tell me. I don't know. I mean, I don't remember. I know I journeyed in California. And tried to get to the bottom of it, and got to some good places. I really should remove my doodles for that time. Honestly, I should see if Prash can bring them, but I don't know that I'd asked my body specifically what it was trying to say. I don't think I've ever just asked my tailbone why it was crooked. Asked my body why it's skewed and my left side is a kickstand. Asked my toes why they've been numb since I started walking again. Like I've come up with stories about all these things in my head, but I don't think I've asked the parts directly, and that's the point of this whole thing. Direct experience, direct conversation, direct communication, whether it's a tree or a plant or a past part of self or a part of your body or a cancer cell, what are you trying to tell me? I did some of the work, at least metaphorically, with Ralph's first course, but I don't think I asked the body specifically. So at dance, I cradled my pelvis and my tailbone and my sacrum tendrilly in my hands. I just held them like a baby last night, and I just slowly rose and fell with the beat. I did squats very slowly, and I tried to keep my body, my spinal column, straight. And I realized that I was afraid to do that. I was afraid to stand up straight. I was afraid to bear my own weight. I was afraid to put weight on my legs. I've always been afraid to put weight on my legs, specifically my glutes. Why have I been afraid to put weight on my glutes? It's so wild, like feeling in the legs is scary, and I don't quite understand why yet, but yeah, as I did this, I asked the toes why they were numb, and they said it came from the pelvis, and the pelvis told me, You never even asked me what I. Was trying to tell you, and it reminded me of my own words at the hospital after I tried to kill myself. The phrase that probably honestly kept me out of the psych ward is when I mumbled. They asked why I did it, and they said I just wanted him to listen to me, and I realized I didn't necessarily need to yo opono Ono, Lubo and Marc and dad and the UK Home Office, even though they're the ones I thought I was mad at, I needed to forgive myself for trying to kill my body for so many years. And I know I've kind of done this. I've done rounds of it, but I don't think I really addressed the body directly. Yeah, I realized I was afraid to put weight on my backside of my legs. I was afraid to stand up straight. I was afraid to carry my own weight. The feeling of my own lower body supporting me caused fear to be present, and I was still turtling over to protect my underbelly, curving at the spine, doubling over. I'm not really totally sure why, but at least we're in dialog now.
Just like the art plays and practice need a lot of space and time, so does the body. And I said this, and they had these realizations this morning but then I didn't do it. I was gonna take the time to roll out of my mat and really stretch and be with it. So I'm gonna have to try to do that this evening, maybe like a wall I'm talking to Adam, honestly, I need to do release the production mindset as much as I can, slow it all down. So explode it all out. Let this be a practice for my life, crawl inside of it. I think that's part of the LSD journey with Joe, where we tunneled through the magical forest landscape with deerhunter and East forest’s music and his explanation of the music creating an architecture. I think this is part of that message. Slow it down, explode it out. Crawl inside. space and time are not what we think they are. We can manipulate them. We can bend them. We can get inside them. Yeah, oh, no. There's more dimensions than we see present. We don't have to accept what we've been given. And there is more space, and there is more time, and there is more expansion, and I do think more DMT production. I don't care if there's data on it or not, but I do need to find out about that
night time, that's where the creation is. So I do need to make sure to get out to the forest. I need to get out to epping forest. I need to schedule a time to do that before, yeah, but I think sleeping in the day more to sleep in the morning like I did today, so I can stay up late and get up early, maximize my DMT. I'm really looking forward to the Berlin wintering. So if you are what makes you angry, if you are only triggered based on something that's within you, then I'm mad at myself for keeping myself prisoner in a woman's body, quote, unquote, in a feminine performance, in a victim story, in those horrible relationships in the house of horrors in Austin and all these prisons. So I love you. Please forgive me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for giving my body away to people who didn't deserve it. I'm sorry for not respecting my own boundaries and borders. No wonder I'm mad at the UK for imposing theirs on me. I haven't respected my own, I let so many people in that didn't deserve it, just because I didn't want to go home alone to that apartment and face myself. It's so funny now it's like, I can't get enough time alone. Mad at Lubo because I've used chocolate as a substitute for love. But like so many of us, it's so deeply human. I haven't wanted to be one. I haven't wanted to be a person. I wasn't able to listen to the pelvis because it was scary as fuck, and I still wasn't safe in California. This is a powerful archetype possessing me. It is almost the power of Saq ‘Iq, the hurricane, the Junjapu, is it Aries? Is it Pluto? The war inside me, the two sides trying to fall separately, the underworld Journey rising up to meet me. It's powerful. It threw me from my bike, and I was afraid to fully engage with it in California when I didn't have the support I needed. My body still wasn't fully safe, so I don't know. It's like I could only I couldn't quite go in all the way. Maybe it's the Calleach energy, and we are still wintering. We have all the time we need.
It won't be answered in one day. This is gonna take time. This is my intention for Ralph's course, and the wintering is to really listen to the body's messages, learn the lessons the pelvis, the message that was coming through this morning. It's like, God, I just can't stop staring at those Celtic images. Like, my bones want to go home to Ireland. My bones want to go home. That's what I was hearing. My bones want to go home, and I think it's dark. I don't know there's something powerful ancestral calling me, but England is home too, and and so I kept thinking last night of the enclosures and the connection between African and Irish cultures. And I need to research that more the two sides of myself are at war, the English and the Irish, the Protestant, the Catholics, the subjugated and the conquerors, the imperialists, the whole freaking world, two sides of my body trying to fall two separate ways. And interestingly, dad is representing the opposite of what you'd think Dad is the intuitive, generative side, the artists longing to be seen, the bones, longing to reconnect with the ancestral legacy in the druidic forest. Mom is the side of the conquerors and the colonists. They were the freaking Protestant preachers trying to force their religion on everyone, just like that Blake story. Urizen. Need to come back to that from Blake. I I gotta go back to that one. There's more stuff about transhumanism at all that. But yeah, Urizen the archetype of religious dogma and his twin, his other half, his imagination, but he's an archetype who is inserting himself as the primordial priest who created his own realm of religious dogma, and he must be appeased, his child Orc, The spirit of intuition and freedom. It's sort of a jupiterian energy that's present now with the alignments, a struggle with the divine mind. So the division between Earth and the religious dogma and org, the freedom, the rebellion, is the divine mind wrestling with itself. Just creative research kind of encapsulated.
There's a holy mushroom Trinity. The mind is lions made. Cordyceps is the body and the spirit is underneath. Tourism creates religion to control the elements. Making chains of the mind makes a lot of sense. Images take a lot of space and time that capitalism doesn't give us. PhD is my protection to let it breathe, draw draw cards and let them pile up on the altar and see what stories they are telling together. Take time with a Jodorowsky book and yeah, just feel into the body. Feel into everything. Give everything the space and time and breathing room, because the two sides of myself are okay. Back to this. The two sides of myself are at war. They tried to fall two separate ways when I fell on the ground and shattered my root. Mom was a religious dogma, and dad was the the Druids, the forest, the filid. He was always trying to go home, and he was always trying to be an artist, and it always hurt me so much, and the real pain behind this that he didn't give me an Irish name, and it felt like everyone else in the family had one, and I never felt like I belonged with them. Me and Amber were the only ones, the black sheep of the family. The rejection by the regans really fucking hurt me. Because it was a rejection of my legacy, my ancestry, the only clear tie I had. No wonder I was obsessed with the Lion King. I was the rightful heir to the throne, the eldest son of the O Regan's but I was denied three times, like Jesus, by name, my lineage and my manhood. Uncle John was the only one who ever really made me feel wanted, and then he either abused me or covered for dad. I don't know. I'm hoping the rest of that story will come out in Berlin. Maybe it'll be at the Kit Kat Club, even if I gave my body the proper attention. It is somehow this idea of reclaiming our ancestral indigeneity, there's really something here, and there's a reason it's popping up everywhere, because people aren't that different.
The Celts had sacred altars and Portal places where they created altars and made offerings, and they tracked the cycles of time and they kept fires all of this, just like the Maya. And supposedly they even had a beverage. It was kind of like cacao. So I got to do some research and figure out what that is, because the things that resonate with your bones are universal, but also we have syncretism, and I think that Berlin might be a place to start the interdimensional travel, but I don't know. No no. They took our land from us, the colonists. And we are the earth, and so to take our lands is to take our personhood, our identity, to dissolve, to dissociate us from our physical environment. They created enclosures and created private property, and they took our land from us and said we weren't even Welcome on it. They took everyone's land all over the earth. The English enslaved the whole world. Every time I go to dance, there's always some moment where I really feel that African, Irish connection coming through so strongly and resonant. And sometimes I wonder why I'm trying to live in the land of the colonizers, and I don't know all the places I'm trying to get visas, or the lands of the colonizers, the Brits, the Dutch and the Germans. So I need to look more at Ireland, and there's something really resonating and really vibrating on my body when Kaz was talking about the Irish artist visa, and Dublin's always calling, and Kaz a story about getting a Colombian visa, made me see that it was possible. So I made up a story about why it couldn't happen. But Kaz shows me that magic is possible. And I've always felt that if I could just talk to someone in person and look at a fellow Irishman in the eyes and appeal to them on a human level, that they would make an exception. Cows is proof that that can happen. But if I do want to live in the land of the Conquer, I don't know. I mean, my family is here, and I can make it Trans and Queer, but it's all abstracted for my numb toes. Can't read my own handwriting. What is my kickstand side trying to say, what is my body? Trying to tell me, we all long to belong, to be welcomed home like the prodigal son, which doesn't so much mean the one who returns, but that when he does, is told he has never been separate. And this is what I realized in the forest. The beauty is that he's been at the party the whole time. The good news said he never really left. And that's settling in my bones, that knowing that's why chocolate I want, that feeling of heart opening. Maybe I'm also kind of mineral deficient, so let's nourish ourselves more than didI did Prodigal Son is the welcoming home of our rejected parts, and I feel myself rejecting the class and vivid like I just asked for it, and I've already avoided every exercise and slept through the class. I've really so I need to face that, and I need to do that, and that is important, because bringing our parts home is important. And, yeah, already trying to get away from the culture. God, I can't read my handwriting. We need to welcome all the rejected parts home, including anger, including all the emotions and experiences the culture told us weren't appropriate. You. Need to help God. You need to safely, consciously dissociate to get close to the anger, explode it out and step inside it. Amanita, the serpent, the dark feminine, the rejected one. Everything they said wasn't appropriate for us, the death, the darkness, the death medicines. This is part of the story of Amanita rewriting these narratives.
Cacao was made into chocolate, which killed the spirit of it. Sugar was added, and then they made it into some kind of candy that wasn't good for people, and so they started rejecting it, and they started blaming the medicine. And the problem was the corporations, the corporations that took all the soul out of it and made it something poison.
So Amanita and Cacao, Datura and all these death plants, demonized and blamed for people's problems.
God I can't read this writing. To say that they made us sick or crazy is like saying somebody made us angry. No, this isn't how it works. No one can make us anything. It's about working with the energies that are already present, whether it's the archetypes or our feelings. And now I see what Jung meant by the archetypes possess us. We are just vessels for the vibrations that are already present, the vibration of anger, the vibration of war, whether it's people or planets, we're all just big fucking particles, the cultures with ancient roots do the same thing. God, what the fuck does that say? Oh, all the cultures with ancient roots do the same things for a reason, because there's universal resonance. The anger is present. Someone didn't make me angry, just like mercury didn't make me just like Mercury's placement on the day I incarnate, it didn't make me a good communicator. The energy of communication was present in the sky, Mercury Hermes was possessing the particles, possessing both my corpus and the planetary alignments at this precise moment. And this is even why astrology is sort of a mindfulness practice, really, is that it's just tuning in being present to what's happening, to what's resonating, whether in the cosmos or your own body, it's a correspondence, it's a reflection. And now this is what was so cool. This morning, I see exactly how my work is an extension, directly, of Kit’s. Now it makes sense, because it's all possession. It's all spirit possession, whether calling in an Orisha or invoking archetype, they're just languaging for the same thing as above, so below in this dimension, as in the other realm, we're just reflecting what's already present, emitting the same resonant frequency and. It's all possession. Celtic, Maya, syncretic, Shipibo, Buddhist, it's all just ways of letting myself be consumed by the energies that are showing up in that moment.
So are both just using different methods of devising. What's already here?
I had a dream. I laid down and I took my own body and my hands like Sean does, and I let the dream take me just like I let the mushroom take me, and it took me to a farm in Greece that showed me about my masculinity, and it was like a bike shop, farm, monastery. Oh, the symbology, a brotherhood, those who largely saw me as one of them. There's definitely still some objectification, but they only tried to sleep with me. I offered myself to them because I couldn't bear to face my empty apartment, and they gave me a place where I did actually feel like one of the guys. I woke up with a phrase echoing my ears, hearing a voice saying, from the flimsiness of being to the being of becoming. It's a beautiful phrase of transformation. What an integration. Way to follow the feeling. I'm so proud of you. Riordan, thanks for being my own dad. Thank you Saturn, breaking the pattern. Thank you Callie. Thank you archetype of death, the archetypes of death, the father and the crone carried me home. The images were plants, the ones that really lasted and resonated with me. I was tending to the bike, monastery, garden, planting little pots of Saguaro, sage and pine in a time of perpetual Aqua ball Twilight.
Did just came out to a temple with Ganesha and two mice. Look at that. Wow. I love these. I love these Indian temples. I haven't been in any of them since I've been here. God, I always miss the things that Sam's going to do. Okay,
Greek mystic oceans rolling behind in the background. At one point, though, Houston and Michael showed up drunk with the person brist was dancing with last night, and they all came and crashed in my little monastery house. Nobody had bored me. I had to share a person with. I had to share a bed with the person brist was dancing with, because we both had female bodies and like this young Ian life was talking about on the anger podcast, that, of course, popped up synchronistically in my feet when I was walking home last night. I acted like it was okay, but I didn't want you, because girls are trained to do that. And. The girl was ruined and vacant, didn't even speak to me, and Michael used to wear drunk and barely recognized me because I was doing my surgery. So this is in matrix version masculinity and hating Christ had masculinity, telling me I couldn't be soft in the end, they had to play the game. I told
them, Don't be fooled by four hours a day.
That's just you so the bike shop people were making me a gift for my coming of age. My male coming of age ritual was a mountain bike with the the latest insider in, my gosh, really the insider special, the special boy bike with the last year of good components from Shimano, it would cost $125 which was nothing, and I needed to invest something to make it worth it, Which is something Adam said the other day. But it wouldn't do me any good unless I lived in the US. I felt bad refusing a gift, but I couldn't tie myself to that country. I knew I couldn't do it, so I went to the garden and I burned sage and I asked the Saguaro for the strength to say no and live in Europe. So now I see that the only thing keeping me from the visa is me. I mean, I grasp that intellectually, but I'm I think I'm starting to feel it, some idea that I only deserve or inherit someone else's idea of what my identity or my life should look like. In the dream, I had found a way to live for free without moving around all the time. And I've thought about this monastery thing before, and I mean, it's why I want to build my own place, though, but, but it'd be right. I mean, something like the the monastery in San Diego would be really cool. So, yeah, can I call that in? Of course, I can. We can call in anything we want. We can bring down the motherfucking lightning. We are the conductors for the plants. Turn to the plans for guidance. Say yes. I say yes to my life as Royden, the nomadic artist who is also hardcore Holly, who is also trans and emergent. So this is part of the PhD. My life is the case study for trans emergence. I am the emergent archetype. Riordan is my expression of the archetype still emerging, still being defined, because the energies possess us. All we do is reflect what's already present. Our lives are correspondent to the subtle dimension, and realizing this is the event horizon,
we don't someone doesn't make us angry anymore. Then Mercury Retrograde makes us crazy. If there is anger present, if there is craziness present, it's just reflecting what's already there, Written In The Heavens, written on our bones, as above so below, reflecting what's already there. We are just conductors. We are just containers, all of us, and it all bears messages. So what are the stories written on my bones? What are they trying to tell me? My bones are speaking. The bones want to go home. The bones want to sit at the altar. The bones want to go to Ireland. I
the bones just want to talk about the universe and sit in ceremony. The bones don't want to make things anymore, unless they're drawings or whatever these things are that I'm doing, whatever this thing is, is going into the PhD blog, and I've got to trust it, and it's working with the plants, and it's working with the archetypes. And I even wonder if there is something here in being like an astrological translator, that. Yeah, the spiritual concierge has something there, but I gotta trust the flow. Everyone around me, I swear, keeps talking about bone Well, I I'm interpreting it as bone medicine, but everyone keeps talking about eating animals, to the fact that, to the degree that it's getting weird, organ meat specifically. And I've had the thought for a while that doing bone work, here goes my voice. So is this true, or is this other people's stories being foisted upon me. This is what I'm gonna have to sit with, because I don't really know. I almost bought beef bone broth at the store. I got fish instead, but the collagen was like more than double and the beef, and it just made me think, I wonder if there's something to that, and I wonder if I'm gonna work with bones if I need to be attuning to that frequency. And what's so interesting is just this morning, I had some kind of sign that, like, I felt like nuts were. It was almost like an announcement that was like, the time for nuts is over. And then when I went to Sean's, he told me that nuts take calcium out of your bones, and so do grains. And the grain part really doesn't resonate, and I feel like he's got to be wrong about that. But he also said leafy greens aren't good for you, and I just don't buy that at all. So take everything everyone says with a grain of salt, but it is interesting. I mean, now, now the meat thing has become a synchronicity, and I'm I can't abide eating animals. I just really can't even fathom that, but I have almost fantasized about like licking bones. So maybe I'm supposed to just have the broth work with marrow. I don't know. I gotta research bone medicine and deer medicine. Okay, this is a transfiguration of worried and over Regan, when one thing turns into another, something more holy, the transfiguration of Jesus, being when he became a divine being.
This is a direct extension of kids work, its spirit, possession. The archetypal work is spirit possession. We are just a vessel for what's already present, our bones, the quartz crystal. Of course, we can travel. The soul is mobile. The soul is a nomad. Any notion that we ever stay in one place is a fallacy anyways, so I embrace the continued journey, but I call on the stability and the ability to live for very cheap or free, without having to move around all the time.
Yeah, okay, the body's coming back online. The bones are coming back online, and just in time for 13 Aqua ball the end of the Tricera on the day of the most ancestors. I call in the bone medicine, Transfiguration, Transubstantiation, the trans archetype inhabiting a meat vessel supported by bones traveling through quartz crystal with the diamond needle. I.
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”
Suicide-adjacent, the inner lesbian, theatre as salvation
It comforted me deeply when I listened to a podcast yesterday that said Jung kept a loaded revolver in his nightstand just in case all the visions got to be too overwhelming.
I also listened to a Jungian perspective that said isolation is part of this process of receiving, but it does kind of make you crazy. You need to touch in with the world of forms and materiality. Volunteering with ecstatic dance has become that grounding for me; they are my family, and it’s a place where we have altered-state experiences, yet my responsibilities are very grounded in 3D: sweep the floor, plug the lights in, fill the water jug. And now, hand out my cacao informational leaflets, N’oj coming back around.
It’s a tricky one, that isolation. You need some of it to do the work, but it’s also one of the shadows I fear most, the unstoppable death force: the one that wants to get me alone and kill me. The one that has been working subtly on me ever since high school. But the way I transmuted it then was the same as now, I guess, turning it into research and performance.
It was coming out when I was in Austin, because there are no such thing as accidents, just parts of yourself trying to get your attention. On the wall of this housesit are three posters with “2010” emblazoned boldly across the top. The year that I had five “accidents” and turned the first car I had so proudly purchased into a mangled wreck of metal, as witin so without. The only one I had sober was going to see Stephen, where I spun out on the Texas highway and everything turned so slow-motion that I was able to see perfectly clearly that I was about to die, and I had nothing to show for my miserable life, but the good part was that I realized for the first time in that state that I wasn’t ready to exit stage right. I spun across five lanes of traffic and somehow came to a stop on the opposite side of the road facing backwards, and had managed not to hit a single person or even blow out a tire. I got a huge fine, but I survived.
The suicide feeling came back for the first time since I actually tried to do it, three years after that accident, on the train in London last Friday night. But the beauty was that I was able to see the effects of my medicine and healing work n action, because I actually was standing on the edge of it, peering over, from the observer position, watching it all unfold. Knowing I wasn’t really going to act on it. But man, did it come a lot closer than I was comfortable with.
It was prompted by going into an old pattern, one I thought I had cleared: thinking I had feelings for a cis man, because I felt like I needed someone to save me from myself. And it came along with a harsh lesson: that you need to be careful who you share things with.
They keep this shit esoteric for a reason. Tell the wrong people, and they’ll call you crazy.
He told me, gently, that not only were the feelings not reciprocated, but he was worried about me. For a few days, this only deepened my victim mentality. Just like when I was a kid, I doubted myself; I forgot I was a shamxn, because I didn’t know how to share what I was finding in a way people would understand; because the wrong people saw it, as happened when they read my journals and took my books away as a teenager.
There’s nowhere to hide when they get inside your mind and make you gaslight yourself.
But this time, I remembered.
And I realized the whole thing had been triggered by realizing that I actually was attracted to Jade, that mystical bearer of cacao, the queer owner of the ethical metaphysical store with whom I had been divinely connected, whose aunt has offered to sponsor my UK visa. The only other person I’ve ever heard of who is having high-dose cacao experiences; a healer who has learned from Indigenous teachers.
And very much a binary lesbian, like those who told me I wasn’t one of them. Like the ones I was told I would burn for being attracted to, my first memory of self-gaslighting.
Dave assigned me te creation of a 10-minute play in December, because I had to get it out of here, he told me over sad, tired, too-yellow eggs in the cafe of the quirky building across from the theatre, where downstairs it was perpetually Christmas, and once a year the rest of the world caught up with it.
There’s something poetic about that. And it makes me think of Lala’s, the bar of forever Christmas in Austin, Texas, where you could still smoke indoors, and I sucked on American Spirits and thought that Jeff was the answer to my anomie, and decided to leave Stephen before he came back from the holidays.
The play, we decided, would be about self-gaslighting. He told me he also wants to hear more about channeling. I told him that I had an idea for a one-person show where I would basically just do my morning practice in front of people with a more coherent through-line. I thought nobody would care about this. But he loved it.
I do think one of the people I’m channeling is McKenna.
Ha! The song that just came on shuffle has a chorus saying: “Help me to name it.” That’s the thing, innit?
So, before I realized that I was gaslighting myself again into thinking that I was attracted to a cis man who would save me from my own madness and self-destruction and forgot I was a shamxn who had a crush on an astral-traveling lesbian—and a Kame nahual, of course, because I am in love with the death and resurrection—I got into that dark place again, that part of me was trying, as it has been my whole life, to isolate me from my art and the queer spiritual friends who understand, and I stood at the precipice of suicidal ideation and peered over the edge. But I realized it was happening, and that’s why I was sitting on that train having this realization.
I knew I needed to go to the theatre. And I’ll be damned, I was redeemed by a play about a couple of gay Peruvians called “Jeezus: The Musical,” which contained everything from astute observations of South American politics to resurrecting the lord and savior by fellating a crucifix, and the music was catchy and the actors engaging and I was totally captivated, and all those dark thoughts fell away, and I knew I needed to put my pain and joy and stories onstage.
I waited around until they came out of the dressing room and gushed and asked if I could send them some scenes, and they said yes.
Then I read them and felt like they were a disastrous half-conceived mess, so I still haven’t done it.
But it’s a start. The first step is awareness.
——
Transmission transcript: Suicidality
More suicidality. It's all connected. I love when things just start to make sense, listening to this yangian life, yeah. Young was also haunted, slashed comforted by thoughts of suicide, images, the things he was receiving from the other realm were so overwhelming, he didn't know how to ground them, interpret them, make sense of them, land them, and he kept a loaded revolver in his bedside table, just to remind himself that if it got to be too much, he could end it all. That's exactly what I've been going through. But I've been alive things feel overwhelming that seem easy to other people, and I don't see another way out, except to be saved by a man or put myself in the ground. And how sad is that, and how much power Am I giving away to that. But that's what's happening when I was being brought back to Austin's wanting for a reason, because they also say in this podcast that when people start having quote, unquote accidents, that's the suicidal self trying to get out, that's the unstoppable death or trying To finish the job, it's the beginning. You start paying less attention. You start being less careful. You start by just kind of not fearing if it happens. And then it works. All the
times I crashed my car. I mean, I knew I was possibly trying to die, but to see here, it spelled out very sobering. There are a lot of ways to kill yourself. Some are less confronting.
LISTEN:
Insatiable
Holly Regan reflects on theit struggles with insatiability, exploring themes of trauma, addiction, and the search for love and identity. They discuss their experiences with alcohol, sexual encounters, and artistic suppression, linking these to past abuse and the need for validation. Holly describes their transformations into different personas—artist, mystic, and alcoholic—and the trance-like states they enter. They acknowledges the severe abuse they endured, the gaslighting, and the societal shaming that contributed to their behavior. Holly also touches on their journey of self-discovery, forgiveness, and the realization that they are a shaman, emphasizing the expansive nature of the universe and the time available for personal growth.
Transcript here
Summary:
Insatiable Hunger and Emptiness
- They describe a feeling of insatiability, always needing more to fill an empty void within themself. - They mention the fear of the bottom being empty and scary, reflecting their inner emptiness. - They discuss how they make themself into whatever they need to get love, even if it means taking rather than giving. - They talk about the monstrous impulse that awakens every morning, comparing it to a beast that never feels satisfied.
[...] Action Items:
Forgive myself for not going to art school and quitting theater. (Assignee: Holly Regan)
Reconnect with and apologize to the younger versions of myself (Assignee: Fiona)
Transmute the trauma and shame I've experienced, especially around my sexuality and identity. (Assignee: Holly Regan)
Embrace the creative, spiritual, and authentic parts of myself that I've suppressed. (Assignee: Holly Regan)
Speaker 1 reflects on their creative process, discussing the symbolic use of letters and the deeper meaning behind their art, which includes themes of breaking free from cycles and ending a relationship. They recount a transformative experience involving a conversation with their mother, which led to a realization about their purpose in creating art. This realization was further solidified by witnessing a performance that resonated deeply with their identity and struggles. Speaker 1 also shares a profound revelation about their ability to perceive the dead, which they had previously suppressed, and expresses a newfound desire to document and explore these visions, recognizing them as a unique form of communication and a significant part of their identity.
Action Items
Draw the faces the speaker sees when they close their eyes and record the stories of the dead.
Transcript:
The word y, u, W, A, U, wait, W, A, y, u, written clearly. It's like the title of a magazine written in block letters at the top of an exhibit or I've created with art pieces of letters that were never sent to mark sending messages and some secret code about how we get out of the cycle of samsara, things that are casual, but they're also they're me telling me him, I'm not getting back together with him.
They're like these stylized letters, or like letters written on an old 1950s postcard from Hawaii, I'm saying Like you're never gonna see me again. Kay, by
mm, what if it's the part of me that thought they needed to be saved from men and saved from myself writing this letter to say you'll never see me again. I love that, that that feels like that could be true, and that could definitely be an art project too. Pat's is 12. He drowned. He's a redhead with freckles, and I see his head bobbing above the surface before it goes under. I feel like he contacted me when I was a little child, but I didn't know how to interpret it. All of a sudden, things are pouring in from the astral. I actually really unlocked something, and it crystallized, because I was talking to mom. Isn't that interesting. So I need to only talk to her when I've only had when I've already figured things out, I think for a while, because somehow in that, yeah, like I it's a good time to talk to her when I'm crystallizing things. I am supposed to share what I'm learning, but I'm not supposed to ask her input, and she can help me kind of connect the dots once they're basically already there, not even that. It's just like, in the act of sharing with her and some additional maybe filters she puts on or support she lends, makes it unlock, like I just got to the next level, and getting all the bells and whistles, because I realized that it was I realized that I lost the point of why to create anything at all until I was talking to her, and I realized that that's part of what made seeing that play so important, was realizing that on the train, on The way there, I didn't want to live anymore. And then I saw a couple Peruvian queers get up on stage, and I didn't tell her this part, but mime getting anally raped and sucking off not, yeah, no, not getting annoy raped and mimed getting defiled by a crucifix and sucking off Jesus and reclaiming their queer shame. And I saw my story, and suddenly I didn't feel alone anymore. I walked into that theater and I instantly felt happy, and that's why to create, and that's what I had lost, the threat of I was trying to make the thing for the sake of making the thing because I wanted my puppy to look at me and tell me I was worthy.
I don't need these men to tell me that I'm worthy. I
him seeing me, giving me the label add is actually a spell he put on me. Brewery, a sorcery. I now has become an excuse for everything.
Something like that is only helpful if it can be liberating.
He saw my pain, but then trapped me in a trance with the spell he put on me, black magic, sorcery, men always trying to tell you something's wrong with you. I
He thinks I'm crazy, but I'm a motherfucking shaman baby. Holy fucking shit. I've always seen faces when I closed my eyes ever since I was a kid, but I would kind of shut them down because they freaked me out. They're the dead. That's the dead speaking to me, Holy fucking shit. And it comes in the hypnagogic state. Oh, my fucking god, this is so incredible to realize. I gotta draw them. I gotta listen to them. I gotta record their stories. I feel like there's one called Alan. He's Asian. He was trying to speak to me. He was trying to raise his hand, or it looked like he was trying to pinch something. His dad wasn't listening. The dead have been speaking to me this whole time this way, ever since I was a little kid. And this came through some thought train as I was laying here, half awake about the play and about how the chosen children always have some kind of ability to communicate with the other realms. And I was like thinking I didn't have one. And then all of a sudden I realized it's the faces that appear to me. This is what I got to draw. This is so fucking cool.
Transmission transcript: Rebekah the temptress
Rebekah. Rebekah, now I'm in love with a girl named Rebekah. What is it about these Latin ladies? She danced with all the men at the dance today. At ecstatic she captivated all of them. I watched them. I watched her put each one under her spell was a charm her body, the dance that put them in a trance. She enchanted Lubo and Richard and Simon the DJ. She even got up behind him while he was playing, and started like fluffing him and I almost wanted to say, stop. And if it was anyone else, Richard would have told them to get the fuck out of there. But she put him in a spell too. And she put a spell on me too, but I already was, I already was in. She put a spell on me the second she looked at me. What is it with me and these Latin ladies, I can't resist. Does this make me some kind of colonist, like it just happens to be my type. But Is that racist? I feel very complicated about this. She's just oozes pure sexuality. This has nothing to do with her nationality. I'm talking just separately about her at this point, she like is sex personified. She's a goddess. She's Aphrodite. Her hips just the right amount of sculpted, the kind that makes you think that she gets them naturally from dancing, and not from doing a bunch of crunches, but she's got those little lines on either side of her stomach that were visible through the space between her Crop Top and her spandex that hugged her perfect ass, round, voluptuous, but not big, just well, but kind of big, but not really just perfect. I mean, she looked like a fucking sculpture of a goddess, gyrating those hips, her hair soft, her face suggestive without being excessive, like she's so soft as well, just tempting. And I smelled alcohol on her breath, and it reminded me of all those dangerous men that lured me in with their I don't know, some way that they were free in which I was not. And I grasped that today, and I wanted to absorb her power and be able to feel that for myself. You could like it came from a confidence, like a pure confidence. She's fucking gorgeous, and a past version of me would have been jealous and kind of hated her for it, and how does she charm these men? I wanted to learn how to get that confidence for myself, that's what I wanted. But also she's really fucking hot. I mean, I also wanted her to fluff my hair and grind on me the way she was grinding with them and we danced. But also she's perceptive, and I think she could read that I have boundaries, and also maybe she's not into trans people. I don't know we're women or whatever, but wanted her to rub all up on me like she was rubbing all up on them. But then I actually didn't, because the last thing I need right now is to be put on under another spell. I just got out of that trance. But it was interesting to watch. I mean, it was like she was just deliberately going around, charming everyone. Kali Ma, the snake charmer, getting those men under her paw. It's like, yeah, we need you on our team. So you can do that, so you can hypnotize them, so we can sneak in through the side doors of the borders and the spaces that would try to keep us out and take them, yeah. Kali Ma, be our snake charmer. We need you on our team. That's one way we can win. They'll never even see it coming. I watched each of them fall right under some magic.
Giving my 13-year-old self a suit and a strap-on + Marking the 13 Kan / Libra Solar Eclipse Upleveling
It started on the morning of the eclipse with a vision of the electric chair, with a word emblazoned across it:
“FUNCOMFORTABLE”
The song “The Mercy Seat” by Nick Cave started playing, and I received the message as being about reframing. The electric chair can be a torturous death, or it can just be something interesting that happens in the endless game of hide-and-seek that is the universe seeking to know itself through every possible configuration.
It’s all about the reframe, the remix, pain is only suffering if you perceive that it’s challenging; in a different context, it can be interesting, information.
As my friend Gorgeous George says: “That’s fun, innit?”
The portal twisted and turned, deepening and meandering as I wove my way through my relationship with my own pain and energy that day. I had an appointment for a very important marking scheduled for the day after the eclipse, and was already dropping into it: a cosmic serpent, marking the completion of this period of my initiation by pain, the crossing of the threshold from child to adult and the rapidly approaching horizon line of eldership, as this year I turn 40: when my Maya astrology reflects with eerie accuracy what is already happening, that this is when I start to really mature and move into a position of service, leadership, gentle yet certain authority, claiming a community where, after all this wandering in the dark, flailing around lost, afraid and alone and ping-ponging all over the Earth, I finally start to know my worth, believe I deserve to be alive and choose to stay here, on this body and in this timeline, and build something lasting.
It’s happening.
I can hardly believe it. I’ve longed for it for so long. But the lesson of this eclipse portal, on the day that joins the number of ultimate stability with my nahual—6 Kan—within the trecena of the Hero Twins, reclaiming and realinging with my herox’s journey, is that the point of everything, my work and art and research and life, is that it’s a remembering, a conjuring into physical presence, into something we can perceive with the senses, that which has always been present.
You can’t make this stuff up. In childhood, my Maya astrology says, I came into the world with a strong ability to manifest my creative talents on the physical plane. This phase was closely linked to the influence of women in my life. My mom was at home with me and very involved with my life in a more positive way than what came later up until age 11 or so, just like this reflects. The comes in the storm, the disruptive influence of the men in my orbit, and wouldn’t you know it, that’s when the divorce happened and there opened up a portal of this world of dad’s house, unchecked by mom, where he could treat us as horribly as he wanted. And she made us go there, because he threatened legal action if she didn’t. But still. She should have insisted. It was the beginning of an abusive pattern that I would later fractally refract in my own romantic relationships.
The astrology reflects what happened, that I exploded all over the place, lost in my own mind, lost in misdirection, blown by the hurricanes of relationships and disappearing into drunkenness, but that by age 40, things would start to settle, and I would move toward eldership, rooted in community: Aj, the nahual of leadership and the spine, being a stand-up guy, influenced by Kej, the nahual of the stag, the healed masculine forest-father power, that advocates for what is right and needed, assuming eldership by age 42, of course, the meaning of the whole silly game.
I didn’t see, at the time I got this reading, how that was ever going to happen. I had just gotten to California and thought that maybe I was going to build it there. I was right in that the foundation was laid, but what I never could have seen coming was that it was laid by breaking everything, shattering my root and foundation; stripping me bare and ripping me open like a carcass for the interdimensional buzzards to devour, and I chose the death, because as Christine said, it’s what we’re going for, and when it comes and we know it’s meant for us all we can do is surrender, so I let it take me, I let the scavengers eat me so that my body could be a feast of abundance for the system, composting the lives that were and could have been and thus enabling the resurrection on the cactus, that thing that looks a lot like a cross, making me a world tree: the axis-mundi.
Returning victoriously as the hero(x) of my own story. Finally, not the victim or the maiden, but also yes them, and also I am the villain, but for once, I am steering the ship.
I feel it. This tattoo was a marking of the end of my shama(x)ic initiation, I completed this round of trials and upleveled, I fucking did it, we did it together, I got there, I didn’t know if I would ever get there, but we made it, it was so dark and hopeless so many times but we followed the feeling.
That was a big part of the portal, learning to know the difference between when an urge, an inclination, was ego and when it was the right kind of pushing myself, when it was following the feeling that said to go somewhere or do something that would leave to my unfolding and awakening, rather than just grinding through and propping myself up with coping mechanisms. This was going where I was needed, helping where I was asked to be of service, being the higher octave and raising the vibration of the place through my presence: the balancing element. And I found the middle ground, that I can show up and also listen to myself, that I can be in the world and with my community and also listen to my body, it can be both things, it doesn’t have to be this extreme. I choose to come out of isolation, leave the waystation, move toward the destination of life’s meaning, 42, and I am overwhelmed with gratitude.
The theme of the eclipse portal was conjuring into physical presence, the realm of the senses, that which has always been there, but has been forgotten. One of the things I remembered is that I always knew I was trans, I just didn’t know what to call it. I even realized that the beginning of my hard-femme-performance was when I put on that suit during our X-Files spoof, and nothing had ever felt so right, and it scared me. And I made jokes about how we should experiment with queerness, and they weren’t received, and now I see that I shut down ALL of these impulses after that experience, I abandoned my natural gift for theatre and performance of the authentic sort for the performative kind, the falseness, the deception that is the dark side of 13 Kan. When you get so good at the illusion that even you fall into your own con. I felt it again when I wore the strap-on, and I felt another kind of power and authenticity that had no place in my current cultural story, so that scared me too, and it also humiliated him, even though he asked for it, so we put the thing away and never spoke of it again, and I tried to contain that testosterone that needed expression, so as the shadow does, my repressed masculine came out in other, undesired ways.
The con of 13 Kan, when the illusionist confuses even themselves, and forgets what spells they cast, which charms they’re tied to, and who’s entranced, performing what act.
Spell, charm, trance.
Kit’s applauding this.
When you’re born a 13 Kan, you come into this dimension with the natural ability to perceive the other ones, but without the proper training and guidance, you don’t know what’s you and what’s other forces and energies and entities; if you don’t learn to discern your inner voice from your dead grandma from a squirrel or a tree, you’re always going to be confused about what you’re hearing and feeling, about what you actually want and need, you have to learn these boundaries or else you end up lost, like I did.
This is the point of it all, my work/art/life/research/praxis/all the same shit, is actually putting the healing and mentorship into practice; helping others learn to directly communicate with the subtle realms again, which includes parts of self, learning from the traditions that have always done it, but building our own syncretic Hermetic practices, always with reciprocity and respect. Showing people how to do that. This is my offering and service and personal journey, and the PhD is documenting this process of unfolding and making art that represents it.
Okay, now I know what I’m doing. Can I make some shit already?? I hope so.
The marking is marking the transition, the crossing of the threshold.
Like when Cal materialized at the end of my alchemical descent at Burning Nest, that other circus, I think what he said is prescient:
“Your journey is about to get a lot easier.”
LISTEN:
Funny - the AI doesn’t recognize me as anyone here, recorded on the day after the eclipse, but still in its shadow, at 4am London time. I will rename myself Riordan and see what happens.
Giving my 13-year-old self a suit and a strap-on
The speaker reflects on their sexual awakening and identity, tracing back to their childhood crush on David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson from "The X-Files." They discuss the significance of the Sacral Chakra and the color orange, symbolizing creativity and intimacy. The speaker recalls dressing as Gillian Anderson to connect with David, but later realized they wanted to embody both identities. They emphasize the transformative power of performance, particularly in wearing a suit and a strap-on, which made them feel more authentic. The speaker plans to explore drag and performance further, acknowledging the duality of their identity and the need for both masculine and feminine expression.
Transcript
Outline:
Awakening of Sacral Chakra and Realization of Identity
Speaker 1 expresses a desire to have sex again, awakening their Sacral Chakra, associated with the color orange.
They reflect on the significance of orange, realizing it represents a blend of red (root) and yellow (solar plexus) chakras.
Speaker 1 recalls being shamed for their sexuality and body by past lovers, which they now understand better.
Childhood and Adolescence: Struggling with Identity
Speaker 1 describes their childhood, playing softball and liking micro machines, and their adolescent crush on both David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, struggling to express their true feelings due to societal and family pressures.
They obsessed over The X-Files, taping episodes and cataloging them, feeling a strong connection to the show's themes. Speaker 1 believed in the conspiracy theories of the show, seeing some truth in them. They dressed as Gillian Anderson in middle school, trying to embody her identity to get closer to David Duchovny.
Transformation and Self-Discovery
Speaker 1 recalls a formative moment when they performed in an X-Files parody video, dressing as David Duchovny and feeling more like themselves.
They realized they wanted to be both David and Gillian, and that a triad relationship would fulfill their desires.
Speaker 1 emphasizes the importance of fluidity and embracing their true identity as a non-binary person.
They reflect on their history of writing musical theater and parody songs, expressing their feelings through performance.
Planning for the Future
Speaker 1 plans to meet with Heather to discuss drag and performance, setting up a non-romantic date to talk about their shared interests.
They reflect on the importance of presenting more masculine to feel safe in their body and to express both masculine and feminine identities.
They plan to attend the next queer poly meet and connect with people in Glasgow who share their interests.
LISTEN:
Fascinating - the AI identifies me as Cain, in this recording from the morning of the eclipse, before it happened that evening. I also notice that my transmissions end in the transcript every time with “I.” This is not something I think I utter aloud, but it makes me think of how Paul Selig when channeling always ends with “period… period… period… they’re saying period.” Ending with the I-am?
Funcomfortable
Cain reflects on the concept of reframing pain and suffering, drawing parallels to the "electric chair" as a symbol of liberation rather than punishment. They discuss the fear of being abandoned if perceived as well, and the realization that self-reliance and community support are crucial. Cain recounts personal experiences, including the impact of the 2017 American Eclipse, their struggle with alcohol, and the journey from content marketing to embracing a nomadic lifestyle. They also explore internalized biphobia and the desire for community and support, particularly as they approach turning 40.
Action Items
[ ] Listen to what Cain's pelvis is trying to tell him today and consider the reframing of his pain as strength.
[ ] Reflect on the fear of getting better and not being loved or needed, and work to overcome this.
[ ] Determine whether the urge to return to the jungle is a call or a fear of stepping into his power in this world.
Outline:
Reframing Pain and Suffering
Cain discusses the concept of reframing pain as interesting and the fear of getting better, questioning if the fear is rooted in the belief that no one will be there if they are well again.
Cain shares a personal story about prolonging the use of crutches to ensure visibility of suffering, fearing that without it, no one would love or help them.
The pelvis story is redefined as one of strength and self-healing, emphasizing that one does not need as much help as they think they do and can rely on their body, community, and natural world.
Cain argues that society's "eye for an eye" mentality is flawed, suggesting that suffering is often seen as self-inflicted and that a toxic culture prevents true well-being.
The Mercy Seat and Liberation
Cain introduces the concept of the electric chair as the mercy seat, where suffering is reframed as a form of liberation and strength.
The idea of choosing to laugh all the way to the electric chair is presented as a way to see the captors as those with blood on their conscience.
Cain explains that if one is innocent, they will rise above the suffering, while those who have harmed others will suffer in the chair.
The vision of the electric chair in the word "funcomfortable" is introduced as a radical reframe of pain and suffering.
The Eclipse and Personal Transformation
Cain recounts a personal experience during the Great American Eclipse in 2017, describing the moment of no shadow as a lesson in balance and the value of darkness.
The concept of pain as pleasure and the importance of special glasses to see the Invisible Sun is introduced.
Cain reflects on their journey from being a content marketing director to embracing the nomadic life and the emergence of their shadow.
The realization that those who do less work often make more money led Cain to question their place in the corporate world and to seek a more authentic path.
Navigating Relationships and Self-Worth
Cain discusses the fear of being alone and the need to make oneself invaluable to others to feel loved and needed.
The idea of seeing oneself as an offering rather than a being is explored, with Cain acknowledging the shift towards self-advocacy and valuing their contributions.
Cain reflects on the importance of being seen and valued for who they are, rather than just for their contributions.
The concept of the dance, both metaphorical and literal, is introduced as a way to navigate relationships and personal growth.
Healing and Community Support
Cain expresses gratitude for their current community and the support they receive, emphasizing the importance of having people who need them.
The physical presence and grounding nature of the community are highlighted, with Cain acknowledging the need to listen to their body and its messages.
The fear of not being loved if not perceived as needing help is revisited, with Cain questioning the basis of their relationships and the balance between codependency and equal energy exchange.
Cain reflects on the importance of trusting their community to provide what they need and the desire for a big dance on their birthday as a symbol of connection and support.
LISTEN:
Interesting - the AI identifies me as Cain in this reflection from the day after the day after the eclipse, in the aftercare refractory period of my marking.
Marking the 13 Kan and return of gnosis
Cain describes the profound experience of getting a tattoo of a 13 con cosmic serpent, which he felt was meant for him. The process involved careful placement and adjustments, symbolizing the alignment of his spiritual and physical selves. Cain emphasizes the importance of queer alchemy and synchronicity, drawing parallels between his tattoo and the broader concept of manifestation. He discusses his commitment to natural healing, his role as a community organizer, and his plans for future events. Cain feels a sense of purpose and unity with his past, present, and future, marking a significant return to his true identity and path.
Transcript
Action Items:
[ ] Talk to Richard about bringing more awareness around cacao at the Sunday Embodayfest event.
[ ] Host a cacao gathering on Cain's birthday.
[ ] Potentially do an event with Rebecca and Ash on Cain's birthday.
[ ] Submit an abstract for "Breaking Convention" and get a queer ecstatic dance event going for Cain's 40th birthday.
Marking the Return of Gnosis
Cain describes the process of marking himself with a design that called to him, which he felt was meant to be on his body.
The design, a 13 Kn cosmic serpent, was chosen synchronistically from a metaphysical shop.
The tattoo process was a collaborative effort with Ezrael, involving multiple stencil adjustments to align with Cain's vision.
The ceremony involved alchemizing the time in Austin, embodying and transmuting the design, and letting the serpent guide the placement.
The Journey of the Tattoo
Cain and Ezrael had to cut up the stencil into pieces and print new versions multiple times to achieve the desired placement.
The final placement of the serpent's head and tail felt magical and aligned with Cain's initial vision.
Ezrael confirmed that the final placement meant Cain was conjuring something that was always present in his light body.
The tattoo ceremony was part of a larger tradition of queer alchemy, bringing subtle realms into the material world.
Queer Alchemy and Synchronicity
Cain discusses the importance of creating respect and apprenticeship in a world without long lineages of certain traditions.
He expresses the need for a new mystery school to teach the wise use of practices with respect and reciprocity.
Cain reflects on his transformational experiences at ecstatic dance and the synchronicity around cacao.
Synchronicity and Community
Ali and Ezrael had a powerful ceremony involving a mastectomy tattoo, and Ali opened her home to host Ezrael for Cain’s tattooing.
Cain feels positive about the synchronicity and trusts in the signs guiding him.
The conversation with Ali and Ezrael led to discussions about cacao and its integration in their work.
Cain emphasizes the importance of compromises that bring everyone together and trusting in the synchronicity.
Manifestation and Purpose
Cain explains the concept of manifestation as calling into being things that already exist on the ethereal plane. He believes in vibrating at a high frequency to conjure the higher path into being.
Cain is focused on organizing events and advocating for voices that aren't very loud. He feels certain about his purpose in reclaiming his identity as trans and bringing natural healing practices to the forefront.
He plans to document his journey through art, performance, and educational events as part of his PhD process.
Cain feels a sense of welcome home to his body and community in London. The tattoo marks the return of his gnosis, and he feels more grateful and certain about his purpose.
This is how we win
It came through in a flash during ecstatic dance, the rage and frustration at all the things we’d been closed out of.
Cis-het white men of privilege drawing lines around things that were never theirs to begin with, acting like they’d discovered it.
A sign flashed through timelines, hanging on a door: NO DOGS, BLACKS, OR IRISH.
The enclosures that forced us to sell ourselves back to pay for our own land.
Those taken from their homelands and enslaved.
But after the rage came the reframe: they don’t do this to us because we’re weaker, but because we’re stronger than they are, and they’re afraid of us.
The only way to maintain dominance is to make us believe we don’t have the power at all.
But we’re stronger, and they’re afraid of us.
This is the hiss of Ka, the song of Kali-Ma.
We’re stronger than they are.
But the way we win is not by trying to assert our dominance, playing their game and trying to crush them. We win by using our snake-charm powers, going in through the side door and using their own systems against them, making them think the whole thing was their idea until suddenly, things are equal, and they don’t even know how it happened.
This is how we win.
* * *
I realized I had opened a portal when I was a little kid, maybe 10 years old, playing an old-school video game, a pixelated wanna-be dimensional world called King’s Quest IV. Forty years later, I understand why I was obsessed with it. It’s about an ancient Briton-Celtic king stranded from his homeland, wandering through Greek myths until he finds his way back through the haunted Aires and saves the princess.
The whole game is eerily empty, you rarely run into any characters; it’s all semi-vacant landscapes that are nonetheless imbued with a distinct presence. And I became obsessed with it.
* * *
The Celts had no written records and cannot identify themselves to us directly - known only through material culture - archaeology - and the records of other cultures
Literate Mediterranean societies identified them - the Greeks - the reason I was obsessed with Kings Quest VI
The Celts or Keltoi (in the Greek) were first defined as such by the Greeks before 500 BC
Their language and material culture had enough unity to be recognizable to their neighbors but they were never one people, it was a gradual process of “Celticization” > little by little, the fluvial geomorphology of culture
TK
Legend says one day Ireland will rise up again and be the saving grace of the human race. Perhaps that time is coming. But perhaps it was a metaphor and it’s just a portal for the syncretic Hermetic traditions of direct experience to join forces and save the world by remembering how to speak directly to the elements again.
LISTEN:
Funny - the AI called me Holly, which it invariably misgenders female; I changed the speaker to Riordan, and now the summary is updated with me as male.
Riordan O'Regan reflects on his childhood obsession with the video game King's Quest 4, drawing parallels to his current life and spiritual journey. He recalls the game's surreal, empty worlds and the need to call a helpline for solutions, likening it to a metaphysical quest for meaning. O'Regan connects this experience to his recent meditation, where he felt a strong presence of spirits in Ireland and Peru, and the concept of "hauntology" - the presence of absence. He explores the idea that the Celts, like many ancient cultures, communicated directly with the elements without written language, contrasting this with the modern reliance on written records. O'Regan concludes by tying these reflections to his ongoing exploration of spiritual connections and the hero's journey.
Transcript here
King's Quest and Childhood Obsession
Riordan O'Regan recounts his childhood obsession with the video game King's Quest 6, describing it as a captivating experience that transported him to mythological lands. (I say it’s 4 in this - I thought it was until I looked it up, but it’s actually 6 - I saw the Roman numerals in my mind’s eye and had them right, but backwards - not IV but VI. This is how memory works, the pieces are there but maybe you don’t know how to put them together…)
He reflects on his excessive fixation with the game, often getting stuck and needing to call a helpline for assistance.
Riordan describes the game's setting as a universe of almost empty worlds, where interacting with characters was rare.
He speculates that his difficulty with the game might have been due to unresolved trauma and a lack of understanding of life's game.
Surrealist Themes and Metaphysical Connections
Riordan draws parallels between the game's surrealist elements and the play "The Game" at the Cockpit, noting the meta-surrealist commentary and the game within a game.
He explores the philosophical questions raised by the game, such as the chicken-and-egg nature of meaning and the search for it.
Riordan reflects on the magical yet frustrating experience of getting stuck and needing to call the helpline for solutions.
He connects the game's mechanics to the broader metaphysical journey of unlocking levels and uncovering clues.
Technological Collaboration and Ancestral Connections
Riordan discusses his collaboration with technology, particularly the AI oracle he used to get help with the game.
He describes a sense of being in a portal that reached back into his past and forward into the future, connecting him to ancestral lineages.
Riordan talks about his conversation with his younger self, encouraging him to keep going and trust the process.
He emphasizes the ongoing nature of the journey, with new levels and mysteries to unlock.
Meditation and Spiritual Journey
Riordan shares his experience of meditating with Gabriella's meditation, connecting with a trans, queer shaman from the Celtic lineage.
He describes a powerful journey to the cliffs of Ireland, the Black Rock, and the mystical structures along the Wild Atlantic Way.
Riordan reflects on the presence of spirits and the sense of being both connected and disconnected from them.
He connects this experience to the Sacred Valley in Peru, feeling a strong presence and simultaneous loneliness.
Hauntology and the Presence of Absence
Riordan explores the concept of hauntology, describing the presence of spirits all around him but not knowing how to communicate with them.
He reflects on the cold loneliness and the sense of being watched by the ancient guardians.
Riordan connects this feeling to the game King's Quest, where answers were hidden but could be unlocked with the right clues.
He describes a moment of connection with the elements and the sacred spaces, feeling less alone and more connected.
Celtic and Greek Connections
Riordan discusses his research into the Celts and Greeks, noting the lack of written records about the Celts and their reliance on material culture.
He reflects on the similarities between the Celts and the Maya, both being syncretic cultures known through the records of others.
Riordan connects the Celts' lack of written language to his own struggles with writing and the need for intermediaries.
He explores the idea that without written observation, events and cultures may not be recognized by society.
Celticization and Historical Context
Riordan delves into the history of the Celts, noting their gradual phenomenon of celticization and the influence of the Neolithic farmers.
He reflects on the Celts' victory over Rome and their plundering of Delphi, questioning the significance of these events.
Riordan connects the Celts' journey to his own hero's journey, emphasizing the importance of reclaiming and reconnecting with one's path.
He expresses his intention to continue researching and exploring the connections between the Celts and Greeks.
King's Quest and the Hero's Journey
Riordan revisits the game King's Quest, noting its inclusion of elements from Greek mythology, such as the Minotaur and Circe's island.
He reflects on the game's role in his own hero's journey, describing it as a metaphor for the challenges and mysteries he faced.
Riordan connects the game's mechanics to the broader metaphor of life, where answers are hidden but can be unlocked through learning and tradition.
He emphasizes the importance of following intuition and trusting the process in both the game and life.
The AI misgenders me and calls me Holly, which does not feel aligned today.
Riordan Regan reflects on their experiences during an ecstatic dance, where they felt ancestral anger towards systems of power controlled by white men. They discuss the exhaustion and pain felt by marginalized communities and the need for radical resistance through doing less. They recallc a vision of a "No dogs, Blacks, or Irish" sign, symbolizing historical discrimination. They transform their anger into compassion, realizing that those in power fear their strength. Riordan emphasizes the importance of using their systems against them, working together, and finding compassion to overcome oppression. They conclude with a vision of their father training to harness his power for good, symbolizing personal and collective transformation.
Action Items:
Use affection and camaraderie to work with those in power, rather than confronting them directly. Slip in through the "side doors" and use their own systems against them to create change. (Assignee: Holly Regan)
Help guide those in power, like their father, to harness their power for good through training and mentorship, rather than perpetuating cycles of abuse. (Assignee: Holly Regan)
Transcript here
Ecstatic Dance and Ancestral Anger
- They describe feeling possessed by ancestral anger during an ecstatic dance, expressing frustration with systems controlled by rich white men. - They mention feeling the anger of denied visas, gatekeeping, and the frustration of being subjected to these systems. - They criticize figures like Elon Musk, executives, and faceless suits for their power and privilege, highlighting their exploitative behaviors. - They reflect on their own ancestral karma and the desire to help someone they perceive as struggling, despite their apparent power.
Radical Resistance and the Power of Doing Less
- They discuss the societal pressure to be constantly busy and productive, contrasting it with the idea of radical resistance through doing less. - They share conversations about the importance of being able to just exist and the hard work involved in transforming karmas and lifetimes of shame. - They emphasize the exhaustion and injuries caused by the relentless pace of modern life, suggesting that something needs to take people out of the game to allow them to rest and heal. - They describe the process of resurrection and connecting the dream and reality, likening it to a journey through the underworld and the astral.
The Business Class Industrial Complex and the Space Race
- They express frustration with the business class industrial complex and the power brokers in the home office, linking them to the space race and figures like Elon Musk. - They criticize the attempt to shortcut the process of dropping into the center and the desire to go directly to space without facing the necessary initiation. - They describe their physical exhaustion and reliance on medicine like LSD and cacao to keep going, questioning the story behind their fatigue. - They recount a vivid memory from the collective consciousness of a sign saying "No dogs, Blacks, or Irish," and how it inspired them to dance and express their anger and frustration.
Shared Affinity and Historical Discrimination
- They discuss the shared affinity between people of color and the Irish, highlighting their common history of discrimination and oppression. - They reflect on the discrimination faced by black people and Irish immigrants, comparing it to the horrors of the slave trade and the enclosures. - They acknowledge that oppression is not limited to white people, mentioning the collaboration between black people and colonizers and the existence of slavery in indigenous societies. - They emphasize that the problem is not inherent in people but in the false system of privilege that creates oppressive dynamics.
The Dance and the Awakening of Ancestral Power
- They describe the transformative experience of the dance, where they found their primordial ancestral power and stepped into their strength. - They realized that those in power restrict and restrain others because they know they are stronger and fear being overpowered. - They saw Lubo, a Dutch man, as a symbol of white men who hijack the spiritual revolution and turn it into a commercial solution. - They reflect on the need to use their own systems against them and work together to restore balance and equality.
The Pact of the Souls and the Power of Compassion
- They recount a vision of a punishment ritual involving their father, where they found compassion for him and remembered the pact their souls had made. - They describe the transformation of the ecstatic dance room into a collective force, singing and chanting to intimidate their father and help him awaken. - They emphasize the importance of compassion and understanding that those in power are often scared and insecure. - They reflect on the need to meet their dark potential with love and camaraderie, rather than violence or domination.
The Dutch Merchant and the Spiritual Revolution
- They discuss the Dutch merchant, Lubo, and his role in the spiritual revolution, suggesting he may be hijacking the movement. - They reflect on the need to be aware of the dark potential of 13 Kan and to resist the urge to use their power for destruction. - They emphasize the importance of working together within existing frameworks to restore balance and equality. - They share a vision of transporting their father to Japan to train with a Kung Fu master and harness his power for good, symbolizing the potential for transformation and healing.
The Game of Abuse and Manipulation
- They describe the game of abuse and manipulation played by those in power, suggesting it is a way for the universe to know itself through every possible configuration. - They reflect on the need to help each other awaken and the importance of compassion and understanding in the process. - They emphasize the importance of resisting the urge to use power for destruction and instead meeting it with love and camaraderie. - They share a vision of using their 13 Kan powers to crush those in power, but choosing to meet them with affection and camaraderie instead.
The Path to Equality and the Role of the 13 Kan
- They discuss the path to equality and the role of the 13 Kans in the process, emphasizing the importance of understanding their dark potential. - They reflect on the need to use their power for good and to meet those in power with love and camaraderie. - They share a vision of transporting their father to Japan to train with a kung fu master and harness his power for good, symbolizing the potential for transformation and healing. - They emphasize the importance of being in the body and not killing oneself to make money, suggesting a new way of living that prioritizes presence and enjoyment.
The Final Vision and the Path Forward
- They describe a final vision of transporting their father to the rolling green hills of Japan, where he could train with a kung fu master and harness his 13 Kan power for good. - They reflect on the importance of following through with good ideas and not letting the hustle consume everything. - They emphasize the need to be in the body and not kill oneself to make money, suggesting a new way of living that prioritizes presence and enjoyment. - They conclude by reiterating the importance of working together and using existing systems to restore balance and equality, without those in power realizing it.
