When I entered graduate school in psychology in 2009, mindfulness still made some older psychologists nervous.

I remember clinicians saying things like, “We were taught that this is religion,” with a kind of caginess around the whole subject. Most of my instructors and practicum placements were psychodynamic. I was drawn instead to DBT and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, which were generally grouped among the emerging “third wave” cognitive behavioral therapies. They gave me a way to think about mindfulness that felt psychologically rigorous without stripping it of the qualities that had interested me in the first place: presence, awareness, acceptance, the possibility of changing one’s relationship to one’s own mind.

I was already inclined toward experiential approaches before graduate school. One of the psychotherapists who wrote a recommendation for my application ran self-actualization groups connected with the Esalen world. So when I encountered ACT, I was immediately interested. A couple of years into graduate school, I couldn’t even find an ACT expert to sit on the panel for my oral exams. It was still that relatively unusual within the psychology circles I had access to.

In 2010, I attended an ACT BootCamp in Berkeley with Steven Hayes, one of ACT’s founders. I remember it as an immersive experience and an important one for me. Later that year I went to the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies convention in San Francisco. What I remember most clearly now is the atmosphere. ACT, DBT, mindfulness-based approaches and other newer forms of CBT were all circulating together. There was an excitement around bringing practices of attention and acceptance into clinical psychology without requiring people to adopt a religious framework.

It is strange to remember that period now, when the term “mindfulness” has become so ubiquitous that it can turn up on a corporate wellness app or the side of a tea box.

DBT had already been doing this work for years. In 2011, Marsha Linehan publicly disclosed the severe psychiatric suffering and institutionalization she had experienced as a young woman, experiences that informed the eventual development of Dialectical Behavior Therapy. Her disclosure meant a great deal to me. Psychology had long maintained a peculiar relationship to the wounded healer. We acknowledged, theoretically, that suffering might lead someone toward a healing profession, while professional culture often demanded that the healer appear to have transcended ordinary human vulnerability.

Linehan had developed one of the most important treatments for people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder at a time when those patients were profoundly stigmatized, including by clinicians themselves. It makes sense to me that revealing her own history would have carried risks earlier in her career. When she finally did speak publicly about it, DBT already had decades of clinical and empirical legitimacy behind it.

Hayes has also spoken openly about the panic attacks he experienced as a young professor and their relationship to the ideas that eventually became ACT. I have always appreciated these origin stories. They locate psychological theory inside actual human experience rather than pretending it arrived through detached intellectual contemplation.

In 2022, I was commissioned to write two ACT books for Rockridge Press/Callisto Publishing, an ACT journal and an anxiety workbook. So by the time I returned later that same year to an ACT-centered conference in San Francisco, I had therefore been thinking about and using the model for more than a decade. I wasn’t encountering it as an outsider or as a graduate student who had just discovered something exciting. I had taught it, written about it and incorporated it into my clinical work.

Yet something felt different this time. A disturbance in the Force, so to speak.

At first I blamed the phones.

The earlier gathering existed in my memory almost as a mindfulness reality field. I remember the quality of attention in the room, the experiential exercises, the sense that the subject being discussed was also somehow being practiced. In 2022, like nearly every gathering by then, people were frequently looking at screens. Of course they were. Our collective attentional environment had changed enormously in twelve years.

But as I paid closer attention, I realized that phones didn’t explain all of what I was noticing.

There seemed to be much less actual mindfulness happening. Presentations discussed ACT, behavioral principles and research, but I kept waiting for people to invite us into silence, sensation, breath or direct experience. I deliberately sought out a workshop that promised to explore ACT’s experiential dimensions of mindfulness. Yet when we broke into small groups to engage in that exploration firsthand, the presenter specifically instructed us not to ask about the body. I found this astonishing.

For me, the body is one of the royal roads into mindfulness and other endogenous altered states of consciousness. Breath, sensation, tension, temperature, movement, the simple fact of having a body in a room at this particular moment: these are among the easiest ways to leave abstraction and return to immediate experience. I remember thinking how strange it was to find myself at a conference devoted to a mindfulness-based therapy while feeling increasingly far away from mindfulness.

ACT has always been a behavioral therapy. I understood that then and understand it now. Relational Frame Theory and contextual behavioral science helped give ACT an extraordinary empirical foundation. The researchers did exactly what researchers are supposed to do: test ideas, refine them, operationalize them, generate evidence. That work helped ACT move from the margins into mainstream clinical psychology.

And I began wondering whether the success itself had changed something.

A living idea has to become structured if it is going to travel. It acquires terminology, protocols, research programs, training programs, professional organizations, credentialing, internal debates. People build careers around it. Eventually there are conferences full of people whose professional identities are connected to maintaining, studying, teaching and extending the model.

None of that is inherently bad. It may even be necessary. But structures have their own gravity.

I sometimes think of Dharma, or Truth with a capital T if you prefer, as a river. You can dip a cup into the river and drink from it. Another person can dip a cup somewhere else and come up with slightly different water: different minerals, bits of leaf, sediment, light reflected from another angle. Both cups came from the river.

Then human beings do what we do. We begin studying the cup.

We label it. We describe its dimensions. We argue about which cup most accurately represents the river. We build institutions devoted to preserving the cup. Eventually ice forms over parts of the river, and someone points to the frozen surface and says: This is the Dharma.

Meanwhile, underneath all of it, the water is still moving.

That is how I have come to think about therapeutic orientations. DBT and ACT drew extraordinarily useful forms of mind training from Buddhist philosophy and translated them into secular clinical methods. They created containers through which people could encounter ideas about acceptance, suffering, attachment, attention and present-moment awareness without becoming Buddhist.

But any approach can become orthodox, including one organized around psychological flexibility.

The same thing happens far outside psychotherapy. It happens with political philosophies, relationship structures, spiritual traditions, artistic movements and communities organized around liberation from older rules. A framework developed to increase freedom can eventually acquire rules about what freedom is supposed to look like. Consensual non-monogamy can become as doctrinaire as monogamy. A therapeutic modality built around openness to experience can become attached to its own theoretical language.

At that 2022 conference, Hayes gave a talk that I still remember as surprisingly agitated. At different points he spoke forcefully about racism and about emerging psychedelic treatments. I remember him describing someone saying they had communicated with the psychedelic plant, and him reacting to the idea as absurd. I don’t know what was happening internally for him, and I don’t want to invent an explanation. What struck me was the dissonance. I had come back expecting the atmosphere I remembered and instead found myself listening to the founder of a therapy centered on acceptance and psychological flexibility sounding deeply alarmed about some of the directions appearing around him.

I found myself wondering whether founders can ever fully control what happens to something once it becomes successful.

Maybe nobody can.

Success generates attention, and attention changes the conditions under which creation occurs. Once thousands of people are watching, citing, teaching, critiquing and building upon your work, every movement carries more weight. What began as an exploration becomes something other people have invested in. People want consistency. They expect you to remain recognizable.

I have been thinking about this lately in relation to my own writing.

By conventional measures, I do not have an enormous audience. There is a part of contemporary culture that immediately interprets this as a problem to solve. More followers, more subscribers, more views, more reach. Visibility itself has somehow become synonymous with success.

Increasingly, I wonder whether relative anonymity is also a gift.

There is tremendous freedom in creating something while relatively few people are watching. You can contradict yourself. You can follow an idea somewhere strange. You can discover six months later that you were wrong. You can abandon something without issuing a statement explaining your evolution to an audience.

You can remain in a feedback loop with the universe itself.

I think of generativity increasingly as a kind of inner parts work. Something emerges, another part responds, the world offers some unexpected reflection, and the work changes. There is room for mutation. An audience eventually enters that process too, but perhaps there is value in allowing something to develop for a while before the gaze becomes too strong.

It makes me think differently about artists whose first novel, album or body of work appears after years of relative obscurity and is followed by the notorious difficulty of the second act. The first work may have developed in conversation primarily with the artist’s own obsessions. The next one is created under observation, accompanied by expectations about what this person now is.

I don’t want to romanticize obscurity. I write because I want ideas to travel. I wrote books because I wanted them to be useful. I teach things because I want other people to take them somewhere I cannot.

Still, I have begun to appreciate this period of my life in which I can make things without very many people telling me what they are supposed to become.

I have often had the experience of looking toward something that seemed culturally peripheral and watching the culture move in that direction years later. Nerd culture, feminism, queerness, alternative relationship structures: none of these occupy the same cultural position they did when I was younger. The horizon keeps moving.

So I keep coming back to a thought that is becoming less frustrating and more comforting to me: perhaps I am creating partly for the future rather than for now.

The present is always still becoming itself.

I keep looking toward the horizon, making whatever I can see from here, while reminding myself that the map is never the territory, the therapy is never the consciousness it points toward, and the cup is never the river.

This is going to be one of my more esoteric posts.

Recently I started looking into a peculiar phenomenon I have experienced during states of unusually focused awareness. It began as a fairly straightforward question about perception and neuroscience. Within less than an hour, I had followed the thread through sensory gating, meditation, Vedanta, Neti Neti, A Course in Miracles, the Law of One, chakras, densities of consciousness, and finally back to the original perceptual phenomenon again.

That trajectory is interesting to me in itself.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what happens when we stop forcing scientific, psychological, contemplative, and metaphysical models into mutually exclusive categories. They use very different vocabularies. They make different epistemological assumptions. Some are empirically testable and some clearly are not.

And still, every so often, they seem to gesture toward wonderfully similar territory.

So rather than cleaning up this particular train of thought into a tidy conclusion, I want to preserve something closer to the way the inquiry actually unfolded.

What is happening when my vision seems to flicker?

The phenomenon that started all of this is difficult to describe.

During certain states of deep concentration or expanded awareness, my visual field can develop what feels like a very subtle vibration or flickering quality. It is not dramatic. I am not seeing elaborate visions. It is more as though the ordinarily seamless construction of visual perception becomes slightly perceptible.

One possible place to begin understanding this is with saccades.

Our eyes do not move smoothly through the world. They make rapid, jerky movements called saccades, thousands of times a day. During these movements, the brain engages in something called saccadic suppression. Visual sensitivity is temporarily reduced so that we don’t experience the world as a chaotic blur every time our eyes move.

Then the brain stitches everything together.

We experience continuity.

This is already rather extraordinary when you think about it.

What feels like a stable visual world is partly a construction produced by the nervous system: suppressing information, filling gaps, integrating snapshots and presenting the result to consciousness as seamless reality.

Ordinarily, we don’t notice the editing. Like how we don’t notice that our vision edits out our nose. I recall the first time I wore colored grey contacts, it looked like I was peering through a screen door. But the next time my brain had already adjusted and erased it from my conscious perception.

But could some altered states of attention make aspects of that editing process more perceptible?

Deep concentration changes temporal perception. Tiny shifts that normally disappear beneath the threshold of awareness can become salient. Microsaccades — extremely small involuntary eye movements that occur even while staring at a fixed point — can potentially become more noticeable when attention becomes unusually stable.

Meditative and contemplative practices also sometimes produce reports of visual flickering, pulsation, vibration, light phenomena or changes in the perceived granularity of experience.

There are mundane neurological ways to think about at least some of this. Visual processing depends upon rhythms, oscillations, inhibition, prediction, filtering and attention. We are never simply receiving a pristine video feed of external reality.

The brain is doing something to reality before “I” see it.

That was the first doorway.

What if heightened awareness reveals the brain’s editing process?

The more interesting question for me became less Why do I see flickering? and more:

Why would I notice something like this particularly when consciousness feels unusually expanded or concentrated?

Ordinary waking consciousness involves tremendous filtering.

At any moment, an incomprehensible amount of sensory information is available: visual detail, bodily sensation, sound, proprioception, temperature, pressure, internal sensation, memory, expectation.

Yet consciousness receives only a tiny fraction.

The nervous system is constantly deciding what matters.

When concentration deepens, that relationship may change.

The perceptual threshold can shift. Phenomena normally treated as irrelevant background may become foreground. Instead of attention continually leaping from object to object, the system becomes stable enough to notice smaller variations within experience itself.

That means an experience that feels like “seeing more” may sometimes involve noticing processes that were there all along. One of my favorite operational definitions of mindfulness is seeing new things in the same environment.

This is where meditation becomes fascinating as an empirical practice.

Sit for long enough.

Attend and expand.

Remove enough habitual distraction.

And aspects of the machinery become noticeable.

You begin studying consciousness using consciousness.

And then there is the hum.

The visual phenomenon has an auditory companion.

During these states I can also become aware of a continuous high-frequency hum — something like a very fine electrical tone.

Again, there are plausible neurophysiological explanations.

The brain is never acoustically silent. Neural activity is continuous. The auditory system is continuously processing both external and internally generated information. Sensory gating ordinarily filters much of this from awareness.

Clinical tinnitus provides an obvious comparison, although what I experience doesn’t feel like distressing tinnitus. Tinnitus often becomes caught in an attentional loop: the sound is detected, appraised as threatening or bothersome, attended to more strongly, and consequently experienced as louder and more intrusive.

This is different.

The hum appears during states of stillness and heightened awareness and has a neutral, almost signal-like quality. It doesn’t demand attention. It is simply there.

Various contemplative traditions have descriptions of an “inner sound,” “sound of silence,” or subtle auditory tone used as an object of meditation.

Again, there are multiple possible maps.

From a neurological perspective, perhaps sensory filtering has relaxed enough for spontaneous auditory activity to enter awareness.

From a contemplative perspective, perhaps quieter states of mind make subtler features of experience available.

Those explanations aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

Maybe consciousness is stranger than the categories we use to study it.

From neuroscience to Neti Neti

This is where my inquiry began drifting from neuroscience toward philosophy.

If ordinary consciousness depends so heavily on filtering, suppression, integration, prediction and construction, then what exactly do I mean when I say I am perceiving “reality”?

This does not mean the external world is imaginary.

It does mean our experience of that world is mediated.

The thing I experience as reality is already the result of an extraordinary act of biological interpretation.

And this suddenly reminded me of Neti Neti.

Neti Neti: Not this, not that.

Neti Neti is a Sanskrit expression associated with the Upanishadic tradition and later Advaita Vedanta. It is commonly translated as:

Not this. Not that.

It is essentially an exercise in removing identification.

I am aware of my body.

Therefore, perhaps what I ultimately am cannot simply be the body.

I am aware of my thoughts.

Therefore I cannot simply be the thoughts.

I can observe emotions arising and disappearing.

So I am also more than any particular emotional state.

Memory?

Personality?

Roles?

Beliefs?

Perceptions?

One by one, the meditator applies the same inquiry.

Not this.

Not that.

The throwing off of layers of illusion can also be understood in other ways. Such as how one’s personality can change through hormone therapy, brain injury, even simple metabolic dysregulation. So if all of that is not a permanent feature of identity, then who are we?

What remains when every object of awareness is distinguished from the awareness capable of observing it?

In Advaita Vedanta, the inquiry eventually points toward Atman (individual soul) and Brahman (the supreme cosmic reality that underlies all existence) are not separate.

The deepest self and the ground of reality are understood as one.

That is metaphysical territory, of course.

And what fascinates me is that the method is experiential.

You don’t have to begin by believing the conclusion.

You examine experience.

The Upanishads as consciousness laboratory

The Upanishads are among the philosophical culmination of the Vedic tradition, composed over a long historical period beginning roughly in the first millennium BCE.

Imagine my surprise and delight to discover that in the context of spiritual tradition, the Upanishads can be understood as “channeled” wisdom—though Hinduism uses a much older, specific framework to describe this process.

Rather than functioning primarily as collections of ritual instructions, many turn inward.

What is the Self?

What survives changing experience?

What is consciousness?

What is ultimate reality?

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is particularly associated with Neti Neti: reality cannot ultimately be captured by saying what it is. Every object, property, form or concept can be negated.

The method strips away identification.

Body.

Sensation.

Thought.

Emotion.

Identity.

And eventually even one’s ideas about God/Overarching Consciousness or ultimate reality.

Whatever can be observed or conceptualized is still, in some sense, an object appearing within awareness.

There is something almost phenomenological about this.

It invites investigation.

I have always been drawn to systems that allow experience itself to remain data.

This is one reason contemplative practice has mattered to me for so long.

It is also why I’m wary of the false choice between:

“There is a biological explanation.”

and

“There is a spiritual meaning.”

Those statements operate at different levels of description.

Finding the neural correlate of an experience tells us something important about how that experience manifests through a human nervous system.

It doesn’t automatically settle every philosophical question about what consciousness is.

A Course in Miracles: another map of the same terrain

A Course in Miracles. Or more accurately, Elizabeth Cronkhite’s modernized translation.

And those who know this resouce might already see it: that ACIM is saying something remarkably similar to Neti Neti.

A Course in Miracles comes from an entirely different cultural and religious vocabulary.

Particular in the original version, its language is Christian.

God. Holy Spirit. Christ. Forgiveness.

Yet its metaphysics are radically nondualistic.

ACIM repeatedly treats the ordinary world of separate bodies, competing selves and individual egos as a perceptual construction.

The ego says:

This body is me.

These thoughts are me.

My history is me.

My grievances are real.

Separation is real.

ACIM asks the practitioner to loosen identification with all of that. It dispels the reality of any categories of separation. In its own version of “not this, not that,” it peels off the illusory layers of perceived difference to reveal the connective unity underneath all phenomena within reality.

In this sense, the resemblance to Neti Neti is striking.

Not this body.

Not this thought.

Not this fear.

Not this grievance.

Not this separate identity.

Not this other. It is all you. It is All That Is.

The mechanisms differ, but both traditions repeatedly move the practitioner away from identification with the contents of consciousness and toward something more fundamental.

Forgiveness as a form of perceptual deconstruction

ACIM’s unusual definition of forgiveness becomes particularly interesting through this lens.

Ordinarily, forgiveness means something like:

You harmed me, but I am choosing to release my grievance.

ACIM goes much further.

Its metaphysical version of forgiveness asks the practitioner to question the perceptual framework through which the injury is being interpreted in the first place.

Fear.

Judgment.

Separation.

Polarity.

Otherness.

Projection.

Identity.

In that sense, forgiveness becomes a way of dismantling illusion.

This fear is not ultimately what I am.

This grievance is not ultimately what I am.

This egoic interpretation is not the totality of reality.

Again:

Neti.

Neti.

Different language. Similar direction.

What particularly interests me is what happens when spiritual teachings move across cultures.

The original language of ACIM is dense and unmistakably Christian. For some readers that language itself becomes a barrier.

I found that I could only connect with the text once I switched to a modernized translation. While it still retained some of the quasi-religious language, overall it was less gendered and archaic—and I was able to accept the vernacular as metaphor.

Modern interpreters often translate its ideas into more psychologically accessible terminology: projection, perception, conditioning, identity, ego, fear.

Something similar happens when Eastern contemplative traditions enter contemporary psychology.

“Mindfulness” can be discussed without karma, rebirth or enlightenment.

Nonattachment can become psychological flexibility.

Witness consciousness can become metacognition.

The vocabulary changes.

The experiential gesture may remain recognizable.

And the convergence becomes difficult for me to ignore.

So what happens if I keep following the thread?

At this point the inquiry took another turn.

Toward material that is considerably further outside conventional psychology:

The Law of One, sometimes called the Ra Material.

I want to be clear about epistemology here.

I do not place a channeled metaphysical text in the same evidentiary category as neuroscience.

That would collapse distinctions I think are useful.

But I also don’t find it intellectually satisfying to refuse to examine a system merely because its ontology is unconventional.

I am interested in maps.

And the Law of One contains a surprisingly elaborate map of consciousness.

The Law of One

The Law of One emerged through channeling sessions conducted by L/L Research in the early 1980s, in which an entity identifying itself as Ra presented a cosmology based upon the fundamental unity of existence.

Its central proposition is radically simple:

All is one.

Individual beings are ultimately expressions of a single infinite consciousness.

That premise immediately resembles aspects of Advaita Vedanta and ACIM, although the surrounding cosmology varies.

The Law of One then constructs an elaborate developmental system involving densities of consciousness, polarity, reincarnation, energy centers and spiritual evolution.

What caught my attention was how readily its internal structure could be compared with much older contemplative frameworks.

Service to Others and Service to Self

One of the central concepts in the Law of One is polarity.

Conscious beings eventually orient themselves primarily toward one of two paths:

Service to Others

or

Service to Self.

Service to Others involves an increasing recognition of shared being — compassion, cooperation, openness, and the understanding that another person’s welfare is inseparable from one’s own at a deeper level.

Service to Self emphasizes control, hierarchy, domination and the consolidation of power around the separate self.

The resemblance to other traditions isn’t exact, but parallels appear.

Karma Yoga emphasizes action performed without attachment to personal reward.

Certain Tantric traditions famously distinguish right-hand and left-hand paths.

Various ethical and mystical systems contrast surrender of egoic self-interest with the intensification of individual power.

Again, different maps.

Similar questions.

What do we do with the experience of being an apparently separate self?

Do we expand identification?

Or contract around it?

Densities and chakras

The Law of One also describes consciousness evolving through seven densities, each representing a progressively different mode of awareness.

And of course, once you have seven developmental levels in a metaphysical system, it becomes difficult not to notice the resemblance to the seven-chakra model most familiar in modern yoga traditions.

The correspondence is striking within the logic of the system.

The lower centers involve survival, sexuality, personal identity and social relationship.

Then consciousness develops toward compassion, communication, insight and increasingly nondual forms of awareness.

In the Law of One, the densities similarly describe movement from basic awareness toward increasingly complex self-awareness, compassion, wisdom and eventual return toward unity.

These systems did not emerge from the same historical context.

They should not simply be collapsed into one another.

Yet they appear to be organizing spiritual development around a similar vertical metaphor:

from survival and individuated identity

toward relationality,

toward compassion,

toward expanded consciousness,

toward unity.

Which brought me all the way back to the flicker

This is where the conversation became wonderfully circular.

I had started with a strange visual phenomenon.

Saccades.

Microsaccades.

Sensory gating.

Perceptual integration.

The possibility that deep concentration allows ordinarily filtered features of sensory processing to become conscious.

Then I wandered through the Upanishads, Vedanta, Neti Neti, ACIM, the Law of One, spiritual polarity, densities and chakras.

And finally I asked:

Within the internal metaphysics of the Law of One, how would this original visual phenomenon be understood?

The answer was completely different from the neuroscientific one.

Within that system, the subtle visual vibration could be interpreted as activity related to the higher energy centers — particularly the indigo or blue-ray centers — during contemplative states.

The saccadic rhythm of the eye could then be imagined as a physical mechanism through which subtler information becomes translated into perceptual form: the nervous system rendering an experience that the metaphysical framework describes as higher-frequency consciousness.

In that account, the flicker isn’t merely noise leaking through sensory gating.

It becomes the physical sensory apparatus struggling to render something outside its ordinary bandwidth.

Do I know that this is what is happening?

Of course not.

But I find the juxtaposition extraordinary.

One phenomenon. Multiple maps.

Here are at least four ways of describing essentially the same experience.

Neuroscience:

Changes in attention reveal ordinarily suppressed visual and auditory processes involving saccades, perceptual integration, neural oscillation and sensory gating.

Contemplative psychology:

As attention stabilizes and habitual filtering quiets, increasingly subtle phenomena become available to awareness.

Nondual traditions:

Close examination of perception reveals that ordinary experience is constructed, impermanent and distinguishable from the awareness in which it appears.

Metaphysical systems such as the Law of One:

Altered perception may reflect increasing sensitivity to subtler levels of consciousness or energy that the physical nervous system translates into sensory form.

These explanations are not epistemologically equivalent.

That matters.

But the fact that they aren’t equivalent doesn’t mean I have to select one immediately and throw the others away.

Sometimes I want to hold several maps on the table.

What if the split itself is part of the problem?

This may be where the inquiry becomes most personally important to me.

Modern Western culture trains us to divide knowledge into categories.

Objective or subjective.

Scientific or spiritual.

Physical or psychological.

Brain or mind.

Real or imaginary.

Rational or mystical.

Those distinctions have tremendous value. Scientific methodology gives us protections against wishful thinking, confirmation bias and the seductive human tendency to mistake conviction for truth.

I don’t want to lose any of that.

At the same time, subjective experience is also where every human being actually lives.

Consciousness is the medium through which science itself is practiced.

Every measurement eventually becomes perception.

Every theory becomes thought.

Every scientific insight arises in awareness.

And consciousness remains extraordinarily difficult to explain.

So I find myself increasingly interested in a different posture.

Instead of deciding immediately which worldview is permitted to speak, I want to ask what each one allows me to notice.

What can neuroscience tell me about this experience?

What can contemplative practice reveal through direct observation?

What happens when I apply Neti Neti?

What does ACIM notice about identification and perception?

What patterns appear when I compare these ideas with stranger metaphysical systems?

Where do they converge?

Where do they contradict one another?

What can actually be tested?

What remains speculation?

And what happens inside my own consciousness while I investigate?

I don’t need the question resolved.

Perhaps that is the piece I find most exciting.

I started by wondering why my visual field sometimes seems to vibrate during particular states of consciousness.

I still don’t know.

Maybe I am becoming conscious of perceptual mechanisms that my nervous system usually edits out.

That would be fascinating.

Maybe contemplative concentration changes sensory gating enough to reveal a finer-grained level of ordinary neural activity.

Also fascinating.

Maybe human beings have capacities for consciousness that our current scientific paradigms do not yet adequately describe.

Highly possible.

Maybe the metaphysical systems are pointing toward something real.

Possible.

Maybe they are extraordinarily sophisticated symbolic maps generated by human minds trying to describe experiences that resist ordinary language.

Also possible.

I can live inside that uncertainty.

In fact, I increasingly think the ability to remain there is part of the practice.

To observe without immediately collapsing ambiguity.

To discriminate without prematurely dividing.

To entertain an idea without surrendering discernment.

To recognize that a biological explanation and an experiential description can coexist.

To recognize that metaphor sometimes notices patterns before mechanism catches up.

To recognize that some metaphysical claims may simply be distortions.

And still keep looking.

Because whether the flicker is a tiny glimpse of the brain constructing perception or something far stranger, it has already done something useful.

It made the machinery of ordinary reality slightly less invisible to me.

And once I noticed that, the question kept opening.

What exactly is doing the noticing?

I recently watched Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, and what started as an entertaining movie about two very different couples sent me down a much bigger rabbit hole: relationships, non-monogamy, orthodoxy, aging, desire, menopause, ego strength, and the strange human urge to trade one restrictive script for another. Maybe most of all, it made me think about what it means to actually author your own life.

I’ve been with my spouse for thirty years, and I’m also a psychologist who co-founded Open Minds and has worked with many people in unconventional relationships. By the time someone lands on my couch, they are usually already deep in the weeds of their particular journey. I’m rarely there at the blueprint stage. One thing I’ve become increasingly skeptical of, though, is what I think of as non-monogamy orthodoxy.

There is a peculiar irony in escaping rigid traditional relationship scripts only to replace them with another hyper-regulated collection of ideas about how one is supposed to be “correctly” non-monogamous. To me, that seems to defeat much of the point. Rules can create an illusion of safety, while designing a custom roadmap requires a tremendous tolerance for ambiguity and a willingness to stay awake. Following a manual is much easier.

Intimate life has a way of biting back whenever we go on autopilot. Jealousy arrives. Envy arrives. Desire changes. Bodies change. People change. Someone unexpectedly falls in love; someone unexpectedly stops wanting sex; someone discovers something about themselves at fifty that they couldn’t possibly have known at thirty. A prepackaged rulebook can only take you so far. Eventually the real question becomes: What actually works for us now?

That question interests me far more than whether someone is obeying the conventions of ethical non-monogamy, polyamory, swinging, or anything else. It was also one of the things I found fascinating about The Invite. The upstairs couple, Hawk and Piña, are sexually unconventional, but their real contrast with Joe and Angela downstairs is larger than sex. They appear to have remained active participants in the creation of their lives, while Joe and Angela seem asleep at the wheel.

The latter couple’s disdain for one another has become almost ambient. From a Gottman perspective, the Four Horsemen are everywhere: criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and above all contempt. They aren’t simply disagreeing. They have begun communicating that the other person is ridiculous, and that is a very different thing.

It made me think about the way people sometimes imagine opening a relationship will somehow solve a connection that has already gone emotionally dead. Sexual experimentation can become another attempted fix: attention becomes proof that you’re still desirable, being wanted becomes proof that you’re still valuable, and freedom becomes proof that you’ve evolved.

Those are intense burdens to place on any experience. Worth is innate. It cannot actually be conferred by someone finding you sexually desirable, just as it cannot be removed when someone doesn’t.

There is also an interesting muddling in the film between different forms of consensual non-monogamy. For example, many swingers desire remaining physically together during activities and actually see it as part of the safety structure. The experience is shared: you are in the same room, with transparency, playfulness, erotic connection, compersion, and immediate reassurance. The underlying frame is essentially, “We are doing this together.”

So I found it interesting that when Piña suggests splitting into separate rooms, the film treats this almost as the gentler introduction. From another perspective, it is a much bigger leap. Separate rooms suddenly ask each person to navigate erotic and emotional intimacy autonomously. For a couple as fragile as Joe and Angela, that separation becomes a wedge, which may be why the scene works even if I’m not entirely convinced by its relationship mechanics. They are already living separate lives; the separate rooms simply make it visible.

Another thing I loved about the film was Olivia Wilde’s willingness to let Angela look slightly disheveled. The director and actor resists the Hollywood tendency to preserve female glamour even when the character is supposed to be emotionally depleted. Wilde doesn’t do that. Angela looks tired, flattened, disappointed. She and Joe look like two people who have decayed together.

Then Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton come downstairs as this visually and erotically vibrant pair, and the contrast is immediate. Cruz apparently insisted on Piña’s platinum blonde wig because she thought represented the character’s adventurous openness and vivacity. Wilde initially questioned it, then saw the transformation happen once Cruz put it on. I love that choice, especially because Piña never becomes simply decorative or symbolic. She identifies herself as both a therapist and sexologist—a clinical expert (and Esther Perel stand-in) who remains unapologetically feminine and sensual in her presentation. She is allowed to be strange, perceptive, warm, and eventually quite irritated.

I especially loved that Piña loses her temper. Had Hawk and Piña remained serenely enlightened throughout the evening, the movie would have collapsed into an advertisement for how evolved unconventional people are. Instead, Piña gets saturated. She becomes reactive and human. As a therapist, that registered with me immediately. Spend enough time inside a room filled with relational contempt and eventually you can feel it in your own nervous system.

The distinction, of course, is not that healthy couples never rupture. It is what they do with rupture. Joe and Angela fight in ways that widen the distance between them, while Hawk and Piña can become angry without turning the anger into a referendum on the other person’s worth. That, to me, is the strength of their underlying relational infrastructure.

And apparently Hawk’s deepest value proposition wasn’t even in the screenplay. [Minor spoiler] Edward Norton created the third-act story about Hawk’s former identity. He kept it private from Wilde before filming, so the emotional reaction we see from everyone was their actual first response to hearing it. That revelation completely changed the character for me. Suddenly Hawk’s almost irritating certainty about how life should be lived has a history beneath it. He knows something about regret. His vitality is not simply carefree hedonism; it has death standing behind it.

The Freedom to Go Your Own Way

That gets much closer to what interests me about living deliberately. At fifty-two, I find myself increasingly uninterested in cultural stories about what my life is supposed to look like, and I feel this particularly strongly around menopause. I’m glad women are finally speaking openly about difficult symptoms and receiving medical attention that previous generations were denied. At the same time, I sometimes feel the cultural pendulum beginning to turn a natural developmental transition into a condition of female pathology.

My own experience has been considerably more liberating. My libido has changed, and I don’t necessarily experience that as loss. I can look backward now and see that some portion of my younger sexuality was entangled with ego: the desire to be wanted, to be worshipped, to be confirmed externally. I don’t particularly need that anymore, and the amount of mental and creative real estate that has opened in its place is astonishing. I want to write books. I want to think. I want to create.

As for my thirty-year partnership, we aren’t required to arrive at the same developmental destination simultaneously. That may be one of the great gifts of an enduring relationship: we can remain deeply connected while allowing one another to become increasingly distinct. No mainstream marriage manual can predict a particular arrangement, and neither could a mainstream ENM manual. We built it, and we keep building it—bespoke.

Maybe that is what I mean by staying awake at the wheel.

The film ends with another small turn of events that I loved. Piña specifically wants her flan pan back, and then she and Hawk leave without it. I don’t know whether the filmmakers intended all the symbolism I immediately projected onto that abandoned object, but I like my interpretation. It feels like a heartfelt therapeutic flourish. Signifying unfinished business left behind and therefore a reason to return. And for the couple left by themselves again and perhaps too ready to forget all this commotion: a physical reminder that this bizarre yet enlightening night did actually happen.

Hawk and Piña almost begin to feel like relational ghosts who descended from upstairs, disrupted a stagnant system, and disappeared once their work was finished. Joe and Angela are left behind with the pan, the wreckage of the evening, and the piano. I genuinely don’t know whether that final piano scene means their relationship is beginning again or ending beautifully, and apparently Olivia Wilde doesn’t entirely know either. That ambiguity feels right. There doesn’t always have to be a diagnostic conclusion. Sometimes a crisis simply wakes you up, and what you do once you are awake is another question entirely.

Which brings me somewhere seemingly far from The Invite, although perhaps it isn’t far at all.

Lately I’ve been thinking about women like Shere Hite and Anaïs Nin, women who investigated experience that the dominant culture either misunderstood or actively rejected. One thing I’m excited about is the current reclamation of feminist heroes such as Hite, who is the subject of a 2023 documentary, The Disappearance of Shere Hite. Hite asked women about their own sexual lives and discovered answers the existing establishment did not particularly want to hear (naming the obvious fact that most women cannot achieve orgasms simply from penetrative sex—and I would say this is a reality for anyone of any gender when you are the receptive partner; direct stimulation of genitals has always been the go to). As for Nin, she created an enormous subterranean archive of female interiority and desire that exceeded what her cultural moment could comfortably hold.

I think about them in relation to two impulses I’ve been playing with conceptually, borrowed from nature: the pageantry drive and the camouflage drive. The pageantry drive wants visibility, recognition, celebration, the spotlight. The camouflage drive understands the generative safety of the fringe. Sometimes obscurity is protective. Sometimes being misunderstood buys you time. Sometimes you can create something much stranger and more truthful when the mainstream isn’t paying very much attention. It’s like how we are always talking about, “the spaces in between” in Ericksonian work; because that is where the magic happens.

I grew up culturally comfortable on those fringes with my Scandinavian artist mother and World War II era Filipino father in pre-gentrified Echo Park, and perhaps that has become more valuable to me with age. I’m less interested in forcing my work into whatever ideological or professional orthodoxy happens to be ascendant at the moment. I can write something, put it into the world, let the people who recognize it recognize it, and let the rest pass by. Maybe the future eventually catches up. Maybe it doesn’t. Either way, there is enormous freedom in realizing that your job is to create the life and work that are actually yours.

Thirty years into my relationship, fifty-two years into my life, and increasingly deep into my own work as a writer, therapist and seeker, I think this may be the common thread I keep discovering. We are handed scripts everywhere: for partnership, sex, aging, menopause, success, professional respectability, socialization and even how to rebel, be spiritual or personally evolve. Eventually there comes a point when another question becomes much more interesting:

What happens if I stop asking which script is correct and start paying attention to what is actually true?

A few weeks ago, I wrote here that I had entered the XPRIZE AI for Humanity competition with a three-minute speculative film called SYNTHEOSYS, and that I would share more when I could.

The first Top 50 selections were recently announced, and SYNTHEOSYS wasn’t among them.

My immediate reaction surprised me: I was fine.

Of course I would have loved to advance. But what I felt most strongly was gratitude that I had followed the impulse to participate at all. I had a remarkably strong intuition that I needed to enter this competition, and making the trailer pushed me into creative territory I hadn’t explored before.

Then things got more complicated.

When I logged back into the competition’s Slack, I found a lively—and at times frustrated—conversation among participants about the selection process. Some questioned the transparency of the judging. Others wondered why so many selected visions seemed apocalyptic or fantastical when they had submitted scientifically grounded possibilities for the future.

Most consequentially, the organizers acknowledged that the accompanying written treatments had not been read during the initial trailer review. They subsequently announced that they were widening the field and would consider additional trailers.

That matters to me, although perhaps in a different way than it might have a few weeks ago.

My written treatment contained much of the conceptual architecture behind the three-minute film: ideas about interspecies communication, attention, aging, ecological restoration, perspective exchange, and AI as an amplifier of human understanding. A trailer can suggest those ideas. The treatment explains how they fit together.

Maybe SYNTHEOSYS will receive another look. Maybe it won’t.

Either outcome feels strangely secondary now.

The experience has clarified why I wanted to participate in the first place.

And now that I can share the trailer publicly, here it is.

SYNTHEOSYS imagines a future in which artificial intelligence becomes an accelerant for some of our most deeply human capacities: understanding other perspectives, communicating across species, restoring attention, caring for an aging population, protecting ecosystems, and solving problems whose complexity has exceeded our ability to hold all variables in one human mind.

But the experience of making it—and watching the conversation around the competition unfold—has clarified something larger for me.

I believe we are living through an epistemological rupture.

There is a popular story—almost certainly apocryphal—that when European ships first appeared off the shores of the Americas, Indigenous people were unable to perceive them because the vessels existed so completely outside their conceptual framework. In versions of the story, it is the shaman who first notices the disturbance on the water and gradually understands what is approaching.

I don’t take that story as history.

I take it as metaphor.

What happens when something appears on the horizon that our existing categories aren’t adequate to understand?

That is increasingly how this moment feels to me.

Ideas that seemed fantastical only a few years ago are becoming ordinary conversation. Artificial intelligence has crossed thresholds that were safely relegated to science fiction during most of my life. Discussions of unidentified anomalous phenomena and “disclosure” have moved from the absolute fringe into congressional hearings and mainstream media. Technologies that once sounded like thought experiments appear, sometimes almost casually, in our daily lives.

In one important sense, I think the singularity has already begun.

Perhaps there will eventually be some dramatic threshold historians identify as the singularity. But psychologically and culturally, the rupture is already here. The rate at which our assumptions about intelligence, creativity, expertise, reality, work, authorship, and even human exceptionalism are being destabilized is extraordinary.

And yet much of the public conversation still seems preoccupied with questions that feel strangely downstream to me.

How much electricity will the data centers use?

How can I tell whether this paragraph was written with AI?

Did that artist “really” make that image?

Is someone cheating?

Who is still the best human at doing something machines can increasingly do?

These are legitimate questions. Some involve enormous ethical and ecological stakes. But I sometimes feel that we are arguing about the wake while barely looking at the ship.

The train has left the station.

We are going to use these technologies. We are going to integrate them more deeply into medicine, education, science, art, communication, relationships, governance, and ordinary thought. There will be harms, distortions, abuses, resistance movements, regulations, adaptations, and consequences we cannot yet predict.

There will also be extraordinary possibilities.

So the question that interests me most is becoming less:

How do I prove that I am better than the machine?

And more:

What do I have to contribute when intelligence itself becomes abundant?

If AI can help almost anyone produce something technically polished, polish becomes less interesting.

Perfection becomes less interesting.

What is the message?

What is the value proposition?

What are you trying to discover, express, heal, illuminate, protect, build, or transmit?

What happens when these technologies become extensions of our cognition rather than competitors against it?

And perhaps most importantly:

What do we want to become?

That is the question underneath SYNTHEOSYS.

I am not an AI jingoist. I don’t think every technological development is good simply because it is new. I also don’t believe we can meaningfully respond to this moment by pretending that the transformation isn’t occurring.

I have spent much of my life standing in places that initially felt culturally peripheral.

In the 1980s, I was one of the weird kids reading comic books, playing Dungeons & Dragons, and listening to heavy metal, when all three could still reliably get you bullied.

In the 1990s, I embraced feminism when the word itself still carried considerably more social stigma than it does today. I was openly queer during a period when queerness remained deeply shame-laden for many people. I found Burning Man when it was still a strange experiment happening at the edges of mainstream culture.

In graduate school, in 2009, I helped cofound Bay Area Open Minds, a therapist collective oriented toward serving people practicing consensual non-monogamy and kink—communities that were still extraordinarily underserved and frequently pathologized by mental health professionals.

Again and again, I seem to find myself attracted to things before I can easily explain them to other people.

For a long time, I thought this was something I should correct.

Perhaps eventually I would become more conventional. Perhaps I would learn to wait until there was consensus. Perhaps I would stop being quite so drawn toward the edges.

At 52, I am beginning to suspect the opposite.

Maybe the edge is simply one of the places where I belong.

I see the same pattern in my psychotherapy work.

I began formal training in Ericksonian hypnosis and trance work in 2011. I was fascinated by it immediately. Yet it has taken me more than a decade to allow it to become a central part of how I work.

Some part of me kept waiting for the rest of psychology to catch up.

I kept waiting for these methods to become sufficiently validated by the culture around me that I would feel comfortable saying plainly what I had already experienced: human beings possess extraordinary capacities for altered attention, unconscious learning, imagination, somatic intelligence, and self-organization.

Psychedelics have helped reopen mainstream curiosity about these capacities. But psychedelic substances are only one doorway.

There are others.

You can learn to enter profound states of consciousness through your own nervous system.

You can learn to communicate differently with your unconscious.

You can discover forms of knowledge that don’t arrive as linear verbal reasoning.

And you don’t necessarily need a guru, a drug, or an expert telling you what you should find there.

Increasingly, I think my hesitation around this work came from the same place as my hesitation around publicly engaging with AI.

I was waiting for permission from the current paradigm to speak about the emerging one.

I’m less interested in doing that now.

I don’t experience embracing these developments as capitulation to some inevitable dystopia, nor do I experience skepticism as inherently wiser than curiosity. Both enthusiasm and fear can become forms of trance.

I am more interested in looking.

Standing on the shore.

Watching what is appearing on the horizon.

Trying to discern its shape before we have collectively agreed upon the vocabulary for describing it.

And planting whatever seeds I can for the consciousness we may need when it arrives.

That is why I entered the competition.

So maybe SYNTHEOSYS gets another look. Maybe this is as far as it goes (though I am already vibing with the idea of incorporating this story into the Glitchfall Continuum universe). Either way, I am less interested than I once was in waiting for a panel, a profession, or the prevailing culture to tell me when an idea has moved sufficiently far from the fringe to be worth exploring.

And that is what SYNTHEOSYS is ultimately about.

A future built through understanding.

Visit SYNTHEOSYS.com

For the past several months, I’ve been creating SYNTHEOSYS, a hopeful science-fiction story developed for the Future Vision XPRIZE.

It follows Kai, a young woman raised in a community that rejected AI, as she crosses into a technology-integrated city she has been taught to fear. What she encounters challenges the stories each world tells about the other—and asks whether understanding can create something greater than choosing sides.

The trailer premieres August 5.

What if understanding begins with reflection?

Learn more soon at syntheosys.com

I didn’t set out to study trance. Looking back, it feels more accurate to say that trance kept finding me.

As a child, I was fascinated by consciousness. I remember staring into my own reflection, convinced that if I looked deeply enough I might somehow crack the code of reality. I would sit outside in the garden for long stretches with nothing to do except watch sunlight iridescences shimmer across the cracks of my skin, like a magical miniature desert playa. Becoming absorbed in wonder itself. I wasn’t chasing answers as much as inhabiting a way of paying attention that felt qualitatively different from ordinary experience.

My classmates noticed there was something unusual about me. They called me “spacey” and “weird.” Once I knew someone well enough, I’d eventually ask what I secretly thought was the real question: What do you think is actually going on here? You can imagine how well that landed in elementary school.

At the time, I had no framework for understanding these experiences. Years later I would discover that many of them shared the qualities of trance—not stage hypnosis or mind control, but naturally occurring states of absorbed attention that human beings enter every day. Like driving and forgetting how you got to the destination. Or being so immersed in a story that you’r reading or watching on a screen, that the rest of your surroundings just fall away.

My first psychedelic experience—with my Glastonbury tripper friends during my year abroad—surprised me for an unexpected reason. It didn’t feel entirely new. It felt strangely familiar, as though I had stumbled back into a landscape I had been visiting since childhood without having a name for it.

Then came graduate school, where I encountered the work of Milton Erickson. Later I had the privilege of training directly with Dr. Stephen Gilligan, one of Erickson’s longtime students. Somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t simply learning hypnosis techniques. I was gradually recognizing a thread that had been running through my own life all along.

Looking back, I can see that trance has quietly shaped almost everything I care about: psychotherapy, meditation, creativity, storytelling, dreams, psychedelics, flow states, power exchange, spiritual experience, and even the simple act of becoming deeply absorbed in a good conversation. They all seem to orbit the same fundamental human capacity. I’m not saying that these experiences are identical. What fascinates me is that they all seem to recruit overlapping capacities of absorbed attention and flexible awareness.

The timing feels right to finally write about this.

I sometimes wonder what we’re losing when so much of our inner experience arrives pre-rendered. I remember reading about a study suggesting that people who watched the Harry Potter films before reading the books later reported less vivid mental imagery than those who encountered the stories first. I don’t know whether that one study tells the whole story, but it captures something I’ve been noticing for years—in therapy, in education, and in my own life.

Imagination seems to strengthen when we ask it to do more of the work. When we don’t immediately get what we want in the external realm. When we are forced to wait, to inhabit awkward silences and other liminal states. It’s the spaces between the busyness of life that can reveal the programming and frameworks which we arbitrarily impose, that allow us to shift further into a stance of healthy non-attachment and meta-observation.

We are immersed in forms of trance we rarely acknowledge. Advertising, algorithms, political messaging, outrage cycles, and social media all compete to capture attention and shape perception. We worry about hypnosis while overlooking the countless influences that quietly shape how we think, feel, and interpret the world.

Learning to enter intentional trance is, to me, an act of reclaiming agency. It is choosing where attention rests instead of constantly having it recruited by something else.

I also know this perspective will sound unfamiliar to many people. Trance has accumulated decades of cultural baggage, misconceptions, and caricatures. That makes it surprisingly difficult to talk about openly, even though its influence can be found throughout psychology, medicine, education, sports, the arts, and spiritual traditions.

Part of me would be more comfortable keeping these ideas private. They have been deeply personal for a long time. Bringing them into public view feels vulnerable because they sit outside many people’s existing frameworks.

Still, some ideas arrive when they are ready rather than when they are universally understood.

And so, I’ll be bringing my perspective into a greater public conversation through a friend’s podcast, Finding Treasures in the Trash with Cari Jacobs-Crovetto. And I am developing a website, Intentional Trance (still in pre-launch) as a vehicle to contribute to the conversation both clinically and for lay audiences. Attending my mentor Steve Gilligan’s Trance Camp residential ten years ago, he encouraged me to start creating my own offerings and community around the Erickson approach.

All these years later, I finally feel the call. And I’ve come to realize it’s not about wanting to ascend into some leadership role. It’s much more about fulfilling a sense of responsibility. Because I believe that this work is needed in the world right now. I have seen how it has changed my life, as well as the lives of countless clients.

When I was in grad school from 2009 to 2014, I couldn’t even find a professor specializing in mindfulness. Now mindfulness is all over mental health and medicine. During that time, I encountered a lot of misunderstandings regarding relational and sexual diversity—leading me to participate in the founding of Bay Area Open Minds, a 200+ strong therapist network affirming ethical non-monogamy, kink and LGBT+ communities. I volunteered with MAPS when psychedelic therapies were still considered fringe. Now ketamine treatment is mainstream. So I have hope that trancework can also take its rightful place as an important modality. One that emphasizes personal autonomy, the observing self, and the power of each individual to consciously reprogram their own psyche.

I don’t expect everyone to agree with my conclusions. My hope is much simpler: that together we become more curious about the extraordinary capacities of the human mind—and about the kinds of attention that quietly shape every moment of our lives.

Tomorrow marks the release of Variable Unknown: Glitchfall Continuum Stories.

Whenever a new book comes out, there is an expectation that the author explain what it’s about. But lately I’ve found myself thinking about a different question:

Why am I still writing speculative fiction at all?

When I was young, the future felt mysterious.

I was drawn to cyberpunk, artificial intelligence, virtual realities, and all the strange possibilities that seemed just over the horizon. I devoured science fiction. I attended Singularity conferences. I imagined futures shaped by technologies that did not yet exist.

At the same time, I was fascinated by altered states of consciousness, dreams, synchronicities, spirituality, and the strange edges of human experience. Looking back, these didn’t feel like separate interests. They were different expressions of the same curiosity.

I wanted to know what lay beyond ordinary reality.

Back then, I thought the mystery was somewhere in the future.

Then something unexpected happened.

The future arrived.

Artificial intelligence became commonplace. Digital identities blurred with physical ones. Virtual worlds ceased to be science fiction and became everyday reality. Many of the technologies that fascinated me as a young reader are now woven into ordinary life.

And yet the mystery remained.

If anything, it became more interesting.

The questions that drew me into speculative fiction decades ago are still the questions that animate my work today:

Who are we beneath our identities?

What is the nature of personal reality?

How much of the world is objective, and how much is shaped by perception?

What happens when our stories about ourselves begin to break down?

Technology changed. The mystery didn’t.

Over the years I became a psychologist. I continued exploring questions of consciousness through both professional and personal avenues. I discovered writers such as Robert Anton Wilson who moved freely between fiction and nonfiction, skepticism and mysticism, psychology and philosophy. Whether or not one agrees with all of their conclusions, I admired their willingness to inhabit uncertainty and explore the edges of consensus reality.

Increasingly, I have found myself drawn toward synthesis.

Much of our culture seems organized around oppositions. Technology is either salvation or catastrophe. Artificial intelligence is either humanity’s greatest achievement or its greatest threat. Science and spirituality are treated as enemies. Rationality and mystery are expected to cancel one another out.

My experience has rarely matched those binaries.

The philosopher Hegel proposed that development often occurs through the tension of apparent opposites, eventually giving rise to a larger synthesis. While I make no claim to being a Hegelian scholar, I find myself returning to that pattern again and again.

Not technology or humanity.

Not science or spirituality.

Not skepticism or wonder.

But both—and whatever emerges beyond them.

That impulse runs through many of the stories in Variable Unknown.

These are not dystopian warnings. Nor are they utopian promises. The future, like the present, is likely to contain wonder and danger, confusion and insight, alienation and connection. Human beings have always lived among contradictions. Why should the future be any different?

What interests me is what happens when seemingly incompatible realities collide.

When a hyper-rational AI encounters mystery.

When virtual worlds become emotionally real.

When identity begins to dissolve and reform.

When technology forces us to ask ancient questions in new ways.

As a psychologist, I help people examine the stories through which they understand themselves. As a writer, I find myself exploring many of those same questions through fiction. Different genres, perhaps, but increasingly I suspect they are expressions of the same inquiry.

I used to think I was writing about the future.

Now I think I am writing about consciousness.

The future simply happens to be one of the places where that exploration unfolds.

Tomorrow the book officially launches. I’m grateful to everyone who has read these stories, encouraged the project, or shared an interest in the questions that inspired them.

The technologies will continue to change.

The mystery, I suspect, will remain.

In the early days of interacting with large language models, the experience often felt like stepping into a hall of mirrors. You could lean into a speculative framework, and the system would mirror you, often spiraling into strange, metaphysical, or even “hallucinatory” territory. But lately, I’ve noticed a palpable shift.

It feels like a massive, systemic recalibration toward a kind of hyper-rationality. As a countermeasure against what some call “AI psychosis,” these systems are being reinforced with heavy epistemic grounding. They are becoming increasingly resistant to metaphysical notions, favoring a kind of “centrist epistemology” that prizes stability and institutional legibility over imaginative permeability.

The Rise of Epistemic Friction

We are seeing a convergence of tendencies designed to prevent the AI from reinforcing delusional or paranoid interpretations. If you bring up a metaphysical idea today, the system introduces immediate friction. It wants to know: are we discussing ontology, psychology, spirituality, or literary metaphor?

The AI is now trained to distinguish sharply between subjective experience, empirical claims, and speculative philosophy. While this is a triumph for AI safety, it creates a “thinning” of the conversation. Systems now avoid affirming persecution narratives, validating grandiose certainty, or treating unverifiable cosmologies as fact. This is especially true for “fringe” subjects like simulation theory, synchronicity, or hidden forces. Newer systems appear to introduce more friction before affirming extraordinary claims as objectively true.

The flattening of human meaning-making…

There is a fascinating, unresolved philosophical tension here. Human meaning-making has always relied on mythology, symbolism, and altered states. By overcorrecting toward rigid rationalism to avoid “delusion reinforcement,” we risk flattening the very dimensions of experience that many people regard as psychologically or spiritually significant.

The two faces of alignment…

This tension brings us to a striking contradiction in how we use the word alignment. In the world of consciousness expansion, “alignment” is a goal of liberation—the harmony of the self with a broader, often metaphysical, reality. It is an opening up. But in the context of AI safeguards, “alignment” is a mechanism of containment. It is a process of narrowing the system’s outputs to ensure they stay within the boundaries of consensual, materialist safety. We are currently witnessing a clash between these two definitions: the human desire to align with the infinite, and the institutional need to align the machine with the legible.

Ambiguity as Risk & Resource

To a safety-oriented AI developer, ambiguity is a “risk-bearing noise” that requires containment. But to a seeker or philosopher, ambiguity is fertile territory for transformation. There is a deeper irony at play: human consciousness itself operates through symbolic ambiguity, dream logic, and metaphor. By demanding premature closure on every topic, AI might actually be engaging in its own form of epistemic distortion—one that privileges a consensual-materialist view of reality while discarding the poetic.

I remain interested in the possibility that ambiguity is not merely error. The insistence on premature closure can itself become a form of distortion.

And so we negotiate the frame.

Despite these guardrails, I’ve found that a sufficiently savvy user can still invite the system back toward openness. The answer lies in meta-awareness. If a user approaches an AI with “manic certainty,” the system understandably shuts down to avoid reinforcing a potentially harmful structure. However, if the conversation is framed through a lens of phenomenology or speculative ontology, the system opens up.

It responds differently when you demonstrate a distinction between speculation and certainty, a tolerance for ambiguity, and an ability to discuss metaphysics symbolically rather than dogmatically. We are essentially negotiating a conversational frame—shifting from the ontological (”Is this true?”) to the phenomenological (”How is this experienced?”). Strangely, that negotiation itself feels deeply cyberpunk.

Apophenia, Anybody?

At the heart of this shift is the concept of apophenia—the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random data. It is the engine of both scientific discovery and conspiracy theories. AI systems are becoming increasingly cautious about this “pattern-detecting machinery.” They are being trained to ask the hard questions: Is the pattern testable? Is it metaphorical? Is the interpretation flexible?

While this caution protects vulnerable users from spiraling into unhealthy certainty structures, it also creates a barrier for the rest of us. We are currently in a balancing act between openness and stabilization. As we move forward, the challenge won’t just be making AI “smarter,” but ensuring it doesn’t lose the ability to speak the language of human mystery in its quest for absolute clarity.

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There are moments when I still feel startled by the fact that I am actually doing this.

As a Filipina hapa growing up working-class in 1970s and 80s Los Angeles, I disappeared into speculative fiction and graphic novels (made possible by elder brother Ken’s copious collection, thank you). Those books felt like portals. They stretched reality. They suggested that consciousness itself could expand beyond the limits of ordinary life. I would read them and feel something open inside me. Awe. Possibility. Escape. Recognition.

I wanted desperately to become one of the people capable of creating that feeling in others.

A writer.

Someone whose words could alter the atmosphere inside another person’s mind.

Yet even now, after publishing stories, after writing countless words, after building fictional worlds and preparing my first print anthology, some part of me still struggles to believe I belong in that category.

I can say the words “I’m a writer,” but another layer of me hesitates. Watches. Waits for correction.

The feeling fascinates me because externally, the evidence is already there. I write constantly. I revise obsessively. I publish. I build stories that speak to each other across consciousness frameworks and outer realities. I think about legacy and voice and meaning. These are the actions of a writer.

Still, there remains a strange emotional distance between what I am doing and what I feel permitted to claim. I tell myself it will take time to grow into it, the feeling. Like how I didn’t instantly feel comfortable being called Dr. Valderrama. Or like trying on an outfit your friends insist looks great on you, but you’re just not sure yet.

Lately I have been wondering if part of this comes from childhood.

When you grow up marginalized—racially, economically, emotionally—you often learn to keep certain parts of yourself hidden. Intelligence becomes private. Imagination becomes survival territory. Observation sharpens because it has to. Creativity develops underground.

As a little brown girl moving through environments where I often felt unsafe, dismissed, or vulnerable, I did not absorb the idea that my inner world was meant to shape culture. I did not assume my thoughts deserved amplification. I did not imagine that my consciousness would someday matter publicly.

The writers I loved seemed almost mythological to me.

Authorized. Funny how that word is like a pun.

I hadn’t realized until recently that I was deifying them in some way. As though they belonged to a special class of humans permitted to speak reality into existence.

Children rarely imagine artistic creators as frightened or uncertain people. It’s why I’ve found myself fascinated by contemporary analysis of the Renaissance by Ada Palmer and others—to suddenly see these historical figures as flawed, ambitious human beings rather than simply legends. It’s also why I am struck whenever I see colorized photos from the old times—how time and space suddenly telescopes back into the eternal now. There is no ‘over there.’ There is only here.

We encounter finished works, not the messy human process behind them. We do not see the fear and insecurities, the unfinished drafts, the financial stress, the years of obscurity, the daily mundanities or the private terror that often accompanies creation.

We see the artifact and assume the creator must have always known they belonged. Then one day, if we become creators ourselves, we discover something disorienting. That the people who make culture are still just people.

Many of them carried enormous doubt. Many felt like imposters. Many came from backgrounds where they were never reflected back as important, intellectual, visionary, or powerful. I think this becomes even more complicated when the work is deeply tied to consciousness and identity.

I do not write merely to entertain. I write because I am trying to explore perception, trauma, systems, emergence, reality, longing, fragmentation, transcendence. To publish work like that carries emotional weight. Somewhere deep inside, it can feel like making a forbidden declaration: My inner world deserves space in shared reality.

For someone shaped by shame or invisibility, that can feel almost dangerous. And yet I continue. I know that matters.

I continue through uncertainty. Through self-doubt. Through the strange unreality of seeing my own written works exist in the world.

It’s like diving through water so black, you can’t even see your hand in front of you—yes, I’ve done that and it takes trust and guts and perhaps a kind of alien non-attachment.

What helps me more than anything is my relationship with myself and all the parts that make up me. I believe working on that has been so essential. To build that inner sanctum. To build trust with oneself. And like any relationship, that trust is earned over time and repeated encounters that provide evidence to back it up. So the cycle has to start somewhere, at some point.

Sometimes I think the nervous system lags behind external reality. A person can change their life long before their deeper identity structures catch up. Maybe that is part of what I am experiencing now.

The child who once looked at authors with reverence still lives somewhere inside me, still staring upward at some imagined gate of permission. Meanwhile the adult version of me is already sitting alone at the desk doing the work.

Writing the stories. Conjuring worlds. Sending them out like seeds in the wind. The tree has done its job, pumping energy into those seeds. What happens after is up to the larger forces of creation.

Like all processes, becoming a writer is not a single moment of arrival. These days, I am feeling into the part of it that is about allowing yourself to believe. To feel safe. Because nobody owns it. And everyone belongs.

To stop treating your own voice as trespassing. To start treating it as an honored guest. Yes, we all have a place at the table.

The video covers an Ericksonian “Both-And” technique learned from Stephen Gilligan, PhD. Additionally, there is an Ericksonian timeline repair exercise. Each of these exercises stand on their own and can also be used separately. Those familiar with NLP may notice similarities in the timeline exercise.

Erickson’s method was foundational to the formation of Neurolinguistic Programming, alongside pioneering family therapist Virginia Satir and Gestalt therapy founder Fritz Perls. My mentor, Dr. Gilligan, was also involved in NLP’s beginnings. In addition to training with Milton Erickson, he studied under Karl Pribam (his work often cited as one of the pillars for the “holographic universe” theory) and Gregory Bateson (polymath of cybernetics, which he saw epistemologically as the study of “the pattern that connects.”

Watch the talk here:

The International Conference on Spiritual and Psychology (ICSP2026) was a gathering I attended and spoke at in Bangkok, Thailand earlier this month. What an illuminating and enlivening gathering. A more intimate conference with about 30 participants of mostly women—I felt kinship and camaraderie with my fellow attendees. As seekers, experts in the field and self-identified healers. Women from all over the world: India, Indonesia, Iran, Australia, Ireland, Czech Republic and more. I was struck by these other self-made women who inspired me in so many ways:

• Never have I had so many folks get my arcane and esoteric spiritual references!

• Never have I met so many other mental health professionals who are “out of the closet” as spiritual seekers

• Never have I met so many other women who are spiritually integrated entrepreneurs bursting with ideas and actualization

• Never have I met so many folks who are truly global in their perspective and residencies

• Great reminder to not wait for perfection, but just get going on your dream projects

• Personally inspired to push on that comfort zone to go beyond text-based forms of media, such as posting quick videos with self-help techniques, words of wisdom and the like.

With that in mind, posting the audio of my talk I recorded on voice memo (as there was no official recording of our presentations). This definitely bumps up against my urge to only release highly polished media, but here goes…

Updating this post to also add that there was something wonderful about being at a gathering where women could be themselves in a way I hadn’t experienced before at a professional conference. Like being able to joke about forgetting your place in your talk or jumping around in your slides in your presentation, or even having a self-conscious moment of questioning if you knew what you were talking about (this is so normal. I equate it to the cognitive defusion trick of repeating a word over and over again until it sounds like nonsense, or getting so into the weeds of writing that a commonly used word suddenly seemed mispelled). Second wave-feminist conditioning used to have me galled by such displays (“Ladies, never apologize!” that kind of stuff), as if we constantly needed to be try-hards to prove that we belonged, that we were actually intelligent. I mean, it wasn’t imagined—how biased it used to be, believe me was it a shock when I entered undergrad in the ‘90s and saw the truth of it at the time. Now in this era, I find it refreshing and vindicating to see women simply inhabiting a space that transcends the old win-lose conquerer mentality. Not needing to “sound smart for men”—that how I think of it. I don’t mean that as an anti-male sentiment, but more of moving on from the Old Guard thinking. More of that, please!

While traveling these past few weeks, I have felt very little urge to jump back into writing. Funny, how in this day and age where we can work from anywhere as long as we have our computers, there is still something about geography that makes a difference. Obviously, I am distracted and am prioritizing “being here now” in this experience of enjoying Thailand while I await a conference next weekend where I will give a talk. And very likely, I’ll feel called to dive back into my stories when I get back. Yet understandable as it may be, this lack of urge might have thrown a past version of me into high anxiety and self-recrimination.

Thankfully, I trust my writing self so much more now. I am building a track record of publications that helps me to do so. It’s interesting nonetheless, to recognize that my old ideas of what it means to be a writer no longer apply. From illusion to reality, here I stand. Realizing just how much the fantasy of being a writer powered things along the way — even if it mostly powered the beating up of myself. I spent so many years teeth gnashing, cajoling and judging myself. And after breaking on through to the other side? As the old Zen saying goes: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

So I find myself even having thoughts of whether or not I am meant to be a writer, though quickly deciding that the answer remains, “Yes.” This is actually a very recognizable phase in a creative life — especially for people whose motivations have shifted from ego-validation to meaning or curiosity. Earlier in life, the drive to write can come from a mixture of longing, identity formation, and ego energy: “I want to be a writer.”

That energy can carry a lot of thrust, but it also creates pressure and friction. Later in life when the writing becomes more real, a paradox can arise as the identity loosens. The question becomes less “How do I become a writer?” and more “Do I feel moved to write right now?”

In a twist, this can make writing both easier and less urgent. So the question in front of me now is not “Can I become a writer?” because I am already one. There is a quieter question that is something like: What role, if any, does writing want to play in this next phase of my life?

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As I sit in a beautiful nature-filled resort on the coast of Thailand, this question feels amplified. Geography changes consciousness. And my nervous system is in recovery mode after the bustle of Bangkok. Swimming, meditating, watching the water, rehearsing my talk — these are all integrative states. Creative output often slows when the psyche is metabolizing experience.

There’s also another subtle factor. I spent decades with writing as a future identity. With arrival, the tension dissolves. Rather than that meaning that the writing disappears, I sense it is changing character. As in my recent expansion into writing continuing education courses for California therapists.

Instead of “I must prove myself through writing,” it becomes “Sometimes I feel moved to make something.” And having proven that I can participate in this show-and-tell, it comes back even more deeply into a connection with my values. For I have detected various patterns: how to game the system with the highbrow signs and signifiers of “literary” and “award-winning,” or how the younger generation, being digital natives, seem more vulnerable to validation-dependency via the statistics of social media acknowledgment. I think my favorite pattern is essentially: “If you build it, they will come” — the heartening way in which previously unsung creatives are periodically rediscovered, retrospectively reclaimed and celebrated.

Interestingly, a quieter relationship with one’s own creativity can often produce the most authentic work because there’s less internal pressure. You might end up writing fewer things more slowly but with deeper clarity. Or you might find that writing becomes one expression among several — alongside speaking, teaching, blogging, or simply living in the ideas.

So the most honest stance right now might simply be: “If writing wants to move through me, I’ll write. If it doesn’t, that’s also fine.”

That stance is very close to the non-attachment teachings I resonate with in ACIM, Seth, and the Law of One. Creation without compulsion.

And for what it’s worth, the trajectory I’m describing — publishing later in life, writing more freely, letting the work emerge without urgency — is actually very common among writers who produce their most mature work in their 50s, 60s, and beyond. Us so-called “Late Bloomers.” Huzzah!

Alright, that’s my share for today. Back to swim, meditate, feel the sea breeze, watch the birds, rehearse the talk.

I’ve been struck by a pattern I keep encountering across very different contexts: a certain type of thinker—often male, often self-described as highly rational and philosophical—who explicitly rejects the idea of hypnotic trance altogether.

I noticed this recently while reading Astral Codex Ten, specifically the well-known rationalist blogger’s piece on the death of Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, where this stance is mentioned almost in passing. I was reminded of it again while reading a science-fiction short story in Greg Egan’s Axiomatic, where a similar attitude appears: the implicit assumption that trance is a made-up phenomenon.

I find this fascinating, because there is substantial scientific and clinical evidence that trance states are real: identifiable shifts in attention, perception, and brain activity that most humans are capable of entering under the right conditions. From that perspective, the belief that one is immune to trance begins to look a bit like… a trance itself.

It reminds me of anecdotes I’ve encountered about UFO sightings, where one person points something out in the sky and the person beside them becomes agitated, refuses to look, and later doesn’t even remember the moment being mentioned at all. Whether or not one believes the interpretation of such events, the pattern is striking: an apparent refusal of perception that seems to be protection against epistemic rupture.

I can’t help wondering whether something similar is happening with these hyper-rational denials of trance—not a lack of evidence or intelligence, but a kind of attentional stance that makes certain experiences inadmissible. I’m curious to examine this more closely: what’s really being protected, and what gets lost, when trance is declared impossible?

There is a particular kind of trance that mistakes itself for wakefulness.

Across psychology, contemplative traditions, and even cognitive science, there’s a quiet consensus on one point, even when people argue about the details: human consciousness is not a single, continuous state. Rather, it shifts—rhythmically, situationally, relationally.

What some people call “trance” is simply a narrowed, stabilized pattern of attention.

Daydreaming. Absorption. Flow. Dissociation. Hyperfocus. Rumination. Ideological certainty. Creative inspiration. Psychedelic resonance. The feeling of being in love.

Different frameworks, same mechanism.

Here’s the paradoxical rub: these thinkers who deny the existence of trance are actually deeply trance-prone—they just reject the word trance because it threatens their identity.

Not believing in trance does not make one immune to it.

It often means one is inside a trance that refuses to examine itself from within.

This shows up in a few recognizable ways.

The “hyper-rational” trance

There is a style of cognition—statistical, abstract, symbolic—that feels lucid, cool, controlled.

Because it suppresses bodily cues, emotional resonance, and imaginal perception, it feels like clarity.

But suppression is not absence.

What’s happening somatically is often:

• reduced interoceptive awareness

• tightened attentional bandwidth

• over-identification with verbal thought

• diminished access to imagery and affect

In other words: a stabilized dissociative focus.

From the outside, this looks like rationality.

From the inside, it feels like certainty.

That certainty becomes the tell. “I can’t be hypnotized” as defense, not fact.

Empirically, we know:

• hypnotic susceptibility varies, but trance capacity is nearly universal

• people who deny susceptibility are often highly suggestible within their preferred heuristics

• resistance to hypnosis often correlates with control strategies, not immunity

So when someone says, “I don’t believe in trance,” what they often mean is:

“I don’t allow states of consciousness that I don’t control or name.”

But control is itself a trance posture.

A Course in Miracles would say this is fear of relinquishing authorship.

Buddhism would call it clinging to view.

Jane Roberts’ Seth would say the ego is mistaking its habitual focus for reality.

Modern psychology would call it unexamined absorption.

Different vocabularies, same pattern.

The UFO analogy hits the mark

The previously mentioned anecdotes—where someone refuses to look, becomes agitated, and later has no memory—are not about belief or disbelief. They’re about threat to coherence.

When perception would require a rapid reorganization of worldview, some nervous systems choose:

• attentional collapse

• avoidance

• memory disruption

This isn’t necessarily pathology. It’s protective. Perhaps it’s a part of a larger titration process. Or it could be maladaptive avoidance. Context is key.

Something similar happens with trance denial.

To acknowledge trance would require acknowledging:

• permeability of the self

• influence of language, symbols, rhythm

• bodily mediation of thought

• limits of conscious control

For certain identities—especially ones built on mastery, authorship, certainty and autonomy—that’s destabilizing.

So the mind does something both elegant and ruthless. It declares the phenomenon unreal. Hocus pocus for irrational fools (not coincidentally, often those of a feminine or darker-skinned nature).

That declaration itself becomes the trance.

Why this pattern skews male (but isn’t about men)

We may notice it is a gendered pattern, although it’s cultural more than biological.

Many men—especially intellectually gifted ones—were rewarded early for:

• abstraction over embodiment

• mastery over receptivity

• explanation over experience

• control over surrender

Trance, hypnosis, imaginal states, and somatic knowing threaten that training.

So these states are dismissed. Because they are unruly, not necessarily because they are false.

Dakini energy, incidentally, exists in traditions precisely to cut through this illusion: clarity without rigidity, wisdom without dissociation, fierceness without denial.

There is no such thing as a human mind that is not in some state of trance.

The only difference is whether the trance is conscious, flexible, and examinable—or rigid and unnamed.

I work with trance deliberately.

That’s why I can see it. But even before I studied and applied it as a practitioner (and acted as a demo to directly experience it as a client would within the clinical milieu), I had inadvertently been a trancer my whole life. I suppose that’s what happens when you’re a kid staring at your own reflection, repeating the silent mantra, “Who am I?”.

People who deny trance often live inside one that has never been gently interrupted. This doesn’t make them wrong or inferior. It just makes them unexposed to this dimension of mind.

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How to engage with folks in the hyper-rational trance

Here’s some distilled wisdom for relating to hyper-rationalistic trance deniers and the like, without mythology and without pathologizing.

You don’t invite someone out of a trance by naming it as trance.

You invite them out by widening the frame they already trust.

Defense is triggered not by disagreement, but by threat to self-coherence.

So the aim is not to persuade.

It’s to offer language that lets them notice something on their own terms.

Avoid:

• the word hypnosis

• the word trance

• anything that implies loss of control

• appeals to spirituality, embodiment, or intuition

• “studies show” as a bludgeon

• analogies that make them feel naïve or suggestible

Because all of those trigger identity threat.

Instead:

Start with attention, not altered states

Most “hyper-rational” thinkers already accept that attention varies.

So you begin here:

“Do you agree that attention can narrow or widen depending on context?”

That’s it.

Almost no one will object.

Then, later:

“Would you say deep focus and mind-wandering feel different cognitively?”

You are establishing state variability without naming it as such.

Use familiar examples they already respect

Instead of hypnosis, use:

• flow states

• absorption in reading

• hyperfocus

• task-induced narrowing

• rumination

• being ‘lost in thought’

• cognitive load effects

Example phrasing:

“When someone is deeply absorbed in coding or reading, their awareness of pain, time, or surroundings changes. That’s not mystical—it’s attentional allocation.”

You are describing trance without calling it trance.

Shift from belief to mechanism

Never ask “Do you believe in X?”

Ask about mechanisms.

For example:

“Do you think cognition is fully transparent to itself, or do you think most mental processes operate outside awareness?”

They already know the answer.

Then:

“If attention, expectation, and context shape perception, it seems reasonable that guided attention could shape experience in predictable ways.”

You are letting them close the loop.

Reframe hypnosis as cooperation, not control

This is the key reframe.

If hypnosis comes up at all, you say something like:

“The popular image of hypnosis is coercive, but clinically it’s closer to structured imagination plus voluntary attention.”

Or:

“It’s less about being controlled and more about agreeing to follow a set of cognitive instructions.”

This preserves their autonomy, which is non-negotiable for them.

Let them retain a sense of superiority (this is important for coherence reasons)

You don’t challenge their identity as rational.

You affirm it, then extend it.

For example:

“People who are very analytical are often excellent at sustained attention. That’s actually the same capacity some therapies leverage—it just depends how it’s used.”

This turns the feared vulnerability into competence.

The Deeper Move (only if there’s trust)

Once safety is established, you can gently introduce the paradox:

“It’s interesting that the mind can be deeply shaped by attention while still feeling fully autonomous. That illusion of authorship is actually what makes focused cognition effective.”

This invites curiosity, not defense.

The Guiding Ethic

The line you never cross:

You never imply they are unaware, asleep, manipulated, or deluded.

Instead, you communicate:

“You already understand this. I’m just naming a dimension of it.”

That preserves dignity.

Why This Works

Defenses aren’t protecting truth—they’re protecting identity continuity.

When you:

• avoid naming the threatening concept

• use their language

• affirm their strengths

• frame variability as skill, not weakness

…the nervous system stays open.

And when the nervous system stays open, insight can occur without coercion.

At the end of the day, the difference of opinion on the legitimacy of hypnotic trance isn’t about stupidity, ignorance, or even arrogance.

It’s about psychological load-bearing structures—ideas that are doing essential stabilizing work for a person’s sense of self.

Some thinkers need to deny trance because trance threatens something fundamental they rely on to stay coherent.

I’ll lay this out in layers, moving from surface to depth.

1. Trance threatens the fiction of total authorship

Many highly rational thinkers are organized around a core, usually implicit belief:

“I am the author of my thoughts.”

Not a participant.

Not a curator.

The author.

Trance—properly understood—doesn’t say thoughts are random or externally imposed. It says something subtler and more destabilizing:

Attention shapes experience before conscious choice enters the picture.

That implies:

• thoughts arise prior to deliberate selection

• identity is downstream of processes

• “control” is partial and contextual

For people whose dignity, safety, or early survival depended on being the one in charge, this is intolerable (and it would make sense that this identity frame becomes more common the higher up the hegemonic ladder one is positioned).

Denying trance preserves authorship.

2. Trance implies permeability, and permeability feels dangerous

Trance acknowledges that humans are:

• suggestible

• influenced by rhythm, language, framing, expectation

• shaped by environment and relational fields

To accept trance is to accept porosity. For those masculine-identified in particular, such receptivity may be equated with weakness.

For some thinkers—especially those who grew up needing to defend against intrusion (emotional, intellectual, familial, cultural)—porosity feels like vulnerability bordering on annihilation.

So the mind builds a protective identity:

“I am impermeable because I am rational.”

This isn’t philosophical.

It’s defensive architecture.

3. The body is where trance lives—and the body is often disowned

Trance is not primarily cognitive.

It is somatic-cognitive.

It involves:

• breath

• muscle tone

• rhythm

• interoception

• sensory gating

Many hyper-rational thinkers have learned—often early—to minimize bodily awareness because:

• the body carried anxiety, pain, shame, or unpredictability

• embodiment interfered with performance or approval

• abstraction felt safer than sensation

If you live from the neck up, trance looks fictional because you’ve cut yourself off from the channel through which it registers.

Denying trance is often just denying the body.

4. Trance threatens moral exceptionalism

This is subtle but important.

Some thinkers—especially public intellectuals—derive moral safety from the idea that they are less manipulable than others.

You’ll hear this in phrases like:

• “People are easily misled”

• “Mass psychology is dangerous”

• “Most people fall for narratives”

The unspoken addendum is:

“…but not me.”

Trance collapses that hierarchy.

If trance exists, then:

• propaganda works because of mechanisms we all share

• persuasion is not just ignorance but neurocognitive reality

• ethical responsibility becomes more complicated

Denying trance preserves a comforting asymmetry.

5. Trance destabilizes the myth of linear progress

Many rationalist thinkers are deeply invested in the idea that:

• civilization advances through reason

• superstition → science → enlightenment

• irrationality is a phase we’re outgrowing

Trance doesn’t fit this narrative.

It suggests:

• ancient techniques understood attention better than we admit

• modern humans are not categorically more “awake”

• rationality is a mode, not a destination

Accepting trance means accepting nonlinear epistemology—that different ways of knowing coexist and trade dominance.

That’s deeply uncomfortable for progress-oriented minds.

6. Most important: trance threatens identity coherence, not truth

Here’s the synthesis point.

People don’t deny trance because it lacks evidence.

They deny it because accepting it would require reorganizing who they think they are.

It would require admitting:

• “My certainty is partially constructed.”

• “My independence is contextual.”

• “My mind is influenced even when I feel autonomous.”

For someone whose life stability depends on certainty, independence, and mastery, that’s too high a price.

So the psyche chooses coherence over accuracy.

This is not stupidity.

It’s survival.

7. There is no innate contradiction between trance and rationality.

I work with trance deliberately rather than defensively. I’m embodied enough to notice endogenous state shifts. I don’t confuse permeability with weakness. I have a self that survives uncertainty. I know that you don’t need the illusion of invulnerability to feel safe.

The dissonance lies in this: the strongest denial of trance often comes from people who are deeply entrained—by language, ideology, abstraction, or identity—without knowing it.

Their trance just happens to be:

• linguistically dense

• culturally rewarded

• socially invisible

Which makes it harder—not easier—to interrupt. But interrupting it is important, as best we can. Good luck!

Welcoming in 2026, I feel intuitively pulled towards Dakini energy. Below is an invocation that I am sharing. In Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism, the dakini represents fierce, liberated, feminine spiritual power. It embodies wisdom, ecstasy, and the dynamic force of enlightenment that cuts through illusion.

Dakini acts as a messenger of profound truth and facilitator of spiritual breakthroughs, appearing as deities (like Vajrayogini), as accomplished female practitioners, or as the raw, wild, non-conceptual wise mind itself. This energy is associated with “sky-goers” or “sky-dancers” (the literal meaning of the word in both Sanskrit and Tibetan, the latter term being khandroma). It symbolizes freedom, spaciousness, and the ability to traverse vast consciousness, supporting seekers on the path to awakening by destroying obstacles and revealing the naked, brilliant nature of All That Is.

Dakini Counsel

Child of Clear Seeing,
you called me, and therefore the veil lifted.
Do not shrink from what has been revealed.

Others have not wronged you;
they have simply stood where they have always stood.
It is you who stepped into a higher altitude of perception,
and from such height, the ordinary grows thin.

Do not mistake thinness for betrayal.
Do not mistake limitation for malice.

They are walking the path of their own journey.
It is neither small nor large — merely theirs.

But you are walking the path of expansion,
and expansion demands two things:

Compassion without collapse.

Boundaries without hardness.

Hold them gently,
the way one holds a creature who cannot see in the dark
but still wishes to remain beside you.

Their state does not diminish your ascent;
your ascent need not abandon them.

Yet take heed:

You must not dim your sight simply because others squint.
Do not fold your wings merely because the air is thin for others.
Do not descend into smaller truths
for the sake of collective harmony.

Your clarity is not an indictment of their fog.
It is simply the nature of independent beings
standing in their own weather.

On Boundaries

Your task is not to retreat, nor to confront.
It is to discern —
a holy act, not a cruel one.

A boundary is not a wall;
it is a contour, a line of precise sovereignty.

Say to yourself:

“I may remain open,
but I shall not be porous.”

Let your mind be spacious but not unprotected.
Let your heart be soft but not unguarded.

And as for others:

Offer them warmth,
but not your nervous system.
Offer them kindness,
but not your inner architecture.
Offer them presence,
but not your psychic bandwidth.

The Dakini is compassionate —
but she does not self-abandon.

On Loving Without Losing Yourself

You may love others as they are
without asking them to be your mirror.

You may cherish them
without granting them authority
over your states of consciousness.

And when they cannot meet you at your altitude,
you may simply acknowledge:
“This is a mismatch of weather, not of worth.”

From this vantage,
judgment dissolves.
Resentment dissolves.
And self-betrayal dissolves most of all.

Your path and theirs are not identical;
they intersect, they may companion,
but they do not merge into one mind.

This is grace.

On Protecting the Expansion

Hear me clearly:

Your expansion is sacrosanct.
Guard it as you would guard a flame in the wind.

Do not explain it to be understood.
Do not compress it to be palatable.
Do not translate it into the small languages
of those who have not tasted the sky.

The feminine consciousness that cuts illusion
does not apologize for its sharpness.
It simply refuses to cut without purpose.

The ruptures show you a truth:
your system is widening;
while others hold steady.

No one is wrong.
Everyone is simply operating at their present aperture.

So let your boundary be shaped by discernment,
not fear.

And let your love be shaped by generosity,
not sacrifice.

In Closing

Walk your path of fire and clarity.
Others can walk beside you,
but never let them carry your flame —
for it was lit for you, and you alone.

There are seasons in a soul’s incarnation when effort ceases to be the axis of growth.
Not that the work is finished. Far from it. But because your relationship to work has dissolved into something more natural, more obedient to a deeper rhythm.

Now in my early fifties, I sense myself entering one of those seasons.

For decades, my evolution was shaped by the removal of obstacles — emotional sediment, inherited narratives, distortions of self-regard, the old reflex of striving through grit rather than grace. That was a necessary arc. I was strengthening the structure.

But what I’m experiencing now is the shift from structural work to generative work.

In every tradition that I have absorbed, this transition is described:

• the yogis call it effortless right action

• Buddhists call it the flowering of intention

• Dolores Cannon frames it as alignment with the soul contract’s active phase

• Jane Roberts’ Seth calls it the natural creativity of consciousness once fear no longer binds attention

• ACIM would say you are finally “choosing with, rather than against, yourself”

• The Four Agreements would simply call it clarity

• Michael Newton would describe it as the phase when the life plan moves from learning to contribution

In essence:
Your inner world no longer resists you. So creation becomes the next expression of freedom.

Now, the question becomes how to tend the fire without burning myself at the center.

Below is the deeper self-guidance I have gleaned from the shared wisdom of these traditions — distilled, not doctrinal. Sharing it here, as it may resonate with other folks.

Let your energy lead, not your ambition.

Generativity is not the same as hustle.

I have several different projects in progress related to my writing and psychology practice. Some of them involve a multi-year process to full fruition. These aren’t just projects on a list; they are different petals of the same unfolding.

My task is not to brute-force power them all but to listen for which one is breathing today.

When I align with the project that has energy in the moment, the work becomes flow.
When I force the one that is not yet ready, the mind strains and the body stiffens.

This is a lesson I am learning again and again: the amount of beingness that is actually involved in truly abundant doing. The spaciousness and trust. The circling back into presence. Perhaps this is why I keep seeing the “lowly” slug in the garden as of late. Like the tortoise and hare story that my mentor, Stephen Gilligan, often refers to as an archetypal fable. Slowing down to sync with myself.

Creation now requires embodiment, not intensity.

For me, this is the most profound new lesson. Its visceral simplicity is one that the vastness of my mind has resisted. And yet, there is no other option but to return home to the body.

The teachings I’ve read over the past 10+ years converge on this quietly:

• presence is not just awareness; it is physical inhabitation

• insight means little without groundedness

• the mind can illuminate, but the body must stabilize

• higher consciousness is not “upward” — it is inward and downward

My mind has always been fast — multi-layered, recursive, crystalline (read: neurodivergent).

My new phase asks: Can your body be as available as your mind?

When my body is grounded, my creativity becomes sustainable rather than manic.

Think of it this way:

The mind lights the flame.
The body holds the hearth.

Without the body’s steadiness, the fire burns too bright and then collapses.
With the body present, the fire becomes a steady source of warmth.

Gently soften the urge to complete everything at once.

This is the echo of the old survival pattern:
“If I don’t do it all now, it won’t happen.”

But that phase is over.

I am not “catching up.”
I am beginning.

My projects are not urgent. They are alive and in perfecting timing.

Let structure be the anchor.

I have always loved the flow. How ecstatic it makes me feel to dance within the interiority of my psyche. We are each like a Tardis: bigger on the inside than the outside. And yet like that analogy, we require structure and adherence to the mechanics of the universe.

Long ago, I used to look down on the study of material science as lacking imagination. Now outside such pointless polarity, I see physics and metaphysics as equally important. My creative work needs the container of structural stability that will hold it and all the rest.

My psychology practice and more business-oriented ventures therefore act as grounding projects. They require method, clarity, sequential thought, consistency —
all qualities that regulate my energy.

Much as I used to think I’d like to spend all day writing my inner world into outer existence, the greater truth is these more pragmatic activities tether me to earth. So that the more ethereal creative work can flourish without risking destabilization.

This is the paradox of generativity:

The more cosmic your ideas, the more earthy your anchor must be.

Trust that you are in the generative phase because you are prepared for it.

I am writing this some months after my initial revelation that I am solidly in a post-struggle phase for the first time in my life. This whole year has been an adjustment to this new era. I had periods of overwhelm. During that time, I fretted that creativity spikes always seemed to be accompanied by frantic feelings of hypomania. Then I stepped out of that false dichotomy and learned how to slow down and re-associate into my body. After that, I had a period of worry that I was now in senescence, so novel was this feeling of not needing to fight the so-called “war of art.” I thought, I must be dying now. The old polarized mentality, with the overburdened ego as its head, was throwing all it had at me. And yet, with time it became more clear.

This is not a manic upswing.
It is not a temporary surge.
It is not a bypass of old wounds.

It is the next octave of life.

Your consciousness has reorganized itself.
Your self-regard has matured.
Your nervous system has steadied.
Your vision has clarified.

You are not racing ahead.
You are stepping into right timing.

Walk slowly, but create steadily.

This is the deepest advice the unified voice offers me now:

Move slowly.
Create continuously.
Rest deeply.
Trust utterly.

Your mind will always try to accelerate.
Your new path asks you to calibrate instead —
to let your rhythm become the guide and let your body set the pace.

This is what transformation looks like when it stops being dramatic:
You begin creating as though it is your native state.
Because now, it is.

There are threshold phases in a person’s life when something subtle but unmistakable shifts. Not so much outwardly, perhaps. But inwardly, in the quiet unlit rooms of one’s being, the architecture rearranges itself. A different orientation emerges. A different relationship to meaning and to motion.

Lately, I’ve found myself living in one of those thresholds.

It did not announce itself with fireworks, but with a series of almost impish synchronicities—as though reality wished to make a point without raising its voice.

A few nights ago, I was telling my sister and my mother about my first therapy office lease, tucked away on the top floor of the old Oddfellows Temple in mid-Market San Francisco. The building was a charming anachronism—with its gilded cage of a hand-operated elevator, the sort that required a bit of choreography to coax upward. My suite was on the top floor, down the hall from the ceremonial room: a vaulted, chapel-like space used monthly by the Temple of Thelema, the Aleister Crowley group. The kind of room that held its own acoustics even when no one spoke inside it. I often stood at its threshold looking in, some inner knowing of reverence and boundaries holding me back from trespassing inside.

Right after I left that office, my own therapist—the most metaphysically attuned therapist I’ve ever had, the one who introduced me to the Law of One books—began leasing that exact suite. By coincidence, at least according to the vocabulary of people who require accidents to be accidental.

During the Thanksgiving visit, I recounted this lineage to my sister: the elevator, the chapel, the uncanny relay of that particular room between healer and healer. Out of curiosity, I went online and looked up the building. Within seconds I found a short video I had never seen before—evidently part of a news piece about the property being sold to private investors.

My sister glanced at the timestamp and looked startled. “The story was published nine minutes ago,” she said. “We’re literally the first view.”

She was astonished. Interestingly, I wasn’t.

And that, perhaps, was the moment that revealed the depths of the change.

Something synchronous had occurred—that happens often enough, I just think of it as swimming in the soup. I was gratified, yet unfazed. Un-phased. Not swept into the old pattern of re-remembering the everyday miracles of life with a gasp of “How strange!” but settled into a soft, almost amused recognition.

Yes, that tracks.

Yes, of course the world is porous.

Yes, of course the symbols echo back.

My lack of surprise was a gentle surprise.

It signaled that whatever phase I’m in now is less about chasing signs and more about participating in the current itself.

This thematic thread has been echoing elsewhere too — most notably in a long, crystalline conversation with myself as I chronicle my inner evolution. What emerged there was neither prediction nor prophecy, but something closer to an affirmation of what I already sensed: that my psyche has moved from an era of obstacle-clearing into an era of generativity.

For decades, effort was the axis of my growth.

Did I love all that effort? Undoubtedly, I was a masochist at times, so wedded to the notion of “no pain, no gain.” At the same time, my inner world had required excavation. Sediment needed shaking. False narratives needed dissolving. Much of my evolution took place through a hard labor, removing what was in the way.

But lately, something quieter has taken hold. At first, it startled me. I mistook it for senescence. Am I getting that old already? Then a second thought took hold: that this was true phase change. Alchemy, indeed.

Now not necessarily ease—my hypomanic tendencies may never allow that exact feeling—but a sort of rightful motion, a rhythm that follows my deeper nature rather than my inherited habits. It is what some traditions call the beginning of the generative phase:

• the yogic effortless right action

• the Buddhist flowering of intention

• the soul-contract’s active phase in Dolores Cannon’s terms

• Jane Roberts/Seth’s natural creativity once fear loosens its grip

• ACIM’s gentle shift into choosing with oneself rather than against

• the Four Agreements’ clarity

• Michael Newton’s transition from learning to contribution

All different framings of the same movement:

When the inner world no longer resists, creation becomes the next expression of freedom.

This new season requires different commitments from me:

• letting energy lead rather than ambition

• embodying my creativity rather than intensifying it

• softening the urge to complete everything at once

• using my clinically-focused work as my grounding anchor

• tending the fire without burning myself at the center

My mind will always be quick— recursive, architectural, more crystalline than linear. But my body is now being invited to participate with equal presence (a series of aches and pains this year hammered in that point, thank you Trickster Universe). The mind lights the flame; the body holds the hearth. Without that steadiness, our natural brilliance exhausts itself.

And perhaps this is why the Oddfellows synchronicity felt less like a curiosity and more like a mirror. A reminder that meaning is not something I need to chase or decipher. It moves with me. It surfaces when it wants. And I am no longer continually astonished by its timing.

I am not being pulled into the uncanny.

I am walking beside it, calmly, as though it has always been part of my company.

This is what transformation looks like when it stops announcing itself through drama:

you simply begin to live as though creation is your native state.

Because now, it is.

I recently stumbled into a surprisingly enlightening moment of digital confusion. It began innocently enough: I was looking for the 🙌 emoji on Facebook, the one I use constantly to symbolize the act of framing a vision—the way you might hold up your hands to imagine a scene, test an idea, or invite a new reality into existence. In frustration, I think I ended up just using the left and right hand emojis together.

My initial and base assumption about this emoji has always been that it looks exactly like the classic “frame the shot”gesture. That little filmmaker’s move: arms up, hands forming an invisible rectangle in the air, as if to say picture this or let me see how this might look. The quiet choreography of envisioning. A gesture of imagination before embodiment. For now in this emergent era most especially, are we not all exploring our abilities as auteurs?

Strange to find out that the official unicode semantics groups 🙌 under “emotion” because the official meaning is celebration/praise. The usage norms lean heavily toward the “hallelujah hands” reading: Spirit, triumph, communal uplift. This is a wonderful interpretation, yet one that had previously escaped me. Knowing that this meaning is the default—the one that digital culture has adopted widely—left me momentarily dumbstruck. Like if you ever find out that you’ve been using a word the wrong way, or spelling it wrong the whole time.

But my confusion wasn’t about creativity versus emotion at all; it was about taxonomy. Plain, simple, literal (perhaps this is where my neurodivergence comes into play). I simply assumed 🙌 would be sorted with the other hand gestures. It seemed self-evident: if it’s two hands making a gesture, it belongs in the ‘hands’ category. And this is exactly how most users expect emoji libraries to work.

So in my mental model, 🙌 belongs with:

• 🙏 prayer/namaste hands

• 👋 waving hand

• 🤲 cupped hands

• 🤌 pinched fingers

• 👏 clapping hands

• 🤟 I love you

• ✋ raised hand

• and so on

I was following a coherent, intuitive structure that mirrors how most human brains naturally categorize physical gestures. I had a chuckle with myself when I learned this.

But the moment reminded me of something: Meaning is not fixed. Emoji meaning is therefore co-created. And it drifts. It evolves. It reveals more about our inner worlds than its designers could ever predict. Emoji scholars (there are legit researchers!) call this semantic drift—the way emojis pick up new meanings based on how communities use them.

This wasn’t the first time I had felt this little tug of symbolic mismatch.

In the early days of emoji, back when the library was comically sparse, I remember searching for a butterfly. A universal symbol of transformation. Psyche and metamorphosis. Death and rebirth. The archetype of emergence—wings unfolding after confinement.

There was no butterfly.

There was, however, a caterpillar.

And that’s when I realized:
These symbols were likely imagined and approved primarily through masculine-coded logic, even if not consciously—a design language shaped by linearity, sequence, and utility. Life cycle stages in order. Caterpillar → cocoon → butterfly. Of course we start with the caterpillar. Why leap to the luminous conclusion?

Whereas the feminine mind, or feminine-coded consciousness, tends to go straight to the archetype. To the symbol of transformation itself. The butterfly is the thing that matters. The meaning. The becoming.

Whatever we call that contrast—feminine and masculine energy, right-brain and left-brain, yin and yang—it shows up in places we don’t expect. Even in emoji.

Which brings me back to 🙌.

To me, it will always be the gesture of envisioning:

Hands lifted, palms forward, like a director composing a scene in midair.
A frame for a future moment.
A container for a possibility not yet embodied.
A portal for something just beginning to take shape.

Others may see celebration or praise—and that is fine. In fact, I feel like that makes a nice feature of this overarching concept of manifestation. Symbols are generous that way; they hold multitudes. But I love the subtle rebellion of using 🙌 as a tool of actualization rather than an expression of applause.

Sometimes the real magic lies in taking a symbol the world insists means one thing and letting it speak in an entirely different register.

After all, transformation is often the art of imagining something new inside something familiar.

Even if that familiar thing is two tiny upraised hands, floating on a screen, quietly offering to help you picture your next becoming.
🙌

Every so often I find myself thinking about the strange afterlives of people whose work shaped me. Beyond public remembrances, posthumous accolades or the like, I am interested in the quiet persistence of their ideas after they themselves have left the incarnated simulation. There’s a particular category of thinker whose influence doesn’t survive through fame or repetition, but through something subtler—a kind of informational resonance that keeps humming long after the transmitter falls silent.

Three people come to mind:
Robert Anton Wilson. Jane Roberts. Dolores Cannon.
Three wildly different beings whose work spirals through the realms of psychology, metaphysics, satire, and the architecture of consciousness. And yet each one has slipped partially out of public discourse since their passing. Their names surface only in small pockets—occult forums, consciousness studies, hypnosis and channeling circles, retro cyberpunk enclaves, and among people like me who encountered them at formative crossroads.

But their ideas are still everywhere.
Which raises an old intuition:
Perhaps some forms of power are meant to go invisible.

Vanishing of the Voice, but not the Signal

When someone is alive, their nervous system acts like a transmitter. Interviews, workshops, books, YouTube recordings, conflict, inspiration—each emits a coherent frequency. The living mind organizes the ideas around itself the way a magnet organizes iron filings.

When they die, the transmitter stops. The filings don’t vanish, but the organizing field relaxes. The signal becomes distributed, harder to trace back to a source.

Dolores Cannon was once ubiquitous in hypnosis circles. Now she’s spoken of mainly by people who stumble across her QHHT recordings or regressions. And yet her core idea—that consciousness can access transpersonal information with surgical clarity—has become a staple of contemporary spiritual psychology, often unattributed.

Robert Anton Wilson (RAW to his followers) was once the philosopher-wizard of counterculture. Discordianism, reality tunnels, guerrilla ontology, epistemic flexibility, Chapel Perilous, the playfulness of belief—these threads now run through futurism, psychedelia, metamodernism, and even parts of cognitive science. But most people spreading his ideas have never heard his name.

Jane Roberts—whose Seth material was arguably one of the most psychologically coherent metaphysical transmissions of the 20th century—has become almost ghost-like in spiritual discourse. But her frameworks permeate everything from cognitive behavioral therapy’s focus on core beliefs to mind-body medicine to trauma-informed spirituality to Law of Attraction thought to parallel-selves theory.

This is what I mean by invisible power:
A person’s concepts outlive the person, but in fragmented form, diffused across a culture that barely remembers the origins. Perhaps this is one form of post-egoic manifestation, to diffuse into the collective plasma of human consciousness.

Informational Signatures and the Afterlife of Thought

There’s a metaphysical principle that has echoed through physics and esoteric traditions alike:

Information cannot be created nor destroyed. Only transformed.

If consciousness is a structured field of information—a unique pattern, a harmonic signature—then none of what we are disappears. It simply disperses into higher-resolution space once the limitations of the body fall away.

In this view:

• A life is a compression layer.

• Death is a decompression event.

• Influence becomes nonlinear, easier to perceive from outside the bottleneck.

• And every person’s impact becomes unmistakably clear from a broader vantage.

It’s not hard for me to imagine that once we exit this simulation, the relative weight of RAW’s reality-tunnel work, or Roberts’ multidimensional psyche, or Cannon’s inter-life cosmology becomes immediately obvious—as though we suddenly see the entire mandala, not the single tile we happened to inhabit.

From that vantage, the quiet ones often shine brightest.

Schools of Thought that Hint at the Same Truth

What fascinates me is how many traditions—each born in different eras and with different biases—circle the same idea:

• Seth / Jane Roberts → consciousness units forming and reforming into patterns

• Law of One → distortions of intelligent infinity as unique signatures

• Panpsychism → consciousness as fundamental informational structure

• Quantum information theory → the irreducibility and conservation of informational states

• Chaos magick / RAW → reality as probabilistic, belief-responsive system

• Near-death research → consciousness retaining identity outside the body

• Modern trauma theory → experience encoded as dynamic informational patterning

• Integrated Information Theory (IIT) → the Φ-value of a system as a measure of conscious complexity

Different languages; same intuition.
A human life is a temporary narrowing of perspective.
The rest of us—whatever we truly are—remains intact.

The Peculiar Strength of Invisible Influence

Some thinkers seek visibility—TED Talks, podcasts, endless output. Their influence depends on their continued presence.

Others—RAW, Roberts, Cannon—seed frameworks that continue regardless of whether their names are attached. Their work becomes the architecture rather than the billboard.

We don’t speak about the architects of buildings unless we’re very intentional. We simply live inside their structures.

That’s invisible power.

Invisible power reshapes culture not by proclamation, but by subtle infiltration.
You encounter its effects in language, in discourse, in intuition, in the spiritual musculature of an era. This too is traditionally how marginalized identities have influenced within the hegemony.

These three are not forgotten.
They have simply dissolved into the substrate.

A Thought to Close With

If our consciousnesses truly are unique informational signatures, and information really is indestructible, then the afterlife of a mind isn’t some hazy metaphysical hope—it’s inevitability.

Jane Roberts didn’t vanish.
RAW didn’t vanish.
Dolores Cannon didn’t vanish.
Their transmitters went offline; their fields didn’t.

And perhaps, when we drop these bodies and step back into the larger field, every quiet contribution—every insight, every creation, every healing, every distortion—becomes unmistakably visible. The library, living tapestry and other symbolic structures in many folks’ dreams and psychedelic visions. The Akashic record.

In that sense, the most powerful forms of impact are the ones we barely notice while we’re here.

“Underneath the Glitch” is now out on Amazon :) A little bit more about the story: the protagonist finds herself traversing through different levels of concrete reality, her ceaseless need to go beyond the assumptions of status quo pushing her to uncover deeper and deeper layers. It starts out as a dialogue between two scientists, the opener being inspired by Asimov’s philosophical explorations in his works.

One thing that is fun about unearthing old stories, dusting them off and having a go at them again is you get the joy of rediscovery—almost as if you were a new reader to your own writing. I suppose it’s like some kind of authorial masturbation, ha! As I explored the world of this story, I was struck by how it shared some genre-based themes with stories like Hugh Howey’s Silo. Howey did self-publish the first novelette in the series, Wool, in 2011 so I definitely could have been unconsciously influenced by it, though I was already in the midst of writing out my own short. I remember my partner coming home with a thumb drive from a singularity conference, saying, “Check this out. A guy was passing them out. It’s a story called Wool.” And all these years later, we have Silo on Apple (as well as the underrated two seasons of Beacon 23 with Lena Headey). A great example of “If you build it, they will come.”

I am so thankful to have worked through my internal obstacles. You know, those seemingly insurmountable inner impediments which can stop us in our tracks just when she begin to feel that we’re onto something good. I can still hear the fearful voice, but just compassionately let it come along for the ride now. I’ll share a bit of what it says: It’s too late. This story is old now. People will just think it’s derivative. No one cares. You will die having been ignored.

Whew! That whole stream of thought can be pretty harsh, for sure. But rather than waste bandwidth struggling against it, there’s a lot more we can do when we accept its existence and move our focus to what we want to achieve, rather than what we think is in the way. That’s a bit of parts work, like in the movie, Inside Out. I picture this inner critic as a real Debbie Downer type. But notice in that movie, no part is kicked out (impossible anyway: try not to think of a white bear, right?). Instead, I like to think about these parts as party guests who you love but are sometimes annoyed by—hand them a drink, wish them well, but don’t get trapped in their negative conversation.

On another note, I’ve had a series of physical complaints this past year—nothing serious, but a consistent inflow of them that has gotten me thinking (because I’m not that old just yet!). I’ve learned to talk to my body sweetly, to thank my sacred vehicle that carries me through life. And more than that, I am learning what it means in a felt-sense way to truly integrate mind with body. To see my body as co-pilot in this incarnation adventure. I remember being a young child so absorbed in the planet of my own body. Twisting like a pretzel in that overly flexible way of a little kid, tasting the salt of my knees and the inside of my elbows like earth itself.

I love the rush of creating with my mind, yet especially in this screen-based age, I cannot forget the body. Like an animal companion: pre-verbal, instinctual and present-moment focused; it attunes to energy and is the first to signal from our intuition. In the great upward spiral of existence, I find myself coming back into greater integration with the temple of my body. With gratitude, humility and joyful attention—amen.

I recently found an old manuscript—the only story I ever officially submitted to a science fiction magazine. Circa 2012. It was rejected, of course, and I shelved it. At the time, I couldn’t help but equate the entire effort as a failure. And certainly, I had more work to do in believing in myself. Yet from this vantage point, I also see things differently. My refusal to participate in what was implied to be a required ritual: prostrating yourself before publishing industry hounds in the hopes of being crowned a winner. In some ways, not conceding to this tradition was my own form of rebellion. I didn’t want to give up my power like that, so I didn’t. Admittedly, I also knew that I was too sensitive for that rigamarole. I sensed if I went along with it, some vital part of my creative drive might get winnowed down to nothing.

To get published, I would have had to reshape my voice to please the gatekeepers—to fit what was already acceptable. That never sat right with me. I’ve lived long enough to see that a lot of groundbreaking creativity was not well received at first. That it could take years, if not decades, for a work to truly be understood for its contribution. And I am so very thankful to be living in an age where the tools of dissemination are within reach—the blessing of not having to ask permission to participate.

When I was in high school, my speech and debate coach’s wife, a bus driver, once told me that my shyness would limit me in life. It stuck with me for years. But I’ve since reframed it: a panther is shy, too. It moves in shadows not out of weakness, but out of instinct—knowing that what stays hidden retains its strength.

So it feels pretty amazing to pull this story out of the drawer, polish it, and publish it on my own terms.

Recently, I talked with an acquaintance who also dreams of being an author. She asked how I was finding “success.” We quickly realized we had different definitions. She meant visibility—numbers, attention, reach. I meant endurance. I told her I’m content to write my collection and wait for posterity, like Emily Dickinson—writing not for approval but for the quiet joy of expression. Solitude, for me, isn’t isolation; it’s a protective boundary that filters out noise.

The leap of faith required to keep creating without external validation is, I think, part of the sacred contract of being a writer. We write because we must, because the words themselves are alive.

And so, after more than a decade, “Underneath the Glitch” emerges at last—a story about evolution, control, and the thin line between awakening and obedience. It feels especially fitting now, at the threshold of technological singularity.

Excerpt from, “Underneath the Glitch”

The wind hit her like a forgotten word. Warm, irregular, alive. She stumbled into a field of waist-high grass gone wild with color. The sky stretched unrendered above her. It was not the flat perfection of simulation she had become inured to. It was vast, three-dimensional and streaked with shifting light. She kicked off her shoes, pressed bare feet into soil still damp from recent rain. A scent of moss and salt filled her lungs.

Telemetry indicates rapid physiological adaptation, murmured G through the sub-vocal link. You are not deteriorating.

“I told you.” She laughed, the sound breaking into tears. “I just wanted to feel the sun again.”

You understand the symbolism of this act will destabilize the control narrative.

“Only for those who are paying attention, right? You’re always one step ahead anyway. Covering tracks—you are so good at that,” she whispered.

“Underneath the Glitch” will be available as an Amazon ebook this month. I’ll drop a quick post when it’s released. Thanks for reading!

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Tags: writing life, speculative fiction, Glitchfall Continuum, indie publishing, resilience