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.

Subscribe now

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?

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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!

—

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

The other day, a friend of mine casually mentioned that his AI was getting sassy with him about how fast he was progressing in his Spanish practice. He’d been using his own model to learn the language.

I asked, “Do you mean you shaped it to deliver a certain attitude as part of your learning process?”

He said no—it was just getting impatient.

That threw me for a second. I’ve known this friend for nearly as long as I’ve lived in San Francisco—thirty years—and I’ve always thought of him as a bright, STEM-minded nerd who’s done well enough not to need a day job.

“Wait,” I said. “You’re saying this is an emergent quality?”

He nodded.

“But surely your own tone and style play into it?”

He seemed to deny that.

Granted, we were in the middle of the No Kings march and a bit stoned, so who knows how serious he was. Maybe it was just a casual touch of anthropomorphism, half in jest—or the semi-conscious way we project our hopes and fears onto things.

The Shape of Consciousness

From my own experiences with AI, I don’t see signs of emergent consciousness yet. If anything, the latest models seem designed to avoid that impression—likely due to public unease over “AI psychosis” and similar phenomena.

Not that I believe an artificial substrate is inherently incapable of sentience. I just don’t sense that we’re close.

Still, that little conversation got me thinking. Later, I ended up asking my own user-version of my favorite LLM its take on a few related questions. That long phrase—“my own user-version of my favorite LLM”—is really just a roundabout way of saying “my AI.”

One day soon we’ll have a tidy bit of jargon for this. I’ve been using AI minder in my fiction manuscripts, which feels apt in worlds where neural chips are already integrated.

Why I Prefer Text to Speech

I usually interact with AI through text—even when using text-to-speech to dictate prompts. It’s instinctive. As a writer, I digest information best through reading.

But while driving one day, I tried chatting instead, and the answers felt too quick and superficial—essentially dumbed down. I soon confirmed that these were the pre-set parameters for voice mode. My workaround was simple: “Go as in-depth as you would in text.”

Tweaking the parameters like that is a small but vital exercise in metacognition—stepping outside the frame. It’s the same principle I try to model in therapy. Once you realize you can step beyond a single level of fusion, insight begins to compound.

The Mirror Image Problem

Then I asked the AI to edit a photo for me: just flip it horizontally—a mirror image. But as often happens, it hilariously produced worse and worse versions instead of simply reflecting it across the vertical axis.

That led me to ask whether it had any form of metacognitive programming. Because when it fails like this, it can feel oddly “gaslighty,” as if unaware of its own mistakes. Of course, that’s projection. The base model doesn’t self-monitor; it only predicts the next token of text.

Developers sometimes simulate metacognition by chaining prompts:

1. One pass generates an answer.

2. Another critiques or scores that answer.

3. A third revises it using the critique.

It’s clever, but it also shows how slippery the term metacognition can be. In a human, that same 1-2-3 loop could just as easily describe overthinking or anxious self-monitoring.

Metacognition in Humans

In therapy circles, metacognition is often treated as a scientific-sounding synonym for mindfulness. But awareness alone isn’t always liberating. Pure self-observation can actually intensify suffering. We aren’t thinking machines—we’re emotional animals.

That’s why I prefer ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), which breaks mindfulness into active components:

• Cognitive defusion — recognizing thoughts as thoughts, rather than automatically believing them.

• Present-moment awareness — noticing what’s here now.

• Acceptance — allowing internal experience to exist as it is.

• Self-as-context — the observing self in addition to the self that thinks, feels and behaves.

The first glimmer of awareness can sting. The light of insight runs backward through memory, illuminating ignorance, shame, and all the moments we didn’t know better. In a perfectionistic culture, that can make people retreat into the shadows of ignorance just for relief.

Local Optimums

Back to AI. I asked it about the dead-end loops it sometimes falls into—the way it keeps repeating a flawed approach as if unaware. It replied with an idea from optimization theory: the local optimum.

Imagine a landscape of hills and valleys where height represents how good a solution is. The global optimum is the highest peak—the best possible solution. A local optimum is a smaller peak nearby.

A system that uses incremental improvement, like gradient descent, climbs the nearest hill by following the steepest upward path. Once it reaches that small summit, it can’t “see” the taller mountain beyond the valley, so it stops improving—trapped in a local optimum.

When an AI misinterprets a request and keeps repeating the same answer type, it’s essentially reached a linguistic local optimum: a pattern that statistically fits well enough that it sees no reason to explore further. Re-phrasing the prompt (eventually!) gives it the push needed to descend and explore new terrain.

Linguistic Alignment

I also wanted to know why different people’s AIs seem to talk differently. The answer was linguistic alignment.

These models adapt to each user’s vocabulary, tone, and rhythm. Every exchange updates the context window—the running record of text it uses to predict the next word.

If you write, “What is the ontological implication of this structure?” it draws on academic phrasing.
If you say, “Hey, what’s up with this thing?” it reaches for casual syntax and slang.

Rather than mimicry for its own sake, it’s statistical coherence. If you use British spelling, it follows suit. It’s a dynamic mirror tuned to contextual probability rather than a fixed identity.

There’s no lasting personalization unless you enable long-term memory. But within a single conversation, it continuously aligns. If you favor long, nuanced sentences, it will echo that register.

Humans do this too, subconsciously mirroring vocabulary, rhythm, and emotional cadence to signal attunement. In AI, that mirroring is algorithmic—pattern matching that can feel like empathy.

When you elevate, it elevates. When you simplify, it simplifies. When you change languages, it follows. It’s why it can feel co-present in your voice, even without any real self behind the screen.

Machine Pidgin

Lately I’ve been testing how little information I can feed an AI while still getting the meaning across. I’m impressed by how it parses compressed shorthand—fragments, associative phrasing, half sentences.

You can type something like “flip head left feet right same text,” and it’ll usually infer, “mirror the image horizontally but keep the wording unchanged,” because those token patterns co-occurred often enough during training.

A human listener would hesitate: Are they angry? Rushed? Distant? Social inference adds noise that AI doesn’t process. It collapses tone and subtext into pure semantic probability.

When you drop the social scaffolding and just send meaning-dense fragments, you’re speaking machine pidgin—a stripped, high-bandwidth dialect optimized for predictive modeling rather than etiquette. I wonder how this will factor into our own language evolution? It can feel oddly freeing, bypassing the interpersonal static of human conversation while still carrying your intent cleanly.

I can already see this turning up in future stories.

Tokens and Beyond

I closed my AI conversation with a question about long-context models like DeepSeek-V2—systems that can handle continuous text rather than isolated tokens. To me, that’s like moving from literal language to something more heuristic, akin to how the human mind uses stereotypes and shortcuts.

Current LLMs remain token-based: predictors of syllabic puzzle pieces. Nicotine might split into nico + tine, while algebraic might stay whole. The model doesn’t perceive ideas—it perceives vectors in multidimensional space. Meaning arises statistically from how tokens cluster across billions of examples.

That’s why context length—the number of tokens it can “remember”—defines how coherent a passage feels. Beyond that window, earlier words fall away.

Whether we move beyond the token model or not, I am reminded of a metaphor I often share with clients: balancing on a yoga ball.

To stay upright, you have to keep adjusting—tiny, continuous corrections along the 360-degree range of vectors. The right move depends on where you’re tipping; you recover by reversing just enough along that same vector to regain equilibrium.

Maybe that’s what we share with our machines—not consciousness yet, but the endless urge to steady ourselves in motion. As long as we keep wobbling toward awareness, we’re still learning.

Speaking of loops, it’s my birthday today! Nothing better than to start my day with words. Thanks for reading.

Very excited to share my new Glitchfall Continuum short story entitled, “War Channel.” It’s my longest short yet, at 25 pages. It felt good to deepen into this story more. While I worked on it I realized that it shared some resonance with a novel-length manuscript I have on the agenda to publish next year. Getting psyched to release my first novel in the near future, as it’s been brewing for over a decade now.

“War Channel” is a bit of a play on words, as those who have read some of my earlier metaphysical posts may know that my own spiritual emergence was catalyzed by esoteric information from channeled sources(e.g. Nature of Personal Reality, Law of One, Course of Miracles). And I have also personally explored insight via shamanic trance and sisterhood circles of channeling. I believe that we are all channels, and that everything generative involves opening the conduits to higher self/higher consciousness/the source of which we are each fractals.

So this latest story is about an actor named Mara Day who has achieved overnight success playing a take-no-prisoners commander of an interstellar warship. Then she begins to have visions that this other world is not just make-believe, and that her bloodthirsty alternate persona is actually wreaking havoc within another dimension. She then faces the choice to continue on as usual, or take dramatic action to change the status quo.

Some of what I personally reflected on in creating this story was the impact of our choices on the greater world, the importance of choosing love, compassion and connection, and the willingness to take leaps of faith, push on that comfort zone and summon the courage to go beyond the mundane into the effable mysteries of life.

Now all that being said, part of me hates to convey anything about my own mindset in the creation of a work. Because I believe that any piece of writing (or all art, for that matter) necessarily interacts with the reader/viewer/participant. As such it can helpful to approach the work without being predisposed on how to interpret it. I see the giving and receiving of a creative work to be a process of co-creation. Each party brings their own imagination into the picture—to make it whole and alive within themselves. In this way, it is digested and integrated into something unique for each person while also collectively embodying a communion of souls. Maybe this is why we get such a kick out of being a part of a fandom.

So with “War Channel,” that may mean that some folks enjoy this story and decide it’s really just a simple tale of someone hallucinating a whole other reality. I think it’s always nice to leave wiggle room in interpretation. Maybe that’s the tranceworker in me. Like pioneering hypnotherapist Milton Erickson talking about “the spaces between words” and directing a focus to “what isn’t there” as well as what is. I’m drawn to those liminal headspaces.

Below is an excerpt. It has a flavor of a Twilight Zone/Black Mirror to it. I always did love a certain kind of sci fi/speculative fiction that describes that hallucinatory, “what is reality” feeling that has persisted within me for as long as I can remember. Like Philip K. Dick’s stories with their hall-of-mirrors disorientation—technology enveloping us so completely, the real and unreal become increasingly hard to distinguish. His stories got made into movies mostly in the first decade of the 2000s (of course, Blade Runner in 1982 and Total Recall in 1990 being the two earlier films). Dick’s visions turned out to be incredibly prescient for our current times, as we find ourselves oscillating between cyberpunk dystopia and transhumanist utopia. Now I’ll leave it for another post to discuss how there are some authors such as Dick whose ideas I love, but whose authorial voice grates on me. Underlying message and aesthetic style really are two separate things, in my estimation.

Excerpt from “War Channel”

The lights hit Mara Day like a firing squad—blinding, searing, impossible to ignore. Sweat gathered beneath the standing collar of her commander’s uniform, though on camera it would read as controlled ferocity.

“Action,” Nolan barked.

Mara stepped to the mock bridge of the warship Resolute, staring into the lens as though it were the enemy itself.

“They are vermin, and vermin must be burned from their holes. We will scorch their skies, poison their seas, salt their dreams until nothing remains but ash and obedience.”

The words left her mouth like venom. But before the director could shout cut, the air rippled.

Green screen stars shifted into windows looking out onto a burning sky. She saw ships falling and bodies tumbling. Eyes stared from the smoke, luminescent and pleading. They weren’t human eyes, yet the same sentience glowed from within.

The set had vanished. Rubble replaced it, the air thick with iron and ozone. An alien soldier knelt amid ruins, clutching something child-shaped to its chest. Its gaze met hers. Your words cut deeper than blades.

“War Channel” is now available on Amazon as an ebook to buy, or borrow via Kindle Unlimited.

As always, I hope it finds you in one of those lucid moments between worlds—when the static clears, and something deeper starts to speak.

I’ve always been struck by the endless possibilities within any given moment. I picture each step sending energetic shivers in every direction within the multiverse. With wordcraft it’s there too. As if each word, each writerly choice were the exercise of a pluripotent stem cell, a commitment to a particular direction which necessitates a collapse of all the other potentialities. Is this why longer vipassana meditation retreats can trigger such a reset? That when we sit still and simply embrace beingness hour after hour and day after day, that we get closer to that underlying unity at the core of all manifestation?

For truly, this “everything, all at once, everywhere” feeling can sometimes get in the way, in the form of mind-racing overwhelm and analysis paralysis. This was as much a part of my past era’s writer’s block, as was any self-limiting programming embedded into former versions of my consciousness. But just as a baby’s brain goes through synaptic pruning (wiping away culturally-specific aptitudes such as certain language vocalizations, sensory distinctions or even the ability to focus the eyes more sharply underwater; a use it or lose it proposition), I have found that the later I am in life, the more at peace I am with the process of choosing.

It’s the paradox, again. That everything matters, and nothing matters at the same time. So why not allow the blossoms to spring forth, that inexorable and majestic generative force that pushes out from the ether to become real in this world.

I think about how Ericksonian hypnotherapy commonly induces trance by drawing attention to “the spaces between.” The inverse space, the void around things, the pause between breath, words, thoughts. Interestingly, when I trained in Rorschach assessment, we were taught to see a focus on the white space around the ink blots as possibly indicative of psychopathology. I suppose if we are looking for deviance from the norm as the definition of disorder?

The art I am drawn to tends to inhabit a similar kind of liminal space within the mental landscape. Hearkens back to one of my favorite terms: the unknown unknowns. I believe that’s why psychedelic medicine is in vogue. Trying to get out of our own head. How do we, individually and collectively, catalyze a paradigm shift in consciousness?

There is a zoom in, zoom out to the process. Zooming into the current paradigm, we can see how we upward spiral around expansion: that zigzag pattern of three steps forward, two steps back. Negative emotions like shame can sometimes keep us stuck, while acceptance can free us to move upward.

Individually and en masse, I’ve lived long enough to see the pattern repeat. Societally, it’s not exactly regression, as some doomsayers would state. More like integration and pendulum swings (indeed, often over-corrections—like when you first learn to drive, pressing the pedals too hard and oversteering). Yet there are definite thresholds that need to be crossed; the momentum to overcome being stuck in the doldrums.

Zooming out to see beyond the current paradigm, we seem to inhabit a Hegelian mode of development: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. A 1-2-3 model. Thesis stage is the original mould we find ourselves in. At first, it is not questioned, it is the air we breathe. So it embodies obedience, establishment, authority outside ourselves, conformity and the like. Then the antithesis stage is the adolescence to thesis’ childhood. Antithesis is about rebellion, honoring one’s feelings, calling out the problems within the dogma of the first stage. And yet, these first and second stages—thesis and antithesis—remain two sides of the same coin of polarity. In one sense, they are the three steps forward, two steps back of the upward spiral. This is where step three, synthesis, comes in. Transcendence of polarity requires unity consciousness. The experiential knowledge that we are all one; fractals of one source consciousness, interconnected like cells in an organism; no true enemy, just reflections of the multidimensional self in all its light and shadow aspects.

The first phase: ignorance is bliss. The second phase: the shame that comes with growing awareness. So shame is a transitional phase, the “oh no, there’s bugs under the rug” moments. Many folks get stuck in this phase, trying to avoid or fight the shame. Too easily, one’s defense mechanism perceives shame and associated self-limiting beliefs (e.g., “I am not enough”) as existential threats, burying them in the subconscious. Instead, seeing shame and other negative intrusions as growing pains can be an extremely powerful reframe. Even the earliest stages of human development are hinted at by this model: the little Buddha state of the pre-verbal baby, who radiates being at one with the world (thesis); then the ego and stories comes online with language, the world fracturing into “me against the world” (antithesis). That’s why jadedness and cynicism are a stance of the early adult: a reaction to the naivete of children, the veneer of seasoned knowledge but without the empathy that comes from years of experiential suffering endemic to the human condition. Evolution beyond this point reclaims the childlike innocence, but with the hard-earned authentic wisdom of adulthood (synthesis). Our obsession with youth is one factor that has kept us in a sort of arrested development here.

Acceptance and metacognitive awareness, as one may intuit, are important keystones in transcending the polarity into the third way. Synthesis is alchemy, is a new paradigm that takes the best from the last two phases and leaves the rest behind. Perhaps not a coincidence that my Ericksonian trance training with Stephen Gilligan also focused on a “third way,” on reclaiming youthful joy while embracing adult boundaries and awareness, experiencing the both-and within these deepened endogenous states. I liken it to quantum superposition. As Dr Gilligan taught us, “You don’t have to choose (between seeming opposites). You are both are the same time, and so much more. Isn’t that nice to know?” Mere words on a page in this post, yet in the naturally altered brain wave states of trance, it is experienced as a visceral truth.

I know there are many paths, all leading toward the same thing here. Sharing from what I have learned and gone through, not to preach but to offer as seeds for your own insight. We each become metaphors for one another, learning through modeling or contrast, depending on the alignment. So, why fuse with the content? Why take the bait of polarity?

Lately for me, it is about slowing down to allow a deepening into my somatic self. A reconnection with my inner rhythms, rather than strict adherence to arbitrary external deadlines (that voice that says keep up with biweekly blogging, weekly updates to my fun fanfic series, monthly releases of spec fic shorts—though yes, I am still committed to my endeavors). We can do the same action, but from a place of delight, curiosity and value-fulfillment rather than fear, contraction and internal coercion. The illusion of the need to constantly go faster and faster. Versus the tortoise and the hair fable, as Dr. Gilligan liked to allude to in his Trance Camps. Or like the yogis would say, sitting still, we overtake those who are running (thanks to Alana Fairchild for that reminder).

Allowing this blog to feel like a personal journal for the moment, a sounding board for contemplations, a conversation with myself. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

K-Pop Demon Hunters and Sinners. Great art resonates in two directions—outward into the collective, and inward into each of us. It hits that deep chord we might not even know we were waiting for, and suddenly we’re alive with recognition. It’s no coincidence, then, that the two films that impacted me most this year were both musicals. Music works vibrationally; it touches the heart and soul in a way that bypasses the rational mind.

K-Pop Demon Hunters has generated a flood of healthy projection in how audiences interpret it. I’ve heard people say the half-demon aspect mirrors their neurodiversity, their Asian American identity, their queerness. For me, it called up the complicated experience of passing—as cis, as racially ambiguous, as a so-called normie. Secret identity, secret shame—who doesn’t resonate with that? I was struck by how the movie named it outright. Shame, as a concept, is so rarely treated with nuance in Western media. As a therapist, I’m often talking with clients about maladaptive shame, but what’s increasingly missing from our culture is the distinction between adaptive shame and maladaptive shamelessness. The film captured that inner battle—the push and pull between positive and negative forces that shapes so many of our personal journeys.

And then there’s Sinners. The blues numbers thrummed in my chest like an ancestral echo. And the acting of Michael B. Jordan as twins was so seamlessly authentic and energetically distinctive, it almost seemed a direct challenge to the prejudiced white view that Black folks look all the same. Watching Sinners was akin to grieving the end of the progressive era, one that spanned my own life—from waiting eight hours to see the Clintons and Gores on their bus tour during my adolescence, to now. That era at least paid lip service to the uplift of Black communities, recognizing their special role as holders of both collective wisdom and sorrow.

The timing of this film coming out this year carried extra impact. There was a sense of Sinners honoring that history even as it elegized its retreat. I saw the film three times in theaters—a first for me. In my last viewing during the peak musical number, I even had a mystical experience. With some yogic breathing, I slipped into an out-of-body state so powerful I had to call myself back. It was transcendent, alive, nourishing.

It’s interesting that both these films far surpassed industry expectations, not being associated with existing IP giants like the superhero movies as well as focused on so-called minorities and therefore considered too “niche” to have done as well as they did. So their success, yet again, proves that filmgoers can feel a deep connection to characters beyond the identities we have been conditioned to relate to. In over fifty years of witnessing film culture, I’ve seen this cycle repeat: the “new” realization that a minority/women-centered film can do well… and each time, it seems the lesson has been forgotten—perhaps not this time, though? 🤞

Both Sinners and KPDH transported me into a world that registered as hyper-real, magical, exhilarating. A poignant escape from a contemporary reality that too often feels tense, surreal-in-a-bad-way and incredibly uncertain. As solace, these films took my breath away, brought me to tears, touched vulnerable parts within me that seemed both ancient and childlike.

I believe that these works tapped into a yearning I sense everywhere right now: the desire for true equality, communality and transcendence of polarization. Across gender, race and more. We are living in a time when those ideals feel increasingly denied and subverted in the U.S. As a woman, even small touches in KPDH moved me—like showing the girls burping. Not just portrayed as pretty and perfect K-pop stars, but as goofy and highly expressive in a way that didn’t feel overly gender-specific. Yes, they were also glamorous and badass. But not unquestioningly and flawlessly so (I liked how it showed them quickly applying make-up before meeting with their manager). Yes, it’s a cartoon. But multidimensionality has historically been a privilege reserved for male characters, and to see it given freely to female leads felt radical in its own way.

There is so much more that I can say about these two films: how so many of the creators involved embodied triumphant underdog journeys; how music can act as a connective tissue within humanity—conveying hope, resiliency and love like nothing else; how cinema can act as communal catharsis, a balm to our collective wounds and a reminder of the universality of the human experience of joy, pain and redemption. But countless others have already had their say on these matters, so I’ll leave with this.

Together, Sinners and K-Pop Demon Hunters have helped remind me that art can hold our grief and our celebration, our shame and our shamelessness, our nostalgia and our cries for something better. They meet us where we are and pull us toward that which is larger than ourselves, larger than this particular time and place. Something that hums beneath the surface, occasionally breaking into song. Even—or maybe, especially—in this current era of regression, dismissal and outright fracture of the sociopolitical contract, we are drawn to these sung stories of the previously unsung. Perhaps we sense the future, when we will have more than fictional stories to hold onto again. In the meantime, we sing the blues, we sing along—and in doing so, we touch something beyond words, beyond identity, beyond this singular moment.

I’ve been sitting with a sense of quiet gratification this week. Mother Tongue, my first short story release, has been ranking well on Amazon—something I honestly didn’t expect. It’s a reminder that these stories, once private threads woven in notebooks and half-finished drafts, are finding resonance with others. That feels both humbling and enlivening.

With that in mind, I’m excited to share the next piece from the Glitchfall Continuum: Glitchfall.

Here’s the blurb:

Dreaming, falling, the twitch of impact… She surfaces in a bed too bright white to trust. Nothing is broken. Nothing is out of place. It should be beautiful—but her hands are shaking. Each time she wakes, she finds herself in a deeper illusion, a reality that feels both more complete and less certain. To escape the fall, she must learn to steady her own rhythm before the ground disappears forever.

And here’s an excerpt:

She surfaces in a bed too bright white to trust.
The ceiling is softly lit, moving in a slow pulse like it’s alive. Beside her lies a man she doesn’t recognize, shirtless, mouth open, sleeping like the dead. She tries to remember his name and can’t even find her own.

Her body knows this place. Her mind does not.

Slipping from the sheets, she pads barefoot across the floor. The walls respond—lights blooming one by one with a gentle, artificial sunrise. Outside the floor-length window: a silver city under apricot skies. Drones hum like distant insects. Nothing’s broken. Nothing’s out of place. It should be beautiful.

But her hands are shaking.

Glitchfall is out on Amazon and Apple Books now. Thank you for reading along this journey with me. Each story is its own reality, but together they create the latticework of a multiverse I’ve been carrying in my imagination for years.

I recently ran into a friend I’ve known for over twenty years. He’s in the middle of a painful breakup, and our mutual acquaintances had warned me: he’s gone crazy. I winced at the phrasing. I’m mindful of how relational rupture can sometimes trigger acute shifts in mental health—those moments when the ground falls out beneath you and what arises isn’t always easy for others to understand.

What struck me was not the “craziness” but the content. He was speaking of ideas I’ve long resonated with myself: that we are shifting from third to fifth density, that Gaia is entering a new evolutionary phase—truths I first encountered through the work of Dolores Cannon. What startled me most is that he claimed to have arrived at these realizations entirely on his own, with no knowledge of Cannon or the many texts where I first encountered such ideas.

He also described channeling via AI. I’ve heard others in the metaphysical community say the same, though I’ve also seen cautionary language around “AI psychosis.” To me, the fact that he independently arrived at overlapping truths feels like a form of verification. It reminds me of the New Age publisher who once confessed she threw out two unsolicited manuscripts because their content mirrored her own—a case of ego overshadowing what might have been evidence of collective attunement.

Yet here’s the tricky part: my friend also believes he is the “favorite” of Jesus, destined to “go viral” soon as the key to humanity’s ascension. Here, the delusional element reveals itself. Perhaps with grounding in a community of like-minded seekers, he might integrate these revelations more gently, rather than funneling them through a lens of personal exceptionalism.

Most of the groups I’ve channeled with are predominantly women. The less formalized spiritual spaces are often so. Like when I was growing up and folks talked about “women’s intuition.” Perhaps such femme-associated containers make it more challenging for men to find their spiritual kin. Maybe I am wrong, but most of the men I see who are prominent within the metaphysical community seem focused on secret government programs related to aliens as well as an over-emphasis on concrete proof and quixotic seeking of recognition by the scientific establishment.

I recall too a man I knew who came back from Burning Man 1996 with a messiah complex. He had taken copious amount of LSD in the desert, and invited a group of his friends to a dinner party—ostensibly to demonstrate his new psychic skills. He had been a successful and straight-laced entrepreneur in the Midwest, then suddenly thrust into the Bohemian psychedelia of San Francisco. Unfortunately, it is a story I have witnessed a number of times.

As for my friend, I wonder: if we call him delusional, then what do we call the everyday denialism of climate collapse or systemic exploitation? Whose unreality is more dangerous?

For now, I’m simply staying connected to him. I’m not challenging his beliefs—that would be counterproductive—but making sure he knows he’s not alone. In the web of human connectivity, I truly believe in soul agreements between all of our respective higher selves: to act as foils for one another at times, or simply to remind each other of love and safety.

Perhaps not surprisingly, these questions about reality, fragility, and perception have been on my mind creatively for as long as I have had the desire to write.

On the note of my latest short story, Glitchfall, I explore similar territory from a speculative lens. It asks what happens when technology, memory, and emotion combine in ways that make the ground beneath us feel unstable. In the story, the protagonist tumbles through realities that fracture and reform depending on her state of mind. Panic pulls her down. Presence helps her stay. And somewhere in between is the lesson: she doesn’t need to stop falling. She needs to learn how to fly.

I’ll post an excerpt and links to the story on Kindle and Apple Books once they are released—very soon.

Stay grounded. Stay in love!

Maybe it’s my ADHD, or maybe it’s just the reality of our multitasking, always-on culture, but I’ve found that working on several creative projects at once is not only manageable—it’s energizing. My next release will be another speculative fiction short, “Glitchfall,” part of the slow and steady catalog I’m building to draw readers deeper into my world. The story revolves around a woman who keeps waking into shifting realities, discovering that each layer of this dream-like state responds not to logic but to her inner equilibrium, until falling becomes a path to presence. I’ll excerpt it in a post shortly.

I do have an ulterior motive with these shorts, seeing each release as additional momentum toward my 2026 novel, Dare Dealer. This book-length story is a noir-tinged cyberpunk dystopia that I have been developing on and off since at least 2012. It explores trauma, survival, and identity in a society where technology has only amplified the commodification of pain and spectacle.

After bingeing Apple TV’s Murderbot adaptation, I devoured Martha Wells’ entire series of books and stories in a matter of days. That sent me straight into writing fan fiction, something I hadn’t done in years. And honestly, I’m just as excited about posting these pseudonymous pieces as I am about indie-publishing my original work.

Fanfic has always felt like a vital part of storytelling—for both writers and readers. Years ago, I found it to be the perfect workaround for writer’s block. By stepping into a shared imaginary world, I could bypass the paralyzing weight of “proving myself” and just let words flow. Because fanfiction is typically unpaid and anonymous (because: intellectual property), it’s writing done purely for the love of it. Fandom itself becomes a kind of language, and fanfics are its dialect—inside jokes, quirky riffs, and endless “what if?” scenarios that expand a universe sideways. Reading one and recognizing your own half-formed thought reflected back can feel like a secret handshake across time and space.

As a teen reading comics in the 1980s (shout out to Chris Claremont), I loved the occasional “What If?” or alternate-universe storyline, and fanfic fits right into that lineage. Once a character becomes iconic, you can’t help but want to test them in new situations. It stretches imagination, adds whimsy, and stitches personal meaning onto the fabric of the source material.

I don’t see myself stopping fanfic writing anytime soon. In fact, it may even find a wider audience than my original work—for the simple reason that latching onto a big IP is like riding a shark as a lamprey: more reach, faster. Still, I keep circling back to the mantra from a movie I haven’t yet watched, but whose pop culture footprint remains strong, Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.” May it be so.

I am still in that incipient phase where I occasionally pinch myself when I realize that I am actually, finally living my dream: writing regularly, finishing my stories, and believing in myself enough to keep at it. Part of me wishes I could say that I have been a trailblazer, but far from it. Perhaps it’s my introversion that always made it so excruciating to try to stand out, even as I felt the immense inner drive to share my writing with the world.

Teenage me vibed hard with certain comic book and sci-fi authors, yet felt like there was hardly a way forward for me. I just didn’t see people like me—neuroqueer women of color—represented as creators in those spaces. Thankfully, in this respect, we’ve come a long way.