Writing the Unseen
How Metaphysical Curiosity Shapes My Speculative Worlds
Origins: The Metaphysical Thread
When I first launched this blog, it was a space for an aspect of my life that had mostly remained a private meditation: my metaphysical explorations as a spiritual seeker. Though insistent and ethereal, this intuitive thread has run through me for years. That ever-present urge to plumb the depths, to confirm that there’s more to reality than what we’re taught to see.
It’s funny how much goes on beneath the surface within each of our individual psyches, as “coming out of the cosmic closet” was experienced by me as a monumental and highly symbolic undertaking. And yet, my outer reality barely rippled. No complaints here. Simply an observation about how much of life is really a conversation with oneself. Perhaps that sounds lonely to some, but I don’t see it that way. As fractals of Unity consciousness within this holographic universe, it’s more that we are each self-contained spheres—baby planets, really. We orbit around one another. Occasionally, we bounce off each other and in doing so, effect chain reactions within. Like electrical storms in our systems. We are living Mandelbrots: as within, as without. The mathematician for which that fractal pattern is named after wanted to geometrically describe the irregular shapes found in nature, and isn’t it neat that the outcome looks like a little Buddha in lotus position?
I’ve written about consciousness, synchronicity, channeling, and even spirituality’s version of edge play aka psychic attacks. I feel at home within the strange patterns that arise when you start paying close attention to the inner world. This blog was—and still is—a space for spiritual emergence, for metaphysical reflection, for asking questions that have no tidy answers.
From Blog to Book: The Fiction Flow
Lately, though, you may have noticed a shift. I’ve been posting about my speculative fiction—short stories and scenes from the Glitchfall Continuum, an interwoven series exploring identity, trauma, and transformation through futuristic lenses. Recently, I contemplated this course redirection during this incipient phase of my blog. Well, one aspect is we don’t always know—at least the conscious part of our mind—the ultimate reason why we embark on certain endeavors. I look back on my life over the decades and only now detect particular through-threads. While I was in the midst of it, I couldn’t always see the big picture. And I definitely protested and fought myself at times. Yet now I see that my unconscious wisdom has been guiding me all along. And I am thankful that I have gotten much better at listening. The body is my friend in this, the sacred vehicle on this journey of incarnation. The heart that holds so much, as if bigger on the inside than the outside. The belly. The hips.
Though these most recent posts might seem like a departure, I’ve come to see them as the next step in the same journey. Going back to my original stint at blogging in the early aughts, regularly publishing my thoughts in online posts was an important symbolic act towards manifesting my larger scale writing projects. That earlier iteration was a kink-focused blog. At the time, an acclaimed author found his way into my circle as a submissive. I remember him talking up my writing, taking me on a journey with his words of what it would be like to be known and regarded for my own words. As I listened to him, I almost felt like I was actually experiencing the roller coaster of adulation and criticism that he described. “But you have to write something real. Not just a blog,” he said at the end of his pep talk.
I tried for a month. Every day, getting back into the saddle i.e. sitting down at my desk to type. Yet twenty years ago, I did not have the tools. Even when I found myself on a streak of good writing, the performance pressure I would subsequently put on myself froze me into paralysis. I was tying myself in knots. Only now do I see that my spiritual quest was not a side plot in the story, but integral to coming into alignment as an author. Today, I can state without shame that I completely resonate with folks who get up on that podium and thank God when they accept some award. This journey has shown me that what I think of as “me”—my little ego who just adorably wants all the gold stars—cannot possibly do what I dream of doing on my own. Yes, I am where I am because of Higher Power. Perhaps one day, we will be balanced enough as a society to state as much without polarizing into either anti-religion or dogmatic zealotry. May it be so.
Fiction and non-fiction. Novels and short stories. Memoirs and blogging. Actually, I was surprised to discover that in Europe they do not make a big distinction between memoirs and novels. That they do not expect a memoir to be factual truth in the same way a journalistic piece would be. I wonder why that is the expectation in the U.S.? The rigidity of our puritanical roots, perhaps. In any case, both modes—essay and story, reflection and narrative—are ways I investigate the same thing: what is real? And what really matters? For me, these questions are at the heart of the investigation. If I come across pretty words and clever construction but the center feels empty. Well, that’s not it for me.
A well-told story can act as a mirror turned inside-out. Just as I let therapy clients know when we do depth work that what they uncover in the process remains as resources within themselves, like three-dimensional vocabulary. Stories are like that. How a wise author can use pages and pages to draw into focus an inner reality that resonates with the reader. And when it resonates, because it has been experienced through the reader’s felt-sense and imagination over the time and space of all those pages, it feels deeper and more meaningful. Almost telepathic.
In my stories that I am working on, I play with altered states, biochips, shared dreamscapes, virtual punishment industries, and posthuman evolution. These narratives have been in my head for decades. In the past, I worried about contributing to a bleaker future with my dystopian preoccupations. Yet I’ve come to realize that my speculative fiction is not really about the future. It’s about now.
And it’s not about escaping reality (though I do believe we can have our cake and eat it too, so a bit of techno-fetishism is not necessarily a bad thing). But more so, it’s about examining reality more intimately. Like I often say in therapy, the surface action can be arbitrary; it’s the meaning you ascribe to it that’s important. More than just plot devices, my spec fic narratives are metaphors for psychological truths, emotional landscapes, and metaphysical possibilities.
Writers as Vessels
There’s a long lineage of writers who used fiction as a transmission device—Philip K. Dick’s cosmologies, Octavia Butler’s vision of evolutionary transformation, Jane Roberts’ Seth books blurring dictation and the definition of self, even Dion Fortune’s occult novels. And of course, Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who—despite being a man of logic and deduction—spent his later years immersed in séances and spiritualism, convinced he was communicating with the other side. While some see this as a disappointing contradiction, I believe it is an arc: from solving puzzles to touching mystery.
Whether it’s labeled as speculative fiction, spiritual allegory, or psychospiritual inquiry, the thread is the same: story as a vessel for deepening.
What I’ve realized is that rather than the speculative and the spiritual competing, they can collaborate. I recall this old snippet of a video of Philip K. Dick on an interview panel, visibly emotional as he described actually having visited some other dimension where a much worse reality existed—the basis for his novel, The Man in a High Castle. It has also been recounted that shortly after his newborn baby’s birth he was given a revelation that his child’s health was in imminent danger. With no outward evidence, he insisted to his wife that they take the baby to the hospital—where it was discovered that the child had a hidden life-threatening condition that required immediate treatment.
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So these twin flames of purpose and passion—spirituality and creativity—push each other further. Where my metaphysical writing can risk abstraction, my fiction brings embodiment. Where fiction might flirt with spectacle, the metaphysical roots ground it in meaning.
Where We’re Headed
Though this blog is evolving, it’s not leaving anything behind. Going forward, you’ll find both types of posts here: meditations on consciousness and craft, dispatches from imagined futures, reflections on spiritual emergence, and explorations of the inner architecture that gives rise to it all. Whether I’m writing about neuroplasticity, synthetic immersion, or the sudden calm that descends mid-trance, I’m still following the same pulse: the desire to map the edges of the real while extending the inner structures to greater depths of connectedness, wisdom and lovingkindness.
Thank you for walking this path with me—whether you’ve been reading since my earliest posts or just arrived through a fictional back door. Early August will see the release of my next short, Rebooting Eden. The story envisions a future where the final remnants of biological humanity must confront the visceral complexity of real-world relationships—messy, unpredictable, and raw—against the seductive ease of perfectly customized virtual lives. In doing so, it challenges us to reconsider what “original sin” might truly mean.
More to follow soon…