I was watching James Blake's live performance of Trying Times on Youtube the other day and Caitlyn, my fiancée, noticing my far-off look, asked playfully "Are you over there fantasizing about your love for me?"

I paused, noticing a flickering consideration to lie, but said honestly:

"No. I'm contemplating the death of western culture."

She laughed, sighed, and scoffed all at once. She understands me, and we chose humor instead of grief that night.

Because she knows what I mean.

She proofs my articles. My Horizon and Shimmer series started as pillow talk with her. She's Bonnie to my Clyde as we audaciously and naively try to build lives worth living as the culture of our parents and grandparents collapse around us under the weight of a technologic singularity we all sense is here but pretend we don't notice.

It's Apocalypse now, and everyone's heads' down.

I've been contemplating the collapse more lately because I got sick recently. I haven't been sick in a long time. For about a week, I had a sporadic low fever coupled with a persistent cognitive and somatic fragility that made doing almost anything exhausting.

I got really comfortable sitting in front of my 60 inch tv that week. I started watching 'The Boys,' the NBA playoffs, and even played a little Mortal Kombat on the PS5.

I convinced myself I was too sick and tired to walk outside, meditate, draw or write. So instead I feasted on the Shimmering screen.

If I sit in a state like this, where I step away completely from work, to-dos, creating, or leading, my soul starts to snort. Like a lazy tantrika, if I continue sitting in my recliner watching The Boys as my soul snorts, those snorts grow songs. My soul is a siren in she needs to be.

The genre of the song my soul sings is horror. Taking a shower I find myself crying for those who commit suicide. While driving, my eyes begin to water as I consider what it's like to be homeless. As I watch another pharmaceutical commercial during the NBA playoffs, I think about the hundreds of thousands of children injured due to inappropriate prescribing of powerful psychiatric medications because their behavior didn't conform to a public education system designed to create factory workers.

This is one of the ways my soul calls me home. My soul says:

We live during a spiritual cataclysm. You have fallen asleep. You need to wake up and step unto your crucifix.

What does that mean?

Some of the people I have the least respect for are those who advocate an extreme conspiracy or political worldview, but who themselves live normal lives.

Their 'normal' life confesses they either are liars or cowards.

You're telling me the world is flat, our leaders are lizards, and they're harvesting children, but you spend your free time scrolling your phone, playing video games, and watching Netflix?

You're telling me Post-Modern Liberalism is geo-engineering the skies, biochemically castrating us, and turning the frogs gay and your response is to share instagram stories of hate-filled podcasters while your public identity becomes the 'New Christian' who now renounces 'New Age spirituality?'

You're telling me Trump is literally Hitler and your response is to spam my DMs from an account with no face and no posts?

Theres an exclusive space in Hell for those who cry catastrophe yet live normally. Coward or hypocrite, I realized I had joined their ranks since I got sick.

I was checking my phone way too much. I wasn't spending time in silence, outside, with wind and sunlight. I wasn't giving my best hours each day to writing true sentences. I had disconnected from my dream. I wasn't in alignment. I'd arrive to 'my spot' ready to watch 'my shows' a little earlier every day.

'Come on,' a voice in my head says, 'we just got done being sick. You haven't felt something like that in a long time. You're being smart with your recovery. The show your watching is connecting you to the zeitgeist. Rest is good for you.'

That voice is honey covered bullshit. Sitting in front of a big screen while looking at a small screen is not rest. It is what it looks like when I forget.

I genuinely believe we face existential horrors, and that our best move is to midwife a renaissance. I've shared this story for years. I've gathered a community around this story. We've established a little island of sanity.

And because I know I walk in the land of ambrosia and amnesia, I know I will forget. So I plan crucifixions.

Our stories give our life meaning. The more responsibility we bear (that our choices matter), the more meaning flows through us. Without meaning, humans decompose and we call it many names you can find in the DSM.

Meaning and responsibility become a cross we call our worldview.

We crucify our soul by living a character that responds to the horror.

Yapping about a conspiracy or extreme political position while living a normal life is like building a cross you refuse to get on while you yell at any who pass by to step up and get nailed.

Crucifixions wake up.

The Crucifixion In The Hurricane

If you have a strong opinion against using psychedelics and you've never tried them, you're afraid. And it's okay to be afraid, but the louder your judgement, derision, or condemnation (without having tried them), the more you appear as a flailing coward in the public square.

You don't have to do them.
No one has to.
Let those two sentences seep into your bones.

Acknowledge your ignorance and allow silence to go before your fear-gripped blathering.

Our culture is rotting, and the nature of a culture is to possess minds, and so our minds are filled with mold and rot. We ought learn how to compost, and this is something psychedelics excel at.

The pre-requisite for contributing to a renaissance is to turn over the soil of your mind. You've got to heal the dirt of your mono-cropped beliefs.

In The Biggest Little Farm, the first step to healing monocropped soil is to infuse it with large amounts of shit and piss. This is alchemy 101, and this is what psychedelics do well -- they kill monocropped beliefs and re-infuse the soil with piss and shit (what we call an ego deaths and new perspectives).

But lets be clear, psychedelics are not required to do this. What is required are altered states of consciousness (that are not ignored, gaslight, or numbed away).

We all shift states of consciousness; sleep, dreams, fantasy, runner's high, breathwork, playing video games, 'the zone' in sports. It just happens to be that our culture encourages us to gaslit the more exotic states of mind so we'll continue giving 50 hours a week to our insurance job.

In recent years, I've grown to prefer Darkness Retreats and Vision Quests for their elegant design of inducing profound altered states without requiring I ingest anything. These practices turns my nervous system into the drug dealer.

However, providence brought ya boy a curandero smuggling a goddess.

Returning to Queen Vilca​

There is a pantheon of plant medicines.

Like the Greeks had Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades as the three kings under whom all other gods organized themselves, the elders of the Andes have a plant medicine pantheon of three Queens; Ayahuasca, Vilca, and Marijuana.

This past weekend I was invited to sit with a master curandero from the Andeas. He would be serving Vilca, and my first reaction was 'fuck no.'

I've done Vilca once, 8 years ago, deep in the Peruvian jungle. I was incredibly sick when I took it (it's a long story), and I proceeded to have one of the hardest, harrowing, and spiritually traumatizing experiences of my life. The only positive I got from it was gratitude for finally returning to 'default reality'. I was grateful to be sick again. I was grateful to exist in spacetime.

I shared with the curandero that I was hesitant to sit with him that evening because of my past experience. He listened, and gently explained through a translator that he was not here to convince me. Each of us has what he calls 'our will' and 'our desire.' The mind desires safety and wants to run from Vilca. The will is different. The will knows. The will chooses. He will only serve me Vilca if I will it to be. He also explained that I could do a 'microdose' at first, and if I wanted more later, I could have more.

I decide to do it.

Four hours later he is standing before me in a dark room. Candles flicker, and he begins to pour the black grey powder into a sea shell.

The plant medicine called Vilca is a powder of crushed tree seeds. It requires a specially carved tool that allows snorting with both nostrils simultaneously.

Archeological records show an advance civilization using this plant medicine in temples for thousands of years.

He gives me the tool, I place it in my nostrils and my heart is thundering in my chest. It is over 160 bpms. If I was an amateur I'd think I was having a heart attack.

I wasn't. This was a fully bloomed trauma response of an animal body recalling a time it almost died.

I inhaled as hard as I could. I got all the snuff into my sinus from the first pull.

He moves a few feet to my right to serve the next person, and I sit there staring into twilight darkness, in a kind of dissociation, as I wait for the plant to take effect.

The medicine comes on strong and fast. They call it 'the hurricane.' The first thing I felt was the singularly unique somatic sensation of a body flooded with DMT. There's a flush of warmth, and a feeling of 'being filled' by some kind of force. There is a feeling of thickening. There's a taste that comes with it. It is both enlivening and frightening.

And then I started sweating. Alarmingly quick. Never in my life had I gone from room temperature to looking like I had been in a sauna for 10 minutes.

Sweat pours from my pores in a way I've never experienced on any medicine. From toes to the peak of my head, I'm soaked. The intensity of the sweat cruises past something to worry about and lands in the surreal realm of marveling at what the body is capable of.

Then the hurricane hits as a malestrom of psychedelic geometries.

There is a state of consciousness where the immensity of information that begins to pour through the aperture of mind is so overwhelming the body's only response is to vomit. Its like, instead of bursting into flames when God shows it's true face, thankfully, we just turn inside out.

Somewhere in the hurricane of multi-dimensional geometries, I had thrown up in a bucket multiple times. I can barely touch the edge of the memory of throwing up. It makes me sick to think. The inner voice you effortlessly jostle with all day, that voice couldn't move or speak or else I'd throw up. It's a brutal way to find the pocket, but I found the pocket.

The I at the center of the hurricane.

There is a posture of consciousness I can get to when I meditate where there is truly no chatter, and if a thought arises, it evaporates before I can notice it. It's hard to get too, and frankly, there is no risk to slipping out of the pocket. When I'm at home on my mat, or laying in a field looking up at a tree, I can find the pocket, but I rarely can stay in the pocket.

Blasted on DMT is different. It feels like I'm big wave surfing. If I stumble, the crash is brutal. If I find the pocket, its to be at one with Thou upon the Throne at the center of allwhere and everthing.

So for what felt like 3 or 4 hours, but objectively was probably only 90 minutes, I sat in the pocket. No linguistic insights, no problems solved, no inspiration to do some project or make some art. Rather, the boon is somatic. I caught the wave. I stayed in the pocket. I did something that terrified me. It has been years since I chose to do something that made my heart rate jump to near cardiac arrest levels.

I found my center and I stayed there.

This was a cruxification.

If Nightmare, at least Dream

Our culture is dying. The egregore of Western Culture has snorted a Machine vilca. A technological hurricane howls around us. Most of us have not found our center. We stumble through the whirlwind drunk on synthetic ambrosia, unaware of our spiritual amnesia.

Our soul knows the song to the center. The Ariadne thread lives immortal. There is always a way home, and you are called to take the journey to your center. Build a hearth in the center of the hurricane. Grow the flame so bright that others who stumble drunk and forgetting through the storm notice.

Remind them what silence feels like. What eye contact does. Invite them to sit down at your fire with you and ask them their story. Share yours too. Show them what humanity is. Feed them. And after they have rested, turn them away and toward their own soul. Encourage them to find there center.

This is how we create islands of coherence during the collapse of a culture that died before we were born. It is only now that the storm is hitting that we notice the statues were empty, the temple's beams were filled with rot.

It all came apart so easily. Quickly.

Since Vilca, my chosen crucifixion, I began journaling everyday with an intense curiosity to find my center. After a few weeks of inquiry, I found that my center is no religion, no deity, no story. It's not writing or journaling. It is not ChatGPT, Claude, or any AI.

It's the boundless ground of being Vilca forced me into, and that I can get to gently with meditation.

Meditation being my center, what does it mean to build a hearth there?

I realized for me its prayer. I pray to stoke and awaken my heart. I pray to wake up, to the horror the brutal facts of our times paint, and to the honor it is to be someone who can help.

Call it coincidence or providence, but every morning I pray aloud outside as I look to the horizon, the wind picks up behind me and rustles the trees before me. Every day I feel my vocal blessings draws forth an exaltation from this local nature.

My eyes water with appreciation.

Two beautiful cardinals just landed on the ledge outside my window as I finished writing the previous sentence. My eyes watered more.

Every article I write is written with the intention of being bread from my center.

The Dharma Artist Collective is an island of coherence for any wanderer to come rest, connect, and train.

The Myths That Make Us are for our stories, told at length, without checking our phones, from our centers.

DEVA School is for those who are ready to start their own islands of coherence.

I dream of forming a League of 10,000 Dharma Artists piloting DEVAs, all an interconnected meshwork of myth and meaning, resilient enough to endure the winds, waters, and weirdness that is hurling towards us from the horizon of tomorrow.

An ark isn't going to survive this storm. We need an interconnected armada. Islands of coherence becoming archipelagos of resilience.

If your going to gaze at nightmares, be sure to also gaze towards lucid dreams.

God bless the I at the center of the hurricane.

Post Script

Carl Jung, the mystic prophet cosplaying as a psychologist had a second home commissioned in stone. It was called The Bollingen Tower, and he built much of it himself. He thought modern man was sick, in part, because he was so disconnected from nature. So Jung built a home without electricity or water, and would spend weeks at a time in this stone home, alone. To write, to think, to remember.

Bollingen is one answer to the question "what does it mean to place something at the center of my life."

Song I'm Listening on Repeat

​The xx - Angels (Hucci Remix)​

The Video That Started It All

​James Blake - Trying Times (Live)​

Quote I'm Enjoying

"It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines."
-Wendell Berry

"The modern world shall not be punished. It is the punishment."
-Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Weekly Journal Prompt

What do you place at the center of your life?