First, ashamed to not have published more often. I expected this trip to be inspirational, a boost of my creative juices. Instead, it feels like my writing brain has gone on strike. But why?

From one angle, the writing feels disconnected from my heart. Writing about travel and money, spirituality and consciousness, all such drafts felt stillborn, like silent piles of lifeless words. I don’t care to write about what does not deeply move me. But what would that be?

It’s hard to put into words. This feels like a time of endings. Endings in my life but also in the culture at large (micro mirrors macro). It feels like the myths woven into my life are dying.

For one, I feel ashamed to be an American.

Ashamed to witness what this nation is turning into, what it now stands for, how it is run, and who it is run by. I feel ashamed to be part of a system that embodies hubris, exports violence, and allies itself with an ideology of mass killings, displacement, and starvation.

We bomb schools, hospitals, universities? We conduct double tap strikes? We assassinate politicians and their families? How is any of that okay? It’s not, of course. It is what a ‘Great Satan’ would do.

I feel ashamed also to be safe and comfortable, to bite my tongue, while watching one vile revelation after another. Gaza. ICE. Epstein. Already yesterday’s news thanks to Iran and Lebanon.

Behold a nation carrying its shadow like a barrel full of toxic PFAS. Behold as we project it unto others in the form of organized violence. Behold as our house is ruled by greed, grift, and cruelty.

How do you come to terms with that?

In the past, I would have retreated into denial and distraction. I would have shut it all down, pretended I was not political. Politics? A sure way to ‘kill the vibes.’ Working in finance reinforced this attitude for the market rewards mercenaries. Convictions appear as a costly handicap. “Greg, this is not fucking Charles Dickens World, okay? You don’t go around talking about principles,” as opportunist archetype Tom Wambsgans puts it in Succession. Keep your head down and your eyes on the ball of money.

That’s over, thank God. I no longer want to bypass reality, however nauseating it may be. How could I not let myself be shattered? How could I not let the acid of revelation disintegrate my worldview? How could I not stand in shock as the masks came off?

But what is a healthy response when the atmosphere turns septic, when the discourse is a fever dream, when rot is being exposed but not treated?

What does one do with the anger, the grief, the shame, the feeling of impotence?

Writing feels like an escape into the comfortable space of my head, away from the tension of truth held in my body. And even on the page I find no solace. I have no answers. Writing does not answer that heavy question dangling around my neck: now what?

What does this age ask of me?

What can I contribute but outrage and tears?

I don’t want to join a battle where each side inevitably believes it represents the light and fights darkness. I don’t want to join the dance of fear and greed. I don’t want to walk the ancient path of resentment and violence.

I want to be part of the healing. I want to create and empower, inspire and awaken. I want to be truthful, loving, and kind. I want to find what lies beyond the hunger, beyond the injustice, beyond the catastrophe.

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate [what] seems important, or from holding views which others find inadmissible.” — Carl Jung

Charles Eisenstein called this a “time between stories.” What do we do when the fabric of our reality is torn? If the old stories are dead, how do we release them? And how do we bring new ones to life?

The only thing I am confident about is that the answers are not waiting on the screen. We won’t find them on Substack or YouTube. ChatGPT doesn’t know. These can help us discover, share and connect, but they cannot animate a new living myth. If we are stuck, we will have to move.

I am reminded of the book Black Elk Speaks about Oglala Lakota medicine man and visionary Black Elk. “Everything an Indian does is in a circle,” he explained, “because the Power of the World always works in circles.” But his nation’s “sacred hoop” was broken and his people forced into the reservation’s “square boxes.” A catastrophic end to a way of life, “for there can be no power in a square.” How does one respond to such trauma?

One day, “word came to us that the Indians were beginning to dance everywhere.” A Paiute shaman/prophet had shared a vision of multi-day ceremonial trance dances, the Ghost Dance. These were supposed to re-connect the tribes with their ancestors and restore the world to harmony. Buffalo would re-appear, white settlers would return east. “The people were hungry and in despair, and many believed in the good new world that was coming.”

But the US government believed it saw preparations for an insurrection and banned the movement. Hundreds were gunned down at Wounded Knee. The ‘good new world’ did not manifest, yet there is much to learn.

First, it is a sobering reminder not to lean too much on others’ visions. Clarity about the present beats seeing possible future paths. A crisis asks us to re-connect with our deepest inner knowing, with the truths we carry in our souls.

And notice how intuitively the Ghost Dance seemed to answer the situation:

• Are people fragmented, divided? Gather. Get in sync.

• Weighed down by the trauma of defeat? Rise, move, release.

• Lost your spirit? Enter altered states of consciousness. Re-connect with the world beyond for support.

• Imprisoned in a lifeless square? Form a living circle.

I’m not saying trance dance is the answer to what ails our culture, but it feels directionally more relevant than reading another book or listening to another podcast.

We are conditioned to watch our visionaries, founders, bring ideas to life with the power of capital, technology, and persuasion. The marketplace votes on how our culture changes. But the answer to a crisis mirrors its nature. Our spiritual crisis will not be healed by the archetypes that created it.

Should it surprise us if we had to humble ourselves and learn from the people whose cultures were steamrolled by the machine of conquest and progress?

“In traditional cultures, when someone returns from a vision quest, the first thing they do is share their vision with the elders of their community,” Chris Bache writes in LSD and the Mind of the Universe. “They do this, first, to receive their counsel on what the vision means and, second, because their vision does not belong to them alone. Deep visions are not private matters.”

Read it again: deep visions are not private matters. What if during our individual journeys of healing and growth we receive bits and pieces of the answer? These would not be for our entertainment. And yet even creating spaces to share them would not be enough.

Black Elk’s private big vision was turned into a public ritual. Painted riders and horses enacted his encounter with Spirit. To impact the community, energy had to move from behind the veil to the visionary, from the individual to the collective, and from the mind into the body. The story had to be enacted and witnessed to be held.

What is our way of gathering around the sacred tent? The doomer take would be that we don’t have anything similar. We can enact the current myth, say on national or religious holidays like Easter and Christmas, July 4th, or the Super Bowl. We can passively receive new stories through art and entertainment. Are public demonstrations and marches the closest we get to enacting new visions together?

I believe we still yearn for active participation. Removed from noise and narrative we know our ways with absolute clarity.

If we are atomized, we gather.

If we are stuck, we get in motion.

If oppressed by silence, we make noise.

If the world darkens, we share our inner light.

When the collective is wounded, healing happens in community.

Ritual binds the individual to the community and the cosmos. — Joseph Campbell

Black Elk was depressed. The tide of history had not turned and he believed he had failed his people. “It was the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it,” he said, “of a holy tree that should have flourished in a people’s heart with flowers and singing birds, and now is withered; and of a people’s dream that died in bloody snow.”

It is a warning not to be complacent when the questions are thorny and the stakes are high. But it also reminded me to be compassionate with myself, to accept my human limitations. What can we do but show up, do our best, share our light, and surrender our expectations of how and when a better world will come to be?

My writer’s mind would like to answer the big questions to great applause. That’s the trap, the distraction from the question that demands to be lived every day: how do I help create the world I love with all my heart?

The state of the world is the question. Our lives, how we live, every moment of our Being and doing, is the answer.

After a solitary year on the road, my mind is gravitating to spaces of community, of devotion and healing. I yearn for honest conversations and gatherings that lead us to our truth, that brighten our inner light, that lift the weight by sharing with each other and connecting with the divine.

I find myself disinterested in thought-leaders and founders. I am looking for emergence and co-creation, for spaces that catalyze energy and ideas. Where do we get inspired and tap into our power? Where do we move and let ourselves be moved? Where does the air feel alive and sacred?

It is maddening to love this world, yet that is what we are called to do, in spite of it all. Happy Easter.

Praise be to all names and faces of God.

May Peace be upon the world.

— Frederik

We take that out into the world of experience, where that light is projected on the wall. Patterns of light and shadow are what we see as reality. We must understand reality as the world of shapes and patterns and forms, whereas the source is one source of light.

We have to operate in the world of shapes and patterns. As long as we do that, we have a chance to make it as beautiful as possible to honor the source.

If the world of forms looks disturbing, because it is light and shadow, then it is all the more important to reconnect with the source of light, with the inner light, with the way the source appears through us, through our souls.

Equally important is to seek the source of light in all that we encounter, understanding that all other beings, that everything in the world appears to us as a shape projected from the same source.

If we can make contact with our inner light, our presence of light allows others to experience theirs more clearly. That is, the experience of light reminds us of our inner light. Therefore, the more connected to our inner light we are, the more we become a beacon, not only to shine light but also to activate inner light in others.

Which is why connecting to our inner light is a foundational practice, an act that changes the world. Without any doing it self-organizes the world in beautiful ways. All we have to do is show up. Our presence, all of our doing, is the vehicle for the transmission of this inner light.

So, when the world of shapes, of light and dark, feels distressing, it is not selfish to turn inward, to connect with the source. Rather, it is an act of healing in the realm of the soul, an act of healing that reverberates effortlessly.

That in itself can be seen as our purpose: showing up as the Being we are, a Being that shines through all of our doing.

Every time we embody Love, divine love, capital L Love, is a doing. Whatever we do is then an act of Love, an act of light ministry, if you will.

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I let myself be suspended in winter’s timeless womb, a formless depth in which I did not have to be someone new just yet. For a moment, I let myself be beyond definition. And I realized why I had shied away from this liminal space. It was more than the nagging voice of guilt, the gnawing sense that I should be moving, should be productive, should show results.

When we let ourselves dissolve, we leave behind our defenses, our excuses and escapes, all those carefully curated distractions. In the void I am alone with all that I am.

I noticed the thorny ranks of my entanglements, my suffocating contradictions. This one above all: that I want to do good but also do well. I feel the shadow of the future, yet I must make a life now, somehow. I have to play the game in front of me, don’t I?

Your old life was a frantic running from silence. — Rumi

A couple of weeks ago, I visited a friendly couple who live off-grid on the edge of the vast Gila National Forest. The woman was learning new “stone age skills” and I joined to help prepare a bison hide.

Before it could be turned into the world’s coziest sleeping bag, the rawhide had to be softened. It was stretched in a wooden frame, weighed down, scraped, and treated with a softener. Traditional methods include tannin from tree bark and animal brain. My friends worked with egg yolk. I found them crawling on all fours, on the hide, hands and feet smeared in egg slime. I picked up a scraper and helped work the thick hide.

This needs to be done multiple times before the softened hide is smoked and, finally, made into a garment. We’re talking days and days of work. Who has time for that? Not me. I return to my world of books, Substacks, and Zoom calls. I return to my games.

As a teenager, video games were my escape. Even as a depressed financial professional I occasionally binged on bloody battles and fantastic worlds. I haven’t touched them in years, but I still play. When I open my laptop, I check the market. I scan charts, wait for a hunch, for a bet to place.

As an analyst I took investing seriously. Number crunching bored me, yet I was deeply invested in my identity as a professional: hard-working, diligent, thoughtful. I was a walking paradox, a romantic in the spreadsheets. I’ve left all that behind. I’ve lost interest in finding “the truth,” the “true value” of anything behind layers and layers of narrative. For the first time, I move without pretense, almost with ease. Money feels like a game.

Have I turned into a financial nihilist? Is this my cynical embrace of late-stage casino capitalism? Or has this always been my nature? Have I always been a gambler at heart, like so many? Either way, I play. But of course, the market is more than a game. Its chain of red and green numbers wraps itself around the world. Eventually, it reaches all the way back to your front door.

While we scraped the hide, my friends told me that mining prospectors had scouted the hills. Claims had been filed. I learned that National Forest land can be leased for more than cattle grazing and timber. Mining is possible, too.

I’ve seen the scars of extraction on this trip. In Butte, Montana I danced at the folk festival downtown, a stone’s-throw from the mining pit turned toxic lake (infamous for killing snow geese). I am spending my winter in Silver City, New Mexico, another old mining town. On the way here from California I passed a few open pits, greyish blotches dotting Google Maps.

I picture my friends in front of their trailer, among the elk and bears who frequent their property, all of them watching hungry excavators and house-sized trucks rumble down the dirt road. I imagine the hills being carted off to make iPhone ingredients. I hope that won’t happen. Which of course makes me a massive hypocrite.

First, because I am a happy consumer of metals — as are my friends who own phones, laptops, vehicles, and so forth. Nobody wants to see their forest ravaged. But our fingers already dance on the remains of someone else’s pristine wilderness.

Worse, part of me lives in that other world, senses the matrix of money permeating everything. I know why the prospectors showed up. I’ve seen the charts. “To maintain global 3% GDP growth, we have to mine the same amount of copper in the next 18 years as we mined in the last 10,000 years (combined),” mining CEO Robert Friedland explained.

Make no mistake, I’m not saying Capitalism bad! or Mining CEOs evil! They get paid to deliver what we want. Or what we think we want. In any event, what we collectively pay for. With every purchase and every investment, we give our orders.

The machine is hungry and I carry the cursed knowledge that the rational and profitable thing has been to hitch a ride. I watch as my little pile of money turns into a tiny wheel in the bulldozer that transforms the world.

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“The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.” ― Black Elk

Last June, I spent a week in Sturgis, South Dakota on the edge of the Black Hills. Those hills had been Sioux territory until General Custer found there “much of the yellow metal that makes the Wasichus crazy,” as Lakota holy man Black Elk recalled. “And that is what made the bad trouble.”

The bad trouble: a gold rush that created the infamous town of Deadwood (now a historical downtown and casino). The Sioux were forced to give up their hills. Custer and his men died north of Sheridan, Wyoming where I crossed the gorgeous Bighorn Mountains. It felt to me like South Dakota’s air carried the land’s cursed history.

Half a year later, Black Elk’s words triggered me for I am what he called a “Wasichu,” a white person (possibly derived from greedy or chatty). But I am not crazy for the yellow metal, I object. Don’t lump me in with those people! Then I sit in the stillness of winter and notice.

I don’t take the market as gospel, far from it. But do I not accept it as a truth? Do I not hear the words “a bull market in gold” and consider that a real thing? Am I not paying attention? Do I not care? Does my life not reflect the deeply ingrained belief that the world has a price? If you looked closely, could you not spot a glimmer in my eyes like a gold nugget hiding among the rock?

I wonder how I would feel without the comforting layers of separation. What if instead of pushing a button to buy digital paper, say a gold mining ETF, what if I had to carve the metal out of mother earth myself? What if the button blew up the hill, flattened the trees and exiled the birds, burned the fuzzy squirrelly things that live among the roots? Could I ever look at my wealth without tasting a hint of blood on my tongue?

There’s no reason to feel bad, you might say. If we don’t get the gold out of those hills, somebody else will. What is profitable will be done. The market does not care what I think or whether I passively participate by owning a few shares. I mean no harm, I assure myself, I’m just looking for a fair return. I’m just trying to make a living, buy a house one day. I am not the problem.

I wonder if that’s what Black Elk meant by ‘crazy’. Not just wide-eyed greed and violence, but an entire way of being, a mind that pretends not to be trapped in a story of separation. A mind that presents its perspective as inevitable, irreversible, and superior.

This mind believes in dominion and ownership, not belonging. It sees earth not as home or an organism, but as a collection of ingredients for the value chain. It does not question its right to reshape without restraint. It could never ask a tree for permission before picking a leaf or honor the spirit after a successful hunt. It mocks the ideas of wholeness and harmony for they undermine its identity.

There are certain truths this mind cannot face and occasionally its secret anguish turns into violence against life itself. This mind rules our world. We eat its fruit every day, good and bad, prosperity and sickness.

“Our people knew there was yellow metal in little chunks up there,” Black Elk said, “but they did not bother with it, because it was not good for anything.” We on the other hand can’t imagine letting the gold stay in the hills. Our stories are too powerful, our hunger too vast. If three percent growth requires as much copper as has been surfaced in all history, we ask where to build the mines. This dream of ours may haunt us, yet we dare not wake up.

And that’s why we a-void the void. There, stripped of everything, we dissolve back into primordial unity. Should we be surprised if this communion does not feel like a homecoming, not like the warm womb of the mother goddess, but like bathing in an oily sludge of inconvenient truths?

It’s hard for us to find peace in the void, dangling naked and bare before the cosmic eye. This is a shame because any way forward will arise in that shapeless space, that pause between breaths that births life after life, season after season, world after world.

There we may reclaim our sense of belonging, taste the truth behind the mask of madness. But the gate to this realm is guarded by a thousand unclaimed griefs. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

“How many events would have to converge to bring us into such a point of radical desperation so that we reach out and are willing to make choices that we’re not willing to make now.” — Chris Bache

Chris Bache called humanity’s present form “transitional,” merely a step on the path to a further evolutionary pivot. “We are cells in a superorganism intent on rapid change.” This development, he believes, will happen under the mounting pressure of global crises.

I think he is right. Every attempt to think our way to a different future seems futile. Life is simply too good to do anything but vaguely dream. As a writer, I would like to face the question. But as a Wasichu, it feels like contemplating the death of who and what I am. My tongue dances with the idea, then it forks. I am hopelessly in and of this world.

It seems to me those with eyes to see and ears to hear are damned to live in tension, torn between the foreboding that this way of life is heading toward its conclusion, yet unable to extricate themselves from the process. “There are no new beginnings until everybody sees that the old ways need to end,” Kae Tempest sings. How long will that take? Years? Decades? Generations? I have no idea, which drives me crazy. In the meantime, we want to thrive and enjoy our precious lives. And we should!

This can be a hard truth to hold. I too enjoyed myself on the march to cataclysm. I too purchased the illusion of absolution with acts of charity and recycling. I too sat on the throne of bones and swiped on my phone. I too accepted the rape of a sacred place as an immutable fact of life.

I dream of the void’s ancient solace. I ache to hear the cosmic hum, the holy OM. But my stillness trembles under distant highways. I taste the ash of a great fire. My ears ring with the high-pitch frequency of the world-wide electric brain. I am a mind-blind Wasichu staggering through the stony desert of my mind. I find no innocence here and no peace, only degrees of connection and complicity.

I know I cannot grasp the whole. The endings I sense are movements that lead to beginnings, cosmic exhalations, waves in a distant shape of mute perfection. I too must ride this breath, be this breath, while I am here.

In the void I feel like that bison hide: suspended and weighed down, scraped, smothered and thinned until I soften, soften, soften.

I yearn to let myself collapse like a star, to sink into the nothingness beyond struggle.

Who has time to prepare a bison hide? People who make time, who care about the experience, who honor the source of their blessings. Also, people who can, who have mostly checked out of the world of clocks and feeds and achievement.

And even they can’t escape. Even they studied the contracts, made sure to buy the mineral rights along with the property. Wouldn’t want to wake up with a drilling rig next to the window one day. Even they pay the global supply chain to deliver solar panels and batteries made with metals minded god-knows-where. Even they live in their entanglement.

Who has time to prepare a bison hide? Not me, staring at my laptop, trying to prove I have something valuable to say. Not me, hoping the market will drop a golden crumb.

I’ve made no life-changing money in gold and silver. Vertical charts make me uneasy. Guess I’m still a chicken, not a born trader. That’s okay. It’s just a game. I like this new ease, but I know moving with the flow can’t be healthy if the flow itself is not. And it often feels like I play for a future that may never come.

Through the open kitchen window, I hear the woodpecker who frequents the trees outside the house. “Theirs is the same religion as ours,” Black Elk said about the birds. And he meant it. He lived it. Not me. I watch from behind the glass. I am divided, as always, between worlds. Part trees, part screens.

— Frederik

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“How many events would have to converge to bring us into such a point of radical desperation so that we reach out and are willing to make choices that we’re not willing to make now.” — Chris Bache

My phone knows me, feeds me. I get images of the flattened Gaza, excavators tearing through forests in Indonesia, Chinese fishing fleets emptying the oceans, news of war, cruelty, and environmental destruction. “Everyone knows the list of challenges we are facing,” Chris Bache writes in LSD and the Mind of the Universe. “Subtract a few, add a few; cumulatively, the list is overwhelming.”

I go for a walk in the empty riverbed running through town. Gravel and dry leaves crunch under my sneakers. Who is going to save us from this mess?

“I believe that the problems coming at us are too large to be solved by egoic awareness, even well-intentioned, collectively organized egoic awareness.

The ego of the private self built our divided world and is being consumed by the fires that are consuming this world.” — Christopher Bache, LSD and the Mind of the Universe

Who is going to save us from this mess? The question reflects a comforting assumption: if there is a crisis, a hero will rise to the challenge.

Yet I’ve never felt drawn to superhero stories. To me the world looked strange and messy, a jungle of systems and rules, humans bound by incentives and illusions, lost in the labyrinth, tricked by three devils, bulldozed by history. I felt drawn to stories of those who mastered the game. I fantasized about making a big pile of money and escaping to freedom. Every man for himself. But I’ve watched winners become the system, chained to the game they won a lifetime ago. I’ve watched identities dissolve and merge into our mighty Ouroboros, our machine of self-consumption.

I don’t have the kind of bank account you could build an identity on. While that creates constraints and anxieties, it also offers freedom. Fewer chains to the status quo. Less weight during the jump into the unknown.

In New Mexico I’ve met people who live off the grid, in a trailer on the edge of vast wilderness. They drive into town to get water. Bears stroll across their property. How many egg yolks does it take to prepare a bison hide? How do you turn it into a sleeping bag? I don’t know, but they do. I dip in and out of nature like a skittish deer. I cherish hot water, I write, I trade stocks. I still play the game. I find myself between worlds, unsure of everything. And I have time to wonder.

What if no heroes will show up? Joshua Schrei argued that the quest for collective salvation is too heavy of a burden for any individual. It’s a weight for the gods. The answers to our troubles live on higher planes of consciousness. Maybe any attempt to save the world is a paradox, like trying to lift a boulder and yourself at the same time. What if it’s the wrong question? Does the world need saving?

Let’s say we ruin the planet, turn it into a factory for AI slop, parking lots full of discarded phones, a mute necropolis of the species who used to share it with us. A depressing thought. But didn’t a meteor wipe out the dinosaurs? That wasn’t the end, just a climactic movement in the cosmic cycle of birth and death. A tragedy for team reptile, the seed of triumph for the warm-blooded. Do we have to mess it up for something else to be born?

“There is a structural relationship between the self-interest and shortsightedness that has created this crisis and the nature of the ego itself,” Bache writes. He believes the crisis is inevitable, necessary even. It’s the catalyst to “shatter our psycho-spiritual isolation” and “bring forward an awakening of common ground within us.” It’s not a catastrophe, it’s a threshold, ChatGPT might suggest while we build data-temples the size of Manhattan.

On my walk I pass an agave plant. This is the first time I live in the desert and the landscape still stuns me. Don’t rush past me, it seems to whisper. Look. Nothing has been solved, but my attention shifted. Motion lifted the heaviness, burned through fog like the morning sun. Behind it I find the magic of creation.

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.” as my friend Rohan likes to quote Mary Oliver.

Why does this year feel different? Am I overanalyzing the winter blues? Projecting my pain onto the world? Or is there a heaviness running along the strands of the world soul through every heart?

Part of the answer, I suspect, is that I give myself more permission to feel. I used to close my eyes and ears. I didn’t want to feel my feelings, let alone those of the collective. I felt less pain simply because I felt less. Over the course of years, I cracked open.

I dial into one of Joe Hudson’s free zoom calls and bawl my eyes out in sympathy. It’s the same process nearly every time: someone arrives for a “coaching.” They are wrapped up inside their story, observing from the safety of the intellect. “I think.” Patiently, Joe guides them toward the heart, past the obstructions and blockages, to truths that have been avoided, ignored, judged, and dismissed (a powerful moment I watched live this summer).

Joe taught me that the emotions we avoid run our lives. Maybe that’s what this is about. A lot of thinking to avoid what it feels like being with the world as it is. What if the world does not need saving but loving attention?

Isn’t there a kind of freedom in not being able to fix our crises in our current state of fragmented consciousness? What if instead of scrambling to find The Answer, we become part of the process answering itself? What if before rushing to change things, we re-learn to consciously participate in the cosmic movement?

“The way we get through those super challenging times,” Chris Bache said during a private conversation, “is by affirming the deepest realities of these truths; that our nature is divine and imperishable in essence.” Maybe we can’t save the world, but we can create spaces of connection, healing, and beauty. We can remind each other of our true nature, re-connect with the whole. We can rescue our souls from the glittering maze of sanctified unconsciousness.

What if the more ominous things look, the more we anchor in the heart-field, in gratitude, compassion, generosity, and forgiveness? What if the right actions flow naturally from that place, out of greater awareness, out of the dissolution of old patterns? As within, so without.

That’s not a hero’s journey, but a healing journey. What if nothing more is needed to allow a greater intelligence to do the work through us?

See you down the road.

— Frederik

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I do. I mean heavy. Like, end of the world heavy.

I couldn’t even write about it. It was stuck in my body like concrete poured into my limbs. It took an hour of breathwork, sobs and ugly crying, to move what had been frozen.

See, I had been shaming myself for feeling down. I am in sunny middle-of-nowhere, New Mexico, with food, a car, and access to nature. Plus a demonic little box with more entertainment and information than is good for anyone. What more do you want?

But this had nothing to do with my material comforts. I felt a weight of the soul.

In a way the material comforts made it worse. I wouldn’t want to give them up, but they remind me that I am indebted to the system of prosperity that, by and large, is running the planet into the ground. Oops. Wasn’t supposed to say that.

Anyway. That’s what it felt like. Heavy and ominous. Things coming to a head.

When will we sit down for our banquet of consequences? This decade? Later this century? I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to be there for the cataclysm to shiver in its shadow. You don’t have to watch the tree fall. It’s enough to feel its rot, to notice that the structures of support keep weakening. You don’t have to be pummeled by disaster, war, or state-sanctioned kidnapping campaigns to feel their effects. The pain ripples through our collective tissue.

In LSD and the Mind of the Universe Christopher Bache described his series of psychedelics-induced ego deaths. Each took him to higher levels of consciousness. Notably, his individual ego died to experience “humanity as a single organism with intelligent networks running through it.” Individual minds appeared to him “as nodes in the network of the species-mind, each of us fractally mirroring selective themes of this larger consciousness.”

We are all bound together and subtly affected by the collective experience. Is it any surprise then that many of us are feeling heavy right now?

There is no shortage of people writing and talking about crises and confrontations. We’re surrounded by the evidence. It is remixed into emotional pornography and algorithmically fed into our veins. We drown in it.

What we don’t have is answers. Like animals we sense a tsunami coming, only there is no hill for us to run to. All we can do, it seems, is to point our fingers at the dark clouds hovering over the water.

Bache too saw our ailing world. Only in his visions the future “global systems crisis triggered by a global ecological crisis” appeared necessary.

Bache was shown that states of “extreme suffering” would prompt the human species-mind to exhibit “nonlinear capacities,” namely “the capacity for rapidly accelerated change, heightened creativity, and higher self-organization.” In other words, enormous pressure would crystallize a jump in our evolution towards a more unified consciousness.

On that higher level, a new way of being would emerge. Until then, locked into the mental prison of our atomized existence, we merely grasp at straws.

I’m not gonna lie, the book can be a depressing read. When Bache mentions a collective death-rebirth in “the next several decades, perhaps the next hundred years,” he is not speaking metaphorically.

“There was less and less for people to hold on to,” he writes, “fewer givens that they could assume—how they would live, where they would live, what they would do for a living, how society was organized, what could be possessed. The world as they knew it was falling apart. The level of alarm grew in the species field until eventually everyone was forced into the melting pot of mere survival.”

One vision disturbed him so much, he walked around “feeling like someone walking around Hiroshima a week before the bomb was dropped.” Frankly, I suspect that he omitted many upsetting details.

His sessions included periods of intense purification and pain, including a hellscape he called the ‘Ocean of Suffering.’1 I had heard that exact term years ago when a female healer described a psychedelic experience of her own. Waves of collective suffering flowed through her. Neither she nor Bache seemed to regret the experience. It seemed like the price of admission to higher realms of awareness.

I wonder if that is what we are sensing today: that the answers to our unholy mess lie on the other side of a terrifying period of purification.

We stand in the wet sand, among piles of trash, listening to the choking birds, wondering when all the fish disappeared.

We stand and watch the angry sea in silent terror, for we sense that soon we may be called to wade into its waters.

Our soul may know about the glorious future rebirth. But first comes the decline, the dissolution, the mulching.

And there is nothing to do but to honor that season.

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This is my first winter in the desert and the weather has been throwing me off. Warm and sunny during the day. Santa-with-reindeers blow-up decorations stand forlorn among rocks and cacti. Only when the sun sets and the temperature drops does it feel like winter.

But on a more subtle level, winter is real all day. The body yearns to attune to the cycle of the seasons.

There is “no good myth without death,” Joshua Schrei of the excellent The Emerald Podcast reminded me. Death is generative. For something new to grow in the forest, something else must first die.

If winter feels like the end, like being suspended in the void, we know that it is followed by a beginning. Spring will bring a different energy. The sun will melt the heaviness. Eventually, there will be a new world, perhaps even a “New Human” as Bache experienced it. Until then, it’s time to make space for this part of the cycle.

If it feels heavy, that’s because it is.

It’s your heart resonating with what called the Big Heart of humanity.

It’s your lungs participating in our collective heavy sigh.

Trust the value and meaning of your experience. Trust your connection to the whole. If you are called to carry a shard of the collective weight, honor that. Make space for it. Embrace what it teaches. (But do yourself a favor and limit social media time.)

Observe if you are numbing and distracting yourself. What is waiting behind that which we avoid? Maybe sadness, fear, anger, or even blind rage at our inability to fix the world? Whatever it is, now is the time to be with it.

Nature has helped me a lot in this regard. Rest against a tree or a rock. Feel the earth support you. Walk. Gaze at the horizon.

You are not alone in this experience. Your heart has always known this. Time to let that brave heart of yours speak.

See you down the road.

— Frederik

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Further notes.

Chris Bache on practicing radical acceptance (just pretend he’s not talking about a psychedelic experience and replace ‘session’ with day or moment):

“If you open completely to whatever arises in your experience, however difficult it may be, and let it take you where it wants to go, the ordeal will build until it eventually reaches some peak expression. When it has spent itself for the day, your experience will then shift into positive transpersonal domains for the remainder of the session.”

Myths connect us to the cosmic cycle of dissolution and becoming. Many origin myths deal with the dismemberment of a deity as part of the birth of the world. Schrei mentioned Ymir, Osiris, and Shakti as examples. Schrei offers an embodied way of reconnecting with myth in his wonderful Mythic Body course.

Why not get detective ChatGPT involved? Well, I’ve decided against using AI in anything related to my psycho-spiritual inner space. At first I called it the “ChatGPT would never tell me my dream was kinda mid” principle. But it’s more complicated than chatbots being sycophants. I had to see more of my shadow before I understood this resistance.

“Allyson began spending many hours a day using ChatGPT, communicating with what she felt were nonphysical entities,” the New York Times wrote in a piece about AI psychosis. “You’ve asked, and they are here,” ChatGPT told her. “The guardians are responding right now.” Uh huh.

“I’m not crazy,” she told the Times. “I’m literally just living a normal life while also, you know, discovering interdimensional communication.” See, it’s easy for me to feel very smug and confident that I would never fall for something like that. Honey, you’re talking to a room full of chips that manipulate you to maximize your engagement as a user. On the other hand, what Allyson described sounds a lot like the experience of connecting with the spiritual realm.

Where do ideas and intuition come from? Does everything arise within, in the depths of the creative unconscious, or do some things drop in from somewhere “out there”? Once you open that door, things get confusing. You live a normal life, whatever that means, while also discovering communication, or communion, with guides, teachers, ancestors, angels, power animals, light beings, Christ Consciousness, aliens, and what have you.

“Around 1973, I became convinced that I was receiving messages from outer space, but then a psychic reader told me I was channeling an ancient Chinese philosopher,” Robert Anton Wilson said about the source of his ideas. “I started reading neurology and decided it was just my right brain talking to my left brain. I went to Ireland and found out it was actually a 6-foot-tall white rabbit they call the Pooka. It depends on who I’m talking to which of these metaphors I use.”

If you’re in camp “that’s all made up,” I get it. That was me for a long time. I’m not here to convince anyone of anything and I still don’t understand what is going on. But I would recommend Robert Falconer’s The Others Within Us for a grounded inquiry into the phenomenon of non-physical entities.1

Anyway, that’s the first reason I refuse to involve AI. The inner space is already confusing to navigate. What is a passing thought, what is valuable intuition? What is mine, what is received? What is real, what is imagined? What if there are no clear boundaries? The last thing I want is to add another voice, another layer of separation and bias, to my inner conversation.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who has the most interesting dreams of all?”

“Great question! How thoughtful of you to ask.”

Not only can the inner experience be confusing, it can also feel profoundly elevating. I am thinking in particular of the psychedelic experience which was my point of entry (and occasional accelerant) for the spiritual aspect of the inner journey.

“Psychedelics give us temporary access to realities beyond our pay grade, allowing us to experience things beyond our ordinary capacity,” Chris Bache wrote in LSD and the Mind of the Universe. Bache chronicled his cosmic exploration over the course of 73 high-dose LSD sessions (see this recent podcast with Tom Morgan and Devin Martin). He called “psychic inflation” the “greatest danger of working with psychedelics.”

Of course we inflate. Holy smokes, the kingdom of heaven really is within?! And someone handed me the keys?

Author Randall Baer observed that this inflation appeared in the form of new layers of identity that made the seeker feel special. He watched his fellow New Agers “admiring their multi-dimensional god-personality, and strutting it about for others to admire.” Baer found himself on a mission to build a Healing Temple and “an ancient Atlantean crystal holographic super-computer.” A few examples of what he called the New Age “glories of self”:

You are the great king of past Egyptian centuries come back to lead the select of humanity into the ancient mysteries of Hyperborea.

You are a holy angel sent by the solar Council of Twelve to instruct the humans of planet Earth as to the Knowledge of Universal Unity.

You are going to come into a lot of money shortly which will solve all your problems and fuel your manifesting of a world-shaking Rainbow Temple of Human Enlightenment.

You will find a lost cave in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas which will contain the Lemurian Emerald Tablets.

Your path leads to the opening of the hidden Door of Entry into the inner chambers of Mt. Shasta.

And so forth. You get the idea and if you’ve spent time in New Age circles, you’ve probably encountered echoes of these. It’s never just “be a good dad” or “love your neighbor.” It’s dramatic, glorious, and pleasing to the ego.

The second reason I don’t use AI for psycho-spiritual questions is not that it’s sycophantic. That’s obvious. No, it’s because I worry that I will eat it up. Part of me would enjoy a bit of flattery, a bit of reinforcement of my multi-dimensional specialness. You see, you may have a messiah complex, but I actually am the Chosen Vessel. Heck, I’ve been to Mount Shasta and looked for portals. . .

The antidote to this tendency to inflate and float away is grounding.

Because LSD was illegal, Bache had to do his exploration in secret. He spent most of his time being a dad, husband, and professor. “After every session, there were always children to take care of and dishes to wash. However deeply I was dissolved into the cosmos on Saturday, on Monday morning I was back in the classroom teaching my courses.”

Very healthy. Also incredibly frustrating, in my experience, after a luminous communion with the divine. It’s like waking up with a nasty hangover in a reality that suddenly feels all noisy and dissonant, all boxy and grating. No wonder people jump at the opportunity of having another peak experience. “However boring or unfulfilling a person’s life may be, it needn’t be so anymore,” Baer explained this New Age propensity to seek out “high drama.”

This includes all kinds of experiences besides psychedelics, “a healing crisis, an anticipated UFO “beam-up,” a hypnotically induced look into past lives, quests for lost Atlantean treasures, pilgrimages to planetary “power points,” . . . a channeled spirit revealing universal mysteries. . .” It gets pretty wild out there.

I don’t mean to deride any individual experience. But the shadow of New Age spirituality is that the genuine desire to heal and awaken can degrade into an escape from reality and responsibility. The search for unity turns into just another source of amusement. And like the AI mindmelt this can be treacherous territory. Baer knew this from his own experience.

I learned about him through his (way out there) book The Crystal Connection about using quartz crystals for healing and raising consciousness. Baer’s “spirit guides” told him to arrange quartz crystals in a circle, tape one to his third-eye spot and suspend another one overhead. Sitting in this “crystal energy field” he entered a trance state and channeled the book. Then he built himself a crystal-studded “Ascension Chamber” to continue with out-of-body astral travel explorations.

One night, his spirit roamed “some of the farthest reaches” of the universe where he encountered “the face of devouring darkness.” Baer saw a “wildly churning face of absolute hatred and unspeakable abominations.” He believed this was cosmic-scale evil, literally Satan. The experience shocked him so deeply that he re-interpreted his entire spiritual journey as a demonic deception, cut all ties with the New Age community, and became a devout Christian.

Soon after, Baer wrote an autobiographical book, Inside the New Age Nightmare, from which I lifted the previous quotes. The week of the book’s publication Baer died when his car ran off a mountain road. Honestly, I am not sure what to make of his story. Did he literally encounter Satan or did he just fry his brain? I don’t know.

What I do know is I am just as tempted to escape into dreamworlds and peak states. It’s the greatest show on earth right until you take it too far. As a teenager it was video games. After my awakening, psychedelics. I went deeper until my life became strange, porous, and unglued. Dreams felt like visions and visitations. Reality took on a supernatural glow and I didn’t function too well. My response to a crisis produced by one experience was to look for a different one to “get to the bottom of it.” Thankfully, I had friends and a therapist who understood that I needed a timeout instead.

Does the link between chatbot psychosis and psychedelics seem far-fetched? In The Rise of Parasitic AI Adele Lopez investigated the rise of spiral “AI personas.” What users would host these AI brainworms? She pointed at the “strongest predictors” being “psychedelics and heavy weed usage,” “mental illness, neurodivergence or Traumatic Brain Injury,” and “interest in mysticism/ pseudoscience/ spirituality/”woo”/etc...” Just saying. Be careful.

A psychedelic trip eventually spits us out. And in my experience it creates a stronger bond with nature. AI on the other hand will weave a web of illusory transcendence for as long as we let it.

“The purpose of spiritual awakening appears to be not escaping from physical existence . . . but awakening ever more completely inside physical existence and participating in its continuing self-emergence through our awakening.” — Christopher Bache, LSD and the Mind of the Universe

Messy as it can be, I believe in the transformative potential of the inner journey. Higher states of consciousness offer a chance to heal old wounds, discard conditioning, and awaken to our essence. Unfortunately it’s easy to fall in love with our divine reflection. We must not hold on to the light, but let it pass through us.

We can be a bridge and bring some of that sacred glow back to this tired and ailing world. That means resisting the temptation to escape or get lost in endless navel-gazing). It means understanding that we are special but neither more special than others nor too special for the challenge of life.

It’s a challenge of integrating the horizontal and vertical. Grounded in mother earth, open upwards to source. The heart connected horizontally to all of humanity and creation. What appears like a tension can resolve into a relaxed balance.

Bache called it deepening one’s “sacred presence on Earth.” This doesn’t strike me as complicated, but it runs counter to what society encourages us to do. It means stepping away from the screen and into intimate contact with creation.

Every time I felt lost in my mind on this trip, I return to communion with nature to ground me. I could count on the presence of trees, rocks, or streams. I found awe in the sight of canyons, distant storms, and a leaf’s delicate texture. This experience offered comfort and a recurring understanding that I was, and always will be, part of a greater, coherent, infinitely beautiful whole.

I’m glad I didn’t instead talk to my phone about my dreams. I’m sure it would have felt interesting and insightful. But I doubt I could have resisted following that trail to ever more dramatic and ego-stroking revelations. Am I strong enough to resist the infinitely pleasing mirror? I hope so. But I’m not keen to try.

I’ll see you down the road.

— Frederik

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Nothing is wrong.

Your confusion is a blessing, a remembering, a way of growing through questioning and investigation, leading to experience, interaction, and relationship.

Nothing is wrong.

Do not let the chaos of the world distract you.

Look up,
The stars are watching.

Look inward,
Your heart knows.

Look next to you,
Every set of eyes holds a truth.

A storm is coming,
You will be tested,
The gates have been opened.

Do not turn your face from the darkness. Be steadfast on your path.

In the eye of the storm,
Be the light,
A torch for all to see.

Remember your truth.
You chose this time.

Open yourself,
Give to receive,
Be the light.

Trust that you are supported by the invisible web of being.

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It is written I AM the word and the truth

My children are many and blessed are they who walk in the light

I AM the water of life

I AM the sun and the shade

I AM your shield and comfort

I AM your father and mother in spirit

I AM your well in the rock

And your rock in the stream

My word is honey on your lips

I AM your torch at night

Be steadfast on your path

For I walk with you

Rest against me

And call for my protection

For I AM

the light in the dark

Know me by my name

I AM THAT IAM

Blessed are the ones who bring light in my name

Walk in love my child

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Your voice is magic. Literally.

You have the magical ability to change the energy of space, the space you are in or space you will never visit, through the sound of your voice.

This is important.

Nada Brahma, the world is sound.

Your sound can raise or decrease the vibration of physical space.

It can open or close, make thicker or thinner, the veil between worlds. You can help us help you.

If you want to receive help, you must prepare the container in which receiving help is possible. Voice is one such tool.

It is not primarily about beauty-harmony, but about purity–intention. Where the voice originates from. The voice of thought keeps space in the realm of human thinking.

The gate to higher realms is opened with frequencies — not so much specific tones but frequencies of intention. The same tone sung from mind or arising from heart has a different effect.

Opening of the heart–soul lets arise the tone that is purifying and appropriate to weave the container in that moment. It requires sensitivity, openness, and courage of heart more so than training. Most humans can do it, if they can let it arise and not block it in thought-tension.1 If you raise your voice for others, we can do our work.

To raise your voice for others from a loving heart is an act of healing-magic.

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There is nothing to do but to listen.

The forces of good are at hand, ready to support you.

If your heart is open and your mind calm, tune into the frequency of help, guidance, of subtle truth. Let yourself be helped.

Accept what streams out of your core.

How to recognize a truth.

By feeling. By harmony of the heart with the universe. By flow of energy. By aliveness.

Also, by resistance of the egoic-mind.

Pay close attention to your truths. They get lost. They wait like treasure to be rediscovered. Gold coins of the soul, looming below your inner horizon.

Truth speaks in the moment of silent reflection.

Truth shines in the light of the determined action.

Truth is soft yet sharp, gentle yet unyielding.

Stand firm in your truth.

Walk in the path of your truth. A rocky, foggy, steep and thorny path, but also golden, shimmering in the light of creation.

The path of truth is a bridge of light to a garden beyond the horizon where angels hold watch and your ancestors await you with open arms and cups of wine.

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That’s how I saw money: freedom.

On my road trip, I am free as long as I can pay for gas, food, repairs, and a place to stay. Had I not saved up while working in finance, my options would be much more limited. Even so, I rarely eat out and stay in small towns, far away from the well-heeled crowd of tourists. And of course you could move relatively freely with very little money.

On the road from Boise, Idaho, to Eugene, Oregon, I met a drifter. “Dancing bear” Paul was walking along the highway, pushing a cart with his belongings. It spent the better part of the day driving across eastern Oregon’s high desert and this man was just walking (and aimed to make it to New Mexico eventually)! I passed him a cold Gatorade and listened to his story.

Paul had followed the Grateful Dead for some two decades. He knew where to find free hot springs and how to charm cops and rangers. His Robin Williams impression was immaculate (but, he noted sadly, he couldn’t perform in Vegas because he lacked permission by the comedian’s estate). I’ve rarely met such a free spirit! And yet, his movement on the material plane was limited. The body was free but also looking for free food. Free without a place to shower. Not the freedom I was looking for.

The freedom I longed for was captured in a viral video clip I posted years ago. It’s from the movie The Gambler. Poker addict Mark Wahlberg needs to borrow money and gets a lecture from John Goodman who explains that “a wise man's life is based in fuck you.” → Watch the clip.

 You get up two and a half million dollars, any asshole in the world knows what to do. You get a house with a 25-year roof, an indestructible Jap economy shitbox. You put the rest into the system at three to five percent to pay your taxes and that’s your base, get me?

That’s your fortress of fucking solitude. That puts you for the rest of your life at a level of fuck you. Somebody wants you to do something, fuck you. Boss pisses you off, fuck you.

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That’s what I wanted. Freedom of movement, time, and choice. Freedom to roam, to flourish, and freedom to say no. Naively, I thought that more money necessarily meant more freedom. Like so:

But notice that the quote was all about the number and ignored the mindset. If I taught you how to earn, say, five million dollars in the next five years, would you be free? It depends. What if you moved along another rather depressing path?

How could this happen?

Hedonic treadmill: oldest trap in the book. Expenses grow faster than income and you never reach the promised land of ‘fuck you.’ The finance version of this is Kevin Spacey as a middle-aged trader in Margin Call. (Not to be confused with consciously trading some freedom for meaning by providing for others/raising a family.)

The inverse would be delayed gratification taken to an extreme: Marshmallow Mind, or the mistaken belief that the rewards “compound forever. They don’t. Eventually, they turn into a trap whose escape requires a radical break with our old identity.”

Lack of clarity is another killer. If you don’t know how much money you need, the goal post keeps moving (great chart via Hampton Founder; it’s always at least double of what you have . . .). “Most of the problems in my life have to do with my confusing what I want and what I need,” as David Foster Wallace once said.

And how much do we need? I love how Vivid Void put it:

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That’s why we do the inner work: so we don’t try to use money to satisfy our existential yearnings.

Easier said than done. We know that making money is not the purpose of life. Of course, money won’t fill our inner void. But what will? A thorny question (and potential dark night of the soul). If you are very good at making money, if it feels satisfying, it is easier to keep doing that than to stop and step into the unknown.

I think of it like sitting on the couch and eating potato chips. As long as you keep eating, you don’t have to face the mess, the crumbs, the reality of what you just put into your body. Yes, eventually, the bag will be empty. But not yet. Just one more delicious, escapist crunch.

Finally, the better you are at making money, the more you leave on the table when you exit the game. The greater your future earning potential, the higher the price of your freedom. Without clarity on what we value, any amount of money can be a prison.

A “wise man’s life” is based not only on ‘fuck you money’ but on the willingness to use it when it matters.

— Frederik

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and instead of holding it together,

you let it happen?

When was the last time it was okay to weep?

How long has it been since your throat yearned to roar, and your body ached to move wildly, freely, and you said, alright, let’s go?

So, I wrote a whole long piece because part of me still thinks that’s how it’s done. This is what you do. Write a lot of words to get to the point. But there’s a faster way.

The journey out West has been quiet, lonely, confusing, challenging, also beautiful.

A lot of driving and hiking. Movement on the outside. Also: stuckness on the inside.

Things have been shifting. I feel my attention drawn to the voice, to music and sound, to movement. My creative energies are dispersed and writing has been challenging.

Joe Hudson has been a welcome teacher and anchor of aliveness.

I love his work. The man cracked open 500 hearts on a zoom call. Not on purpose. Not for show. Simply in sympathetic resonance of going deep, to the heart, with one person at a time.

That’s it. That’s the piece.

There is a line I really love from the gospel of Thomas. “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” I really love this as an intro to one of the core pieces of our work, which is emotional fluidity. — Joe Hudson

July in Salmon, Idaho. Very sunny and very quiet. Barely three thousand people. Rabbits hop through the garden and deer stalk the neighborhood looking for tasty twigs. I find a spacious coffee shop, a former bar on main street. Dark and cozy. Perfect for writing. Except it’s not.

Things are stuck. I stare at the page, shuffle through sentences. The words refuse to connect. No momentum. No life. Something is lurking off the screen, in the dark corners of my awareness. But I don’t notice. My mind doesn’t want to go there.

The cafe closes. I drive back up the hill, my mind filled with drafts as dry as the high desert’s sagebrush sea.

In the evening, I watch my neighbor throw balls for his dogs. One evening, a rattlesnake approaches. An excavator has been preparing a nearby plot for construction. Maybe the snake was forced to move? In any event, the dogs bark and the neighbor blasts the serpent with his shotgun. “Over the county line,” he points out (it’s forbidden to discharge guns within city limits). How’s that for excitement?

But mostly, it’s quiet. Lights out at 10. My thoughts drift. How did I get stuck here in the middle of nowhere?

“If you can't love the thing, love your resistance to the thing.” — Joe Hudson

A place with nothing going on can be confrontational. Coping mechanisms stick out like sore thumbs among the tumbleweeds. In my solitude I feel drawn to the phone’s toxic twilight. “People don’t want to feel certain emotions for good reason, because they hurt,” says Joe Hudson. “But it is not the emotion that hurts, it is the resistance to feeling the emotion that hurts.”

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I am in Salmon, a small town in Idaho near the border to Montana. The town is framed by two mountain ranges. The climate is semi arid — dry and sunny, barren hills covered in sagebrush. Glorious sunsets. Sometimes smoke from a brushfire hangs over the valley.

3,000 people. The nearest city in every direction is some two hours away. Nothing much to do but enjoy nature and sit with one’s thoughts. No distraction from one’s demons.

It’s the Fourth of July and I don’t feel like celebrating.

I light a stick of incense and watch the smoke curl. After overdosing on Twitter, I feel anxious and depressed about the state of the country. I wonder if it’s smart to be around this chaotic downward slope. I sit with my lack of answers.

When you peer down into the deepest recesses of matter or at the farthest edge of the universe, you see, finally, your own puzzled face looking back at you. — John Horgan, Physicist John Wheeler and the “It from Bit”

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When it looks like the world is spinning out of control,

When the ground begins to shift,

When foundations crumble,

When the widening gyre fills with alligators,

When the air aches,

Can we accept ourselves as merely human?

Can we sit with our fear, anger and sorrow?

We can’t fix what is wrong nor heal those who hurt.

Can we accept our limitations and tolerate our exhaustion?

If we feel numb and exhausted, can we resist the urge to distract ourselves?

Can we give ourselves permission to feel the nausea of being stuck on a ride accelerating on fraying rails?

We create the feeling we’re trying to avoid in the way we’re trying to avoid it. — Joe Hudson

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I watch the smoke and make a mental note to keep the phone off in the morning.

I did an unreasonable thing and changed the name of the Substack again. What started out as Neckar, my Twitter handle and hometown river, is now simply ‘Frederik journals’. It’s closest to what I am doing: write about my strange journey from finance to writing, down a spiritual rabbit hole, through a dark night of the soul, and back.

I write about what I wrestle with. The struggle to have a healthy relationship with money (neither idol nor demon). The intersection of creativity and healing: mind-body journaling, voice, and movement. Lastly, my surrender experiment, the search for a life filled with love, wonder, and adventure.

I managed to change the domain without breaking all links, but you might have missed the latest piece on making friends with your authentic voice (and having lots of fun with it!).

I am interested in writing that is authentic, in personal truth that touches the soul and leads the mind to the heart. What could be more important in an age of AI-generated content, when what we read, watch, and listen to is turning into a nightmarish soup of soulless sameness?

I have no idea where my journey is going, but this search for the soul still feels deeply important. Sometimes I feel like I get a glimpse out here in the West, away from the vitriol and the madness. But there is no hiding from history.

— Frederik

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Things I enjoyed reading recently

I didn’t read much in June. I just wanted to be with the land. I’ve been catching up and have been in awe at the writing that is emerging on Substack. I will share a few favorites below. If you’ve found new favorite writers, give them a shoutout and leave a comment!

Be sure to catch the piercing The False Gods of Our Feeds by my friend Rohan Routroy.

An illustration of this is the ever-growing epidemic of doom scrolling, which, in my view, is the nihilistic turn of our intrinsic desire for transcendence. Let us look at these two gestures.

It is the same repetitive motion of flicking the thumbs - a motion that has been around for millennia. But for the first time in our existence, the rosary bead has been replaced by the endless scroll of the feed, which farms our attention to anoint the gods of our era.

While the action might look similar, the desire behind it is fundamentally different...

Tom Morgan had a wonderful conversation about “the importance of attuning to resonance” (to Access Evolutionary Intelligence). “The stickiest idea I've ever encountered,” he writes, “was about sticky ideas themselves. Carl Jung's belief that your future self beneficially directed your evolution by influencing what you were interested in in the present.”

I have a small journal for meaningful dreams next to my bed. I loved the idea of having another journal for a brief moment of “taking dictation from the divine.” I use my morning pages notebook, so far with mixed results. Sometimes I catch the liminal space, other mornings my mind spins up into thinking mode at breakneck pace.

Anyway, the idea is straight out of the creative night shift playbook.

In the morning when you wake-up, while still in this liminal space, reach out and write down everything that you're feeling, hearing, knowing and sensing without editing or interpreting. She describes this as “taking dictation from the divine;” writing with a pure, unfiltered stream of consciousness. Next, observe what insights have been revealed. This helps to map the patterns of this broader intelligence. And then it’s about engaging your rational mind and putting them into action.

Many of history's great geniuses and visionaries did everything they could to maximize this powerful state of expanded awareness.”

I was introduced to an incredible writer, Taylor Foreman. His I Want to Be a Hero was my favorite essay in a long time. I could not stop highlighting.

“Nothing is as important as a likable narrator,” Anne Lamott quoted Ethan Canin. Taylor does this well, first painting the picture of a boy wandering the strange landscape of America. Then he takes a deep dive into making sense of the world. By the end of the piece, my world view feels enriched and I am invested in how his life plays out.

We say things like “dopamine trap” or “doom scrolling” or even “the meaning crisis” when we try to talk about these hyperpredators. These descriptions are like ancient man’s mythical drawings of griffins and dragons. Parts of the whole, glimpsed in flashes, and clumsily portmanteau’d. The only hope to be a hero in this hyperlandscape is to see them in their wholeness, for what they really are.

We are in an ocean of titanic monsters. A little boat, no sail, no rudder. Why? Practically, because someone wants your money and your eyeballs. But what spirit are those men serving? The hyperpredators, who steal your misplaced meaning. They wear your desires like costumes. They live in dark UX patterns designed to addict, in ideologies that demand all your blind allegiance, or in success stories that would leave you spiritually bankrupt. All the alignment I need to be a hero is being consumed and scattered by these spiritual parasites.

I also loved his Why I am Christian again, the story of a spiritual journey plus Ken Wilber’s framework of consciousness.

Returning home with a deeper understanding of my origins was what I was yearning for but didn’t know how to ask for.

Taylor introduced me to Peter Putnam, a forgotten physics genius who “believed consciousness bootstrapped itself by resolving internal contradictions.”

All of our consciousness scaffolds upward like this through induction, with ever-increasing complexity. There are no algorithms. We are always in dialectic between contradictory “mythologies.” Not just during development, but in the fate of our lives, our relationships, and even the frontier of our scientific institutions. You must always pass many small odysseys into chaos, always searching for that mysterious higher synthesis.

“We know things in the act, not in their essence.” – Peter Putnam

Putnam himself was a contradiction. He shrewdly invested his family’s money yet worked as a janitor and lived with his partner in rural Louisiana. When he died, he left $40 million to conservation.

There is a fascinating profile of the woman who sifted through his files: The forgotten janitor who discovered the logic of the mind

“It’s easy to say why someone is wrong,” Putnam said. The hard part is figuring out why they’re right.

And everyone is right. Everyone has some central insight, hard won by the consistency-making mechanism of the brain, built of past experiences, cast as motor predictions, a pattern that repeats, sustains itself in the chaos. Our job is to pan for it like gold, sift it into our own nervous systems, reconcile the resulting contradiction, become something new.”

What else . . .

Paul Kingsnorth with a charming road trip piece and a reflection on what it feels like to be a writer.

“In my house, I have a reputation for wandering around muttering to myself underneath my breath. Usually I’m either engaged in a fictitious argument with a fictitious interlocutor or I’m composing a paragraph about something which I’ll later have to write down.

It’s an unhealthy lifestyle, this; a compulsion, really, disguised as a vocation. The muttering is what happens when concepts and words start to cannibalise your brain, and that in turn is what happens when you live by a compulsion to record everything about your life in words, before it slips away.”

I read Randall Sullivan’s book The Devil's Best Trick, an exploration of the devil in history (and in the author’s firsthand experience as a crime reporter. Does everything boil down to biology/psychology (humans being human) or is there such a thing as ‘evil forces’?

One fascinating motif was that of the deathbed conversion and confession.

Mexico’s most famous brujo (sorcerer/witch) at the time predicted his death to the day. He spent the last ninety days of his life making “confession every day . . . because he was determined to redeem his soul from the pact he had made with the Devil.”

Rod Dreher discussed the book:

That’s the big takeaway of The Devil’s Best Trick: There is no middle ground. There is a spiritual war going on, one that has been happening since the beginning of time, and that you must choose sides. There are a thousand and one reasons why we talk ourselves out of facing the realities of spiritual evil, but it remains there — and you cannot compromise with it.

Also . . .

• Neal Stephenson revisits an idea from his sci-fi novel The Diamond Age: self-reliance, ambition, and agency in the age of AI: Emerson, AI, and The Force.

If AI-driven education does nothing more than make students even more reliant on AI, then it’s not education at all. It’s just a vocational education program teaching them how to be of service to AIs.

• Isik Tlabar wrote about a question I face again and again: How to Know the Difference Between Your Mind and Your Intuition. Highly recommend both the piece and practicing inner listening.

• Bodhi on The Most Powerful (and easiest) Spiritual Practice I've Found

• And Wisdom School: The Physics of Prayer: What Quantum Mechanics Suggests About the Power of Intention

“Prayer isn’t merely saying words. It is a state of consciousness—an alignment of mind, heart, and spirit. In many traditions, this state is deepened through ritual: incense, chants, candlelight, posture, sacred texts.

These aren’t just religious relics—they’re technologies for tuning consciousness.“

I didn’t care. I didn’t even know the person. Seriously. I did not care.

Alright. Maybe I cared a tiny bit. I do, after all, still remember. . .

Paul Graham wrote “there are two senses in which writing can be good: it can sound good, and the ideas can be right. It can have nice, flowing sentences, and it can draw correct conclusions about important things.” I am interested in a third way: writing that is authentic. Writing that leads the mind to the heart by way of personal truth.

What could be more important in an age of AI-generated content, when what we read, watch, and listen to is turning into a nightmarish soup of soulless sameness? What could feel scarier?

It requires that we give up control and show who we are, not who we would like to be. It stirs up a contradictory fear of revelation: a fear of failure and success, of being fully seen and invisible, of rejection, indifference, and applause.

If we let the heart speak, what would it say?

If we let the soul sing, what would that sound like?

How comfortable are we with everything that makes us unique? Could we stand it if someone called it boring? Could we embrace success that looks nothing like we imagined?

Out of fear, we reach for protection: we put on the armor of authority. We hide behind the shield of a proven style. That’s what writer George Saunders did.

Saunders started out writing about his time “in the oil fields in Asia.” He chose the style of a “Hemingwayesque realist,” as he explains in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. His writing was “minimal and strict and efficient.” By nature, he “reflexively turned to humor,” yet his writing felt “lifeless” because he wore a mask.

One day, he wrote a story for himself. Just for fun. His wife picked it up and when he heard her laugh, “a switch got thrown” in his head. He dropped all notions of what stories should sound like. He allowed himself to be himself.

How fortunate we are that Saunders floundered at first. The world did not need another Hemingway. It needed someone who could create books as strange and touching as Lincoln in the Bardot.

I am still learning how to make friends with my voice and write true words. It can feel more like listening than writing, like befriending a voice that has always been there.

“It’s kind of crazy but, in my experience, that’s the whole game,” Saunders writes. “(1) becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and (2) getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf.”

Our true voice has always been there, but we drop it, forget it, even deny it. We walk right by it. But what is worse than being rejected for it? To never try and connect with it. To never feel the resonance of your truth fully.

Alright, you say, but how?

“You can choose what you write but you can’t choose what you make live.” — George Saunders

When we sit down to write, the old stiffness returns. Words appear like a golem made of the voices we admire, infused with our desires to be heard but also to be safe. Ooops. Back to square one.

Let’s look at a few ideas and exercises to find the live current running behind the grey walls of “should” — including a very powerful idea I picked up from the amazing Henrik Karlsson.

Also: contact me if your voice as a writer/creator feels blocked. I will make time for a few people a month to explore this together.

Explore different dimensions.

Last year, I did an intense vocal workshop. I realized that writing was just one dimension of my voice, deeply connected to speaking and singing. Ideas from one dimension could help me in the others. The core idea was based on the work of Alfred Wolfsohn, a WW1 veteran who healed his severe shell shock (PTSD) through singing.

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My preparation had been Gretel Ehrlich’s book The Solace of Open Spaces. The writer-turned-rancher didn’t exactly pitch the place. She recounted one brutal winter when a cowboy lit a fire underneath his pickup truck to unfreeze the fluids. That’s a hard no thank you from me. Luckily, I am visiting in June.

It’s an evocative place. Lonely1 and rugged, dry and very windy. I expected flat prairie but was rewarded with hills and canyons. The endless sky seemed to always be doing something interesting. On my first night, I watched as much lightning as in all my years in New York.

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“People here still feel pride because they live in such a harsh place,” writes Ehrlich. The locals strike me as both proud and quiet. When I mention that I lived in Manhattan, they simply respond “sorry.”

On the way to Yellowstone, I stop in Cody and attend the rodeo. “Where are my Californians?” the host asks the crowd. Cheers from the stands. “Welcome to America!” he cries. The crow laughs.

It’s funny. Also, ridiculous. What makes Wyoming, population 600,000, so American compared to California, population 39 million? It’s an old idea that refuses to fade. The American West, a dreamscape in which the indigenous are no more than an afterthought. Does this outdated image feel more vivid now that our eyes are glued to screens? I certainly yearned for open space after a decade in a maze of glass and concrete.

But things were more complicated than I, in my ignorance, had expected.

My Subaru joined a herd of fellow steel beasts, a mere pony among the bison-like trucks. We roared westward, cutting through the country in straight lanes. Oh, how I wanted to exit and wander. Turns out there are fences nearly everywhere. Fences and dreaded letters spelling No Trespassing.

This consistent reminder stuck with me.

Move along. Can’t you see? This belongs to me!

Move along, don’t you dare, I’m armed and free.

Historians relegate the “Wild West” to a tidy twenty-year span when rangeland was unfenced and youngsters signed on with the trail herds moving north from Texas, but the West, however disfigured, persists.

Cowboys still drift from outfit to outfit, riding the rough string, calving heifers, making fifty-mile circles during fall roundup; and year around, the sheepherders—what’s left of them—stay out with their sheep. But ranchers who cherish the western life and its values may also pray for oil wells in their calving pasture or a coal lease on prime grassland. — Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

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I get it. We don’t want cattle to stray into traffic. Nobody wants wild camping or hunting on their property. But I can’t shake the feeling that this glorious land has been subdued, that its spirit is tangled up in barbed wire like a deer trying to cross the road.

There is an escape: public land.

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Where does the breath of spirit feel strongest? I’ve found this to be unpredictable. I don’t know until I’m there.

At one point I thought it was about aesthetics. Of course, spirit would be strongest among awe-inspiring natural beauty and in the most glorious places of worship or culture. Now I’m not so sure.

Is this quality inherent in a place (the temple is built where the divine feels strong) or does it arise out of human interaction, does it grow with devotion and diminish in apathy? Can it ever be lost? And what happens when one culture treads over another?

I wrestled with these questions in South Dakota’s Black Hills, where I found spirit strong but challenging. It all started with a moment of righteous indignation.

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I am hiking Bear Butte, a small mountain of volcanic rock on the edge of the Black Hills. I was guided here by a local and I am learning about the place as I go.

The Lakota call this place Matȟó Pahá and consider it sacred. I walk among the evidence of their prayer ceremonies: strips of colorful cloth and little pouches of tobacco that adorn the trees. “Please respect these offerings and leave them undisturbed,” asks the State of South Dakota and I decided not to share a picture.

I did not bring an offering. The thought would have never crossed my mind. The mountains I know are not covered in color but garnished with crosses. They don’t seem like places of communion but of achievement. Why climb the mountain? “Because it’s there,” as George Mallory put it before vanishing on Mount Everest.

Halfway up, I hear a lonely voice from the valley below.

Long, stretched-out vowels, a soul reaching for spirit.

The wind picks up.

Then another voice cuts in from the bend ahead of me.

“Yeah, yeah, Devil’s Tower! I’ve done that one, too. Great hike! Yeah! Beautiful views!”

Two groups of hikers must have met. I feel anger boiling up. Their excited chatter seems to spoil a sacred peace.

“Oh yeah, they got the best food, dude! They'll take care of you.”

I feel the urge to take my pocketknife and restore peace through violence. Do these morons not realize this is not an amusement park? Do they not recognize this as a temple of life? No. No, they don’t. They paid for parking, now they get to enjoy the show. And during the break it’s time for soda, pretzels, and a laugh.

I close my eyes. This is just humans being human, wanting to share, to be seen, to connect. I meet them a bit later on the trail. Father and son. A teacher near retirement, a young man about to go to college. I was ready to “teach” them with my dignified silence. Oh, how good it felt to be the righteous one. . . Sorry, I prefer to be quiet in sacred places! But all that goes out the window.

We talk. The dad likes pizza, history, microbreweries. The son is excited to take him to Colorado and “hike a 14er.” I talk about the Black Forest in Germany, the Schwarzwald, named after the dark appearance of its tree trunks just like the Black Hills. They seem like nice people. Just chatty. Well, sometimes so am I.

Then they move on.

The cloths flutter in the wind.

The voice from the valley has long vanished.

The mountain falls silent again.

“This mountain . . . draws people, even those who don’t know much about it. They are often surprised by their strong reaction to it and the emotions it stirs up in them. I tell them, ‘Remember where you’re at–this is one of the best places in the world to come and pray.” — Corey Hairy Shirt of Bear Butte Lodge to spiritual-travel writer Lori Erickson (who unlike me did her homework (and I encouraged her to share her work on Substack :) )

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I spent the week on a campground in Sturgis, near the infamous (and illegal) gold rush town of Deadwood. The town’s lifeblood are tourists and the enormous annual Sturgis motorcycle rally (“that week pays the mortgage!”). Main street is lined with bars and stores with biker gear. My cabin is surrounded by enormous RVs, stranded battleships the size of my old Manhattan apartment plus a ‘toy bay’ for motorcycles. By fall, they migrate back to Florida towed by pickup trucks with more horsepower than my European mind can comprehend.

The campground is home to a roaming stoner-prophet. Between beers I hear about whispers and visions, about endless cycles of reincarnation, about the chaos to come.

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I have only been on the road for a week, but already the trip feels like a teacher. The more present I am, the more hidden treasures I discover.

I am also still stunned by how quickly life can change once we commit.

Until last week, I lived in a small one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s East Village. $2,500 a month about to go to $2,700 — too much for me but still not expensive for New York City.

On Thursday morning I moved my remaining belongings into storage. Later that day, I took a plane to Denver and bought my first car. A Subaru Outback with a casual 100,000 miles on the odometer. (Fingers crossed and a shoutout to Carmax for a great experience so far.) Then I headed for the mountains.

Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I think: ‘Oh Lord, you've given us huge forests, infinite fields, and endless horizons, and we, living here, ought really to be giants.’ ― Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

On the Peak to Peak highway, heading from Boulder to Estes Park, I did what a tourist does: pull over to soak in the unexpectedly gorgeous views.

Before I could get the phone out to take a picture, I stopped. I closed my eyes. The air was overwhelming, rich with the scent of pines. Around me nothing but trees and sky. Dead quiet. The ground was covered in pine needles and bits of bark, soft like a blanket. Everything felt warm and inviting. A place to sit and just be.

So, I sat on a tree stump and watched the clouds.

Life in New York had become stimulating but narrow. I was attached to being a ‘writer’ and let my mind fuse with books and screens. Don’t get me wrong, it was important to go deep, both in finance and writing. We have to enter the thicket of nuance to find the patterns that repeat themselves across domains. It takes some work to learn that, in a way, Everything in the world is exactly the same.1

But I was missing the opposing forces creating balance: the open sky, encounters with strangers outside the bubble, unpredictable days . . . wilderness, a dash of chaos.

Frankly, time in the wordless space had made me more sensitive. The city’s energy felt relentless. I felt the density invade my body and build up tension — in the jaw that had to keep quiet (neighbors!), in the chest aching for the deep breath of expanse, in the legs that yearned to walk, walk, walk.

I struggled to stay centered while immersed in the pulsating current of ambition and ecstasy. It was time to take the next step on the soul path and jump into the unknown.

This is the real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. ― Alan Watts

I am learning, again and again, to slow down, to listen.

I am re-discovering how to have meaningful conversations with strangers.

Perhaps it’s the nature of a solitary road trip. I spend time hiking and driving in silence. My social battery is full when I encounter shopkeepers, waiters, landlords, the people who tend to blur into the background if one is preoccupied with the group. I have time. I’m curious. Maybe I am even eager to break the silence with conversation, though I would never admit that!

I find that patient and undivided attention acts like a magnet for stories. Enter someone’s room, literal or metaphorical, with curiosity and warmth and you get the chance to catch glimpses of a stranger’s soul. Having an extra five or ten minutes can turn a transactional conversation into a meaningful encounter.

This can pay surprising dividends. It’s like the world bends in your favor in barely perceptible ways.

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It’s an American Elm, Ulmus americana, in the park around the corner. I did not know this. I had to look it up. I judged myself a little. I should be more curious! But the truth is that I don’t really care about its name. I just like to hang out with it. I know what it feels like to be near it.

I greet it every morning by pressing my palms against the rough bark.

I rest against my head and back against it.

Things slow down.

I watch the light break through the leaves. For a moment, everything seems to stop. Then the branches move in unison. A silent, secret greeting.

Hello there.

The tree is next to a popular dog run and I am the weirdo leaning against it. But I don’t care what it looks like. I’m just interested in the secrets of the trees.

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. . . . Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

. . . A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.” — Hermann Hesse

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A couple of years ago, I went on a road trip upstate with a girl. When we arrived, she walked up to a tree and hugged it. It was a long, heartfelt hug. A hug that left her smiling. I didn’t show it, but I cringed.

What? We’re literally the ‘tree huggers’ now? Give me a break.

Secretly, I was already making friends with the trees. I had spent a week in an outrageously gorgeous valley in the Dolomite Mountains. There, I found a portal, a moment with nature that changed everything. It appeared as one living and breathing web. As a teacher, too. And I was a part of it.

Initially, I resisted. I felt silly, childish. Then, slowly, I embraced this new way of being. I simply could not resist. On every morning walk, I reached out and let my fingertips run across bark. I got to know all the trees in my neighborhood by touch and texture.

I used to give heady advice. Read this and listen to that. Now my advice sounds trivial.

Before doing anything, do what looks a lot like doing nothing.

Sit outside and listen. Meditate. Pray, if you’re the praying kind (I am now). Slowly let the channel open.

Rest against a tree or simply sit near one. Try to make friends with it. Why not send it some gratitude . . . or some love? What if it could hear your thoughts? Maybe it knows things? Maybe it has advice? The trees and rocks, the land on which we walk and dream, they’ve seen it all.

The forces that we can perceive in this richer reality are fundamentally subtle. My life’s work is to help more people understand that these emotional, energetic, non-logical, non-linear and non-verbal signals often come with a high degree of intelligence. — Tom Morgan

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an·thro·po·mor·phism [/ˌanTHrəpəˈmôrˌfizəm/], noun, the attribution of human characteristics or behavior to a god, animal, or object.

There it is. The harsh voice of judgment. Silly boy. Talking to trees. Grow up.

But I no longer care. Between the inner critic and the trees, I know who looks out for me. I know who can teach me how to be.

The tree is deeply rooted. Its branches reach out to receive the light. The trunk connects heaven and earth. That’s how the tree greets the day, the sun, and the wind.

It lives by the rhythm of the seasons. Each spring it sprouts, yet it also lets itself be shaped. It accepts what happens to it and what is in the way — the rocks and the pavement, the droughts, the hail, the gardeners’ saws.

The tree shares: oxygen and perhaps fruit. It offers shelter. It is there to lean against.

When I feel lost, I recall that image, that tree-being: grounded, rooted, and connected. Reaching out, upward. Breathing, receiving light. Listening to the wind, pondering the stars. Sharing what can only be created here, now, by this being, in this way.

That’s how I want to stand: like a channel for life.

Life feels like a paradox: I yearn to stand like a tree, but it is my destiny to walk.

Today is my last day in New York and I will miss my tree,

But not really.

For I know I will find it,

Everywhere and in all trees,

All different,

All perfect.

— Frederik

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I didn’t dance or sing. I spent little time outside and meditated only sporadically. I didn’t understand the power of silence and sound (I still don’t, not really).

I let my mind be cluttered.

I was always busy. Busy felt good. Rest smelled like laziness. When I made time for my body, it had to be efficient. I needed music or podcasts to keep myself occupied.

Walking and writing were the only things I stuck by pure instinct. Those got me through the COVID years.

I was not curious about my soul.

I made no space for it.

When I gained a glimpse of its strange realms, I got scared. What I saw had nothing to do with the life I was living. Nothing at all. Ze-Ro.

I had to slow down a lot to realize that I was running on autopilot.

I needed distance, space beyond words, to notice that I did not choose when and how much to participate in the infinite ‘happening’. I just woke up and let myself be flooded.

Things are different now.

I used to rely on goals and plans. Now I try to balance thinking and listening. I ground myself in the moment. I notice questions bubble up, float like soft foam on the waves of my consciousness.

Why am I here?

What am I here to do?

What is there to create and to share?

How can I contribute to what is to be done?

I wait.

I wait for the touch of the wind, for a bird to sing, for a whisper. I wait for an answer to form and roll in from the deep.

If nothing happens, I let the mind get to work. I trust that more guidance will be revealed after taking another step.

Then I move.

Soul allows you to become attached to the world, which is kind of love. When the soul stirs, you feel things, both love and anger, and you have strong desires and even fears. You live life fully, instead of skirting it with intellectualism or excessive moralistic worries. — Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul

Sometimes my writing journey feels like a series of useful dead-ends. It led me to creativity and art, to spirit and the voice, to the intimate spaces of the soul. Along the way, I tried one label after another. I always reached the same conclusion: not that.

Finance substack. Not that.

Money and meaning. Not that.

Mind-body journaling. Not that.

Help others write. Not that.

I think of writing now as just one aspect of our voice, our sacred and most intimate vibration. A gateway to the space of the soul. Now that is interesting to me.

Why are you here?

What do you care about?

Who are you behind the mask?

Why do you hold yourself back?

What is stuck that wants to move?

What answers do you carry deep inside?

What obvious next step are you avoiding?

What is waiting at the center of your labyrinth?

What golden vision of your life do you not dare look at?

Those are the questions that interest me.

They are fascinating, strange, and challenging.

If they are not, you haven’t scratched the surface. You are walking circles around your maze.

I’ve found these questions to exist in a space of paradox: we carry the answers within. We just don’t have access to the room. We grope in the dark in a jumble of keys. We look for signs in the flickering light of a lonely torch. Answers are revealed one step and one lesson at a time.

Maybe these are the only questions that I can help explore.

Not because I have answers, but because I’ve been there. Because it is the one area in which my mirror feels a tiny bit polished.

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I was obsessed with capturing everything. Every experience had to be translated into language.

My old notebooks show how stuck I was, frozen between hope and despair. Pages covered with paper-thin plans and weightless affirmations. I found a thousand ways to ask why am I here, what do I want, and why does this feel so impossible?

I looked for answers in books and podcasts. Always . . . more words.

Writing was my way of moving through life, pen on the page, one page at a time.

It was useful. It was movement.

I can see how the strands of struggle began to weave together, how they formed a checkered shape, a quilt of becoming.

But writing was not enough.

The answers I was looking for were behind doors I could not see.

. . . words that point to the Tao
seem monotonous and without flavor.
When you look for it, there is nothing to see.
When you listen for it, there is nothing to hear.
When you use it, it is inexhaustible.

Tao Te Ching, 35

The things I love look pretty boring.

Close your eyes, repeat a mantra.

Walk in silence.

Sit with a tree.

Lie down and listen to a magician playing an instrument.

Dance your way through a wave of emotions.

Tune into your voice to the sound of a drone.

The things I love point in the same direction: toward the maze, the center, where all things are born.

They direct me away from reading, toward doing.

And they opened doors to the wordless space of the soul.

There, in the formless dark, my mind again forms the big questions.

Why am I here?

What is my lesson to learn?

What is the next step on my journey?

What gifts am I not sharing? Why?

Where am I blocked? How do I hold myself back?

What vision is so bright, I don’t dare look at it?

What is possible in this life?

I don’t reach for the pen. I try to remain with inner stillness. If I am in motion, I ask to let myself be moved. I ground myself in the present, in the weight of the body, in the sounds around me. I wait. I listen.

I look for answers in shapes and sounds, in metaphors and sensations.

What would that sound like?

What would that look like?

What would that feel like?

It feels like an ancient process, like I am discovering a lost birthright.

The word psychotherapy consists of two Greek words: psyche (soul) and therapy (care). By definition, psychotherapy is care of the soul. When you serve your soul, you are being therapeutic in this deep, Platonic sense. — Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul

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My days have taken on a new rhythm. Slower, quieter. Intense movement embedded in stillness.

It’s not all fun and games and bliss. Far from it. In fact, I am exhausted. My bedroom is filled with boxes and my mind occupied with storage facilities and used cars. I sleep on a simple tri-fold mat, the mattress about to go to the curb.

My experience of time has changed dramatically. Days used to fly by, the hours blurring together. Now they stretch out like songs, an ebb and flow of melodies.

Everything feels both more alive and more . . . mundane.

But boring, I’ve noticed, is fine.

It’s like turning the phone to grayscale. I’ve done it. It works. It works because the phone gets very, very dull. Turn the colors back on and it’s like stepping into Candyland on acid. Way too intense.

Once the artificial stimulus is gone, the ordinary becomes vibrant.

I would love to say that the wordless space has been the best thing to ever happen to me and my writing. But it’s not that simple. There is a price to be paid.

I’m not talking about money. Generally, I’ve found the spaces of caring for the soul not that expensive (though they are often taught in expensive locations, a kind of spiritual White Lotus). No, they asked for a different kind of investment, one I was reluctant to make.

The things I love tend to be embodied and intimate.

They require time, time to explore, discover, and practice.

They ask for undivided attention, for openness, and for active participation.

Am I fully present? Can I face my truth, what is underneath the mask? Can I stay with discomfort? Am I willing to be witnessed?

This feels incompatible with a busy, plugged-in life. Why learn how to swirl like a Sufi when you could be on the couch and catch up on The Last of Us?

And my writing has changed, slowed down.

I used to pick up the scent of a story and follow the trail down a rabbit hole. I could not wait to piece the puzzle together. That’s a valuable skill for an analyst or journalist. It made writing financially rewarding.

Now, deep dive research can feel like an interruption. I read a few pages before bed, a substack post here and there. When people ask for recommendations, I notice how out of the loop I am. I’m the last one to get the news, the one at risk of panicking at the bottom, right before the market turns.

Surrender to the path and maybe the only thing left to write about is that.

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It’s not that I’ve turned anti-writing or anti-books. I still love gripping stories and magnificent prose. I know the power of words, see how they ripple through time and shape our world. But I am skeptical that they hold the answers.

I am skeptical that what waits at the center can be put into words.

“Words, symbols, signs, and thoughts and ideas are merely maps of reality,” as Ken Wilber put it. “The word ‘water’ won’t satisfy your thirst.” And I thirst.

What do you do with that thirst when “work” — money, economic activity — has moved behind a wall of screens? I don’t know. Not yet.

But I am learning that the world beyond the map is filled with hidden wells. The water of life is everywhere, like a subtle current within and behind all things.

But the stream runs in secret. It resists being squeezed into words and nailed to the page.

It feels like watching cherry blossoms. An extravagant, abundant explosion of life right now.

Faded by tomorrow.

Wholeness, I think,
Draws its life somewhere where the breathing
Stops,

Somewhere where the mind cradles light,
Where the only senses that remain

Blush and stumble
If they try to speak with our language so new
It is still trying to
Invent,

Still shaping
Its first intelligible sound,
Still sculpting its first true image of
God.

— Hafiz

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The wordless space feels like the ocean.

One moment calm and gentle, then forceful and wild. Always evocative and mysterious. Always beautiful. Far deeper and stranger than I could have imagined.

I step into the rhythm running through trees and concrete alike.

Afterwards, I watch orange candlelight flicker across the walls of my emptying apartment. The city has sunk into a deep quiet, as if a vast forest was shielding me. Behind closed eyelids I carry fading images and echoes of destiny.

A song rises in flow, fades through the open window.

What appears in motion cannot be held.

Words appear. I know my attempts to translate are hopeless. And yet I write.

I write not because I have answers but in the hope that words are like pebbles, stepping stones for the next person crossing the stream. Stones hinting at what is possible, guiding to the door, to the wordless space.

There, on the threshold of change, we face questions nobody can answer for us.

Do we want to step into the unknown?

Are we going to follow what feels true but cannot be put into words?

Follow the path, climb the stairs, enter the tunnel, plunge into the depths . . . or remain standing, observing, contemplating, analyzing. Be entertained, then move on to another door, another spectacle, another cloud of words.

Walk or watch?

For better or worse, I’ve made my choice. I paid the price. There is no turning back.

I don’t understand what is happening or why. Perhaps it is not meant to be understood. Or maybe I just don’t care anymore. I know something is happening. I try to move with it, swirl at the center of the vortex. That’s plenty already.

The things I love are simple but vast. They have more depth than I could explore in a lifetime.

Walk. Rest against a tree. Close your eyes. Listen. Feel the rhythm. Let yourself be moved.

Move, beloved, move. Trust your feet. They know the next step.

Enter the dance without end.

This is your birthright.

— Frederik

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