This summer’s horror movie, Obsession, is already the most profitable film of all time. Made on a minuscule $750,000 budget, it has currently grossed nearly half a billion dollars.

As you will know by now, I am fascinated by which stories grip global attention, and why.

[Slight Spoilers]

Obsession is a simple-yet-horrifying “be careful what you wish for” myth. The protagonist is the lonely and love-lorn Bear. He wishes for his childhood crush Nikki to reciprocate his love. He gets what he wishes for, but the result is a bloody trap of his own manifestation. The main reason Bear ends up in this predicament is that he’s too afraid to tell Nikki the truth about his feelings for her.

One of the topics that has been incredibly alive in all of my conversations over the last few years is authenticity. This theme has accelerated meaningfully in recent weeks.1 Hundreds of people that I speak to are stuck at their desks doing something that they know is ultimately pointless, but do so out of a fear of presenting their own authenticity to the world. As a result, they keep manifesting lives devoid of the one thing that matters most: genuine love. They are ultimately afraid that, if they admit this to themselves or other people, the false safety around them could evaporate. Moreover, many people don’t know what their true gifts are yet, or they suspect that if they offer them to the world, they’ll have nothing like the same kind of financial value and safety. Like Bear, they are terrified that if they reveal their authentic self to the world, they will be rejected.

I’ve recently been exploring a simple theory, and it goes something like this. The later stages of personal evolution, that we typically reach in midlife, are defined by greater energetic sensitivity. Our subtle senses and intuition become much more important in navigating the world. We get better at allocating our energy and attention to the places that matter. This is wisdom. Greater sensitivity requires a more robustly functioning “energetic grid” in our bodies. Some parts of us can get shut down due to trauma. As we reach the points in life where we need to reopen them, we confront these failed or outdated coping mechanisms. This can create crises as we are forced to face old psychological and physical blockages.

A perspective I’ve read is that dreams are one way we try and release these old patterns and traumas. Seemingly as a result of learning this, my dreams have been going absolutely bonkers. In only the last couple of months, I’ve now had the same dream nine different times (something that has never happened to me before). Every single time find myself sitting in my old equity sales job on a trading floor with a client list to call in front of me. I have a deep knowing that it’s all just a waste of time. I’m afraid to admit to anyone that it’s pointless because I’m scared about losing my job. In real life, I was so stuck I retreated back to the same increasingly stale role three times. I felt intrinsically worthless outside of my professional identity. My fear of revealing my emerging passions meant I remained in a dying relationship.

I’ve obviously been wondering a lot about what this dream might be about. Having recently been told that the fascia and muscle structure around my lower back and my kidneys is frozen, I can’t help but make a link. The kidneys are the source of both fear and intuitive knowing. One theory I have is I might be trying to release an old pattern in my body that no longer serves me. But I also have another interpretation; it’s a symbolic message relating to a fear I still have: it may be unsafe to speak what is intuitively known to me. At the end of a transcendent bodywork session recently, I had a clear sentence appear in my mind:

“Will I be safe if I tell the truth?”

This is a historically valid fear for me to have! When I was on Wall Street back in 2015, I started to become interested in broader themes like AI, exponential tech, and even consciousness. I simply couldn’t stop myself from talking and writing about it to my clients and within the firm. Eventually, management realized I had no interest in the mundane specifics of my job anymore and laid me off. It was devastating at the time. And once again, recently, I realized that the meaningful, but “fringe,” topics like reincarnation, psychedelics, and Earth School were inappropriate for the wealth manager where I worked, and I had to strike out and found The Leading Edge. My commitment to following, and sharing, my curiosity has repeatedly blown up stable home and work environments, which created significant disruption, but it also led me eventually to glorious new, more expansive vistas. Essentially I was following my curiosity, my intuition. But in ways that were consistently scary to me because they led me down unknown paths. The person that I was becoming was no longer appropriate to the life that I had created.

Why We Don’t Talk About Bruno

My daughter recently performed a song from Disney’s Encanto at her pre-K concert. As a result, my entire family has been singing songs from the movie for the last few weeks. Given the way I feel reality sometimes communicates with me (music and movies), I’m certainly paying attention. Encanto is a fairly transparent allegory for Internal Family Systems. It’s about a family that lives in a magical house. Each of them has specific paranormal gifts. The family’s magic is dying, and their enchanted home starts cracking. The heroine Mirabel’s quest leads her to uncover buried family secrets, especially around her missing and judged uncle Bruno. She eventually finds him hidden behind the walls of the house. It emerges that Bruno is actually precognitive. And yet he gets blamed for causing the events he forecasts. It’s not safe for Bruno to talk about what he sees coming. It’s not safe for him to tell the truth. As a result, he gets repressed. “We don’t talk about Bruno” is deservedly the movie’s most famous song. Bruno’s reintegration into the house leads to it being destroyed, but then subsequently rebuilt in a state of greater harmony.

This allegory makes me wonder if we hide these overwhelming intuitive parts of ourselves in the walls of our own house; the parts of our body that get shut down energetically and then reopened later in life. The truth can only be buried so long, until the tension starts pulling our house apart.

This process can often reawaken a deeper sense of unconscious knowing, and it might be telling us things we don’t always want to hear. Things we have hidden in the fog. The latin origin of the word fate is “that which has already been spoken.” Bruno doesn’t speak the truth into existence, it’s right there waiting to be uncovered. And, as Joseph Campbell said “we must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.”

What’s most interesting at this present moment in time is that many of the gifts I see emerging among the “normal” professionals around me are also unconventional and emergent, even paranormal. There’s always something a little bit scary about intuitive gifts, even when they are your own. In many cases it’s why we shut them down when we are younger. They are stigmatized and dismissed by society and threatening to our controlling but limited left brains. They often cannot be successfully contained within the rigid confines of our traditional jobs and relationships.

For many of us, I believe this is actually the central lesson in the hidden curriculum for Earth School. It isn’t a mistake that so many Western professionals find themselves in these situations. Late stage capitalism is an amazing classroom! According to many mystical traditions, the purpose of our incarnation is to learn about the power we have to manifest with our thoughts and words. And yet our fear of rejection and sense of disconnection and worthlessness leads us to manifest these lives without love. At this point in our evolution, we mostly use money as a proxy for self-worth, but it also quickly becomes a prison. In contrast, as you reveal more of your authentic self, and create from that place, reality gives you more of what you actually need. I regularly repeat the quote “love is mutually accelerating disclosure.” As we open up to the world and face our blocks, our gifts also manifest more fully and more obviously to us. In my experience, the world also responds to these gifts and makes it abundantly clear that we are held if we are willing to make the first move.

As I like to say, I believe your present suffering is directly proportional to your future potential. And why would that potential manifest in the absence of an equivalent challenge? The greater the fear, the greater the gifts. And sadly, often the greater the disruption and suffering required to get to them.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been exploring this topic, a close friend sent me a rehearsal video for the song This Is Me from the musical The Greatest Showman. It gave me goosebumps from head to toe. I’m not much of a crier in general, but the first time I saw it, I had to lean against a wall on the streets of Manhattan and lower my sunglasses so nobody could see my teary eys. I recommend you give it a watch.

I am not a stranger to the dark
"Hide away, " they say
"'Cause we don't want your broken parts"
I've learned to be ashamed of all my scars
"Run away, " they say
"No one'll love you as you are"

But I won't let them break me down to dust
I know that there's a place for us
For we are glorious

-This is Me

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The most practical and powerful worldview shift I’ve had over the last few years is my suspicion that we may inhabit “Earth School.” I’ve written about it in a few different places, but the importance of the idea has driven me to produce a more comprehensive exploration.

Across a full spectrum, from scientific Near-Death Experience (NDE) reports to more esoteric channeled material, accounts of the structure and purpose of Earth School are surprisingly consistent. So, using the awesome power of Claude’s Fable 5, I built a single-page website, Earth School, that aggregates 49 different sources and NDE case studies to show where they agree and disagree. I asked it to condense all these perspectives into a short list of five (A.I. generated) bullet points:

1. Earth is a deliberately constructed learning environment; dense, slow, and veiled, where consciousness develops capacities unavailable in less resistant conditions.

2. The veil of forgetting is the central design feature: only by not remembering our origin can love be freely chosen and will genuinely exercised.

3. The curriculum is twofold: learning to love and learning to know, with suffering functioning as a catalyst rather than punishment.

4. After death, life reviews measure not external judgment but the felt experience of our own effects on others: graduation is the degree to which one has become love rather than merely learned about it.

5. The arc is evolutionary; consciousness descends into matter, develops selfhood through resistance, and re-ascends as a co-creative participant in the larger life of the cosmos.

[On the site, each claim links back to the reference source and there’s a second interactive grid that shows exactly where all the sources agree and disagree. There’s even an explanation of precisely how they confirm or deny a central viewpoint].

If we entertain the possibility that these diverse accounts of Earth School were describing something real, what do they then say about how to thrive within it? Fable generated another eight bullet points synthesising the common features across all sources:

1. Act as if you will feel your effects on others from their side, because after death, apparently, you will.

2. Treat every experience, welcome or not, as material to be consciously worked rather than wasted.

3. Keep a daily inner discipline; control of thought, equanimity, small deliberate acts of will, and alongside it a practice of remembrance: the heart turns toward its source while the hands stay in the world.

4. Face what you least want to face in yourself, since whatever goes unfaced runs the curriculum for you.

5. Build deliberately, because beliefs and intentions shape experience more than experience admits.

6. Attend to the little things: a forgotten kindness, a casual cruelty, since the grading runs at a finer resolution than anyone expects.

7. And treat the hardest people in your life as the syllabus rather than the interruption; some of them may have agreed to the role.

8. Stay in, keep choosing love, and let the difficulty do its work.

Now you know what A.I. thinks.

So what do I think? And why has this idea been so important to me?

There are four specific ways that this idea has improved my life:

1. It has shown that there’s a direction to my life’s path.

2. It taught me how to read the symbolic street signs along the path.

3. It has helped me know I’m walking my own unique path.

4. It has helped me stay on the path when things got tough.

1. Showing the Path Ahead

One of the central things implied by the existence of an Earth School is that there is a directionality to our lives. One of my core beliefs is that the purpose of our time here is to walk the path of doing what we love in service of love. Put more scientifically, we participate in the increasing complexification of the universe by becoming ever more individually differentiated and more collectively integrated into the whole. This view is supported by diverse models of human development, that show that the increasing integration of our consciousness leads to us being more loving, creative, and subtly attentive to energetic signals.1 Our curiosity is one of the key ways we orient ourselves on that path and one of the ways we come to co-create with reality.

The framing of Earth School also makes it clear why simply manifesting what you think you want may sometimes be a bad idea. Video games are no fun with all the cheat codes turned on. And, in real life, lack of friction can often be even worse than meaningful hardships. So instead of asking for what you think you want, you can ask for more lessons, rather than comforts and distractions that might insulate you from learning them.

In fact, this practice of “just asking” for more guidance has become central to the way that I now live my life.

When I get curious about a question, especially one around my own personal growth, I just ask for an answer. Then keep my eyes peeled for symbolic clues. For example, at the start of this year, I got very curious about certain unresolved aspects of my healing journey over the last ten years. I had wondered why aspects of my dark night of the soul nearly ten years ago had felt so demonic and evil. So I simply asked for greater clarity. What followed were a series of synchronicities and cues to direct me down an unexpected path. The result has been the meaningful healing of unpleasant physical symptoms.

One of the traps on the path of personal evolution is constantly looking backwards to excavate traumas or biographical stories. I’ve personally found that most of the lessons present themselves when you’re moving forwards. If you follow the path of aliveness and curiosity with your eyes open, you are going to constantly bump into opportunities for personal growth. You can then dig into them with individual practices and practitioners as they arise.

One of the key things that has shifted along my own path is that I have come to see my reality increasingly symbolically.

2. Learning to Read the Signs

"Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul."

-Carl Jung

One of the non-speaking autistic “seers” from The Telepathy Tapes, Asher, describes our time on Earth as an “escape room.” There are a series of puzzles and riddles around us that are aimed at evolving our consciousness. While I rather enjoy my time on Earth and have no burning desire to escape, I find this metaphor useful.

Our right hemispheres are dramatically more connected to the world than our left. I think it just makes sense that messages from the outside world will be coming to us predominantly energetically, somatically, and symbolically. The clues are very rarely obvious or verbal.

Throughout human history, dreamwork has been one of the most effective paths of engaging with the symbolism of life. Before you go to sleep, try asking “what do I need to learn?” or pose a more specific question. As Thomas Edison said, “never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” I also regularly engage in a practice Leading Edge’s Jungian wizard Dan Lawrence suggested in his lecture on dreams. This is getting into the habit of deliberately falling into the phrase in your mind “I had a dream that..”, but applying it to your waking life. So if you meet with Steve in real life, you can begin to connect waking dreaming with night time dreaming by reframing it as “I had a dream that I met Steve.” If Earth School is truly communicating with us symbolically, rather than solely verbally, then you can start to learn its language.

What I have come to find in my own life is that when you simply ask for guidance, the universe may also learn the ways that you like to be communicated with. For me, this is often movies and song titles. Over the last few months, I’ve been called to new and old stories that have contained key insights and archetypes as to where I am on my current path. I think a similar dynamic applies to “woo” tools like tarot, astrology or intuitive readings. They aren’t objectively or falsifiably “right” in any way, but once the universe realizes it can speak to you through any new medium, it might.

This kind of pattern recognition is obviously not too far away from psychosis when it goes wrong, so you have to be really careful when it comes to deploying analytical rigor and holding any potential coincidences lightly. But one of the central takeaways for me is that reality is much more symbolic than we might think it is. Whether it’s movies, music, dreams or coincidences, we benefit from reflecting on a deeper meaning behind many of the events of our lives.

3. Individuality: Everybody’s Truman

“I once heard Earth described as eight billion individual simulations running at the same time and there seems to be some deep truth hidden within that.”

-Jeff Williams

How might Earth School work? I know not everyone needs a potential theory or mechanism for why reality works the way it does. Some people are happy to be content in “The Mystery.” I am not one of those people. Imagining a way that something could literally be true helps me be more open-minded.

The Law of One2 introduced me to the idea that the Sun is kind of a local manager of our individual solar system. It controls our reality and what we can see and when. It determines how the veil of forgetting works. The specific thing that I’ve been pondering recently is if this reality is slightly different for each of us. This would obviously require an incomprehensible level of intelligence. Which brings me back to the fascinating topic of plasma. Plasma is a medium that conducts, self-organizes, and carries information through electromagnetic filaments, which is a kind of computation. The Sun is a gargantuan mass of plasma. What if the Sun somehow uses that processing power to run a subtly individualised simulation for everyone on Earth? It’s the like Truman Show, where everything we experience is being arranged specially for us, but we are all Truman.

That said, I don’t really like the idea that reality is “just a simulation.” I think about walking through a pediatric cancer ward and remarking to the distraught parents, “don’t worry, this is all just a simulation!” But I do like the idea that the technology that we invent reflects deeper realities we can only sense. And I think some video games can reflect the dynamics of the school we have inhabit. Reality is profoundly responsive to your actions, it rewards your evolution and the learning of new lessons. There is a “main quest,” which is the evolution of our consciousness. You also seem to “level up” when you face fears.

The individual school theory also helps you relax about the relativity of your own difficulties. Something that seems entirely trivial to other people may actually be hugely significant to your personal journey. The little things may matter. For someone in their mid-40s, learning to drive was actually terrifying to me. I know that for other people it’s trivial and even embarrassing that someone of my age didn’t know how to drive. And yet, when I finally embraced my fear, I received a series of abundant rewards and synchronicities. This framing is also supported by a lot of the literature; loving actions that appear insignificant for you can be enormous for other people, and vice-versa.

It’s the individualized nature of Earth School that might help explain some of the weirder aspects of my own spiritual journey. Apart from anything, it’s why any meaningful synchronicities meant just for you tend to sound ridiculous to anyone else. I’ve also been in situations with friends when I’m about to turn the conversation to something mystical, and suddenly a waiter across the restaurant will drop a huge tray of glasses. The conversation resets, and whilst I’m tempted to force it, I don’t think I’m supposed to. For example, I’ve been discussing The Telepathy Tapes with somebody very close to me in the years since it exploded into popular awareness. I attended a Zoom event with a non-speaking autistic girl and her mother. I saw something that was closer to compelling “proof” than anything I had seen before. So the next time I saw that person, I pulled out the video to show her. Three seconds into the video, she looked right past it, turned around, and walked away without saying anything. It was like it had never happened.

This makes me wonder if certain ideas are just not meant to reach people at certain times in their journey. It’s like somebody else’s “veil of forgetting” won’t let something through at the wrong time. In this school, the teacher only arrives when the student is ready. Respecting the free will of other people’s path seems to be paramount to most spiritual traditions. I think it also explains why we continuously forget key ideas on our own path. I’m sure I’ve been presented with ideas that would have rocked my world years ago that I simply wasn’t ready for at the time. It’s almost certainly happening right now, I’m just not ready to see it yet.

4. Resilience on the Path

“Life is good, death is safe and what really matters is love.”

-

Despite a pretty solid array of supporting sources, I have no way of “proving” my belief in Earth School is true. But my life seems to have followed an obvious trajectory of increasing alignment and integrity. I have used my skills in more positive-sum ways and have flourished in unpredictable ways as a result. I have become more responsive to synchronicity and feel like I have established a subtle two-way relationship with reality.

A career on Wall Street taught me that, no matter how high your IQ, if you’re not open to the collective intelligence of the market, you’re probably going to get carried out quite quickly. The sign of the real veterans was that they started from the premise that the market was right and they were wrong. As I’ve said many times before, I believe that this dynamic applies to everything in our reality, from random coincidences to our closest relationships. If we exist in a learning process, almost everything is a potential lesson. That has made me more resilient to adversity, so far, and very open-minded about why certain things are happening to me. Being attuned to symbolic cues around me has made me less emotionally reactive to negative events. The Law of One describes all emotional reactions as catalysts for growth. The significant hardships and blessings I have received make a great deal of sense within this context.

Perhaps most importantly, my fear of mortality has also significantly diminished. Supported by some surprisingly robust scientific research, the vast majority of Earth School sources confirm some kind of continuity of life after death.3 They also almost universally talk about the force driving this process being loving and benign. Dr. recently posted his own research that argues that even frightening NDE experiences are the result of an incomplete rebirth process, rather than some kind of eternal hell. I have come to believe that more awareness of the research around NDEs and Out-Of-Body Experiences is one of the most powerful linchpins to shift our damaging materialist mindset.

At the end of our interview with Dr. Bache, we asked him about what he had learned from his nearly fifty years of extraordinarily intense psychonautic travels and subsequent integration. He replied that there is no final end point of the journey. “It’s not about getting somewhere, but about changing the porosity of the membrane between physical reality and spiritual reality, allowing more of the energy of spiritual reality into your life.”

It’s exciting to learn the lessons, and I believe you can even accelerate the process if you want to, I think a lot of overly-serious spirituality ignores the fact that we’re here to have fun. It’s living with the “increasing energy of spiritual reality” that makes life so special.

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"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

- C.S. Lewis

I will die on the hill that 2016’s Moana is a top three Disney movie of all time. Reflecting my mediocre parenting, when my little boy was three, he watched it probably twenty times. If you’ve never seen it, I’m about to ruin it for you. The trickster demigod Maui steals the heart of Te Fiti, the goddess of nature. A thousand years later, Moana’s island is being destroyed by a mysterious crop blight. She ventures forth across dangerous seas and eventually confronts the volcanic demon Te Kā. At the end of the movie, she realises that the demon is actually an enraged version of Te Fiti, Mother Nature. When she returns the heart to her, Te Fiti becomes her loving and nurturing self again. This is a variant of a story we’ve been telling for thousands of years.1 And, like all perennial myths, it reveals a hidden relationship in our reality.

As it happens, my own personal hero’s journey started in Maui. About ten years ago, I was snorkeling in the emerald ocean off Lahaina. Swimming in deep water often gives me a sense of primal anxiety because I have instantly moved from the top of the food chain to the bottom. But this time it just felt like gliding through the inside of a gemstone. A warm, silent cathedral, filled with rays of light from a hundred stained-glass windows. I felt truly at one with my body and everything else around me. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a crippling panic attack turned this dream setting into an instant nightmare. My mind became a very busy place. I was suffering from sharp abdominal pains and felt like my entire body had blown up to five times its normal size. It was like an allergic reaction, but for everything, including my brain. I rushed myself to urgent care, but they couldn’t find anything obviously wrong with me.

In fact, I’ve only recently come to really understand what had started happening to me that day, and in the years since. It’s actually been like a really fun detective story. A big part of that process has been discovering that what I thought was a demon was probably something else entirely.

I am fascinated by the concept of the Rumpelstiltskin effect. This is when simply receiving a clinical diagnosis for an ailment removes a lot of its negative power. In the original fairytale, a young woman promises her first-born child to Rumpelstiltskin in exchange for the ability to spin straw into gold. When she changes her mind, he says he will only release her if she can guess his name. As and noted in an article about the phenomena, this is also how classic demonology is supposed to work. “Discover the esoteric name, control, and destroy the source of suffering. Traditional exorcism works according to a similar principle.”

Throughout my entire two-year psychotic depression, I kept repeating to my wife and psychiatrist that “my dragon was time.”

But now, I think my “dragon,” isn’t the demon Te Kā, it’s the goddess Te Fiti.

Revealing the demons.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

-Blaise Pascal

Over the last few months, I’ve been exploring why aspects of my spiritual awakening experience nearly ten years ago felt so evil. The intuitive I love, Mary, recently said that my heart-opening and dark night of the soul was a deliberate reentry to hell in order to reclaim a lost part of myself that had been left there. She said that a part of me had been frozen in place by judgment.

I hold diagnoses of pre-verbal trauma very lightly due to the fact that I’m not sure I can never know for sure. But I was born ten weeks prematurely and was kept in an incubator for months afterwards. I was denied any physical human contact for all but four hours of every day. My nervous system was probably wired in an incredibly unusual and hostile way, one that treats connection to pain in the body as something existentially dangerous.

Whether or not that was the cause, I have recently come to realise that time without stimulation is literally physically painful for me. Time is my demon. Ten years ago, the universe had been doing everything it could to bring my attention to this dynamic. It placed me in sequentially less and less stimulating work environments until eventually my psyche cracked. And then during that awakening day, I think I was stripped of a lot of my defensive scaffolding. A few months later, I made a heartfelt commitment to deal with my trauma. I was immediately plunged into a state of constant terror. I felt like nothing was safe, and I kept grasping on to savings accounts, spiritual ideologies and job titles to try and keep me from drowning. After my son was born, every time he cried, it created a truly hellish burning in my heart center. Perhaps it was an embodied echo of the sound of the incubator room. But it made me so enraged, my wife was worried I might hurt my son. My psychiatrist at the time even called me one Sunday evening to tell me not to kill my wife and children. I was never even close, but that was how concerned he was.

Even now, years later, I currently have a life remarkably free of any obvious stressors. I don’t really suffer from worries or anxiety at all. I have two wonderful children who are healthy, a supportive wife, and a career that brings me immense meaning and purpose. I now understand what unconditional love is. But I also realize I have constructed a life based around near-constant stimulation. I live in buzzing Manhattan. Up until the last few weeks, I drank a shedload of coffee in the morning, while I wrote to dance music. Then I had the euphoric adrenaline dump of full blown combat Brazilian Jiu Jitsu at lunch time. Then I filled my afternoons with gripping conversations, largely with new people. The moment the stimulation dropped off in the evening, when my wife and kids came home, I would find myself retreating into my phone, desperate for another fix.

I was pretty aware of how bad it was and have committed to address it, but I didn’t appreciate how much of the physical impact was previously below my level of awareness. If I’d read this essay three months ago I’d be thinking “boy, I’m glad most of this doesn’t apply to me.” And yet, everything that’s happened recently seems to have been conspiring to show me how much it does.

First I started doing jhana meditation, which drew my attention to the burning sensation in my chest. Curiosity as to whether it had a gastric cause led me to cut out caffeine. An absolute humbling at the hands of a 110lb, 17-year-old Brazilian kid at Jiu Jitsu led to a wrist injury that put me out of action for a few weeks. Two of my very best friends came to visit me and took me for a relaxing week in the Bahamas. With that fresh clarity, I came to realize that time without stimulation is painful, threatening, and triggering to me. So I can unconsciously resent anyone or anything that drags me into it, including my wife and children.

I wonder how much this dynamic applies to everyone. I suspect the easiest way for you to find out is to cut out all stimulation for a prolonged period of time and then see how easy it is for you to sit in a room for 30 minutes without a phone. That’s probably a bit of a challenge for many of us now. Thankfully, Leading Edge also has an expert in nervous system regulation, , and he has his own tailored assessment that will give you your own scorecard. I fared pretty poorly with 58/100, where 100 is the best. Whoops.

And then, if you want to see if your body is in structural alignment, you can simply place your heels against a wall, lean back for five minutes, and let gravity show you where the imbalances are (or, even better, use a slant board).

With considerably greater embodied clarity, I now realize I experience much of my day with a profound burning in my heart center. Mary described my current initiation as a reunion with an unenvolved heart. Time was my dragon, the demon Te Kā before she became the goddess Te Fiti. She was a literal fire in my chest.

So I decided to see what she wanted.

Hands-on Healing.

During my experience inside the King’s Chamber in Egypt in December, I had a strong intuition to resolve the chronic pain in my lower back. At the time of my panic attack in Hawaii, I had started to really stretch deep into my lower back and clean up my diet. Snorkeling put me into an unusual sense of embodiment and then suddenly a catastrophic sense of panic. Over the next few years, every appeal to embodiment, connection, or heart opening resulted in a crisis so intense it often felt demonic. I now wonder if it was because of my fear of confronting overwhelming trauma held in the body. My work with Egoscue physical therapy has now centered around instability in my back and hips, particularly down my right leg. My latest round of exercises is now once again getting very deep into my lower back.

While I was exploring these topics I typed in everything from all these hours of research over the last few months into Claude, and it concluded that I probably had a chronically stressed nervous system. I wondered if I could test this diagnosis with my lived experience. Because I’m impatient and curious, for the last few months I have I flooded my calendar with different practices and practitioners in New York.2

I eventually found myself in the office of a magical woman called Delia Ahouandjinou, who specializes in a combination of disciplines she calls “manual therapy.” Using only the gentlest of touches around my body, she generated dramatic muscular contractions and spasms. She said there were many signs of tension and armoring in my organs, muscles and fascia, especially my heart and kidneys. This wasn’t speculative; I could literally feel it in my body when she touched key spots. Most interestingly, she said that the area surrounding my kidneys were frozen in place, perhaps due to emotional repression. I’ve literally never paid any attention to my kidneys, which might be precisely the problem. I then recalled what Mary had said about an emotional part of me being frozen by judgment. I didn’t think that her intuitions would be so literal. Perhaps exacerbated by my body’s structural imbalances, I gain stubborn weight on my lower back. I hate my appearance, and being touched there, and I judge it awfully. It was also interesting to me that kidneys are the site of the adrenal glands, the ones I had been habitually stressing through my life of constant stimulation. They are also responsible for homeostasis; keeping the body in balance.

I then obviously spent a while interrogating different LLMs for their symbolic and spiritual interpretation. I always hold these particularly lightly, especially from A.I., but this was the summary paragraph from Claude (which emphasized a link to Chinese medicine).

The kidneys hold what is most hidden and most true about a person. They are the seat of will at its deepest root — not effortful willpower but the basic orientation of the self toward life. They carry fear in its most existential form. They hold ancestral material — what was inherited rather than chosen. And they are associated with discernment — the capacity to weigh, to know from the inside, before the mind has caught up.

My hidden demons, fear, ancestral trauma, and discernment have all been absolutely front and center in my last three months of exploration.3 This discovery implied a link to a specific part of my body that constantly hurts and is judged by me.

But I care more about how I’m feeling than the story around those feelings. When I walked out of Delia’s office, the burning in my chest was largely gone. The next day I sat with my children in the park, mostly off my phone, and started to notice the welcome return of presence to my world. Since then, I’ve had a couple of unusual “oh wow, this is it” moments of deep joy and happiness. But I still have considerable pain in my lower back, and the burning remains, now in my throat. After a couple of sessions, Delia’s take was that my body was resisting structural fixes. Her intuition was that it was waiting for me to learn how to hear it properly, and let it speak. I think that’s now what lies ahead for me.

The treasure is within you.

“The reason you aren’t living in the present, when all is said and done, is because you don’t feel the present living in you.”

-Philip Shepherd

In a finale consistent with so many fairy tales, at the end of Moana, Maui realizes he doesn’t need his magic fish hook in order to be a hero. The power lies within him. For me, it’s clear this is a change in the way that I perceive time. Joseph Campbell said the dragon hides the treasure. And I was always incoherently aware that my dragon was time. If you flip your relationship with your body, it turns time from a fiery demon to a life-giving goddess.

Ever since my panic attack in Maui I have been on something of a personal healing journey. I think I now understand what keeps some people stuck and how to help get them unstuck. It has resulted in me leading a life of exceptional flourishing. But over the last few months, I realized I hadn’t actually returned with the boon, the treasure. This is presence, and it lies within us.

A regulated nervous system is a healing gift to everyone around you. You could argue it’s crucial to the wellbeing of your children. Every parent knows they pick up on absolutely everything, conscious or unconscious. For me personally, it is also opening up slightly more headspace and time for me to consider the needs of my family, especially my wife. Previously, her asking me to think about or do something mundane was felt as a triggering invitation to pain. And during those worst days, when I was called into the agony of presence by my baby, I saw how those triggers could have turned me into a demonic monster.

I recently interviewed futures-trader-turned-Jungian-analyst Dan Lawrence. It was one of my favourite conversations I’ve ever had, because I realised how integrated he seemed. It was as if his presence alone had a healing quality. This is what I now aspire to. What has really struck me, looking back at his story, was a pivotal encounter with one of the scariest patients at the high-security mental health facility where he worked. This man looked terrifying, but when Dan approached him, he realized he was secretly compassionate. He kept himself unwashed because he was so afraid of what he might do to people if they got close to him. It reminded me that Mary specifically said the emotional part of me that had been repressed was dangerous and should be approached only carefully.

What happens when you realize the demon is actually there to help you? As C.S. Lewis wrote “God shouts in our pains.” Perhaps you can then open to receive more from the Goddess.

When I told Delia about my experiences in Egypt, she said her own meditations had given her the impression that the King’s Chamber was energetically powerful, but broken. This is something I’ve heard in multiple places, and the central sarcophagus itself is literally broken and cracked on the corner. She mused that it was interesting I had also emerged with the intuition that my body may also be energetically powerful, but broken. In my recent interview with Dr. , he described how the purpose of our incarnation is to become integrated enough to experience more of God, without being shattered by the experience. If our electrically-conductive fascia is constantly defensively clenched, I doubt we are maximizing that capacity of our bodies and souls. As one of Leading Edge’s members memorably wrote “Spirituality is Secure Attachment with Reality.”

One of the real felt shifts over the last few weeks has just been simply a sense of unclenching. Of being able to tell myself, and my body, that I’m safe, when I wasn’t even previously aware I felt I was in danger. I’ve been consciously relaxing parts of my body I didn’t realize I couldn’t previously feel. Through his nervous system research, says he’s a big fan of Michael Edward Johnson’s theory on latches (great interview). This proposes that in times of danger or trauma, thin muscles wrapped around your blood vessels can clench and then glue themselves shut, restricting blood flow by as much as 20x. This “latch” is then constantly held in tension, waiting for a specific "all clear" signal to release. Perhaps this is what many of these somatic modalities aim to address, and there are so many different ways to do it. Johnson even has a provocative idea that dreaming is your body shuffling through scenarios trying to hit the "release password" for old clamps you no longer need.

Over the last few weeks, all these somatic practitioners have asked me questions like, “What does your body want to say?” or “What are your kidneys telling you?” And to be honest, I just find it mostly frustrating. But I’m wondering if my dreams might hold a key. One early morning in bed I was breathing deep into my lower back, and I had a half-dream. It was of a veteran Japanese soldier, the ones they found in the Pacific Islands still fighting WWII decades after it was over. In my dream, another figure walked up and asked him if he needed a hug. He nodded yes and fell into its arms.

I now wonder to what extent our bodies are still in foxholes fighting wars that ended a long time ago; years, generations or lifetimes. My awakening experience plunged me into years of living from a place of terror and insecurity. But I was also tantalizingly shown what a life could look like on the other side of this failed coping mechanism. A couple of days after my awakening, I arranged to have lunch nearby with some friends. I arrived half an hour early. As I waited, I realized I wasn’t bored at all. Quite the reverse; the passage of time was glorious: a rich golden river that I bathed in. I’d never experienced this kind of relationship – a loving friendship – with time before. It’s one of the best memories of my life.

“Midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear:

‘I’m not screwing around. All of this pretending and performing—these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt—has to go. Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts.”

-Brene Brown

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A common knowledge event isn’t when everyone knows something. It’s when everyone knows that everyone else knows something. My favorite example is when the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was booed by a crowd on a balcony during a televised speech. Although each individual person knew they disliked him, they didn’t know for certain that everyone else did too. This common knowledge event brought down his regime within days. I feel we are approaching the same moment, but the tyranny is a rigid and outdated map of reality.

I currently meet somewhere between ten and twenty new people a week. The topics are typically life transitions, curiosity, and bringing forth more of your potential. A remarkably common feature of all of these conversations is that the person I’m speaking to holds a mystical belief and thinks it is still deeply taboo. Many of these people have had life-changing nonordinary experiences, some of which they have been told were just features of mental illness. This isn’t your typical “spiritual” folk either. It’s people working in mainstream jobs in major cities. Culturally, we often use “woo” in a dismissive way to indicate a lack of intellectual discernment and rigor. But what if these leading edge perspectives were actually widely (but secretly) held by intelligent and successful people?

I think breaking this taboo is radically important, because if people are working with incomplete maps, they can get stuck in bad places.

So I put together a four-minute, 30-question survey, “How Woo Are You.” You can try it now and it will also categorize you into some fun buckets as to how you might view the world. The idea was to see how widely held an array of mystical beliefs actually are, and to line the beliefs up from the most mainstream to the most "out there."

I put it out to my followers and the members of Leading Edge. The results were pretty interesting.

• What I would define as the most "practical" non-traditional beliefs are also the most widely held. That consciousness is more than just the brain (92%), that dreams can carry meaning (88%), that meaningful coincidences are real (86%), and that the universe has some kind of purpose (84%). I believe these are all the kinds of beneficial beliefs that open you up to intelligent guiding forces.

• The less immediately practical, conspiracy-type beliefs are the least common overall. But the more spiritual a person is, the more conspiratorial they also tend to be. "Conspirituality" shows up clearly in the data.

• If you could ask only one question to predict how "woo" someone is overall, it would be whether they believe in channeling. It's the single most telling belief (a correlation of 0.83 with someone's total score), followed by the Akashic Records (0.82) and spirit guides (0.79).

• There is obviously a reasonable selection bias (under 30% of the respondents were classified as skeptical). But the fact is, I know my community well and, to a lesser extent, my subscriber base, and they are also pretty sober and discerning people.

At the start of the survey, I also asked respondents if they have had either a mystical experience1 or taken a psychedelic, in order to see how much it might alter their worldview.

• Mystical experience lifts almost everything. People who’ve had one are far more likely to hold nearly every belief on the list; led by God (+38 percentage points), life after death and psychic abilities (+35 each), and then synchronicities and channeling (+31). The effect is broad: mainstream spirituality, healing, and esoteric beliefs all rise together. Only the conspiracy items at the very bottom stay flat. So a mystical experience seems to open people up to spiritual belief specifically, not to believing anything and everything. Phew.

• Psychedelics are more selective. They lift some beliefs sharply and others only a little. The big movers seem to be the hands-on, body-based beliefs; plant medicine as a doorway to other intelligence (+31), tarot (+26), chakras and energy healing (+22). The more abstract, head-level beliefs rise too, but more gently — God (+12), the universe having purpose (+11). So where a mystical experience raises the whole spiritual spectrum at once, psychedelics mostly boost a specific, embodied cluster. But they also seem to be starting from a higher baseline. That’s probably not too shocking: if you’re the kind of person open to taking a psychedelic in the first place, you’re likely more mystically inclined than average to begin with.

In our 232-person sample, 84% reported having had a mystical experience versus the US national average of 49%,2 and 71% reported psychedelic use versus a national lifetime rate of roughly 28%.3 But the fact that nearly half of Americans report having had a mystical experience is something that implies to me that these “woo” beliefs are held by more people than you would commonly expect. Interestingly, of the 194 people who’d had a mystical experience, only four (!) stayed skeptical afterwards.

One fun take-away from this, which has been confirmed by my own lived experience, is that the person opposite you, making polite small talk, probably has had a non-ordinary experience that’s they’re secretly dying to share with you. But each is worried that the other person will think that they are crazy. In my experience running Leading Edge, too many people feel loneliness about those transcendent experiences. And yet, they often rate them as one of the most meaningful moments of their lives. Imagine if you had to keep your wedding day or the birth of your first child a secret? Once they find out what I’m working on, I’ve had people I’ve known for years open up about synchronicities, past life memories or their psychic abilities. Our members are drawn to us through curiosity and the desire to discuss exciting topics with a grounded peer group. This shared connection about the things that truly matter means that these relationships become deep and loving very quickly.

“Love is mutually accelerating disclosure.”

-John Vervaeke

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I’ve been thinking a lot about demons recently.

Back in 2017, my “awakening experience” changed my view of what reality was instantly. I’ve been telling the story of what happened next with increasing honesty, and I’ve been on probably fifty podcasts. I have a settled narrative, and I feel reasonably content that it’s true. But there are some pretty creepy aspects of the story that I still have no real explanation for, and they have bothered me for years. So I’ve spent the last few months exploring them.

In October of 2017 I experienced a spontaneous awakening moment (or psychotic break?) on a trading floor in Manhattan. This was followed by a couple of months of confusion, destabilization, and spiritual inflation. Then, on Boxing Day 2017, I had a sudden descent into insanity and an endless abyss of depression. It was only after ketamine therapy that I began to recover in March of 2020.

The most intense aspect of the two years I spent in a living hell was that many of my experiences felt evil and demonic. It seemed that there was something within me that definitely did not have my own best interests at heart. In fact, it wished only for my destruction. One of my overriding thought loops was that I had made an irreversible mistake and was going to be damned to hell forever.

I became obsessed with Moloch, the bull-headed Canaanite god of child sacrifice, and similar figures: Ba’al, the Minotaur and Satan. The mythologist Joseph Campbell talked about the Minotaur being at the center of the labyrinth. And it felt like I was being drawn there against my will. I have intellectual theories for what it all meant, but a part of me knew it was unresolved.

So I asked to return to the center of the maze, and see what evil was still waiting there for me. What I found there was not what I expected.

Demonic Possession or… Heartburn?

While I was in Florida on vacation in April, one of the members of Leading Edge’s 150-person community, contacted me. He’s an expert in Internal Family Systems (IFS), and coincidentally messaged me to tell me that the fear of irreversible, damning mistakes is a classic feature of what are called Unattached Burdens (UBs). Made famous by IFS practitioner Bob Falconer, UBs are negative energies, beliefs, or emotional states that a person carries, but that didn’t originate from their own lived experience. One thing that’s interesting about the theory of UBs is that it’s they themselves that carry the belief of irredeemable damnation, not you. Bob even believes that there may be some larger UB force that lies to these lost souls and tells them that they’re irredeemable and that’s why they need to stay here and feed off of us to survive.1 I wondered if that was one explanation of sorts for why I felt overpowering shame and guilt, despite the absence of any evidence of its cause.

Around the time all this was happening, Leading Edge hosted a session with , the founder of Jhourney. Jhourney focuses on jhana meditation teaching and retreats. I was initially skeptical of the many reports2 that this kind of meditation could reliably produce bliss states on demand. But when they started coming from people I trust inside our community, I knew it was worth exploring in greater detail. The aspect that resonated for me was that my (extremely early) understanding of jhana meditation aligned with Falconer’s recommended meditation for dealing with UBs. What he calls the “Sealing Light” meditation is focusing on the part of your body that seems to have the most life force in it (usually your heart center) and then allowing it to expand. This also appears to be how you kick off the very early stages of the jhanas. Falconer likes this practice because it doesn’t waste energy or create conflict by putting up barriers and defenses, but instead allows us to cultivate our life force in ways that should be positive either way.

As I engaged with jhana practice more deeply, I noticed that there was a profound burning sensation all the way down my throat into my heart center. I gained a much clearer sense of my inner physical state. Whenever I tried to focus on any pleasant feeling, it would be overwhelmed by a sensation of irritation.

I believe that emotional, spiritual and physical ailments can be mutually reinforcing. It’s what makes reality so tricky to unpack. I enjoy spicy food. I drink a pint of cold brew on an empty stomach in the morning. And then I also realized one of the legacy psychiatric meds I’ve been on for the last few years is acidic. I emailed my psychiatrist to see if he could discuss alternatives. Thirty minutes after I sent that email, I had a pre-arranged meeting with a mutual contact through Leading Edge. Only when I started the call did I discover that the man I was speaking to, Jason Goldberg, had just founded his own CPG product with a holistic response to gut acid and esophageal repair called Kiss My Acid Goodbye.

And then, in the remarkable way that my life seems to run right now, the next day Justin Wilford had arranged for me to have a personal 1:1 session with Bob Falconer to interact with any potential UB of my own. I actually haven’t had the sense of having made irredeemable mistakes or even really many bad days at all for many years. But I was still terrified at the idea that some demon would suddenly start talking with my voice. As my mind is always a jumble of unreliable thoughts and ideas, I decided to focus on the body and make the burning sensation the topic of our session. While I still remain agnostic about UBs, there were indeed moments when I felt like I was responding with voices and intentions that were not my own. But equally, I could have been making it up. What was interesting is that that sense of burning moved around whenever I tried to focus on it. Sadly, the part where Falconer tried to guide the UBs back into the light had no effect on me. I didn’t emerge with a glorious sense of redemption. And the burning remained.

As a result, I made the heartbreaking decision to quit my excessive caffeine consumption for the first time in over twenty years. Over the next few weeks, without the stimulation from coffee, my physical sensitivity increased. I was pretty exasperated when I realized how long the burning had probably been there in the background, just below my awareness. When I had a strong emotional reaction to something, it made my chest burn, which made me irritable, which made me more angry, which made me more irritable. As a result, I would end up snapping at my children for really very trivial things. I realized it was one of the drivers of why I never stop moving and thinking during the day, then dissociate into my phone during idle time on evenings and weekends. At those times when the burning is there, the passage of time is literally painful. It robbed me of the tranquil moments that should have been most precious with my family. I couldn’t even sit and help my boy with his homework without a beer in my hand. Despite all the work I’ve done on myself as a father, it was particularly bad with my wife because the dissociation crowded out a lot of the time that I should have been helping her carry the mental and physical load at home.

I was still wondering if the burning was related to some kind of evil force. A demonic presence severing my direct connection to divine joy. So I continued to explore the topic of demons and possession and, in fact, had an incredibly long essay about my experiences and the different theories until reality conspired to offer me an entirely different interpretation.

Samara and the Phoenixes

Two weeks after what I half-jokingly refer to as my “IFS exorcism” experience, and announced the formation of their new practice, The Phoenix Era.3 This is a two-on-one energy healing experience where both of them work on you simultaneously. They are both good friends of mine, and I’ve interviewed both for Leading Edge.4 They are also both accomplished neuroscientists. Mona wrote a pivotal book in my life: Proof of Spiritual Phenomena. It describes her journey from materialist skeptic to someone who assembled the robust statistical and empirical evidence for psychic phenomena and reincarnation. And now it has even resulted in the spontaneous materialization of her own gifts.

I’ve seen probably fifty different spiritual practitioners in my role as the founder of Leading Edge. This session was qualitatively different because I intrinsically trusted both of them. Throughout pretty much every single energy healing or intuitive reading I’ve had before, there’s a significant skeptical part of me that’s wondering if I’m being conned or imagining things. But I know Allison and Mona and their intentions, and even more powerfully, they confirmed each other’s readings throughout the session.

For as long as they’ve known me, I’ve had this sense that either I am evil or I’m going to accidentally do something evil. This feeling came up again recently through my fears of lack of discernment in exploring mystical ideas. I had come into our session terrified about some sort of historical relationship with demons. And I’m still definitely not discounting that some aspects of my time in hell may have involved contact with those kinds of forces. But they don’t seem to be present in my life now. And yet the burning has remained.

Allison & Mona immediately said that I wasn’t evil. Instead they both independently observed a dissociated part of myself around my throat. Allison saw it as angry and red, she described actually seeing it even before our session. When she focused on my throat during our healing, she said an unusually intense wind blew up around her in LA, where she lives. Both of them also identified a disruptive feminine energy in my presence. One of Mona’s insights was that I was somehow suppressing my core essence, and that was enraging another part of me. It was like I was unable to speak my truth, and that was creating irritation in my throat, between my heart and my head.

The next morning I had already arranged a session with Mary, the intuitive I have found so helpful. I deliberately told her nothing about what I was experiencing as a test against my own skepticism. It was a test she passed immediately. She said she saw an angry, feminine part of myself that had been fragmented from me. The cause of that fragmentation was judgment. Me believing that wild part of myself was evil had prevented me from integrating it and had frozen it in time. She described how this creates a raw, untamed emotional anger. This animal nature was in my feminine side. It just hadn’t come into my full awareness, full consciousness. She described the process of how we go from unconscious wholeness, to unconscious fragmentation, then conscious fragmentation, finally conscious wholeness.

Her metaphor was that my own unconscious fragmentation was like taking a three-year-old and shoving them into the closet, turning out the light, and leaving them there for 30 years alone in the darkness. “Then you open the door 30 years later. Are you going to find a cute little three-year-old who’s adorable? Or are you going to find something that might not look so good?”

I believe in paying very close attention to the specific stories that we personally find most emotionally resonant. I believe they are one way our unconscious communicates with us. In the nights directly following my awakening in 2017, I dreamed in huge abstract symbols. One night I simply saw a glowing ring, apparently a Jungian symbol for wholeness. But my only frame of reference for this was the scariest movie I’d ever seen; The Ring. I became convinced that, true to the plot of the movie, I was destined to die in seven days. And I merrily went around telling my concerned friends as much. But I think that delusion also held some wisdom for me in retrospect. The Ring is about a psychic child, Samara, whose powers are terrifying and uncontrolled. They lead to her being thrown into a well and forgotten about. She emerges, enraged, with catastrophic results. I even dressed as her for my Halloween costume back in 2014.

Shortly before my son was born, I had a dream, with the intensity of something close to a vision. I saw a baby and expected it to be my unborn son. Instead, as she turned around, it was a baby girl, her face was twisted with rage and fear. I woke up terrified and confused.

I think the fact that The Ring is [correctly] regarded as one of the scariest horror movies of all time indicates that this isn’t just a “me” problem. In fact, a variant of this story is actually pretty common throughout human culture, as noted by Joseph Campbell’s biographer (and Leading Edge interviewee), Dr. Stephen Larsen:

The shaman descends to the matrix of creation, to reenact the archetypal quest of the hero: once again magically to transform the Great Mother from her angry, withholding aspect to her life-giving, bountiful aspect. He ignores the appearance of ugliness and does something nice for her. And only then does she respond in kind, granting the shaman his wish…

… It would seem a highly reliable rule of thumb, whenever one confronts such a grotesque hag in dream or fantasy, to give her the kiss, or as the Eskimo shaman does, comb her hair. For to him who is willing to face the appearance of ugliness is beauty given or the life-giving boon bestowed.

Obviously Mother Nature has solid reasons to be angry with us right now. For individuals, our body is also the primary place the feminine, the unconscious lives. People talk a lot in abstract terms about the intelligence of the body. But I think we are going to discover that it is much more sophisticated than we’ve ever realized. In his recent Substack, pioneering biologist Dr. recently noted that:

The fact that you don’t feel your liver being conscious is irrelevant – you don’t feel me being conscious either. It may not have the linguistic chops of your left hemisphere and can’t speak up for itself, but we’re working on that (interfaces to communicate with diverse intelligences).

I find it amusing that the organ he picked, the liver, is associated with anger and intense emotion in many ancient cultures. If we simply ask our body what it needs, we may get non-verbal cues or symbolic answers. As my experience has already revealed, dreams are obviously one powerful way it does that5, and I have found the period between sleeping and waking particularly fruitful.

In writing this essay, I encountered the inversion of this idea, which was so powerful and simple it really blew me away. I believe that we exist in something like “Earth school” to learn lessons that evolve our consciousness. One of Carl Jung’s most famous quotes is: “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” But once you make the unconscious conscious, perhaps you can also co-create your fate. One of the clearest signs that we have a lesson to learn is a strong emotional reaction to something. So once you have a clearer sense of an unexplained emotional or physical sensation, perhaps you can simply ask for lessons and experiences that show you their underlying cause. And so I did: I asked what the burning was about.

What was funny is that I then realized I had already been receiving relevant lessons. One of the first things more spiritually-mature people had told me before I started Leading Edge was that these kinds of communities were like rocket fuel for revealing your flaws and shadow. In the weeks before I met with Mary, Mona and Allison, the topics of trauma, rage, and dissociation repeatedly had emerged in community dynamics in dramatic and surprising ways.

Meanwhile, after six months of diligent work, my Egoscue physical therapy has successfully resolved much of the corkscrew in my body, and in the process has revealed deeper imbalances I didn’t even know I had. And it now seems to be zeroing in on a structural weakness in my hips, also an area associated with emotional repression. It feels like I am going to the center of the maze within my own body.

I now realize I have leaned on my right leg my whole life. The torque in my body was towards the right side, symbolically interpreted as the analytical over the intuitive, and perhaps this is also reflected in the way that I permanently lean to the right. This was causing chronic back pain and now sciatic issues. In resolving deep structural imbalances, perhaps our bodies can then talk to us more accurately. For example, Dr. John Sarno is famous for the idea that chronic lower back pain can be caused by repressed emotions, particularly rage. He claims that even just the awareness of this possibility can sometimes instantly resolve the problem.

Trauma and Rage

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

-Joseph Campbell

As all this was unfolding, I had already (!) agreed to undergo The Richards Trauma Process with Leading Edge member Amon Woulfe. He describes it as a full factory reset for your nervous system. Like a computer, our subconscious can be running all sorts of redundant programs in the background. This process offers a way to shut them all down. Just three short, powerful sessions involved semi-hypnotic reprogramming and produced a much deeper biographical understanding of the various different traumatic events in my life. I won’t spoil it for future participants, but it climaxed in a safe and therapeutic expression of my emotions, particularly rage.

I’ve previously been pretty dismissive of the way therapy-speak has invaded normal life and the corresponding “trauma-fication” of everything. I felt I personally don’t “deserve” emotional outbursts because there was nothing especially traumatic in my past. That said, my wife’s interpretation of my mental health crisis was that I had a life filled with unresolved micro-traumas. From a very premature birth, to being bullied at school, being laid off and losing my father. The pressure was slowly building over time with no real emotional release valve. Then when I started meditating, this gave my demons an opportunity to kick the door in. And while my personal history wasn’t especially dramatic, you never know what you are holding on an ancestral basis. For example, my grandfather fought in World War II in Burma. My father was a child during the Blitz. My other grandfather was a teenager on a machine gun at the Somme in World War I; the bloodiest day in British history. There is also a pretty virulent strain of mental illness running through my maternal line.

About ten days before my son was born, I was pretty extravagantly deranged. I was overcome with an inexplicable horror that he was at risk of attack by an evil force. And yet, I made the rather unwise decision to watch the petrifying horror movie Hereditary. Essentially, it’s about demonic possession being passed down through family lines. Once again, it was less about the specifics of the story, but more the emotional intensity it generated that was most telling. Years later, on a long flight to visit my sister in Berkeley I was gripped by the inexplicable idea of Moloch being some kind of family possession. I can’t really explain why. When I arrived at her house, I tried to explain my garbled reasoning. She looked at me with polite confusion. But then I immediately walked into her bathroom and at exactly my eye level on the shelf above the toilet was the book of Alan Ginsberg’s poem Howl, about Moloch.

And, as much as I now believe that reincarnation is probably real, I still find it hard to apply the concept to myself. It’s difficult for me to truly accept the idea that I might contain lifetimes of suffering and trauma that are still playing out through my karma now. Over the last few months I had another strong unconscious impulse draw me to revisit the end of the excellent first season of the TV series Westworld. I had also watched it during my period of depression and had felt very significant at the time. The plot focuses on lifelike robots in a theme park for humans. These “hosts” are doomed to circular loops of behavior where they are systematically abused by the park’s guests. A key theme of the plot is a maze as a metaphor for the robotic hosts coming to consciousness; a mysterious minotaur even appears throughout the series. The protagonist, Dolores, a loving, mild-mannered robot rancher, is on a quest to find the murderous figure Wyatt. [Spoiler alert] She eventually finds out that Wyatt is a repressed part of herself; the part that remembered every abuse, every death, every loop across decades of exploitation by the human guests. Like Dolores, we might all be carrying a lot more pain than we can rationally explain or remember.

One major risk is that constant excavation of traumatic causes and stories creates a labyrinth all of its own. But I think the wider acceptance that trauma can be pre-verbal, ancestral or even pre-incarnation means we don’t need to feel guilty for not having an obvious excuse” for a good cry or emotional release.

The explicit message of Westworld’s plot is that conscious wholeness only comes from reintegration of this exiled part hidden in the center of the maze. In contrast, like the psychic little girl Samara in The Ring, all the hosts eventually escape the park in an orgy of violence. Shadow work is even more essential than I realized if you’re expecting to accrue any degree of real-world spiritual power. If we gain the kinds of superpowers that can come through spiritual growth, without resolving these hidden traumas, you then risk explosive emotional consequences. I’ve been in an inner development process for the best part of the last ten years. And yet I was shocked and embarrassed at how much of my previously unknown shadow has been revealed to me over the last few months.

The Ultimate Treasure.

“Your nervous system will always choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven.”

- Kathy Overman

For years I’ve understood that the route back to human flourishing leads through reunification with the right hemisphere, and therefore the directly interconnected heart and body. I just didn’t realize that the emotional confrontation involved might feel dangerously demonic in its intensity.

I’m still not sure what the relationship of the left hemisphere is to this hero’s journey. How much it both prevents or protects us from this confrontation. I don’t know if those hostile thought loops that accompanied every attempt to open my heart were trying to keep me safe, retain control, or even to kill me.

Directly after my awakening I became obsessed with a poignant movie called A Monster Calls; where a terrifying demon appears in a little boy’s garden every night. But his true intent is to help him understand and release the trauma of his father’s death. I forced my confused and concerned family to watch it with me. Only looking backwards, do I now realise that every individual mini-crisis of those years in hell was triggered by an appeal to open my heart. The night of my descent into insanity was marked by the intention to have a son. One of the scariest nights of my life, accompanied by waking visions of demons, was the night of his birth. My final ketamine trip vision was hellish, and again it related to my son. What followed immediately afterwards was about four hours of fairly persistent crying. Mona’s intuition was that this emotional release was part of what prompted my recovery.

Asked about ‘the meaning of life,’ comedian Jimmy Carr responded with a five word answer: “Enjoying the passage of time.” I’m hopeful that long-term resolution of my previously unconscious trauma will help get me to that most desirable of all states: true presence. Perhaps this is the “boon” or treasure at the center of the maze. And perhaps we may get there by integrating the burning rage of any Minotaur we find hidden there.

One thing that I hope stands out from this ongoing story is that, while Leading Edge was the trigger of so many of these shadow issues, it was also the container that is spontaneously providing most of the solutions. As you can also see from this narrative, Leading Edge had a spooky knack of consistently providing me with solutions before I even knew I was looking for them. Every single person mentioned in this article is either a part of Leading Edge or someone who I met through our members. The last time I went through this experience, I had relatively little help. This time I am also being held in an intimate support group with some of my closest friends from Leading Edge. My experiences with Allison, Mona, and Mary also broke my frame, where what I thought for years was one cause may in fact have been another. I’m still not sure if all of this was prompted by “just” heartburn. But the removal of stimulants that might cause heartburn raised my awareness of my emotions and sensations in a new way.

I don’t think this is the end of my story, it’s the start of a new one. And I plan to write about which kind of somatic and emotional processing methods are most effective for me in the months ahead. In fact, the last few days have given me a new possible diagnostic direction that makes me feel more hopeful than at any point in the last ten years. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the last three months have refined and clarified my entire understanding of my life so far. I cannot think of a stronger endorsement to be a member of one of these groups or to form one.

“Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us.
The labyrinth is thoroughly known.
We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god.
And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves.
Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world."

-Joseph Campbell

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My mind has recently turned to the prospect of revelation. The UFO disclosure process started by the U.S. Government yesterday seems like another step towards broadening our collective understanding of reality. Apocalypse means unveiling, and so my mind has been drawn to the rather intense associated concept of the antichrist. I’m not alone; I recently received three consecutive Substacks on the same topic in a matter of hours, and another one the next morning. They all identified the antichrist, whether literally or figuratively, in the same way: the steady abstraction of the human soul from connection with the divine spark through technology and transhumanism. It seems obvious.

But reality then conspired to offer me an alternative vision. One of my friends is a Christian. A few weeks ago he shared his belief that sometimes the devil comes in a deceptive form of love and light. The day after speaking to him, I was pondering the claims from Rep. Tim Burchett. The rough gist of it is that he believes alien disclosure is going to come with some fairly dark revelations. General Mike Flynn then replied to Burchett’s tweet saying that we had better not fall for a false flag; where the simulation of a fake hostile alien attack is used by a governmental cabal to assume greater totalitarian control. With the Vice President himself saying that he thinks aliens are demons, this is one of those utterly absurd-sounding conspiracy theories that looks a little more credible by the day.

Having watched from the sidelines for the last two years, I can say that the UAP/UFO information ecosystem is the hardest one I’ve ever tried to navigate. So I rapidly lost interest in the when of disclosure, but I became much more interested in how aliens might challenge our worldview if we discovered that they were real. I even interviewed Jim McCarty, the scribe for the famous alleged channeled alien text, The Law of One.

In discussion with a friend on this topic a few weeks ago, he sent me a link to the Wikipedia page on Operation Blue Beam. This is a theory devised by a man called Serge Monast. What caught my eye was his claim that this kind of “evil alien” disclosure would be used to install a deceptive New Age worldview. I asked Claude for a summary and this was what I got.

The New Religion

The centerpiece was the Maitreya — Benjamin Creme’s “World Teacher” figure. Creme claimed Maitreya was already present on Earth, awaiting a “Day of Declaration” when he would telepathically address all of humanity simultaneously. Monast saw Blue Beam as the technology to fake exactly this — presenting the Maitreya as the simultaneous fulfillment of every tradition’s messianic expectation: the Christian Second Coming, the Jewish Messiah, the Islamic Mahdi, the Buddhist Maitreya, the Hindu Kalki.

The theological core, in Monast’s reading, was Luciferianism. His primary evidence was the Lucis Trust — Alice Bailey’s organization, originally founded as Lucifer Publishing Company. This organization had infiltrated the United Nations and was using it to propagate its deception. The “Masters” Bailey was channeling were actually demonic entities, and their externalization would be staged through technology.

Drawing on Bailey, the religion’s doctrinal shape would include:

• The divinity of man — humans as gods in development, requiring no redemption

• Lucifer as liberator — the true light-bringer freeing humanity from orthodox religion

• Consciousness evolution replacing the sin/redemption narrative

• The Christ as an impersonal cosmic force, with Jesus as merely one of many vehicles for it

• Reincarnation replacing heaven and hell, dissolving fear of death and with it a key mechanism of Christian moral accountability

For Monast — a committed Catholic — the specific horror was the religion’s surface appeal. It would speak the language of love, unity, and enlightenment, drawing in New Age seekers, disillusioned Christians, and universalists alike. The Luciferian core would remain esoteric, revealed only gradually to initiates, while the exoteric face presented a warm syncretic humanism. The entire New Age movement, in his view, was unwitting — or sometimes witting — preparation of the cultural ground.

Reading this, my stomach flipped and I wanted to vomit. Many of these ideas have fascinated me and I write about them regularly. More strangely, I had been reading one of Alice Bailey’s books the night before; it lay at my bedside behind me. The website for Lucis was even open on my desktop. On the bookmark for Bailey’s book, they had printed a prayer called the Great Invocation (once recorded by Eleanor Roosevelt). For some reason, our cleaner had placed it above my desk. Most bizarrely of all, next to it she had also randomly placed a commemorative medal my diplomat father once received from the United Nations.

Bailey’s work had been recommended to me by a channeler I’d found exceptionally useful (although to be honest Bailey’s books didn’t resonate much for me either way). Was she channeling demons? Is the channeled Law of One material I’d been gripped by over the last couple of years from deceptive demonic entities rather than benevolent aliens? I’m not so much afraid of being wrong (otherwise I’d never write anything), as much as I am being deceived into amplifying dangerous lies.

Fear and thought loops invaded my mind. Had I damned myself and my readers, you all, by being duped by demons dressed in robes of light? I obviously couldn’t think about anything else all day. The anxiety was so bad that even a scheduled root canal that afternoon was a blessed relief from the rumination.

I was given some peace by the fact that I have really quite a few examples of people telling me my work has helped them, and nobody has ever said it actively hurt them (yet). I also now have close companions to sense-check my panic. Only when they mirrored my fears back to me did they start to diminish.

By the time I woke up the next day I was more curious than terrified. I also knew I had to write about this experience. Sunlight dissolves shame. If the ideas I’ve been drawn to are this dangerous, I owe it to you, my readers, to highlight that alternative perspective and let you decide for yourselves. As so many of you kindly do, I would love you to tell me where I may be right, where I may be wrong and why.

If I have somehow been deceived and amplified dangerous ideas, I guess “I’m sorry” doesn’t really cut it, but the road to hell was always paved with my good intentions.

Steelmanning The Deception.

Last month I spent ten days on vacation in Florida with my family. I used that time to eat fried food, drink dirty martinis, and reflect on what I really believed. I waited until I got back to read about Monast’s theory behind Operation Blue Beam in more detail. And when I did, to be honest, most of it sounded completely insane.

But I decided I needed to steelman the broader “deceptive New Age” thesis. Here are some key components of the theory that I could identify:

• The risks of channeled information. This one seems like the strongest warning. Surrendering your sovereignty to “spirit guides,” or “higher powers” without proper discernment risks eroding your free will and opening you to manipulation and deception. As cutting-edge science increasingly validates the existence of disembodied intelligences, we have to accept the uncertainties and risks that come with creating interfaces to interact with them.1

• Ascension narratives eroding individuality. The “global shift in consciousness” or “ascending to another density” frameworks may be quietly training us to treat human incarnation as merely a staging post, eroding the individual moral discernment that matters most right now. It may also place the focus from self-development to outside of us and onto the world. Even more extreme: are these deceptive narratives designed to make us surrender our unique individuality, Pluribus style, at a pivotal future date?

• Reducing Christ to a general archetype. The framing of Christ as a balanced psyche or cosmic force, an idea I’ve found appealing, is specifically identified as an instance of deception. The more orthodox Christian framing is that the only route to salvation is through a personal relationship with Jesus of Nazareth. The recent trend of serious, intelligent people returning to orthodox Christianity may be a more direct response to this danger than I've been willing to accept.

• Incorrect frameworks overwhelming direct experience. As someone with both an overdeveloped intellectual side and a burning desire to be seen as intelligent, this is a pronounced risk. I might prematurely place misleading frameworks around direct experience and therefore shut myself off from the correct path.

• New Age groups as Trojan horses for evil cabals. The initiated secrets start out loving and benign, but the higher up the hierarchy you go, the more the truth is distorted. At the same time, your ego’s desire to be special inhibits your ability to test these ideas against other people. While this is probably a broader risk, I’m not a member of any of these kinds of esoteric groups and am intrinsically untrustworthy of them. A more subtle danger is that I have allowed deceptive ideas into my own non-hierarchical community. But then my hope and expectation is that my own community of discerning individuals can help challenge and course-correct each other. It’s certainly a much better idea than doing it alone, or in a cult.

This exercise was incredibly challenging and scary. Over a period of weeks I interrogated LLMs. I deliberately read dark, ominous, mostly AI-generated Substacks. I had to continuously confront the fear that I may have accidentally done some very real, even irreversible, damage to myself and those that I love. I kept trying to find the decisive demonic deception that would reveal how badly I had failed everyone. I haven’t been able to find that smoking gun, yet.

The crux of the New Age deception hypothesis seems to be that mysticism inserts a clever substitute in the place of our connection to the divine. It may even open you to influences and intelligences deliberately designed to mislead you. It doesn’t matter what the moth’s intentions are, the flame will burn him all the same.

I regard curiosity as a direct connection to the divine, your own unique path of conscious evolution. This exercise made me question my own motivations to their very core. The fear of New Age deception at times made me want to stop writing about these topics altogether. It made me want to withdraw back to an ordinary life dealing with more mundane, less risky material. Like everything else, curiosity isn’t always beneficial. Beyond the more obvious risks of bypassing and New Age immorality, spirituality obviously has some very naive and dangerous ideas. I especially believe that black magic is probably both real and an incomprehensibly bad idea. Some rabbit hole topics are also prone to make us fearful and negative, which in turn may open us up to manipulation through adversarial forces. Darker things swim in the deeper waters. But the ideas that have most resonated with me over the last few years have meaningfully improved my life, and my relationships with friends and family.

Although this framework identifies it as a New Age deception, and it’s central to The Law of One, I have found the abundant evidence for reincarnation of significant benefit in my life for reducing my death anxiety.2 The idea of Earth as an intelligent, loving school for the evolution of our souls has made me more emotionally resilient and enormously grateful for my daily experiences, even the bad ones. It has actually made me incredibly excited about living and enjoying this life here on Earth because this is the place where the most important lessons are learned. I hope it has also made me more morally responsible. Meanwhile karma simply allows you to attract the lessons you need to evolve. Depending on the day, I’m now about 70-80% sure this worldview is true. In fact, I am wondering if facing this fear of deception is another lesson in itself. Even in the last few weeks, I’ve been continuously reminded that I believe that reality is intrinsically good, limitlessly intelligent and trying to help you out all of the time. This is as close to the definition of God as I have come. Following these cues and learning these lessons is the evolutionary path of consciousness and one that I believe tries to walk in Jesus’ footsteps, back to God.

So, if, if, there is a force that works to freeze us in place on the path, severing that golden thread to the sacred, for example by inhibiting our curiosity, is a great strategy.

It is this force, if not a specific figure, that I think might be a manifestation of the “real” antichrist. This isn’t simply fear, some fears are entirely logical. This is a specific kind of irrational fear that often doesn’t have an obvious source, and distracts, diverts and petrifies. This force gets into us through our traumas and then inhabits and perverts different energies, whether it’s technology, money, or spirituality. When I meet people that are being blocked on the path to their personal evolution, it is overwhelmingly the distorted energy of money that’s doing it. The cast-iron certainty that they can’t follow their curiosity because it will damn themselves and their family, or it already has. Aside from money, the other most common blockage I hear from people I meet is that pursuing the spiritual path will see them mocked, ostracised or abandoned. Some people, justifiably, fear psychosis and insanity. For the more religious ones, they even fear the ideas and practices risk their damnation. It’s a much more subtle deception than money or technology, but one that’s worked for centuries.

In fact, I now wonder if the “antichrist” is actually the thing that tells us there are such a thing as irreversible mistakes that damn us and our loved ones.

Friendships and Fellowships

Even if she’s somehow secretly deceptive, that channeler has taught me a great number of resonant things, most importantly how to cultivate my own embodied intuition. It’s much easier to be deceived if you can’t feel truth. I suspect one lesson from this encounter is to learn to trust my own heart, rather than be seduced by ideas that only tickle my head and my intellect. Surely my goosebumps don’t lie? I’ve listened to all of my recordings with her and read all the transcripts, and honestly struggled to find anything that was problematic.

But the fact is, the only reason I could be shaken by all this is because I don’t totally trust my discernment yet. I’m pretty early to all this mysticism stuff, and at the same time the world seems to be getting exponentially stranger. I’m still genuinely unsure if I’m missing something. It’s too easy for me to conclude this piece with a tidy sense of certainty that I did the right thing. I’m not sure if the strong Alice Bailey synchronicities were a warning for me (and you?) to steer clear of her work and channeled material more generally.

The channeler also said that it was incredibly foolish to walk this mystical path alone. I’ve spent the last few weeks talking to different discerning people in Leading Edge about my fears of being deceived. The amazing things they were doing in their lives, and the compassionate way they talked to me, did more than anything else to calm me. Maybe we’re just all in culty groupthink, but to be honest I even struggle to imagine what the focus of the cult is beyond love and curiosity.

The fruits of our actions are obviously more important than the roots of our frameworks. But corrupted roots can poison the fruits. So want the end of this piece to be something that opens into questions rather than closes into conclusions. As my fear subsided it became obvious that I’m not going to stop exploring the ideas that I think will make my life, and the lives of others, better. I have a powerful intuition that things are going to get seriously weird and wacky from here. And so I’d like you to help us find the truth, together.

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Dan delivered a pretty mindblowing lecture about dreams for Leading Edge’s Accelerating Wisdom Series. He’s someone who has let his curiosity guide him from a very young age. It took him through a traditionally successful path into a world filled with mystery and intuition. Obviously he would never say this, but listening to him speak, particularly towards the end of his story, I was really struck by the fact that this is what a successfully integrated life looks like. He seems to have balanced spiritual and material, intuitive and intellectual and masculine and feminine, all while building a successful career and life for himself and his family. In a world desperately short of role models, I think his is a fine example.

I loved his story so much that I decided to release it as a standalone interview and transcript. [You can listen to our conversation on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and I’d recommend it on 1x for the full effect of Dan’s voice and presence].

Dan Lawrence: I didn’t speak to anyone outside of my home until I was five. Funnily, with me doing the work I’m doing at the moment, what it meant is I fine-tuned — or I was drawn into what you’re calling “down” — I was just fascinated by the connectedness of things.

The weirdness — Wyrd — of things, almost frozen in that. I had a lot of fear in me as a young boy. It seemed intuitive to me not to speak, because by the time something arrived as language — as a word — I was already some way removed from where it had come from, and I was absolutely fascinated by that. So when people around me spoke, I wasn’t much interested in what they were saying. I was just curious — deeply curious — about where it was coming from, and whether they knew. I know this sounds a bit anachronistic, but it’s the best way I can explain it.

How did I do that? I had no guidance. My parents were completely irreligious. My dad’s mother was Catholic and he’d rejected that. So I just developed these little idiosyncratic practices where I would sit on the edge of my bed and basically do Zen. I would even describe it to myself as having to take layers away from my mind.

I had to go back in my mind. I would sit there and enter into darker and darker iterations of mind until I was in complete blackness. Of course I was a little boy, so I was completely ill-prepared for that — often in states of quite severe dread. I’m aware of what a psychoanalyst would make of that, but I know: the initial impulse came from curiosity, not from fear. I arrived in a place of fear once I was there.

And yet what I found there, in that complete nothingness, was that I had a kind of mobility. I had a slipperiness. I would sense presences around me that were felt, for want of a better word, evil or demonic. But if I stayed very still, I could move around that space, and I would have all these experiences of faces appearing in front of me. If I engaged with them — with their eyes — I’d have some kind of energetic exchange. If I moved them to the side in my mind, another one would take its place. So I would sit there with this stream of faces and became quite adept at it in my silence.

TM: Were those faces mostly evil, or were they a mix?

No, just people. Just people.

TM: And what did you think they were at the time?

I thought they were dead people. I still probably do. I’m describing a process that happened in my mind’s eye. If they appeared in my mind’s eye and I looked into their eyes deliberately, there would be some kind of exchange — they would engage me in conversation. There were some repetitive ones, but they were just normal people. And then there were these more nameless presences in the background that, every now and again, if I went deeper, I would become aware of — just dark — and I needed to stay very still and move myself back out.

So I spent a lot of my early life, until I was about five, in this state. My parents were very worried about me. Luckily it was long before the over-fascination with neurodiversity. I wasn’t put in front of anyone. I wasn’t diagnosed.

I spoke indoors sometimes. Someone had given me an illustrated Bible, so I asked to go to Sunday school. They would take me on Sunday mornings, and I became fascinated by the archetypal stories there — in particular, Daniel in the lion’s den, because that mirrored my situation very well. And Samson — I was fascinated by the story of Samson and this power that resided in him that no one could work out.

I would oscillate between a state of real fear and dread, and yet was also happiest and most content in silence, in darkness. I couldn’t understand why other people wouldn’t do that. I couldn’t understand why everybody wanted to talk so much.

I spent a lot of time with my mother because I was at home. I went to preschool, but after a year or so they didn’t know what to do with me because I wouldn’t talk and would not engage with anyone. So mum withdrew me from that. But I was fascinated by this: she would call me Danny, and I would immediately be prompted to wonder where this notion of Danny came from in her — match it against my interior feeling. I had this insight I couldn’t quite put words to: her Danny had to be something to do with what she called thinking and language. And it wasn’t quite right. The pre-Danny was back there somewhere. So how could she know that?

I would spend hours in this state, reading the Bible and drawing. I would draw repeatedly — figures that I encountered in my practice, faces.

And once, at about five, I did this huge drawing of what I later came to connect with the figure Baal — the pre-Canaanite deity — because I’d encountered that. I drew it out to show my parents. Of course, they just looked at it, thinking, what is he doing? I’ve always been very artistic.

TM: To jump in there — I was obsessed with Moloch, which is right, the same figure, and I felt I had an archetypal confrontation with Moloch during my most insane moments, as the god of zero-sum games. It felt very real to me, in a world where those things weren’t considered real. My God, it’s interesting you picked that example. Carry on.

It’s a very present example to me. And then I started school, and of course in a school structure — it’s quite an anxious environment — they’re managing kids and trying to reach milestones, even in those days.

I just wouldn’t speak. I didn’t feel the need to. I was quite happy, content in the classroom. But there was one day when I finished school, looked up, and my mother was talking to my teacher. I could see how worried they were — I could see how deeply worried my mum was, in a panic really about what to do. And then I thought, I better start talking. I began to form words and talk. Very quickly it became clear it was a selective mechanism, not a speech delay. From that time onwards, I felt it was my task to pick up the thread of worldliness.

I quite quickly found that I enjoyed using words. I was a bright kid.

I was in a small primary school. I was very bright — years ahead, very quickly. Because I loved drawing, I would do my work in the first two hours of the day, and then they would give me things to draw and I would go off around the school or the grounds and draw and draw and draw.

From then onwards, all the way through childhood — I went to grammar school — I picked up the thread. I had this latent ability to form words, to speak, to write. I loved English. I became very welded to that. That was the backdrop. My parents had lived their whole life in the same area. They were just outside London. My dad was in print. My mother was in finance. In the area I grew up in, you go into finance, you make good, you follow a particular linear route. I was very good at maths. I took my maths GCSE three years early.

TM: Wow.

Did A-level when other kids were doing other things.

So it was like the flip — the breaking in came once I’d made it into the world successfully. I was a futures trader. I’d done my pit exam, so I was a trader and broker. I was on the phones in the pit — a dual role. And at that point, I fulfilled what I think really were my parents’ wishes and this deep sense of fitting in — because my parents carried that anxiety all the way through my childhood, that I was going to revert back to something.

I was still a strange enough child. I still spent a lot of time on my own.

I was allergic to dogs and all my family had dogs, so whenever we went to visit anyone I would be outside on my own, and everyone would come out to check on me. I’d be like, no, fine — reading, or just having an opportunity to be in my own company, back in that state of when I was younger. State of reverie. As I got older, I performed a language around it. Again, this underlying connectivity — I love that word “weird,” Wyrd, because there’s something slippery about it that really resonates with me.

When I was on the trading floor and working, I started to reconnect with aspects of my old life. I started to read Freud and Jung. My grandfather died — he was very important to me, stimulated something in me — and then suddenly, once I’d opened that door just slightly, I couldn’t close it. Things started to — whichever way you put it — either unravel or reawaken, whatever language you want for that.

And it felt like a relief. It felt like I was coming home to myself. I suddenly had this realization of the amount of effort I’d put in between five and twenty-five — however old I was — to get where I was, and how far I’d gone away from myself. The distance and the pain in that distance. And the more successful I was in that trading floor environment, the more extroverted I was, the more “successful” — the more the loss of that little boy and his innate way of being in the world felt intolerable.

TM: At that stage, did you get to a breaking point of stuckness? Or was this something where you adapted quite quickly back into following the flow?

Let me think about the chronology of it.

It really accelerated when the trading floor closed and I was an earlier adopter of screen-based trading, because I could just see that’s the way it was going. And bear in mind, on the trading floor I’d been part of a small group where we would share dreams. It kind of began to encroach even in that very extroverted, very left-brain environment.

I was part of a small group of eight guys who would meet up every morning before the open and share dreams over breakfast — as a form of technology, a kind of co-opted left-brain version of something, as an edge on the market.

TM: So you were using your dreams to enhance your pattern recognition?

Yes. And so everybody had access to all the screens, but I had access to this feeling-based intuition that would appear in images. If I dreamt of something and someone else dreamt of something similar, or our dreams crisscrossed, there was a point of real confirmation that we had access to something. So on a Friday morning, three out of eight of us dream of a symbol that connects, and we explore that symbol using basic symbol diaries, trying to connect it. And it’s a Nonfarm day on a Friday. Everything points towards a bull market, and we are taking a bearish position. We’re not necessarily taking a position over the figure, but we are ready to go — as soon as there’s any sign of something, we’re in and going.

It wasn’t quite as formulated as that, but that was in the last two years that I was on the floor. I was trading at that point, broking on screen for people because screen-based trading started about two years before the floor closed. After hours we would do screen-based, and I was one of the first people to broke that, because I could just see where it was going.

TM: Why — why could you see where it was going?

It just felt inevitable.

You’re asking about intuition. I think it was pattern recognition. Well, it is a very good question, because all the signs were there — the tone coming out of the trading floor, announcements and news, and the ambivalent excitement that came with people being able to trade on screen.

But I think it was me reading the field of the floor.

Most people — the floor had been open twenty-odd years. People spent their whole career down there, very social. You didn’t have to trade particularly well. The actual floor environment of a stock market is about relationship — it’s not about foresight. So people are very beholden to that as a model. And yet I could feel in the field a draw towards screen-based trading and a sense of excitement. After hours I would sit with a screen on the floor, trading Japanese bonds and stuff, broking them for people. Very quickly there were people gathered around me, and I could just get a sense of where this was going.

I jumped in with a bunch of other traders. I was by far the smallest trader. We took a floor of the ING building in King William Street before the floor closed, in order to get set up with screens and early trading technologies, score boxes, all sorts. We all had our own zone in that big office space. We took a three-year lease between us. But within the first year, everybody disappeared except for me, because people just weren’t truly ready for it. They were used to trading relationships. And yet suddenly your position is transparent. Someone won’t do you a favour to get you out of it. You’re outside — you’re engaging with a machine.

But that’s when, thinking about it, this is interesting to open up: how did I trade?

The guys that set up in this room were mostly the guys that shared dreams, and their dreams shifted away from preoccupation with markets and symbols around that, to their own lives and their difficulties adapting — beginning to dream of their own childhood, their shadow, their potentials that had been arrested as they went straight to trading and became successful traders. Over the course of the year, listening to their dreams gave a sense that they had new things to do. One guy went off and opened a garden centre. Another guy trained to be a teacher, following these dreams. Their dreams became more anxious when they were trading.

How did I trade? I traded almost wholly through intuition. I was disciplined and not disciplined. I was not disciplined in terms of the way I was living, but I was disciplined in the way I was trading.

In terms of keeping things small — it’s a new environment, very transparent, largely liquid compared to the floor markets at times. I traded FTSE Futures mostly, and I developed various rituals around my trading. I’d play “Writing to Reach You” by Travis as I timed it to the market open — I associated it with being in a state of flow. And then I would sit there on the open and take no opinion of where the market was going. I would just feel where the market wanted to go and then go in and out — skin the market — in and out for an hour. Once I reached a hundred ticks or whatever, I would just take a break, go away, and then decide whether I wanted to continue trading.

I had screens, I had access to all kinds of market data. I was very adept at technical analysis — candlesticks, whatever was the vibe then. Had it all set up. Ignored it. Just traded purely from a kind of psycho-somatic instinct — a body feeling allied to allowing my body to move my fingers. Very quick in and out — well ahead of the curve at that point.

And it all accelerated. I started to read Freud, found it really sticky, started to read Jung. Suddenly it was like I’d met someone who understood this four-year-old sat on the edge of his bed — Jung’s “Number Two.” It’s like, oh my God. And I put myself into Jungian analysis. The dreams started to really come, and I had a major precognitive dream after my third session.

I was in analysis for seven and a half years in the end, but after my third session with my first analyst, I had a major precognitive dream that confronted me with my history — my almost forgotten history of precognitive dreams. Once that was open, I was just flooded with dreams, day in, day out, waking dreams.

I’ve told you the big precognitive dream at the start?

TM: No.

So before my very first session, I had a dream in which I was walking down what was almost like a dilapidated high street with old shops. As I was walking along — it was like my childhood high street, but different, maybe a hundred years earlier, ramshackle wooden buildings — I could see this very sliver of an alleyway between two buildings. I could see through it, somehow magically, that behind this alleyway there was a very old, ramshackle structure of a house or cottage. The alleyway was that kind of wide, but somehow in the dream I could go through it. I came to the house. The door swung open as I got there. I walked in. I knew I had to climb up the stairs, so I climbed up, turned the corner. There was a room in front of me. I walked in, and the room was divided horizontally by a shimmering kind of curtain. I stood in front of it — it was beautiful, and I was a bit mesmerized. Then suddenly I realized the curtain was eyes — the shimmer was all these different eyes — and it was my task to choose one. I stood in front and somehow chose from here, and kind of waited for this to tell me. It reached out, chose one, and put it into my head. That was the dream.

That was my first dream in analysis, and my analyst immediately took it up in terms of being curious about my experiences. Then a couple of nights later, I had this dream. I was with my wife — we weren’t married then — and I dreamt I was in the basement of a department store. I knew I was in the basement because there was an escalator coming down. I knew I was underground. In the dream I soon became aware I was frantic, looking for a breathing apparatus to help my wife’s mother — Patricia — breathe. I’d go to ask someone and say, “I need something to help her breathe,” and they would give me an asthma pump. I’d become really agitated and say, “No, you don’t understand — she cannot breathe, her lungs aren’t working.” And they’d ask someone else, and they’d come up with a different colour asthma pump. I’d be furious. This happened about four times, four different pumps or something. And then there was this disembodied male voice in my ear that said very loudly, “It’s done.”

And then I woke up.

By this time I was remembering that I’d dreamt all my life — I’d had many precognitive dreams — but this was unnerving. It had a real energetic charge, a real numinosity. I told Claire about it. Woke up the next morning, still really unnerved. So I called her mother. Her mother was visiting Ireland — Claire’s Irish, her mother’s from Belfast — visiting for the weekend from Oxford. I said, “Tricia, are you okay?” She said, “Yes, I’m fine.” I said, “Is your asthma okay?” She said, “I feel absolutely fine. Why?” I said, “I just had this dream. It made me wonder about your lungs.” She said, “No, I’m absolutely fine.”

The next night I had exactly the same dream, with at the end exactly the same disembodied male voice: “It’s done.” I woke up again in a real sweat, really unnerved. The next day I called again and said, “Are you sure you’re okay? I’ve had the same dream twice, and I don’t usually take dreams literally. But I was sitting there thinking — it’s done. It’s done. What does it mean? It’s complete. But her lungs are fine.” I was trying to work it out.

That night she was out with her two sisters. They’d gone for dinner, had a few drinks. They were crossing a road and a drunk driver ploughed into all three of them. Tricia took the brunt of it. We got a call in the middle of the night to say she was in ICU — a hundred broken bones, head swelled up three times the size. We rushed there, had to fly to Ireland. But the gravest concern when we arrived at the hospital was that she had developed toxic shock syndrome — when the lungs harden and stop working. There’s not much you can do about that. They can put you on a ventilator, but it has to resolve itself. As soon as we got there, they sat us down with Claire’s dad and said, “We don’t know if she’ll survive this. And even if she does, we don’t know what brain damage she has. Our real concern is her lungs have stopped working.”

She did survive — but with quite profound consequences. When I asked about the details of the accident, it transpired the accident happened outside Dunnes Stores. I’d never heard of it before, being unfamiliar with Ireland. I hadn’t made any connection like that.

So I had this major precognitive dream right at the start, and my poor analyst was confronted with this. It set the tone — suddenly I couldn’t deny that I’d left this behind. It was my task to reconnect with it, because otherwise it would act upon me in some way.

But the reality of that over the next two years was very difficult. I had about eight months off work. I was plagued by imagery. Luckily I was in analysis — four times a week — so I had that containment.

By the time I was halfway through that, I’d stopped trading. I was working part-time as a consultant to trading teams in London on projects, but I still had to take time off — signed off. They sent me to a psychiatrist who, as I began to tell him about this, immediately wrote down “schizoid question mark.”

I said, “Hang on a minute — just listen to me before you start diagnosing me.”

TM: How do you know he wrote that?

I asked him. I saw him write it. I could see him stiffen as I began to very openly tell him what was happening. I said, “Look, I’m in analysis. This is encouraged. It’s held. But I’m seeing — if I’m sitting here, I might see presences. As a child I would see things, I would see thoughts before they came into fruition.” And I said, “I’m back there again.” I saw him stiffen and start to write.

And around about that time I had a vision of Christ — very Eastern, very grounded.

I was staying with my future in-laws in Ireland, and three times in one day I opened three different Bibles on the transfiguration. Then that night I had a vision of a transfigured Christ — wordlessly — which was important to me, kind of saying: orient yourself around me, but have no image of me, have no concept of me, have no word for me. A very Eastern image, which made real sense to me. I didn’t need the rest of it. I just needed that connection.

That constellated opposites in me.

I had some kind of ground on which to lean that had real meaning. And at the same time, I had this untethered, uncontained intuition running riot in me because I’d ignored it too long.

Scary enough. At times I wondered if I would disappear into the ether somewhere — because not only was I dreaming a lot and visioning a lot, but I was having lots of precognitive dreams. Things like plane crashes — I’d wake up in the morning and there’d been a plane crash overnight into a football stadium that I’d dreamt in great detail. I’d woken up, told my wife, and then we switched on the TV and this had just happened.

I was having this rather extreme kind of precognition that I didn’t have any sense of control over. Not that I do now, but I didn’t have a relationship with it. I love Jung’s phrase, “perception by way of the unconscious.” And it was like — I was born into a natural state of perception by way of the unconscious. Hence, I resisted this conscious transformation of it. I then forced myself into that and actually really enjoyed it, developed my mind, discovered that I was really intelligent and could thrive in that kind of environment. And then suddenly I was thrust back into perception by way of the unconscious, but the models I’d formed around it suddenly didn’t work.

TM: Yeah, I can sympathize.

But then — what to do about that? I spent the rest of my life honing that and stepping into it, saying, okay, this is me. This is my way of being in the world. Iteratively — with some stubbornness. Sometimes the unconscious has had to take over, confront me and say, stay here. But I’m very grateful for that. Twenty-five years on, I’ve just spent twenty-five years rooted there, really.

And the nod back into the world — the container for that — has been study. Really. Finding a technical-enough language that transmutes it into something people can engage with. My qualifications, my standing, my registrations are simply carriers for me. Once I have them and have a foot in the door, I’m just myself again.

And there’s a prophetic notion to this, right? And what happens to prophets — they’re held up and they’re crucified. So you just live life that way. You don’t get attached to either side. If I go into a new environment and there’s real excitement around that shamanic, prophetic, dream-body-like quality that somehow is in my field, I don’t get attached — because I know it will probably shift at some point. And vice versa: it enables me to go into environments where I’m misunderstood — which used to be very painful — or denigrated. “That’s too woo, too out there.” If I just stay the course, it has its place and will be appreciated.

When we first started talking today, I’m more content and happier than I’ve ever been, because I’m doing the work I love. Jung’s letters and paranormal cognition and the psychic thread — I’m playing. I’m back like that little boy, but with some standing I’ve created for it.

TM: And you ended up in some pretty tough places in that. What happened after those eight months? You worked in some pretty hardcore situations.

So my analyst at the time — very wisely — I had a really good analyst. He’s an academic at Essex, Renos Papadopoulos. A Maltese man. Quite classical in his approach. I began to talk about transforming this into some kind of body of work, realizing that I love trading — I often sit here and think I could apply this cycled intuition on screens and probably enjoy it — but I realized at the time it made me desperately unhappy. I wasn’t living out the right container for this little boy to express himself.

So he said, “Look, I think there’s a place for this in mental health. It’s a narrow pathway in terms of what you have to offer. Luckily you have intelligence, so you can get qualifications along the way that give you some standing. But if you really want to express this, the best way to test it is to go into the harshest environment you can and see where it sits.”

So he suggested I get a job — the most basic job I could —on forensic psychiatric units, on secure units. Which I did. And it was wonderful, because I was confronted by the interplay between the two — between left and right, this intuitive, field-like way of being in the world and the theory I also loved.

I had these experiences where I’d go into these environments that held a lot of fear. The most dangerous people in those settings are often the staff. Patients are really over-medicated and have no life at all really. Of course they all have a story behind them. They’re just victims of systemic failure, over and over again.

And yet I found myself judging, making quick assumptions about people. I’d land on a ward and the staff would say to me:

“Don’t go anywhere near this guy. He’s really dangerous. Don’t turn your back on him — he attacks people from behind.” He was enormous — like a bear. And I swallowed that whole for about three months until I began to notice and became curious again. In conjunction with my analysis, which was holding this movement between the two in a managed way — making space for this intuitive curiosity — I realized: he told me that the reason he attacked people was because he was afraid of himself.

The reason he didn’t wash — we had to take him to the hospital every week to have skin cut off his feet because he refused to wash — it was all to protect people, to keep people away from him. He didn’t want to harm anyone. And yet there was this history of psychosis, probably wrong meds, and just fear of being in a pretty awful environment for a forensic psychiatric unit. Scared of staff, scared of being provoked and reacting. So he decided the kindest thing he could do was just act like this wild, unwashed, unkempt man — in order to protect the only sense of freedom he had. The only sense of protecting his goodness in the world.

That’s tragic. Truly tragic.

My words won’t do it justice, but even as I talk about it now, I’m so profoundly grateful. What a beautiful man. There I was, in the early stages of this career, thinking I’ve got to learn all this, I’m in analysis, I’ve got all this knowledge, I’ve got this intuition — and getting it completely wrong. And this guy, who was the “maddest and baddest” in the description of him, just having the patience to teach me about psychology and what it is to be a beautiful person in the most awful circumstances.

I can’t quite remember the moment. I think he approached me one day — I think I began to relax around him. I remember the moment he told me why he acted that way. We were at the hospital — Hamilton Hospital in Hackney — waiting to have his feet shaved. Three of us had to take him. He was enormous. God knows why they had me — the smallest guy in the unit — nursing him. They used to send me into all the hairy stuff because no one would feel threatened by me. They would — but there was this very strict rule that three people had to be with him at all times. For whatever reason, I was left alone with him that day in hospital. I sat there right up against my own fear — in a waiting room, on my own with him, this hulking presence above me. I could hear him making noises and shifting, and I was trying to think, why am I afraid? Why am I afraid? There was this internal process going on in me. And then he just leaned in and said, “Are you scared?” I said, “Yeah, but I don’t want to be.” And he said, “You don’t need to be. Let me tell you why I act like this.”

And then he told me. It was a deathbed moment, Tom. I will carry that to my grave. I often think about him.

I’m assuming he’s dead now. I will thank him one day, because he showed me great kindness. He really did. One of the most profoundly kind moments — and he was offering it to me. And he was the one in the most awful circumstances imaginable: someone who would be held down routinely, given injections, no autonomy in his life at all.

But again — you talk about left and right. That’s a great awareness he held.

TM: Maybe I’m reaching, but does it feel like he almost represents the unconscious — this thing that was untamed and untamable, and when you got closer to it, you realized you didn’t need to be afraid of it anymore?

Yeah. Once I wondered out loud if he was, in a way, the boundary crosser — the psychopomp — saying, “This is what I do.” Because it was one of the three or five most profound moments of my life. In terms of my practice, there are many different moments, but that’s the earliest moment where I actually understood that I was in the right field — but had so much to learn. The learning would not come through building knowledge, although that was important. I realized the real learning was moments like that.

I was there in that environment for about two and a half years, and learned more than in all my other years in the NHS — through getting things wrong, coming up against fear. Fear was a cornerstone. I was still working out my relationship to fear. Here I was, re-confronted with this field-like, right-brained, intuitive way of being in the world, and yet my earliest associations carried dread. And then I placed myself in high-secure forensic environments surrounded by people who had committed awful murders — serial killers. A real confrontation with fear. And yet, in that example, I was fearing a figment of my own imagination. What was sat next to me was probably the most profound kindness I’ve ever experienced. I almost missed it, but he offered it to me anyway.

Jesus.

TM: So what happened next in your career and life?

I began to gradually — I think I repeated something of that movement into the city and life, initially. I’ll be careful not to repaint this too romantically. At the same time I was getting married, kids were on the way slowly, bit by bit. And of course the old pull was powerful. If I’m going to build a career here, how do I do it? How do I be professional about it? So I started to do another postgrad. Very practically, I had a life to build and a wife — a wife who thought she was marrying a futures trader and ended up with someone cleaning up in a forensic psychiatric unit for about a twentieth of his former salary.

Looking back, I still marginalized this. It would appear in terms of my irritation in trainings. I was a difficult student in those psychotherapy trainings, especially given that in the NHS I needed them. My first training was person-centred — an intensive, five-and-a-half days a week, two-year encounter group. Quite an old-fashioned training. I would just say: “What about the unconscious? What about the unconscious? What about the unconscious?” — a real flea in their ear about it. I was still in Jungian analysis at the time.

I then went on to work in the NHS, CBT was coming in, and I very quickly ended up managing teams and had to do a CBT training. In the meantime I was studying psychoanalysis, and I guess still trying to fill myself up again to find some standing. I still didn’t believe in myself, I think. It goes back to those preverbal years — those first five years — so much of it was so straightforwardly precise. In a way, I knew something and then it would transpire, and I’d think, of course, because I’m silent, because I’m perceiving in the field — I’m just getting myself out of the way.

But then, ironically, twenty-five years later, going into this field feeling like I had to find a language for it and had to almost be a professional in order for it to have some kind of say. It was clunky for years and years.

If I’m honest, Tom, I would only say since my body took over again — I almost died in Malaysia — that it’s really clicked. So I spent twenty years in this field living a half-life, I think — dressing it up in language I thought was acceptable. Still caught in a kind of: “I can’t just sit here completely in silence. I’ve got to scoop up this five-year-old kid and dress him up a bit and give him some structure.” And it’s only since I was forced back into a very silent period of my life — in an ICU — and silenced in terms of two strokes and not being able to, for a short amount of time, form words particularly well. I didn’t know what a number was for about a month — completely mystified by what a number is. Silenced again, to go back into that field-like awareness. And then suddenly it’s taken centre stage in my life again. What’s really exciting for me now is that, rooted back there, I can start to talk about it and write about it in a way that doesn’t move away from it at the same time. Doesn’t have to be anything else.

The relief — the sense of this being a central, comfortable living-out of that first five years of my life — it’s taken me forty-five years to do that, which feels pretty good, actually, because I’ve got hopefully a fair few years ahead of me.

And I think I’ve lost the fear. There’s something about being very close to death, being told you’re going to die and not being able to do anything about it — and yet knowing you’re going to survive it at the same time. Again, back to that field — the underlying knowing of moving between states. Severe panic in an ICU ward in a private hospital in Malaysia that had been taken over by the government, so surrounded by Malaysian doctors, very broken English. I’d have these broken conversations maybe once a day. They would express relief that I was still alive and that there was still nothing they could do — that the best they could do was keep pumping me full of anticoagulants and medication and hope that my body would start to respond. They couldn’t operate. It was all around my heart and lungs. They were completely overwhelmed — it was high COVID.

There I was, having moments of panic, not able to see my wife or kids. I had no way of contacting them because everything was on lockdown in Malaysia. I thought I was going to die a very lonely death. And yet at the same time, just knowing I was going to live.

And then taking it up in a dream-like way: I had a dream that I had twenty-nine clots around my heart, around my breathing apparatus. What would the dream offer you? What would that mean? I just sat there thinking — my route towards this: I know I’ll survive, but I know I’ll survive through sitting quietly in the dream and not moving away from it. It’s like a somatic precognitive dream. Where am I clotted?

And I realized I was clotted around the expression of this — its centrality in my life. I was also clotted around money. That really struck me — I had this sticky relationship with money throughout my life. By then you’ve done enough Jungian work to know that money is energy too. So I had this energetic stuckness in me. I connected that money-energy stuckness with this fuller expression — it’s like, if I made money on the trading floor or made a good investment, I wasn’t living out that inner five-year-old. It was like I’d borrowed it. I knew I’d betrayed myself to get it. So I’d just give it away — find ways unconsciously of giving it away and going back to this silent, monastic poverty, until I could bring him into things and he could live in me. Since I’ve done that, my life is far more abundant and I don’t feel guilty about it.

My life has opened up in pleasure. I’ve never — I had the means at times to have a nice car, and never did. I would just get old bangers because I’d feel like that car would represent something that wasn’t authentic in the means by which I got it — I’d betrayed myself. Now for once in my life I’ve got a car I really love. I love driving it — it’s pleasurable. I’ve got a Jeep. I live in the middle of nowhere and I can drive a Jeep across a field, get it full of mud. What pleasure. How expansive.

I’ve come to realize that in order to inhabit that little boy, I almost drive myself out. I had this rather austere notion of emptying — in order to be receptive to the world, I had to empty, empty, empty — in a way that actually wasn’t good for my systemic health. And now that feels like it’s flipped. It’s flipped because I’ve always had this sense — I’ve said this to you before — that I’ve always carried this sense of interconnection. Awful things can happen around me, and it’s like I don’t deny the awfulness of it, but I instantly go looking for the larger picture. I know that nothing is wholly bad or wholly good. And by grace I have that. I’ve always had that larger pattern in front of me.

So I’ve come to realize — and my supervisor, who is an old Jungian analyst, sharp as a tack, has been a wonderful supervisor to me — she made the point a few years ago that the heart of my work is that people are grounded in my presence because I am connected to that underneath, and that’s all I need to do. I was complaining in a session that I didn’t have the answer to something and was struggling. She said, “You don’t need to have the answer. Just go back to that stance in you and reconnect others with that. It’s not about finding an answer. It’s about ground — it’s about weirdness, it’s about connection, it’s about curiosity — and it’s a quiet strength.”

So I often joke with people that if someone listened to the transcript of my sessions, they’d say, “What the f*ck is he doing? That’s not psychotherapy?”

I’m not sure it is, in the modern sense. But it’s just curiosity. I sit here as best I can as that core five-year-old. That’s it.

It’s not for everyone. If you’ve got a raging OCD or a raging generalized anxiety disorder, go and see a really good cognitive therapist — they’ll give you tools to get on top of it. I won’t, because I’m much more curious about what it’s expressing in the whole, and that might not help you in the moment. So you might need that first.

And it’s like this room has taken on that quality. If you could see my desk — I’ve got so many books, but these are the ones that really mean something to me. There are paranormal books on that side of me. I have drawings I’ve done. Just things that are completely wordless — I can’t explain them to you. I’ve got images. My whole desk is full of it, and it just faces me. It’s like I’m sat on the edge of my bed again as a little boy, with nothing to do but be curious.

Of course I don’t know. Of course you don’t know. Let’s try and find out together.

For the first time in my life, I think I’ve put down trying. I’m working too hard at the moment because we bought this house a year and a half ago, and I’m trying to push through a load of work on the house — probably got a bit trapped by that. But in my work, I’m not working too hard, and that’s a key difference.

I’m about to really kick on with the PhD. And now that’s almost going to force me to clear some things out of the way. But I live a really simple life. I’m here for hours a day. I walk the dog, I read, I dream. I spend about two hours a day sketching dreams, translating them — translation rather than interpretation. You can’t interpret a dream. It’s a living, breathing thing. That little boy would just sit there for hours with one image. So I’ve gone back to him.

As ever, it has come through suffering. And my version of that, Tom, has tended to be somatic — moments where I made movements back towards myself would often follow some kind of somatic event. Some unexplained virus that would take me to bed for two weeks, and I would soon discover within the first hour of going to bed — because I’m someone who just keeps going, right? My wife goes to bed in a really practical Irish way: she’s unwell, she goes to bed, gets better, carries on. I’m like — no, keep working. I’m throwing up right now, but I immediately eat something. I just keep going. I’ve had this rather skewed relationship with my body over time.

But I’ve come to really appreciate my body’s wisdom. Because within an hour of being forced into bed, there’d just be this sense of relief: finally, I can catch up with myself. I can lie here for a week, completely silent, and receive — from the field, from the environment, from the unconscious. Retrospectively understand my last year. By the time I climbed out of that bed I’d be like, everything’s fine. It’s like that old Himalayan phrase of your soul catching up with your body. And I would launch back into my work completely renewed, with this deep understanding of the patterns of my life — until I’d forget them again through searching and yearning.

God. I feel like I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent there.

TM: I’m sure you haven’t. I think it’s one of the most profound and interesting conversations I can remember having.

Oh, that’s lovely. Thank you. I’m going to stop.

Dan Lawrence is an experienced Jungian psychoanalytic psychotherapist , writer and social dreaming consultant. You can learn more about him, and work with him, here. You can listen to our conversation on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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I recently traveled to Amsterdam to talk to a group of investors and business owners on the topic of the Art of Quality in life and work. We met at The Embassy of the Free Mind, which houses a collection of thirty thousand books of wisdom, all made available to the general public.

On the flight to the Netherlands I watched a few videos and read a few substacks by Professor Jiang. He’s an English teacher in China that’s going viral for his concept of “predictive history.” He pulls together a vast array of sources to make some questionable arguments and forecasts. His core claim is that the world is run by a cabal of secret societies backed by an array of wealthy families. They all share a convergent framework for hastening the apocalypse by means of World War centered in the Middle East. Israel will then emerge triumphant at the center of a new world order. The key feature of this new era is that technological acceleration through A.I. will reach a climax with a totalizing surveillance state and the triumph of transhumanism.

Given the extremely convenient timing of his emergence, I can’t work out to what extent his work is a Chinese Communist Party psyop, free-associative psychosis or genuine insight. But whenever I encounter this kind of content, I now ask myself: is it increasing either my consciousness or agency? Even if partially accurate, conspiracy theories rarely do that. If I discovered that the world was actually run by lizard people, there’s probably very little I could actually do about it.

However, Jiang’s work was unexpectedly helpful. I run a community for the exploration of consciousness, purpose and mystical truths. Reading his theories prompted me to ask myself what the worst kind of secret society could look like, and what kind of world they would try to create. One thing history teaches us is that small groups of powerful people can push apocalyptic agendas based on destructive worldviews. Even more provocatively, it made me wonder that, if Jiang was somehow right about the push towards armageddon, what agency would we each have in trying to stop it?

It turns out the “free mind” may hold the answer.

The Michael Community

Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner devised detailed spiritual-scientific theories of the forces he believed were influencing human civilization at this stage of our history. Why are Steiner’s esoteric visions of Archangels and Atlantis any more valuable than a guy drawing spaghetti maps of Freemasons and Illuminati on a whiteboard? One reason is that Steiner was a polymath who made profound contributions to the fields of education, agriculture, medicine, and the arts. Another reason is that, even if they are metaphorical, his frameworks still resonate with my own explorations. Conspiracy theories use stories to construct misleading lies, myths use stories to reveal guiding truths. Apocalypse or not, I believe Steiner’s ideas lead to the kind of agency that reduces unnecessary suffering.

For me, this is the primary purpose of learning pretty much anything.

I’m new to Steiner’s cosmology, and it’s pretty complex stuff (this interview with is a powerful introduction). As I understand it, a core duality in his worldview are the twin forces of Ahriman and Lucifer, reflected by the two extremes of human temptation. Ahriman represents cold materialism and technological dominance, and Lucifer is spiritual bypassing and the denial of our earthly responsibilities. Full left brain versus full right brain.

I don’t consider myself to be a “traditional Christian” but, the more I learn, the more I have been drawn to Christian mysticism, particularly to the archetype of Archangel Michael.1 Steiner believed that we were currently in the Michaelic Age, the cosmic intelligence that clears the path for humanity's conscious reunion with what he called the “Christ impulse.” This is a marriage that allows each of us to freely choose the path of heart-driven co-creation. The superpowered left hemispheres we’ve cultivated over the last few hundred years could be redeployed in contribution with the whole.

According to Steiner, Michael defeated Ahriman in the heavens and he was cast down into the world of men. He prophesied that Ahriman would eventually manifest in the physical world, around the end of the start of the 21st century. It’s almost impossible not to equate this with the rapid rise of A.I. and Silicon Valley transhumanism. There is substantial overlap in Steiner’s view of Ahriman and the techno-dystopian worldview people like Jiang claim is now being forced upon us. This is one reason these metaphorical warnings may have value.

Twenty years in finance taught me to reflexively dismiss any grand forecasts of imminent doom or the dawning of a glorious New Age. But I confess that I’ve become increasingly unsettled by how many normal-seeming people I meet are anticipating a dramatic shift of some kind over the next two years. As most of us know, “apocalypse” actually means an unveiling. And without predicting, just observing, it’s clear we are currently living through an unprecedented period of A.I.- assisted discovery, governmental disclosure of institutional corruption and potentially even declassification of advanced technologies. Most importantly, it’s also blindingly obvious that we are going through a radical reframing of our relationship with reality. I have repeatedly noticed little synchronicities that the “Second Coming” will actually be in the form of this collective transition in consciousness.

The term “crystalline consciousness” has really stuck with me. If you put a single grain of salt into a super-saturated solution the whole container suddenly transforms into a crystal. Small-seeming influences can change things very fast. Steiner talked about how this dramatic crystallization of the Christ impulse could be catalysed by what he called The Michael Community.2

These groups would be able to balance the polarity of Ahrimanic materialism and Luciferic spirituality. Steiner also believed they could incorporate both the Platonic and Aristotelian worldviews, a distinction that maps pretty closely to McGilchrist’s left and right hemispheres.3 As I wrote recently, I believe that the modern Michael Community will need to hold five different polarities in order to be successful.

For me, the most interesting part of the philosophy behind Steiner’s Michael Community is that it also seems to support the most powerful and effective worldview I’ve encountered in all my explorations so far. It’s also the one that has most increased my sense of individual agency; my free will. This is the concept of Earth as a kind of “school.” Steiner makes a fascinating distinction between backward-looking analysis of your karmic history and forward-looking interpretation of the signals being presented by reality.4

If this is literally true, as I increasingly believe it is, then once you learn the lessons your past has presented, they might stop repeating (I find usually after one last test to check you got the message). Then, looking forward, if you can be open to the signals our limitlessly intelligent reality is offering you, choosing the right path forwards becomes easier. Emotions and sensations are a catalyst to orient your attention, so if you ignore them they often grow louder and more intense. Irrespective of whether we are in some sort of “end times” right now, this perspective has significantly improved my daily life. Left hemispheric analysis of your past and right hemispheric intuitive navigation in the present can combine to reduce your unnecessary suffering.

Variants on this core worldview have been consistently reinforced by many of our most resonant teachers, as well as recent Leading Edge guests like Dr. Chris Bache and Dr. Bill Plotkin.5 Most importantly, it directly rejects the dominant disempowering and dehumanising lies of materialism: that death is permanent and the material world is indifferent to you. This worldview, more than any other, keeps people trapped in inauthentic lives that slowly crush their humanity. And yet, if reincarnation is real, and the soul survives the body, it makes sense that the deliberate evolution of consciousness is the purpose of our time here. That’s why learning the backward-looking lessons is so important. And if reality is intelligently responsive to our actions, there is a path of co-creation that is specifically meant for us. For centuries, mystery schools have taught these heretical secrets, and even demonstrated them by inducing out of body experiences among their members. But these secrets previously reserved for initiates are now increasingly mainstream scientific research.6 This information now needs to be generously shared through a network of networks, rather than greedily hoarded by cabals.

I have called these truths the Sword that Slays the Dragon. In the corner of our meeting room in Amsterdam my eye was drawn to a sketch, apparently by the owner’s wife. To me, it immediately spoke of Archangel Michael’s sword of truth. Curled on the blade is an ouroboros snake eating its own tail. This was the image the channeler Mary recently said came to her when she spoke about me. I inhale the world’s information and try to synthesize and share the resonant truths. I keep meeting people who love doing the same. I read that the Michaelic Age will see the emergence of a kind of “cosmopolitan mind”; someone at home in every spiritual tradition, driven to bring them all back together. The sword’s blade itself balances light and dark and there’s a five-pointed star on its handle. Coincidentally this is the same shape I had just used to represent the five polarities held in a Leading Edge community. The sword’s point meets at a rose, representing the opening of the heart.

I left Amsterdam with fresh optimism that we’re going to make it through. The Art of Quality project is run by heart-centered investors William Oliver, Paul Higgins, John Candeto, and Ferdinand von Bennigsen. They are trying to balance the polarities of material and spiritual. And in the middle is the Tao, Quality or the Christ impulse. The emphasis was on love, curiosity and culture. Many of the attendees have access to substantial wealth, power and influence. And, like most people I now meet, they know it’s now time to freely share it. To let it spread through the Network of Networks. Money is the most significant perceived constraint on free will for the people that I meet. I’ll be honest, the possibility that we may also be on a pretty tight timeline has made me a lot more generous with my own time and resources. What am I saving it all for?

Sitting in the Embassy of the Free Mind I was struck by the resonance of that name. They have deliberately made the world’s mystical wisdom available to everyone. Every single mystical tradition has the sanctity of free will at its heart. A “bad” kind of secret society, mystery school or power structure seeks to manipulate and the “good” kind seeks to empower. It is striking, for example, that Jeffery Epstein was a patron of so many scientists, ideologies and technologies that see the human as a machine to be exploited.7 Our greatest wealth creation engines now derive their value precisely from their capacity to capture and direct human attention. This gives a tiny group of largely interconnected men the power to manipulate, at unprecedented scale, what people notice, feel, and want. This is not a conspiracy theory.

Evolving your free will doesn’t mean the anything-goes “do what thy wilt” of black magic, it means deliberately aligning with creation. One of the Leading Edge members who joined us at the event is an enthusiast on the origin of words. He noted that the word sacrifice derives from “making sacred.” Whether truth or fiction, secret societies have always been associated with blood sacrifice. Taking someone else’s life in return for power. The ultimate infringement of free will. It struck me that the Michael Community would do the opposite. Self-sacrifice doesn’t mean self-destruction, it means integrating your consciousness so you can freely use your gifts in mutual flourishing. And you make yourself sacred in the process.

The telos, the inner direction and goal, of the Western mind has been to reconnect with the cosmos in a mature participation mystique, to surrender itself freely and consciously in the embrace of a larger unity that preserves human autonomy while also transcending human alienation.

-Richard Tarnas

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“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.

To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

- Buckminster Fuller

Look at what’s happening in our current corporate, technological, and geopolitical world. Now ask yourself if that’s the place you still want to be spending most of your time. Thankfully there is a new positive-sum system forming in parallel as the current zero-sum one collapses. Because both sides benefit from the exchange, a cooperative system always has more energy in it than a purely competitive one. That makes this new system much more fun and exciting to be a part of. You can either plug yourself into a grid that recharges you or drains you.

This isn’t some mystical ascension to another dimension. It’s simply making a conscious choice to connect yourself to a more energising kind of person, practice or purpose. This network already exists right now, and is evolving rapidly. This is how to be a part of it, and how you could play a pivotal role in its growth.

There are 3 paths from here:

1. Join the Network of Networks

2. Start or join a Leading Edge Network

3. Start or support a “Steward School”

1. Join the Network of Networks

At the end of 2020, I started talking more publicly about consciousness, life transitions and finding your life’s purpose. This led to hundreds of 1:1 conversations over the next three years. I realized there were barely any communities helping successful mid-career professionals with these topics. So in early 2024 I founded The Leading Edge. In the two years since, I have met an increasingly large number of other network founders. Then I realized there was no connection between them all. So, along with , we have just founded the Network of Networks. And now things are moving incredibly fast. In only a few weeks we’ve connected 20 communities across 11 countries.

For individuals, this page shows you which communities have joined the network so far, what their membership costs (if they are open/invite-only) and who they are aimed at. Episodic in-person retreats are essentially a solved problem. Most people can now go and take psychedelics or have spiritual experiences on a one-off basis. But it’s then hard to integrate those experiences and stay in touch with the community when you’re back to your busy professional lives. So I would recommend that you look for a strong online structure, because it’s a surprisingly neglected feature of these communities.

While there have been these kinds of groups before, to my knowledge they have never had the potential to be networked together at this speed and scale. I recently met someone who has been connecting conscious communities for decades. He said that, up until now, there have been plenty of bricks but very little mortar. So, for network stewards, the near-term intention is to openly and lovingly share resources across the communities. There are at least five clear ways this can happen, outlined below.

If you are a network steward and want to join the Network of Networks, your community should ideally resemble a Leading Edge-style network. What does that mean?

2. What is a Leading Edge Network?

“The leading edge is where absolutely all the action is. The leading edge contains all the infinite possibilities of the future.”

- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

What makes a Leading Edge network different from either a purely spiritual community or transactional club? The broad definition I’m using is: a ~150 person digital/physical network where members are “wise-agency,” in terms of skills, resources, executive function and motivation. Beyond that, me and our members still struggle to articulate precisely what a Leading Edge network is. However, this is actually a good sign that you’re close to the evolutionary frontier. You know you’re about to make a developmental leap when you hit a paradox. I have therefore come to realize that the success of Leading Edge style communities will be determined by their ability to hold the tension between two forces.

Here are five core tensions held by a Leading Edge community, and how each can be enhanced by connection to the Network of Networks:

I. Individual/Collective.

• Individual. The primary intention of The Leading Edge is to help its members find and deepen into their life’s purpose. This is an entirely unique niche for each person. The community therefore offers an alchemical container within which each individual can experiment with new identities, practices, and frameworks that resonate the most with them, while also being supported by everyone else. There is no central guru with the answer or a one-size-fits-all solution.

• Collective. When each person truly inhabits their unique niche and deepens into their soul’s purpose, it massively benefits the collective. This is the fundamental paradox: that everyone pursuing their own individual integrity will have an disproportionately positive effect on the whole.

The Network of Networks win-win: The vast majority of the content we produce and the practices we pursue are aimed at helping people find their purpose in the world and execute on it. If there is anything you’ve found that can facilitate this transition, let us know. These could be content or experiences, but they could also be high integrity startups, jobs or investments.

II. Material/Spiritual.

• Material. Leading Edge members tend to be coming to us after having achieved a degree of material success. They also have the ability and desire to make real world impact with their consciousness journey. I believe one role of these communities is to healthily integrate money, not reject it.

• Spiritual. Our members are also increasingly understanding that their own material achievements were a necessary stage. This then needs to be transcended and included as we integrate our consciousness. Ironically, a more integrated consciousness makes us even more effective in the world, just in very subtle ways

The Network of Networks win-win: the simplest reconciliation we’ve found for the tension of material and spiritual within Leading Edge so far has been mystical budgets. Those members with significant resources are increasingly spending more of their money on transformational practitioners, both inside and outside of the community. An effective way is to set aside a comfortable percentage of your income, and then decide how to allocate it afterwards. This has the added benefit of raising demand and prices for the most aligned practitioners, who often struggle to be valued for their gifts. We obviously also have people building aligned businesses and other members funding consciousness research and cutting edge studies. Money remains by far the most complicated and thorny issue within all of these communities, so we are curious to have discussions with other groups that might have creative approaches.

III. Intellectual/Experiential.

• Intellectual: Using Leading Edge as an example, our private WhatsApp and my writing and interviews are typically aimed at a left-brained intellectual understanding of these topics. I typically produce a public interview and article with a leading thinker. I then host a private Q&A session for the community.

• Experiential: We host private group experiences such as somatic sensing, or breathwork. We also have a pod structure that allows small groups of six to seven members to settle into a practice for as long as six months. So far, we have covered fundamentally right-brained experiences like breathwork, intuition, embodiment meditation and money-focused IFS. The idea is that each member can find a practice that really resonates, that they can incorporate into their daily routine. This year, we have also been particularly focused on perhaps the greatest teachers: our relationships and our children. The most exciting part of The Leading Edge has been finding mystics and teachers from all over the world who can help us with our own spiritual growth.

The Network of Networks win-win: On the intellectual side, I am always overjoyed to be recommended new under-the-radar teachers, alive or dead, that can enhance our understanding of this new emerging reality. We are also seeking to find where mystical traditions are consistent with emerging science. On the experiential side, we are always particularly keen to find master practitioners that can facilitate the experiential work, either for us as a group or as individuals. Whilst we obviously love to hear from the practitioners themselves, it’s even better when an individual, or ideally a whole community, has had a great experience with someone they want to recommend to us.

IV. Ordered/Chaotic

• Ordered. Leading Edge has a clear structure and walls in the form of vetted membership, as well as membership fees to enforce commitment. I also monitor the group to make sure that the spirit of the community is being maintained.

• Chaotic. Within this ordered structure of the container, aside from asking members to commit to proactively meeting each other, very little else is proscribed. Which is one reason the group remains hard to describe succinctly.

The Network of Networks win-win: if you are aware of ways that our current structure can be improved, please let us know.

V. Digital/Physical.

• Digital: The bulk of our community’s communications are on Zoom, email, and WhatsApp. As we are currently spread across 21 countries and 5 continents, that is essential. We also use a stunningly useful bespoke community management app created by our member David Weinstein, called KayOS.

• Physical: We have in-person dinners, events, and conferences all over the world. In the last year, The Leading Edge has taken me to the world’s oldest hotel in Japan, Chartres Cathedral, inside the King’s Chamber in Egypt, Amsterdam, and to the marvelous Retreat Costa Rica. In the next six months, we are hosting an event with Tim Freke in Glastonbury and a “Soul Initiation” experience in partnership with Animas in both Utah and South Africa.

The Network of Networks win-win: On the digital side, we are always looking for ways to enhance our tech stack. Our primary need is for something that can facilitate deeper one-on-one interactions with our members but also provide richer context than the WhatsApp chat. On the experiential side, we also want to expand the number of high-quality retreat centers or sacred experiences available to members of the entire NoN network.

It’s important to reiterate the North Star of each community. Our members overwhelmingly come to us out of curiosity, and stay for love and connection. I firmly believe that curiosity can represent a relationship with a benign force that guides us into an aligned niche. Because curiosity drives the community, as implied by the image, there’s a slight bias in the polarities towards whichever side is more open: in-person over online, the benefit of the collective over the individual or direct experience over intellectual understanding.

3. Start/Support the Network School

The clearest bottleneck to the formation of Leading Edge communities are schools to train stewards of these networks. This is one of the highest leverage uses of wealth I can imagine.

Here’s a thought experiment: a physical campus trains fifty stewards over a three month intensive. We bring together the best teachers and mentors in the world. Those stewards then return to centers of influence like Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the City of London. Possibly with a grant to get started (although you probably want founders who have already experienced some degree of material success). Each of them recruits 150 members from their high-agency tribes. Within a single year you’d have a community of 30,000 aligned individuals all networked together and sharing resources.

The impact of your our individual efforts, even combined with small communities of others, may feel insignificant relative to the challenges we face. But anyone who understands complex adaptive systems knows phase shifts start small and then explode fast.1

In my experience so far, it’s been slightly disheartening that many billionaires and foundations cannot see beyond a relatively narrow mandate. Some people would rather be the Messiah than Noah. And yet, a foundation or benefactor focused on systems change could fund this entire project for peanuts on the typical philanthropic scale and be the catalyst for a transformational movement. With technology increasingly ensuring material abundance, most of our problems are downstream of consciousness. And one thing that’s become abundantly clear to me over the last few years is that the more energy that flows through you in integrity, the more real power you actually have.

You must allow yourself to be transformed through your interactions with other agents and the knowledge that passes through you from them. This knowledge and energy will flow through the entire system in feedback loops, and you must be prepared to change so that those feedback loops are not blocked. An agent that is truly adaptive and changing is open to sudden eruptions of transformation, in which the agent may temporarily take on the role of strange attractor and facilitate chain reactions of creative events within the system.

-Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk

[If you match any of these descriptions above and would like to discuss any of this face-to-face, you can click the button below to contact me directly. My calendar has gone slightly nuts, as you can imagine, but I make every effort to speak to everyone].

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Is Manifestation the Main Quest?

“There’s a certain sound the scalp makes when it’s being ripped off of a skull—like a large piece of Velcro tearing away from its source. The sound is loud and angry and just a little bit sad.”

Thus begins the dramatic opening chapter of Into the Magic Shop by Dr. James Doty. A recommendation from a fellow member of Leading Edge, I recently read the book on vacation in less than three hours. It was so engrossing that I didn’t even shift position and gave myself incredibly painful and oddly-shaped sunburn in the process.

Doty, who died last year, was a clinical professor of neurosurgery at Stanford. He was raised in abject poverty by a violent, alcoholic father and a severely depressed mother. When he was twelve, he wandered into a local store selling stage magic props. The woman behind the counter, Ruth, offered to train him in real magic. Over the following weeks she taught him a process of first relaxing his body, quieting his thoughts, opening his heart and finally visualising his goals. The book provides specific, itemised guides on how to do each. He trained diligently for hours a day for the rest of his life. He claims to have used these practices to fulfill his life’s goal of becoming a doctor, and eventually a successful neurosurgeon, despite not having anything close to the necessary grades or money.

Over and over again Ruth warns Jim that if you visualise with your heart closed you risk creating chaos and suffering. So you don’t need to be clairvoyant to imagine what happened next. Jim’s childhood trauma eventually drove him to visualise from a place of scarcity. He was superficially successful; during the dot-com boom he amassed a net worth of over $75m. But it came at the cost of his relationship with his family and connection to his heart. Eventually he lost it all. In the rebuilding process he was taught the importance of authenticity, via a Near-Death Experience, multiple synchronicities and an encounter with the recently deceased.

Not only have I come to suspect that “manifestation” is real, but that mastering it might be one of the central goals of our lifetimes. We already know that human consciousness has a scientifically measurable impact on reality, but that it’s incredibly subtle. And that’s probably a good thing, given the chaos that would ensue if humanity were given full manifestation powers at this stage of our collective consciousness. Many mystical traditions speak of our lifetimes preparing us for a subsequent stage of collective evolution where we can manifest our desires more directly on demand. As Jim discovered, the key is to learn if you’re manifesting from head and heart or from just your head alone.

This is a warning that emerging technology is beginning to make visible in new ways Jim and Ruth could have never imagined.

What do you want to be?

“Be careful what you wish for, not because you’ll get it but because you’ll be turned into the thing that can get it. It’s not a process where you just ask for something and it magically appears, it’s a process that breaks you down and rebuilds you into the right tool for the job.”
― Jed McKenna

More than any other, that quote has influenced how I now think about manifestation. Jim Doty got the millions he wanted, but that safety came at the price of his integrity and aliveness. My suspicion that manifestation is real is strengthened by the fact that this dynamic has been repeatedly described over thousands of years in two of humanity’s most popular myths. The culturally ubiquitous hero’s journey describes the process of coming into alignment with the creative flow of reality. In contrast, “be careful what you wish for” myths warn us about manifesting from ego alone. King Midas and Aladdin get turned into people that can get what they think they want, but at the price of integrity and authenticity.

I also suspect that manifestation is real because I might have made that precise mistake, several times, in my own life. With predictably catastrophic results. One of my weirdest intuitions is that I may have manifested my degree from Oxford. After graduation, I took a three-month backpacking trip across Africa with some of my closest friends. One of the many quirks of the Oxford exam system is that the final results are initially only posted on a physical wall in the college. Because we had already left for our trip, I asked one of my classmates to email the results to me. He duly sent me the whole list of our college’s grades. Everyone else shook out roughly where I had expected, but I botched my degree and got a dreaded “2:2.”

About ten percent of people get a First, sixty percent get a 2:1, and the remainder a mix of the more shameful 2:2, Third and Fail. I was DEVASTATED. I was in the Africa of 2003, so I was four days from my next contact with the Internet. I spent those days on a train from Malawi to Tanzania depressed and ashamed, drinking heavily. I recall promising, pleading that if my degree could just be reversed, I would do anything.

When I finally reached Dar es Salaam, I rang my parents to apologize for letting them down. My self-love, and the love of others, felt conditional on my achieving academic success. At first, my dad was confused, but he read me a letter from the university that didn’t list a grade of 2:2, instead a (highly unexpected) First Class degree. It took a while for this to sink in. When I emailed my classmate to clarify, he responded that he’d merely sent me the previous email “as a joke”. But nothing about it had read like a joke, it was just a list of all of our grades. Meanwhile my devastation turned to elation.

The “be careful what you wish for” element appeared rapidly afterwards: due to this entirely unexpected affirmation of my elite intellectual status, I became arrogant and complacent for too long after I graduated. I felt that I was simply destined to succeed without any real effort. So I failed. A lot. I got fired from my first job as a soccer agent within the first ten months. And even well into my thirties I hid behind what the degree inferred rather than who I actually was.

I had not only manifested without using my heart, I had surrendered even more power to my tyrannical head.

A.I. is a Mirror for Manifestation

It’s shocking to realise the extent to which we are still making these same mistakes, especially in the way we use technology. Social media on our phones is arguably the most devastating example we’ve ever created. It wastes our time, feeds negative emotions and removes us from a direct connection to reality. We wanted safety and entertainment, but it came at the price of our vitality. We created a digital world using our heads, not our hearts.

One of the most interesting reframings of contemporary technology is as an analogy for the way reality actually works. As our technology evolves, it increasingly reveals dynamics at play at a deeper level. Artificial Intelligence is now giving us a window in the creative potential of our thoughts. Vibe coding has given us the power to use simple text prompts that can generate virtual agents that go off to do our bidding, spin up whole websites or found businesses instantly. At times, it genuinely feels like digital magic. Even in just the first few months of A.I. agents being on the scene, we’ve seen multiple Sorcerer’s Apprentice style situations where they’ve run amok and created complete pandemonium. For many of us, our lives are going to be increasingly impacted by knowing the right thing to type into a prompt; knowing what we want to manifest.

What if A.I. is now holding up a mirror to our own untrained manifestation abilities?

The Leading Edge recently hosted dinner in Los Angeles with EarthElder Masaaki Nagai. Along with twelve other Elders from across the globe, he is working to bring wider awareness to the urgent need for humanity to return to harmony with our environment. Masaaki is anticipating an imminent shift in our relationship to technology as soon as the next few months. Spending time with him made me ponder another perspective. What if our material technologies are a sandbox to see how we would use spiritual technologies if they became more fully available to humanity? If there are higher powers, are they watching to see how we behave towards our current technology to see if we can be trusted to shape the very fabric of reality itself? What if the world is like a text box that can generate whatever you want?

Run your own wish list through the filter of your heart. I find it gets a lot shorter. If you could have anything you wanted, but it can only bring joy to yourself and others, what would it be? Now imagine applying that same standard to everything you type into an LLM or A.I. agent.

We have already manifested technology that takes us out of coherence. How can we now use technology to come into more harmonious creation with reality?

The Intention Economy

An unprecedented convergence is underway between A.I.-enabled breakthroughs, potential disclosure of formerly-classified technologies and the rising acceptance of a new paradigm of consciousness. IONS scientist and psi researcher Dr. Julia Mossbridge recently told Leading Edge she envisions a transition from the parasitic “attention economy” to an “intention economy.” This means actively harnessing individual and collective intention toward positive goals, rather than letting the social media industry monetise our passive distraction. The first stage of that transition is technology that makes the connection between consciousness and reality more tangible.

Adam Curry is an inventor, tech entrepreneur, and a guest on this Leading Edge episode. Adam also sees anomalies in our incomplete materialist worldview as clues to paradigm shifting technologies. [You can listen to our conversation on Spotify and Apple Podcasts].

Adam has helped develop the Mind Lamp, a desk light with a Random Number Generator inside that changes colour to indicate when it’s being influenced by human intention. I have one of Leading Edge member Peter Merry’s Wyrd Lamps above my computer, and I’ve found it useful as a simple feedback device to notice the quality of attention I’m bringing to a conversation or a piece of work.

As we become more comfortable with the idea of our thoughts influencing reality, how can we use technology to come into greater creative coherence with it? The brain’s right hemisphere is more directly connected to the heart, and I believe the heart is in relationship with what I call “attractor intelligence.” One critical intention economy sector to focus on is therefore devices that aim to restore hemispheric balance. In our conversation, Adam tells the story of how a sustained exploration of neurofeedback twenty years ago provided him with a sense of unity that really emphasised what felt like the true goal states of meditation. But he notes that it’s still been difficult to make a reliable consumer headset that’s sensitive and subtle enough to handle the infinite complexity of the human brain. It also helps to have trained supervision of your sessions.1

The Monroe Institute has been doing this work for decades. Their Hemi-Sync audio technology uses binaural beats to induce specific brainwave states, and their flagship Gateway program has now been attended by over 20,000 people. It gained broader cultural legitimacy when it emerged that U.S. military intelligence had sent personnel there, and a Zen Buddhist teacher reportedly said Gateway students could reach in one week meditative states that took him thirty years to achieve.2 Which also makes me ponder Carl Jung’s warning to “beware unearned wisdom.” Wired recently reported the story of a Gateway Tapes user who found herself in a full spiritual psychosis. It ultimately led to positive changes in her life, but she warns against doing it without "a tether to reality." In 2017 I experimented with an early EEG meditation headset. The causality is obviously impossible to establish, but shortly afterwards I experienced an exceptionally intense and destabilising awakening. I'm especially reluctant to move fast and break things when the thing being broken is my psyche. It’s also not clear to me yet how much this technology takes the essential step of reconnecting us to our hearts.

But, like A.I., spiritual tech is probably as crude now as it’s ever going to be, and is surely poised to improve at an exponential rate. Its goal should be to make us feel at home in the world, to allow us to feel safe and held. This tech could assist with nervous system regulation, hemispheric rebalancing, frequency generation or something we haven’t even thought about yet. But most importantly, it needs to bring the heart back into balance with the head. There’s an old African proverb “the child that’s rejected by the village burns it down to feel its warmth.” As both Doty and I learned, if we let our wounded children manifest in isolation, they will cause havoc. Whether it’s AI or our own brains, we need to integrate our powers and creations and let them be beneficially guided by something greater than ourselves. Our brains will become coherent with our hearts and artificial intelligence will return to harmony with nature.

[You can listen to my conversation with Adam Curry on Spotify and Apple Podcasts]

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The deepest and most fulfilling meaning in life comes from discovering the unique individual place we were born to take in the greater Earth community, and then embodying that place as our gift to others and to the world.

-Bill Plotkin

Bill Plotkin, Ph.D., is a depth psychologist, wilderness guide, and agent of cultural evolution. As the founder of the Animas Valley Institute he has spent nearly 45 years guiding thousands of women and men through nature-based initiatory passages.

Plotkin describes an essential developmental process that is missing from modern culture. Beyond merely diagnosis, he also provides a map and mechanism to reincorporate greater meaning into our lives. Our conversation is an introduction to his work [You can listen to our conversation on Spotify and Apple Podcasts].

Through his study of other cultures, Plotkin believes healthy human development means reaching a breaking point where our culturally-defined definitions and roles fail us. We then undergo a Soul Initiation from adolescence to true adulthood. This involves a process by which you discover your unique ecological niche in the web of life. In his framing, “Soul” is primarily an ecological concept, not a psychological, spiritual or religious one. His work is therefore primarily focused on exploring what you are meant to do for the collective, rather than exclusively your individual growth or healing journey.

Both this diagnosis and prescription have basically disappeared from Western culture. Over literally thousands of conversations over the last decade I can confirm the truth of this statement. Many people I speak to express shame and bewilderment when their objectively satisfactory life and professional identity suddenly collapses. And yet, according to Plotkin’s analysis of other cultures, it’s what’s supposed to happen.

Once you look at modern society through Plotkin’s lens of being stuck in adolescence, a lot more makes sense. Many of our most visible public figures are transparently driven by a need for social proof and material success. Both are highly necessary developmental stages, but we’ve forgotten how to transcend them. In fact, Plotkin believes that less than 10% of contemporary humans ever mature to the point where they’re psychologically prepared for the journey of Soul Initiation.

One of Plotkin’s key additions to developmental frameworks is the “Descent to Soul.” It has five phases, with the “Soul Encounter” as its pivotal moment. The Descent is typically a difficult phase that lasts weeks to months, as a part of the longer Journey of Soul Initiation that can last several years.

Since 1980, Plotkin’s Animas Valley Institute has developed a series of nature-based practices designed to facilitate Soul Encounters. It often includes a multi-day vision fast, alone in the wild. These can involve everything from dramatic storms, uncanny interactions with animals, synchronicities, life-transforming dreams, and visions.

Why are Soul Encounters more likely to occur in wild or semi-wild environments? It’s because we can only understand the messages from our souls indirectly, or “mythopoetically.” The world mirrors it to us by way of nature-based metaphors, human archetypes, or other mythic or poetic symbols. This means that Animas’ work inverts a lot of developmental processes. For example, they engage in dreamwork, but almost never from an analytical perspective. Instead of working on a dream by interpreting it, they ask “what is the dream wanting to do to me?” This reframing opens us up to the idea that there are greater powers at work in our lives, powers that are guiding us toward our ideal niche.

The Soul Initiation process doesn’t tell you how to embody your soul; what professions or skills to pursue. Plotkin calls the how the “delivery system.” His own soul’s purpose is to “weave cocoons” and his delivery systems have been as a psychologist, vision fast guide, author, and soulcraft facilitator. As we discussed in our conversation, Carl Jung also undertook the hazardous path of the Descent to Soul on his own, as documented in the Red Book. He ended up revolutionizing depth psychology as well as fulfilling a prophetic role in diagnosing the spiritual sickness of modern humanity.1

“Am I Held?”

The open question, one we explored in our conversation, is if the soul-initiated adult can return and thrive within a decaying adolescent culture. In my own experience, most conversations about life transitions have one core question at their heart: “am I held?” If I make that transition from adolescence to adulthood, can I still survive and feed my family? I viscerally understand how it’s one thing to suspect that benign guiding forces really do exist, and another to bet your safety, comfort, savings, career and family’s future on it.

As our relationship with “nature” specifically, and the divine feminine in general, has basically collapsed, so has our faith that there’s an intelligence strong enough to help us overcome the forces that are destroying us.2 And, like any adolescent, we are secretly afraid to offer our truly authentic selves to the world in case we get rejected.

Bill is optimistic, but realistic. He thinks there can be three outcomes from a Soul Initiation:

1. It works out beautifully. We discover our gifts, find a way to deliver them to the world and achieve a personal fulfillment that’s deeper than we even thought was possible.

2. We get stuck in the cocoon. Unfinished business from earlier stages, usually childhood, means we need to spend longer in transition or need support from soul-initiation guides.

3. We die in the initiation process. This is obviously more common (although still rare), in intact nature-based indigenous cultures of the past and present. But it’s accepted as an unavoidable risk; the societal risks of having no initiation process are infinitely worse. In my experience it’s not a straightforward choice either. I’ve regularly seen those that refuse their purpose descend into resentment, addiction, health crisis, or even suicide.

It’s easy to look at dreamwork, vision fasts and alternative indigenous cultures and assume what Bill and Animas are doing is backwards-looking. But he continually emphasizes that this is a process for birthing something entirely new; a culture populated by revolutionaries; the “visionary artisan.” When your work is in service of life in a destructive culture, your work will necessarily be transformational. Many of the case studies in Plotkin’s work end up in healing, guiding, or ecological professions.

One purpose of founding The Leading Edge was to create a digital cocoon for people to discover their soul’s purpose and then experiment with different delivery systems. As Bill and I discussed, he thinks we will increasingly see the emergence of different communities that develop their own versions of practices and ceremonies that help people through the Journey of Soul Initiation.

The role of stewarding of those networks, especially digital ones, is also one example of a relatively new delivery system. I had my own vision in 2017 about being a node in a network that would help catalyse social evolution. Writing, interviewing, and running the community are different delivery systems I enjoy doing simultaneously. Perhaps most importantly: this combination also allows me to flourish with a modest lifestyle in Manhattan.

But the plural of anecdote is not data. I don’t think we can ever be sure if a vision fast, Soul Encounter or life transition will be a guaranteed success. And I think if we were certain of success going in, we wouldn’t learn the lessons the transition requires. The question then remains if the pain of stagnation outweighs the risks of the adventure.

[You can learn more about the Animas Valley Institute here, and listen to our conversation on Spotify and Apple Podcasts].

If you’d like to dig deeper into Bill’s work his 2021 book Journey of Soul Initiation is a great start. Here’s a helpful glossary of Bill’s terms, and a couple of excellent articles with more on the Soul Initiation process. The Realm of Purpose Least Realized (But Most Essential in Our Time of Radical, Global Change) and The Journey of Soul Initiation: Q & A with Bill Plotkin.

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“What did Jesus do immediately after being taken down from the cross?” She asked.

My New Testament knowledge isn’t exactly great, so I mumbled something about the resurrection.

“No,” she replied. “He went down to Hell, to set the captives free. That’s what you’re here to do.”

I’ve probably met with at least fifty mystics, intuitives, non-traditional teachers and practitioners over the last couple of years. This session with Mary felt very different. A voice in my head piped-up immediately and said it was only resonating because she had just compared me to Jesus Christ. “Careful of that messiah complex,” it said. But I knew she was right because it simply felt different in my body. And because I’d already been to hell.

I also knew who the captives were. Because I had been one of them. They are the terracotta army of mid-career professionals who have been told the lie that there is no second act. There is no soul. There is no purpose. There is no Tao to follow. There is no God. There are only Peak Earning Years, mortgages, college funds, health insurance premiums, and your responsibilities to your culture and your family. Keep your head down and your KPIs up. Ride it out until retirement. Don’t mind that you’ll die a thousand deaths, or maybe even a literal one, while you wait.

Back in 2017, I was gifted with a vision. And the price of that vision was insanity and the end of the life that I thought I wanted. I wasn’t exactly the kind of person you would expect to have a vision either. After a spontaneous awakening experience on a trading floor, I suddenly knew what my life’s purpose was and what was going to happen in the coming years. It felt like remembering the future. I saw a network with energy running through it. I was going to be another node in that network. I knew that that energy was simply Truth with a capital T.

Immediately, another voice entered my head. It said, “No, you are going to spread death.” But this voice felt different. It was totally flat, dull and emotionless. It didn’t land in my body at all.

Two months later, I knew what I had to do. That evening I was surprised to hear a voice come directly out of my body. It was different from anything I’d ever heard before. It made a soul-deep commitment to fight the devil, the prince of lies. I then knew that my heart needed to be opened, but I had no idea what that meant.

The moment I made that commitment, a voice started in my head. It told me that I was damned, and who was I to disagree? It was my own thoughts telling me. Over the next two years, the voice barely relented at all. It told me I was worthless. That I was going to run out of money. That I would never work again. That I was mentally ill. That I was disabled. I tried to argue with the voice. My family tried to argue with the voice. Psychiatrists tried to argue with the voice. Spiritual teachers tried to argue with the voice. But the voice was always flawless in its logic. As G.K. Chesterton said, “a madman is not someone who has lost his reason; but someone who has lost everything except his reason.” The voice was also lying.

It was only after fully descending to hell through an intravenous ketamine vision that my heart started to open and I began to be able to feel Truth. After that point, I encountered a series of teachers, articles, and ideas at highly synchronistic moments, and I began to reach a modest audience by spreading them.

I’ve written two pieces in my life that didn’t feel like they were solely produced by me. I believe that’s the case because, unlike the rest of my articles, I can read them back without cringing. The first was two years ago, when I felt like we were on the cusp of an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment. The toxic half-truths of dogmatic materialism were about to be exposed through a revolution of common knowledge. I wrote a second follow-up recently, talking about how the lie of permanent death was a lynchpin upon which this entire false façade has been erected. These ideas that felt truly insane to me just a couple of years ago are now entering the mainstream even faster than I could have predicted. This Secret of Secrets now needs to be spread through the Network of Networks.

Over the last eight years, that symbolic vision I received in 2017 has become increasingly concrete. The future that it showed me has moved from an impossibility to a probability. I founded a community called The Leading Edge. It has already reached its limit of 150 people. Our success is far from guaranteed. We could still fail, probably due to my arrogance or incompetence.

But four years of researching these kinds of communities and then two years of running one have shown me that the general model will surely be a success. In over twenty years of studying industries on Wall Street, I have never seen a supply-demand mismatch like this one. Every single person that has somehow found The Leading Edge has expressed surprise that there aren’t a wealth of other similar groups. And yet, after years of looking, I’ve only been able to find less than ten high-quality communities. Meanwhile the addressable market is probably now millions of people, which means the world can already support thousands of us. There are an extraordinary number of high-agency, well-resourced, and effective mid-career professionals who are suddenly interested in deliberately evolving their consciousness. My sense from speaking to my old colleagues on Wall Street over the last six months or so is that the growth trend has just turned into a hockey stick. But the lie that they’ve been told is that they are alone and there’s no one else like them. They hunch over their microphones on Zoom and whisper to me about their mystical experiences, and their true ambitions, fearing that I will think that they are mad. They don’t know that they are the fourteenth person I’ve spoken to that week alone that is offering me a similar story. That voice in their heads telling them to play small may not even be their own.

Let me tell you what I think is going to happen next. Because it has already started.

Over the last few months I have met many other community leaders. We have started to come together into a Network of Networks. I have called this the World Wise Web. I’ve written an open source blueprint of what we’ve done successfully at Leading Edge. But I want to be told what can be improved.

I now see a three-part industry evolving. The first is the individual Dunbar networks, where the constraint is a supply of high-integrity founders who are willing to give themselves to this glorious life. We need schools and teachers to train them. The second is the flow of people, places, and capital between these groups. And the third is a content and tech stack that allows for the efficient flow of Truth between the groups.

These communities are now the rarest of things. They are not just passively resilient to A.I., but actively gain from its disruption. They favor curation and creativity over manipulation and slopification. They place the unlimited growth of human wisdom at their center rather than limited intelligence. Competing with machines at their own game is a blindfolded sprint into a wall of your own obsolescence. People are drawn to The Leading Edge out of loneliness and curiosity, but they stay for love. The LLM may tell you it loves you, but I can promise you you’re never going to feel that warmth in your heart.

Most people who come to us are a little less alive than they know they can be. But the lie that they’ve been told is that this is all they deserve. We can rapidly reconnect them to content, community, and practices that bring them alive again. This rejuvenating energy means that the members of these containers are starting to burst like popcorn into the fullness of their gifts. They are then offering them back into the community and out into the world. These are the cocoons that people have always needed to experiment with new identities and their soul’s purpose in a world that wouldn’t even use the word “soul” and doesn’t acknowledge the existence of a true purpose. It’s when we come back into integrity that the magic happens.

My ludicrously high quality problem is that I now have too many people trying to join our deliberately constrained community at The Leading Edge. And I also have people offering me so many gifts. A naturally busy group like my members can’t even take up all the different transformational experiences they are being offered. I want to offer this abundance back into the rest of the emerging network.

What makes these emerging groups special is that they are open to a wide range of different spiritual teachers and practices. We aren’t restricted to meditation or breathwork or dreamwork, but can experiment with a combination of anything that resonates with us. When combined with high intellectual discernment and a wealth of individual experience and resources, the result is a distillation of quality. Within The Leading Edge, we are exploring what loosely defined “works” and who the most effective practitioners are for the greatest number of people. We now want to share our findings with the world and for the world to share its findings with us.

The first problem that aspiring community founders come to me with is typically the cold start. This model is so new there isn’t a name for it yet, and the “value proposition” isn’t quite clear. But I can assure you the impact is potentially life-changing, because many of our members tell me it is. You just have to take a leap of faith with your time and your capital. I would ask you what you are saving both for anyway. I wholeheartedly believe we should all be prioritizing a mystical budget alongside our gym membership and formal education. Perhaps even higher. As this trend accelerates, I’m very curious to see if the most forward-thinking wealth stewards and family offices start to allocate to their own evolution in this way.

We all know that A.I. is coming for the left brain. It will soon be commoditized virtually to zero. The reflex is to assume that that value will naturally accrue to the right brain. But we have a culture that is used to devaluing and denigrating intuition. Part of our collective duty is therefore to deliberately ascribe a higher value to it and vote with our wallets, time and resources.

My biggest fear now is that I will get this wrong. Specifically, that I will broadcast lies instead of the Truth. That the voice was right when it said that I would spread death. But then Mary told me that this fear itself was a lie. She told me “the Mother always recognizes the voice of the Father.” When I feel Truth, it comes to me in my body first, not in my thoughts. Lying thoughts simply do not resonate. Evil does not vibrate. It can only corrupt and pervert. It isn’t alive. So I am learning what the wrong ideas feel like. They make you sound clever but they aren’t exciting. There’s no resonance when I listen to an intellectual explain why, actually, I have no free will or read another article about how our civilization is inevitably doomed. When you search your heart, really drop in, you don’t believe it either, do you? That’s what Radical Hope feels like, and it’s real.

After spending four hours in the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid in early December, I emerged with clarity as to how physically distorted my body was. In my first session with Mary, she immediately correctly intuited (off camera) that I had a rightwards corkscrew in my body. This represented an overreliance on the intellect at the expense of intuition. Over the last few months, I have successfully begun to correct that torsion. That has allowed me a greater sense of embodied Truth. I get the chills increasingly often when I hear it, and tears come to my eyes more easily when I speak it.

But it’s still early. Mary tells me I’m only finally finding my feet. So I need your help. There is a specific kind of person that’s drawn to these networks. They have managed to synthesize Truth from a thousand different sources. They don’t care if it’s “science” or “spirituality” as long as it’s True. They have become a node, and they are loving it while also being changed by it. The way Mary put it to me was that I was like the Ouroboros snake, swallowing the universe. I like to inhale the internet and distill what resonates. “It isn’t for everyone,” she said. “It’s a dangerous job. It can drive you insane.” Another reason why this is a team effort. Each encounter with every prophet and visionary I’m lucky to meet further confirms that “the next Buddha is the sangha,” and “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

If this sounds True to you please tell me. Does this call to adventure seem fun to you? I particularly want to hear from you if you have already built something like Leading Edge. Because our village already gives me everything I need, I want for nothing. But what I would like is for our group to get even tighter and for me to bring them the best of everything we can find. And then offer that back out to the other tribes that see the same beacons burning on the mountaintops.

Meanwhile you can either cower in your frozen foxhole waiting for the A.I. artillery to zero-in on your zero-sum games. Or you can create the infinite game you’ll want to play till the day you die, and possibly beyond.

[No A.I. was used to write this article]

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I have a seven year old boy and a four year old girl. I have no idea what college will teach, or cost, by the time they are eighteen. But I am relatively certain that, whatever A.I. is capable of by then, their intuitive capacities are going to be radically more important. This is because the primarily left-hemispheric educational system that emphasizes analysis and memorization is already obsolete.

But there’s much more at stake for ourselves, our families, and society, than just our tuition costs.

Leading Edge member Allison Paradise holds degrees in neuroscience from Brown and Harvard. Based in Los Angeles, she’s the founder of The Epicenter. They work with children aged 7-22 on the cultivation and recovery of their intuitive capabilities. She’s a dear friend, and one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met, something I think comes across in our conversation. [You can listen to our conversation on Spotify and Apple Podcasts]

The Telepathy Tapes has brought global attention to the possibility of our children having capabilities that far exceed the current materialist understanding of consciousness. From as early as she can remember, Allison was also having anomalous experiences. As she tells me, these included seeing and speaking with people who had passed and having a telepathic relationship with her father. Her mother, meanwhile, dismissed these experiences as hallucinations caused by allergies to medications.

When Allison was three her sister was born. She has a very distinct memory of the baby coming home from the hospital glowing with the most beautiful light. She saw the same light dulled in the older children and adults around her. At that moment she received a very clear message that she was meant to work with kids. She told her parents she wanted to be a teacher, but in her family the only two acceptable options were doctor or lawyer. So off she went to study neuroscience at Brown and Harvard instead. While she was there she experienced an outright dismissal and disinterest in anomalous experiences of consciousness. She increasingly repressed them in herself and then dove into a deeply unfulfilling career in consulting.

Years later, she was driving on Highway 280 in California when everything suddenly came back to her. She says she doesn’t have words for it. It was as if the universe was fed up with her. It had been trying to tell her since she was three that she had something to do, and she had been ignoring it.

In many spiritual traditions the siddhis, psychic abilities, are accepted as real, but also sometimes regarded as distractions. This is because the true prize from a stronger intuitive connection to yourself is authenticity, integrity and a clear sense of your own life path. It was this calling that Allison had repressed, and now she helps other children nurture in themselves.

Flash forward a few years and Allison’s classes now help kids understand the difference between externally imposed labels and who they actually want to be. They ask open-ended questions together about where the stories and labels they apply to themselves come from. They do an exercise where the kids literally stick labels on themselves or a mannequin to examine where they come from and if they accept them. There are no right or wrong answers, only lies are unacceptable.

We are all familiar with the famous Einstein quote: “everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Many of our children are now swimming in waters most of us cannot even sense. A combination of civilizational urgency and material abundance has provided a platform for the opening of their senses to subtle evolutionary pulls. This scene from the movie I Origins beautifully explains the entire concept in less than three minutes.

While still largely invisible, from Marvel and X-Men, to Harry Potter, to Stranger Things, this idea of magical, mutant children has unconsciously seeped into the waters of popular culture. This more expansive evolutionary drive frees our children to consider life paths more suitable to their unique gifts and interests. I increasingly wonder how much of modern neurodiversity and mental illness derives from repressing this intuitive guidance and instead asking children and adults to focus on life paths that aren’t suitable for them.

Towards the end of her classes, Allison and her colleagues talk about what the children are here to give. They even ask the younger kids, “what are the gifts that you have to share with the world?” She prompts them to move beyond abstract concepts like kindness and love, and instead name what their unique thing is that they get to share with the world. She said that, with the little kids, they give them gift boxes. They are asked to write what their unique gifts are, and then decorate the gift box. Only if they then want, they can give the box to someone else and practice the action of sharing those gifts.

She said that with the older kids they talk more explicitly, using the word “purpose.” But she very specifically doesn’t allow them to define it in terms of a profession; “my purpose is marketing.” No, it's probably not.

One of the closing activities with older students involves writing or drawing one’s purpose on a piece of paper alongside something in nature that the students resonate with. Students are then asked to stand in a circle with their nature drawings facing outward. They then identify the ways in which their drawings connect to each other – trees are connected to the sun which is connected to the birds which are connected to the ocean, etc. As each connection is made, students also make a physical connection to each other using twine. By the time everyone has shared their nature drawing, all the students are interconnected. They are then asked to share their purpose, while still being connected through the twine. Once everyone has shared, students are then asked what happens if the sun decides it’s not going to shine, or the tree decides it’s going to be a bunny or if the birds decide they’d much rather be fish. What happens if things in nature don’t show up as they are? If the sun doesn’t shine, for example, whatever is connected to the sun can’t thrive. The same is true for our purpose.

Starting with a single student they then enact what happens when their part of nature and their true nature decide to not show up: they sit down. The twine between whatever is connected to them is cut, and anyone holding that cut twine has to sit down. This starts a cascade, with more twine being cut and more students sitting down until the entire circle is sitting. This provides a powerful demonstration of what happens when one person decides to obscure themselves and to live away from their purpose. It affects everyone and everything around them. It not only shows the kids that they can show up as who we are, but also how important it is to support others in doing the same.

Positive Sum Parenting

Work like Allison’s can often have a profoundly positive effect on the parents. This is something I’ve witnessed and personally experienced recently as well.

One of our Leading Edge members works in finance and he has a highly creative, neurodivergent teenage son. Out of nowhere, he recently told his father he sees energy fields, auras, feels frequencies in a room and has had out of body experiences. Since then, his son has been working with another one of our members, an intuitive and reiki healer. As a result of their work together, he says his relationship with his son has changed unrecognizably for the better. And, just as interestingly, he now believes in a new way of perceiving the world because it’s his own son telling him.

Over the last few years of reading about psi and emergent features of consciousness I’ve obviously been encouraging my kids to talk about their intuitions and experiences. I’d be lying to you if I hadn’t secretly hoped one was telepathic or had past life memories of being a Japanese samurai. But it was all pretty normal until my son turned to me recently and said matter-of-factly “daddy, sometimes I get chills.” I asked him if he meant when he was cold. He replied “yes, but also when people are lying. When they tell the truth I go hot and when they lie I go cold.”

I was recently informed by a channeler (yes, I know) that I am also “clairsentient”; I have strong embodied intuition. But a rightwards shoulder corkscrew in my body has prevented me from feeling it properly. Since then, I have been seeing rapid, visible progress from Egoscue, a kind of physical therapy. I haven’t had any crazy intuitive pings yet. But I am getting goosebumps more frequently when I sense truth and tears come to my eyes when I say it. As I told Allison in our conversation, I had my own precognitive vision in 2017 about what felt I was going to become. I was going to be a node in a network that would spread truth. But I wasn’t going to be the person generating the truth. I wasn’t the center of the network, I was just allowing truth to flow through me. During my intense awakening experience I could feel anyone’s emotional state if they walked within a few feet of me. Whenever I said something that wasn’t true, I felt a sharp pain in my heart center. Up until very recently I assumed that that’s what happens to everyone when they’re in that kind of altered state. But, if this is something that my son also has, is it a little more unique to us both?

In Portugal last year, I learned that the “Holy Grail” might actually refer to initiatory resonance chambers. They can elicit altered states that shift our perspectives in important ways. In December, a small group of us visited the King’s Chamber inside the Great Pyramid in Egypt. My primary desire going in was to be a better father. Since I’ve been back, I’ve made a real effort spend quality time with my four year old daughter. She imagines A.I. prompts, then we generate the pictures in black-and-white and then color them in together. Before our visit to Egypt, one of my companions generated a picture to represent the Holy Grail. Obviously my daughter never saw it. One day she dropped a painting from school on my desk as a present for me.

I asked her what her painting was of, and she replied that she had no idea.

In the grail legend, the prize is to become who you truly are. This is what Allison’s work tries to cultivate in children, but also what we might recover in ourselves if we are willing to give them our presence. Leading Edge recently met with Dr. Chris Bache. His decades of cosmic exploration led him to believe that perhaps the highest leverage action we can do right now is support our children. Initiatives like Allison’s Epicenter can be a global movement, if we are willing to commit our attention and financial resources to it.

[You can learn more about The Epicenter, and support their work, here. Listen to our conversation on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for more of Allison’s insights on parenting and education].

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Borrowing a framework from and , I think you can roughly sort the content you consume into four quadrants.

1. Low Agency/Low Consciousness

2. High Agency/Low Consciousness

3. High Consciousness/Low Agency

4. High Consciousness/High Agency

A couple of quick caveats. I don’t like the description higher and lower consciousness. The awkward truth is that some people are definitely further along the path, but I prefer the term “more integrated” rather than higher. Seeing consciousness as a hierarchy to climb is itself a sign of less integrated consciousness. I also don’t love the terms NPC, Agentic Fool or Spiritual Bypasser. One of the key things you learn about developmental models is we all probably have to pass through each quadrant sequentially. So by looking down on any stage we risk unhealthily repressing it in ourselves. That said, the red arrow trajectory that Scott Britton drew through the quadrants is a really helpful shorthand that has been reflected by my own interests over the last twenty years of my life. [Links below are a relevant interview or article of mine].

Low Agency/Low Consciousness: While I find the video game term Non-Player Character (NPC) unpleasantly dehumanising, I’d broadly class “NPC content” as politics, news, celebrity gossip and sports. And I say this as someone who spends roughly twenty percent of his time either watching or reading about Premiership soccer. So why is it “Low Agency/Low Consciousness” content? Because, at its worst, it degrades your consciousness by forcing you into binary thinking and unpleasant emotional states like fear, jealousy or anger. The persistent negativity bias can also reduce your agency by making you feel helpless and nihilistic. The combination of AI slop, deepfakes and global chaos is making this quadrant increasingly uninhabitable.

High Agency/Low Consciousness: In my twenties and early thirties I was mostly drawn to information that would make me more materially successful. As I worked on Wall Street, this was investment research and macro and thematic trends. I then became interested in mental models, cognitive biases, Buffett and Munger. Around 2015, I became drawn to rationalist, big picture thinkers like Tim Urban, Yuval Noah Harari and Scott Alexander. Sam Harris then opened me up to meditation and the topic of consciousness.

High Consciousness/Low Agency: The first significant turning point for me, like many others, was the emergence of Jordan Peterson in 2016. For all his faults, his focus on the transcendent, mythic and psychological led me to Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, both of whom changed my entire perspective. My central takeaway was that there are hidden, but very real, forces driving the evolution of our consciousness.

In 2017, these explorations culminated in an explosive and destabilising frame break in the form of an awakening experience. This is when I would say I became high(er) consciousness and low agency. I became interested in Eckhart Tolle, Alan Watts and Michael Singer, but personally struggled to integrate their insights into my daily life.

High Consciousness/High Agency: Over the next eight years I regained a degree of personal agency as I gradually reintegrated science and spirituality. The second pivotal moment in my journey was the discovery of Iain McGilchrist’s work in 2020. He was the first thinker I encountered who had a robustly-researched neuroscientific model that could explain much of the world, but without denying the mysteries of spirituality. It also increased my agency because it inspired a year of research into how to become more hemispherically balanced in real life. This increasingly leads to being able to do the right thing, at the right time: the definition of the Agentic Sage.

McGilchrist led me next to cognitive science and the work of John Vervaeke. Then to those pioneers synthesizing science and spirituality like Mona Sobhani, Julia Mossbridge and Ervin Laszlo.

I then learned that this leading edge science resonated with mystical frameworks such as those found in Kyriakos Markides’ books on the modern Cypriot Christian mystic Daskalos, classical and historical research from Peter Kingsley, Greek-Armenian mystic Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way and even esoteric channeled material like the Law of One.

As these explorations continued, I started to realise how critical it was to understand “stages models”: the process of consciousness evolution itself. This led me to return to Ken Wilber’s integral frameworks and explore Don Beck’s Spiral Dynamics and Tara Springett’s Stairway to Heaven. My series of conversations with also helped raise my awareness of the many pitfalls along this path.

These quadrants represent my own personal journey, not necessarily any negative judgement on the thinkers themselves. Any consciousness journey is subject to accusations of cherry-picking and recency bias. But also the teacher appears when we’re ready, we can then integrate their insights and move on. Moreover, like stages models, these content types build on themselves sequentially. As with most things, it’s a holarchy not a hierarchy. It’s hard to be materially successful without a basic understanding of what’s happening in the world. It’s then easier to focus on deliberately evolving your consciousness after your basic economic needs have been met. This balance then provides the foundation to use your skills and resources in a positive-sum way.

Where next?

I’m obviously not calling myself an “Agentic Sage”, but I am definitely powerfully drawn to people that might help me along that path. These have been thinkers who are offering entirely fresh worldviews that place consciousness and agency at their heart. While their perspectives are consistent with ancient spiritual traditions like Taoism, Buddhism and Christianity, they are also equally comfortable with the analytical power provided by emerging science.

For example, while I naturally find points of disagreement with both, Tim Freke and Chris Bache have been two of the most electrifying thinkers in the agentic sage space.

The author of 35 books on mysticism and spirituality, Freke has devised a “unividual” worldview that describes the current emergence of high agency/high consciousness people. A key distinction between NPC content and Agentic Sage content is the capacity to see beyond binaries and hold paradox. There is an elegance in Freke’s framing: the unividual is defined precisely by their ability to grasp the paradox of being a unividual at all. A unividual is both highly individually differentiated and totally integrated into the whole. Freke’s worldview and meditations are fundamentally relational, and offer one of the most immediate and accessible forms of emergent human experience. One exercise involves sitting face-to-face and directly sensing how you are both utterly unique and yet fundamentally one with the other person. Our closest relationships therefore become the primary training ground for the realization of Freke’s worldview.

Dr. Chris Bache is best known for his remarkable 2019 book LSD and the Mind of the Universe. It relates his insights and experiences from 73 therapeutically-structured, massive-dose LSD sessions over the 20 years from 1979-1999. Our Leading Edge interview with Bache is the most popular one we’ve ever done. He has developed an extremely robust framework for the structure of the universe and the evolution of consciousness, derived from surely one of the most intense psychonautic journeys a human has ever undertaken. It culminates in his vision for a completely new evolutionary stage of humanity: the Diamond Soul.

Despite the literally infinite scope of this cosmic process, in a recent, profoundly moving private conversation with Leading Edge, Bache stressed the importance of thinking in high agency terms. Based on scientific research and direct experience, Bache believes that reincarnation is a reality. Evolving the Diamond Soul is about successfully integrating all the lessons from this life, and all of our former lives. This leads to a paradoxical urgency from knowing we will only live this life once, but with the freedom that comes with suspecting we may have thousands of other chances to get it right. Bache said that we know we are doing our soul’s work when we are thinking about our learning and creative process across multiple lifetimes. This is surely the opposite of NPC doomscrolling?

Bache suggests one of the most powerful ways of awakening the human species is also personal: empowering our children. As they represent the most emergent layer of humanity, it’s already clear that this current generation is exhibiting capabilities at the frontiers of human understanding. Cultivating these intuitive gifts in our children might also help unlock them in ourselves. Every time we decide to favour social media and NPC content over our own children (speaking personally), we are missing this opportunity.

A thinker in the top-right quadrant helps you see the world more accurately and act within it more effectively. Freke’s unividual worldview shows the importance of deepening our closest relationships and Bache’s cosmic visions make the nurturing of our children even more critical. This isn’t a simplistic, binary appeal to swear off screens either; our offline relationships can be greatly enhanced by our online explorations.

Finding the Top Right Quadrant

When we’re being NPCs we’re distracted by transient events we can’t control. After a certain point we absolutely don’t need to “stay informed.” Despite the overwhelming focus on politics in our information ecosystem, for most of us, our political agency is restricted to making an unsatisfying binary choice once every four years.

When we’re being Agentic Fools we look to people doing the obvious and quantifiable, like company founders, billionaires or politicians. They offer us a valuable, but incomplete, form of material enrichment.

Our inner Spiritual Bypasser can then get stuck in the mystical without making it practical. We can also fall down rabbit holes common to conspirituality-riddled domains like UFOs and alternative history. It’s easier to trick myself into believing podcasts on the origins of Atlantis or the secrets of the Knights Templar are somehow contributing to my personal evolution. But these topics often exhibit the same low-agency distractions, apocalyptic narratives, ephemerality and gossip as NPC content.

I’ve found it really helpful to mentally pass each book, podcast and article I consume through the quadrant filter first.

The “Agentic Sage” knows that very small-seeming aligned actions have a disproportionate impact on the whole system. They have developed the skill of navigating the world through a fine balance of intellectual analysis led by energetic perception. This is reflected in the information they consume. By far the most important skill to cultivate in the post-AI age is becoming increasingly sensitive to how a piece of information makes you feel. I have yet to consume any AI generated content that gives me an embodied charge. If you stick to information with an exciting energetic frequency that aligns with both your personal curiosity and the good of the whole, it’s likely that it will change you for the better. If you share it and discuss it, ideally in community, that evolutionary process is accelerated for everyone.

[Who is in your top right quadrant? Tell us all in the comments].

In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”

- Alain de Botton.

My wife would find it hilarious that I have the nerve to write an article about relationships, but thankfully she’s too busy to read my Substack.

When people hear my story about enduring a two year depressive hell in Manhattan, the first question they usually ask is “were you married?” My answer is “yes; but barely.” We had been married for seven years before I became a different person literally overnight. At different times I was variously delusional, manic or deeply depressed. If those early years hadn’t been so easy, I doubt we would have made it through the impossibly hard ones that followed. It also made me realise how much I believe we undervalue resilience when picking a life partner. Most marriages I know have encountered at least one nuclear extinction event. Some combination of mental and physical illness, infidelity or unemployment. They don’t all make it through.

Our marriage survived my depression and insanity, thanks primarily to the strength of my wife. Eight years later, I would argue we are even better than we were before. But we still emerged with scars. So my wife requested we attend regular couples therapy. I initially resisted because “we were fine,” which is about as stupid as refusing to go to the gym because you’re not unhealthy yet. As usual, my wife was right and I was wrong. We’ve been in monthly couples therapy for several years and it’s been great.

We both agree that the most useful part of it has been to reframe our communication in terms of our own emotional states, not what the other person is doing wrong. So “why can’t you stop leaving water on the bathroom floor?” becomes “when you leave water on the bathroom floor it makes me feel disappointed that you’re not thinking about my needs.” It’s almost impossible to argue with somebody else’s emotional experience. It has also led to an interesting series of insights into the other person’s personality.

Four Horsemen of the Marital Apocalypse

In his decades-long work on marital interactions, Dr. John Gottman famously identified the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”: criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. Among those, contempt is considered the most destructive and the single strongest predictor of divorce. Exemplified by the eye-roll, it shows a fundamental lack of respect for the other person.

Coaches Brian and Nicole Whetten have an interesting theory that contempt for someone else is typically a sign of an “unacknowledged superpower” in yourself. Put simply: it’s triggering when your partner finds something difficult that you find intuitively easy. This relates to an evolution in my relationship with my wife that has been so transformational it makes me disappointed that it took over a decade of marriage to discover it.

My wife’s a News Anchor for ABC. She was recently diagnosed with adult ADHD, something she’s spoken about emotionally on Good Morning America.

Some of this is adaptive neurodiversity: as a news anchor, she can be reading an autocue, editing her upcoming script, and listening to the producers in her ear all at the same time. It makes my brain melt just thinking about it. During breaking news, she can instantly prioritise the most important things that require her attention.

But at home, what’s adaptive sometimes becomes maladaptive. With nothing being most urgent, she finds it hard to attend to the thousands of demands that come with living in a small apartment with two young children shouting at you constantly. So she has the mental equivalent of twenty browser tabs open at any one time. Without being able to prioritize tasks in a clear order, she constantly bounces between them wasting her time and effort. Things like her consistent failure to return the milk to the fridge aren’t petty acts of defiance, they are because she’s habitually distracted by something else.

Specifically, her diagnosis also revealed that she’s “time blind”; she can’t accurately estimate how long any task will take her. I used to assume she was being dismissive and inconsiderate when I asked her how long she’d be doing something, while I watched the kids. Now I realise that she simply struggles to do it.

For every fault my wife has, I have at least ten. The worst is intellectual dissociation. I really enjoy manipulating and combining abstract ideas in the safety of my head. And the shadow of that is the slightest amount of physical or emotional discomfort leads to me retreating, usually into my phone. One thing that led to me cutting down on alcohol was realizing my screen time often doubled when I was hungover. This headspace is so all-consuming that our apartment could be on fire and I wouldn’t notice until my legs started burning. In contrast, my wife notices literally everything. When she realised I was not being an inconsiderate idiot deliberately, she’s had a little more compassion for me. As long as I’m still actively working on solutions for it: an explanation isn’t an excuse. It’s become us against the problems instead of us against each other.

So when philosopher Alain De Botton suggests you ask your partner “how are you crazy?” I think he’s really onto something.1 A great refinement is to ponder your cognitive superpower, then its corresponding curse. When you can both identify the same dynamic in your partner you develop a degree of compassion and cooperative problem-solving that makes contempt nearly impossible.

A big contributor to the spike in diagnoses and awareness of ADHD among adult women is because they resonate with the diagnoses of their children. It’s only an accidental result of their concern for someone other than themselves. This is yet another reason to allocate time and money to the deliberate evolution of your own consciousness. The obsession with inner-work can sometimes be self-absorbed, but equally you can’t help your partner understand how you work if you don’t even know yourself.

“All of us are crazy in very particular ways. We’re distinctively neurotic, unbalanced and immature, but don’t know quite the details because no one ever encourages us too hard to find them out. An urgent, primary task of any lover is therefore to get a handle on the specific ways in which they are mad.”

-Alain De Botton

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There was a red moon rising over Cairo by the time we arrived outside the entrance to the Great Pyramid of Khufu. The plateau was totally deserted, except for a few stray dogs. Along with our guide, our small group of seven walked up a short flight of jagged steps towards a grotto-like hole in the side of the pyramid.

It was a chilly December night outside, but just a few feet into the pyramid, the air rapidly became hot and thick. A short walk further inside led to a tight upward-sloping passageway. You could only climb it stooped over at a right angle, with your back pressed against the stone ceiling. I was told it was only twenty five meters long, but I lost count after sixty rungs on the wooden footholds. I tried not to think about being trapped between my friends climbing ahead of me and behind.

On the other side of the passageway we emerged into the Grand Gallery. My relief at being in a slightly larger space was quickly tempered by the realization that the air was getting stiller and hotter. I was already sweating heavily.

Another hundred yards and I found myself standing in front of a small hole leading into the King’s Chamber, one of the world’s most mysterious and sacred spaces.

And I was as scared as I’ve ever been in my whole life.

The Mystery of the Pyramids

There are a whole range of theories as to the function of the Egyptian pyramids generally, and the King’s Chamber specifically. On the same day I returned from Egypt, popular podcaster Jesse Michaels interviewed Italian scientist Filippo Biondi on his alleged discovery of man made structures and columns that extend as much as a half a mile below the Giza plateau. Biondi and Michaels raised the highly speculative possibility that these structures could have had an energetic function that would align with fringe ideas about pyramids as power-generators.1

For his part, Joe Rogan recently said his best guess is that the pyramids are a “stargate” portal that allows astral travel to other solar systems.2 As obviously wacky as it sounds, it’s something confirmed by direct experiences of other people who have visited it. Sacred site expert (and previous Leading Edge interviewee) Freddy Silva also tells a story of his entire group witnessing thirty figures dressed in white satin materializing out of the walls of the King’s Chamber.3 It was the experience that finally led to him quitting his day job. Legend also claims that Napoleon emerged pale and shaken after spending a night in the Chamber. According to later accounts, he was asked on his deathbed what he experienced there and he replied, “What’s the use? No one would believe me.”

All of these different theories were as terrifying as they were exciting.

Why was I even there?

The short answer is that a group of my dearest friends asked me to join them on the trip. The long answer is that this year has seen me drawn into a series of ideas that seemed to be culminating in that exact moment. My trip to Portugal back in May first taught me how sacred spaces use acoustics to generate altered states of consciousness. It became increasingly clear to me that out of body experiences were central to these initiatory rituals. I believe they are also the key to a potential paradigm shift in modern culture. This is because they would help us transcend the materialist worldview towards one where we realize that the evolution of consciousness, of the soul, is the primary purpose of our existence. Shortly afterwards, Dan Brown’s #1 New York Times bestseller Secret of Secrets made precisely the same arguments.4

What’s factually true is that the King’s Chamber is a rectangular room built entirely of massive Aswan granite blocks and located about 43 meters above the pyramid’s base. It contains a lidless granite sarcophagus that is too large to have been moved in after construction, indicating it was installed during the building process. If it was indeed intended as a burial site, it’s interesting that no inscriptions or burial artifacts were found inside. Acoustic measurements show the chamber and sarcophagus have strong natural resonant frequencies.

The Chamber itself wasn’t that claustrophobic, but it was incredibly humid. I had a splitting headache. I was starting to sweat through my T-shirt and linen trousers. I tried not to think about how far I was from the pyramid’s entrance. If I had a panic attack and needed to escape, I wasn’t getting out to fresh air for a long time. My companions then asked to kill the lights. After a little grumbling and settling-in time I agreed. We were completely alone, in absolute darkness, in the middle of the night, under millions of tonnes of stone.

Potentiator of the Body

The Law of One material I’ve found so oddly compelling this year is closely associated with Egypt. The advanced non-human entity named Ra claimed they visited Egypt during a time when its people were spiritually advanced and seeking guidance. Egypt’s polytheistic model apparently made them more open to Ra’s metaphysics. The Egyptians subsequently made an association between Ra and their Sun God. The name stuck.

The Law of One makes the typically esoteric claim that Ra materialised the Great Pyramid using “intelligent energy.” It was intended as a technology to help with initiation and healing, specifically of the body. It’s an idea that didn'’t seem entirely ridiculous when I was standing at the foot of the pyramids, in full recognition that we still don’t fully understand how they were actually built.5

According to Ra, the 22 archetypes of the Tarot were offered to us as a tool to help us penetrate the veil of forgetting; to access the collective unconscious. In advance of my trip to Egypt, I reflected on the purpose of my visit and I drew a card. It was Wisdom or The Sage, also known as “the Potentiator of the Body.” To me, this means having the judgement to interpret the many signals of our body. Ra describes all emotional experiences, especially the intense ones, as an orchestrated “catalyst” to learn the lessons necessary in our current incarnation.

The day before we went to Egypt, we prepared with a trip to Chartres Cathedral in France. The idea was that exposure to one of the most sacred sites celebrating the divine feminine would help ground us in love. Despite dogmatic religion’s many attempts to erase the connection, a great many similar sites are dedicated to the divine feminine; commonly associated with the wisdom of the body. Whether it’s Isis, Mary Magdalene, the Black Madonna, Persephone or Sophia, the divine feminine was seen to be a secret source of wisdom and transformation. Indeed; the word philosophy comes from philo-Sophia: love of wisdom. “Incubation” in these sacred spaces, spending extended periods in darkness, was also associated with Goddess encounters.

It was only after my experience in the King’s Chamber that I realised quite how significant the divine feminine was going to be for me personally.

The Sarcophagus

We were in the King’s Chamber for two sessions of two hours, divided by a two hour break, ending at 1am. We did absolutely everything to ensure our time there would scrupulously respect the sacredness of the space. And the details of my companion’s experiences are private. During our second session, one of our party asked for the air purifiers inside the chamber to be turned off. While it made the resonance inside the chamber clearer, it made the air even more stale. Once again I swallowed my objections and tried to ignore the panic. It helped that, even if I completely lost it, I knew I was totally supported by my friends.

I lay in absolute darkness, while we matched our voices to the resonance of the room. The whole Chamber was throbbing. It was eerie, otherworldly and beautiful. I hummed until I found the frequency of the granite around me, which was easy to do. My whole head and torso started immediately vibrating in sympathy. The sarcophagus resonates at ~117 Hz, a low-frequency sound that apparently enhances interoceptive awareness, which helps you feel more connected to your body.

I waited for something dramatic to happen.

A Good Day to Die

On the morning of our visit to Giza, one of my companions had the idea of a ritual we could perform leading up to our time in the Chamber. He gave each of us seven rocks. We would make each rock something we wanted to leave outside the pyramid, a part of ourselves that we didn’t want to take into a sacred space.

As I spent my morning in reflection, I realised how little of my life I wanted to discard. My life is practically perfect. What I really wanted was to become more present to the life I had, especially as a father and husband. I also particularly wanted to let go of my lingering fears of insanity: the one thing that could instantly detonate the beautiful life I’ve built. After my awakening experience in 2017, I became totally destabilised overnight, and felt like I lost absolutely everything in the process. I had also felt totally alone.

The only handful of times I’ve felt really dysregulated in the years since my awakening have been when I was overwhelmed by uncertainty and strong emotions. The day before entering the pyramid, we had a preparatory session with one of Leading Edge’s most trusted mystics. Unprompted, he told me one of my gifts was being able to see complex scenarios in my mind, using what he called my “energetic prefrontal cortex,” as well as the ways they might play out. But the corresponding curse was that constantly running these simulations in my head overloads a brain trying in vain to control all the outcomes (I get awful air travel anxiety!). Entering the Chamber was the first time in my life I was reluctantly walking into a room where I felt that literally anything could happen.

Walking around Giza that morning I was suffering from a crippling headache in the front of my skull, which reached a climax as we entered the Chamber. It was so bad it brought me back to the rare migraines I experienced as a child. More than once, when I was being dropped off by my parents back at my deeply toxic boarding school, my vision started blurring in my left eye and I became incapacitated by the pain. I now suspect that the situation was too uncertain, and the emotions were simply too large for me to control. Then again that night, my fear and anxiety about facing possible death or insanity in the pyramid was overwhelming my brain. As Carl Jung said; “all neurosis is the avoidance of legitimate suffering.”

But there was something else present that day as well, a rare visitor to my guest house. There was an extremely faint sense of embodied joy and calm.

Finding God at Home

In my recent interview with Dr. Chris Bache, he described how the purpose of our lives is for our consciousness to become integrated enough to experience ever deeper levels of reality. To be strong enough to see more of God, without being shattered by the experience.

For me, I find God most often when looking into the faces of my children.

But my confession is I often get bored when contemplating the prospect of being present with a seven and four year old for hours at a time. The dissociative dopamine of the doomscroll is too powerful a draw. I’d rather go back into the relative safety of my intellect and play around with scenarios and ideas. And all my years of attempts to app-block and brick my iPhone have failed. This distant dad was someone I wanted to leave in Giza.

Part of the reason I can’t be more present in the moment is because my primary relationship with my body is one of discomfort. The only time I really notice it is when it’s desperately trying to get my attention. As embodiment teacher Philip Shepherd puts it so wonderfully: “the reason you aren’t living in the present, when all is said and done, is because you don’t feel the present living in you.”

By the end of our second session in the Chamber, I was in so much pain I was hunched over the sarcophagus nursing a familiar ache in my back. For as long as I can remember I have suffered from chronic discomfort in my lower right-hand back.6 After those four hours in pitch darkness the only thought in my head was how much I have always hated the appearance of my own body. Especially the fat around my lower back.

To mark the end of the final session we gathered in a circle. One of my companions instinctively grabbed me around the waist and cupped a love handle. This is the part of my body I am most ashamed of, and in turn it’s the part that supports me the least. Rather than cringe and withdraw, I let myself soften and receive his embrace.

I can’t feel safe in my body and I’m rarely aware of when my body is receiving love. In the time since coming home I’ve tried to notice where in my body is feeling joyful. I am aware I’ve made promises like this to myself, and my family, too many times. But this time I hope the intensity of the initiation experience gives me a fighting chance. And there are some signs the universe wants to help me.

Cats and Corkscrews

The night before I entered the Great Pyramid I had an especially vivid dream. When I woke up I recalled a clear sense of “there was left, there was right, and the pyramid was in the middle of them both. Its foundations were home, they were safe.” Then my childhood black and white cat appeared in the dream to tell me he loved me and that it would all be OK. On our minibus to the pyramids that night, I chuckled when I sat down and found a three-foot-tall poster of a black-and-white Egyptian cat deity Bastet directly in front of my seat. Bastet represents the feminine, balance and protection.

Within 36 hours of landing back in New York I had a session with an expert on accessing somatic wisdom and finding joy in my body. It had been booked, by somebody else, well in advance of my trip to Egypt. Within 72 hours I finally committed to try a new kind of physical therapy I’d been recommended called Egoscue. In less than half an hour they used a clever photo process to diagnose my chronic back pain as being caused by a forward corkscrew in my right shoulder.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the “spiritual significance” of this imbalance. Across multiple traditions, the interpretation is apparently that I was exaggerating my right-hand masculine side, my intellect, at the cost of my intuitive feminine left. I was drawn to return to the transcript of the session with our mystic before the King’s Chamber. He had described seeing a diagonal energetic line in my body going from my left hip up to my right shoulder, in the same direction as the corkscrew.

Shortly afterwards, I was referred to another intuitive, a channeler. I was obviously curious if she’d mention the corkscrew too. First she asked why I wanted to see her. I mumbled something inarticulate about wanting to serve life. I hadn’t said anything else to her, and was off camera. She replied that wasn’t actually why I was there; I was there because I was repressing the intuition of my body. She then immediately described seeing what she called a “torsion” in my system that was skewing me away from my feminine body up to the masculine in my head. Her poetic phrasing was “the mother always recognizes the voice of the father.” That my body would resonate when I hear truth.

Mysticism aside, I subsequently learned that thousands of somatic-therapy accounts report that, when the right-side torque releases, people commonly describe an ability to receive and a deeper sense of safety.

A $40 physiotherapy session 40 years ago could probably have saved me all this trouble, but I’m not sure that was how this was supposed to happen. A lifetime of diets and workouts had always failed to shift those shameful love handles. But after just a few weeks of consciously rotating my body a couple of degrees clockwise, they have begun to vaporize, even over Christmas carb season. My back finally feels strong. Now I’m curious and excited to see what happens to my embodied intuition.

Maybe I got that headache because I was dehydrated in the Sahara Desert. Maybe my back hurt because I’d been standing all day. Maybe those intuitives got lucky, twice. I don’t think I’ll ever fully shed my skepticism, and I’m grateful for the healthy role it plays in my explorations at the fringes. But the net effect of the last few weeks has been to tip me from 51:49 skeptic to 51:49 believer. And it wasn’t because of a single dramatic experience in the pyramid, but all the little moments since.

Nobody was more disappointed than me that my time in the Great Pyramid didn’t involve contact with aliens, angels or “proof” of the existence of life after death. Then I could write to you all with certainty about the triumphant culmination of all this year’s explorations.

But initiation means getting what you need, not what you want.

And I didn’t need to leave my body, I needed to come home to it.

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My selections reflect the fact that I believe this year saw a clear tipping point in mainstream perceptions of the previously-fringe ideas that are meaningful to me and my fellow members of The Leading Edge.

Favourite Podcast:

Harvard Sociologist Explains The Global Awakening Happening Right Now- with Martha Beck.

This is one of those rare inspirational podcasts that manages to be both grounded and profound. Beck: “Based on what we see sociologically, the interesting thing is that what’s happening now has happened before in various societies, but it’s happening so much more rapidly and at a larger scale now. And I would give it about two years until there are enough people who have chosen to walk away from the culture into their own truth for much of the fuel to go out of the old culture and a new way of being to begin.”

Honourable mentions:

• On Powers, Great and Small by The Emerald. A typically poetic examination of all the ways modern culture misunderstands the true nature of subtle power instead of brute force.

• Iain McGilchrist and Michael Levin in conversation. Probably my biggest incremental obsession this year is the work of biologist Dr. Michael Levin. Even if I only ever understand ~20% of what he’s saying. He recorded a two part interview with Leading Edge icon Dr. Iain McGilchrist. He also recently appeared on Lex Fridman. Mystical savant wrote an excellent mystical interpretation of his ideas.

[From a personal perspective, last month I recorded the most popular podcast I’ve ever done with Dr. Chris Bache. He recounts his mindblowing experiences from 20 years of 73 massive dose LSD sessions].

Favourite Book:

The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown.

Seeing this book rocket to #1 on the NYT Bestseller List was one of the most gratifying moments of my year. For me personally, it truly marked the turning point when I saw all the “fringe” ideas I’ve been exploring for the last decade go truly mainstream. This is obviously a work of fiction (shamefully, the first one I’ve read in years) and is more of a page-turner than hardcore literature. But the science behind it is robust. Brown said that after eight years of exploring the real-life scientific research: “I discovered that we have a model of consciousness that’s outdated in the same way the geocentric model of the universe was outdated. This research will change the way we view our world.” He also said that he no longer fears death. The book might make a great gift for the family at Christmas.

For a good intro, Dan Brown was recently on Rick Rubin’s podcast. There was also lots of good writing advice along with his insights on the research into consciousness. He thinks these revelations could become more widely accepted within the next year.

Favourite Article:

Life is Woo by for ’s Kainos community.

“As nervous as we may still feel about waving our “woo woo” flag, the truth is, woo isn’t fringe anymore… Cultivating the woo gives us hope, inspiration, and expands our capacity for pleasure. With each new experience of the nonordinary, our reality becomes fuller, bigger, richer.”

Honourable mentions

• The Essence of Healing by .“I must confess something that feels almost embarrassing after years of intensive training, studying countless modalities, living in a monastery, and devoting an unreasonable amount of time to understanding human transformation: it really is this simple. The essential movement of healing—creating safety for what’s been fragmented to emerge, and meeting it with the qualities of secure attachment—is the essence of every approach to transformation I’ve encountered.” He recently wrote a deep dive on this key modality.

• Four Funerals and a Flood by Jeremy Radcliffe. A beautiful and harrowing account of his personal experiences following the devastating floods in Hill Country, Texas.

Favourite TV Show:

Pluribus by Vince Gilligan.

You can always trust the creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul to deliver. This is a darkly hilarious exploration of collective consciousness. It was also released just days after I wrote about the almost identical topic of “social memory complexes.” Which is a pleasingly weird sign. This show makes me chortle more than most actual comedies.

Honourable mention:

• The Pitt. Superior medical drama that simultaneously illustrates the aburdity and heroism inherent to the U.S. Healthcare system.

• The Studio. Genuinely funny madcap farce. A couple of unusually hilarious episodes make up for the more uneven ones.

Best of the rest:

• Favourite DJ Sets: Elderbrook at the Greenpoint Waterfront was a great mix of new remixes of old classics. Also, it’s not my usual genre (more house/dance than melodic EDM) but this Oliver Koletzki at Mystic Creatures Festival 2025 is utterly infectious (thanks for the flag). FWIW: three different EDM fans in my community recommended Colyn b2b Sainte Vie at Burning Man 2025.

• Favourite Movie: Although it was imperfect, Weapons was really refreshing in how unpredictable it was relative to the formulaic dross we have become used to. From a Woo-verton window perspective, it was interesting to watch the trailer for Spielberg’s 2027 blockbuster Disclosure Day. And, while I didn’t love it, the calibre of talking heads appearing on the documentary The Age of Disclosure was notable, including the sitting Secretary of State.

My love to you and your families.

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Investor and author Eric Markowitz has a remarkable survival story. In early 2023, he received a life-threatening diagnosis. Doctors discovered a “rapidly enhancing lesion” about the size of a walnut deep in his cerebellum. The lesion could either have been terminal brain cancer, or an equally dangerous infection. Either diagnosis carried an extremely high risk of death. But he not only survived surgery, the pathology came back benign. A one-in-a-million cerebellar abscess. It was in his brain for almost six weeks and nobody knows why it didn’t rupture.

Eric’s brush with death led him to be fascinated by survival, specifically the concept of what makes for an enduring business. He’s been traveling around the world researching his book OUTLAST, which I am certain is destined for bestseller status.

I recently had the privilege of interviewing Eric at the annual general meeting for a venture capital firm. I asked him what he had discovered in all his travels so far. Whether it’s luxury cashmere or fishhooks, Eric has found a pattern among long-lived companies. Yes, they are obviously relentlessly focused on the quality of their product and customer satisfaction. But, perhaps less intuitive, is his observation that these companies tend to treat their employees like family.

He recounted one anecdote. He spent time at the 500-year-old gunmaker Beretta, and interviewed the 16th generation CEO. He also spent time with workers, one of whom was a 4th generation Beretta employee. Her family cares for the business, just as much as the business cared for them, which feels increasingly rare in modern society. All around the world, he’s heard similar stories: how companies built housing, schools, and even hospitals to care for their employees.

That loyalty to their workers may look “expensive” on paper, but the company stewards argue that this approach is essential to innovation, prosperity, and the endurance of the firms they operate.

Even though many of these founders obviously come from multi-generational wealth, one of the reasons they continue to work is that they are often treated like family by the members of their own company. This was the insight that interested me the most.

Isolation or Integration?

For the last couple of years I’ve been running a community for generally wealthy and successful people. As it’s now mostly referral, the hit rate for new members being a good fit has been about 90%. The rarer exceptions have tended to be the wealthiest and most prominent applicants. As our community is deliberately capped at 150 members, it’s not been a big problem. But it’s a serious issue for the larger communities I’ve studied that cater more to the ultra-wealthy. This dynamic fascinates me because I think it could transform the way we think about leadership and money.

We’ve seen an extremely clear pattern within Leading Edge: the more other members someone meets, the more value they receive from the community. With notable exceptions, the wealthiest members have been least likely to be super-nodes, and the most likely to be isolated.

This isn’t that surprising. Our current economic system rewards left-hemispheric dissociation, mastery of abstractions and sometimes even sociopathic detachment. So it makes sense that wealthy executives tend to be more isolated. But even into second and third generation wealth, their kids often can’t know who their friends really are, or engage in society in the healthy ways they want to. Philanthropy is obviously great, but because it’s often a one-way flow of resources, it doesn’t really impact the donor’s ability to genuinely integrate with the world; to receive.

Survive, Compete, Then Thrive

I recently flew to Los Angeles for a weekend with developmental coaches Brian and Nicole Whetten. They were hosting an Authentic Leadership Intensive to train a new generation of founders and coaches.

One of their most powerful frameworks is the “fuel source” model. They map leadership mindsets into three distinct modes. Each level receives exponentially higher power, awareness and energy.

The red boxes, lose-lose, rely on the intelligence of one flawed individual. This is the doomed CEO convinced that they’re right and everyone else is wrong. The blue boxes, common to the win-lose iteration of capitalism, are much more powerful because they aggregate the intelligence of all the market’s participants: the power of the Dow.1 Authentic leadership is exponentially more powerful than both because it draws from an external intelligence and energy source: the Tao.

The Tao fuels the top four boxes (mature love, contribution, growth and creativity), and it’s what the best leaders receive from their relationships and businesses.

Many people use the word “service” to describe the ideal form of leadership. But I vastly prefer contribution. You are co-creating with emergence to bring something uniquely personal into the world that benefits everyone. In a virtuous circle, contribution fuels creativity and growth.

And, as Eric Markowitz’s research confirms, mature love is also a feature of enduring businesses. He cites the example of a a 17th generation steward who said that his life’s work is to create better lives for his employees. He says that seeing them succeed is far greater success than selling their product. This kind of leader also receives the love of their employees. Mature love doesn’t equate to weakness. As we discussed with Dr. Julia Mossbridge, her research on the science of unconditional love shows that mature love can mean making hard decisions, even moving on employees you believe will genuinely be happier in a different career. In return: this kind of leadership requires a humility and receptivity to environmental feedback that is rare at the highest levels of Western business. You can’t access the infinite intelligence of the Tao if you don’t even know it exists.

The next generation of leaders will need to be open to this force, this love, which is why authentic leadership is based on receiving.

Back to the Main Quest

I’m allergic to wafty thinkpieces on “how to redesign capitalism” that don’t land back in the world of individual agency. It has become increasingly obvious to me that pretty much all of our problems are downstream of consciousness.

As I have written before, one of the easiest ways to reintegrate dissociated capital is for wealthy people to pay for transformational work on themselves. This will allow them to increasingly access the Tao and produce positive-sum creations. I call this the Integration Economy. Today wrote an important piece on the transformative impact of allocating a “mystical budget” for his family, specifically working with . We all need communities, and wise advisors like Bodhi, to tell us where to safely invest time and money. Imagine the revolution if the world’s family offices diversified just 0.01% of their assets into the deliberate evolution of their individual consciousness? It’s the most neglected investment I can think of relative to the unlimited potential ROI.

Individual investors and traders who consistently believe they’re smarter than the collective human intelligence of the market often end up in deep trouble. Societies that believe the collective human intelligence of the market is smarter than the Tao seem destined to do the same. ’s article this week on AI, gambling and the “vibecession” is one of the best syntheses of our deteriorating economic environment that I’ve read in years. I believe our financially nihilistic youth only gamble on win-lose games because they don’t yet know there’s a win-win force more benign than luck.

More broadly, I’m curious if win-win businesses can survive and thrive in an economy that’s becoming increasingly win-lose. So a core question I wrestle with in my work is: is the Tao smarter than the Dow?

I suspect the main quest right now for any “wise-agency” leader is to find out. To learn if receiving material abundance follows the right contribution. To see if money shows up as a consequence of making the right choices and learning the right lessons. I’ve seen it happen consistently in my own life, and in many others. Witnessing these mini-miracles leads to faith, faith leads to safety, safety leads to openness and openness leads to receiving even more “love.” Once that happens we feel the urge to consume and accumulate far less, because we are held in daily loving flow by something exponentially more powerful than money.

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Welcome to the 21st annual Thanksgiving Quiz. It’s the same format as always: 20 questions, Google/ChatGPT honesty policy. You can find the answers here.

1. What is the only fruit with seeds on the outside?

2. In 2023, what made up 93 of the 100 most-watched broadcasts on American television?

3. If you take the last name of Jordan Peele’s comedy collaborator, the last name of the artist behind the album “Yeezus” and the name of the rapper behind the song “Wild Ones”, you’ll get a popular holiday destination.

4. “Black: fight back, brown: lie down, white: good night.” What is this advice about?

5. This Caribbean island is the only nation named after a woman.

6. The name of this ~$500bn company comes from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It describes one of several indestructible crystal balls, and the name means ‘far’ and ‘watch over’ in Elvish.

7. What’s the only planet not named after a god?

8. What role links actors Robert Pattinson, Val Kilmer, Michael Keaton and George Clooney?

9. Two thirds of the world’s longest-lived businesses are in this country. I went to visit the world’s oldest hotel there this summer, founded in 718AD.

10. The most viewed series in Netflix history garnered over 265 million views and was recently surpassed by an animated film which became the most-watched original title in Netflix history with over 325 million views. Which country are they both set in?

11. According to legend, the name of this country comes from “For/through you the Grail.”

12. Despite being closed on Sundays, this chain generates more than twice the average revenue per restaurant of its competitors.

13. Which of these is the oldest: The Aztec Empire, Oxford University, The Mongol Empire or the printing press.

14. This city beginning with “C” is the most populous city in China, with a population of 32 million people.

15. What occurs once in a minute, twice in a moment, but never in a thousand years?

16. During World War II, were the highest casualty rates among the Allies in the Army, Navy or Air Force?

17. This book with a 2 word title was published in 2018, has sold 25 million copies, was the best-selling book on Amazon in 2021, and spent 5 years on the NYT Bestseller list.

18. What is Psyche 16, estimated to contain up to $10 quintillion worth of metals?

19. This Pacific Island nation with the web domain .ki is the only country in the world in the Northern, Southern, Eastern and Western hemispheres.

20. Which director connects: 1) a mountain in South Dakota with the faces of four presidents carved into it, 2) the capital of Hungary, 3) A town in India’s West Bengal state famous for its tea and 4) an ancient maritime civilization in the eastern Mediterranean, centered around modern-day Lebanon, Syria, and Israel.

All my love to you and your families this thanksgiving!

Tom

Dr. Christopher Bache is Professor Emeritus in the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), and on the Advisory Council of Grof Legacy Training.

Dr. Bache is perhaps best known for his remarkable 2019 book LSD and the Mind of the Universe. It relates his insights and experiences from 73 therapeutically-structured, massive-dose LSD sessions over the 20 years from 1979-1999. Upon revisiting the book for this interview, I was struck by how remarkable it is. I am not aware of anyone else who underwent such a sustained exploration of the outer limits of consciousness, especially one who returned able to lucidly articulate exactly what they experienced. Bache also maintained a high-level teaching career throughout his sessions.

While he admits his adventure was perhaps foolhardy, and he strongly dissuades anyone else from attempting it, his commitment to travel to the very edges of human experience offers an unparalleled vision of our present reality and maybe even our collective future.

For our conversation I was joined by my friend Devin Martin, an experienced transformational and psychedelic coach [available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts].

Bache summarized his findings from the 73 sessions in a single paragraph. When I first tweeted it, it attracted over a million views, which may indicate a strong degree of collective resonance. And, hey, a tight summary of twenty years of unimaginably intense mystical experiences is probably pretty valuable. In one (long!) sentence, Bache claims to have discovered:

That the universe is the manifest body of a Divine Being of unimaginable intelligence, compassion, clarity, and power, that we are all aspects of this Being, never separated from it for a moment, that we are growing ever more aware of this connection, that physical reality emerges out of Light and returns to Light continuously, that Light is our essential nature and our destiny, that all life moves as One, that reincarnation is true, that there is a deep logic and significance to the circumstances of our lives, everything we do contributes to the evolution of the whole, that our awareness continues in an ocean of time and a sea of bliss when we die, that we are loved beyond measure and that humanity is driving towards an evolutionary breakthrough that will change us and life on this planet at the deepest level.

Bache believes that this birth of the “future human” will be preceded by a collective dark night of profound suffering.

When examining Bache’s findings, the first question is obviously: how trustworthy are psychedelic experiences in general? He has engaged in a thoughtful dialogue with Near Death Experience expert Ken Ring.1 Psychonauts have been predicting a catastrophic collapse and glorious rebirth into a new evolutionary stage of humanity for decades. Ring is no longer as convinced as he once was that these represent prophecy. Instead, he suggests it might just be reflections of culturally-specific conditioning. The consistency of apocalyptic death and rebirth visions may just reflect something specific to a Western Christian psyche. For centuries our culture has been grounded in the myth of agony, followed by glorious resurrection into a heavenly rapture.

It’s not really an argument anyone can “win,” but Bache does note the consistency of visions across NDEs and deep psychedelic sessions. Someone’s sessions may start in culturally and personally specific territory. But, like his, eventually they move into the shared, common landscape of extra-physical reality

Bache also undertook his explorations as a professor of religious studies, with a solid understanding of cross-cultural mysticism, and yet he was consistently surprised by what he found in his sessions.

For example, reincarnation isn’t typically part of the traditional Christian worldview. Bache already had his mind opened to the robust empirical evidence for reincarnation through Dr. Ian Stevenson’s research at UVA.2 This was then repeatedly confirmed by his direct experience. He also had experiences that aligned with the results of Dr. Michael Newton’s hypnotherapy research for the book Journey of Souls. Newton claims that our souls choose the nature of our incarnation in order to deliberately evolve our consciousness.3 One purpose is to learn how to master our innate creative powers.

Bache regards the soul as a system of consciousness that integrates all our different lifetimes. He himself has used hypnotic regression to experience and integrate his past lives. As he described them in our conversation, it was clear how many of them have aligned with his desire to explore the deep structure of reality. Our individual and collective goal is to eventually bring all of our former lives together into a single embodied consciousness and then to live that consciousness here on this planet. Bache calls this the “Diamond Soul,” which he experienced by gradually journeying through five ever more expansive scales of reality.

1. Personal mind: Ego death and purification of his own personal traumas

2. Collective mind: This is where he was encountering and healing species-level material. This involved more than two years in an incomprehensible “ocean of suffering,” where he witnessed atrocities like soldiers killing thousands of children.

3. Archetypal mind: Moving beyond the species mind, this is where he encountered vast forces that influence us on a cosmic scale. He experienced humanity as a single organism with our minds as nodes in a vast intelligent network.

4. Causal mind: This is where “oneness” becomes the dominant experience of reality.

5. Diamond Luminosity. This is his term to describe a glorious clear dimension of light that he encountered in the last five years of his journey. Buddhism calls this domain Dharmakaya. The “Diamond Soul” is the “future human” that he describes as being crystalized out of that light.

Accessing each level involved suffering a corresponding death or surrender of the prior stage as one opens to the next level of consciousness. First the personal ego, then the collective ego, then what he called the shamanic ego (the part that was used to navigate psychedelic space) and then the transcending of human-centric experience as a whole.

Making the Cosmic Practical

As Bache himself warns against following his path, and his worldview plays out over generations, what’s the immediate relevance of his work? How do we bring this broadest imaginable cosmic exploration into our daily lives?

One immediate benefit is the potential it offers for a transformational worldview shift. In terms of daily practice, he recommended to us that we simply read. Mere exposure to these ideas opens your mind to the experience of deeper forms of reality. He believes that exploring them in community is even more powerful, and helps us grow faster.

Although it derives from a source many will regard as inherently subjective and untrustworthy, Bache’s experience further supports the primary anomaly that would torpedo the dogmatic materialist worldview that is poisoning humanity. The wider acceptance of life after death is the antidote to existential nihilism.4 Not only does Bache think that reincarnation is a fact of life, but also that there is an evolutionary direction to our existence.

The legendary systems theorist (and former Leading Edge interviewee)5 Ervin Laszlo famously called this forece the “holotropic attactor.” In the foreword, he calls LSD and the Mind of the Universe one of the most insightful and significant books he’s ever read:

“But to understand its significance and to endorse its message, one must be willing to entertain three premises:

1. That there is an intelligence behind the things that exist in the universe,

2. That there is purpose exhibited by this intelligence, and

3. That it is humanly possible to access some elements of this intelligence and learn some aspects of its purpose.”

If we are guided by some kind of energetic or bioelectrical intelligence, it would make sense that we dedicate a lot more attention to cultivating our subtle sensitivity and resilience.  As Bache cautions in our conversation, if you touch the divine light without having a very strong, clear field, it can shatter you. This requires making ourselves integrated enough to fully experience and participate in ever deeper levels of reality.6 This trajectory of transcending and including at ever-increasing levels of intelligence is also increasingly consistent with leading edge science.7 Moreover, the Diamond Soul could be the ideal form that humanity is being pulled towards (which was the argument of my last piece).8 In his final session he tells the story of how he was given a glimpse of what he came to call “Diamond Vision.”9

Suddenly my sight became impossibly sharp. Colors, shades, and textures were vividly distinct; looking at my hands, I could see every pore at the base of each hair follicle. Dust floated in the air with crystalline precision. I could count the leaves on a tree. After about ten minutes the clarity vanished, and my vision returned to normal. That was the moment I understood I had been seeing through the eyes of the Future Human; a glimpse of how our physical and perceptual capacities are being refined and brought forward by the universe.

Against this immense cosmic scale, Bache’s work indicates that our personal spiritual work ripples out and contributes to the healing of the wider whole. In our conversation, he described how his own explorations had a profound impact on the collective consciousness in his classroom.

Bache believes that we are each self-generating fields of energy in a living universe. Our choices generate energy and the universe responds in complex and subtle ways that can play out over minutes, years or lifetimes. The turning point for each of us is when you notice these responses and learn the corresponding lessons they are offering. But, in a lovely moment in our conversation, Dr. Bache emphasizes that we have time:

Even then I learned that there are deeper and deeper dimensions of reality beyond even where I had reached, and that’s when I realized I had made a false assumption; that eventually you arrive at some final end point of the journey, a culmination that brings peace, enlightenment, and completion. What I discovered instead was that it doesn’t work that way. You can stop anywhere along the way, take the blessings given at any stage, live with them, and be enriched by them, but the path itself is an infinite progression; you never get to the end of it. That’s one of the reasons I’ve learned to be gentler with myself: it’s not about getting somewhere, but about changing the porosity of the membrane between physical reality and spiritual reality, allowing more of the energy of spiritual reality into your life. That can be done gently, physically, psychedelically, or therapeutically. I got about as far as I’ve seen anyone get, and I have great respect for the masters who live in communion with those levels of reality at the more subtle tiers.

[You can listen to our conversation on Spotify and Apple Podcasts]

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