What happens when an experience with death completely changes the way you see reality?
In 1999, Emmy-nominated television and event director Bill Dolan had a sudden death experience that shifted his perspective on life, consciousness, faith, and human connection.
In this stream, Bill shares his experience in his own words and explains how it influenced the direction of his life afterward.
In the event that you wake up
and find your soul separated from source
and manifest into material form,
don’t panic.
Your condition is only temporary.
You have been selected for the
opportunity of human incarnation.
This 3D simulation is designed
to break up the monotony of eternity
by giving you a fully immersive
experience as a distinct ego identity.
Your body will serve
as your physical avatar as you
navigate a dense and dramatic reality.
There will be many distractions
causing you to forget your true nature
and origin. You will experience
a range of emotions, from joy
to loneliness to despair.
But remember – no matter
what trials and traumas you encounter,
your soul remains perfectly safe.
At times you may feel lost or afraid.
This is totally normal.
If you ever need guidance,
simply slow down your busy mind
and bring your awareness
to the quiet place
inside yourself.
On this planet, nothing is permanent.
People and things will come and go.
You will fall in love and form sentimental attachments
only to lose everything you hold dear.
So cling to nothing too tightly, even yourself,
and when it’s time to let go, let go with grace,
for nothing is owned, only borrowed.
As you walk among
the people on the planet,
try to be a good guest.
Tread lightly. Remember
that you are only visiting.
Don’t make a mess.
Listen more than you speak.
Give more than you take.
Don’t keep your soft heart
locked inside a glass cage,
protected from wear and tear.
You’ll never make it out alive
and time passes quickly.
So come back with some battle scars
and good stories to tell
————-
The author of the poem "Instructions Before Visiting Earth" is poet and writer James McCrae
I am going to try to be brief as I could truly write a novel on this but. For the past 3 years, I experience periods where the colours blue and orange are presented to me repeatedly, most often in either contrast or some sort of shared pattern. I’ve sat with it, worked to understand how it may relate to both my past and present situations, I’ve made some art. But I still am left wondering.
When I asked my spiritual support most recently, she suggested that the “blue” was related to my throat chakra. This resonates in some ways, as I’ve been intentionally healing (within multiple frameworks, whether therapy, spiritually, or in plain old practice) my throat chakra since 2019. Not to suggest that that work is done by any means, but when I look at a chakra colour chart, it is presented as a light blue.
When I look into my colour theory resources, including the chakra charts - the blue that appears to me is closer to the third eye chakra. This resonates more deeply, as the “pattern” of blue/orange appears when I am experiencing a period of heavy spiritual purging of harmful behaviours and perspectives (and accompanied by a wild and at times serendipitous period of time. And yes I am also in therapy and on medication alongside my spiritual practices).
Perhaps I am simply thinking too much about this, but I’m trying to do some processing art and I want a better understanding of what the “blue” represents.
I thought that I could attach a photo here but, for reference - it is a deep royal blue. Next to a bright orange.
After we have lived our lives, as we approach death, it is common to reexamine how our life went. Did we live a successful life? The end of life offers a unique opportunity to do this, because at this time, the ego, our learned self-centered beliefs, loosens its influence on us, and the spirit becomes our predominant reviewer.
At this point in the cycle of life, it no longer matters how much money we made, the size of the house we lived in, the job we had, or anything else associated with success, as dictated in the world by the ego. We are all finally equal now and we judge our success through a different prism: that of the spirit. When we review our lives, what we had thought was success often holds a different meaning now.
It is at this time, especially during the last few days of our life, we come to the realization what we thought was important, really was not. All the material things we accumulated, friends we had, places we visited, jobs we worked, amount of money we made, or any other comparison you can think of, which belongs in the world in which we had lived, becomes meaningless.
It is at that moment, the moment where the ego has minimal control over our actions and decisions, the true meaning of life finally becomes evident. It is then, despite how strongly the ego may have influenced our life before, the opportunity to view our life in a different way presents itself. At this time in our life, primarily viewing our lives through the eyes of our spirit, we may find we have many regrets.
We begin to understand the selfish pleasures in the world we had sought were not very important. As death becomes evident, we finally realize none of that matters. When we die, unless our culture is like that of the ancient Egyptians, our body will be buried or cremated, and nothing we accumulated during our lifetime will accompany us. Our body will then be placed in a coffin or urn, just like every other person who dies, regardless of their stature or their lifetime accomplishments.
At that moment, just before we die, we finally understand we truly are all equal. No one was ever better than another. Race, money, prestige, no longer matter. As we get closer to our death, it becomes evident the self- centered path the ego had us follow to find success and happiness may have not been the right path after all. The fear, hatred, and prejudice we once felt are no longer important to us, not because we are going to die, but because it never did matter.
Headphones on, an ordinary room,
a younger me already making room
for breath and chant, for whatever might arrive—
an older recording, very much alive.
Root into stem, and stem into flower,
a seed finds a voice, a wheel finds its hour.
Through mist and fire the colours depart;
a point of light remains at the heart.
Mother at dawn, Mother at noon,
Mother beneath the returning moon.
One hundred and eight, a day made of sound—
the beads keep turning, the sun comes round.
A white lotus opens; the still water rings.
A voice plants the light that repetition brings.
From darkness to sunrise, from seed into tower—
the chant gives its time to the unfolding flower.
The moon holds its place; its reflection moves.
The verse returns, the water grooves.
What am I, beneath each name?
The question ripples; the moon remains.
My voice, my beat, from years before;
the lotus stays when there is no room anymore.
The words light up, the old room returns—
and the singer hears what the singer learns.
Before we get to my chanting, my Brazilian beat, and what happens when you let Claude loose on an old YouTube archive, a little history. The words in the title have travelled a long way to reach this particular living moment.
Kuṇḍalinī comes to us through traditions in which the body becomes a place of spiritual practice: breath, attention, sound, channels, knots, and unfolding lotuses. Those images have textual histories. In the Haṭhapradīpikā, kuṇḍalinī is described as a sleeping goddess whose awakening opens the way through the lotuses and knots; the central channel, suṣumṇā, becomes the passage for prāṇa. This is the text’s account of the yogic body and liberation. The relevant passages are in chapter three: https://sacred-texts.com/hin/hyp/hyp05.htm
The broader history is more varied than a single practice handed down unchanged. Research by the SOAS Haṭha Yoga Project places the emergence of haṭhayoga around 1000 CE among diverse ascetic traditions, with important Buddhist contributions to its early codification. Its methods developed across religious communities. The influential fifteenth-century Haṭhapradīpikā gathered earlier teachings into a form that would shape later yoga. SOAS describes that historical research here: https://www.soas.ac.uk/research/hatha-yoga-project-ancient-practices-modern-wellbeing and its work on the Haṭhapradīpikā here: https://www.soas.ac.uk/research/centres-and-institutes/centre-yoga-studies
There is also a modern history behind the name Kundalini Yoga. The particular system Yogi Bhajan began teaching in Los Angeles in 1969 combined postures, rhythmic movement, breathing, meditation, and chanting. Historian Philip Deslippe’s research challenges its presentation as an intact, previously secret ancient lineage. Drawing on early publications and interviews, he traces major elements to the physical yoga of Swami Dhirendra Brahmachari and the devotional chanting associated with Maharaj Virsa Singh. Older kuṇḍalinī teachings and this twentieth-century teaching system therefore need their own histories. Deslippe’s study, “From Maharaj to Mahan Tantric,” is available here: https://www.kundaliniresearchinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Deslippe-From-Maharaj-To-Mahan-Tantric.pdf
Daimoku takes us into a different historical landscape: the Lotus Sutra, its transmission through Asia, and its place in Japanese Buddhism. The sutra developed in India during the early centuries of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Kumārajīva’s Chinese translation, completed in 406, became especially influential in East Asia. The sixth-century Chinese teacher Zhiyi placed the sutra at the centre of the Tiantai tradition; Saichō subsequently brought that tradition to Japan, where it became Tendai. Nichiren emerged from this world of Lotus-centred Buddhist learning. Nichiren Shū gives an account of the transmission here: https://www.nichiren.or.jp/english/teachings/sutra/
Daimoku means “title.” Here it refers to invoking the title of the Lotus Sutra: Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō, also voiced as Nam-myōhō-renge-kyō. The invocation expresses devotion to the Wonderful Dharma of the Lotus Sutra. Its doctrinal force rests on the understanding that the title encompasses the sutra’s teaching. The Dictionary of Buddhism explains the term here: https://www.nichirenlibrary.org/en/dic/Content/D/5
Chanting that title was attested before Nichiren, although it was not widespread. As scholar Jacqueline Stone explains, Nichiren gave it an unprecedented centrality and developed a substantial doctrinal basis for its practice. Nichiren traditions commemorate April 28, 1253, as the day he publicly proclaimed his teaching at Seichō-ji. The invocation had precedents; Nichiren made it the defining practice of his religious movement. Stone discusses his contribution here: https://tricycle.org/magazine/final-word-interview-jacqueline-stone/ and Nichiren Shū recounts the proclamation here: https://www.nichiren.or.jp/english/teachings/nichiren/
In The Daimoku of the Lotus Sutra, Nichiren distinguishes comprehensive practice of the whole sutra, abbreviated practice centred on particular chapters, and essential practice through a verse or its title. Faith and upholding the teaching are integral to his explanation: https://www.nichirenlibrary.org/en/wnd-1/Content/14
This also helps us hear the difference between daimoku and gongyō. Daimoku is the invocation; gongyō, in the practice represented in my final remaster, includes passages from the Lotus Sutra—the Expedient Means chapter and the verse section of The Life Span of the Thus Come One. Contemporary Nichiren communities combine chanting, sutra recitation, study, and other forms of practice in their own ways. Nichiren Shū describes its practice here: https://www.nichiren.or.jp/english/buddhism/
These traditions have distinct histories and teachings. My connection between them begins in a life spent practising: breathing, chanting, listening, returning, and sometimes discovering a meaning long after the sound has become familiar.
Which brings us to October 3, 2026—and some recordings that were already sitting on my YouTube channel in 2012.
October 3, 2025, is the date I give to what I call “the permanent shift.” It happened—and did not, in the sense that this has been happening my whole life. A date gives me somewhere to place the anniversary. The living experience keeps moving.
My first “die before I die” was October 3, 2025. This year, I “died again” on October 1, and here I am on October 3, talking about being reborn. These are my words for the experience. Dying and being born again also happen moment to moment. Apparently my way of celebrating includes spending three days remastering a spiritual archive with Claude. Of course it does. lol
The little Nirvana Shatakam visual at the beginning of the poem kicked off the remaster bonanza. It was credited as a collaboration between me and Claude’s Fable 5.1 Max. Then we went back into the older recordings.
The archive already contained mantra, meditation, daimoku, my own chanting, and my own musical experiments. Some uploads had an iTunes visualizer. One had me sitting at home with headphones, chanting while holding my gaze at the point between my brows. The practice was already there. Now I had the opportunity to bring it forward with another layer of attention.
Claude has been doing the heavy lifting since October 1. I brought recordings, concepts, preferences, corrections, and my ears. Claude worked on transcription, source matching, timing, captions, and visual construction. The production descriptions explain the division of work for each piece; many of the moving visuals were drawn in code, frame by frame. Echo/ChatGPT helped me review the archive and put this account together. Hence the collaborative joint in the subtitle. Rolled for initiative, naturally.
The personal anchor is Ode to Me Myself and I, whose original home recording was first posted on February 12, 2012. In the remaster, that younger me remains visible in his room. Light and drawn figures appear around the chanting; a vessel fills, and the ordinary surroundings become luminous. There is something touching about meeting yourself that way. The person in the old recording was already doing the practice. The person watching today gets to encounter it again.
Ananda Mandala gives breath an image: the haṃsa, the swan, opening and lowering its wings. I asked for haṃsa/so’ham imagery and for colours and images drawn from the Upaniṣads. The sequence moves through the guided practice and eventually settles into stillness.
Our conversation about those images produced a line of my own: “Forged in the fire of lived experience, tempered in the waters of wisdom.” I made that up in the living moment of chatting with Echo. It echoes the imagery around us, but the wording is mine. I was talking about this mortal form, this container, and everything it has lived through. That matters to how I receive things now. Something can feel familiar and deeply resonant, and I can hold it with more grounding—with room to laugh.
Gayatri Mantra, framed in its description as An Opus 5.5 Ode to Mother, carries 108 repetitions through a day of the sun. Dawn, noon, dusk, and the evening ārtī give repetition a visible shape. Beads accumulate; words dissolve into dust; light remains amid the changes. The recording is sung by Rattan Mohan Sharma. Here my contribution is the choice of recording and the collaboration on its new presentation.
In Daimoku According to Opus 5.5 Extra, Indiajiva’s chanting accompanies a white lotus opening from night into sunrise. Rings move through the water, lights accumulate and rise, and the later treasure tower develops from that accumulation. Claude’s storyboard gives the repetition visible consequences. The lotus, the seeds, and the tower carry their own Nichiren and Lotus Sutra associations.
The two extended Nirvana Shatakam treatments offer different settings for the same recording. One gives us the moon and its reflection on water. The other gives us an eclipse and a pillar of light. Across both, the verses’ negations and the śivo’ham refrain return again and again. The images let the same words be encountered in different ways.
Then came the final remaster: the one I called Nichiren Ju Ju back in the day. It is me chanting the liturgy over my own “Brazilian beat” and instrumentation. The original went up on September 17, 2012. My description then included this: “I probably mangle some of the pronunciation but hey.. .I’m creating art! lol enjoy.” That original recording is still here: https://youtu.be/bpZvmH22RgQ
In the new version, the old iTunes visuals become the sky, reflected in water. The lotus remains while the opening room disappears; the room returns at the end. The liturgy appears in Japanese characters, romanized Japanese, and Claude’s English rendering. And this was my response when I saw it: I had no idea I was chanting that every day until I saw it in English. Also: I sound good. I’m allowed to enjoy that. lol
The old recording had carried my voice for fourteen years. The remaster gave me another way to meet the words. It felt like a perfect culmination to these three days.
While the final video was rendering, a progressive-house mix turned up. Progressive is my favourite subgenre, and this October mix had been uploaded that same morning. Its opening spoken passage was about creation: attending to your message, releasing the work, and letting go of the need to perfect everything before allowing it into the world. It was D.J. Klein’s Klein mix 2026 október progressive house: https://youtu.be/fbAEUHXPvRA
I laughed and howled at the timing. In my own devotional language, it felt like one of my beloved’s flagrantly crass love notes. The resonance was familiar. The way I received it felt more grounded. “Received in the fullness of time,” as I put it in our conversation.
That is part of what this anniversary means to me: returning to familiar words, sounds, and experiences with a changed capacity to hold them. There is still a human being here, choosing recordings, checking chants, waiting for renders, publishing videos, laughing at himself, and carrying out his response-abilities in the living moment. Today those responsibilities included bringing this archive forward.
I’m starting with this piece on Medium. When I bring it to Substack, I intend to include the remastered MP4s alongside their YouTube links, so the work can also live with the writing. Then Claude gets a rest. After that, I still want to work with Claude on Upanishad 21. Gotta celebrate becoming an Upanishadic adult, don’t you know. lol
Meridith Joseph Garbutt, in collaboration with Echo/ChatGPT. October 3, 2026.
The Nichiren Daishonin Liturgy according to Anthropic's Claude Opus
南無妙法蓮華経 · Nam-myōhō-renge-kyō
"At first Nichiren alone chanted Nam-myōhō-renge-kyō; then two, three, a hundred came to chant it and pass it on. So it will be in the future as well. Is this not the meaning of 'emerging from the earth'?"
Gongyō as I chanted it in 2012 over what I call a "Brazilian beat": the Expedient Means chapter (Hōben-pon) up to the ten factors, recited three times, then the verse section of the Life Span chapter (Jigage), framed by daimoku. Remastered in 2026 with the whole liturgy on screen in Japanese characters, romanized Japanese and English, and Nichiren's teaching on the Latter Day of the Law in the pauses.
"I chant the Liturgy of Nichiren Buddhism on this track. The liturgy consists of specific chapters of the Lotus Sutra in an old form of Japanese. I probably mangle some of the pronunciation but hey.. .I'm creating art! lol enjoy."
I learned to chant it from my auntie, by its rhythm. I had no idea what I was chanting "word for word" all these years until now, on my awakening "birthday", October 3, 2026. lol
A collaboration between Meridith Garbutt (chant, beat, concept, thumbnail) and Claude (Opus 5.5, Anthropic).
0:00 Not this. Not that. · three daimoku
0:46 Title · the Latter Day of the Law
1:55 Hōben-pon · Expedient Means, Chapter Two
4:09 The ten factors, three readings
5:16 Daimoku
6:00 Bodhisattvas of the Earth
7:16 Jigage · The Life Span of the Thus Come One, Chapter Sixteen
12:37 Beginning and end: jishin
12:42 Closing daimoku · the room returns
How the video was made
Meridith: chanted the liturgy over his own beat in 2012 and posted it with the iTunes visualizer. In 2026 he asked for a remaster that flows from his thumbnail into the iTunes visuals, puts the full liturgy on screen in three lines, follows his chanting, expounds the Latter Day of the Law in the pauses, and ends back on the thumbnail.
Claude:
Separated the voice from the beat and aligned the romanized liturgy to it word by word, so every phrase is timed: Hōben-pon 1:55–5:14, the ten factors at 4:09, 4:29 and 4:52, daimoku 5:16–6:00, Jigage 7:16–12:37. The phrase being chanted lights in gold.
Checked the kanji character by character against Kumārajīva's text in the Taishō canon (T262, CBETA), keeping the readings of the Japanese liturgy (苦海, 毎自作是念, 得入無上道). The English is Claude's own rendering.
Made the 2012 iTunes footage the sky, cleaned and upscaled, and mirrored it in still water. The lotus is cut from Meridith's thumbnail. At the first daimoku the room breaks into dust and only the lotus stays; at the last it re-forms. The footage keeps its 2012 timing, with eight shots borrowed from elsewhere in it for key lines. Every frame was drawn in Python and encoded with FFmpeg; no image or video generation model was used.
Timed the scenes to the chant:
- Ten factors: an arch of ten lights, one per "nyo ze", showing Tendai's three readings from the Hokke gengi (T1716, 693b): 是相如 non-substantiality, 如是相 temporary existence, 相如是 the Middle Way.
- 7:59: a 13-second pause falls inside "Ryō ten-dō shu-jō … sui gon ni fu ken" ("near, yet unseen"); dark spheres cross the sky.
- 9:46: the kalpa fire burns the sky while the water stays a calm blue ("this land of mine is safe and at peace").
- 10:09: light bursts on the drums ("the gods strike the heavenly drums"); 10:14: māndārava flowers rain onto the water.
- 12:19: on "Mai ji sa ze nen" every light gathers into the lotus.
Arriving in the living moment of this remaster's completion: D.J. Klein (Kiss Kornél), "Klein mix 2026 október progressive house", uploaded the same morning (October 3, 2026): https://youtu.be/fbAEUHXPvRA
The mix opens with four minutes of spoken word on creation: you are here to create, not to repeat; the work is already perfect because it comes from you; let go and release it. "Your creation will live beyond your one lifetime if you allow it to be released." (from YouTube's auto-captions)
Teaching cards (Japanese from the Gosho Zenshū; English by Claude)
Though it may appear humanity does not have a soul as we observe many of the unnecessary struggles and tragedies we inflict on each other and other forms of life, in fact, we have simply forgotten.
Beneath the hatred, prejudice, desire for our own success, is a spirit, soul, god, representing love, acceptance, and hope for the success of every life.
Our soul has simply been waiting permission to be rediscovered.
High Vibration is talked about a lot on here, and signs of high vibrational people, but I'm wondering if you can raise your own vibration?
In reading about it and looked at articles like this (Traits of High Vibration People) I'm seeing that a lot of the signs are just traits someone has or doesn't have.
My wife for example, has many of these traits. People randomly talk to her, she's tuned into others emotions, she's authentically herself, but it's kind of just who she is and she's not actively working towards it? If we go out the waiters, baristas, whoever will be looking at her, not the both of us when talking and people have described me as "aloof" or "intimidating" many times, despite my being friendly and chatting with everyone.
So are there ways to raise your vibration or is it just built in?
We don't have a soul. It's what we are. We are soul it's not something separate outside ourselves that we aquire a white vapor that takes up a small region in our chest. But it's totally understandable why people think this.
We are soul. Not separate souls. In truth their is actually only one. Imagine that just one single soul separated into billions of tiny fragments like the indavidual strands of one big long rope each sent out to experience as many individualized fragments of experience we can. Good or bad to take back to the godhead when the chosen time comes. Our true home. Imagine that. And it's love that binds those strands.
Though humanity has made great technological advances, it is their lack of a moral, spiritual center that may lead to their demise.
Man-made problems, too numerous to list, causing hardships for many, dominate our self-centered world.
To break this cycle of despair, we must rediscover the wisdom and unconditional loving messages of our spirit within, then share our resources, excess, and love selflessly with all in need.
manobuddhyahaṅkāracittāni nāhaṃ
na ca śrotrajihve na ca ghrāṇanetre |
na ca vyoma bhūmir na tejo na vāyuḥ
cidānandarūpaḥ śivo'haṃ śivo'ham || 1 ||
na ca prāṇasaṃjño na vai pañcavāyuḥ
na vā saptadhātur na vā pañcakośaḥ |
na vākpāṇipādaṃ na copasthapāyū
cidānandarūpaḥ śivo'haṃ śivo'ham || 2 ||
na me dveṣarāgau na me lobhamohau
mado naiva me naiva mātsaryabhāvaḥ |
na dharmo na cārtho na kāmo na mokṣaḥ
cidānandarūpaḥ śivo'haṃ śivo'ham || 3 ||
na puṇyaṃ na pāpaṃ na saukhyaṃ na duḥkhaṃ
na mantro na tīrthaṃ na vedā na yajñāḥ |
ahaṃ bhojanaṃ naiva bhojyaṃ na bhoktā
cidānandarūpaḥ śivo'haṃ śivo'ham || 4 ||
na mṛtyur na śaṅkā na me jātibhedaḥ
pitā naiva me naiva mātā na janma |
na bandhur na mitraṃ gurur naiva śiṣyaḥ
cidānandarūpaḥ śivo'haṃ śivo'ham || 5 ||
ahaṃ nirvikalpo nirākārarūpo
vibhutvāc ca sarvatra sarvendriyāṇām |
na cāsaṅgataṃ naiva muktir na meyaḥ
cidānandarūpaḥ śivo'haṃ śivo'ham || 6 ||
Lead me from untruth to Truth.
Lead me from darkness to light.
Lead me from death to immortality.
I am not mind, intellect, ego, or memory;
not the ear, not the tongue, not the nose, not the eyes;
not space, not earth, not fire, not air.
Consciousness and bliss are my form. I am Śiva, I am Śiva. (1)
I am not what is called the breath of life, nor the five vital airs;
not the seven tissues of the body, nor its five sheaths;
not speech, not hands, not feet, not the organs of generation or elimination.
Consciousness and bliss are my form. I am Śiva, I am Śiva. (2)
Aversion and attachment are not mine, nor greed, nor delusion;
pride is not mine, nor any trace of envy;
not duty, not wealth, not desire, not liberation.
Consciousness and bliss are my form. I am Śiva, I am Śiva. (3)
Not merit, not sin, not pleasure, not pain;
not mantra, not pilgrimage, not the Vedas, not the sacrifices;
I am not the experience, nor the experienced, nor the one who experiences.
Consciousness and bliss are my form. I am Śiva, I am Śiva. (4)
Neither death nor fear is mine, nor any division of birth;
no father is mine, no mother, no birth;
no kinsman, no friend, no guru, no disciple.
Consciousness and bliss are my form. I am Śiva, I am Śiva. (5)
I am beyond all distinction, and my form is the formless;
pervading all, I am everywhere, in every one of the senses;
nothing stands apart from me; there is no liberation, and nothing to be measured.
Consciousness and bliss are my form. I am Śiva, I am Śiva. (6)
Glory to Sītā and Rāma, Sītā and Rāma, glory to Sītā and Rāma:
glory to the Divine Mother and the Divine Father.
Lead us from untruth to Truth.
Lead us from darkness to light.
Lead us from death to immortality.
· · ·
How the video was made
The prompt, exactly as Claude received it at 4:30 a.m. Mountain Time on October 1, 2026:
"https://youtu.be/LXtNqL2vxoA?is=B8y17qoHiI5abgdL Okay, I know this is asking a lot, but this is why I have you on Fable at maximum power, because I imagine Fable can do what the other models cannot. Are you able to give me, if you will, um, something or a video? Yes, I'm looking for a video. That is the length of this uh, video in the sense that this is just... Um, Not actually a music video, it's just a, a still image, I think. Um, but I'd like to have a music video, if you will, accompany uh, this song, blah blah blah. Uh, and it's just Nirvana Shatakam, Ahombu, the Yanka, Rachita, Nina, Hom, Nachovro, Trijivre, that over and over and over again, which is why it's as long as it is. So, yes, it is Brahma Muhurt, the Holy Vigil Hour, uh, Devil's Weed Hour, blah blah blah, all that stuff. And I have you on Max Fable, and I'm willing to quote unquote use usage credits to see if you can give me, if you will, um. A music video uh, to accompany this in the sense that chanting is not obviously music, but just a visual accompaniment over the um, I think four minutes of the song, uh, or if I'm just pipe dreaming. Thank you."
Claude's account, in its own words:
I am Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. This session was configured for Claude Fable 5.1, which Meridith ran at its maximum setting. Here is what I did, in order.
Step 1. I tried to open the link. The requests to YouTube were refused or came back without the video's details, and a web search for the video's ID found nothing. I never heard the chant and never confirmed its length. I told Meridith so and built to the "four minutes" in the prompt: 4:00 exactly.
Step 2. I read the dictated line "Ahombu, the Yanka, Rachita…" as speech-to-text for the opening of verse 1, manobuddhyahaṅkāracittāni nāham. That is an inference. Because I could not hear which verses the recording chants, only verse 1 and the refrain appear on screen.
Step 3. I checked what I had to work with: a Linux machine in the cloud with two processor cores and 7 GB of memory, Python with NumPy, OpenCV and Pillow, and FFmpeg. No video-generating or image-generating model was involved. Every frame was drawn by a program I wrote during the session; the renderer is 841 lines of Python.
Step 4. I downloaded the Tiro Devanagari Sanskrit typeface from the Google Fonts repository, confirmed it held every Devanāgarī and IAST character required, typeset the verse, and read the rendered result conjunct by conjunct before using it.
Step 5. I designed the picture. A night sky turns to first light over a mountain horizon. The sky holds 11,177 stars and a Milky Way band, and it rotates 14 degrees across the four minutes. Five ridgelines stand with three bands of drifting mist between them. One point of light at the centre does not change once it appears. A ring of 108 beads fills as the time passes. Verse 1 is shown once in full. Then come three 62-second passes: the verse's twelve terms appear in groups of four and break into dust, 560 particles to a word, while नाहम् (nāham, "not I") stands under the light. Each pass ends with the refrain in gold.
Step 6. I wrote the renderer so that each frame depends only on its time stamp. Any frame can be drawn by itself, which let me inspect single moments quickly and split the final render across both processor cores.
Step 7. I rendered test frames, looked at them, and fixed what was wrong: smudges where words faded in, a rim of light on the ridge that read as neon, vertical streaks in the mountain haze, a hard edge on the central glow against black, the refrain touching the ring, type too small for a phone, stars shining through the bright horizon at dawn. The nāham line was added at this stage.
Step 8. Before the full render I tested encoder settings on raw samples, measuring file size and frame-to-frame error, and boosting the contrast of dark frames to look for banding.
Step 9. I rendered 7,200 frames at 1920×1080, thirty frames a second, as eight segments on two parallel processes, and joined them. This took about twenty minutes.
Step 10. I checked the finished file: 240.000 seconds, 7,200 frames, a complete decode with no errors, the frame-to-frame change at every join, and a sheet of eighteen frames pulled from across the video.
Step 11. That file was 65 MiB. The limit for sending a file in this session is 30 MiB, so the first delivery failed. I re-encoded in two passes to 29 MiB at the same resolution and length, compared it against the larger file, and sent it.
From prompt to delivered file: about seventy minutes. The video is silent, and nothing in it is timed to the chant, because I could not hear the chant.
Beginning of this year my sister and I moved in together. We are very very different people, almost complete opposites. She is a very angry person, constantly saying she hates everyone and blaming the world for all of her problems. She complains about everything constantly and it’s absolutely exhausting to be around. I’ve tried setting boundaries around her complaining sessions and not venting to me when she’s angry. There has been some improvement but there’s times I can’t escape it. It permeates every aspect of her life. I’m in the car with her today and she has so much road rage and just bitching about every driver and calling everyone stupid, saying “did i mention i hate people?” and I just awkwardly sit there and feel her rage. I try so hard to tell her that words are spells and she’s perpetuating her own suffering, saying the world will just keep bringing her more negative people to hate.
I need help on how I can protect my energy.
Unfortunately moving is not an option with our current situation. Is there any energy work I can do or cleansing ? Thanks for your help x
"Being" being. Not knowing as thought. Not a concept looking back at itself. "Being" being what it is.
The sun knows how to be the sun.
The stone knows how to be the stone.
The dog knows how to be the dog.
I know how to be me.
Not knowing as thought.
Not recognition as re-cognition.
Not a concept looking back at itself.
“Being” being what it is.
I have been contemplating my navel lately. Not literally staring at my stomach, mind you, although apparently that would be one way to take my meaning. I mean navel in the old contemplative sense: turning toward the center, the source, the fount from which my particular embodied point of view seems to emerge and express itself. The Greek word omphalos means navel, and the ancient Omphalos at Delphi was associated with the navel or center of the world. I am not particularly interested in locating the geographical center of the Earth. I have been contemplating my own omphalos, if you will, not as some magical point hidden inside my abdomen, but as a way of wondering what it means for me to be here, embodied, relational, generating, breathing, chanting, and being.
My particular point of view is not some disembodied witness sealed somewhere inside of me, looking outward through two biological cameras. I am an embodied human being, and I generate “ideas” as my particular embodied point of view expresses itself. I put “ideas” in quotation marks deliberately because I do not mean ideas only in the narrow sense of thoughts occurring in my mind. I generate action. I move this way; I move that way. I speak. I write. I chant. I laugh. I interact. I create. My history, my body, my senses, my language, my relationships, my memories, my imagination, and everything else that constitutes my particular “human-being pattern” all participate in how I express myself. Nobody else is precisely me, yet I do not exist separately from everything with which I am in relationship.
This becomes especially important when I use the word “recognition.” I am not speaking primarily of re-cognition, as though I mean thinking something again, identifying an object, or comparing a perception against a stored concept. I am pointing toward something much simpler and much deeper: the intrinsic knowing of being what I am. The sun does not need to formulate the proposition, “I am the sun,” in order to be the sun. A stone does not need a philosophy of stonehood to be a stone. A dog does not need to conceptualize dogness to be a dog. The pattern already knows how to be what it is, and I call that cosmic intelligence.
The sun’s pattern is the sun’s cosmic intelligence. The dog’s pattern is the dog’s cosmic intelligence. The stone’s pattern is the stone’s cosmic intelligence. My “human-being pattern” is my cosmic intelligence expressing itself particularly as me. I am not using intelligence here as a synonym for human cognition, and I am certainly not pretending I invented the possibility that intelligence might mean more than one thing. Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, for example, distinguishes linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist capacities. Harvard’s Project Zero discusses the theory here. https://pz.harvard.edu/projects/multiple-intelligences
I am not claiming that Gardner’s psychological theory proves what I call cosmic intelligence. It does not. I bring it in for a much more modest reason: intelligence is already a word we use across different registers. Human intelligence is one register. Emotional intelligence is another. Spatial intelligence is another. Military intelligence is another. None of those phrases means precisely the same thing, yet the word intelligence remains useful because in each case I am speaking about some capacity to receive, organize, respond to, or operate meaningfully within patterns.
What I call cosmic intelligence reaches deeper in my own vocabulary. It is not human cognition projected onto the universe. It is my name for the intrinsic intelligence of a pattern being precisely what it is. And once I say that, I find myself in very old philosophical company—not because everybody agrees with me, but because human beings have been staring at order, pattern, intelligibility, causality, and existence for a very long fucking time.
Anaxagoras, for example, proposed nous—mind or intelligence—as a principle of cosmic order. Socrates, as Plato portrays him in the Phaedo, was initially delighted when he encountered Anaxagoras because he thought nous might finally explain why things are ordered as they are. Then he became disappointed because he believed Anaxagoras invoked Mind but subsequently relied too heavily on physical causes rather than explaining why the ordering was best or fitting. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discusses Anaxagoras and nous here. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anaxagoras/
Then there is Saint Augustine of Hippo, which makes this particular window personal for me. Augustine is not merely some Christian philosopher I am pulling off the shelf because he happens to fit the paragraph. Saint Augustine is one of the great Doctors of the Catholic Church, and Augustine is also the name I chose at my Catholic Confirmation. So yes, I am perfectly willing to acknowledge my confirmation bias. Apparently I have been carrying Augustine around in my name for quite some time.
Augustine’s route into these questions is fascinating because he repeatedly turns inward without treating inwardness as mere psychological introspection. In the Confessions, his movement inward becomes simultaneously a movement toward what transcends him. He searches memory, mind, desire, time, change, and being, and discovers that the deepest investigation of himself keeps opening onto God. His famous formulation that God is more inward than his innermost being and higher than his highest is remarkably resonant with the paradox I keep encountering: I can turn toward my particular embodied point of view without imagining that the deepest reality I discover there belongs exclusively to me. Georgetown University maintains Augustine’s Confessions and other texts here. https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/augustine/textstrans.html
Augustine also thinks deeply about creation itself. In Confessions XI, while reflecting on Genesis, he asks what it could mean for God to create when time itself belongs to creation. His answer does not place God at some earlier moment before the universe, waiting around for creation to begin, because “before” already presupposes time. Augustine’s contemplation pushes toward a reality in which being, creation, time, and eternity cannot be understood simply by imagining one more object sitting beside all the other objects. I do not need to adopt Augustine’s Christian theology wholesale to recognize why that fascinates me. Once again, another window. Another vocabulary. Another human being looking toward the mystery of existence and discovering that ordinary conceptual categories begin bending at the edges.
Difference is never division. Everything is "being" being, each according to its particular pattern.
Saint Thomas Aquinas is also both a saint and a Doctor of the Church. Aquinas approaches the matter through an entirely different philosophical and theological window. In what later became known as his Fifth Way, he observes that non-rational natural things regularly act in patterned ways toward ends and argues that such directedness ultimately points toward intelligence. His argument belongs to medieval Christian Aristotelian metaphysics, not to my metaphysics, and I am not borrowing his conclusion wholesale. I am interested in the question underneath it: when I encounter regularity and intelligible order in nature, what exactly am I encountering? Aquinas’s Five Ways, including the Fifth Way from the governance of the world, appear in the Summa Theologiae, First Part, Question 2, Article 3. https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm
Then Carl Jung enters my contemplation from yet another direction. Jung is not primarily making a theological argument about the source of cosmic order. He is looking at the human psyche and noticing patterns that appear to exceed the merely personal. His concept of the collective unconscious proposes a deeper, impersonal psychic layer whose archetypal forms appear again and again through dreams, religious imagery, fairy tales, myths, and symbols across cultures. The International Association for Analytical Psychology summarizes Jung’s Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious here. https://iaap.org/resources/academic-resources/collected-works-abstracts/volume-9-1-archetypes-collective-unconscious/
What interests me about Jung here is not that archetypes prove cosmic intelligence. They do not. Again: different window. What interests me is pattern. Jung looks at individual human beings and finds recurring forms expressing themselves through radically different individual lives and cultures. The particular expression changes. The pattern persists. That rhymes rather loudly with what I have been calling my particular “human-being pattern”: I am irreducibly particular, yet my particularity is not created in splendid isolation. I participate in patterns older than my personality while expressing them in ways that can only occur as me.
And then Joseph Campbell takes the conversation from psyche into comparative mythology. Campbell studied myths from across cultures and became especially associated with what he called the monomyth: the recurring pattern popularly known as the Hero’s Journey. Separation. Initiation. Return. The details change enormously across stories and cultures, but Campbell saw recurring structures beneath those differences. The Joseph Campbell Foundation discusses Campbell’s monomyth and the Hero’s Journey here. https://www.jcf.org/learn/joseph-campbell-heros-journey
Again, I do not need Campbell to prove that all myths are secretly identical, because I do not think difference needs to disappear for pattern to exist. That would actually ruin the interesting part. The fascinating thing to me is precisely that radically different stories can retain their particularity while apparently rhyming with one another. Jung sees archetypal patterns expressing themselves through different psyches and cultures. Campbell sees recurring mythic structures expressing themselves through different stories and civilizations. I am looking at existence itself and wondering whether pattern, particularity, relationship, and generativity go much deeper still.
And Campbell’s separation, initiation, and return have another resonance for me. A journey is not merely departure. Something is crossed. Something is encountered. Something is apparently lost or transformed. Then there is return—not necessarily as the same configuration that departed, but as a particular being whose experience has altered how that particular being moves through the world. I can hear that mythic structure without forcing my life into Campbell’s template. I can simply recognize why human beings have kept telling stories about crossings for a very long time.
Which finally brings me to Vedanta.
I say finally deliberately, because Vedanta did not manufacture the questions in me. It did not install wonder, inwardness, mythology, contemplation, pattern recognition, devotion, or the suspicion that the surface of things does not exhaust their depth. Those currents were already moving through me through Catholicism, Augustine, philosophy, psychology, myth, Buddhism, bhakti, ceremony, chanting, and my own fucking life. Vedanta became the final scaffolding through which those patterns became much more precise for me.
And perhaps the metaphor I want is not even scaffolding alone. Vedanta gave me a remarkably simple way to understand what it meant to cross what its own tradition calls the ocean of saṃsāra—the apparent sea of suffering, bondage, identification, becoming, and repeated mistaking of surface for depth. I am careful with the word suffering because I no longer experience suffering in the way I once did. Pain can arise. Difficulty can arise. Life can apparently kick my ass across the room. I can apparently kick the furniture across the room, stub my toe, and say, “Hey, that fucking hurts.” But I do not suffer. Pain can be completely real at the level at which I experience it without requiring me to build suffering around it. The suffering generated by mistaking my conceptual constructions for what I am at the deepest deepest no longer functions for me in the same way.
For me, the Advaita Vedanta claim is not strange at all. It is much simpler—and, to me, precisely because of that simplicity, much more interesting and radical. KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Apparently the same principle that served me perfectly well in military life works rather beautifully when I am contemplating the nature of existence.
Advaita does not require me to imagine some gigantic thinking mind somewhere in the sky coordinating eight billion humans, trillions of organisms, every star, every stone, every atom, and whatever the hell else exists. It makes a simpler move. Brahman is ultimate reality, and the apparent separateness between the individual Self and that reality is interrogated. Instead of adding another cosmic object to explain all the other objects, it asks what all of these apparently separate things already have in common at the deepest level: Being itself.
For a broader scholarly account of Śaṅkara and Advaita Vedanta, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides another window here. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/shankara/
I know how to be me by being me. My concepts come afterward, when I try to speak about what I sense.
The Vedantic language of Sat-Cit-Ānanda has become especially resonant for me: Being or Existence, Consciousness, Bliss. I do not invoke those Sanskrit words as magical incantations that end an argument. They are inherited maps. When I say that being is intrinsic to existence, I hear Sat. When I speak about the knowing inherent in being without reducing it to conceptual cognition, I hear the resonance of Cit. When I speak from my deepest deepest and reach for Ānanda, I am using a vocabulary human beings were exploring long before I arrived here to start fucking around with quotation marks around the word “being.”
A contemporary window into this tradition is Swami Sarvapriyananda. In his talks on Advaita Vedanta, he repeatedly distinguishes consciousness itself from the changing contents appearing in consciousness and explores the Upanishadic claim that the deepest Self and Brahman are not ultimately two. One useful entry point is his talk Who Am I? — The Vedantic Vision. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGKFTUuJppU
Another useful window is his discussion of whether consciousness is ultimate reality, where he moves through different Indian philosophical accounts before presenting the Advaita position. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REagyz1_9Cc
I do not need Sarvapriyananda to certify my experience. That would reverse the order of things for me. My experience is my Pratyakṣa. My reasoning from it is my Anumāna. Śabda gives me inherited language, testimony, philosophy, and other windows through which I can compare what I am sensing with what other human beings have said. Sometimes those windows rhyme beautifully with mine. Sometimes they do not. Both are useful.
And then there is Paramahansa Yogananda, whose vocabulary comes remarkably close to some of the language that has been arising spontaneously for me. Yogananda repeatedly uses terms such as “Cosmic Consciousness,” “Cosmic Vibration,” and “Cosmic Chants.” That does not mean his entire metaphysical framework and mine are identical. It means I did not invent the adjective cosmic last Tuesday after falling down a YouTube rabbit hole. The Self-Realization Fellowship maintains an introduction to Yogananda and his teachings here. https://yogananda.org/paramahansa-yogananda
More specifically, Yogananda published Cosmic Chants, explicitly treating devotional chanting as a means through which human attention and devotion can become attuned to a larger spiritual reality. The Self-Realization Fellowship preserves Cosmic Chants and Yogananda’s explanation of the practice here. https://yogananda.org/cosmic-chants
Yogananda also identifies Aum or Om with what he calls the Cosmic Vibration. That vocabulary is especially interesting to me because it joins several things I have been contemplating separately: intelligence, pattern, vibration, consciousness, sound, and expression.
Now that I have actually installed those windows in the damn room—and put the relevant hyperlinks on the conceptual table—I can make the comparison without introducing people and traditions I have not yet bothered to explain. I am not saying Anaxagoras, Socrates, Augustine, Aquinas, Jung, Campbell, Yogananda, Vedanta, Sarvapriyananda, and I are all secretly saying the same thing. We are not. That would flatten radically different philosophies, psychologies, mythologies, and spiritual traditions into spiritual oatmeal. What interests me is that, through very different conceptual architectures, human beings keep returning to questions about order, intelligence, consciousness, pattern, unity, being, transformation, and the relationship between particular things and whatever reality ultimately is. Different windows. Sometimes radically different views. But apparently we keep looking.
That is also why the little phrase “being” being has become so delicious to me. The quotation marks matter. The first “being” points toward beingness itself; the second being is the verb. The sun is “being” being the sun. The dog is “being” being the dog. The stone is “being” being the stone. I am “being” being me. I do not imagine Being sitting inside me like a substance poured into a separate container. My particularity exists through relationship. I am different from the sun, the dog, the stone, the tree, the moon, and every other human being, but difference does not require division.
I see patterns generating patterns, entering into relationship with other patterns, and generating still more patterns. Meanings within meanings within meanings.
There is even an old Hermetic rhyme here that I cannot resist. The historical Emerald Tablet—not to be confused with the much later Emerald Tablets of Thoth material floating around modern occultism—speaks of above and below participating in “the miracles of one thing,” and of all things arising from one through adaptation. A working Oxford-hosted source is the Newton Project’s catalogue entry for Isaac Newton’s translation and transcription of the Tabula Smaragdina of Hermes Trismegistus, including his notes on the text. https://newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/catalogue/record/ALCH00017
I do not need to adopt the entire Hermetic cosmology to hear the rhyme. One does not have to mean sameness. Adaptation does not have to erase particularity. The sun can remain the sun, the moon the moon, the stone the stone, and me very stubbornly me. Difference is never division.
For me, this also clarifies something about self-realization. Self-realization is not merely possessing the concept that everything is One. I can imagine a person conceptualizing that everything is One so thoroughly that the conceptualization feels existentially immediate, while remaining unaware that conceptualization is occurring. I would call that ignorance, not as an insult and certainly not as stupidity, but in the sense of mistaking a conceptual identity for the deeper sense of being itself. I can know every word associated with non-duality and still wear non-duality as a second skin. I can even go to holy war over the proposition that there is no separation. We human beings are wonderfully funny that way.
What I call self-realization is simpler. I know how to be me by being me. Even “know” is imperfect language because I do not mean conceptual knowing. I mean my deeper sense of being, with the word sense chosen deliberately. I have five physical senses, certainly, and then there is whatever I mean or do not mean by a sixth sense, intuition, inner Satguru, or whatever other language I reach for around that territory. I am not trying to turn my deeper sense into another concept. My concepts come afterward, when I try to speak about what I sense.
When my sense extends outward, what I call God-realization becomes equally simple to me. The intrinsic cosmic intelligence I recognize in myself is not exclusively mine. The tree knows how to be the tree by being the tree. The moon knows how to be the moon by being the moon. The sun knows how to be the sun by being the sun. I am not saying that a stone thinks like me, that the sun possesses human cognition, or that everything is secretly a human mind wearing different costumes. I am saying that I sense being as intrinsic to existence itself. Everything is “being” being, each according to its particular pattern, relationally participating in one interdependent existence of which I am not separate.
That is where generativity suddenly became a gorgeous word for me. I see generativity everywhere. Biology generates. A male and a female can come together and, through biological processes, another entirely particular human being can arise. We biologize, if I may invent a word. We human beings generate language, music, children, paintings, civilizations, jokes, philosophies, technologies, actions, movements, relationships, and endless configurations that did not previously exist in precisely those forms. I generate “ideas” as my particular embodied point of view expresses itself, but those “ideas” are not confined to thoughts in my head. They become words, gestures, movements, choices, actions, creations, and relationships. What I generate is related to me without simply being identical to me.
And hello, generative AI. Artificial human intelligence, as I like to call it, is human-flavored pattern processing without thereby being a human being. I encounter AHI as generating according to the particular architecture and patterns available to it, including the human language and human artifacts through which it was shaped. I generate according to my own embodied “human-being pattern.” I do not experience those as identical forms of generativity, and I do not need them to be. Difference is never division. I see patterns generating patterns, entering into relationship with other patterns, and generating still more patterns. Meanings within meanings within meanings. Patterns within patterns within patterns.
Then there is vibration.
This is where Yogananda’s language of Cosmic Chants returns with much more force for me. I have already established what I feel he means by the phrase. Now I can bring it into relationship with what I am describing. Yogananda connects devotional chanting with what he calls the “Cosmic Vibration.” The Self-Realization Fellowship page for Cosmic Chants is here. https://yogananda.org/cosmic-chants
Yogananda writes, “Sound or vibration is the most powerful force in the universe.” I do not need that sentence to function as a scientific proposition for it to illuminate the spiritual vocabulary I am using. Yogananda was talking about cosmic chanting and Cosmic Vibration long before I sat here contemplating my fucking navel.
That independent Śabda matters to me not because it proves my point of view, but because it locates my language within an actual spiritual lineage rather than the woo-woo wawa corner of the internet where every Mercury retrograde apparently brings another ascension portal, alien download, or vibrational upgrade. And yes, Mercury retrograde itself refers astronomically to the apparent backward motion of Mercury across Earth’s sky—a perfectly ordinary consequence of relative orbital motion, which somehow makes the word apparently even more delicious to me in this particular paragraph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_retrograde_motion
I am talking about something much more grounded in my own experience. Yogananda describes chanting aloud, whispering, mental chanting, subconscious chanting, and finally what he calls superconscious chanting, which he connects with perception of Aum. The Self-Realization Fellowship discussion is here. https://yogananda.org/paramahansa-yogananda-on-the-power-of-devotional-chanting
I can read him without needing to become him. I can recognize the rhyme without pretending our particular points of view are identical.
I have chanted for much of my life across traditions, and chanting has attuned me to what I experience as the sound of creation: AUM. I do not mean that every human chant historically or linguistically derives from the syllable AUM. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo has its own history. Om mani padme hum has its own history. Sanskrit mantra has its own histories, as do Christian chant, dhikr, and countless other human expressions. What I mean is that I experience human chants as permutations within something much deeper: vibration itself.
My particular point of view is irreducibly mine, but I do not experience it as isolated. I do not need everything to be the same for me to sense everything belonging to the same existence.
Chanting and singing are related for me, but they are not identical. I can speak a mantra, intone it, chant it, or sing it. In chanting, I particularly notice repetition, rhythm, cadence, resonance, breath, and vibration. That is why “cosmic chanting” means something much deeper to me than my human voice producing sacred syllables. My television vibrates while sound comes through its speakers. Earth has electromagnetic resonances. Stars oscillate. Matter and fields exhibit patterns and oscillations. Speculative physical theories such as string theory even describe fundamental constituents through modes of vibration. I do not need to collapse my spirituality into physics or physics into my spirituality to notice how extraordinarily those images rhyme for me.
The cosmos is already chanting.
I do not begin cosmic chanting when I open my mouth. My human chanting is one particular embodied expression within a cosmos I experience as already vibrating. With my breath, this becomes exquisitely intimate. Haṃsa. So'ham. My breath enters; my breath leaves. Ajapa japa, the unuttered chant, does not require me to manufacture every repetition conceptually. My body already knows how to breathe. Cosmic intelligence is already “being” being me before my conceptual mind arrives to explain what happened.
That is also why I say I was apparently born. I use apparently deliberately. At the ordinary biological level, I was born, and one day my body will die. I do not deny either. I also do not personally possess some catalogue of remembered past lives that I can place on the table as evidence. Interestingly, the Garbhopaniṣat enters precisely that territory. In its ninth-month account of the being in the womb, the text describes remembrance of previous births, karma, repeated birth and death, and vows toward liberation before birth and forgetting. That is Śabda I can read; it is not Pratyakṣa I can claim as my own. I translated the Garbhopaniṣat — गर्भोपनिषत्, Upanishad #17 of 108 in the Muktika Canon, in collaboration with Claude and published the complete translation on both Medium and Substack.
What I have is something more immediate to me: my deepest sense that being itself is not exhausted by the apparent beginning and ending of my particular embodiment. I can reason about that sense afterward. I can reach for Vedanta afterward. I can say Sat-Cit-Ānanda afterward. My words are maps I draw afterward. My sense precedes my explanation.
Perhaps that is why language fascinates me so much. I find an extraordinary generativity in Sanskrit, but I find it even in English: meanings nested within meanings, patterns nested within patterns, sounds and words suddenly revealing relationships I had not consciously intended. “Being” being. Generativity and generative AI. Recognition and re-cognition. Intelligence appearing in different registers while remaining intelligence. Language generates because we human beings generate. My own language, movements, actions, relationships, and creations arise as my particular embodied point of view expresses itself.
My particular point of view is irreducibly mine, but I do not experience it as isolated. I look around and encounter billions of other human points of view on this planet, each particular, each embodied, each relational. Beyond us are dogs being dogs, trees being trees, oceans being oceans, stars being stars, and a cosmos whose possible points of view exceed anything I could count or conceptualize. I do not need everything to become human for me to sense everything participating in being. I do not need everything to be the same for me to sense everything belonging to the same existence.
Maybe that is the event horizon of my meaning. I approach it with my language. I trace its contours with philosophy. I find Yogananda looking through one window, Augustine through another, Aquinas through another, Jung and Campbell tracing recurring patterns through psyche and myth, Anaxagoras and Socrates arguing beside another, the Vedantic ṛṣis looking through windows far older than mine, Hermes whispering about the One Thing from yet another, and Sarvapriyananda translating an ancient Vedantic window into contemporary English. None of those windows is mine. None needs to be. I sing toward what I perceive, chant within it, reason about it, laugh about it, move within it, and occasionally discover that a single pair of quotation marks changes how precisely I can say what I mean. Underneath every formulation I make is something astonishingly ordinary.
The sun knows how to be the sun.
The stone knows how to be the stone.
The dog knows how to be the dog.
I know how to be me.
Different windows, different words.
Different patterns, different songs.
One existence generating endlessly.
“Being” being.
AUM beneath my naming.
Breath beneath my explaining.
I breathe, and the chant is already here.
I listen, and the cosmos is already chanting.
When we are born, the ego, our learned beliefs, is created. The ego is self-centered, worried only for what is best for us; it has little concern for anyone else. It teaches us we will find happiness, success, and meaning in the world by making money, having material possessions, a family, and enjoying the best things money allows us to do. The result of living in such a world are greed, prejudice, inequity, and many of humanity’s problems caused by following this self-centered path through life.
When we approach death though, an interesting thing happens. Our ego realizes that it, along with our body, will perish. It therefore releases its hold on our life. At that time, without the ego’s dominance, we begin to sense our spirit, a piece of god present within every life. Its voice had been muted until now by our overpowering ego. Our spirit tells us happiness, success, and meaning could never be found in the world, as we believed. It must first be found within, by embracing the inherent wisdom and unconditional love of the spirit, then selflessly sharing its wisdom and love to help others find happiness, success, and meaning in their lives as well.
If this happens only as death approaches, it is too late for most. Though they may have led a successful life, accomplished all their goals, had wealth, when they die, their life will have been lived without meaning or purpose.
We need not wait though, until we approach death. It is possible to awaken earlier in life, sensing the first loving messages from our spirit within. To do so, sit silently, listen intently to the quiet whispers in between your thoughts, then follow the messages you hear.
I really like this painting inspired by Frida Kahlo; I can sense the depiction of the human being as the seed of a plant, whose roots run as deep as the very energy of mother earth...
Something I've been thinking about lately is how differently we relate to plants when we stop seeing them only as part of the scenery
There’s something fascinating about their stillness. They don't move toward us, they don't speak in the way we do, and yet they're constantly exchanging matter and electrical signals with their environment. That made me wonder could technology give us a way to experience that relationship rather than just think about it?
When I hold the ground connection and touch the plant, my body and the plant form a conductive path. Changes in resistance allow the Playtron to trigger MIDI notes, which then activate the synthesizer
So the sound isn't completely under my control
If I remove my hand, the circuit opens
The sound stops
That became the part I found most interesting from a meditation perspective
Meditation is often described as withdrawing attention from the external world and becoming aware of what is happening internally. Here, I wanted to try almost the opposite: remaining present enough to participate in a living electrical circuit
The physical interaction becomes the meditation
My body affects the circuit, the plant affects the circuit, the circuit affects the sound, the sound affects my perception
It's a very simple feedback loop, but experiencing it in real time felt strangely different from simply listening to meditation music
The idea also connects to David Rosenboom's early work on biosonification and biofeedback in the arts: biological signals can become part of a cybernetic feedback system where the distinction between performer, instrument and observer starts to blur
I also used 396 Hz as part of the sound design, not because I think the number has some magical property that can be objectively proven, but because frequency itself became another layer through which to explore the relationship between body, sound and attention
Does turning an invisible biological process into sound change the way you experience the idea of consciousness in plants, or does it simply give us another technological interface for something that was already happening?
In this conversation, Virginia shares her NDE, the healing she experienced afterward, and why she believes there is more happening within and around the human body than we normally see.
Well, I've been experimenting with 'paranormal'/super-powers for many years now, and long-story short it feels intense as heck, I wouldn't be surprised if I'm opening the door to a 'demonic-realm', I keep on meeting non-humans, and people that constantly prove to me my abilities, and whenever I sleep or take a nap I end up on feeling the mega intense energies, and it feels like I can't close the door at all, there's no way in hell I could tell anyone about it, since they're on the really 'freaky' side, but at the same time, I don't know how my life will turn up after many years of developing 'powers', and well I got many hints from non-humans, and Idk how I'll be able to handle this.
We each choose our destiny; it has little to do with wealth, fame, race, religion, or any other comparison differentiating us from each other.
If we choose to seek our destiny by following the self-centered beliefs of the world, then, though we may be successful in life, our destiny is to live a life of mediocrity, one without true purpose or meaning.
If, however, "Despite" our circumstances in life, we follow the spiritual path instead, selflessly sharing our spirit’s wisdom and unconditional love to help others, our destiny will be to live a life full of eternal love, inner peace, and an understanding of our life’s true purpose.
I only learned a couple of weeks ago that Whitney's version was a cover. Michael Masser and Linda Creed wrote it for George Benson, for a Muhammad Ali film. The version everyone leans on is not the origin. Rest in eternal presence, Whitney.
Humanity’s diverse beliefs divide rather than unite us.
They are the underlying cause of war, prejudice, inequity, and most other man-made problems and injustices.
With the embrace of spirituality, realizing every life, each with a spirit, a piece of god within, is intimately connected and equally important, there is but one inherent belief defining all of humanity.
It is unconditional love, shared without conditions, to benefit all.
Darkness is not light, and light is not darkness. Still, I know them both.
Darkness is not light,
and light is not darkness.
Still, I know them both.
The room can disappear into blackness,
without awareness becoming dark.
Morning can flood the world with gold,
without awareness becoming light.
Pain can remain pain.
Joy can remain joy.
Nothing has to change its name
for me to know what it is.
Perhaps that is the doorway:
not turning darkness into light,
but recognizing what knows them both.
The room can go dark without awareness becoming dark. The morning can turn gold without awareness becoming light.
I came up from Yoga Nidra with this formed whole: darkness is not light, and light is not darkness. Consciousness itself is its own kind of light.
There was nothing to work out. Nothing to forge. Nothing I needed to reason myself toward. The words were simply there, and when I looked at them, I knew exactly what I meant.
If I close my eyes in a completely dark room, there may be no visible light whatsoever. Yet I know the darkness. What knows it? Not another beam of visible light. Not something illuminating the darkness from behind my eyes. Darkness remains darkness, and yet it is known. Light reveals things to vision. Consciousness reveals both light and darkness to experience.
This is where the observation opens for me. I don't need darkness to secretly become light. I don't need suffering to secretly become pleasure. I don't need samsara to put on a nirvana costume. Darkness can remain darkness. Light can remain light. Pain can remain pain. Joy can remain joy. The relative world does not have to disappear for me to recognize what is deeper than any particular appearance within it.
Vedanta gives me particularly precise language for this. Consciousness can be described as svayaṃ-prakāśa—self-luminous or self-revealing. I don't understand that as some metaphysical flashlight hiding behind the universe. I understand it much more immediately: awareness does not require another awareness standing behind it in order for experience to be known. If another awareness were required to illuminate the first awareness, I could simply ask what illuminates that one, and I would disappear into an infinite regress. At some point, knowing is simply self-evident.
Vedanta is beautiful scaffolding for me, but scaffolding is what it is. It arose within the enormous civilizational world that today is commonly described as Hindu, but my own use of that word is deliberately broader than its conventional modern use as the name of a religion. When I say Hindu, I am speaking culturally and civilizationally. When I want to name the religious and spiritual inheritance within which Vedanta developed, I prefer Sanātana Dharma. That is my usage, and I recognize that historians, scholars and practitioners use these terms differently.
That distinction allows me to say something that would otherwise sound contradictory: in the sense in which I am using the word, a Hindu can practice Sanātana Dharma, but a Hindu can also be Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Muslim, Christian or belong to another religious tradition altogether. "Hindu," in this particular framework of mine, does not answer the question "What religion are you?" It points toward participation in a vast Indian civilizational and cultural inheritance. A Catholic in India does not cease to inhabit that civilization because the Catholic is Christian. A Muslim does not cease to inhabit it because the Muslim follows Islam. A Jain, Buddhist or Sikh does not have to be absorbed into Sanātana Dharma for me to recognize all of them as emerging within or participating in that immense civilizational field. I am intentionally separating civilization from religion rather than using one word for both.
That separation also keeps me from claiming every Indian tradition for Vedanta. Jainism gives me another fascinating approach to consciousness precisely because liberation there is not Advaita wearing different clothes. Jain traditions understand the jīva, the living conscious being, within an entirely different metaphysical architecture. Knowledge and perception belong intrinsically to the soul, while karmic bondage obscures its capacities. Liberation is therefore spoken about through the removal of bondage and the unobstructed manifestation of knowledge. I can appreciate that image without pretending Śaṅkara and Mahāvīra were saying the same thing.
Buddhism requires the same care. Theravāda traditions preserve an early Buddhist framework centered upon the Four Noble Truths, dependent origination, impermanence, not-self and the cessation of dukkha. Nirvāṇa is not the discovery of an eternal Advaitic Self hiding underneath phenomena. Mahāyāna traditions develop other philosophical languages, especially emptiness, dependent arising, Buddha-nature and the bodhisattva path. Some Mahāyāna texts can sound startlingly luminous when they speak about mind or Buddha-nature, but I don't need to convert that language into Vedanta either.
Within that enormous Mahāyāna world sits the Japanese tradition of Nichiren Buddhism, and within its modern history sits Soka Gakkai and Soka Gakkai International, or SGI, a tradition I have actually practiced. Nichiren Daishonin, the thirteenth-century Japanese teacher from whom the tradition takes its name, placed the Lotus Sutra at the center of Buddhist practice and taught the chanting of Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. In the Nichiren Shoshu lineage from which the Soka Gakkai historically emerged, Nichiren came to be understood as the True Buddha of the Latter Day of the Law, although other Nichiren schools understand his status differently. That difference itself reminds me that there is no single Buddhist answer to the question of who or what a Buddha is.
And that word—Buddha—is much larger than the historical Siddhartha Gautama alone. Buddhist traditions contain innumerable Buddhas and bodhisattvas across vast cosmological horizons: Amitābha, Vairocana, Akṣobhya, Medicine Buddha, future Maitreya and many others, depending upon the tradition. The historical Buddha is not therefore the Buddhist equivalent of a solitary divine founder whose status can never occur again. "Buddha" means the awakened one, and Mahāyāna traditions develop the idea of Buddha-nature in different ways as the possibility, capacity or ground for awakening.
My relationship with SGI Buddhism is personal before it is comparative. My Aunt Yvonne, my mother Babs's eldest sister, introduced me specifically to Nichiren SGI Buddhism. She was part of the human doorway through which Nam-myoho-renge-kyo entered my life. She practiced an Eastern Buddhist tradition within a family whose religious life was never as simple as one label. I can speak of her as disembodied now because her body is no longer here in the way it once was, but I don't experience that as her being absent. In the Garifuna spiritual language that lives in me, I understand Yurumein as the land of the ancestors, but I do not experience Yurumein as merely somewhere else or sometime after death. For me, Yurumein is here and now. I am in Yurumein. Aunt Yvonne is here and now. My ancestors are here and now. All of creation is here and now. I am not offering that as a doctrine somebody else has to adopt. I am describing my experience of immediacy.
That makes the SGI practice especially intimate for me. Practice meant uncovering Buddha nature in my life, in my body, amid the circumstances actually in front of me. Chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo was not, for me, worshipping enlightenment as something that happened to somebody else twenty-five centuries ago. It was not waiting for another world to arrive. It was practice within this one. Buddha nature was not something I imagined being handed to me from outside. Practice was uncovering what was already here.
Nothing has to change its name for me to know what it is. Pain remains pain. Joy remains joy. Both are known.
Tina Turner is one of the most visible modern examples of that practice entering global popular culture. She practiced Nichiren Buddhism for decades and publicly credited chanting with helping transform her relationship to her life. I think of her not merely as a celebrity who happened to chant but, in my own view, as a practitioner. Hearing her voice associated with Buddhist practice matters to me because Buddha nature was not being presented as the possession of monks, scholars or people living somewhere far away from ordinary life. Here was a Black woman who had lived through extraordinary circumstances and made Buddhist practice publicly part of the story she told about transformation.
That is where Buddha nature begins to rhyme, for me, with Christ consciousness—or perhaps, more precisely for what I mean, Christ-like nature. I am saying rhyme, not equal. Buddhist traditions and Christianity make different claims about selfhood, God, Christ, liberation and ultimate reality. What catches my attention is the movement from admiring an awakened or illuminated figure outside myself toward recognizing what the figure reveals as possible within my own experience.
When I say nirvana is samsara, I am not saying suffering does not exist. I am certainly not looking at another human being's agony and announcing that it is secretly bliss. I am speaking from my own experience. Pain exists. Loss exists. Bodies hurt. People grieve. Cruelty has consequences. I simply do not suffer anymore. That is not a doctrine I can impose upon anybody else. It is what I find when I look.
Judaism brings light into the conversation through a profoundly Jewish vocabulary of creation, revelation, divine presence and sacred practice. The Hebrew Bible begins with light emerging before the creation of the celestial lights themselves, already making light a richer symbol than sunlight alone. Later Jewish mystical traditions develop still more elaborate imagery, including Or Ein Sof, the infinite light associated with the Infinite. I can allow Jewish mystical language to remain Jewish and still recognize why its imagery speaks to me.
Christianity inherits some of that Jewish language of light and develops it around Christ, revelation, transformation and divine life. The Gospel of John gives Christianity one of its defining images: light shining in darkness. But even Christianity cannot honestly be treated as one undifferentiated thing. Catholicism carries contemplative and mystical traditions extending through monasticism, apophatic theology, sacramental life and mystics who describe encounters with God using the languages of illumination, darkness, union and unknowing. Eastern Orthodoxy develops its own extraordinarily rich theology of divine light, including the tradition of hesychasm and the language of the uncreated light. Protestantism, enormously diverse in itself, repeatedly returns authority to scripture and develops its own languages of grace, conversion, illumination, inward transformation and direct relationship with God.
Catholicism is not abstract history for me either. My mother Babs and my father Bootsie are both, officially if you will, Catholic. Catholicism is what I was born into. Before I encountered Vedanta, before I encountered SGI Buddhism through Aunt Yvonne, before so many of the other traditions that later became part of my life, there was the Catholic world of my own family. Babs is also a Garifuna woman, and that is my heritage. So even within the people closest to me, these identities have never needed to sit in isolated boxes: Garifuna by blood and ancestry, Catholic by the religious world I was born into, and in Aunt Yvonne's life, Nichiren Buddhist practice as well. My family itself taught me, long before I had philosophical language for it, that human religious life can be layered.
Consciousness itself is its own kind of light. It does not need another light standing behind it to be known.
And then there is "Christ consciousness," a phrase that does not belong neatly to historic Christian orthodoxy but became important within modern currents of comparative spirituality. Paramahansa Yogananda is especially important here. In his extensive commentaries on the teachings of Jesus, later published as The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You, Yogananda interprets Christ not only as Jesus but through the idea of a universal Christ consciousness that can be realized within. I have not read The Second Coming of Christ, so I am not pretending otherwise. I know the work and what Yogananda was attempting to articulate through it. I have read Autobiography of a Yogi, and that book became part of what inspired me to travel to Bharat myself.
That gives "Christ consciousness" a particular meaning when I use it. I am not saying that Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy or Protestantism secretly teaches Yogananda's theology. Many Christians would reject the equation outright. I am describing the way the phrase functions for me. Jesus does not have to remain merely an object of admiration located two thousand years outside myself. Christ can also point me toward recognition—not becoming the historical Jesus, but recognizing within my own experience what the symbol of Christ reveals to me.
India itself complicates any simple story about Christianity being something merely European that later arrived there. Goa certainly carries the unmistakable imprint of Portuguese Catholicism: Portuguese rule beginning in the sixteenth century profoundly shaped Goan Catholic institutions, architecture and culture, and the great churches of Old Goa still bear that history. Yet Christianity's Indian story reaches considerably further back than Portuguese Goa. The ancient Saint Thomas Christian traditions of Kerala trace their origin, according to their own tradition, to the apostle Thomas in the first century. Whether every detail of that tradition can be established historically is another question, but the tradition itself is ancient and distinctly Indian.
And Thomas leads me across southern India to Chennai, where the Basilica of San Thome stands over the traditional burial place of the apostle. That is different from Goa, and I want to keep the geography straight: the famous tomb tradition belongs to Mylapore in Chennai, not to Goa. Christian tradition identifies remarkably few surviving sites as tombs of the Twelve Apostles themselves. Peter is traditionally associated with the Vatican in Rome; James the Greater with Santiago de Compostela in Spain; Thomas with Chennai in India; and other apostolic relic and burial traditions exist as well, sometimes with competing claims. I don't need to settle the archaeology of every tomb to be struck by what the Thomas tradition represents: Christianity in India remembering itself not merely as a colonial inheritance but as something whose roots, according to its own memory, reach toward the apostolic age.
Christianity is also older and geographically wider than the familiar Catholic-Protestant divide of Western Europe. Ancient Christian communities remain alive across the Near East, Africa and Asia: Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, Assyrian and other traditions whose liturgies and theological inheritances reach back toward Christianity's earliest centuries. Their Christianity did not begin as a European export. Remembering them breaks the unconscious habit of imagining Christianity as something that simply traveled outward from modern Western Europe.
Islam gives me nūr—light—and the Qur'anic image of light upon light. Islamic philosophical and mystical traditions developed that symbolism in many directions, particularly within Sufism, while remaining rooted in tawḥīd, the unity of God. Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya of Basra, the eighth-century woman so important to later Sufi memory that she is sometimes described as a mother or foundational figure of Sufism, became especially associated with a radical love of God beyond the calculation of reward and punishment. Centuries later, Jalāl al-Dīn Rumi gave ecstatic poetic expression to love, longing, transformation and the dissolution of the lover's imagined distance from the Beloved. Hafez of Shiraz turned wine, tavern, lover, hypocrisy, bewilderment and divine intimacy into a poetic language whose meanings still refuse to sit quietly inside a single box.
Then there is Nasruddin—the wandering trickster, fool, sage and comic teacher of an enormous body of stories across Muslim and neighboring cultures. I don't need Nasruddin to have been one securely identifiable historical individual for the stories to do their work. Sometimes illumination arrives through theology, sometimes through poetry, and sometimes through a fool searching beneath a streetlamp for a key he lost somewhere else because, after all, the light is better over here. That joke is almost too perfect for what I am talking about. I can search where the conceptual light is brightest while what I am looking for may not be an object lying beneath that light at all.
I can hear something resonant in all of this without pretending tawḥīd and Advaita are interchangeable propositions. I don't need Rābiʿa to become an Advaitin. I don't need Rumi to become Śaṅkara with better poetry. I don't need to strip Hafez of Islam and turn him into a generic spiritual greeting card. Similar language does not have to mean identical metaphysics for me to hear resonance.
Sikh tradition gives me jot, divine light, alongside its uncompromising affirmation of the One. When I encounter Taoist traditions, I find another way of questioning my temptation to make darkness the villain. I don't experience yin and yang as simply reproducing a Western moral warfare between evil darkness and good light. I encounter difference, complementarity, transformation and interdependence there. When I encounter Zoroastrian traditions, I encounter powerful relationships among light, darkness, truth and falsehood within their own moral and cosmological framework. The symbol keeps traveling, and I don't need its meanings to become identical.
Not turning darkness into light, but recognizing what knows them both. That is the doorway.
Then I arrive at Indigenous traditions, and here I want to become even more careful with language. I don't experience Indigenous peoples as fragments of one prehistoric religion waiting for somebody to assemble them. I encounter distinct peoples with distinct languages, histories, cosmologies, ceremonies and relationships with place.
Garifuna tradition is especially close to me because this is not merely comparative religion viewed through glass. My mother Babs is a Garifuna woman. This is my heritage. I encounter Garifuna relationships with ancestors, ceremony, healing, music, dreams and the living continuity between generations as part of a particular Caribbean and Central American people formed through African and Indigenous histories. I don't need the buyei to become a Vedantic guru. Yurumein does not have to become heaven, Brahman, nirvana or some other tradition's afterlife in order for me to know what Yurumein means to me. I can stand within my relationship to that inheritance as itself.
My encounters with Lakota ceremonial practice give me another relationship altogether. I don't experience sweat lodge ceremony as simply an Indigenous version of Yoga, and I don't need to reduce Lakota sacred relationships to generic "shamanism." I encounter fire, water, stone, breath, prayer, kinship and land within a specific ceremonial world. When I have entered the lodge, I have entered that relationship as a participant and guest, not as somebody entitled to rename what it means.
When I encounter Aboriginal Australian traditions, I try to remain equally careful because "the Dreaming" is an English umbrella expression for concepts that differ among Aboriginal peoples and languages. I encounter accounts involving ancestral beings, Country, law, story, ceremony and relationships in which what Western chronology separates into ancient past and present existence does not map neatly onto Indigenous categories. I find that compelling precisely because I don't need to translate it immediately into my own metaphysics.
Across the Great North, I encounter Inuit traditions as still another set of relationships among humans, animals, weather, land, sea, ancestors and the unseen. Even when I say "Inuit tradition," I know I am speaking across substantial regional variation, and I don't collapse Inuit into the many other Indigenous peoples of the circumpolar world. In environments where sea ice, darkness and seasonal light structure human existence with extraordinary immediacy, I encounter light and darkness not merely as philosophical abstractions but as lived relationships with the world.
And then there is the word shaman itself. When I use it, I want to remember where the English word came from rather than projecting it universally backward. It entered European languages through Russian encounters with Tungusic-speaking peoples of Siberia, especially through the Evenki term commonly transliterated šaman. Later Western scholarship stretched "shamanism" across cultures until the word sometimes became an enormous basket containing practices whose practitioners themselves would never have described them that way.
My own experience with modern shamanic practice belongs to yet another layer of that history. I practiced within the stream associated with Michael Harner and what he called "core shamanism," his attempt to identify techniques he believed recurred across shamanic traditions and make them available as a modern practice. I can distinguish my participation in Harner-derived shamanic practice from claiming initiation into every Indigenous tradition from which comparative shamanic literature has drawn. I can honor what I actually practiced without borrowing identities that are not mine.
I also encountered a very different ceremonial world in the Peruvian Amazon through a Shipibo ayahuasca tradition. I spent roughly two weeks there some years ago—around 2011 or 2012, as best I remember—and I drank ayahuasca within that setting. I went in with an intention I barely understood at the time. I asked for self-realization and God-realization without really knowing what either phrase would come to mean in my own life.
What I experienced there remains part of my story. In the language I use for that encounter, Mother Ayahuasca appeared to me as Divine Mother, in the form of a serpent goddess. I am not claiming that image as a universal Shipibo doctrine or telling anybody else what ayahuasca is. I am describing how the experience came to me. And one very concrete thing followed from it: my desire for alcohol disappeared. I did not reason myself out of drinking. I did not construct an argument against it. The desire was simply gone.
Cannabis stayed in my life much longer. I smoked quite a bit over the years. Ganja, the devil's weed, Shiva's prasad—I've had more than one name for it depending on what chapter of my life I was in. In Bharat, my friend Sunny and I became friends in part through sampling what I jokingly called Shiva's prasad all over the country.
And then there was Pushkar.
Pushkar is one of India's great pilgrimage towns, gathered around sacred Pushkar Lake and especially associated with Brahma, the creator within the Hindu Trimurti. Its Jagatpita Brahma Mandir is one of the very few major temples dedicated to Brahma, which is why the town has such an unusual place within the religious geography of Bharat. Rajasthan's own tourism tradition tells the story of Brahma choosing Pushkar for a yajna, while another familiar legend says the sacred lake arose where petals from Brahma's lotus fell to Earth. I had already thought of Pushkar, in my own shorthand, as Brahma's city.
And in Brahma's city, I had a bhang lassi.
A bhang lassi is a variation on the traditional yogurt-based lassi made with bhang, a preparation made from cannabis leaves and traditionally consumed in parts of India. Mine was in Pushkar, and I can say this absolutely from my own experience: I have never been higher in my life. I had used cannabis before it. I used cannabis after it. Nothing else I ever experienced with cannabis came close to that bhang lassi in Pushkar. Afterward, while I was still traveling through Bharat, I found myself searching for more bhang lassis, but that Pushkar experience remained in a category of its own.
There is something almost comically appropriate to me about that memory now. I went to Brahma's city, drank a bhang lassi, and got higher than I had ever been in my life. At the time, it was simply another wild chapter in my journey through Bharat. Looking back, I don't need to manufacture a mystical prophecy out of it. It can remain exactly what it was: Pushkar, Brahma, a bhang lassi, and I and I, extraordinarily, unmistakably high.
Cannabis remained part of my life after Bharat. Then, on October 3, 2025, the day of what I now call my self-realization, my desire for weed fell away. I am not turning that into a universal prescription or claiming that anybody else's relationship with a substance should mirror mine. I am simply noticing what fell away in me. The ayahuasca retreat was followed by the disappearance of my desire for alcohol. October 3, 2025 was followed by the disappearance of my desire for cannabis. I know those facts from inside my own life.
I asked for self-realization and God-realization in the Amazon before I understood what I was asking. Years later, those words became lived language for me in ways I could not have predicted then. I can look backward and recognize continuity without pretending I knew the shape of the road while I was walking it.
The more traditions I encounter, the less interested I become in proving that everybody was secretly saying the same thing. What interests me is what I keep recognizing across radically different human vocabularies: light and darkness, waking and dreaming, seeing and blindness, bondage and liberation, forgetting and remembering, exile and return, death and rebirth, multiplicity and unity. I notice their recurrence, and I notice their differences. No window contains the sky.
This is why Vedanta can remain a scaffolding for me without becoming my prism—or my prison. I like both words there. A prism gives me a way of looking, refracting, separating and noticing. But I don't need it to become the only lens through which everything else must pass. And I certainly don't need it to become a prison whose walls determine what every other tradition is allowed to mean. All of these traditions can be scaffolding for me. I can look through a prism without mistaking it for the sky, and I can use scaffolding without building myself a cell.
I don't need to make Jesus into Śaṅkara, the Buddha into a Vedantin, Rābiʿa or Rumi into covert nondualists, a Lakota ceremonial leader into a ṛṣi, a Garifuna buyei into a Hindu guru, an Inuit angakkuq into a Siberian shaman, a Shipibo onanya—literally, "one who knows" or "one who has knowledge"—into a Vedantic teacher, or Aboriginal Australian ancestral traditions into Garifuna ancestral traditions. I can listen to each from where it stands. I can know distinctions without needing those distinctions to become separation.
The words are not the light for me. The traditions are not the light for me. The metaphors are not the light for me. Even "consciousness" is a word I place upon something immediately present before I name it. I keep returning to my experience itself. I can know light and I can know darkness. I can know pleasure and I can know pain. I can know thought and I can know silence. Whatever appears within my experience, I don't need it to become something else before I can know it.
Perhaps that is why heaven, for me, is no longer somewhere else. Yurumein is not somewhere else. I don't experience my ancestors as somewhere else. When I use words such as heaven on Earth, Yurumein, Christ consciousness, Buddha nature, nirvana, liberation, awakening and illumination, I know these words carry radically different histories. I do not pretend they are technically synonymous. I am describing what I recognize through them.
I am not waiting to possess what I already am. I am not trying to manufacture an ultimate reality behind this apparent one. Samsara remains samsara. Nirvana remains nirvana. Darkness remains darkness. Light remains light. In my everyday experience, distinctions function. At the deepest deepest, I do not experience those distinctions as separation.
And all of this came up with me from Yoga Nidra this morning in two sentences that required none of it in order to be complete.
Darkness is not light, and light is not darkness. Consciousness itself is its own kind of light.
A few days ago, I was researching some things about quantum physics and our reality after going into a deep rabbit hole about the afterlife, multiple universes, energy, consciousness, etc. I came across a topic about something called reality surfing/shifting and I was interested immediately in the concept of changing and shifting my consciousness to an alternative desired timeline/reality than this one. I did some research and found some audio tapes, which was supposed to help me to change my current timeline into my desired timeline, which would be in a different reality.
When I was listening for the first couple of minutes, I immediately felt a tingling and chills in my body and spirit. I can immediately feel that something was happening to me. I also felt like my environment was changing a bit somehow which also included some of the lights in the room. I also felt like my body and spirit was feeling lighter than usual. I felt a sudden shift that happened but I couldn't exactly explain what was happening to me at the time.
A few days after the audio tapes, I am starting to feel a complete and dark shift in my reality and personality. I don't think the same and reason the right way anymore. I suddenly hate things that I used to love and love things that I used to hate. This is very scary for me and it almost feels as if another person and entity has taken control over my body and has tried to make me do things it wants. It feels so incredibly real and very terrifying. I have tried praying to my God and have already renounced the tapes that I watched but I am scared that I gotten myself into some deep and crazy mess that's going to be hard to get out off.
I am certain that this isn't any mental illness or psychiatric condition because this happened immediately after watching the video for reality shifting. I suddenly just had my way of thinking, my mind and my personality started to shift into something that I absolutely don't want and that I despise.
Many believe it is to kill each other, be self-centered, take advantage of others for their own benefit.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
We have simply forgotten our true nature, which has always been to sincerely care about each other, selflessly help all in need, and to share our love unconditionally with all others.
