Welcome Gardeners

Welcome to the reader, the seeker, the thinker, the feeler, the wanderer, the wonderer. Welcome to the wounded healer and the peaceful warrior, the doctor and the failure, the fool, the mother, the father, the middle child, the forty-year-old virgin, the candlestick maker. Welcome to the armchair philosopher, the civil war reenactor, the enlightened, the Buddha, the aspiring school shooter, the incel, the careerist, the salaryman, the truck driver, the dog walker, the house cleaner. Welcome to the lover, the friend, the bitch, the asshole, the creepy neighbor, the ex, the taco truck guy, Karen, Chad, the pigeon man, the blind leading the blind, the clergy and the laity, and all those who wonder.

And you who are truly none of these I welcome most of all.

They say we teach what we need to learn. They say every novel is an autobiography. They say when we are ready, the teacher appears, and it doesn't matter what they teach.

Thauma Dump

Something is off. You sense it too.

The incentives driving much of the activity in the world are upside down. Meaning has become nearly entirely inverted. Symbols now stand in for what they signify. We reduce nature to numbers, and life to chemicals, then wonder why we feel so lost and alone. At least we still wonder. This will guide us back.

We often blame trauma when we lash out. Is that how, as humans, we can justify systematically murdering and imprisoning nearly every other form of life on Earth? We're traumatized so we can't help but behave this way?

I think there is another explanation. I think someone told most of us a scary story when we were young, and we've gone mad with fear. And in that madness, we build more and more elaborate cages in and with our minds, for our children and our children's children, and we go on telling the same stories of separation and scarcity to our progeny long before they have forgotten the wonder of non-dual non-being. How many of us will fit in Plato's cave? I request a non-captive audience for the remainder of this guide.

The overwhelming majority of earthly mammals live in captivity. Who wants it this way? How much longer can we survive such a ubiquitous debilitating chronic psychic illness? Have we stopped looking for a cure? Do we even know we are sick?

Sanzon's elders watched the 1960s wave of awakening move through the Western world and said: no root. Without lineage or memory to ground the opening, the wind carries it away. Freedom becomes merely individual—a personal liberation that leaves the world unchanged, the cage still standing. The guide that follows attempts something different: to trace all the paths, all the wounds, all the thauma, back to the root that was always there. The root is love. It has been there the whole time.

Once upon a time, we all had thauma. We had shared thauma; we thauma bonded. We carried thauma in our bodies. Sometimes it got overwhelming and we had to thauma dump. Hence this guide now emerges: I couldn't hold it any longer.

Holding thauma—the innate sense of wonder that paints the world with rainbows—in one hand, and trauma—the debt of suffering that stains our outlook and steals our joy—in the other hand, we can get a feel for what lies in the balance as the real and the imaginal trade places yet again. We have been here before. We know what to do. Resistance is futile. The obstacle is the way.

The Greeks had a word for thauma's hotter twin: thumos. It rises like agni from belly into chest, like breathing in the hot humid air of a teeming jungle, like vapor from a volcano. Thauma is cool and easy — a gentle breeze at the eyelashes, inviting the lids to crack open. This guide runs on the cooler current.

A sign that claims to be a sign is not a sign. The tao has no name.

And while the pathogen holds the cure, we cannot solve a problem with what caused it. We can't control climate change with more extractive control mechanisms. We can't fight war; we're losing to war because we fight it. And we can't kill evil; it feeds on violence, consumes the energy of resistance.

The antidote awaits us at the center of evil, which it may dismay you to hear, sits very close to the very center of you, me, and everyone. You could say evil has us surrounded. This guide offers a map for a journey that we must each and all complete, on one side or the other. Should you endeavor to make the trek in this waking dream, know that you have my utter faith, and I have invested all my love into this guide.

A Bit on Belief

This is the closest we will come to a disclaimer.

The way back to wonder lays paved in mystery and paradox. Without confronting and releasing our limiting beliefs, we are bound to remain in a karmic loop on this mortal coil. Or at least, this has been the process for me, and I have dedicated myself to collecting the beliefs I shed and the realizations that have helped to peel them away.

You may have heard of egregores: ideologies or shared constructs of belief that feed upon our minds and sustain themselves by infecting more of us with divisive stories of fear and separation. Not all egregores appear evil at first blush; some compel us to become philanthropists or to fight systemic oppression. But rest assured that such beliefs that commandeer our powers of will and compel us to judge and sort and categorize according to the pronouncements of assumed moral authorities, these beliefs do not serve us, or anyone. They only serve themselves.

Herein lies the rub. After all this reconsideration, after holding each belief up to the light and laying still and silent with it in the dark, very few remain. We will approach them one by one throughout this journey, but we must first decide what we believe about belief in the first place.

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe. This is how I have come to understand faith in contrast with belief. Believing adds a lie to being when we could just be living. I have faith that the sun will rise in the morning; this is not a belief. When I have a lack of faith and grasp for security in that uncertainty, I often reach for belief. This road ends in the fetid, stifling bog of dogma, which—in this remarkable era of reversal—might be better understood as claiming "am god".

Sanzon arrived at the same passage through the Andean ceremonial tradition—through ceremony and direct experience, the lived knowing preceding any statement about what he believed. Jung said it plainly: "I don't believe in God—I know, because I have experienced it in my own being." The difference runs through the body, the way all genuine knowing does.

Belief be the lie between the beef…

Or could it be that what we expect becomes more likely, that our beliefs sculpt reality? The placebo remains the most consistently effective drug in trial after trial. This way leads us onto the spiritual bypass and up into the clouds of fantasy and manifestation. Belief may be insidious deception and marvelous conception all at once. Shall we try to hold two opposed ideas and retain the ability to function?

When we confront something dissonant with yesterday's worldview, might be incline to pause and suspend disbelief? When what we encounter clashes with what we once clung to tightly and held dear in a moment of gullibility or trepidation, will we have the courage to drop our guard and try another way? If we can "imagine Sisyphus happy", as Albert Camus requests, maybe we can play with our beliefs a little too. What's the worst that could happen—we change our minds? The world?

Robert Edward Grant knows the insidious power of the nocebo effect: "The only real obstacles in life are the ones that we consistently and persistently cling to and believe in." I wonder whether we can say the same about opportunities. The guide that follows came about as I followed the advice Matías de Stefano received from Hermes: you are supposed to question everything. True knowing—real knowledge—resides in the questions, not the answers.

The Octave of Love Evolving

When I set out to origami the omniverse into a rectangle, I quickly realized that I had to choose between complication and complexity. The model you will encounter in this guide may appear to be oversimplified. The map is indeed not the territory. C'est ne pas le monde. How could one expect to contain the infinite possibilities for involution and evolution in only 7 tones of vibration and the grace notes among them? The magic enters with the octave—perhaps our most familiar example of the fractal holographic toroidal shape of, well, anything we call real. Travel far enough in any direction and we end up at a new scale of the same realm. Transiting the boundary between, crossing the chasm, reaching the end of the rainbow, we enasce (birth ourselves) into yet another strange plane of being as yet another intricately architected agent of love and wonder. Admittedly, though this is natural and inescapable, we often get lost in the process.

So I have mapped this guide to music. Like the keys on a piano there are seven notes in a major key (which I refer to as Legs of the journey), five ghost notes between (which I call Turns), and the next note invites us into a new octave of the same same but different. We could bow to the Sun cult so obsessed with verticality and call these new octaves higher or lower, but I prefer to receive them as deeper or finer. We may dive into the depths of the unknown even to the threshold of non-being where we surrender to irresistible density. And there we will find a secret passage to a world of powdered silken stardust, impossibly smooth and blindingly radiant, weightless and boundless. Or we can hone and polish to a perfect sheen until the mirror disappears and object meets subject. Artifice indistinguishable from art or artist, the imaginal realizes. Where seer, seeing and seen unite we return to the same non-being we find in the depths.

That the chakras of yoga, the hexagrams of the Yijing, the alchemical processes, the elements of Ayurveda and Wu Xing, the cards of the Tarot, the mysteries of quantum theory, the Hermetic principles, a wealth of nascent realizations on the fringe of epistemology and wellness, and all known mythologies and archetypes map neatly into this octave of love evolving indicates the same divine integration we witness as the trees dance to the same song the birds sing. No model of reality is correct or complete, just as the finger pointing at a star must not be mistaken for the star. For truth begins within, then paints and sculpts the dream we share.

As with anything we encounter, you have found this guide because you are ready for the code it contains. Not everyone is. You have asked for this. Not everyone has. There are infinite finite games we can play, and each of them becomes more enjoyable when we simultaneously play the infinite game with fully conscious intent. Then we neither try nor try not to try. Then we can trust the process.

I am teeming with gratitude that you have joined me here. May we continue to choose with love and wonder until only the fun fears remain. May your day abound with bespoke artisanal miracles. May healing hurt less and less. May we all remember our part in the earthsong, until the harmony weaves so well we forget to forget.