Not so much a blog as a collection of my favorite Substack posts.
Maybe you’ve noticed: this world can be a very weird place. Even if you’ve never experienced anything like this yourself, you know that otherwise very reliable people have given sworn testimony that they’ve seen UAPs, survived near-death experiences, or encountered something so uncanny it left them shaken and at a loss for explanation.
Occasionally such things happen to people who are inclined to write down their experience, and then analyze it at length, because of an inescapable sense that they’ve caught a glimpse of the Mystery that is the condition of our existence. Wanting to know more, in such cases, isn’t just curiosity; it’s existential.
Emanuel Swedenborg was such a person. So was Philip K. Dick. And Robert Anton Wilson. Most famously, there was Carl Jung, who between 1912 and 1919 experienced a nearly mortal confrontation with the Unconscious that provided him with the raw material for his life’s work.
Some people dismiss their work as madness. Where Some Holy Spectacle Lies begins from the countervailing premise: that ignoring such reports is the mark of a calcified worldview, not sophistication, and that taking them seriously, without immediately converting them into belief or pathology, is a harder and more interesting problem.
Between 2016 and 2025, I underwent a prolonged period of intense anomalous experience—visions, dreams, and synchronicities. The experiences were often exalting, but just as often terrifying, frustrating, and anguishing. Most of all, they were hard work.
To manage that sustained effort, I fell back on what I already knew: strength and conditioning training. Quite without meaning to, I began applying the principles of exercise science—progressive overload, recovery, adaptation—to the psychological demands of altered states, gradually developing capacities traditionally associated with the shamanic role: antifragility, executive function, and gnosis.
In Where Some Holy Spectacle Lies, I endeavor to tell the story of my nine-year journey in the Underworld of the unconscious, and to explain the nature of the boons I’ve returned with. The only way to do that with any kind of objectivity, while still conveying just how strange the entire experience has been, was to write it as a gnostic, sci-fi memoir.
Structurally, it’s a novel that takes place across seven levels of reality simultaneously. In each, a story is unfolding; these stories are not causally connected, but instead must be understood both horizontally as independent melodies, and vertically as being in harmony.
You could call it ontological counterpoint, if you want—but it isn’t necessary to keep that model in mind while reading. If you can imagine Wes Anderson filtered through William Gibson, with traces of Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick, you’re in the neighborhood.
But make no mistake: this book is not really a novel. It is documentation, from within the process it describes, of the development of a system of meaning-making that allows engagement with Ultimate Reality on its own terms, without the safe harbor of a traditional belief system.
Maybe you’re thinking, That’s all well and good—but what’s in it for me?
Think of Where Some Holy Spectacle Lies as a kind of radiation suit: not something that removes danger, but something that makes it possible to approach territory positively aglow with both beauty and terror. By refracting raw numinous experience through the lenses of popular culture and depth psychology, the book offers a way of thinking about reality that remains grounded, even as it ventures into the unmapped terrain at the edges of human experience.
Where Some Holy Spectacle Lies is not for people who have collapsed possibility into certainty. If you believe Ultimate Reality does not exist, or that your personal worldview or inherited tradition has already said the final word on what Ultimate Reality is and how human beings may relate to it, individually or collectively, this book is not for you.
It is also not for those who fear risk, ambiguity, or responsibility. Not for those who are unwilling to confront the individual and collective Shadow. Not for those who want meaning without cost, or transformation without exposure.
The experiences described in this book involve looking foolish, getting things wrong, and feeling emotions at superhuman intensity. If reading that list makes you anxious, defensive, or eager to argue, do yourself a favor and stop here.
But what if you think religion is more than an just an accretion of stories and practices, justified by increasingly baroque and incomprehensible theory? More than merely a way to anchor ethnic and national identity, or to allow institutions to exert social control?
What if you suspect any religion worthy of the name ought to provide the means to get up close and personal with some One, or some Nothing, that feels like infinite power and infinite meaning?
What if you’ve realized no worldview can be complete if it refuses to grapple seriously with psychedelic journeys, Near Death Experiences, and the full range of anomalous encounters that fall under the heading of Mystery?
If you find yourself nodding in agreement with these premises, then you already recognize the wager this book makes.
Where Some Holy Spectacle Lies documents a firsthand investigation of Ultimate Reality that treats gnosis as an achievable, repeatable human capacity rather than a matter of belief or inheritance. What that investigation evokes—astonishment, alarm, inspiration, or something else entirely—is not the point. Its claim is narrower and more demanding: that the history of religion is not over, and that what comes next may demand far more of us than what came before, but will finally deliver on what religious traditions have been promising for thousands of years.
The other day, Instagram offered me a post from someone I don’t follow. A man in his sixties, gray beard, kind eyes, identified himself as a psychedelic integration specialist, and offered some advice for those experiencing difficult thought-loops while working with these medicines.
“Find the space between thoughts,” he said. “Abide there. Recognize you are not your thoughts.”
That’s good advice! But it also oversimplifies the phenomenology of challenging psychedelic experiences.
If you regularly experience anxiety in everyday life, you may have noticed that the symptoms of anxiety—tight chest, accelerated heart rate, shallow breathing—sometimes arise without a specific cause. Nothing in your immediate circumstance has changed. You weren’t even thinking about anything that might trigger you.
But then suddenly there you are, in the thick of jittery, smothering discomfort, and then you become conscious of anxious thoughts.
If you’re someone who believes every effect has a cause, the Occam’s Razor explanation for this dynamic is that your physical symptoms arose in reaction to unconscious contents—an activated complex, or even seed thought planted by a dream you can’t remember.
Similar things can happen when you’re working with psychedelics. You’re cruising along, exulting in your experience, when BAM! From seemingly out of nowhere comes fear, futility, despair.
When this happens, there’s no “space between thoughts” to abide in. There’s just the physical fact of what you are feeling in your body. That’s prior to thought. And if the sensation/emotions—there’s no way to disentangle them—are powerful enough, they’ll swallow you whole.
We’ve all been there. We call such experiences “bad trips,” or more euphemistically, “challenging experiences.”
There’s no thinking your way out of such a situation. However, there is feeling your way out of it.
If you can recognize what’s happening, that your body is experiencing powerful negative emotions, that opens the possibility of recognizing that you are not having that experience, your body is. And if you can realize that, then it becomes possible to exert conscious control over your body’s psychosomatic state.
It’s not a matter of trying to force yourself into anything. It’s more like cajoling. Whatever negative emotion you’re experiencing, find where you’re feeling it most accurately in your body, and then talk to it. “Hey, you’re okay. We’re okay. This is an intense experience, but we are perfectly safe. We’re alright, we’re alright.”
This is an assertion of sovereignty—not over the experience, but over your response to it.
This requires something not usually associated with psychedelic experiences: agency. You don’t need to passively accept what’s happening, or even seek solace by abandoning your sense of self. Instead you can ask, “In this moment of stress, who do I want to be?” And then take action to realize the answer.
Everybody knows how to get in better physical condition: you exercise.
That means doing work. Force applied over distance. Walking, yoga, rolling on jiu-jitsu mats, lifting barbells—it’s all work.
Doing work requires expenditure of energy. In physical exercise, that cost can be measured in calories burned, but also in discomfort: you feel the burn, you suck wind, you collapse on the floor to make sweat angels.
Whether or not you choose to participate in that dynamic, it illustrates a simple but profound idea: nothing good comes for free.
In exercise science, this is restated as: exertional stress leads to positive adaptive response. Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls this property—growing stronger in response to stress—antifragility.
The human body is antifragile in many ways. So is the human psyche. Psychological antifragility can be developed using principles very similar to those used in the gym: exposing yourself to carefully titrated doses of stress in order to elicit positive adaptation.
The capacities that result from that kind of training are what I demonstrated in “Turn On the Lights: Staying Organized in Altered States When Things Go Sideways.” The ceremony described there, The Discotheque at the End of the Universe, is a kind of group workout, where participants engage that same training protocol together. That protocol is Entheogenic Fitness Training.
It’s intense. As intense, in its own way, as CrossFit, SoulCycle, or Tough Mudder. And like those activities, it’s for people who are healthy and uninjured. It is not for those seeking trauma healing, or for people with known risks such as diagnosed mental illness or a family history of serious mental illness.
This work is not about believing in anything beyond the power of the human imagination to generate real experiences of meaning and beauty. It is about building capacities like antifragility, executive function, and gnosis, and about the kind of community that forms when people take on difficulty together and support one another in the process.
If you were told there is a way to improve your ability to remain organized, responsible, and oriented while under genuine cognitive or emotional load—would that training interest you, or would you rather avoid the situation entirely?
Twenty-nine people were crowded onto the rubber-matted workout floor of the St. David Bowie EntheoGym in Portland. Eighteen sat around the edge of the dance floor, the rest stood along the back wall. Twenty-nine. More than double the size of any group I’d worked with before.
It was early evening in late July, and the day had been brutally hot. The warehouse that housed the gym had absorbed the heat and was still holding it. Even before anything began, people were already warm, shifting their weight, fanning themselves with folded programs.
I was dressed as Pa Dammit, the cleric character I used when leading these sessions: Dr. Martens, black Dickies, a Roman clerical shirt with a blue LED dog collar glowing at the throat. At the top of three stairs rising from the workout floor to a lofted kitchen and living space stood a microphone on a stand. Around it were footswitches wired to lights, fog, strobe, and a bubble machine. This was the control point from which I’d be running what I called The Discotheque at the End of the Universe, a ritual structured like a class rather than a performance.
At the mic, I welcomed everyone and laid out the rules of engagement. Nothing metaphysical, just practical boundaries. Then I led them through a simple warm-up. I asked everyone to make the familiar heavy-metal horns gesture—index and pinky extended, middle and ring fingers tucked under the thumb—and on the count of three, shout a single unprintable phrase together.
We did it three times. People laughed. A small but unmistakable charge ran through the room.
That was enough. It was time to begin.
I killed the house lights. The only illumination now came from the two large screens flanking the stage area. From my laptop, I started the pre-rendered video sequence for the Discotheque. Once it began, it would run on its own. I returned to the microphone and guided the group through the opening section, which used familiar ritual language to establish orientation and containment rather than belief.
The next phase unfolded over three songs of slow, lilting chamber pop, paired with custom visuals that mixed animation, religious iconography, and pop-culture debris. The goal wasn’t emotional catharsis. It was pacing. The room settled into a shared rhythm.
For me, this marked the first gate. I stepped backstage to change into the costume of the character who would lead the next phase: Dr. Shonda Freude. Shonda—a fictional PhD in Western Popular Culture Studies and Jung Institute dropout—wore knee-high white vinyl go-go boots, a white mini-dress, white opera gloves, a blunt white wig, and white sunglasses. A glowing plastic red heart hung at her chest. Over everything, a cape of lights, and over that, a blue hooded cloak.
When I returned to the side of the stage, the first song was almost over. I took a breath and centered myself. By this point my consciousness was significantly altered, intentionally so. But the task ahead was not surrender, but organization. I would be singing, dancing, speaking, and tracking the room while holding an active imaginative frame and maintaining situational awareness.
This was not improvisation. It was a demonstration of a capacity I had been training for years: staying relaxed, oriented, and responsive under cognitive and sensory load.
As the second song began—Jeremy Enigk’s “Explain”—I walked onstage and took my place behind the microphone. I sang along, matching pitch as closely as I could. The aim was technical as much as symbolic. I was mapping what I heard onto the felt sense of my own vocal apparatus, trying to collapse the distance between the recorded voice and my own. This exercise, which I called singpassana, was one of several ways I’d learned to work directly with attention and embodiment inside altered perception.
The third song ramped up the iconography. I stepped on a footswitch; the fog machine hissed. To this point, my stage had been dark, and I was mostly in shadow. Now I triggered a white light situated directly behind me. What the crowd saw: a feminine figure in silhouette, spangled with lights like tiny stars, the edges of her blue cloak glowing, white light streaming through clouds. Face shrouded in shadow, but a vivid glowing red heart on her chest.
The song was called “Mother of Love.” It was heartbreakingly lovely, delicate at the start, soaring at the finish. It set up what was to follow: a recitation of the ancient Gnostic prayer The Thunder, Perfect Mind, which I would deliver in character as the Goddess Sophia.
“TURN ON THE LIGHTS!” someone shouted. “TURN ON THE LIGHTS!”
What the—? I went to my offstage desk and killed the video. Someone had already found the wall switches and flipped on the lights over the workout floor.
One of the participants had lost consciousness and slid halfway out of her chair. People gathered around her, checking her pulse. Was she breathing? Yes. Someone patted her cheek. No response. What had happened? Was she on anything? No one knew.
A glass of water was requested. I went to the kitchen, filled one, and brought it down to the small cluster attending her. Why wasn’t she waking up? Should we give it another minute, or call an ambulance?
I went back up to my stage area. There were competent adults handling the immediate situation. And I, too, had a situation to handle.
Once it became clear that the woman was not in danger and people were helping her outside to get some air, dark thoughts fluttered around my head like bats. I was a middle-aged man, in drag, the ritual container for my altered consciousness suddenly suspended. I felt exposed, ridiculous, humiliated, furious—and everything was amplified by the substance in my system.
But I also knew what to do. It was what I’d been learning over the course of dozens and dozens of ritual performances, and increasingly in my everyday life. When things went sideways, I asked myself a simple question: In this moment of crisis, who do you want to be?
The answer came back immediately. I wanted to be the guy who engages difficulty with a light-hearted, can-do attitude.
For ten minutes, I focused on that. When the woman was brought back inside, she was alert and embarrassed but fine. The heat had been too much for her.
I shook my head and smiled. I’d been afforded another opportunity to demonstrate what I’d come to call visionary virtuosity.
Using my strength and conditioning coach’s voice of command, I called the room to order. I reminded everyone that fifteen minutes earlier we had created a sacred space together. That space still existed; we only had to find our way back to it.
I asked for the lights to be turned off again. I led the crowd through a deep-breathing exercise. Then I restarted the ceremony from just before the third song of the invocation.
From there, things went off without a hitch. It was an intense night.
Being onstage is stressful for all but the most seasoned professionals. It intensifies self-consciousness.
People often use psychedelics to escape that condition. They can produce a temporary release from self-consciousness, sometimes even a dissolution of identity, what’s referred to as “ego-death.”
But that depends on passivity. There is another, active way to work with these substances. The model is the traditional shaman. This approach doesn’t aim at reducing self-consciousness, but at increasing Self-awareness. It depends on placing trust in the Source of Being, however one conceptualizes it.
After that near-disastrous ritual, I realized that by performing in an altered state, this was exactly what I’d been training for: the ability to enter that kind of Self-awareness under any circumstances, even the intense stress of public performance.
Who knew where that might lead?