Bending the Realm
This essay is the second piece in a triptych that began with the Day Out Of Time and will end with the final installment, Transmission of the Death Mother.
A woman is a wild animal but many have forgotten this fact.
This sense of separation from our true self is another form of death and the one most fundamental to the maintenance of society at large. Do I reject this? Yes. The denial of raw nature is a false truth; the first suffocation of the eternal self.
Having seen some things, I have doubled down on my devotion to those ancient desires, now dedicating my journey to reclaiming all the parts I threw away; relegating them to the outsider realms. Banished to the darkness.
My mind-bending stroll with Jeks in Mexico had soothed one festering sore but unleashed other primal urges. I suppose that is the exchange. Any flip of the coin is bound to return a foreign side one day. Once you learn the colors that exist in the dark, you cannot erase the memory.
A forgotten essence had ripened on my vine while I was away.
Returning to America, I could sense that I had crossed over some inside threshold and found myself in unknown, undiscovered territories. Suffice it to say: I had entered a portal somewhere along the line. Perhaps in another dimension, Jeks and I had entered the leafy maw presented to us, our fated portal. In another world we were still walking.
Either way, I wasn’t returning to my old life, that much was evident. A door ajar on the Day Out of Time had yielded a surreal new trajectory.
I made a deal with destiny: Show me where you want me.
An invitation arrives from a man I met a long time ago, at my very first Burning Man. When I first clapped my virgin eyes on Bru he was standing askance in the middle of the desert, a glowing lasso whipping circles in front of his leather gladiator kilt. The swirling wind caught his long grey hair, which obscured his face until the very last minute. When it was revealed, I recognized him: a modern Merlin.
Another portend.
Bru and I rode into the thumping dark that night in the mouth of another predator, a gigantic neon shark tricked out with a deafening sound system and glow-in-the-dark drinks — until inevitably we all got swept away into other amusements and lost touch for a few years. These things happen in ephemeral places — especially in this particular feral colony of freaky pirates blowing things up and dancing like banshees until the sun rose each day.
No different than other ancient future civilizations, no?
Bru and I remained connected on Facebook but didn’t really talk for the next four years. I followed his work online, fascinated by his intersections. A multi-dimensional scientist, researcher, and storyteller who lived in the wild mountains south of San Francisco, he had been friends with many of the psychedelic heavyweights and counterculture pioneers of the 1970’s. His work straddled worlds, both virtual and visible, and had been focused for the past several decades on connecting the dots around the origins of life.
Contributing to the theories of how it all began by mapping the conditions that governed our evolution over momentous timespans.
My travels abroad had reignited a conversation between us that summer. I returned to California from the Yucatán to a personal invitation from Bru to attend a seminal gathering he was throwing in a few weeks. It was to be in honor of the 50th anniversary of Woodstock, and all the intergenerational wizards in the shire would be there, ready to initiate in the next generation of counter-culture pioneers.
Perfect timing. Twas the weekend before Burning Man, and I would be driving up with my gay Jesus. I had a date with a portal in the desert and could pitstop for one more.
Bru’s home was wild, a living memory palace if there ever was one. Shared with two rowdy and radical witches who were the ones tending the property while he did what he did, Bru’s homestead was filled with priceless cultural relics and dusty talismans from his past lives building space shuttles with NASA and hanging with Terence McKenna. His personal barn was overflowing with every newspaper clipping that mentioned psychedelics, and there were thousands, starting in the late 50’s. Timothy Leary’s old record collection, rare books from quantum nerds, old Apple computers signed in Sharpie by the Woz.
Filled with rats and many kinds of spider, this feral barn was a living grail, crammed to the rafters with technology that evidenced the exponential development of intelligent systems throughout modern history.
I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to frolic with this crew.
Spattered with wildflowers and ancient redwoods, the land lent itself well to a revival of epic proportions. Built on top of a watershed, everything bloomed too much, evidenced by the two-story San Pedro cactus by the back door. Peacocks were known to mate at dawn in the gardens. Plump grapes climbed the vines winding up towards the moon, which must have been ripe because we howled so loud that night.
We were all there, of course, to partake in psychedelic shenanigans. But the whole point of the evening was to honor the elders who had helped steward the movements that had led us here. As Grand Wizard of the evening, Bru would be sharing a transmission about an evolutionary theory he had just published in Scientific American.
Perhaps it was the LSD passed around in an eyedropper by a man in a top hat or the surreal curation or the fact that we opened with a prayer and then a clown song sung by us all. Now strangers are holding hands. Something has happened. We’ve dropped in, are going somewhere else together, and the evening is only just starting.
It feels right and good to be alive.
Not everyone is tripping of course, and that includes me. I am still feeling warped from my time-traveling and not sure I can handle more than a few puffs of a joint. Plus, the vibe is so high that I’m vibrating, and that’s not a lie. Bru tells me later that the stronger frequencies in a collective can roll the rest into an almost ecstatic state, an energetic assistance to the collective that is mutually beneficial. These elevated vibes cohere the entire tribe. The nervous system relaxes. More information and energy is able to enter, cultivating a state that one can also access via psychedelics.
Same door but different.
Ton, an Argentinean that lives on the mountain, is waxing socratic as he giggles with laughter, wearing his furry blanket as a cape. Omin is telling stories about his forays to India, holding his hallucinations better than anyone. And behind him, the cypress columns rise black and elegant, framing the moon’s gleaming hole with soft fangs.
At some point, the call is sounded to gather in the pavilion, inside a large fabric-draped dome. Bru is sitting upon his carved wooden throne, soft and regal, patient as a minister, as the people amass before him on various cushions and carpets.
The dream of this gathering is to celebrate the histories that have led us here and amplify what is being generated as a result of this particular seeding. Visions insist upon active imagination. I look around at the flushed, expectant faces of our radical congregation as Bru starts his sacred weaving.
It is the story of a great birthing.
We go back several million years. Bru speaks to us as though the Earth itself is telling the story of the evolutionary choices which led us here: the tumultuous, hairy, branching tail of life on this planet, from a perspective almost too immense to fathom.
A few feet in front of him, in the center of the dome, dangle swaths of deep purple fabric; aerial silks that are hitched to the ceiling of the dome. Three small boys swirl inside, tangling themselves in the folds.
As he speaks, Bru passes around two dark stones, rough and brown, pulled from a worn cardboard box. He explains that they contain evidence of the first microbes. Over a billion years old, found near the teeming mouth of a hot spring. Some people press the stones to their hearts.
How surreal to hold so much history in one piece of rock, smaller than a skull.
Then he passes around a jar and has us sniff the air inside. It smells of yeast, of funk, the fermented pang of living dust. The boys huff it several times.
It smells like dirt, they finally announce, and everyone laughs.
There are so many intricate threads to explore, so many dots to connect, and yet he never loses us, his children. His energy permeates the room but never demands our attention. We give it freely to Bru, as one beholds a redwood tree: with respect and reverence. Even the elders look young again, for it is a story we all share, told in a way we can all understand — even the young boys, hidden in the purple swaths, who seem to be lost for long spans of time.
They whisper to themselves in their own language as the rest of us dangle on Bru’s soft measured words.
•
Imagine — You, a primate no bigger than your own hand. And even that might be gratuitous. As Bru tells it, we tiny simple monkeys survived a devastating event that transformed the planet into the one we know today. We lived in the trees back then. The safety of the canopy was far better compared to the ground floor below. As the theory goes, there were maybe a thousand of us huddled into a ball in the canopy; sucking drops of nectar to stay alive.
There was a snake of course.
While all that natural sugar hotboxed our monkey brains, expanding and distorting them rapidly; a hungry snake coiled up the tree. You must understand. Our seeing apparatus was basic, limited; us monkeys had monochrome colors and gradations. Think early computer graphics: pixelated at best.
But in this moment that shifted history, one lucky monkey noticed something unique. This tree was moving. The pixels started pulsing and changing direction as the snake came forward. In that fraction of a second, the monkey’s mind mutated. A revelation generated a new evolutionary mechanism. Danger was present. This monkey leaped to safety; populated profusely.
It became the first ancestor of humans.
The snake is not the emblem of evil, although many assume. Rather, the snake is the archetypal signifier of a most ancient technology: evolution. The portend of change underfoot. There has been a serpent since before time began; coiling, coiling.
Ready to unwind.
By now I assume Bru has lost the small boys, the real beneficiaries of the keys he shares so freely. He is handing over a sacred teaching, in the old way; a master passing down an origin story. The message is both sacred and scientific, groundbreaking, and he has developed the ability to decode its meaning for many. But it is the children that his living myth is meant to reach, the ones cocooned in the silks like hungry grubs.
He pauses. No one else dares to interrupt. Then one of the boys asks a brilliant question.
They could be considered a distraction. Instead they become a form of symbolic attunement that somehow echoes the shockwaves of history and eventually, humans. Their interactions strike me as parallel events, metaphors for a story that transcends them. The boys roughhouse, laugh, an arm exits the curtain, someone stumbles, come together, silent again. But still — they listen.
Lost in play, they are somehow the most present.
The parallels between their innocent sparring and the story unfolding around it become so resonant that I start to wonder if this is scripted, a compelling performance piece put on by the mountain people. I wouldn’t put it past the wizards in this group. The boys’ magic infuses the room, animal and inquisitive. Dare I say –they take us further than Bru does. They are raw and unfiltered, the way real life is, and we need them to teach us just as much as we want them to listen.
What the children represented to me and what I think we received that evening: a download of source codes. A memory that transcended every single one of us. Ancient languages contain living ciphers that have persisted across all of history, beyond the boundaries of tribe or culture, reminding us of a sacred root we share. Like those winding, wrapping threads that first laddered life, the aerial silks in the center functioned as an accidental memetic symbol, a metaphor that painted a picture far beyond Bru’s words reverberating through the hushed enclosure.
It made our magic evident. The energy was palpable in my sweating hands.
More archaic than English, the vibe winding its way through the room, connecting every heartbeat in a song, was more than just a story. Don’t get me wrong, we were all dazzled by the dirt dust. But more astonishing to me than a billion year old microbe was us.
Together we witnessed what author and professor Jeffrey Kripal refers to as the “paranormal portal of language.” The real gift of that evening was the thing we manifested while we remembered the stories woven into our literal blood. Our collective presence revealed something profound: true revelation is bigger than one person.
It requires the collective.
We were not the first to break our heads open on theories like the ones he espoused, and yet a well-timed story from our mountain Merlin shook me awake to the surreal reality we now faced as a civilization. We all were a critical part of this evolutionary puzzle, necessary in ways we could barely comprehend. And here in this circus tent on a side of a hill was the first of us, reduced to dust, held in our hands.
You can only perceive that for which you have the consciousness to understand.
Perhaps that is why humans love altered states. Your ability to comprehend larger truths and more expansive definitions of reality hinges upon your ability to open your field of perception; to be seduced into believing things that don’t yet exist.
Stories do this — plant the seeds. Evolution is its own lingua franca, a common language shared by all living ancestors. Consciousness was the lattice, the divine ladder. Only by operating at the razor’s edge of awareness could life move into more complex and creative directions. In a moment when our culture is experiencing many failures of imagination, Bru brought forward a potent truth, whether he meant to or not.
Timelines are thought forms.
Take heed, my freaky wizards, for what I say is true. It’s time to recognize that puny you is the living rung of this divine ladder. Your context selects for the next evolutionary thrust. We are here because the hairy tale of human beings is branching again and we have two options: bend the realm in favor of something better for everyone or be the butt of a cosmic joke, an evolutionary blip in the grand sweep of things.
A bunch of savvy monkeys walk up to the edge of a cliff.
Life is connecting the dots at a pace that our brains can’t yet compute. So why try to outsmart it? Strangely, when you fully conceive of how much and how little you matter, then it seems you can influence far beyond your niche.
Somehow, the stories we tell go farther and faster when we remember them together. As we have done for millennia. Your words matter, yes, but if there’s anything I’ve gathered here, at the edge of the universe, it’s that the energy with which you inhabit them is what forges the future.
All paths radiate from the present. Each choice has consequences.
So my friends, I ask you this: How will you choose to exist?
🔺
Katharine Hargreaves is a spiritual mentor, transformational facilitator, ceremonial guide, and initiated medicine womxn. Her first book, The Art of the Experiment, is a transformational manual for people who want to change their life but don’t know where to start. For more information on Katharine and how to work with her, visit her website.
