Unmasking the Spiritual Matrix:  The Truths & Lies of the New Age Rainbows

I wanted to begin this letter-essay by addressing you as “brothers and sisters” because it’s a familiar and routine formula, which is to say it has already become a cliche. But, to tell the truth, I always felt a slight discomfort when hearing “brothers and sisters” because it tacitly invokes the subtle hierarchies of family relationships, of mothers and fathers, older and younger siblings, favorites and black sheep. I’d like to believe that we are inside a movement that is based on open, peer to peer relationships – a loose community of equals, united by common ideals, solidarity, admiration and love. Perhaps “friend” is the best word to call to mind a nonhierarchical relationship without family dramas and neuroses, and to suggest a bond that is voluntarily taken up, with gladness and mutual respect. So, let us begin again…

Dear friends, I offer these words to you, my equals, my mirrors, and my companions in a journey of darkness unfolding into light. But I write this equally for myself, because I share the pains and the joys of discerning its lessons. I write it from the inside of a movement that is not a movement, and from the landscape of dreams we share for a new world that is awakening from the slumber of separation. But I also write from the perspective of having understood and transmuted the distortions of vanity, consumerism and superficiality that we often fall prey to within this (non)movement. And we don’t fall prey to them by chance, but by deliberate design, by following the traps and detours that have been orchestrated for us (or rather against us). This text was not comfortable to write and I don’t think it will be comfortable for you to read. But please know that it is not meant as a dismissal or a putdown; it’s an attempt to engage in the alchemical practice of solve et coagula. Of separating out the illusions (and bullshits) that are covering over the higher truths that bind us, so that the foundations may be strengthened into a new unity. And I know these truths and lies very intimately because I’ve climbed the summits of their grace and have hit the rock bottom of their hells, many times, within myself. (more…)

Innocence once lost, twice regained

Dreaming Awake
3. Innocence once lost, twice regained
(Cusco / Six of Cups)

I woke up fat with sleep for the first time since I arrived in Cusco. After overdosing on authentic wood furniture, hand made ceramics, old tapestries, and heavy, alpaca wool blankets, I confess, with some embarrassment, that I really enjoyed the familiar comforts of my new apartment with its plain, mass-produced furniture, and the memory-foam mattress, feather pillows and down comforter that reminded me of dreadful Ikea. I was on my rooftop terrace enjoying a lazy Sunday morning coffee in the sun when I received a message from Lukas saying he would pick me up in an hour for a vegan brunch party at Healing House. Healing House is the spiritual venue in Cusco that draws an international crowd of tourists and expats for events ranging from yoga to sound healing, breathwork, ecstatic dance and “mayan” cacao ceremonies. Lukas was going there to spread announcements for the upcoming ceremonies with the paqo Don Manuel, and a week-long retreat to his village at Ausangate mountain. He said since they didn’t operate like a mainstream tour agency, their promotions were mainly done through word of mouth among friends and in the alternative communities in Cusco.  (more…)

In search of the authentic

Dreaming Awake
2: In search of the authentic
(Cusco / Two of Swords)

Pisac, Pisac, Pisac. I heard it three times, like a secret invocation, as I dozed on the floor near the chapel at Lima airport. I chose the spot for a nap during my 5 hour layover to Cusco because it was quiet, empty and had a security guard 20 meters away. I thought no one would try to steal my stuff as I slept in his presence, even if they might not be discouraged from doing in front of the house of god. I’m not sure if the word Pisac was spoken by different people passing me on the way to the chapel or if it was the phantom voice of my own dreams. But I woke up from the groggy limbo of sleep with a sense of clarity, trusting that intuition was chosing my itinerary for me. I decided to explore Cusco for a week, before heading to Pisac. Cusco is perched 3500m high and the altitude sickness turned out to be much worse than I expected. I felt it as soon as I left the airport: the air seemed heavy and viscous like a foreign substance my lungs couldn’t take in, and my heart was pounding quickly in my chest. For the first few days – in between the headaches, dizziness and shortness of breath – I felt like I was walking around in a semi-drunken buzz of restless exhaustion.  (more…)

The threshold of the unknown

Dreaming Awake
1: The Wanderer … and the threshold of the unknown

My life has been haunted by a restless feeling of dislocation and of never belonging anywhere, no matter where I happened to settle. Do you know that feeling? That sense of being a misfit in your environment and your culture, and of not understanding the “normal” desires that people have for house, career and family, or their striving to find happiness through relationships or possessions. I’ve always longed for something more from life, even if I didn’t know what it was. Maybe it was to understand who and what I was, beyond my name and address and family history, why I’ve landed in this strange world that I can’t seem to connect with, and how to decipher that gnawing feeling of seeking elsewhere for something that is missing in the here and now. Have you also had strange dreams and vague memories of an elsewhere that felt more like home than the uncanny landscape of our familiar world? Have you had weird thoughts… that you were not only in the wrong place, geographically, but in a wrong dimension? And that the here feels like a surreal dream that you can’t wake up from?

As a child, I was haunted by strange dreams and memories of impossible places, dreams of flying through the clouds, and memories of landscapes with purple skies and a horizon with two moons. Sometimes they felt more real than the every day world I couldn’t get used to. I remember that when I was four years old I used to cry when mother left me at kindergarten because I thought the other children were aliens, bird-people with sharp beaks that had come from other worlds with an evil intent to eat my light. Their beaks made frightening noises, which I could not understand. I tried hard to fit in and make friends with these creatures, but I felt really out of place and couldn’t connect to them. Their games and activities, like playing with dolls or pretending to fight with plastic-swords, made no sense to me. Probably they saw me as the alien and the outsider in their world. I don’t know where I got such crazy ideas about the bird-people because I grew up in a communist country without Walt Disney or fantasy movies, with only one channel on black and white television that aired state propaganda and an occasional, badly acted local film. Once every few years there were James Bond movies playing in the cinema and my mother used to go with a crowd of girlfriends. They were all secretly in love with Roger Moore. Or maybe it was with the imaginary universe of those films, which seemed so different from their monochrome reality. (more…)

On Integral Alchemy

The familiar image of the alchemist that has come down through history is that of an old, bearded man with long robes bent over glass flasks in a medieval laboratory, preparing a secret concoction that would turn lead into gold. This may be quaint and charming, but it isn’t really what alchemy is about. This is not to deny that medieval alchemists were, in fact, preparing secret concoctions in their laboratories, but to highlight the deeper reality beneath the surface appearance of things. Alchemists knew that the secret substance, the so-called magical “philosopher’s stone,” was their own transformed consciousness. Unless they had gone through inner alchemy, as a process of purification by fire to eliminate all of the heavy, leaden aspects of their own personality in order to achieve a (golden) state of enlightened awareness, there would be no corresponding change in the material world, or in the chemical substances they were experimenting with in their laboratories.  (more…)

The Stages of Awakening

Integral Alchemy: A Guidebook for Phoenixes
Chapter 2: Awakening Within the Dream
(ii). The Stages of Awakening

What I share with you is not a textbook narrative of awakening, but a personal mapping that came out of the insights of my own experience, as there can be no other barometer of truth. But I do not believe that it is a singular or unique experience, and I’ve witnessed it enough times in others to discern a clear pattern. You can think of these stages of awakening as the journey of one person in a single lifetime, but also as the stages defining a single, peak experience – many of my meditations, breathwork sessions, and ayahuasca journeys passed through these stages, one by one, like falling dominoes. And I believe that on a larger, macrocosmic level this is also the journey that humanity is on, collectively. It’s because this is the pattern of the evolution of consciousness, the way awareness naturally ascends on a scale of frequencies, so it is inevitably mirrored in many overlapping levels of experience. (more…)

The Burning Tower: Crisis as Catalyst

Integral Alchemy: A Guidebook for Phoenixes
Chapter 2: Awakening Within the Dream
Part (i): The Burning Tower: Crisis as Catalyst

Many years ago, in what seems like another life, I used to have weird, hypnagogic reveries, as if I was waking up from an uncanny dream in broad daylight. It was an eerie, slow-motion awareness of being awake but still trapped in the strangeness of the dream landscape. In my most memorable walking dream, I found myself in an attic apartment on the 6th floor of a very old building in Berlin on Chorinerstrasse, looking out the slanted window. The vantage point seemed much higher than I knew it was, and I saw tiny insect-people on the street below, moving not in a straight line with purpose, but in a chaotic scramble of habituated fear. I smelled something burning, and began to walk around in a panic, going from one room to another, but there was no door leading outside. I intuited that there must be some hidden passageway, but I didn’t know how to find my way out. And then I suddenly realized in a flash of clarity: the burning was coming from within. I understood that I was being challenged, symbolically, to make a leap out the window into the abyss of an unknown future, and to let go of the obstacles that kept me stuck in that sealed Tower of my own mind: my sense of self-identity, which was mostly a mask to interact with others; my attachment to my personal history, my possessions, my fears, my walls of protection, and even my dreams of the future. (more…)

The Collective Scream … of Freedom

On January 1, I had a dream of a collective scream that resounded as powerful earthquake bringing down a tower of lies and heralding a new freedom, the likes of which we have never experienced before. It came to me as a vision in between a half-awakened, lucid dream and a trance-like, psychedelic meditation. And it was, for an instant, very real – like a soft blanket you grasp in your hands for comfort. I share the personal context out of which it emerged, to make the vision clearer to understand. And also to mirror it back to you, so that you can better discern your own experience in its reflection. (more…)

I am the you in me

Integral Alchemy: A Guidebook for Phoenixes
Prologue: I am the you in me

I see you in your darkness, and I behold you in your boundless light. I come from your present and future past, from all that you have been, and from your hopes and dreams. I have been calling you for a long time, but your ears have been deaf to my song.

You have found your way to me after a dark night of the soul. You have journeyed through many unravellings and rebirths on the surface of your inner world, but you know this one is different. This is the night that will not wait upon time. Although you come before me with a humble request, I cannot promise to deliver you into the light. But I can sit with you, for a while, as you learn to light your own candles. And it is possible that your night may get darker still, before the dawn appears.

You cast your gaze outward, but you already know the answer you seek, even if it’s only a vague premonition of the untold question. Do you remember those fateful words from the Matrix, which seemed to herald the irreversible moment of the only choice that ever matters? The decision to give up the comforts of illusion for the unforgiving landscape of reality.

(more…)

Wind of Change

I had a dream of watching myself within a dream. I was with my parents, in our old apartment in New York City, looking at a broadcast of the fall of the Berlin wall on television. My father had tears in his eyes, and I saw a stream of half-forgotten memories reflected in his aging face, of the arrests, and the hunger strikes, and the struggle for a dream of freedom. He grasped my mother’s hand and said “Mamicuto, se va prabusi peste tot. Si in Romania noastra.” (Little mother, it will collapse everywhere, even in our Romania). I closed the television and told my parents I was going downstairs into the streets to see it for myself. As I climbed down the stairs of the apartment building, I kept hearing the Scorpions song, Wind of Change, playing in the background of my mind, in a loop:

“Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow dream away
In the wind of change” (more…)