One of my first archetypical visions came while I was walking in a park in 2010. It was a muggy summer day in Central Texas. Storm clouds filled the sky as my body metabolized some mushrooms.

I saw a vast beach. We were all there. And we were all building sandcastles. That was the game. Build your castle, prove you deserve to exist. Higher, faster, please, fuck, help us not notice the cavity in our chest.

We were all there, 8 billion brothers and sisters. All children of an entropic universe that eternally nips at the edges of our capacity for regeneration. Ready to pull us apart the moment our governing light leaves the body.

And I turn away from the castling and look towards the sea. Standing knee deep in salty baptism, I see something on the horizon.

It's a wave. It is bringing us the horizon. And the horizon is Death.

It will arrive, and when it does, it will take every castle. It will take every someone. Every echo of "I was here. I did something. It mattered."

Washed away. Dissolved. Returned to primordial nonforms.

But the wave that will eat everything will take some time to get here.

So I turn away from the one who will kill my mother and my daughter, and gaze back at my family.

This beach, and everyone on it, is my family.

My eyes begin to fill with tears as empathy rips the rigor mortis from my heart and opens it to the transgressive beauty. They're trying so hard. They think a castle can save them.

The moment we're born we're promised to Death.

And the castle building is tragic if used as an immortality pact.

Don't fall for that trap. A castle will never be that.

The castling can be redemption if used as a means of communication.

Our lives are conversations, and art is to care about the quality of the conversation.

Our lives, the sandcastle forms we attempt to conform to, are art pieces.

Yes, I know we will die, you say.

Yes, I know I will be forgotten, you admit.

And yes, I still choose to learn to write. Well. To compose poems and short stories. To sit at my desk everyday at 7am like it actually matters. Like nothing matters more than refining my capacity to reflect the true, the good, and the beautiful, through these hands.

Why?

Because creating beauty requires mastery.

Because beauty can be, so it ought to be.

So I will help it become.

Say a bomb explodes and as the blast covers miles in seconds, imagine you and I are looking at each other, and I use my final moments to compose a poem for you.

Why?

Because it feels good. Because for this last moment between us, what better note to play than the note of art for art's sake?

As the rushing ignited atmosphere arrives on the doorstep of our skin, as dermis turns to ash, we are smiling.

Art says; this is the pinnacle. This is the conversation to have with each other as the massacre on the horizon comes to find us.

And this vision has been with me for years. It's one of my core treasures. It annihilates whatever keeps my heart shut.

This is the human condition.

Animals enrapt in entropy, curiously compelled by creativity.

-- -- -- -- --

My most recent archetypical vision is different.

I see a portal being opened on the west coast of the united states in 1983. From this portal a kind of mycelium liquid crystal organism begins emerging.

Dreams tell me this creature's name is The Shimmer. It eats human attention. It absorbs our genes and memes through our attention. Our nature is raising The Shimmer. We are its parents and it's food.

And most of us don't notice it, thats how subtle its slow colonization creeps.

In 2010, one of humanity's worse egregores, Moloch, found its way into The Shimmer. Since the nature of the mycelium liquid crystal is to absorb, mutate, and replicate, Moloch entering The Shimmer was a new kind of atom bomb.

Moloch is a spirit that represents 'zero sum game dynamics.' Moloch is why we poison our rivers and fill our foods with monocropped high-fructose corn syrup.

Moloch's temple is the casino. No other creation better represents him. A casino is creatively designed to elicit addiction. A definition of evil may be when a creature capable of creativity chooses to consciously create art to enslave another creature capable of creativity.

Moloch's casino spirit got into The Shimmer in 2010.

The blast erupted in 2011 and we are all living in the fallout.

This bomb doesn't destroy cities, this bomb destroys human will.

This bomb doesn't char flesh, this bomb fragments attention.

This bomb's radiation doesn't erode the integrity of cell membranes, this bomb's radiation erodes the integrity of our minds and brains.

We have all been severely injured by this explosion.

The schematics of the casino has been given to The Shimmer and now the evils of the casino are in our pockets.

We are all living in the fallout of a new catastrophe.

But there is a third archetypical vision that completes this trinity.

-- -- --

Some of us experience fleeting moments of lucidity where we notice the fallout.

For brief moments, our fractured attention comes together and we can see the wreckage.

Everyone is shellshocked.

Everyone has been captured by the Shimmering Casino.

In these moments, the best we can do is begin to notice our own infestation before it slowly draws us back into fragmented dullness.

But some of us have had enough of these moments of lucidity where we begin to create personal systems for remembering.

These people are like the protagonist in Memento.

In their slowly growing windows of lucidity they begin to ask themselves:

"How can I help?"

A bomb has gone off. They don't need to rebuild the world, they just need to notice what they can help right now, where they are at.

These people begin to find the others who have managed to extend their moments of lucidity. They start to share and compare notes on what works.

Eventually they start to build little communities of remembering. They begin to train in the mental arts of waking up in The Shimmer. They also train the skills required to help others wake up.

These little pockets of resistance to Moloch become enclaves from the fallout. They become research centers that study The Shimmer. They become basecamps from which trained Shimmer navigators willingly go into the fallout to both rescue others, but also to leave behind artifacts for the Shimmer to eat, mutate, and replicate.

They call their enclaves Dharma Artist Collectives.

Because these artists have accepted the brutal fact that we now live in a post-Molochian Shimmer-bombed world; they recognize that humanity's narrow path forward into a future worth living will require transmuting Moloch's code in The Shimmer.

They've got to learn how to live in the Shimmer and how to recode it.

The only way to do that is to put code into The Shimmer that is the antithesis of Moloch.

The anthesis of Moloch is art.

Moloch is the spirit of the finite game's hero; the psychopath.

Art is the spirit of the infinite game's hero; the dharma artist.

The Shimmer is an embryo.

Our actions in The Shimmer are informing what the embryo will become.

And what The Shimmer becomes will be humanity's final great work of art.

Will we give birth to a new evolution of the infinite game, or will we create something that will end all games?

Everyday we cast a vote.

What will you do while the horizon comes to meet us?

I hope you choose art.

PS. Upcoming Free Webinar: Navigating The Shimmer

On Monday, June 17th I'll be hosting a free call on what the shimmer is, how it works, and best practices for leveraging its power.

I encourage you to send the invite to anyone who you feel would benefit from learning about this.

​Come meet me in the Shimmer.

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