Preface: Wandering Through the Desert, a Lifetime is Spent…

In the years I’ve spent writing this book, it only dawned on me rather recently how it truly began. We must go back to the spring of 2013. I was at the Sasquatch Music Festival held at The Gorge Ampitheatre in eastern Washington State, coming down from an LSD trip in my tent next to my-then girlfriend. As she slept, I began a process of active imagination — an endless visualization practice in which the unconscious is allowed to emerge freely in the form of images and sounds. Chemically-propelled, I was soon out of my body and onto other planes, traveling in the midst of specters, brushstrokes, tones, feelings, sensations, landscapes, ecologies, dreams, visions, stars, galaxies, gods, ghosts, and siren calls. When I was at last fully lifted from my life in the tent, I found myself in a vast desert. There I was gathered with a throng of people, and we were wandering, searching, hoping. After what I did not know, although it felt like the most meaningful quest I had ever been on. As we traveled through sandy vistas in the scorching heat, we eventually stumbled upon what we had been unknowingly seeking: a golden temple.

We poured in, taking stock of our surroundings. I was captivated — no, no, enraptured. It was everything I needed, proof that the journey had not been made in vain. Our collective, however — composed of roughly thirty people — could not be more unsatisfied. Their voices rose around me, shouting, bickering, complaining. I felt the chaos fill the single room, which was nearly empty save for our bodies. I tried to convince my companions that we had found what we needed, but I was unsuccessful. They began pouring out, my pleadings arousing no confidence. At last, there was one woman left in the temple with me. I looked at her with desperate eyes and said, “You can’t leave!” She replied simply and with exhaustion, “There’s nothing here.” And with that, I was alone.

I accepted my solitude, sitting down in the center of the room and began meditating. In my meditation, a lifetime was spent: I grew old, hair becoming long and turning grey, and the years passed on into eternity. This was my station and in truth, I was happy. I had found my home, my purpose, my center.

My psyche has been deeply anchored to that temple and that zealous meditation ever since. After studying Carl Jung’s analytic psychology throughout the years, I have begun to see those companions I had traveled with as masks, as personas, as archetypes that I had needed to reach the meeting place of the conscious and unconscious mind — what Jung referred to as the Self. My body was the conscious mind participating with egoic awareness; the desert was the unconscious, traversed by my many archetypal companions; and the temple — the jewel hidden in plain sight — was the union of each.

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So what can be said about this? It is certainly not that I found enlightenment, but perhaps something more important: sensitivity to the numinous. I’ve buried my nose in books, rattled my mind on drugs, lost myself in sensual passion, and exalted my imagination in the artful forms — but none of this compares to the simple faith derived from that strange moment. Some would caution me against such forwardness; it may not be very pragmatic of myself to reveal my faults, my missteps, my wanderings, my little nooks and the benders they fostered. However, I also think that it would be a great disservice to not only myself, but also to my potential readers to pretend this work came from something else. All I can say with certainty is that I am this life, and with it, I am bonded to all life. Honesty even in fabulation; truth wrapped in wondrous artifice.