Field Notes
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For the first time this year I finished my morning run with sunshine in my eyes. The way I like to structure my routes is so that the last quarter of the run is always in the direction where I will face the rising sun. No matter how hard I'm working, no matter how exhausted I am from the mileage already behind me, no matter what's on my mind... the moment when the rising sun's rays hit my face and eyes is more invigorating than six cups of coffee. I can't recommend it enough.
Half of last year I kept having lucid dreams I called staging. Every single one ended the same way — I'd sink, spiral, spin down into a void. I read them as endings. They weren't. They were the instruction, repeated over and over until I finally tested it this past weekend and went down instead of up during transitions.
This past weekend my family and I were sitting down at our local In-N-Out as we usually do on Saturdays. It was very busy but we were lucky enough to grab a few seats at a bar section next to an older gentleman as we waited for our "to-go" order to be called. The older man moved one seat over to let me have a chance to sit down as well, I thanked him and we struck up a conversation as we all waited there.
This has been an interesting week of same ol' struggles that I've been facing over the past few weeks and a couple of new discoveries that are shaking me out of the perceived rut. I feel like I'm methodically working my way back up out of a valley with the recent progress. I've also begun to change how I use some of my tools for consciousness exploration and I'm liking the results.
Art
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Essays
View AllBelief, Experience, Knowledge, Gnosis
I've written near and around my personal practice, Agile Awareness, in my last two essays, scattered over various Field Notes, and bits and pieces in other scraps. I have yet to address it directly. After some serious thread pulling, I've realized that a string of recent meditation queries have woven those threads into a tapestry that not only describes my current physical existence but more importantly the practice that I've arrived at.
If Stillness Is Sin
If identification with mind is the original sin — the moment presence is lost and duality begins — then the practice that systematically dissolves that identification is not a deviation from the sacred but rather a direct path back to it.
No One Is Coming
The most dangerous prophecy doesn't fail to come true—it's specifically designed to keep you waiting forever. When you convince people that salvation comes from outside, that they need to wait for someone else to fix things, to save them, to reveal truth, you've built the perfect control system. One that runs on hope turned into passivity.
The Wall Had a Door
For months I kept slamming into the same wall. Lucid in a dream, attempting to "meditate my way into projection," and either collapsing back to waking or losing lucidity entirely. I've known about staging lucid dreams for further altered state exploration and have had most of my success in projecting through this exact modality. The success rate has always been about 20% and for a long stretch last year I felt like every time I transitioned from a lucid dream into projection it broke down or failed to launch almost immediately. I understood it intellectually. But I couldn't execute it. January 24th showed me why.
Who Do You Want To Be Next Month?
Early on in working through The Gateway Experience tapes, a particular session became an instant staple in my practice, just like for many others. There are other tracks throughout the entire program which I've identified as "practical" and continue to return to, but this one takes the prize for most used. I'm talking about "The Gateway Experience -- Wave II - Threshold -- One-Month Patterning".
Bear With Me
On January 11, 2026, I laid down for a guided self-hypnosis session, one of Dick Sutphen's Astral Projection Workshop tracks. It's an old one that I've been returning to when I don't really feel like I have a particular direction to focus on and am limited on time. I've mentioned the following many times before: I absolutely love the depths that Sutphen's method takes me to. By the time you're taken further into the deep end, you begin to really understand what riding the razor's edge between losing consciousness and being aware is. The best part is how heavy and non-existent the physical body becomes, which is absolutely crucial.
The Broadcast Theory
During one of my familiar, and at this point staple, stops in Focus 12 I inadvertently set off a cascade of events that helped bring into focus what I've been suspecting for quite a while. The first section is purely personal and subjective but it is important to observe before laying out the hypothesis. I will paraphrase before expanding on everything: What appeared initially as personal communications from guides have transmuted into a much more digestible and broadly defined communication modality.
Homecoming
On December 31st, 2025, I consumed 4.5 grams of Golden Teacher psilocybin. My ADHD brain processes the compound differently than most - instead of flooding the visual cortex it routes straight to cognition, amplifying the already multi-threaded thought processes running in parallel. Zero visuals during the peak, just 10+ tracks of thought simultaneously unfolding. I ended up meditating through it, watching the elephant symbolism arrive: historical images, intimate close-ups, and one particular elephant face smiling, laughing. The laughter felt welcoming but also knowing - it recognized the performance aspect, the ego wanting to see, wanting to learn, the impossibility of self-exploration without ego entanglement. The elephant knew. Perhaps I was laughing at myself.
2025
Self-portraits are a specific kind of category of creative work that I simultaneously absolutely enjoy viewing and dread doing it myself. Percept Index presents a unique opportunity for me as my long-term project: a way, a reason, a need to produce at the very least a single self-portrait and at semi-regular intervals, such as once a year. So, in the most 'I'm an artist, witness me!' way possible here is my self-centered and completely ego-driven contribution to the year of 2025.
Mental Sink
The beginning of my journey with deep meditation and altered states exploration was primarily focused on shadow work, and rightfully so. Eventually once you make some headway and see not just beginner progress but real and impactful changes, there's a natural tendency to coast, or sometimes completely forget how you got there to begin with. Fear not, this is a self-correcting problem. When it's been a while since you've done "housekeeping" or what I like to call "psychological hygiene", you'll know because you will let yourself know.
Spherical Energy Outline
Field Notes entries focus on brevity and getting to the point of the particular session or experience that was had. They also include other events that happen which seem to be out of the norm, they're worth recording in case we can spot a connection or simply to document. What I seldom ever do is discuss my own base process and how I go about getting my meditations started. In today's longform journal entry, I will be outlining what I do as my meditation starts and the phenomena that I've been tracking for the last 6 months, which I'm finally deciding to write about.