I promise, after I get these tracks out I’ll go back to publishing the substack-standard essays and podcasts. I just need somewhere to bring forth this work.

Through Parables of Rupture I charted my own initiation into this weird and wild moment. But then I became curious about following the same process to spotlight the mystics, psychonauts, and consciousness explorers who had gone before me. To popularize the stories of those courageous individuals who laid the foundation for the consciousness-first paradigm now emerging. The Pioneers.

1. The Murder of Hypatia

Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 355–415 CE). The last great philosopher of classical Alexandria, head of the Platonist school and one of the most brilliant minds of the ancient world. She taught mathematics, astronomy, and Neoplatonic philosophy openly to students of all faiths in a city where knowledge was still sacred. By the time the Christian mob came for her, the great Library of Alexandria had already been burning in pieces for centuries — Caesar’s fire, the destruction of the Serapeum, the slow strangulation of pagan learning under the new orthodoxy. Hypatia was what remained of its living spirit. When they dragged her from her chariot and killed her with roofing tiles in 415 CE, the ancient mysteries lost their last great public teacher — and the open inquiry of the classical world died with her.

2. Viriditas

Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179). Walled into a Benedictine monastery as a child anchoress, Hildegard saw visions of “living light” from age three and somehow grew them into one of the most extraordinary bodies of work the medieval world produced — sacred music, herbal medicine, theology, cosmology. She coined the word viriditas, the “greening power,” to describe the divine vitality coursing through all living things. She defied bishops and even challenged the Pope, and the Church silenced her in her eighties. She kept going.

3. The Pewter and the Pink Beam

Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) & Philip K. Dick (1928–1982). Two men, four centuries apart, both shattered open by light. Böhme, a German shoemaker, saw sunlight reflect off a pewter dish in 1600 and perceived the entire spiritual structure of reality — he spent the rest of his life writing it down while the Lutheran authorities tried to silence him. Dick, a science fiction writer in 1974, was struck by a beam of pink light refracting off a fish pendant and received months of gnostic revelation he chronicled in the 8,000-page Exegesis. They’re paired on this track because their initiations mirror each other so perfectly — the same kind of light, the same kind of cracking open, separated by 374 years.

4. The Secret Doctrine

Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891). Russian aristocrat turned occultist, world traveler, séance-room scandal, and the woman who almost single-handedly cracked open Western materialism. She co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 and insisted — loudly, flamboyantly, and with zero interest in respectability — that the ancient wisdom traditions of the East were not superstition but a coherent science of consciousness the West had forgotten. The Victorian establishment called her a fraud. The door she kicked open is the one Steiner, Jung, and the entire Western esoteric revival walked through.

5. Ahriman’s Prophet

Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). He came up through Theosophy and broke away to build something that still stands: Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophic medicine, eurythmy, and the Goetheanum. Steiner warned of a coming spiritual being he called Ahriman — the force of cold materialism, mechanization, and the deadening of human consciousness — and dedicated his life to building scaffolding that would keep the human spirit alive against it. When arsonists burned down his Goetheanum, he lectured through the smoke and rebuilt it in concrete.

6. The Red Book

Carl Jung (1875–1961). When Jung broke with Freud and the clinical orthodoxy of his time, he didn’t just disagree theoretically — he descended. For years he conducted what he called “active imagination,” entering visionary states and recording his encounters with archetypal figures: Elijah, Salome, Philemon, and more. The result was The Red Book, a hand-painted illuminated manuscript he kept private for decades, terrified colleagues would call him insane. From that descent came the entire vocabulary of depth psychology — the collective unconscious, archetypes, individuation, synchronicity — the map underneath every other pioneer on this album.

7. The Gateway

Robert Monroe (1915–1995). A successful radio executive in Virginia who started having spontaneous out-of-body experiences in 1958 and started taking notes. He documented his journeys for decades in books like Journeys Out of the Body and Far Journeys, and eventually founded the Monroe Institute, where he developed the Hemi-Sync audio technology and the Gateway Process — a system anyone could use to access expanded states of consciousness. The CIA studied his work, and ran with it to create their own cohort of psychic spies against the Soviet Union. The tools Monroe built are still working today.

8. Two Cups in Cambridge

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) & Ram Dass (1931–2019). They started in the same Harvard psilocybin experiments in 1960 and walked away in opposite directions. Leary went outward — evangelism, provocation, “turn on, tune in, drop out,” prison, exile, spectacle. Ram Dass went inward — to India, to Neem Karoli Baba, to decades of devotional service and Be Here Now. One was the lightning, one was the lamp. They argue across your headphones, and the song doesn’t pick a side because the paradigm shift needs both of them.

9. The Channel

Jane Roberts (1929–1984). A poet in upstate New York who sat down with a Ouija board in 1963 and ended up channeling a non-physical entity calling itself Seth for the next two decades. The Seth Material she produced is one of the most coherent metaphysical bodies of work ever recorded — articulating, with the precision of a physicist, the idea that consciousness creates reality. Before that idea was diluted into bumper-sticker spirituality, it was genuinely radical philosophy, and it cost Roberts her health. She didn’t seek the transmission. It found her.

10. The Cartographer

Dolores Cannon (1931–2014). A grandmother from small-town Arkansas who spent nearly 50 years using deep hypnotic regression to map territories most people don’t believe exist — past lives, parallel dimensions, the space between lives, splitting timelines, and what she called the Volunteer Souls. She developed Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique (QHHT) and produced 19 books of session transcripts that read like field notes from beyond. Across thousands of sessions with people who had never met each other, the reports were staggeringly consistent. Cannon didn’t seek fame. She just sat in a chair with a notepad and asked the right questions.

11. The Curandera and the Bard

Maria Sabina (1894–1985) & Terence McKenna (1946–2000). The most charged pairing on this album, and a tension I refused to resolve. Maria Sabina was a Mazatec curandera, keeper of the sacred mushroom velada that had been practiced in her community for generations. But when R. Gordon Wasson visited her in 1955 and published her story in Life magazine, it triggered a flood of seekers and ultimately exile from her own community. She died in poverty. Terence McKenna walked through the door she opened and became the most gifted psychedelic philosopher of the counterculture. Reverence and reckoning, held together.

12. Love in the Laboratory

Ann Shulgin (1931–2022) & Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin (1925–2014). A love story that doubled as a paradigm shift. Sasha was a biochemist who synthesized and personally tested over 200 psychoactive compounds. Ann was a lay therapist and Jungian explorer who brought the depth of inner work to every experience. They tested the molecules on each other at their home in Lafayette, California, and documented everything in PiHKAL and TiHKAL — half chemistry textbook, half love letter. They were paired on this track because their partnership was the method: chemistry and consciousness, molecule and meaning, working as one.

13. Communion

Whitley Strieber (b. 1945). A successful horror novelist living in a remote cabin in upstate New York. On December 26, 1985, something came into his bedroom — and nothing was ever the same. Communion, published in 1987, was not a UFO book. It was the unflinching record of what happens to a human being when something utterly outside their frame of reference forces its way into their life. He didn’t seek contact. He didn’t want it. But he rose to meet it. And for forty years he has refused to reduce the experience to either aliens or hallucination, insisting instead on staying in the question.

14. The Next Pioneer

You. The album turns the mic around. Every pioneer on this album was, before their initiation, just a person — a philosopher in a chariot, a shoemaker, a grandmother, a writer asleep in his cabin. The paradigm shift doesn’t choose special people. It chooses those willing to be cracked open by it. And there’s a suggestion in the final track that the next frontier may not look like another voice or another book. As shown in The Telepathy Tapes, it may be the awakening of capacities we’ve barely begun to use, beyond the bottleneck of language altogether.

Pioneers is available on Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube Music, or wherever you like to listen.

If you’d like to learn more about the process of collaborating with AI to create this album, and my deeper inquiry about creativity and artistic integrity, you can read about the full journey at Parables of Rupture.

This song started on the playground.

My daughter was small — three, maybe four — and she was already a climber. She’d clamber her way up the tallest rope structure, fearlessly. Little hands, little feet, arm over arm until she reached the very top. Meanwhile, I flinched at every slip. Prayed her grip was true. And always at the back of my mind, there hovered that word: “Careful…”

But I didn’t want to plant “careful” into my young girl’s wild and uninhibited mind. I didn’t want to be the voice that made her second-guess her own body, her own knowing. So I learned to follow her up the ropes. To hover like a guardian angel, ready to catch her when she fell and hold her through the tears.

Really, she was teaching me. Helping me remember who I am before the conditioning wore me down.

My daughter would see a creek and rush to jump in. But I was so rigid and serious back in those early days of parenthood. I’d groan in protest: “We didn’t bring a change of clothes,” or “You’ll get cold, this wasn’t the plan.” While she was already knee-deep in the water. I just had to kick off my shoes and join her. And you know who I met through all the splashing and stomping in the mud?

My own inner child.

That has been one of the many gifts of parenting my daughter, and then my son. And to this day I continue to apprentice myself to their ways of wildness and wonder.

In A Little Book on the Human Shadow, Robert Bly says we arrive into this world as 360-degree beings, full of radiance and wonder. But when we offer that to our parents, they can’t take it. Kids raising kids, doing the best that they can. Our full-spectrum emotionality challenges the parts of them that have been smothered and forgotten. We quickly learn to do the same, stuffing those unacceptable parts into a long black bag we drag behind us. And that bag grows heavier and heavier with all the weight of our repressed grief, our wild longings and unbridled rages, until we arrive at adulthood as a thin slice of who we were. The voice from the outside moves in below, and we run the prison from the inside.

I keep asking myself:

When did you stop?

When did you stop shrieking with joy or howling with grief?

Dancing like no one was watching, climbing trees, or rolling in the mud?

Little by little, I’m remembering.

“Careful” is available on Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube Music, or wherever you like to listen.

If you’d like to learn more about the process of collaborating with AI to create this album, and my deeper inquiry about creativity and artistic integrity, you can read about the full journey at Parables of Rupture.

Suno Prompts for Careful:

Style Prompt:

Delicate indie folk, chamber pop, sparse acoustic fingerpicking, gentle swelling strings, melancholic lullaby transitioning into a dark orchestral dirge, Powerful male vocalist, warm baritone, hushed and intimate delivery, emotionally raw, close to the mic, tender but sorrowful

Lyrics:

[Intro] Very delicate, warm acoustic guitar fingerpicking. Sounds like a nursery. Vocals: Hushed, tender, almost a whisper right by the ear.

You arrive electric. You arrive whole. Feral and wide open in the body and the soul. And then the shaping begins.

[Verse 1] Soft, warm acoustic guitar continues. Vocals: Gentle, observant.

Running on the playground, learning how to fall

But the hands are always hovering, building up the wall.

Share your toys, be a good boy, don’t you make a scene.

We pave over the wildness to keep the edges clean.

It’s kids raising kids, doing the best they can do

Passing down the armor that they were handed, too.

[Chorus] A soft, melancholic cello or violin enters. Vocals: Sweet, but carrying a heavy sadness.

Careful, careful, careful now. Don’t you climb too high.

Careful, careful, careful now. Don’t you dare touch the sky.

We say it like a blessing, we say it like a prayer

But we’re just weaving cages out of the open air.

[Verse 2] Guitar rhythm becomes slightly heavier, more rhythmic but still quiet. Vocals: Emotionally raw, chest voice creeping in.

You scrape your knee on the gravel, the tears begin to flow

A full-spectrum sorrow that you just need to know.

But Dad swoops in to save you, to wipe away the trace

Because he cannot hold the weather breaking on your face.

“It’s not that bad, you’re okay, come on now, don’t you cry.”

He’s terrified of the river, so he teaches it to dry.

An uninitiated elder, a boy behind a wall

Who learned that to be loved, he had to be so small.

[Chorus] The music swells beautifully, chamber-pop style, horns and strings — but it sounds tragic. Vocals: Sweeping, heartbroken.

So careful, careful, careful now. Don’t you feel too deep.

Careful, careful, careful now. Put the wildness to sleep.

We say it like a blessing, we say it like a prayer

But we’re just weaving cages out of the open air.

[Bridge] The warmth starts to drain from the music. The strings turn slightly dissonant. The dirge begins. Vocals: Spoken-word pacing, intimate, haunting.

And it happens so slowly, you don’t even know.

The voice from the outside, it moves in below.

Until you don’t need the father, you don’t need the guide.

You are running the prison from the inside.

[Guitar/String Break] A haunting, beautiful, but desolate chamber-pop instrumental. The lullaby melody played slow and sad.

[Outro] Instruments drop out one by one. Only a solitary, cold acoustic guitar note remains. Vocals: Barely a whisper, hollow, resigned.

Careful, careful, careful.

Look at you now.

So safe. So contained.

When did you stop?

A final, unresolved acoustic chord rings out into silence.

These songs shouldn’t exist.

Though I’ve dabbled in music for years, I’d never be able to create such extraordinary tracks. From high school orchestra to picking the banjo for my church congregation, and from busking fiddle at farmers’ markets to blues guitar classes at Berkeley’s Freight and Salvage, I’ve tried my hand at various instruments and styles throughout my life. I adore music. Always got a tune in my ear. But I’m no Musician with a capital M.

I’m not a singer or a song-writer. And I’m not a producer. I hold such talented folks in the highest esteem, and I would never want to cramp their style, or threaten their art.

And yet I went and done something bad.

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It was so fun though. It was magic. And I fell completely into it, following my own creative spark.

In a matter of days, I created a whole album of AI generated songs.

The notion came to me after I finished my proof-of-concept trailer for The Lost Years. I had used Suno to create the Southern Funk-Guitar track to which Young Yeshua evades the Roman Empire while hunting the secrets of Ancient Egypt, and I had credits left over on my account. (For $10 a month, you can create a whopping 500 songs!) And, I don’t know, I just wanted to try it.

I wanted to hear what it would sound like. I wanted there to be music in the world that spoke to the perilous and potent times we are living through. Songs that faced the metacrisis with full spectrum emotionality, without backing down. An album that was a kind of sonic initiation into this paradigm shifting moment.

So in collaboration with Anthropic’s Claude, I honed my vision for the album and architected its structure following the stages of my own dark night journey: From realization of climate catastrophe and civilizational collapse, through breakdown into the wild edge of sorrow, and rising up to offer my gifts in service to the healing and regeneration of our planet. Then I crafted a custom Gem in Google’s Gemini, a “singer-songwriter” tuned to the frequency of The Great Turning. To create each song, I poured my thoughts and feelings around a particular topic into this Catalyst Bard. This soul-less intelligence pushed back, asked questions, helped me go deeper into my own self-inquiry. Then, when we were ready, Catalyst Bard suggested lyrics and a detailed style prompt for Suno.

Song by song, I iterated to find the right words, the right sound to express the stages of my metamorphosis. I’d challenge Catalyst Bard: Where’s the conflict? Where’s the breakthrough? Make it darker. Make it catchier. Needs more guitar. (I’ll have to be honest, it was fun as to hell to play at being a music producer.)

Sometimes I’d find the song in the first couple of tries. Sometimes it took 30 or 40 iterations, bringing the lyrics and the prompt back to Catalyst Bard for revision and fine-tuning. And then I’d bring them back again.

Generate and iterate. Generate and iterate.

Until, finally, I’d hear it.

Yes, that’s the one!

The instruments are synthesized. The voices are amalgamated from every singer on the internet. But holy fuck does that track slap.

The first time I heard ‘The Flood,’ I melted into tears. ‘Rise Up’ gets my blood pumping for the revolution.

Here was my story, my own personal journey, reflected back to me. And my whole psyche felt the resonance.

Others I’ve shared the album with have had similar reactions. They were deeply moved by the music. Even said it was genre-defining. They were thrilled at the prospect of flooding the airwaves with propaganda for the more beautiful world.

Still others were utterly repulsed by what I had done. And rightfully so! In a couple of days, and with some clever prompting, I had created something that would have taken an honest, human musician months or even years. Where was the artistic integrity in that?

In ‘The Pill,’ my gospel-funk singer belts out: “We’re taking back the soul!” But there’s no soul in that AI generated voice.

Is there…?

The Inquiry

Now I’ve been a struggling writer for over a decade. I could paper the walls of my apartment with all the rejections I’ve received from literary agents and sci-fi/fantasy magazines. The submissions I’ve made that never got a response would light a bon-fire for days. I did sell one story to Analog Science Fiction and Fact, for around $1200. Divide that by the number of hours I’ve been honing my craft, and multiply by the mass of white-collar workers who are about to lose their jobs to AI, and I might just be scraping by on a living wage. (If only they stopped building high-rises in Berkeley, and driving up the rent!)

All joking aside, I know that you don’t make good art without cracking a few eggs. At least not art that’s authentic and sings from the core of your truth. There will always be those who love your work, and those who hate it.

But the strong reactions about AI music, from people I respect and consider friends, prompted a deeper inquiry.

Should I even try to share this music? Or should I just keep it to myself? And how would I bring it forth in integrity, without threatening the real musicians who have poured years into their craft, like I’d done with writing?

I’ve been holding this inquiry for weeks, wrestling with it, and seeking counsel from mentors and friends. I still don’t have an answer.

And yet AI music exists. It’s not going away.

The Instrument

This little thought experiment has helped me make sense of the situation:

Suppose I’d never touched an oboe before in my life. I picked it up, pursed my lips against the reed. Clenched my fingers over the buttons, and—

BLAAACHTT!

I belched out a sloppy, irreverent sound.

But that same instrument in the hands of a virtuoso could emit the most etheric and subtle melodies.

Now imagine an instrument where the pipes and valves are infinitely more complex than the ones that compose an oboe. You could place your fingers on a board of keys and make your best attempt at self-expression. Then the energy of your intention would zip through its infrastructure to output something along the spectrum of slop to high art.

The instrument can’t play itself, though. Even if all those wires and pipes are a million miles long, trace them back to the source and you’ll find a human soul.

Parables of Rupture may have been made in collaboration with AI, but I’m the one doing the belching.

And to the point of integrity: The vast majority of AI generated music out there is sneaky. You might not know that you aren’t listening to a human voice, as artists are not in the habit of disclosing that their work is AI generated. I really think there should be a different category, a choice. But these tools are evolving way faster than we can adapt.

My response is full transparency. This essay details my process. My artist’s profile will name the tools I used.

Listen. Or don’t. It’s up to you.