Return with Elixir: Four Maps for the Soul's Pilgrimage through Death and Rebirth

Visions

Third Eye Intuitions

I’ve never considered myself a visionary, but I do have visions. By this I mean full images appearing in my waking state seemingly out of nowhere, offering a message to decipher and prompting me to begin a discovery process. I’m no longer apprehensive about sharing these visions because they are more common than we think. Most of us have intuition, premonitions, or even extra-sensory perceptions, yet we’ve been conditioned by our culture to dismiss them outright or keep them private for fear of being labeled an attention-seeker, lunatic, grandiose, or worse. As I will explore in depth in this book, that’s part of the problem: our culture fails to acknowledge and connect us with the dimensions of non-ordinary states of consciousness like the unseen world of spirit or the Dreamtime. The deeper our separation from Source, or what the ancients called the awe-inspiring mystery becomes, the more profound our symptoms of dis-ease.

For centuries Western culture has cast skepticism on our innate capacity for expanding consciousness. While we have made strides toward understanding the material world through quantum physics, cognitive neuroscience, and molecular biology—even sending people into space and manipulating genetic code—we have done so at the expense of our innate psychological abilities, the evolutionary advantage of awareness, the healing capacity of the subtle, energetic, nervous system, and the potential for meaning derived from fulfilling our soul’s purpose.

In the months preceding the pandemic of 2020, I had a series of revelations that directed my students and me on a path of sacred wisdom intertwining ancient cosmology, Joseph Campbell’s mythopoetics, Carl Jung’s archetypal psychology, and the Tibetan alchemy of rebirth. Departing home I followed these threads deep into a foreboding labyrinth where I faced a terrifying minotaur and eventually came through the other side, not alone, but with a group of fellow pilgrims, seated atop the Borobudur, largest mandala in the world, and together broadcasting a message of hope to you and future generations. The tapestry woven from those threads and their relevance to the meaning crisis humanity now faces during this seismic epoch shift became this book—Return with Elixir.

Visions like mine mark an odyssey as ancient as time itself and led to me reclaiming something vital that is so often lost in modern culture. The particulars may not have global relevance, but my visions were part of my conscious metamorphosis, and by extension, an invitation for us each to embark upon on a collective journey and shared mythos. My journey is my own, but I followed the path of mystics and heroes, validating and reaffirming the larger enterprise we human beings can—and I would add must—undertake in a pursuit of truth, meaning, and fulfillment. As Campbell wrote, We have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path.¹ This is especially true nowadays, when we find ourselves on the cusp of an extraordinary paradigm shift toward the expansion of consciousness, societal regeneration, structural reorganization, and a renewed spiritual connection with nature. In this way, sharing my story is a call to action, a leap of faith, and a reunion of reason with intuition.

This book is an invitation to you, in which I encourage you to go deeper into the mythological mysteries—the shadow world—to listen to the whispers of your embodied wisdom, the echoes of your ancestors, the prophecies of mystics, the forecast of astrologers, and even the noetic silence of God. No matter where you are in your journey, never underestimate the power of your soul to teach and guide you, even if it appears in unrecognizable guises, communicates in unsuspecting ways, or leads you into territories of hardship and loss; learn its language, become a servant to its mission, and be willing to take risks to receive its boon. Challenge the status quo of globalist propaganda and materialistic culture that has zombified us into a dissociative servitude, deprived of meaning, and instead embark upon an adventure into the netherworld.

For me, it was visions of the Greek god Asclepius that prompted me to begin an odyssey to reclaim my soul.

VISIONS OF ASCLEPIUS

In 2017, I was working as a psychotherapist and Buddhism teacher, when the panic attacks I’d had when I was young returned. The irony of being a psychotherapist plagued by anxiety before seeing my patients is not lost on me. They mainly occurred on Monday mornings. I felt suffocated, like the walls were closing in. The collar of my button-down shirt choked me. My high-rent Manhattan office, once a source of pride, evidence of my so-called success, had become an ornate birdcage—pretty from the outside, but a trap, nonetheless. The windows looked out on façades of enormous buildings that typified the concrete jungle. Piles of garbage stacked neatly in those iconic black bags lined the streets below obscuring flowers and trees. Day after day, building after building, floor after floor, office after office, for as far as I could see, workers buzzed, clutching their to-go coffee in one hand while sedated by their smartphones in the other.

As Annie Dillard famously wrote, How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.² Where were their lives going? How was living like this accepted, even sought after? How did we get there? How did I get here? In those mornings of panic, I felt like I was the only person witnessing how humanity had devolved. In this unnatural landscape, caged and barely able to glimpse the sky, a consistent but confusing drip of stimulants and anesthetics delivered through digital IVs, the pace of life has hit warp speed. Yet, we persistently run around in circles, exhausted and going nowhere, living what the Buddha described as a cycle of suffering without end—samsara—on steroids. Although my vocation was to heal this suffering, I myself had become symptomatic. The view from my office revealed the communal symptoms, my panic attacks the private ones—messages from my soul alerting me that we had lost our way.

I had reached the limit of my ability to offer the care my patients deserved, so something had to change. I felt like a fraud. For decades, I’d trained in and practiced conventional talk therapies and took seriously my aspiration to be of service to those in pain and for whom the manifestations of the outer world were the causes of problems in their inner worlds. I counseled the working well, what Freud called ordinary neurotics, about their job stress, relationship difficulties, low-grade depression, and the all-too-common meaninglessness, apathy, and unworthiness that plague us modern humans. These were well-intentioned and mostly high-functioning people struggling with the symptoms of our post-industrial civilization, best characterized as fragmentation between body and mind, self and other, humanness and nature.

While my consistency, presence, and attunement often helped people in their time of need so that they could keep putting on their button-down shirts and heading to their offices, something was missing. Something vital was not being addressed during our weekly sessions. Could people even get well when our world has gone so utterly mad? How could we treat a dis-ease that had become so normal, its symptoms so well blended, they dissolved in the everyday currents of life? I constantly recalled the words attributed to Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti: It’s no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.³

THE LAMENT OF HERMES

My vitality, patience, and capacity for delight atrophied as I slipped toward the precipice of my existential self-doubt. What the fuck was I doing? According to the mandates of my training as a psychologist, I was following protocol. According to the benchmarks of my culture, I had achieved all measure of success. Yet nothing could have felt more misaligned. Was I really helping people? My Monday morning anxiety persisted as the answers evaded me. Was I going to put myself on medication, spend more hours with my therapist in his concrete box on the other side of the city, or was there an alternative?

Those questions raced through my mind as I listlessly searched the internet for answers. By chance, but more likely synchronicity, I saw a video by British author Graham Hancock reading the Lament of Hermes, an ancient Greek and Latin text interpreted by Saint Augustine in the first century CE. Like a piercing arrow, the words emanating from my computer screen bypassed my linear, left brain and dove deep and directly into my soul.

Of thy religion, nothing will remain but an empty tale, which thine own children in time to come will not believe; nothing will be left, but graven word and only the stones will tell of thy piety. And that day, men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the universe worthy of reverent wonder and worship. And so religion, the greatest of all blessings, for there is nothing, nor has been, nor ever shall be, that can be deemed a greater boon, will be threatened with destruction; men will think it a burden and will come to scorn it. They will no longer love this world around us, this incomparable work of God, this glorious structure which He has built, this sum of good made up of things of many diverse forms, this instrument whereby the will of God operates in that which he has made, ungrudgingly favoring man’s welfare, this combination, and accumulation of all the various things that can call forth the veneration, praise, and love of the beholder.

Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life; no one will raise his eyes to heaven; the pious will be deemed insane, and the impious wise; the madman will be thought a brave man, and the wicked will be esteemed as good. As to the soul, and the belief that it is immortal by nature, or may hope to attain to immortality, as I have taught you, all this they will mock at, and will even persuade themselves that it is false. No word of reverence or piety, no utterance worthy of heaven and of the gods of heaven, will be heard or believed.⁴

The words Hancock shared are described as a lament, which is precisely what I felt toward our culture. The message conveyed in this passage could not have been more relevant to my plight. After a moment of profound awe, I dug deeper and discovered this wisdom was based on a mythological prophecy attributed to Hermes, the Greek messenger of the gods, describing the fall and rebirth of the Egyptian civilization. Addressed to his student Asclepius, it was part of a text of the same name—The Asclepius—found in the Corpus Hermeticum containing the ancient foundational teachings of Egyptian magick, alchemy, astrology, and other esoterica. Hermes’s Lament was a message transmitted through the ages, which fortunately for me, reached my soul’s antenna.

I’d been a student and teacher of Tibetan Buddhism for more than twenty years, so my first encounters with Asclepius and his serpent-entwined staff via synchronicities such as this one—and later, in dreams—took me by surprise, because they originated from a culture I knew little about. I came to learn Asclepius was the Greek god of healing. His name means to cut open because, according to myth, he was delivered via cesarean section by his father, the god Apollo, from his mortal mother’s womb as she lay on her deathbed. For me, this was profoundly symbolic because it was Asclepius who would excise me from the bondage of my culture-bound prison.

Apollo entrusted young Asclepius to the centaur and physician Chiron, archetype of the wounded healer, who raised and trained him in the secret arts of natural healing. One day, Asclepius killed a snake with his staff, then observed another snake revive the dead one by regurgitating medicinal herbs into its mouth. He deduced which herbs were used and began resurrecting patients from the dead. As his gifts as a healer grew, Asclepius antagonized the gods, deprived Hades of souls for the underworld, and disrupted the natural order of things to the point of provoking the ire of Zeus, who killed him with a single thunderbolt. After his death, Asclepius spent a short time in the underworld, but because of his acumen and virtue, Zeus placed him among the stars as the constellation Ophiuchus—the Serpent Holder—elevating his status from demi-god to god.

Asclepius is often depicted as a healthy, bare-chested, bearded man dressed in a toga, holding his iconic staff. Many will notice the similarities to the caduceus—the staff with not one but two intertwined, winged, and ascending serpents wielded by the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian goddess Isis—which still today represents medicine and is depicted on modern hospital and pharmacy logos. In most Indigenous cultures, the serpent is a potent symbol of rejuvenation and rebirth because the snake sheds its skin to become anew. The snake is also a compelling symbol because its poison, if administered appropriately, can be transformed into medicine becoming—according to the Asclepius myth—the elixir of immortality. Poison, which ordinarily kills, with esoteric wisdom, liberates.

Citizens of ancient Greece and Asia Minor made pilgrimages to their nearest Asklepion—healing temples and sanctuaries, sacred places to resolve physical and mental diseases. Ruins of more than 300 Asklepion still exist in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. These include the most well-preserved and famous sites at Athens, Kos, Pergamon, and Epidaurus in modern Greece and Turkey. They were our hospitals’ precursors, but their healing modes were holistic and spiritual. The locations for these healing sites weren’t arbitrary; they were remote places of natural beauty, far from the bustle of the cities and of commerce; quiet, serene, and restorative. They were places where natural elements featured prominently as part of the healing matrix.

This isn’t limited to the Mediterranean. Ancient and Indigenous peoples have customarily considered ___location and environment to be as important as action and process—and it’s universal. Consider how Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce peoples famously said, The earth and myself are of one mind. The measure of the land and the measure of our bodies are the same.⁵ The Greeks understood this; as part of the therapy, the Asklepion incorporated the power of the sun, geothermal radiation, hot and cold natural springs, medicinal herbs, fresh air, and perhaps even magnetic fields called ley lines.

As for protocol, based on inscriptions on stela that have survived the centuries, we know pilgrims and patients made their way to the sanctuary entrance where they underwent two phases of healing. The first—katharsis—involved a strict diet and ritual bathing—practices of purification sometimes lasting several days. This had a twofold purpose: cleansing the body and priming the mind. Offerings were made to Asclepius himself at the inner temple, along with prayers and other rituals recommended by the temple priests according to the patient’s symptoms. Again, I imagine these actions of reciprocity with the divine allowed the soul access to what we would now call the placebo effect, or what famous Harvard cardiologist Dr. Herbert Benson redefined and coined remembered wellness.⁶ There was a keen awareness that, in addition to the natural environment, a patient’s belief, worldview, and lifestyle were critical in the restorative process. Consider all we have lost along the path of industrialization.

Patients were led to a sizeable open dormitory called the abaton for the second phase—incubatio. You read that correctly; the main form of healing at the Asklepion was incubation or temple sleep, which was more than mere rest and perhaps the earliest known precursor of psychoanalytic dream interpretation. In the abaton, patients may have been given hallucinogenic plants to facilitate deep hypnotic slumber and initiate them into the therapeutic dream journey not unlike the current therapeutic use of psychedelics.⁷

At some Asklepion, hundreds of beds filled the central dormitory. Along with the patients, supine on low mattresses on the marble floor, host animals—dogs, roosters, and of course, non-lethal snakes—roamed among the sick, occasionally biting or licking the wounds of the injured who, in their dream journeys were visited by Asclepius or his daughters Hygeia and Panacea, who might spontaneously heal or directly diagnose and prescribe treatments. At other times, dreams were more cryptic, and upon awakening, patients would receive counsel and interpretations from temple physicians we might call the first psychotherapists, literally soul healers. When healing wasn’t immediate, patients were prescribed holistic treatments and remained on the sanctuary grounds for days or weeks to recover and rejuvenate. In some cases (as evidenced by the array of surgical implements uncovered on-site at Epidaurus by modern archeologists), surgeries were performed, or patients were sent to the gymnasium for exercise and rehabilitation. Finally, they could attend the outdoor amphitheaters—the one at Epidaurus held 15,000—for music and performances that elicited catharsis or emotional release. The origins of Western theater used now for entertainment likely came from these early forms of therapy, allowing onlookers to access the shadow world of their unconscious and, through active imagination, identify with the heroes and antagonists in classical drama and comedy, which allowed for emotional integration.

Testimonials of patient recoveries were inscribed in stone at Epidaurus for future generations. Along with the Oracle at Delphi and the summoning of mystical or non-local agencies for healing and guidance, the Asklepion served the sick throughout Greece and Asia Minor for centuries before being phased out toward the end of the Roman period. Despite their success, these natural healing centers, and the remedies they delivered, accomplished perhaps what was most threatening to the late-stage Romans and early Christians: they empowered citizens to heal themselves. As in the mythology of Asclepius, destroyed by a threatened Zeus because of his power to heal, successive civilizations would require unquestioning and unflinching allegiance to the state or dominant religion and could not afford the competition posed by the empowering wisdom of the great mystery schools and bastions like the asklepia.

MY DEPARTURE

This potent symbol of the Asklepion was a stark contrast to my sterile office in Manhattan. This vision of more natural and integrated healing inspired me to break out of the suffocating status quo. After years of meaningful psychoanalysis, I left my therapist and deepened my work with astrologer Lynn Bell, who encouraged me to follow my intuition, to engage my dreams and daytime visions of Asclepius, and to more broadly turn myself over to a mythological way of life. With her, I reconceived how I could deliver therapy in ways that fed rather than starved my patients’s souls and mine. Lynn challenged my attachment to long-held dogmas in psychotherapy and Buddhism—organizing systems that were instrumental in my development but began to stagnate the growth of my psyche just as my Manhattan office confined me. As you shall soon see, every step forward arrives not at a sought-after destination but at a new way station on the soul’s journey. Lynn helped me connect with a fire that was destroying me from within, one representing my soul’s pushback against the restrictions of professional conventions, and she coached me on how to channel that fire to incinerate those limitations to make way for a new, more creative work with my clients. Just as one may ironically slash-and-burn to make fields more fertile for new crops, Lynn helped me confront rigid, long-standing allegiances to external institutions I cherished, so a new, inner authority could emerge.

Along with the button-down shirts, gone was the neck-up therapy approach. As Lynn guided me, I gave myself permission to employ and blend techniques I had gathered over the years but lacked the confidence to implement. I introduced my clients to guided visualizations from the Buddhist tradition, the mythological dimension from Joseph Campbell, somatic therapy for root-cause trauma, shadow-work from Swiss psychoanalyst and mystic Carl Jung. More important than any method, I trusted our intuitive processes and spontaneous interactions.

To truly accomplish this shift in therapeutic practice—and, as the ancient Greeks had done in the Asklepion—mindset and setting needed to be considered as part of the treatment, and for that to happen, the right brain had to come online, and the conversational, analytic left brain integrated with the right’s embodied sensations, dreams, rituals, poetry, and art—all serving as highways into the soul. To connect right brain with left—reason with intuition, executive prowess with creative genius—I recognized that mythology and astrology needed to be incorporated into my psychology practice along with Tibetan alchemy.

As I journeyed in this new direction my panic attacks subsided because something within me was being attended to and acknowledged. I was breathing deeply again. The dormant serpent of vitality and creativity had been roused from its depressive slumber. Had I consulted a conventional psychiatrist instead of Lynn Bell, perhaps medications would have been prescribed, suppressing my panic attacks, and drowning out the faint call to adventure of my soul. Panic may not always be a symptom of pathology after all, but an intuitive push against stagnation and conformity. In many cases when we suppress the symptom in its early stages, when a tremor, it can magnify becoming a volcanic eruption—a midlife crisis, manic episode, depressive relapse, psychotic break, or suicide attempt.

During this metamorphosis I exchanged my network of over-medicating psychiatrists and cognitive therapists for natural healers of various disciplines: astrologers, Tibetan doctors, reiki practitioners, herbologists, and sound bowl experts. This meant incorporating the missing mythological dimension of healing. If I had dreams, saw images, or felt sensations in my body during or between sessions with my clients, I interpreted these not as pathologies to be feared or distractions to be dismissed but as messages to be interpreted. Whenever I felt resistance or blocks, or if something felt incredible, extraordinary, or altogether unknown, I leaned in with curiosity and allowed the process to unfold. I instructed my patients to do the same—to attune to their bodies, attend to their dreams and synchronicities, and be intrigued by imagery, myths, music, and literature as they followed the path into their psyches, braving the unknown, and trusting that together, we could revitalize a sacred relationship with the unconscious. For example, some clients selected myths that resonated strongly with their presenting problems, and we enacted the narrative themes in their lives. Others used paintings or mandala drawings, and we tracked, metabolized, and integrated emergent material from their unconscious. Dreams were not minimized as flights of fancy and dismissed, nor were they overanalyzed as Freudians do, privileging reason, but by deeply attending with reverence, as archetypal psychologist James Hillman said, the dream has nothing to do with the waking world but is the psyche speaking to itself in its own language.⁸ The power of healing comes not from eliminating symptoms through cognitive-behavioral reframes, but by restoring the broken lines of communication with the soul.

Soul, Buddha nature, mystery, God, Self (as opposed to self) . . . whatever you name it, is ceaselessly communicating messages from subtle realms—where what Carl Jung referred to as the collective unconscious and personal unconscious meet. Although our culture has tried to destroy these invaluable relay lines through skepticism, the need for rational control, or because wisdom does not engender profit, occasionally, the messages slip past the barricades. The question becomes: Do we listen to whispers, decipher encoded messages, and allow the intuition to guide us deeper into the netherworld for a chance at discovering something new? Can we surrender hyperrationality, to liberate the soul?

I chose to listen, and as I did, something happened. Beyond my panic attacks subsiding, my existential doubt about the plight of our modern culture did as well. I believe the same can happen for humanity if enough of us listen and learn from what lies hidden within us. Our global symptoms are likewise a call of the collective soul to adventure, to disrupt the status quo of rigid conformity, to salvage our sovereignty, and begin again anew.

FROM KNOWLEDGE TO WISDOM

In the months before the pandemic of 2020, I had a series of three more visions that became the impetus for this book. The first occurred while I was visiting the island of Ithaca in Greece, made famous as the home and primary destination of Odysseus. I learned an incredible new word while I was there: nostos. Lexicographers may refer to this as an acquaintance or something known, but in the epics of Homer, nostos refers to the love for and longing to return home. After the Trojan War and what we will see was his Hero’s Journey of separation, initiation, trial, and treasure, Odysseus persisted for ten years before he returned to Ithaca and his beloved wife and son.

The power of myth is that it allows us to walk in a hero’s footsteps, so think about what home means to you—the place, people, and state of mind. If you were separated from them for a long time, what creature comforts would you surrender, what unimaginable challenges might you face, in order to return? Put in the context of the soul, we’ve been on a journey since beginningless time, yearning, seeking, but not arriving home. Yet, against unfathomable odds, we have earned this precious human life endowed with liberty and opportunity, and all the internal resources and external conditions are ripe for us to return to the headwaters from which we sprang. Every myth, religion, philosophy, or story throughout time and culture has this archetype of nostos at its thrust: to return home, to return to our spiritual source.

If you visit the Greek island of Ithaca, you’ll find the ruins of Agios Athanasios or Homer’s school, a place of higher learning during antiquity built on the remains of the Odyssean Palace that sits below a more recently constructed Byzantine Church. Within a crumbling third-century BCE stone chamber overlooking Afales Bay, I had my second vision, one that inspired me to shift direction from the two-year curriculum of Buddhist studies I had recently launched. As I was recording a video there to include in our program, I experienced a powerful intuition that caused me to change course, pivoting on a dime. It was the call of the mythic dimension of life. I realized then and there that myths are the archetypal narratives that underlie our rational experiences, connecting us with transpersonal, ancestral, and universal realms, nourishing the soul with symbols and wisdom, which, if applied skillfully, can transform the everyday muck of human misery into the mulch of spiritual maturity. Without the mythological dimension, the soul is trapped behind a perceptual filter, reducing a spectrum of reality into a narrow band of matter that we can only perceive with our five senses—in the same way human eyes see only a fraction of the spectrum of light.

I realized I had been omitting a crucial element from my teaching and—in the video I was recording—I articulated to my students how important it was to include mythology in their studies. Consequently, I rebuilt my Contemplative Studies Program (CSP), changing the curriculum by integrating three seemingly disparate threads of knowledge: 1) Tibetan Buddhism, 2) the mythological perspective of Joseph Campbell, and 3) the analytic psychology of Jung.

First, the Tibetan Buddhist alchemical art of rebirth, which involves mastering the cycle of three phases: conscious death, sublime liminality, and altruistic rebirth. This Buddhist framework follows the transmigration of consciousness across lifetimes and dovetails with a distillation of Campbell’s mythological cycle, called the monomyth or Hero’s Journey, which offers a neophyte a rite of passage through the three phases of separation, initiation, and return. Both models align with the psychological process of individuation articulated by Jung, which can also be condensed into three phases: from ego, deepening into shadow of the personal unconscious, to the Self in the collective unconscious. These three distinct systems—each divided into three phases—would guide my students and me in a natural progression from the ordinary into the magical world from which we can all return as transformed beings, each a map for navigating the human landscape from delusion to awakening—and it was my hero’s call, a concept I will explore in depth in this book, to synthesize them.

I wasn’t pursuing this convergence of ideas as artifacts of passive interest in the same way people might amuse themselves in an art gallery or museum. What drove me wasn’t knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but creating a practical, unified map that could help us all navigate the actual terrain of life’s struggles, chaos, and uncertainty.

INITIATION INTO THE MANDALA

Despite the consternation of a quarter of my students (who had rightfully expected the original Buddhist course direction) dropping my class, I continued to follow my intuition, a lesson for anyone caught at the crossroads between comfort and uncertainty, loyalty and independence. If we betray our passion to meet the fickle expectations and needs of others, we send ourselves to the cross for crucifixion. As I learned the hard way, we must be willing to disappoint, even disobey, others to follow the never-before-tread path of authenticity. Throughout my teaching career, I had been well-acquainted with the topic and prepared before class, but for this new version of the course, I gave myself over to the unconscious and allowed intuition to be my guide in realms hitherto unfamiliar. I was following the hero’s thread into the labyrinth, and being summoned by some mysterious force from the depth of my psyche towards revealing.

Normally I began each class with a traditional Buddhist visualization, but on the evening before the first course resuming the new term, while alone in my Manhattan office gazing down onto the rush hour streets congested with pedestrians mindlessly circumambulating the concrete towers of financial institutions, I had my second vision. There I saw a mandala—which I later crudely sketched as a series of concentric circles, one within the other, surrounding a central axis and representing the relationship between the cosmos and the psyche. The outermost circle was the ouroboros, the universal motif of the serpent eating its tail, a Chinese, Mayan, and Greek symbol of infinity, the timeless nature of ultimate reality. Within that was the zodiac, with its twelve archetypal symbols and the water bearer Aquarius strategically positioned at six o’clock. Puzzlingly to me was how the zodiac unveiled over time, mysteriously began rotating counterclockwise, yet I persisted in flowing with the vision. This is how the journey of the soul goes—no neat and well-tread passageways to follow. No familiar roadside neon signs.

Fig. 1.1. Original Mandala Sketch: Circumambulation through astrology, stages of dissolution, and Buddhist refuge.

Within this series of circles was a topical view of the Mahabodhi temple in Bodhgaya, India, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment. The temple is built in the classical Buddhist style, structured like a mandala or cosmic palace with four gateways in each cardinal direction surrounded by a series of three concentric square walkways descending toward the inner sanctum at the center. There we find what is known as the Diamond Throne, both a physical site and a universal symbol. The diamond thrown is positioned within the sanctum sanctorum of the Mahabodhi Stupa flanked by the Bodhi tree to commemorate where the young prince Siddhartha Gautama sat and discovered the nature of reality, the actual seat upon which he claimed Buddhahood. As a metaphoric symbol the diamond throne represents the innate potential within each of us to awaken at any moment, reclaiming our royal sovereignty from the tyranny of samsara.

In the vision, I saw the procession of the equinoxes (the zodiac) in its rotation of the Great Year (an approximately 25,800-year cycle—I’ll talk more about this later) spinning counterclockwise. Within the cycle of the Great Year I saw myself walking with pilgrims, circumambulating the Mahabodhi temple three times as we descended together into the inner sanctum. During our first circumambulation we experienced the dissolution of the four elements, one element and phase of dissolution occurring in each of the four directions respectively: earth dissolving into the East, water into the South, fire into the West, and air into the North. As the elements dissolved, our physical bodies died, releasing free-floating consciousness from the binds of material form.

The second circumambulation was a dissolving of the three mental afflictions expressed in Buddhism, the instinctual drives, which contaminate consciousness and distort perception—grasping, aggression, ego-centrism and transforming these base instincts into luminance, radiance, and imminence, and culminating in the pure, clear-light nature of mind known as transparency or dharmakaya.

During the final circumambulation, we took refuge in the three jewels of Buddhism—Buddha, Dharma, Sangha—and generated altruistic intent (bodhicitta) as we continued circling each of the four directions, before entering the final threshold of the Mahabodhi Temple. After making extensive offerings to the Buddha sitting on the Diamond Throne in the inner chamber—reconceived as an alchemical crucible or pregnant womb—we took his nectar blessing in the form of rainbow lights that entered our crown, throat, and heart, purifying body, speech, and mind, transforming us into the future Buddha.

After this coronation ceremony, and assuming the divine pride and pure view of the Buddha, the pilgrims and I turned 180 degrees away from the altar and the Bodhi tree to face the Eastern gate through which we entered, now flanked at our back by the tree and the lineage totem of deities, protectors, and master sages. There at the horizon, on the dawn of a new day, we witnessed the turning of The Ages, from Pisces to Aquarius.

From the Diamond Throne, the pilgrims and I actualized our potential, donning our crown, sending a wave of nectar lights coalescing the union of wisdom and compassion, or what Jung called the coniunctio, the conjunction of masculine and feminine energies, emanating from our hearts outward, past the mandala gates and walkways, rippling out across the planet as a harmonic resonance calling all beings home to their true nature.

This mandala vision became the mainstay meditation practice for my students and myself at the beginning of each class in the new course. I led them through the circumambulations of elemental dissolution and royal coronation, as we collapsed and rehearsed the entire span of evolution towards becoming a Buddha in a single session. Following the tantric methodology of assuming the goal, interspersed with Jungain, Campbellian, and astrological archetypes, we tried our divine dignity and destiny on for size, internalizing the insights gleaned from active imagination just as a fighter pilot gains invaluable learning experience in a virtual reality flight-simulation. What we think repeatedly, we become.

I later asked my astrologer Lynn why the zodiac I had seen in the vision was rotating counterclockwise. She said functionally when we look down at a birth chart it rotates clockwise. But from the point of view of us looking up at the night sky, and because of the rotation of the earth, the constellations have the deceptive appearance of rotating around us in a counterclockwise manner. Synchronistically, when I showed my mentor Phil Cousineau—a direct disciple of Joseph Campbell—a drawing I had made of the Hero’s Journey map, he also told me that the direction of the stages should be depicted counterclockwise. In an email Phil wrote me during my initial mapmaking, he explains:

Your drawing of the Hero’s Journey is fine stage-wise, but it is backwards. The journey is not clockwise; it is counterclockwise. That was Joe’s [Joseph Campbell’s] innovation and it is critical to understanding the depth of it. So many people get it wrong these days, I’m in despair about the original message getting lost. . . . All adventures and all stories go counterclockwise, which is why they feel . . . timeless.⁹

THE MAGICIAN DAMIEN ECHOLS

The third vision occurred two weeks after the first class guiding my students through this mandala visualization, when I had the pleasure and fortune to meet with my friend Damien Echols. He is a teacher of ceremonial magick and has written extensively on how this ancient occult practice sustained him for eighteen years in maximum security prison for a crime he didn’t commit, enduring torture at the hands of guards and long stretches in solitary confinement. Upon his release, one of the first places Damien went for solace was to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, particularly the exhibit of the Assyrian and Sumerian artifacts, which he describes as his second home.

Several years after his release, Damien started giving private tours of the exhibit and using the artifacts as an energetic source to draw upon for talks and guided experiences of his magick practices. Continuing to follow my intuition, I decided this was a perfect opportunity to meet him in person. Upon encountering Damien in the museum lobby, what struck me was how he had a timelessness about him. He was dressed in black with his ever-present tinted sunglasses to protect his eyes after incarceration-induced retinal damage. Heavily tattooed, with a long black beard, he seemed to emerge as a modern-day manifestation of the Nimrud, from among the carvings of the man-headed, lion-bodied Assyrian temple guardians around us. I gifted him a phurba, a Tibetan ceremonial dagger symbolically used for the decimation of the ego, but also, uncoincidentally, in the shape of a magic wand. It had been in my possession for a long while, but I never felt it to be mine. In Damien’s hands, it was returned to its rightful owner.

We wandered the galleries discussing history, astrology, and mysticism, until arriving at a fountain at the center of the museum. Damien asked if I wanted to do a short meditation practice with him. We made an offering of coins into the fountain and synchronized our breath. He asked me to draw energy from the periphery of my body toward my heart chakra and to hold my breath to coalesce the energy before releasing. Then, to my amazement, on the third round of breath-holding, a vision appeared! For a few minutes, time stood entirely still. The museum and even New York City disappeared, and all that remained was the magician and me in the courtyard of a Babylonian temple. Then, as I looked where my heart was supposed to reside, I saw a single planet orbiting through a sea of stars. Saturn was clearly distinguished by its concentric rings undulating and pulsating as the universe’s heartbeat. I inhaled, Saturn expanded; I exhaled, it contracted. Then, suddenly, Saturn exploded in my chest! Boom! The seemingly solid planet fragmented into millions of particles of dust before completely dissolving. Although Damien and I never spoke about my experience, I sensed we’d shared something profound beyond words. We left the museum as if what needed to be seen had been seen. Our meeting had served its purpose, and as quietly as the magician appeared, he disappeared into the chaotic sprawl of Manhattan’s evening streets.

I was perplexed and enthralled by my vision of Saturn. I discussed it with my reiki healer, who directed me to explore the archetype of Hermes, perhaps because of his gift for moving and communicating between realms and worlds. This turned out to be another synchronicity, one that reconnected me to the Lament of Hermes. Again, I searched for answers in the dark, traveling through labyrinth corridors, towards an unknown destination. Was I unsettled? Yes. Was I enthralled and alive? Absolutely. Opposing states like paralyzing fear and mobilizing vitality, shame and confidence, are often tethered in a secret relationship, but because we often disavow one aspect to the shadow, we are bereft of the other.

My search for the meaning of the exploding rings of Saturn led me back to astrology, which turned up an article by evolutionary astrologer Maurice Fernandez entitled The Saturn Pluto Conjunction and the Transits for the Year 2020.¹⁰ Maurice and several astrologers predicted that as the major planets of Saturn, Jupiter, and Pluto align in their long and complex cosmic dance, a cataclysmic event would unfold, the likes of which had not been seen since World War I and would usher in a historic period of transformation—particularly of structural and institutional change. Little did I know that we were only a few months away from the coronavirus pandemic. Astonishingly, Fernandez’s article was written in 2016! The precision with which he wrote, coupled with the vision of Saturn I experienced with Damien, led me to take the predictions seriously. I integrated the article, along with some of the guidance from Lynn Bell, into my teaching and shared the insights with my students so we could prepare for whatever might come next. The power of astrology lies not in passively enduring fatalistic facts, but in navigating predicative possibilities with greater preparation and agency.

CYCLIC TIME

These visions following my discovery of Asclepius allowed me to connect the intuitive wisdom of the psyche with the predictive science of cosmology. I rekindled long-held fascinations—ancient cultures from Egypt to Greece, alchemy to astrology and recalled something I’d read about during college. In 1901, a fisherman looking for sponges in the reefs along the coast of a Greek island retrieved a wooden box from an old shipwreck. It’s not entirely uncommon to find earthen jars and bits of pottery from antiquity in this region, but his discovery was unexpected, even baffling. The contents of the box came to be known as the Antikythera Mechanism, a surprisingly old and sophisticated mechanical model of the solar system called an orrery—dubbed the oldest analog computer in the world.

The instrument contained a series of gears that modern scholars determined were used to track astronomical movements of the