The Chord of Lineage: Dropping the Systems to Find the Codes
Nobody exists outside of lineage. In each moment, each one of us exists at the leading edge of a wave that never stops, and may never have begun—an infinite river of becoming, which includes atoms and galaxies, lizards and moss, Kid Rock and St. Theresa, film noir and bagels.
How we define lineage depends on the filters we use to see the world. We are part of the lineage of matter and energy, undergoing transformations through cosmic time; we are part of the lineage of Earth-life, sharing 60% of our DNA with bananas. The soul, too, has a lineage composed of every experience it has ever had.
Perhaps that’s all we mean by the word “soul”: lineage in motion, projecting itself into the present as the tendencies and events, people and places of our experience, with a divine I at the center. When you begin to peel back the layers, there is no end to what you find—goddesses, planetary and galactic intelligences, rishis, ascended masters. . . Holy shit. But let’s not go there just now.
Your experience as an individual, conscious being is the sound of a chord made of the “notes” of whatever lineages are being struck on the keyboard of your current lifetime. However you slice it, this moment contains everything that has ever been and the potential of everything that ever will be. But rather than blast into the infinite, let’s get particular. Little whiffs of infinity are all we need; we do not need to huff it like glue.
To the Gurus: Or How I Fucked My Mind Up and Who I Have to Thank For ThatThis was all a ridiculously cosmic preface to what will now be a pretty straightforward acknowledgment of my influences, and an explanation of whatever this is (he says, gesturing toward himself).
For years, I immersed myself in esoteric philosophies and practices, all of which contributed something essential to my perspective and—most importantly—triggered a remembrance of something I always knew, but had forgotten. In the early stages of this remembering, I identified strongly with these systems.
As time goes on, however, I feel the systems––or rather, the need for them––dropping away. I feel less of a need to directly reference any of them, or to force my language on other people, preferring instead to adapt to theirs. I believe––no, I know––that every person possesses all true knowledge somewhere in their being, and each has a unique “code” to access it.
I also realize that the need to rely on external authorities––whether systems, teachers, or practices––was actually diminishing my own embodiment of the knowledge they helped awaken in me and my own ability to “transmit” it. Transmission is not a matter of someone passing something to me and me passing it to you; it is a resonance that triggers a remembrance of what is already known. I am simply a link in that chain.
My codes are my own; most of them cannot even be spoken. You have your own. We probably share a few. Though I am choosing to stop filtering gnosis through external authorities (except in my academic work, where that is the way the game is played), I want to share a list of the biggest influences in my mystical life––to honor my ancestors.
These are the teachers, philosophies, and practices that have most influenced me in this life. They are (in order of appearance):
Jungian Psychology and Personal Mythology
When I was 17, my high school English teacher showed us The Power of Myth with Joseph Campbell and I instantly “got” it. “Yass, yass, yassssss!!!,” I thought, feeling I had found a secret key to things I’d long sensed but not been able to articulate. Later, this led me to study Carl Jung in my 20s and, in my 30s, to work with my first mentor: Richard Stromer.
My mother had set me up with a birth chart reading with Richard—who is an astrologer as well as a personal mythologist—and he helped me discover the hidden myths living through me and the new one wanting to be born.
Mindfulness
I came to mindfulness in my 20s as a way to cope with depression following my sister’s death, through a book I found on her shelf: The Mindful Way Through Depression. It worked. My depression lifted. It also planted the seed for my later commitment to meditation—though it took another ten years of “off-and-on” before I fully committed.
Shamanic Journeying
I came to this through my mother as well, who suggested I attend a drum-journey meetup group led by shamanic practitioner Ruth Schwartz. I was struggling with a creative block as a musician and frustrated with my career, trying to get things flowing again. I immediately had a series of powerful experiences that felt like much more than ordinary imagination.
My first journey came with the message:
“To find what you seek, you must first find the magic.”
I did not yet know it, but I was done for. Later, I enrolled in a two-year shamanic training with Wilder Harper, learning and practicing healing and journeying techniques, soul retrieval, and connecting with a tribe of freakz like me. We’re still family.
Archetypal Astrology
Following that initial reading with Richard, I gobbled up the work of evolutionary astrologer Steven Forrest and other luminaries in the field. But the real shift came with Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas—an intellectual historian-gone-rogue who presents an exhaustive analysis of Western history through the lens of planetary cycles.
Tarnas presents astrology as a multidimensional cosmic language, which it is. It taught me to decipher the poetry of the cosmos. Now, I regularly guess planetary alignments based on things people say, or the kind of art a person creates. It reshaped my mind into something capable of translating multidimensional perceptions into ordinary terms.
But it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I’ve found that leading with it can create unnecessary obstacles, so I don’t even talk about it anymore until someone knocks at the door at least three times—or pays me for a reading.
Psychedelic Healing and Exploration
After a bad mushroom trip at age 19—where I swirled down the drain of true insanity for five hours—I swore I would never touch psychedelics again. But in my mid-30s, the drum journeys had buttered me up to the point that I decided to try LSD.
In truth, I’d had my eye on it since I was thirteen, listening to the Beatles and reflecting on the fact that drugs really did a lot for their music. I couldn’t square that with my anti-drug education at school. The Beatles also planted the first seeds of meditation in my mind; they were really my first gurus.
When I finally took the journey, it was love at first sight––I wanted to marry LSD and have its babies. I felt my consciousness had come home. My natural inner habitat is to see vast patterns at a glimpse, to not take a single thing seriously, and to love. I’d spent much of my life in a contracted state, grasping at things that always seemed to evade me; LSD blew that contraction away like dandelion fluff. That first journey also “downloaded” astrological language into me; everything I’d been studying suddenly clicked and I just spoke it.
The next morning, I vowed to make this a permanent, ultimately drug-free state of consciousness.
For the next five years, I used various medicines to work through layers of emotional conditioning and traverse the realms. The work of transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof was a primary guide; his cartography of the psyche provided the map for my cathartic blow-outs and integration. It so happens that Rick Tarnas developed archetypal astrology out of his collaboration in psychedelic work with Grof—a lineage I immersed myself in through studies with Renn Butler, a brilliant carrier of the Grof-Tarnas torch.
Shakta Tantra
This brings me to the center of the mandala––Shakta Tantra. Not the neo-tantra most of us are familiar with, but actual classical tantra: goddess-centered practices for transforming the mind, body, and life involving mantra, yantra, breath, and visualization.
Following my first LSD journey, I began looking into Kundalini, which I imagined would deliver my longed-for state of a permanent, drug-free trip. I eventually received an invitation for a course with Raja Choudhury. He was talking about the dance of Shiva and Shakti––infinite consciousness and universal power––and I was like, “yassss.” I was familiar with the concepts, but had never been initiated.
The practice brought the Goddess into my life—or rather, made me aware of her presence. When I say “Goddess,” I mean a living, intelligent cosmic power that goes far beyond anything the word “archetype” can convey. She works as psyche, body, energy, nature––everything. As I tuned to her, correspondences started to resonate in utterly magical ways.
If there’s one lineage I belong to, it’s that of the Goddess, in all times and places. Tantra provided the technology, but she is much bigger than any tradition. Alongside the Goddess-centric part of the practice, the masculine Shiva side has also been central. This is the practice of pure transcendence, storylessness, and the stillness of the void. Whether through yogic concentration or direct awareness of awareness, this practice has shown me the still point at the center of the universal dance.
Hermeticism and Druidry
Though I am not initiated in any Western occult methods, my naturally cosmic way of perceiving reality resonates with ancient Hermetic teachings and the Renaissance magic of Marsilio Ficino. I know this is one of my prime lineages, even if I don’t care much for the Western occult vibe, post-Renaissance.
Similarly, I am not an initiate of any modern Druid orders, but I just resonate. In my doctoral program, I investigated my Welsh ancestry on my mother’s side. I was amazed to see that the themes of my early shamanic journeys followed a distinctly Welsh pattern, centered around music, poetry, the oak, and the raven. It formed a missing link in my practices––one of the central “activation codes,” showing me the true nature of my work. I now joke––but it’s really not a joke––that I am really a Druid who just happens to chant in Sanskrit.
Integral Yoga
Last but not least is the practice behind the practices: the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Put simply, Integral Yoga teaches that evolution is a spiritual process and that we are currently evolving beyond the “mental human” toward a divine consciousness.
In the integral view, we do not choose between transcendence and embodiment––we embody transcendence. It is a philosophy of liberation and enjoyment. The goal is to awaken the soul personality—the individualized essence, with the divine spark at the center—as the guiding principle of life and to surrender to the power of Shakti to work through that vehicle.
The bottom line: each person has a divine imperative to be what they truly are, and what only they can be. Rather than escape the material world, the aim is to divinize it. When I encountered this a few years ago, I realized it was the only philosophy capable of holding space for all these different lineages working through me. It is the umbrella under which all my other codes live.
Acknowledgements
So there it is: a short introduction to how I got this way––the easily communicable bits, anyway. I can nerd out for hours on any one of these, but I will mostly allow the lineages to speak through me as the spirit bloweth and the situation demands.
If you want to know more about any one of these, DM me and I’ll invite you into my wizard tower.
Thank you to my parents, Harvey and Michelle Stein; to my mentors Richard Stromer and Raja Choudhury, and through Raja, Guruji Amritananda. Thank you to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and to all the rishis, masters, ancestors, and cosmic beings who are in my corner. Thank you to Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Rick Tarnas, Stan Grof, Renn Butler, and Keiron LeGrice. Thank you to my beloved kula and to those friends whose codes activate my own: Amy and Nico Martinez, Hilary Hecht, Ruby Akin, Nathasha Kumar, Noemi Perez-Corbo, and Snigdha Motadaka.
Jai Ma!
Nobody exists outside of lineage. In each moment, each one of us exists at the leading edge of a wave that never stops, and may never have begun—an infinite river of becoming, which includes atoms and galaxies, lizards and moss, Kid Rock and St. Theresa, film noir and bagels.
How we define lineage depends on the filters we use to see the world. We are part of the lineage of matter and energy, undergoing transformations through cosmic time; we are part of the lineage of Earth-life, sharing 60% of our DNA with bananas. The soul, too, has a lineage composed of every experience it has ever had.
Perhaps that’s all we mean by the word “soul”: lineage in motion, projecting itself into the present as the tendencies and events, people and places of our experience, with a divine I at the center. When you begin to peel back the layers, there is no end to what you find—goddesses, planetary and galactic intelligences, rishis, ascended masters. . . Holy shit. But let’s not go there just now.
Your experience as an individual, conscious being is the sound of a chord made of the “notes” of whatever lineages are being struck on the keyboard of your current lifetime. However you slice it, this moment contains everything that has ever been and the potential of everything that ever will be. But rather than blast into the infinite, let’s get particular. Little whiffs of infinity are all we need; we do not need to huff it like glue.
To the Gurus: Or How I Fucked My Mind Up and Who I Have to Thank For ThatThis was all a ridiculously cosmic preface to what will now be a pretty straightforward acknowledgment of my influences, and an explanation of whatever this is (he says, gesturing toward himself).
For years, I immersed myself in esoteric philosophies and practices, all of which contributed something essential to my perspective and—most importantly—triggered a remembrance of something I always knew, but had forgotten. In the early stages of this remembering, I identified strongly with these systems.
As time goes on, however, I feel the systems––or rather, the need for them––dropping away. I feel less of a need to directly reference any of them, or to force my language on other people, preferring instead to adapt to theirs. I believe––no, I know––that every person possesses all true knowledge somewhere in their being, and each has a unique “code” to access it.
I also realize that the need to rely on external authorities––whether systems, teachers, or practices––was actually diminishing my own embodiment of the knowledge they helped awaken in me and my own ability to “transmit” it. Transmission is not a matter of someone passing something to me and me passing it to you; it is a resonance that triggers a remembrance of what is already known. I am simply a link in that chain.
My codes are my own; most of them cannot even be spoken. You have your own. We probably share a few. Though I am choosing to stop filtering gnosis through external authorities (except in my academic work, where that is the way the game is played), I want to share a list of the biggest influences in my mystical life––to honor my ancestors.
These are the teachers, philosophies, and practices that have most influenced me in this life. They are (in order of appearance):
Jungian Psychology and Personal Mythology
When I was 17, my high school English teacher showed us The Power of Myth with Joseph Campbell and I instantly “got” it. “Yass, yass, yassssss!!!,” I thought, feeling I had found a secret key to things I’d long sensed but not been able to articulate. Later, this led me to study Carl Jung in my 20s and, in my 30s, to work with my first mentor: Richard Stromer.
My mother had set me up with a birth chart reading with Richard—who is an astrologer as well as a personal mythologist—and he helped me discover the hidden myths living through me and the new one wanting to be born.
Mindfulness
I came to mindfulness in my 20s as a way to cope with depression following my sister’s death, through a book I found on her shelf: The Mindful Way Through Depression. It worked. My depression lifted. It also planted the seed for my later commitment to meditation—though it took another ten years of “off-and-on” before I fully committed.
Shamanic Journeying
I came to this through my mother as well, who suggested I attend a drum-journey meetup group led by shamanic practitioner Ruth Schwartz. I was struggling with a creative block as a musician and frustrated with my career, trying to get things flowing again. I immediately had a series of powerful experiences that felt like much more than ordinary imagination.
My first journey came with the message:
“To find what you seek, you must first find the magic.”
I did not yet know it, but I was done for. Later, I enrolled in a two-year shamanic training with Wilder Harper, learning and practicing healing and journeying techniques, soul retrieval, and connecting with a tribe of freakz like me. We’re still family.
Archetypal Astrology
Following that initial reading with Richard, I gobbled up the work of evolutionary astrologer Steven Forrest and other luminaries in the field. But the real shift came with Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas—an intellectual historian-gone-rogue who presents an exhaustive analysis of Western history through the lens of planetary cycles.
Tarnas presents astrology as a multidimensional cosmic language, which it is. It taught me to decipher the poetry of the cosmos. Now, I regularly guess planetary alignments based on things people say, or the kind of art a person creates. It reshaped my mind into something capable of translating multidimensional perceptions into ordinary terms.
But it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I’ve found that leading with it can create unnecessary obstacles, so I don’t even talk about it anymore until someone knocks at the door at least three times—or pays me for a reading.
Psychedelic Healing and Exploration
After a bad mushroom trip at age 19—where I swirled down the drain of true insanity for five hours—I swore I would never touch psychedelics again. But in my mid-30s, the drum journeys had buttered me up to the point that I decided to try LSD.
In truth, I’d had my eye on it since I was thirteen, listening to the Beatles and reflecting on the fact that drugs really did a lot for their music. I couldn’t square that with my anti-drug education at school. The Beatles also planted the first seeds of meditation in my mind; they were really my first gurus.
When I finally took the journey, it was love at first sight––I wanted to marry LSD and have its babies. I felt my consciousness had come home. My natural inner habitat is to see vast patterns at a glimpse, to not take a single thing seriously, and to love. I’d spent much of my life in a contracted state, grasping at things that always seemed to evade me; LSD blew that contraction away like dandelion fluff. That first journey also “downloaded” astrological language into me; everything I’d been studying suddenly clicked and I just spoke it.
The next morning, I vowed to make this a permanent, ultimately drug-free state of consciousness.
For the next five years, I used various medicines to work through layers of emotional conditioning and traverse the realms. The work of transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof was a primary guide; his cartography of the psyche provided the map for my cathartic blow-outs and integration. It so happens that Rick Tarnas developed archetypal astrology out of his collaboration in psychedelic work with Grof—a lineage I immersed myself in through studies with Renn Butler, a brilliant carrier of the Grof-Tarnas torch.
Shakta Tantra
This brings me to the center of the mandala––Shakta Tantra. Not the neo-tantra most of us are familiar with, but actual classical tantra: goddess-centered practices for transforming the mind, body, and life involving mantra, yantra, breath, and visualization.
Following my first LSD journey, I began looking into Kundalini, which I imagined would deliver my longed-for state of a permanent, drug-free trip. I eventually received an invitation for a course with Raja Choudhury. He was talking about the dance of Shiva and Shakti––infinite consciousness and universal power––and I was like, “yassss.” I was familiar with the concepts, but had never been initiated.
The practice brought the Goddess into my life—or rather, made me aware of her presence. When I say “Goddess,” I mean a living, intelligent cosmic power that goes far beyond anything the word “archetype” can convey. She works as psyche, body, energy, nature––everything. As I tuned to her, correspondences started to resonate in utterly magical ways.
If there’s one lineage I belong to, it’s that of the Goddess, in all times and places. Tantra provided the technology, but she is much bigger than any tradition. Alongside the Goddess-centric part of the practice, the masculine Shiva side has also been central. This is the practice of pure transcendence, storylessness, and the stillness of the void. Whether through yogic concentration or direct awareness of awareness, this practice has shown me the still point at the center of the universal dance.
Hermeticism and Druidry
Though I am not initiated in any Western occult methods, my naturally cosmic way of perceiving reality resonates with ancient Hermetic teachings and the Renaissance magic of Marsilio Ficino. I know this is one of my prime lineages, even if I don’t care much for the Western occult vibe, post-Renaissance.
Similarly, I am not an initiate of any modern Druid orders, but I just resonate. In my doctoral program, I investigated my Welsh ancestry on my mother’s side. I was amazed to see that the themes of my early shamanic journeys followed a distinctly Welsh pattern, centered around music, poetry, the oak, and the raven. It formed a missing link in my practices––one of the central “activation codes,” showing me the true nature of my work. I now joke––but it’s really not a joke––that I am really a Druid who just happens to chant in Sanskrit.
Integral Yoga
Last but not least is the practice behind the practices: the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Put simply, Integral Yoga teaches that evolution is a spiritual process and that we are currently evolving beyond the “mental human” toward a divine consciousness.
In the integral view, we do not choose between transcendence and embodiment––we embody transcendence. It is a philosophy of liberation and enjoyment. The goal is to awaken the soul personality—the individualized essence, with the divine spark at the center—as the guiding principle of life and to surrender to the power of Shakti to work through that vehicle.
The bottom line: each person has a divine imperative to be what they truly are, and what only they can be. Rather than escape the material world, the aim is to divinize it. When I encountered this a few years ago, I realized it was the only philosophy capable of holding space for all these different lineages working through me. It is the umbrella under which all my other codes live.
Acknowledgements
So there it is: a short introduction to how I got this way––the easily communicable bits, anyway. I can nerd out for hours on any one of these, but I will mostly allow the lineages to speak through me as the spirit bloweth and the situation demands.
If you want to know more about any one of these, DM me and I’ll invite you into my wizard tower.
Thank you to my parents, Harvey and Michelle Stein; to my mentors Richard Stromer and Raja Choudhury, and through Raja, Guruji Amritananda. Thank you to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and to all the rishis, masters, ancestors, and cosmic beings who are in my corner. Thank you to Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Rick Tarnas, Stan Grof, Renn Butler, and Keiron LeGrice. Thank you to my beloved kula and to those friends whose codes activate my own: Amy and Nico Martinez, Hilary Hecht, Ruby Akin, Nathasha Kumar, Noemi Perez-Corbo, and Snigdha Motadaka.
Jai Ma!