About Me

I graduated from Michigan State University with a master's degree in Educational Technology in 2014—during my time there I also studied educational psychology, critical theory, and critical pedagogical ethics. In 2011, I completed my bachelor's degree in Psychology at University of Washington in Seattle. I am a committed healer and teacher, and I spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about the ethics of helping and speaking.

My interest in psychology and magic grew out of an early fascination with technology and the "minds" of computers. As a teenager, I became fascinated by Buddhist psychology and philosophy as well as the psychology of Carl Jung. By designing computer systems which resembled human thought, I came to understand my own psyche at a technical level of detail.

My primary research into sapience began when I went to college and began asking the question, "Why is it so hard to find interesting friends?" I began to read about and study self-awareness and self-actualization (Maslow), the strange loops of consciousness (Hofstadter), and shamanism.

Although raised and taught a modern scientistic worldview that left no room for the mystical, I was drawn to numinous experiences and the most mysterious and human phenomena of consciousness and spirituality. Eventually, while taking a neuroscience class, a class tracing the development of Freud's theories, and a neuropharmacology class, I began asking questions to myself which not only broke my models of material science—the questions themselves did strange things when you asked them, things that resembled magic. By developing a "mindware" model of magic, I was freed from having to think according to an externally-supplied rubric of truth (e.g., comparing everything to the rubric of science), and could instead experiment with different kinds of thoughts based upon their effect when thunk (poetic thinking).

I approach the study of occult texts phenomenologically, meaning that I take written accounts of occult phenomena as experiential data that can be collated and parsed. By reading many of these texts, I began to understand the patterns, the symbols, and the allegorical nature of these texts.

In 2012, due to my studies and my occult experiments, I triggered an initiatic experience in myself which landed me in the psych ward. Diagnosed as bipolar disorder, I have instead approached my experiences with a shamanic model, focusing on deep self-understanding and self-care, spiritual insight, and the mastery of altered states of consciousness. This approach has allowed me to live a happy and inspired life without the use of medications. I am critical of many of the ontological claims made by modern psychiatry, such as the idea that "mental disoders" are classifiable as such and secondary to brain chemistry. I find most of modern psychiatry heavily corrupted and colonized by the pharmaceutical industry.

My experiences with mania and depression and their underpinning in a sick society combined with some horrific experiences of being restrained, drugged, and imprisoned against my will by well-meaning but tragically mistrained psychiatrists has left me with an extraordinary passion for alternative mental healthcare and patient's rights. I think that spirituality and the occult sciences not only have plenty to offer modern psychiatry—they underpin and precede it historically. Ignorance of the occult roots of psychiatry and the ethical issues involved in spiritual care have resulted in an ongoing holocaust of weird people in our society, a problem on par with prison conditions and the incarceration rates in the United States.

I have always had a strong passion to help create political change. When I was 20, I worked for a canvassing organization for almost a year, and flew to Florida and New Mexico to help get Obama elected in 2008. Disaffected with electoral politics, I am more hopeful that crypto-anarchist and social networking strategies can lead the way from a world of systemic corruption and hegemonic injustic to a world of peaceful cooperation and abundance.

I am currently a minister of the Church of the SubGenius and an active member of the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education. I attended X-Day 2014 and the ACMHE 2014 conference, and I look forward to attending future gatherings/conferences through these organizations.

Thank you for taking the time to read about me—I hope it helped you to get to know me. Please take a look at my books, classes, or the other pages if you're interested in learning more.