Apotheosis

Your Spring Equinox mix featuring music/audio by: Shipibo Shamans, Twin Peaks, Entheongenic, Kalya Scintilla, Inkyz, Nominus, Zebbler Encanti Experience, Kaminanda, Deya Dova, Goldfrapp, Cio D'or, Bryan Kearney, andSnatam Kaur

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A new mix featuring music by: Nils Petter Molvaer, Matthew Halsall, The Avener, The Comet is Coming, Flying Lotus, Deya Dova, Alice Coltrane, Steven Halpern, Clarinet Factory, Magnus Ostrom, WDL, If These Trees Could Talk and samples from Paramahansa Yogananda, Dean Radin, and Missy Elliot.

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This mix exists because I needed beauty in a time of darkness.  A year ago today I entered what some might call a “dark night of the soul.”  It was a period I barely survived it and from which I am still recovering. 

But there were two elements in my life that I turned to every day to bring something beauty into my world:  time with my dog and music.

I had only one aspiration for this mix:  to make something beautiful.

This solstice I feel my dark night of the soul finally ending, and like all periods of pain and loss I have learned much about myself and what I will allow from others.  I haven’t turned the corner completely but I feel the light breaking; I feel the sun returning. 

May this music bring beauty to your lives as you celebrate the longest night of the year with the warmth of friends and family and the blessing of the eternal force from which we all arise.

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You could hear it on Main Street in Lexington, Kentucky from two blocks away when you were 19 with an ID that said you were 21--diva music rising like a fist in the night.  Beer bottles thrown through windows of passing pickup trucks.  

But the music: euphoria, heartbreak, release, survival.

Pull on your gym shorts even if they don’t fit you anymore, put on a shirt he bought you.  Fuck it.  You’re going to the gym.  

You always told yourself you hated gay bars, but God what you wouldn’t give for one now that GPS-based apps have taken over.  At least back then you could be dismissed in-person.

And that year on the road with him, the year you will never get back, you did it for love you’ll say when the great imaginary autobiography of your life is finally written.  You tell yourself you gave it all you had, but what did that ever get you?

True love, soul mates, twin flames, souls who chased each other across lifetimes.   This is what we believed—how do you survive a love like that when it ends in only flames?

Pull on your gym shorts, go to the gym.  

You’re way too close to forty and already the twinks call you “daddy.”   

Fuck it.  Pull on your gym shorts, go to the gym, try not to drink so much tonight.  

Your side of things may never be heard.  Fuck it.  You can’t hide from the world forever.  If he was dead you could grieve, but he is not dead.  Pull on your gym shorts, get to work.  

The body shakes as the heart breaks.

There is no spirituality without the vitality of a body.

The body: purification through sweat, through motion, through lust for other bodies. 

The body: more than pixels on a computer screen—the supermarket of desire.

The body, let it move, let it heal. 

This is who you were.  This is who you are.  Let the music find your way back.

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That Spring I cleared all the overgrowth and debris from the garden.  The poppies bloomed at the same time and were not bothered by the rain.  It seemed that life had found a rhythm, a normalcy. 

I am sitting on the floor waiting to blast off.  My destination is what my new friends call “the spaceship.”  This is DMT, transcendence in a hot flash, five minutes into that other place and ten minutes for the journey back.

I barely know these people.  I just met them a few weeks ago when an improbable mutual friend introduced us.  This is only the second time we have hung out, but now they are about to chaperone my husband and I through our first and only DMT experience.

Before it was the subject of documentaries and discussed openly on podcasts and Reddit, DMT was the stuff of legend: an entheogen talked about in hushed circle, a badge of psychedelic honor for all who had tried it and came back to tell the tale.   I believe you should try everything in life at least twice (since the first time is mostly nerves and uncertainty).  Our new friends have only enough DMT left for my partner and I to go one time, so the pressure is on to do this right.

I hit the pipe; the DMT is harsh and hard to hold down even for a seasoned cigarette smoker like me.   I get the hit down; my lungs are aching; the corners of the room begin to move like they are stuck in glue and I am pulling them toward me.  I have not taken enough.  I hit again, hold the smoke as long as I can, then collapse back onto the floor as the material realm collapses. 

There is the sound of space/time being ripped open as I am shot through a tunnel of light to a place that is utterly foreign yet instantly familiar.  It is a multidimensional realm of visual information and light.  Before me is the jeweled-fractal veil that cross this space like an ER curtain.  Many get lost here, caught in the trans-dimensional shimmering of informational objects, but I push through which requires the shredding of my corporeal body.  Giant gears and lasers surround me and shred my body, then I am free to pass through.

Bringing back stories from this realm, from what I saw there, from the information that was downloaded to me, is a pointless endeavor.  What I experienced there was intensely personal, unwinding like strands of DNA deep into my familial history, beyond the confines of language.

A few fragments from my journals of this time:  A wolf the size of dragons, astral bodies of other travelers, the flash of a yellow figure in the room, my grandmother in the river of Gethsemane, cherub beings--one who pushes a shimmering multidimensional triangle of light into my chest before it goes, a fractal veil like a peacock tail, fractal realities cascading and colliding offering infinite variety and variation, calm/purpose, illusion, time does not exist, actual living Gods, love connects all beings in all realms of creation.

In Buddhism the Bardo is the realm that the dead enter after death—the same as purgatory to some Christians.  It’s a waiting room where all that we lived is revealed and where Karma takes us to our next incarnation.  In Buddhism, we remain in this place for 49 days.  The enlightened, during the time, are able to learn great lessons so that they might have a more generous rebirth:  49 days the length of time between death and rebirth; 49 days the point in an embryo’s development where Buddhist believe we gain a soul; 49 days when sex is determined in embryonic development; 49 days when the pineal gland develops in the embryo’s brain. 

Descartes hypothesized that the pineal gland is the “seat of the soul.”  Modern science has discovered that DMT is produced by the pineal gland in the human brain.  It is theorized that this substance is the root of both dreams and near death experiences.  The pineal gland resembles an eye, and it located at the exact point of the “third eye” chakra—the point where many believe we access cosmic consciousness.

Another theory:  When we die, the pinea

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A 2017 mix that is a battle cry for a dying planet. Read more at www.astrangerhaven.rocks/

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