For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to the unseen world behind our world asking questions like, why are we here? what happens when we die? where do we come from? what is consciousness? what is my purpose?
As a child, I became obsessed with Buddhism and reincarnation. I was raised catholic but that ideology never resonated. Then I found the story of Siddhartha Gautama and his ideas of rebirth or Saṃsāra later leading me to Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama and the teachings on reincarnation. I became fascinated by the sheer precision of the tradition—how, when a Dalai Lama passes away, a search party of high monks sets out across Tibet to locate his next incarnation, guided by visions, smoke patterns from fires, and oracle dreams. When they find the young child, they present him with a collection of identical objects—beads, bowls, walking sticks—some belonging to the deceased Dalai Lama, and some completely random. The child must unerringly choose his own past-life belongings, recognizing them by pure instinct. To me, this wasn't just a religious ritual; it was a physical tracking system for the soul. It felt like magic — real magic. Later came books, podcasts, interviews, videos, and conversations with friends and family about consciousness, near-death experiences, manifestation, mysticism, Jungian psychology, intuition, and spirituality. These stories shaped my understanding of what reality might be.
What fascinates me most is that, despite coming from wildly different sources, I rarely find contradiction. I find pieces of a puzzle. Sometimes the pieces are labeled differently. Sometimes they seem to conflict at first glance. But when I look closer, or better yet take a step back, I usually find that the conflict lives in the language, not the idea. An article I read recently by a medium described it this way — we are all colored cups. The water poured into each cup is transparent, but it looks different depending on the color of the cup. How a person receives or describes a spiritual experience is filtered through their unconscious beliefs, fears, and cultural symbols. The cup changes how it looks coming through. But the water is the same. We are trying to describe something larger than ourselves using tools designed for the physical world.
Put another way, “the eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
I am by no means an expert, but over time, a picture has begun to emerge and a kind of mental spider map began to take shape.
MAPPING IT OUT
I’ve come to believe that what we call god, universe, source, and the collective consciousness are all the same thing wearing different names. I don’t know how reality came to exist and while I don’t feel the need to have it fully resolved in this life I’m constantly fascinated by all the different areas of the transcendental, metaphysical, spiritual world and the multitude of ways it connects to the physical. Whatever “god” is, I don’t think it’s separate from us. I think we are individual expressions of it. Different apertures of the same light, each of us giving that light a unique angle, a unique experience, a unique form. See this article about my thoughts on the individual vs the collective.
And I believe that consciousness — our individual consciousness — plays an active role in shaping the reality we experience. This is something Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about extensively, and I find it resonates. The thoughts we hold, the emotions we carry, the stories we repeat — these don’t just reflect our reality, they participate in creating it. On the other hand, I don’t think my consciousness is the sole author of everything. There is a larger reality beyond my own perception and a whole architecture of existence that doesn’t depend on me or my idea of it to be real. In other words my consciousness shapes my experience of that reality. It doesn’t generate the reality itself.
Many traditions have tried to map this larger structure. They use different names, different numbers, different symbols — whether it's the 12 Universal Laws running parallel to the seven Hermetic principles, the Theosophical maps of the Seven Planes of Existence, or the nested sheaths of Vedic philosophy. But like the Law of Correspondence the basic shape keeps repeating. I believe there is an infinite source from which existence unfolds through layers — from pure spirit down into thought, feeling, then finally form. The physical world is not the foundation of reality. It is the outermost expression of something that begins somewhere far beyond what our senses can reach.
One Mystery, Many Languages
Religion, as I’ve come to understand it, has always been trying to say this. The names change. The stories change. The rituals, the texts, the figures at the center of each tradition — all different. But underneath, the same idea keeps surfacing. That there is something greater than us. That we are connected to it. That love, in some form, is the organizing principle. Christianity calls it God or Christ consciousness. Buddhism strives for enlightenment. Hinduism describes Brahman. Islam speaks of Allah as closer to us than our own jugular vein. The Tao that cannot be named. The Ein Sof of Kabbalah, infinite and without boundary. These are not competing answers. They are different languages attempting to describe the same thing.
Strip away the cultural layer and you find mystics at the heart of nearly every tradition arriving at remarkably similar places. Union with the divine. Dissolution of the self. The discovery that separation was always an illusion. The Sufi mystic and the Christian contemplative and the Zen monk are not describing different experiences. They are describing the same one in different clothes.
The same pattern holds across what we might call modalities — astrology, Human Design, Jungian archetypes, the collective unconscious. Jung spent his life arguing that certain patterns are not invented by individuals but inherited, existing in a layer of consciousness that belongs to everyone and to no one. When he hit a wall with a patient, he would calculate their astrological birth chart to map their psychological complexes. He famously noted that astrology represented the sum of all ancient psychological knowledge, observing that the planets were simply the physical symbols humanity projected onto the deep, collective archetypes of the human mind (Mars as the warrior/drive, Venus as the lover/relationship, etc.). I think he was mapping real terrain. The same terrain that shows up across cultures that never had contact with each other — the same symbols, the same archetypes, the same stories surfacing independently in dreams and myths and visions. These systems aren’t competing. They’re triangulating.
PIECES OF THE PUZZLE
When I read Weiss’s Many Lives, Many Masters something cracked open inside me. The idea that we live multiple lives, that between lives we review what we’ve experienced and choose what comes next — it didn’t feel foreign. It felt like confirmation of something I already half-knew. And then over the span of many years I studied everything I could find that claimed to peek behind the curtain — NDEs, messages from beyond channeled through mediums, past life regression, astral projection, metaphysics, quantum physics (surface level), universal laws, and religion. What struck me wasn’t how strange or different these sources were from each other. It was how consistent they were. Astral projectors frequently describe visiting a place where life reviews happen — the same place that near-death experiencers describe being taken. People who remember past lives describe the same between-life landscape (perhaps what esoteric traditions call the Buddhic Plane of soul wisdom) that subjects under deep hypnosis describe independently. The details vary. Even the architecture can vary depending on the color of the cup so to speak. For instance, a patient under deep hypnosis mapping the intermission between lives will describe walking into a sphere of light to meet a panel of wise, non-judgmental 'Elders' to review their soul's progress. Across the world, a cardiac arrest survivor in an ICU, with no knowledge of metaphysics, will return to consciousness describing a 'Council of Light' that guided them through a panoramic, holographic review of every choice they ever made. They are looking at the exact same room, just naming the furniture differently. But the patterns in the architecture are what contribute to my spider map.
Near-death experiences in particular read like testimony rather than imagination. The light, the expansion, the absence of fear, the life review, the reluctance to return — these show up across cultures, across centuries, across people who had no reason to report the same thing. They went somewhere. They came back with similar reports. I find that significant.
What this suggests to me is that there is a “self” larger than the one living this particular life. A higher self that holds the full arc across many lifetimes while the version of us walking around in a body remembers only this one. I find this idea not just intellectually interesting but personally useful. I believe that higher self is always with us — and so, in a different way, is every version of us that has ever existed. If time is not linear, if all moments exist simultaneously, then the inner child I was at seven years old is not gone. She is still there, in that moment, in that experience. And I can reach her. When I do deep visualization work and go back to comfort that younger version of myself, I believe she is actually receiving it. That healing can move in directions we don’t usually think time allows.
The Same Question in Different Forms
Not long before I conceived my son, I read a book called Spirit Babies. It describes souls as conscious beings who exist before birth, who choose or at least participate in choosing, their incarnations, and who exist in relationship to their future parents long before a physical body is formed. I think that book opened something in me. Whether it was the idea itself, or the openness it created, I can’t say for certain. But I don’t think the timing was accidental.
The concept sat easily within the map I’d already been building. If consciousness precedes form, if souls are not created at conception but arrive from somewhere, then the question of when life begins becomes more complex than it first appears. Many accounts suggest the soul moves in and out of proximity hovering in the astral plane throughout pregnancy, only fully anchoring later. Mediums often describe seeing a soul hovering like a sphere of light just outside a mother's energetic field months before conception even occurs, tethered by a thread, dipping its toes into the physical world before fully diving in. Not a switch being flipped. More like a ship slowly docking.
This is also where my paintings enter the picture — not as illustration, but as part of the same inquiry.
When I mix colors on a palette, no single pigment survives untouched. Each color becomes itself through relationship. What I make is never just red plus blue. It’s what happens between them. Looking back, I can see that my paintings have always been a way to explore the vast inquiries of destiny, purpose, creation, death, rebirth. And what is the individual? What is the collective? Where does one end and the other begin? The canvas doesn’t answer that question. But it anchors those massive inquiries directly into the physical, holding them in a way that language sometimes can’t.
The Rest Remains Ocean
I’ve spent a lot of my life comparing notes from all the different sources I’ve mentioned who claim to have touched different parts of the same mystery. Mystics, scientists, people who nearly died, people who remember past lives, people who describe leaving their bodies. When you spend enough time with those accounts, you stop arguing about the details and start looking for the outline.
This map may be wrong. Parts of it almost certainly are. But after decades of collecting clues, reading, questioning, painting, and paying attention, this is the coastline I’ve managed to sketch so far.
The rest remains ocean.
