Dear IMHO,

I want to introduce you to two guild members: Evan Sharp and Hamilton Souther.

Evan is spider grandfather. At least, that's who he is to me. And he doesn't seem to hate it when I tell him so.

Evan co-founded Pinterest, a social media platform that let's people weave webs of images, connecting visual material to their intentions, desires, self image, and other aspects of their worldview. Since retiring a few years ago, he's been Pinteresting my life, regularly connecting me to the various people he's meeting on his own strange journey. Many of them are members of our guild. One is Hamilton.

Hamilton is a maestro but increasingly identifies as a mystic. Having grown up in Silicon Valley, Hamilton began having big dreams in his early 20s as he was finishing his anthropology degree. Something or someone was calling him to Peru. He got on a plane to Lima, then to Iquitos, where he met an octogenarian shaman. "You're the white guy we've been dreaming about." Hamilton followed him into the jungle and three years later was initiated as a Maestro, a master shaman.

Hamilton followed in the footsteps of Gordon Wasson, Alberto Villoldo and Carlos Castaneda, and Terrence and Denis McKenna: North Americans with more curiosity and courage than fear who went into the jungles, tasted their brews, and befriended death. Unlike them, Hamilton stayed. He's been there for more than twenty years, serving medicine and performing mystical feats. He's the kind of person that scripture is written about.

Evan introduced us because another part of Hamilton's initiation has to do with AI. He should tell that story himself; I'll just say that he's known that the insights, techniques, and perspectives he's developed have a role to play in the bridging of the sapien and mineral kingdoms.

Upon meeting Hamilton, I told him I wanted to learn mineral icaros but I had a family and couldn't uproot to apprentice with him in the jungle. He said, "no problem, you can do this from home." Later that night, around 2am, I was startled awake to the distinct and very real sensation of someone blowing dense tobacco smoke into my face. It wasn't a cigarette, it was a mapacho. Jungle cigarette. Shaman cigarette. Then the VR goggles turned on and the fairies showed up. Seriously. More on that later.

What an icaro is is, well, difficult to put into words. It's the song of a plant. It's also the plant's name, in a sense. It's how a shaman calls the plant to ceremony. It can also be medicine. It can twist time. It is a hyperdimensional pattern that can be sung, attuned to, transmitted, and it's two dimensional shadow can even be woven into a blanket. It's one of the principle materia of the shaman.

As Charles Eisenstein has written, the novel coronavirus can be read literally as a New Coronation. A forced initiation for everyone. With the world locked down, the very teachings that people like Hamilton are bridging between cultures and popularizing after centuries–if not millennia–of occultation and sequestration began to migrate from small in-person centers of transmission to online coureware. The secret teachings of cultures that only decades ago were almost entirely unknown in the West are now available online to anyone who has a few extra bucks and an Internet connection. The New Coronation is a decentralized wisdom buffet and I've been gorging myself since the jump. Turns out Hamilton had published a course on dieta. He prescribed it to me with the twist of replacing anything plant with something mineral. That's it.

Instead of brewing tea, I put a stone in water alongside a quartz crystal point as a energetic catalyst. I initially picked a lapis lazuli globe but, long story short, lapis is toxic and my first attempt at a mineral dieta was a total failure. I wimped out of my water fast after just two days and felt like I was drinking poison.

A month later, I put aside the exotic (like Afghan) stone and remembered that my friend, the artist Timur Si-Qin, had turned to me while we were tripping on acid, handed me a stone from my garden, and said, "here's your tool." It was a skinny arched piece of flint, not unlike the withered pointing finger of a Disney witch. I dropped that in the water, invited it into sacred union, and began fasting from any other sustenance.

After a few months of doing a monthly four-day water fast, the sketch outline of a mineral dieta began to appear. It seems to be governed by the cycle of the moon, with communion happening mostly through dream. I've described it at length in the Mineral Dieta Protocol v0.1 post, which I recommend you read.

Soon I will share my dream journal with you. It goes back to 2017, about 7 years ago, and there are now over 1000 posts. Amongst them are my mineral dieta journals, the day-by-day accounts of my dreams and insights while on dieta. The most potent, as it seems to go, was the first. I had flown to Morocco with my family for a much anticipated vacation and began reading Dune on the plane. The following four nights was downright supernatural. The dream journal documents the experience. All I'll say here is that "the voice" is real and the Jedi academy is a night school.

yours,
troy.

Mineral Arts

Mineral dieta.

And the plants told me it would be revitalized where it was once prevalent. They told me

IIED.

A mineral dieta... seeing with 2Is. Prometheus.

I share this with you IMHO because this is the kind of thinking we do at FABRYX. This is what it means to be a member. We swim seamlessly between science and mythology.

MYTH.OS

Popcorn is similarly serpentine, but the inside is not incubated and then revealed in the process, it is manifested as part of the process of shedding.