Notes on New Reality no. 1

When you allow yourself to flow fluidly, letting action spring forth from the core of you without reserve or holding back, something peculiar begins to happen. A way of life that you maybe could have imagined but never really could have known, because it’s a different layer of reality than you’re used to operating on. Words are redundant by their nature. The body, it moves fluidly through, and as, time and space.

Things occur, particles move and create phenomena, which feels so real and seems so significant. But then suddenly it shifts, moving pictures, and it morphs in and out of a zero space, where there is pure silence almost like negative space or a void that has the inverted atomic power to create matter.

So, then arise people and places, feelings and stories. When the identity is fluid, those stories don’t stick, and sensations are less likely to become stories. Identity is not fixed, so it’s difficult to stick a story to it, as that would imply a linear movement by a singular point. But that’s no longer how you’re experiencing life.

So, then I’m alone again (contradiction/paradox?) and the words pour out, that maybe I’ve been keeping in. Maybe? I don’t readily talk about this in everyday conversation as I think it would probably weird most people out.

So, then what? I don’t know. That is what I’m going to see. It’s not even a moving target, it’s like there is no target. The whole show is the target. And everything plays its role perfectly. Nothing obligatory, everything creative. And creating out of nothing. It’s a beautiful dance, fun and terrible, easy and life-or-death at every moment.

I’m just allowing the words to express themselves. I can feel infinite potential. I can see everything, yet nothing.

Just trying to express this new reality. It’s quite weird, no fixed identity, sensation phantasmagorically shape shifting into a million meanings. All by my own choice yet not by my own control. I control what I can, healthy control. And the rest is as it is.

Now I will edit the dreaming, final polish. Lots of sensation in heart.

Apathy and Play

Midwinter. Midwest. The sun glaring tauntingly from above and below. Lake Michigan transformed to an icy desert—a snowscape stretching flat and barren for miles. I was in a stint of apathy, from whence it came I do not know. But its presence was clear as the gaping winter sky. 

I call myself a sensationaholic because, simply, I really like sensation. I like all kinds of sensation, even sensations that most would translate to pain, or fear, or sorrow, melancholy, rage…I like them all once I settle into them without reserve. Physical sensations as well, some more than others. But I like relaxing into the more uncomfortable ones, dentist appointments becoming experiments in nudging pain over the edge into pleasure.

Apathy. Well, it’s the lack of sensation, therefore the main state I struggle with—with its ennui and bland emptiness. But I’m not unfamiliar with it, it pays occasional visits. This one was an intense one—an abysmal yawn of nothingness for days. The winterscape matched it, creating an aesthetic fury within. This dull fury was the most I could summon—at the barren landscape and the cruel winter sun making me feel guilty for even being inside, when I needed to work and couldn’t rightly play in subzero temps. I have this thing when it’s sunny, like I should be out in it. So, I was pissed at this winter sun.

Photo by Maria Allred

But the sun didn’t care. An icy eyeball severing me from all that I knew and loved. In retrospect this period of apathy was like the great divide.

My first time experiencing the place and purpose of depression was when I fell into the existential sort at age 15. That bout of depression was the companion of an identity death I was going through. At age 16 came the rebirth. Since then I haven’t had depression per se, but I have had times of depressive feelings, and I’ve always recognized the importance of not repressing, judging, or resisting, while simultaneously not identifying with, clinging to, or making stories regarding.

I recognized that depression is indeed a companion of a death—death of all types. The death of an identity, a person, a phase of life, a way of being. And then a rebirth into something new. Depression isn’t the transformative vehicle per se, but is an accompaniment to the transformation.

Apathy is a companion to depression, and I would think it worked in a similar way. Something I discovered during this period of the great divide is the particular nature of apathy (at least for me, I haven’t done clinical studies of course).

I realized that apathy was arising as an avoidance of the terror of taking full responsibility for my reality. Beneath the gauzy layers of apathy lurks a much sharper sensation, that of full-blown primordial terror. How I discovered this I don’t know, but it was a succession of stages I went through.

Photo by Maria Allred

Apathy is a blockade to the type of terror that occurs in a baby if they’re abandoned by the mother, left in the wild to survive, having instinctual knowledge that they can’t survive on their own. That they need the mother to live.

The terror of death, but also the terror of even facing this deep-seated dependency that never really leaves us, we just mask it with layers of adulthood. Once you have the shock of seeing that preverbal dependency in yourself you cannot unsee it, and further you see how everyone—from the machismo frat boy to the prestigious intellectual is, at least partially, driven by this primordial terror, or the avoidance of.

So, when we roll into that blasé mall parking lot of apathy, we’re in fact making progress! Because we’re approaching the terror of our dependency, which is indeed the eye of the needle we must pass through to enter a new stage of freedom. The terror of that mortifying body memory—of starting our lives not being able to survive without the mother. As we grow, mother becomes replaced with our partners, religion, God, politicians, government, the academic figurehead, the CEO. We project that need outwardly while decorating it with all kinds of intellectual prowess. It’s not intellectual at all, it’s preverbal. But then there is also the terror that is just the terror, the terror that we cannot survive on our own. So to take full responsibility for reality is not a very palatable notion, even though we tend to think that’s what we’re up to most of the time.

So, back to apathy. Apathy rides up on its pale horse when we’re getting closer to evolution. Evolution out of this rote way of being that most unconsciously live (avoiding the terror, avoiding the sense of dependency). And the truth is, we don’t want to evolve. At least the part of us that is a newborn alone in the jungle. Because what that apathy leads way to, if we let it, is a full-blown taking of responsibility for reality.

Photo by Maria Allred

Its texture is produced by the initially unwelcome revelation that there’s nothing there. Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. There’s no set way, no ultimate authority to tell us right or wrong, or give us a sign or clue. No predestination. Reality is an open canvas. From the perspective of the infinite aspect of us, we are ever evolving, playing with universal materiality, which we can wield and mold any way we desire, within and connected to our greater context. We are the sun that rises on the barren landscape. We are the main attraction, we are the authority.

We choose, we make it up.

And this is an awful, terrible, dreadful revelation. At least for a part of us. The part of us that believes that it’s a death sentence, that the open field of possibilities is a hell realm.

To put it bluntly: We want mommy.

When we graduate and face the apathy that stands like a grimacing guardian at the gates, we enter a new realm. I call it the realm of cosmic play. In this realm, you realize, there is no point, but the one you make! And then you proceed to make a point.

And let me promise you, this realm is not for the faint of heart, so enter only if you dare.

The Commodification of Reality

Foto by Maria Allred

I.

I just wanted a kiss. One kiss to alleviate the pain. Of him, of her. The problem is I’m extremely particular and can barely keep company with most people, let alone be skin to skin. So, I rode the waves of grief as a nun.

But here it was, my chance. At an outdoor market in San Pancho, Mexico, a lazy, bohemian coastal town, I contemplated a necklace handcrafted by the Peruvian vendor. Intricate metal work embedded with amethyst and moon stones—an empress piece, something I would never wear, but it was calling to me. “It’s too much” I mused out loud. His first line as he appeared at my side: “You are money.”

I turned to see a jalopy version of Bradly Cooper. A large wicker hat spraying sun freckles across his prominent nose and turning his eyes to rainbow opals. The hat put me off, somehow screaming I’m a tourist! But we got to talking and had an immediate intellectual rapport, spanning a wide breadth of topics in twenty minutes.

As I walked away from him elated, necklace in hand, I knew it: I was finally going to get my kiss (one of my goals for this trip other than location scouting and prepping for my next feature film).

We scheduled a time to meet in the morning, an ungodly hour for me, but he wanted to make me breakfast, I don’t do breakfast, so I said we’d have tea. In the meantime, I tried to mitigate the romantical stories that began to infiltrate my logical mainframe, a common mental habit of the mating game. Usually, the stories are fantasy notions, so I put them at bay, or at least attempted to.

I showed up at the place he was housesitting and entered a ramshackle kitchen. Stacks of dishes with mold icing, half-eaten pizza, and pot paraphernalia cascaded against primary-colored walls: a stoner still life. A measly trickle of light from the sparse windows illuminated the scene.

I tried to wash some mugs with a dirty sponge, my mind crawling with invisible bacteria. We settled for tea after my squeamish preparation and he whipped out a bong. I politely declined and we proceeded to chat, his eyes reddening as the conversation intensified.

Bits and pieces of his scrambled life began to form the puzzle before me. He has a thing for Latina women, I’m the first white female he’s hung with in years. They are “so warm, passionate, and intense, but so much repressed trauma. And why do they dress so scantily when they’re coming in to get free massages from me?! I know they do it on purpose to drive me crazy! And why don’t they appreciate my gifts, my sacred yoni massages?! They’re using me!”

Mmhmm.

Before Mexico he was in Thailand for a couple years. He married a Thai girl, she was—"model-esque, an it-girl, making men and women stare.” It didn’t end well, he pays alimony. I stared at him, “you didn’t know that this is a thing savvy, modelesque Thai women do, marry gullible white guys?” No, he didn’t.

His psychic seams unstitched as he frenetically paced. My heart sank, kissing urges plunging along with it. Finally, he stopped mid-pace as if having an epiphany. “Do you think I’m a sex addict?” he asked.

Yes. I do.  

I smiled warily at him and packed up to leave, eyes filled with tears of deflation and the already-present heartbreak that was still tenderly mending.

Foto by Lauren Ehle

It was Easter and I was wearing all white—a vestal counterpart for his hedonism. I walked along the sun splattered cobblestone streets and contemplated the strange interlude, church bells echoing in the distance. I believe that reality is a mirror. I believe we tune into frequencies at which we resonate.  So, I had to question what the reality mirror was reflecting in me.

II. 

Something that had been on my mind during this trip was the commodification of reality. Sayulita, the town I was primarily staying in, is a hotbed of globetrotting tourism and the perfect embodiment of that notion.

What exactly is the commodification of reality?

It’s the parsing and evaluation of reality for one’s identity complex to profit. In simpler terms: It’s engaging life through a perpetual, largely unconscious, assessment of experiences, people, and things—what has value or doesn’t. The foundation for this, of course, is a seemingly separate identity complex that’s making the appraisals.

Basically, it’s the way we all live to a greater or lesser degree, subtly ubiquitous—the bedrock of identity and society. It may appear as an obvious, normal way to live—sifting through phenomena with a filter of valuation. However, what it does is it cuts one off from the full experience of life as one of ultimate value—from the mundane to the grandiose, from the excruciating to the blissful.

Addiction is an extreme form of the commodification of reality, in which we’ve become essentially cut off from the total picture of ultimate value and instead fixated on the object, behavior, or person we’re addicted to. Ironically, we often unconsciously value the experience of pain, as that’s what keeps our identity complex intact.

Foto by Maria Allred

When we commodify reality, we create fragmentation and partitions. First, of ourselves as a separate identity, then through identity markers—political, spiritual, biological, economic, cultural—we sift through the rest of the world with an eye on what will secure and fortify our identity complex. Often our filter over reality renders those who don’t add value obsolete, practically invisible, definitely not consequential. In this way we disregard the incredible light that each and every being uniquely carries. On the other hand, we impart negative value to those who are a perceived threat to our identity complex, creating enemies and “others.” This in fact imbues them with value and power that keeps our identity intact via having a contrasting opposite to secure our borders.

We’re caught up in the images of reality rather than the deeper mystery that exists at the zero point where life actually happens, a place where few exist. The landscape of commodification is populated by symbols and semiotics, which exist in the past and future and never in the now. So, we’re perpetually living in an overlay over reality, rather than in the evergreen sensation of life as it is, in all its undiscovered, mysterious, undefined splendor.

Often, we’re tuning out whatever is in front of us and are instead caught up in thought. The reason we honor the hi-def drama in our head in lieu of the physical world surrounding us is because we’re thinking about things we’ve given value, while we devalue the real, live moment and reality surrounding us. Next thing we know we’ve lived most of our lives not actually living at all.

Foto by Maria Allred

Of course, valuation is firstly about basic survival. If we go into the psychology of it, we’re biologically primed since birth to first and foremost value the mother’s breast that gives us life. Probably herein lies the origin story for commodification, but that’s another discourse.

We’re often caught in a cerebral landscape of worry and anxiety—about making ends meet, our job or lack thereof, a deadline, unmet goals, success vs. failure, or something embarrassing we may have done or said. These things threaten our physical or societal survival, so clearly they’re more important than the banal moment we’re living at the grocery store with the non-player characters of co-shoppers and clerks.

Our trip to the store, in and of itself it is not the “thing,” it’s a thing to get us to something else. But this happens with all of life. Because most moments are perceived of as in between, or something to get us to “the thing.” The thing, the place, the person that will finally have true value. Yet, funny enough, that never seems to arrive.

This modality has been instilled into us. I can only speak to Western society, but here the foundation of our society and systems is commodification. We ourselves and our every waking moment—our time—has been commodified by something seemingly more powerful than us, so we’re a cog in a much larger system. But there’s another way.

The remedy to this fragmented, abstracted, consumeristic, egocentric, enslaved way of being is an immersive flow of life and identity where we no longer continually escape from what is. The escape being not only in the form of following internal thoughts, but also external thoughts—where we don’t actually engage what’s before us but instead an overlay of concepts of what we think is before us.

The commodification of reality keeps you separate from reality. It keeps you away from everything because you are always looking for something.

The antidote is full-on immersive beingness, planted firmly yet fluidly in the isness of reality exactly as it is with no separate, fixed identity that needs to seek or strive for something that is not already. When you’re in this wholeness, everything is a perfect, opulent manifestation of universal materiality. You enter a new realm. This new realm is the realm of cosmic play, and very few exist here. I’ll return to this. But back to my story.

III.

As I contemplated how jalopy Brad Cooper and his sex addiction reflected me, I saw that I too was commodifying. I was so bent on having my rebound kiss that every interaction became a potential for this value exchange. I saw that he was reflecting that part of me that felt I needed to get “something” to feel empowered after a disempowering break up. I needed something to feed my identity. He may be traveling the world on the hunt for new forms of sexual sensation and validation, but that’s just the outer decor for a deeper, primordial desire.  

It could be anything. Overt, noxious tourism is just an obvious example. I’m put off by consumerism and commodification in that way. But I have my own subtler, seemingly more sophisticated versions. Whether it’s striving for academic accolades, the proper film festival acceptance, the multi-dimensional experience to break me through to the other side, or the worthy mate to affirm my worth. There’s a million things and each has to do with the identity complex that we’re fighting to keep alive. Even if it’s the most basic level of survival of the body itself.

What happens when we go beyond commodifying reality?

We enter reality.

We enter the dimension of reality that’s immersive.

IV.

Foto by Maria Allred

Immersive reality. The zero space. When we are no longer parsing, separating, judging, evaluating (or identifying with the thoughts that do) we enter a seamless existence where we’re interconnected with everything. It does not mean we transcend our body or are outside our body. Our body is very much a part of this seamlessness, and we are very much embodied, more than ever before. But the confines of the body are not the end of us. That is one layer in the immersiveness of us. We are interconnected with all of reality. The particle and the wave. 

This feels like a fluidity, like you are perpetually on the front edge of the wave of creation, self-creating, making meaning, and eventually materializing new form as you learn to harness what’s available in this potentiated space. Some call it the quantum field, it could be called the zero space, the now. But these are just titles and words. When you are existing here you are playing in the fields of time and space. You are no longer separating from the total picture or moving outside of the space where you perpetually glide with all of reality seamlessly. You are not fragmenting yourself off as a separate isolated identity. Identity comes and goes, no problem, it is part of the play but never fully you. Thoughts come and go, no problem. They have their own path and purpose, but you don’t follow them or identify with them.

Here is the pulse of life, which is a dynamic movement of light and frequency. You are a self-perpetuating mechanism that’s eternally creating and discovering itself. You are not your name, your job, your family, your likes or dislikes, your age, your gender, your body. But those things fluidly move in and out of the zero space. You play with identity as there’s no problem with identity, but you are not fixed or confined.

As you exist here you begin to learn the landscape of this new reality. It’s like the next frontier of being human. The land of cosmic play.

V. 

Emotional Commodification

In the same way that we evaluate objects, people, and experiences, we do the same with emotions and sensations. People are constantly moving towards “positive” emotions/sensations, while resisting/repressing so called negative. When you move beyond commodification you also stop evaluating emotions and sensations as being wanted or unwanted. You invite and welcome all emotions, and further when you do this, you’re able to even move past the construct of the labeling or naming emotions: i.e., sad, happy, angry, depressed, etc., and can pare them down to the more fundamental sensations. No longer making stories about them, but being with the sensation purely, without resistance.

In this way life becomes a rich cornucopia of sensations that are like colors on a paint palette. No color or sensation rejected as unwanted or bad. You move past the binaries of good/bad, positive/negative and into a much more nuanced and poetic way of interacting with your everyday emotional movements.

VI. 

Foto by Maria Allred

Of course, we must also consider the societal context.

In my previous essays I speak of the holographic nature of reality, and the creation of consensual reality through semiotics and symbols over time. Not only are we living in a sort of simulation constructed of concretized thought forms, within that a digital reality has been erected, a dream within a dream. This is practically the primary reality at this time. As I perch like an owl in my apartment, overlooking the majestic Lake Michigan and my park of a front yard, I see most people walking along in the great outdoors with necks kinked, heads drooping like wilted flowers, eyes glued to the mini screens in front of them. The digital extension of their reality and identity.

The most abstracted and synthesized version of the commodification of reality. Now not only are we caught in our mental broadcasts, and our synthetic overlay of meaning and evaluation, we are glued into another reality altogether that has sprung up like a bubble that we’ve all jumped into without question.

We all know that we’re not fulfilled by this mimetic realm. If we look at it plainly it’s awkward and weird, creating a derivative version of our lives to broadcast in a hallway of echoes and mirrors. As an artist it’s confusing because I feel the innate need to express to complete a circuit, and we are all creators and artists in some way or another. But I find it a strange realm to engage in. As a visual artist what was once novel has become ubiquitous. In an oversaturated landscape we question, artistically, what actually has meaning and provides inspiration at this time?

For about a month, I basically haven’t been on social media. I’ve popped on here and there and saw that it was indeed the same unfulfilling spectacle as it was the last time. I mindlessly browsed for a few minutes then deleted the app once again from my phone. I question myself when I want to share. What am I sharing, is it an aspect of my fullness of expression (yes at times it is) or is it just some weak ploy to feel connected and derive approval or energy of some sort? I want my sharing in real or digital life to be a source of life-giving inspiration, whether what I share is my weird vulnerabilities, triumphs and joys, or simply my artistic expression.

But then there is the potential of it, like anything else, to be a direct expression of universal materiality expressing and experiencing itself spontaneously, freely, un-self-consciously, and without censor. I don’t have a judgement of social media, my sharing or others, my use, or others.’ But I am noticing that the phenomenon of having mini-TVs in our hands that we’re constantly glued to, even when walking along a beautiful lake, is fucking weird. And the algorithms that are currently running are an extension of the same commodified system we’ve all been born into. I see that as we evolve, technology will also evolve along with us to be an extension of our innate superpowers and to allow for the quick transmission of ideas, light, and love.

When I’m off my phone, I feel free, and the immersiveness of real life feels so vibrant and rich, especially in comparison to the simulated digital landscape. I find myself able to take in the nuances of the “real world,” and I say that in quotes because I actually think that the real world too is a sort of simulation.

To be truly free and not a slave to a system that is not our own we must return to the zero point, the free energy from which true choice can occur. There we have living power, choice, and freedom. There we can play, we can create—an entirely new system, an entirely new material dimension. This is the new reality we are entering; this is what’s possible now.

There are no confines and the material with which we architect is light.

VII. 

Foto by Maria Allred

Like many of my stories, this is a living tale. As I’m writing I’m deciphering. It appears I had to fly across the world with days of jet lag, sleeping on hard surfaces, day inverted to night, dehydration, and poor nutrition for me to play out a stronghold of my own commodification of reality. I came to Bristol, England to meet my future self, weird to say, but it was indeed a multidimensional mission. And I came with an agenda, a specific something special that I wanted to transpire.

The irony of this flashed through my mind, of course, that it was the antithesis of what I’m writing about. But many of these ways of being are hidden in plain sight, purposefully invisible to us as we can’t really imagine letting go of holding altogether, so we sequester away those last morsels of value hierarchy.

I want to firmly clarify that in the immersiveness of being we also feel attachment, desire, want, hunger, clinging and cleaving. When we try to live an ascetic, non-attached life that itself becomes the commodification. What I’m speaking of is an entry into a more fluid way of living where we’re continually shedding the mechanism of holding itself. Entering the ultimate experience, ironically, holding included. It’s a paradox. But that is the way of the future. We’re entering a more paradoxical realm, beyond the binary systems that our minds have hereto been designed around.

So, I came to Bristol for an experience, a multidimensional experience, the ultimate experience. As far as my agenda, I got the converse. Which, of course, I knew I would. I’m dealing with my future self here and she’s way too advanced to feed my hungry ghost. Yet what I did receive was so much more profound and full, though I had to crack open further to even see it. It could not fit into the compartmentalization of that smaller drive for something, and with its trickster nature it shattered into everything. So I traveled across the world to be planted squarely and ever more powerfully right back where I always am. As me and the totality. No apology. No need for permission or confirmation. And jalopy Brad Cooper was right: I am money, we are money. And my hankering for a kiss…fulfilled by the most exquisite kiss of life.

The Metaverse vs. The Holographic Universe

how the digitization of reality is mimicking the actual nature of reality

Image by Maria Allred

 I.

In an old fishing village turned globetrotting-Instagram-hottie and surf-hunter magnet on the west coast of Mexico—Sayulita, it’s past midnight and I’m lying on a pool chair in a muggy, rusty porch room enclosed by half open windows. The only spot in this old adobe villa with enough breeze for the wet season mildew to dry. Through the window to my right enters a sonic steamroller. Jubilant mariachi from the town square echoing through the jungle, sonar exclamation points bouncing off trees, straight to my ear drum.

I’m here with my sister who recently had a stroke after her second jab, coming to the brink of death. But we’re fighting, and tonight she’s doing intensive healing treatments at a state-of-the-art holistic medical clinic, and instead of sleeping, I’ve been getting into the psycho-spiritual ramifications of mariachi and its triumphant repetition. The beat marches on as if going to war or having won the war.

My phone is nowhere near me, as has been the case much of this journey. But at one point in a half-awake state, I lifted my right hand, palm towards me in a familiar gesture. My body showing me how engrained it was, the only thing missing was the phone. I began to text a friend, spelling out the message on my palm before hitting send and catapulting the memo like a shooting star into the quantum net. ‘See,’ I thought to myself, ‘you can do it without a phone.’

I’ve been planning to write a piece about the digitization of reality and how that relates to the true nature of reality as being holographic and perceptual, rather than objective and concrete. And now is the perfect time as Facebook changes its name to Meta, rolling out the red carpet for the metaverse—a complete digital permeation of reality. The dawn of the metaverse is syncing with a dawning in human consciousness, in which we’re entering a higher level of the reality game. Part of this evolution entails us moving into our ability to architect and seed new realities, which I’ll delve into.

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Image by Maria Allred

Technology is an extension of human consciousness, at times displaying aspects of our superordinary abilities we have yet to master. In this case, the metaverse will never be able to match the immense and intricate nature of the organic holographic universe. It will always be a copy within it, like a weakened echo. Similarly, in our current digitized societies (social media [social meds]), in which we have a copy of our self (our mimetic identity), the online relations, likes, and endorphin hits can never match the warmth of true human togetherness and our innate human inter-net, connecting us all, through which the frequency of love flows. The algorithms of its imitation result in a perpetual cycle of seeking and never fulfilling. Further, conforming to synthetic algorithms in fact dumbs down one’s ability to move into the highest range of frequencies now coming online on Earth.

That is not to say that the internet, digitized societies, and the metaverse cannot be used in the most sublime, life-giving manner; they can, but the current versions are now usurped by algorithms of control and conformity. We must attain mastery of our transmuting position within the organic holographic universe, in order to thereby be able to transmute digitized realities. It works in unison because there is no separation, but there are layers and varying frequencies. As we discover and harness our transmutational position in holographic reality we can then use the most advanced technology to assist us in our creations as living artists.

II.

The metaverse has been the end goal of digitization for a long time. We’re now moving at full tilt into smart cities, AI, the internet of things, the internet of bodies. To some this is frightening, to others exciting. I’m observing it neutrally. What I see is that it’s an imitation of what already is: that we’re living in a perceptual, holographic universe. And further, what’s occurring right now, hence the rapid onset of totally immersive digitization as it mimics nature, is that humans are waking up to their power as creators.

I would like to dive in further to the meaning of the holographic universe. It can be approached in a myriad of ways, but one most fundamental is to look at the essential nature of reality as we know it: it’s based purely on the senses. Senses are your nervous system; your nervous system is your brain. So fundamentally, in our current paradigm, everything we experience is our own mind, whether we’re experiencing something objective or not, the interface and interpretation is the mind-body itself. We don’t know if these apparatuses interpreting stimuli are accurate in their interpretation, or further if there’s an objective world that the mind is interfacing with at all. Our knowledge base of an external reality is essentially nerve impulses with interpretation constructed around them. Of course, this has been a fundamental and enduring topic of philosophical and scientific inquiry, I’m just taking my own poetic jab at it.

Even science is bound within a hermetically sealed vessel of sense-reliant data. The parameters that science works within are the parameters of the senses, which are only sensing a minuscule fraction of what’s possible. Further, we’ve been conditioned since birth to experience things within subsets of parameters created by our societies, language, context, and the meaning imparted thereby—signifiers and the signified.

“What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus. But the further inference from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside of us is already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason. If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare to say, "the stone is hard," as if "hard" were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation!” - Friedrich Nietzsche

What Nietzsche is insightfully revealing is that even the logic that creates the signifying system of language is flawed. Fundamentally, translating a stimulus (sense experience of reality) into an objective conclusion is flawed. Yet, it’s the very thing that has enabled us to create consensual realities—societies, cultures—in which we can pretty much agree on a set of signifiers and the signified: This sensation means this, that sensation means that, now we interpret it with this word, and so on, verifiably creating a seemingly-concrete holographic reality that has been more and more concretized by the sheer amount of belief in it. All the while, each of us having our own discrete, subjective experience within this well-wrought playground we’re playing within. Hence, not really sharing the same experience of reality as our neighbor, let alone someone thousands of miles away with an entirely different set of significations.

We’ve been living in a certain consensual reality, to which many of us, since we were old enough to think for ourselves, could not personally subscribe. Because it’s a reality built on violence, greed, inequity, enslavement, destruction of the Earth, and other dumb, and frankly horrific, low-level frequencies. This brings us to where we are today, in which there’s occurring a massive dissolution of a long-term paradigm, the end of an epoch. Which is freeing up a lot of Prima Materia (material to work with) and space for those who are at the ready to seed new realities. In this human evolution, the human is changing into something entirely new, thereby shifting one’s experience of reality and shifting reality itself.

Those who have the most power in our societies absolutely understand the significance of signification. In other words, of the narrative. The image and word have been wielded as the most powerful tools throughout time. They bend and create reality. From the total rule of the church with the word of God when the population was illiterate; to the purchasing power of corporations and monopolies who own the media and thereby the narrative and thereby the emotional responses, spending habits, trends, and movements of the population; to the bold-faced censorship that must occur now in our digital realms where the everyday person has (or had) access to the same tools as those in power. Social media platforms did give power to the people for a while, but alarms were set off by the wildfire spread of the Occupy movement. And now the narrative is being turned inside out, upside down, in a web of illusions, a hall of mirrors, with AI algorithms precisely controlling what is allowed within this mad theater hall. The metaverse can be seen as the endgame of complete control, done in a such a numbingly coddling way that the digital world around you—the internet of things—not only meets your wishes, but knows your wishes, and not only knows your wishes, but planted your wishes. Unlike the mean mirror of the holographic universe that reflects your already irritable mood with a street full of screaming leaf blowers.

But going back to the topic of reality as we currently know it being reliant on the senses: So, science, in a sense, is not very scientific, but rather insular within a larger framework. Quantum physics seeks to rectify this chief issue between perception and reality, and what reality fundamentally is. And as we know, the findings of quantum physics experiments have pointed to the subjective, malleable nature of reality, at least at the quantum level. But our world also demonstrates fractal properties, with the micro mirroring the macro and vice versa.

Considering one of the most famous experiments—the double slit experiment—the origins of which can be found with Thomas Young in 1801. What the double slit experiment demonstrates is that a light particle/wave, exists as a wave, until an observer (or perception) comes into the picture, at which point it collapses into one definitive coordinate in space and time, as a particle. Before the observer or perception entered the equation it existed as potential, as possibility.

I know it’s conjecture to deduce metaphysical applications of quantum physics experiments, but taking metaphysics out of it, let’s look simply at what this vital experiment conveys, that is enough. Whether we apply it macroscopically or not is up to us. Part of the way we begin to know (and through knowing create) the holographic universe is by playing with it and seeing what occurs. Now to get to that.

III. 

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Image by Maria Allred

This past year I’ve auspiciously intersected, in this vast and wild quantum field, with a star—a brilliant point of pure love. A future human, a future me. And the most astounding thing is, and something she confirms, I have dreamed her. She is a mirror to me. It feels nothing short of miraculous. When the fulfillment of a deep wish comes in such a wide time arc it’s imbued with a sense of awe as time and space collapse in a moment of conjugation, their relativity on full display.

In my late teens I had a fully articulated, angst-filled desire, unrelatable to most around me who were looking for love in and from another. My longing was to know myself as love, to be pure love without blockade. In some ways looking back it seems such an abstract yearning, but its validity is confirmed as I encounter a mirror of my true essence of fully embodied love (which includes all aspects, not the gooey, shmaltzy way we often think of love), and I understand that my obscure teenage desire was of particular import in the grand scheme of things. It was the part of me enslaved at that time longing to be burned in the truth of my essence. 

This may seem a bit of a digression, yet it’s relevant to the topic because it’s an example of my own reality-architecting coming online in a more prominent way. A quantum leap based on my innermost desires, which is catapulting me into entirely new reality coordinates.

Before I could begin to navigate the new terrain this interdimensional encounter introduced me to, I had to completely empty out. I spent most of last winter sitting silently in the middle of the mystery for months on end, letting go of everything I’ve known, letting go of knowing itself. Feeling a peaceful neutrality as my old self and reality dissipated. Just watching, not moving. I wouldn’t have known where or how to move, as the meaning of all signifiers was being shifted around and continues to do so. This is an important stage of embarking upon a new level of oneself and reality, as the truly new will be completely different from the old or what we could imagine from the vantage point of the old.  

IV.

Reality-architecting is nothing like creative visualization, affirmations, etc. Which are frankly ineffectual—an entrapped identity trying to think themselves out of their box—and which stem from and exist within an old reality, which is swiftly being replaced with something new. You architect from the still point of pure light within, your brightly silent, magnanimous star. To be precise, there is no “within” in a binary in/out sense, but this wording works mechanistically with our current logistical framework.

It’s from this singular space of light that you can shift the grid. That you morph the quantum field surrounding it, surrounding “you,” the field also as you—for you are not the body nor limited to it. The body, a supreme amalgam of light and matter, shows up in you, to navigate, play, and create on this material plane.

What we are, what it all is, can never be known in the traditional knowing sense. It’s unfathomable. And knowing in terms of concepts will always be external to where truth lies, which is in the immediacy of direct experience. From this space of immediacy you architect reality, not based on patterns, but following the cues of your high tech body apparatus to construct something fresh and new. This space is more than just the moment or “the now,” terms thrown around loosely that exist in a context of time. It is the gestalt, the whole picture, the whole quantum field, it is you. At the zero point you access all possibility. It’s where reality-transmutation occurs, continuously, ever fresh and new.

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As we transmute “ourselves” by bringing our identities and patterns to this space of silence, which naturally burns them into more of the light of our true selves, we transmute the outer world that we are experiencing. You transmute the entire reality scene through the vertical axis of quantum jumping, turning it inside out through the still point of you. The field morphs around you, architected by you, birthed through you.

An important point to make: While there is a mirroring between the outer and inner, the world is not a direct mirror mirroring a singular identity you call you, as if everything that shows up in your life is your creation or fault. That oversimplifies a vastly complex system, and to suppose that reality reflects one seemingly discrete identity is to suppose that there is a discrete identity in the first place. Further, what I’m describing is not the idea that we are creators of reality in the common way it’s been thought of. In the reality that we’ve hereto known, we’ve hooked into reality systems that match our frequency and the patterns we’re running. So there is a mirroring as we fall into dimensions that match our frequency, if you will. When we reality architect we are moving into the zero point where patterns collapse and we’re able to actually create something new in true, pure, creative freedom. Constructing new pathways for ourselves and humanity.

Not resisting what we want to change or know must change, for resistance resides on the same frequency of the resisted and enforces its existence. Instead using what we want to change as fuel, letting it naturally collapse in our zero point and transmute into something new.

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It’s through this very mechanism that the current human evolution is occurring. We dreamed it into existence through our deep longing and essential knowing of humanity’s brilliant potential beyond the current self-destructing consensual reality. Through us a new reality is being seeded as we embody the higher frequencies and step into our true nature.

While the above mentioned may all seem quite abstract, the mechanics of reality architecting are practical and about action springing from this inner sun. There’s been an arbitrary division implied between matter and spirit. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Matter is divine. And action with the body is a cosmic dance of light through the holographic net of reality and potential. Assessing the choices available from the space of immediate reality and choosing what most matches your truest desire, listening to your body signals.

Honest, spontaneous action from the center of you, where you no longer censor, and no longer act or react according to patterns or dictates that are not your own. Staying on the front edge of holographic creation as wholly new choices appear according to this freedom. It is from the position of already being at peace and satisfied, which occurs at this still center—this flame of existence existing—that reality morphs to match it.

V. 

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As something begins, so must it end. My sister miraculously healed. From frantically worrying about who would take care of her two kids when she passed, to being given a new lease on life and a passion to help others who’ve been similarly harmed. This journey with my sister and what it meant to us is a whole other story. I’ve been estranged from her for years, and I wouldn’t have been able to truly hear or know the desperate help she needed if there wasn’t a powerful voice within that said: you need to help your sister, she’s dying. This impulse arose within the zero point. I had to first enter it to know where I was truly needed and what I truly desired. If I hadn’t, I may be too caught up in false identities to be in touch with this impulse, more essential than all others. I went immediately into action, and my sister, whom I love from the depths of me, is alive, and her children have their mother.

Sayulita had come to me in visions long before I set foot in it. With its beaming locals, jungle juice and greenery dripping from every crevice, huts and villas stacked up hills, golf carts decorated with neon lights weaving through mud roads. Similarly, I had a future memory of one of my sister’s main doctors, Dr. Chantal, and recognized her as an old friend when I met her, linear time collapsing as we enter the new reality. I was gifted artistic treasures and opportunities during this journey, something I didn’t expect, but made sense that when I surrendered to love these types of corridors would also open.

The metaverse is a cheap copy, a weak echo, of a profound truth: we are in a vast, malleable, infinitely flowering universe, and as living artists we have the power to architect and seed new realities within it.

Obvious disclaimer: these writings are art and my opinions. I don’t subscribe to the notion that facts are concrete absolutes.

Image by Maria Allred

Zero Point

I stand in a cornfield that curves and cascades and yawns for miles, surrounded by oaks and aspens murmuring in a cacophony of whispers. The sun dazzles golden against a true-blue Indiana sky. My gingham dress floats. I see myself in the scene, and take a snapshot with my mind’s eye.

I know this is an image I have chosen in the new world I’m creating. A 3D impressionist painting of perfection that I dreamed into existence. I relax, seeing the outer reflection of the inner vision.

I have finally surrendered to what I have always known was my call: to enter a cosmic flow of aliveness where the full spectrum of my light can come online to play and love and architect reality. A seismic shift, tangible but ineffable. In order to experience this new existence I had to first drop what I was before. Let me explain:  

1.5 weeks prior

(Though somehow time and space have collapsed, and the world is appearing more as snapshots).

The words are a tangle and won’t come out. I try with hero’s might to crawl to my third act turning point, ascend the climax, and ease into resolution, but the core of me resists. A deep, low-level resistance for the past few years, more correctly, my entire life.

I’m writing my latest script, The Watcher’s Game, but I can’t move. We could easily call it writer’s block, but this is something else entirely…the most profound but subtle call. So easy to ignore….

Yet today, I am finally heeding its siren song.

And so I stop.

And I put it all down.

For that is what is being called for.

I sit, perfectly still, and watch the mood ring of Lake Michigan reflect the mercurial emotions of the sky. This summer in Chicago has been a perpetually shifting storm.

For a few years now I’ve wondered: why the subterranean ennui? The lack of passion? The very thing I’ve most identified with—inspiration, art, expression—semi-dormant with a thick soil of apathy atop. I didn’t know how fertile that soil was, and from it what would spring. An entirely new dimension, an entirely new me.

I noticed today that beneath the low-buzz of apathy something has been silently screaming for attention. The inner necessity for a full halt of the trajectory that’s been running on autopilot my entire life—a flock of scattered images obscuring the core light of me. I now stop and put down identity-seeking through actions in a way that has enslaved me to something I am not. Something that is, of course, very familiar to me, yet is an amalgam that includes many falsities, unworked out ancestral wounds, and deeply entrained entanglements with a societal system that I actually don’t subscribe to. Because this option exists, has always existed. Because this is the only true option. Everything else I’ve been up to is pattern.

I’ve been ignoring this vibrant call to instead feed a hungry ghost. I’ve been trying to prove myself to a dying world and so, naturally, that would make me feel dead. (My art must be good or deemed so by others or else I don’t deserve to live! Why am I here if I’m not creating great work?!)–yeah that absurdity is a core narrative that’s been adding coal to the slow burn of this identity-locked life.

I stop and I dive into the silent, alive space within. The bedrock from which truly spontaneous action can spring. I can discover what truly wants to spring, what truly wants to be expressed when I’m not expressing from issues—to secure worth and value, to get my needs met. What actions cascade in the river of aliveness?

It feels very strange and impossible in its simplicity. The portal of now where past, present, and future disappear. Like the way the sun rips a white hole in the sky and if you really look you will really see it is the entry way to this dimension.

I haven’t wanted to fully let go into what been happening to me this past year, because I don’t fully understand it. Like a caterpillar that turns to mush before alighting its wings upon the wind, I didn’t want to liquify completely. So I held to a thread, to the central program running through the mainframe: ‘I am an artist, I am a filmmaker, I must succeed, I must create something profound. I must strive.’ And with that, its counterpoint is naturally present too: ‘I am not good enough, I have failed, I have no intrinsic value.’

I mean, nothing too wrong with that, if I’m living in the old world and don’t want to open up to the luminous perfection of my multidimensional self. And I’m compelled to add, this mainframe program is replaceable and has been replaced many times. It used to be tied into piousness and philanthropy, and then was tied to physical attractiveness or lack thereof, but the core thread is about seeking identity, seeking worth, seeking to be valued.

Again, nothing wrong with that—just a pattern, an ancestral program, but the issue here is not moral. The issue is about putting it down and stopping. Stopping and being who I have always been. Liquifying the caterpillar of my old identities to open into my multidimensional self, interconnected with everything. This was the blueprint for my life all along. It was always here (I was always here, how do I say?), but somehow I had to ripen into it.

Even the words I now write, they can either be living or dead. I feel the difference when I surrender to what’s actually happening. This cosmic miracle transpiring before me and through me. Me becoming Me in the new World that I’m creating. Instead of me trying to appease a dead world that was never mine. Trying to fit my life force into a ring box to give to a lover that would leave me at the altar anyway.

It does not mean I will not create in a similar fashion, using cinema as a portrait of this profound aliveness. But it means I must first start by stopping completely.

This is what I knew I must do. I must stop, totally stop, in a certain type of way. Stop the belief in everything that is not real, that is not aligned with this ever-present becoming that is finally finding its footing in the material world. Stop trying to prove myself through this one very limited channel of identity: the Artist, who must be lauded or is worthless. I literally and figuratively put myself on an altar in a scene in my first weirdo feature film, but the irony was lost and maybe that’s because I was too.   

The harbinger for this profound stopping and opening was the pressure. Taut under the surface. I finally turned my attention to an unusual space, a space so obvious, yet so subtle and omnipresent, it’s easy to miss. The yearning is tricky—the desire to stop? It’s the antithesis of the whole damn trajectory of our worn-in identities. But when I shed the cheap cloak of this false self that believes it’s so deficient and flawed, I enter into a sun-like portal of now, where I am my true, very-alive existence. Like spiraling upwards to a new dimension that always existed adjacent to the first. We can all feel it, yet we skirt around it constantly. But you can’t skirt around this and actually get what it is. You must stop and dive in.

What will be revealed there, well, I shall see, but the first thing I’m noticing is that I feel free. I feel alive. There’s a richness I’ve been missing. The burden of space and time is gone, the pressure and sense of obligation to create in order to establish identity and worth is gone. Yet, creation and creativity are very much here. In a way that I’ve longed to feel yet haven’t felt in so long.  

1.5 Weeks Later 

Back to my cornfield, but not just any cornfield. A cornfield of infinite possibilities.

It was strange at first because it was like the stopping had to take hold and nothing new arose. There was a pause and stillness. I met with a familiar other and found my patterns reemerging, trying to reestablish the familiar, wounded identity. I recognized what was happening and entered back into the core aliveness of my true being.

And then I felt the first true impulse that I knew I must follow. This impulse takes me in a direction away from the identity seeking I’ve been up to, but it is arising from the heart vortex and I can’t deny it. The impulse takes me in a direction that is of love and taking care of someone in need. It’s an impulse I would have resisted and possibly missed altogether before, when I was too busy with my agenda of establishing identity in a dying world. While it doesn’t feed my old identity, when I follow it I feel truly alive in a strikingly new way.

From this surrender, the snapshots of my dream of reality are of love reflecting the love that is being birthed in a synchronous flow of life unfolding. A step in a continual unfoldment of what I’m becoming, of my multi-dimensional self finding its footing in the new world. An alive river of consciousness. I am in it, and I am it.

Like today after the cornfield.

At the beach there was a woman, Eva, from Prague, who plopped herself down in the shade next to our group of friends at the base of a tall dune that I saw in a dream long before I’d ever been there. She was a vision in her neon yellow swimsuit and 80’s butt-rock sunglasses.

I went to her to offer a piece of Honey Mamma chocolate. We got to chatting and she spoke of her boyfriend who treats her so well, buying her massages and clothes. She describes:

“All the other men I’ve dated before have been garbage, my husband of 17 years was an alcoholic. But two years ago there was a homeless man, Simon, who I took into my home and he is still living with me. Since I did that my whole life changed, everywhere I go, it is love, like you guys today, so kind, and it is all the time, everywhere around me beauty and love, and I am in shock. Every day I just say thank you God, thank you God.”

And so in this new dream that I’m dreaming straight from the source of aliveness, neon Eva, who’s living from the heart vortex and being reflected back love continually, shows up to reflect back my own moment of surrender.

And together, silently, we basked in an entirely new reality.

Somehow I always had a vision of this, inner instructions for when this moment arose, the instructions were not computable before this moment of the shift, and they are unfolding in real time. It is so completely and utterly astounding. I am now spontaneously off to Arizona, to follow the impulse and serve in a new way, we’ll see how it unfolds from there. But one thing I know:

I am alive.

Self Portrait by Maria Allred

Going Through the Portal

The Fluid Expression of Life on Earth Now

I.E. What the Fuck is Happening?

Image by Maria Allred

There’s something happening, and you won’t hear about it on the news. The broadcast will come through a whisper. A subtle spring breeze that is a fresh future memory. An inner knowing that is simultaneously a creating.

Welcome to planet Earth 2021, beyond binaries and into the heart of the paradox.

We’re changing quantum coordinates and it’s a weird and messy process. No one can ever truly know what this transition looks like. That’s one of its characteristics. At the heart of it, you enter into a profound and honest state of not-knowing. You find yourself smack dab at the center of the Mystery. Where you’ve always been, but now more aware of it, more in awe of it, more able to sit, dumbfoundedly relishing in its opulence.

Image by Maria Allred

Swirling around this Mystery are all potentials, all possibilities. Multifarious realities springing up, crumbling down, budding, decaying. Time as we’ve known it is gone. There’s a poetry to this portal. It’s creating itself as it goes, flowering itself fluidly into the haiku of its perfect, precise expression in each moment, and you are a part of guiding that blossoming.

But what does all of this abstract, flowery language really mean?

We’re at an end of an epoch. There’s a seismic shift stirring. It’s actually already happened, as time and space are nonlinear; a net of all things concurrently existing, instead of a unidirectional stream from past to future. As Einstein asserted, “the distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Further, “Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live.”

At this “current time,” there are enough humans dreaming into a new paradigm, that we are in fact raising the very frequency of the Earth, effectively catapulting the world into an entirely new landscape. That’s what the 2020 rupture was really about—the grand entrance of a vast evolution and the dissolution of that which must go. As convincing as it may be that the commotion was and is about a virus, or the “Great Reset” (a large-scale financial and structural reorganization planned for many years by the World Economic Forum and its cohorts ), there’s in fact something even deeper driving the disruption and chaos.

Image by Maria Allred

The old world is crumbling, and a new world is arising from the ashes. There is still a lot of havoc and destruction yet to come as defunct systems collapse and the outmoded reality implodes. There is and will be a massive attempt at control as the old powers desperately slam on the breaks while flying off the cliff.

But don’t be distracted by the calamitous display, there’s something precious and phenomenal happening underneath. There will be chaos and lack of sensical order. Don’t worry, this is a natural part of the death-rebirth process. What’s important, crucial even, is to not cling to that which is exiting.

It’s almost unbearably difficult to admit that the systems of order that we’ve grown up in: the governments, societies, and the perks that come with being on the privileged end of a death economy, are actually horrendously abusive, violent, unlawful, and squarely on the wrong side of our moral compass. To do so is to turn our entire reality upside down, to break down our identity, even to thrust ourselves into an existential crisis.

Image by Maria Allred

But now that the absurdity—no, insanity—is on audacious display, it’s critical that we open our eyes and look. The evidence is there, but you must heed the whisper that’s coming around the bend. The truth is not hailing from the news screen, daily paper, bastardized search engines, or social meds, but it’s there, tap, tap, tapping away at your heart. Many won’t look, won’t heed, and the world will split. It has already split, and everyone will abide by that which they choose. So we must choose wisely and be honest about what we really feel and believe. Now is not the time to simply go along or fly under the radar. Of course, whatever we choose in full volition will be the space and reality in which we thrive. But if you’re on the fence, now is the time to listen deeply to your inner knowing, even if it’s currently just a meek whisper.

For a long time Earth society has existed in a ignoble, low-level evolutionary state: violent monopolies, covert and overt war economies, tyrannical colonization, blood-shed, power-hunger, poverty, unnecessary starvation, inequality and greed being the name of the game and soup of the day, for many days. We’ve been prisoners of a system that we did not create nor choose, which few have true knowledge of the inner workings of, covered up by a long-term, widespread propaganda campaign, laughably called news media—owned by corporations—owned by about 15 billionaires. But those silly, extraneous facts of what’s really happening in our societies and world aren’t important to know…right? Better to stay placated and numbed by our new digital worlds that are a part of a colossal data grab and digitization of our reality and of our very Selves.

Because the roots of our societal structures are steeped in dysfunction and corruption, every single branch that stems from those roots (and those who work within the bureaucracies of each can attest) have been infected: academia, science, medicine, pharma, entertainment, media, politics, etc. This current entropic trajectory of these adulterated systems is simply the natural process of change, and chaos is the organic state before the new, more evolved systems emerge.

The possibilities that exist outside of the mutant-animalistic-war-game-theater are not all fluffy, airy-fairy, care-beary cloud walking. The silly symbol for heaven being a bed of clouds. Who the hell wants that?

Image by Maria Allred

Actually, moving beyond the embarrassingly debased state of existence we were born into is highly stimulating, creative, innovative, intuitive, intelligent, logical, practical, miraculous, and, well…it’s happening, and we knew it would. It includes both dark and light in their proper place and proportion and walks the razor’s edge of now that’s both everywhere and here. We’re moving into a new science, into a new vocabulary beyond binaries—which most of the vernacular of our human experience hereto has orbited around.

We’re moving into a quantum-based paradigm. And to clarify what I mean by that, so I don’t throw the word around like some new age charlatan, I mean, being both the particle and the wave at once. Solidly in space and time, embodying our light in the physical more than ever, while concurrently existing in the space of all possibility. Entering the paradox. Assuming our interconnectedness in the way we exist, rather than being informed by a scientific materialism viewpoint that is always parsing out the parts, creating division where in fact there is none. As Dr. Vandana Shiva puts it:

“The way you design the world in your mind is the way you relate to it in the real world…We have a design in the paradigm of mechanistic thought (which didn’t evolve, it was imposed) that is based first on the assumption that we are separate from nature and nature is constituted of discreet particles who only can relate through violence, through force, through action by contact. In the quantum world, there is no separability.”

To fight against what’s not working is a part of the old paradigm. When we are in opposition to something we’re resonating at the same frequency of it, creating a perfect yin-yang relationship. To truly transform at this time, we must simply allow our frequency to rise along with the Earth’s, and stay open to this process that’s already transpiring. It will inform us, and our own unique path will unfurl before us. As we bring more of our multi-dimensional selves online we further the shift. This notion harkens to the quantum mechanics findings that the presence of an observer “forces” a wave function to collapse into a particle (infinite potential into a finite location in space and time).

This symbiotic relationship between the observer and observed is the crux of the new reality. As we transform, we naturally transform our entire holographic, perceptual universe as well.

Divisiveness, polarity, and us-against-them are old-world dynamics. And as you may have noticed, they don’t work. They only perpetuate the same “problem.” The victim-perpetrator dance is an intimate one, with each side mirroring the other. Don’t let the current intentional ploys to divide and rule actually divide us. That’s a predictable tactic—one that has consistently worked. We need to question what’s happening behind the scenes while they’re blatantly attempting to disperse our collective power.

London Protests: Unknown photographer

There are many around the world that are still in brutal, inhumane lock downs as the global powers attempt to move steadily towards their ultimate endgame of the Great Reset (and maybe more, but I won’t get into that now). Word from the ground in India is that they’re locking down the poorest states like Bihar and Maharashtra, closing all the food markets at the hottest time of the year. The poorest are locked down with no food, no water, no medicine. Hundreds of thousands are dying a day, not from a virus, but from being deprived of their basic needs. Many around the globe are protesting as their very lives are being stripped from them, but of course mainstream media does not show this. I suggest that instead of wasting our precious energy protesting a system that’s on its last legs, we instead use that time and energy to plant seeds and grow something different.

Everything is open and available right now, the system is cracking and we’re in lawless territory, as much as it appears to be the opposite. That’s a façade. We now have the opportunity to withdraw our power from the soon-to-be obsolete establishment, claim our unique knowledge and skills, follow our singular truths and passions, and create the new world. Many are already engaged in this.

The Key

Image by Maria Allred

Now turning my attention away from the political and back to the internal process of birthing your new Self. There will be entry points for you to move into the transformation and evolution that’s available now. One of the most potent entry points is fear. Yes, fear.

Fear is a gatekeeper at the threshold of the new.

Don't be afraid to purely feel it.

If you do this without running, numbing, repressing, bargaining, or story-making you will discover the precious gems it’s guarding.

Fear can be used as an ingress into the unknown. And that’s what this shift is all about.

Forget the trite new-age binary: love vs. fear. Yes, it’s true that who we truly are—Love, dissolves all fear. But I reiterate, in the process of going through the portal, fear is most often a concierge.

The fear to feel fear is what stops many from even approaching the roaring periphery of this portal into the beyond, this canal for your own birth. It sounds simple: feel your fear. But I challenge you the next time real fear arises to simply feel it. It’s a ferocious process. And one that most would rather bypass altogether with the pacifier of a phone in their hand, computer in their lap, or TV on their wall, mesmerized by the mind-numbing light show meant to do just that—distract. Distract from the most phantastic light show you could imagine, happening through your own high-tech body.

And so one of the main keys to transformation that I’m recommending here is to feel your fear. To outline the actual process:

Fear arises (and it will).

Just be still.

Turn towards the sensation.

Don’t distract with anything.

Don’t analyze why you’re feeling it.

Don’t pay much attention to any mind interference about the why.

Feel the sensations in your body.

Relax.

Congratulations, that is hard work, takes courage, and guaranteed took you into a new space of being. This may be a short endeavor, mere minutes, or it could be something that lasts for days in cases of those persistent anxieties that gnaw at you with their raw desire to crack you open.

The experience will be unique to you and this can be repeated many times as the frequencies continue to rise. There’s a quickening occurring on Earth and in our bodies and it can feel frightening. You can practice the above with any emotion or sensation that shows up. Fear is just a particularly potent one, but any emotion that you embrace and sit with in this way will activate a portal or internal transformation. This is better practiced than described. It sounds deceptively simple, when it’s actually immensely powerful.

I want to make clear that meeting fear as a gatekeeper and fully feeling it, is the complete opposite of living in fear, which is actually a mental loop and an avoidance of going through the portal that fear is guarding.

Image by Maria Allred

For me personally, I don’t fear society’s collapsing, as I’ve been shown the likely possibility of that coming since I was 16. So my own unique portals come in different places. For example: lately I found myself feeling apathy (my least favorite emotion or anti-emotion of all), and the reason for that stagnation was because I was avoiding the fear of truly expressing myself, being unflinchingly honest about who I am and what I really think and feel. For example writing this blog, I’m afraid to be shunned, judged, labeled, disliked. So, for me to bring more of my own light online and in so doing co-create the new paradigm, I must face my own fear, which has to do with my expression—stopping monitoring, hiding, and staying safe under the radar. There’s nothing safe about this piece of writing for me, and there’s nothing safe about personal, heartfelt expression, especially when it doesn’t go along with the status quo. And so, I go through this personal portal, and I come out the other side a new being, with more of the Love of my true essence made flesh. And this in turn accelerates the shift in the world by the very quantum principles of interconnectedness that the new reality is materialized from and as.

 If we are honest and attentive, we will perceive the spaces that we each individually must move into, the actions we must take, the fears we must face in order to enter the cosmic river that is gushing rapidly to our new quantum coordinates. It’s crucial that we’re honest with ourselves and others about who we really are and what we really feel. It’s essential that we don’t stay hidden, and don’t support anything that stems from or is feeding into the old paradigm of slavery and fear—as much as it may be masked as the very opposite.

Be aware that everything is intentionally inverted right now by the old powers. It’s, I guess, supposed to be a savvy trick, but for those who know it’s just a lame attempt to put lipstick on a fascist pig. So, we must pay attention to the inner inklings that we feel. That which may appeal to our innate compassion is often supporting an agenda that brings nothing of the goodness it purports.

Image by Maria Allred

For many this will all sound like utter nonsense, of course if that’s you then my writings are not for you. But if you’re curious about what I’m pointing to, yet haven’t been feeling this frequency shift and want to feel it more, my suggestion is for you to find time in your day to just be still. I don’t mean meditate, I just mean be quiet, be still. Don’t worry about “doing” anything or eliminating thoughts. In nature is preferable, even if that’s just by a random tree. Nature is supporting us greatly in this evolution.

If you’re still and silent without distractions, you’ll begin to tune into this shift. And it will begin to unfold in your own life. It’s unique to each individual and we all have a part to play in its creation.

Going back to what I described at the beginning as a poignant state of not-knowing: An aspect of my own portal-diving and Self-birthing (which I’m currently in process of) has been dropping all of my familiar conceptual constructs and ideological systems of order. In so doing I have often entered into a state of pure awe—that comprehensive Mystery that cannot be described, prescribed, isolated, or boxed in. An enlivened experience of being on the front edge of holographic creation. If it’s something you’ve already conceived of, is it new? No. So in order to move into a new dimension you must let go of all of your conceptualizations and spiritualization. You may return to the “knowledge” you once had, but as it actually takes form. Your not-knowing includes all-knowing.

In new reality there is no need to step outside of everythingness in order to analyze or put it into spiritual categorization. That’s just a distraction from simply living it. When we birth and live as our full multi-dimensional selves, spirituality is simply lived in the most practical of ways, just by being who we are. That’s it. The light of you in the flesh. To step outside of your pure, fluid stream of being in order to to practice, do ritual, analyze, conceptualize in order to “get somewhere” is simply another form of consumption and moves you back into a state of imagined separateness, limitation, and enslavement. All of that is being left behind.

 As the new human, you are That. And that is It. And you melt open ferociously, all feelings accepted, nothing clung onto, nothing resisted. There are no instructions for this living, except your own.

And in this way we wield our light, sing our cosmic song, and co-create materiality beyond our imagination, all from the purity of Love that we are. What we will see in this lifetime is going to astound. And we will be dreaming it into existence.

Obvious disclaimer: these writings are art and my opinions. I don’t subscribe to the notion that facts are concrete absolutes. I am more into the notion of an eternally-morphing perceptual holographic universe. My ideas shift and change in an ever-flowering stream of my own consciousness. And even more so as I go through the current transition I’m going through. And so, I shall write, as expression is a part of me being fully alive, but I may contradict myself as I evolve.

Changing Quantum Coordinates

Photo by Maria Allred

As a child I was afraid of many things. My passionate fear of insects could conjure hallucinations of beetle armies stampeding me as I perched petrified on a pillow in the center of a forest cabin during a family expedition. In essence I was afraid of everything about the woods. I grew up in urban NE Portland and as a kid was comfortable walking alone along any city street at night, but the darkened forest threaded an existential fear through my soul.

Ironically, at age 15 I planned to hitchhike across the country, camping wherever I went, living primarily in the woods. To take this wild leap, I had to face my deep fears. I prepped for the journey by learning wilderness survival skills: wild edibles, building shelters, starting a fire without a lighter or matches, sleeping exposed with the bugs. I stayed for days in nearby trails and rugged national forests with few rations or supplies. By practicing exposure therapy, I faced and conquered my fears.

And I was ready to set off into the unknown.

While on the road I learned the scrappier survival skills of dumpster diving and “spanging” (asking for spare change). Primarily, I learned to live with a lot less. Yet, it’s hard to divorce oneself from the urges of comfort, security, survival. These are instincts not easily shaken.

Image Source: https://www.instagram.com/travelgram/

Six months into my travels I was camping at Cougar hot springs outside of Eugene, Oregon with my younger sister, Amanda, who had left home after me. I had hitchhiked with a friend as far East as Missouri and then headed back West, where I joined up with my sister.

She and I journeyed up and down the West Coast. We had been at Cougar hot springs for about a month. We would get food two ways: one, from a group of travelers also camped at the springs who formed a kitchen, preparing food for themselves and fellow nomads; and two, we would hitchhike into Eugene, spare change, buy some groceries, and then hitchhike back.

One day I hatched a plan to create a bit more stability. I was the older sister after all, and felt in some ways it was up to me to be “responsible.” We had a friend, Joseph, from the hot springs. He was a biblicalesque figure with a silver mane and fervid blue eyes who’d become so enthused by his own stories that he’d rise from the hot pools, arms spread, steam creating an otherworldly halo around his looming naked body as he preached whatever truth was coming through at the moment. He also let us into a secret that he had a pot crop in the woods behind his house, which was down the hill a few miles.

So, my plan: we would go on a mission to find his crop, take just a bit, not enough to really make a dent, and then hitchhike into town to sell it. Well, this plan was not very viable—the wilderness is vast, and a pot crop is a needle in an evergreen haystack.

We hunted for hours and then, defeated, headed back to the springs.

I was in a prickly mood as we walked along the sun baked country road. I was tearful. I think I was hungry. We were living day to day and always had enough (barely), but old habits die hard. Even though we were joyful, alive, free, I wanted more of a sense of stability. Or at least perceived stability.

Amanda, who at times would play the shaman role, much to my chagrin (but also gratitude), turned to me and declared, “Maria, it’s time.” “Time for what?” She responded prophetically, “It’s time to let go of money. We don’t need it. We need to trust everything will come.”

I was pissed because I knew she was right and that it was the next level of this life game I was playing—a deeper surrender being asked of me. I teared up and glared at the pure blue sky. I tried to retort but couldn’t, so instead just huffed ahead of her contracted with the tension of my resistance.

But the tension released and I felt a sweet surrender with a flavor of security that is only available when you really let go. “You’re right” I called back to her.

And so, we began to live without money at all. For the remaining months that we were on the road we never spare-changed again and everything we needed came to us. We even began to get creative and put out specifics of what we wanted: a pocket knife, books to read, sweaters as the season began to turn. All of it came. And it came quickly. For a period of my life I experienced something that is quite rare in modern society: living completely without money, as well as without fear.

At that phase in my journey, at age 16, I was receiving dreams and visions of a time that was to come. A time I was preparing for when my survival skills would be put to necessary use. But what I was shown is that at that time, the important skill wouldn’t be so much physical survival, but spiritual survival. When it comes down to it we can all learn to survive in new and unknown circumstances, we’re hardwired for it, but it’s the inner strength and stability that has the highest value.

Illustration by DAVID S. GOODSELL

My attention turned back to this memory when the coronavirus made its way into the collective body and mind of humanity. It all happened so fast, within a few weeks our entire global societal context shifted and is ever-shifting every day since.

And how glorious that is.

It is such an exquisitely rare opportunity for the status quo to get so disrupted that we’re forced to question, ponder, feel our vulnerability, our fear, and our strength. To ponder our daily existence and what it’s comprised of (in the face of the rupture of our routines), to ponder the nature and meaning of our lives and of humanity’s place on the planet. To tap into the part of us that is untouched, untouchable, even in the very face of death.

Instead of mourning a loss of the norm, I suggest we could be rejoicing. Not only for the powerful catalytic potential that this holds for our individual and collective evolution, but also because the norm is not normal.

IMAGE SOURCE: https://engoo.com/app/daily-news/article/air-pollution-as-bad-as-smoking-for-human-health/_cPhCGICEemSAweGA22eIQ

4.6 million people die every year from air pollution, 1.25 million people die every year from car accidents. This is “normal.” That’s a lot of deaths. Those are deaths created by humans. We are not freaking out and staying home because of pollution, but we know about it. We’re not alarmed and abstaining from driving because of car crash fatalities, but we are aware of the danger.

We are choosing to make the coronavirus phenomenon into what it is because humanity is ready for a change. It’s not conscious, this choice we’re making, but some deep force from within us and directly from the Earth herself, which actually is us—we are created from her, born from her, we are her intelligence manifest—is choosing to stop. To finally just stop.

To pause. To look around. To look within. And to evolve. And instead of responding from a simplistic fear of survival to take this opportunity to deeply feel:

Photo by Maria Allred

Death is a doorway.

Maybe in your beliefs it is not. Maybe it is neither—a doorway or not—maybe it is both. Maybe it is quantum. But once we decide to treat it as such we are able to make choices that are actually choices, rather than choices that are survival instincts running their program through us. When we liberate ourselves from the bondage of the fear of death we are free to evolve to the next level of our potential.

Our freedom is not exclusive of our mortality. Our freedom—our immortality, exists concurrently with our mortality. It’s actually mortality that gives us the taste of immortality because as we age I believe we all feel a strange split between the part of us that dies and that part of us that is immortal. Our eternal self become even clearer. As children that immortality is more brazened into our bones, our sinews spark with the sense of everlasting life.

Instead of mourning as the hands of time begin to decompose our earthly vessel, we should celebrate, for it gives us the opportunity to feel our limitlessness in the face of limitation and to understand that we have chosen to be in these mortal, destructible bodies in order to know ourselves as eternal, timeless, and indestructible.

Limitlessness embodying limitation in order to see itself, to know itself.

It is the same with separation. We are not actually separate from anything. This is not an esoteric idea. As Einstein said:

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness…Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Photo by Maria Allred

We are not separate—from anything. I am but a particle in a cosmic body that is much grander than my singular identity in one unique body. Yet, we are experiencing this “optical delusion” of separation because it is a huge part of our evolution, of our cosmic play and exploration. Time and space are used for a vehicle of understanding and education. And right now time as we have known it is over.

Now it is time to turn our attention to our true nature as the whole, that is both reflecting the particle and is the particle itself. As my good friend, brilliant author, Paul Levy says, “our psyche is not inside our skull, but rather we are inside our psyche.”

And as described by Bernardo Kastrup in Scientific American, “at bottom, what we call “matter” becomes pure abstraction, a phantasm…solidity and concreteness are qualities of our experience. The world measured, modeled and ultimately predicted by physics is the world of perceptions.”

We are manifesting this virus, this horrific and beautiful and profound moment, because we are trying to tell ourselves something crucial: that we need to heal. We need to heal individually and collectively. And those two things are one and the same.

We are at an evolutionary crossroads and it is a blessed time to be alive.

You may think, ‘easy to say when you’re not infected or affected by the virus,’ but what I speak about is finding a peace within that is indestructible, even in the face of death. As all contexts change and phantasmagorically shift from terrifying to beautiful and back again, there is a watcher within that watches with a pleasant smile, because it is free and invulnerable in the face of all phenomena.

Photo by Maria Allred

I believe it is time for us all to tap into the strength, stability, and freedom within ourselves. The joy without reason, the lover of the divine drama, taking pleasure in both life and death, taking pleasure in all the sensational experiences one can experience in this current form, on this current planet, in this fleeting life, that will be over in the blink of an eye. To tap into that which remains.

I began this blog with a story about living money-free for a period of my life. That was an experiment with the rules. What it taught me is that the rules are bendable, and that we can create them. We were tapping into a place within us that is free from the restrictions of living from and for mere survival.

You only live as far as your beliefs will let you. Outside of the confines of societal and learned norms exists a world of possibilities.

Photo by Maria Allred

Once we begin to shake loose of everything we know, expect, and have been taught we open ourselves to a creative realm of what this world can actually be. We are creating this pivotal moment together. This is a deep dream that we are dreaming and it’s a profound opportunity, a rare gift.

What we can do is open to what it’s giving. To allow our fear and have compassion for it. To let go of our fear realizing the place within us that is indestructible, eternal, and playful. A playful creator having fun with this life game in all its sorrow and glory. And we can begin to create consciously, to choose new rules, to realize the rules we have come to accept are not concrete. The norm we have come to know is a fabrication and not necessarily normal.

And the final frontier: to face death, to know that it is but a doorway to the next adventure. And when you begin to live creatively as a conscious creator instead of reactively as an animal running from the fear of death you are taking a leap into a new level of consciousness, into a new evolution of our species. And if you take this leap individually, you will see….

…everyone and everything took it with you. 

Written by Maria Allred

Fully Living • Fully Dying

I wanted the plane to crash.

I was flying to Southern Spain for the world premiere of my first feature film, The Texture of Falling. Enveloped into the hard-bread-cushioned seat, I was overwhelmed by the strangest and strongest longing for the plane to crash—strange because I was not depressed or suicidal, the urge seemed to appear out of the blue. I immediately felt guilt; if the plane crashed all the other passengers would die too. I let go of my death wish, until an involuntary bolt of yearning ran through me at the first sign of disturbance.

I believe this irrational impulse at that particular time was my psyche preparing me for a major internal death and rebirth I was about to experience. I will delve into this in a subsequent blog. In short for the moment: at the film festival I fully awoke in my own life dream, which at the time felt more like a nightmare. Yet because of my lucidity I had a deep humor about it all and have never felt freer.

The days leading up to the film festival I could feel it coming on…something major. I entered a small depressive state, which is always a sign to me that vital change is imminent. So I softened my stance, a deep weeping in my heart as I swam through the cerulean seas. It didn’t match up—my emotions and the golden glow of the Casa del Sol, but perplexingly, I wandered like a lonely ghost through the vibrant new land.

In my experience with depression it has revealed itself to me as the companion of death—the small and large deaths throughout life; deaths of our identity, our ego; the security of the known; deaths of relationships; physical deaths of loved ones. If we allow the death-rebirth cycle to run its course the depression is a temporary gatekeeper. If we resist the change depression can become a sort of new identity we cling to. (Note, I am not including chemical imbalances in this statement, which are to be addressed for their biological roots, though even biology has psychic roots, in my opinion).

As I lay in my Spanish bed at night, compulsory images of various modes of dying flashed in my head. With life juxtaposed against death that closely, though imaginarily, I sensed that choosing to live was also like jumping off a cliff.  It is as radical of a choice as dying. The desire for death actually indicates the desire to be truly alive. In fact we are always fully living and fully dying. Paradoxically, death and life are one.

I have known this for a long time, at least cerebrally, but my mental exposure therapy to dying was revealing more deeply how my avoidance of uncomfortable experiences—the humiliation of rejection or failure, the nakedness of fame, the unfamiliarity of success, the possibility of social annihilation—stemmed from my fear of death. It was unleashing courage to face all the unnerving sensations that kill my small identity. Because, why not? If choosing to live is as wild a choice as choosing to die, I might as well jump off of the proverbial cliff and actually live. I felt as if there was nothing to lose.

When you realize you are the observer watching everything, and that "life" as we know it is simply sensation coupled with thought patterns, all sensations become ok, further, they can become pleasurable. This is what allows me to enjoy my dentist visits—a perfect petri dish for practice. 

Aging is a cruel joke that plays itself on everyone. The naivety and pride of youth are not enviable, but rather, foolish. The purity of ageless consciousness is where true wisdom and freedom lie. The more you experience “time,” which according to the theory of relativity does not actually exist in a continuum but is an inextricable part of four-dimensional space-time, the more you can feel that which is timeless.

A common refrain I hear from people who have aged to some degree is that they don’t feel their age. The body ages, but there is a watcher who does not. You can feel the nonexistence of time by experiencing the existence of time. You can sense that you are not your body when your body involuntarily, without your volition or control, changes of its own accord and those changes baffle another aspect of your being that is not doing that aging thing at all. As Einstein stated, “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

When you can feel this contrasting juxtaposition between a part of you that is timeless—the observer that does not age and is perplexed by physical changes—and the part of you that is time-based—the corporeal you, you can sense the relativity and illusion of time, and more importantly, you can sense your freedom. You are not bound to this body. You are not even fixed to the particular point of reference that identifies as, or in, this body.

One of my favorite quotes comes from The Elegance of the Hedgehog, it reads:

“Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It’s the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you see both their beauty and their death...Does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance? Maybe that’s what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying.” –Muriel Barbery

I believe there is always a choice. A choice to be dead while alive, a choice to actually die, or a choice to undergo the many invigorating ego/identity deaths that come with being fully alive. 

All of the consensual societal norms that people take so seriously are just agreed upon fabrications. When you perceive how absurd this amazing existence is (why are we even here for god’s sake?) you realize you can chart your own course and risk...

...all of the electrifying results of that. 

Image by Bryon Phillips

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I Didn't Believe in Love

Film still from The Texture of Falling

I don’t want to make sweeping statements, but from my observation the Western culture I was raised in has produced a prominent fairytale narrative surrounding love that many subscribe to.  I may have pledged allegiance to it briefly when I was a child and melodramatic love songs pulsed through my head as I pounded the pavement feverishly chasing my fourth-grade crush. But that histrionic sentimentality was left behind when my family moved from my childhood home at age 14, ripping me from all things familiar and thrusting me into an existential quandary and subsequent depression. At age 15 I left home to hitchhike across the country and hopefully solve the puzzle of my spiritual funk. I had other things to think about besides boys. I was on a quest.

Image by Maria Allred

Let me clarify what I mean when I say I didn’t believe in love.  Since my teens I did not believe in romantic love, i.e. falling in love. When my friends would come to me to report their latest starry-eyed affairs I would commonly retort, “that’s great, but report back in a year and let me know how that’s going for you.” I didn’t understand what the big deal was. I just knew that romantic love was nothing more than biological drive mingling with regressed projections to create a seductive cocktail of chemicals in one’s brain, stirring up all kinds of irrational thoughts and behaviors. I intuitively knew it was temporal. I didn’t need to read the myriad articles on the subject to realize it was a fleeting state of bliss that developed over eons to continue the propagation of our species. And it simply didn’t intrigue me.

I believed in a different kind of love—unconditional love, i.e. growing in love.  My relationship choices were pragmatic, based in deep spiritual and intellectual resonance, friendship, comfort, and common goals.  I had never felt chemistry.

I never believed in love…until I fell in love. 

Still from The Texture of Falling

And when I connected with Him it smacked me upside the head—some sort of strange, cosmic but earthy, electrical pulse that catapulted me into the most ecstatic high I have ever experienced. So ecstatic it hurt, because even in my consumed state I knew it wouldn't last.  It's a basic principle of physics—that much potent energy cannot sustain itself.

At the height of my ecstasy I could feel the seed of its demise. I was already mourning the inevitable, which lent the experience even more poignancy.

At the time of the initial eruption, I said to a friend of mine; “if we don’t create something with this energy it will make us insane, it either wants to create babies or art, and I prefer art.” 

Yet insane we still went, and art I did make. Though I thought the art I’d be making would be with him—I’m a filmmaker and he a classical musician.

My experience of falling in love was the tragic sort, the star-crossed lovers, two ships in the night, Romeo and Juliet sort. We were impossible.  Except, maybe we were possible in some other version of the multiverse that we didn’t choose. After the initial decision that caused our separation, there occurred a cascade of events that continued to widen the canyon between us. It was the most wrenching loss I’ve ever experienced. It was a death. Further, all of the blissed-out chemicals—found to be similar to the effects of cocaine on the brain in neurological studies—were immediately halted at their apex. And I’m a sensationaholic, so that was just agonizing. My bliss was replaced with raw, relentless grief.

A knife had been thrust in my wide-open heart and I was running about like a wild animal, lost and confused, still longing and craving profoundly, but with no relief. 

I had to channel my pain somehow, and so one day in the middle of a teahouse shaped like a caboose, wanting to die, I began writing the script. Every word I wrote cut me, because I did not want art, I wanted him. But he could not be with me, and I had no other choice. My sense was that the entire thing occurred for my art, and that devastated me. It was a cruel initiation into the next stage of my artistic journey, and as much as my heart protested, a bigger part of myself simply surrendered to what felt like the call.

Still from The Texture of Falling

It’s funny, because only a few months before I met my first love I was talking to my good friend about an idea I had to make my way into feature films. At that point I had only made short films, doing all aspects by myself: camera, sound, story, editing. The idea of a feature film was beyond daunting and so I thought I would make a cohesive collection of shorts called Portland, I Love You, in the vein of Paris, Je T'aime and New York, I Love You. I would produce the entire thing, choosing directors from Portland to make the various shorts, and I myself would write and direct one.

I was relaying to my friend that it was funny that I had chosen the topic of love, as it’s not really my thing. Also, I felt that I didn’t know how to make up a story, I had always written creative non-fiction, and my short films were all documentary or abstract. I had never written a fictional story, and further I was a bit uninterested in stories in general (funny that I’m a filmmaker, but my passion for film at that point was driven more by atmosphere than narrative). He told me that I am blocked to stories (I now believe he was right), but I protested, “no, I have to work from life, but it will come to me.  The story will come.”

And came it did. Enter stage right—Love with a capital L and a penchant for pain. I didn’t recall that conversation at the time. But it struck me retrospectively. 

Had I invited this all in simply for my film?

And what was the connection between Eros (romantic love) and the artistic muse? 

Photo by Maria Allred

I contemplated this because the foreign encounter with love opened me up not only to the illogical experience itself, but it acted like a slingshot, thrusting me into a much grander phase of my art. I didn’t have to sit around pondering what the topic of my feature film would be; the story arose like a tsunami and picked me up in its inexorable power. I felt I had no choice but to surf it the best I could. I was on fire; driven, compelled, mad even. All of that raw desire for my first love was channeled into the creation of my first feature film. I worked 100 plus hour weeks for years. I sacrificed many aspects of my ego, I faced my fears constantly, my skills and knowledge evolved exponentially. And I made a film. Not a collection of shorts, but a real, full-length feature film.  After years of herculean work—playing the roles of 15 experts in the production, working another job, getting no sleep, drinking too much alcohol, fueled primarily by adrenaline and ambition, I was crashed to the shore, worn and torn.

At that point I had to stand up, brush off the sand and keep going. The next equally intense stage of getting my film into the world—festival submissions, premieres, publicity, marketing, sales, and dealing with the bureaucracy that is the “independent” film world awaited with little pity for my depleted state.

Now, years after the loss that incited my hurricane of creation, I sit in a 7th floor loft in Marbella, Spain. Out the wall of windows is a swath of azure that is the Alboran Sea. The air is fresh, yet smoky and sweet. Wind whistles in the shoot of the old building.  I am here for the world premiere of my film, The Texture of Falling.

And sometimes I still miss him profoundly.

Does my film do our love justice? Probably not. And as you might imagine, it strayed far from a typical love story. It is more a symbolism-rich labyrinth contemplating the nature of love, art, cinema, sacrifice, power and the connections between. It contains the layers of my psyche—the skepticism, the melodrama that became schematized satire, and also…the sentimentality. That buried place within me that finally awoke to what the poets poeticized, to what the love songs sung, the archetypes and dreams that I once relegated as a fleeting illusion in service of procreative drive. 

Have I changed my mind? Well, in some ways no. I see I was right. Our love was temporal, ephemeral, the stuff of dreams and in between. And further, I know that for those whose relationships become long term, the initial romantic phase wears away after time, and that’s when the real, gritty work of unconditional love begins. But I also see that there is something so much more than my cold, incisive, deconstructionist perspective.  Whether it is chemicals that spur this fantastical world the lover enters into, the world is nonetheless inspiring and subjectively real. The stuff that art is made of, where reason and logic are checked at the door.  And isn’t all of sensorial life chemical reactions? I am a love skeptic still, but my heart has been changed. And that I cannot quantify nor deny.

Thank you for reading. This is just the beginning of this blog of philosophical musings. Below is the film trailer to my feature film, The Texture of Falling, which was created out this experience. We will be having screenings around the world, which we will post in the events section, and it will be streaming online in Winter/Spring 2018. If you would like the weekly blogs as they come hot off the press, subscribe below. -Maria