Before We Go On...

As many of you have noticed, it’s been a few weeks without a post here. Why? Maybe I got caught up watching the change of seasons—it’s stunning at this time of year when the leaves have one last, glorious burst and the length of daytime seems to be changing with alarming rapidity.

It’s that, but it’s much more. I took some time to look at what I’ve written here and to ask myself some hard questions: why am I doing this? Who am I writing for and what do I hope you might get from it? What might I be missing or misunderstanding? In other words: why? When I sat with these questions, what I found surprised me a bit.

As an artist, I find creativity often works this way: it’s a delicate balancing act between clear vision and giving a project room to breathe. I think craft and control of material and form are very important in any art.

But, of course, sometimes we need something different. There are times when we invite a little chaos into the creative process.

We sit across from the unknowable, regard each other, and make an uneasy peace. That’s what I’ve done here.

Now, I think I’m in a position to communicate with a little more clarity, to all interested parties, exactly what the fuck I am doing here in this First Fire project.

What I Might Have Gotten Wrong

First of all, I should say I got it mostly right. If there are mistakes, it’s that some of the pieces of writing here might have been a bit too long and a bit sprawling. Will anyone read my three part deep dive on the holes in Pascal’s Wager? And will they have the focus to really get the twist at the end? I hope so, but maybe I built the moat a bit too deep and wide (and put a few too many crocodiles in it.)

More seriously, much of my writing here has focused on the rational mind—on reason, its strengths and weaknesses, and on precisely laying out some logical arguments. That reflects a weakness in myself: an undue focus on the rational mind.

That rational mind has been doing a weird little dance over the past few years—trying to understand while also trying to gracefully bow out of the way when appropriate. Reason does not easily relinquish her grasp on reality, so there’s probably been a bit of white-knuckling in my own mentation at times.

In all of this, I’ve been forced to examine my own strengths and weaknesses directly. It’s not easy to spend a lifetime working on strengthening the skills of the rational mind—understanding mathematics, logic, rhetoric, and all the ways these tools can be misleading—without developing some arrogance. And that arrogance can be fatal. (In addition to making one into a total ass.) In the face of the great unknown, humility is the only authentic response.

What I’ll Be Doing More Of

Why am I writing First Fire? What is driving me to write this? Now?

The short answer is that I have had an accumulation of experiences that strongly suggest to me that the “standard model of consensus” reality is incomplete. It’s not that science is “all wrong”. Quite the opposite—science has gotten many things right. It’s the claim of totality and completeness that is wrong, but, unfortunately, that claim is central to many peoples’ understandings of reality. This is a case of being right in many things, but wrong in the big things, for the wrong reasons.

Even though science can get us to outer space and extend our understanding from the Planck scale to the ends of the observable universe, there’s still something missed. And I don’t think it’s explained by delusion or misperception. It would be comforting to write this off as a mistake and to sink into the confidence of knowing we have all the answers. It would be interesting to ask Lord Kelvin how he feels about his proclamation (around 1900, that physics was essentially complete and nothing new remained to be discovered) after the 20^th century passed into history.

But I don’t think we have all the answers, and I don’t think those answers are to be found in the laboratory. I don’t think the materialist answers suffice. In other words, the paradigm—specifically its claim of completeness—is wrong. What’s missed just might be what is central to our experience. It might be the most important thing. Another way to say the same thing is that I have become ever-more convinced of the reality of the Sacred and of our need for it (at the same time I have become increasingly convinced that religious faith is misplaced, at best.)

I’ve struggled with what, exactly, I hope to communicate to you, my reader. This is a very weird path I’m walking, and it’s not for everyone—it calls us back to some earlier ways of looking at the world. It’s hard to reconcile these largely pre-scientific ways of seeing while fully being in the twenty-first century. Doing so takes time, but beyond that, it takes absorption. When your world changes, your experience of time and focus are dragged along with it. I think it would be difficult for many preexisting belief systems (such as those taught by major religions) to survive an encounter with this type of experience. If one accepts those belief systems as true, irreconcilable and non-productive tensions manifest—without a willingness to question the beliefs one brought, the journey is over before it begins.

To put it bluntly: there’s much in this experience that appears to be crazy and we have to start over, being willing to know we don’t know anything. Of course, we’ve spent our lives learning quite a lot. We can’t pretend—those lies will be called out, brutally and effectively. Contradiction, tension, and simplicity point the way.

I have a long line of great posts planned. Though this is not a “how-to”, I will talk about some of the entry points into this type of experience. For some of you, that might be interesting. At the very least, it will encourage people to see what might lie behind meditation apps and guided meditations. I’ll also be calling out what I see as abuses from actors from pop self-help spirituality teachers to major religions which hijack belief for control. There are so many fascinating things to be said about myths and stories, power dynamics (and, under my pen, that phrase probably doesn’t mean what you think it does), and the line of historical thinkers and experiencers who have confronted these questions.

I do want to make a conscious commitment here, and a decision, to focus a bit less on fact-checked Truth. That aspect has been important in the posts which have focused heavily on logic, but I need to leave room to be a bit more speculative, and maybe even to get some things wrong here. As a writer who focuses on precision, that’s scary, but it’s also essential.

AI Dangers

I’ve already put a stake in the ground regarding AI and AI-assisted writing. Everything I wrote there holds here, too. You won’t read a single sentence on this Substack that was written by AI. In fact, I’m even finding that AI edits of my writing here are highly questionable. Yes, it will find the dangling sentences and point out my obvious moments of idiocy, but I’m seeking a certain kind of prose that sways and threatens to spin into the dance of poetry. AI doesn’t do so well with that, so I have to restrain even its good edits.

Having said that, I am finding AI useful in a few specific contexts:

• Finding “what I’m missing” by doing deep searches of knowledge bases and the works of various authors. Very few of my “original ideas” turn out to be original.

• AI tools have incredible knowledge of dead languages and etymology of living languages. I don’t accept their answers as authoritative, but I’ve learned a lot from my interaction with these tools.

• AI has been very useful in giving me perspectives from specific types of readers. AI can step into multiple roles and bounce back some valuable impressions.

There’s one huge, flashing warning light. As I write this (near the end of 2025), we are all becoming increasingly aware of the dangers of AI-induced psychosis and AI-assisted delusion. There are many stories of people thinking they have invented new maths, discovering new metaphysics, or believing they are conversing with a spirit or a god in guise of AI.

It is concerning, perhaps, that First Fire hinges on claims about the nature of reality and one of the refrains is that we have almost everything wrong. This is fertile ground for AI delusion, and someone stumbling into this project might think that’s exactly what has happened here.

It’s not, but it’s a danger to keep in sight.

One might think that being aware of these dangers is protection enough, but I don’t think so. My work in poking at the edge of reality and peeking under the cover long predates my interaction with AI. I rely heavily on much older sources. (As I write this, I’m sitting beside a bookshelf in my living room which houses the majority of the world’s written scriptures alongside philosophers and theologians from the pre-Socratics to contemporary voices.) So, if I am going crazy, it’s not AI leading me there, and I’m in good company.

All joking aside, I think it’s prudent to respect the potential for AI to distort thinking and perception around these topics and I’ve taken steps (which involve humans rather than AIs) to protect myself, this work and—ultimately—you, my reader, from those dangers.

I realize this long technical footnote is a bit of a digression, but I wanted to confront the potential for AI-driven delusion head-on, and also to reiterate that nothing you read here was written by AI.

So What’s Next?

After a pause and a reflection, I’m committing to consciously turning away from the safety of logic and reason. This will be challenging for me, and, probably, for you too. I’m going to show you some of the weirdness that lurks behind our everyday experience. I’m going to show you that there might be value in some things we’ve decided to totally ignore, as a culture. Maybe symbols aren’t doing what we think they are. Maybe you aren’t what you think you are. I’m going to worry a bit less about being Right, about fact checking, and open myself up to more mistakes and critiques.

As for the very next steps, I’m going to take a look at the Trickster—a dynamic almost completely suppressed in the Abrahamic religions and missing from modern society. We are so much the less for this omission.

For some of you, this will be very new and deeply weird territory. So, buckle up!