After the Haze

Strange dreams, midnight reckonings, and the courage to build Beloved Community.

For years I went to sleep without entering the theater of my own unconscious. Night would fall, my head would hit the pillow, and I would slide into a thick, unbroken darkness. No symbols. No stories. No visitations from the hidden rooms of memory. When I was smoking pot daily, sometimes heavily, I did not dream. Or at least I did not remember dreaming, which neurologically amounts to much the same thing. The mind that metabolizes THC suppresses REM sleep, and REM is where the psyche stretches its mythic wings. I lived for years without those wings.

I did not think much about it at the time. In fact, I considered it a benefit. I slept easily. I did not toss or turn. I did not wake in the night wrestling with existential questions or unfinished conversations with my past. I lay down and disappeared. At the time that felt like peace.

Now I am clean, and the nights have changed.

Dreams have returned, but not in the cinematic, technicolor way some spiritual teachers like to describe. They are strange. Disjointed. Often absurd. Rooms that make no architectural sense. Conversations with people I have not seen in decades. Symbols that refuse to resolve into tidy metaphors. I wake sometimes wondering what any of it means, if it means anything at all. They are not prophetic visions of destiny. They are messy. Human. Unedited.

And sleep itself is no longer guaranteed. I find myself awake at two or three in the morning, staring into the quiet. Not anxious, not spiraling, just awake. A body recalibrating. A nervous system learning to regulate without chemical assistance. In those sleepless hours, something else has begun to happen. Thoughts arrive that feel less like mental chatter and more like revelation. Memories surface, not to accuse me but to integrate. I see patterns from my past with a clarity that daytime busyness once obscured. I glimpse possible futures, not as fantasy but as invitation.

It is as if by removing the haze, I have reentered the laboratory of my own becoming.

For a long time I told myself that marijuana made me more creative, more open, more spiritually attuned. In some seasons that may have felt true. Yet I can no longer ignore that it also numbed certain edges of my awareness. It kept me comfortable. It kept me sleeping. It kept me from wrestling in the dark.

Comfort is seductive. Especially for those of us who speak publicly about evolution, transformation, consciousness. It is possible to preach awakening while privately anesthetizing the very faculties that make awakening inconvenient. I am not interested in shaming my former self. I am interested in telling the truth.

“Awakening is not a light show. It is the slow return of sensation.”

Sensation includes dreaming. It includes lying awake with unanswered questions. It includes the subtle tremor of realizing that the life you are building must now be built without your old coping mechanisms. In those early morning hours I sometimes find myself pondering questions that stretch far beyond my own nervous system. How did we, as a nation, allow authoritarian impulses to grow so bold? How did oligarchy become normalized language in a so called democracy? How did spectacle replace substance in our civic life?

These are not abstract political musings for me. They feel connected to the same pattern that allowed me to numb my dreams. When enough individuals choose sedation over engagement, systems calcify. When comfort becomes our highest value, we slowly trade agency for ease. Authoritarianism does not simply march in with boots. It seeps into cultures that prefer distraction to discernment.

New Thought has always insisted that consciousness shapes experience. If that is true, then the collective consciousness of a people matters. What we refuse to look at grows in the shadows. What we anesthetize in ourselves, we eventually tolerate in our institutions. I cannot separate my personal sobriety from my civic concern. Both require presence.

Spirituality is under scrutiny right now, and rightly so. The misdeeds of a few high profile teachers have cast a long shadow. Financial exploitation. Sexual misconduct. Ethical bypass. It is tempting for some to circle the wagons, to defend the movement at all costs, to insist that critics are attacking the light. I do not feel called to defensiveness. I feel called to integrity.

If New Thought is to be a force for good in this era, it cannot rely on platitudes or magical thinking. It must mature. It must demonstrate that metaphysics without ethics is illusion. It must show that unity does not mean the erasure of accountability. It must become a living laboratory for the Beloved Community, not just a slogan we place on banners.

In my sleepless hours I ask myself what great work I am being summoned to serve. Not what will grow my platform. Not what will protect my reputation. What will actually contribute to the evolution of human consciousness in a way that strengthens our collective capacity to live together with dignity?

I find myself increasingly impatient with the persistence of false ideas that masquerade as spirituality. Mercury retrograde becomes a convenient scapegoat for poor communication. Cosmic weather replaces personal responsibility. Magical causation substitutes for disciplined self inquiry. I understand the appeal. It is easier to blame a planet than to examine a pattern. Yet if we are serious about transformation, we must outgrow superstition disguised as mysticism.

New Thought at its best has never been about superstition. It has been about the disciplined use of mind, the recognition of divine potential within each person, the insistence that we are co creators with an intelligent universe. That vision demands maturity. It demands psychological insight. It demands economic literacy. It demands courage.

Which brings me to money.

In the quiet of the night I often confront my own limiting beliefs around income and support. I speak boldly about abundance, yet I still feel the residue of old narratives. Money is scarce. Visibility is suspect. Spiritual work should not be compensated too well. If I am truly devoted, I should struggle nobly. These scripts are older than my ministry. They are cultural. They are theological. They are familial.

Breaking them requires more than affirmation. It requires exposure. It requires admitting that I want to be well resourced. I want patrons who believe in this work enough to fund it generously. I want streams of income that flow not because I have manipulated anyone but because the value offered is real and recognized. I want to experience what it means to let the universe pay me to be me.

“Prosperity is not proof of virtue, but chronic under-earning can be a sign of hidden vows.”

Hidden vows of invisibility. Hidden vows of martyrdom. Hidden vows that equate struggle with holiness. If I am honest, part of my sleepless pondering is about dissolving those vows. Not so I can accumulate for accumulation’s sake, but so I can build infrastructure for impact. Media networks require funding. Ethical oversight requires funding. Spaces for dialogue, training, and community require funding. The Beloved Community is not built on sentiment alone. It is built on resources stewarded wisely.

When I was smoking heavily, I rarely lay awake considering these things. I slept. Now I wrestle. And in the wrestling I sense invitation rather than punishment. The body is recalibrating. The psyche is detoxing. The spirit is clarifying.

I have also noticed that without the nightly sedation, I am more aware of my own mortality. Dreams carry reminders of time. Faces from my past appear as if to ask whether I have said what I came here to say. Sleepless hours whisper that the window of influence is finite. This is not morbid. It is galvanizing.

I am committed to never giving up on myself. That is not bravado. It is covenant. There have been seasons when retreat would have been easier. Seasons when criticism stung deeply. Seasons when financial strain made the calling feel irresponsible. Yet something in me refuses to abandon the vision of serving the evolution of human consciousness.

That evolution is not abstract. It shows up in how we regulate our nervous systems. It shows up in how we tell the truth about harm within our movements. It shows up in how we confront political realities without losing our center. It shows up in how we dismantle magical thinking and replace it with mature metaphysics. It shows up in how we handle money.

“Beloved Community is not built by the well rested alone. It is built by those willing to stay awake.”

Stay awake to our dreams. Stay awake to our distortions. Stay awake to injustice. Stay awake to possibility. Staying awake does not mean living in perpetual exhaustion. It means refusing to anesthetize the very faculties that allow us to discern what is ours to do.

I do not romanticize insomnia. I still hope for deep, restorative sleep. I am grateful that anxiety has not accompanied this transition. What I am experiencing feels more like integration than agitation. My system is learning to trust itself without chemical assistance. My imagination is reclaiming territory. My questions are sharpening.

The strange dreams may not be visionary in the traditional sense, yet they are teaching me humility. Not every symbol must be decoded. Not every night must yield a message. Sometimes the work is simply allowing the psyche to clear its backlog. Years of suppressed REM do not reorganize overnight. Years of suppressed emotion do not surface in tidy narratives.

Likewise, the cultural backlog we face as a nation will not reorganize overnight. Authoritarian tendencies, economic inequities, spiritual scandals, and intellectual laziness have accumulated over decades. They require sustained, sober engagement. They require communities that can hold complexity without collapsing into denial or hysteria.

This is where I believe New Thought can either mature or fade. If we double down on magical explanations and spiritual bypass, we will become increasingly irrelevant. If we embrace psychological insight, ethical rigor, and civic responsibility as spiritual disciplines, we may yet model a way forward. Not a partisan way, but a principled one.

My personal sobriety is a small act in that larger arc. It is a refusal to live half awake. It is a declaration that I want access to my full dreaming capacity, even if the dreams are strange. It is an acceptance that sleepless pondering can be sacred ground. It is a commitment to examine my own complicity in every system I critique.

The question that echoes most clearly in the night is simple and relentless. What is mine to build now? Not what was mine ten years ago. Not what worked in a previous cultural climate. What is mine now, in this moment of scrutiny and possibility?

I suspect the answer includes deeper teaching around nervous system regulation and spiritual maturity. It includes clearer economic models for spiritual media. It includes bold conversations about ethics without collapsing into self righteousness. It includes inviting others into partnership, not as consumers but as co creators.

It also includes joy. Sobriety has sharpened my laughter. Dreams, even bizarre ones, remind me that the psyche is playful. Sleepless nights have led to ideas that excite me. I feel less dulled, more porous. The world feels more vivid.

Perhaps that is the quiet miracle beneath it all. Not fireworks. Not instant enlightenment. Just the gradual return of color.

If I am to serve the evolution of human consciousness, I must first inhabit my own with integrity. If I am to speak about awakening, I must be willing to experience the discomfort of waking up. If I am to invite others into the Beloved Community, I must model what it looks like to stay present through recalibration.

The nights are different now. They are less predictable. They are sometimes strange. They are occasionally luminous. I am learning to trust them. I am learning to trust that revelation does not always arrive in coherent sentences. Sometimes it arrives as a question that will not let me go back to sleep.

And maybe that is the point.