About APTITUDE
APTITUDE is a course that represents the path to Free Will and Wholeness for drowning mystics and Liminal Creeps.
After twenty years of talk therapy and ten of dilettantish meditation practice, my family experienced a pregnancy loss while pursuing IVF. I blamed myself. I was a smoker. I got drunk almost daily. I scrolled for hours at a time, stewing in dread and despair. I was often violently twitchy with double the recommended limit of caffeine pumping through me. My anxiety, depression, and mania were out of control. I was finally taking my medication consistently, but I still wasn’t taking care of my Bipolar Disorder. I believed all of these things contributed to my infertility. To my tragedy.
I didn’t believe that it was within my power to make a change. I thought Free Will was simply an illusion.
But the brush with death changed something and I made a serious mission of study and practice, reading over 60 books in two years about various scientific domains’, cultures’, and spiritual traditions’ approaches to Free Will. I dialed in my practice, which continues to evolve but currently looks like about an hour a day of Samatha Vippassana. And at the same time, I picked up all the habits I had always wanted to add to my daily routine—all the things that life hackers recommend like cold showers and gratitude—but that I had never been able to make stick.
I found sobriety, from cigarettes, alcohol, caffeine, and scrolling.
This program is the result of all that therapeutic navel gazing and, honestly, reflects my desperation to create a strategy that would work for me. If it helps someone else, that’s wonderful. That’s why I’m sharing it. But the point of making it was always to build my own user manual for the uniquely neurodivergent mind that I incarnated into.
Wanderers!
Welcome! It’s a silly welcome: one to the path you were already walking. Just by clicking the link that led you here, I’m betting you’ve got the karma to belong—the childhood trauma and neurodivergence, perhaps, but also a familiarity with the flow states of shamanic epiphany and probably a brief glimpse or two of the face of the divine.
Maybe most of all, you have a gnawing sense that humans are simply biological machines; slaves to social roles; victims of inevitable, self-sabotaging habits and addictions.
You might go so far as to express it using the singularly disempowering slogan, “Free Will is an illusion.”
You’ve felt it. You’ve raved—both a dancing partier and a ranting madman—from your perch on the edges. You’ve dawdled your toes into transcendence. Felt the paradox of being both more than and less than human. You are a Liminal Trickster Mystic, or at least, you suspect you might be.
And you’ve been called.
APTITUDE—Adepthood: Praxis and Theory for Integrating, Transcending, and Unbridling from Determinism Effectively—is neither a dogma nor a rigid hierarchy that only by summiting can one be enlightened, whole or Good Enough. Although the course comprises both theory and the way to put theory into action—praxis—the ingredients of the experience of Adepthood are already available to you right now.
It just helps to learn the scales before you forget everything, shut off the analyzing mind, and let go. Even though you don’t necessarily use it when the moment comes, being able to read sheet music and understand music theory helps you flow, expressing your unique aliveness like an improvised jazz solo.
But let’s be clear—this is not about transcendence in the way a Creep’s spiritual bypassing ego might prefer.
No.
This is about the full, messy, embodied experience of being alive, about pulling every ounce of juice from your human incarnation. It’s about awakening, sure, but it’s also about getting your shit together.
This Course, outlined in the graphic above, is not at all the kind of path where you’ll turn to a pillar of salt if you look back. Although some of the most cutting edge approaches to spirituality often claim to “integrate” the lower loops of the growth spiral, as they “transcend” them, those of us belonging to the subculture that obsesses with self-actualization sometimes seem to look down on the “woke” Greens or the “sheeple” Blues or anyone else “beneath” them on the hierarchy.
Wholeness isn’t about outgrowing or leaving aspects of the human experience behind. It’s about expressing them in the maximally effective, healthy, authentic way available.
Get yourself a guide for moving from Liminal Creep to Whole Adept.
I think of Adepthood as a stage past adulthood where you can actually trust in your capacity for Free Will. Where you choose your own path. APTITUDE is a ten-stage, 36-week rite of passage, an adventure in self-integration, shadow reclamation, blissful union, and radical agency.
You may be expecting this to be like other courses you’ve encountered—all rigid and prescriptive and self-aggrandizing—but let it be known: I am no guru. If I know one thing about Liminal Trickster Mystics, I know we are wont to veer off the paved path and whimsically weave through game trails. We make our own adventure.
Your playful curiosity, authentic self-expression, and auto-didactic virtuosity are welcome here. You’ll teach yourself just as much as my words do.
Throughout the program, I’ll be presenting a framework for Wholeness into which you can plug whatever practices you personally feel called to explore. There will be options, opportunities, and examples you can use to inspire riffs and substitutes. However, you’ll be able to use what uniquely works for you throughout.
After all, this Course is about Free Will. How could I claim to enhance it while dictating exactly what practices to pursue? My aim is to empower you to be your own guru.
Who is this for?
If what you’ve read already hasn’t struck a chord, allow me one last invitation.
APTITUDE is for the digital mystics. It’s for the Creekmasons. For those seekers who refuse to allow rigid, atavistic traditions to confine them but who know at their core that they can construct their own, perfectly suited belief system from every holy book ever written. Like cutting up and gluing together a ransom note offering the return of their own soul, Whole Adepts make use of the ancient wisdom universally available for the first time in history.
If you’ve been circling the periphery, feeling both too much and not enough, wondering whether the same strange gifts of epiphany you hope can help the world might irrecoverably set you apart from it—this is your portal.
