Toward a Balanced Awaking - 2026

As I look toward 2026, I feel less compelled to chase new ideas and more compelled to bring coherence to the ones that have been walking with me for years. What keeps returning—quietly, insistently—is the realization that consciousness and materiality are not rivals. They are not enemies locked in some ancient tug-of-war. They are expressions of the same Reality, encountered at different depths, densities, and degrees of freedom. My work now feels less like invention and more like integration.

Hermetic thought gave me one of the earliest lenses for this integration. In The Kybalion, reality is described in terms of planes—physical, mental, and spiritual—not as separate worlds but as ascending degrees of the same life. The insight that has stayed with me is that these divisions are “more or less artificial.” Matter shades into mind; mind shades into spirit. There is no hard boundary where one ends and the other begins. What changes is not substance, but expression. Spirit is not what replaces matter; it is matter remembered at a higher level of coherence.

The Tao offers the same wisdom without metaphysical scaffolding. When I return to Tao Te Ching, I am reminded that reality flows best when it is not forced into false separations. The Tao does not privilege the invisible over the visible, or the mystical over the ordinary. It moves through rivers and valleys as easily as through silence and insight. Yin and yang are not opposites competing for dominance; they are complementary movements within one living process. Strength without softness becomes brittle. Spirit without form becomes ungrounded. The Tao does not ask us to escape the world—it asks us to move with it.

Christian mysticism, at its best, has always known this as well. Long before doctrine hardened into systems of fear and reward, the mystics spoke of a God who is both within all things and beyond all things. Meister Eckhart’s insistence that “the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me” still rings true—not as theology to defend, but as experience to be lived. The Incarnation itself is the great refusal of spiritual escapism. God does not save the world by bypassing matter, but by inhabiting it fully. Flesh is not the problem; forgetfulness is.

What I am weighing in this season is the idea that abstract infinite potential and infinite lived experience are simply the two poles of the same mystery. At one end is the All—containing everything, yet never exhausted by what it contains. At the other end is experience—finite, textured, embodied, sometimes painful, sometimes luminous. Conscious agents like us are not mistakes in this system. We are the means by which potential becomes experience. Without limitation, nothing can be felt. Without form, nothing can be known as this rather than that.

This is why I no longer believe the goal is transcendence in the sense of departure. Enlightenment, salvation, awakening—whatever word we use—cannot mean abandoning the material for the spiritual. That move only recreates the split in reverse. Balance, as I now understand it, is learning to stand consciously in both poles at once. To honor the body without idolizing it. To honor spirit without floating away from life. To see work, money, relationships, suffering, and joy as part of the same sacred field in which prayer, silence, and insight arise.

There is, of course, a mystery here that cannot be solved. The All is always more than the sum of its manifestations. No part—no soul, no consciousness, no enlightened state—can ever fully comprehend the Whole in a final way. That is not a defect in the system. It is what keeps experience alive. Knowing is participatory, not totalizing. We know the Whole by expressing it, not by enclosing it.

This perspective also reshapes how I understand spiritual experiences—especially encounters with unseen presences that feel helpful or hostile. I no longer rush to literalize them into cosmic beings, nor do I dismiss them as meaningless projections. Experience is real. Interpretation remains open. What feels “malicious” is often consciousness under extreme constriction—fear, fragmentation, resistance. What feels “helpful” is consciousness moving toward coherence and integration. Nothing exists outside the All; therefore nothing ultimately exists beyond the possibility of integration.

So my direction for 2026 is not escape, conquest, or certainty. It is balance. A spirituality that can sit at a kitchen table, pay bills, feel grief, and still recognize the sacred shimmering through ordinary life. A material engagement that does not forget its depth or reduce reality to dead mechanism. I want a path where spirit and matter remain in dialogue—where neither is lost, neither is idolized, and both are allowed to teach me how to live more fully awake.

If there is a prayer in all of this, it is simple:
May I never lose the mystery by trying to solve it.
May I never lose the world by trying to transcend it.