Death, Fear, Doubt, and Bioenergetics
What Happened to Heliotroph?
It has been about 8 months since I last engaged with Heliotroph. It may have looked like I abruptly abandoned it, but really it was a fairly drawn out and emotionally tumultuous process that led to me stepping away. Now that I have some distance from those feelings as well as from this little channel I had built up, I just want to pop back in and talk about it, as well as some other developments in my life and my thinking.
To begin, early and mid 2023 was a time when I found myself delving deeply and greedily into esoteric topics in a frankly compulsive manner. When Heliotroph was at its peak of output and engagement, the honest intention was to contribute as much as possible towards building out an intellectual, communal, and practical basis for the widespread adoption of a Western polytheist religion with a comprehensive philosophical and spiritual tradition. I believed that part of doing so would involve understanding and evaluating practices and phenomena like divination and miracles, meditation, “enlightenment,” etc, and the thought even occurred that if I was going to succeed, I would have to pursue some sort of Eleusinian initiation.
First and foremost this led me to greatly deepen my study of astrology, which was actually quite rewarding — I am convinced that astrological practices were much more integral to antique religion than many realize, and any reconstructionist project is crippled without recovering and developing the application of astrology to devotional practice towards the planetary deities.
Secondly, my research brought me into contact with John Michael Greer’s extensive writing and commentary on western magical traditions. I found these to be very interesting and thought-provoking in the ways they both accord with and dissent from Platonism, Christianity, and antique folk religion.
Beginning to learn about Western esoterica dovetailed into curiosity about the Eastern esoterica that middle-modern occultists took selective influence from, as well as about the New-Age spirituality that manifests a difficult-to-navigate matrix of Eastern practices, Occultist cosmology, and scientific language and teleology.
My own religious practice began and mostly remained as a devotional one centered on attempting to organize my thoughts, rites, and life in a way that acknowledges, accepts, and furthers the divine providence. Most of my practice involved simply thanking the gods, speaking my mind to them, and when I made requests they were generally for the simple well-being of the people around me as well as myself, always making sure to remind myself that whatever peace and strength I have is a gift that is meant to be put to use in contributing to others and the world. Despite my inconsistency in practice, these were at least my principles. They served me well, and honestly, writing this in hindsight, I feel foolish for pausing my practice in the course of following events.
As I read and investigated more, the topics of death, near-death experiences, and speculation on the afterlife kept popping up simply because they are perennially on many peoples’ minds. I lost my father when I was 13 — as distressing as it was, after a year or two of processing it through writing, which is when I picked up the habit, I felt that I had basically dealt with death as much as I needed to (and perhaps as much as an angry adolescent is able to) and I had no more interest in the topic.
I was raised in an agnostic household with no real spiritual practices. My mother vaguely believes that the spirits of loved ones visit or accompany people they care about. I came to agree because it intuitively fit with my experience of recurring vivid dreams of spending time doing mundane tasks with my dad. Such dreams still happen once in a while, and until only the last couple years they almost always involved feeling a sense of confusion at why his presence was so tangible despite consciously knowing he had passed.
Through 2022 and 2023, though, death once again entered my mind, this time in the form of fear of my own death rather than grief or fear of loss. Specifically, I began to struggle with keeping at bay a persistent fear of impending war and disaster as Ukraine and then Taiwan dominated the news cycle. Examining it in hindsight, a large part of my religious practice at that time was focused on maintaining stability, some amount of self-soothing, and honestly it may have dipped into “spiritual bypassing” territory.
At some point in the summer of 2023, consuming information on NDE’s and the afterlife became almost obsessive simply because I was so caught up in comparing and evaluating the many different claims from many different traditions, ancient sources, modern NDE and visionary or psychic accounts, scientific or pseudo-scientific explanations for how consciousness might emerge or transfer or how hallucinations work, and logical deductions from observation or from philosophical principles.
This mental work, despite being alternately daunting or tedious, did not really have any emotional impact on me. I found it interesting, and in the case of many of the new-agey type accounts I found the reports overall hopeful or comforting. At some point, though, I stumbled onto a long video where a Tibetan Buddhist teacher of some rank, an older white woman with the voice of a smoker, described in excruciating detail the process of dying and entering the “bardo” states according to their tradition. What set this video apart from other accounts I came across was this strange authoritative and almost patronizing tone, combined with a description of what happens to the body that was so detailed it bordered on body horror.
It made me sick to my stomach, yet I continued watching out of morbid curiosity, in a state of near-shock that frankly I think made me suggestible and made the rest of her claims sound more plausible than I’d otherwise find them. The process she described was profoundly isolated and disorienting. No loved ones coming to gather you up, no psychopomp to lead you into a populated under (or over) -world, just a swirl of apparitions. The best you could hope for, if you were skilled or fortunate enough to be an arhat, would be to remain forever in an empty plane she described as an endless horizon of blue twilight stretching forever in all directions.
In spite of my negative instinctual reaction, and, over the next weeks, my increasingly negative intellectual evaluation of Buddhism, I have to credit the experience with causing me to truly confront my mortality in a non-abstract way, with an acute somatic reaction to the concept of consciousness separating from body. Even though the physiological fallout made me borderline non-functional as a human in society for nearly a month, It’s probably better to confront these feelings as a young person with time on his hands rather than to spend a lifetime burying one’s head in obligations and responsibilities that make it harder and harder to assimilate them.
I also have to say there were positive repercussions as well. I found myself becoming more gentle and understanding, more available to people around me, and more focused on grounding activities like spending time outside or with friends. Though the latter is because I was aware that I was profoundly un-grounded and depersonalized and was making a desperate effort to recover my sense of being a human that lives on earth in the present moment. Ultimately in order to recover some grounding, I jettisoned basically all my abstract intellectual activity, including Heliotroph, and this here is the first long-form writing I have done since.
In that time I also returned to college, got a wagie job after living off book sales for a year, got back into the gym after losing my gains over the lockdown era, and took up a few new hobbies, of which my favorite has been video game development. For any of you interested in astrology - this all played out over the course of the couple months that straddled the transition between my 12th house profection year and 1st house profection year. This year has also been my Jupiter return. It is only after this stretch of extensively and intentionally ignoring all metaphysical questions that I now once again feel myself to be in an emotional and physiological state to philosophize again.
As I look back on the last year from my new perspective, the narrative that takes shape for me now, instead of being a logical or philosophical one, is actually a bioenergetic one. Of course those other narratives exist simultaneously in parallel, along with many other narratives that can be applied to the same stretch of time, but as this point I believe the physiological lens is the most useful for describing both my prior state and how it has improved.
Last year, I told the story in a YouTube video of the process I went through to become a person with any metaphysical convictions, as well as how those ended up being pagan and then finally Platonist. That process began in my sophomore year of college and was initially an outgrowth of my political curiosities. It was February 2020, the midpoint of my Junior year, when I fully committed to polytheism and made an altar out of a cutting board I put on top of the radiator in my tiny apartment bedroom. The year and a half between mid-2018 and early 2020 was at that point my physical and emotional peak, with the acute exception of a very difficult breakup in December 2019. I was in shape and had a whole village of close friends thanks to my rowing team, my course work was interesting and stimulating, and I was finding success with women for the first time.
Then, in 2020, covid disrupted every single aspect of that equation. Firstly I was literally physically isolated as I moved back home and spent three months straight hunched over a laptop gaming. Then I became even more mentally isolated as I watched most of my peers go completely insane over the summer of Floyd. I felt like so much of an outcast for simply having a moderate skepticism that if I was not such a stubborn and self-assured autist I’m sure I would have gone along with the crowd.
I moved back into my apartment in my college town despite dropping out of school because I had already re-signed the lease in January. There, largely out of loneliness, I began a relationship with a girl I was utterly incompatible with. Soon after that, I began to have issues with dermatitis and with my sleep. In hindsight I am certain that a combination of exposure to birth control, exposure to her constant weed use, and a tight food budget all contributed.
That relationship lasted about eight months and when it finally mutually ended and I moved back home again, the skin issues persisted. Flare-ups continued and even worsened as the weather became colder. Multiple doctors visits did nothing, alternative health rabbit-holes about heavy metals, keto, candida, ayurveda, and whatever else, all were of no use. What finally worked? Literally just adding a small amount of beef liver to my diet. And what caused me to try that? It was exposure to some of the crude, downstream ripples of Ray Peat and the Bioenergetic philosophy of health.
Ever since then, I have maintained an interest in and curiosity about physiology and biology and researched these things on and off in parallel with my Heliotroph-related studies. Eventually, it was the fruits of this research, and not of any philosophical or religious study, that would allow me to escape the rut of confusion and depersonalization that dominated the summer of 2023. But before I explain how that happened, I want to discuss the specific metaphysical questions I was wrestling with in the meantime and how my feelings or opinions changed or got refined in that time, as well as how I now believe my physiological state to have been involved.
In my state of panic, there was a short period where my instinctual reaction was to look deeper into Christianity and give it a second chance after I had decided against it once back in 2019. Where I previously sought commonalities between east and west, I began to look for where east and west diverge so that I could attempt to better evaluate if one was nearer to the truth than the other. I began to approach Christianity with the perspective that, well, the flagship “Western religion” has just as much material to inform a Western Pagan religion as Eastern religions do.
Consciously, I know Buddhism is a diverse array of schools that disagree on even quite basic tenets and definitions, but my experience viscerally soured me on the religion, and on an emotional level, seeing what death and dying looks like if the Eastern views are correct made me much more receptive and willing to accept the Christian view. I already had a quite different set of objections to Christianity than most people who reject it — I’m not terribly opposed to traditional sexual ethics, etc. Rather I have always found christianity hard to accept as a full package — which the religion insists on — for two reasons:
One, I find their historical account unreliable and many parts of their practice depend on that account’s accuracy.
Two, infinite eternal inescapable hell or separation from God being the lot of most humans after living only a single lifetime in an already fallen world, seems inestimably cruel for a both benevolent and omnipotent god. And I know there’s plenty of apologetics and exegesis about why logic and the biblical or patristic sources support the idea, and I’m also aware of the idea that a human casting judgement on a divine decision is impossible, foolish, and sinful in that tradition. Really, pulling on that single thread is what unravels christianity for many people and is probably why skepticism is considered prideful, pride being the mother of all sin.
I’m also aware of skilled and compelling apologetics and exegesis supporting a “universalist” position where salvation is inevitable. I have to say, such a position would make it easily feasible for me to convert if I could find a solid, functional church that expounded it. And yet I still came close to accepting the normal, traditional orthodoxy of Christianity simply because I felt the need for a definitive authoritative answer that would absolve me of the heavy responsibility of evaluating an endless sea of input to arrive at any tenable, actionable belief.
That last point leads me to the important intersection of philosophy and bioenergetics in my journey. The mental state of depersonalization and anxiety that I found myself in during that time, like all mental states, was not simply an abstract dataset the nous-computer summons from cloud storage in the anima mundi to implant into a flesh robot. Well, maybe on one level or from one point of view it was. But that point of view was not one that gave me hope or a clear path forward.
Instead I found it more helpful to acknowledge that a mental state is largely a physiological state, even if this felt conflicting with the months worth of transcendentalist thinking I had been consuming. Dianoetic, descriptive thought, even if it is a power of an abstract soul, is mediated by the hormonal and neurochemical environment of the organism it is present to. My ability to reason had been impaired by a reductive recursion where the recognition of my own ignorance and the desire to avoid pridefulness induced a sense of “learned helplessness” that in turn molded the organism to reflect that way of being — mildly hypothyroid and serotonin and pituitary-dominant. On some level I intuited this, and I believe my withdrawal from engaging with religion and metaphysics was a wise choice not made by my rational mind — indeed my rational mind wanted to stay on the hamster wheel seeking a steady external locus of truth — but by the infinitely complex and mysterious total system of my body.
It has been my tending to that system over these last months that has brought me back to a place of clarity and willingness to share. Two specific interventions I believe started the process of leaving that hole: That August, as school started up, I began to supplement low doses of exogenous thyroid and progesterone with the aim of improving my energy and stress resilience. I know the golden rule is to address lifestyle, habits, diet, etc. first before supplementation. And I did pay attention to all these things, but in my experience, changing one’s environment and habits is energetically expensive, requires high executive function, and requires intense thought, foresight, and intimate self-knowledge in order to perceive what actions have the highest return on investment at any given time. In the last several months, I have begun to be capable of all these things, and I believe that my supplemental intervention is what kickstarted the process of gaining or recovering that ability.
A pattern I observed with myself and really with nearly everyone who tries to improve their lives in today’s environment is this ubiquitous loop of taking action in a manic, stressed state, returning to procrastination when the manic feeling wears off and leaves you exhausted, and then feeling guilt and pressure until the mania returns. Bioenergetics is the first school of thought I have come across that acknowledges that not all energy and action is equal, that there is more to health than just the absence of acute symptoms, and that true high performance is relaxed, sustainable, and structured.
As I felt better and learned more, I gained intense admiration and agreement for the central tenet of the philosophy, which is that energy and structure mutually reinforce each other in a constructive spiral. I believe this is compatible on a deep level with traditional Western philosophy, but in a way that requires a different reading than the modernist one that has informed the development of science into a study of dead matter dissipating with entropy.
Ray Peat has condemned Platonism on interesting grounds — that he believes it to set matter and ideal apart as divorced realities. I.e, he views it as a kind of dualism and prefers some kind of William-Blake inspired monism. I personally do not agree that Plato or Platonism are dualistic, but I do acknowledge the history of viewing them as such; one tradition in antiquity of overplaying the separation of mind and body out of disdain for the body, and one more recent tradition of reading a separation of matter and ideal that sets Platonism up as an easy target for materialists.
The line of thinking that I have found most interesting and stimulating lately is an idea that it is possible to assimilate the Bioenergetic view of energy and structure’s generative interdependence with the Platonic vision of a fundamentally unitary cosmos, a cosmos which is constantly in a state of playfully expressing the infinite complexity that is latent within the infinite simplicity of One Good.
My deepest compulsion in intellectual activity has always been to pursue the roots of things and to find the levers that move the needle farthest with the least amount of input. Perhaps relatedly, My Venus is in Virgo in the 8th house and my chart is dominated by an exact conjunction of Mars and the Moon in my Scorpio 10th house. That was the impulse that led me to Platonic philosophy. Perhaps that impulse also creates an emotional bias that compels me to now full-throatedly reject the two Buddhist tenets of dependent origination and the idea that desire is the root of suffering, even if it also puts me outside the more traditional bounds of Platonism or idealism.
I think there is no such thing as emptiness, no such thing as non-being, that the existence of a created object is its act of creation, and that the acting-being is real, whole, eternal, and indestructible. Desire is not a corruption of a being, and indeed to say so is to say that existence itself is inherently corrupt, because all existence simultaneously proceeds towards complexity and reverts towards simplicity as a result of a desire that is inherent to existence, the simultaneous desire of the Good to Be and the desire of Being to be Good, a desire that nothing could possibly lack because to lack it is to cease existing, and to cease existing is a logical impossibility for something that exists.
The traditional answers to that line of reasoning are, as far as I can tell, twofold:
Either, yes, existence is corrupt and one should flee this state of “becoming” that is somehow separate from and inferior to “being” or pursue a hypothetical existence in which the being is isolated from its act, i.e. the elimination of karma.
Or else, yes, nothing that exists can cease to exist, and thus the things that we observe as falling out of existence were actually not real in the first place, and one should seek to eradicate the process that creates those illusions.
I cannot accept either answer, and I believe various different readings or sets of emphasis within Platonism are liable to produce both reactions. I may even be compelled to disagree with Platonism in its purest or most accurately read form if it cannot produce a satisfactory third answer, which may not be possible without departing from the genuine convictions of most of its founding thinkers. Still, I think there must be a way, and I have a hunch that it involves the understanding of time as a field in which the conscious awareness seems to move about, with the various temporal conditions of an entity not actually being “changes” but being 3-dimensional “frames” of an image that is unitary and simultaneous in a 4th or 5th dimension. I believe Iamblichus comes close to such an idea when he describes the soul as spherical, and its mortal condition as being “upside-down” or “inverted” so that it witnesses things sequentially instead of simultaneously.
I also believe Iamblichus offers the best possible form of Platonism when he advocates for Theurgy as a way of ritually and intentionally completing the immersion of the soul into “matter” so that its organizing, perfecting, vivifying action is made most immediately apparent, creating the most accurate image of Soul possible within space-time and thereby also effecting the ascent of the center of awareness back towards the soul. Procession, abidance, and reversion aren’t just simultaneous, they are three facets of the same process and to strengthen one is to strengthen them all.
Interestingly, and perhaps not coincidentally, Iamblichus was the last philosopher I was engaging with deeply before my nervous avoidance of metaphysics began. I have always intuitively felt that a strong, healthy body is conducive to mental and spiritual health and I was always suspicious of asceticism and certain thinkers’ and mystics’ injunction against weight training. Ascetics must get the results they seek, but as for me, in the months since I started applying bioenergetic principles of health more fully to my life I have experienced more moments of spontaneous joy, gratitude, presence, and appreciative admiration for others and for the world than I did in two or three years of frequent prayer and occasional religious fasting.
Of course I still advocate prayer and it’s an unambiguously positive practice. My point is only that physical well-being and spiritual well-being are more connected than many want to admit, and you should probably only attempt separating them if you are trying to turn yourself into a lich or an arhat.
Otherwise, you should love your body, you should “see the beauty and strength of which (it) is capable.” You should tend to it not just as a garden for sensation and vanity but as a moving image of your own soul, an act of theurgy in which the creating-being is pouring itself out into the maximal extension of its own complexity and intelligence and striving for the self-reinforcing and beautifying increase of energy and structure, an undertaking it carries out in imitation of God. You are not going to meditate your way out of a thiamine or magnesium deficiency, and dissociating from your nervous system will not help regulate it. Letting your body waste does not build up your soul, and if it gives you mystic visions there’s a good chance all that means is that your pituitary system is working overtime to compensate for a debilitated thyroid.
I don’t know what awaits after death. There are enough psychics out there claiming it’s a big party and you get to meet dead celebrities that I think I’ll probably just go with that. I hope the gods will be there. But mostly, I’m going to try to trust that when I’m supposed to be there, I will be there because of the exact same benevolence and grace that has put me here at this moment, and that time here is good in itself and is best spent being here, acting in accordance with and for the benefit of life and the world in the most concrete and obvious ways. For me, that means improving and promoting health, building things with friends and family, and pursuing creative expression for the simple sake of enjoyment.
Maybe that will include returning to Heliotroph, resuming work on a couple different books, and rekindling my own practice, but I don’t know. I don’t really enjoy twitter anymore, and I don’t feel that much connection to the Heliotroph “character” anymore either. I never really set out to play up or play down any aspects of my own personality, but it happens inevitably and naturally as a result of interacting with any specific milieu and especially so when there is anonymity and avatars involved. In this case, the character that took shape was serious and authoritative in a way that doesn’t necessarily reflect my real life personality, at least not when I’m at my best and happiest. Frankly, I am a goofy person. There’s something objectively funny about being a “lapsed pagan,” something silly about getting to the cusp of occult initiation through the sheer force of being an overconfident 20-something with too much time on his hands and then getting cold feet and screwing off to go learn C# and paint action figures. Let’s see how far I get with my new spergy fixations of bioenernetics and biomechanical calisthenics.
I’m sure I’ll continue to write and share my writing for the rest of my life, and there are other things I’d like to share as well. I might use Heliotroph for some of it, or I might find a new pen name, or I might not even stay anonymous.
To finish, this is a poem that I wrote in a fit of inspiration back in December, the first poem that I had written since March 2023. A few days after writing it, my paternal grandmother passed. I would like to think whatever was going on in the stars was meaning to say “yes, things are as they should be, strange but ultimately good.”
All is eternal - - It is only the moment of attention that barrels on with drunken momentum to watch each thing come forth in joy and leap beyond this narrow grasp For all is each, each god embracing All in boundless, selfless Self to know each other in a wholeness holding All in perfect health For all that Is is only ever all it always will have been, a perfect sphere whose perfect motion casts a steady solar beam and only the moment of drunken attention draws molten lead forth from its gold, forgetting that we who now think ourselves dying are truly, eternally, being born
As a final note — when I backed out last year, I also paused sales on my book Hymns for the Gods because I felt that it would not be right to continue earning money from it while I was experiencing such doubts about my own practice. Now, even if I haven’t resumed my own offering rites yet, I can easily see myself doing so, and I have also received numerous messages from people who told me that the book has been a great help in their own practices. So I’m putting it back up for sale. Maybe not all of it holds up, but I’m still proud of it and I still enjoy the hymns themselves.
Good timing on this post as I came across this blog a day or two ago. Happy to hear that you've found some positive avenues for yourself that suits your particular nature.
More specifically, I think this captures much of what any genuine practice should require:
"My point is only that physical well-being and spiritual well-being are more connected than many want to admit.."
I mostly write here on Substack about the Eastern Traditions from the standpoint of what they originally taught and many of them do in fact adhere to this basic formula....Patanjali's Astanga Yoga is the clearest example of this, but you can even find a recognition of it in Early Buddhism through practices like Satipathanna and Anapanasati though these do not lend themselves to an immediate technical application and instruction in the way that Yoga does.
Although you may not ultimately jive with either of these traditions (which is fine), I thought I'd just mention it. Either way, take care of yourself and hope to see more of your writing.
I lack the requisite knowledge to comment on the details of your spiritual journey, but overall it sounds like it's been a harrowing but rewarding process. I'm glad you've found yourself in a better place, and while I can understand why you might not return to Heliotroph, I hope you do some day. All the best.