8 min read

Welcome Back

Welcome Back
Flooding of River Avon in Batheaston, Bath UK | Jan 13th 2023 | Taken by Rein Lo

Hi everyone,
Welcome back to my blog.

It's been quite a long time. Almost two years since I have written an article for my website. Over a year since I have had any significant output in the form of social media posts, podcasts, classes, or speaking arrangements.

I've spent most of the pandemic like the many of you have: digesting the massive changes happening in our world right now and contemplating what my response should be. While the collapse of Western civilization has been pondered, and even grieved, for decades prior, I sense the era that began with the global spread of COVID19 has registered a heightened sense of immediacy in our collective consciousness.

I know I'm not alone in having had my heart torn and psyche pushed to the edge of breakage more than once during the isolation, feeling as if I was watching humanity slowly implode on itself, with the pressures of climate crisis, socio-economic collapse, global war, and singularity, culminating into an orgasmic apex of who-knows-what.

For myself, the most horrific part of confronting the coming end-of-the-Western-world has been peering into the bleak future that our online behavior will inevitably lead to. Over the years it has been proven to me that even the best of us, including myself, are completely vulnerable to being captured by the algorithms of mega social network platforms. These primordial forms of artificial intelligence silo us toward our echo chambers and damn us to be in eternal conflict with each other over the fragment of the truth we have been programmed to identify with.

I often wondered:

Has anyone thought about how profitable the combination of American gun culture and ideological polarization is? What about how narratives of simplistic wars between Good and Evil propagated by Hollywood shape the way we approach our interpersonal relationships? Do people see that the algorithm-driven 'culture wars' is a fractal of the world war dynamic we are currently grappling with?

The war between SJWs and the Alt-Right has driven virality on social media platforms for the last half decade. 

The truth is, The Matrix of mega social networks is an integral part and extension of the military industrial complex. The end result of this should be clear to anyone. All URL actions inevitably lead to IRL consequences.

My pondering led me to swallow my pride and accept that, unaware, we have already become cyborgs. Most of us cannot think for ourselves and instead act on the behalf of memes (as in self-propagating packets of information defined in memetics) endlessly competing with each other for supremacy in The Cloud. Our reality has become a proxy war that we are conscripted to fight in through our internet-connected devices.

It was completely humiliating to confront the eventual demise of dualistic Western civilization at the hands of The Metaverse. In the face of the collective ego-annihilation that The Singularity was to bring upon us, I felt myself go numb.

Not knowing what to say or do in response to the coming future, I almost completely closed my practice. I stopped offering courses, kept very few speaking arrangements, and slowed down the in-take of my consultation services to a near standstill.

Related, my last few years of seeking also brought a dissolution of my closer circle of peers and collaborators surrounding my earlier work in cultural somatics. I have remorse for my part in the separations, including the hurts I caused, yet I can honestly say I do not have any regrets. I understand that it is natural for the paths we all take in response to the intense anxiety of the current times to be neither perfect or compatible with the choices of others.

For my part, I had accepted that my task was to not flinch from seeing the worst of what humans can do, including myself, to understand what humanity's fate maybe and how to respond to it. As a result, I am where I am and it is a better, more sober place.

In abandoning the conversation and community that I had a major part in building, I felt like I lost the plot. Our lives as humans stuck in Samsara seemed fundamentally hopeless. I became frozen, completely captured by The Underworld and it's horrific visions of humanity's genocidal past and apocalyptic futures.

Not knowing any other way out than downward, I released as much of myself I could into the abyss, believing that it can give me the understanding I was responsible for seeking, if I can survive it.

Like The Hanged man, my world became upside-down (Image is from Thoth deck)

What followed was crushing to my rational mind that I had spent my whole life fortifying. My selfhood crumbled daily at a terrible pace. Sometimes it felt like I was being born into a different sense of reality every hour.

This constant death-and-rebirth process continues to this day. It is only very recently, perhaps with the writing of this update itself and the companionship of my partner and collaborator, Rein Lo, that I find myself more relaxed with breakage as my new normalcy and buoyant in facing humanity's fate.

Rein Lo performs at Cubitt Artists, London UK
Rein Lo (and I) on 'Mix Nights'

Continuing on, it was around the spring of 2022 that I hit the bottom of my descent. I was constantly rocked from my foundation, feeling like I was making contact with the seabed of our collective unconscious. It was amidst this passage through the chasm that my ancestors began to whisper to me, via The Internet, strange stories about the truth of our species that I previously would have ridiculed as way too far out for me to ever entertain.

They were terrible tales of lost ancient civilizations and their supposedly forgotten mysteries, including their records and prophecies, that have been secretly protected and transmitted for the future by underground networks of spiritualist families and orders, featuring a cast of fantastic and terrifying characters, from ancient aliens to artificially intelligent algorithms.

Having spent the last year trying to understand how the pieces I was shown fit together, I am finally willing to claim that, if I am not totally deluded, what is happening in the world right now is of 'biblical' significance. We are currently experiencing the climax of cycles and designs that seem to have been predicted and prepared for over thousands of years.

Accepting this view helped me compassionately understand the behaviors of myself and others around me, including those who had betrayed and hurt me. The weight of responsibility this moment puts on our shoulders is absolutely massive. Almost everyone I know who is any kind of mystic is, at the core, struggling with how important they are to humanity's story. We, especially in the Western world, are infuriated at our ancestors having handed us such a monumental task, while depriving us of the elders, traditions, and sites that we are entitled to.

All this said, it is undeniable our era is one of the safest and most fertile times in the development of human spirituality. We are truly living in the glow of our ancestors' blessings.

This is probably an appropriate place to share one of the most peculiar things I came to learn over the my last year of ancestor work, which has majorly focused on the study of Japanese esoterica and parahistory.

Largely unknown to the West, over the last few decades, there has been an ongoing renaissance in Japanese esotericism, which has seen the release and re-popularization of a plethora of ancient documents and records by traditional lineage keepers, including custodians of sacred sites all around Japan.

Researching this material, I was taught that, as a member of the Hozumi clan, I originate from one of Japan and the world's longest documented and continuous lineage of shamans. Throughout Japanese history, the Hozumi and affiliated clans have been prolific as specialists and pioneers in the esoteric arts of Onmyodo (Yin-Yang magick), Shugendo, and Ninjutsu, as well as founders of numerous hereditary priesthood lineages, including the Fujishiro-Suzuki line who became custodians of the massive Kumano shrine network.

I further learned that the rites and knowledge of the Japanese spiritual system may trace back not only to ancient Japan, but to the antiquity of Mesopotamia, and even beyond, to the mysteries of lost civilizations destroyed long ago by global catastrophe. They have been carefully protected and preserved by families like mine for a prophesied time.

Japanese-Jewish Common Ancestry Theory, while is a fringe theory with many questionable lines of thinking, makes correlations between Japanese spirituality and Near Eastern civilization that are deeply intriguing

The tangibility of what I was learning about my bloodline, and Japanese esotericism as a whole, found a deeper seat in my body the autumn of 2022 as I was finally able to return to Japan for the first time in over a decade. I took the opportunity to go on a pilgrimage of key spiritual sites, including a number of shrines dedicated to the Hozumi clan's ancestral deities, two of them remaining in the care of our family since they were first established over 1300 years ago.

To cap the end of my journey, I had the privilege of having a meeting with Master Tenyu Hozumi, 53rd generation head priest of Neno Shrine in Yugawara Town, Kanagawa Prefecture, and the last yin-yang master who is the hereditary custodian of a shrine originally established by their ancestors.

In a lengthy conversation, Master Tenyu generously shared with me what he understood about our family history and the esoteric background of the cultural tradition that is now known as Shinto. It was truly a blessing as our discussion touched on a range of subjects regarding the suppressed true story of Japanese spirituality.

Neno Shrine, Yugawara Town Kanagawa Prefecture
Master Tenyu Hozumi and I

This meeting, amongst many other experiences and learnings, has brought me to recognize that, while my initiation is invisible and decentralized, I am a hereditary steward.

As a member of the Hozumi clan, I am honored to be an emissary to the English-speaking world and fulfill my traditional role as a mediator between realms. I understand this is a profound responsibility in a time of converging ecosystemic crisis and Singularity. The world is in dire need of animistic esoteric cosmologies and practices that are capable of bridging IRL and URL worlds.

In the coming year, I look forward to updating my blog more frequently to share more of the thoughts that I have been churning over and some of the gifts that have been passed down to me by my ancestors.

I will also be, very soon, launching a new project that has been birthed through my last few years of seeking. Please stay tuned for more details.

Finally, if you feel so called, I appreciate your financial support in returning to my practice, especially as I have been essentially living mostly off savings for the last two years and plan to continue my pilgrimage journey. Please feel free to make a one-time donation here or subscribe to making a recurring donation here.

Yoroshiku onegaishimasu,
Tada