Books and Free Excerpts

Santa Fe Light: Touring the Visionary Geography of Santa Fe, New Mexico (iUniverse, 2009)

Introduction: Getting to know where you live could take you through the galaxy. The old Roman term for the spirit of place, genius loci, could invoke a galaxy-size spirit. Santa Fe, New Mexico, wildly popular tourist destination, high-desert cultural mecca in the American Southwest, home of artists, rebels, cowboys, scientists, and mystics, could be filled with stars. What does this mean?

Consider this book a travelogue through some of the inner aspects of Santa Fe. Put simply, I like this place, and I wanted to understand why that was so. What is it about Santa Fe that is so appealing? I wasn’t satisfied with the conventional list of sociological attributes, the excellent weather, the high, dry climate, the clean air. Is there something deeper that also, or primarily, accounts for the town’s livability? In Eastern cultures, notably India and Tibet, travelers had compiled reports of their journeys through lands, usually far away from where people lived, that had effects on their awareness. These lands were usually described as sacred, numinous, revelatory. Some of the more visionary travelers even described temples of light they saw in these lands, in fact, in the same places as mountains, caves, streams, and other features, and in the temples, hosts of exalted spiritual beings living in conditions of bliss.

But must one travel to exotic, remote locales to have even a glimpse of this? Is there any chance of that in materialistic, capitalist, down-to-Earth America? Over the years and in previous books I have explored the geomantic underpinning of certain locales that already had a reputation for these same qualities as the Tibetans found. I even lived in one crazy-spiritual place, Glastonbury in Somerset, England. That place had accreted no end of attributions and provoked no end of mystical experiences. The basic discovery I learned there is that energies of the planet seemed to congeal into structured spaces, often called Light temples or visionary palaces, even cities, that if you somehow could shift your awareness into them it produced visionary adventures. In fact, if your extended awareness was sharp and lucid enough—clairvoyant—you might start discerning entire landscapes of Light temples and spiritual beings in them.

It worked in Glastonbury, so why not in Santa Fe? I took this as a starting assumption and began looking at Santa Fe, extending my awareness past its alluring skin of outer world façades and appearances to see if the place has any Light temples. It does. In fact, it has a great deal of them, an entire numinous landscape of light. The total impact of these on our awareness and feeling for life here I call Santa Fe Light.

I know writers and artists have extolled the fabulous light here, but I mean the Light behind the light. This book documents 111 different geomantic features or Light temples in Santa Fe, all of which contribute to this Light. Amusingly, this is like the way urban lights obscure night-time astronomy with their steady glare. Remember the last time you flew over a big city at night in a jet? How the landscape down there was copiously lit, lights everywhere, like seeing a star cluster on the land.

Santa Fe Light points to the inner lights that are on all the time, even in the daytime. Except in this case the proliferation of landscape lights derives not from 100-watt light bulbs in kitchens and living-rooms down there in the pueblo-style homes, but from the Light temples whose existence in our world is like a forest of 100,000-watt bulbs. And unlike the electric lights the astronomers dislike at night because they block the view of the stars, these lights of the Santa Fe Light are those stars themselves on the land.

The book’s scope actually extends a little farther than the city. I settled on a 43-mile diameter section of landscape with Santa Fe at the center, and I take this section to be the master landscape temple or sacred landscape of Santa Fe. The reason is that the biggest geomantic feature here measures 43 miles across so it makes a logical but only relative demarcation of a geomantic landscape. Since the system is organic and not linear, the notion of a geomantic boundary is only provisional. This level of reality is more like a hologram: once you’re in there, everything’s connected and the full extent of your sacred landscape is the planet.

When I say I “document” 111 geomantic features in the Santa Fe landscape temple, this means I provide visionary recitals of likely experiences in them. Visionary recital is a wonderful term from early Persian mysticism; mystics would have clairvoyant experiences inside Light temples they found in their landscape and then recount them in a somewhat formal but inspiring manner afterwards to their friends. So I report on my visits—and many times with colleagues, so I report theirs too—to many Light temples that co-exist with familiar physical structures around Santa Fe, sometimes churches, parks, the Plaza downtown, and other times pueblos, hills, rivers, or mountains. It can get a bit uncanny, for it becomes evident that two worlds overlap: the outer tangible world of trendy pueblo-style Santa Fe, the famous City Different, and an inner, previously unsuspected geomantic terrain of Light temples and spirits. Even more mysterious, or exciting, is the suggestion that these two worlds interact.

That leads to my second research topic or reason for investigating Santa Fe this way. Does this inner geomantic landscape have a working relationship with our outer world? Does the collective of Light temples, their activities and spiritual beings, have a direct correlation with, even influence on, the town’s observed sociological qualities? Again the answer came up yes, and decidedly so. In fact, I’m prepared to suggest that the underlying geomantic pattern, Santa Fe Light, has a profound determining effect on all aspects of Santa Fe life and that we could, without inflation or exaggeration, say that even if we’re unaware of it, we all participate in a marvelous lucid dream in which our outer, apparent lives co-participate in a greater spiritual reality, one, in fact, that actually implicates—better: involves—the entire galaxy.

I provide reports of my visits to these 111 features, and I offer practical tips on how you might, should this excite your interest, do the same. With Santa Fe’s 400th anniversary as a capital city, founded in 1610 by the Spanish for that purpose, it might be helpful to have a deeper view of what makes Santa Fe the way it is. Even better, knowledge of the geomantic landscape and the location and types of its Light temples gives us a map with practical applications. You can actually start to help maintain your local geomantic landscape. Interested in ecology? Going Green? The geomantic terrain is the underlying formative force-field that sustains all ecologies. A healthy, Light-filled visionary geography gives your going-Green some traction. It’s the place to go if you want to introduce activity of maximum benefit for the world. It’s just like the principle of acupuncture and most holistic medicine. Got a problem with your gall bladder? Try adjusting the qi, or life-force energy, in the appropriate meridians to start correcting the physical problem. It’s the same with the Earth. To correct a physical imbalance, adjust the energy field that creates and sustains it.

All of this is the kind of thing that if you merely hear about it, you might not be convinced. It might seem a bit outlandish, unproven, unprovable. I understand. But were you to glimpse it, even for a moment, all that skepticism would dissolve. That’s why, whimsically, I call Part I “The Sales Pitch.” I’m making a pitch to you that the Santa Fe landscape is inherently sacred, numinous, and Light-filled. In Part II, I take you on a visionary tour of the real estate, giving the familiar term a twist in nuance, to 111 different geomantic features and highlight some of the likely mystical experiences a person could have at those sites. In Part III, “The Purchase,” I’m hoping you will “buy” my contention that Santa Fe is a visionary landscape as I correlate its observed sociological qualities with its now observed geomantic features. As I said, my research question propelling this book is this: To what degree may we attribute observed sociological qualities of this community to its underlying geomantic template? My research answer is this: To a big degree. The geomantic or visionary landscape is what we might call the realm of the causes and influences shaping our familiar outer lives.

This is the seventh in a series I call “Primers on Earth’s Geomantic Reality.” It’s a primer because mostly it’s a concentrated introduction to a complex subject. I bring in the Earth because the features are distributed across the globe so the entire planet is implicated in their reality and application. Geomantic is an old British term with different nuances; mine is that it is the discipline of figuring out Earth’s energy patterns and how to use them. Reality means higher or deeper reality, something a bit beyond the comfort zone of our consensus reality yet very much a planetary truth.

The purpose of the series is to show different ways we can interact beneficially with the planet through its many geomantic nodes designed just for that. My intent also is to reveal some unsuspected design aspects of our host planet so that we might form a more respectful and more accurate picture of what our planet actually is. An additional purpose is to provide enough information, conceptual models, mythic traditions, field reports, and geomythic adventures to inspire people to find ways to re-engage themselves with the planet and to pick up the human responsibility we all share to help maintain it and in effect to continue the cosmogony on Earth.

If I were reading this book, instead of writing it, the first thing I’d ask the writer is this: What’s your epistemological basis, pal? How do you know it’s this way? So here are my “credentials” for making these observations and conclusions in Santa Fe Light: nine years of professional, certified training in clairvoyant development enabling me to use clairvoyance as a precision research tool; 25 years of wakeful interactions and (I hope I don’t overly flatter myself) collegial adventures with an angelic family called the Ofanim who apparently are charged with a lot of responsibility for maintaining and explaining the Earth’s energy body or Light grid. They mentored me in learning the Earth’s geomantic pattern, and they still do. It was a bit like going to an invisible school with invisible teachers whose subject matter was invisible things in the landscape of the planet: that’s just great for one’s résumé! Still, its oddness or remoteness from comfortable reality doesn’t detract from its truth. Plus, as I hope you’ll see in the book, the Ofanim are rather fun and upbeat to work with.

In addition, I have a brain, and it works, so I have done my due diligence as a scholar, acquainting myself with myths of the world, some science and math (the parts I understand), history, folklore, whatever seems useful as a tool to open the big door. One discovery I’ve made is that myths are true if you read them clairvoyantly. They are shorthand picture-notes left us by earlier psychics and visionaries; they can provide wonderful, and wonderfully precise, maps to the geomantic terrain. Sure, they’re descriptive of inner psychological processes as Jung and Campbell taught us; but they go beyond that into the metaphysical realm. There they are also descriptive of psychological processes extrapolated outwards to form a visionary geography. That way our inner psychology matches the outer geomantic “psychology,” and that, in turn, enables us to participate fully and effectively as mandated players in Earth’s life.

Further, I haven’t spent all my time in a library (though it has its appeal), and all of my work has been field-tested; scientists call this approach empirical, and I like it. Is this stuff—these visionary recitals and assertions of a 111-featured Light temple landscape—real when you actually sit down on the land and have a look for yourself? It is, and the best way I can convince you of that is to help you have your own looks. This book is a gesture in that direction, and I hope it provokes you to go look for yourself.

Another aspect of empiricism and science is corroborability. Just because I saw all these amazing things can anyone else see them and repeat the results? Yes, they can, and yes, you can, and that is actually a great deal of the fun with this kind of geomantic work. It is inherently corroborable: we may all jump into the same lucid dream and narrate different but overlapping and congruent aspects of it to one another. We may do this today, next Friday, and two years from next Friday because it’s repeatable. As an added advantage, the more often you look, the better and the more you see.

Rudolf Steiner always said you ought to take the protocols of true science into spiritual investigation. Scientists in his day, and ours, are reluctant to get metaphysical, even though reality is; and psychics in his day, and ours, can often be seduced into a wild-west maverickism with glamorous results that may not be grounded in actual reality. Steiner coined the term “spiritual scientist” to denote this combined approach; so let’s be a team of spiritual-geomantic scientists carefully researching, documenting, and servicing our own landscape, or what I like to call a Land of Light.

What are my conclusions? For one, Santa Fe is a premier sacred site, even if nobody knows it or there’s so little outwardly and physically to support this view. No stone circles, no odd manmade hills, no barrows, pyramids, stone avenues, ancient temple ruins, or any of the other familiar megalithic paraphernalia useful to support numinous claims of other sites. There aren’t even many UFO abduction or sighting claims and no magical vortexes such as have propelled Sedona, Arizona, for example, into new-age prominence. There are the remains of many pueblos, and some of them are still viable and inhabited by Native Americans who follow their ritual calendar. To me, that fact alone bespeaks the survival of Mystery in the landscape, and the survival of the possibility of discovering it and using it as a protocol for beneficial interaction. There must be a reason why these long-term residents find this area still interesting.

Another conclusion is that Santa Fe, because of its juxtaposition with an inherent, pre-determined geomantic terrain which acts like an engineering blueprint that stamps itself on our physical reality like a complex tattoo in multiple dimensions, has a function that goes beyond itself and involves the planet. That’s actually not surprising, because one of the inescapable truths of geomantic discovery is that landscapes are always embedded in bigger ones, that everything always has a rationalizing context, one that explains it, and this fractalized pattern goes up into the realms of the galaxy and beyond, and into the far reaches of the spiritual worlds. Touch one Light temple with your awareness and you open a door into the universe.

All of this is especially fitting for Santa Fe because one of the prime aspects of its collective geomantic terrain—the functional meaning of its 111 Light temples—involves the heart. I don’t mean the pumping organ in the chest, but what yogis call the heart chakra, an energized wheel of light, force, and consciousness in the chest. It has a certain agenda, which I explain in the book, but one thing it does is help move our awareness out beyond the concerns of ourselves as individuals, out into the world. Santa Fe’s participation in this geomantic heart chakra function makes it easier for us to appreciate how all its Light temples always point beyond themselves, and how they can enable us to experience something that seems beyond ourselves. It’s a paradox, because ultimately, nothing is beyond us, but everything is both inside and outside us. The whole truth of the human has been templated outside us as a visionary geography to enable us to gradually see the pattern all of it creates, and that pattern is ourselves.

Here’s what I mean. Take your body, but I mean not just the physical form you can see, but the whole package, and in case this is a new idea to you, that package is big. It consists of many chakras; an aura or energy field with many layers; and six more bodies, all of them subtle, but at least one of them you might have heard of, the astral body; and lots of energy-conducting lines from acupuncture’s meridians to the super-minute nadis, or sound-threads of yoga. Add to this something enigmatic and mystical called the Higher Self who is a kind of higher-world custodian of all your property (did you realize you are a real-estate magnate?) and history (yours, and your past lives).

Take all this and project it outwards to create a human-modelled landscape of light. Where you would have a chakra (the human has 81 “in” the body, more outside it) in the visionary geography you have a Light temple, something classy from myth, such as a Palace of the Gods, Sun Cave, Grail Castle, a dragon’s jewel-hoard. Now go outside, which is really, in terms of your cognitive experience, inside, for a walk. Visit some Light temples; have a visionary adventure inside some myths; download a little cosmic wisdom; understand a bit about how the world is much bigger, deeper, broader, and richer than you ever thought and, even better, find you like it that way. Do this enough and you start getting the sense you’re looking in a mirror, that all this Light temple “furniture” has something to do with you, even if this “you” is not quite you.

That’s because the you that is mirrored is more a portrait of your Higher Self, or what we might call the archetype of the human, the microcosmos, as the mystics used to say, the little version of the greater cosmos, embedded with all its mysteries. In the visionary landscape behold the Higher Self, and the greater Self beyond that. Santa Fe Light is the nimbus emanated from this great you-not you in the land. So you, why not get out in the Santa Fe Light and visit some high-end Light temples?

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