"It is a question of producing ourselves, not the things that enslave us."

Reflecting back on my entry into the Evolver Social Movement stirs up a brew of diverse personal influences and memories of surprising connections and turning points. Here’s how I joined the Reality Sandwich family and became an Evolver regional coordinator in Los Angeles, and what I’ve learned about transformation within the emergent space of the Evolver Social Movement.

As a news-writer for Reality Sandwich and regional coordinator for Evolver Los Angeles, the Evolver network informs just about everything I do. This is the story of how I followed a few whims and landed in the self-selecting community of edge-walkers known as the Evolver Social Movement.

I trace my journey back to one night in 2007 when I was a sick with a cold, watching TV alone in the middle of the night. I caught an episode of a show called “Going Tribal” that featured the host undergoing an iboga initiation in Gabon. Fascinated with the symbols and origins of the Bwiti ceremony, I decided to write about iboga for school. I read Daniel Pinchbeck’s Breaking Open the Head, which along with the other psychedelic literature I read for research, became a foundational text for me. I later met Daniel on his book tour promoting 2012: Return of Quetzalcoatl and started writing for Reality Sandwich on an almost weekly basis. I corresponded with news editor Jonathan Phillips to cover readers’ suggested stories that ranged from organ transplants and jury nullification to supernovas and harmonic templates for reintegration. My job as a newswriter was to find the transformative or evolutionary threads of these seemingly disparate stories and weave them together to counteract the doom and gloom of daily news. It is an on-going practice in drawing parallels, entertaining a plurality of truths, and discerning substance from fluff.

Meanwhile, I was getting my English degree in college and digging into literary theory and creative writing. The Reality Sandwich ethos had seeped into my whole thought pattern, and I found myself scanning all texts for insights into time, sex, money, visionary states, and the nature of reality.
My writing for Reality Sandwich also coincided with a shift in my social life that sprung up around Ron Paul’s presidential campaign. Up to that point I was pretty apolitical and generally perplexed by the two-party system. I knew I wanted government out of my wallet and my bedroom, but didn’t know there was a name for that. Slowly I found myself joining a circle of well-read, tech-savvy libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who did not fit my perception of political activists. I realized that I had made it through high school and college without really grasping basic civics, much less US foreign policy and the monetary system, so I frequented their meetings even after the 2008 primary was over. Almost every week they gathered at a former Theosophist colony-turned-apartment complex in the Hollywood Hills to talk about projects, news and current events as well as influential memes like spontaneous order, natural law, Austrian economics, civil disobedience, and many others that would later inform my approach to Evolver. While I’m still reticent to support any politician, the group of friends that came together around the Ron Paul campaign were elemental in clearing the way for new myths of the world after corporatocracy and central banking.

In May ’08 I went to Lightning in a Bottle, the Southern California camping festival that promotes sustainability through visionary art, activism and consciousness workshops in a party atmosphere . There I met Daniel’s friend Scott Beibin, who had a way of participating in the festival that spoke to my interest in culture jamming and subverting authority structures. Scott and his partner Liz Cole run the Evil Twin Booking Agency, a speakers’ bureau that books events about social and economic justice, media, environmentalism, outsider art, and the metaphysical. I loved how Scott explained Evil Twin’s method of associating radical activists and media pranksters with cutting edge scientists and journalists, all in the DIY spirit. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew I had met an unconventional trouble-maker.

Scott’s journalistic interest in LIB made it feel ok to forgo the fire-spinning, dubstepping, head tripping aspect of festival culture and view LIB more as a hub of transformational subcultures. I didn’t realize it then, but that weekend was a turning point for me that spurred lots of opportunities and expanded my social circle to the point that I am now one or two degrees away from many of my favorite writers, inventors, and artists.

After graduating from college in late ‘08, I floundered for about 6 months, half-heartedly writing and working at a concert venue in Los Angeles. I registered for graduate school in Portland, partly because I wanted to pursue my MFA in nonfiction writing, and partly just to buy time and flee Los Angeles. I knew that Reality Sandwich had a social networking component in the works for a long time, but didn’t envision myself in any type of community leadership role, on- or off-line. This brings to mind the saying “You plan, and God laughs.” In April 2009, I was at an event in downtown hosted by Project Butterfly, the conscious event team that was set to co-present the launch party for Evolver the social networking site. Project Butterfly founders D and Midori introduced me to Baza Novic, now my regional co-conspirator and all-weather friend.
Baza had gone to the first Reality Sandwich retreat in Utah and volunteered to start a spore in Los Angeles. We got in touch and hosted the first spore, “Spreading the Network” in July of 2009 at the Project Butterfly loft. It was an intimate gathering of maybe 15 people where I remember describing myself as an “empty vessel,” not feeling qualified to say that anything is impossible. The first spore confirmed for me that other Angeleno Evolvers – the hope fiends and utopian pragmatists that the website caters to – were navigating the same networks as me.

Meanwhile my relationship was in flux and my enthusiasm for grad school was waning, and I still had this nagging sense of stagnation. Once again, “the network” interjected and set me on a new path. One morning I got a call from Scott Beibin asking if I wanted a job as a personal assistant to our friend Dr. Ryan Wartena, a chemical engineer and energy system designer. I jumped at the chance to work and that was the deciding factor in blowing off grad school. After a brief visit to the East Coast, I was hired as Ryan’s assistant and initiated into new realms of business and technology. In a nutshell, Ryan’s ambition is to install a global renewable energy grid inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s Global Energy Network. Being immersed in energy system design for a year now, I have learned a nuanced definition of the word “utility” and garnered a new understanding of electrical power as personal, political, and metaphysical power. It has been a tremendous influence on me, but that’s a feature story in itself.

Once I had a job that committed me to LA, I got more involved in organizing spores with Baza. At first I was more of a supportive participant than “sporganizer,” and early spores were centered mostly on conversations as we tried to figure out how to host intelligent, community-serving discussions about alternative currency, holistic health, contemporary shamanism, 2012 and so on. The structure of Evolver lends itself to local autonomy, so we use the language and forum discussions as a jumping off point to tailor each spore to the local community. While sporganizing will always be a dynamic process, this year of spores has revealed a preliminary pattern of what’s effective for us to invite transformation to the City of Angels.

Every spore incorporates a grounding ritual, usually a meditation or activity that relates to the theme of the night. One of the most memorable grounding rituals was for February’s “New Look at Love” spore when Baza taught Kardiomancy, a meditative biofeedback practice that uses “heart math” to draw attention to the physiological feeling of love. That synthesis of biology and emotion reverberated with me and traveled to my daily awareness, and I felt others took a lot from it too. Other times we have gone on techno-shamanic drum journeys, activated pressure points and mantras as part of the Emotional Freedom Technique, gazed eye to eye with strangers to grasp the power of attention, and of course smudged. All of the aligning rituals are practices in sharpening attention, harvesting compassion, and easing resistance to new ideas.

An equal amount of creativity goes into balancing speakers and presentations with something interactive. Roundtable discussions, dance breaks, chocolate samplings, and even simply passing plants around have all worked to keep the flow between screenings or panels. It sounds obvious, but underscores the little lessons in community interaction that I feel are valuable. Being a regional coordinator has also personally empowered me by providing the backdrop to approach potential speakers. Evolver LA has been honored with some stellar guests from organizations like Transition Town, Tree People, Growcology, Metabolic Studios, and most recently the Extraterrestrial Phenomenon Political Action Committee. It has been a wellspring of friendships and a channel to a unique subset of thought leaders.

In a greater sense, Evolver has crystallized how I perceive transformation. In his 2006 Palenque Norte talk “Pharmacology and the Post-human Phuture,” Erik Davis talks about the “crude prophetic function” of visionary culture, the tendency to look for dramatic transformations just around the bend that will change everything or re-integrate the individual. Adopting these grand visions seems like an escape from modernity, but actually reflects a distinctly modern preoccupation with the idea of revolution. Davis points out that indigenous or “first peoples” did not concern themselves with mass transformation and instead focused their energy on “continuity and return,” bringing fragments and glimpses of the visionary experience back into the mix of everyday life. I view the Evolver network as a means of practicing continuity and return, or “turning the state into a trait,” and I think of the spores as activation sites for everyday transformation that cannot be squashed like traditional uprisings.

The framework that best captures my personal approach to Evolver is rooted in the Situationist International, and particularly Guy DeBord’s concept of the Spectacle. DeBord wrote that the spectacle is “the social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” Spectacular media- advertisements, entertainment, politics, and even built environments- create “democracies of false desire” where consumers are motivated by pseudo-needs and alienated from themselves, from each other, and from the means of production and survival. This is how I have come to understand fiat currency, factory farming, greenwashing, the public education system, the prison system, and just about all electoral politics: representation superseding reality and pacifying entire generations of people.

More to the point, the spectacle imbues passivity as a means of social control by offering an “inner spectacle of participation” in the political process. Mass media fosters false antagonisms (between left and right, young and old, immigrant and citizen) and hosts false debates to quell revolutionary impulses while no real change is affected. This rings true for me as I feel very alienated from conventional forms of protest and democratic participation in this time of oil rain, drone warfare, hyperinflation, and draconian drug laws. I wonder what will be the last straw and ask why aren’t we using the known technological fixes or working toward implementing new solutions. DeBord writes that “the spectacle preserves unconsciousness even as practical changes in the condition of existence proceed.” Essentially, spectacle hampers individual participation in evolution.

The Situationist International was a movement in the 50s and 60s to break the “never-ending accumulation of spectacle [that] made a world in which all communication flowed in one direction, from the powerful to the powerless.” They constructed situations to break the passivity of the spectator and discover genuine desires, rather than the “images of need proposed by the dominant system.” I think the situationist methodology is compatible with Evolver’s distributed network of communities holding emergent space to allow things to manifest. I think of every spore as a spectacle-busting “situation,” an event that intercepts the usual inundation of mass media and offers a container for genuine interactions and activism, whether it’s chanting, doing the spiral dance, planting trees or acting out your dreams.
My journey into the Evolver Social Movement started before I could even articulate my disillusionment with the type of activism that was familiar to me. I had my own revolutionary inklings and energies, but knew that the modern model of perpetual struggle and overthrow was not for me. Now I consider Evolver as a means to step out of my role as spectator and, to paraphrase Robert Anton Wilson, “think of the world as a conspiracy run by a very close-knit group of nearly omnipotent people,” myself and my friends.