”What you are basically — deep, deep down, far, far in — is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.”

- Alan Watts, The Nature of Consciousness

Hello friends,

It’s Labor Day, and the evening is colored with mixed feels of summer’s end. My, how our whereabouts in a lap around the sun affect things. I feel transition afoot, fall into winter coming, and find myself looking back across a beautiful, filled-to-the-brim, but all too quick summertime tonight.

This August I had the tremendous privilege of spending two weeks in Washington State for the Festival of Yes and Silver Gate, Montana, my favorite mountain town on earth, where I used to run the Range Rider’s Lodge.

The whole year, the Festival of Yes has been there, slow-simmering in the back of my mind, ever since the Yesman asked me to speak at the festival on our place in space. He knows me well and pinned the tail on my obsession of late. I've never really given such a talk before, especially espousing my own worldview so directly. The whole year I’ve felt a light nervousness and deep excitement resonant of that famous Joseph Campbell line, "the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek."

A few weeks before, I wrote the speech in bullet points on index cards and practiced a handful of times at home. I felt pretty good about it. However, a deeper inspiration struck while flying to Seattle. The sun setting for what felt like the whole flight out the window, I rewrote the entire speech in a full-hearted frenzy, no longer aiming to just give people a feel for the vastness of the universe, but taking a full swing at oneness, in the spiritual sense, through an astronomical lens.

The festival was utterly magnificent. A dance floor in this great dugout bowl deep in the Mount Baker National Forest, a nearby clearing to gaze out at the universe at night with meteors constantly vaporizing in the atmosphere above (the Perseid Meteor Shower at its peak), and a frigid Sauk River just down the road for an invigorating daily dip with direct flyovers by both fighter jets and bald eagles. There were probably 150 people, 25 DJs, 10 workshop hosts, and an unquantifiable mix of uncategorizable humans of varied and rad pursuit. The Yesman stoked the people. The buy-in was high. The music pumped late afternoon through sunrise Friday and Saturday. Friends played incredible sets. We danced and danced and danced. Deep conversations were everywhere. I fell in love with a dozen people I’d never met before and even deeper for a dozen I had before met.

Saturday afternoon, my “Cosmic Consciousness” slot came around. It was hot in the direct sunlight of the dance bowl, so we moved up to a full living room set in the shade of pines. I looked at the people in the living room in the forest before me, at my yesterday-finished high-flying index cards, had a little chuckle at the gorgeous absurdity of it all, and started speaking.

Rather than go into great detail — I can do you one better — as the Yesman recorded the whole thing! I polished the audio and uploaded it to YouTube.

A bunch of people came up to me afterwards with big questions, thanks, asks for another ‘In This Together’ Bumper Sticker, and one dude even proposed I open a festival he was throwing with the same speech. Holy wow! Now I’m all stoked about speaking and have a new medium to create and share through.

This is what participatory experiences are all about. Nobody is there as an audience member to merely observe. Everybody is there to actively create the experience. When people are empowered to give there gifts, magic can happen.

After breaking personally new ground with a speech, the Yesman’s brother Rubin played flamingo guitar for everyone. He’d been playing flamingo guitar for fourteen years but had never played in front of a crowd before. I cried as he played. Not just because he played with emotion and it was exquisite and gorgeous, but because I also realized that something incredible was happening here: we were breaking the psychological barriers that prevented us from sharing the things we love.

This is psychomagic. “Psycho” as in psychological and “magic” as in amazing transformation or breakthrough. It’s the highest happening of any participatory experience. This August at the Festival of Yes, it happened to me.

Til next month!

With love and stoke,

Ethan

P.S. WONDER WANDER 2023 is happening at the Golden Hawk Retreat in New Mexico in less than two weeks! Shoutout to this year’s wonderwanders for taking the time and making the leap.

P.P.S. Over 200 ‘In This Together’ Bumper Stickers have been distributed since released last month! Thank you to all who’ve ordered and stuck that stickable symbol of planetary togetherness out in the world (please send pics!).

Cosmic Consciousness: A Speech at the Festival of Yes

I recently had the grand privilege of speaking on Cosmic Consciousness and the inherent oneness of all things through an astronomical lens at the Festival of Yes.

Wandering through my near-death experience at sixteen, insights into the psychological growth process from Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, the formation of the universe, wise words from Ed Abbey, Alan Watts, Carl Sagan, and John Frusciante, and ultimately offering contemplating the cosmos as a means of transcending our repression of “the primary miraculousness of creation,” it felt wildly out of the blue and well received.

A true legend — while running the festival — the Yesman managed to record the speech on his phone! I polished and uploaded the audio to YouTube for your listening pleasure.

Listen in >

In This Together Bumper Sticker

The ‘In This Together’ Bumper Sticker is a symbolic reminder that we are literally in this together, residing on a tiny blue-green ball of life miraculously afloat in the void of space.

Each 11”x3” bumper sticker costs $1 (plus $6 for packaging and shipping by yours truly). Why pay $7 for one, when you could grab four for $10, twenty for $26, or a hundred for $106 to share with your fellow riders on spaceship Earth?

Place an order >