The more obvious motivators are those that people will likely gravitate towards first, including fame, fortune, or some form of filling a deep sense of personal inadequacy or lack of self-esteem, which, interestingly, mirrors Jung’s warnings about ego inflation when confronting psychic³ phenomena which, no doubt, intersects spiritual experience for the mind cannot be so easily separated from the soul, or vise versa.

Indeed, losing perspective and humility after an anomalous event is a real possibility for a witness, however well they may believe themselves to be capable of fully integrated the encounter. To compound the risk, much of our media celebrates so-called heroes who succumb to ego inflation—while conveniently omitting the spiritual consequences they suffer. There may be more cautionary tales out there than I can remember off hand, but I suspect that there are far more stories about protagonists feeding the egos of audiences than otherwise⁴.

And this is not an easy road to navigate, for our current society at the time of this writing encourages and entices people to crave and seek the attention of others and great sums of wealth. But fantasies are tempting because they seemingly offer us prizes without costs, and material prizes always have a price. I myself do not pretend to be immune to these temptations and I work vigilantly to avoid and defend against them. Attention and wealth themselves are not evil, but the inflation of the ego and the corruption of the soul they can produce is.

So, what then is one to make of a good reason and motivation for sharing their anomalous experiences?

I can think of several, including 1.) helping others who may have similar experiences, 2.) helping others who have not had such experiences realize they happen with insight into what they might mean, and 3.) processing overwhelming experiences through language. We easily forget that the same langauge we use in our everyday thoughts is the same one we use to communicate with others. By using our synchronous and asynchronous communications with others, we can help ourselves better understand the meaning and implications of our experiences without becoming buried beneath the weight of their memory or dismissing them outright and unjustly.

I do not pretend that these are the only possible reasons one might decide to share their anomalous experiences openly. The real focus here is on encouraging other witnesses to be disciplined in their decision making, and to honestly consider the real reason or reasons behind their sharing and the implications to their own integrity as a result. All else is but lazy insincerity. What then does integrity demand of us? If not our own dignity, then the dignity of the experience that has forever changed us.

#Intermundia #Excultio

Notes:

1. I had considered coercion a possible motivator until I realized that without either need or want, coercion is powerless as a motivator.

2. I do not presume that motivation in this context is limited to the intrinsic. That is a decision best left to the decider.

3. Psyche, ψυχή: breath, life, soul.

4. My suggestion to the witness who truly seeks to integrate their anomalous experience puts great effort into avoiding such actions that might lead to ego inflation or any loss of humility as this may have lasting consequences far beyond the immediate sight of the individual.

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

For example, one's reputation is probably the most immediate personal aspect at risk. By exposing deeply personal experiences, such as those involving the anomalous, one will certainly be judged by society at large, including by family, friends, employers, coworkers, acquaintances, strangers, and so forth. Different people have different thresholds for how much or how little they value their privacy and their social reputation and capital. This is not a protest against sharing the anomalous, but a caution to pause and consider what it might mean for the reaction of others who encounter an inner truth and, in turn, for the person who shares it. For in the eyes of others, especially those who cannot relate, these two things are one and the same.

Another example is the potential harm the sharing may cause the people close to them, such as spouses, best friends, parents, children, and so forth. Even if one doesn't care or worry about how the sharing might affect them directly, it's still wise to pause and consider the possible effects on the people they care about. Our modern, highly toxic society is filled with piranhas scanning the web for prey—fodder for their subscribers and views—and the personal story becomes blood in the water.

One more risk is that of digital permanence. The internet does not forget, meaning that when the potential chaos and social media feeding frenzy has finished, that personal exposure never really goes away. Years, even decades, may pass, and the story once shared, and the names and words associated with it, will forever be enshrined in the growing digital footprint of humankind.

As I mentioned, I'm not encouraging others who have anomalous experiences they wish to share to remain silent, but I am suggesting that some pause and deep thought be given to it—for themselves and the people they care about.

The question of “Should I?” is the important first question, but it certainly isn't the only question, because any question about should must also ask why.

#Intermundia #Excultio

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Darkling, n. being in the dark, or without light — Webster’s (1898).

Darkness is still a strange new topography for me, unlike any vast sweeping desert, ocean, or mountain range I can see or imagine. A miasmic sort of void that clings to the skin and clouds the mind, slowly erasing the sparkle of her eyes, the softness of her touch — her countenance now shadow this morning turned. And yet I journey this dream of life, half knowing and half not, torn between and betwixt — within and without — by a fate without precedent, a bond that, despite the retrograde, intensifies.

Here I sit together with no means to correspond, no sense among but these five to perceive. Just these fleeting words read by a longsuffering soulmate, in imperceptible omnipresence, and through the blinding noise of humanity, dying to hear her faint familiar words whispered warmly again in my ear, “Darling, I’m listening.”

#Intermundia

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Emily Dickinson once wrote,

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant— Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind—”

Hers is a poetics of the telling. It assumes the decision has already been made. Mine has not been — until now, or at least, so I presume. Perhaps it was already made long ago, and I’m just now discovering it.

But within the telling, there is always the fear — unavoidable but not unbearable. The consequences of silence outweigh those of being seen. The mediation is permissible, but betrayal is not.

Drawing on Virginia Woolf’s unfinished problem of “telling the truth about my own experiences as a body,” I believe one must accept the possibility of failure while continuing to find truer ways to speak from embodied experience. And I have yet to fully resolve what has happened to me, and what continues to happen. I can only hope the revelation fosters, rather than hinders, the metamorphosis of both the experience and its telling.

So, I have lit this candle meant for two, afraid of what my silence might conceal, afraid of what my words might yet reveal — there’s so much more to life than just fear.

#Intermundia

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

#Intermundia

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Attraction — the pull that draws one in as if recognizing a deep chasm and falling into it all at once, where the power of gravity prevails before reason can respond. It is unconscious, erupting overhead like a cloudburst. It carries delight and electricity to the one whom it has befallen, even if unrequited. When shared, it flickers before either party has consciously acknowledged their choice. It can initially appear as fascination, desire, or lust, confounding the most mature of us.

Care and affection — the subtle dimension of small but powerful acts. The healing hand that appears suddenly to soothe the suffering. The pleasure that feels selfish but is always reciprocal. The attention that remains when all other eyes have withdrawn. The hand that meets one’s own when the journey seemed solitary. The kiss on the forehead and warm embrace when the pain has nowhere else to go. Its beauty lies in its endless manifestations.

Respect and devotion — attention held steady long after the novelty is spent, and the initial spark of electricity has transformed into a new kind of energy that tightens and stabilizes the entangled orbits of two bodies. It is neither vow nor worship per se, but the integration of vows into routine, and seeing through the eyes of another as predisposition. It is satisfaction by another — and only that other — where all other doors remain open — unforbidden to both — and yet both always choose their same-shared door. Exclusivity that is neither confinement nor imprisonment, but a unique realm known only to two, co-created and cohabited.

Unconditionality — giving that expects nothing in return, where the fundamental connection between two cannot be transacted or commodified. This facet holds nothing back, showing up without pretense or mask, to be wholly known without fear of judgment, ridicule, or rejection. Two people, their bodies and souls stripped naked, standing before one another, both saying to the other, “I accept all of you.” A beautiful and unparalleled dynamic only of partners who are able and willing to see connection as effort may live to experience.

Sacrifice — spending oneself never seen as loss. The give of surrender that is never extracted or exploited by the other, paid out in presence and in absence alike through the grief and longing only love can create, across unimaginable distances and extraordinary circumstances. Of all the facets, this is the one where both parties willingly give of themselves in ways the outer world never sees, where joy and sorrow, togetherness and loneliness, contentment and longing are all one and the same.

Love may or may not be universally experienceable, but each experience of love is unique to the those involved — a special and specific dynamic they create by the nature of who they are and the energy born between them — appearing differently between what others outwardly see and what the partners experience inwardly, inside and in-between. The world sees two people sitting across a cafe table from one another, but hidden from sight is the realm shared between them, a whole universe only the two of them can enter. A place called love.

#Intermundia #Excultio

Notes:

1. This post may not look it, but its writing took nine months of patience and discipline. Love must be lived before it can be written.

2. Love is itself a bond, but not bondage — one that frees rather than shackles. Not two halves forming completion, but two wholes choosing something more in each other — interdependence rather than dependence, domestication rather than adventure, contentment rather than euphoria.

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Yet is also an admission, in both senses — the first, confession; the second, entry. Admissions have their own geometry, opening only at certain alignments of and by certain bodies, filtering the song from the noise, the performative from the real, and the heart from the heartless.

I'm listening to a very special playlist again, songs gathered across lifetimes, realities, and synchronicities. Some would call it nostalgia. I call it communion. I can't go home yet, can't be there together, and yet I can still feel it through the music — confirmation of bond as connection and destination. Perhaps that is how one remembers a place not yet reached, by looking back to look forward, listening patiently for the key to finally turn.

#Intermundia #Anomalology

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

A short dialogue buried in an 18th-century German alchemical anthology, Wasserstein der Weisen ('The Water-Stone of the Wise'), reprinted in 1743 and traditionally attributed to Johann Siebmacher, begins like a domestic quarrel. Nature appears as a central female power figure, speaking through a name other than the author's, and she arrives on scene with quite the temper. She calls the seeker a fantastical fool and a coarse ass who breaks glassware and burns coal until the fumes cloud his head (p. 118). Every other creature does its office faithfully, she complains, and only man, presuming to take up hers, strays from it (p. 120). For a text about sacred secrets, the opening is strangely familiar — not the voice of an oracle, but of someone who has been misunderstood one too many times.

But the tone soon turns. Around p. 128 the scold becomes a plea: have mercy on yourself, I beg you... I will lie to you in nothing. There is something revealing in that twist — she asks for acquaintance rather than worship. “Learn to know me first, before you call yourself a master” (p. 135). The art does not lie in the skill of his hands but in knowing hers (p. 129). What she offers goes to the one who trusts her, to the good-hearted who followed with patience “at the time I ordain,” not to the merely learned (pp. 132, 136). Then, unexpectedly, something like a covenant appears: Help me, and I will help you; as you do for me, so I will do (p. 134). The alchemist echoes it late in his reply: the stone comes from Nature alone, yet not without her instrument, nor without the help of a wise person who understands the work (p. 150). Neither party is sufficient alone. Transformation is something done with, not something received or achieved. Anyone who has learned this the hard way will recognize the terms and conditions.

At another point in the narrative, the alchemist stops arguing. Not an hour passes before he says he does not think on what she told him, and whether he lies, walks, or stands, her words are there right before his eyes. It is the only place where the tract gives way to testimony — where the evidence becomes less about the interaction and more about how the one addressed has changed in thought, word, and action. That shift matters. The witness no longer describes the encounter; he describes what remains of it.

There is also a lesson in restraint. Once the seed is sealed in its vessel, he says, it needs no opening, no closing, no touching (p. 144). The work is to prepare the conditions and then take one's hands away. That may be the hardest part of any participatory practice, knowing the difference between tending, participating, interfering, and exploiting — helping versus hurting.

But the text is not without its contradictions, and I am no longer sure which side of the narrative is truth and which is stagecraft. The author's talk of reciprocity is incongruent with the book's language of hierarchy: nature is God's handmaid (p. 121); the alchemist thanks the power figure with “honor and praise” (p. 139). She contradicts her own claims about the secrets she may or may not possess or share (pp. 121–138). The author tells us out of both sides of his mouth that we are expected to be a partner, yet keeps writing as patron. He argues for partnership and participation while actively performing deference. Furthermore, all of this is a personified nature, staged as a debate, with a long history in theology and mythology. The overall narrative feels borrowed, with no indication of actual phenomenology, whether original or imported.

What I missed on first reading is that these are not small errors on the part of the author or the cosmology of Western alchemy. My own transformation has come through commitment and cooperation, not dramatic conflict or deliberate misdirection wrapped in hierarchical worship. What I have lived and learned through my own inner experiences has been attention, patience, thoughtfulness, and trust extended and tested — through learning the conditions of another's way of being before presuming to discern anything of or for myself. The book grasps that knowing comes by the company one keeps. What it fails to discover is that true reciprocity in partnership is wholly unexpected and unconditional, without rank or privilege.

The pleading, the afterimage, and the sealed vessel are the things I remember most. The text feels its most authentic when it momentarily forgets its theology and simply describes the relationship, the need, and the connection. Learn to know another fully, first. I believe this is a better rule for the actual inner metamorphosis than any of its prescriptions or borrowed concoctions.

#Philology #Intermundia

Notes:

1. My copy is a 1743 German edition in Fraktur, which I cannot read unaided. The quoted lines are working translations and may differ from published English versions of this dialogue, which appears to descend from an earlier French original. This affects my accuracy for quotes and citations from the book.

2. Via Veritatis makes the same claim in this volume, that the old books mislead and the seeker must go to the source. Because they are compiled by teh same person, I count them as one witness. The admission of misdirection, though not uncommon, challenges credibility.

3. If a given work borrows its conceptual and lexical DNA from another, can we tell from the text alone which is which? Value is not always in being first, however. (See What we tell of the teller's telling.)

4. Can a relationship be both instructive and mutual? Nature claims to need the pupil's help, yet demands his obedience. This is not equality, partnership, or symbiosis. This draws my ire and skepticism based on my own lived experiences. But then, perhaps such a position was necessary given the witness’s mind and circumstances. As with most relationships, that question is best left to the two people involved.

5. The alchemist mentioned around p. 141 has already changed before he takes any action, which usually forms the basis for transmutation, and it feels unearned, or at least inconsistent. Though the physics of causality is not universal across orders or reality, the example given is immediately suspect. Perhaps the opus should’ve begun elsewhere? (See Truth as surrender, transit, and transformation.)

6. Alchemic texts have a problem of clarity in the way they are written to conceal as much as reveal.  Beweis der Natur and Via Veritatis both claim that the old books were written darkly on purpose, and that the reader must therefore go elsewhere. The question I once asked was why write a book only to tell people to look elsewhere? I suppose it reflects the truth that true wisdom is forged person by person and event by event rather than gifted from sage to student. I suppose it also reflects the fact that some witnesses must propagate their experience rather than suppress it.

7. An aside for the curious, the last stretch of this volume is a small comedy of attribution. The Nature dialogue is credited to “Johann von Mesung,” a borrowed name for who I believe to be the medieval poet Jean de Meun. Right after it comes the Summarium philosophicum (the French Sommaire philosophique), credited to Nicolas Flamel, who died in 1418 and very likely never wrote it. Flamel isn't even listed on the title page. He simply turns up as an uninvited guest as if on cue. Last comes the Via Veritatis, which names no author at all and spends most of its length warning the reader, rather oddly, not to trust books. That makes one borrowed name, one dead man's name, and one missing name. Two of the three agree that the old books mislead, and the third, Flamel's, is mostly a recipe involving dragons and a hen. Perhaps this was the way some people could only explain the unexplainable, for magic remains magic until it can be named, explained, and understood otherwise. As always, readers must draw their own conclusions, especially where the corridors are remote and the intersections are mislabeled.

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

The anomalous voyager faces both wonders and dangers on their journey. I find the myth of Icarus helpful, at least for my state of mind today.

“The boy began to delight in his bold flight, and, abandoning his guide, seized by desire for the sky, he steered a higher course.” — Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.223-225.

Icarus, son of the craftsman Daedalus, escaped imprisonment in Crete on wings his father made from feathers and wax, but, intoxicated by the freedom of flight, he ignored his father's warnings and soared too close to the sun. The wax melted, and he plunged into the sea and drowned.

The wax melted by proximity, and Icarus died. That is the lesson most learn in school. But what of the man who kissed the sun only to survive the fall. The one who wakes up each morning to find his senses burned, leaving ordinary life numb, joyless, and tasteless. How the supernormal blinds the normal. How I have forgotten the taste of the ordinary. How I long for any taste, here or there.

Does this merit caution? Perhaps.

But I fully admit that even if I had known the consequences beforehand — the scarring, the numbness, the Grey — I wouldn't have changed a thing. For kissing the Sun is more than just a kiss. More than just intoxication, enchantment, and euphoria.³

And so, on mornings like this one, I wake with the taste of nothing, and the memory of why. Both are gifts. Both are debts.² Both symbols of the bond I’ve embraced. One foot in the past, one in the future — the herenow and the hereafter.

#Intermundia

Notes:

1. It's a mistake to diagnose the Grey as melancholia or some form of depressive state. Though it has qualities that mirror depression, it is a psychospiritual state all its own, where the absence of one incurs symptoms in another. A depression of spirits, per the 19th century definition, is a better description than the modern one. Perhaps a depression of soul is a better phrasing still — where the soul is partially or wholly alienated from its counterpart.

2. The gift of choice to choose deserves the conviction to follow through.

3. Those who know, know.

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Two things from my Thus wrote I post (August 31, 2026) call out to me today:

“Speaking my truth to the world is better than letting my inner world consume me whole.”

And:

“Silence also corrodes. If left unmanaged, some unspoken words and thoughts become toxic. They rush the mind, body, and soul like a firestorm, leaving nothing but ash and cinder in their wake.”

I'm not suggesting I've found some new reservoir of strength. But I do feel I've arrived at the edges of something unfamiliar, where knowledge, however subjective, and uncertainty are coming into a strange sort of balance I’ve never encountered — a cheimorropia between worlds.

But is balance preferable? Does balance mean smoothness? Is there friction that is healthy, even necessary?

#Intermundia

Notes:

1. Cheimorropia — (n.) from Greek cheimōn (winter storm) + rhopē (the tilt of the balance before it settles); storm-poise; balance amidst chaos.

By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.