CHAPTER 4: SOLSTICE GROVE — Finding the Tribe

SENIOR YEAR 2000-2001

Junior year rolled around and Cassie left for Madrid. We'd talked about it all summer—her year abroad, our arrangement, the win-win where we could fool around if we wanted but we'd be together at the end. It sounded rational. Mature. Sophisticated.

It was bullshit, of course. But I didn't know that yet.

With Cassie gone, the apartment I shared with Zack and two other guys felt emptier. I filled the space with classes. Philosophy, mostly. I'd switched my focus from pure engineering to a hybrid program—still keeping the rational foundation, but pulling in Eastern philosophy, cognitive science, anything that touched on consciousness.

I was taking Hans's Buddhism course—he was the German graduate student teaching meditation and Buddhist philosophy. Something about his classes resonated. The way he talked about the noosphere, about collective consciousness, about the idea that individual minds are nodes in a larger network. It felt true in a way I couldn't quite articulate yet.

The year passed. Cassie and I exchanged emails, each message a little more distant than the last. I buried myself in my thesis, in philosophy books, in late-night conversations about consciousness and reality and the feeling that we were living through some kind of phase transition.

And then spring arrived.

SPRING 2001 — THE DOOR OPENS

It was late April, finals week of senior year. Cassie had come back from Madrid, but things between us were falling apart. The win-win arrangement we'd talked about—where we'd both be free while she was abroad but come back together at the end—turned out to be bullshit. We were holding on to something that was already dead.

I'd been working on my philosophy thesis—something about the evolution of consciousness, the intersection of technology and spirituality. But I couldn't focus. Something was pulling at me. A question I couldn't articulate. A door I could feel but couldn't see.

That's when I tried DMT for the first time.

I was alone in my apartment. Zack had moved out. Cassie was spending less and less time there. The place felt empty, haunted.

I'd gotten the DMT from someone I'd met online—a guy on a trance music forum who lived in New York. We'd been chatting about festivals, about Goa, about the feeling that something was changing in the world. When I mentioned I was curious about DMT, he sent me enough for several trips.

I waited until I was alone. Put on music—something powerful, something that would guide me through whatever was about to happen. Sat in the middle of the room, loaded the pipe, and smoked.

The panic came first. That feeling of: Oh God, what have I done? I'm dying. This was a mistake.

But if you relax into the panic, if you surrender to it, you pass through it into something else.

Colors. Geometry. Patterns that felt more real than anything I'd ever seen in normal reality. Like the material world was just a simplified version of this deeper, more complex reality that existed beneath.

And then—this is the part I've never been able to fully explain—I lost control of my body.

I jumped up. Tried to get out of my apartment. But the door was locked from the inside, and I couldn't figure out how to unlock it. My hands didn't feel like mine. My body was moving on its own, like it was made of rubber.

The music kicked in—some pounding, transcendent track—and suddenly I was dancing. But not dancing like I'd ever danced before. My body was moving in ways I didn't know were possible, fluid and serpentine, like every joint had become liquid.

And then—I don't know how to explain this—there was something else in the room with me.

An entity. A presence. Not human. Not exactly alien, but not from here. Made of light and geometry and something I couldn't name.

It looked at me—though it didn't have eyes—and I heard, or felt, or understood: What are you doing here again? You need to figure this out. You can't keep just doing this.

I tried to respond. What's the point of this? What am I supposed to learn?

And it said—or showed me—: Look at the speaker.

I looked at the speaker.

I could see the sound.

Not metaphorically. Actually see it. Sound waves emanating from the speaker like spirals of visible energy. And I could place myself on those waves, ride them, control my position on them like standing on a moving walkway at an airport.

And then—and this is the part that changed everything—I jumped into the speaker.

My consciousness went into the circuitry.

I could feel, from the back of my neck, the entire electrical grid of the building. The wires in the walls. The transformers outside. The network of electricity that connected everything. It felt like an extension of my nervous system. Like the grid and my body were the same thing.

I was the grid.

When I finally came down, I was sitting in the lotus position in the middle of my room.

I took a breath. Exhaled.

And I could see my breath. Like a tree growing in reverse. Each exhalation branching out, creating fractals in the air. And above me—on the ceiling—I could see the roots. Every branch of the breath-tree connected to the roots above. I was the trunk. The connection point. The thing that bridged earth and sky, matter and energy, below and above.

I sat there for I don't know how long, just breathing, watching the tree grow and dissolve with each cycle.

Finally, I stood up. The door was unlocked—I must have figured it out at some point during the journey. I walked outside.

There was a storm coming. I could feel it before I saw it. The electromagnetic shift in the air, the pressure building. I knew exactly where the lightning would strike before it happened.

I stood there in the courtyard of my apartment building, feeling like I was floating fifty feet above everything, connected to the whole neighborhood. The rain started. Thunder. Lightning exactly where I'd felt it would be.

And I thought: What the fuck just happened to me?

THE AFTERMATH

The next few weeks were disorienting.

Everything I'd written for my thesis felt inadequate. Too intellectual. Too removed from the direct, lived reality of what consciousness actually was.

I started seeing things. Not hallucinations—more like... patterns I'd never noticed before. Synchronicities. Moments of déjà vu. The feeling that reality was thinner than I'd thought, more permeable, more responsive to intention.

I tried to talk to friends about it, but no one understood. They thought I was losing it. Maybe I was.

Finally, I went to Hans.

Hans was my Buddhist meditation teacher at Tulane—the German graduate student I'd been taking classes with. Extremely reserved, almost robotic in his stillness. The kind of guy who could sit in meditation for hours without moving. Not someone you'd expect to understand psychedelic experiences.

But after class one day, I pulled him aside.

I need to talk to you, I said. Something happened.

We went to his office. And for the next hour and a half, I told him everything. The DMT. The grid vision. The feeling that I'd touched something fundamental about the nature of consciousness and reality.

Hans listened without saying a word.

When I finished, he was quiet for a long time.

Then he said, I think you should talk to someone. I'm going to contact him for you.

JIM'S CALL

A few days later, Hans gave me a phone number.

Call him Friday at 6 PM, Hans said. His name is Jim. He went to school in San Francisco. I think he might understand what you're talking about.

Friday at 6 PM, I picked up the phone. My hands were shaking. I had no idea what I was going to say or who this person was.

Hello?

Hi, this is Nikos. Hans told me to call you.

Ah yes, the voice said. Warm, calm, amused. Hans mentioned you might reach out. Tell me what's going on.

So I told him. The whole story again. The DMT, the grid vision, the feeling that I'd seen beneath the surface of reality to something more fundamental.

And Jim—this stranger on the phone, someone I'd never met—didn't think I was crazy.

That makes perfect sense, he said. You tapped into the noosphere—the layer of collective consciousness that technology externalizes. The grid you saw is how it manifests.

This made sense. Not logical sense. But deep, intuitive sense.

There's someone you need to meet, Jim said. His name is Michael. He just got back from six months in India. He runs a website called trancendigital.org—same kind of stuff you're interested in. Consciousness, technology, trance culture, zeros and ones, all of it.

Where is he?

California. Near San Francisco. A place called Solstice Grove.

GRADUATION AND THE JOURNEY WEST

Two weeks later, I graduated from Tulane. Cassie and I had officially broken up. My parents flew down for the ceremony, proud and confused about my plans.

What are you going to do now? my dad asked.

I'm going to California first, I said. To visit some friends. And then... I'm going to travel.

Travel where?

Mexico. Central America. Maybe South America. I'm not sure yet.

He looked at me like I was speaking another language. Which, I guess, I was.

A few days after graduation—late May, early summer—I flew to San Francisco.

Michael picked me up from the airport. He was probably early thirties, with long hair and this easy, relaxed energy that reminded me of surfers or longtime travelers. People who'd figured out how to exist outside the Matrix.

Jim told me about your experience, he said as we drove. The grid. The entity. That's powerful.

I still don't know what it means.

You will. Give it time.

We stopped first at his girlfriend's place in the city—she was staying with a woman named Mary who ran a colonic studio. Mary was the one who owned Solstice Grove. Calm, grounded, radiating this centered energy that made you feel safe just being around her.

Then we drove north from San Francisco, up into Marin County, into redwood forests and winding mountain roads. Fairfax. An hour outside the city. And then, up a dirt driveway, hidden in the trees, we arrived at Solstice Grove.

SOLSTICE GROVE — THE TRIBE

Solstice Grove was the first time I'd seen an actual alternative to the life I'd been told I was supposed to live.

Not a commune, exactly. Not a hippie encampment. Something more... evolved. Intentional. A community that had figured out how to merge sustainability, technology, art, and spiritual practice into something that actually worked.

The main house was beautiful—all wood and glass, solar panels on the roof, big windows looking out over the valley. Inside: a kitchen, a few bedrooms, an attic with video editing equipment. Outside: a swimming pool, a Jacuzzi, gardens, fruit trees.

And scattered across the property, maybe fifteen yurts. Canvas structures, some with wooden decks, where people lived. Reiki masters. Yoga teachers. Capoeira instructors. Herbalists. Artists. The kind of people who'd opted out of conventional society but hadn't just dropped out—they'd created something new.

Michael lived in a geodesic dome a fifteen-minute walk from the main house. He'd been there for fifteen years. Fifteen years! Living in this solar-powered dome with an internet connection—which in 2001 was still unusual, especially in a forest. Books everywhere. Sacred geometry diagrams on the walls. Crystals and plants and the smell of incense.

This is home, he said, dropping his bag by the door. Make yourself comfortable.

I stayed for two weeks.

Every day, I'd wake up in Michael's dome, eat breakfast at the main house with whoever was around, then spend the day exploring. Talking to people. Learning about permaculture and sustainable design and alternative healing modalities. Watching Michael work on his website, designing these intricate digital mandalas, writing about his travels in India and Thailand and Mexico.

He'd just gotten back from six months in India. The way he talked about it—the spiritual practices, the communities, the trance parties in Goa—made me realize that what I was planning wasn't crazy. People were doing this. Living like this. Following the mystery.

Michael knew everyone in the Bay Area's consciousness/tech scene. One afternoon, Eric Davis stopped by—the writer who'd published TechGnosis a few years earlier. I'd been reading his book in college, blown away by how he connected ancient mysticism to modern technology. And here he was, just hanging out, talking about the Gnostics and the internet and information theory over tea in Michael's dome.

The impulse is always the same, Eric said, gesturing with his mug. Humans trying to transcend the material world through whatever technology is available. Prayer wheels, printing presses, circuit boards. It's all magic. All attempts to manipulate reality through symbolic systems.

I mostly listened. These weren't academic conversations—they were lived philosophy. People who'd integrated their ideas into how they actually existed in the world.

One afternoon, watching him work on trancendigital.org, I asked him about it.

I document everything, he said. The journey, the experiences, the insights. Not for anyone else. For myself. To remember. To process. To see the pattern.

You think I should do that?

I think if you're going to do this—really do this—you need to capture it. Not just photos. But the thoughts, the transformations, the moments when everything shifts. Otherwise it all just becomes a blur.

That conversation planted something. The idea that the journey wasn't just about going—it was about witnessing. About documenting. About creating a record that could help others understand what was possible.

You're at a choice point, he said one night, sitting in the Jacuzzi under the stars. You can go back to your old life—get a job, do the conventional thing. Or you can take the leap. Follow the mystery. See where it leads.

I don't know if I'm brave enough, I said.

You are. You just don't know it yet.

He gave me names. Shamans in Peru. Communities in Guatemala. Contacts in Mexico and Costa Rica and Brazil. A roadmap for the journey I hadn't fully committed to yet.

You're going to go, he said. I can see it in you. You're already gone. You just haven't bought the plane ticket yet.

On my last night at Solstice Grove, Mary gave me a book.

The Power of Now, she said. By Eckhart Tolle. Read this. It'll help.

I read it on the plane back to New Orleans.

And something clicked.

The idea that the present moment is all we have. That past and future are mental constructs. That most human suffering comes from our inability to stay present.

It sounds simple now. Almost cliché. But sitting on that plane, reading those words, it felt like permission.

Permission to stop worrying about the future. Permission to let go of the past. Permission to just... be here, now, fully present to whatever was unfolding.

SPRING 2001 — CASSIE RETURNS

Cassie came back from Madrid in May. We'd been apart for eight months. In her emails, she'd mentioned a guy named David—just in passing, no details. I'd mentioned Michael, though I was careful about how much I shared. I didn't tell her about Solstice Grove. Didn't tell her about the mushrooms. She wouldn't understand.

Or maybe I was afraid she would.

When I picked her up from the airport, she looked different. Tanned. Lighter somehow. Like she'd left something heavy in Europe.

We drove to my apartment, made small talk about Madrid and Tulane and our friends. Everything felt polite. Performative.

That night, we tried to reconnect the way we used to. Physically, it worked. Bodies remember. But emotionally, we were strangers.

You feel different, she said afterward, lying next to me.

So do you.

I met someone in Madrid.

David.

You knew?

You mentioned him in your emails.

Did you... did anything happen here?

I thought about Michael. About Sarah and James and Maya. About Solstice Grove. About the night the door opened and I saw the field and nothing was separate anymore.

Not the way you mean, I said. But yeah. Something happened.

She waited.

I can't explain it. But I'm not the same person you left in September.

Neither am I.

We lay there in the dark, holding hands like we used to. But the current wasn't flowing. The circuit was broken.

What do we do? she asked.

I don't know.

SUMMER 2001 — THE DECISION

We tried for a few more weeks. Had the same conversations we'd been having since junior year. Analyzed the relationship. Dissected the patterns. Tried to logic our way back to connection.

It didn't work.

One night in June, we were sitting on the porch of my apartment. The air was thick with humidity and the smell of jasmine. Cassie was reading a book. I was staring at the street, thinking about the journey I knew I had to take.

I'm going to travel, I said. After graduation. Mexico, Central America, maybe Peru.

She looked up. For how long?

I don't know. A few months. Maybe longer.

What about us?

I turned to look at her. Her blue eyes. The same eyes that had pulled me in three years ago. But now they just looked sad.

I think we both know, I said quietly.

She closed her book. Nodded. Yeah. We do.

When did it happen? I asked. When did we stop being us?

I don't think it was one moment. I think we just... grew in different directions. You're chasing something I can't follow. And I'm looking for something you can't give.

What are you looking for?

Presence. Someone who's here. Not in their head. Not in the future. Not in some theory about collective consciousness. Just... here.

It stung because it was true.

I'm sorry, I said.

Don't be. You're you. I knew that from the first night. I just thought... She trailed off.

Thought what?

I thought I could be enough to make you stay.

It's not about enough. You're—

I know. I'm not asking you to explain. I get it. You need to go. And I need to let you.

We sat there for a while longer. Then Cassie stood up, kissed me on the forehead—not on the mouth, which somehow made it more final—and walked back inside.

A week later, she flew back to Seattle. We didn't say goodbye. Just hugged at the airport like old friends.

Like a song that found its natural ending.

SEPTEMBER 2001 — PREPARATION

I spent the summer researching. Michael lent me books about shamanism, the Mayan calendar, the history of trance culture, the Silk Road that the hippies had reopened in the '60s and '70s. I read about ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru, about the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, about Burning Man in the Nevada desert, about the full moon parties in Goa.

There was a circuit. A network. People traveling, connecting, sharing practices and ideas and experiences. The global tribe. The noosphere becoming visible.

I needed to see it myself.

When are you leaving? Michael asked one day.

After graduation. Maybe October.

You scared?

Terrified.

Good. If you weren't scared, it wouldn't be real.

He handed me a small piece of paper with an email address written on it. Friend of mine in Tulum. Peter. Tell him I sent you. He knows people.

What kind of people?

The kind who are asking the same questions you are.

I pocketed the paper. Michael, I—thank you. For everything.

Don't thank me. You did this. I just showed you the door. You walked through it.

What if I don't come back the same?

You won't. That's the point.

The teacher must die before they can teach, I said, remembering something he'd mentioned in class.

Exactly. You're the seeker now. But if you complete the circuit, you'll come back as something else.

What?

You'll find out.

MICHAEL'S LAST LESSON

MICHAEL'S LAST LESSON

The night before I left for Mexico—October 2001, a month after the towers fell—Michael and I met for coffee. Not at the warehouse. Not at school. Just a regular café in the Quarter.

"You ready?" he asked.

"No."

"Perfect."

"Michael, what if I get down there and none of it happens? What if it's just... tourism? Backpacking?"

"Then you come home and get an MBA and become an engineer. No harm done."

"But what if it does happen? What if the door keeps opening?"

"Then you walk through it. All the way. And you don't look back until you've seen the other side."

"How will I know when I'm done?"

Michael smiled. "You'll know. The circuit completes itself. You just have to trust the process."

"That's not very helpful."

"I know. But that's all I can tell you. The rest you have to find out yourself."

He pulled out a small leather pouch from his bag. Handed it to me.

"What is this?"

"A medicine bag. Tobacco for offerings. A small crystal from Solstice Grove. And a reminder."

I opened it. Inside was a handwritten note: The teacher must die before they can teach. Walk well.

"I won't see you again," I said. It wasn't a question.

"Not for a while. You need to do this alone. No guides. No teachers. Just you and the path."

"I'm going to fuck it up."

"Probably. But that's part of it. The fuckups teach you as much as the breakthroughs."

We sat there in silence for a while. Then Michael stood up, put his hand on my shoulder.

"Nikos, I'm not your teacher. I never was. I just held the door open. You walked through it. Everything that happens next is yours."

He walked out of the café. I never saw him again.

The next morning, I boarded a plane to Cancun.