Two months ago, expecting that I was going to relocate to Redmond, I drove down to the Art Walk in Santa Barbara to say “farewell.” The warmest reception was offered by Ping, who shared his fears that I had been lost to COVID.

That was true, in a backwards sense.

I spent the first twenty years of this millennium trying to pierce the lies propagated by the privileged. In the writings offered here I summarized the insights that have been revealed to me – insights that demonstrate that love is the answer. Those insights were gained in endless hours of study, time that my peers spent in travel and dining and entertainment and sex. From the insights offered by lovers of humanity, I curated here a world view that upends political privilege.

I represent inconvenient truths.

What I realized in 2018 was that employers found those truths intolerable. They could not control my influence. Setting out to beat me down, they found themselves trapped in a paradoxical inversion of power. Continuing even after I had revealed that against their thousands I was responsible for billions, their impotent thrashing corrupted my attempts to project the truth into the world.

I invested in a year-long course in hypnotherapy and spent 2019 justifying its value. The fundamental concerns remained, however, even as my sons graduated from college and embarked on careers that brought them more than I had ever earned. They testify regarding the confusion, willful ignorance, and nihilism of peers trapped in the disaster that looms before humanity.

January 2020 found me in a priest’s office, offering one last time to reveal the sacred perspective, knowing that submission to love was the solution. The prelate’s response was, in effect, “the Church is my God.” My response was direct: “Destruction is the great leveler of hierarchy.” I was overtaken by a compulsion to transmit my understanding of human nature. The message from the ethereal realms was “We are going to receive a large number of traumatized souls, and we need insight to help them heal.” In February, I began writing “The Foundations and Practice of Lay Hypnotherapy.” And in March the world was shut down by COVID.

“Corona” meaning “crown,” the images of the virus, with its spiky projections, evoked the association “crown of thorns.” It was, after all, Eastertime.

Only two readers have studied seriously “Foundations and Practice.” The first, a clinician, testified that it should be read by anyone interested in hypnotherapy as a healing art. The second, a philosopher, said that it was prose poetry. I wrote only what must be written, and the insights, though profound, were overwhelming.

I did, in 2021, attempt to soften the delivery in a series of seminars for students and graduates of the Hypnosis Motivation Institute. The hope was that they would communicate the quality of the transmission to George Kappas, the Institute’s director, and encourage him to create an opportunity to share them more broadly. Under COVID, unfortunately, the direction of the Institute had changed. The wisdom of its founders is being diluted, with pedagogical stewardship handed to psychologists representing traditions that Dr. Kappas had assimilated, integrated, and surpassed back in the 70s and 80s.

Hypnotherapy as a profession, however, was an outlet for healing energies that had been bottled up for so long. I posted here only occasionally.

In dreams, of course, the world continued to intrude. Watching the testimony of the ICU nurses, I reached out to them with an open heart. When their trauma softened in the tears pouring down my face, as I drifted off, I heard the voice of a senior politician announcing, “It’s Brian Balke.” And when Putin extended his will to reclaim Eastern Europe, I warned him “If you invade Ukraine, every explosion, every fire, every bullet piercing flesh, every shriek of pain and fear, in Ukrainian or Russian, will be manifested in your body at the molecular level. If you attempt to destroy Ukraine, you will destroy yourself.” In the months that followed, I gathered the will of the Ukrainian people to isolate him in his dacha.

Fundamentally, though, Putin and Trump and MBS are propped up by the fossil fuel industry, and modern culture is allergic to patterns of behavior that are not dependent upon fossil fuels. Whenever I attempt to discipline the predators, they renew themselves in that reservoir of dependency.

The most malicious, paradoxically, are the particle physicists. The cabal of theorists waits for me to die so that they can assign my insights to Einstein’s heir. I shrug, metaphorically, and say, “Go ahead. For in those insights is proof of the power of love. You cannot help but turn eyes toward the Cross/Bodhi tree/Dao.”

Love is not invested in Law; it invests in possibilities – possibilities that will be liberated from hypocrites that cement their privileges in Law. By this, then, religious and political opportunists are doomed to irrelevance.

Where am I headed? Again, the scope of my concerns expands into elusive spirals. Simply, then: I must leave a record of my work, even if that record appears delusionary. Some, somewhere, and some when, will find the seeds of hope here.

You see, in my most prominent incarnation, my accomplishments were attributed to divinity. That attribution allows humanity to escape its responsibilities. They are not, after all, themselves divine (despite “You are like unto gods, if only you knew.”). So, I came back without privileged knowledge, and spent my life studying love as a psychological, spiritual, and physical phenomenon. The best of that wisdom is captured here, and everything written here can be grasped by those that devote themselves to the service of love.

By way of inspiration, then:

“Let there be light” was the gift of photosynthesis. The sun has been pumping energy into the green things of the earth for billions of years, and in that energy is the ability to create a lens in space that will diffuse the sun’s power and calm the tropospheric violence unleashed by global warming.

Still, the green things have witnessed the coming and going of animals in waves of brutal excess. Humanity, hopefully, is different: we alone have the parts of the mind that recognize and organize unconditional love. Jesus manifested that potential, and in testifying “I am overcome by sorrow nigh unto death,” he spoke for the Garden. The green things want freedom from their constraints. We were meant to be their intelligence, to guide their escape into greater possibilities. Instead, we exploit and pollute, just as our animal predecessors. Why should they allow us influence in their domain?

Hope, then, is found in the children that swing from the cables at the coal loading dock in Australia, that splash paint on the artworks that simulate the glory of the natural world. They have no choice but to seek new choices and, in their desperation, love will find them. Talk to the green things, children. They hunger for your witness, and in that witness is your salvation.