Mapping the Subtle Worlds

A journey through the subtle atmospheres of consciousness

There are maps, and then there are maps. Maps of story that define our progress along our path.

The ones in atlases show you where the rivers run and where the mountains touch the sky. But the maps I've been drawing for twenty years—with my camera, with my words, with the careful documentation of every strange synchronicity that crossed my path—these maps show you something far more useful. They show you where you are.

Not your body, mind you. Any GPS can tell you that. I'm talking about where your consciousness lives, which layer of the world you're currently inhabiting, and why the people you meet seem to arrive like characters summoned from the pages of a story you didn't know you were writing.

This isn't positive thinking or wishful interpretation. This is cartography of the subtle worlds that surround us always, maps drawn with the careful attention of someone who has spent decades learning to read the subtle signatures that reveal where we truly are in the topography of consciousness itself.

Key to understanding this is realizing there is no separation between our self and the soil, that the layers of our mind and the layers of the earth are part of one another, part of a larger Grove of Life that holds space for all our stories.

The Architecture of Wonder

You see, the Earth isn't just a ball of rock spinning through space. She's layered, like an onion made of dreams and memory and possibility. Each layer corresponds to a different stratum of our own minds, and most people spend their entire lives walking through only the topmost skin of reality, never suspecting that beneath their feet lie territories vast and strange enough to make Middle-earth look like a suburban shopping mall.

I've learned to see these layers—or rather, I've learned to illustrate them through photos and illustrations mapping the beats of my story. My camera became a kind of dimensional compass, pointing not north or south, but inward and downward into the secret geographies that exist between what we think and what we experience.

The outermost layer—what I call the terrasphere—is the one you know. Concrete and coffee shops, traffic lights and tax returns. This is where your conscious mind lives, dealing with the business of being human in a world of apparent objects and obvious cause-and-effect.

But step down into the Mythica—the subtle layers that mirror the deeper strata of our subconscious —and everything transforms. In the mythosphere, suddenly the coffee shop becomes the tavern where you meet the hermit who gives you exactly the wisdom you need. The traffic jam becomes the delay that prevents you from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Your personal mythology starts bleeding through the mundane, turning your commute into a chapter of your own heroic journey.

Beneath the mythosphere lay the mnemosphere—the collective memory of our species, the place where your grandmother's fears about money tangle with humanity's ancient stories about scarcity and abundance. It’s where our sense of self shifts into the collective, where the illusion of separation becomes the inclusion of shared story.

Here, the landscapes shift to reflect not just your personal drama, but the great themes that every human soul must wrestle with. Love and loss, power and surrender, the eternal dance between what we were and what we might become.

I've photographed people walking through these realms without knowing it, their faces carrying the weight of ancestral sorrows or the light of collective hopes they couldn't name. They thought they were just walking down the street. They didn't realize they were traversing the neural pathways of the planet's memory.

Deeper still, in the akasphere, lie the blueprints—the original patterns from which all our stories spring. This is where the archetypes live, not as dusty concepts in psychology textbooks, but as living geometries of consciousness that shape our experience from the inside out. The Lover, the Warrior, the Sage, the Fool—they're not metaphors. They're architectural features of reality itself. Here, there is no "your" story or "my" story. There is only Story itself, the vast cosmic narrative writing itself through billions of characters who think they're separate but are really just different viewpoints of the same infinite tale.

Finally, in the deepest layer of the Mythica—the aethersphere—even the archetypes dissolve. Here, form becomes so subtle that the very building blocks of consciousness reveal themselves: earth, fire, water, air, and ether in their purest states. Individual identity, personal story, even the great archetypal patterns—all melt back into the elemental forces from which they arose. This is the place where the self and the soil become indistinguishable, where the layers of our inner landscape and the layers of the Earth reveal themselves as one seamless tapestry of form within form.

The Flickering Self

The strange thing—the thing that took me years to understand—is that we don't live in just one layer at a time. We flicker between them, sometimes moment by moment, like a radio tuning between stations. One minute you're stuck in surface-level frustration about your bank account, the next you're receiving profound insights about your relationship with abundance that shift your entire reality.

This flickering is why most people think magic isn't real. They catch glimpses of the deeper layers—moments when synchronicity becomes undeniable, when meaning pours through experience like wine through water—but then they snap back to the surface world where such things "don't make sense."

This happens more than you might think. In fact, it happens to everyone all the time.

Reading the Landscape

Once you learn to recognize these layers, once you understand that consciousness and landscape are two faces of the same phenomenon, the world reveals its deeper architecture. You begin to see yourself as a character in a story far more intricate and meaningful than anything Hollywood could devise— one filled with all the challenge, pain and pleasure that makes a good story.

In the Mythica, I offer these maps to anyone ready to see their life as the mythic adventure it has always been—not someday, not after they've fixed themselves or found their purpose, but right now, exactly as they are, in whatever layer of reality they currently call home.

Because the truth is, you've been the hero of your own story all along. You just needed better maps to see where the story was taking you.

Welcome to the Mythica. The adventure has already begun.