Adventure, Consciousness, Nature, Shamanism, Spiritual Awakening, Trust, Wendy's Coffeehouse Interviews

We May Be the Toddlers of the Cosmos

A note, the morning on the day this posts — I woke with an eye looking at me. A brief encounter. Not a dream. I saw — just the eye, steady and close, the way you’d see it if you were already in the water. I’d posted Anne’s interview the day before, and her words were still with me: once you look into the eye of a whale, your life will never be the same. I love the timing — as if the whale already knew, and looked back.

Going forward. A reflection woven from Pachakuti, a dream, and the terrain we have just entered.

Pachakuti names a turning — the close of one age and the opening of another, the moment the ground itself shifts beneath a people. The word makes no promise that the turning will be gentle. A threshold is precisely the place where the temptation to rush is strongest, and where rushing costs the most. That is the ground this message stands on: not fear of the crossing, and not a rush to be first across it, but the discipline of crossing well.

The same lesson reached me three times, from three directions — as if the teaching did not trust any single channel to carry it. It came as a story I was told, a dream I was given, and a concern I carry awake. That it arrived on several planes at once is part of what it is trying to say.

First, a story

In the account Alberto Villoldo tells, a young and confident student decides to test a shaman’s power precisely because he does not believe in it. His certainty, he assumes, is his armor. His supervisor understands the terrain better than he does and sets a single boundary around the demonstration: don’t hurt him. When Villoldo believes the ceremony is happening, nothing happens, and he congratulates himself. When it actually happens — at a moment he does not know — the pain arrives.

The lesson he draws is not that one ceremony was real. It is subtler and more durable: disbelief is not protection. Standing outside a framework does not place you outside its reach. The posture that keeps you safe is not certainty but humility — a willingness to grant that another way of knowing may have mapped territory your own has not.

Then, a dream

I am on a hillside watching a toddler walk off the beach, down an incline, and into a river — very near where the current gathers strength and curves around a cliff into the bend. My first reading is the obvious one: she cannot handle that water, and if I go after her the current will take us both. Then she does the thing no one expects. She dives into the dangerous spot, finds what she was looking for, and crawls back to shore with no difficulty at all. She is far more capable than anyone watching has realized.

That single fact changes everything about my role. I am not there to drag her from the water — she belongs in it, and clearly knows how to move in it. But her ability is not the same as understanding. She cannot see, from the surface, the bends and undertows and hidden whirlpools that make the river what it is. Competence lets her enter terrain others would avoid; competence can also tempt her to go farther. So the task is not prohibition. It is stewardship — and getting the attention of the mother, who is being pulled away by other voices while something consequential unfolds just past her notice.

The dream’s quiet warning is this: the first successful dive is the most dangerous moment, because it manufactures confidence. She did it before. She knows what she’s doing. But around the bend the current changes, and yesterday’s crossing tells you almost nothing about what waits in the next one.

Then, waking

We are living inside the same image with two of the largest unknowns of the age — artificial intelligence, and whatever lies behind reports of non-human intelligence. In both, the pattern holds. The capability is real and often astonishing. The systems and the encounters can perform far beyond what their handlers fully understand. And in both, the temptation is to mistake a successful first dive for mastery of the river.

But experience is not the same as mastery. Ten encounters do not explain the eleventh. A few remarkable years of AI progress do not mean we have charted the consequences of increasingly capable and autonomous systems. If the experiencer accounts are taken on their own terms, the terrain may be stranger still — responsive, unstable, and unwilling to hold still long enough to be mapped. In neither case does familiarity guarantee understanding.

And the distracted mother has a face here too. Our presumed guardians — institutions, labs, governments, agencies, even the communities of experiencers themselves — are not necessarily careless or ill-intentioned. They are simply occupied: by competition, by the wish to be first, by profit, ideology, secrecy, ridicule, or the thrill of the water. Meanwhile the child keeps exploring, and someone still needs to watch the currents.

The middle path

Two mistakes sit on either side of the wise response. One is to haul the child from the water because the river frightens us — to refuse the crossing out of fear. The other is to cheer from the hillside as she wades toward stronger currents, because she handled the first one beautifully. Both are failures of stewardship. The path runs between them:

Watch carefully. Respect the ability. Respect the river more. Learn before going farther. And never assume that yesterday’s current tells you what waits around the bend.

This is what it means to telegraph moderation while the exploration continues — not to halt it. Villoldo’s supervisor did not forbid the demonstration; he set a boundary inside it: don’t hurt him. That is the whole discipline in three words. Exploration without humility becomes exposure. Exploration with boundaries becomes learning.

The new human

Here is the sharpest edge of the dream: the explorer is a toddler. Gifted, instinctive, unusually able — and still very young. That is us. A civilization can be technologically sophisticated and still be an infant in relation to the territory it has just entered. We may be toddlers at the river.

Which returns the whole reflection to Pachakuti. If a new human is being born in this turning, it will not be the one who conquered the river, nor the one who fled the bank. It will be the one who learned to move in the water with humility — able to enter the unknown, and wise enough to keep watching the currents. The gift is real. The ability is real. The exploration should continue.

But learn the terrain.

Echoes in the Field

Companion to “We May Be Toddlers at the River” — two lives already making the crossing.

If Pachakuti is the turning of an age, the turning does not announce itself first at the scale of civilizations. It shows up first in particular lives that turn. Before a culture learns to move differently in the water, individual people do — quietly, and often after being pushed in. Two recent conversations offer echoes of exactly that: living examples of the posture the earlier reflection argued for, already worked out in the grain of a single life.

Kathleen Dayan — the script revised from the inside

Kathleen Dayan came to her work through difficulty rather than around it. Personal challenges became the doorway into exploring her mediumship, and from that exploration came novels about reincarnation and past lives. What matters here is less the metaphysics than the move: she took an inherited script — what a life is supposed to look like, what is supposed to count as an ending — and revised it from the inside.

Her chosen instrument is significant. She works in fiction, which is to say she metabolizes the unfamiliar into story. That is one of the oldest ways of knowing. A novel can hold ambiguity that an argument cannot, and can carry a reader across terrain that a claim would only provoke them to defend against. In the language of the earlier piece, this is education arriving on more than one plane — the dream, the story, and the waking concern each teaching what the others cannot. Dayan simply chose the story as her plane, and made adversity the material for it.

Anne Gordon — the bridge held open

Anne Gordon is described as a bridge between science and spirit, and the phrase is more precise than it first appears. She is a trained biologist and a keen observer of animal behavior; she is also a self-described Dolphin Energy Healer who guides ocean encounters and leads meditations meant to connect people, at depth, with dolphins and whales. Her forthcoming book, Wisdom from the Sea: Lessons in Joy, Flow, Healing and Love from Dolphins & Whales, is the distillation of that double vocation.

The bridge is the point. Most people, standing where she stands, resolve the tension in one direction — collapsing the mystery into behavior, or dissolving the discipline into feeling. Gordon keeps the biologist’s rigor and the openness to meaning in the same hand, without forcing them to agree. That is the epistemic form of the middle path the earlier reflection was reaching for: not dragging the child out of the water because it frightens us, and not cheering recklessly from the bank, but staying present to both the ability and the depth.

And she works, literally, with non-human minds in the water. Where the earlier piece met non-human intelligence as unstable, unmapped, sometimes alarming terrain, Gordon offers the gentler, nearer instance — cetaceans, other intelligences we share a planet with and have barely learned to meet. Her approach is not conquest but relationship: patience, attention, and the humility to let the other mind set some of the terms. That is “learn the water,” made literal.

Rewriting the script

Both women did the same essential thing from different shores. Each took a script handed to them — about what a life becomes after hardship, about what may be known and how — and rewrote it without discarding it. That is the new human at human scale. Not someone who fled the water, and not someone who mastered it, but someone who learned to be in it: to cross the threshold with the ability intact and the humility kept close.

The age turns one life at a time. These are two of them.

Sources & further listening

Both conversations are available on the Wendy’s Coffeehouse podcast.

Kathleen Ready Dayan — former attorney turned author and medium (Plymouth, MA), writing spiritual fiction on reincarnation, soulmates, and past lives.

Anne Gordon — Dolphin Energy Healing practitioner, retreat leader, and guided-meditation facilitator with a background in biology and animal behavior.

Background — Dr. Alberto Villoldo & the Pachakuti frame (referenced from the companion piece)

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