While there is immense beauty in the world, there is also terror… wars, genocides, corrosive politics, relationship conflicts, personal neuroses, confusion, and so on.

All human-made terrors come from the mind. The mind is a bundle of narratives inside the head. Within these narratives exists our personal identities—who we take ourselves to be. Identifying as these identities, which is to say, as thought patterns, is the root problem of the existential crisis humanity is facing.

Spirituality is the recognition of this root problem underlying all others, as well as the recognition that humanity’s existential concerns cannot ultimately be solved by the mind as it is the mind which creates them. Further, it is the recognition that underneath the mind there is a source of non-conceptual peace.

Underneath the mind there is “being”—an empty awareness—which is inherently peaceful, inherently loving, and inherently good, and, which is what we truly are. It is what we all are. Beneath the mind of each and every individual, regardless of race, class, gender, culture, history, or psychological disposition, is the same peaceful, loving being.

When one connects to this inner being, they recognize their own basic goodness, and release themselves from the hypnotization of their narratives—of their mind and its stories—becoming free from the shackles of the psychological self and thus ceasing to be affected by the narratives which threaten it.

Narratives can be good—through narratives we can tell stories that make us wholesome and compassionate individuals, orient ourselves socially and in the world, and challenge harmful belief systems. But when we identify with those narratives, our sense of self and well-being becomes dependent on their validity and we suffer challenges to them.

When opposing narratives arise, whether in our own minds or in the minds of others, inner conflict emerges, as our sense of identity becomes threatened. Only through the absence of narratives is lasting peace possible in the individual. Only from a singularity of collective inner peace is global peace possible.

Narratives are rooted in our ideas about how the world ought to be, and how we ought to be treated within it. Ideas pull our attention into conceptual activity and thus obscure the non-conceptual being underlying it, blinding us to our shared nature. Good ideas can be spread through activism, but (while useful and necessary in the mind-dominated world) good ideas are still conceptual and thus prevent access to the dimension of being within us which is the ultimate solution to humanity’s existential woes.

Spiritual Activism is the spreading of spiritual ideas which point to the absence of ideas altogether—the peaceful being within. Spiritual Activism is helping more and more people realize that the thoughts in their head are mere imaginations superimposed onto reality and are not ultimately real, and that, although sometimes useful or entertaining, the narratives they produce are the cause for all personal and global problems.

Ideas are contagious. The more prevalent an idea, the faster its rate of spread. Good ideas are challenged by bad minds, and bad ideas are challenged by good minds. Spiritual ideas, however, cannot be challenged, as they go beneath the mind and into awareness which, when experienced, is an undeniable, pre-cognitive truth of being. This truth of being cannot be denied by any narrative as it is not a propositional truth—it has no conceptual content to be negated. Thus, the increasing rate of spiritual spread has no antagonist, and so once enough people attain this higher level of spiritual awareness, we will begin approaching the knee of “the spiritual singularity”.

Anyone can be a spiritual activist and help catalyze the spiritual singularity, first by expressing peaceful being in their speech and activity, and second, through communicating this spiritual message. You do not need to be a spiritual guru to communicate spirituality. You need only believe in peace beneath the mind and point others to spiritual ideas.

Any spiritual book can be a source of spiritual awakening and can point readers to this possibility of freedom from their mind. And so you can promote any spiritual book. However, with The Voidmuter’s unique gamified and lore-based format, Spiritual Activism becomes much more accessible.

The Voidmuter has endless content that can be shared in a myriad of ways. Any sharing of The Voidmuter equates to Spiritual Activism, because it points to The Voidmuter, and thus to the spiritual message.

Sharing The Voidmuter can be done through art, discussion, philosophy, physical activity, and community participation. The Voidmuter is uniquely suited to bringing spirituality into popular culture and the more The Voidmuter makes its way into popular culture, the more wide-spread spirituality becomes.

The more wide-spread spirituality becomes, the more people are exposed to a way of being that is free of the mind, and the closer to a spiritual singularity we get.

The mind may be a magnificent tool, but it is also a destructive one. And, more importantly, it is not essential to who we are. We are conscious beings. The mind is merely activity overlayed onto our sense of being.

Beneath that activity is a realm of peace that can be experienced. This peace can radically transform your thought patterns and relationships.

It can radically transform your life.

And, with enough traction, it can radically transform the world.

—Nathan James

When I was a kid, I never liked playing games so much as watching other people play them, or better yet, creating my own. Anytime a video game had a creator option, I would spend all my time doing that. I wasn’t much for playing with other kids, because they never wanted to participate in my obsessive orchestration of rules, objectives, and lore that I would insist go into our activities. Playing basketball by myself was always way more fun—I could create a level system, different attacks, health points, ways to revive if I “died”, etc., with nothing more than a ball and a hoop.

I grew up addicted to art, in particular drawing, but painting and crafts too, as well as music. In high school, though, I got mixed with the “wrong crowd”. I use quotes because we’re all good beneath the mind, but “wrong” is an apt description for the behavior I got into. During those years I gave up on my talents, but continued to create in other ways, writing riddles, lyrics, poems and, of course, games. Sometimes I would create game ideas on paper, other times I would act them out in real-time. Basically, I never lost that child-like desire to overlay imaginary worlds onto reality.

At 25, after sobering up, reinventing myself, and transitioning my life, I decided to go to university. I chose computer science as I thought it would be the best way to bring my ideas to life. After a couple years, however, I realized that coding, while interesting, was not an enjoyable medium of creation for me. I understood that coding would allow me to manifest my ideas, but also that my mind is what generated them. So, I switched to philosophy, aiming to make my mind more open, logical and creative.

During my time in university, I created a game called The Way of The Social Ninja. It was a real world gamification system aimed to combat social anxiety. In this game, you collect seeds planted by the good hosts and ride the up cycles into the higher states, while avoiding triggers planted by the bad ghosts and breaking the down cycles to stay out of the traps (mental disorders), all as you venture out the Light (comfort zone) and complete missions earning XP and leveling up to attain the 100 Rings and unlock Game 2. I didn’t see that project through, but quickly turned to a new project: The Last Absurdum.

The Last Absurdum was meant to be a game that contained an entire bachelors degree of philosophy. In The Last absurdum, an evil philosopher from the future created a knock-down argument that proved every philosopher king throughout history was correct, resulting in mass contradictions throughout the universe. These contradictions caused a cataclysmic rupture in the fabric of space-time. After waking up in a psych ward with amnesia, the main character gets caught in an unlikely adventure, traveling through time to defeat the philosopher kings in debate, aiming to rid the universe of contradiction. After some obsessive months, I dropped the project.

The Last Absurdum was loosely based off my life. I have been in the psych ward on more than one occasion. I have Type-1 bipolar disorder, and while I believe manic episodes to be the psychiatric term for pseudo-awakenings (spiritual awakenings with the ego intact), I recognize the validity of psychiatry and take medications to manage my disorder. I have managed it quite well, although there have been plenty of ups and downs.

Towards the end of my degree, I dropped out of university to transform my character. I wasn’t happy with myself. Not at all. I was still suffering from social anxiety despite winning the provincial championship of public speaking and being an active member of the philosophy community for several years. I knew something was still wrong with me. I needed to get to the root of it. So, I decided to go on a massive self-improvement bend. I got into running, acting, writing, and dancing, in addition to the public speaking I was already doing, plus my full-time job as a machinist.

By the end of three months, I was running half marathons, in an improv program which ended in a live performance, the member of three public speaking clubs and president of one, and training as a ballroom dance instructor. It was a lot, and so I (naturally) had a meltdown. Meltdowns weren’t unusual for me, but this one was particularly bad.

I quit every single obligation with one AoE text message, and, almost instantaneously, was washed with a strange, peaceful glow. I had removed every single stress in my life in one fell swoop. I simply texted everyone I was responsible to and told them I had bipolar disorder. To my surprise, they were all very kind, understanding, and accommodating.

However, intense anxiety quickly returned as I knew I was going to have to face my responsibilities again and return to the world, only this time more shaken and distraught than before. And then I had an idea… I had to reinvigorate spirituality into my life. So, I walked down the street to the local Buddhist monastery and befriended the monks. Shortly after that, I was living there, donning the robe and greeting the lay people.

Since I was 17 I had been interested in spirituality, ever since reading The Power of Now (the spiritual gate-way drug). I remember walking around town with my 6 foot rainbow toque taking pictures of bugs, writing in my journal, and tripping out about the nature of my own mind. In The Voidmuter I talk about different “frames of clarity”, such as “fluttered thinking”. I remember sitting on the rocks at the beach at 17 years old and observing that I could turn my thoughts fluttery with my attention. I was so amazed I would spend hours dreaming of teaching people how to do it.

Throughout my life I have entered intense spiritual states, but I have also been in states completely deprived of spiritual depth, wrapped up in trivial drama, overwhelmed by my own thoughts and neuroses. It seems the spiritual journey is cyclic in nature, just like bipolar disorder. But when I spent 6 months living at that monastery, I settled into a quality of being impossible to overlook.

However, I wasn’t ready to shave my head and take the vows, so I returned to the world. This time, though, I wouldn’t do ten different things at once. I chose dance.

I resumed my training as a dance teacher at 29 years old, having not a single shred of prior dance experience. Five years later, I was competing around the world as a professional ballroom dancer, both with my professional partners and students.

Towards the end, though, I began to long for philosophy.

I’m not really a “doing type”. I’m not a physical person. When I was a kid I quit sports the first chance I got so I could stay home and make games. My passion is creating with my mind. I like to sit and think. I like to write. I like to develop systems. I like to develop worlds. So, while working full time as a ballroom dance teacher, I began The Voidmuter.

After 8 months of constant effort in any spare time I had, the book was complete. But, the more I wrote, the more I realized what it could become.

I have a vision, and I aim to realize it.

Now… I am not an enlightened being. I do not profess to have realized “the truth”. I do not aim to be a spiritual teacher like those who have guided me on my journey. I am simply a guy who has had some deep spiritual experiences, who understands the philosophy fairly well, and, most importantly, who has a mind that is uniquely suited to manifesting a movement of spiritual gamification that I believe will bring spirituality into popular culture.

This is my mission. This is my purpose. I hope, sincerely, that you will join me.

—Nathan James