Last week was Jonathan Talat Phillips’ second visit to Saint Mark’s Church on 36th Street in Hampden hosted by Breathe Books. Talat first visited breathe three years ago with writers, Daniel Pinchbeck and Ken Jordan when they were on their Toward 2012 anthology book tour. The aura awakenings that Talat first spoke about with Daniel and Ken an icy night in February ’09 had since been developed into his first novel, a memoir called The Electric Jesus: The Healing Journey of a Contemporary Gnostic.
Talat began the night with a grounding ritual, a chakra activation, where he led us into the visualization of each of our chakras and then the corresponding syllables that we chanted in unison as we moved slowly from the root to the crown.
After the activation, Talat checked in to see where we were at, for us to share our experiences and head spaces, before he launched into his story, his journey from being a counter cultural media activist to someone who saw and perceived auras, finally becoming an activist of a different ilk through his work with Reality Sandwich & Evolver, an online web magazine and on and offline community that both work towards expanding people’s consciousness around spiritual discoveries, design solutions, and new systems of thought.
Talat spoke about everything from spirit guides, to Christ as a healer, to Santo Daime healing, to synchronicities that happen at Burning Man, the one galactic city on Earth. All of these experiences he shared as a shift in consciousness that he and many others have begun to embark on as an opening up, rather than a shutting down, of reality, as life is so much more open, playful and interdimensional than consensus reality would ever have us believe. And, the connecting thread between Talat’s journey to understand his awakenings and heal himself is also the collective need to catalyze an awakening to heal the planet. Talat explained how we’re still as a species in the lower third chakra with a denser vibration, but if we can move to open the world’s heart chakra, through the inner and outer work we engage in with ourselves and our community, this may be where miracles begin to happen.
