The game board is inside you

BE YOUR FRIEND AGAIN.

First POST, without anesthesia, on a blank page.

THE WAY IT IS

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

William Stafford.

Life is a very curious thing. One of my "talents" has always been writing, writing well intuitively, seducing (in both a strict and broad sense) through writing, and my best pieces always came out as if "vomited," all at once... feeling the need to transmit something and bam!

Yesterday, I heard an impromptu critique of another writer, and it went something like this: "He writes very well, very effortlessly, but it is the triumph of style; the substance cannot withstand scrutiny, his ideas are romantic, but they are flawed, we are fascinated by romantics because complicated beings seem interesting to us, and because we worry that romantics believe suicide is romantic." Touché!

Uranus will enter Gemini (my Sun, my "horoscope", with Moon in Sagittarius –a Molotov cocktail– and Ascendant leaving Scorpio (intensity) and entering Sagittarius (more "gasoline on the fire in an environment with a lot of air") at the end of April and, nevertheless, I don't know if I'll be here by then, I literally have no idea... but we will dive into these mysteries later.

Mercury, my ruling planet (the mind), goes retrograde tomorrow (I have been noticing it for days now) and that will "cloud" it a bit (or a lot) and perhaps it's a blessing. I have a Stellium of personal planets in my Hod (language, structure, orderly communication, where my Sun, Mercury, Uranus, and Pluto cluster together... quite the cocktail) with the exception of Jupiter, which fortunately is in my Tiferet, my Moon in Chesed, and my Mars in Netzach (these are blessings, if I manage to find a balance). Saturn and Neptune, those two transpersonal planets everyone is talking about now regarding their conjunction at zero degrees of Aries (a hydrogen bomb capable of disintegrating ten planets), I have them, no more and no less, in Gevurah (phew!) and my dance of ascendants in Malkhut.

It is fascinating how in the West we have institutionalized the idolatry of the intellect, and I have been a devoted high priest in that temple. Our level of mental justification is brutal; we are true champions of the mind. For years, my ego—that brilliant internal editor Esteban Macías talks about—built an immense psychological closet. Into that closet, I forcefully shoved everything that hurt, everything that didn't fit with the sophisticated "avatar" I had to present to the world. Sometimes I didn't care if my total soul suffered, suffocating in the darkness of that closet, as long as on the surface my mind's successful goals were being met. I was climbing my own intellectual Everest, blindly believing that upon reaching the summit, the sky would finally be within my reach. But the sky of the soul is not conquered with ideas.

I have just "uploaded my Birth Chart" to the "Tree of Life" and, for those who understand, you will have already glimpsed how fascinating and screwed up, how dual and oscillating it is; and for those who have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, no worries, we will figure it out together.

You don't need to move, I want you to imagine that you have just moved to a city or town (wherever you live now), that you have just landed, you are new, a stranger, a newcomer and you don't know anyone, and you ask yourself a question: where will my soulmates be here in a few years? I have a resounding answer for you: your best soulmate is already with you, right "behind your mind," waiting for you to listen to them, waiting for you to say hello, waiting for you to give them a voice.

We tend to believe that loneliness is having no one to talk to in a new city. But true loneliness, the kind that makes your blood run cold, is the panic of being left all alone with ourselves. As Gabriel Rolón masterfully explains, we flee from that inhabited loneliness because it terrifies us to discover our own incompleteness. To discover that our orange is missing a slice. And here is the greatest secret: we didn't come to complete ourselves, we came to learn how to navigate that incompleteness without so much pain. Your best friend is not the one who fixes you, it is the one who sits with you in the crack.

And that is what I am trying to do in this text: turn off my mind. Everything is dual, what I feel I have to say here is probably the easiest, simplest, and most direct message in the world; however, I am finding it tremendously difficult, it feels almost "impossible"... and the duality is that it's probably because of that retrograde Mercury, but I still don't know (spoiler, duality ahead) if it's because I need it to go direct again or precisely the opposite: for it to go mercilessly retrograde, completely cloud my mind (Hod), and finally let my Soul out to say what it has to say.

I don't want to turn this text into some sort of impromptu "Kabbalah class," so I will start using colloquial metaphors. If I get tangled up now with "levels of the Soul and different Universes," Hod and Mercury will take the wheel (my mind), and that will leave my Neshama, my Tiferet, and my inner child—who is screaming to get out—feeling sad. So I will stop thinking about people who are already initiated in Kabbalah, and because of that, I will commit inaccuracies from an orthodox point of view, but if Kabbalah is anything, it is NON-dogmatic, so all these liberties will be justified.

Do you know who that soulmate already with you is in colloquial terms? Exactly! Your Inner Child.

We are already experiencing, and it will increase almost exponentially in the coming months, a flood of "gurus," all trying to "monetize" their "marvelous self-help systems." Likewise, we are experiencing and will experience an explosion of "returning to spirituality," with the emergence and resurgence of many mystical paths and "ingenious blends" of them (that's where most of the supposed "systems" come from, which for a modest—or not so modest—price you can purchase to be "mentored"). The paradox is that, just as they are emerging and will continue to emerge by the thousands, they will inevitably fall, because we are in a different era.

I should clarify that I am not judging them nor criticizing the "monetizing" aspect (we all have bills to pay in this material dimension), although I DO criticize "where they are doing it from," that is, the "intention." And I criticize it out of compassion, because I understand the trap. The third world war we are living right now is not fought with missiles, it is a spiritual war for your attention. When you place your attention outside—on the next magic formula, on the next retreat, on the need to forcibly "vibrate high"—you disconnect from yourself. We often use spirituality as a highly elegant excuse to avoid taking responsibility for our pain. We confuse awakening with feeling special, and consciousness with superiority. But true spirituality, that of the Neshama, is not a flight toward the light; it is the immense courage to go down into the dark basement to embrace the crying child.

I am not a guru, although I consider myself relatively "prepared" as an eternal student to "accompany and help" others to the best of my abilities, especially in these turbulent times. We will eventually talk about who I am, what I am, what I study, where I have some knowledge and where I don't, etc., and those will be the last agonizing death throes of my rational mind in this text.

I am just a real person, like you, living my own process. I have already created a space, a kind of "universe," a sort of Think Tank to give an outlet to my Rational Mind, to my Hod (neuroscience, epigenetics, AI, forbidden ancient history, declassified files, geopolitics, Kabbalah, quantum physics, hard sciences, other Mysticisms... from a radical Transversality)... but this new space, which we will call "BE YOUR FRIEND AGAIN" is not for my mind, it is for my Soul, it is for my Tiferet, it is for my Neshama and for my Inner Child. This space is for my HEART, with all its consequences.

My current personal situation in this Malkhut, in this dense world of material reality, is at its limit and I will not dwell on it because I would have to apologize to all those who are about to die in a hospital, or living through a war, or dying of hunger or thirst somewhere in the world, etc... but it is borderline, so borderline that I don't know if I will still be "here" next month, I have no idea what is going to happen with my life in the very short term, and yet, there is an unshakable Inner Peace within me.

I can only describe it using the image that Sergio Fernández masterfully paints: imagine crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a small sailboat. Suddenly, you realize you have reached that point of no return where you are fourteen days away from any coast. If the mast breaks, you stay right there. Rescue helicopters can no longer reach you. You are radically, absolutely, and wonderfully alone in the face of the vastness. And at that point, the horrifying yet safe trench where you used to live entrenched loses all its meaning.

Does it mean I have no fear? Of course I have fear, I am terrified; however, my inner peace in the face of that "come what may" which, of course, includes "the worst," doesn't even flinch. Perhaps it has to do with what they call "acceptance"... what they call "letting go"... which is not the same as "resignation." It is the peace that descends when you surrender, not to defeat, but to life. It is approaching the Matrix and finally making peace with the unfathomable emptiness of our own soul, knowing that the All is contained within that emptiness.

I am going to talk to you about many of those "dualities," transforming into "polarities"... it's like realizing that they are NOT opposites, but two poles of the same "reality": Light/Darkness, Good/Evil, Fear/Courage, Strangeness/Familiarity, One/All... Being "inside the process," I still don't have all the perspective I would like; that will come with time, and that is why this space will be a living, oscillating space, in motion, just like life. And today I am speaking to you from the perspective that is available to me right now, in real time.

I have heard some scholars say that in late 2025 there was a truly massive amount of "Dark Nights of the Soul." Whether true or not, I was one of them, and from late September to early December, without warning, something "hit" me with a force I had never experienced before. It was a total and absolute collapse. Of an intensity and depth that, for those who already know what I'm talking about, needs no further explanation, but for those who don't, to be brief: you want to die, you want to end it, seriously, and at the same time you feel you are being freed from something. You feel true terror and at the same time a courage that comes from "somewhere else." Something in you is dissolving, dying, and it screams, kicks, fights with all its might, and you are assaulted by very serious and cold thoughts of "ending it all," and at the same time, a kind of "inner little light" tells you: "NO, stay calm, everything is fine... hold on!"

In our heads, there are two radio stations constantly broadcasting: Scarcity FM and Abundance FM. Two crazy broadcasters who never sleep. During that Dark Night, the station of fear and lack broadcasted at a deafening volume, but that inner little light, which is the frequency of pure Love, never stopped transmitting. I just had to learn how to tune into it.

In early December I started to kind of "emerge" from it, thinking "that's it, my ego has dissolved, my previous avatar has died, I have integrated my Shadow"... naive of me to think that the Dark Night is a singular, one-time event... ugh! And even worse, that the Ego "dissolves," when in reality it only disguises itself and is an unbeatable master at doing so, besides being, not only necessary, but a blessing, an essential tool in this dimension. Your mind is not playing against you, as neuroscience and depth psychology rightly remind us; your mind is exquisitely designed to guarantee your survival. But surviving is not the same as living, and sometimes, in the name of emotional survival, we become puritans of ourselves, repressing our truth to fit in.

It won't be in this first post where I delve into all those concepts, I will only say that in early December I received a gift, an incredible gift: I experienced a Bitul. My logical mind, still with the sufficient stubbornness and skepticism of the small mammal, with small desires and a small brain with very specific functions (it's not there to make you happy, but to make you survive... we will talk about that later), tried to rationalize the experience in the following days, like: "could it have been a micro stroke? And besides, where is that supposed 'download of intuitive information' that accompanies the Bitul?".

Until one day, two or three days after the experience, like an automaton, I got up from the couch, sat at the desk, opened my laptop, and in three weeks I "downloaded" enough content that would have taken anyone, including myself, ten years; and they weren't ideas coming from "me," but through me, I wasn't studying and writing, but "remembering." I wrote a powerful, complex, multidisciplinary, transversal, polemical, original, and controversial book... in about 8 hours (that's just an example, that was the first book).

To this day, I am still "blown away" by the experience. But it wasn't that, which is already fascinating, why I call that experience a GIFT, but for something much more powerful. In that Bitul, in that no-place, no-space, no-time, no-duality, no-nothing and at the same time EVERYTHING (Bitul means annihilation—of the "I"—that is, unification with the "all"), I completely lost the fear of death. Totally, absolutely, and radically.

What is my perspective on that experience today? Well, that I received that gift right after "integrating my ego," but my ego transformed into a "spiritual ego" and I created an impressive Metaphysical Universe (I created it and it still impresses me when I reread it, it is truly brutal), but still from "my mind," still from my "Gemini" trying to tell everyone: "Look, look how smart I am! Give me validation!". The ego is brilliant. It dressed up as a mystic, organized the stars and the data, but deep down it was still the same orphan begging for love through the intellect.

It is true that during all that time my Neshama, or at least my Tiferet (my Essential Self, my inner self, the real one and not the social ego), in short, let's call it my Inner Child, spirit, or soul (just to explain and break this down would require an essay of twenty thousand words, minimum) were very happy, something like: "Finally this stubborn old fool wakes up and, somehow, listens to us!".

Well, I realize in real time that I am still "broadcasting" from my mind and not from my soul in this text, so I will close this part as soon as possible. That Think Tank (call it whatever you want, that Universe I created) is complementary to this one being born today, but I DO NOT want to link them, at least not yet. In that universe, that metaphysics that came to me through Chochmah in that Bitul, there are very controversial theories. Many of them I falsify myself on a daily basis, but others are being confirmed, months later and little by little, by entities as powerful as Google DeepMind with its AlphaGenome or the US FDA itself.

But I will clarify something. In my opinion, in this era of "specialization" we live in, even a Doctor or PhD in whatever discipline barely "knows" or has access to 0.001% of the information. Imagine me then, applying the spirit of the Renaissance, a sort of Da Vinci spirit of transversality, and also as an amateur. I know NOTHING! All I do is share my own experience. I insist that I am not a guru.

So, returning (or trying to return) to the soul, to my heart, to what inspires this space called "be your friend again," I will tell you about my own experience. Let's start with what "connecting with your inner child" is or means to me. Without trying to preach. Do not dogmatize absolutely anything or anyone.

In my case, when I connect, when I truly connect, an uncontrollable physical reaction occurs: I break down in intense tears and it is useless to try to control myself. The most poetic and devastating science (the one that does unite mind and spirit) reminds us that the heart has a vibrational field five thousand times greater than the brain. It is fascinating: the heart thinks, feels, and acts fractions of a second before the mind. We receive the raw and pure truth in the chest, and by the time that information goes up to the head trying to be rationalized, the body has already spoken. My crying is not sadness, it is the heart bursting the dams of reasoning.

If this happens to you: DO NOT BE SCARED, feel it, cry intensely and EMBRACE the experience. Look your inner child in the eyes and EMBRACE HIM, EMBRACE HER and tell them that everything is okay, that they are safe, that you are here with him or her. Embrace them with all the love you are capable of, without measure, without limits, without judging, without anything... just, DAMN IT, FEEL IT!

Do not do it to be a "good" person in the eyes of the world, do it to be COMPLETE. In the name of goodness and purification we have amputated entire pieces of ourselves. Accept that you are your own sanctuary. Tell yourself, and that exhausted child you carry inside: "It is safe to stop. This pool is healing, and you can drop your weapons on the shore."

I insist that this is my experience and surely there will be "graduates or doctors in Psychology diagnosing the whole thing," but remember what I just said: 0.001%, that is... NOTHING, ALMOST ZERO! Alpha Genome just discovered that the 98% of "junk DNA" that the supposedly "hard" sciences "diagnosed" as such is not junk, but the damn "source code" (one of the controversial theses anticipated in my other mental universe).

My father passed to another plane a year and a half ago and we were never "connected" in life, and yet, now, he is with me all the time. I love you, dad.

I am going to paraphrase Jacobo Grinberg (if you don't know who he is/was, I recommend you investigate) and it will be my "message" for those supposed "erudite psychologists" (I also recommend you investigate what Nietzsche thought about "erudition"):

"To judge someone is to predetermine them. It is to think that what determines their behavior and their reality is simple and mediocre. When we say that someone is making a mistake or when we consider someone to be foolish, simple, bad, or any other quantum, unitary category, the only thing we show is our inability to penetrate the experience of that someone whom we judge. Judging is very easy and comfortable, and it also always has a narcissistic component. What we do when we judge is turn ourselves into an absolute and flawless point of reference. At least, that is what we think. It is feeling ourselves as determinants of realities. The truth of the matter is that when we judge, we are nothing more than a blade of grass moved by the wind; the problem is that, in that moment, that blade of grass believes it is an oak tree, and acts as such. The magnitude of our blindness is such that instead of discarding judgments and realizing that they are just a game, we institutionalize them, creating a science of psychological diagnosis. In it, people are considered healthy or sick depending on their greater or lesser acceptance of structures and agreements, when in reality, the only sick one is the diagnostician. The only health or sickness is determined by the greater or lesser respect a person gives to their internal reality. The only disease is the distrust and invalidation of ourselves."

I recommend reading Jacobo very slowly and rereading him. And I will leave it here for the moment, because if I get into the extraordinary thesis for his PhD in Psychology by Professor Mario Javier Sabán, which you can purchase in a book titled: Kabbalah: The Psychology of Jewish Mysticism... if I get into that, I would never finish. For those unfamiliar, when I speak of Kabbalah, forget all religion, including Jewish, Christian, Catholic, Protestant, Islamic, and any other... it has NOTHING to do with it. It is esotericism and mysticism devoid of all the perversion of the use of those words, it is "technology," it is not dogmatic and I insist, zero religiosity.

What is the difference between "conspiracy theory" and "pattern seeking"? In the first case, you settle on a thesis and search through an enormous confirmation bias for everything that "confirms" your thesis. In the second case, you let your intuition and your rational part go "pattern seeking" and try to tie the loose ends together. In the first case, the confirmation bias is indisputable; in the second, it could also exist, although it opens the possibility of what Jung called "synchronicity."

Loving your neighbor as yourself is NOT a "commandment," but a statement of fact: it is what will happen when you love yourself, and also "remember" that this "neighbor" is you. In the game we came to play in this life, the board is inside ourselves, and it's not about "competing," but about "remembering." And we better do it as soon as possible.

World powers have spent almost 100 years ridiculing the "non-human, extraterrestrial, etc." and yet Trump now wants to "declassify." Spielberg is coming out with a "special" movie again this June. And I could give hundreds of examples like this, but that belongs to the other universe, that of my mind, not this one.

Intuitively and not algorithmically, through sparks, in dreams, awake, I started approaching Wilber, Grinberg, and many others. From there to Kabbalah, then modern Astrology in its different branches, certain Tarots, in addition to my previous passions like Psychology, Philosophy, Neuroscience, Quantum physics, hard sciences, etc... and always trying (successfully) to separate the "clickbait" or the author's "intention" from that something more subtle, more elegant, less obvious, and paradoxically, much more direct, more "ad hoc," more of listening, seeing, reading, or stumbling upon "exactly that" which "confirms" you and is undeniably "for you"... is all this "confirmation bias" or "synchronicity," when it happens dozens, hundreds, even thousands of times in just a few months?

All this about the Matrix, the "game," and all the rest, of course it could be a comforting or consoling narrative we tell ourselves in turbulent times. Of course it could all be a new "tale," a kind of tailor-made resurgence of a New Age. It could all be, because the reality is that we know practically NOTHING. But when everything starts converging in the same direction... and when I say everything, I'm talking about millennia-old mysticisms (not religions, older than that, from East and West), thousands of brilliant minds from many different eras, hard sciences, very hard sciences, technologies that break through without educational biases (that are able to shake off the biases of "training"), 2 to 4% of the population recounting their NDEs (near-death experiences)—that is, some 300 million cases—and a very long etcetera... when some clay tablets with cuneiform writing from Sumer coincide with the latest in Quantum physics or Epigenetics, and in turn with what some "madman from the 13th century" said about meditation, being receptors, vibrations, and frequencies, coincides with declassified CIA files, and above all, when what your Soul is screaming at you (whether you listen to it or not) coincides with all of that... is it confirmation bias or synchronicity?

Once upon a time, an ocean wave, for an instant, became aware of itself, and then it began to "compete," feeling like a "separate" entity... and it looked at other waves and saw some taller, others faster, others curlier... because upon becoming aware of its "being," paradoxically it forgot "what/who it really was"... a fractal, a divine spark of the ALL experiencing itself in the form of a wave, ephemeral and divine, unique and unrepeatable.

They say that the conscious Souls who are here and now have "chosen" to be here and now to live this moment in which it seems the Veil of Maya is falling, or at least dissolving at cosmic speeds. And I believe so, or I should say, I feel so, or even better, sometimes I believe I "remember" so.

I am just a frightened little mammal, with its little brain designed to help me survive, but also the bearer of a Soul and, on a more earthly level in this dimension, of an Inner Child who was wounded (without blaming anything or anyone) and who is in there waiting for you to comfort them, to listen to them, because that creature is at least closer than your avatar, than your ego, than that character you created to interact and adapt in this dimension, much closer to purity, understanding this as something akin to a certain "truth."

Your inner child or inner girl is your soulmate and a first step to "be your friend again," which will be the threshold for your Neshama to take the wheel and tell your ego, thank you for everything, stay there because you are necessary, but I am driving now, I am in charge.

The paradox of these times is that the disaster of the collapse of the old world, which is and will be violent, disastrous, with a lot of pain, coexists with the birth of the new world, which also hurts, it hurts us and it will hurt to "start breathing."

It is no longer just highly recommended that... it is imperative that "you shall love your neighbor as yourself"... it is OBLIGATORY, my friends.

Return to your essence, embrace it, LOVE IT, LOVE YOURSELF, and let's return to the only force that transcends Time and Space: Love.

Sal