About

e mail contact: shokti@queerspirit.net

https://linktr.ee/shokti

I am Shokti, an organiser of Queer Spirit Festival (https://queerspirit.net/). I awoke to the multidimensional consciousness in 1995, aged 30, when I experienced a complete dissolution of everything I believed about life, of who I thought I was and why we exist, when the ravages of AIDS brought me to the threshold between the worlds…  Yet rather than killing me, AIDS was to be my awakener, to be my Accelerated Individual Discovery of Spirit.

In 1995 I entered into a five year inner journey, a cocoon called AIDS in which I would transform from gay caterpillar, innocently and ignorantly chewing away at life, into rainbow butterfly ready to fly.  Spirit guides were with me all the way, communicating through signs, wonders and voices.  I dived into a study of the world’s mystical, spiritual, religious and magical paths, applying the skill-set that a degree in History at Cambridge University had given me, and making myself my own experiment – I set about entering into non-duality consciousness and a multi-dimensional reality.

A complete transformation of my being began straight away, and I received highly charged visions of a massive change, a paradigm shift, coming for the whole world.  My studies were practical as well as intellectual, I threw myself into the path of awakening, surrendering to spirit and letting in the light, coming to understand that we come into life to grow in all parts of our nature – physical, mental, emotional and spiritual – but if we stop growing and learning, we get sick. I took hold of my own evolution by studying, meditating, making ritual – ultimately not to lose the self (as some spiritual paths propose), but to gain the Self, the universal consciousness in all of us – the kingdom of heaven within – which is One with the individual self, and experiences itself through it. The goal is to embody the Self, but to manifest it through the personality of the self we are in this lifetime.

At 30 years old I realised how I had been ‘educated’ at school to ‘believe in’ science – aged 12 I had decided I was an atheist, and the Christianity that had added sparkle to my childhood was gone.  While reading for my history degree I was horrified by how much of human history is one long war between various belief systems for supremacy: this had affirmed my atheism and alignment with the western world’s sense of secular superiority.  What I see now is that science had given me another belief system, or an anti-belief system, had not encouraged me to think for myself, instead to simply buy into what scientists, the modern priests, were telling the world is true. HIV led me to discover the real goal is

I emerged from my AIDS Cocoon in the year 2000 set about seeking people serving the evolution of human consciousness in the world.  I found my kin within the global phenomenon of magic, mystery and mayhem that are the Radical Faeries and along with friends made in that tribe i became one of the founders of Queer Spirit Festival in the UK in 2016. The 6th festival will be in Bridwell Park in Devon in August 2026. I also facilitate Queer Spirit Warriors retreats at the Asha Centre in the Forest of Dean and have been running a roughly monthly Queer Spirit Circle in London since 2005 – up to 100 people meet usually at full moons for an evening of drumming, dancing, ceremony and socialising. (Join Queer Spirit mailing list for drum circle notifications)

On this blog, and also at https://medium.com/@shokti_36711 I write about mystical awareness, pagan history and wisdom and about the hidden spiritual history of queer souls on planet earth, expressing through prose and poetry, always with passion and purpose, and intended to assist us all to wake up to divine presence and profound inner peace.

“By accepting impermanence and our own mortality on a deep experiential level, we also discover the part of us that is transcendent and immortal.” Stanislav Grof, The Cosmic Game

“Notwithstanding, then, the prevalence of the foot regime (inductive science) … let us suggest that there is in man a divine consciousness as well as a foot consciousness. For as we saw that the sense of taste may pass from being a mere local thing on the tip of the tongue to pervading and becoming synonymous with the health of the whole body; or as the blue of the sky may be to one person a mere superficial impression of color, and to another the inspiration of a poem or picture, and to a third, as to the “God-intoxicated” Arab of the desert, a living presence like the ancient Dyaus or Zeus–so may not the whole of human consciousness gradually lift itself from a mere local and temporary consciousness to a divine and universal? There is in every man a local consciousness connected with his quite external body; that we know. Are there not also in every man the making of a universal consciousness?” Edward Carpenter

“The tribal attitude said, and continues to say, that Gay people are especially empowered because we are able to identify with both sexes and can see into more than one world at once, having the capacity to see from more than one point of view at a time.”

Judith Grahn, Another Mother Tongue 1984

The vast universal suffering feel as thine:
Thou must bear the sorrow that thou claimst to heal;
The day-bringer must walk in darkest night.
He who would save the world must share its pain.
If he knows not grief, how shall he find grief’s cure?
If far he walks above mortality’s head,
How shall the mortal reach that too high path?
If one of theirs they see scale heaven’s peaks,
Men then can hope to learn that titan climb.
God must be born on earth and be as man
That man being human may grow even as God.

From Savitri, by Aurobindo