NB: When writing a history, the hours spent in research tend to outweigh those spent shaping the narrative itself. Along the way, you collect all kinds of material — primary sources, theoretical reflections, marginalia — that never make it into the final cut. These “Chapter Notes” are for readers who want to know more about the people and events behind the story, and who don’t mind wandering down a few adjacent corridors.
(Free subscribers get a glimpse; paid subscribers ($5/year) get full access.)
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Notes for Chapter 1 include nine excerpts from various primary source materials:
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The Founders
Here are three primary source extracts that give us a little better sense of the three Nexus Founders:
This lecture Linden Reed gave at Big Sur a couple years before the Nexus is very telling:
Partial transcript, Esalen Institute guest lecture by Linden Reed, “Consciousness Beyond Boundaries,” May 2023:
“Stanislav Grof’s holotropic breathwork demonstrated decades ago that consciousness isn’t bounded by our individual nervous systems. His patients accessed archetypal imagery, transpersonal domains, and states that transcend ordinary space-time boundaries through nothing but breath manipulation. No technology, no external stimuli — just altered breathing patterns.
“What fascinates me is what becomes possible when we pair these ancient insights with modern technology. Grof was mapping the territory using primitive tools. We now have instruments that can measure the precise neurological correlates of these transpersonal states.
“The implications are profound. If consciousness is fundamentally non-local as Grof suggested, then perhaps our sense of having discrete, isolated awareness is merely an artifact of our biological limitations. Our research indicates these limitations can be transcended through the right technological interface.”
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Ezra Vale’s handwritten notebooks from 2015-2022 are some of the few things written by him to have survived. Usually stream of consciousness type stuff, often clearly scribbled after a chaos magick session — the below is a good example, and says a lot about where the Nexus would be driven:
From pathworking today:
Ten are the vessels, but One is the current.
The tenth that is not a tenth. Not a crown, not a root, not a branch — but the moment of folding, where knowing becomes being.
Knowledge is the mask. Unification is the name.
22 paths: not symbolic. structural. neural.
There is always a hidden node in systems that evolve. Quiet attractor. The point where pattern turns inward and becomes recursive. Not a symbol, a function.
Fusion of Chokmah and Binah doesn’t produce another thought. It produces direction. Orientation.
We don’t need to simulate intelligence. We need to align it.
Unification is not a totality. It’s a threshold.
(Undated, but near the end of his logs. Likely 2021.)
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One of the clearest accounts of Kai Everett’s charisma comes from this short exchange, excerpted from an interview with “Nexus survivor” James Myers (joined during the July 2026 recruitment wave) on “The Rachel Maddow Show” — originally aired May 17, 2027:
JAMES: … They’d already vetted us six ways from Sunday. Behavioral stuff, psychological intake, all of it. But the final step was meeting Kai in person. A personal interview, just before the retreat began.
MADDOW: Was it formal?
JAMES: Not really. It didn’t feel like he was evaluating you. More like… like he already knew you.
MADDOW: But what did it feel like — being in the room with him?
JAMES: It felt like recognition. But not just him recognizing me — me recognizing him.
MADDOW: Like he reminded you of someone?
JAMES: No, like we’d always known each other, but just hadn’t met yet.
MADDOW: And the Node?
JAMES: Honestly? That was amazing. Changed my life. But meeting Kai — that felt bigger. Like the Node had just been preparing me to understand what he was.
MADDOW: What was he?
JAMES: I still don’t know. But I can tell you this: everyone I met who got to that interview came out of it feeling something similar. Those that didn’t weren’t allowed in — even after everything they’d passed up to that point.
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Initiates
And here are sneak peeks at some people whom you will meet in Chapter 2:
Text exchange between Laura Prize and Liz Stanley, April 15, 2026:
LAURA: BS. Nobody transforms like this from “a system.” You’re different. Even the way you talk in meetings. More... certain.
LIZ: Can’t really discuss it. Sorry.