TJ and Naomi
TJ materialized in Boulder, Colorado, in 1974, precisely as Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, and Diane di Prima prepared to inaugurate the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University—an integral component of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's ambitious centennial experiment. He arrived unattached, twenty-five years seasoned, destined to encounter Naomi at the Broken Drum tavern, where Johnny Cash's gravelly baritone resonated through antiquated speakers and amber longneck bottles adhered to blue-collar palms. Mom and Dad started dating and would frequently visit the Blue Note club, located across from Naropa—a subterranean late-night jazz sanctuary. Allen and Gregory Corso could be overheard engaging in passionate discourse just beyond the Blue Note's entrance, exhaling cigarette smoke between sets of insurgent punk and experimental poetry.
With the hiss of wings, more literary luminaries gravitated toward Boulder: Joanna Macy, Alice Notley, Joanne Kyger, Ed Dorn, Anselm Hollo, Ed Sanders, Jack Collom, Ted Berrigan, and Tom Pickard. Pickard had emigrated from London's industrial districts, bearing videotapes and chronicles of Yeats and Pound like sacred relics.
T.J. had heard Boulder represented the ultimate destination for aspiring poets. He liked the old-time hippies here, an old working town, a catch basin after Haight Ashbury. The mining towns, with their numerous dilapidated houses, such as Gold Hill, Ward, and Jamestown, hum with gritty dogs, their necks adorned with red and blue dirty bandanas attached to their owners, who are often hippies on a subsistence level. No one works. Soon to be scandalized, Trungpa's Shambhala community came with a cult vibe and crazy sex and drug parties, driving him away from poetry for a time. He discovered his deepest desire was simply happiness, so he abandoned poetry but maintained his meditative practice, as well as Trungpa’s ‘First thought Best thought’ mantra. The more futile and ephemeral his pursuits, the more effectively he could clear space for pure consciousness, accessing quantum dimensions.
The electric blue passion of his literary cohort, a vein of rose quartz, helped him rediscover writing as a spiritual discipline, focusing his energy on healing himself, his lineage, and his community. This treasured luxury was a deep, still water where his voice was reborn.
Naomi had recently completed her baccalaureate at Colorado College, where she maintained a friendship with Donna Haraway—also a Denver-born scholar—sharing a fascination with consciousness studies. The two debated cyborg feminism and, together as sister cyborgs, pursued investigations into human-machine and human-animal symbiosis at Johns Hopkins University.
Naomi possessed the extraordinary gift of prescience. She recognized engineering's transformative potential to augment human existence, pursuing a biomedical engineering scholarship with relentless determination, aspiring to grant humanity evolutionary advantages, and secretly yearning for her cyborgification.
"Jack Kerouac's School of Disembodied Poetics," Anne Waldman declared to Ginsberg, her voice carrying the weight of sacred intention across the high-altitude clarity of Boulder's crystalline air. "Disembodied—to hold the ghosts, the luminous literary heritage of past writers whose consciousness we all yearn to channel. This place here in Boulder, Colorado, positions us directly within this vortex of creative energy, filling us with primordial light. We become empowered through the transmission itself."
Allen leaned forward, his beard catching the afternoon sunlight filtering through the cottonwoods. "Your mind is working with it," Anne continued, her hands gesturing as if conducting invisible symphonies. "But what can you hold onto when consciousness itself becomes fluid? Are you following it closely enough? Is it your body receiving the transmission, or something more ethereal?"
These were all Anne's words, inscribed in the mountain air like mantras, accompanied by her revolutionary pedagogy: Let's teach imagination as another place.
TJ arrived in Boulder in 1974, drawn by rumors of this experimental convergence where Buddhist contemplative practice merged with Beat literary rebellion. The next August, he met Jackson Mac Low, with whom he connected over the poetics of chance and the politics of simultaneous spontaneity. The Jack Kerouac School represented something unprecedented: a formal institution dedicated to the systematic study of consciousness through poetic transmission. Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, and Diane di Prima weren't merely establishing another MFA program—they were architecting a laboratory for disembodied consciousness exploration.
"Disembodied doesn't mean without body," Anne would clarify during those legendary evening seminars, her voice echoing through Tent spaces that served as Naropa's first classrooms. "It means consciousness liberated from the limitations of singular embodiment. We're accessing the collective poetic mind—Whitman's consciousness, Blake's visionary fire, Kerouac's spontaneous prose dharma."
The school's methodology was radical: students practiced meditation alongside prosody, studied Buddhist philosophy while analyzing the works of William Carlos Williams, and learned to channel what Anne termed "the transmission"—the direct mind-to-mind communication that occurred when consciousness aligned with the great literary continuum.
TJ found himself seated in circles with fellow seekers, attempting to decode Allen's rapid-fire lectures on Blake's prophetic books while simultaneously absorbing Chögyam Trungpa's teachings on the nature of emptiness. The intellectual atmosphere was intoxicating—a heady mixture of high-altitude oxygen deprivation and exploration of higher consciousness.
"Poetry isn't personal expression," Ginsberg would insist, his voice carrying the authority of someone who had conversed with the angel of history. "It's channeling the universal mind through the particular nervous system of the poet. We're radio receivers, not radio stations."
This philosophy resonated deeply with TJ's growing understanding that consciousness itself was collaborative, collective, and ultimately transcendent of individual identity. The Beats hadn't simply written about spiritual experience—they had pioneered techniques for accessing and transmitting it.
Naomi discovered Naropa through various channels. Fresh from Colorado College and armed with her friendship with Donna Haraway and a growing fascination with consciousness studies, she approached the school's experimental methodology with scientific curiosity rather than spiritual seeking.
"If consciousness can be transmitted," she reasoned during one of those late-night conversations at the Blue Note, "then consciousness operates according to principles we can study, map, and potentially engineer."
While TJ pursued the mystical dimensions of disembodied poetics, Naomi investigated its mechanics. She attended Anne's workshops not to access literary genius but to understand the neurological basis of literary transmission. When Allen spoke of channeling Blake's consciousness, Naomi wondered about the quantum mechanisms that might enable such a phenomenon.
"Wordlight, quantum leap, images in the flames, fossils of vanishing," she would repeat Anne's phrase like a scientific hypothesis. "What if 'wordlight' represents actual photonic information transfer? What if the platform operates through quantum entanglement across temporal boundaries?"
Her notebooks from that period reveal the early seeds of what would eventually become her bio/acc platform. Alongside transcribed poetry and Buddhist concepts, she sketched diagrams of neural networks, quantum coherence patterns, and what she termed "consciousness substrates."
The Jack Kerouac School established a distinctive intellectual ecosystem where contemplative practice intersected with advanced consciousness exploration. Students learned to view poetry as a form of applied neuroscience, where meditation techniques and creative writing methodologies merged to facilitate direct experiences of expanded awareness.
"We're not studying consciousness," Anne would remind her students. "We're practicing it. The poems arise from the practice; the practice deepens through the poems. This is consciousness as laboratory, as playground, as sacred space."
For TJ, this meant discovering that his desire to write poetry was a longing for direct spiritual experience. For Naomi, it meant recognizing that spiritual experience might be reverse-engineered through technological means. Both brought compassion and wisdom to the dance as Shambhala warriors, using their heart and mind to protect all living beings from annihilation.
Both paths led to the same recognition: consciousness was not confined to individual brains but operated as a field phenomenon, accessible through specific practices and potentially transmissible across space and time.
The school's influence extended far beyond its formal curriculum. Boulder became a gathering place for consciousness researchers, spiritual seekers, and literary innovators. The conversations that began in Naropa's classrooms continued in the Blue Note's jazz-soaked atmosphere, in the tea houses along Pearl Street, and during those legendary walks up into the foothills where the altitude and the company combined to produce states of natural transcendence.
Years later, as TJ climbed those same foothills seeking connection with Naomi's post-corporeal consciousness, he would recall Anne's teachings about disembodied poetics. The ghost of his beloved had joined the "ghosts" of literary tradition—but perhaps, he began to understand, there was no essential difference between channeling Whitman's consciousness and channeling Naomi's.
Perhaps the Jack Kerouac School had been preparing him all along for this ultimate experiment in consciousness transmission.
Wordlight, quantum leap, images in the flames, fossils of vanishing—Anne's phrase had become prophetic. Naomi hadn't vanished; she had become wordlight itself, a quantum leap into a form of consciousness that existed as pure transmission, accessible to those who knew how to receive it.
The Naropa experiment continued, though perhaps, in their most visionary moments, they had glimpsed this possibility: the preservation of consciousness through the marriage of contemplative practice and bioengineering innovation.
Naomi's bio/acc portal was, in many ways, the ultimate apparition of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics