10 Years

Behind-the scenes in our internal OS

Ten years ago today, on March 16th, 2016, Numinous Realm was founded.

At the time I had very little idea what I was doing. All I knew was that the planet Jupiter was about to come into aspect with the Uranus-Pluto square which had dominated global consciousness since 2007.

To the average person, this may have seemed like a strange statement... what could the alignment of Jupiter in space possibly have anything to do with my life, sitting in a garage on the edge of Silicon Valley in my parents house? And yet, I was about two years deep into my study with Richard Tarnas, a man who seemed to live in material form a life I had imagined for myself many years ago, in a cramped shoebox in the East Village of Manhattan as a graduating senior at NYU Stern. I knew that the world of Wall Street finance was not my future, as a global fury at the financial industry erupted around me -- a study abroad student walking over the bridges of London, the alleys of Shanghai, and the boulevards of Buenos Aires.

Since walking away from an offer at JP Morgan, I had spent feverish nights poring over books on revolutionary history and politics in a cement hut in the tribal monsoon jungles of South India; I had spent balmy afternoons wandering through the streets of the Mission District as the startup revolution unfolded around me at a Hacker House in San Francisco; and eventually found myself on the edge of death as several addictions came to a head, prompting a necessary and painstaking spiritual rebirth.

I was searching for something, but I didn't know what. It was something deeper than day, and finally, in the Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness department at CIIS I found it -- the revolution I had been searching for all along. A new vision of the human and their role in the cosmos -- a breakthrough of a scale not seen since nearly 500 years earlier since Copernicus published De revolutionibus in 1543 towards the end of the Renaissance.

As a graduate student at CIIS, I had the opportunity to study with and befriend figures such as Richard Tarnas, Stanislav Grof, Brian Swimme, Robert McDermott, Sean Kelly, Carolyn Cooke, and many other artists, philosophers, and activists within the Bay Area intellectual matrix. It was there that I discovered that a new vision of humanity was being born. And at the heart of this was Tarnas' re-discovery that planetary alignments, previously relegated to the "pseudo-science of astrology, " could be seen to have a clear and recurring correlation to psychological themes at both a micro and macro level going back over centuries.

Tarnas' preparatory research for his theory had resulted in The Passion of the Western Mind, a best selling book on Western History that extended all the way back to the ancient world. So Tarnas' theory was not based on casual study, but by a professional historian of the highest order, bringing with him the rigorous clinical depth of his mentor Stanislav Grof, whose seminal research into LSD-assisted psychotherapy began a new "cartography of the psyche" that will continue to deepen into global awareness over the coming decades and centuries (as many books of such visionary character usually do).

Thus, Tarnas' theories were not a mere reversion to medieval thought, but rather represented the emergence of post-Enlightenment empiricism. The recognition that in humanity's quest to master the material world, something essential of the inner journey had been wiped away.

Thus there I sat, a week after my 29th birthday, deep in my own Saturn Return, aware that if there was any moment to found something, this was it. And that was the genesis of Numinous Realm. The intersection of a world transit and a personal transit incepted in the heart of a young revolutionary seeking to "make an impact" on the world.

A picture taken the week Numinous Realm was founded, from the hills on the edge of San Jose, CA behind my parents’ house.

Two other projects with a similarly revolutionary aim paired with an open ended mandate were initialized around the same time: OpenAI and Ethereum. Where OpenAI sought to revolutionize the foundations of production with AI, Ethereum sought to revolutionize the foundations of commerce with blockchain. And within this mix comes Numinous Realm, seeking instead a revolution of cosmology, of human perception of its role in the cosmos, of recognition that there are depths far deeper than day can comprehend (as intoned by Nietzsche).

This mission has been of life-and-death importance to me—almost having fallen prey to the nihilism of a world in which the only meaning is ascribed to physical progress. It was not enough to hold me, and it is not enough to hold the millions of souls who suffer in silence, caught in the vast rift between a discredited religious world, and the lack of a clear spiritual vision that can survive the interrogation of contemporary analysis.

And yet, it may be that faith itself holds the key. For what is a life without belief? Archetypal Cosmology—the formal term given to Tarnas' paradigm—unites the rational and the romantic impulses of human endeavor, bringing into concert both the analytical clarity demanded by the modern mind with the fathomless meaning and purpose that maps to an infinite cosmos that can never truly be known (no matter how meticulously we take its measurements).

The journey of Numinous Realm's first 10 years have not been about massive globe spanning infrastructure, or $100m fundraising rounds, but about depth. Of venturing into the subtle shapes of the artist's brush, the nuanced glance of the fashion designer, the frenzied charting of the meme coin investor, the deepest longings of the brand visionary. We have sought to deepen into and understand what it truly means to be a member of modernity, while simultaneously keeping our eyes heavenward, observing with devastating clarity the archetypal predictions of Tarnas come true over successive world transits (Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 2018-2021, Saturn-Uranus square of 2020-2023, Saturn-Neptune conjunction of 2024-2027, the Uranus-Neptune sextile of 2023-2029, and the deeply mysterious long Neptune-Pluto sextile of 1943-2037).

Over the years, as Numinous Realm took on successive forms, and being joined in 2021 by my fellow PCC philosopher and now wife, Somya Thakker Desai, it has been a journey of discovery and difficulty. I felt early on that if I could deploy this planetary revolution without institutional fundraising, that would likely serve the global mission better without the suffocating pace of VC logic. We've tried every trick in the book, and gone through severe phases of constriction to keep this hope alive.

And so I can say it is with pride and gratitude I can say that we are still alive, ten years later, in the year 2026, back in New York City, as I write these words from the Meatpacking District next to the Google building. We are days away from launching Psyborg, our AI Platform for Personal Development, with 15 early access users already part of the ecosystem, that puts Archetypal Cosmology directly into the hands of the market—thus avoiding the institutional gatekeepers such as the Catholic Church that punished the revolutionaries of the previous wave, like Galileo's inquisition.

Tune from that year’s “Numinous Realm Playlist” 🔮

For us, this is a labor of love, and faith. Of sacrifice and gratitude. This project would be nothing without the world which gave rise to it. And so we invite you in, to deepen your engagement with Numinous Realm, as of today a family-run studio of Archetypal Cosmology, helping you to reconnect with the depths of your being, as rooted in the mystical principles with have shaped humanity since our earliest stirrings in the Great Rift Valley. Take your place in the Age of Re-Enchantment—a new era where the progress of matter meets to poetry of meaning. We will do our very best to put on the best show we can. 10 years at this scale is just the beginning—bring your heart and reason to set the stage for the coming 500 years of human endeavor on Planet Earth.

Bridging the depth of the California dream with the intensity of the New York City hustle.