“Archetypes of Self…?”

The following talk is based on my experience as a subject, writer and actor on Portlandia — a show based on my home town of Portland Oregon — and the consciousness shift that followed. The Treetruck Festival consisted of investigative journalists, humanitarian aid works, energy innovators, filmmakers and local Lopez Island people. An unplanned exposition, I landed on Lopez Island to Midnight’s Farm and Barnowl Bakery, which hosted me for a week while meeting the landscape and people of the island.
Presenter: It’s my honor to call up Ashby next. I don’t know the exact title of your talk, but, something along the lines of Archetypes of…Self…?
Ashby: I like the question mark of that [audience laughs]. The question mark, let’s do that.
Hello, my name’s Ashby Lee Collinson [?]. And um, I am a writer [?]. But unlike everyone else that’s spoken and that might speak tonight…
I don’t write with my mind, on a piece of paper…
I seem to be writing…with…my life.
And with my own kind of instrument of my body on the Earth…
I was a writer and an actor on the show Portlandia…for 8 years. I randomly showed up day one, first episode, and struck a relationship kind of immediately just as an extra — not speaking. And…Fred Armisen ran up to me and was like…

Fred Armisen: Who are you? What’s your deal? Are you an actor? Like, what’s your deal?
Ashby: No, I’m a real person. [audience laughs]. You know, I just came back from Seattle. I was like a Linux anarchist. I dumpster dived.
And he was like…
Fred Armisen: Woah, you’re like a real person [audience laughs].
Like, you live the things we’re doing, that we’re shooting [audience laughs].
Ashby: So we just like hit it off…as this like…as this strange relationship of a specimen examined [audience laughs].
But in a…you know…direct conversation. So over the next 8 years…we developed a friendship. And it turned into sort of an experiment, where each time he would ask me to…
Fred Armisen: Be myself.
Ashby: I would be writing myself playing myself over and over and over again to the point where, as we saw, and as we see as a collective…all the things we hold dear being taken away from us. As an artifice, or as a story itself. I started to see my ego destroyed. Year after year after year, which, was extremely traumatic, and sort of liberating at the same time. Because I didn’t really understand what he meant by…
Fred Armisen: Be yourself.
Ashby: What is that? What is myself?
Because…I’m more than…you know…an anarchist, or…
I’m more than an activist or…
I’m more than a writer, I’m more than a barista, I’m more than a thrift store attendant. More than all these titles and things that I’ve been really passionate about. You know…as my identity.

Over the course of that 8 years, the lessons kind of started to seep in as the world changed and my town changed into an unrecognizable place.
I started to experience a disconnection with myself and my community and in my own body. I ended up having kind of a pretty extreme consciousness shift. Because I didn’t have anything to attach to anymore. And we’re kind of seeing that in culture right now. We don’t really know what’s stable, what’s gonna happen. Where are we going. Who am I as a people, as a human. And virtual reality and augmented reality started to kind of seep into my scope, so I tried that out. I was like…
Ashby: Well let’s just keep going with this! You know, everything’s blowing away! Let’s keep going.

So I tried virtual reality for the first time. At an art function that friends of mine had been doing. And I started to kind of see myself beyond kind of those little markers of identity and ego to being aware of my awareness of my body. To the point where I’m looking at reality in a completely different way. Beyond my own spiritual investigations. Where I’m seeing this sort of view as an encroachment into what I’m viewing as even human…that started to become questioned. All of a sudden my very docile consciousness shift that can be kind of tempered with some acupuncture — a little walk in the woods — got me in two car wrecks, I lost my job in advertising and production, lost my boyfriend, I was homeless. Everything that I could cling to as a stability disappeared.
And then I started to see visions.
I started to hear things, experience things, know things about people. The fabric of my relationships and the reality around me started to disappear. And I realized through just years of investigating, that there are multiple levels of reality. Not just in constructions of technology, but even on a spiritual level, on a consciousness level. There’s the physical, then there’s like this archetypal dimension where all things are coming from. I started to realize that things we see as fictional characters, or the notion of the pilgrimage, these religions, and identities on a theoretical level, we could actually start to engage with.
So I started to see things as a relationship with reality in that there was no separation. Even talking about it’s starting to blow my mind. Once you have an awareness of an awareness of an awareness you turn into this…like…medium, where everything ends up being a sign, where even being here today, I knew about, in some vision months ago. Through a series of things that felt like a sieve. Where I’m just trying to be aware, to listen. Which is kind of being known as The Tao or The Way. Where things communicate with you, you listen, and you walk through it. It’s created this interesting kind of suspension where I’m not writing my future anymore. I’m listening and I’m showing up. Which is an interesting concept, to show up in a barn, with a bunch of journalists.

Ashby: I don’t even know where I’m gonna go with this anymore, because I don’t even know what I’m saying, it doesn’t even feel like it’s me.
I’ve surrendered myself as a human being into a more of a community. Because to me, 90% of our bodies or something is bacteria? Right? Like, humanness is a concept that we’re learning about through the journalism from the people here today. Everything’s being deconstructed, which leads me to this point where, the other day…
Ashby: I don’t even know how I got here. I mean, I wasn’t supposed to be on Lopez Island.
…I’ll talk about it some other time…but…It’s a really magical, mystical experience being a human being, like, we don’t really understand it. But I ended up living next to a pig pen, in a cow field, in like the worst air, the other day on Lopez, which was so traumatic. Couldn’t breathe, it felt like I was breathing gas, sleeping in a tent, feeling like I was forced out of my town because of technology, or whatever narrative I could think of.

But then realizing, that having this experience of technology, or this encroachment or these things that feel oppressive — drove me to the Earth. And all of a sudden I’m hearing that the pigs are having a hard time breathing too, and the trees are having a hard time too. All of a sudden I’m like one with the Earth for the first time. The Earth as this archetype, the Earth as this feeling breathing entity that I can feel as this medium now, that’s aware of myself as this receptor of an ecology. And I ended up feeling this extremely beautiful — coming from Portland and cities and everything — feeling aware and listening to all the different animals and the creatures and thinking of my life as this series of names and signs and things that I’ve been and I could trace it back to the Earth and to feeling gratitude for being created. And I experienced light as a language. I experienced light as who I am. I’m not Ashby a writer on the show Portlandia. I’m this thing that comes from light, that’s a composite of all the things I’m feeling as this weird mycological weird mass of matter.
Ashby: So that’s my talk, I don’t really know [audience laughs]. So in a sense, everything to me then, is part of this ecology. Perhaps there’s no good and bad in a sense, that everything — trauma — all of those things that are squeezing us away from each other, are actually catapulting us together in the middle of nowhere on an island. I mean, perhaps there’s a system at work, through light, through magnetism, through our hearts. You know, however things actually function, that are outside of our own ego and our own minds, that put us together. And that’s ultimately where we’ll be, and which is where we are right now. So I don’t know if anyone has any questions about that [audience laughs]. I don’t know how that’s a story, but it’s my story. I don’t know…does it make any sense?
Audience member 1: Thank you very much. I loved it. So…how are you taking care of your material needs? Food, a place to sleep, that kind of thing.
Ashby: That’s a really good question. I’m provided for. Which everyone is. I trust that through my authentic experience, through living in my heart, that those needs are met. I mean, I was working just a humble retail job up to recently. I ended up walking out. The next day I received a settlement from the car accidents I got in two years ago. And I was led on this path to go camping in the Eastern Oregon wilderness, I was provided housing. I moved to different places. Food arrived. I mean, all of these instances where I had these breaks in trust, that I was terrified that I wasn’t gonna get to the next day, or have a place to live. And I’ve absolutely been taken care of, in the trust that I would be, not knowing, and communicating with that heart space. It’s not a fight or a push, and it’s actually a falling in, because I’ve allowed that disruption or the mediation to disappear.
Audience member 2: I…ultimately I don’t believe in free will. It doesn’t really matter what I believe. But, in a big way, that’s not practical for my everyday life. I don’t believe in free will. And it sounds like you’re shoeing the idea that there’s free will and I’m wondering if that’s the case. If you have any conflict of ego, by accepting your person, your self, your ego, and like what sounds like you don’t have control.
Ashby: I don’t actually believe in free will either. And I actually feel like I’m being directed. And I have no choice but to listen. And to show up in the ways that I’m doing.
Audience member 2: And it doesn’t cause you trauma? Or a sense of insecurity or stress?
Ashby: It did in a lot of ways. Fear was huge. But what I realized was that when I started to engage in an archetypal dimension, where I was dealing in things, you know, persons and deities and you know there’s these levels of frequencies or consciousness that you can engage with. Once I was outside of that sort of lower terrestrial human construct consciousness, I was learning from these entities and accepting universal consciousness, which is an extremely high frequency built on love. And matter itself is built on justice and communion. And in my own personal path, it has a path, and you can see through the time continuum once it’s built on love, like you know that movie, Matthew McConnaughy, he’s in a library, love transcends or whatever…
Audience member 2: Interstellar.
Ashby: Interstellar, like, I’ve experienced things like that. You know where people can see into the future and the past and that’s something that a lot of yogis and things have experienced in actual life of living in a nondual state in the dual reality, which I think is a human trait. It’s an innate human trait, that we’re all going to be experiencing more and more just through all the traumas and things and the fear and breaking through those things. Softening us into our authentic nature. Which for me I feel like is already a predetermined path, for me alone. So I do agree with you, but a matter of trust.
Audience member 2: You sound very comfortable.
Ashby: Thank you, it’s taken a really long time [laughs], but the beautiful thing of getting to this point of acceptance, is that it’s absolutely magical, and I didn’t do any of it, and it’s all based on love from my fellow human beings and having a relationship with the Earth. I mean, that’s what a human being should feel like, and that’s a goal of mine, is to understand what humanness feels like. To not have control, to not think you have control, not to think you’re above. Like I think of human consciousness as a natural system. It might not be the flow of water, but it sure as heck feels like it. You’re a stream of water coming down a glacier, traveling all the way to the ocean, where all the streams meet together.
Audience member 3: I think it’s really beautiful that you’ve taken that leap and gotten comfortable with surrendering to the path of your own heart and I was just kind of wondering, how long on a time frame did it take you to become really comfortable with surrendering to kind of like you said the flow of water?

Ashby: Maybe like a couple of days ago [everyone laughs]. Like, Lopez is a really beautiful community. I mean, I haven’t met everybody, but just feeling how the land is being taken care of, like, seeing 400 year old lichen on the rocks and having the opportunity to be around animals of different species and people opening up their land to me and just being around the different minds and openness. And the water — water is conductive — the ocean, the health of this ecosystem, I mean, it takes all of that to create a stable heart. To trust that that’s like the basis of what’s real, for me… [audience claps][laughs]

Presenter: Ashby please come back.
Ashby: Oh! Sorry…
Presenter: Let’s practice that connectivity in another brief…
Ashby: Oh cute!
Presenter:…embodied connective interlude. Everyone please hold hands…
Ashby: Cuuuute!
Presenter:…everyone please hold hands as close as you can. We’re just gonna do one pulse passing through the whole group. So let’s do it promptly so we can continue on with the talking and the listening and the learning and the sharing. Thank you.
Ashby: Thank you!
Presenter: So there are no real rules, just when you feel the pulse pass it along.
[Audience, Presenter and Ashby gather holding hands in a big circle squeezing pulses in each other’s hands].
Presenter: If you haven’t felt something, I also welcome you to initiate.
[laughter]
Presenter: It’s unclear how we’re all connected, but I’m pretty sure we are…
[laughter and applause]

Thank you to Trevor Snapp, Roopa Gogineni and participants of the Treetruck Festival for inviting me to speak, Todd Eckert for getting me to document, and Father Casey Bailey and Dr. Seymour House for their spiritual direction. Thank you David and Faith for opening their land up to me, Nathan, Sage, Eden and Skye for opening up their family to me, and to the cast characters that lead me: Nikyta, Arthur, Neil, Timofey, Gordon, Michael, and the orca whale mother Tahlequah who carried her deceased calf for 17 days through the Salish Sea in mourning. This talk is dedicated to her suffering, and to Mother Earth.