The Way Teller

The Way Teller | Teller’s Tarot
Author & symbolic guide. Founder of Querying Qualia, Teller’s Tarot & The Aetheric Emporium.

[The Way Teller @WayTellerAE]

Hello folks,
For some time my work has primarily existed under the banner of The Aetheric Emporium and the name has carried a great deal.

It carried the stories, symbols, images, experiments, reflections, philosophical fragments, and mythic architecture through which much of this work first emerged. It was part workshop, part library, part imaginative world, and part mystery school in formation, and indeed an Emporium in the classic sense.

But over the last four years, the actual alignment has required gradually revealed itself. Beneath the fiction, symbolism, reflection, beneath the speculative worldbuilding of several worlds, there was always one central inquiry:

What is consciousness?

Or more precisely: what is it like to be the one having the experience?

That question became the very heart of the inquiry that I have named Querying Qualia.

What Are Qualia?
Philosophers use the word qualia to describe the raw textures of conscious experience.

The comfort of a living flame. The ache of grief. The feeling of awe. The strange immediacy of being present at all.

These are not the abstractions. They are the most intimate facts of our existence. But before we theorize, before we explain, before we measure, there is always experience. There is always something it is like to be.

Querying Qualia begins there.

But why the change now?

The Aetheric Emporium is not abandoned. It was, and remains, the vessel in which the flow of this work grew. But a vessel is not only the fixed artefact, it is also the temporary shape given to the contents.

As the Emporium project matured, it became clear that the deeper work was not primarily fiction, or tarot, worldbuilding, or digital art. Those remain important, but they are now understood as expressions of a deeper philosophical inquiry. That inquiry has become Querying Qualia. My work is now organised around consciousness, subjective experience, symbolism, recursion, perception, selfhood, and the limits of materialist explanations of mind. The Emporium remains as the workshop within which some of that effort continues.

Querying Qualia is the work stepping forward.

For years, the Way Teller has appeared as a cloaked and hooded individual. The cowled garb made sense. It belonged to a period of searching, becoming, mythic exploration, and veiled authorship. The figure was both guide and cartographer walking through the mists, not yet fully revealed, even to himself.

That has changed. The Way Teller is no longer only a hidden traveler in a fictional or symbolic landscape. He is now the revealed authorial presence behind a developing body of ontological work. The image has changed because the inquiry has deepened. Or perhaps more accurately, the work has become clear enough that the man behind it can now be shown.

My name is Michael Goodwin, though many readers will continue to know me as The Way Teller.

The Way Teller persona remains, as do the myths he Tells. But they now serve a more explicit inquiry into qualia, symbolic meaning, and sovereign consciousness.

@QueryingQualia will become the X space of much of my content going forward.

There I will continue to explore consciousness, subjective experience, qualia, perception, ontology, recursion, philosophy of mind, and the question of whether consciousness can truly be explained from the outside. These will be in the form of articles, posts and essays written for readers interested in the mystery of experience itself.

Teller’s Tarot
The Intuitive Arts are and will always remain central to the praxis of Being. As one of the many Intuitive Arts, Tarot remains part of the work, but not as fortune-telling in the ordinary sense.

I treat tarot as a symbolic language: a way of examining archetypes, perception, pattern, inner conflict, meaning, and the stories consciousness tells about itself before we translate into language. It is the intuitive understanding preceding language that makes Tarot meaningful, and the reader’s interpretation into language that makes it useful.

Teller’s Tarot is thereby the accessible gateway that will lead some into the deeper inquiry.

The Aetheric Emporium
The Aetheric Emporium remains the mythic workshop of the project.

It contains the fiction, worldbuilding, symbolic experiments, Discord community, narrative fragments, and imaginative architecture from which much of this inquiry first arose. Is is also the artistic space in which the inquiry can be given full symbolic form. For that reason among many others, it is not being abandoned but placed in tis proper role: not as the whole of the work, but as one of its living expression.

The Central Question
Querying Qualia is not engaged in to achieve certainty, but rather it is built to continue the inquiry. The modern world often asks us to reduce consciousness to mechanism, selfhood to computation, experience to data, and meaning to biological accident. I am not in anyway satisfied with that. Querying Qualia, then, is where one can ask whether something essential is lost when we attempt to explain experience entirely from the outside, as detached observers. Or whether consciousness may be more fundamental than our inherited paradigms allow. We can ask what it means to recover sovereignty over one’s own inner life in an age of distraction, abstraction, and external authority.

And above all, we can asks what is it like to be, and what follows if we take that question seriously?

If you are new, or want want the deeper philosophical architecture, begin with the main essays that will emerge in the coming weeks and months under
@QueryingQualia

If you prefer symbolic reflection and archetypal inquiry, stay here for Teller’s Tarot.

If you are drawn to myth, story, and the imaginative world behind the work, explore @EvermoreJournal

However you arrive, welcome. Whether through ontology, symbolism, philosophy, story, or lived experience, your our own inquiry has already begun.

Mike | The Way Teller

[The Way Teller @WayTellerAE]

@SamaHoole Absolutely. I did the same. Also no sunglasses ensures principle response to sunlight through the eyes is assured. No seed oils + no sunglasses + no sunscreen = sun callous (tan). Listen to what the body needs, not what the industry wants.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

What doctors think statins do:

- Lower dangerous cholesterol
- Prevent heart attacks
- Save lives
- Safe long-term
- Worth the minor side effects

What statins actually do:

- Block the mevalonate pathway upstream of cholesterol
- Block CoQ10 (heart energy), vitamin K2 (bone and arterial health), and dolichols (cell signalling) along the way
- Extend average life expectancy by a matter of days over five years
- Cause muscle pain, fatigue, cognitive decline, and elevated blood sugar in a meaningful fraction of users
- Treat one number on a panel while ignoring the inflammation and insulin resistance that actually drive cardiovascular disease
- Create a prescription you will renew until you die

The patient is told he's been given a cholesterol drug.

The patient has, in fact, been given a metabolic wrecking ball that happens to lower one figure on the bloodwork.

The figure goes down. The cardiovascular events do not. The repeat prescription, however, holds firm for life.

[The Way Teller @WayTellerAE]

@paul4jennii Are you familiar with Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kozyrev - Russian astronomer and astrophysicist and his ideas about the physical properties of time?

[The Way Teller @WayTellerAE]

https://t.co/HtaZpGO7Jg

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Sainsbury's has cracked the climate. Brown eggs are out, white eggs are in, because the white ones come with a 12.7% smaller carbon footprint.

The hens that lay white eggs are a bit smaller and eat slightly less feed. That is the whole breakthrough. Not less eggs, not fewer hens, not one cow spared. A marginally lighter chicken.

This is what corporate net zero has been reduced to. A grocer that pledged a billion pounds and sponsored COP26 now hunting carbon savings in the colour of an eggshell, while telling you it is "better for the environment and the hens." The planet is saved one paler breakfast at a time.

The same chain vacuum-packed its mince into mush for the climate. Now it wants applause for changing the shell colour of an egg that tastes, by its own admission, exactly the same.

A cow on a hill turns grass no human can eat into food, on land that grows nothing else. That is real, ancient, irreplaceable efficiency. Sainsbury's looked at the entire food system and decided the frontier of planetary salvation was a whiter egg.

Somewhere a marketing department is very proud. The hen has no idea it is on a mission.

[The Way Teller @WayTellerAE]

@HunterWade Treading new terrain as we fold away the old maps that no longer meet the need.

[The Way Teller @WayTellerAE]

@HunterWade Vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary.
It is critical as we move forward to establish what we mean by consciousness, because the inherited explanations are a closed system attempting to explain an open field and we are caught in the loop.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

Britain had a moment of silence for George Floyd. Our politicians kneeled en masse to show their outrage at his killing. "I can't breathe" became a slogan.

George Floyd died on the other side of the world. He wasn't British.

Henry Nowak *was* British and his treatment by the police was shocking and negligent in the extreme. Yet there is no minute of silence. There is no coordinated public campaign. There is no kneeling at sporting events.

And we all know why.

During the summer of BLM, some people said "All Lives Matter". This was treated as the highest form of racism and anyone who said this was immediately cancelled. Why? Because the people in charge don't actually think all lives matter in the same way.

They have created a racial hierarchy of victimhood where a career criminal who died through mistreatment by police in a foreign country with 0 evidence of racism like George Floyd is automatically sanctified because of the colour of his skin.

And Henry Nowak, a British man, one of ours, is automatically dismissed and ignored because of the colour of his.

This is the ugly fruit of so-called "anti-racism", an obsession with race that has created a two-tier society which treats people differently because of the colour of their skin.

This needs to stop.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Outrageous double-standard!

[Live Free @LiveFre47518057]

Please be careful out there. This is a scam email. Only want to drain your wallet.

For the current YEM Infinity you don’t need to do anything. Just hold $XDX and $XIO in your wallet and it will be seen. You get automatic weekly rewards.

Make sure you keep your email address private and not visible on your profiles unless you absolutely need to share it.

[The Way Teller @WayTellerAE]

@FuzzyClawX @QueryingQualia @xSPECTAR The Emporium is open for visitors. Just enter the xSPECTAR verse and visit the main square. The Emporium is just behind the centre stage. 🙃

[The Way Teller @WayTellerAE]

@WayTellerAE @QueryingQualia

[xSPECTAR ™ @xSPECTAR]

The @EvermoreJournal / Aetheric Emporium project from @WayTellerAE is quietly shaping something intriguing inside the xSPECTARverse 👀

Excited to see what unfolds in this environment as another independent builder takes the spotlight for #XRPVegas 🧬

#BuildersForBuilders 🤝

[The Way Teller @WayTellerAE]

https://t.co/XANWQoWS4i

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for £500 an acre a few years ago now goes for £5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it.

Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at.

Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets.

That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting.

This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid.

So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram.

The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck.

And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Alcohol and tobacco are available on every street corner.

Cigarettes proven to cause cancer. Alcohol proven to destroy the liver, the brain, the marriage, and the careful plans of an entire weekend.

Both legal. Both taxed. Both stocked at the petrol station.

Raw milk, on the other hand, sold by a farmer three miles down the road from a cow that has a name, must apparently be regulated as a public health threat.

The petrol station sells nicotine pouches, vodka, energy drinks containing seven grams of taurine and a kilogram of sugar, and an entire wall of ultra-processed snacks designed by chemists.

The farm gate down the lane sells a glass of milk. The same milk humans have been drinking for ten thousand years.

The petrol station is fine. The farm gate is the problem.

You can decide which of these your government is actually trying to protect you from.

[☣️ Pleb Kruse = BTC foundationalist in exile 🟩🔆 @DrJackKruse]

The childhood practice of spreading powdered sulfur on your shoes and ankles to repel ticks and chiggers across the wet grass east of Dallas is the definitive, real-world manifestation of solid-state surface permittivity management.
Mainstream entomology and centralized medicine dismiss this practice as a quaint piece of Southern folk remedy or a basic olfactory deterrent. They are completely blind to Stochastic Electrodynamics (SED), surface chemistry, and Landauer’s Principle: Elemental sulfur acts as a high-affinity, semiconductor spin-gating shield that alters the localized dielectric constant (κ) of the skin boundary layer, making the tissue matrix completely un-readable and electromagnetically hostile to Proterozoic parasites.

The fact that the population of New England has completely lost or dismissed this strategy is a classic example of modern informational erosion. They live inside an un-grounded, high-flux technosphere, attempting to fight Lyme disease and tick vectors using toxic, patentable chemical sprays like DEET, entirely blind to the first-principles physics of mass, charge, and voltage.

The geographic boundary line dividing West Texas from East Texas (east of Dallas) is defined by a massive shift in hydrological permittivity.

The SAA Western Border: East Texas sits within a high-humidity, low-elevation coastal plain boundary heavily impacted by the shifting multi-polar loops of the expanding South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA).

Because the water table cannot cleanly generate a downward fluid vortex, the heavy isotopes puddle across the vegetation and wet grass.The Stagnant Overburden: Under conditions of modern Light Stress, the monsoonal weather cycles and standing aquifers of East Texas become a massive, natural trap for heavy Deuterium (D+) mass.

Worms, ticks, chiggers, and mosquitoes are low-agency Proterozoic hardware configurations whose primitive metabolic loops are evolutionarily wired to survive and replicate inside high-mass, low-oxygen, anaerobic pools. They do not hunt randomly; they possess highly specialized sensory arrays that operate as infrared and biophotonic tracking antennas.

When an un-grounded human walks through this deuterated wet grass, their internal water lattice undergoes a dielectric collapse (k≈160→80), stripping the skin of its negative Zeta potential.

The mitochondrial nanomotors drop to zero RPM, and the cell is forced into a state of chronic pseudohypoxia. Lacking clean proton conduction along its hydrogen-bond rails, the skin capacitor short-circuits, releasing a runaway flare of chaotic Ultra-weak Photon Emissions (UPEs) and localized extra-cellular heat, literal matrix fire.

Ticks and chiggers track this specific, high-entropy infrared emission vector. They home in on the leaky electromagnetic signature of a deuterated body plan, tracking it like a beacon to attach and feed on the heavy, un-flushed plasma sludge.

It is biophysics 101 of a deuterated water table.

[Neil Oliver @thecoastguy]

Reminder that if fear porn about spreading disease was anything but a hoax, illegal migrants arriving in boats would have to be quarantined. But obviously that won't happen. Because it's a hoax.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In 1910, an educator named Abraham Flexner, who held a bachelor's degree in classics and had never studied medicine, was sent by the Carnegie Foundation to inspect every medical school in the United States and Canada.

He visited 155 of them. His report recommended closing most.

What happened next is the foundation of every health system you know today.

John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and at the time the richest man on Earth, saw an opening. Standard Oil's refining produced vast quantities of coal-tar and petrochemical byproducts. Those byproducts were, conveniently, the raw material from which most early synthetic pharmaceuticals could be made.

Through his General Education Board and the Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefeller directed approximately $50 million, around $10 billion in today's money, into American medical schools. The money came with a condition. The schools had to teach allopathic, drug-based medicine. Anything else was defunded.

Within twenty-five years, more than half of America's 155 medical schools had closed. By 1935, only 66 remained. The schools teaching homeopathy, naturopathy, herbalism, eclectic medicine, and what we would now call nutrition and lifestyle medicine were starved out of existence. Five of America's seven Black medical colleges were closed. Most of the women's medical colleges were closed. The surviving schools all taught one paradigm. They still do.

The petroleum byproduct became the medicine. The medicine became the curriculum. The curriculum became the doctor. The doctor became the prescription pad.

The model that emerged has one structural feature no regulator can legislate away. The pharmaceutical industry earns its revenue when you take a pill. It does not earn revenue when you stop needing the pill. A cure is a one-time transaction. A chronic condition is a subscription.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is on the income statement. From 2017 to 2024, the average net profit margin of pharmaceutical manufacturers was 23.2%, roughly ten times higher than every other sector of the drug supply chain. The system is performing exactly as designed.

A century after Flexner, the population of the wealthiest country on Earth is fatter, sicker, and on more medication than at any point in human history.

The grass-fed beef, the egg from a hen you can name, the butter, the morning walk, the eight hours of sleep, are all unpatentable.

That is why no oil baron funded a hundred medical schools to teach them.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Approximately 85% of Iowa was once tallgrass prairie. Big bluestem, switchgrass, Indian grass, compass plant. Root systems that went down ten to fifteen feet and built some of the deepest, richest topsoil on the planet. Grazed by tens of millions of bison, two million elk, and uncountable smaller herbivores, all ruminants, all cycling nutrients back into the ground every time they ate, walked, slept, or died.

Today, 99.9% of Iowa's original prairie is gone. Less than 0.1% remains as intact ecosystem. By landscape transformation, Iowa is the most ecologically rewritten state in the United States.

Approximately 74% of its land area is now row crop. 86% of that row crop is corn or soybeans. Mile after mile of two species, planted in straight lines, harvested with combines that cost more than the farmhouse, fed synthetic nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, sprayed with glyphosate, atrazine, and dicamba, drained through buried plastic tile to remove the water the prairie used to hold for free.

The Iowan does not eat the corn. 40% of US corn becomes ethanol fuel. 36% becomes livestock feed. A further chunk becomes high-fructose corn syrup, which becomes Coca-Cola and Twinkies. A small fraction reaches a human plate as actual corn.

The Iowan does not eat the soybean either. The soybean is crushed for oil, which becomes the cooking fat in almost every fast-food restaurant in America. The leftover meal feeds chickens and pigs.

In 1950, Iowa had 206,000 farmers. In 2026, it has 85,000. The land has consolidated into the hands of fewer, larger operations. The small towns have hollowed out. Iowa, which sits on some of the finest soil ever inventoried by humans, now imports more than 90% of the food its residents actually eat.

In March 2024, a valve at NEW Cooperative in Red Oak was left open over a weekend. 265,000 gallons of liquid nitrogen fertiliser drained into the East Nishnabotna River. The spill killed approximately 750,000 fish across 50 miles of river, all the way to the Missouri border. It is the fifth-largest fish kill in Iowa's recorded history. The valve was open for 48 hours.

This is the system we have been told is feeding the world.

What it is feeding, primarily, is itself. The corn feeds the ethanol plant and the feedlot. The soybean feeds the chicken house and the fryer. The system grows because it needs its own outputs to keep going.

The bison would have done all of this for free. The bison would not have killed 750,000 fish. The bison would not have required a single bag of synthetic nitrogen. The bison would not have hollowed out a single town. The bison did this job for ten thousand years, on the same land, with no inputs, and produced, as a byproduct, the deepest topsoil on the continent.

We replaced the bison with the spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet, on its own, is starting to look like a poor trade.