Before the Words: 

The Story Behind Manifestinction and Cormunity

One man's forty-year journey from a rooftop in Arizona to a candlelit boat in Mexico

 — and the mythology that followed him home.

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I never know what I'm doing. I still don't. But I keep showing up, and things keep happening. That's the only pattern I've found in eighty years of living — show up, stay honest, and let whatever's pulling you do the steering.

This is the story of how I ended up here.

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The Shedding

I was young and I was good at something. Design — the kind that puts you in boardrooms with important people and your name on things that last. I'd risen fast, faster than I had any right to, partly through talent and mostly through a readiness I couldn't explain. I was always prepared for the moment before I knew the moment was coming. Walked into rooms I had no business being in and met what was there. Not bravado — just a capacity to be ready for things I hadn't planned for.

That readiness built quickly into a career. The big conventions, the industry parties, journalists asking when my chair would debut. And without hesitation — without knowing anything except that I knew nothing — I heard myself say, "In Milan, this spring." That was the peak. My name on a chair, introduced to the world at the highest stage the industry had. I was living someone's dream. I just wasn't sure it was mine.

Then it ended. The economy buckled, the position dissolved, and everything I'd built scattered. So I packed an old Honda Accord with what little I needed, left everything else behind, and pointed it toward California.

I never got there.

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The Rooftop

I stopped in Arizona to visit my sister. Prescott — five geographies meeting in one place, mountains and plains and rivers and desert, big sky country that still had room to breathe. Her contractor was building a house that looked like something Frank Lloyd Wright might have designed — overhanging eaves, heated floors, a Rumford fireplace, all of it nestled into the hillside rather than sitting on top of it. He'd just lost his helper, I'd just shown up, and that was that. I got hired.

It was brand new to me — the physical work of building. I'd spent years designing things on paper and in boardrooms. Now I was mixing foundations, framing walls, making windows and doors in the shop by hand. Going from design to building, from abstraction to something I could hit with a hammer. It was the most refreshing thing I could have ever done.

By summer I was on the roof. And from up there I could see the whole valley, with it's trails winding through juniper and piñon, ridgelines stacked behind ridgelines and the kind of open beauty that makes the imagination stretch to meet it. A land still breathing, still wild enough to change the way you think just by looking at it. I could also see jet trails overhead: those white streaks cutting across the sky. I knew those jets. I'd been on them weekly not so long ago. Now I was watching them pass over from the rooftop I was building holding a hammer instead of a mechanical pencil in my hand.

And I could see what was coming below. Roads unspooling. Parking lots encasing open ground. Structures overtaking the natural spaces that made this place worth living in.

I came from the design world. I'd been trained to see how structures shape behavior. And standing on that roof, watching the jets I used to ride trace lines above a landscape being consumed, I saw it clearly: we were building over the very thing we came here for.

Something inside me said: "There has to be another way".

I didn't plan to spend the next four decades thinking about it. But that moment handed me a question I couldn't put down. I saw the problem. I just didn't have the answer yet.

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The Mountain Top

The following winter (on the solstice), I left before dawn and started up Granite Mountain alone. The trail disappeared into blackness almost immediately. I climbed by feel, by breath, by the sound of my own footsteps. Hours of it. Just me and the dark and the mountain and the balloons and small pieces of paper I carried with me as intentions, questions, and things I wanted to hand to something larger than myself.

I think I was also letting go. The career, the ego, the man who needed to be ready for every room, the designer who could walk into a meeting cold and hold it. I'd been carrying all of that, and it was still heavy. The rooftop had given me a question. But I couldn't hear the answer while still gripping who I'd been.

The cold bit into me on the way up but I barely noticed. By the time I reached the top, the eastern sky was just beginning to separate from the land as that thin line of light that isn't yet color but is no longer dark. After all those hours in blackness, the light was arriving. I took off my clothes. All of them. Stood there the way I arrived in the world. Bare feet on cold granite. The wind finding every surface of skin.

I put the messages in the balloons, blew them up, and released them into the updrafts coming off the mountain edges. They caught the air and rose — fast at first, then slower, then just drifting, until they disappeared into the brightening sky.

I stood there watching until there was nothing left to watch. Just me and the sunrise and the feeling that I'd handed something to the world that I couldn't take back. I felt the resolve of the release as well as the foundations of something new.

Something in me marked that morning as a beginning, yet I couldn't have told you of what. The past was released. The ego was quiet. And for the first time, there was room for something new to arrive.

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The Idea

What arrived was clear, and it was detailed, and it came with the force of something that had been waiting for room. The design mind doing what it does: but now, doing it with the old self out of the way, seeing a different kind of problem.

The idea came with an unexpected clarity: a community structured like a corporation, but turned inside out. Not shareholders invested in profit, but shareholders invested in their own becoming. A legal citizen that could hold a new way of organizing each of us according to our best and most personal interests. A place where the whole reason the structure existed was to give every person inside it the ground to discover their own worth, their own purpose, their own way of being fully alive.

I called it Cormunity. Cor — the heart, the core. Drop one letter from corporation and everything changes.

It was complex. It was detailed. The kind of vision that only arrives when the design world falls away and the real design problem finally shows itself. And it raised a question I couldn't answer from where I stood: if this is what the future could look like, how did it look like before we built over it?

You can't design forward without understanding what came before. Every system we've created — currency, banking, industrial production, digital networks — was layered on top of something older and simpler. Somewhere underneath all of it, people once lived in community without any of these structures. Not because they lacked sophistication, but because what held them together was something our systems eventually made invisible: presence, reciprocity, the simple act of being available for each other.

I needed to find that. Not in a book. But in the flesh. I needed to find a place where the old ways still breathed, untouched by the world I knew. If the root was still alive somewhere then I would know this idea had ground to stand on.

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The Border

I didn't tell anyone. Not my family, not my friends. (How could I explain that I was off to find a village unaffected by modern ways... and why?) So I drove south, parked on a hill at the border, and walked across with a sleeping bag and a backpack. If I hadn't come back, nobody would have known where to look.

I was following something I couldn't name. And by now, that was just how I moved through the world.

The Village

I traveled south, asking questions in broken Spanish, until I heard about a place you could only reach by mailboat — a fishing village at the mouth of a river between two mountains, where the Pacific met the coast. No roads in or out. Less than a mile of beach before the mountains took over.

I sailed in with the weekly mail.

The village was small but it was complete — a world organized around what mattered and nothing else. There was a tortilleria where women made tortillas the way they'd always been made. Fresh water came down from the mountains. A woman swept the pathways along the river with a brush, keeping them immaculate despite the donkeys, and the paths were as comfortable to walk on as any sidewalk I'd known. On Thursday nights there was music by one candle — Mexican music. Friday was American music, still one candle. Saturday was two candles and everyone and their music together. It was a makeshift "nightclub", lit by flame in a village with no electricity, and it was as alive as any place I'd ever been.

This was paradise. Not because it lacked anything. Because everything it had was enough.

I didn't intend to stay. But there was homemade tequila, and time lost its edges, and there was no exit plan. So I stayed.

The first night I slept on the beach. The village dogs (left to roam free) had found me and peed on my sleeping bag. So the next morning I went looking for shelter.

I found front half of an old broken fishing boat: a hand-carved dugout, split in two. I spent a day in the jungle shaping two Y-sticks without tools, dragged them back to the beach, and propped the boat hull up in the sand. Then I built a small picket fence from sticks to keep the dogs out.

That was home.

The Children

They came without being asked. Small faces appearing at my little fence, carrying pages torn from magazines. I don't know who sent them or if anyone did. They just showed up.

The only paper we had for writing were the white margins in those pages nobody uses. That became our notebook. The sand was my chalk board. I taught them English letters and words by candlelight. We scratching lessons into the margins of someone else's discarded pages, and they sat there in the glow learning sounds that belonged to a world they'd never seen.

They taught me something too, though it took me decades to understand what it was. Community isn't a system. It's what happens when people are present for each other with nothing but willingness and whatever's at hand.

No ledger. No institution. No curriculum. No money. Just candlelight and the willingness to be there.

And there it was. The root I'd crossed the border to find. Alive, breathing, functioning without a single structure from the world I'd left behind. People taking care of each other because that's what people do when nothing gets in the way. The proof wasn't data or documentation. It was the feeling of being held by a place that had nothing to offer except itself.

The Dream

I don't know how long I stayed. Weeks, maybe longer. Time moved differently there — by tides and meals and the light changing on the mountains.

Then something shifted. A dream came — not clear, not specific, but urgent. Someone I cared about was in trouble. I couldn't see who. I couldn't see where. But the pull was strong enough to break the spell of the village.

Leaving wasn't simple. There were no roads, no phones, no way to arrange anything. I had to wait for the next mailboat and work my way to the railroad and north however I could.

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The Train

The train heading north was already standing room only. I found a spot between two cars where the air was fresh and I could watch the landscape roll by. Men started drifting over — to talk, to practice their English, to pass the time. I became a fixture in that doorway.

One of them kept coming back. A young man who was strong and handsome, with a directness that cut through the language barrier. He'd been hired to dive for the gold from shipwrecks in the Sea of Cortez by by some Californians who turned out to be running drugs. They'd been arrested. He'd been left with nothing but his scuba tanks and a long ride home to the oil rigs in the Gulf.

He offered me his gear bags to sleep on behind his seat. I curled up on oxygen bottles and let my legs stretch across the aisle where passengers stepped over me. It wasn't comfortable. It was the best sleep I'd had in days.

When seats opened up across from him, we orchestrated a swap, timing it so I could slide into his row before anyone else claimed the seats. And there I was, sitting with him, his young wife, and their infant daughter.

Then the train stopped. Not at a station. Nowhere. Just open country.

Federal police boarded. Big men with ammunition belts crossed over their chests, armed to the teeth. They were looking for someone, and they found my friend. He'd been gone from his seat for a while. When he came back, he pressed a folded note into my hand.

He was being arrested. It was extortion. They thought he had money from the diving job. He didn't have a cent. The note had a Louisiana address on it. And he asked if I would see his wife and baby safely to their family.

I said of course and they hauled him away.

Then something in me made me stand up. Not smart but just unwilling to just sit there. So I walked to the back of the train where they had him against the wall between the cars, thinking of a plan.  I was going to tell them I was an American journalist and this incident would be reported. My spine was straight. My chin was out. I was going to bluff my way through this on sheer audacity.

They didn't understand a word I said. I was speaking English to men who spoke only Spanish. The whole bluff collapsed on contact.

They started pushing me around. Yelling. My friend said quietly: they want your papers. I think you're getting arrested too.

So now the wife and the baby had lost both of us.

But I didn't back down. I don't know why. I just stood with my friend and kept my ground, not fighting, not running, just refusing to fold. Projecting something I couldn't have named then and still can't now along with the certainty that we mattered, to men whose power to disagree could have dire consequences. 

Then, as suddenly as it started, they let us go. Both of us. They stepped off the train. The train moved on.

I never fully understood why.

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Coming Home

The train ride lasted days. When I finally crossed back and found my way to a phone and then a road and then the life I'd left behind, I learned what the dream had been trying to tell me.

A young person I'd known (someone caught in the wreckage of a family coming apart) had died while I was gone. I'd felt the pull from a thousand miles away and a country with no phones. I'd left paradise to answer it. And I was too late.

I came home carrying two things: the memory of a village where people showed up for each other with nothing more than themselves, and the knowledge that the world outside that village could break the people I loved while I wasn't looking.

For a long time, I thought the whole trip had been a failure. I'd gone looking for proof of an idea and come back with nothing I could point to. Just a feeling. Just the echo of candlelight on children's faces and the white margins of torn magazine pages.

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What I Didn't See Then

It took forty years to understand that the feeling was the proof. That I'd lived inside the very thing I was trying to design, and it worked — not because I'd engineered it, but because people were there for each other with nothing but what the place provided.

The design career gave me the eye and the ego that had to fall away before I could see clearly. The rooftop showed the need. The mountain released what I'd been holding and made room for the vision. The idea gave me direction. The village gave me the root. The train showed me what it costs to show up. And coming home showed me what it costs when you can't.

One thing led to the next. Each moment a building block I didn't know I needed until much later.

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What Was Trying to Be Born

I worked on Cormunity for two decades after that. Diligently, quietly, alone. Building out the architecture of a community where every person is a shareholder in their own becoming — where care, creativity, and presence aren't invisible extras but the foundation of recognized worth.

Then the cell phone arrived, and with it the mass fear of being tracked. Nobody wanted to hear about a system that asked them to be seen. So I set Cormunity aside — not because the idea was wrong, but because the world wasn't ready to hear that visibility could be a gift instead of a threat.

What filled that space was Manifestinction: a mythology about consciousness itself. About the Earth as an author, not a backdrop. About humanity standing at a threshold where we either manifest a new way of seeing or face the consequences of blindness. Manifestinction became the larger story — the why behind everything. The story of what consciousness is doing, and what it's asking of us.

And Manifestinction carried Cormunity inside it the whole time. The way a seed carries a forest. The mythology held the economics. The vision of conscious evolution held the practical blueprint for how people might actually live together differently.

Now — forty years after a man released his old life into the updrafts of a granite mountain, and found the root of community by candlelight on the margins of torn magazine pages — both are ready.

Cormunity is the structure. Manifestinction is the story that makes the structure make sense. Neither one is complete without the other. And neither one belongs to me. They never did. I was just the one who kept showing up — again and again, in places I didn't plan to be — until the shape became clear enough to hand forward.

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The Release

I'm eighty years old. I still don't know what I'm doing. I just keep showing up.

This morning, on the day astrologers say the dreamer and the realist merge at a degree of the zodiac not activated in six thousand years, I'm doing the same thing I did on that mountain at winter solstice decades ago. Writing my intentions on whatever I can find. Letting them go into the updraft. Trusting they'll land where they're meant to.

This time, the balloons are words. And the updraft is you.

Cormunity — the idea that your worth deserves a structure that can see it — is no longer mine to hold. Manifestinction — the story that consciousness is evolving and asking us to evolve with it — is no longer mine to carry alone.

They're yours now. Not because I'm giving them away. Because they were always yours. I just got to them first.

After all these years, showing up is still the only thing I've learned for certain.

It's the whole thing. It always was.

Campbell Auer 

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Campbell Auer holds a BS in Business Administration and a BFA in Furniture Design. Diagnosed with dyslexia in his forties, he tested with reading ability below eighth grade and an IQ in the upper fraction of one percent. For most of his life, he carried the reflection other people handed him — that he was slow, that he was strange, that something was wrong with the way he saw the world. It took decades to understand that what looked like deficiency was a different kind of intelligence — one that sees patterns before it can explain them, thinks in wholes instead of parts, and builds mythologies because linear argument was never an option. The torment was real. So was everything it produced.

This is mythology. One person's memory, offered as story. Nothing here asks to be believed. If any of it rings true, it was already yours before you read it.