My name is Twylla Lannes, I am a 37 year old Brazilian American woman and the ideas behind possibilitism and futuring are the result of questions I have been grappling with from a young age. Despite being raised in a very loving and forward thinking family and school environments, spirituality was not a theme central to my life until a spontaneous and unexpected epiphany occurred to me when I was only 17 years old. I had an out of body experience — something I had never heard about — in which I watched what I thought to be my 'self’ leave my body and join what I can best describe as an all encompassing unity. Despite having watched that ‘self’ leave and not witnessed anything return, to my surprise, my body woke up exactly where it was before this event.

What followed this moment was the beginning of my path as someone who had unexpectedly seen the face of god at a young age and now had to figure out what to make of that. This experience left me with a very strong sense that there was nothing particular or special about me that made me privy to that, instead the overwhelming feeling was that some sort of profound access had taken place, and that it was something that all creatures either had or would have direct experience of. I also quickly realized that instead of trying to provoke or mimic that experience again, my path from there on out was to exist as someone who had been through something as potent as that, and to allow this experience to permeate how I live my life.

This episode was central to me deciding not to go to college after being accepted at 19 into one of the best colleges in Rio de Janeiro. To the desperation of my parents, I chose to move to a small community in the high altitude savannah in the heart of Brazil. A place that attracted seekers from different places, backgrounds and ages to lifestyles that centered around spirituality and self discovery. I started working with Ayahuasca then, accompanied by a worldly and diverse ecumenic crew that sourced guidance from ethnic groups, traditional Brazilian Ayahuasca lineages, as well as spiritual lineages from outer space. It was within the context of these practices, that I was first exposed to questions regarding the nature of reality and how it comes to be.