Chapter 1: Vision Quest Manifesto

I) Introduction

Vision Quest is a digital travel magazine created by me, Glenn Arnfinn Remøy. It is a visionary travel magazine that weaves together self-growth through travel, knowledge of myths around the world and the art of finding oneself in certain myths. It is platform for sharing the sacred journey of transformation drawing inspiration from all corners of the world. It blends photography and storytelling into a single thread—image and words becoming like alchemical tools. Each chapter is both a journey and a symbolic passage: from forgetting to remembering, from separation to wholeness, from blindness to vision.

Northern lights over my tometown

The inspiration for Vision Quest came to me on a starry night in the middle of winter in Norway. It was December 2023. I remember I was feeling particularly dismayed that night by the state of the world and I was rather horrified by the direction we seemed to be going in, like there was no end to the insanity we see on a daily basis. As I was laying there in that frosty field on my puffy winter jacket, wondering what's my role to play in all of this, I had the revelation that all of our problems are actually solvable. In the Alchemical tongue: from dissolution comes crystallisation, and back to dissolvement: leaving deadwood behind and becoming purer. From despair, apathy and nihilism to meaning and purpose. That night, something clicked. I realised that we've just forgotten how to do so. We've forgotten who we are, where we came from and what we're here to do. Not in a vague spiritual sense, but in a very real, practical and sacred sense Once we built sacred temples aligned with the planet and stars. Once we were attuned to the workings of the entire cosmos, and thus we brought heaven down to earth and we lived in total harmony with our environments. We carved our wisdom into stone hoping it would last for eternity. However all things must come to pass, and civilizations rise and fall like the rise and fall of entire continents.

 Today we have all the resources and tools at our disposal to make life on Earth wonderful, yet we chose not. Greed, division, anger and hate reigns in the global consciousness still. Wars break out seemingly at an increasing rate. The world is ending, or so they say. Do we chose to believe that into reality?

My vision is to reignite our passion, or enthusiasm for life. For us all to become conscious creative players in our daily lives and in the global society at large. I want to encourage people to leave their familiar surroundings with a badly planned trip into the unknown and explore. It is the privilege of a lifetime to have the means to prove yourself in this way, and I am trying to reach those who feel called but are still on the fence. Do it. Take the leap.

As the late great McKenna once put it:

"Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that comittment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is how magic is done: by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed."

Purpose

We've lost track of where to go. Once the vision was simple: serve God, love everyone, live your life. Now God is dead and humanity is drifting in the abyss, not knowing where to go next. Some believe our destiny is to merge with the machines, upload our consciousness to the cloud and live forever. Some believe we're building God through AI and that the whole world is one big simulation. Others believe that's all non-sense because global warming will kill us all first. So many strange beliefs. So many strange fates. One thing is certain: we remain as religious as ever—we've just replaced the word God with lesser things. ​​​​Vision Quest aims to reinstall God in the general consciousness of the population and merge rational thinking together with mysticism.

I founded Vision Quest to realign us with truth, beauty, and goodness—the divine forces guiding creation. This is my vision of God. Today, we’ve traded God for lesser gods—money, machines, hubris—but I believe the sacred endures in myths, soulful architecture, and nature’s patterns. Rejecting the “Church of Progress” and its soulless cities, Vision Quest blends science and mysticism to illuminate our past and inspire a future of compassion, humility, and harmony. Through my photography and stories, I explore adventure, history, and philosophy, offering a blueprint for cities and lives rooted in reverence for the cosmos.

Vision Quest aims to provide a new vision and understanding of our personal relationship to a higher part of ourselves and to argue for the necessity of God and consequently the necessity for humility. Humanity's hubris has once again reached delusional levels and we are in the process of destroying everything for everyone. The Tower of Babylon is about to repeat itself. We need to stop it before it happens and it can only happen by the acknowledgment that we are not God, and initiate servitude to that part of ourselves that is higher, wiser and kinder.

Mission

Share personal and authentic stories through photography and writing about journeys undertaken around the world. Themes such as adventure and travel, myths and history, self-growth and philosophy are central pillars.

Two supporting pillar as seen in Karnak Temple. Luxor, Egypt. October 2023.

The Amnesia of Humanity

Graham Hancok always used to say we're a species with amnesia. I believe he's right. Our memory of our past have been wiped clean many times over. If it is not done by nature, through earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, solar winds, comets and asteroids, it is done by ourselves, by the destructive nature of human conquest. When one civilization conquers another, they tend to erase all memories and records of who they were to legitimise their moral rights to rule. Buildings are tore down, books and scrolls are burned, and countless human lives with it on the piles.

The Lament

The Transfer

A mysterious body of text came down to us from the Ancient Egyptians shortly before its fall in 30 BC, when Cleopatra the 7th took her own life to preserve the dignity of Egypt in the face of Roman conquest. In it, a prophecy;

"There will come a time when men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the universe worthy of reverent wonder and worship. They will no longer love this world around us, this incomparable work of God, this glorious structure which he has built, this sum of good made up of many diverse forms.

Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life; no one will raise his eyes to heaven; the pious will be deemed insane, the impious wise; the madman will be thought a brave man, and the wicked will be esteemed as good."​

We're in is this time now.

The Threefold Cosmic Flow

The human tendeny to destroy can be understood as the impulse of Shiva, the great Destroyer in Hinduism. Shiva is part of a threefold cosmic function, with Vishnu, the Preserver and Brahma the Creator as the other two. Together, they form the Trimurti, or Brahman. Shiva is the easiest to follow. It is very easy to destroy. Pick up a glass cup with your hand and drop it on the floor. It will break easily. Now compare that to the time and energy it took to create this glass cup. A lot more. Brahma is the hardest to follow, because creation needs a plan, an intention. It needs more resources and precision than it does to destroy a thing. Vishnu is the middle ground many philosophies such as Ayurveda, Sufism, Kabbalah, Confucianism and many more, all aim for. Vishnu aims to preserve, to guard what is worthy of being guarded. But at times, Vishnu needs to pick up his sword and slice a thing in two, becoming Shiva for a time, before returning to Brahma, and then back to Vishnu.

The balance of civilizations, and human individuals, depend on our ability or inability, to flow in-between these three states: to know and to do what is necessary in the moment. What might be the correct decision now, might not be the correct decision some other time, and vice versa. The universe is dependant on flow, flexibility and wisdom to discern when to follow the rules, and when to break them.

Sacred Memory

The universe is already balanced. Only human beings are not aligned to the balance. Left vs right. Us vs them. You vs me. It's all two-dimensional, destructive and belonging to Shiva. History, or true history, and the wisdom extrapolated from understanding it, has the power to stabilize Shiva. This is Vishnu, the great preserver, carrier of sacred memory and truth, guardian and stabilizer. Vishnu incarnates in times of great crisis, when Shiva threatens to destroy everything, to restore what has been lost. Historically, this has happened through Vishnu's many avatars, such as Rama, Krishna or Buddha. But this phenonema is not restricted to figures only of the East; Jesus and Mohammed were also incarnations of Vishnu. The name is not important or avatar is not imporant. What is important is the message they spread.

Living History

We tend to look at history like it's finished, that it belongs to the past, and in a way, dead. History is no such thing. History is alive. It is here. We may separate ourselves from it but it will always be with us. It is unerasable, no matter how many books you burn, no matter the cities and lives destroyed. History is engraved in every atom. The universe remembers everything that has happened. From the past the present is created. From the present the future is created. “People without the knowledge of their history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.” Without knowledge of the past we cannot hope to understand the present, and when the present cannot be understood the future will certainly stand on shaky ground.

The Eternal Message

The truth has been spoken many times, by many voices, in many languages, in many ages. Throughout history there have been many messengers of this truth. They always come at crucial points when civilizations are at a crossroad. The message they spread has the capacity to shift consciousness to anyone who hears it, or rather, anyone who is ready and willing to hear it. The message is what's important. The messenger is not. If the messenger becomes more important than the message then the message is already lost. This is how religions are made. The messenger comes to reveal lost knowledge, but the moment they leave, the followers rewrite the message to fit their own desires. What was once pure becomes structured, distorted and rewritten. True messages do not need hierarchical structure and a priestclass standing between the God and the people. If the message leads to division, it is not truth. If a message leads to control, it is not truth. If a message leads to fear, it is not truth.

The New Priestclass

Today we don't have religions, but we are in no shortage of believers. The priestclass has undergone a namechange, and are now simply called 'scientists' and 'experts'. In concept, scientists and experts should be the basis of a rational enlightened culture, but in practice it is not. Most of these people are all bought and paid for, and for anyone remotely awake they saw that demonstrated beautifully in 2020. The truth is, we don't really know what's going on. It's all just guesswork. Your guess is as good as mine. Science will tell you this but it also tells us that. There is so much we do not yet understand, but we are so desparate to appear like we do know. So many of us are so cocksure of ourselves, and even more of us are so desperate for someone to give us answers, for someone to give us purpose—for some authority to tell us what to do. You can see how religions are so easily made. One group of people full of pride and hubris, and one group so full of uncertainty and fear.

The Modern Message

For those who ask, an answer shall be given and the message of the world in this day and age is this: you mean nothing, You're replacable. You're a cog in a machine. You're here to consume whatever we tell you to consume (through our ads). There is no meaning to any of this, so you better acquire as much wealth as you can, and indulge in as many hedonistic whims as possible, because one day you'll die, and you will lose everything and stop existing forever. Oh, and there is no God. We made him up. Now go enjoy your petty little life. Gee, okay, glad I asked!

This—as you perhaps will come to know—is not a very satisfying answer to me. It leads to nothing but fear, to hedonism, to the abandonment of virtues, to carelessness, recklessness, to numbness—indifference. To despair, apathy and disease. To war, pestilence and chaos. What we fail to realize is that this is nothing but a belief, but a clever one, because it masquerades as if it is a cold hard fact. It is a belief which arises as a conclusion after hitting the bedrock of the materialistic-reductionist-paradigm of which we have built the scaffolding supporting the creation of our modern world with all our technological miracles.

The Design of Separation

Our environment shapes how we think. A city is an artificial creation that is laid on top of nature. It keeps chaos at bay by taming nature, and enables societies and cultures to grow and to thrive. The design of the city matters. The structures, the roads, the appearance, they all matter. It influences all aspects of the inhabitants in it; how you move, who you meet, what you do— what you think and believe. Architecture thus, tells a story. They are like books written in stone, and at some level we understand what we're being told by our environment; we are unnatural beings—separate from nature; lost. Like we are some weird off-spring that don't belong. This thought is is reflected in all aspects of our life, particularly in how the world will looks. Meaning, how we build.

Indeed, the atheistic and megalomaniac society we live in today naturally rejects all notions of anything being remotely sacred and thus, in the name of "progress", we have dismissed it in favor of profit maximization, minimalism, and soulless functionalism— to humanity's detriment. Harsh lines, grey palettes, and sterile glass boxes is hostile to the soul, and is unlike anything we find in nature. It alienates us and causes all sorts of psychological and physical illness. Yet its influence remains subtle and mostly unnoticed; its power vastly underestimated. Postmodernism is what happens when man feels estranged from the universe, from nature, and from himself.The more I looked into architecture and city design and its effects on human behaviour, the more I believed this is a major reason why we seem to have lost our bearings.

Mosque of unknown name (I forget). Istanbul, Turkey. August 2023.

The Divine Template

All things created in this world need to follow a design. Design determines functionality as well as conveying emotion. Any fool can build a house to exist in, but not any fool can build a house to thrive in. Why does design matter? Because a design can be intentionally or non-intentionally made chaotic, non-sensical or disharmonious to the human being. The natural world follows a harmonious design and we call its design the Golden Ratio. The Golden Ratio is the closest visual representation we have of God. This is the Divine Template. If we do not respect the natural world in our structures, we will feel uneasy and estranged when being around them. It's as simple as that. At a very deep level we recognize when something simply feels off. This "offness" will influence our behaviours, and ultimately, it will influence how we think. Geometry tunes the soul like an instrument.

The Golden Ratio, or the Divine Template, is a ratio that appears in all of nature, in the spirals of galaxies, the growth of seashells, and the bones of our bodies. You have undoubtedly seen it already. It is found even in the human body; the length of your entire arm's length to the length of your shoulder to elbow is the Golden Ratio. What does this mean? Well it suggests that this design is not imposed but revealed—drawn forth from the formless by a deeper intelligence. It is not random. Not accident. It is intentional. It is Divine Design. So we must ask: Is beauty the result of matter aligning with unseen law? Is form the echo of a divine thought? Are we witnessing, in every proportion and pattern, the fingerprint of the Creator?

Consider the natural world. It grows in a set limited amount of ways, and her patterns are fractal. What could possibly be the reason a sunflower and a galaxy should share any similarities? Yet when we observe, they obviously do. Ancient Romans, Greeks, Islamic Caliphates, Persians, Mesopotamians, and Egyptians, just to name a few—all built according to these principles in one form or another, thus creating an environment which brought about cosmic harmony.

We come from nature. All of nature, flowers, trees and animals grow in a certain way. The human body is no different. It is not random, it is not chaotic. It grows according to laws. This is the Golden Ratio, or numerically, it's called the Fibonacci sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144... All of nature follows this pattern in one way or another. Why? Because it is harmonious. It's balanced. In short, it is self-supporting. There are other laws that work upon us, but for the purposes of this text I will only address the effects of the Golden Ratio, and the effects on us if it is not followed.

Before something is made into this world it is first conceived in the mind. The world, our society, is an artificial creation laid on top of nature. A technology of some kind. We build structures, shelters and machines to help us tame and bend nature to our will so that it sustains and not destroy us. Buildings must follow an architectural design of some kind. This design must exist inside first our minds before it takes birth in the outside world. There are many ways to design a thing but only a handful that are harmonious.

Take the design of a sunflower: if you were a sunflower, how much of a turn would you make before you made a new seed? If you don't make a turn at all, and you just continue making a straight line of seed, the flower will become unbalanced and fall. If you make half a turn, 180 degrees, you get two lines in opposite direction, becoming unstable and eventually fall. Make a new seed every 1/3 of a turn, and you get 360/2 = 180, 360/3 = 120 degrees. 360/4 = 90 degrees, now you have 4 lines. You are stable, but you are wasting precious space. How do you use all the space available and at the same time remain balanced? There is only one solution to this problem, and you guessed it, it's the Golden Ratio. A new seed every 137.5 point infinite turn. This is the intelligence of God at works, hidden in matter.

Like the chaotic flow of water before it crystallizes into structured ice in a singular moment. Does the structure and blueprint of ice exist in a blind unrealised form inside the water molecules before it's created? Like a memory? Or is there an unseen hand at work, like a law beyond matter, a divine template to be fulfilled? Chaos yields to order when certain conditions are met.

If the mind has been distorted to think we are somehow separate from nature we will form images in our mind that reflect this notion. We believe we are something else entirely and thus our minds are filled with distorted views of ourselves and we build our world accordingly to this notion. For the inhabitants living in such conditions nihilism, despair and apathy soon follows. This is the story of modernity. It's our notion of separation manifested into material reality.

If you do not fix the distortion within you, everything you look at will become distorted. This distorted vision is reflected in our architecture—particularly in globalist modernism—which is the overwhelming dominant style found in all major cities around the world. Modern architecture is the real-life manifestation of this distorted vision because it ultimately attempts to deny the existence of objective beauty. In short, truth. Because the source of Beauty is truth.

Beauty is a ladder: we begin by appreciating physical beauty, then move toward the beauty of minds, laws, ideas, and finally the Form of Beauty itself—pure and Divine. Truth is tricky, for what is the truth? No one person possesses absolute truth. However, if we choose to at least not lie, we can approach truth, and that is Good. If we let honesty and beauty be the guiding principle in the act of life, the way will appear; as it has so done many times before. When we walk the way together with respect for ourselves, other beings and the natural world, harmony will naturally arise between man and cosmos. Architecture thus, is more than simply function; it is there to tune and to align your inner architecture to Beauty, and consequently, to Truth.

The Courtyard

The courtyard in Islam is called the Sahn, in Balinese it is called the Natah.

An ablution fountain situated in the middle of the courtyard of a mosque.

The Sahn.

An obelisk stretches into the heavens — Temple of Karnak, Luxor, Egypt.

The Axis Mundi

The Dark Night of the Soul

Humanity as a whole is going through a collective dark night of the soul. We are fragmented, delusional, and we've been utterly convinced of the non-existance of God. We believe the end-times are near and there is no future for our children. fertility rates

This is the legacy left behind to us from the french postmodernists in their rational decontruction of God. Without a central unifying point in which we all orient ourselves towards we all go our seperate ways, believing whatever our culture tells us to believe. This inevitably, will lead to the worship of what the Bible calls 'false idols', money, fame, celebrities—power.

The problem of God and if he is real or not is not the right question. First of all, what do you mean by 'God'? If you look around, something obviously exists, so something is there. If we believe Darwinism like so many of us do, it's blind intelligence—dumb luck that we're here—without reason, without purpose. It's everyone for themselves—take as much as you can before someone else takes it before you. In fact, take as much as you can before you die (this is hedonistic capitalism) and go into the abyss from which you will never see sunlight and day again. This is a terrible thought, and it has taken firm roots in our collective world psyche. We are like traumatized children, separated from our parents, alone, drifting—clueless.

God has turned into a definition problem and the scales of eye drop heavily down on modern man when he hears the dreaded word. Because when I say God you immediately think some angry mythological figurine in the heavens looking down at humanity, judging left and right between Good and Evil, who gets to go to Heaven and live eternally and who goes to Hell in a handbasket. This is an image that comes down to us from Christianity with its message from the prophet Yeshua. His message got so distorted it lead to world dominance.

Ironically, Christianity enabled its own demise and unraveling through the Gutenberg press. What was once sacred and guarded became mass-produced—and eventually dissected and dismantled by Carthesian rationalism.” Fast forward 400 years and it is now common knowledge that God was nothing but a myth, just an idea invented by humanity to give ourselves justification for all the horrors we've committed. This image is a distorted version of the truth.

God

God, is not someone up in the clouds. He is not one man. God is in all things. The messenger has once again been confused with the message. God doesn't decide if we're Good or evil, we do. I mean, the voice inside of you, your conscience. If you do evil acts, your conscience will torture you to death. If you do good acts, your conscience will not be as loud, but the world around you will gradually start getting better, not worse. If your conscience is loud at telling you just how good and right you are it will lead to spiritual narcissm, where you think you believe you're in fact so good, that you place your self above others. This will make you morally righteous, and enable all sort of wicked crime. Think about the misery one person can spread. He can affect millions and even become the direct cause of their deaths. If there is no thing such as judgment in the afterlife, would you want these people not to be punished? And this is where we get confused. Punishment is not the way of the soul. Forgiveness is.

Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.

My vision of God is that he is everything in existence. God is a force guiding all living and non-living things to grow and to move. The belief elements is whether or not we think that this force is a good thing, or a bad thing. I like to quote the Bible because that is what I happened to grow up to, and in later years I have found there is a lot of hidden truths in it, like so many of the texts that come down from us from the Ancient World. But if God is good why is there evil in the world?

Facing evil in the eyes is a catalyst for growth. But most people do not want to face it, and they shy away. Evil is but a negative and distorted manifestation of the free will humanity has bestowed upon humanity. God cannot remove evil, because he would remove free will with it. If everything was perfect, what would there be to do? God allows us the freedom to choose. That's the key element to remember. God allows us to choose between Good and evil. The decision is our hand, and this is what I believe is our purpose here. It is, ultimately, to learn to differentiate between Good and evil. To learn how to choose to do the right thing, no matter the odds we are up against. And whatever we choose, we will surely reap the consequences of it. You reap what you so. So God, for me, is synonymous with the belief of objective reality. And this objective reality has three distinct qualities: it is Good. it is True and it is Beautiful.

If any of the conditions above are not met, we are not talking about the same phenomena, and thus not God. If we become what the world so desperately wants us to be—disconnected from God, the very source of truth and beauty—then why does it give rise to such overwhelming ugliness, especially in our modern cities? Who or what has taken the place of God in today's society? You will know them by their fruits.

​Modern architecture is the fruit of a soul estranged from nature. We cram human beings into sterile glass cages, stacked like rats on top of each other and call it progress. This, like John Anthony West calls it, is the infamous Church of Progress. What is says is progress is actually a regression. By this notion of rat-stacking, ask yourself this; what kind of distorted perceptions of life do we cultivate in such dire circumstances?

While we may proudly believe that we do not believe in anything, we do. In fact, it is impossible for us to function in this world without having an orienting principle. Something must always be on the top of our personal Pyramid. If there isn't anything, the world will hand you something. Everything less than God and you will be lead astray.

The Compass

What do we do when we're lost in the woods? We use our senses. We look around, we listen, we smell—we taste edible plants so we do not starve. Many plants are bitter so we spit them out. Some plants are gentler and more tasteful. This is an analogy for how we navigate when we have lost our compass. In our modern world most of us are in no danger of starving. Thus the taste I'm talking about is not something we do with our tongues, but rather, it is with our eyes.

The all-pervading cosmic order you can find all around, is synonymous with developing a relationship with God. That is what happened to me. I believe God is Good, True—and Beautiful. One need only take a closer look at the patterns found in shells of snails, in flowers, in trees and in rivers above. It is clear, and it is everywhere if you know how to look. And your ability to look, to perceive, is determined by your taste. Taste is everything. You will construct your reality according to it. In fact, you're doomed to live out the consequences it. All because of one thing, taste.

I began looking at old architecture and I found them unmistakenly beautiful. They were tasteful. I couldn't immediately explain why, but beauty is like that. If you need to explain why something is beautiful, chances are it isn't. And the more I looked the more I developed a taste of beauty. This is what my photography is all about: exploring this developing taste.

Now I have often been accused of being obsessed with temples, and this is true. The Sacred Art of temple building is what the modern world has left so recklessly behind in our quest for profit maximisation and functionalism—to our own detriment. For once upon a time we used to build with purpose, with meaning, with enthusiasm.

The Dream

It was dark and there was no moon in the sky. A huge phoenix appeared in a glowing bright yellow, red and orange. It was hovering gracefully over a bridge I’m intimately familiar with; the bridge which connects the island—of which I grew up—to the rest of civilization. It wasn’t moving. Instead it kept itself perfectly still—mid-air like a mocking bird in slow motion. I remember flying up to it and having some dialogue. When I awoke I could only remember the last thing it had said. I had asked: what is my purpose on earth? It answered; you’re here to spread enthusiasm.​ 'Enthusiasm', from the Ancient Greek word enthousiasmós (ἐνθουσιασμός) means to be inspired or be possessed by God.

I think that’s why I’m so drawn to temples and ancient architecture. I’ve been seized by something—by God, or the Good, the True, the Beautiful. You only have to look at the work of the old temple builders to feel it. No one builds like that without reverence. The symmetry, the proportion, the scale and magnitude of their megalithic endavours—it’s not just craftsmanship; it’s worship. To create something that enduring, that precise, that beautiful, they must have been inspired by something higher. Civilizations like Egypt, Greece, and Rome weren’t just building for function—they were sending a message to everyone who walked through their gates and land: You matter. You count.

— Welcome to Vision Quest.