A three-month one-to-one mentorship in perception, agency and creative intelligence
Season 1: Winter 2025/26 (December 1 – February 28)
A seasonal practice shaped around your own life and work.
Your entire life is a tiny blip. The rest is non-existence.
Between those two vast silences lies shimmer, the continual movement of perception and change. To notice it, to live within it consciously, is to reclaim the world as something alive, unfinished and responsive.
The Shimmer Method is an immersive, dialogue-based an cross-disciplinary mentorship that explores how to see clearly, think independently and act deliberately. It is a distillation of everything I have learned over two decades of work and coincides with me moving further south again after lengthy periods in the Highlands and Islands.
The Philosophical Ground
This work draws on pre-Socratic philosophy, existentialism, psychogeography and contemporary cutting-edge creative practice.
It begins with a simple understanding: Reality is not fixed.
The world is a game, a stage, a flux, best understood through aesthetic and perceptual intelligence.
Within that flux, your task is to discern, edit and participate.
A Practice in Perception and Action
The mentorship unfolds through unique personal dialogue, not lectures or coursework. It develops a way of seeing that is beneficial to your own work and circumstances. It is not a set of beliefs or doctrines.
There is nothing else quite like this. The work exists outside institutions and trends.
Themes explored include:
- Zooming: Expanding and contracting perspective and scale from the microscopic to the planetary.
- Essentialism: Acting only where it matters. Doing less, with precision.
- Drones: Sustained awareness, patient observation of small changes.
- The Unlearning: Casting off inherited assumptions and fashionable ideas.
- Trance Awareness: Recognising that ordinary consciousness is already a trance. And then learning to reshape it.
- Reclaiming Language: Words like manipulation and discrimination regain their original meaning: the ability to shape and discern.
This is not therapy, coaching or spirituality – though it may intersect with any of them.
It is primarily a form of philosophical craftsmanship and guidance applicable to all aspects of life. Lived, improvised and applied to both real and theoretical circumstances. The mentorship is immersive, conversational and quietly transformative – built around the rhythms of your own days.
Format
- Duration: Three months (a ‘season’)
- Delivery: Direct conversation and ongoing WhatsApp (or similar) dialogue available 24/7
- Focus: Your projects (creative or otherwise), choices and perception of the world
- Cost: £600 per month (three months minimum)
- Cohort: Limited for the first season to three paid places
- Scholarship place: One extra space for someone without financial means
- Option to extend: Continue or evolve your work into the next season
Who It’s For
Writers, artists, thinkers, educators, entrepreneurs or anyone who senses that their way of seeing has become dulled or automated.
The Shimmer Method is for those who want to perceive with depth and rediscover creative autonomy. It is delivered remotely so is suitable for participants in all time zones and locations. Participants can be working on their creative projects full-time or on evenings and weekends alongside a day job.
Apply
This is an independent practice based on the findings of over two decades of specialist, unique work.
If you are keen to know more, write a short message describing your background and how you think The Shimmer Method can help. Genuine curiosity matters more than experience.
A maximum of four people (three paid, one free) will be invited to begin Season 1: Winter 2025/26.
Apply / Enquire via dan@gunung.org
Daniel Patrick Quinn
Composer, writer, researcher.
Co-founder of Gunung Bagging.
Former Artistic Director of One More Grain.
Lead author of The Relative Mountains of Earth.
Philosopher, lecturer, traveller and lifelong student of perception.