Apocalypse Fatigue

Chapter Zero: Side A - Con-Text

Thanks for turning up to play. I’m going to just let you know now that this chapter is a doozy, but it’s the foundation for all that follows. Find a suitable chair, get comfortable, and settle in.

Let’s review the Spoiler Alerts so far.

We’re in a trap, but as we will review many times, it is also a game. As I will also repeat: Be not afraid.

A transformation is happening. Many, actually; not all seen but all connected.

You’re not crazy or doomed, though in this moment in the time-line it would be easy to feel like you might be both.

If you’ve been keeping up, it seems like the world is on course to burst from pandemic into pandemonium and that the latest wave of the human experiment has just about ruined itself with an endless progression of exhausting trials and avoidable errors. In the short term, the “easy” way is to look at it all and declare time a flat circle where stupidity and depravity go on and on through the years, election cycles, generations, and centuries. This is an attractive option to some because it facilitates divorce from responsibility, but long term, it does nothing to add light or slow down the darkening. Collapse enthusiasts love to make fun of hope, but despair is a dead end. Optimism, however crazy it may seem these days, at least facilitates possible solutions. I have tried both, and though I enjoy a nice cup of scorn now and then, I would rather feel crazy for hoping. Suppose we were able to pry our attachments off of this doom and zoom our collective perspective out for a wider view. I believe we’d all see what I tend to believe, which is that history is not a circle at all, but a spiral. This may seem a small shift, but it makes all the difference. A spiral is still circular, but it implies growth and progress rather than eternal repetition. The problem is that we have been moving outward without moving upward, which creates multiple problems.

The view never changes. Reruns forever, and with nobody writing new shows.

Patterns persist because they are normalized. The game never gets less painful, just more familiar.

We lose the memory of our origins in the wake of history. We forget that the power we’re conditioned to abdicate actually comes from inside us.

Let’s have a hard look at where we are in our collective journey. The GPS is broken, we aren’t going where we want, the satellites aren’t connecting to help, and the Big Bus doesn’t care if we’re happy. We keep getting new drivers and they keep going the same way, because they wear different uniforms but work for the same company. Between you and me, this thing is running out of gas anyway. We’re going to have to get out and push to open the road. If we can just edge it up far enough, we will be able to see not only the shape of an aeon of trauma, but what existed before we all fell in love with captivity. With a little height above the grand chessboard we would understand what we’re doing, we would remember who we are, and we would begin to steer toward new territory. Many people have risen up to try and inspire us to do this work, but we make the same mistakes in receiving them over and over again. We allow the system to kill most of them, then a few decades or centuries later we put up shrines to celebrate these teachers and parrot our favorite parts of their lessons (usually the vanilla bits). We get so into the process of identifying with the various cliques and cults that we forget to follow the original instructions; helping each other was the point all along. We drop the ball a lot, but the game goes on. May we live to discover that we’re on the same team.

I want to tell you something right now, and I hope you’ll hear it, but if it bugs you today, dog ear the page and come back to it a few times. You, yes you, have an essential role in nudging the world off this dead end track. Nobody’s coming, and you’re here now. I don’t care what you’ve been told by the ones around you or the voices in your head. You matter, and you are here to help in the mutual aid of the entire inhabited world. No pressure, right? Listen though: If we can move the spirals of our paths outward even an inch, we’ll be that much closer to a new world. Everyone deserves to live better, and the world deserves for us to be in a better relationship to and with it.

Spoiler Alert Number Four: You Are the Missing Piece.

It seems too simple, and yet in our choices we have the power to shape our world. There’s that little fraction of a second where we pick between futures and it ripples out, good or bad. While this power remains available to us, we must use it with intelligence to steer this bus away from the cliff. All of this horror and the pain it breeds can be reversed in our individual lives by playing a better game, one of our own design. The switch from outer victim to inner warrior must be made now both on the scale of the individual and en masse if we are to halt and reverse the accelerating destruction of both personality and planet. In my opinion, it will have to happen in that order, and it better happen pretty damn fast or we’ll be invoking all the worst bits of the futures science fiction speculated were possible. Another world, one we haven’t been free to imagine yet, is still there for the making, but it’ll take all hands on deck. Consider the possibility that humanity can make any world it agrees on, and that this potential has long been stuck in a box.

The Great Game is set up to create the impression that if you work hard enough, you can get to the level of those directing it. At the same time you’re expected to claw your way uphill, the siren song of trickle-down economics rings in your ears. While it’s true that hard work earns you tangible improvements, the gold-painted false idols advertised in the media are hustles, traps and tricks. Through fear-mongering, hypnosis and good old fashioned violence, the Wizards of Cause and their myopic minions do everything they can to keep themselves in power and the rest of us in thrall, and have even convinced us to pay them to do it. We are exhausted and hollowed out trying to keep up with it all and find pockets of peace. We yearn for it all to make sense so we can find the ways to turn it off and start over. Wouldn’t it be nice if it were all so simple?

The awful and beautiful truth is that nobody is really in charge but us in our individual lives. A framework of control based on false class divisions and psychosocial, biological and electromagnetic manipulation of human consciousness is real enough, but it’s we who keep it going by agreeing with its contempt for us and collaborating in its machinations. We arrived here with this system in place, and while our primitive instinct reaches for a bigger rock, the best way to work around the system is not to burn it down but to play with it. You could play the game you were born into, of course, but why not choose your own adventure instead as those books of a bygone age suggest? Let’s take the reigns by making the jump from played, to players, to game programmers. This whole planet runs on stories, and you can start editing yours.

Time to lay out the path of this book so you know what to expect, as is only right for me to do as your host. Step one is what is defining the apparent parameters of the game. From there, we’ll explore the mechanics, and discover how flexible it all is and much power we actually have. I refer to this shared predicament of ours in various ways because it takes various forms. I call it The Con because the incestuous tentacles of government and bureaucracy form shapes that seem intentional and malicious. They are expert shadow puppeteers with centuries of practice. I call it The Verbal Hologram because certain illusions manifest through the manipulation of language and media messaging, which in turn shape thought and drive action.

At the center of it all is what I call Adversary, a kind of parasitic energy network with base camps in each human ego. This game force/character is a metaphor amplified for effect, but if you examine your innards, you’ll find something like it in there just the same. If you picture it, it takes the form of your go-to bogeyman, but it also loves to dress itself as the shadows of the things you love. Nearly all human power structures require sacrifices of many kinds. Adversary is the dark beneficiary of such. It serves as the opposite of our better natures, and it is everywhere. Adversary must be toppled by disinfecting and disconnecting one heart at a time until each of us remembers who we are without it. In the meantime its infinite mouths gorge on the stress, pain, and destruction that are so prevalent in this sleepwalking world. Its survival demands that we deny our connection to the ecosystem, reduce our living world to dead matter, dehumanize ourselves and each other, and fill the holes in our souls not with connection but with consumption. It’s all too happy to provide band-aids with carcinogenic glue to distract us from what’s going on behind the circus, desensitize us to the pain that calls us to a better way, and destabilize communities that offer alternatives. So where did this abomination come from? Well, I hate to break it to you, but it didn’t come from outer space, another dimension, Hell, or any of the usual suspects. It came from inside of us.

In time out of mind, when some nameless ancestor lifted a stone with clear intent to crush its first skull, a kind of psychological subspecies was born. To this day it presumes a “might is right” calling to authority. From here we got our politicians, the priest class of every discipline, the warlord and the common bully. Some joined in the violence, some cowered in fear, and some, who discovered it is easier to bend minds than matter, invented deception as their own sort of weapon Some even crafted “Good Person” disguises so exquisite that they fooled themselves and became “useful idiots” to the system they think they’re saving others from. There are those who long for the power, those who love to steal, those who prefer to pull strings from the shadows, and those who truly have no conscience.

Now most folks refuse to believe that such beings walk among us, and some folks reckon they’ve figured out the One True Conspiracy so they know who to blame for it all. We make a grave error in believing that all of these people think and operate from the same point of view, or even consciously collaborate. I personally believe it’s more like iron filings lining up with magnetic fields. We are called, pulled, and shaped by forces outside understanding, but if we can perceive this, we can begin reclaiming our agency and remembering how to pull away. Over eons, things have coalesced and calcified and normalized. There’s a kind of fractal pyramid scheme stretching from the corner shop to the highest echelons of financial and political power, formed by the sum and interactions of various fingers in various pies.

Perceptions are confused and managed, crimes are camouflaged and excused, distractions are everywhere all the time, we get paid just enough to stay in the grinder, and brute force waits offstage with a stick just in case we stop taking these carrots. When we notice this corruption, which is ever more obvious, it seems “too big to fail,” and maybe it is as long as we keep it going with our time, sweat, blood, cash, and imagination. It’s easy to feel tiny and overwhelmed before these distorted projections. We must remember that we are each only complicit and victimized to the degree that we allow ourselves to be. This phantom world requires our captive imagination and willful participation to prolong itself. Phillip K. Dick called it a “black iron prison,” but if enough of us push we may find that walls and bars are made of words and thoughts.

Many of us have felt the gravity of our time arriving in strange ways. Our species no longer has the luxury of procrastination. Let’s cut to the chase. I’ll wager that like so many of us, you’re tired of spending your life meeting someone else’s standard for happiness. We’ve grown weary of trying to keep up with the Joneses. The Joneses, if they exist, are at best living contrary to their nature and at worst predators in berserker mode, so it’s no wonder growing numbers are not buying into the rat race anymore. This year, like none before it, really highlighted in neon colors that the Empire didn’t work out. We miss something we can’t remember. We’re looking for a more authentic way to live. We know that the “As Seen on TV” life is bogus. We can smell rot beneath the cheap perfume and scented candles. There’s a hollow quality to our public laughter and our smiles lack luster.

For myself and a lot of people I’ve talked to, the years of the mask created a kind of a relief because we didn’t have to fake a smile every time we walked outside. Like that wonderful poem by Langston Hughes says, “we wear the mask” out of necessity. COVID-19 has added layers to mask as metaphor. So many are frustrated, anxious, depressed, or all three. We’re suffering because we feel like we’re doing everything wrong, even in the middle of what feels like the end of the show. If this sounds familiar, listen to me. You’re not wrong, you’re just yourself, and you’re coming out of a trance.

Humanity is waking up from a very long nightmare, even if the snooze button is taking a beating. Rejoice! You’re one of many, many people in the same situation. We’re not in the same boat, but it’s the same storm being weathered. We’ve all developed ways of hiding the ways in which the modern world has worn us down. The word “person” comes from a Roman word for masks worn on stage. We’re all actors, in our jobs and public, even in our families. To deny pain is to convince ourselves of its absence, but it remains beneath the masks that weigh us down and hide our true faces from others and even ourselves. If you’re tired of wearing a flap of cloth over your face, imagine wearing a costume over your spirit for your entire life.

I propose that by taking an active role in playing the Game of Life, not by the rules we’re given but by rules we make, we can win as individuals and small pockets of resistance despite the odds the society may have. It’s easy to dismiss this as naïve. I challenge you to accept the possibility that you’re capable of more than you currently believe. A mental illness is like a self within the self, and one the best tricks it pulls in its quest for self-preservation is to portray itself as the only situation available to you, to paint hope as something to be scorned and helplessness as something to be shouted from the rooftops. Can you imagine an insurance company campaigning for people to exercise and strengthen their immune systems? The same dynamic is at work here.

Keeping the collective human body, mind and spirit diminished is essential to the success of Adversary. To put it simply, it’s a spell, a lot of them really. We have been lulled into a sleep that begets nightmares. Many of us feel at times that we can’t even function, much less help ourselves and those around us. This is why we have to start by understanding the conditions we call “depression” and “anxiety.” These names are familiar to us all but they are dis-empowering and inadequate terms that obscure both the depth of pain and extent of damage done by the conditions to which they refer. They insulate us from facing pain, both that of others and that of our own. All creatures feel and prefer pleasure to suffering, but equating pain with weakness creates a world of nested cages where countless beings suffer in silence. It is insane and impossible to deny both our individual shadow-selves and the long shadow of our collective actions in the interest of preserving flat social roles just because we are expected to keep this tired old puppet show on the road.

Adversary uses repetition to program us, and that works both ways. I will say it again: the word “apocalypse” has been abused. It means the unveiling, not the end. There’s a reason the idea of “awakening” is trending in (and co-opted by) factions of society that would appear to be opposites. Current events suggest the revelation and realization of the world’s shadow is at last upon us, for better or for worse. Darkness is real, and becoming visible. It’s time to allow it to exist, witness it and learn what it has to teach. It’s time to take responsibility for how this happened and what happens next. Aside from a tiny minority of true psychopaths, human beings feel a full spectrum of emotions to which we have every right. Despair is as valid as joy, as long as it’s not seen as the only option. Hate, horror, and division is pushed all around us now by those who find it useful. It’s a time of wall-building and maximum polarization, but beneath this is a current of acceptance and expansion of what it means to be human. I remain more hopeful than the tone of these words may suggest that we will remember, together.

A large part of our role in this is the way we treat uncomfortable emotions and psychology that we deem abnormal. I propose we each take down the false wall between physical and mental pain. We don’t yell at a person in a cast for limping, we open doors for them, we give up our seats, we ask what we can do. Why don’t we do this for people with less physical afflictions? For some reason it’s acceptable to punish people for being visibly depressed and anxious in a world that amplifies those states, and may even depend upon them for fuel. Perhaps people put distance between themselves and the mentally ill to avoid the pain of resonating with them, but it’s the way we treat these people that shows real madness. I have heard so many people chant their pain as if it were their whole identity, and this anchors them within it. You get better at what you practice, whether it’s good for you or not. When we police ourselves and each other by denying our right to self-rule we act as perfect slaves, posing no threat to our own malignant mental habits or exploitation by authority run amok. If we are to live in a world of peace and progress rather than march into the mouth of some Great Annihilator, we must change our way of living while we still have the time.

I’ve mentioned hope. I am not talking about the passive form, which encourages us to detach and let the Savior of the Week fix it for us. You ever notice how that never quite happens? No, it’s time to face facts. We live in a troubled and troubling world. There are literally millions of us for every person in “power,” and when we unite even in small groups we can work miracles. A lot of us have dreamed of some huge and final revolution, but perhaps the real solution is to break up and use the power of parallel processing to tackle things in pieces. One could get lost in woe over any number of disasters-in-progress. How did we get here? From where I sit, the main problems in the big picture are a lack of love for self and others, a lack of knowledge about this mess we’re in, and a lack of courage to resist it. The thorn bushes choking our world grow from those wounds.

We traded a lot for our mastery of the material sphere. The worship of the tangible often comes at the neglect of the unseen. Courage isn’t reserved for mythic heroes, it’s part of who we are, and one of the bravest things to do is being kind. Being empathic isn’t just a New Age buzzword meant to make us feel superior. Empathy is or was an innate human quality, diminished over generations of accepting a way of life that is much more like Sea World than the sea. We have let fear get the best of us as nations and as individuals. Even in the bubbles of prosperity people are well on their way to giving up freedom in the pursuit of imaginary security. You can’t buy the latter with the former. No government has ever returned a right removed in the name of crisis. The more power we deny ourselves, the more of our blood we feed to the monsters keeping us up at night.

We feel emotional problems physically as well as energetically, so it’s helpful here to use a disease model. Just as with a migraine or pains in the gut, what we call mental illnesses are tangible signs that something is wrong in the unseen. On a certain level depression and anxiety are manifestations of chemical and electrical network problems; road blocks and speed bumps. On another there is a relationship between stress and inflammation of the body’s tissues. Even the guests living in our digestive tracts play a role, and the “good guys” are easily replaced by more parasitic companions when we eat to fill rather than to thrive (the further from nature we go, the closer we are to Adversary). There’s a mountain to move, but each of us can do our part by lifting one grand of sand.

Look at yourself with the kindness you might reserve for a child, for you were also born an innocent in a world immeasurably divorced from nature. As a species, we are quite young, and we are each survivors of the trauma inherent to our system in addition to whatever haunted us as kids. Some have suffered far worse than others, but none of us is unmarked. We have been conditioned over centuries to adopt a victim model in which we blame ourselves for our troubles and self-punish over a lifetime, associating reasonable and natural feelings with isolation and shame. It’s a great way to control people, but all it offers us is a frustrated rage and yet another avenue to be exploited.

In the history of the circus, elephants were chained as babies to heavy chairs to train them not to move. These elephants could easily walk free years later, but their minds kept them still beside the same chair, now dwarfed by their adult bodies. Like the elephants, we learn to fear our chains before we’re strong enough to test them. Fear and shame are most effective when self-inflicted, and we are encouraged to partake in cowering and masochism from the moment we can comprehend social instruction. Not long after that comes the sudden anguish and emotional roller coaster puberty brings as we’re pushed into social identities we aren’t quite ready for. If you can’t relate to someone who seems “crazy” to you, imagine living in that adolescent confusion for most of your life.

The words we use for mental illness are always too weak or too divisive. In treatment it’s good to have a defined condition, but we all too often defined by condition. The instant you slap a name on something, it’s in a box. It’s ridiculous to stigmatize something that almost everyone feels on some level. Are we just trying to protect ourselves by classifying these kinds of pain as something that happens to a mythical group known as “other people” so we can tell ourselves we’re okay, or are we living in the largest possible version of a toxic relationship, convinced we have to persist despite the red flags in all directions? The way people talk to those suffering with depression and anxiety is as cruel and useless as the way children are banished to the corner in kindergarten.

I work with kids every day. Many of them are stigmatized as “combative” for being who they are, and it’s maddening. It’s crazy to punish kids for being bored in school, which is often indeed boring. How often have you been excited in a classroom? Rather than find ways to medicate and alienate them, we would do well to invest in an education system that can engage and stimulate them. It’s equally mad, then, to punish adults for being frantic and morose in a man-made world of control systems which create this precise state of affairs instead of reaching out to heal and free them. I hope you like soapboxes, because mine is glued to both feet.

When our speech or behavior suggests the status quo may not be ideal, the social machinery defends itself automatically. It’s like in The Matrix where random people become Agent Smith as the control grid responds to resistance. Security software overwrites their personalities until they have beaten down the perceived threat into silence. Verbal weapons are employed as a way to label people who are confronting hard truths and feeling the effects of stark realities as “nuts.” This masks new paradigms as mythologies, paints contrasting information as noise, and reduces human beings to grim statistics. It is all too easy to forget that there are real people doing time in these mental prisons. Deemed unacceptable, the depression and anxiety that come from resistance to toxicity are ignored or treated as shameful glitches rather than what they are: a set of nuanced, personal reactions to the baffling, challenging world in which we all tend to play someone else’s game.

The problem on the level of the individual is triangular: one of hardware, software, and environment. The brain is a marvel, but like our unique spine, it burns the candle twice as bright for half the time. It’s very needy, actually. It requires just enough water, just the right fats, just the right sugars, just the right blood pressure, and just the right temperature. Missing any of these marks by too much can turn the sanest of us into bleary-eyed raging beasts, and over the years we’ve adapted to running just under par with regard to all of the above for most of a lifetime. An alarming number of people, and I was one, are proud of living on fumes for years. About a quarter of your day’s calories go into brain activity, so imagine the strain when health is an afterthought. We’re also marinating in stress hormones due to the frenetic, always-on way we live. We get rewarded for ignoring this in the service of the machinery, but it does catch up with us all. Neurons wear out under stress in the same way that cheap extension cords burn up under too high an electric load. This dials down the quality of our thinking, leading to all manner of bad decisions and domino effects.

What we know as culture is our software, or programming, the operating system that we pick up as we grow up. It is installed and maintained by language, because it is through language that we define and understand our world. The final layers of personality we choose as adults, though much is installed in the developing minds of children and reinforced over a lifetime by habit and media. Our original programmers are our parents and teachers. They screw us up a bit in the process, but in large part they mean well. A few layers down, it can be seen that they are acting out their own programming, and in some cases, they’re cooperating with us to break old curses. It’s best to try and forgive them and empower ourselves to correct these mistakes. Otherwise the malignant aspects of culture are repeated and enforced with no real logic beyond the will toward traditionalism. Whatever your experience, I am pleased to remind you that we can delete the code that steals our joy and reprogram ourselves as the need arises. For every human alive today, that time has come.

Our environment is one of great situational stress, often seen as collateral damage in a cycle of endless growth which could never have worked out. We’re taught to push it all down and ignore it, and this taxes the software in ways that cause harm to the hardware. This bubbles up from bad thinking into the realm of wrongful acts, which create more stress for ourselves and others. Vicious cycles take hold which create self-destructive behavior loops. Once repetition breeds habit, those of us under the spell can feel powerless, but I submit that in all but the most extreme cases, the game is not lost if we’re willing to play it consciously. It took a lifetime to get to where you’re sitting now, and it won’t be undone overnight for any of us, but we can control and even reverse these behaviors if we learn and understand the mechanisms behind them and how our choices open us to new realms of experience. Getting the facts helps us cast off fictions.

Up to now I’ve presented a pretty unpleasant picture. I have a lot of practice with that, because my internal environmental threat scanner is overactive and loud. It works well when it works and it’s an exhausting drama farm when it doesn’t. Please do know that problems are only one side of things, even though they’re easier to talk about than solutions. Too often we get caught up in the shock cycle and never progress to solutions. To invert the dark triad of damaged hardware, infected software and crumbling environment, we will have to initiate self-repair, assist others in the same, and radiate our newfound light. In time, our software will be tailored to our will and wisdom, and our hardware will recuperate. A world of more liberated beings can regenerate all the lost limbs of the last ten thousand years or so. If we’re blinded by fear, we won’t be able to change things in our scrambling fits, and we’ll depart history without learning its lessons. That would be a serious waste of our turn. We must learn how to see the world in multiple ways at once. We must look without flinching at the bore and gore that stain experience. We must learn how we reflect and shape reality within our skulls. We must learn to see with the eyes of the heart and know that everyone bears some of this load.

We find ourselves in strange days in which veils and scales are slipping from our eyes. We’re beginning to see that the modern world is at once a terrarium and a farm and that there are those who look at us rather like pets and livestock. The real world, the one we knew before kingdoms and borders, is still there at our elbows. Escape from the trance of the Verbal Hologram to the deeper language of the spirit is attainable and the solutions are much simpler than the problems. Even struggles with soul-crushing pain can offer paths for transformation and in time can even be seen as good fortune with hindsight. When we take the reigns and remake the rules of our subjective reality, our world unfolds from a light-less prison cell into the possibility that was always there. When I suggest we play the game, I do not mean we should be flippant about reality, but that we do well to engage with circumstance rather than being passive pawns.

Before I go any further, I must acknowledge that for some people, the problems truly are rooted at the hardware level in the form of electrochemical imbalance, or their software is caught in a ghost-loop processing unspeakable trauma within their environment. In these cases the resultant glitches and their coping programs may run too deep to be corrected by the effort of an activated will alone, and a combination of catharsis, therapy and medication may be the only way to get a foothold on progress. I feel compelled to say that no one of the above by itself is likely to be enough on its own for some folks. We must push for a system that supports recovery for all who need it, not just those who can afford it. In my professional and private experience, I have seen medication transform lives for the better by enabling the rest of the work to feel possible enough to engage with. After that, the real healing comes, but it’s the work of a life time and most of us just want a quick fix.

Medication is often treated as a panacea, and much of it is driven more by profit than by kinder motives. Much as the needs of a population in physical pain resulting from lifestyle were cheerfully met by the industrialization of opium, I have suspicions that masking deeper issues or the natural flux of childhood with numbing agents is too common a practice in treatment of mental illness. Here in America, antipsychotics and antidepressants are prescribed regularly for children. Part of my job is uncovering what accommodations can be made to help a child’s circumstances fit them better rather than trying to force the other way around. Can a developing brain be ready for such complex medications? I’m no pharmacist, but I reckon more is at play here than these legal drug cartels care to admit. Suicide and homicide are not acceptable side effects. We’ve got a ways to go, but the paradigms are opening up to include bold new therapies and more holistic approaches.

I don’t mean to demean anyone’s journey to wellness, and certainly I welcome progress in whatever form it takes. The worst case scenarios don’t happen to everyone. Taking the right pills can give some people enough of an edge to gain the momentum needed for breaking cycles and taking the reigns. For others, therapy is the way out of their dark, dark wood or soul sucking swamp. Counseling depends upon resonance with the therapist (not guaranteed) and in the current health care system most people can’t afford the price of admission or the years of hours it takes to see progress. In time, I hope to see that change. If pills, therapy, or a combination thereof are working for you, bless you and keep at it. Do what works and climb at your pace. My aim here is not to demean or to sell cures but to offer you a means to help yourself, with or without the above. I’ve made it my mission to experiment on myself and report to you what has worked in the absence of access to the go-to solutions. What you read here is road-tested and hard won. My goal is to empower your own pursuit of happiness, and my hope is that you will finish this book with the ability to make more informed choices, opting out of aspects of cultural programming that cause unnecessary suffering.

I think self-realization is what’s missing in this culture. Initiation into the mysteries of life has been replaced by a checklist of mandated goals to cross off in order to prove adulthood to others rather than to know worth for yourself. I believe our mounting misery as a species is evidence of growing awareness that many aspects of our modern way of life are not good for human beings or anything that lives around us. I believe that only remembering our place in nature and reconnecting to it will free us from what John Perkins has called “a death economy.” I believe we are liberated by understanding the effects of complying with the rules of the established game. Playing along harms our bodies, limits our minds, and starves our spirits. There was always another way. It waits for us, but not forever.

I am not speaking from an ivory tower and I offer no “correct” perspective. I am neither expert nor guru. I am a stranger coming to you as a friend, offering a transfer of practical tactics and insight that I hope will serve you. Mine is one point of view. Yours may well vary, and I have no issue with that. I have always had a drive toward questioning authority, and that extends even to mine as the dominant voice in this book. People can share ideas, but only your experience can give you the beginnings of real wisdom. A world where we could all bounce these insights off each other without reflexive conflict would be a lot closer to the one we dream about.

In reading this book and experimenting with its suggestions, I hope you will have the freedom to find your own meaning in these models, which in time will give you more power to deal with these conditions. People find courage more easily when they perceive a righteous battle, so let’s lay it out. From here on, we will view all forms of fear-based behaviors in our minds and in the world as heads of the same Hydra, which we have named earlier as Adversary. We will see all the forms of love as aspects of Ally, the unseen web of interdependent intelligence that stitches and communicates with all things. We should recognize right up front that everyone is a mix of each, and that in the end the battlefield is in our hearts and minds. Our task is to liberate ourselves of Adversary’s grasp by aligning more fully with Ally. To do this, we will adopt the character of an Aspirant, another way of saying “one who quests,” and begin the journey to rediscover ourselves and our power through comprehension, action, and balance.

There’s a bit of irony here, since those of us who are not content to play along with exploitation games are ourselves seen as adversaries to the status quo, which I call The Con. I assert that those of us who suffer social vertigo don’t “fit in” because we have resisted being milled down by The Con into the shapes that fit its needs and that our world is in turmoil because we’re living contrary to everything else in it, whether we mean to or not. Perhaps life is hard not because we compete but because we forget to collaborate. We’ll explore that in greater detail as we go, but for now, I will accept the badge of well-meaning curmudgeon with honor.

If this is all seems a bit dramatic, that’s because it is. Doesn’t this moment in time feel like a movie? The contrast is exaggerated, the sound shakes your bones, and the deja vu is constant. There’s a palpable shift in the background energies. Some dormant part of the human oversoul, whatever it is that’s seen us through the great catastrophes of the past, is being called back on stage. We’re in the crunch and it’s time to take back the wheel before the tires of this jalopy skid right off the cliff of history. We have to clear out the infections in our hearts and minds and then get a chain reaction going. Only in this way can we reverse what I call The Curse and remember what it is to truly live.

Humans find strength in our stories, and imagination is how we build our personal worlds. We all knew the power of imagination as children, when playing “pretend” opened our minds to infinite possibility. This was a big clue as to how our relationship with reality can actually work for our whole lives. There’s a case to be made that the people “running” the world have taught their own children this secret for generations. We in the other 99 percent have allowed ourselves to be shrunk to fit into roles by the hammering of circumstance, but we never lost the ability. The problem is not that we can’t create reality, the problem is that we’ve been using it wrong. We pretend that we “must” do all kinds of things we hate, and that we “can’t” do the things we love. Where do you reckon that point of view came from? Who is it useful to? Who would you be without that mindset? To a degree, we must surrender to That Which Is, but you can swim with the current without being swept away by it. That’s how you do magic, which, by the way, is still as real as when you were first learning to play.

You’d be hard pressed to find a story of a hero’s quest or a game worth playing that didn’t include obstacles and enemies along the way. Our predicament is no different. In setting up a framework for life as game, I employ terms like The Curse to stand in for the chronic anxiety and depression that strip so many of even the ability to imagine another way of life. They are often viewed as separate conditions, but it seems that one may flow into another. In my experience they tend to be entangled. I think of them as psychic parasites, and in this book we will treat them as if they were material creatures so that we can identify their traits, habits, life cycle, the ways they spread, and the means by which to be free of them. In this way we can move from being victims to healing ourselves on our own terms. Curses can be broken, when you’re ready.

If you’ve lived with these conditions at all, chances are that people who don’t understand the gravity or intensity of your experience will tell you to cheer up or calm down, but we all know it’s never that simple. Their various combinations and forms are subjective experiences, so the burdens are different for everyone. Any good strategy employs a multi-pronged approach rather than relying on one catch-all game plan. Real change comes not from forced emotional gear-shifting but from understanding, empathy with self and others, and the mental exercise that rebuilds the brain. Go into the cave, brave the beasts, and bring out the wisdom.

When first responders come upon a wreck or fire, they act suddenly but not recklessly. They have to assess the scene before proceeding to rescue and treatment, and we must do the same here. We will take some time to examine the state of things, both to offer new perspective to veterans of inner war and to offer insight to people who have never plumbed the depths. We will also explore the nature of Adversary and its roots, since it does not grow in a vacuum. What we dismiss as a case of the blues on the surface is the result of many factors that must first be recognized and then addressed.

After we have come to an understanding about these problems and those who live with them, I will present a plan to aid those withering in its grip to get control over their inner battles and begin the transformation to a more fulfilling life. Don’t worry; it’s not a “get rich quick” scheme. It’s simple, but it isn’t easy. You’ll work, but you’ll keep what you earn. I believe the way to mend the bruised mandala of human experience is to understand our predicament and then work on what we can in our individual lives, using the old axiom “As above, so below; as within, so without.”

There are very good reasons we’re miserable and angry that go well beyond mismatched neurotransmitters. I can only speak to life in America, but at least here, it’s a new Dark Age. Education is bleeding to death as it plummets to last priority, and politicians are trying to phase out critical thinking on all sides in a world that never needed it more. The manufacturing base has been moved to places where people will work for nothing in conditions born of nightmares. Cities are going bankrupt. Laws are made in secret to serve corporations at the expense of people and all life on Earth. People act like racism is over but the struggle for equality is ramping up everywhere. Police departments are being militarized and the worst among their ranks are being let off the hook for rape and murder. A new excuse to shrink liberties is always arriving right on time. Our phones are tapped and our movements are tracked. Our taxes always seem to fund horror instead of its remedy.

People can’t afford the care they need. Social programs are being ground up to feed The Great Beast and if things go on this way they won’t even exist within a generation. War and consumerism are expanding as we grasp at dwindling resources to fuel a dying empire. Millions can’t afford to eat anything but addictive chemical cocktails packaged as food. Many thousands of jobs were lost, maybe forever to government incompetence and predatory politics. We are not secure, and the power structures offer only self-serving lies. Our leaders aren’t leading. They aren’t even listening anymore. It’s up to us to change all this. I know how heavy this all is, but I still believe in people. I must.

Despite engineered ignorance and mesmerizing media, everybody already knows deep down that we’re locked in the trunk of a car that’s on fire and headed for a sharp drop. It would be easy to stop at sounding the alarm, but that would be as empty as pretending that nothing is wrong. We can resign ourselves to ruin and die with a whimper or we can gnaw through our ropes, pick the lock, and bail out just in time, like in all our favorite stories. We’d all love it if aliens or time travelers or God would show up and bail us out, but we made this mess and nobody’s coming to save us. Why not opt for self-liberation while there’s still time on the clock?

There’s a reason for the rise of post-apocalyptic and dystopian themes in media in the last generation. Utopias are always thought experiments. We never seem to work out how to get to those dreamy destinations, and it always feels like such a gamble to give up the world we know. What’s certain is that we can’t go on like this. We’re exhausted and pissed off. We yearn for a better way. To sum up, we’re screwed, but there’s hope. Historically, humans seem to have a tendency to take abuse right to the limit before rising up against their oppressors with the fury of generations behind them. “Play it again, Sam. Play it for me.”

External revolutions shake things up and pacify angry mobs, but without complementary changes in human character and society at large, the familiar machine always reassembles itself in the shape of whatever took it down. Revolution is just turning the same circles. Revelation is what we need. I believe we can find a new way and will continue to strike for change at the right moments. First we’ve got to get ourselves in order. We have to start with the inner reflections of those oppressive regimes to access our full power for the greater fight, and I think people are just about ready. If you’re reading this, you already are. Get that oxygen mask on yourself first before you try to save anybody else.

Isolation is among the most painful states of being that exist, whether it is real or imagined. These days, it has become suddenly real for most of the people on earth, at least for the short term. Before we go on, know this: You may feel little connection to people around you, you may be estranged from your family, you may feel or even be treated like an alien, you may feel that you have no friends or that love will always elude you, and these feelings are all valid and horrible, but despite all this, please know that you are not alone.You might not know it from this introduction, but I am happier now than I have ever been and find myself growing up at last. Like you, I would guess, deep beneath my genuine gratitude I often find a certain amorphous sadness. Deep and mournful as the song of a humpback whale, it’s the local echo of a sound which permeates everything, the cry of a weary world exhausted and longing to return to balance with itself. It’s not just you. At some point, it’s all of us. We answered the humpback’s call and brought it back from extinction. Let’s keep that trend going.

I’ll say it again, because I know how loud the dark is: You are not alone. You are also not crazy, just a human being in pain. You are not a leper. You are not a fool. You are a point of light in a crowded darkness, and your struggle to shine and thrive reflects a greater cry for the fundamental change and deep healing needed by all. Most of all, know that this transformation can and will happen inside you, and that it will spread out from there. If you’re rolling your eyes, all that tells you is that the part of you holding on to pain is defending itself. You’ve let the disease run the shop for long enough. Time is of the essence. The world needs you, and the game needs changing before the clock runs out.

Hopelessness is a dead end, whether we are speaking of our interior struggles or the outer conflicts that threaten the world. The most punk rock, beautiful thing you can do is to see the truth behind the lies and accept your part of the Great Work that can turn your life and the human story around. The game of the skull-crushers, The Con and Curse of Adversary, is woven for an outcome that doesn’t serve life at large. I’ll tell you a secret: Adversary loses either way, because its vision of the world is unsustainable. But rather than allow it to choke reality to death, we can gradually take back the controls. We don’t need to play along anymore. We can transcend and change our own realities through disconnecting from the Death Grid and reconnecting to the place where we’re all connected. It’s “All One or All None,” just like the label on the hippie soap says.

The first part is the hardest: choosing to see, know, and accept who you are before moving on to discovering who you can be and what you’re capable of when you don’t live like you hate yourself. That sounds harsh, but it shines a light on a secret we all share. On some level, we do hate ourselves, otherwise we wouldn’t allow all this horror to go on, much less help it spread. Self-loathing is a sort of coping mechanism we’ve developed to shoulder the guilt that comes with compliance. Like much of what we’ll discuss, it runs very deep, but this disease need not be terminal. Cooperation with Adversary through violence and melodrama is optional, and it relies on compliance for existence. Re-read that line as often as necessary. I have to remind myself every day.

You don’t need to waste any more energy hating yourself or projecting your pain onto others. Everything is connected, so in the end you’re only hitting yourself. We fall into patterns, and become automatic, but even the most robotic of us can be reprogrammed where there’s a will. You may have noticed that lashing outward and inward in anger doesn’t accomplish much but increasing the amount of money you spend on coping mechanisms. Hate is the easy road, but we’ve been duped if we think hate of self or others will solve our problems. We can keep trying that until we’re out of bridges to burn, or we can turn things around at the next opportunity. Remember, it’s behavior that sucks. People are just people, and love really is the answer. Puke if you need to, it’s true.

Beneath the programming what we all need and want is to be part of the solution instead of fuel for the problem, and it’s a goal we can all reach. I can’t know what you’re going through as you read these lines, but I can tell you this: With time and work, you're going to be fine. The world may indeed devolve further into dystopian nightmares, but it’s less likely to do that if we all work toward being self-actualized, self-empowered individuals. Such people can resist solo or band together, but they won’t be dissolved in the stomach of Adversary. In the grip of The Curse, pain feels eternal, but in reality everything changes. You need not be dragged down or beaten up by circumstance or the wiles of The Con. You need not be a slave to the game you were born into. You can instead choose to play your own game, and now we will talk about how to begin.

To become an Aspirant does not require that you become a true believer in any of the concepts laid out here, but for the purpose of game play, it will help to temporarily believe all of it, or at least augment your existing worldview by adding these elements into the mix. Think of the concepts in this book as metaphorical handles for things that are otherwise a bit hard to talk about. If you dive in with mind and heart open to the ideas presented, you may be surprised at the changes that happen in your experience. You may even find that the difficulty levels start sliding down toward easier play as you allow new ideas into your programming.

Let us acknowledge a hard truth together. Any game has levels of difficulty that color the experience of playing it. The catch is that the less conscious we are of the games we play, the harder those games are. In modern times most people are too busy trying to keep up with the standards and celebrities to realize that they have no reality beyond bait laid to drive mass behavior. What’s even more tragic is that most people, myself and probably you included, are playing life at the highest available difficulty level, through habit or by choice. Most of us have never even considered that we have access to the control panel. You don’t get a magic remote that gives you what you want all the time, but what you can have is awareness of your inner workings and how to tweak them to play a far more active role in the unfolding of your life.

In life, there are those who see themselves as shapers of fate and those who see themselves as its victims. Have you ever seen a painting of St. Sebastian, the Catholic martyr? He’s usually depicted as tied to a tree and shot full of arrows. Over the course of human existence, the majority of people accepted their lot in life with a bit of grit and did what they had to do to survive and improve their situation. We’re alive because they did. Over decades, things have shifted and many if not most of us are now programming ourselves daily to be professional victims. We may not be tied to trees, but we feel we’re tied forever to bad jobs, unhealthy relationships, or mental illness. We may not be perforated with projectiles, but we take a lot of random and trivial events so personally that they might as well be arrows with our names on them. Many of us play as Sebastian, and I certainly have.

Martyrdom has a strange magnetism. It feels so much better to tell ourselves we can’t help how we are, how we feel, or what our life looks like. If you take the narrative of this culture as a reflection of reality, it seems as though some people are just born with it all and the rest of us are just fuel for their trips. Now on a grand scale there is clear class warfare and a genuine fake upper class that I call The Champagne Club. There are real groups doing real harm through media and government and industry, because that kind of power attracts the morally bereft. At the level of the individual, cleaner power is available through choice. It’s no wonder then that individuality is so promoted when it fits the status quo and met with so much scorn when it offers a path to personal freedom and beneficial mutation. Don’t suck up to The Champagne Club. They only let outsiders in to eat them.

Just about as long as I have been able to read, I’ve been reading people’s wild speculations about who’s running all this. Like most things, you can find evidence for just about any theory, no matter how wild, and honestly I honor and bless the “conspiracy theorists” of this world who keep their minds open throughout the search. I believe the seekers among us are motivated by a desire to find a way to help everybody, but a lot of them get stuck in the flypaper of grandiose blame games. The world gets weirder the deeper you dig, and genuinely anything can happen here. You can’t blame people for looking. But in the end, no Illuminati or supernatural threat can screw us like we screw ourselves by our own misguided will. This is not an easy position to accept. I challenge you to meet this ugliness head on and proceed in order to process and overcome it. Cuss a blue streak and put the book down now and then. You can pick it up later, and when you do read it, you can ignore what you don’t find helpful. I do hope you’ll test it first. Whether you agree with my point of view or not, you’re ready to do the work, and that’s what matters to me.

So how do we start this journey? I’d suggest turning the page, in every sense of the word.