You are Here!
At this moment, there is an incredible amount of energy and money being spent to make you feel tiny, insignificant, powerless, and disposable. You are none of these, even if you’ve never felt that truth. So, right off the bat, it is my job to remind you and your job to remember that your life is much bigger than you think it is, that your power is much greater than it may feel, and that you have the ability to transform yourself and the world around you. You are one of many places where ideas are brought into reality, and that includes the reality of yourself and who you get to be. Don’t be the screen, my friend, be the projector. Most of us are hypnotized in a parasitic trance that thrives on misery, but I am here to nudge you toward bursting its most local bubble, which is in your head. If you don’t already know, you’re about to find out how big you really are.
Congratulations are in order, stranger and friend. You and I and everyone we know are smack dab in the middle of the most complex version of the Universe to date. This is the most interesting time to be alive. Billions of years and trillions of events have led to this very special instant. Life has produced a species that has shaped an entire planet and has the power to transform its own destiny. A human being can examine its present, ruminate upon its past, and speculate about its future. We might be the only form of life in an unfathomable amount of space that can do this. We are co-creators of this world, doing it all the time whether we intend to or not. You can see what’s happened in our sleepwalking. It’s time to wake up, and show up for work.
At the risk of being obvious in a time that seems to scream it from every corner of every rooftop, we are at a critical moment in our history and development. Humans as a group have many vital choices to make, right now and with no more time to ponder. You and I can and must liberate and evolve ourselves as individuals, and our choices will shape the fate of the species. At this moment we are being carried by a current that leads to a huge, vital fork in the road. Down one road, we wake up, transcend the damage done and build Heaven. Down the other, we stay ignorant and automatic and keep making sand castles in Hell.
It’s a pretty big deal, but you’ve got your share of what it takes. What makes you yourself is not what people think of you, what people pay you to do or say about you; it’s what you do from your heart and imagination. We are told many times and in many ways that only some of us are special enough to shine, but that’s a lie in support of a system that prefers us to be passive consumers worshipping program-approved short-term idols instead of bringing our own light out. A world where everyone wakes up to those inner gifts and puts them into service would be Heaven indeed. The one we’re used to seems the inverse of that, if you really start to pay attention to how it works. Regardless of that, here’s a reminder: you are here, now, and you matter. Your talents are required in a larger mission. Your voice and message are essential. Are you up for it? I very much hope so, and on another level, I’m sure you are.
It is as much a duty as an honor to be alive at this surreal, knife-edge moment in human history. Most of us feel crazy trying to keep up as the world flip-flops between progress and dystopia. We are each experiencing life from different perspectives, and all have our own dreams and nightmares, but we share this tide of events and reactions through which the human experience is sculpted as it moves through history. Our own lives can be every bit as unstable as the rest of the cosmos, but if we’re clever, we can help to balance things out as we go. We all go through waves of emotion that range from stunning bliss to pitch black nights of the soul. We trust in sinister myths which promise steady-state happiness. "All problems solved forever and nothing will ever hurt again. Call right now and make Three E-Z Payments of everything you have until you’re dead!"
All who’ve made that call have found that the thing that came in the mail was not what we thought we ordered. When disappointment shocks us out of believing the endless sales pitch we call everyday life, we start to assume one of two things. Either we’re the victims of some Other, who steals our joy, or there’s something wrong with us, and not the bigger picture. Reality is somewhere between. We’ve become convinced that we must earn the experiences most crucial to our survival: happiness, empathy, love, and peace (HELP for short). You can’t earn your birthright, but you can reclaim it. There’s plenty of work to do, but the rewards don’t always come in the way we expect. Competition replaced cooperation as the main mode of play out there, so we act as though we’re all wrestling for the last grain of rice, or the last roll of toilet paper as so many did not long ago. There’s more than enough to go around if we treat each other as equals, which we are. Where pockets of this resistance to the trance form, HELP follows.
Spoiler Alert Number One: The world is a trap (But it’s also a game).
We've each gotten stuck on some strand in a web of confusion. The fear of not being “normal” or “correct” is an ancient and terrible pain, so the pied pipers playing all around us are very seductive. We walk backward and follow the weathered dance steps painted on the path without asking why. There are a great number of groups, symbols, and systems out there vying for our attention. They attempt to gain influence over our behavior by playing into our desire for peace. Some mean well, and some mean very ill indeed. They only have what we give them; remember that. Claiming victim-hood provides an answer but not a way out. Only claiming responsibility can do that. We are here to take care of ourselves, each other, and our world, but our lives are more like a to-do list we can’t remember writing. We yearn for a life free of the spiritual nausea brought on by all this turbulence. This is how the hooks get baited. When you're looking for answers, remember that this is your life. You do well to listen at a deeper level than the spectacle these side-shows offer our senses. I can tell you this because we're after the same thing. I’m meeting you here on this page, in the dream we both inhabit. I hope that I can talk you into finding your own way to truth and freedom. I won’t promise you an easy road there, and nobody who’s genuine can.
Spoiler Alert Number 2: A transformation is happening.
All around us we see apocalypse. Most people think that means doomsday, and it’s not exactly a birthday party out there, but the true meaning of the word is “unveiling.” Layers of illusion are being torn away, and a bedrock of truth is being uncovered. In the wake of these revelations, long obsolete and corrupt structures are starting to crumble. Plague, war, famine and fire are spreading, but in the wake of these dark horsemen room is being made for the change that is essential and overdue. Now is the time for us to be honest with ourselves about our role in replacing social graveyards with community gardens. It's time to talk about what we’re doing as a species and as individuals that keeps us from peace.The madness we flee from comes when we struggle to replace what is with what "ought to" be happening. This doesn't mean not to act, but we have to put our energies in the right places.
This game of masters and servants gets dressed up as fair play where anyone can work their way up to the top. In truth quite a lot of us wind up as stepping stones or fuel for someone else’s ascent. Everywhere you look, people get stacked like bricks. The masses bear the weight of a so-called “elite” who have divorced reality and left us like so many displaced children. Take heart, for that only goes on so long as we play along with their game rather than directing our own. The world is as it is because we are being used as a machine to print out the world a few people want, and we haven’t all noticed yet.
You can take step one right now: pledge to make yourself the master of your experience. Royalty is an accident of birth, and most authority is arbitrary. If you want a boss, hire yourself! No one is more qualified. We didn’t set out to put sinister forces at the controls, but over centuries, we’ve given away freedom and responsibility to those who promised security. The eternal grift is “we’ll protect you from A by taking B which leaves you vulnerable to C,” and so on through the whole set. Maybe that’s why they call them the alphabet agencies. It doesn’t matter if you lean blue or red, since it’s all about the green in the end.
Running things ourselves is much harder than going along to get along, and in our laziness we're drifting into the mouth of an old anglerfish, following the dim light of relative convenience. Dozens of movies and books have tried to warn us, but we’re in denial. The darkness doesn’t come dressed the same way twice. It always takes the form of the times. We’ve got an addiction to authority, and the pushers are eager to please. It’s time to get clean. Falling in line on the well-worn road has led us to a world of incredible inequality and unnecessary pain.
Obedience and complacency are invoking an age of extinction and endless conflict. We cooperate with and are betrayed by systems that claim to work for progress. Nothing much changes except the rhetoric, the names, the faces, and the scapegoats. That keeps us numb and complicit, so things lurch toward the point of no return. A lot of us are like zombies on this dread-mill. Every few years we’re encouraged to vote the pain away, but the real work is done moment to moment, when you elect within yourself to do the right thing. We have to wake up, reanimate, and remember who we really are.
Maybe we’re not the walking dead so much as unwitting survivors of mass generational trauma: PTSD by degrees on a grand scale, so common as to seem invisible. We compare our pain to that of others, and we pretend ours doesn’t count as much. Anxiety and depression are being normalized rather than looked at as canaries in the coal mine. Increasing numbers of people feel hollow, frantic, and disconnected. Alienation and isolation were everywhere even before the quarantines, which just made it obvious. A lot got worse behind closed doors. Despite the veil of antisocial media and its corporate connectivity, we are increasingly cut off from the organic connections and community we thrive on in favor of a hyper-polarization that can only suffocate us. Some people do not hide their pain as well as others, and these we brand “defective” and dismiss to the fringes. There is an obvious spectrum of privilege, but in some way we are each pushing up the boulder of an unsustainable way of life. If we allow the current arrangement with authority to continue, the system it perpetuates will consume and destroy everything we know and love. Nobody is coming to save us from ourselves.
So that’s the bad news. Don't worry, though, there’s good news too.
Spoiler Alert Number 3: You’re not crazy or doomed.
The way a handful of humans play at running the world and the way the rest of us treat our home is insane and overwhelming, but it's not insurmountable. Every game has turns, and one can only hog the board for so long before the stakes change. We tend to love stories of superheroes more than ever these days, but the magic you need in this moment has always been there inside you, waiting to be activated. A system of kaleidoscopic madness has enveloped you in disinformation about your worth and power so it can use your magic to create the world it wants rather that the one you deserve. You can transcend it by ending the trance. One by one, we all can.
We can each find all the places inside us where we’ve made agreements with our little demons. We can turn those contracts into tinder. Rather than continue to suffer the stench we can dig down to where the poison leaks into the groundwater and cap it off. Rather than waiting on the cavalry, we can liberate ourselves and each other. All it requires is that we redirect our energy, time and money. Divesting from what drains the juice from our lives and investing in what brings us back to our best is the way out.
When we first start to see the situation as it is, it can be overwhelming and the gravity makes it hard to know where to begin. We feel crazy and people love to confirm it so they don’t have to admit their own confusion. Let’s start where we are, at the crossroads of Here and Now. In this condition we call normal life, we are born and live and die in the latest version of a rigged game as old as civilization, but fighting our way out of nightmares is what us peasants have always done. We aren’t guaranteed to lose, but we are playing without being privy to the rules that a few people have known all along. Beneath the programming and the pain, what we need and want is the same. Each of us would love to be part of the solution instead of feeding the problem, and it’s a goal we can all reach. Pendulums feed on the energy they’re given. A little change in the way you interact with this world can change the form it takes for you. Shifts happen.
I can’t know what you’re going through as you read these lines, but I can tell you one thing as a veteran of my own ongoing inner war. With time and work, it does get better. What you’re going through now is preparing you for what’s to come. My aim in this book is to convince you to reclaim and redirect your energy. If we settle for things as they are, our lives may indeed become more and more bleak and our world may indeed devolve further into Orwellian nightmares. It’s much less likely to do that if we all work toward being self-empowered individuals.
We owe it to ourselves and each other to exhume our best selves from the graves we may have dug for them in our minds. We can resist one by one or band together, but either way we won’t be food for the parasite class or our inner demons anymore. Mental anguish can feel eternal, but everything changes. You need not get dragged down or beaten up by circumstance or illusion. The game you were born for is not the game you were raised in, and your turn to play is ready when you are.