I’ll be hosting a weekend retreat at the Omega Institute, August 28-30. Story Medicine: Healing the Story of Separation. It will revolve around story, and its relation to civilization and consciousness. How our stories change and how we change with them. It will be an immersion in a way of thinking that draws from a different story than what prevails today. Beliefs are not simply thoughts in the head—those are just the outer layer of a state of being. That’s why it isn’t such an easy thing to change your beliefs and the stories you tell yourself. Change can happen, though, through the power of attention to bring unconsciously operating beliefs into consciousness.

Then from September 10-13 I’ll be at the World Ayahuasca Forum in Spain. It is an interesting format: half indigenous, half non-indigenous. There are powerful currents moving around this event. Although I am not personally much of an ayahuasca drinker, I have tremendous respect for this and all the plant (and other) medicines. In fact, I don’t think human civilization could make it through the present passage without them. They are among the most powerful solvents eroding the Story of Separation.

I hope to see some of you at one of these events.

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Please listen with a good speaker or headphones, when you have time to really drop in.

Deep gratitude to Sam and the musicians and vocalists. I am so grateful to you for bringing these words to life.

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I don’t mean to be dismissive by calling any of this a “mythology.” Myths are vehicles for truth, whether literal or not.

Some years ago, I began sharing the following story, titled The Courtship of Tara. I was only vaguely aware of Tara’s role in various mythologies. The name just came to me. The water rises from many springs.

The Courtship of Tara

The World-man is the collective being of all humanity in its masculine aspect, the oversoul of mankind. He is a vast and magnificent being; every man who ever lived is one of his cells.

Once not too long ago he was full of vigor and zest, eager to create, eager to build bigger and higher, better and more, oblivious to the consequences. But recently he has looked upon the body of the earth his mother, Mother Gaia, and his stirrings of unease have turned to grief and alarm. Because, it is apparent that Mother Gaia is very ill.

One day the World-man goes to Mother Gaia and says, “Mother, you are not well. I am afraid for you. I believe I have taken too much and too recklessly. Tell me what I can do.”

She repies, “I am not just sick, I am dying. And when I die, when my animating spirit has departed the world, life systems on earth will collapse. The whales will die. The fish will die. The oceans will die. The forests, the frogs, the insects, all will perish. All but you, humanity. You will not die, but you will be alone, my son, alone in your climate-controlled cities, eating lab-grown food, with only digital simulations of the life you have destroyed.”

“That’s terrible! Oh mother, is there no hope? I will try to do better. I will do less harm. I will leave a lighter footprint. I will implement sustainable growth, how about that?”

“It is too late for that, far too late,” says Mother Gaia. “I am dying.”

“No! Let me die instead. Earth will be better off without me. I’ll erase civilization. I’ll go back to being hunter-gatherers. I’ll go extinct so life can thrive.”

Anger flashes in Mother Gaia’s eyes. “Do you think I birthed you for no reason? Do you think you were my big mistake? Do you think I want you to remain a child, or even to die? No. Every gift I have given you, your abilities of hand and mind, and all the materials for civilization, all has a purpose. You will know what that is when you come of age and marry.”

“You see, another feminine spirit desires to animate earth. Her name is Tara. If she comes, earth will blossom in a profusion of life and beauty greater than you have ever known, even in your childhood. And the good news is: Tara is already in love with you. For she will not be your mother as I am, but your lover, your partner. Together you will create much beauty and spread it through the cosmos.”

“Wonderful!” exclaims the World-man. “When is the wedding?”

“Not so fast,” says Gaia. “She is in love with you, but she is not convinced that you are ready or qualified to be her consort. You are going to have to woo her to win her consent. You must show her that you love her, too.”

“How do I do that?”

“With gifts. You must bring her gifts of courtship. You must bring her gifts that demonstrate you love life (for she is the spirit of life) and that you are sincere in your desire to serve life. Only then will she consent to give you her hand.”

Gaia explains, “Every act that any human being does in service to life and beauty lands as a gift into Tara’s lap. Even if no other human admires or acknowledges those acts, Tara does. She sees them and receives them. Any gift to life—human or otherwise--is a gift to Tara, and the more brave and beautiful the gift, the more it will move her. She will approach you, step by step, and as she does earth will burst into new abundance.”

“Yes!” says the World-man. “How much time do I have before I start?”

“There is no more time. You have to start now. You see, my son, I am slipping soon into a coma from which I will never awaken. Already the indigenous people speak of the spirits fleeing the sacred rivers and forests. Already the dying is accelerating. My life systems will fail one by one, and if your courtship is not successful before the last one fails, then you will no longer have any life to which to give. You will have chosen another path.”

“I will begin the courtship now,” says the World-man.

The World-man gazes once more into the fading eyes of his mother. He kisses her hand and whispers goodbye.

Leaving her side, he visits every person on earth. Can you feel him now, urging you to make courtship gifts for Tara? Can you feel his ardor?

Tara is present too. Can you feel her hopeful gaze?

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The second is a tidbit about the generative power of listening. Watch here.

These are both from the retreat I hosted in Maine last month. I’m hosting another, smaller one at the end of August at Omega. Registration link. Last time I announced this I gave the wrong link. Anyway, these two videos exemplify the kind of information we will work with at Omega. I called the event “Story Medicine” because I had to provide a title like a year ago, but I think it will be more around the space between stories.

You’ll notice that the price listed by Omega is lower than for all their other workshops. That is because it subtracts the portion that normally goes to the teacher. It covers your room and board. Beyond that, those who attend can pay whatever feels appropriate, right, clean, and respectful of your financial condition—it could be zero even.

I’ve been working really hard on my book. I just did a word count: it’s around 35,000. I think that’s about a third of what the first draft will be. I’m entering the phase where it seems endless, like I’ll never finish it, but I know from experience that at some point all of a sudden the destination will swing into view.

I think you can connect with that feeling, which visits a lot of situations, not just writing a book. Like raising a child. It seems endless, then all of a sudden its almost over, he’s a teenager. Where did all those years go? Ah, those precious times. This precious life. Endless and so short.

I’m looking for a short excerpt from my book to share with you. The search reminds me why I am writing a book in the first place—when I extract and decontextualize any passage, it becomes something other than what I intended. It sounds cliched, or silly. It invites the reader to make some obvious objection: “Wait, you haven’t thought of this! You haven’t thought of that!”

Notwithstanding all that, here are a couple paragraphs.

Have you had the experience of hearing, “I love you,” and pushing it away, thinking, “If only she knew. If only she saw the real me.” And maybe making a case for yourself that you may deserve some love. After all, your missteps aren’t so very terrible. Not as bad as some people’s. And you were quite justified that one time. At least there were some mitigating circumstances. It wasn’t your fault. Your inner defense attorney makes the case that you do in fact deserve love. Ah, but now the prosecutor enters. The Accuser. The Inquisitor. The Judge. They demolish your alibis. They find you guilty. And you carry that conviction on your permanent record as a secret, pretending it isn’t so, and therefore believing you do not deserve love.

There is a truth in that conviction. You do not “deserve” love. Love comes whether you deserve it or not, whether you have earned it or not. Love, and all you have struggled for in the inner courtroom. This is the meaning of mercy. The giver does not review the court records and decide that you are worthy after all. She does not even enter the courtroom.

Because I’m working on this book, my publishing on Substack will be scanty. If you do a paid subscription anyway, basically you are supporting the book writing. You can also donate on my website. Thanks everyone!

Charles

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I didn’t think I was going to write another book. There are so many other ways to communicate that better meet today’s short attention spans and fast news cycles. A book takes months or years to write. What could one say about AI or politics or any number of topics when we rush past the landscape at such terrific speed?

I will only write another book, I thought, if the material absolutely has to be in book form.

Well, I’ve started writing another book, probably my final book. It has to be a book and not a series of substack posts because the material requires sustained attention. Substack posts pop up in your inbox and recede down the scroll bar into oblivion. People typically read them during email time or browsing the web time, in contrast to reading a book, which is typically more intentional. The material in this book asks that the reader sit with it, linger over it, return to it, stop and think about it. The book is meant to be an experience in itself.

I’ll share two excerpts from the first draft. Here is the opening paragraph.

The most important thing to know about this book is that a human being wrote it. I did not use AI to generate these words. Why is that important to know? Because when you feel something, you will know you are not alone in feeling it. I was feeling it too—or some kindred feeling. I am feeling something, and so are you, and therefore we are together.

As I write this book, I pause often to feel the reader across time and space. Sometime the pause is for a few seconds, sometimes for longer. I pause until I feel an actual person. It is uncanny and, rationally speaking, implausible that I could feel an authentic connection with a reader I’ll never meet, maybe someone who isn’t even born yet. My intention is that when you read the book, you will have one of those uncanny moments when it seems that the author has written these words directly to you. You won’t be imagining it.

I probably won’t publish with a traditional publisher. I want to retain control over the title, the design, the cover, and the audiobook (if I record one). I may not produce an electronic version—not sure yet—because I envision this book as an object you can hold in your hands. I want it to be beautiful. It will transmit something through its form as well as its content.

I’ve worked on it sporadically over the past year, but only in the last couple weeks has the full vision of it seized me. I’m going to be working on it in earnest the rest of this year and into next. Therefore I’m not going to be posting much writing to Substack. I will still post the occasional podcast or video, however, and maybe some excerpts now and then. Some really special videos are in the pipeline. I won’t be posting on social, political, or technology issues for the time being.

I am very grateful to those who have continued their paid subscription despite my irregular posting. If you continue to subscribe, you will be supporting me and my family as I write the book. You can also donate through my website, one-time or monthly, in any amount you choose. This is crowdsourced patronage—an alternative to monetizing content through ads or paywalls. Beyond the financial support, donations boost my morale. When people send money without getting anything in direct exchange, it inspires me to rise to the level of their trust.

In tone and theme, this book will resemble The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible, but longer and deeper and even more lovingly written. I am in full service to this book. Here is another excerpt:

For the speaker, a truth does not become real until someone hears and understands it.

That means that speaker and listener have an equal power to bring truth into manifestation. It is a joint process, the process of creation, the exercise of the power of fiat.

Fiat. The word has a bad connotation today, used as a term of disparagement to describe federal reserve money: “fiat currency.” Let us reclaim that term, because it refers to a primal creative principle: the power of word. Fiat means, “to speak something into existence.”

God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

Who was the listener, through whom these words became real? Is the listener the divine female counterpart of the male creator God of Genesis? Few Christians seriously ask how God could be male if He is prior to all duality, as “male” makes no more sense without “female” than “short” without “long” or “near” without “far.” Meanwhile, secular people typically dismiss the male creator God as a figment of the patriarchal imagination.

A third possibility beckons, the divine embodiment of the generative power of listening, the feminine power that receives the words of God and even draws them forth. It is she who then becomes pregnant with the seed of creation. Something is always born in the one who listens in full receptivity to the words of another.

Something is always born in the one who listens in full receptivity to the words of another; equally, something is born in the speaker too. Thank you for your attention, your support, and your listening over these years.

Charles

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I am uncomfortable with the title he gave to the podcast, “I was shown the future,” with a subtitle “He was BORN with MEMORIES of the future.” That makes it seem like I’m special in a way that I am not. I believe all of us carry a memory of the future, as a sense that a more beautiful world is possible. That is why we sometimes feel a surge of recognition in those special moments of healing or cooperation, forgiveness, intimacy, effortless collaboration, or trust.

This is what it means to be “shown the future.” I’ve never been taken into a UFO or presented visions in the Great Pyramid or anything like that. The future (in fact, many possible futures) show themselves to us repeatedly throughout life.

I do believe there are special people among us who are granted clairvoyant visions, or are shown possible futures by ETs, or other beings. I am not one of those people. That’s good news, because it means the things I said on the interview are accessible to us “normies” without having to take them on someone else’s authority. I prefer listeners to trust their inner authority instead, which means to listen and, if it rings true, to take it in. It is just that simple.

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As you may have noticed, it has been a while since I have posted anything. There is a reason for that—I am writing a new book. I’ll tell you more about it in my next post. I do have a few things to share now, however.

First, here is a conversation I had with Iain McGilchrist. He is the author of The Master and His Emissary, and one of the most erudite and intellectually creative people I know. We connected a lot of far-flung dots in this conversation. I think you will enjoy it.

Second, on June 23 I will be part of a program for the Peace Activation Network, entitled “Calling Men to Peace.” There are so many women’s peace initiatives around the world—why not men’s? We, after all, are the ones who do most of the fighting.

Finally, I’ll be hosting two in-person events this summer. A five-day retreat in Maine, The Space Between Stories, and a weekend at the Omega Institute in New York, called Story Medicine.

Charles

We can see a lot through the lens of breakdown, of collapse. However, there is a lot we cannot see through that lens.

Also, we can ask, “Which future are we preparing for?” Is the future already determined? Or is it still in a juxtaposition of radically different possibilities? Could it be that those different possibilities are connected to the choices we are making right now? If so, we can do more than passively await it; we can do more, even, than to prepare for it. We can prepare the future.

That what this video is about, starting with a question.

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Reality is escaping its confinement.

I recently read a political article by a radical left writer whom I follow. He said basically that topics like this offer an escape from grim political realities into fantasy and delusion. It is the old “opiate of the masses” position. Ironically though, walling paradigm-breaking topics off from political reality preserves the status quo and locks us in the fruitless struggle of centuries.

The rational materialism that denies the experiences of so many people, including those in non-modernized cultures, underpins the present world order. In a universe in which human beings are the sole source of intelligence, no larger intelligence need be respected. In a universe where the sole causative principle is force, naturally we seek a version of power that requires exerting force over others.

Let us acknowledge and operate from a full picture of what is real, who we are, and what is possible.

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More info and tickets here. You get a 10% discount if you put my name in all caps (CHARLES) in the coupon code box.

My topic is, well, I’m never sure until I step onto the stage. General theme of the event is around science & spirituality, ancient tech and future tech, transformation of civilization, that kind of thing. So I’ll probably hit those themes.

Charles

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The ceremonies this woman conducts are powerful, in that they alter consciousness and induce a sense of the sacred. But what she was referring to was the power of ceremonies to bend reality, to make objects appear and disappear, to distort time and space, to transport people from one location to another, to heal illness and change the weather. One of our group related his experience in Burkina Faso, in a deep festive ritual where the entranced participants would raise their hands to the sky and lower them, and in an instant their costumes had changed. Why do such things rarely happen anymore?

I once read a similar lament from a South American shaman. “In my grandfather’s time,” he said, “our rituals would manifest living seedlings in the palms of our hands. Now it is rare that even a single seed appears.”

Whatever is going on, something similar is happening to the rituals of our own society, the rituals of modernity. They aren’t working as well as they used to. In both cases, it is because the story, the mythology that embeds the rituals is breaking down.

Another woman in our group was in intense pain from a pinched nerve in her shoulder. Finally she went to a Western medical doctor for a cortisone shot. The doctor’s office was festooned with signs urging patients to get all their vaccinations, ridiculing alternative medicine, and dismissing the idea that eating organic food would prevent disease. Our friend got her shot and a bunch of pills (painkillers, anti-inflammatory drugs, etc.) The next day, her shoulder was worse.

Our rituals aren’t working so well.

Let me pause to consider what I mean by ‘ritual” and “ceremony.” People use different definitions and apply them differently in different contexts, and I won’t try to rigidly distinguish them. But the normal understanding of ritual gets it exactly wrong. A ritual is not a set of merely symbolic actions that are therefore less real than practical actions. A true ritual feels more real than other acts, not less.

Stella and I performed a ritual yesterday together with our mortgage broker. You see, we wanted to refinance our mortgage at a lower interest rate. We had prepared for this ritual for several weeks, assembling the required offerings such as bank statements, tax returns, and credit scores, and executing innumerable mouse-clicks on Docusign. An extraterrestrial anthropologist watching all this would smirk under his beard at the superstitious natives clicking away at documents that they do not read or understand, believing nonetheless that they are doing something real. Anyway, now the big day had arrived for the final ritual. We sat around a table and the mortgage shaman, a nice young man named Jeff, passed us document after document to which we each affixed our ceremonial mark. Neither he nor we read a single word in that inch-thick sheaf of papers. Jeff could have replaced whole paragraphs and pages with excerpts from Beowulf and it would have made no difference.

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Signing a contract is one of the prime rituals of modern society. It feels more real than other actions. It has consequences. Signing a contract is serious business. Taking an exam is another ritual. Going to the doctor’s office. Taking a supplement. Getting a vaccination. Bringing a lawsuit. Filing a patent. Casting a ballot. Issuing a judicial opinion. Passing legislation. Swiping a credit card.

A ritual can also be a ceremony, though normally none of the ones I just listed rise to that level. A ritual becomes a ceremony when it is performed with reverence. Any act can be a ceremony, even making your bed or greeting a guest, if it is done with reverence and precision.

Rituals lose their power as the agreements beneath them unravel. These are agreements about what things mean, who or what is legitimate, and ultimately what is real. These agreements weave a story-of-the-world from which the ritual draws its power, and each diligent, ceremonial performance of it strengthens that story. A perfunctory performance, in contrast, weakens the story that gave it power. That’s what happens when we routinely, thoughtlessly click “I agree” every time we subscribe to a website or log onto wifi at a cafe. We are supposedly signing a contract every time we do that. In so doing, we cheapen the very idea of contract. That mouse-click becomes a ritual in the popular sense: a meaningless symbolic action, an “empty ritual.”

Today, many of the rituals that run our society are losing their power. For example, the Trump administration simply ignores judicial rulings, the US Constitution, UN resolutions, treaties with other nations, and international law. To be fair, Donald Trump did not originate this trend, but he has certainly taken it to a new level. For decades, cynicism has eroded the forms of democratic governance from within, until they became mere pantomimes disguising the naked power operating behind the scenes. Outside of an agreement-field that makes it more, a judicial ruling is but some words spoken by a person dressed up in robes wielding a gavel. The Constitution is but a sheaf of parchment. The UN is but a bunch of chattering homo sapiens in a big auditorium in New York.

The suspicion grows that we are all playing a game of “let’s pretend.” The rituals that run the world have emptied, and we wonder if we are doing anything real.

To be sure, many of our rituals embedded in technology, medicine, governance, and finance still work reasonably well. Currency has not devolved into mere slips of paper, nor account balances into mere columns of figures. No hyperinflation has yet visited to destroy the story of value. The anesthesiologist’s potion still induces unconsciousness, and the antibiotic wipes out the infection. Everyone still believes that a judge’s sentence means that armed men will drag you off to jail. The intricate rituals of science and engineering deliver tools that work for their intended purpose. And yet, as we zoom out, the aggregate of these rituals fails to hold the world together as it once did.

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Medicine can cure individual ailments, even as the overall level of health deteriorates across society. Psychiatric medications temporarily alleviate depression or anxiety, yet despite their continued development, society as a whole grows more depressed with each passing year. Each new technology saves labor and increases productivity, yet overall leisure continues to decrease as economic anxiety intensifies. Individually, each of our rituals to create safety, health, convenience, connection, and abundance functions as it ever did, yet life slips inexorably toward fear, illness, loneliness, and scarcity for the modern majority.

We are losing faith in our rituals and in the mythology beneath them. As a result (and also as a cause), we become attracted to the outposts of other mythologies, other stories of what is real, what is possible, and what a human being is. This explains, in part, why many people are so attracted to indigenous knowledge, Buddhist and Hindu cosmology, and New Age metaphysics. It is why UAPs and telepathy and the miraculous hold such fascination. (A miracle being something that is impossible from an accepted story-of-the-world.)

A couple days later, our friend with the shoulder pain had a remote healing session with Stella. Now for the first time in months she is able to sleep on her side. Stella’s healing work that she calls Resonant Attention is not ritualistic. It is a ceremony however, and it draws on a different mythology from the prevailing force-based causality.

To answer the sangoma’s question, the reason that the ceremonies don’t work quite as they used to is that their underlying mythology has been diluted by Western education and modern worldviews—explicitly through schooling, and implicitly through engaging modern medicine, market economies, and the products of technology. Together, these invite other cultures to doubt their story-of-the-real. Their myths, once accepted as literal accounts of what is and how the world came to be, once held as you and I might hold the Big Bang and Boltzmann’s Law of Gases, become metaphors and allegories, mere stories, cultural artifacts, mementos of a former time. They are no longer held in quite the same way. When you learn in school that change happens when you exert a force on a mass, and when you are surrounded by technologies based on that principle, other causal principles recede from your lived reality. This process is not sudden or uniform across a society or even within an individual. The more intact a culture, the more insulated from competing mythologies, then the more powerful its ceremonies will remain.

The mythology of modernity is collapsing. The next mythology will not replace it though; it will expand it. The worldview that was so total at its zenith is not wrong; it is just partial. We have grown against its limits. No one alive today remembers how liberating it once was to be free of moribund notions of God and spirit and a higher power, to be free of any notion of limit imposed by a natural order or divine law, to exult in our supremacy and its license to limitless creativity. Enlightenment thinkers spoke of the “shackles of religion.” The mythology of rational materialism was a womb in which humanity grew in a certain mode of development. Now a new mode of development beckons. Titanic forces are propelling us through the birth canal, and we see a light from another world.

In that world, we will still have access to the rituals of modernity: its technology, its medicine, its money, its legal structures, but mostly they will recede to a subordinate role. The old story (rational materialism, objectivity, metrics & measurement, quantification, standardization, scale, mechanical causality—the Story of Separation) will be but one of the many tributaries to the mighty river of human development. No longer will it impose itself on other cultures as the ultimate truth. Its gifts will remain available but its ontological imperialism will end. Freed from its hegemony, other cultures, what Orland Bishop calls communities of memory, will recover the power of their ceremonies without having to insulate themselves to remain intact. They will be free to coevolve with all the rest. They will join and intermingle with the other currents and eddies of the Great River. They will deliver their gifts to the world, that they have been holding for so, so long.

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In a certain way of looking at things, one might say that Rutendo was a hard act to follow. However, I love it when the person before me says powerful words, because it opens the field to go even deeper. I believe all of us were in service to something beyond each of us.

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(1) The Confluence gathering in Bandera, Texas, April 23-26. This event brings together various elements of the dissident community that coalesced during the Covid years. The official description says, “Confluence blends the best elements of a traditional conference, a farmer’s market, a wellness retreat, and a music festival into one immersive, community-centered experience.” I’ll be attending with my family and speaking. I’m usually not sure what my topic will be until I get on stage, especially when world events are proceeding at such a fast pace. But it will probably be something about peace.

(2) We are expanding our annual NAAS community retreat to the general public. The theme this year will be “The Space Between Stories.” Register here. We are holding it in Ferry Beach, Maine, right on the ocean. Family friendly – bring kids.

Here is the description:

This is a special 5-day retreat for a special time. The dissolution of who we thought we were, and what we thought was real, that so many of us have experienced is accelerating on a mass level. People who never before questioned “normal” are in deepening doubt. Each of us, in our own way, are entering a space between stories, where the old story no longer makes sense but the new one has not yet arrived. Or it has arrived, but it is not fully formed, and the old stories still pull on us.

In this retreat, we will embrace the space between stories, the unknowing and the unlearning, and thereby discover the truths that are beyond story. These are essential guides in coming times, when different information ghettos offer completely different stories about what is happening in the world, what is coming, what is real. And, embracing the space between, we clear the air for a new story to emerge, a genuinely new story not a retelling of the old.

The intention for this retreat is that you will leave strengthened in the story and the consciousness that co-resonates with who you want to become, as an agent of love, joy, and healing in the world.

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The few years of peace that followed the Vietnam War ended with the mini-wars, covert wars, and proxy wars of the Reagan-Bush era: Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, Angola, Libya, Lebanon, Honduras, the Philippines, Kuwait. Then came Clinton’s wars: Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan (Operation Infinite Reach), and Iraq (Operation Desert Fox). This low-level simmer of post-Vietnam conflict finally erupted after 9/11 into the War on Terror under George W. Bush, starting in Afghanistan and Iraq (and neighboring countries), plus Somalia and the Philippines, launching the era of borderless global war. Next came Obama, who added major military operations in Libya and Syria and expanded Bush’s incessant low-level drone wars in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Trump continued most of these operations, as did Joe Biden, who contributed the proxy war against Russia via Ukraine and supported Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza.

Finally we have Donald Trump, who in defiance of his numerous anti-war campaign pledges has continued his predecessors’ globalized omniwar and added a catastrophic new one in Iran. Let us also mention his campaign across Latin America, ostensibly against the drug trade: “Operation Total Extermination.”

Given this history and current events, what besides wishful thinking could inspire the declaration of an age of peace?

First, we are entering an age of peace because war isn’t working anymore. On some level, it never did work, but with the Iran war it is becoming so obvious that even Donald Trump cannot ignore it.

Pragmatic critics of America’s imperial wars are fond of observing that the United States has not waged a truly successful war since World War Two. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya… each was left in worse shape than when the war began; in none of them were the stated objectives achieved.1 Of course, to the extent that the real goals like enriching defense contractors, sowing chaos, or justifying domestic surveillance and control, then these wars succeeded admirably. Nonetheless, the aggressor would have at least liked to achieve the appearance of victory. Why was it unable to? Why can’t the world’s most powerful nation not actually win a war against far weaker adversaries? If it were just Vietnam, or just Iraq, we could dismiss it as an aberration. But every war? There must be a deeper reason why war isn’t working the way it used to.

The historical coincidence between the last “successful” war and the dawn of the nuclear age offers an important clue. The Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949 closed the era of total war. For thousands of years prior, utter destruction of the enemy was a viable possibility to resolve a conflict—obliterate civil infrastructure, decimate the population, or even kill every man, woman, and child. That all ended with the Bomb: the doctrine of mutually assured destruction and the threat of radioactive fallout and nuclear winter made total war between the United States and the USSR impossible.

Certain nations have not yet realized that victory through force is disappearing from the menu. They may have to learn the hard way.

The basic principle operating underneath mutually assured destruction is interdependence. I like to take the concept further and call it “interbeing” —the basis of peace consciousness. It means that we aren’t really separate, that our very existence is relational. In the case of nuclear war it is obvious: what we do to the other, we do also to ourselves. In the case of conventional war it is less obvious—or was less obvious.

Mutually assured destruction no longer depends on nuclear weapons. In asymmetrical warfare (as between the United States and Iran), of course the weaker party bears the brunt of the casualties and physical damage. Yet the stronger country cannot actually win. We see that now. Iran doesn’t have nukes, but it could destroy enough energy infrastructure to cripple the world industrial system. Energy shortages, frozen supply chains, plummeting food production, financial collapse, and civil unrest would quickly follow an all-out war. Two factors give Iran and similar countries that kind of leverage. First, military technology like missiles and drones is more easily available than ever. Second, the world is so tightly interconnected, so technically and economically interdependent, that damage to any of its key nodes reverberates throughout the whole system.

What happens when the simple solution of obliterating your enemy is no longer available? You have to find some form of accommodation. To do that you have to understand the situation, at least a tiny bit, from their perspective. To do that you have to acknowledge that they have a valid perspective in the first place, that they aren’t simply a pack of frothing orcs. You have to acknowledge their humanity.

It isn’t only military technology and economic interdependence that is making war obsolete. I want to say that the rising consciousness of our time is inhospitable to war, but that’s not quite right. Consciousness does not “rise” along some linear axis on which some people are more conscious than others. The question is, “Of what are you conscious?” So when I speak of rising consciousness, I mean the conscious awareness of interbeing. Or let’s call it the Mirror Principle—what we do to the other, we do to the self.

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The Mirror Principle operates across every domain. We dump vast quantities of plastic into the environment—and our bodies and brains are riddled with microplastics. America wreaks violence abroad—and suffers high rates of violence at home (gun violence, domestic violence, violence to self). On a personal level, we also find that we are not immune to the radioactive blowback of our harm to others. Those we have mistreated may not take revenge, yet somehow what we have done eats at us from the inside. And the good that we do others glows within us too.

Consciousness of interbeing is growing, through our direct experiences, through the discovery of observer-dependence in quantum theory, through the teachings of ecology, through psychedelic medicines, through reacquaintance with indigenous worldviews, through revelations of UAPs and psi phenomena, through many many ways. War is utterly senseless in that consciousness. Its rationalizations ring hollow, even if we accept its geopolitical premises.

The Mirror Principle operates partly through mundane channels. For example, as the United States has destroyed whole countries’ infrastructure over the years, its own infrastructure has fallen into disrepair. That’s an obvious matter of budgetary priorities. But there is a deeper pattern operating too.

War is the logical extension of the habit of externalizing problems that are actually within. Now sometimes problems are very much external and can be solved by force, and only by force. Running away from a predator is an example of that. The leopard isn’t attacking the antelope because of the latter’s victim mentality. However, most of the time the outside problem mirrors something within. To look at that is uncomfortable, because it means altering one’s view of oneself. In the national case, to examine how the actions of our “adversaries” reflect our own actions will violate the story, forged in the aftermath of World War Two, of America the hero-nation. So it was that after the 9/11 attacks, virtually no one (at least in politics or the media) asked what US policies and imperial systems might have bred such terrorism in the first place. No, the only explanation was, “They are deranged fanatics who hate us for our freedoms.”

Projective externalizing of problems invariably leads to their neglect. If, for example, we blame Trump’s 2016 election victory on “Russian interference,” we never look at or understand the Trump phenomenon and the unrest and dispossession that fueled it. If Democrats blame his 2024 victory on the bigotry, madness, and dim wits of his followers, then they never see the grievous shortcomings of their own party. If we blame disease solely on pathogens, we never look at the diet or lifestyle that creates the terrain in which pathogens thrive. If we blame crime on those depraved criminals, we never look at the social and economic conditions—in which we participate—that breed crime. If I blame the disgusted looks I’m getting on rude people, I never will notice that I have dog poop plastered to my pants.

War mentality is victim mentality. It rejects self-responsibility and displaces it onto others. Paradoxically, hero mentality and victim mentality are one and the same. The problem is always someone else’s fault. The hero vanquishes one villain after another, externalizing all evil, never recognizing his own participation in creating the very thing he is fighting.

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Note that the Hero as presented by Joseph Campbell isn’t quite the same hero I’m discussing here. Yet even the Campbellian Hero is self-evidently immature, a boy archetype not a man archetype. After his journey, the Hero must enter a next phase of maturation, in which he is presented with the limitations of his previous triumphant approach to challenges. He nonetheless reiterates it, each time to greater sorrow until finally, through the bitter gift of defeat, he looks at what he had never examined before. He understands that the parade of villains was a byproduct of his own warlike nature.

See the world in terms of enemies, and enemies will appear to fulfill that seeing. It matters little whether those enemies are objectively villainous. Regardless, the hero nation will portray them that way. It must, in order to maintain its identity.

Arguments about the personal character of Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, Ali Khamenei, etc. are diversions. The hero not only attracts, but also produces his foil. US policies of sanctions, “maximum pressure,” and missile and drone attacks discredit moderates in the targeted countries and enhance the power of militant extremists, who are then used to retroactively justify the aggression. These political dynamics illustrate a larger principle of interbeing. The world reflects back upon us who we choose to be.

Naturally, with a large part of its attention and resources focused on externalized problems, the hero nation neglects the blind spots that might otherwise be visible if it turned its gaze inward. So it is that America, once a mighty engine of invention and discovery, the leader in nearly every field of technology and industry, the standard-bearer of freedom and democracy, has fallen into such profound disgrace. The rot is easily visible in the form of dilapidated infrastructure, homeless encampments, and the baseline ugliness of the modern built environment. The less visible rot is even more serious: epidemics of chronic disease, depression, obesity, and infertility, economic precariousness, community disintegration, loneliness, child abuse, domestic abuse, and perhaps most tellingly, addiction.

None of these problems will succumb to war mentality, yet war mentality permeates every aspect of policy discourse. We wage a war on drugs, a war on terror, a war on poverty, a war on crime. We “tackle” our problems. We wage “campaigns” against them. We mobilize our forces. We fight homelessness. We battle deficits.

But terror is an emotion; drugs are a substance, and homelessness is a condition. What is there to fight with? We have to insert a proxy with which to do battle, someone to blame. Saddam Hussein! Narcotraffickers! Blackrock!

War terminology offers a framing that people understand, but it forever leads us astray by offering easy, superficial, false solutions to the problem at hand.

It is a relief to identify a culprit for one’s troubles. Then you know what to do. Then you know whom to blame. Then you know whom to bomb.

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To exchange the identity of hero and villain does not undo the basic pattern. This has sometimes been the approach of the political left. America is not the hero, it is the monster. The rogue state is not Iran, it is ourselves. White people are not better than brown people, they are worse. Industry is not the benefactor of the world, it is the destroyer. Modern cultures are not superior to the indigenous; it’s the other way around. Flipping the script like this serves a useful function, which is to reveal the hero’s shadows, to fill in the untold parts of the story. The aforementioned maturation of the hero requires that he know himself as he has been. However, to reverse the roles in the good-guy/bad-guy drama does nothing to change the drama itself.

The oppressed become the oppressor, the victim becomes the abuser, the hero becomes the villain, the solution becomes the problem, endlessly cycling until we inhabit a new story.

The age of peace runs a different screenplay. The hero/villain drama, the victim-abuser-rescuer drama, the us-versus-them drama may never disappear entirely (just ask the antelope), but it will no longer be the template for understanding every conflict. We will bring other plot lines into the theater that draw on interdependency, interbeing, and the Mirror Principle. We will ask, “What are the conditions that made you who you are?” “How have I contributed to those conditions?” “What can we do together to change them?” Conflicts may still arise, but we will no longer battle cartoon versions of real people and real nations painted in the hues of our own unhealed histories.

Turning attention to the wounds and maladies that we no longer externalize, we can finally begin to heal them. The age of peace will therefore be also an age of health and an age of prosperity. All that has languished while we were busy fighting ourselves will grow strong. That is true for an individual, it is true for a family, it is true for a nation, and it is true for this earth.

It has been a while since I’ve sent one of these letters. I have been through a phase of frenetic activity around the Iran War, channeling some of my horror into concrete action, and also at the same time questioning whether the action is accomplishing anything, and whether I am perhaps reacting too quickly, alleviating my anxiety with …

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The second is from a live call that I do every couple weeks for the New and Ancient Story Community. That is for people who want to engage more directly with me and each other around the issues I write about. This part is my monologue piecing together traditional, indigenous, and animistic causalities with the immediate crisis and horror of modern warfare. In it I express a deep optimism for the potential of our present moment. Can’t really summarize. Have a look if you have time.

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“I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars.”

“We’re going to end these endless wars.”

“We will turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars. They never ended.”

“I will expel the warmongers from our national security state… and stop the war profiteering.”

“He [his predecessors] sent our blood and treasure to back regime change in Iraq, regime change in Libya, regime change in Syria and every other globalist disaster for half a century.

“We believe that the job of the United States military is not to wage endless regime-change wars around the globe, senseless wars. The job of the United States military is to defend America from attack and invasion here at home.”

“These endless wars keep going and going, people getting killed all over the place, spending billions and billions.”

“There must be a complete commitment to dismantling the entire globalist neocon establishment that is perpetually dragging us into endless wars, pretending to fight for freedom and democracy abroad…We should have never gone into the Middle East. Under my leadership, we will turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars…. Stupid, senseless, endless wars…”

He didn’t just start saying those things in 2024 either. In 2019 he said, “Lindsey Graham would like to stay in the Middle East for the next thousand years, with thousands of soldiers, fighting other people’s wars. I want to get out of the Middle East.” In 2013 he said, “The US should stay out of Syria.” In 2011, “The United States spent $2 trillion in Iraq and thousands of lives. Now we’re bombing Libya and giving aid to rebels. What are we doing?” And in the mid-2000s, “We should never have been there [Iraq].”

Trump concluded his 2024 campaign by saying in his victory speech: “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars.”

I hoped that he would follow through on those words. Sometimes I am naive and tend to believe the best of people, but I wasn’t the only one who took his anti-war rhetoric seriously. Neoconservative war hawks believed him also, which is why many of them endorsed his opponents in the primaries and general election. Bill Kristol, Max Boot, Robert Kagan, David Frum, John Bolton, Liz Cheney, and Elliot Abrams all publicly opposed him. A year later, Trump has fulfilled their dearest fantasies.

What happened? Is there some dark secret behind his abject fealty to Israel? Did he gravitate toward the most war-obsessed neocons like Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, and Ted Cruz because he needed their political support? Was it that his narcissistic ego and delusions of grandeur made him susceptible to manipulation by flatterers promising glory? Or were his anti-war statements going back to the mid-2000s mere pretense from the beginning?

I’ll leave it to others to figure that out. What is important now is to end this war before it spins further out of control. One way or another, the old world order is dead. Either the United States will lose this war, or it will “win” by means so inhumane that it will destroy what is left of its soul. Either way, US hegemony is over. The more the war spirals out of control, the more that Chaos will determine what comes after. Things can get much worse. Is there anything in the President’s actions or temperament that would assure us he won’t deploy nuclear weapons? The deranged, truculent, juvenile, unhinged statements coming from the White House offer little comfort.

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Our first priority must be to stop this war. Maybe the firestorm of negative public opinion coupled with economic turmoil will be enough to cause him to, absurdly, declare victory and pull back his forces, but at the present writing he seems to be moving in the opposite direction: toward further escalation.

If so, we’d better get active, and fast. I am skeptical that mass street protests will be adequate. The last truly effective marches and protests date back to the civil rights and Vietnam era. Since then they have become a kind of theater. Moreover, the authorities are adept at neutralizing them with agents-provocateurs, media blackouts, or “free speech zones” where people blow off steam before going home again. Certainly traditional street actions have a part to play, but I think we are going to have to get more creative. We live today in a digitized society, and new forms of digital protest can have massive immediate impact.

I’m not talking about online petitions and letter-writing campaigns. I’m talking about wielding the most powerful symbol available to us: money. The public can quickly bring corporations, financial institutions, and governments to their knees through various forms of electronic action: boycotts, debt strikes, and tax protests, to name a few. On Friday, BlackRock’s stock fell by 7% when it had to freeze withdrawals from one of its flagship private credit funds, because investors (apparently many from Arab countries) pulled out just 10% of the fund’s value. The financial system is so tightly wound that even a loss of 10% of deposits or funds under management can threaten the entire system as institutions scramble for liquidity. I’m not sure exactly where to apply this tactic, but I’m putting the idea out there to fuel a discussion. Which institutions are especially culpable? Which are the most systemically important? Which actions will deliver the most pressure to the political establishment?

Another form of mass protest is a debt revolt. What happens when even ten or twenty percent of debtors skip their loan payments? Creditors face a sudden liquidity crisis and have to quickly find cash to meet their own obligations. The effects ripple outward instantly. If only a few people do this, they get crushed. Their credit is ruined, they are taken to court and their assets are seized. If tens of millions of people do it though, they bring the system to its knees. We are powerful. As helpless as we may seem, as helpless as we have learned to be, still the powers that rule us depend on our consent.

Such an action must be coherent, organized, purposeful, and well-timed. It will require more courage than signing a petition. It won’t feel symbolic. It will feel real. It will feel like you are putting yourself on the line, and you will be.

What does it take for people to say, “Screw the consequences. I’ve had enough!” What will it take before we say “No!” and back that no with real non-compliance. Was the “double-tap” strike on a girls elementary school enough? (The first missile killing 165 schoolgirls, the second killing the medics and parents who arrived at the scene to tend the wounded and search for survivors.) Will the last two days’ bombing of Tehran, a city of 9-10 million people, of its fuel depots that are spewing toxic smoke into the city causing oil to rain down from the sky, of a desalinization plant providing drinking water to countless civilians… will that be enough? Will we say no if, in desperation because he is losing the war, President Trump unleashes nuclear weapons?

A mass uprising is coming, a mass “No!” It will end this war and it will bring down the Trump administration. It will dismantle the system that produced that administration in the first place, and which waged the endless imperial wars that Trump himself criticized in his campaign. It will follow the Epstein files and all the other threads of global power to their source. We have an opportunity to unravel the fabric of power, now that all can see it for what it is. Total domination. Child rapists and the war machine both enact that selfsame principle. Here are the words of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth: “Flying over their capital. Death and destruction from the sky all day long. We’re playing for keeps. Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise, and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” This statement distills the darkest essence of power: to take pleasure in the suffering and humiliation of others.

That is what our uprising will say no to. Then the question will arise, “To what shall we say yes?” The new yes starts from the way we say no. We leave behind the mentality of war starting now. No longer do we see the world in terms of allies and enemies, conflicts and battles, heroes and villains. No, not even Pete Hegseth, Lindey Graham, or Donald Trump. We refuse to dehumanize these men, no matter the fury and anguish we feel at their crimes. We do not seek vengeance; we seek change. We do not deploy war narratives in our movement for peace. We do not seek to justify harm to anyone, for we understand that war is always justified (in the sense that the aggressor always justifies himself). We do not wish that anyone suffer. We do not take pleasure in the suffering and humiliation of others. Instead, we say yes to dignity. We say yes to consent. We say yes to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We know every human being, regardless of race or nationality, as equally sacred. These are the yes’s that we will build into the next version of our nation.

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https://x.com/whitehouse/status/2029657893155311927

https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2029741548791853331?s=20

I’ll tell you what’s in them in case you don’t want to click the link. The first shows videos clips of explosions in Iran alternated with SpongeBob SquarePants saying, “Want me to do it again?” The second is titled “Justice, the American Way” and shows movie outtakes glorifying violence, domination, and machismo, again followed by real bomb explosions from Iran and a deep voice intoning, “Flawless victory!”

These were produced in the days after 160 schoolgirls were slaughtered by a US missile in Iran.

To call these videos juvenile would be to insult actual juveniles. To describe their vibe as “frat-boy” would be to insult actual fraternity brothers. One commenter on X said, “Beavis and Butthead have hacked the White House X account.”

But the reader doesn’t need me to explain how depraved these videos are. There is more to be said.

The posts portray war as if it were a movie or a video game. For those perpetrating the war, it is indeed like that, in the sense that they experience no real consequences. Doubtless, their situation reports, their intelligence briefings, their strategy memos, their lists of targets, their military jargon of “theaters” and “assets” insulate them from the reality of wailing parents, screaming children, severed limbs, scarred lives, and ruined families.

Coming hard on the heels of the Epstein files, it is hard to ignore the common thread of depravity. In the files as well, human beings, especially women and children, were totally dehumanized into mere instruments of power, profit, and pleasure. Their suffering was inconsequential “collateral damage.” Worse than that, it was a source of revelry, mockery, and glee—the same triumphalist vibe as the White House videos.

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The antidote to dehumanization is rehumanization. It is to recognize the truth of the human as precious and sacred, to recognize that none of us is made of better stuff than the other, and to act from that knowledge. You may think you already know that and do that. But are you sure? I’m not. The subtle habits of judgment, of instrumentalization, of dehumanization operate in most of us, just not to the extreme degree that they do in human traffickers or war hawks. I noticed those habits stirring in me when I read Secretary Pete Hegseth’s words: “Flying over their capital. Death and destruction from the sky all day long. We’re playing for keeps...This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” This is the same attitude displayed in the White House videos. I felt a sickening wave of revulsion, not only toward the words but toward the person.

That hate reduces a human being to a placeholder, a cartoon. It neutralizes the curiosity that is required to create conditions that no longer produce or allow a Donald Trump or Pete Hegseth or Linsdey Graham or Marco Rubio to rise to power. What is it like to be them? What makes them into what they are? Even if some may be born sociopaths, most of their supporters and enablers are not. Besides, too often labels like “narcissist” and “sociopath” collapse a complex individual into a simple category, cutting off the possibility of understanding them. And understand them we must.

To understand does not mean to allow. These people must be removed from power. A massive social movement is brewing from the widespread disgust at the rhetoric and actions of the Trump administration and its enablers in Congress and the mainstream media, which generally despises the man but maintains the ideological infrastructure of imperialism. In fact the movement was already gaining momentum from the Epstein files and the Trump administration’s slow-walking of them. It has been gathering for many years.

“Anti-Trump” is much too small a bucket for this movement. After all, the Iran war is just the most brazen, naked, and undisguised episode in a series of imperialist wars going back to Vietnam, waged by Democrats and Republicans alike. Earlier wars—Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine—wore a fig leaf of “defending democracy.” The Iran war is just naked power. It shows in clear relief what we want to change. It shows is clear relief the depravity that has always hidden behind our reigning institutions. And so, this movement will not be satisfied by deposing Trump and replacing him with a Democrat who will re-affix the fig leaf to body of the rampaging monster our country has become. The attitudes on display in distilled form in the White House videos pervade our entire system. The whole system instrumentalizes and reduces human beings.

What is the higher vision an authentic peace movement may draw on? It comes from recognizing the inherent dignity and preciousness of each human being. Whether that human being is American or Iranian, a citizen or a migrant, Muslim or Hindu, Christian or Jew, black or white, male or female, gays, straight, or something else, all are worthy of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A society built on that understanding devotes its resources toward healing: bodies, communities, places, soil, ecosystems, water, the addicted, the destitute, the hopeless. That aim is utterly incompatible with maintaining a trillion-dollar military. The gathering peace movement will not be content merely to stop the Iran war. We will not rest until the entire military machine has been dismantled, and until people around the world agree that it is not needed.

Some people say I am unpatriotic if I don’t want America to win this war. But what is patriotism, really? True patriotism does not seek to win at others’ expense, to dominate other nations by force. What is there to love about a country that does that? No, true patriotism seeks to fulfill the nation’s purpose in service to humanity. The people of our country do not resonate with the belligerence and callousness of these videos and statements and the barbaric war against Iran. We are done with that. Let all who call themselves patriots unite to forge a new version of America.

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You can help. Most Democrats (though sadly not all) will vote for the Resolution, but only a few brave Republicans have indicated the same. However, many Republicans understand that MAHA (the Make America Healthy Again movement) is crucial to their chances. And most in that movement are strongly anti-war. So I wrote the following petition that will be sent to members of Congress in the next two days. (The vote is soon---urgent action is needed.)

I framed it around the basic principle that a nation’s physical health and its moral health are inseparable. If you resonate with that principle, and you want to see this war end, and you want to contribute to a lasting peace movement to end future wars before they begin, then please sign it!

Here is the petition text. It isn’t anything deeply philosophical. Just a simple statement of principle and call to action. It is a little different from normal petition language. Please share the link widely!!! https://healthnotwar.com/

Health Not War!

Support the War Powers Resolution

We, the undersigned, are American citizens who care deeply about the health of our nation:n: both its physical health of its people, and the moral health of its conduct in the world. We understand that these are related. Neither can stand without the other.

Congress is set to vote this week on a War Powers Resolution to reclaim its Constitutional authority over warmaking, a crucial step toward ending the reckless and immoral war against Iran.

We remind members of Congress, and the Trump administration, that our nation has squandered $8 trillion on regime-change wars since 9/11. We remind them that our nation’s infrastructure, its middle class, and its health have all been hollowed out to fund these wars. We remind them that these wars have also hollowed out our moral standing in the world. And we remind them that they have uniformly failed to achieve security at home or freedom abroad.

We remind our representatives in Washington that, though the halls of power may insulate them personally, war will bring economic chaos, higher debt, and deeper poverty to ordinary Americans; that our soldiers will face injury and death; and that countless innocents of Iran and other nations will perish in the brutal hell called war.

Finally, we remind members of Congress that a great nation leads by example, not by force; by conscience, not by coercion. As we wage violence and terror abroad, we ask, “Is this the great nation we want to be?”

Therefore, we ask our leaders and representatives to chart a new course. We call on them to turn America’s attention, money, technology, science, and resources toward rebuilding our nation from the inside out. We call on them to end these “forever wars” and focus instead on building a safe, clean, healthy, and prosperous society.

We call on all members of Congress, especially those who want to Make America Healthy Again, to support the War Powers Resolution. We ask all members to make clear where they stand on this new regime-change war, so that we as voters can choose candidates who represent our priorities of health, prosperity, and peace. And we call on President Trump to abide by the limits to his Constitutional authority.

We know the forces pushing war are powerful—a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the courage and leadership to defy them. May you find that courage and represent the will of We the People to end this war.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Again, here is the link to sign or share this petition:

https://healthnotwar.com/

Thank you for taking action!

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