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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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

Share

Share

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.

Share

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Share

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.

Share

(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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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 …

Read more

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.

Share

“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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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!

Share

Who knows if the US/Israel intentionally bombed the school or if it was hit by accident. Maybe someone will claim it stood atop tunnels full of terrorists or an arms depot (the excuse for bombing nearly every school and hospital in Gaza), or that the Iranians blew it up themselves to generate sympathy. Maybe someone will explain that it is one of those unfortunate accidents of war, “collateral damage,” and therefore the fault ot the Iranian government for failing to capitulate to the United States. Probably, most Americans will hear nothing about it at all.

The political conversation in the weeks leading up to the war—in my country anyway—has mostly been about the consequences for ourselves: American troops dying, terrorist blowback, gas prices quadrupling, the war turning into a quagmire that drains American blood and treasure. All that might happen, but to argue on those terms implicitly grants the assumption that this is the conversation we should be having. It seems to say that if we could avoid all those consequences, then certainly we should proceed with the regime change.

What about the girls in the elementary school? What about the babies in the families of the Iranian leadership targeted for assassination? What happens when we affirm, through murder, our allegiance to the principle: “Do whatever is in your interests as long as you can get away with it”? What world do we thus declare into being? What prayer do those actions issue unto God?

Epstein and his cronies, and the whole world of human trafficking, operate on exactly that principle. “Do what is in your interests as long as you can get away with it.” Those horrified at the pedo-elite and the systems that protect them should be equally horrified at this geopolitical expression of the same thing. It is another version of the principle of total domination. It is another expression of the ignorance of a basic truth of nonseparation: that what we do to the other, we do also in some form to ourselves.

Even if the US can prevent violent retaliation through an impregnable missile defense system; even if it can quell terroristic blowback forever through an ironclad AI-powered regime of global surveillance, even if it can keep gas cheap by taking over the oil fields, the consequences will penetrate the fortress walls. Civil violence and domestic violence will mirror foreign violence. Suicide will mirror murder. Depression will mirror oppression. The deadening of inner life will mirror the extinguishing of life outside. Those who live safe behind walls are still living behind walls, slowly suffocating. Those who go numb in order to commit the evil deeds of war must live numb. They cannot escape the suffering they inflict on their victims.

Share

I want to say that we are done with this. I have some reason to think so. The Iraq war of the early 2000s enjoyed a broad level of popular support, the result of a vigorous propaganda campaign to manufacture consent. That campaign could work only because the prevailing consciousness was receptive to it. This war is different. A small minority of the American public supports it. The Trump administration has launched the war anyway, without even trying to engineer the consent of the governed, in a display of naked power. Only the public’s habit of apathy and passivity allow the war to proceed.

I would like to think that the apathy will dissipate quickly when the consequences come home. However, those consequences may not be what people fear: terror attacks, military casualties, high gas prices. They may not be visibly connected to the war at all, but rather take the form of an accelerating erosion of social, family, and personal wellbeing. Therefore, we will have to source a peace movement from somewhere besides conventional pragmatism.

Ultimately, the source of peace consciousness is not fear of the bad things that will happen to ourselves if we harm others. The more beautiful world our hearts know is possible is built on love. When I love someone, my child say, I don’t think, “I hope he lives a long and happy life—so that he will support me in my old age.” I don’t think, “I hope he is happy—or people will think I’m a bad parent.” And if he is addicted or depressed, no one can console me by saying, “Just change your locks and block his number, it needn’t affect you.” I want his happiness for him, not for me. Yet, paradoxically, his happiness is my happiness. His pain is my pain. We are not separate. We are interconnected, inter-existent. Love is the felt realization of that truth.

My readers are aware that I was RFK Jr.’s speechwriter in his presidential campaign. I had a lot of influence from the outset of the campaign up through October 2023. In fact I wrote the initial campaign platform and slogans. The two that ignited the most enthusiasm were “Heal the divide” and “End the forever wars.” The $8 trillion squandered on regime change wars after 9/11 was a mainstay of the candidate’s stump speech. He spoke of all the things that $8 trillion could have funded. All true, but I thought there was something missing from that framing. When you speak to someone’s self-interest, you speak into reality the self-interested part of themselves. But human beings need more than that, they crave more than that. I wanted the candidate to speak more in terms of “Who do we want to be as a people? What do we want to bring to the world?”

Donald Trump, despite having campaigned on ending the regime-change wars, combines the worst of isolationism and imperialism in his foreign policy. He has capitulated to the Neocon warmongers who were so alarmed by his anti-war campaign rhetoric, and he has betrayed not just the MAHA faction who loved RFK Jr.’s pledge to end the forever wars, but also much of his own MAGA base who understand American “greatness” to be a matter of middle class prosperity and a functioning civic society, rather than that of a preening bully humiliating the weak. He has also destroyed the last vestiges of Constitutional separation of powers by (among other things) launching a war without Congressional approval—again, after campaigning to end the unconstitutional abuses of power (censorship, propaganda, weaponization of the DOJ and IRS, etc.) waged against him and his supporters after his first term. On the international level, he has destroyed the illusion of American moral leadership (probably a good thing, since the reality of American moral leadership was long defunct). More ominously, he has also destroyed the principle of diplomacy by using negotiation as a mere ruse to launch surprise attacks. And he has valorized the principle of “might makes right,” which again has always been the reality behind the facade of the neoliberal “rules-based order” (the US makes the rules, everyone else follows its orders), but in dropping the facade he precludes the formation of any other relational patterning besides dominance and submission.

The lack of public support for the Iran war and the voter enthusiasm for Kennedy’s “end the forever wars” campaign theme point to a possibility of an authentic and nationally transforming peace movement. By authentic, I mean that it doesn’t just argue from self-interest, but from compassion, from the understanding of a basic inseparability of self and other. By transforming, I mean that it remakes the entire country in its image.

I don’t know what that movement will look like. I don’t think it will take the form of protests and marches and riots that provoke a police response which is then leveraged to incite public sympathy. It will take a new and creative form. Perhaps it will spread invisibly, reaching its mycorrhizae into the halls of power and into the hearts of their inhabitants who, just like most of us outside them, want to be done with this. In fact I think it is already spreading. The war feels like the final throes of an old and dying story.

Up until now, American power was draped in idealism. It was about freedom, liberty, democracy. A peek behind the drapery always revealed other designs that have become increasingly obvious since WWII. Now the drapes have fallen completely to reveal the naked truth of power. When the true nature of power is exposed to our view (as is also happening with the Epstein files), we have an opportunity to know clearly what we are choosing. No longer can we pretend to be serving anything but power, if we support President Trump’s foreign wars.

Mark my words, there will be blowback from this war. It may not take the form of higher gas prices or terror attacks. It may simply be a deeper mirroring domestically of the harm waged abroad. Some are predicting tumultuous times this year and next. I tend to agree, but the tumult may be as much or more on the level of meaning, story, and identity than on the level of civil strife and economic turmoil. Wealth or luck may shield us from the latter, but from the former there is no escape.

It’s getting real, people. It always was, but now and increasingly henceforward, there will be no denying it. Normality is dissolving. Thank God. Who now shall we be?

Share

Some who pursue domination will naturally take it to its extreme. Even if one doesn’t pursue power, but is born or brought into it, depravity exerts an insidious pull. It may start with a subtle sense of one’s own superiority, an aloofness, a patronizing attitude toward inferiors, a tendency to associate with other powerful people as peers while subtly dehumanizing the rest. From there, under the right circumstances, with nothing to limit its drift, it may progress toward its fulfillment: the most heinous acts of complete domination of one human being over another.

The dehumanization that is so routine in modern society—that turns us into consumers, functionaries, market opportunities, profit centers, voters, sex objects, characters in degrading political narratives, occupants of racial, gender, or ethnic stereotypes, and so on—seeks somewhere to take on its most extreme forms. Any society that commodifies nature and normalizes dehumanized relationships will necessarily harbor, in its darkest recesses, in its prisons and concentration camps and black sites, behind the closed doors of its normal-seeming houses, in the recesses of its family secrets, and in the fortified compounds of its elites, the most grotesque violations of human dignity. It is an organic necessity. Abnormalized degradation complements and completes the normalized. It is impossible for a world that has one, not to also have the other.

The Epstein files are a ringing indictment of our society, but no such indictment is necessary for those of us who have studied the normalized exploitation and degradation of human beings (and other-than-human beings) on earth. We never believed the system was sound. We saw the sweatshops, the toxic waste dumps, the slums, the landless peasants, the refugee camps, the child labor, the neoliberal extraction and the wars, prisons, death squads, and torture regimes needed to maintain it. We saw the conversion of life, earth, beauty, community, and imagination to money. We didn’t need the Epstein files or notions of Satanic cabals to reject it. But for most people, these costs to humans and nature were relatively invisible, hidden behind global supply chains and ideologies of progress, of development, of the ascent of humanity. The Epstein files pierce that obscuring haze. They show us the true nature of power, in its distilled form.

The files arouse a feeling of confirmation, of vindication, that does not depend on the factual truth of the specific claims surrounding them. The smaller truth is: “Aha! I knew it! Inhuman elites are running the world.” The larger truth is: “Something inhuman is running the world.” The second truth contains the first, neither denying nor depending on it. If the elite predators are byproducts of something greater, if they are its functionaries, if they are among its symptoms, then the task before us is much larger than merely to send them to the guillotine. If we are serious about ending the age-old civilizational reign of terror, we must resist the familiar reflex, the familiar problem-solving template of “find someone to kill.”

We have been well-versed in that template. What Hollywood action movie doesn’t hinge on defeating the villain who is the ultimate cause of the problem? Those films program our understanding of what action is, what the cause of suffering is, and how to erase it.

Some of my critics think I must not be serious about ending the horror because, they think, I want to “let the perpetrators off the hook.” It is the reverse. It is because I am absolutely serious that I want to find the real cause and not the easy answer. If a spasm of bloodletting would forever end the cycles of exploitation and horror, I would say yes, let’s do it. But if it would only give the appearance of a solution while distracting us from—and thereby perpetuating—the underlying causes, then those of us who care must look deeper. We must ask, why are the elites so naturally drawn to depravity? What is in the “job description” of power that includes depravity? What in our deep, unconscious narratives, myths, and collective psychology generates that job description in the first place?

Please—I am not advocating that we sit back and philosophize while giving predators a free pass. Those who have violated trust must be removed from power. Is that the final solution though?

Share

A friend of mine was a South African labor activist, a revolutionary radical in the 1970s and 80s who ended up serving in Nelson Mandela’s cabinet. After decades on the outside, he and his comrades were now in positions of power. The good guys won! The age of corruption was over, because the old elites, crooked and cruel, had now been replaced by an incorruptible revolutionary cadre with the fiercest ethics. Well, you know what happened. It didn’t take long for the new elite to start behaving just like the old. Their skin color was different, but the dynamics of power remained the same. Mandela himself was exceptional, but he could do little to stem the tide even when he was still in office, much less posthumously. My friend had the choice of whether to join the corruption, one compromise at a time, or to retire from power entirely. He chose the latter course. He literally could not remain in office and remain uncorrupted. Because, that was simply the way things were done.

I’m not saying that the South African government is full of pedophiles and torturers. Not everyone in the elite—probably only a small minority—takes power to its most extreme expression. The point is that when the roles are available, someone will step in to fill them. And these roles are systemically produced. They self-replicate.

I just spoke yesterday with a survivor of Satanic ritual abuse who was trafficked by her family of origin throughout her childhood. She goes by the name of Shoshana. She has been on a long healing journey. Before she began to heal, she had no memories of any kind from before age 12. Now she has full access to her childhood. I have her permission to share whatever might be useful. Over years of abuse, Shoshana witnessed the process by which her older brothers were broken and trained to abuse and traffic her, their sister. They did not start out evil. They started out as sweet, innocent babies. The abuse their father inflicted shattered them. They became monsters. And what of the father? What happened to him to turn him from a sweet innocent baby to someone who would rape and traffic his own daughter?

Maybe the whole generational pattern was consciously conceived by some evil mind long ago. Who knows. But no evil mind or deliberate plan is needed to perpetuate it. It is like a malware program that has commandeered the entire system to run itself endlessly, autonomously, long forgetting its author.

Generational patterning, the cycle of trauma, is only one means of depravity’s perpetuation. The essays that follow in this series explore primal forces of human social psychology, archetypal dramas, ritual magic, and morphic fields that have aggregated over tens of thousands of years. If we understand them, however dark they may be, we will have hope. We will have agency. We will know how to contribute to a world where such things never happen again.

Many of us feel despair confronting material such as the Epstein files. The despair has two sources. First is the apparent power of the perpetrators, their money and political position, their influence over media, law, government, religion, technology, and so forth, enough to crush all resistance. Second is deeper. It is the despair that cries out in anguish, “How could human beings do this to one another?” recognizing that I too am human. It is not a force external to humanity that is committing these horrors. Even if we cast the perpetrator into a separate category of being, still the despair remains that we face something that, because it is part of us, is inescapable.

Share

The despair draws on false premises about how creation works and what a human being is. Ironically, these are also the premises of the very thing we despair of ever changing. First, power is not what we have been taught. The world is subject to causal influences far transcending the instruments of force that the elites wield. We can align with a larger intelligence—Shoshana calls it spirit—that guides us toward extraordinary creative and transformative power. Secondly, human nature is not fixed. What we call human nature has developed to host the dramas necessary for its evolution. When someone like Shoshana heals, she does a great service to humanity, not just to herself. She removes a filament of human nature from the weave and replaces it with a different kind.

Shoshana has no desire to see the perpetrators of the Epstein files swing from the gallows. Our call ended with a prayer: “May your healing ripple back through time to heal your ancestors. May it ripple forward to heal your descendants. May it emanate outward to heal the world.”

Whether or not your theory of change can account for it, you probably have had the experience of feeling gratitude—not just admiration or respect, but gratitude—for another person’s healing. That feeling comes from a deep wisdom. It recognizes that soul’s generosity in taking on such horror so that it might be removed from circulation forever.

This is another kind of power. As we grapple with power in the normal sense, let us also stay tethered to this kind. It is not a diversion. It is not a bypass. It will make us brave and unblinking as we face the worst of what human beings have done, and it will show us how to respond.

Share

Share

Also, I have a pretty bad cold.

Share

I hope everyone understands the we are in the midst of the most significant political event since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. In fact, the release of the Epstein files is even more significant. The 1963 coup was a consolidation and intensification of a system of power that goes back centuries (at least). The Epstein files are its undoing.

I say that in the spirit of prophecy, not prediction. Predictions relegate us to the role of passive observers of likelihoods; prophecies come true only if we make them true. A prophecy comes true only if we recognize the possibility it illuminates, and participate in its fulfillment.

The material in the Epstein Files so severely violates the stories that scaffold our society that there is no way to accept it and keep those stories intact.

Yet there is no way to reject it either. The material is too public, too accessible, too horrifying, and too credible. The dark reality the files portray has escaped its exile to the hinterlands of “conspiracy” to run amok in the general public mind. It is like a herd of feral pigs that have burst through a hole in the manor walls and are now rampaging through the gardens, uprooting the shrubbery, tearing down the trellises, defecating on the croquet lawns, and wallowing in the flowerbeds.

They cannot be contained. The taint of corruption leaves no institution untouched. Not academia. Not the media. Not the FBI or the intelligence services. Not Congress. Not global NGOs. Not the justice system. Not the transnational corporations and banks. Not the Trump administration (it will fall) nor any of its predecessors. The entire elite establishment is implicated in Epstein’s depravity—some through direct association with him, and the rest by letting it happen and then covering it up.

The situation is much like that of an abusive family. It appears normal from the outside, but it carries a dark secret, a hell behind its closed doors. Everyone in the family knows what’s going on, at least half-consciously, but no one speaks of it. It cannot be spoken because it is unspeakable. To speak it would be to destroy the story of the family. It would violate agreed-upon reality. Some pretend not to know. Some know and do not speak.

That has been true of our media, law enforcement, and most of those within or adjacent to the circles of power. Many did not speak because they believed—with good reason—they would be dismissed as crazy, or silenced even more drastically. It is the very definition of insanity to deny what everyone agrees is real. So it is in a family, and so it is in the larger human family.

Share

In neither case, though, is any healing, any real change, possible unless the secrets come to light. No new reality can be built while the old one still stands. That is where authentic hope lies, in the voicing of the unspeakable. What the Epstein files reveal in the elite echelons of society is not confined there. It is rife throughout, in any situation where the operation of power is hidden from view.

What is disintegrating now is much bigger than institutions and systems. It is their fundamental legitimacy, the credibility of those authorities who tell us what is real and what is not, what is possible and what is not, what is crazy and what is sane. The collapse goes deeper still: normalcy itself is disintegrating, the basic mythology that defines what normal even is, and the mythology of modernity, of progress, of a society that has risen above medieval barbarism toward enlightened values and democratic ethics—the mythology of “the West.” All of these are crashing down. It is as if reality itself were breaking.

Thus we are entering what I call “the space between stories.” The old story that told us who and what to trust, that narrated past and future, that told us how to conduct ourselves as responsible members of society, that defined what is real and who we are, is collapsing. “I don’t know what’s real anymore” is the hallmark of this space between.

A new and true story may arise from the wreckage of the old, but that will take time, and we must be available to receive it. Right now we are vulnerable to hasty substitutes for the collapsing old story that offer temporary relief from the bewilderment and vertigo of the space between. These substitutes beguile us with tidy explanations of what is happening, a new story-of-the-world to replace the old, but n fact they are the old, in disguise. If we allow them to seduce us, humanity will endure another cycle of horror. We must resist ready explanations until more of the unspeakable has been spoken.

We have been here before, my friends. The example that comes most readily to mind is the French Revolution. Then as now, an elite that ranged from the out-of-touch, to the decadent, to the downright depraved presided over a society that was groaning under the weight of its incompetence and corruption. To the guillotine! For a brief golden moment, it seemed that a new era had dawned. Liberty! Equality! Fraternity! Certainly these ideals were worth chopping off a few heads for. Yet once awakened, the guillotine’s thirst knew no limit. The streets ran with blood. Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world. Scarcely a decade later, Napoleon took power and put an end to it, instituting the bureaucratic system in which new elites (and many of the old ones) enacted the same inevitable dramas.

The French Revolution was a rehearsal, a trial run, whose failure to achieve its noblest ideals can inform humanity at our present crossroads. The stakes are higher this time. If we reenact the same old story, removing the occupants of the roles but not the roles themselves, switching the actors in the drama but preserving the drama itself, removing the corrupt from power but preserving the mindsets and habits of power itself, then our species will have made an irrevocable choice. The technologies of control are so powerful that there will be no more breakouts. Surveillance technology, digital currency, and AI will lock us in a totalitarian nightmare from which there is no escape.

Share

If, on the other hand, we pass this initiatory threshold, we will enter a new era of civilization. For one thing, the same elites who raped and tortured children also presided over a global system of war, genocide, and exploitation whose victims are no less pitiable. Is it really so different, to sacrifice a child in a Satanic ritual to further one’s personal power, as it is to sacrifice whole populations for geopolitical power? Both are outcroppings of the same mindset, the same dehumanization and instrumentalization of human beings. The lies that shroud each draw on a common source: the legitimacy of the elites, their institutions, and the story-of-the-world that elevates them. When one crumbles, so will the other.

Secondly and more importantly, waiting just outside of the carefully-guarded borders of official reality is knowledge that can revitalize humanity and all life on earth. The same breach in the wall through which the feral pigs of pedophilia, human trafficking, rape, murder, satanic ritual, and financial and political corruption are invading public awareness will also allow more welcome exiles to enter. What will this world become when we bring in all that has been suppressed? Circular economy money systems. Mind-body technologies. UAP technologies. Psychedelic therapies. Indigenous practices of ritual, dream, sound, story, and ceremony. Over-unity energy devices? What happens when “alternative” healing modalities come into their own? Regenerative agriculture? Bioremediation of waste? Ecosystem healing? And social technologies too, of inquiry and listening, conflict resolution, compassionate dialog. And what happens when we fully countenance the reality of extraterrestrial civilizations, of telepathy and ESP, of the continuity of consciousness after death? We will be able to create together the more beautiful world our hearts have always known is possible.

I’m quite tired of holding knowledge of all of the above against the assault of “impractical,” “Impossible,” “delusional,” “fake,” “fraud,” and “debunked.” From personal experience and decades of study I know they are real, yet we have lived in a reality-story-agreement field in which they are not. That is starting to change.

It’s not only that the guardians of official reality suppressed research and even eliminated researchers who challenged the interests of the energy industry, the medical industry, the chemical industry, and so forth. They also enforced the paradigms in which such technologies were impossible. They dictated not only what was real, but what could be real. Some of this suppression was conscious and deliberate, but much was unconscious, instinctive, driven by mythic and archetypal forces. When we understand this we can avoid one of the most dangerous traps that would shunt us back into a new iteration of the old story. The trap is to confuse symptom and cause; in this case, to believe that evil individuals are the cause of humanity’s present degradation and suffering. They are not. They too are symptoms.

The old story, the Story of Separation, narrates human progress as an ascent toward greater and greater control—over nature, the body, society, the genes, the brain, biology, matter. Control is the solution to every problem. Find the culprit. Find the pathogen. Find the cause, preferably the single cause, of a problem, and then you know how to solve it. Spray those bugs, kill those weeds, quarantine the contagious, eliminate the pathogen, lock up the criminals, bomb the enemy into oblivion. Problem solved. This is the habit that allows the public to be so easily manipulated into fighting against itself—just define two sides and tell each that the cause of their problems is the other. Shall we unite and turn that same habit against the manipulators themselves? Better that than incinerate our energy in civil warfare. But it is still the same habit, the same reflex. It never asks, What are the conditions that breed weeds and pests, criminals and enemies? Leaving those conditions unchanged, it leads to endless war, always a new superbug, a new crop of criminals or terrorists. So also will it ensure someday, and probably sooner than we think, a new crop of elite monsters.

Please understand—of course those who have violated trust should be removed from power. That will indeed require a revolution, since we cannot rely on the very institutions that protected them, the institutions they influenced and controlled, to do the removing for us. What kind of revolution shall it be though? Lynch mobs, or truth & reconciliation committees? Punishment, or redress? A revolution of hate, or a revolution of love?

When we the people seize power, will we be ready to hold it responsibly? Doubtless, some on the Epstein list were born psychopaths, but as the saying goes, power corrupts. Do you imagine yourself to be incorruptible? Do you think you are just made of better stuff than the global elites? (Just as they believed themselves to be made of better stuff—a better quality of being—than their victims?)

When we see the perpetrators of the Epstein files as inhuman, what shadowy parts of our own humanity do we deny? Reading some of the material, hearing the stories of victims, sometimes I am ashamed to be a member of this species. Within that shame lies a deep recognition that perpetrator, victim, rescuer, and bystander are not as separate as we would like to think. A revolution that denies this will bring us back in the end to where we are today.

Denial has been the problem. It is in secrecy that evil thrives, behind closed doors, out of sight, behind veils of pretense, buried beneath our vanity, beyond the fences of acceptable reality.

There may be something of Jeffrey Epstein in all of us, but let us not shield our gaze with spiritual platitudes. Let us not minimize the depravity of the elites who populate the Epstein files, nor the complicity of our institutions in allowing them. Here is what one man said after viewing some videos in the files: “Bloody hell. We are living in bloody hell…. I had to stop because I can’t unsee what I saw... Blood-curdling screams of young kids. The fear in these children. These people are the Devil walking.” We must take in this data point: that world movers-and-shakers, elite figures whom you might see on CNN, were circulating child torture videos. We must face the fact that our political institutions such as the FBI and Department of Justice did nothing for decades despite having access to the information because, as Attorney-general Pam Bondi explained, the people in Epstein’s black book were too important and revealing them would bring down the whole system. (She was right. It would, and it is.) We must not flinch from the revelations that continue to pour in through the widening gap in the fence. Apparently, nothing less than abject horror suffices to shake us from the hypnosis of normalcy. The revelations will continue. A lot of “conspiracy theories” will become agreed-upon fact; others will continue to dance in and out of the flickering borderlands of reality, until our very notion of objectivity will dissolve into a quantum superposition of narratives. Yes, the collapse of sense, meaning, and identity will reach that deep.

Reading the Epstein files and adjacent materials, it is hard for many of us to believe anyone could be that evil. This disbelief is partly why the fence cordoning off most of reality has held for so long. However, even as we face the depravity squarely, we must not allow our horror to divert us onto false diagnoses and false solutions. If we are to end the depravity we must understand it. We must understand power. And we must understand ourselves. The next essay in this series will be titled, Power and Depravity.

Share