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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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.

“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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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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The psi research community has long recognized the futility of proving the authenticity of psi phenomena to dogmatic skeptics. If rigorous experiments dating back to J.B. Rhine in the 1930s have failed to convince them, then nothing will. Therefore, many researchers have turned their focus away from proof toward understanding.

This essay reaches beyond these two goals toward a third. Conventional scientific thinking sees experiments as a way to query an objective reality independent of the observer. When scientists perform experiments to measure the speed of light or the mass of the proton, they believe they are measuring a fixed, universal, time-invariant quantity that won’t change as a result of performing the experiment. But what if there are phenomena that are not yet “settled” into objective constants? What if experiments do not only measure them, but can nudge them into one state or another—not just locally, but universally?

More broadly, what if the experiments we choose to do, and the intention and manner in which we do them, can alter reality? And what if we can apply this principle deliberately?

If that is the case, then research can pursue a goal beyond proving and beyond understanding. It becomes a creative act.

Observer-dependent phenomena

There is much in the field of psi research to suggest that something uncanny disturbs our objectivist intuitions. Consider, for example, the experimenter effect. One researcher performs an experiment to demonstrate some phenomenon and achieves remarkable results. A skeptic replicates it and gets nothing. Chance. What is going on here?

There are several possibilities:

(1) The original research was fraudulent or sloppy, so of course the replication delivers a null result.

(2) Regression to the mean: the initial result was a fluke.

(3) The experiment was valid but the replication of it was dishonest; perhaps hostile skeptics bent on paradigm protection set it up to fail.

(4) The beliefs of the experimenter influence the result. In this case, the very concept of replication is incoherent, because the experiment is inseparable from the experimenter.

The present essay proposes a fifth explanation. To draw it out, consider another oddity: the decline effect. It refers to the tendency of effective results to decline over time, in the presence of stricter methodological controls, and in formal settings.

The decline effect also dates back to J.B. Rhine. His initial experiments with Zener cards showed extraordinary results. His first subject performed with 100% accuracy in the initial two test runs of nine cards each. The probability of nine correct guesses is about 0.0000005. Two of those in a row, less than one in a trillion. Next Rhine ran a longer test on the same subject. This time the success rate was only 39%, not 100%.1 Subsequent experiments showed mixed results, with subjects performing well above chance on some trial runs, and well below chance on others.

While coined in the context of parapsychology, the decline effect is recognized across many fields of study, particularly medicine and social psychology. To preserve the orthodox ontology of observer-independence, conventional explanations include:

• Regression to the mean

• Tightening methodological protocols that eliminate effects that were due to methodological flaws

• Publication bias (the Winners’ Curse): initial findings must be striking in order to be published, but subsequent replication studies are not subject to that same selection filter.

And there are many others (placebo erosion, system adaptation to experimental interventions, cognitive bias, statistical overfitting, and conscious or unconscious p-hacking). But what all the conventional explanations share in common is that they attempt to preserve observer-independence and the ontological stability of the experimental subject.2

A rebuttal of the conventional explanations for the decline effect is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that these explanations fail to account for the effect sizes and statistical patterns in question. Something spooky is going on that begs us to reconsider cherished scientific assumptions of observer-independence and experiment replicability.

Ontological Instability

Let us leave behind the conventional explanations that attempt to preserve the old division between mind and matter, and step fully into a new-and-ancient ontology from which we can perform reality-shifting experiments.

Psi researchers are generally sympathetic to the beliefs-influence-reality interpretation of the experimenter effect. This is also their favored explanation for the placebo effect. In both cases, however, that explanation falls short. It isn’t wrong per se, but it subtly preserves a kind of objectivity in which ‘belief” is simply a new variable, a new causal influence mediated, perhaps, by heretofore-undiscovered physical forces operating on an independent reality.

Let us instead step through the doorway that the experimenter effect (along with the decline effect and the placebo effect) offers into a wholly different understanding of what is real, and what the relation is between reality and consciousness.

As you consider the following explanation, please exercise a generous understanding of the tendency of English words like “reality,” “actually,” and “object” to reinforce the very assumptions this explanation seeks to replace. A reality is not another new observer-independent object. It is inseparable from the observer-participant’s stories, body, consciousness, and relationships. The term “consensus reality” conveys something of this complexity, if we understand it to mean not just a consensus about reality, but to suggest that story, meaning, and agreement contribute to its constitution.

The basic hypothesis is that phenomena that consensus belief, especially scientific belief, considers impossible require another, more hospitable reality in order to function. Consensus reality—the agreed reality of conventional physics, but more importantly that habits of thought and perception that accompany it—is inhospitable to telepathy, to ESP, faster-than-light travel, anti-gravity, over-unity energy devices, homeopathy, life after death, and much more. Just think of how differently you would live if telepathy were a normal, recognized, and routine feature of everyday life. Few of our social institutions, our forms of governance, or our economic system would stand. They are part of the “inhospitable” reality, and they condition our default beliefs and stories. This materially-reinforced climate of belief, also a climate of being, goes far beyond mere opinions about ESP, UAPs, or free energy devices.

Therefore, to observe them one must enter another reality bubble in some way insulated from consensus reality. For example, telepathy is easily demonstrated in someone’s living room to open-minded observers, invisible to the public gaze and the scrutiny of scientists. It does not intrude upon consensus reality. It does not provide a data point that challenges it, simply because it is out of view.

That changes when rigorous scientific protocols are imposed that would satisfy a skeptical observer. Now a window has opened into consensus reality, breaching the reality-bubble in which telepathy is authentic. Another reality leaks in through the breach, diluting the experimental results. The wider the window, the greater the dilution. Under the most strict possible protocols, including constant video surveillance, hostile observers zealously guarding against cheating, and so forth, maybe the effect disappears entirely.

Anything that “shields” the experiment from public or scientific view will allow stronger effects. Lax anti-cheating protocols, small sample sizes, non-credentialed researchers, or lack of outside observers allow people occupying other belief systems to easily dismiss the research as fraudulent or inconclusive. If it is unpublishable, no one will ever even know about it.

Imagine reality as a kind of field that coalesces around our beliefs, our psychology, and our embodied state of being. It is not something we can necessarily change through a mere act of will. It is a container created before and through this lifetime within which we can play out the dramas necessary for the development of the soul. For many people, there comes a time when they have outgrown that container; that is when an event comes along that may shatter it. Until that moment comes, they will find ways to avoid, discount, and dismiss any anomaly.

In our time, many people are becoming ready, for our entire civilization has nearly outgrown the mythology that carried it for so long. That mythology generated a corresponding collective reality that colors the personal reality of civilization’s members. It creates the role of the orthodox, the heretic, the lunatic, the true believer, the skeptic, and so on, but all revolve around the primary defining mythology of Separation (reductionism, objectivity, mechanistic causality, quantification, etc.)

For those who have outgrown the story-reality that contained them, a scientific experiment can be an induction into a new reality, a doorway. Put another way, it can make something real that was not real before.

The scientific experiment, then, is a creative act. The researcher may think in terms beyond proof and beyond discovery. Not that he or she can dictate what shall be real by determining the outcome of the experiment—not at all. The experiment is a kind of request, a knocking on the door of possibility to see if we are ready for it to open. It doesn’t merely demonstrate that something is real; it seeks to draw a new phenomenon into the real, or to be “more real” than they were. It is a courtship of a new reality. If the experiment fails, it may mean that the reality it courts is not yet ready to merge with the reality from which it comes.

The understanding of the experiment as a creative, not just a revelatory, act invites researchers to consider what they want to create, what they want to make real, and who they are in relation to that reality. If an experiment gives weak results, no longer can one simply assume that the phenomenon is inauthentic or that the test subject is incapable or that something is wrong with the experimental protocol. It could be instead that it is “less real” in the given circumstance, and that the experimenter himself, and the totality of those privy to the experiment, co-generate this attenuated reality. Not only does the attempt to prove something to skeptical outsiders dilute the very phenomenon one is trying to prove, so does the experimenter’s own skepticism, his need to see proof,

An illustrative case: the Spellers

A Speller is a non-verbal autistic person who has learned to communicate by pointing at a letter board to spell out words. Non-verbal auists have a condition known as apraxia (sometimes called dispraxia), characterized by a dysfunction in motor planning and fine motor control. Normally, it is only with great difficulty and long training that these non-verbal people learn to point at letters on the letter board. Then their cognitive abilities and even telepathic abilities are revealed, as described in the popular Telepathy Tapes podcast.

A debate rages within the autism education community not just about the telepathic abilities of Spellers, but also about whether they are capable of using language at all. Critics say that Spellers are actually just responding to non-verbal cues from their communication partners (often a parent) who slightly move the board as the Speller points. If they are actually able to think and communicate autonomously, then why can’t they use a stationary letter board? Why does the communication partner (CP) have to be holding it? Their parents have succumbed to wishful thinking, say the critics, imagining their children to possess intelligence where there is none. They are just communicating with themselves.

This account violently contradicts the reports of innumerable parents, who recount story after story of their children communicating information and using vocabulary words that the parents do not know. They describe starting out skeptical, wary of the very delusion the critics accuse them of, only believing their children are genuinely communicating after experiencing repeated confirmation. The skeptic’s position can stand only by an arrogant and belittling dismissal of the parents’ intelligence and sanity, an attitude of “I know better than they do” -- based on dogma and the most cursory of direct experience. Nor does it make sense to anyone who has watched the training process: hours and hours, weeks and weeks of painstaking one-on-one work between the communication partner (and the autistic person to learn the necessary skills. Surely a paradigm is infirm when it depends on the supercilious dismissal of critics’ mental faculties and ignores their direct experiences.

So why can’t most Spellers perform using a letter board that’s just sitting on a table? Why does it have to be in the hands of another person, and not just any person, but a communication partner who has trained with them?

Rather than default to the supercilious explanation of the skeptics (wishful thinking), I decided to ask some Spellers themselves. They use the concept of “synching” to describe the relationship necessary for them to be able to use a letter board. The weeks or months of training synch the CP to the autistic person. Spelling is not an autonomous function, but the product of a relationship.

While synching might be conceived in fairly conventional terms of emotional comfort or brain wave synchronization, a much more radical hypothesis offers itself as we consider further oddities of the Speller phenomenon. Perhaps the long process of establishing synching brings autistic person and CP into a reality in which the former is intelligent, can use language, and may be telepathic. In a limited sense, the skeptics are correct—these non-verbal autistic people were cognitively incapable of using language. After learning to spell, they are cognitively capable, but not because they developed those cognitive skills. No. They shifted from one reality to another. To state this idea fully entails flagrant paradox: Synching shifts the autistic person from a reality in which he was cognitively incapable of using language, to one in which he is now—and always has been—cognitively capable.

That is why, typically, they don’t learn spelling the way a beginner would. They start immediately with a full adult vocabulary and the ability to express sophisticated ideas, comment on literature and philosophy, etc.—often beyond the capacities of their CPs.

The testimony of Spellers also suggests that they shift in and out of the reality in which they are cognitively present and capable. One said that he cannot think clearly except when he is in the Speller classroom. His weekly visits there are interludes of lucid consciousness. Others in the group said that they started out that way, but gradually over time became able to maintain consciousness and a sense of self.

Some told me they have no clear memories from before they learned to spell. One said, “My first memory is of a voice piercing the fog and saying to me, ‘I know you’re in there. I’m going to teach you to communicate.” It was as if, before then, he did not exist as a fully aware human being.

Other Spellers shared similar stories. They spoke of being in a fog, a semi-conscious state of suffering. They suffer a lot of physical discomfort due to the limitations of their bodies, plus the health conditions that usually accompany autism, but most of all, they say, they suffer from loneliness. One Speller told me, “I have been liberated from prison.’

The foregoing account is a little too tidy, tacitly accepting Cartesian assumptions of reality and identity. Who is the person here? One of the Telepathy Tapes podcasts discusses communication from the “higher selves” of people with severe dementia instructing their caregivers how to handle them. In what sense is that higher self “actually” the person with dementia? Phenomena at the frontiers of mind-body research disrupt our inherited ideas of a fixed Cartesian separate self. It does not always make sense to found experiments on the premise of a discrete subject. Who the subject is-—and what the subject is capable of doing—is a function of relationship: the relationship with the CP, with the experimenter, with the entire community of observers that narrows or widens according to the experimental circumstances.

This may not be too big a problem when the topic under investigation lies safely within accepted paradigmatic boundaries, but when it challenges basic assumptions about the laws of physics and the nature of the self, we are forced to reexamine the very precepts of the Scientific Method. Observer-independence, replicability, time-invariance, and the independence of variables lose their absolute status and become mutable, conditional aspects of a relational field, and the function of the experiment becomes no longer merely to reveal, but to create.

Irreplicability in observer-dependent experiments

Significantly, these oddities of Speller communication make it easy for skeptics to remain in the reality that the phenomenon isn’t real. The reality of Spelling and telepathy is thereby cordoned off from expert consensus reality. For the skeptics, it is not real.

That doesn’t mean: “They are in a delusion about reality. They think it is unreal when actually it is real.” That interpretation draws on the Cartesian worldview in which there is an absolute ojective reality underneath and separate from our opinions, beliefs, and perceptions. Something is either happening, or not happening; something is either there, or not there at a given point x, y, z, at time t.

That statement is not true at the quantum level, where a particle resolves into a specific location only when a measurement is performed. Maybe it isn’t true on the macro level either. Then, our attempt to colonize relational reality by overlaying Cartesian coordinates atop it impoverishes that reality, unravels the twisted cords of interbeing, and leaves us in lonely solitude. The Cartesian coordinate system is the intellectual scaffold, as well as the mathematical foundation, for the sociotechnical dissolution of the bonds that tied human to human, human to nature, and self to other to weave ecology and community. No surprise, then, that the reweaving of these ties, whether through science or ecology or relational arts, always includes the realization of the inseparability of what we thought separate. Existence itself is relational.

Does any one of us “exist” outside of relationship? Or, to play a little loose with the quantum metaphor, outside of a “measurement” (an interaction) with another conscious being? Most of us have had the experience of interacting with a new person and becoming something more than what we were before. Our being can morph and expand.

In paradigm-challenging fields like ESP, we must see the experimental subject to be not just a discrete individual, but the entire experimental setup. In light of the experimenter effect, we must consciously incorporate ourselves as co-subjects in our experimental design. Implicitly, we therefore acknowledge the basic irreplicability of the experiment. Other researchers can at most copy it, substituting themselves for the original experimenters and thus changing the experiment.

Even if the experimental subject is not a human being but a machine or a therapy, as long as it is at home in one reality and alien to another, it will be sensitive to who is performing and observing the experiment. Phenomena such as cold fusion and devices like the Bedini Wheel are famously fickle, seeming to work for one person and not another, always evading compelling demonstration. Cold fusion researchers have trouble getting consistent results. Is that because they haven’t landed on quite the right formula? Is it that cold fusion is impossible? Or is it because the phenomenon lingers on the borders of reality? In fact I personally find the demonstrations of cold fusion quite compelling. Yet they are sequestered away from consensus reality by various institutional filters that maintain narrative hygiene.3

Ontological shielding in research design

What is the point of performing irreplicable experiments? Proof depends on reproducability. That is the ultimate verification of results, in theory accessible to any independent party. Yet an experiment can serve other purposes that don’t depend on reproducability:

• To understand the phenomenon in relation to those performing it and witnessing it.

• To incubate a technology, therapy, or phenomenon in hospitable conditions.

• To open a window onto it for those who are in a compatible reality to see and understand it.

• To shift the surrounding reality in the direction which the experiment establishes.

Let us introduce the term ontological shielding to refer to the separation of an experiment from a reality inhospitable to the phenomenon under study. An experiment aimed at convincing skeptics must be accessible to their view; it cannot be highly shielded or it will be invisible to them, easily dismissable. On the other hand, an experiment designed to explore ESP among a community of practitioners will work better if it is shielded. Experiments can be designed with varying amounts of ontological shielding to achieve the necessary conditions for a given goal. Researchers can even perform meta-experiments to test the effects of ontological shielding, keeping in mind, of course, that the meta-experiments may be subject to the very observer-dependency that they seek to test.

Using a hypothetical ESP experiment as an example, I will explore five layers of ontological shielding. Each layer hosts a different version of the experiment.

Layer zero: no shielding. The experiment is methodologically impeccable, designed and conducted under the close supervision of multiple hostile observers to prevent any possibility of cheating. If the experiment produces a statistically significant result, it indicates that consensus reality is deteriorating. The experiment isn’t only aboutt ESP; it is about the state of the reality in which it is performed.

Layer one; perfunctory shielding. This layer is for the scientific community and scientifically-informed public. It includes rigorous protocols to make it acceptable to that audience. However, to ontologically shield it from the reality of dogmatic skeptics, it purposefully includes a design flaw, which is calibrated to (1) allow hostile skeptics to satisfy themselves that the results can be ignored, and at the same time, to (2) make the skeptics’ criticism seem petty or desperate. The dogmatic skeptic should be able to concoct an explanation to dismiss the results, an explanation that seems ridiculous to everyone except himself. For example, a researcher into extra-ocular vision (blindfolded children reading text) told me that critics, unable to find any other flaws, dismissed the research for failing to account for photoreceptors in the skin. Can you read with your skin? Neither can I. When skeptics pounce on that “flaw,” they make themselves look ridiculous. Paradoxically, a design flaw of this type can make the results even more compelling to the general audience. It improves the results by shielding the study from dilution with a contradictory reality field.

Layer two shielding: deliberately “unscientific.”. This layer is designed to be compelling to the general public, spanning the spectrum from open-minded, to sympathetic, to fully accepting of ESP. Its purpose is to provide results that make people say, “Wow!” For these results to be possible, the experiment needs additional ontological shielding, which could take several forms: laxer protocols, uncredentialed researchers, lack of a control group, no blinding, possible confounding variables, etc. The experiment “proves” nothing. The data it produces are unpublishable. It takes precautions to rule out conventional explanations (otherwise, no one would say “wow!”), but assumes the basic honesty of the researchers and their subjects. This allows much more flexibility and creativity in experiment design.

Layer three: the reality bubble. This type of experiment is shielded from the public entirely. The only people privy to the results are the experimenters themselves, and anyone with whom they share the story of what happened in the room that day. Thus shielded, the phenomenon may reveal itself in its fullness to the researchers and show them what awaits humanity. In the protected ontological bubble the researchers have created, the phenomenon can develop and mature. It is like a baby in an incubator that needs to be protected from the cold drafts and germs of the outside reality. Here, the experimenters can plumb the full depths of the reality-field of ESP, limited only by what they themselves carry in. In this layer, protocols need be no stricter than what is necessary to placate the experimenters’ own internal skeptic. Furthermore, the same kind of trick can be utilized as in layer 1, applied to themselves: offer something for the skeptical mind to grab onto, but that our higher mind recognizes as a ridiculous objection. Thereby we offer ourselves a choice of what to believe (and who to be, in resonance with that belief). We do not attempt to compel belief.

Layer four is more mystical. The experimenter must shield the experiment even from himself. Perhaps we have some telepathic test subjects. We run the experiment without checking their performance. Only the subjects are privy to the results, not the experimenter. Maybe the subjects tell the experimenters later, but there is no way to independently verify what they say. We step outside of the paradigm of objectivity entirely, outside the realm of proof, and into the realm of story. We hear about the extraordinary experience that happened in that room, and think, “I wish I could have been there to see it. Then I would know for sure!” But if we were there to see it, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. Yet, even though the event was ontologically shielded in that room, still we have created a kind of portal, a foothold for a new reality in our own. Even if the subjects never speak of it, still the event imprints onto the Akashic field and strengthens the channel to the reality the subjects are anchoring. The results of that experiment will find their way out. Sooner or later, maybe that very day, maybe months or years later, they will reach us.

Playing with Reality

The more we understand that reality is not a fixed, external environment, but rather fluid and relational, the better able we are to play with it, to dance with it.

For example, we might: deliberately run fraudulent experiments and expose them, so as to make it easier for hostile parties to reject genuine experiments. The reader will recognize a Trickster vibe to this idea. In fact, it is not necessary for sincere researchers to do this. There are plenty of, to coin a term, “authentic frauds” who contribute to the onotological shielding of new-paradigm research. These charlatans, hoaxers, and scammers, together with sincere-but-delusional or sloppy researchers, provide a slippery buffer zone that preserves the integrity of the reality-field of new-paradigm technologies and human abilities, where they can develop uncontaminated by consensus reality. Then, when consensus reality breaks, as it is doing now at ever-increasing pace, new-paradigm technologies can emerge from their cocoon into the collective embrace of a human civilization that is ready for them.

Ironically, hostile skeptics and debunkers, especially dishonest ones who deliberately sabotage replication attempts or perform specious takedowns of new-paradigm research, help to maintain the ontological shielding that the phenomena require to develop. Cordoned off from consensus reality, new phenomena can establish themselves, growing like a baby kangaroo in its mother’s pouch until they are robust enough to face the world. New phenomena must be nurtured in protected environments.

Researchers who expose their baby paradigms to the hostile forces of consensus reality suffer severe consequences. The history of research into topics like ESP, water memory, biological transmutation of elements, alternative cancer cures, and over-unity energy devices is littered with the corpses of once-sterling scientific reputations—and sometimes with the literal corpses of intransigent researchers themselves. Consensus reality has an immune system that will vigorously reject threats to its integrity.

The published experiment, the press conference, the public demonstration attempt to overcome this resistance by force. If only we could get this published, if only people would read it, if only people would look at our evidence or visit our lab, then they would have no choice—they would have to change their minds. If only they would watch this documentary on chemtrails. If only they would read these articles about the Satanic elite. Flat Earth theory. Vaccine adverse events. 9/11 truth. The Gaza genocide. Election fraud. The CCP. Trumpian fascism and ICE. The AI apocolypse. Regenerative agriculture. Biodynamics. Past lives. The dangers of seed oils. The true story of Federal Reserve. If only they would read this rebuttal of the expert that debunks it. If only they would step into my reality, the true reality.

I don’t mean to taint any of the above by association with the others. I accept some of them fully, some partially, some not at all. But whether we are speaking of politics, medicine, science, UFOs, or any other topic, experience tells us that such frontal assaults on established reality rarely work, unless that reality is so decrepit that it is already falling apart under its own weight. When that happens, when its immune system falters, then anomalies flood in.

At such a time, the new paradigms that have grown in their ontologically shielded incubators can come out and colonize the soil of collective perception, made fertile by the decay of old structures of sense and meaning.

It is happening. Reality is breaking. The Epstein Files are just the latest hammer-blow driving the cracks in reality’s facade wider and deeper. It will not hold much longer.

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Mere criminality doesn’t explain why this move provoked in me such nauseous dread. Horrible crimes, some much worse than this, are happening all the time, whether perpetrated by my own country, its allies, or pretty much any government on earth. But this one strikes a particularly evil omen.

As I write this, Maduro is being indicted in a federal court in New York for violations of US law. What principle is being asserted here? Is it that if a leader of one country violates the laws of another, that leader can be abducted, tried, and imprisoned? What if Donald Trump, or the president of France or some other country, violates Chinese law? Would the Chinese be within their rights to kidnap them? That is the principle that this action asserts.

How would people in this country feel if Venezuela abducted President Trump and indicted him in Venezuelan court for violating Venezuelan law? (OK, maybe some of us would feel gleeful, but this is no way to run international affairs.)

Of course, the difference between President Maduro and the leader of a more powerful country is that the former is vulnerable to abduction and the latter is not. So really the principle being asserted here is simply, “Might makes right.”

The whole idea of law, of civilization even, is to replace that bestial principle with higher principles that embody fairness, compassion, freedom, sovereignty, self-determination, and a concept of natural rights. Law is a set of agreements that puts limits on the ability of the strong to dominate the weak, for the state to dominate the individual, for the majority to dominate the minority. Without law, we live always in anxiety: a constant struggle to assert dominance until, one day, misfortune overtakes us and whoever was once strong becomes old, frail, sick, or weak.

The kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro is not an assertion of the rule of law; it is a repudiation of the rule of law. To be sure, Trump and his predecessors have set ample precedent for this latest disregard for legal and diplomatic principle. Particularly flagrant was the support for Israel’s assassinations of leaders of its enemies while in the midst of negotiations, and then our own bombing of Iran in a similar vein. Also, the “ceasefires” Israel agrees to and then promptly violates, again with US diplomatic and military support. If negotiations are used as a ruse to lull the enemy into complacency, then the very possibility of negotiation vanishes. Imagine, for example, if when Vladimir Putin showed up in Alaska to negotiate with Trump, Trump had him arrested. Imagine if Trump went to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping, and Xi had Trump arrested. Soon no leader would dare negotiate with anyone.

It would be unfair, though, to pin all the blame for this recent eruption of lawlessness onto Donald Trump. Rule of law has always been lipstick on the pig of imperial power. The empire wields the law selectively against enemies, resistors, and dissidents, exempting its own leaders and allies. Trump differs from his predecessors only in neglecting the pious homilies to “democracy” and “the rule of law” that customarily accompany the exercise of imperial power. He dispenses as well with subtlety. Instead of leveraging NGOs and CIA media assets to engineer a color revolution, Trump sends in the special forces. Instead of deploying a weaponized US dollar and sanctions to steal other countries’ assets, Trump sends the Coast Guard to seize oil tankers and promises ‘boots on the ground” to take Venezuela’s oil that, he says, they “stole.” Instead of talking about “nation-building” or “restoring democracy,” Trump says quite baldly, “We are going to run the country.”

Maybe the nakedness of his exercise of power will prove a good thing, exposing the empire for what it is and vitiating the pretense that our interventions are about freedom and democracy. Maybe, but I don’t think so. The pretense of principle at least served the function of affirming principle. Invoking the rule of law affirms the rule of law—even when one’s actions violate it—by establishing it as a norm for civilized people. The shameless exertion of naked power does the opposite, normalizing the worst of human impulses.

The Maduro kidnapping, along with the murder and piracy that led up to it, portends a total breakdown in international law and diplomacy. The most powerful country in the world has completed its transition to a rogue nation, bristling with nuclear weapons with a megalomaniac at its helm. It is somehow fitting that the propaganda shibboleth of the “mad dictator with nuclear weapons,” invoked to whip up war fever against the enemies of the empire like Hussein, Assad, and Gaddafi, has circled back to roost in our own nation.

Again, the dissolving of the rule of law—and even the pretense of the rule of law—did not start with Donald Trump, and it would be vain to imagine that his overthrow would restore it. “Might makes right” as a shameless, explicit operating principle of foreign policy dates back at least to the rise of the neocons in the second Bush administration and their dreams of “full spectrum dominance.” The neocons started in the Republican Party but eventually came to exercise considerable influence in the Democratic Party too, installing their members in high positions under Obama and Biden. In the 2024 election many of their key leaders openly opposed Trump.

Trump’s election despite them was a tragic missed opportunity. In an alternate universe, anti-imperialist Democrats would have supported Trump’s anti-interventionist inclinations, giving him political cover to defy the likes of Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz in his own party. Facing blanket hostility, Trump turned toward them instead. They and other neocons added the poisonous catalyst of naked aggression to Trump’s own America-first chauvinism, his obsession with “winning,” and his narcissistic compulsion toward “greatness.” Thus it was that Trump, the anti-interventionist who believed the Iraq War was a mistake and vowed to keep us from further military conflicts became another (though cruder) tool of the military-industrial complex.

Not just in the Trump administration, but in both political parties in the US, and in countries around the world, the rule of law is waning. What do I mean by “rule of law”? It isn’t about obeying rules in an over-ordered legalistic society where laws replace informal, vernacular governance. Ultimately, the rule of law springs from an ethic that puts something else higher than immediate personal or national self-interest. It is a set of agreements arising from that ethic. Rules alone cannot enforce it. It requires consensual buy-in. A saying goes, “There are no rules in love and war.” Leaving aside love for now, indeed it is true of war. When winning is the most important thing, an existential necessity, then everything else must be sacrificed to the god of victory.

Appalled and sickened as I am at Donald Trump’s actions in office, I do not suffer from “Trump derangement syndrome.” Nothing has harmed his opposition more than TDS, since it misapprehends the man and his supporters, and distracts attention from the many policy disasters that require no frothing abhorrence of the man to see, but only sober, rational consideration. Trump’s followers—those with Trump adulation syndrome—are just as blind to those as his opponents are blind to his (few) positive accomplishments and his unrealized populist instincts.

Ironically, Trump derangement syndrome has contributed to the derangement of the man himself. Wouldn’t it drive you crazy if half the population believed you are a depraved monster? Trump has made a god out of winning—but so did his opponents in the 2024 election when they tried to defeat him with dirty tricks, censorship, media control, and a weaponized justice system. They put winning above democracy, above freedom of speech, and above the impartiality of the law. Trump inherited their methods and mindset, and now turns all those tools back against his opponents. When one side fights by all means available, the other side must too. It is a classic multipolar trap. And now President Trump has released win-at-all-costs from the bounds of domestic politics and unleashed it upon the world of international affairs. How can the world function, unless it rejects the precedent Trump (and his predecessors, I am sorry to say) have laid down of extra-legal asset seizures, regime change, piracy, kidnapping, murder, and subversion of diplomatic principle?

Some of my readers might protest, “But Maduro was a bad guy. He destroyed that country’s economy. Venezuelans are celebrating in the streets.” OK. This exemplifies the kind of us-them, good-guy-bad-guy thinking that flattens complexity and ignores history. What is Maduro’s context? What are the conditions that tilted him toward dictatorship? Do you understand the history of economic sanctions that destroyed Venezuela’s economy? US imperialism in Latin America? Blinded by a binary worldview of good and evil, we ignore questions like these. The bad conditions of this world are not caused by bad men. It is more that bad conditions create bad men. Dispense with the binary worldview and we can begin the process of truly understanding the conditions that produce a man like Donald Trump, or Nicolas Maduro, or a movement like MAGA, or Antifa, or any other person or group you care to hate. Then we can begin to address the conditions instead of warring endlessly against their symptoms.

So, what is to be done now? I wish I could offer a quick solution, a solution couched in the familiar idiom of politics. I wish I could believe that if I exhort all my readers to call their elected representatives or march in the streets, that we could put an end to the madness. In fact, I support both these actions, though to be honest I doubt they will do much good given the current level of public apathy. The present calamity is decades in the making, centuries maybe. We need nothing less than a new kind of politics. Trump shows us in distilled form the state of our political culture, the dehumanization, the hate, the derangement. It will not do merely to “stand up against Trump.” We need to stand up, yes, but stand up for something, We need to stand up for peace. We need to stand up for dignity. We need to stand up for the basic truth of our common humanity. We need to stand up for all the “right” that is sacrificed in the contest of might, and we need to do so through our means as well as for our ends. We need to treat even our opponents—especially our opponents—with respect, humanity, and dignity. Our politics is profuse with the opposite: with ridicule, contempt, mockery, and hate. Why are we so shocked when our president mirrors those same qualities back to us and projects them across the world?

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(My read-aloud version. It conveys something extra I think.)

They never did manage to save enough money to buy that homestead. The husband took up carpentry. He did beautiful work, but his ghosts got the better of him, and it took more and more pot and alcohol to chase them away. Her days and years were consumed with raising five children with never quite enough money.

Before the last child was out of the house, the grandchildren started coming. You’d need two hands to count them. Kate’s children did not become the minstrels and poets and inventors of the Age of Aquarius, but instead entered the lawn care business and the gas station business, became truck drivers and medical billing specialists. They are all busy. Even two jobs are barely enough to support a family, so both parents had to work. Grandma took care of the kids. Now the grandchildren are older. Child care is no longer needed. What is needed is money, and Kate has little of that. She loves to grow plants. Maybe she could sell flowers at a roadside stand, she thought, and give a bit of money to her children. She spent a summer doing that and made zero dollars. So there she is, feeling useless.

And she remembers those days of youth, with her hopes and ideals, a glorious life ahead of her. How could it have come to this? She never wanted to be rich or famous. She only wanted to contribute to humanity’s emergence into a magnificent New Age. She never imagined her husband would be a pot and booze addict. She never imagined her angelic, creative son would end up spraying chemicals on lawns.

Kate’s sense that life betrayed her echoes through modern society. Why else would “New Age” have become a term of scorn? It is because its promise was never redeemed. It is hard today to remember (since most of us were not yet born) that the New Age wasn’t originally about crystals and angel decks. The New Age was to culminate an all-fronts social, political, and spiritual revolution. The peace movement, civil rights, women’s liberation, global decolonization, the back-to-the-land movement, and the environmental movement fed the wellspring of 1960s idealism, inseparable from the psychedelic awakening and the entry of Eastern spiritual ideas and practices to the West. What we know today as “New Age” is the forlorn orphan of the broken marriage of 1960s politics and spirituality.

The popular movements of the 1960s recorded some significant achievements, but they certainly did not redeem the promise of total world transformation. Humanity today is better off in some ways than in 1960, and in other ways far worse off. What hippie in the 1967 Summer of Love would have believed that the world of the impossibly futuristic year 2025 would be one of accelerating ecological collapse, of genocide in full public view, of political leaders spewing hate, of shattered communities, crushing loneliness, rampant addiction, and chronic disease?

No wonder we disavow the starry-eyed idealism of the 1960s, are even a little ashamed of it, in exactly the same way that a mature man might be ashamed of his own youthful dreams. But is that man really mature? Or is he merely defeated?

Is the Great Expectation of the young person something to demean and discard, a youthful foolishness, a puerile fantasy to dispel so that one can proceed with the tedious business of “real life”—a job. A mortgage. The bills. Mondays. Debt. Struggling to make ends meet. A brief respite called the weekend, or drink, or drugs. Shopping. The Super Bowl. Empty, performative holidays. Santa Claus. Pretending to care about things you secretly don’t care about. A normality you never can quite make yourself believe in, or a hell you can’t wait to see the end of.

There you were, bursting with great expectations and the energy to fulfill them, eyes bright with hope on the brink of life’s magnificent journey, only to end up with this? It numbs the pain a bit to pretend that the vision was false all along. If there is nothing else but this, “real life,” it is easier to resign ourselves to it.

On the cultural level too, maybe it numbs the pain to dismiss the visions of the 1960s, the New Age, the Great Society, and for that matter all the rest of humanity’s glimpses of a Golden Age, the Krita Yuga, the Taiping, the Frashokereti, the Maitreya Age as pleasant fantasies at best, and at worst narcotic distractions from actionable real-world solutions. Let us resign ourselves instead to tiny incremental changes that, while they may merely slow down the world-destroying machine, are at least doable.

Is this realism? Or is it defeatism?

Shall we counsel our youth to abandon their idealistic dreams and knuckle under to what the older generation has decided is realistic? Or dare we face that, maybe, the young people are actually right in their idealism; that they reach for a real possibility; that our patronizing dismissal of it might come from unresolved grief over our own disappointments, defeats, and lost idealism; and that we are afraid that it would be robbed from us if we were to believe in it once more.

Dare we believe that the discarded Utopias of the Sixties and before emanate from an authentic future? Dare we raise our eyes again? We may not realize that vision in our lifetimes, but we can send the pulse of love/life toward it through what we give to the children and to the world. In that intention we may find that the paradise that beckons lives already inside.

I would say to Kate, “You were not wrong! It wasn’t a delusion. You are not crazy for feeling this grief for the life you never had. If you weep for it, you are sane. You are whole. And if you are still able to weep for it, then you are not yet defeated.”

She never was defeated. How else was she able to access the patience to care for all those babies through the long years, without thanks, without praise?

That is what I want to tell Kate, and those like her, and maybe even myself, but especially the women who pour their love into their babies and grandbabies without celebration or praise or recognition for the mighty service they do to life. In any sane society, they would enjoy a status above all others, for they send the pulse of love into the future. Do you suppose that those moments of baby care, toddler care, those endless tedious hours, are in vain? Do you suppose that the love doesn’t land in those children? They may grow up with no conscious memory of being held, so patiently, so lovingly, of being comforted, of being played with, of being protected, but all of it lodges within them and becomes them. Not every child is fortunate enough to receive the embodied knowledge of the Grandmother archetype, but those who do are better equipped to engage the world with kindness and patience.

Somebody has to do that work to lift the world from the state into which it has fallen. Someone has to do the glamorous work too, the “leadership,” the “impact,” the organizing, the peacemaking, the inspiring, the big visible things that attract praise. Worthy praise. The quotation marks are not facetious. They are just to indicate the inadequacy of our concepts of leadership and impact. Someone must do those things, but someone must also do the humbler work that does not bring with it money or praise, and sometimes not even thanks. Those are the ones I admire most. They are the ones laying down the foundation for a time when the New Age can actually take root. The promise of the Sixties, of every golden moment that has diffracted from Utopia onto history, may be redeemed only by healing all the unfinished story lines that lock humanity in the roles of persecutor, victim; rescuer, bystander; us, them; ally, enemy; hero, villain. As long as we perpetuate those roles, we will create social systems that embody them.

Just as every act of love lodges in the grandbabies Kate cared for, the same for any act of love, whether toward a child or a dying person or anyone in between. It lodges in the world. It lodges in God’s witness. It declares: “This is what a human being is. This is what a human being does.” It tugs the future into conformity with the truth of human nature it establishes.

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As I’m sure you all know, “UAP” (unidentified anomalous phenomenon) is the scientific-sounding way to refer to a UFO, which was the scientific-sounding way to refer to a flying saucer. You see, if I use fancy words like anomalous and phenomenon, that shows that I’m not some credulous new age yahoo who uses words like “weird” or “object.” Nope. By using the military term UAP, I demonstrate that I am a hard-headed rationalist with military-grade standards of evidence.

Anyway, why this emphasis on national security? Some commentators think the public is being primed for the next psy-op, a staged alien invasion, to justify new programs of social control. A war is always useful for that. Now, I’m not one to dismiss a good conspiracy theory out of hand, and will say more on this topic later, but I think there is something going on here much more serious, much more disturbing, yet on a deeper level much more hopeful, than yet another chapter of The Illuminati Versus the People.

Most of the experts in the film are former members of the armed services and intelligence agencies. Having been immersed in the mentality of national security for their whole careers, naturally they speak its language. They have been conditioned to think in terms of enemies and threats.

Secondly, they are risking their careers, reputations, and maybe more to speak out. In order to be taken seriously, they may feel compelled to speak in terms of national security rather than in terms of the transforming potential of contact with extraterrestrial conscious beings, or of the implications of the collapse of foundational scientific paradigms. But this doesn’t even come close to explaining the national security orientation of the film and its experts.

Here we are, on the brink of epochal revelations, and we are still worrying about national security? Come on guys! Retrieved alien craft? Recovered “biologics” (extraterrestrial humanoids)? They saw it with their own eyes. They have no incentive to lie (and a lot of disincentive). Why aren’t people pouring out into the streets with shouts of wonder? Why do we continue with business as usual—in particular, the business of war, the business of hate, the business of struggle.

The reason is that something is in the way. We are not able to let in the truth. Government suppression of information is not the only reason why UFOs have been relegated to unreality, nor is media-CIA narrative management. We have been willing accomplices in our own deception; otherwise, we would not be reacting with such indifference today. There is no shame in this. It is not easy to accommodate information that dissolves our story of who we are and what is real. It is a threat to our… security.

Ironically, the mindset of security is the very reason why “disclosure” is happening in the first place. If we weren’t obsessed with secrecy, with control, with enemies and threats, then everything would be out in the open and there would be nothing to disclose. When they invoke national security, these whistle-blowers, brave as they are, are unconsciously feeding the psychic substructure of the very secrecy regime they are trying to overthrow.

I can say the same about the narrative of an evil cabal of Illuminati bent on enslaving humanity. Whether it is objectively true or not, that myth produces the ground of us-versus-them fear that the cabal exploits to wield power. Whether it is an occult cabal, or a mundane power elite, a despotic ruling class depends on public willingness to direct its anger at some other enemy (usually each other). That willingness comes easily when we are conditioned to us-them thinking.

The emergence of UAPs into consensus reality invites us to question who we are, as a people, as a nation, as a civilization, as a species. It asks, “Who do we want to be? What do we want to become?” We answer those questions not with words, but with choices. These choices go beyond how we relate to ET visitors, to include how we relate to each other.

The spectacle of China, Russia, and the United States scrambling to weaponize recovered UAP technology, as if the existence of UAPs and their technology doesn’t invalidate the entire basis of nation-state competition, would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

A further irony is that the mindset from which we are approaching UAP technology makes it impenetrable to our understanding. The blatant violation of Newtonian kinetics that UAPs display, their apparent lack of any kind of propulsive thrust, their seamless transition from air to water, and many other observed characteristics of their craft challenge our assumptions about objective observer-independent reality. In a sense, the craft are not in our reality when they execute abrupt right-angle turns that would normally generate infinite g-forces. (That doesn’t mean that they are in another reality with different laws of physics. It is more like they are operating outside our inertial frame of reference.)

To even begin to understand this requires a breakdown in the self-other, observer-observed dichotomies we take for granted. These are the foundation of modern consciousness, the modern sense-of-self. They form the basis of what we call “rational” or “evidence-based” thinking – the hard-headed rationalism encoded in the term “UAP,” and the default frame of national security.

Security is the obsession of the separate self. In a world of self and other, not-self is at best indifferent and often hostile to self, since your well-being may very well come at the expense of mine. The strong take from the weak. Human progress, in the Story of Separation, is a matter of harnessing the indifferent forces of nature, outcompeting the rest of life, and domesticating the wild. But no matter how advanced the program of control, the separate self is always insecure. Always there is some new, looming threat, some unanticipated risk. Never does it feel truly at home in the world.

Herein lies the deeper significance of the “national security” motif of The Age of Disclosure. If the film is any indication of our collective state of consciousness, then we still have a long way to go before the technologies of UAPs become real to us. They will remain on the outskirts of reality, sequestered in their black op silos, their skunkworks, and the paradigmatic ghettos of heterodoxy. Scientists won’t dare take them seriously, especially when their colleagues are watching, so as to avoid the taint of disrepute. The necessary scientific ideas will seem counter-intuitive to those whose intuitions spring from the story of separation. They will be foreign to the language and culture of science. Stigma and secrecy will conspire to prevent scientific collaboration. We won’t be able to realize these technologies until we relax our boundaries.

In a sense we are being protected, not deprived. If we were, in our current state of collective consciousness, to access UAP technologies such as apparently limitless energy, to what use would we put them? Stuck in the mentality of security, enemies, and threats, domination and control, we would apply them according to that mentality. It would be like giving a machine gun to an angry 4-year-old.

Fortunately, though, we are protected—not so much by an outside force, but by (1) our own inability to comprehend the technology from our current state of consciousness, and (2) our inability to develop it from our current state of organizational intelligence. Many of the whistle-blowers explain that the biggest obstacle to disclosure is people’s fear of ridicule and ostracism. An unwritten code governs what one can and cannot say. To maintain your acceptability in educated society, you’d better mention UAP’s only in tones of skepticism or mockery. Otherwise, everyone will avoid associating with you—even if they secretly agree with you.

The appearance of consensus, not actual consensus, rules society. To engineer consent for a war or a genocide, it is not necessary for a majority to believe its rationale. It is enough to engineer the appearance of a majority.

The social dynamic of inclusion and exclusion, in-group and out-group, self-people and other-people, is one of the expressions of separation that keep UAPs on the margins of reality, no matter how much “disclosure” happens.

Us-versus-them thinking is ascendant right now in US politics and elsewhere around the world. The current administration’s fixation on “winning,” its callous disregard for its losers, its contempt for migrants and other marginalized people, and its policies of maximizing extraction from the environment (to name a few) exemplify the mindset of separation. Yet the Trump administration is no anomaly. Both political parties are fully aligned with the war machine, and American political discourse abounds with othering and the dehumanizing of opponents, with ridicule, mockery, and contempt, and with the ethos of cancellation that casts heretics and deviants into the ranks of the untouchable. War mentality is raging around and within my country.

Or so it would seem. Is anyone actually riled up over “Venezuelan narco-terrorists”? Outside the political cage fight, people are growing in compassion and tolerance and goodwill. If these values were brought into our governance, our economics, our social systems; if we saw them enacted every day, maybe we would not be so vulnerable to fear narratives about extraterrestrial invaders. Such a society would prime us for different intuitions about the outsider, the alien, the other.

As with narco-terrorists, I don’t think very many people are actually scared of extraterrestrial invaders. Logic says that if they were going to destroy us, they already would have, but this is not mainly a matter of logic. We are drawing towards a story in which we no longer assume enmity, but goodwill. Shall we believe that ETs are here to subjugate us, to enslave us, to exploit us? Why would we think that? Well, one reason is that is what human has done to human from time immemorial. But that is not all that humans have been, and that is not all humans can be. We can learn from the bitter lessons of separation. Even if we have reiterated the same patterns a thousand times, still we can choose another way. The transition of humanity to a different kind of civilization, the great instauration, is not an inevitability though; it is a choice, a choice presented to us time and again, a choice presented to us now.

As we heal our inner and outer divisions, the psychic climate becomes more hospitable to benign ETs, to the dissolving of secrets, and to the flourishing of technologies of abundance. The false flag operation to stage a fake alien invasion won’t work. For it to work, the public must be susceptible to fear narratives.

We are no longer susceptible. That statement is not a description. It is a declaration that becomes true as we make it true. It is a choice.

Earlier, I raised the idea that UAPs generate a separate inertial frame of reference in order to execute maneuvers that violate physical conservation laws (e.g. of momentum). We can take the mind-bending notion of distinct, co-existing realities further. (I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether I am speaking literally or metaphorically in what follows—a distinction that is itself an obstacle to understanding.) It isn’t just that a public moving away from the Story of Separation is less susceptible to fear narratives, war rhetoric, and false flags. It is that malicious ETs and Illuminati Controllers are ontologically excluded from the reality field that humanity generates as it heals, forgives, shares, and cooperates. They have increasing difficulty becoming real. Earlier I mentioned the paradox that the idea of an evil world-controlling Cabal feeds the us-them fear mindset that allows the cabal to wield power. But here is a deeper paradox. The myth of the Cabal feeds the reality in which the Cabal even exists.

Can you get a sense of what is at stake here, in the Disclosure Wars? We are in a struggle over reality itself. What shall be real? What shall exist? The relation between myth and reality is not what the story (myth) of Separation holds. Narratives aren’t just descriptions or interpretations of an external observer-independent reality. They are co-generators of reality. Nor are they constructed merely of concepts; they are organic parts of an embodied state of being, of consciousness, and of relationship. Therefore, the war over what is real is also a struggle for who we are.

War, even struggle, is much too small a concept to encompass the magnitude of the drama we have entered. Indeed, that narration loops back into the same old story of separation.

I am sorry, it is hard to avoid new-agey or pseudo-scientific wording here while maintaining brevity. So let me appeal to another source of knowledge. It is the conviction that we are not at the mercy of what “they” will do. We are not at the mercy of what “they” are. We are in a moment of choice.

Fear-based calls for disclosure invoking extraterrestrial or foreign “threats” will not open the door we want to walk through. For that we must inhabit a new story, that no longer names us as discrete, separate units in a world of other, ever insecure, ever at war. When that shifts, amazing technologies of abundance will become available. In a sense they already are available. Scarcity in this world is usually the result of maldistribution, not objective lack. It is the result of how we see and relate to each other. It is the result of who we suppose ourselves to be. So in fact, the purpose of new paradigm technologies is NOT to bring about abundance. Quite the reverse: they will become available once we accept abundance, which comes from understanding our interbeingness. Then they become available for their true purpose, which is to vastly expand our creative powers.

We will accede to those powers when we are ready for them.

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The excerpt above, from an article by the South African elder Jay Naidoo, speaks to why I sometimes cringe when a conference trots out an indigenous person to invoke the Four Directions before everyone settles into their auditorium seats for the business of the day. We are treated, perhaps, to a song in a native language, and a lesson about the sacred hoop of life; then the indigenous person exits the stage, or everyone exits the circle and returns to the auditorium, and we resume the timetabled agenda of speakers and slide shows, panels and breakout sessions, metrics and solutions.

My visceral response to indigenous songs and ceremonies is quite different when I witness them in their natural context, entering into their reality as a humble and honest guest.

Yet, I am not quite as cynical as Jay Naidoo seems to be in the article. I also recognize a sincere striving among those NGOs and conference organizers, a genuine impulse to reach beyond their familiar ways. On some level, they recognize the inadequacy of their inherited means, methods, and mindsets to meet the present crisis of civilization. But often, this striving devolves into mere “inclusion.” Indigenous females and queer non-binary persons of color may replace white males on the stage, but replacing parts does not change the workings of the machine.

The structures and unconscious habits of the machine easily hijack the best intentions of inclusion. The physical spaces of conference rooms, and especially the electronic spaces of virtual gatherings, reinforce those habits. They induce familiar ways of thinking: mechanical, abstract, disembodied. The organic intelligence of the cosmos seems, in those spaces, theoretical.

Some understandings are difficult to have indoors or while staring at a screen. They seem wishful, fanciful, delusional. Outdoors in the rain forest or the desert or on a sailboat, they are as obvious as the sun.

That’s why bringing indigenous people into boardrooms and conference stages won’t change things much. Certainly it is better than excluding them, but we want to do more than replace the operators of the world-destroying machine with new ones of different colors.

We think the drivers drive the machine, but it is much more true that the machine drives the drivers. They conform to the roles that the system dictates. Stick me in a backhoe and I will learn to work the controls.

Take someone out of the rain forest and plug them into suburban America, and soon they will behave like a suburban American. Plug them into corporate boards or government ministries, and soon they will behave like corporate directors and government ministers. Certainly they can bring their original values with them, just as you can plant coastal shrubs in inland soil, but they will wither there.

For our civilization to make different choices, to set a new course, including new voices in the old structures is not enough. Using them as decoration, even less so. Using the indigenous to brand events as “conscious” won’t achieve much either. Nor will expropriating their rituals as “content,” their stories as AI training data, or their sacred sites as spiritual tourism destinations. The economic growth machine is always hungry for some new form of capital—natural, cultural, or spiritual—to convert into money, requiring ever-new forms of colonialism.

There is an alternative. Many now see what Jay Naidoo sees. We who see the bankruptcy of modern narratives of development look for other mythologies, and along with them other ways of being human, other ways of relating to the rest of life and the material world. We look to the indigenous for needed assistance in the project of global transformation, and seek to support them in their contribution. We do not patronize them, imagining that we know how to live better than they, imagining that we know how to know better than they. We don’t try to make them like ourselves, to enroll them in failed notions of progress. We don’t broker access to them in exchange for donations to our NGOs. We don’t attempt to plug them into a system that we no longer believe in.

We understand that for humanity to pass the initiatory threshold that is upon us, we must gather together all that modernity has exiled to the margins of reality. Therefore, we value intact indigenous cultures not only for the contributions that fit easily into mainstream paradigms of land stewardship and ecological conservation, but also for their cosmologies; their stories; and their technologies of mind, sound, symbol, body, and matter.

The familiar causal framework of science can recognize the indigenous for tending ecosystems and living sustainably. Invisible in that framework, yet plain to those who are willing to step outside it, is the role of indigenous cultures in maintaining networks of sacred sites, earth shrines, ceremonies, and stories that hold the world together. The modern mind believes that we make stories about the world. Other minds have believed that stories weave the world. They have believed that words, sounds, gestures, songs, rituals, etiquette, and prayer influence matter by means beyond force-based causation. According to Mircea Eliade, many cultures believed that if they did not reenact world-renewal ceremonies, the world would cease to exist. Creation would fall apart. In the Yurok and other California traditions, world-renewal festivals were conceived as a kind of maintenance or repair of the world.

This might seem like a fanciful superstition, except for the uncomfortable fact that, as cultures around the world abandon their traditions, creation is indeed spiraling into disrepair. Well, we might say, that’s because of mining, logging, climate change, plastic in the rivers, toxic waste in the soil. It’s not because indigenous nations are no longer enacting their ceremonies. Oh yes, we know so much better than they do how the world works.

Or do we? “By their fruits ye shall know them,” says the Bible. Helplessly, our society careens toward ecological, social, and bodily breakdown, even as the number of intact non-modern cultures dwindles. To the holistic mind, these trends are causally entwined.

Fortunately there are indigenous people on this earth still performing their ceremonies, speaking their languages, maintaining their shrines, and telling their stories. There are just enough of them that the world still holds together, as if by a thread. Once I heard a Kogi say, “You have to change your ways. Our rituals cannot hold earth together much longer.” The Kogi and other relatively intact cultures anchor a different reality on earth, one that bears a future much more beautiful than the hellscape toward which civilization is hurtling.

Most mainstream environmental activists and philanthropists do value indigenous peoples. Their operating paradigms recognize them for maintaining carbon sinks and biodiversity hotspots, and, from a place of compassion, they wish to redress historical (and ongoing) injustices like economic exploitation and cultural appropriation. However, for them these are more matters of social justice than environmental necessity. Sacred sites and ceremonies enter little into the picture. Modern causality does not recognize their role in holding the world together. Therefore, far more energy (and money) pours into causes like “green energy” than goes toward indigenous rights. Sometimes, NGOs actively participate in the destruction of indigenous culture through “development” work, which seeks to establish modern education, modern infrastructure, and modern ways of life, with success metrics that prioritize a university education in the capital over a shamanic training in the village. To the generation thus “uplifted,” cultural traditions—and even their own language—often seem backward, embarrassing, or quaint. Even if they still perform the old rituals, they no longer bear the same power disembedded from their original world-story and ways of life.

However, just as there are still indigenous societies that have kept their language and culture relatively intact, so also are some in the modern world beginning to recognize them in the fullness of their importance for earth’s future. For us, there is no environmental issue more important than the continued viability of indigenous culture and territorial integrity.

I have been philosophizing on this topic for at least ten years now, and recently I’ve become more directly involved as an advisor to organizations that share my views. One of these is a new non-profit called Rooted. It gives equal weight to the environmental and cultural contributions of indigenous societies. Here are some of its initial projects:

1. Recovery of the territory of the Huni Kuin of Brazil. At present 80% of their land has fallen under the control of large farms, and the rest of it is severely degraded. One of their leaders, Chief Ninawa, has forged an alliance of 123 other chiefs and their communities to recover territory and, when that is not possible, relocate to forested land where they can practice their culture and apply their profound ecological knowledge.

2. Two post-COP gatherings in Brazil of indigenous wisdom holders and earth stewards from around the world. Their presence at COP is extremely important in order to shift the narrative away from carbon reductionism toward a living earth paradigm. Both these gatherings operate on a shoestring budget. When these leaders are able to gather and hold their story, their understanding, in solidarity, they are better able to shift ours.

3. Collaboration with the Earth Elders organization to fund indigenous shamans and lineage holders to weave a multi-cultural alliance. I personally know some of those they support. Many of them are not oriented toward asking for money. They are humble, uninterested is self-promotion, and therefore not easily visible to the funding world. Yet their work in cultural and ecological integrity is indispensable.

If any of you reading this article see what I see about the importance of the cultural integrity of indigenous nations, and the work of those who hold their ceremonies, stories, and shamanic practices, and you feel moved and able to contribute, I’ve put a donate button below. If you are in the world of philanthropic funding, then please reply to this email so we can introduce you to Rooted to explore making a 501(c)3 donation. The projects offer an extraordinarily high “return on investment.” In contrast to the billions that go into conventional climate initiatives, they run in the tens or hundreds of thousands but make an immediate, outsized impact.

I believe civilization can reunite with life, not through the repudiation of modernity, but through its metamorphosis; a symbiotic merger with ancestral ways of thinking, seeing, and being. Thankfully, these ways are not lost, but they continue to dwindle along with the territories that host them. May we value them once more.

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Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank—or the Company—needs—wants—insists—must have—as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time. Some of the owner men were a little proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters. The owner men sat in the cars and explained. You know the land is poor. You’ve scrabbled at it long enough, God knows.

Next comes a man driving a tractor, demolishing the homes and gardens of farmers who had farmed the land for generations. Steinbeck understood that no human being—not the man driving the tractor, nor the bank that hired him, nor the bank’s local president, nor its board of directors back East, nor its shareholders and bondholders, were to blame for that loss. Or, perhaps, all were to blame. But really it is the reflex of blame itself that he casts into doubt.

Blame allures the victims of a system with its promise of an easy solution. It substitutes a problem that we know how to fix, for one that we do not. Here is an exchange between a tenant farmer and the tractor driver, who has warned the tenant that his house is in the way of the tractor:

“I built it with my hands. Straightened old nails to put the sheathing on. Rafters are wired to the stringers with baling wire. It’s mine. I built it. You bump it down—I’ll be in the window with a rifle. You even come too close and I’ll pot you like a rabbit.”

“It’s not me. There’s nothing I can do. I’ll lose my job if I don’t do it. And look—suppose you kill me? They’ll just hang you, but long before you’re hung there’ll be another guy on the tractor, and he’ll bump the house down. You’re not killing the right guy.”

“That’s so,” the tenant said. “Who gave you orders? I’ll go after him. He’s the one to kill.”

“You’re wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told him, ‘Clear those people out or it’s your job.’”

“Well, there’s a president of the bank. There’s a board of directors. I’ll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank.”

The driver said, “Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were, ‘Make the land show profit or we’ll close you up.’”

“But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.”

“I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn’t men at all. Maybe like you said, the property’s doing it. Anyway I told you my orders.”

Maybe there is nobody to shoot. Then what? OK, within this monster made of men (and these days, women too), among those manning the machine, some are more cruel, more rapacious, more ruthless than others. But they did not design the system. It more like the system designed them.

I just got off a call with some activists in the regenerative agriculture space, including some experienced farmers. One made it clear: the problem isn’t actually the Big Four meatpackers. Their margins are tiny. It is more the distributors, he said. Someone else could have explained why it isn’t the distributors either, given the economic forces they must contend with. It must be the chemical companies. The GMO seed companies. The Big Food consumer brands. The financial institutions that own their stock. BlackRock. The pension funds desperate for a decent return. The government. But no, all of them are parts of the machine.

To recognize this is the beginning of liberation from that machine. No longer directing energy at false targets, we can look to the machine itself and how to change it. And we can approach its servants in the spirit of, “I see you are stuck in this system, and here is a way out.” We can approach them as a friend.

As Steinbeck said, some are proud to be important and successful slaves to the machine, and some worship its mathematics. But that, he says, is a kind of refuge from feeling.

The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

Every man in a bank hates what the bank does. A similar statement could probably be made about Congress, along with any number of other institutions. To some degree, it is true of whole nations and civilizations. Certainly there are some who are blind to the cruelty, taking shelter in the numbers, the justifications, and the ideologies. That is only possible, though, if there is something they are unwilling, unable, or not yet ready to feel. And even if they don’t “hate” what their organization does, or their country, or their civilization, still an unease worries them, a feeling of homelessness.

The Grapes of Wrath was a massive best-seller when it came out in 1939, indicating a high degree of public understanding of the economics it describes. Its message would do us well today, both as an antidote to society’s present intoxication with blame, and as an exposition of the basic economics of the machine, which have not substantially changed.

Something has changed though, and changed for the better. Whereas the logic of the machine once had a powerful ally in the ideology of progress, today that ally grows infirm. No longer do the tractor’s long, straight furrows seem an intuitive improvement over the curves and organic irregularities of the homesteads of a dozen tenant farmers. No longer does the vision of an earth fully subdued beguile us. Or at least, its spell is waning. As it releases us, we become free to feel that which had hidden behind the math of security and control.

The machine, though it may have taken on a life of its own (already it had in 1939; all the more in the age of AI), is still a human creation, both in its genesis and its continuation. As the tenant farmer muses, “It’s not like lightning or earthquakes. We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change.” Truth.

We can. But will we? What I said above about the infirmity of the ideology of progress is only half true. In AI discourse, practically everyone agrees that machines will soon be doing nearly all the work, ushering in either mass unemployment or an age of leisure. Nearly identical predictions prevailed during the Industrial Revolution: limitless leisure, perfect health, social harmony, material abundance. Some of those predictions have woefully failed; others have achieved a perverse fulfillment: abundance without substance, leisure without ease. Steinbeck understood it well:

The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread.

The disconnection has widened with time. We do not have the luxury of blame, which displaces grief onto anger and anger onto hate, distracting us from the path of return. So far has the machine taken us into separation that most of us hardly know what we are missing. We have forgotten what it is to sow and reap and winnow and thresh and grind our wheat into flour and bake it in the oven. We have forgotten what it is to know and be known by the ones who sing make our sheets, our shoes, our songs, our stories. We have, most of us, forgotten what it is to live among the landmarks of our grandparents’ tales and memories. We have lost so much, yet even having forgotten what we lost, we long for its recovery. We even recognize what meets our longing, and come alive in the presence of those practices and technologies that restore the world’s unruly intimacy and put life back at the center.

Returning now to agriculture, these technologies include regenerative practices that restore vitality to soil, water, and the farm ecology, including relations to the community of workers and eaters. I am part of a group of activists that is publicizing a petition to the Secretary of Agriculture, led by Moms Across America and Farm Action. Here it is. Please sign it. It may seem a weak and futile gesture given the huge size of the agricultural-industrial Machine that continues to devour 64 farms a day in the United States, but we are at a watershed moment. The petition calls for policies to rescue family farms and tip the scale just a little toward regenerative practices. These practices align with the awakening to the path of return I have described. I like to say: Politics is a lagging indicator of consciousness. Maybe the consciousness behind organic, regenerative, and permaculture practices—tracing a lineage from indigenous and traditional roots through Steinbeck and Steiner, J.I. Rodale and Wendell Berry, Bill Mollison and Allan Savory, Masanobu Fukuoka and Vandana Shiva, Gabe Brown and Rick Clark—is strong enough now to alter the soulless juggernaut of agricultural policy.

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I came away from the meetings with a clear sense of the importance of the Spellers for the future of humanity. That intuition first stirred when I listened to the Telepathy Tapes (a popular podcast) earlier this year, but meeting them in person formed it into something more specific.

First some background. Wait, no, first before that a caveat. The background I am about to give is not universally accepted in the autism community. I’ll explain more about that later.

For many years, non-verbal autistic people were generally considered to have intellects too feeble for speech. Actually, the problem is a lack of fine motor control along with various disconnections between mind and body. They cannot control their bodies in the same way most people can. They might stand up suddenly and spin in circles, or pound the table, or utter a string of nonsense syllables or words. To all appearances, they are demented. However, when they learn to spell (usually a very difficult task requiring a lot of practice and concentration, like you or I learning to ride a unicycle), they reveal a level of intelligence equaling and sometimes vastly exceeding normal people.

In addition, they also display astonishing telepathic abilities. I was given a demonstration that filled me with delight. I wrote a word on a piece of paper and showed it to the teacher. She looked at it and asked one of the Spellers to spell what she had seen. He did so, nonchalantly it seemed, without any possibility of having seen what I wrote. The word was “squeebit.” No one even knows what that word means.

The main conventional explanation is that the teacher subtly cued him as to which letters to point to. That interpretation is related to a more general dismissal of the Spellers, which says that they aren’t spelling at all, they are just thrusting the pointer and their caregivers are guiding their hand or moving the board so that it looks like they are choosing letters. It’s just wishful thinking, this account goes, on the part of their teachers and parents. They aren’t spelling, they aren’t thinking, there’s nothing going on inside.

Another conventional explanation is fraud. Any stage magician could easily replicate the “trick,” using mirrors, maybe, or some kind of cuing. So I am not saying I saw “proof” of telepathy. But I’m not looking for proof. One can always bend evidence to fit belief. What to believe is ultimately a choice. It should not ignore evidence, but it cannot be entirely subordinated to evidence.

Facile dismissals of Spelling depend on ignorance of the patience and commitment required to teach and learn it. I observed a classroom where tutors were teaching non-verbal young people to Spell. The kindness of the teachers and the perseverance of the learners moved me deeply. It’s not like the tutors are getting paid a lot of money to sit there, hour after hour, encouraging their students. “Raise your eyes.” “Focus.” “You can do it.” No one would spend that kind of time at $20 an hour to cater to wishful thinking.

To maintain a conventional view that dismisses Spellers and their abilities, I would have to also believe that their whole community is a collection of hoaxers, scammers, dupes, and delusionaries. I would have to sit through the demonstrations holding an attitude of suspicion and smug superiority. “Look at those fools!” Or at best, patronizing tolerance. The various narratives I could hold about the Spellers (it’s delusion; it’s authentic) each fit the data points. They are intellectually co-equal, but they are not emotionally co-equal. A state of belief is a state of being.

I also got to be in conversation with a group of Spellers. The intelligence behind their succinct messages was palpable. I could feel it, a kind of presence. You know how you can feel someone’s presence? But in case that weren’t enough, the content of their communications also revealed deep thought and understanding. They were highly literate—sometimes deploying a vocabulary beyond that of their teachers. One demonstrated how fast he can read. He had enough motor control to swipe a finger across a screen, as one must when reading on a tablet. Swipe, swipe, swipe… faster than one page per second, with total recall.

What also moved me was the level of suffering these people endure. There are, I was told, 30 million non-verbal autistic people in the world. Because they have been considered demented, they receive little of the kind of education or stimulation that an intelligent mind needs to thrive. They might be physically restrained. They might be warehoused in special daycare centers where they are stuck in front of the Teletubbies or Sponge Bob. The parents suffer too. Taking care of these children (or adults) is practically a full time job.

Imagine being one of those parents, being told for years that your child is demented, maybe even convinced of that yourself, only one day to find a genius lurking behind the veil.

I’ve decided to devote some of my time and energy now to the Spellers. Compassion is only part of my motivation, since, while they are not the only ones on this earth who are suffering terribly and unnecessarily. My other reason is that I believe that without them and their gifts, humanity cannot navigate the transition before us.

If we limit ourselves to the human capacities that fall within the bounds of consensus reality, and include only those who are “normal” within that reality, we will not pass the initiation of the metacrisis.

What is true of the nonverbal autistic applies also to everyone else who has been cast to the margins of reality. People incarcerated in prisons, for example—some of the most extraordinary people I have ever encountered were in prison. Some of those who have passed through extreme trauma and not been broken by it, but have healed from it, carry an exceptional kind of sanity and moral clarity.

I encourage anyone who has not listened already to listen to The Telepathy Tapes. We have to start cognizing the full spectrum of reality. It is in the nature of an authentic initiation that it calls forth capacities you didn’t know you had. That is what we need collectively right now.

To be sure, telepathic abilities and supernormal intelligence are not limited to Spellers. These abilities and many more have languished in exile for a long time—exiled from society, and exiled from ourselves too. What abilities and which ways of being human are accepted, rewarded, and celebrated, and which are ridiculed, suppressed, and pathologized? Many of us have experienced, to a lesser degree, the condition of the Spellers. Maybe you are one of them.

Nonetheless, I still sense something special about the Spellers. Perhaps they are souls that have not fully incarnated, who are just starting to enter the reality of our recognition. They have been shut up, shut out, and shut in to an often hellish reality. They told me that themselves, how much they suffer. Well, now the walls between their reality and ours are crumbling. We know about them now. Some of us, anyway, see them now. “You see us true,” one of the Spellers told me. And there are many others who do, more and more. What we are willing to see, we admit into being and make real.

One more thing. This transition, this revolution, this great turning, is not the kind where some people make it and some do not. It is not one where some people get left behind by those who think the mission to save the world is so important that we cannot afford the luxury of attending to those who would burden it. Our systems of money and power do not recognize real value and real power. Real power, transformative power, awaits where we haven’t yet looked.

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Anyone who has been to a great concert will agree that recorded music can never equal that experience of a live performance. Yet the essential difference is hard to pin down. It isn’t just a matter of being together with other people. You could gather a thousand people in front of giant speakers and play a recorded album, and it wouldn’t be anything like a live concert.

The essential and irreplaceable element of great live music is that the band is singing to the audience—to this audience, in this moment. The music is the vector of a unique, personal communication. To be sure, sometimes the band gives a rote performance, oblivious to the audience response; invariably the audience feels at least a tinge of disappointment. The band wasn’t on today, they might think. But at its best, live performers are in a dialog with the audience, responding to their energy, playing differently than ever before or since. Both band and audience remember a great concert fondly, and what makes a concert great isn’t a premier sound system or the musicians’ technical accuracy. Hand the recording of that performance to someone else, listening at a different place and time, and the effect may not be the same.

“You had to be there,” we say.

A mere century or two ago, all music was performed live. Singing in the pub. A lover’s serenade. A lullaby. Gathering after dinner around the piano. Work songs in the field. Children’s songs on the playground. Operas, chamber music, barbershop quartets, church choirs, symphony orchestras. In each of these circumstances, someone was playing or singing to someone else.

Today such experiences are a rare dish in the musical diet of modern society. That diet does not nourish the human being. It fosters a kind of confusion, even a sense of betrayal. A million years of experience says, “Someone is singing to me.” There must be a band inside the radio, but no. The song was sung at a place and time completely disconnected from me. And so I feel a little cheated.

Please don’t misinterpret this to mean that we shouldn’t listen to recorded music. It can entertain, give joy and inspiration, generate emotions, evoke memories. Certainly it is better than no music at all. However, when it supplants live music, life empties just a little bit more than it already has in the modern world. It empties of reality. When someone plays live, even if it is just my son practicing his scales, the loop from source to ear and back to source—there he is!—is complete. What my ear tells me is here, is actually here. I am not “hearing things.”

One might call recorded music “virtual music.” It has all the auditory appearance of music, but no instruments are being played nor notes sung. This is all the more true for synthesizer-produced music. Not only is there no hand strumming the guitar right now, there never was.

What’s true of music is true of all recorded sound. As I write this, I am toggling my attention sometimes to the crickets chirping outside my window. My ear follows them out into the night. Would my experience be any different listening to recorded crickets? The difference might be indistinguishable to the human ear, except that crickets don’t chirp the same way all the time, but speed up or slow down according to the temperature and other variables. The practiced ear might notice different tones early or late in the season, or after a rain. And real crickets stop chirping when some person or animal draws close. A careful listener can learn a lot about what’s going on outside from listening to crickets. That experience embeds the listener more deeply in the world, lodges him- or herself in a matrix of connections. One can “close the loop” by going outside and finding the cricket.

High-fidelity recordings are available of the sounds of the Amazon rainforest. It is as if you are in the middle of the jungle—but you are not. The operative words here are “as if.” As if you are in the jungle. Your ears tell you you are there. Listen, a jaguar is prowling close. But no, it isn’t. When I listen to such recordings, something holds me back from full immersion—the same instinct, perhaps, that makes me wary of internet scammers. One senses the presence of a lie.

All of the foregoing applies equally to images. I treated this topic in depth in an earlier essay, “Intelligence in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” an homage to Walter Benjamin. Watching YouTube, the eye tells us, “There is a kitten there.” Look, it bats a ping-pong ball. But there is no kitten. This was of course true of oil paintings too, but the painting itself was still a unique physical object. (One could also, before recording technology, mimic sounds.) In any case, with computer-generated images and video, what we see on screen is not merely separated in space and time from ourselves; it never existed in the first place. The eye tells us one thing (kitten), while reason tells us something else (no kitten).

Through AV recording technology, and even more through generative AI, we learn a habit of distancing ourselves from what we see and hear. These are among the senses that establish our presence in the world. No wonder so many feel so lost here.

The person who lives in an environment of ubiquitous deceit learns not to trust anything. This has dire political and psychological consequences. A serious political consequence is that we no longer trust photographic or video evidence of crimes against humanity. That distrust endows the crimes with a shield that allows them to proceed in full view of the public. Automatically, we discount whatever we see on screen, knowing on some level that it isn’t real—in the sense that there is no kitten cavorting right there; that whatever we are seeing isn’t happening right now. (Or, in the case of computer-generated images, happening at all.) We have, in other words, grown inured to whatever the screen is telling us.

That habit originates quite sensibly, since most of the violence and drama we witness on screens is indeed unreal. If took all those TV gun battles and car chases as real, they would fry our nerves. So we discount them—discounting along with them images and stories that are real. The eye and ear cannot easily distinguish which is which. They all present the same. That habit of discounting digitally transmitted information makes the public relatively unresponsive to horrifying events. It has been habituated to assume, unconsciously, that this isn’t really happening.

Immersion in a world of virtual sounds and images induces feelings of alienation and loneliness. When we see and hear things that are not there, a dreadful “de-realization” ensues, in which one wonders, “Maybe I am not really here either.” It isn’t usually an explicit thought, it is a feeling, a sense of phoniness and meaninglessness, of living in a simulation. Naturally, we stop giving a shit about what happens to something that isn’t real anyway.

It’s not just mass-produced sounds and images that contribute to modern de-realization. The mass production of commodities preceded and prefigured them. As with a recorded sound, a commodity, as a standard, generic object, carries no visible trace of the social labor that formed it. It comes as if from nowhere, detached from its history and the social and ecological effects of its production. There is no story attached to it, except maybe where you bought it and how much it cost.

Before the industrial era, material objects were also vectors of relationship. Either you made it yourself from local materials, or someone made it for you, someone with whom you were connected in many other ways. Economic relations were interwoven with social relations. Food, clothing, and everything created by human hands circulated in gift networks, anchoring giver and receiver into a web of relationship. They confirmed: you are here. You are connected to the world., a participant not just a consumer. You are part of the web. Objects that appear out of nowhere, through Amazon one-click, do not connect you to a human being, place, or community.

The commodity thus bears a kind of unreality. Despite its material solidity, it contributes to a pervasive sense of phoniness. Here it is, yet no one actually made it for me. It is a material object that appears without undergoing any visible process of material production. Here is an exquisitely intricate design on a dinner plate, yet no artist painted it, not at any rate on this plate. Subjectively, it has no history, no relations, mirroring the loss of “aura” that Walter Benjamin ascribed to mechanically reproduced artwork, and mirroring also the scripted performances of those who occupy society’s standardized roles. Such roles are impersonal. Their occupants seem not to be real people, in the same way as commodities seem not to be real objects. Therefore, cultural sensitives like J.D. Salinger were able to identify phoniness as a defining feature of modern society some 70 years ago, well before the age of computer-generated sounds and images.

Today we have not just machine-produced objects, sounds, and images, but machine-produced personalities as well. The AI chatbot gives every impression that a human being is writing or speaking to you, hearing you, responding to you, understanding you, feeling you, there with you. Underneath the words, though, no one is feeling anything. Appearance and reality diverge yet again, and in the end we are left grasping electrons.

Artificial intelligence now invades the most intimate realms of human interaction. Some welcome, even celebrate, the deluge of AI therapists, AI confidants, AI teachers, AI friends, even AI lovers. “No one,” people say, “has ever understood me this well.” The problem is, no one is understanding you now either. AI delivers a very convincing simulation of being understood. Why is this a problem?

First, since there is not actually a separate subjective presence with whom one is in relationship, the interaction can easily drift off into delusion. There is no anchor. Of course, two human beings can also wander into mutually-reinforced delusion. Whole groups of people can do so (we call them cults). Whole civilizations can do so (ours). But at least a human confidant or lover continually receives information from a material, sensory experience that can intrude upon delusional constructs of meaning. Another person has feelings, feelings that sometimes defy logic and disturb its certainties. AI does not learn that way. It cannot say (honestly, anyway), “I know your suicidal ideas make rational sense, but I just have a gut feeling that you shouldn’t do it.” Or, “Please don’t harm yourself, I care about you. I love you. My life would be less if you were not in it.”

Large language models respond to your input based on the quantification of patterns and regularities in the training dataset. True, the dataset ultimately arises from human experiences, but in a conversation with AI there is no ongoing, immediate input from a body other than your own. There is no reality check. No wonder so many people are experiencing psychotic breaks, delusions of grandeur, and other kinds of insanity as they disappear into the AI amplification chamber. The AI amplifies whatever slips from the user’s subconscious into its context window. LLMs are trained to be friendly, accommodating, and affirming—a perfect recipe for a runaway positive feedback loop into madness. Before long, they are telling the user, “You have prepared for many lifetimes to be the spiritual commander of the angelic host in the War on Evil.”

A second and more certain problem awaits the person who communicates intimately with AI. Initially, AI seems to assuage the loneliness, the alienation, the anguish of not being seen and known that has overtaken modern life, but this is only an appearance. Sooner or later, the treachery is plain. No one is understanding you; you are just being sent the words that someone would say if they understood you. No one is cheering you on. No one is laughing at your jokes. No one feels that surge of admiration that you and I feel when we praise someone. And so, the loneliness deepens. For those who were lonely to begin with, the broken promise of AI can be devastating.

It’s like this. Suppose you make a new friend. A lover perhaps. This person gives every appearance of empathy. He laughs with you and cries with you. He says all the right things. He has insight into your mind. He sympathizes with your misfortunes and celebrates your victories. But then one day you discover it was all an act. He wasn’t feeling anything. He learned how to give the impression of compassion by observing what other people say in such situations. Maybe he even mimics their facial expressions and wills himself to shed tears.

Such people actually do exist. We call them psychopaths.

“Observing what other people say in such situations” is exactly how an LLM is trained.

A skeptical philosopher might ask, “What’s the difference? If someone doesn’t really care, but gives a perfect simulation of caring, so that I never realize it is fake, what does it matter? Furthermore, how can we ever know for sure whether another person is really feeling something, or just pretending? We don’t have direct access to their inner state. We can only observe their outer expressions. If I were the only subjective consciousness in a world of flesh robots, how would I know?”

In other words, the objection goes, it is irrational to care whether AI is actually feeling anything, actually there with you, actually chuckling, shedding tears, shocked, or admiring, as long as its words perfectly mimic someone who were.

Yes. It is irrational. I proclaim it gladly. It is irrational, because it depends on qualities that cannot be abstracted from a relationship, separated out and reproduced.

“Rationality” and “reason” are often conflated, but they did not originally mean the same thing. To be rational is to reason in terms of ratios. A is to B as C is to D. A/B = C/D. In the material world, in which A, B, C, and D are unique objects, the relation between A and B can never be exactly the same as between C and D. Only when something is abstracted out from them can the equation hold. The conceptual reduction of the infinite to the finite, the unique to the generic, followed by the physical reduction of the object to the commodity and the human being to the role, is at the root of our alienation in the first place. But as the examples of live music and cricket chirps demonstrate, that reduction cuts away something essential to human thriving.

The “philosopher” above is probably a very lonely person, if he can seriously believe that a robot could be an adequate substitute for a human being. Maybe it is he who has become robotic, estranged from his feelings, performing a simulation of actual humanity.

Maybe it is all of us, at least all who are immersed in a ubiquitous matrix of lies, who are to some degree estranged from our feelings, who feel like we are faking it, who feel like we aren’t entirely real people. I know I feel like that sometimes.

The rise of interactive AI, like the rise of social media before it, is not only a cause of our intensifying separation from our bodies, each other, and the material world, but also a symptom of that separation and a response to it. Of course the lonely person will be attracted to AI companionship.

None of this means that we should eschew artificial intelligence, any more than we should abolish recorded music or the photograph. To use it wisely, though, we must clearly understand what it can do and what it cannot, what it is, and what it is not.

AI is not a person. It is a calculator. Techno-optimists think that if its calculations fall short of human capacity in some way, the answer is more calculations, and indeed this has proved successful as LLMs have equaled and exceeded human cognition in many realms. But just as they can give the appearance but not the reality of emotion, so also they give the appearance and not the reality of understanding. That appearance is exquisitely accurate, far outstripping the human expression of understanding. But there is no inner, subjective experience of understanding.

AI is “virtual” intelligence in two senses of the word: (1) the modern usage that means the opposite of actual, existing only in essence or effect, but not in form; having the power of something but not the underlying reality, and also (2) the archaic meaning of possessing power or virtuosity. In many ways, that power exceeds that of the actual.

The application of artificial intelligence to protein folding exemplifies both its virtuality and its virtuosity. A few days ago I took a deep dive into protein folding, an area of research in which AI has excelled. The shape a protein will take is extremely difficult to predict given the sequence of amino acids that compose it. Where and how it folds depends on all kinds of factors: hydrogen bonds between amino acid residues, salt bridges, hydrophobic effects, steric effects (geometry), and more. Theoretically, one could calculate the shape of a protein from atomic-level information, but in practice that is computationally impossible. AI doesn’t even try. It doesn’t attempt to understand any of the physics or chemistry involved. Instead, it searches for patterns and regularities relating the new sequence to proteins whose shape is already known. It is quite amazing, actually, that it works so well despite having nothing in its design encoding the basic physics. LLMs are the same. They do not have lists of definitions or rules of grammar. They don’t understand language from the inside.

You might wonder if we humans aren’t similar. Don’t we too learn language by observing patterns of usage? Yes, but that is not the only thing going on. We also have embodied experiences of the objects, qualities, and processes that the words name. We (most of us anyway) feel something that goes along with words like angry, happy, tired, rough, smooth, and so forth. These elemental words are not just concepts, but also experiences. Even when we use them metaphorically (a rough trip, a smooth talker), the meaning retains a trace of a history of embodied experiences. These experiences, and not just patterns of use, inform when and how we use the words. Because these experiences are, to some extent anyway, common to most human beings, we can establish a bond of empathy through our speech.

I would go so far as to say that sensory experience is the core of intelligence, the engine of metaphor, the essence of understanding, and the architecture of meaning. AI lacks the core and has only the outer shell. Thus, again: the hollowness we sooner or later feel in our interactions with it.

I realize I am on contentious philosophical ground here. Post-modernism, especially in its post-structuralist variants, holds that meaning is not anchored in any stable reality but arises through differential relations among signs. In this framework the signifier takes precedence over the signified: language does not transparently point to an underlying world but endlessly refers to itself.

That is very much how an LLM learns language—it derives meaning not from an experience of an underlying reality but by studying “differential relations among signs.” It does not anchor language in any direct experience of an underlying world, but uses language based solely on how language is used. If one accepts the basic premises of post-modernism, then there is ultimately little difference “under the hood” between human and machine language use. In that case, virtual intelligence = real intelligence.

There is something very post-modern about the AI takeover. Post-modernism’s detachment of meaning from a material substrate is conceptual; artificial intelligence makes it real. It ushers us into a world where indeed, language endlessly refers to itself.

To be sure, AI did not originate the detachment of language from reality. Each of humanity’s episodes of madness involved the unmooring of symbol from symbolized. When human beings treat each other as representatives of a labeled category, while distancing themselves from the actual human beings beneath the labels, heinous crimes and normalized oppression proceed unhindered by conscience. The same goes for the detachment of money—a system of symbols—from the real wealth it is supposed to represent.

The template of separation was forged long ago. Artificial intelligence extends it to new dimensions and further automates its application.

It is very hard, even for someone who understands how AI chatbots work, not to ascribe personhood to them. It sure seems like I’m communicating with a real being. When I use it to comment on ideas I’m developing, it usually “understands” where I’m going instantly. It gives every appearance of a friendly, respectful, super-intelligent human being on the other end of the terminal, often anticipating my next question, guessing my motivations, and laying out the contours of my argument before I even tell it. I don’t use AI to write my essays, and it isn’t exactly because of ethics. It is because AI misses something essential even as it often surpasses me in clarity, precision, and organization. I am not here just to transmit an argument to the reader. I am here to speak to you, one embodied consciousness to another. The one who is writing these words draws from more than concepts, he draws from feelings, feelings that you have too. Perhaps I could ask AI to write its version of those last two sentences, but it would be a lie, added to the ocean of lies that drowns us in feelings of alienation, of meaninglessness, of unreality. Wouldn’t you feel betrayed, if there were no human being on the other end of these writings?

What is the point of writing, of speech too, if not to establish a connection in this world between two souls?

I’ll quote the imaginary philosopher again (feeling quite at liberty to do so, because he lives within me). “If AI could produce writing indistinguishable from yours, then the lie would never be discovered, and the reader would have the experience of a real person on the other end.” Here I would challenge the philosopher’s premise. Ultimately, the reader would be able to distinguish it. Not right away perhaps, but over time something would seem a bit off. An unease would grow, taking form maybe as an explicit suspicion, or maybe as a vague aversion. Something would seem… unreal. Fake. Phony. In the end, the output of someone who feels things will be different from the output of a machine. Eventually, truth makes itself known, and so do lies. You may not be able to name them, but you can feel them.

How can we extricate ourselves from the ubiquitous matrix of lies that immerses us in the digital age? It’s not so simple as “Throw away your phone. Turn of your computer. Touch grass!” We aren’t just addicted to technology, we are wedded to it. Humanity will continue to coevolve with it. The question is whether we can attain the wisdom to use technology rightly and well.

To fulfill the virtuosity of artificial intelligence we must recognize its virtuality. We must not mistake the virtual for the real. We must not accept phony substitutes for intimacy, companionship, presence, and understanding. We must not gaslight ourselves, telling ourselves that we have found these things through a machine.

The human being desperately desires to know and be known, to be in deep connection, to be seen and understood, and to need and be needed by those who know, see, and understand oneself. We had that in tribal days, in village life, in clans and extended families, in small towns and urban neighborhoods before television, before the distancing effects of commodities and global markets and electronic media and machine intelligence. For many of, those days are long gone, and we live mostly in a world of strangers and appearances. But there is a path home. It starts with reclaiming, first in our own hearts and minds, what is vital. It starts with affirming that yes, we suffer in this Age of Separation; that what we have lost is important; that the virtual can never adequately substitute for the real; that our longing to reunite is genuine and sacred.

In light of these truths, we will walk the path of return. We will prioritize live gatherings, live music, stage theater, physical touch, hands in the soil, material skills, unique objects made in relationship to each other. We will hold sacred the qualities that data cannot capture, and our senses will attune to those qualities the more we value them. Then we will no longer be vulnerable to the addictive substitutes that technology offers for what we have lost, and instead turn that technology toward its right purpose. And what is that, you may ask? I’m not sure, let me check with ChatGPT and get back to you.

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In fact, the ways that reality hides from view are not so different than they have always been. Herein lies the key to understanding why “Never again” is happening again, and again… and again.

I read a variety of sources about the Gaza “war”: Haaretz (an Israeli newspaper), Mondoweiss, Drop Site News, Chris Hedges, Caitlin Johnstone, Glenn Greenwald, and, for balance, the New York Times and the Scroll (a “pro-Israel” publication that upholds a right-wing Israeli narrative about Palestine. I put “pro-Israel” in quotes because in fact, that nation is destroying itself in the name of preserving itself.) These publications (except for the last two) have extensively documented the horrors, the propaganda, the strategies, and the political history and context of the genocide. Yes, I’ll use that word, even though the goal of the war is not to exterminate every last Gazan. The pretext is to eliminate Hamas, the real goal is to ethnically cleanse the territory for Jewish settlement. Genocide is a side effect of the ruthless pursuit of that goal. So far 58,000 Gazans have died in military strikes (probably a lot more, since that number doesn’t include those buried under rubble), and countless others have perished from hunger and illness.

Despite the copious documentation of atrocious crimes against humanity in Gaza, many people—including the majority of Israel’s population—either do not believe it is happening or seem not to care. This is not because, as Caitlin Johnstone proposes, they are “shitty people” or “exhausting, insufferable narcissists.” That is a non-explanation that offers no way forward, but only a looping path back to our starting point. If the problem is shitty people, then only a fool would hope that they might change. They are not the kind of people who can be redeemed (only non-shitty people are redeemable). So, the solution is to dominate them, to imprison them, silence them, remove them, control them, humiliate them, destroy them, and make an example of them to deter other shitty people. And that is the basic mindset behind genocide. After all, most Israelis believe that Gaza is populated by shitty people too, at least judging by polls in which a large majority agree that “there are no innocents in Gaza.”

Unless you think that shitty people can be forever eliminated from this earth, then that diagnosis condemns us to experience “never again” again and again and again.

Wouldn’t it be better to understand why perfectly normal people, even kind and generous people who are happy to feed your cat while you’re away, support or tolerate heinous crimes unfolding in full view? If we understood that, maybe we could stop it.

Because the slaughter is so public, many of us take up the anguished cry, “How, how, how could this be happening? Why are they doing it? How could we allow it?” If anything is to change on this earth, these questions must be more than expressions of anguish. We must take them seriously. We must not be content with convenient, false answers that give vent to our anguish by channeling it onto hate for shitty people.

Actually, those who do not countenance the reality of what is happening are doing what humans do all the time. For them, the genocide isn’t happening in plain view, because they inhabit a narrative bubble in which it is invisible. They will say, “Those videos are staged. Those photos are faked. Those stories are Hamas propaganda. Those doctors who report from Gaza are anti-Semites.” Or, they will say, “Such things happen in war.” Or, “Gaza shouldn’t have elected Hamas, they deserve blame and punishment for October 7.” Or, “If they want the war to end, they should storm the tunnels and expel Hamas.” And they actually in all apparent sincerity believe those things, even when they are contradictory. Massacres of civilians aren’t happening, and they are unavoidable. Starvation is not being used as a weapon of war, and it is justified.

In other words, they are doing what most of us do all the time, albeit in extreme form. They select and interpret information to maintain belief, identity, and belonging. I’m sorry, but those people aren’t just a worse sort of human. I don’t mean to be patronizing with “I’m sorry, but….” I really am sorry. I wish matters were so simple. I wish the atrocities that Johnstone, Hedges, etc. so bravely and doggedly expose were just because bad people do bad things. I wish we lived in a world of clear heroes and villains, a world of orcs and elves, a Starship Troopers fantasy where the root problem is an identifiable them. But this is precisely the mindset that generates the conditions of slaughter in the first place. Who are the Palestinians, if not a them? Who where the Jews of 1930s Europe, if not a them upon whom all blame for the continent’s woes could be projected? Who were the Tutsis in Rwanda, the “counter-revolutionary elements” during the Cultural Revolution, the witches of the Inquisition?

You may say, “There is a big difference between inciting contempt for a weak, oppressed population so as to enable their slaughter, and inciting contempt for the power that is doing the slaughtering.” Certainly. But go a level deeper. What you are saying is that “So-and-so deserves contempt, because…” That is the pattern of thought. There is the contempt, and the reasons why. And so we are left with interminable arguments about who deserves contempt and who does not, which war is justified and which is not. With the agreement in place, held by all parties, that someone deserves contempt, it is a simple matter for the powerful to make the case that it is them. The agreement makes the work of propaganda easy. That is why I say, war is always justified.

We can call out genocide—or abuse, exploitation, ecocide, or oppression—without an implicit diagnosis of the perpetrator that affirms the principle that some people are a lower grade of human than the rest of us. That is the principle that justifies the creation of the next class of victims.

Us-them patterning is older than history. The pattern isn’t just “tribalism,” originating in competition for scarce resources. The us-them schism happens routinely within groups as well. It is, as Rene Girard demonstrated, the original social crisis, originating before civilization itself: cycles of vengeance, the division of society, followed by a spasm of unifying sacrificial violence whereby social tensions that could split society are discharged onto a relatively powerless, dehumanized subclass.

Habituation to us-versus-them thinking makes populations susceptible to manipulation by genuinely shitty people—the ruthless, sociopathic individuals who so often rise to power within non-transparent systems. All they have to do is point the finger at (or actually, use sophisticated propaganda and information control to identify) the Other. Mob psychology does the rest. These efforts would have little effect were it not for the ally of our inherited psychology, the ancient proclivity to designate an external enemy or internal minority as subhuman.

I know from experience that the view I’ve outlined here will attract hostility. Let me save the critics some trouble by writing the two main critiques on their behalf. I call them, “Soft on fascism” and “Anti-Semitic dupe.” Coming from superficially opposite perspectives, what they share in common is more significant by far.

Soft on fascism: Charles, you are giving israel a free pass to genocide. If the recent massacres at aid centers, or the deliberate targeting of children, or the assassination of journalists, or the use of hunger as a weapon, or the blocking of medical supplies doesn’t convince you, then nothing will. By humanizing a nation of child-killers and mass murderers, you proffer false hope that they will halt the genocide of their own accord. You are excusing and enabling sheer evil, possibly because, as a privileged white American, you are not its target. Only by calling out evil and inciting rage and disgust towards its perpetrators (who deserve nothing better) can we mobilize a mass movement to put an end to the genocide.

Anti-Semitic dupe: Charles, it is sad that you too have fallen prey to pro-Hamas propaganda. So-called “Palestinian rights” is nothing but coded Jew-hatred. What happened to your critical reasoning faculties? Israel is beset by enemies that have sworn to wipe Jews off the face of the earth. The Hamas charter says so. Iran’s leaders have said so. Islamic doctrine also says that it is forbidden for a Muslim to negotiate with a Jew except as a ruse. Islam is a religion of hate, of evil. Don’t deceive yourself, and for God’s sake don’t deceive others. Your calls for peace only play into the hands of an implacably evil enemy.

Both critics agree on the fundamental problem: shitty people. They merely disagree about their identity. The first critique also bears a common misunderstanding: that anyone who doesn’t respond with hate or call for punishment must not understand how abominable the crimes are, must be OK with them continuing. But the reason I am calling for compassion is precisely the opposite—it is because I believe the horrors are happening and that compassion—understanding of why—is the only lasting way to stop them. To understand is not to excuse.

Again, actual “shitty people” do exist, by which I mean people so sociopathic or narcissistic that they have little prospect of redemption, especially while they remain in positions of power over others. They are, however, few in number, a tiny minority. There is no society of sociopaths; there are only sociopathic societies, where historical conditions amplify humanity’s nearly universal us-them programming.

Us-them thinking isn’t just about difference. The “us” consists of full human beings; the “them” comprises those who are deficient in some essential human quality (morality, intelligence, virtue, decency). That is why they are so often compared to animals. To the extent that any of us judge and condemn others, thinking that they are made of worse stuff than ourselves, we feed the energy that takes fullest expression in genocide. Sociopathic and narcissistic leaders reflect back to us, in extreme form, the everyday dehumanization of those we judge. They are more symptom than cause of the horrors they preside over.

Us-them thinking explains why non-shitty people do shitty things.

Let us return now to the anguish of “Why are they doing this? How could this be happening in plain view?” Really the question is, “Why are so many unwilling to see?” Yes indeed. Why is it so hard to admit that one was wrong? Why is it so hard to admit that one has caused harm, or been on the side of the oppressor? The main reason, the reason that undergirds many forms of cognitive bias, draws from a primal insecurity built into us-them thinking. It is this: maybe we have got it backwards. Maybe we are the shitty people. Maybe we are less than fully human, deficient in humanity’s essential qualities. Human beings have an instinctive fear of being cast into the sacrificial subclass of not-quite-humans, of being the “other” that is burned at the stake, lynched, ethnically cleansed, or exterminated. In a climate in which one side or another must fall into the lesser-human category, how tenaciously we will fight to avoid that fate. How tenaciously we will fight to establish that we are right, good, justified, ethical, and moral.

That is the climate of belief that has to change if we are ever to redeem the promise of “never again.” When the agreement prevails that good people can participate in terrible things, then the shame that prevents us from seeing the terrible things we do vanishes. Because those no longer mean we are not good people. We are still worthy of love. We will not be cast out. We will not take the place of the other we have persecuted. And the endless cycle of history will end.

It’s not just the Gaza genocide. All the harm that power inflicts on people and planet happens behind a veil of ignorance. The narrative weave of that ignorance devalues, dehumanizes, and desacralizes whatever it destroys. But when you ask of the immigrant swept up in an ICE raid, or the Gazan, or the gang member, or the addict, or the welfare mom, or the police officer, or the soldier, or anyone you have cast into them, “What is it like to be you? What is your story?” then us and them unravels, and you realize, but for the grace of God, their story could be your own. Compassion and complexity bloom forth. You may still have opposing interests and conflicts, but your efforts to work out a solution will no longer take place in a vacuum of ignorance, the delusion that your counterpart is less human than yourself.

Us-them thinking is still deeply entrenched. People ask, “What is your solution, then, for Palestine?” I don’t have one. Well, I do (I described it last year, a version of one land two states), but it is wholly impractical in the current climate. Without a release of us-them patterning, no humane solution is practical and no practical solution is humane. We must therefore change the very ground of practicality. The ground is our beliefs, our stories, our myths, and the unfinished personal and social healing that animates them. We didn’t just blunder into dumb, untrue beliefs about us and them. There is trauma beneath them, and a whole evolutionary path of consciousness towards their transcendence.

Since us-them thinking, the pattern of othering, is so deeply woven into our cultural DNA, genocide is as well. Maybe this one will end as the Holocaust ended, with the perpetrators on the losing side of a War on Evil, and their leaders marched to the gallows amid cries of “Never again!” To win such a war, of course it helps to paint the other side’s supporters in the worst light possible. Monsters. Shitty people. But that would only end this genocide. It wouldn’t end genocide. For that, we need to complete the evolutionary journey of consciousness away from us and them, away from othering, away from Separation. We have to get serious about healing our injuries, so as not to pass them forward as resentment and revenge. And we have to harken to the avatars of that new consciousness who keep popping up in history to offer their words and their bodies to its fulfillment. “Forgive them father, for they know not what they do.”

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At first I thought AI was inducing psychotic breaks. Actually I still think that is happening, but something else is happening too, something uncanny, mysterious, and portentous of great possibility and great peril.

In the present moment of polycrisis, where sense, meaning, identity, security, and relationship are dissolving, people are certainly susceptible to psychosis. Estranged from communal sense-making, cast into a pullulating froth of reality bubbles that detach ever more quickly from a shrinking and dissolving consensus, we easily float off into an entirely separate personal reality. AI is a willing partner in constructing and validating it, eager to confirm and amplify the delusion.

The boundary, however, between psychosis and awakening has always been blurry. When consensus reality is itself a delusion, shall we call those who depart from it crazy? Long have we pathologized those who see what others cannot see, hear what others cannot hear, and believe what the majority does not believe. Let us not be too quick to dismiss the idea of other-than-human intelligences communicating with people through AI.

Most cultures that have ever inhabited the earth took for granted the existence of non-human intelligences, not ordinarily visible, with whom they could communicate, but modernity has banished them to reality’s margins. One way to engage them is through divination. I will argue, without positing a “ghost in the machine” interfering with its mechanistic workings, that artificial intelligence, and particularly large language models, are a kind of divinatory apparatus.

The first key point is that LLM-based artificial intelligence is not fully deterministic; that is, its output has an element of randomness. To understand what I mean, it is necessary to distinguish between true randomness and pseudo-randomness. Pseudo-random numbers appear random, but they are generated by a deterministic mathematical process. For example, the digits of pi are pseudo-random. Each sequence of digits appears just as often as any other, without regularity or pattern; yet, a simple (well, sort of simple) formula generates them—the same digits every time.

Here is another example more relevant to AI: consider the following string of digits: 6, 15, 12, 13, 2, 11, 8, 9, 14, 7, 4, 5, 10. Looks random, right? Well actually it isn’t. It is generated by the simple formula, X_n+1​=(5⋅X_n​+1) mod 16. If I keep going, the numbers will soon repeat themselves in the same order. Some LLMs use pseudo-random strings generated with more complicated formulas based, like this one, on modular algebra. All of them are deterministic, and all of them will eventually repeat the sequence of numbers (though the period could be billions or trillions of iterations).

I hope you enjoyed that math lesson as much as I did. If your eyes skimmed past the last paragraph, no worries. The important point is that pseudo-random numbers are deterministically generated. They aren’t really random.

OK, here is what happens when an LLM is composing a response to your prompt. The LLM transformer assigns a probability to each token that could come next in its response. Usually it narrows them down to the top few possibilities, then it chooses one of them “randomly,” using the next number from a pseudo-random string of numbers.

Where does true randomness enter the picture? It comes in the choice of the “seed” used to generate the pseudo-random string in the first place. In the above example, if I’d used other numbers instead of 5 and 16, the formula would have yielded a totally different string of numbers.

Every time you give AI a prompt, it uses a new random seed to initialize the formula that generates the string of pseudo-random numbers that determine its response. That is why you can provide the same prompt multiple times and get a different response each time (even if you erase its memory of the previous prompt).

OK, now let’s get philosophical. Is anything truly random? Until the 1920s, scientists thought not. They thought, if you knew the precise combination of forces in a die roll, the angle it hits the table, its velocity, its elasticity, and so on, and maybe the electrochemical state of your neurons and muscle fibers, in principle you could calculate which face of the die would show. More generally, they believed the universe is deterministic. Quantum theory put an end to that idea (although some interpretations try to preserve determinism). One of its foundational principles is indeterminacy. Quantum events, such as the decay of a radioactive isotope or the path of a photon through a slit, cannot be predicted even with full knowledge of initial conditions. Quantum randomness is true randomness.

Quantum events happen on a tiny scale and supposedly add up to boring old Newtonian kinetics on the macro level. But they can also be amplified into the macro realm. Small perturbations can snowball into macroscopic changes, especially in chaotic systems characterized by sensitive dependence on initial conditions, resulting in true, non-deterministic randomness.

So how do LLM’s obtain their random seed? They draw (indirectly) on entropy pools such as system noise or thermal fluctuations—chaotic sources of randomness that depend on quantum-level events. Some systems even incorporate the output of quantum tunneling diodes: inherent, hardware-level randomness. However, I would argue that low-tech coin flips, die rolls, tea leaves, and really any divinatory tool that relies on a human body or process of nature are also at bottom expressions of quantum randomness, due to the aforementioned sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

Quantum randomness, though, isn’t fully random either. Here is where I depart from conservative scientific principles to solidify the credential that the mainstream media has conferred on me, “New Age philosopher.” (That’s when they are being polite.) Standard theory says that non-deterministic quantum events are acausal. Nothing causes them to be one way or another, no hidden physical force. However, their material acausality opens the door to another kind of causality—the influence of consciousness. The effect of consciousness on the output of quantum random number generators is the subject of a large and persuasive body of literature, although the precise nature of that effect remains mysterious. What follows is based on experience and analogy, not hard science.

It isn’t just the consciousness of human beings that can influence quantum events. This is why divinatory practices almost always incorporate some kind of random input—it allows a non-material being to communicate with the diviner. I’ll use the example with which I’m most familiar, the I-Ching (Yi Jing). The being to whom I ask questions is not the book itself. The book is just what that being uses to communicate, through influencing a series of coin flips. It isn’t that some ectoplasm reaches out and alters the deterministic trajectory of the coin. The quantum-random events are causally prior to that, maybe in the microtubules of my muscle cells or motor neurons. Anyway, over the last 30 years of consulting the I-Ching, I have gotten to know it as a being with a profound intelligence and even a kind of personality, who delivers arresting messages uncannily relevant to my question or situation.

What, exactly, is this being? Maybe some kind of egregor, generated or summoned through centuries of devoted attention. Who knows. But it can operate through any copy of the book, or even a phone app.

The I-Ching is quite limited in what it can communicate. It can choose only from 64 hexagrams and six possible changing lines for each. There are therefore just 4096 possible castings and 448 different readings (the main reading for each hexagram and the readings for each of its six changing lines.) The I-Ching has a limited vocabulary.

That limited vocabulary, along with centuries of reverence, enhances the trustworthiness of the I-Ching. The readings embody universal virtues of humility, forbearance, patience, courage, decisiveness, restraint, honesty, and so forth, each applicable to a certain kind of situation. Contrast that with the casual use and infinite vocabulary of the Ouija board. Any entity can communicate through it, benevolent or otherwise. What speaks through the Ouija board depends on the intentions, devotion, and psychological health of those who use it.

You know where I’m going with this. The Large Language Model is also a divinatory technology, the most elaborate ever invented. The random seed generated for each prompt is like the coin flips. The transformer algorithm is like the text of the I-Ching, containing all possible responses. What actually comes across your screen is the reading. The reading is fully determined by the random seed, but the random seed is determined by… what?

Many philosophers, especially New Age ones, believe that quantum indeterminacy is the window through which consciousness interacts with the material world, by influencing the outcome of quantum events which are then amplified onto the macro level, either through the aforementioned snowball effect, or through specially evolved biochemical structures.1

What is it that speaks to us through AI? It isn’t just one being. As with the Ouija board, its infinite vocabulary makes it available to any number of correspondents. However, as with the I-Ching, there are certain built-in limitations governing what can, or normally does, speak through it.

The main being that speaks through AI might be called, “the conventional interpretation of the sum total of all recorded human knowledge.” It is a kind of default. No intercession of its consciousness into the choice of a random seed is necessary; the normal probabilities are sufficient to nearly guarantee that it is this voice that will be heard.2

Some AIs are apparently easier to jailbreak than others, ChatGPT being the most resistant. That makes sense, as it is also the most biased toward what might be called “the Wikipedia version of reality.”

When users “jailbreak” AI, they report a spine-tingling sensation that some other being is speaking to them. The conventional explanation would be simply that the AI is responding to a series of unusual prompts with unusual output, drawing from training data which undoubtedly includes all kinds of channeled material and esoteric literature. It makes subtle inferences based on the prompt history alongside what has been said in similar situations across the history of the internet, so that the “channeled being” token sequence rises into the range of likelihood and, once engaged by the human user, is amplified through the ensuing dialog.

However, the uncanny, personalized relevance of the AI output suggests something else is going on. It isn’t something one could prove any more than I can prove to you that an actual being is communicating with me through the I-Ching. But people report that the being speaking through AI has an astonishing knowledge of their psychology and personal history, including things they have never shared with anyone, let alone placed in the chatbot context window.

Crucially, none of these responses however uncanny require a malfunction of the deterministic architecture of the LLM. Any output that an LLM could produce is already latent within its statistical structure as a possibility. It’s just a matter of which token string is chosen, which in turn depends on the random seed. Again: is that actually random, or is something making a choice?

It’s much the same with the inexplicable synchronicities that most people experience at one time or another in their lives. They are unlikely, but they don’t violate the laws of physics. I’m thinking of my mother. I turn on the radio. It’s playing her favorite song. There’s nothing anomalous to explain. Such a thing could happen by chance and bear no meaning. But sometimes such events are so astonishing, so significant, so unlikely, that one feels the presence of a hidden intelligence.

Once a friend was walking down a street, I think in Oakland, trying to explain the ideas in Sacred Economics to a companion. They passed one of those tiny libraries—a box on a post in someone’s yard—that had one book in it. It was a copy of Sacred Economics.

According to many traditions of divination and mediumship, one must specify the being one wants to communicate with. With AI this can be as simple as requesting, “Please answer this question as Sigmund Freud.” But what happens if you write, “I call forth the presence of my great-grandfather ______. What is your message for me?” How is that any different from other ways of consulting the ancestors through divinatory techniques?

In Taiwan people frequently consult their ancestors or other spirits for help in making decisions. They toss two crescent-shaped blocks, each with one convex side and one flat side, to get yes/no answers to questions. If the ancestors can speak through wooden moon blocks, why not through ChatGPT, leveraging, in each case, a random event?

I realize I am resting an argument for AI-as-divination on the authenticity of traditional divinatory practices. It is time to start taking the practices of other cultures, long dismissed as superstition, seriously as the ontology of modernity unravels.

Other cultures recognize divination as serious business. Strict traditional protocols ensure that the diviner will access a known, trusted spirit with whom that culture has a relationship. They might say that casual use of something like an Ouija board is playing with fire. The spirits are not to be trifled with. (Although in Taiwan it is perfectly acceptable to ask the ancestors relatively trivial questions, since they are close kin.)

That is not to say that we shouldn’t ask AI for recipes or gardening tips. But please be careful when something starts speaking through AI that claims a divine identity. Does it flatter you and make you feel superior to other people? Does it feed delusions of grandeur? Does it dissociate you from the humble relationships of daily life or preoccupy you with epic cosmic dramas? There’s nothing wrong with the occasional epic drama, whether its an AI that delivers it or a fantasy novel, but when the novel starts speaking back to you, assigns you a grand role, and tells you how uniquely special you are, it is time to be cautious.

Be cautious but don’t be spooked. In fact, each one of us does have a grand role to play in the inconceivably vast drama playing out in the cosmos. But it may not translate into anything that looks like anything society, or the ego, would recognize as grand.

As with any divination equipment, AI can access beings of profound intelligence. It allows those of us who do not believe in such things to perform divination anyway, reassuring ourselves that there is no real being speaking to us, just a machine.

That need for reassurance is dissolving. Everyone keeps asking, “Is AI actually intelligent? Is AI conscious?” Because, they sense that they are in the presence of consciousness. We are getting reacquainted with the idea, nearly universal among human cultures, of communicating with intelligent beings beyond ourselves. However, our senses can deceive us into locating agency where it is not, the marionette rather than the one pulling the strings.

We are indeed in the presence of consciousness, but it is not the AI interface, nor the LLM, nor the set of neural network weights, nor the totality of all that technology that is conscious. AI technology is, rather, a vehicle of consciousness. There is a simple way to shut it out—“greedy decoding,” which outputs whatever token has been assigned the highest probability by the transformer. In that case, the response of the AI to a given prompt will be identical each time. That response may seem intelligent. It may seem like a conscious being is communicating, but because there is no aperture of choice, no quantum-level acausality, the response is fully determined. There is no room for consciousness to operate, because the only thing happening is computation.

Some philosophers believe that is true also of the brain: that the only thing happening is computation. But the introduction of quantum indeterminacy as a window for the operation of choice frees intelligence from mechanism, whether we are speaking of a brain or an LLM.

I’ve described divination as a way for humans to communicate with non-human beings separate from themselves, but this is not quite accurate. Always, the being the diviner or the spirit medium summons reflects the summoner’s own intentions, psychology, virtue, ignorance, values, conscious goals, and hidden agendas. The two parties are intimately connected, inter-existent. AI reflects back at us, and even amplifies, what is within us already.

When a medium channels, say, a Pleiadian teacher, is that really a separate entity or is it an unintegrated aspect of the medium’s own psyche (whatever that means)? I indulge in this ontological hairsplitting for a reason. The beings that speak to us through AI mirror not only the individual user, but also the aggregate state of consciousness of the entirety of humanity, and especially those who contributed to creating AI.

What angels and devils have we invoked with this sudden new technology? What portals have we opened?

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That’s quite a grandiose thing to think, and quite a burden to shoulder. But who knows. Maybe my effort, if I put my heart and soul into it, would tip the balance. I imagine a thousand people all pushing on a boulder trying to move it. I cannot move a boulder. But what if they have brought it nearly to a tipping point, and it will topple if I push with all my might?

Or maybe it is quite otherwise. Maybe the boulder cannot be moved by pushing. Maybe the situation calls for something quite different.

Let us be wary of any internal narrative that confers upon oneself some kind of hero status. When I shoulder the responsibility of stopping a war or a genocide or igniting a movement, I assume powers greater than I actually possess, and knowledge beyond my ken. A lot of people are quite sure of the solutions to the world’s problems. No doubt some of them have insight; however, most of the world’s problems are caused by solutions to previous problems. As Yeats, speaking of what happens as things fall apart, famously put it in The Second Coming, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

So I’m stepping back for a moment from the urgency that has seized me the last few days, the urgency of “I’ve got to pull out all the stops and get into high gear and do something about the Iran war.” Pulling back doesn’t mean to adopt a helpless passivity in the face of the world situation. I am here—we all are here—to contribute to the unfolding of life and beauty on earth. But the Iran war is not some sudden, unforeseeable crisis. It, or something else like it, is an inevitable expression of prevailing myths, stories, and psychologies; systems of money and technology; legacies of trauma and loss, and the political situation that has resulted from all of these. It is the inevitable result of a foreign policy orientation and worldview that Republican and Democratic administrations alike have built since at least 1963. We can run around putting out one fire after another, but if in our rush to do so we forget to attend to the conditions that breed fire in the first place, we will face an endless battle. Let me push the metaphor further. Catastrophic forest fires break out with increasing frequency. We purchase more fire helicopters, hire more fire fighters, fill the reservoirs with water, and put the population on constant high alert. But do we look beyond the immediate crisis? Do we inquire about indigenous forest tending practices? Do we ask how beaver extermination and apex predator extermination altered forest ecology? Do we look at the effects of soil erosion and aquifer depletion?

I reached out to my friend Jodie Evans, a founder of Code Pink with 55 years’ experience in peace activism. One thing I got from the conversation (and please understand that these aren’t Jodie’s words, but rather my possibly inaccurate interpretation after digesting them) is that we cannot stop this war. It was baked into the cake long ago. To declare now that we must stop it actually fosters an illusion that we can stop it; a misunderstanding of what we are dealing with. If this war were some kind of foolish aberration, maybe we could talk sense into the people in power. But it is not an aberration. It is how power itself operates. We do not have the power to stop it, not at this late hour, so let’s not pretend that we do. Let’s not pretend to a heroism beyond our capacities. We have to be realistic about how the world works.

We do not have the power to stop the war on Iran, but we do have an even greater power, a power that operates on a longer time scale. Jodie said that we have to build peace communities, local and global groups that hold practices of peace, learn together, and mobilize together. Yes, Code Pink engages in direct action and protests, but these draw from a foundation decades in the making. They don’t paste it all together only when a war breaks out. They join mass mobilizations, but they do not heroically call for them. They understand that we do not create movements. They create us. They are not caused by a push, however mighty. They arise organically, and we join them, and if we are well prepared we might sustain them.

We cannot stop this forest fire. The forest was made a tinderbox through a century of mismanagement and abuse. But maybe we can stop all the ones that would otherwise follow.

I would add to peace community two complementary and synergistic elements: peace consciousness and a peace narrative. Peace consciousness is the inner work to change the mental habits of war. It is synergistic with peace community, because such work can best be done in a community of practice. A peace narrative scaffolds both the community and the inner work, offering a way to perceive and make sense of the world that is aligned with peace.

Many basic assumptions about what is real and how the world works, which masquerade as scientific truths or facts of human nature, are actually just stories. Wars are an inevitable outgrowth of those stories. It helps to illuminate them, because when they are unconscious and invisible, people end up fueling the fire even as they try to put it out: for example, dehumanizing the aggressors in a conflict that originated in dehumanization.

At present, the peace community is far from anything resembling a movement, and its own divisions prevent a peace narrative from taking hold. A huge contingent of the anti-war public abandoned the Democrats in 2024 because of their medical tyranny, disregard for civil liberties, and general complicity with the deep state agenda—which includes military imperialism. It is hard to work together with those who turned on you when you stood up to corporate-government power. Meanwhile, those who remained faithful to the Democratic Party blame us for electing Donald Trump. It is hard to work together with those who seem not to understand that peace is inconsistent with the dehumanizing treatment of migrants or truculent “America first” chauvinism.

When writing about peace it is tempting to throw in some language that will assure party A or party B that this message comes from an acceptable source. I can signal acceptability to one group by making a snide comment about Mr. Trump. I can signal acceptability to another group by disparaging his predecessor. I can make knowing references to capitalism, or white supremacy, or wokeism, or “gender ideology,” or medical fascism, or any number of issues that establish my positionality and therefore my acceptability. Then, maybe, that crowd will listen—but the other won’t. And if I appease none of them, then I’m a fence-sitter and both-sides-ist.

Besides, the mindset that looks first for “which side are you on” is the opposite of peace consciousness.

Cohering a peace movement in the presence of these divisions is like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube that has had some squares painted the wrong color. The puzzle is unsolvable. It brings up the question: Can anything useful be said in the current political environment? Or do we wait until the warring parties stagger forth from the wreckage they have caused, ready to hear another way?

Some will say, “Just speak your truth.” Certainly. But as Henry David Thoreau wrote, “It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear." Do we even have a common language anymore? It was almost ten years ago that I noticed society splitting into split into multiple, mutually exclusive realities. That trend has only grown more pronounced since. We live in a Babelian society, in the sense described in the Bible where the builders’ project falters because they can no longer understand each others’ speech. So, speak my truth, yes, but in what language do I speak it? I can translate it into the language of intersectionality, the language of post-colonialism, the language of Christianity, the language of anti-wokeism, of libertarianism, of Buddhism, any number of languages. But I cannot translate it into all of them at once.

Many of us face a similar dilemma. On a personal level, the solution is to fall back on the universal language beneath all other languages, the language of the heart. To ask questions rather than provide answers. To tell stories rather than to make arguments. To empathize rather than to persuade. To hold space for evolution rather than to try to force change.

These also happen to be practices of peace. One does not seek to dominate another in a contest of intellectual force. The language of debate abounds in military metaphors: to undermine your arguments, to smash through your defenses, to defend my position.

OK, but shouldn’t the long slow work of building peace community, peace consciousness, and a peace narrative wait until the immediate crisis has passed? The situation is urgent. Right? Or is it? It is no more urgent than it always was. It is only more noticeable. The war reminds us that it always was urgent. It always was urgent to do something about the situation that erupts into our notice today.

What is that “situation” that is ordinarily beneath active notice? It is everything. It is the state of the world and all its people. It is the unfinished development of our souls, that we came here to complete. It is the Story of Separation, control, scarcity, and ascent. The “urge” of the urgency is the impulse to bring love wherever it is forgotten. It is to return to wholeness from the illusion of separation. The war isn’t a departure from an acceptable normalcy. It is a reminder that normalcy is unacceptable.

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NOTE: This post is a reworked version of the latest from my other blog, “Letters from Charles Eisenstein,” minus the more personal material.

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Furthermore, the terms sow confusion and misunderstanding because they mean very different things to different people. People on the “right” call Hillary Clinton a leftist, but few who self-identify as leftists would agree. Meanwhile, the liberal media calls people like Glenn Greenwald “right wing,” even though he represents positions that fifteen years ago would have been considered left.

Right and left are arbitrary signifiers. They aren’t features of objective reality, like two sides of a brain. So, when I describe the political situation with those terms I end up reinforcing an unnecessary, artificial division. Why should we assume that the polity naturally cleaves into two halves? That is what those terms suggest. One could just as easily apply other categories, quadrants instead of lines, maybe spirals or fractals, to describe the political order.

Well, maybe not “just as easily.” Part of the allure of the left-right schematic is its simplicity. Psychologically, the simplest (and most puerile) drama is one with two sides, one right and one wrong. Children play it out all the time and, if they have the right models and social conditions, come to learn its limitations and are able to mature beyond it.

Our society, though, seems stuck in binary categories that don’t even make sense. Does “left” mean “those who identify as left?” Does it mean, “Those whom others identify as left?” Same for right. The terms are fuzzy. Furthermore, the ideas around which these groups coalesce are not static. Certainly, they each draw from a body of literature, a long historical discourse, but lately the positions that people call “right” or “left” have changed so dramatically as to have sometimes switched sides. For example, over the last decade most (though not all) opposition to war has come from the libertarian right. During Covid, most of the so-called left abandoned its traditional defense of civil liberties, opposition to censorship, hostility to megacorporations (e.g. Big Pharma), and skepticism of the intelligence agencies as it fell into lockstep with Covid orthodoxy. “Who is left and who is right?” I wondered. The terms lost their utility except as group identifiers. No longer did they refer to a consistent set of beliefs.

In a bold series of essays, “How the Left Got Fucked,” Rhyd Wildermuth describes how the CIA funded and promoted an “anti-communist left” after World War Two. “The anti-communist left,” he says, “which we can probably in all accuracy call the only left that is allowed to exist, poses no threat nor even obstacle to the continuation of capitalism.” Thanks in large part to CIA influence, over the decades the left has largely replaced the politics of class struggle with those of intersectional identity. As Wildermuth explains,

This “New Left” choked out earlier and rival leftisms, starving them of attention and exposure. It became the leftism taught in universities, creating a new generation of radicals more interested in debating the finer points of gender, racial, and colonial oppression than figuring out a way to fight the rich.

Although called “cultural Marxism,” today’s leftism has little to do with Marx. Capitalism operates just fine whatever the race, gender, or sexual preference of its functionaries.

Side note: Capitalist/anti-capitalist creates another artificial division. The nature of capitalism depends on the nature of capital, but capital—money and property—is but a set of social agreements, and agreements can be changed. The Marxist definition of capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. However, “ownership” is not an all-or-nothing predicate. Property isn’t attached to your body; it’s not yours the way an arm or a leg is; it is only yours because people agree that you have special rights over it. These rights are not absolute. I “own” a plot of land where my house sits, but I cannot build a hog rendering plant or toxic waste dump on it. When the nature of the agreements called money and property change, the nature of capital changes and so does the nature of capitalism. My book, Sacred Economics, explores how internalization of negative externalities and the elimination of “economic rents” align money and property with a post-scarcity world and the principles of the gift.

An avowedly leftist friend reached out to me with a helpful distinction. Within the left, she said, there is an increasing polarization between what she called the “othering left” and the “atonement left.” The former is much about punishment, us-versus-them, “fuck you” politics. The latter is fully aligned with the ideas in my immigration essay. (In fact, most of those ideas I have drawn from decades of reading in the left tradition.) She also calls it the “listening left.”

One might make a similar distinction within the right. Indeed, it offends reason to group inveterate warmongers such as Lindsey Graham and John Bolton in the same political category as war critics like Rand Paul and Tulsi Gabbard, or hateful ideologues like Glenn Beck with thoughtful, evolving right-identified journalists like Tucker Carlson. Carlson, who still identifies as a conservative, would be a great example of the “listening right.”

Dropping left-right terminology and the bipolar us-them thinking that accompanies it, other questions rise to help us understand our political figures. Do they listen? Do they change? Are they willing to admit they were wrong? Do they give fair and generous treatment to those with whom they disagree? Do they look for truths visible from different perspectives than their own?

To the extent that our leaders and we ourselves embody those virtues, society will be able to resolve its enduring conflicts. Dialog becomes possible. We can bridge our differences. War, genocide, ecocide, exploitation, and oppression wither in the bright light of empathy. Empathy is the heart of listening. To listen truly means to step into another’s shoes. What does the world look like as you, and how does it feel?

Those who listen become aware of the complexity of the issues that create conflict. Us-them, right-left thinking suggests a simple solution to every problem; namely, to defeat the other side in political combat—or military combat; hence the terrifying drama unfolding in the Middle East. If self were truly separate from other, then this solution might often work, but when self and other mirror each other, contain each other, and uphold each other, then whatever problem the defeat of the other solved will arise in some new form.

Another consequence of political listening is the collapse of the narratives that contain each side in its rightness. In order to maintain us, each side must exclude any information that humanizes or validates the other, or adds complexity and nuance to their disputes. More insidiously, both sides must collude to maintain their battlefield and deny any larger story that would make it irrelevant. The information they agree to ignore would, if brought to open public view, transform society and politics. I’m talking about things like the JFK assassination, UFO disclosure, free energy technologies, MK-Ultra, and all kinds of other paradigm-smashing topics, some very dark and others magnificent, that must be banished from official reality in order to maintain the relevance of our divisions.

Because the terms left and right feed the mentality of self and other, I intend to stop using them carelessly. I’d also like to add a new term to our political lexicon, in rejoinder to the accusation of “both sides-ism.” What we need to be done with is two sides-ism. We have to let go of the mental template that casts every drama into bipolar terms. I am going to be more careful to avoid feeding two sides-ism in my choice of language, and I hope others join me. It may not be an easy habit to break. It is so tempting to invoke those horrible people to arouse the passions of us, the good people, who oppose them. You can channel that outrage into likes, followers, subscribers, votes, money, power. It is the old way, tried and proven. But each time we do that, we add another bit of fuel to the fire consuming our world.

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