Something is Breaking
Birth and death are two aspects of one sacred movement.
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There is a certain kind of tiredness in the collective psyche right now. It’s not just the average end-of-the-year panic, but more of a knowing that we are on the verge of an arrival.
There are obvious sociopolitical reasons to be exhausted right now. But what I want to focus on are the energetics beneath this moment, ones that may connect to what we are seeing on our world stage.
We are hearing the death rattle of an era. An era of screen addiction, of hyperfocus on creation for monetization and performance over connection, is dying - we are bored with the very stimuli we have been entrained to be addicted to (and yet still addicted.)
It feels like God/Source/The Universe is priming us to break with a reality that lacks sensuality, a reverence for the erotic, and prioritizes the hollow over the solid - out of sheer boredom. Is it Neptune in the last degree of Pisces showing us how tired we are of our own fantasies?
At the same time, optimizing, hacking, tracking, and designing for efficiency have reached the zenith of their usefulness; it seems that the more we treat ourselves like robots, the more we feel threatened by actual machines taking away what we hold so dear. Jobs are important because our socioeconomic construct forces them to be, but they are not who we are or the core of our identity. It fortifies the power structures that exist if we opt into the belief that we are our work, so it’s no wonder we have been hypnotized into believing that purpose = job.
I’m just as guilty of this as anyone. I’m writing this on a Sunday because I love what I do.
It seems the more we treat ourselves like robots, the more we feel threatened by actual machines taking away what we hold so dear.
Right now, we are realizing that our identities don’t have to be enmeshed with our labor. An existential crisis looms as Artificial Intelligence points to a question that dominant culture would rather avoid: What is organic intelligence, and what is its value? And what does it mean to be human?
But there is an overarching narrative here, one that is easy to miss if you’re too zoomed into crisis or the oversimplified questions, like is AI good or bad? A wider context is available to us when we have the imaginal capacity to zoom out: Identity crises preclude transformation. When the old us is backed into a corner, finally tired of making arguments rooted in our knee-jerk tendency to defend staying the same, we finally become open to other paths.
It is at our breaking point, where we are most creative. We have less to lose and more to gain. Staying the same becomes more painful than taking the risk of change.
Desperation can serve a purpose. Like the caterpillar surrendering to the process of dissolution, a moment comes when we need to let go to make space for a process that threatens all we know.
‘All we know’ is the phrase to key in on here. Since 2020, I have been observing how afraid we are of mud. We want to be creative, but when we get to parts of life without clear delineations, hierarchies, or definitions (the mud of life in which art is made), we default to fear.
Our nervous systems have been entrained to believe that clear boxes and chains of command = safety. Our fear of being with the messiness of life is something we inherited, not something innate. But awareness is the first step to change, and now we know the messy way is the honest way, and that honesty is the first step to innovation.
Why Things Are So Intense Right Now
We all have different coping mechanisms, and there’s a lot to cope with right now. As uncertainty starts to spread out into foundational parts of our lives- our jobs, our livelihoods, our creative pursuits and relationsihps… it is natural for extreme responses to emerge.
One extreme I’ve been seeing: Rigidly cling to logic and fact.
It makes sense to try to stabilize through the mind when the field is cluttered with nonsense and inaccuracies. Some of us are responding to this “post-truth” era by doubling down on the importance of institutions and traditions that hold cold, hard facts as the ultimate form of knowing.
There’s a lot of good to save in the rich history of scientific discovery and academia. And I do believe it is worthwhile to undo the distrust of scientific information caused by meme-ified science news, sensationalized headlines, and corrupted experiments paid for by corporations. But it’s also important to remember that prioritizing the mind over the body and dismissing intuition is a value system rooted in colonization.
The Other Extreme: Putting Intuition and Spirituality On An Unquestionable Pedestal
The other extreme response I’ve seen is to declare that we must trust intuition, mysticism, and feeling alone. That the only way to change a system corrupted by mental constructs is to cut ourselves off from the mind’s way of knowing completely.
Another Deeper (or Higher?) Layer
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