EPIC
Sex, Magic, Alchemy & Your Next Story of Us
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I have a dream.
You know that feeling of knowing that you know even when you don’t know? That’s the one. The people and places change, though the feeling stays the same. Felt before said, each time the whispers sing in new tongues: There is another world, and it is inside this one.
We know what awaits us is amazing!
Sci-fi myths of the past are here in the present. The world travels with us in our pockets now, jet packs and hover boards are real things, we can actually move objects with our minds, and build almost anything we can imagine with self-replicating nano materials and use them with 3D printers that can reproduce themselves.
We now produce gold in a lab with microbes, run cars on saltwater, harness energy from thin air, power gadgets with the energy from our bodies and the vibrations of our voices, and even heal ourselves by reprogramming our DNA with our thoughts.
We have self-organizing sentient robots replacing production lines, deep learning A.I. algorithms that can learn languages, read, write and perform tasks better than any human, auto-recording, receiving and transmitting smart dust, and autonomous flying machines that deliver, track and manage self-correcting and self-cataloging libraries of physical objects from virtual spaces, recycle all our waste, including plastic into energy and so much more.
Plus there is decentralization, or the distributed ability to self organize local intelligence for network benefit. Technologies like DAPPs, DACs and DAOs (Distributed Automated Applications, Companies, and Organizations respectively) are now being served from platforms like Etherium, Maidsafe and others that can literally re-write the rules of our political, environmental, social, technical, and economic engagements. We can create dynamic agreements with trusted peers to make our own money, create our own contextual governments, underwrite our own insurance policies and much, much more.
Yet, most of these innovations are not accessible to us. Do you know that just a handful of people own 70% of the famed cryptocurrency called Bitcoin, and the founders are holding secret boiler room meetings to control the rest? I know, because I was actually in one of those meetings!
The so-called sharing economy innovations like AirBnB and Uber which could potentially solve many of the housing and transport problems, are still bound to the terms of the predatory lending practices of the venture capital backing them! Creating the negative impacts of raising rents that displaces local residents in the case of Air BnB, and squeezing drivers into slave labor as in the case of Uber. For every 21st century technical promise, there is 12th century or earlier socioeconomic assumption co-opting progress for power.
Most of us are unaware of these technical innovations.
We are all busy seeking a better life for ourselves and our families, while running the old story of progress that is not working out for any of us. It’s not even working out for the .0001% that many of us like to vilify. You know, those 85 people according to the latest Oxfam report who own over 50% of the world’s wealth! Wealth. That’s a funny word in todays world.
We would not drink the word “water” if we were thirsty, yet we chase a symbol of perpetual debt against nature and ourselves called “money” and think nothing of calling it wealth! Isn’t wealth the evolution of intelligence to help us thrive, and not kill us? Is anyone really leaving true wealth behind if their children can’t eat the food, drink the water or breathe the air?
There has to be something better than this!
See, I still have this dream.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. Haven’t we all felt this feeling with each possibility? With each discovery, purpose, calling? Isn’t this persistent dissatisfaction with how things seem to be ending up, really the beginning of how things could be? Isn’t that the perennial story of personal transformation, and isn’t personal transformation ultimately societal transformation?
Don’t all of our favorite stories begin with this same plot? What the great mythologist Joseph Campbell identified as the Hero’s Journey? Isn’t this why Luke Skywalker ventured out of his native Tatooine in Star Wars, why Neo took the red pill in The Matrix, and why Alice went down the rabbit hole? Maybe this is exactly that calling. That crucial moment in time for all of us to rewrite our story. To express our true selves, to be who we really are instead of who we were told we should be…
“What is not said will be wept.” ~Sappho
“Let go or be dragged.” ~Zen Proverb
“Wisdom is knowing that I know nothing.”~Socrates
The wise before us have left us quite a collection of crumbs to follow. Creating a better life than of those before us. Better ways for receiving, decoding and transmitting information better than before, so that life can go on.
Simple enough, right?
You’d think so, but no. We block the flow! Even though we know that we know. We know that people no smarter than you or I had created the stories that hold our civilization in place now. So why do we still hold on to their old stories as our current ones, even if the results of all that they have thought are no longer serving us?
Can’t we all intuitively feel that the surface symptoms of economic instability, war, disease, famine, violence, poverty, environmental and systemic ecological collapse threatening life on this planet, are about something much deeper within us?
Don’t we all know that the worldwide epidemic of chronic loneliness, medicated mental illness, and the sociopathic narcissism that is now confused for healthy ambition, are all rooted in a fundamental disconnect from what we feel inside to what we see outside? How long can we keep up with our old story of individual advantage at the expense of all other life, when its ill effects of anxiety and isolation begin to consume our own lives? Aren’t TPP, NSA, CIA, FBI, TSA, DEA, IRS and all the other symbols for mass mistrust and domination just the visible symptoms? By now, we already know that economics disconnected from ecology is unsustainable, but even the more subtle symbols are also cracking all around us!
We can each feel it in our own lives.
Just look around at the contrast between our generation and the one before us. Aren’t our old myths informing our social containers of culture, marriage, family, education, work, religion, politics, nation states and personal status based on the ability to step over and out-consume one another, all feeling awkwardly uncomfortable now?
Who are we if we cannot survive this imagination of ourselves?
On one hand, we want to live the promise that our collective ingenuity is showing us, yet on the other, our own stupidity is blocking this flow. Biases and ideologies, the unquestioned assumptions of our savage ancestors who wrote down their limited explanations of the unseen reality as religion, and we still let their musings distort what we can receive. Religions by any name, including capitalism, communism and every other ism still blocks us.
Then there is the distortion of how we decode what we receive. There is no government, no military industrial complex, no economic system, no mass media that can ever reduce us to puppets and robots as throughly as the biological and environmental feedback loops of our existence. We are delusional primates, deluded by our cultural conditioning of mind and bound by our own perception of time and space to think we can affect our reality by reason. Yet, everyday life continues to prove the irrationality of our actions, driven by impressions and imprints formed at critical times in our lives, operating as lost children in adult outfits.
Our old myths about ourselves are obviously dying. We need new ones, but where do we start? How do we realize what we dream on the inside to what we develop on the outside?
Yes, that dream. My dream, your dream, our dream.
We know the dream we dream together is the reality we live. We all feel that there has to be something more, something better, something beyond this stupid one…where we somehow accepted the idea that some lives are more important than others. Why do we subscribe to this self-imposed separation? Does saving myself have any meaning if there was no other life but me? Would it be any different if I left this earth with all that I wanted out to space? Isn’t the world as we are?
Of course, there are always people with answers.
You know, those pompous pricks from the privileged parts of the planet with their ONE grand solution system to save the world? Whose silver bullet will you suck on now, before it occurs to you to ask the obvious: Save who’s world?
The one eyed rule in the kingdom of the blind, and now the new cult leaders are rushing to compete for our salvation…promising the timeless myths of omniscience, omnipotence, and immortality for anyone willing to pay the premiums. Are we really that incapable of realizing the obvious within ourselves?
The Vedas, or the Sanskrit word for Science have told us:
“Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names”
Perhaps the obvious eludes us, because when our personal dreams depersonalize as our shared myths, the metaphors and symbols move us further and further from the truth. Like when we tell our children about sex with the birds and the bees, or how babies come from storks…we create a layer of distortion from what we understand it as, to what the child now associates it with. When the child grows up and learns the real truth, the same experiences take on another meaning. It’s a shock to the system that requires a new story to hold it!
The cracking of our old myths everywhere now might just be that shock to us all!
Maybe this is our maturation process as a civilization. Maybe our real salvation lies in the debunking and then rewriting of the old mythical stories that got us here. Technology alone is obviously not saving us! We invented software to make the material and energy production costs go away, yet we still talk about the big tech company IPO payout! Huh? It’s so outrageously insane once you stop and really think about it…
See, technology since the time of fire is neutral.
We use materials and energy more efficiently as we receive, decode and transmit energy as information more efficiently. In other words, our intelligence as a species drives how we use our environment to serve us. Our consciousness, or why we do what we do informs our capital, or what we do it with, which informs commerce, or how we do it. This is, and has always been the case. What slows it down are only the beliefs in the incomplete explanations of the past.
Sounds simple, though it is not.
This goes deep into the timeless questions of the stories of our own existence bound to the story of time. Our stories and symbols are bound to time, and our physical existence in the world is about the limited time we have in this life. Any symbol associated with time is going to be scarce. For example, when we say time is money, then money is always going to be scarce, regardless of how its actually created. Such as now, when our economists and our banking cartels have invented three trillion dollars of imaginary money to plug the leaks of the drowning ship called global debt! There will never be enough of it! Especially since our bio-survival is based on these archaic symbols of money on our paychecks, no one dares to have a counter opinion to expose the obvious: Who the fuck are we in debt to?
It has become too easy for the eco-friendly soy latte crowd to tell people outside of their clean and comfortable worlds to adopt an attitude of abundance, when the lives of most people on the planet are anything but.
We the spoiled children of inner poverty and outer extravagance, pass around the #hashtags and Facebook memes of suicidal tech workers in China, starving farmers in India, and genocide victims in Africa behind the comforts of our shiny iScreens from our plush, climate controlled dwellings.
Yet, how many of us are willing to stop consuming to the next gluttonous goodies like those drive through burgers and fries that everyone eats, but no one admits to? Or the next fashionable outfit or the next electronic gadget directly accelerating the despicable living conditions of those who produce them?
Spoiled westerners riding high of the opiate of the privileged called “awareness” campaigns, glibly throw out solutions and simple explanations, like killing the ego. A problem that will go away if we can all sit in meditation, wearing our stylishly scrappy mystical outfits and beaded accessories produced by starving children who cannot afford to give a fuck about the level of transcendence you have reached from your superfood juice cleanse!
See, it was never as simple as declaring war on the ego.
It feels like more of a reaction to the tribal consciousness once driven by the ego, or the mammalian recognition of our order in the pack, now scaling beyond our original agreements. Just as higher levels of coherence or what is now considered knowledge, has outgrown the cognitive capacity of the biological family unit to our educational systems, our past systems of religion, politics, economics and more have outgrown their industrial age containers.
Moreover, the great mythologists, mystics and the mindful before us had told us long ago that the EGO has the specific task of going to its inner salvation, of making synthesis among the different centers of consciousness within the vast universe of the psyche. We can no more exist without our egos, as we can exist without time. I think what we are reacting to is the inner and outer world disconnect from the current story in play. Our collective myths that drive what we value and why. The more we peel back the real onion of how we got here, the more we realize that we are going to have to go much, much deeper…
It’s that dream again.
The intuitive understanding from our unconscious inner worlds that appear as the symbols that make up our stories. Our collective mythos, the structures we have imagined, to make meaning from all of our sensory perceptions and projections into what we describe as our reality. Like the inter-nested Russian Matryoshka dolls, the stories of our reality are made of stories of what we are feeling, enveloped by the stories of what we’re thinking, and then validated by mapping the observable evidence to prove that what we think is so.
Remember that once we had thought that the Sun revolved around the Earth, so we organized our observations to fit that story. Then we imagined that it was the other way around, so we reorganized the evidence to fit that! We’ve been at this for a very, very long time. Yet, at every age, and every epoch, we find ourselves the victims of these very stories that got us to the next uncomfortable, and often perilous position in the name of progress.
So here we are again.
Once we realize that it is our story that is limiting what we can experience as our reality, we are faced with yet another dilemma. I “get” it, but how do we all “get” it? There is way too much invested in the status quo. To keep things as they are. The history of the world thus far, has been the history of conquerors and conflict. The chosen people, the competing champions, the righteous few celebrated far and wide, for keeping us stupid, for blocking the evolution of intelligence. The idiots of ideology, the drum beaters of bias, the heaviest hoarders of intelligence.
It’s the only way of being we have been led to believe as our nature. The priests monopolizing knowledge, the conquerors monopolizing government, the landlords monopolizing land and the bankers monopolizing the accounting of all of it! Like the vice-like grip of a pit bull’s locked jaws, our selfish genes and memes keep us separated from each other and all life, as if that was the only option for us to survive. There are plenty of good ideas to pull us out of this nightmarish narrative, yet, those stories are not yet part of the re-tweetable mass consciousness.
Try proposing a truly equitable egalitarian solution, and you will be labeled a liberal loser. Create a fully circular, regenerative business ecology, and you will be considered a communist. Think critically and not give into the lobotomization of groupthink, and you become an extreme right libertarian anarchist. Find your true inner voice, and you also find yourself alone. There is an acceptable level of assumptions you can question before you become the asshole. This is the irony of individual transformation. If your personal quest for self knowledge pulls you out of the reality tunnel of your time, you are going to be considered a threat, not a genius.
This, unfortunately is where we still are as a civilization.
Way too much invested in past conflicts, old wounds, and old stories that no longer make sense with new understandings. The preoccupation with only the visible, trying desperately to measure the immeasurable, even though it has always been the invisible and non-quantifiable that move us. How can we reconcile this persistent delusion? The disconnection of the material from the spiritual, the seen from the unseen? How do we put back what has separated out of control?
I’m following that dream.
The same one I started with, the same one we all recognize as a version of our own. We know it is the story that informs the solutions, and we can shift that story in our favor. Words and images transmit the story to the mind, though intellectual understanding has never changed anything. Actions of kindness and compassion speak to the heart, and as beautiful as that is, it is not fast enough to spread to all of us. Show it by making an example through the life you live and make it visible, and now we are getting somewhere.
So this is my dream.
That feeling of knowing that you know even when you don’t know? Well, this is what I feel I know. I know there is another world, and it is inside this one. This world of mine was created with what I can see, what I can feel, and what I could synthesize from what I can see and feel. You see, I dream in patterns. I can see what we are chasing when I look around, I can feel what we are feeling when I deeply connect with another, so that I can synthesize what I see and feel as the next living systems through images and words.
In other words, Sex, Magic and Alchemy.
Sex, is information that moves life forward. Beyond our biological explanations of those invisible chemical contracts negotiating our physical union, sex is also about our psychic symbols and social norms. Sex is life. Perhaps that is why historically, human creative achievement and societal sexual liberation have been directly related. We know that when our social stories of sex impose unnatural constraints over natural creativity, all life suffers.
What if we told a new story instead?
Why does society fear true sexual liberation so much? What would happen to government, or the will of one imposed upon another if human sexuality was retuned to our biological equilibrium? The perspective of the inclusive and welcoming matriarchal egg is a lot different than the survival at any cost view of the patriarchal sperm isn’t it? Would the next story of sex free us from this artificial delusion of material scarcity? The next story of us where we can unblock our ideological biases, neurobiological imprints and limiting symbols that distort our perceptions to what is? Receiving, decoding and transmitting information more efficiently than before and evolving into a more coherent society?
Magic is the manifest of the unexplainable. Making the invisible visible over time. It’s how we relate to time itself. Our projections of our perceptions in the pursuit of sex. Our view of sex shifts what we consider as magic. The more we tune into the natural rhythms of our biological purpose within the living organism called planet earth, the more we touch magic!
Nikola Tesla said: “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
This feels like the next significant chapter in our evolution. The next aspirational symbols for the future that first appear in our dreams, then in our will and then in reality. Magic is appearing all around us now. We can visualize the weather, our sentiments, our tendencies, our energy signatures and so much more, though it is still framed within the lenses of logical contraction instead of emotionally intelligent expansion. The continuation of wonder, the surrender to perpetual inquiry. The surrendering to what we cannot ever control with the perceptions that we can, for seeing wider and deeper, for living a life truly worth living.
Alchemy is the synthesis at the intersection of sex and magic. When things are muddled together, they need to be separated, distinguished and ordered so that they can be put back together. Even our old material myth of converting lead into gold was about exactly that. The convergence of the unseen with the seen, the inner to the outer.
Modern alchemy reframes all of the emerging technologies previously mentioned into a higher form of coherence. It informs the next stories of us, the next technically viable solutions to synthesize from our newly heightened perceptions of Sex, and our more effective projections of Magic, to finally transform this version of reality into the next.
Sex, Magic and Alchemy are fundamental to the stories we are.
This feels intuitively true to my soul.
The soul, as Jung, Freud, Reich, Berne and all the other modern shamanic interpreters of dreams have conceptually modeled, arises at that uniquely intangible intersection of the conscious mind and unconscious dreams. Our stories of us. Those personal journeys of transformation reflecting these collective journey of revolution.
The story of our times is not to discard all that we have thought and learned, instead, it is about re-synthesizing all that we know with all that we feel. Passing on all that we’ve learned to the next iteration of life. Becoming whole. The more that we can understand ourselves, the less we will adopt somebody else’s view of how to be. We avoid the trappings of group-think, and thus become more integral by contributing our unique essence to the mix.
The world does not need to be saved. It never did.
The world needs more free thinkers to come alive!
As more and more free thinkers rise amongst us, more opportunities for a better world emerge. Informed, intuitive and ingenious humans that we are, we can now start breaking out of the bounds of the old stories. The societal programming of the past.
How satisfied are you with the life you’re living? What are you finding yourself ignoring as somebody else’s problem? Which problems can be rationally explained and which ones are inherently unexplainable? What is the implicit assumption behind your explicit actions? What and where is your call to be you?
The clock of the old reality tunnel of mass extinction and systemic collapse is ticking. The fate of our species depends on each and every one of us. The outside stays the same until the inside shifts the game! Are you ready? The next world reveals itself for you when you accept this challenge. The challenge of letting go of who you thought you should be and begin the journey of becoming who you really are.
Sure, you can sheepishly hold on to the comforting old lies, waiting for the next proverbial shepherd to lead the way, or realize that the ruler of your reality is you.
You have a dream.
Make it epic.
