Here Comes The Next Thing

How to make friends with uncertainty in an age of decline

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

There are probably a few covid skeptics out there who feel like Anthony Fauci’s one hundred and eleven invocations of the constitution was a cathartic experience. Their thought process is the same as Charlie Brown and the football: maybe we’re about to finally get some justice. Any minute now! On the other hand if you have been paying attention to the mass murder campaign called “public health” that he’s been spearheading for the past sixty years then you would know better to expect any sort of official justice. These crimes are not the result of one man or one institution, but the grinding momentum of an entire system that has broken free of it’s constraints and set a course towards the Orwell and Huxley islands.

But therein lies another problem for those of us who want to melt into a puddle of hoplessness. In occult study one of the earliest lessons presented to the candidate is that evil is a self-terminating force, and therefore something to be avoided unless the goal is to maximize your own suffering. The concept is simple, but simple is not the same as quick and easy. It typically takes multiple lifetimes once the soul hits what the alcoholics call “rock bottom” to start the journey back to the light of the central sun. Learning how to transcend our biological drives and unlock our latent powers is difficult and time-consuming work, which is why so many of us choose to take “shortcuts” that inevitably fling us further down into the pit of despair.

The bad news is that we have spent the past few decades living under a shadow government addicted to shortcuts, and we are now standing on the precipice of the next level down. The Managers have done an especially poor job preparing us for the age of shortages and contraction. Instead they have focused on feathering the nests of their doomsday bunkers while treating the citizenry like a herd of domestic animals that needs to be tagged and culled. They think that throwing us a bone like Lil’ Tony’s perp walk is going to settle the masses back into slumber, but therein lies the paradox of evil. Their self image might be Sauron, but the fictional resemblance is closer to Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Forces have been unleashed that go far beyond the meager constraints of human comprehension, and now we are all forced to ride the whirlpool of chaos towards an unknowable destination.

Over the past 20 years of exploring this model of reality one of my biggest concerns has been the realization that I did not have the emotional bandwidth to handle rapidly increasing levels of uncertainty. Thankfully I stumbled on the work of John Michael Greer back in the Archruid Report days and began the challenging work of self-initiation while simultaneously learning how to function with a less energy-intensive lifestyle. The most enlightening part of this journey is learning that it is only by stripping away unnecessary things that enough space can be made to build something better, and I cannot think of a more appropriate metaphor for the period of crisis we are now entering.

The Butterfly Effect has become part of the cultural lexicon since the first Jurassic Park movie wrapped production in Kualoa Valley, yet even stranger are the individual transformations that created billions of butterflies in the first place. When the caterpillar is done gobbling up everything in sight and enters the chrysalis phase of it’s life cycle, the body it once occupied dissolves itself in a period of creative destruction. What remains are called imaginal cells and discs, which then go on to re-assemble into the adult version of the insect. Even in these days of advanced radiography, genetic engineering, and biowarfare the entomological process of metamorphosis remains a mystery to even our most advanced scientists. Those who are trying to control the world would be wise to take heed of the implications of such a massive knowledge gap. They think they can control the imaginal, but from the inside it looks more like they are the empty shell that is about to get cast off and left behind.

On the other hand those of us who are willing to work with nature instead of trying to control her have an incredible opportunity in front of us. The previous form of our civilization was basically an eating machine obsessed with endless consumption, and therefore quite difficult for us as individuals to have any influence on it’s course. As we enter the pupal phase of the approaching dark age, magic will start returning to the world and individual acts will once again carry far more weight than the force of the collective. The downfall of the Managerial Class is going to be quite brutal, but it will also be an excellent example of why it’s necessary to avoid the temptation of trying to control everything and everyone.

The ultimate challenge of Thinking Apes might be the acceptance that we will never unlock the secrets of the imaginal, while simultaneously learning to work with it to achieve an ultimate purpose that we are unable to comprehend. The first step in this long journey is to learn to work with nature instead of constantly declaring war on it. How many resources could have been conserved by allowing sheep and goats to maintain our golf courses instead of bombarding them with machines and chemicals? In Hawaii we have a rich heritage of aquaculture starting from the top of the mountains all the way down to the fish ponds. The ahupua’a system used to feed hundreds of thousands of people, and yet for some reason we did away with it and became addicted to Costco.

As the chrysalis phase intensifies and structures continue breaking down, a substantial part of the population will no longer be able to ignore the ongoing crises. They will begin to mourn the world that is going away like children crying over spilled milk, and then begin searching for meaning outside the officially sanctioned thought prison. For us folks out on the fringes this means we will have to get used to the strange sensation of the Normies asking us what’s really going on, and then actually sticking around to listen to our responses. This is incredible power that we can put to good use if we are prepared to embrace The Weird in service of a higher purpose. However if the temptation ever arises to guide this momentum towards selfish goals, then it would be wise for us to pay close attention to what’s about to happen to the industrial poisoners. It’s the sort of lesson that a person only gets to learn once, so it’s better to let someone else become the example.