You Are Profoundly Under-Resourced For What Is Coming

Week by week, the forecasting model continues to tick over on its way to our inevitable Buffy-style season finalé. It has me thinking about what readiness looks like and, most importantly, how to find that state in a way that is not autonomically exhausting. The first requirement of true readiness must be that it makes room for the nervous system to actually relax, rather than continuously remind it that a storm’s a comin’.

Terence McKenna once said words to the effect that the challenge is not to find the answer; it is to face the answer. And the answer is you chose to be in a body to bear witness to the ignominious destruction of western civilisation. I suppose the good news is this process is actually almost complete. All of the soft parts have already been boiled off. These soft parts were the ‘payoff’ or cover story The System told itself.

The ‘payoff’ for living inside this system was getting to outsource the true cost of running it: The cost to the more-than-human world, the child labour that made all the devices, the ludicrous fake desert royals propped up to keep the gasoline flowing at prices low enough to be affordable to literally anyone in the west.

You did not have to see these costs. You got to go to school with the expectation it would turn into a job you only hated with most of your soul, rather than all of it. A job that would allow you to eventually afford housing, buy more slave-made devices and take an annual holiday.

None of these promises ever come back. All those soft parts have boiled off. There is just the gleaming skull of The System, of the realpolitik reality of what it actually took to keep you in the hologram of virtue and optionality. The university students correctly protesting the ongoing Gaza genocide were appalled but also surprised that their schools were accepting and continue to accept money from American and Israeli military technology companies. But if the universities refuse that money, then student fees must go up, which the students also understandably do not want. There is blood on every Masters Diploma Certificate in Gender Studies that will never wash off. The skull just stares at you, as if to say “this is what it costs. The only free education is the one I bring you now. This is what it always cost.”

The payoff for the expectation that a consumer economy will always expand in both delight and opportunity is a necessary amount of corruption in the government to ensure military and diplomatic pressure are put on foreign countries to get the right products and resources in at the right price. Now there is no pretending there is anything but corruption. All the soft parts, the cute frivolities that give life a little sparkle of joy -school milk programmes, minimum wages, municipal water supplies that don’t catch fire- have been boiled off. Now you just see the skull.

The good news that this process is almost over is also the bad news, of course. Because after all the flesh is boiled off, the skull will be shattered with a hammer. The System does not survive. It will be the last thing left, but it too doesn’t make it through this transformation. That’s where we are now. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a skull.

Face the face-free answer. There is nothing to be done except this. There are no senators left to write. No protests left to organise. No candidates left to vote for. The Right has lost its mind to a resurgent dank Christianity of trad wives and carnivore dieting. The Left has lost its mind to trans sportspeople and a superstitious worship of Big Pharma. It’s just you, me and Yorrick, baby.

With everything that’s going on, I thought I would start this Substack on a positive note, clearly. Let me explain.

You are profoundly under-resourced for what is coming because you are relying on the resources of a world which is going away. The post-skull world not only has all the resources you could ever want, you literally arrive in that world by claiming them. That’s truly all it takes.

All of these are going to get the video and/or Substack treatment in the coming months, but consider the following:

Human Relationships

The human cosmos is moving from engagements defined by co-dependence through engagements defined by independence (20th century feminism, etc) to one defined by interdependence. You laugh at the vegan polycule until you find yourself knocking on the door at 2am after your wife chased you around the house with a Moderna bird flu shot until you fled into the night.

Remember how in the last apocalypse, we had to, you know, do the apocalypse and also exist alongside people who were pretending it didn’t happen or actively aiding and abetting it? This time, try not to act so surprised. The pain and tension of those ruptures in primary relationships -romantic, familial, etc- should have expedited the process of moving into primary engagements defined by interdependence. If they haven’t, there is still time but not much.

Find your human tribe. Ones who are nearby in the physical, and ones who are nearby at the level of the field. We are out there.

Non-Human Relationships

Part of interdependence—the relationship form that exists in Charles Eisenstein’s world of interbeing—includes forms of abundant and continuous relating with the more-than-human, with Country, with the named and unnamed Dead, and with the angelic and hyperdimensional.

This is explored in considerable detail in my Foundations of Magic course and the Angel Magic course, but a universe of interbeing runs on consent. You must ask. You must call in. That is literally your function. You are the conduit and the portal for these hyperdimensional connections. It is part of the natural functioning of a human to do that, in the same way it is part of the natural functioning of a nightingale to sing.

There is genuinely no such thing as loneliness or isolation when you step into this fullest expression of being a human. There is still unpleasantness and pain, for sure. But loneliness is a perceptual error. (You can remind yourself of that when you are hiding in the bathroom from your uncle’s Democrat-uniparty hectoring at Thanksgiving. See? I’m helpful.)

Close your eyes and ask, “How are my relationships resourcing me?” Are you looking for a type of resource from someone you know in your heart is incapable of offering? Are you, in the words of the amazing Kelly Brogan, trying to buy eggs at the hardware store?

How and where and with whom and in which combination are you resourcing your relationships? You are not responsible for resourcing yourself alone. But you are responsible for being honest about the resources you need and where you get them from.

Stay Out Of The Spirit Triangle

In my healing tradition, we speak of the Triangle of Disempowerment, or the Victim Triangle.

Stephen Karpman, M.D., developed his “drama triangle” – victim, rescuer, persecutor – almost 40 years ago, and I find it’s just as relevant – and just as new to many people – as it was 40 years ago.

Even if you don’t spend much time yourself playing any of these three roles – you probably deal on a daily basis with people who do.

Knowing how to put our “big girl” or “big boy” pants on and get out of the triangle is essential when dealing with people who want to pull us in. Using our own wise mind to recognize when we’ve regressed into one of these roles ourselves (usually because of the usual culprit, needing to play those roles early in our family of origin conditioning) is also essential to make wise conscious choices in our intimate and social interactions with others.

On the one hand, this is a development from the previous point about relationships. Make sure you don’t get triangulated into one of these roles. On the other hand, intentionally staying outside of the triangle requires resourcing at that wider level, allowing more capable soul parts to be in more productive relationships with other beings in the cosmos. It is choosing to come into relation in ways outside the familiar patterns. Take the same approach, get the same results. Take a different approach?

As things get worse, recognise where the activist impulse both within yourself and others comes from, and set an intention to avoid triangulating or being triangulated. As Bayo Akomolafe asks, “what if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?”

The post-skull world is one that allows, one that allows agency outside of the human. This means you might, just might, not know what everyone should do everywhere at all times. Inside the triangle, the resources are finite and the game is zero-sum. Outside the triangle, the resources are infinite and untapped.

It’s not what can you do. It’s where can you do something? And who or what are you making room for when you pose that question?

Time

Think you’re running out of time? Or that time is itself running out? Until what? This process cannot be averted. We are in it now.

More importantly, you aren’t running out of time. A huge part of the upcoming course in Time Magic is about ceremonially re-engaging with time as the community of beings it is.

Any desire you fear will not be fulfilled because of the looming omnipocalypse is, in a sense, false. You may think you wanted to sell fidget spinners to federal employees in a second Biden administration, and are thus afraid that time is ‘running out’. Instead turn a friendlier face to this fear and understand the subsurface desire that may have wished to express itself with this particular path. That’s the real desire. There is infinite time for that.

As a thought experiment, assume that any ship that might sail has. Then ask yourself how you are resourcing the genuine desires that will always find new and delightful ways to come into this dimension.

Find Your Points Of Consent And Departure

This is something I have been working on magically all year. Which parts of the transformation that is the end of the west do I consent to, and which parts do I depart from, which parts do I decline?

There are only so many barricades from which you can wave the French flag and break into song. Digital currencies? Supermarket egg availability? Vaccine passports? Antiwar?

An important way to ensure you remain resourced is not to erode them through resisting the experiences that have arrived at this time to ensure the dismantling of the west.

Telling the story of consent and departure means not falling into the fantasy that your opinions about any of these things matter, or that opinioning is what the world needs from you. I believe it needs you to grieve. All forms of solutionism -including activism- spring from an inability to hold pain, to sit with discomfort. And it is very understandable. Because what is going on is really, really awful. Since before this decade I have been saying this will be the worst decade of your life. It’s truly just getting warmed up, and no painkilling stops that. It may even exacerbate it.

Tzutijil-initiated shaman Martín Prechtel correctly tells us that grief -for a person, for a country, for an ideal- is praise because it is the natural way love honours what it misses.

Grief is praise of those we have lost. Our own souls who have loved and are now heartbroken would turn to stone and hate us if we did not show such praise when we lose whom we love. A nonfake grieving is how we praise the dead, by praising that which has left us feeling cold and left behind. By the event of our uncontrolled grief, wail, and rap, we are also simultaneously praising with all our hearts the life we have been awarded to live, the life that gave us the health and opportunity of having lived fully enough to love deep enough to feel the loss we now grieve. To not grieve is a violence to the Divine and our own hearts and especially to the dead. If we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love. We are not praising the life we have been given in order to love. If we do not praise whom we miss, we are ourselves in some way dead. So grief and praise make us alive.

The Smell of Rain on Dust.

I do not believe you will be under-resourced when it comes to grief. I believe you will have an abundance of it.

What I simply wish for you is to see grief as praise, the way Martín does. An unstoppable prayer calling in a future made of all the things we only realised we loved when we grieved them.