Postmugglism Ep. 11: The Problem With Solutions

foreign the difference between an existential problem and a crisis is the crises are used by the ruling class to expand their powers of Oppression and existential problems tend to get leaders deposed crises can be marketed existential problems can only be accepted and adjustments made to live with them the modern world is filled with such crises and dangers mostly of our own making one way or the other we have an appalling Health crisis in the west surging violence mental health decline supply chain shortages political unrest and other threats building towards disaster these risks are serious and yet all we have are insane sounding and ham-fisted solutions proposed by the experts for each scenario nowhere is the situation more extreme than with the fight for or over the protection of Earth's natural resources an existential problem if there ever was one but one which our society's best Minds have vastly oversimplified erasing the intricacies of our untenable situation in favor of more easily marketable and also theoretical technological solutions the danger modern civilization poses to the natural world is an existential problem it causes us to examine our very right to exist clearly humans have had a devastating effect on the natural world essentially whenever we engage with it and it's not wrong to classify us as a threat to Nature the problem is that this framework of mind with humans as the root of all evil to the natural world doesn't present a viable alternative to anthropocentrism meaning that humans are still at the very center of the story interfering now to fix things instead of breaking them human Ingenuity is our answer to every problem but it seems to always involve making deals with our inner devil where there is a problem there is also opportunity and where there is opportunity there is always the demand for more big problems and even more so with urgent problems affect lots and lots of people by a definition and easily package solutions to commonplace problems have a tendency to be very profitable this blood in the water attracts the Sharks and inevitably once we've invented a decent Hammer people start looking for new scenarios where hammers might be useful unfortunately once you focus on making hammers all you can see is Nails everywhere even if they're really screws human beings have problem-solving capabilities that enable us to address imbalances mitigate risks and make plans informed by strategic thinking this is of course extremely valuable and has earned our place at the top of the food chain but this capacity has limits and over-reliance on it has led us to forget another equally powerful mode of gathering and analyzing data and making informed decisions one that succeeds through intuition when the analytical quality is of the brain fail to deliver the brain sees problems as merely data variables which can be interpreted and manipulated given the requisite framework of understanding the materialist framework from which we analyze the world is built on universal truths which can be validated empirically or at least this is the idea what works in one place should work in another what works one time should work another and this often appears true enough to be very convincing particularly when we're observing a tool or machine of our own creation our capacity to create is relatively simple in comparison to the divines though which is Sublime where we prefer simple tools that can reliably perform the same action the same way every time the Divine prefers Organic Solutions which grow adapt or evolve to achieve their intended outcome differently in every time place Etc nature favors balances which involve the greatest number of invested parties each performing their unique duties in tandem with the others potentially even unaware of the collaboration but all interlocking perfectly to produce systemic Harmony where everyone's needs are met at a species level we think in comparably simple terms the Earth is warming so we must prevent it by blocking the sun's energy people are having a Time regulating their hormones so we should artificially Supply those chemicals to them bugs eating your plants kill the bugs the pesticide will kill your plants too well then alter the plant's DNA to resist the poison all the bugs become resistant to the poisons well then use more deadly poisons and then you know genetically modify the plants again and repeat this is why we're constantly playing whack-a-mole with the Myriad crises of the Modern Age something is always going wrong and when we try to fix it artificially we cause some other unforeseen problem and then we have to try to fix that the Divine thinks in holographic terms it has a matrix of intelligent potential at its disposal and simply creates a biological mandate so that the most appropriate life form fulfills whatever purpose the Predator pest hegemony is an excellent example of this Dynamic at work nutrient-rich plants produce an abundance of fruit which attracts pests and once the pests have gorged themselves and controlled the plant crop the pest Predators arrive on the scene to keep the pests in check the greater the infestation of pests in a natural self-managed setting anyway the more the ranks of the Predators will grow the biological mandate manifests through self-interest and opportunity to keep the system in Balance compared to the ham-fisted human approach pesticides which has been shown to infuse carcinogenic neurotoxins into the foods we consume causes soil depletion and erosion and upsets related Natural Balance is critical to our survival pesticides and insecticides kill beneficial insects as well as pests the natural approach strengthens the group holistically while also elegantly resolving the original imbalance the Fatal flaw with our solutionist mode of thinking is that it invites untested theoretical possibilities into an otherwise balanced system full of nuance and complexity our theoretical models do not always or even often sufficiently represent the real thing being modeled such that experiments can actually discover empirical truth the problem is often the lack of data it takes time to acquire enough data through naturally occurring processes to make experiments complex enough to adequately represent the scenario being modeled this lack of data means that when we attempt to be clever and create novel solutions to overcome our challenges our Solutions fail or worsen the situation because they have not benefited from having been tested by time this forms something of a paradox because it's impossible to prove a solution valid over time without first running the risks associated with prematurely implementing that solution and this is why new and completely novel developments are best approached cautiously and evaluated for their potential dangers and complications long before being implemented when faced with an urgent problem or challenge that must be addressed quickly if that is indeed the case then we always have examples provided in nature to draw upon for inspiration which mitigates the risks associated with our cleverness significantly facilitating natural processes to achieve our various goals presents much less risk and a greater overall chance of success to discover the right natural processes and the right ways to support them to address our various crises we have to tap into our much neglected and often outright denied intuitive capabilities we have to practice being a part of the community of beings that we share the world with and gain their wisdom by engaging with them and the benefit of divine wisdom as well to discover the way out of our predicament we have to admit to ourselves mostly that we do not get to be single-handedly responsible for solving these intractable crises in this episode I explore a constellation of ideas that when taken together charts a course away from the dogma of scientific materialism to the felt truths of ego intuition being with as Praxis for learning as Anna Singh puts it the Arts of living on a damaged Planet the complex web of ecological crises that we face today demonstrates the felt truth of a world being poisoned by industrial chemicals while the people that profit from their use Gaslight us with shoddy science distracting us from the real issues at hand s has failed us here quite obviously but our intuition will show us the truth if we learn how to listen stay tuned for episode 11 of the post-mogulism podcast the problem with Solutions in just a moment welcome to episode 11 of the post-mogulism podcast I'm your host Nate AKA post muggalism and this week we're talking about a simple idea that represents shift so profound as to make possible a complete restructuring of our framework of mind if you believe mainstream history in science human beings have evolved to the dominant species that we are today almost exclusively because of one trait our ability to solve problems cognitively before attempting to solve them physically but I propose that instead we've forgotten more than we've learned in modern history about the cosmos and that we solve problems now from a fundamentally limited scope of awareness we understand a proportionately great amount about the physical mechanics of the universe that part which is already manifest in our reality and we ignore or deny the other half of experience that which exists prior to manifest reality the realization that ideas have agency and that they exert this agency by influencing the physical world into manifesting them and thus there are a causal influences underlying all material cut causality dilates the perception to allow in the other half of Human Experience the half that we've been missing entirely for at least a few hundred years in the west and I think this is what people are trying to describe when they're grasping around in the dark with metaphors about opening the third eye this is attempting to describe a type of seeing by feeling that enables us to learn things about the universe in ways that are literally impossible in materialist reality and I suggest that in this impossible secret Trove of wisdom are the answers not only to every problem that we face today but everything that we could ever want to know the problem with Solutions is that they are produced by our relatively small minds and limited perspective and there's really no way around it besides acknowledging our limitations and embracing the ineffability of the cosmos with Wonder and awe this doesn't mean that we can't solve problems it just means that it probably won't be all on our own perspectivism helps us understand why we can't really ever understand the universe we can only understand progressively more and more about what it's like to be us in this universe we don't understand what it's like to be a tree in this universe or a dog or a god regardless of what biohacking transhumanists want us to believe about reality being coded in the language of biology there is a difference between observing and experiencing ask any ethnologist or Anthropologist about the risks of jumping to conclusions based on a subjective framework of mind and this is exactly what we're doing when humans look at the world as a series of problems that need to be fixed through human intervention the world much less the cosmos is an infinitely complex Matrix of delicately balanced interactions which operate in Harmony when they're left alone let's just be honest with ourselves about this point human intervention and natural processes produces unpredictable Downstream effects which often create new and novel problems which wouldn't otherwise Exist by introducing unexpected variables into delicately balanced natural systems we unintentionally create problems which threaten the stability of our society our species and the world around us and our reaction to this is to attempt to fix the problem by adding more chaos into the mix rather than the individual causes of the crises to which we are responding human intervention itself is largely the root of all these problems let's look at some examples agriculture is popularly credited by experts as the unifying force behind the development of formal civilization Villages and tribes Nations and their cities and so on and by agriculture we mostly mean the industrialized production of cereal grains wheat barley Etc these could be easily stored long term and mass-produced as baked goods and turned into beers and other products and this method of food production was easy to industrialize and to organize into specialized labors however the very nature of this method of food production inevitably introduces hegemony into society which inevitably leads to class division economic disparity cruelty and suffering and a cycle of Oppression and Revolution it's almost as if organizing for efficiency and convenience is the real original sin as an alternative to the Sodom and Gomorrah trajectory which seems inevitably embedded into this version of the story of humanity we can perhaps go back to just before agriculture went mainstream for inspiration in the book The Dawn of everything David Graber and David windrow postulate an alternative and just generally more nuanced history for the development of civilization and they examine the transition between a forager society and agrarian society in great depth they offer a more complicated story of competing ideologies or even spirits and evolving human culture spread over disparate tribal encampments and over a very long period of time foragers banded together for practical purposes hunting raiding protecting religious rights and so on agriculturalists traded Liberty for convenience and efficiency and safety in the short term however the foragers appear to have existed in relative peace for thousands of years where killing and conquering became commonplace almost as soon as we built our first grain silo but this distinction is more difficult to parse in the details it's not as if forager societies never sowed seeds or tended plants in fact they did so on a grand scale but not in the industrialized ways that we associate with agriculture they cultivated naturally occurring seasonal resources like grains that grew in river flood Plains during rainy season what they did not do is force the issue designing for industrial convenience and attempting to control Nature by tilling and irrigating Fields artificially instead they found ways to cultivate natural Providence into abundance by supporting naturally occurring growing conditions that they observed in their surroundings opportunistically rather than industrially to put it simply they worked with nature rather than attempting to dominate her another example in the face of a rising Mental Health crisis in Western Nations increased awareness of the issue has yet to do anything to improve the situation and may have unintentionally accelerated its decline most adults over 30 can recall a world where therapy and mental health issues were less commonplace or at the very least under recognized and underreported in any case reported levels of anxiety and depression among other mental health issues have skyrocketed if therapy has helped you then good for you but it's hard to make the argument that mental health awareness has benefited society's overall mental health the numbers don't lie a paper from the most recent volume of new ideas in Psychology from this month April of 2023 titled our mental health awareness efforts contributing to the rise in reported mental health problems a call to test the prevalence inflation hypothesis draws the common sense conclusion that an increased focus on Mental Health Awareness in the form of increased awareness about mental disease contributes to the growing mental health problem more than IT addresses that problem reading from the paper's abstract now awareness efforts are leading some individuals to interpret and Report milder forms of distress as mental health problems we propose that this then leads some individuals to experience a genuine increase in symptoms because labeling distress is a mental health problem can affect an individual's self-concept and behavior in a way that is ultimately self-fulfilling for example interpreting low levels of anxiety as symptomatic of an anxiety disorder might lead to behavioral avoidance which can further exacerbate anxiety symptoms we propose that the increase in reported symptoms then drives further awareness efforts the two processes influence each other in the cyclical intensifying manner again our best intentions to improve mental health by focusing on it seems to have backfired and not actually helped the situation at all it has however greatly increased pharmaceutical company profits through the widespread adoption of neurochemically altering ssris and maois and other chemical interventions for depression anxiety and other conditions for which healthier natural remedies already exist and alternative treatments are regularly disparaged by pharma-funded researchers and Pharma trained and sponsored doctors and of course the FDA and marketing from the relevant mental health institutions also sponsored by pharmaceutical companies a study in the UK found that prescriptions of antidepressants specifically ssris in this case Rose over five percent between 2021 and 2022 and over the last six years this totaled an increase of 35 percent of new prescriptions which tend to be long-term and most often for Life prior to that a report on MAOI antidepressant prescriptions and earlier favored method of treating depression produced by the NIH reports a 300 percent increase in prescriptions between 1990 and 2018. yet our world and data.org shows a roughly 30 percent rise in anxiety Related Disorders between 1990 and 2019 and the who reported a 25 increase in mental health issues generally between 2020 and 2021 alone which they contribute to the pandemic the medicine doesn't seem to be working not for the people taking it anyway they're definitely lining the pockets of Pharma companies which are notorious for scandals cover-ups and censorship to hide the underreported dangers of their products an article in Scientific American from 2016 titled the hidden harm of antidepressants describes how antidepressant safety studies are manipulated by pharmaceutical companies and how it has been deliberately ignored by the FDA that antidepressants in some cases actually cause Suicidal Thoughts aggressive behavior and other counter-intuitive side effects so we can see the pattern emerge here as well issues with depression caused by the legitimately depressing and nature-starved experience of Modern Life are treated with drugs that alter our neurochemistry often for life in ways that we've barely begun to understand and by focusing so much on mental health or rather mental disease we have manifested more of it into the world the materialistic world is soulless and disconnected from the source of joy and fulfillment the Divine and ingesting experimental chemical compounds to replace true fulfillment with synthetic Tranquility is a poor solution to the wrong problem our lifestyle needs to change not our biology all right one more especially damning example and I'll move on to how a shift in thinking can open the door to new ways of living on this planet in these times of Crisis returning to agriculture again but this time in the Modern Age industrial agriculture is perhaps the best example of the technocracy of solutionism the underlying premise of modern agriculture is embarrassingly simple totally without Nuance but the Extraordinary Measures industrial AG companies like bear Monsanto have to employ to operate in this fashion is worth close examination because unknown to most it is a race against ever diminishing returns Fair Monsanto produces both Roundup the weed killer and the seeds the engineered genetics of Roundup Ready crops which are resistant to the pesticide and in some cases even manufacturer pesticides internally Roundup contains the extremely toxic compound glyphosate which has been shown to cause cancer have neurological effects and other nasty consequences the method that bear Monsanto promotes and in many cases enforces is to grow monocrops that is large fields of a single crop by first killing everything in the growing field with Roundup and then planting a Roundup Ready crop in the poison soil then over the growing cycle to treat the field frequently and heavily with a cocktail of pesticides insecticides fungicides Etc which are so toxic that the workers are not permitted to enter the fields for days afterwards without special Hazard gear let me make this painfully clear it's simpler to automate the process of growing large monocrops of a single species but the prevalence of one species in an area as I mentioned before when describing the prey Predator Dynamic triggers a pest response in nature because no one species should be allowed to grow like this our answer is then to fight nature tooth and nail with extreme violence employing insanely toxic chemicals to kill absolutely everything in the vicinity of our all-important crop this also destroys the delicate mycorrhizal and bacterial communities within the soil that retain nutrients and support the development of life in the soil in the first place these pesticides and insecticides Etc cause the wholesale destruction of beneficial insects in addition to the pest including pollinators which are absolutely essential to the continuation of all life on this planet our chemical interventions not only cause widespread damage to the ecosystem directly but indirectly they facilitate erosion and with it nutrient depletion from the soil this annually dumps staggering quantities of fertilizer into waterways and eventually into the ocean largely causing the seaweed problems plaguing the coastal communities in the Gulf of Mexico for example worse yet the pests and weeds that we're fighting with these chemicals are becoming resistant to them and our returns are diminishing as a result and when bacteria fungi and insect pests become resistant to our various Solutions the only option we have left on this course is to switch to even more toxic chemicals the pattern is the same we perceive a threat assume it's a crisis and that we can only overcome it with technology and then we act quickly our attempts failing to account for extended repercussions and creating all kinds of new problems which we then attempt to solve in the very same manner repeating the cycle I could continue with length as I'm sure you're beginning to realize but let's just assume that this pattern is distinctly human and that we earnestly believe particularly from within a scientific materialist framework of mind that the world is all problems and only Grand technological solutions can save us Nigerian educator author and philosopher with one of the most prescient and essential ideas of our time asking if how we respond to a crisis is part of the crisis it's a beautifully simple idea with such profound implications When You observe the crisis soaked modern world and begin to wonder is anything we're doing actually helping or are we just making everything worse for all of our efforts in his remarkably observant article a slower urgency bio sets the stage for this other way of being that I'm advocating reading a passage from that article now a troubling question to ask is what if crisis is the wrong way to think about the challenges we Face the figure of Crisis calls on Panic Hasty reactions bleeping lines and tick-tocking sounds it is when the slow rise of mercury through thin tubes reaches a point of alarming resolution an inflection point the modern figuration of crisis has enrolled reactionary platforms where the urgency of a situation is the sole argument for sidestepping complexity and doing something now we've been hit by climate change we've got to hit it back we've been used by the one percent we've got to overturn the tables African children are failing their simple math lessons and not doing well at school let's send them laptops and funds to get them desks people in the global South live on less than a dollar a day let's create development programs and offer them loans in the meantime we are experiencing sadness we have to get over it quick what if we ask ourselves now quietly in our minds the question what if we didn't try to solve our problems but simply focused on not causing them in the first place I bet you have all kinds of feelings about that statement and double or nothing the first one was well that doesn't make any sense then we'll still have all of our problems exactly what if the problems we've created can't be easily or quickly fixed what if we're at the mercy of natural processes which Can Heal the World obviously they terraform the world on long enough timelines but from a human perspective those timelines are long enough to be irrelevant what if practically speaking we have to live in the world that we've made this is what Donna haraway talks about in her essential book staying with the trouble rather than making the solution our responsibility she asks each of us what is our response ability how are we able to respond quoting her away now she claims I am not interested in reconciliation or restoration but I am deeply committed to the more modest possibilities of partial recuperation and getting on together call that staying with the trouble this is important because the urge to respond with novel new and typically technological solutions stems from a powerful myth that we've told ourselves for many generations but one of our own making and in our own image rather than one that is divinely inspired and as I hope the examples I gave earlier demonstrate these Solutions are at least as problematic as the issues they're intended to resolve they contribute chaos and add entropy which natural systems then have to work that much harder to balance instead haraway encourages us to think beyond our human perspective to include the perspectives best we can of the more than human world when she says recuperation is still possible but only in multi-species Alliance Across The Killing divisions of nature culture and technology and of organism language and machine sewing world is about opening up the story of companion species to more of its Relentless diversity and Urgent trouble hear the trouble that she means is the mixing of inner species world and the chaotic reshuffling of natural order that has to occur for all to find their place and resume their natural function we can't make this happen we can't accurately model it in a computer we can't predict it or shape it effectively we must simply allow it to be and adjust our expectations according to the will of nature she further encourages us to learn practical healing rather than wholeness to do actual good to make things actually better the answer is never going to be a neatly packaged solution with a pretty bow on top the world is messy so our responses to the world will also necessarily involve getting our hands dirty making compromises making difficult and imperfect choices and so on as long as we attempt this process in the blind meaning without the benefit of the experience of perspectives beyond our own so far in this episode we've set the stage by developing the villain first technocratic solutionism Blinded By ego then we introduce the cast greedy and short-sighted human Masters the clueless populace and the more than human Community around us now we're at the big moment the plot twist let's go back to Akuma lafe for a quick anecdote from that same article which opens I learned a long time ago about a particular saying from the continent I grew up on the times are Urgent let us slow down there is important medicine in this saying when the world is going too fast when we feel out of control the right course of action is not panicked attempts to fix everything at once the right thing to do is to slow down take stock and evaluate your options carefully to avoid making things worse this is the first step in a rehabilitation our retraining of how to be in the world without making so many waves causing so many problems with our Solutions this is obviously quite counter-intuitive to solutionist thinking problems don't just go away so if we don't fix them then who will right but this is the first of several critical oversights on our part we are anything but alone in this crowded world that is bursting with life and all of that life is involved in what happens on Earth and prior to our interventions all of life was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing we are the ones causing imbalance so the first thing that we have to do is to stop causing more damage or at least slow down while we work on making further adjustments but this is problematic though imagine if we attempted to address anthropocentric climate change what would we have to stop or slow it's not just about energy consumption and the increase of carbon more fundamentally it's about deforestation and the dewilding of Earth's surface or if we just stop treating mental health issues with the world and the state that it's in and suicide rates Rising sharply over the last few years this would be catastrophic this is why it's infantile to think that climate change can be averted by carbon sequestration or that mental health can be solved by drugs or that we should poison our growing fields to kill inconvenient pests first of all fundamentally the problem is more complex than that and secondly the act of intervening will cause new novel and unpredictable Downstream effects that will only further increase entropy and imbalance what happens when we increase our Reliance on digital technology because we've reduced our physical activity in the real world well one obvious outcome is that our energy consumption will increase significantly and we're already having problems supplying the current demand we'll have to introduce nuclear energy to support demand from ever more complex technology another potentially fraught intervention that's very difficult to take back our population grows more neurotic and non-functional with each progressively more drugged up generation Our growing fields are progressively more toxified and depleted of nutrients and in each of these examples are only solutions for the future are to do more of the same harder but we can't just do nothing you might say well I agree if by nothing you mean keeping the status quo with destructive Behavior to reduce our impact is something particularly if we can reduce our impact without requiring tyranny and oppression which means that addressing this problem does actually involve a bit of our cleverness because reducing our demand for energy without causing misery is actually quite defeat all the solutions we've come up with involve increasing our production rather than decreasing our consumption this path will lead us to trade the right of the population to consume energy to make that energy available to the machines that we expect to run our society while we stay at home when it comes to the environment degrowth is about the most effective strategy for saving the world that you could hope for its shortcomings lie in the marketability of consuming less being Frugal with our resources and so on decades have been spent making westerners consummate consumers and even the threat of annihilation doesn't seem sufficient to compel the required changes from people the roots of our problem run deep into the past many generations at this point have been programmed for the Manifest Destiny of consuming Earth's resources to invert our belief in the ascent of humanity is Charles eisenstein calls it requires a spiritual shift not a physical one even physical force and oppression will fail to overcome the momentum of this centuries-old framework of mind and you could say the same for the battle of the human mind and soul honestly where a majority of humanity believes that Consciousness can be hacked Through Chemistry and programmed like computer code and the remaining minority believe some variation of the idea that the universe is intelligent and in collaboration with us this struggle isn't a fight it's a quest for meaning there's no way to Triumph by force only by invoking self-interest people have to want Spiritual Awakening and only Spiritual Awakening will compel people to slow their urgency and only faith will give them the clarity to do so this represents a shift not just in thinking but in spirit as well spiritual shifts are nodal interventions as Carol Sanford author of The regenerative life refers to the phenomenon of making a significant difference through small intentional changes this stands in stark contrast to the direct interventions that I've been describing because it produces a Field Effect like when you pull on one corner of a blanket and the effect is distributed to every other corner the field is the fabric of reality and small interventions can have distributed effects spiritual shifts can't be imposed they can only be received so the best strategy is to present acceptable Alternatives and to lead by example to be the spiritual shift that you want to see in the world and while you can't force the spiritual awakening on anyone else you can trigger one in your own life easily enough and then use this as a platform to set an example for the world whether this can scale is beside the point because of the potential power of field effects and nodal interventions the most difficult aspect of this process is simply allowing it to happen how do we do this by being receptive to intuition to Spirit to that part of your experience of reality which cannot be completely explained or even articulated by restraining our programmed inclination towards action and instead sitting with being with the world around us and collaborative contemplation for perhaps the most exceptional example of this practice we now turn to the work of Monaco Gagliano PhD author of Thus Spoke the plan Agliano is a plant biologist and researcher and performed a series of now renowned laboratory experiments on pea seedlings which demonstrate that plants exhibit something like memory adapting to stimuli after the introduction of successive stressors in their environment such as the removal of light fans blowing sudden drops and so on but what is truly exceptional about gagliano's story is that the inspiration for her experiments at a remarkable level of detail came from psychedelic and shamanic experiences with plant guides this is remarkable in a number of ways not the least of which is that her experiments are quite respected among the scientific community and have been used to further science in meaningful ways I have enormous respect for her achievements of course but how this relates to our discussion of solutionism is that gagliano's example is a precedent for an actionable alternative approach to gaining knowledge wisdom and addressing our problems essentially after being stuck on a problem in her work she went in search of a breakthrough like you do she was indeed given such a breakthrough from what sounded like an excellent psychedelic experience which resulted in the inspiration that she needed her plant guide which she says appeared to her as a giant woman showed her how to test plants for a pavlovian responses which in turn demonstrated conclusively that plants are able to store experiences and remember prior responses to changes in their environment besides how freaking cool this story is and side note I highly recommend you read this fascinating book Thus Spoke the plan it's pleasantly accessible and a truly remarkable and inspirational story but beside that she also demonstrates a viable technique for extracting hidden wisdom well Gagliano did that is so brilliant whether she was aware of it or not is to call upon plant guides to understand plants her technique isn't the focus of the book but if you read it with magician eyes it is embedded in her story a few passages in her own words I thought I had been waiting for something to happen and instead I was learning to wait without waiting I understand now that for something I was waiting for to appear at all I had to be willing to be surprised by definition of course a surprise can be possible only if it arrives unannounced unintended unpremeditated it is when we are willing to let life surprise us that Alternatives and unanticipated solutions become visible and accessible and the best part of this entire process is that once out of our insane Loop of control and insecurity we are effortlessly delivered exactly where we are going infused with a sense of awe and deep trust in the life that we are we wait without waiting to know exactly what to do and when free to see clearly we don't need to find our way out of the Maze We realize there never was a maze it seems our society is ready for a perceptual shift by overthrowing our conditioned seeing ready for a disobedient disruption emerging from the Tidy background of Silent obligations and pre-packaged reality that have prevented us from seeing innovative solutions that could bring planetary well-being and peace into being it's clear that this journey isn't planned in advance it's approached with faith and experienced in the state of openness and receptivity if you're new to such things as psychedelic experience is a Fairly reliable way to punch through your psychic barriers just as Gagliano has done but if you're accustomed to magical thinking and Praxis then it may only require reaching out a number of times appropriately to make contact with the spirit of the beings you were attempting to engage this has certainly been my experience there is a framework for this type of Engagement which is very useful in spirit communication that I call Prompt and response when you're trying to elicit answers on any topic from a relevant Spirit it is best to format your dialogue with the spirit like a two-way radio conversation where each side sends as clear a message as possible one at a time on only one subject at a time and waits for the response before transmitting another message invoke summon Etc and then say your bit and wait for the response generally speaking and I was just talking to Reverend jungle Bones on the soapbox podcast about this not long ago it's best practice to only bring one matter to the table in a ritual so there is no confusion about what you want combined with the prompt and response Dynamic that I'm suggesting here it only makes sense to work like this to make sure that you get clear and actionable answers but how do you make contact in the first place how do you stimulate the exchange of energy and ideas with spirits places plants trees and so on the technique for this is what is referred to as being with which is part physical action and part spiritual engagement and on the surface doesn't look like very much at all at best it looks like from the outside being lost in a reverie however internally there is something much more like a conversation of Minds taking place beyond words and the structures of thought and material reality in a state of pure potential we typically think of this as using the imagination as if it is a machine-like function which can be employed as a device but what we actually mean is that we visited the imaginal and were inspired by engaging with some of its residents this is done unintentionally through dreams and idle thoughts all the time but it is more difficult to navigate the territory deliberately because our self-limiting thoughts interfere but when we lack understanding and desperately need it there is no better destination to begin our search for truth this is what we call journeying or active imagination using the prompt and response technique in imaginal settings which are crafted in great detail for the purpose of housing metaphorical dialogue this can be applied broadly in search of wisdom but when it is combined with physical adjacency sharing physical space improves the Fidelity of the communication opening The Exchange up to new possibilities the practice of thinking under trees makes use of this phenomenon perhaps you've noticed in your own experience that thinking contemplating processing Etc is more productive when done under trees there is something distinctly human and ancient about this practice that absolutely feels right I think that old trees are a source of great wisdom and physical adjacency improves our ability to engage with them energetically which on our end causes greater Clarity and inspired thinking what I'm implying is that rather than simply thinking under trees we're actually thinking with tree spirits and benefiting from their patients wisdom and the interconnectedness that they share with other wise trees Wilder places like old forests are the urban centers of the more than human world and are absolutely haunted with Spirits if thinking under trees gives us extra Clarity then what happens when we directly engage with the spirits of a forest when my wife and I visit our land in the jungle we always visit our sacred tree and leave offerings for the alouche who are the FAE of the Yucatan we're wrapping up the design phase of our home construction project now and we'll start construction soon but about a year ago I was still exploring the property and trying to figure out exactly where we wanted to build Etc so I went to our sacred tree left an offering and asked to be shown where on the land it should go and then just wandered off into the jungle sort of aimlessly until I came upon the right place and now this is where we're going to build the house wondering with an open mind taking long breaks to appreciate the life in a place and learning to listen to its subtle demonstrations of Personality are all ways of entering into this practice of receptivity that allows the universe to communicate with us proximity or adjacency is important to the technique but gaining wisdom from Spirits of place plants animals and so on it's really more about co-presence with them I learn about my land and about what it wants simply by being out on it in a receptive thoughtful state but this effort is ultimately a co-creative exercise it's neither all the spirits of place nor all me instead it feels like we imagine the possibilities together these examples I've mentioned provide a rough template to follow regardless of what problem you're trying to solve once we accept that we don't have all the answers and we don't need to we can shift our efforts from trying to think up solutions to learning them from nature and her guardian spirits spending times in places in crisis opening ourselves up and sending our intentions and our words opens a channel for communication with the local spirits of place who can help us understand what they want or need if we want to prevent or reverse global warming through carbon sequestration then we should be reaching out to tree Spirits since they are the experts or at the very least thinking under trees I mean really with all that we know about the benefits of biophilic Design Forest bathing and so on it shouldn't be so hard to imagine the clarity that we experience when we visit the forest isn't simply because it's quiet in the woods but because trees actually affect us energetically mentally and spiritually likewise what might herbs and diet teach us about mental health I suspect quite a lot and not by injecting their Essence into rats but by burning and inhaling herbs and ingesting them in ceremony and by engaging the spirit of plants in Journey meditation and then allowing thoughts to Bubble Up unbidden from the unconscious and paying close attention when they do and what about industrial act what's the alternative there to whom do we make sacrifices to appease the angry spirits of our supply chain well plant Spirits obviously corn wheat soy Etc we should ask them what we need to do to encourage their flourishing spirits of place as well to learn where to grow how to help the area flourish and so on and we should be asking fungi how to reclaim soil for they are nature's experts on the subject prompt and response prompt the universe with respect gratitude and genuine intention and then wait for a response and learn how to accept the responses you get and translate them into something actionable we don't have to solve The World's problems she's quite good at that but we may need to accelerate her efforts in certain key areas that threaten our way of life in those circumstances it's critical not to overreact to fall into the ego trap of solutionism and to work in collaboration with nature and her guardian spirits to find ways to support the flourishing of all life because from our limited perspective we have no way to comprehend the multitude of seemingly insignificant Miracles across the many thousands of species that are required to hold together the delicate balance of Life on this planet if we pause to reflect it's obviously true that we create new problems for the world every time we invent new Solutions and that creates entropy which is building towards a state of chaos the solution isn't more solutions it's not to try to be the genius or hero that saves the day we need to react with a slower urgency and to stay with the trouble while we evaluate our response ability our ability to respond and take the time to speak with plants and other spirits to learn how to contribute to the greater flourishing of the world without creating more entropy in the process being with places in crisis species and crisis Etc and with the teachers of the natural world the indigens ancient trees herbs Animal Spirits sacred mountains and rivers and so on opens the doorway to direct engagement and engagement can take many forms and go many places but it is always inspiring and revelatory thinking under trees wandering forests ingesting psychedelics herbs and other plant medicines under the supervision experience guides leaving regular offerings and so on these shamanic tools reliably yield results from this kind of Engagement with the natural world when science has only fantasy to offer and not wisdom we must remember to rely on the other half of our perceptive abilities our intuition to guide us towards truth and understanding thanks for tuning in to the 11th episode of the post-mogulism podcast if you enjoyed this content Please Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts or on YouTube If you prefer that way you'll never miss when I publish new episodes new videos and other good stuff and you can follow along with all my content regardless of which platform it's on by visiting my website at www.postmuggalism.com and subscribing to my email newsletter in the sidebar this week's episode is near and dear to my heart obviously because I'm practicing degrowth myself in our attempt to disappear into the jungle but also because it's an eye-opening and essential reframe for the great fallacy of the Modern Age that technological technocratic interventions are the ideal solution to every problem this issue threatens us at every turn but as is the way with such things the solution is counterintuitive to our materialist framework of mind so we'll add it to the list of ways that we need to deprogram ourselves and move on as best we can next week the show will focus once again on the stars but this time not on a particular Transit but on practical ways that I've used astrology to plan important projects to navigate mitigate risks and to always be able to put the story of my life into perspective to maintain coherence if you have big plans and aspiration the Stars can give you the Insight that you need about the future state of the world and how to navigate its challenges successfully so tune in for that next Wednesday thanks again for joining me in this episode do me a favor if you enjoyed it and share it with a friend we'll appreciate it and I hope you'll tune in again next week for my deep dive into how I use astrology to plan My Crazy Life until then take care and I'll see you in the next one foreign

2023-04-13 00:24

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