Reality Breaking Apart, Down, Up, Left and Right

No, that isn't a cheat code in this boss-level battle against chaos...

It's a comment on the fractured here and now,
unleashed by our inconsiderate, at times immature, tendencies.

There is literally so much to think about and make sense about... There's a densifying, a quickening, an entangling/disentangling, a Fire Horse 🔥 and fire hose 🌊 moment happening for us all.

I've decided I'd like to share a selection of media I'm consuming and thinking about—so that if you also want to think about these, we might discuss them!

Links are below. But first—a sermon.

Discoursing Doorways Into Better Worlds 🚪🌎

We've got to discourse about this fascist, technocratic, cascading moment.

To face it does not equal suffering. It equals the gateway to overcoming our suffering. For: many, much bigger, irreversible losses loom on the horizon.

The Tr*mp regime is working to dismantle voting, to suppress dissent, to dismantle government itself, is building detention centers everywhere... for whom?

No balanced branches of government could be expected to keep up with such utter bad faith, corrupt, violent, authoritarian conduct by the most powerful of them.

This is tumbling toward something worse... When AI disemploys us all, amid severe socio-economic inequality... It will be beyond wretched. (<– Side note: Watch this video to learn more about how fighting for a more equitable society is actually imperative to surviving climate collapse.)

These cynical, privileged, underdeveloped billionaire oligarchs see a dystopia in their mind's eye—and they'll enact it in reality. Unless we withdraw our consent.

I believe neither our institutions, nor our minds, are adequately matching the moment.

The majority of the minds of the people
and the praxis embodied in our lives
cannot meet the severity of this moment
because they are not matching the complexity of this moment.

For most people, our mindmaps (aka our worldviews or cognitive structures) are not complex enough. Not complex enough in terms of content, and in terms of processing capacity.

Few us have maps whose content is adequate to navigate the moment.
The references have scattered, split, multiplied, much faster than our brains can keep up with.
Most of us have maps that are so non-adaptive as to be irrelevant to surviving and thriving in the reorganized reality today.
Naturally, this puts us in a precarious state. And this is sensed—
often arising as terror, a primal intuition, that one is in danger
from not-knowing, even as one desperately clings to what one thought one knew.

Regarding processing capacity: Our minds are not complex enough to handle the hyper, pressurized information environments of this time. We're struggling to effectively intake, filter, and digest information—so as to generate a more adaptive worldview. We are physically, emotionally, and spiritually unprepared to process all that's happening in this moment.

I want to be clear that I'm not saying our minds can't. But, worryingly: they aren't.

The wealthy oligarchs, who've hijacked the right-wing political party in the most powerful nation on Earth, are well on their way to winning control of the total infrastructure for life as we know it. Including—if not especially!—our minds (cognitive structures). Just look at what screen media does to children's brains, and you'll see yet another angle on the tragic dissolution present.

💣 The rendering has begun. 🌪️
Depraved smash-and-grab dismantling of what the people once owned in common.
Consuming the people.
Consuming the truth in a hail of disinfo—depriving the people of their faculties of understanding.
Late stage capitalism at its hungry-ghost ugliest: we consume our own lifestreams: Our attention streams.
Our own living consciousness-fields.

We have a slim, moonshot chance to organize well enough to circumvent this. 🌙

It will take developing minds—expanding capacities for critical thinking, imagination, and agentic enactment alike, from a foundation of our embodied innate personhood. Only through becoming irreducibly human and free, will we learn how undefeatable we can be. 

And sadly too few of us are free enough in this moment.

Too many of us are trapped by oppressive systems into survival modes.
Too many of us are trapped in cycles of attention- or emotional- hijacking, terror at complexity, rage and retreat, suppression-explosion cycles—straining our relationships. Too dissociated to know up from down, the what is from the what's shown/seen.

Yes, in my experience, even some of the staunchest "freedom fighting" anarchists and social good activists among us are trapped in their ideologies in ways that render them impotent in social change. A lack of critical investigation and comprehension of power—including internally—renders them unable to progress us any closer to their ideals whatsoever.

I was this naive. For the majority of my life; for years. But I saw I had to outgrow such "childish things" to continue deepening into the responsibility I indeed was being invited to hold by creation: as an elder, a doctor/minister to our problems from the deepest of levels.

And the enormous convergence of crises in this moment compels us to interrogate just how ineffectual we have been at organizing as of late. How inadequate our grasping and grappling with the truths of the moment has been. An erosion, a wearing down, a slow landslide decay in the people's power even to think—this we've collectively witnessed over the past couple decades, fed by the exploitation of our animal attention and belief pathways.

There are alternative worlds, beyond tribalist, dog-eat-dog-ism that can be unlocked and ushered-into-being only by minds capacious enough to imagine them, and bodies practiced enough to enact them. To these dreamer-doers, we owe any hope for a desirable future for life on Earth to be.

And that means you. You must become what is called for by this moment.

Be a force in the front—the people's movement to redignify our lives... claim the moral power in right relationship... stand on the sacred sovereignty of sense-making and the better designs resulting from it... seize back the legitimacy and the capacity to lead our lives without the oppressive status quo "order."

If we own our own tech.
If we claim our own voices.
If we tend our own place and people.
If we develop our own knowledges.
If we cultivate our own regenerative, life-giving cultures.
If we strengthen our conditioning for design thinking, distributed power, and decision making.
If we awaken to oneness and embody that wisdom vigorously.
If we discern and determine our own ways.
If we are enterprising and ambitious in approaching the worlds we yearn for.

May we be thus reunified with a beautiful purpose
that acts as a salve to our yearning hearts
and energy for our guts' fire to respond.

Today I read this recent article by Charles Eisenstein, and it formed the basis of a conversation I started over on InfiniteConversations, which is Cosmos' community forum.

Reality is breaking down, and churning up... How might we speak into the breach?

Just as there was no coming back “to normal” from the Covid-19 pandemic… there might be no coming back from this moment socially, politically, economically, ecologically, informationally, technologically… I’m talking true collapse. ⚫ What happens when our own depravity and systemic failure to achieve justice is staring us in our arrogant faces? What happens when reality-defining authorities lose their legitimacy? When that which is suppressed in order to maintain the status quo,…

Infinite Conversations

🎟️ Here's my quick plug for joining Cosmos Co-op today. I'm a co-owner and co-organizer.

• It takes two seconds to create a free account on Infinite Conversations. Once you're in there, you can engage in the discussion on my post and others. I'm planning to hold many more Fractal Praxis conversations here!
• Better yet, you can become a Cosmos member for $12/month. This gives you an expanded-access Infinite Conversations account, plus other community discounts & perks—including FREE attendance at any of my upcoming Integration Circle meetups!

Other media I want to share:

• https://youtu.be/DqCnUxA-BIU - here's a unique, front-lines analysis on the dearth of brave discourse and the co-ascendent fascism afflicting us. I've been thinking along these lines too, and I'm ready to take up more space with the truth telling, my specialty being: pattern diagnostics and remediation courses for society.
• https://youtu.be/zSMcLEZgEeE - How synthetic do we want our world to be? And ourselves to become? Before we've achieved becoming deeply human, can we risk becoming shallowly post-human? How harrowing will the future be when all of our emotional and relational regulation, to say nothing of our information and decision-making, that we depend upon is outsourced to electronic, frictionless mimics — whose agendas are managed by a black box of elite owning/ruling-class — in the context of mass social inequality, isolation and dissociation, and a dying planet?

⚫💀🐈‍⬛

Thanks for reading. I look forward to being in these discussions—and these emerging enactments—with you.

Your friend in truth & apocalypse,

C.