the cliche dark night of the soul is a real developmental transformation in the nervous system and belief infrastructure of a human.

people who go through this “woke” process are not special nor are they inherently good, they are just children re-learning how to make decisions and that process is the scariest process a human goes through.

humans inherently want control to navigate their lives through a risky environment called life, earth and everything.

(the danger is all around, mostly from each other, sometimes from wolves, but we killed most of them so….)

if that control comes at the expense of other beings, most humans will do it.

now that wokeness is profitable (profit existing as a means to sanction violence and non consent) we see many people having a secret nervous breakdown at the influx of power they are able to wield and siphon.

this is part optics, part p.r. campaign.

those who were/are “victims” can now enact force on others.

power/force is addictive. power may be the single most addictive “substance” for humans.

any assymetrical power dynamic or distribution will cause harm, even if its just the neurological harm of addiction.

the developmental re-patterning will likely look like around 3 plus years of high intensity zealotry, righteousness, and childlike behaviors, aka the ends justify the means style behavior, and a kind of selective narcissism, much like we witness in the developing human child.

narcissism is an inherent human tendency. it is not wrong or evil, but exists on a spectrum and in contextual relationships. it is as natural as hunger, tiredness, fear and pain. these are not problems to be solved, but rather inherent processes to understand, befriend, and respect… because they can essentially cause your direct perception of life to become warped.

we live in the motivated tyranny of our fears.

the shocking re-developmental process that happens in wokeness or animism is the result of generations of threat based domination aka controlling behaviors.

ghosts are normal, possession is normal, the path from birth to death is a circle with no beginning and no ending. everything is continuous continuity continuing.

animism is pre religion. it is the behavioral constellation that allows one to to relate well with whatever is happening. it is actually nameless, it existed before there was a name for it, in a cloud of risky playfulness and creativity: multiple animisms colliding with living encounters, and transformed via our own hungers, passions, hatreds, fears and hopes.

once upon a time, this was not abstract or conceptual at all. the fact that it is now, speaks to our relationship with it. for example, it is better to have a real relationship with one actual Black person, than it is to have a relationship to “Blackness”. the former is a messy pile of realness, the latter is a curated and interpretation dependant concept.

internet and social media have both quickened and flattened our experiences of both real, non conceptual reality, and of abstract, conceptual reality. and thus we are all now soldiers in the reality wars, the cult wars, the religion wars.

because concepts are how we today make decisions, when our concepts are shown to be fickle, manipulative fictions full of unintended consequences (western materialism, neo liberalism, christian fundamentalism etc) the identity of a person begins to crack.

without elders and intact ritual technology to hold this cracking (death rebirth cycle) we can get a kind of infinite purgatory or simulation… very easy to fall into yet another dream that exists within the cracks of the old one.

the re-awakening/re-membering of basic animist cosmology and the physiological sensory phenomena that accompanies animism, often brings about a high intensity state of delusion for a few years. an ungrounded wondrous terror of the world as it may actually be, beyond our constant need to control it.

many people stay inside this cracking phase as if it is the culmination or end goal. this is still addiction to duality and polarity. there is a lot of money to be made here. trance states, altered states, prayer, ritual, entheogens, community bonding, (western) tantra, preaching, ecstacy, hallucinations, lucid dreaming…. these are big parts of human craving.

but ritual and animistic communication with the more than human world are not inherently high intensity, are not inherently full of deep meaning, tragedy, greif, love, ecstasy or any of that. those interpretive feeling states are just part of what is available to experience, not the whole.

maybe now you are starting to see the delusion as not something that happens to us, but something we desperately are creating and forcing on ourselves and others. the mere fact that i cant say “ritual” and assume that people interpret that as relaxing, gentle, creative and also not about being saved, means that even the words we are using are being co opted to reinforce the delusion.

there is actually no escaping this circle. but relating differently is always possible and usually requires less effort, the stopping of doing something rather than the next “ten rules for an effective morning ritual”. you can apply what im saying to social justice of course, but the minute you do that notice how you go from a chuckle to a grimace.

if life isnt about saving or being saved, how would that transform our behaviors? would we stop seeking justice or would we just have a more honest sense of what justice actually is underneath the abstract concept of justice?

i get the sense that a lot of what is happening is that western/dominance based culture is largely about forcing non conceptual justice needs (everyone should have good food and housing, no fear of being killed because of skin color) into conceptual processes (politics, optics, debate, verbal manipulation) where those basic needs can be manipulated for power hoarding and control purposes.

without the stark honesty of being able to describe and name what is happening underneath these conceptual disguises, i do not see much worthwhile in continuing discussion. this is why the base for healing eventually gets down to the root of our fears, which is usually fear of death, fear of abandonment, fear of lack. when we can soothe these base fears with real life, real animist relations, it is much easier to deal with stressors.