What Do We Need Right Now?

Thinking about our current zeitgeist and the need to embrace a new story of being.

I’ve taken a step back for a while now. Primarily, I have gone through a major change in my personal life over the last 4 months that has required me to put almost all of my attention on that. At the same time, I have taken some time to reassess the current cultural zeitgeist to ask the questions once again: what is the best way I can show up? The best way I can serve what feels like a moment of great chaos and yet great change?

For some further context, (some of you know this, so I’m sorry for the repeat) when I started CE in 2009, it was based on the premise that I felt we were already in an unfolding quantum leap in the way humanity thinks and lives – a shift in consciousness.

Leading up to 2009, I thought a lot about why our world was the way it was, what was driving humans and the way we think, and whether it was possible to create a better world. In my heart, I knew we could, but how? What would need to happen? How do we even talk about these questions? Is there anything different about revolutions now vs. the past?

It’s no secret that now, our world seems to be coming apart. Not only are challenges with mental health, loneliness and meaning greatly increasing (caused perhaps by our system designs), but deep fractures in how we speak about, trust, make sense of, and respond to what’s fracturing in society are occurring.

A common line I hear from everyday people is “I just don’t even know what’s true anymore. I don’t know what to believe. People seem so polarized, and I don’t know where things are headed with any predictability.”

This is not necessarily a new thing in history, but I do believe something else is at play here too.

Today, like back in 2009, when I think about our current human value systems, our worldviews, the way we choose to design society, relate to each other, and make meaning, I see much of it as having a flavor of being stale. I talk to many others who feel this same thing. There is a sense of “Why are we doing this?” “Something doesn’t feel right.” “Why do I feel disoriented about the state of the world?” “The old ways of understanding our world don’t make sense.”

To me, this stale feeling is a profound evolutionary pressure. And the coming apart of society sets the stage for us to ask deeper questions because we can’t ignore how obvious things are.

I’m suggesting that we can’t blame our current meaning crisis, loneliness crisis, polarization, division, and path toward self-termination as just the fault of social media, the economy, the elite, or even mainstream media, but also of a quiet call of a new consciousness.

I feel we are starting to lose a sense of meaning in our current world because we are also outgrowing it. It’s time to re-ask big questions and discover whether they invite us to move beyond old paradigms. And like any birth, the moments just before are rather intense.

This quiet call of a new consciousness is being heard and felt by millions more now than when I started in 2009 – that is clear to me.

But still, our old systems are strongly resisting change. As people are feeling disoriented and confused, and our society is fracturing deeply, many are looking to old stories to make sense of and solve this moment. But I don’t feel the old ways are sufficient in explaining or navigating our moment, and it seems neither do many others.

So how do we explore new ways of understanding ourselves and our world without simply going back to old stories? How do we navigate the stress of it all when the world seems so chaotic? Said another way, how do we make space for and hold the calls of a new paradigm?

All I can offer is what I feel was helpful for me, what I notice works for others, and what feels right in my heart.

So, below I’ve offered a few thoughts on what may be some important elements of what our world needs right now. I’m happy to be wrong here and certainly don’t feel this is an all-encompassing list. Also, I would love to hear your thoughts about what you think is needed right now.

A Culture of Complexity

Whether we are making sense of autism and vaccines, who Charlie Kirk was and why he was killed, whether Trump is a good guy or bad guy, or whether anthropogenic climate change is a huge concern or not, we have to be willing to embrace complexity and uncertainty.

Our world, our human bodies, social systems, and nature are complex things. This means they are not mechanical and predictable in ways we see with complicated systems like a car. Complicated systems have a blueprint to tell you how they work. If you take out one part, you know what will happen next because the system is complicated and predictable.

With complex systems, there is no blueprint and thus very little predictability. You cannot know what will happen in a forest when you remove one species. You can theorize, but you can’t know for sure, as you don’t know how the other thousand (let’s say) factors will adapt to the lack of a squirrel, for example.

In a human body, just because you study a single vaccine for safety, doesn’t mean you know what will happen when you give an entire vaccine schedule to a child, especially in a world where umbilical cords are filled with hundreds of environmental toxins. Will there be too great a toxic load? How will the system handle all of this? We don’t know.

Diving deeper into that, a recent review of 40 studies reported that PFAS (“forever chemicals”) were detected in every umbilical cord blood sample tested. Other work going back decades has documented hundreds of synthetic chemicals in cord blood samples, including PCBs, pesticides, flame retardants, phthalates and bisphenols.

The point being, we are living in a soup of toxins, and then we’re adding more toxins to a child via vaccines. We don’t really know what happens when you put a complex load of toxins into a sensitive human body. No study has ever been done to understand this because our scientific studies are often reductionist and simplistic. Yet we are treating this question of vaccines and autism in a simple way instead of taking a complex look.

If you really wanted to know what’s going on, you’d have to study the effects of that entire load of vaccines on the human body. To go further, you’d want to do so in concert with the toxic environment that is also increasingly affecting our bodies as people.

That’s a very complex thing to do.

So to say “vaccines” are safe is not taking into consideration the question of total toxic load. And when you have many autism signals coming out of children who have just received vaccines, it’s worth it to take a closer look.

Look at how Charlie Kirk was turned into a hero or a monster after his death. In my mind, having followed Charlie for years, he was neither. He was a guy who was strong in his convictions and driven by religious insight and conservative viewpoints. I didn’t agree with much of what Charlie said, but to embrace complexity and not pick a side will help you see him more clearly and not cherry pick his thoughts in either direction.

Watching our culture virtually NEED a singular explanation to latch onto to explain whether he was a hero or monster is the lack of complexity that isn’t serving us.

People aren’t that simple. Narratives aren’t that simple. And oftentimes simplicity is used for propaganda.

If we want to understand each other and our world, we have to become more attuned to complexity as a default. Right now, our default is knee-jerk and tribalistic reactions.

This scales into a large problem because we can’t solve problems well if we have not defined them clearly. In order to define them, we have to accept that our systems, including human beings, are complex. And if that’s true, then we must be willing to build a culture of complexity to collectively understand the challenges we face and thus implement potential solutions.

Interestingly, simple and tribalistic explanations tend to benefit those in power.

How can we solve this? As individuals, it starts with noticing where we tend to have knee-jerk reactions, become tribal about our thinking, and jump to conclusions too quickly.

Practicing mindfulness so we can notice our thinking, emotions, and state of being leads to the ability to self-reflect. This is how we can observe our thinking and behavior. Making a point to embrace uncertainty and not jump to conclusions will help keep our inquiry and curiosity alive as well.

Slow Down and Reduce Stress

Chronic stress = unclear thinking.

One of the best ways to help build openness to complexity is to not allow chronic low-level survival stress to run our lives. We may not even know this is happening to us because we are so used to the high level, gas on, go go go of our modern world. We forget how wound up many of us truly are. Being wound up creates a low-level sense of one form of survival activation or another: we can be more anxious, fast moving, defensive, and aggressive, or we can be more hopeless, shut down, pessimistic, or nihilistic.

Both of these states of being are emerging from survival stress built up in the human body over the course of our lives, and not having processed this stress properly. This is what leads to nervous system dysregulation, and sadly, no, we cannot simply “reset our nervous system” by taking a few deep breaths. What’s happening with ‘resets’ is a form of temporary self-regulation, but what truly needs to happen is a release of that stored stress in the body to bring back a baseline of regulation.

Putting the complexities and joys of survival stress release aside for a moment (look what I just did there lol), what’s more approachable each day for many of us is slowing down and reducing stress in our lives. It will help us not build up more survival stress in the body, and see more clearly by simply being less activated.

To embrace complexity, we have to slow down. To want to listen to others clearly, we have to slow down.

When we are slower, we are less inclined to jump from one social media post to the next or rush to conclusions because we feel rushed all the time. Instead, there is more thoughtfulness, patience and curiosity to explore more critically.

Some simple ways to slow down and reduce stress in our modern world would be:

- Begin slowing down as much as you can each day, moving more slowly and doing tasks more slowly will help signal to your system that it can also slow down.

- Take breaks between tasks, avoid extensive multi tasking. When we don’t take breaks between tasks, stress builds up in our system and then gets stored away. When we multitask, we also often bring about survival responses as we jump from one thing to the next. Oddly, we’ve come to glorify multitasking in our world, trading human health for ‘productivity.

- Set your phone aside as much as possible. Don’t get caught up in doom scrolling. Instead, notice what you are feeling in your body as you find yourself in the habit of doom scrolling. If you really want to take this seriously, delete social media apps from your phone and only use them via a computer.

- Take time at the end of the day to destress. One great way to do that is to use this exercise I created. It tunes you back into your body, slows your mind, and connects you back to the here and now.

Connect to Something Bigger Than Yourself

Part of what I’m presenting here is the fact that new data points are emerging that tell us a new story of who we are needs to be considered. That new story of who we are also suggests there’s something bigger going on here. (More on the new data points here.)

I cannot walk away from the fact that I have had personal experiences showing me that we are all connected in some way. That we are part of something much larger than ourselves as individuals.

From telepathy and synchronicity to what feels like resonant fields of energy that connect us, something is going on here. It also seems to me, as we’ve written about for 16 years, that emerging science supports the idea that we are connected, and that the typical materialist explanation of the world no longer fits.

This means a new story is emerging about who we are and how our world works, and that looking to our past stories may not be the best way to understand who we are.

I also believe, from my own experience and from exploring the science, that we are reincarnating. And if we are reincarnating, the idea of separation from one another, especially by religion, culture, place of birth, etc, becomes much less important in explaining who we are. This is another data point I have to include when I consider who we are and the nature of our reality.

I feel I’ve had enough experiences in my life that suggest there is a large amount of intelligence driving this experience we call life, which includes an entire cosmos with other beings than humans a part of it. This doesn’t mean I feel everything is fate or predestined by this intelligence, but that something larger is at play that I don’t quite understand. Although this larger intelligence seems to be tending toward the evolution of consciousness, and it feels like something that can be connected to and sensed.

Within that sensing comes a knowing of sorts. A knowing that states what is playing out in our world helps evolve our consciousness through experience, at a level beyond the mind and how we identify daily. The material world is rich in its experience for the purposes of creating an experience that includes suffering, pain and difficulty. But also joy, love and other beautiful experiences.

But beyond the material world is something larger that invites me not to get STUCK in the seriousness of the drama playing out. If we indeed reincarnate and if there is a sense of non-duality when I go beyond the consciousness of the everyday, it means on some level, the everyday is not all there is.

In an individual sense, life isn’t just about me, my accomplishments, my acquisitions, and my desires, but about something greater. I don’t lose my sense of being an individual and taking care of myself and my needs by feeling this, but I don’t seek to serve just my needs and acquisitions, but that of others too. Because in some way, others are me too.

This connects me to something bigger, something beyond my life. Something beyond just my family fighting for my piece of the pie. It’s moving from the paradigm of separation to one of connection and what Thich Naht Hanh called interbeing. My personal experience and the emerging post-material science suggest this is a better explanation of the nature of our reality. In this way, I feel open to a new story of who we are.

This can become a lived experience. A default, if you will. It affects my choices, my actions, the way I see others, and the way I treat others. It informs my ideas around the design of society, policy etc. It doesn’t seek that everyone believes what I believe or follows any God or guru, but that their wellness and wellbeing are intimately connected to mine and so I want what’s best for others too.

That connection to something bigger allows hope to be alive in a world going through chaotic moments. It doesn’t cause me to pull away and retreat into avoiding what’s happening, but to see the potential in this moment and inform how I might respond to it.

When I connect to the idea of collective consciousness, or morphic fields, even more hope can emerge. Morphic fields is an idea Rupert Sheldrake brought forth (which, to be fair, has been spoken about for thousands of years in other words). They refer to fields that carry information, not energy per se, and they influence the form and behavior of systems across time and space.

The more something happens, the stronger its “morphic field” becomes, making it easier for the same thing to happen again (this plays into what’s being found via post-material science too.) For example, if one rat learns to run a maze in New York, it might become easier for rats elsewhere to learn the same maze, because the knowledge is stored in the species’ morphic field.

Applied at the human level, if I choose kindness and heart-centered approaches to my actions, and am truly embodying a service to others way of being, I’m not just impacting those around me but also feeding into a collective field where others are invited to engage in that field as well.

I feel that our reality is shaped by these fields, and the more we collectively carry stories, actions, and ways of being based on a certain paradigm, the more that shows up in our world. In that way, our world is a reflection of our collective consciousness, not JUST the actions of a few power elite.

By sensing into something bigger, realizing the effect our individual actions can have on the whole, we move out of what feels like an impossible, hopeless linear path toward “fixing” our world, and into a space where we see how our individual power is actually great. And that the choices we make matter.

We can control who we are, how we act, and what we do. Perhaps a good chunk of our energy could go toward that, and not the majority toward doom-scrolling social media. This isn’t to say we should avoid the outside world and use spirituality as an escape, but to integrate the two.

With this said, I don’t feel we are in for a change that is going to take hundreds or thousands of years to show signs of positive outcome, but that it can happen much more quickly due to the nature of our reality and morphic fields.

I’m not saying this to say “we are alive at the most important time in history,” but instead to suggest that we are faced with a moment of great change that seems both driven by the advancements of our material world and what appears to be a quantum advancement in our consciousness.

Look at the weapons we have. Look at AI. Look at the ways in which fundamental thought is driving dangerous narratives about who ‘the enemy’ is that we must fight. We are faced with a moment where we indeed have to get in the game and help shape our future through our way of being, thoughts, and actions.

As stated, this doesn’t have to be some grand gesture on our part as individuals, but in the way we choose to engage with our friends and neighbours. The desire to ask whether our values and stories still feel relevant to us. The ways in which we engage online, and the energetic state of being we choose to hold, which I feel affects the overall morphic field that makes up our reality.

An action item for this element might be to research morphic fields and what post-material science says about our interconnected nature. By having an intellectual understanding of this, we might be invited to reshape how we think of ourselves and our reality. I feel these theories present a more accurate way of seeing our reality than material science has offered, as many data points don’t fit into that material model, and thus that story needs to be updated.

Further, to put this into practice, we can ask: What does it look like to connect to something bigger than ourselves? How can I practice truly feeling something bigger than myself in my body and being each day?

One other question might be: if connecting to something bigger invites you into a story of good vs evil, good guys and bad guys, this may still be feeding right back into the old paradigm.

Thanks for reading, and I would love to hear from you.