What Now?

Assuming the outgoing administration doesn’t create a catastrophic crisis to avoid accountability, I feel things are largely settled for the short term on the geopolitical front. The Ukraine War should end soon, there should hopefully be a detente in the Middle East, and the adults can get to work on creating a bitcoin strategic reserve, while severely slashing government to begin working on the national debt. The ordinary person can get back to worrying exclusively about ordinary person stuff like health, wealth and personal relationships.

Not that you should ever neglect those things, but when free speech is under attack, the state is forcing you to take medicine in violation of your basic rights and imbeciles are fomenting World War 3 to launder money to their arms manufacturing cronies, you have to interrupt the scheduled programming for engagement in politics which nobody should want.

But going back to mundane ordinary life is a bit of a comedown after all the drama — remember there were two assassination attempts, one of which grazed Trump’s ear! The chaos that could have unleashed is almost unimaginable.

One thing that happened to me (and a lot of people I know) during Covid is we were forced to become more resilient. It’s not easy learning what you thought was a corrupt but not-that-important state would actively disrupt your life so severely in violation of the law and without any valid scientific basis. That the corporate media would gaslight you and foment compliance and division only augmented the stress and sense of despair. In order to retain one’s sanity in the face of so much capitulation and abdication of rational sense-making one had to reach deeper within, trust one’s own judgment and connect with one’s core values more entirely.

Now that we’ve hopefully defeated those retarding forces, a golden age of innovation and prosperity might be upon us. But I can’t go back to being the person I was before, primarily concerned about making money, living a comfortable and fulfilling life and handling my day to day responsibilities. It feels like there is something bigger. Having a false and destructive reality imposed on us from the outside drove us to get in touch with something real on the inside, and now that the door has been opened, we have no choice but to go farther into wherever it leads.

I’ve been reading a series of books lately on the topic of exploring the inner space, the brain-mind quantum machine that’s capable of perceiving aspects of reality beyond the narrow spectrums detectable by the senses. We are not simply animals who survive for a time to reproduce the species and optimize for pleasure while avoiding pain. (Even animals are likely more than that, too.) There is a sublimity to our existence, and now we are aware, not just theoretically, but in practice because we were forced to locate it.

There is no point in trying to describe it. It will either sound like magical thinking or be too slippery to grasp. The words are like the proverbial finger pointing at the moon — if you fixate on the finger, you miss the moon. It doesn’t matter what your concepts are either. “The Simulation,” Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, the Tao, the quantum foam, the Kabbalah, Sufism, whatever. I don’t care, use whatever works to take you away from the map and into the territory.

But into the territory we must go. There is no turning back.