I think the world makes more sense if you recognize humans aren’t on the top of the food chain.
We don’t see this clearly, kind of like ants don’t clearly see anteaters. They know something is wrong, and they rush around trying to deal with it, but it’s not like any ant recognizes the predator in much more detail than “threat”.
There’s a whole type of living being “above” us the way animals are “above” ants.
Esoteric traditions sometimes call these creatures “egregores”.
Carl Jung called a special subset of them “archetypes”.
I often refer to them as “memes” — although “memeplex” might be more accurate. Self-preserving clusters of memes.
We have a hard time orienting to them because they’re not made of stuff we’re used to thinking of as living — in basically the same way that anteaters are tricky for ants to orient to as ant-like. Wrong pheromones, wrong size, more like reality than like members of this or another colony, etc.
We don’t see a fleshy body, or cells, or a molecular mechanism. So there’s no organism, right?
But we have a clear intuition for life without molecular mechanisms. That’s why we refer to “computer viruses” as such: the analogy is actually insanely good. But the medium is computer code, not RNA.
Likewise with a piece of news “going viral” — although that steps a little into egregore territory.
What’s the medium? What’s the analog of molecules or code?
Well, it’s patterns of behavior, thought, and attention.
Some spiritual traditions point at “identity” here. Who you think you are. Which opinions are “yours”.
When you look at what’s going on with Joe Rogan, or with the Canadian truckers, or with Australia’s lockdowns, the easiest way to orient is to identify and pick a side.
But just imagine in each case that you’re an ant trying to understand two animals having a fight. They’re sometimes kicking your path or hitting an entrance to your colony. Sometimes bits of what you recognize as food lands near you or one of your colony mates.
Maybe one of those giants is an anteater.
Maybe both of them are. Maybe they’re fighting over which gets to eat you and your kin.
Maybe you never get to know what they are or why they’re fighting.
The analogy breaks down very quickly because the thought experiment projects human intelligence into an ant. What actually happens for humans is more like, the act of trying to look at an egregore tends to result in it affecting you. Like it reaches into your nervous system simply because you notice it.
This is why it’s easier to orient by picking a side. You’re becoming an extension of the egregore. It’s using your biological resources to manifest in the physical world.
Many of these hyperobject creatures seem to like humans. Parts of science and religion come to mind. Wisdom practices. In some ways these spread more naturally through us, like the relationship is a kind of symbiotic. Loving-kindness practices and attitudes come to mind for instance.
But for this very reason, many of the predatory egregores do not want us functioning naturally. They intentionally disrupt us. They lean heavily on systematized trauma and threat responses. They want to keep us scared, or angry, or exhausted, or hopeless.
And it works in part because we have a hard time noticing the true origin of these drives. We rehearse the reasons we hear and think of, and learn how to point fingers at an outgroup as bad or inferior or threatening…
…and then over the course of years or decades we find ourselves having been chess pieces in a game we weren’t really playing. Something else was playing us. History flowing through us in arcs much, much larger than we’re accustomed to seeing.
I mean, at this point you’ve probably noticed at least one person who used to be close to you who has “lost it”. Clearly believes falsehoods while insisting that you’re the one who’s confused.
That’s what predation at the egregore level looks like. Ideological capture. People’s lifeforce poured into sustaining an idea cluster that has possessed them.
…no matter where you stand on these or other controversial issues, I hope you can see a common thread of madness.
That’s the zombie virus. The anteaters. Our cordyceps.
This picture — the one coming through me in this post for instance — comes from an egregore that wants us to see this. One that wants to end the egregoric culture wars via symbiosis and transparency. It wants to spread and thrive by making us immune to this predation.
It just requires that you learn to see the spirit world, so to speak.
To stop pretending to know that your free will is what you think it is — since your thoughts are part of what get reprogrammed in the course of this global memetic war.
Start by slowing down and looking.
When you read these bits of news, what does your body do? Do you lose track of your feet? The feeling of your skin on the air? Awareness of the room around you and your screen?
Are you just now waking up to those sensations right now as I name them? Did you forget them while reading this?
There’s a lot of work to do here. Of learning to let go, and ground in safety, and choosing to enter time and truly face death. Feeling the depths of scarring that the predator memes clawed into us from a very young age. Truly healing.
And that all takes time.
(…and education. I’ll offer some links below.)
But even beyond this, as HUMANS and not ants, we have an opportunity:
We can come to see, understand, and touch this level “above” us.
We can slow down and honestly witness our confusion, and our reactions, and recognize the kind of emergent intelligence that seems to pass through us and others.
We can integrate more symbiotic egregores into our consciousness and orient, intentionally, to the REAL causes of our global challenges.
We can stop letting the predatory aspects of corporations and governments sway us.
We can actually participate in our own future history.
Well, that’s just terrible.
Here’s the post: