Abandon Hopium

All Ye Who Enter Here

Photo by Dmitry Grigoriev on Unsplash

Last night, I had that dream again, the one where I’m looking at the natural world, and it wavers, goes out of focus with a sound like Zzzzttt, a glitching. This time, I was looking at my backyard, but I knew it was all of reality that glitched.

Today, I want to write the words that will open my heart, and yours, if you’re willing, the ones that will lift us out of certainty and drop us into kindness. These days, last week, this morning, I’ve woken up with a heavy sadness in my sinuses that doesn’t release. The feeling rises, builds, swells my eyes. A drop falls, but the storm does not break. I court the storm, welcome it into my heart, into the joy, as I know how to do. But I am merely seeking relief, and the storm is not moved.

Perhaps, two storm fronts need to clash, to crash into each other, and I am less accommodating of conflict - too many opinions about that. So, instead, I hold this sadness, which feels like being 9 months pregnant, and terrified of giving birth, of being so out-of-control and at the mercy of forces much larger than I. Naturally, as a novelist and storyteller, I reach for hope.

Our story structure, especially the hero’s journey, has prepared us to expect some kind of eucatastrophe. Some version of Tolkien’s giant eagles to lift us off Mt. Doom just as the earth beneath our feet splits apart in rivers of molten lava.

We’ve come to accept that this is what happens when the hero - we - is at our capability’s end. Too bad about all those orcs and the legions who sided with Sauron, but they got what they deserved. Schadenfreude, right?

Tolkien coined that hopeful phrase, eucatastrophe. The root eu means good, and he said the catastrophe part means “sudden turn.” Hmmm. That’s not the primary meaning of the word catastrophe, which had, until then, meant: sudden ruinous disaster that leads to great suffering. But okay. I’d rather be in a good catastrophe, if there are two kinds.

Are we, though, in that story? I would like to think so.

Except that modern life, with such complex global systems both natural and man-made, does not fit into that story structure. It’s too complex. In fact, our expectation that it should is one of the trances we put between ourselves and reality. We expect to be saved, no matter how many times we heart the meme that no one is coming.

Perhaps I can’t imagine anything else yet. I still want a new, improved version of our old system. Say… an egalitarian government run by compassionate women. I’m attached to that story. Certain it would be better. And certainty is the best indicator I am lost in a trance - mythmaking a counter-narrative to patriarchy. A political trance of an egalitarian future to match our species’ past.

Should we forgive the vast majority of those Faux News trance inductees? Who hasn’t been lied to? But these problems are bigger than Alex Jones and Steve Bannon flooding the zone on purpose. The truth is, we’ve had these exact problems for centuries before all those other guys with the wrong point of view were even born.

Our problems will not be solved when we put all those horrible other guys into prison. Though every horrible other guy who has broken the law should go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 dollars. No Get-Out-of-Jail-Free cards. It’s possible to hold people accountable without hating them. Dispassionately. The way a mother holds a tantruming child, then sends them for a time-out. In prison. But breaking a trance takes willingness, or we’ll simply recreate the problem through resentment.

A trance is the projection of a self-serving story as a buffer between ourselves and reality. We have so many trances that some of us hardly ever see anything else. Religion is another one.

Last week, I watched some clips from J.D. Vance’s book tour, and what became clear is the way people in power are using the religion trance to weave one story for the great unwashed while acting out, with the shining eyes of the hypnotized, a trance about how human beings are not capable of governing ourselves. We need an overclass for our own good.

If their certainty ever glitches, they don’t let us see it. They don’t wince, even once, at how self-serving their vision of humanity is. They tell us that the almighty wants them in charge. He said so in his compendium of cobbled-together holy books, which took 400 years of tweaking to compile. All that time, men were editing the sacred word, as you do, when you’re crafting a trance of certainty.

Though not originally European, our country’s god is a Euro-centric white supremacist, too. But even in cultures without many white people, He puts women at the bottom. And those not-so-white cultures are often working with ours to usher in the next wave of domination even as they are demonized. Apparently, if you are a crown prince, you have enough money and power that they work as a get out of racism card. Trances don’t need to cohere. Ask any dancing chicken.

Most of us wear several pairs of sunglasses while praying to see the light. Of course, we could just remove our rose tints, but we’re afraid our eyes might sting from the sudden shock. So we’ve refused. For decades. And now, we are past the tipping point anyway. The old way of being in the world is already dead man walking.

The harm our worldview has done is incalculable. For centuries, no bar has been too low to limbo beneath, and now, the bar rests on the ground of being: Who are we, and what do we want?

At this most basic level, we are finally becoming able to see our trance, and the way the hypnotist has us all clucking. But no matter how suggestible we are, we cannot be hypnotized without our consent. Withdrawing that consent is simple. Click your heels together three times and repeat: There’s no place like home because there is no other place.

And here’s the terrifying part, because there is one. The threshold guardian at the gate to new life is Death. At some level, we all know this. Isn’t that what I’m actually terrified of? Isn’t that why climate change deniers cling to thin air like Wile E. Coyote? Systems collapse means that the death is not just my own. Because of course, it isn’t. And that metaphor of the threshold guardian means I still haven’t escaped this story structure yet.

Our dying worldview is not capable of fixing the mess it made. The near-simultaneous collapse of all these interconnected systems, human and ecological, will likely occur whether we come out of our trance or not. And that makes me cry. Reality is not affected by the mental overlays we project onto the world. Waking up from the centuries of the trance we were born into is only the first step, the one we’re still on: Being willing to see.

There never has been anyone inherently better than anyone else. Patriarchal control of women and white supremacy are a self-serving trance. And really, there is no other kind of trance. Even the one that tells you that you are worthless serves a purpose.

Last weekend, I was at a theater performance of a show that had a Q&A afterward. A woman stood and waxed poetic about how much “The Lord” loves us all. Her eyes shone with fervor.

There’s no god called He. Just isn’t. There is no god that wanted the human species to take dominion over the earth. Never was. There is no god that supports one side in a war over the other. Even when both sides are praying to the same god, and you’d think: someone’s prayer will necessarily be answered, it isn’t. In fact, every story we have been told about a god who wants… is a projection of a trance upon reality. It’s people who want.

And right now, we are looking at the response reality is having to all our wantings and the stories we told about them. While our global systems are collapsing, we could voluntarily collapse all our psychological complexity and simply want love. Nothing more. It could be our yardstick for examining political policy. Does it love?

We stand at the gate, but the threshold guardian has drawn a sword. If we try to cross the threshold, the guardian will lop off our heads. There’s a raging wildfire, extreme weather, and species extinction that threatens our food supply, funneling us toward the narrow opening. We take a hesitant breath. We are going to die either way. Stalled at the gate, we wonder if there’s a way to hunch our shoulders and run through fast enough. But we also know you can’t trick a threshold guardian.

So I walk through the gate slowly with my spine straight, shoulders back, and my head high, making a good target.

Here’s the secret: You’re better off without your head. Let the guardian cut off all the mental schemas we project upon reality. Then, perhaps, we’ll see how to live from the brain in our guts, the one that knows through the body, the soft creatures that we really are, the nervous system that doesn’t lie the way minds do. Then what to do will become clear. How to love becomes obvious, and all our systems can shift from protecting us from the fear of death to extending love because we are all fragile and impermanent and we need each other to create communities that include all the living systems of the earth - which is our reality.

This earth. This life. Right here, in this body. The earth’s living systems are the opposite of the mental schemas we have constructed. Reality is stripping away our projections.

For me, what’s left after all the illusions evaporate isn’t hope. Thank goodness, because hope is just another trance. This week, I gave up hope, actually let the heartbreak and despair in. And the feeling my body dropped into was more akin to relief. Yes. We can’t stop this. We don’t know how. It’s a recognition of how untenable the mess has become, how impossible it is that we could ever Tower-of-Babel our way out of it.

And for the last few millennia or so, the myth of Western Civilization is that violence determines who wins. Imposing separation and isolation through shunting us into nuclear families and working us to death for personal profit… is a “traditional” way to live. That isn’t reality; it’s a trance.

Love is the baseline, the connector under everything and through everything. Love. We are social animals who need community, and that includes the more-than-human beings, even those tiny ones, millions of them, contained in a single tablespoon of living soil. Behind the trance of modern life, we are glimpsing how important these beings are to us and each other, worlds upon worlds all layered through one another. Here, in this earth we stand on.

All of us alive today are involved in the shift, the cataclysmic change in our worldview, the letting go of the domination trance. It’s glitching. Some of us cling, and some of us let go.

We are in a liminal state already, the in-between, no longer what we were, and not yet what we are becoming. I breathe into that uncertainty, for it will likely last for years. Can we, can I, tolerate that not-knowing? For that long?

We catch a glimpse when the trance slips, especially when it seems so solid, because it’s not. It’s wavering. But we can only see the glitching, not the reality it might reveal if it were gone.

What if I knew I was going to die in a week? I would not spend that time reading people arguing with other people on social media, certain they are right, and how important that rightness is. The physical world would sparkle with aliveness, and all that love could pour through my soft belly. For my loved ones and strangers alike. I’ve been that love so many times. That love is here now, and I let it spill like water through the cracks of my worldview.

We don’t know what’s happening; we can’t know. All the systems of trance are failing simultaneously - both individually and collectively. Reality is breaking through. When the trance glitches, we see, however briefly, that there is reality even when we project our trance between us and that.

Every creature, every plant, every everything carries its own vibration of love. The human is only one instrumental section in a symphony called: We Are Here. The heartbeat of this world is the two-syllable iamb: I love; I love; I love. And the prevailing myth, that monotheistic, patriarchal culture of violence, is glitching. Perhaps we will have an opportunity to live in reality. I want to say “again,” but who knows? It could be the first time. It could be an evolutionary process we’re in.

I feel into this moment and the courage it requires to stand in the truth: I love the people our culture is hurting. That’s what’s breaking through, that open-eyed, open-hearted sky. That. My own trance, the personal history of trauma I healed? Gone. Our collective history? Wiped out. Who are we then? I don’t know.

Without a trance, we don’t know what’s going to happen. None of the people who imagine they’re in charge, who think they’re pulling the strings, are actually in charge. Human beings have never had dominion over reality. We only think so, but that’s another trance.

It’s possible now, perhaps, for many people at once to come out of trance, each doing their own part, and that is more powerful than governments and corporations behaving badly. No matter how much time I have left here in physical reality, I cast my lot with love and trust, and the willingness to tell the truth no matter the cost. With everything up in the air, I let the chips fall where they may.

This twin flame of joy and sadness might be who I am now. It’s very tender. It’s so hurt, it’s kind. I recognize my failings, and I accept yours. How can I forgive myself if I can’t extend that forgiveness to you and allow it to break my heart? Again. And again, and again. And I don’t like that answer. I like my clear, untrammeled joy. I like to beam. But when I accept that there is no real way of being in this mess without that sadness, I’m letting go of certainty in favor of kindness.

We are in the hands of the mystery now, facing our own death collectively. Personally, I’m comfortable with the process of death. But collectively… collectively? That means war, famine, climate collapse, economic collapse, corporate collapse (probably even megafarms and grocery chains), and every other kind of disaster. We are experiencing that now. It’s already in full swing, and we can’t stop it.

And time and again, I see that part of me that doesn’t want to write about letting go of hopium without offering you some hope. What a paradox. So I surrender that into the embrace of reality. The connection I discover when I drop my trance of certainty and just be kind. From there, I can do the next thing life puts before me, whether it’s large or small. Whether it makes sense or not.

For what sense is there in writing novels? None. And yet, I will rise tomorrow and take my seat, as I do every day, paying attention to the twin flames and listening to the words in my heart as I write them down until some better way of being comes to me.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. I count them, you know… those hearts.

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