a case for multi-realm thinking ||part 1||
the reality-altering question of "why?" during collapse
In case you missed it, last month I published an audio conversation with a friend about the importance of deep remembering. It has already shifted the way I view just about everything, and if you would like to access it, you can find it here:
The Ceremony of Remembering, Part 1
The Ceremony of Remembering, Part 2
I will publish an audio version of this article and its subsequent parts in the near future. Stay plugged in :-)
we are here
It’s a wild & devastating experience to be alive during a time of so many colliding elements of collapse & injustice.
How do we help one another process this magnificently catastrophic decay as we sit isolated behind our screens, witnessing the blue-lit frantic blur of images offer up windows into police murdering our kin, floods washing out our farms, fires obliterating the forests, and oligarchs designing deserts of destitution while increasing investment in prisons & weapons?
So much of the denial & anxiety of these times, I believe, comes from the unprocessed grief we hold inside our bodies, and that is activated, as we begin to attempt facing the reality that this is happening.
The English American language and the colonizer version of Euro/American cultures intentionally leaves us floundering as desperate, fumbling, isolated messes as we try to crawl around and figure out how to both be and move forward during times, such as these, of absolute reckoning.
Without ceremonies to let grief move through us, without communities to practice celebrating the being-ness of life, without relationship to earth to teach us how to heal our wounds, without practices of imagination to t each us how to envision utopian futures, without systems to maintain regenerative relationships between our bodily needs and the earth, we stumble desperately, through darkness, all while pretending the lights are on.
Here we are. We are here.
We are here in the place where greed, individualism, short sightedness, and ritualized hate have had the heaviest hand in shaping our days. Our societies are run by insatiable billionaires, our land and spirits colonized by traumatized hoarders, our ecologies collapsing and rebelling, our spirits dormant behind screens and inside sheetrock houses, our livelihoods tied to 40+ hours of toil for corporate profits.
Many things led here, many attempts at revision have been made and are currently being made. But what I know to be most true is that in this moment, we are here in this place that we don’t want to be in. We are here in this plastic dystopia, with a planet rebelling against our greed.
now what?
There’s so much to be said about how to move forward through intersectional, liberation-minded action. How to imagine other ways of being, how to collectivize, to heal in community, how to engage in true, disruptive activism. There’s so much to be said about the fight. And it is a fight; it’s a battle. It’s a battle between trauma and healing, greed and collaboration, despair and joy.
There’s also much to be said about individual healing. How to process trauma, how to develop a relationship to the land, how to re-imagine one’s unique path forward, how to design a life that is outside of the boundaries of the white cis het patriarchal christian puritan dominator imagination that was shoved into the tissues of our bodies and slathered liberally over the archways & creases of our minds.
However, I have been feeling deeply called to write about a third topic. One for which there is equally much to be said, but one that I experience the least exposure around. For me, this topic magnifies the question: why?
but why
Why are we trying to reimagine? Why are we trying to heal? Why are we trying to create collective change? Why are we trying to battle this incredibly powerful force of greed to create a world that has more dimensions to it?
Why even try when we know all things are finite? We are certain of the finitude of our human bodies in this form, this planet, the sun, the habitability of this biosphere to humans with the irreversible damage we’ve already inflicted. We could just tap out. We know an end is coming, one way or another, whether it be a human or geologic time scale. Why not just sip fermented wheat at breweries and watch netflix and create a sense of inner peace at annual yoga teacher trainings and dismiss this bigger -- ultimately futile -- project of struggle?
I think all of this wondering this brings us back to an even more foundational question: why are we here?
It breaks my heart that so many who belong to the culture I was born into are often too jaded to hear this question spoken seriously. “Ha,” folks chuckle, when I earnestly pose this question in non-ceremonial conversation. “Isn’t that the question?”
I melt in a puddle of loneliness to imagine that we are too lost to play with the most foundational, potent question of our existence.
So here I am! Engaging in this third topic, as we march head-first into an era of collapse. I place myself on the path with the ancient, timeless web of people who have dedicated their lives to contemplating a question that begs for deep imagination & an open line to spirit.
Why are we here, amidst collapse?
mono-realm thinking
I was born into a culture that taught me that we’re just kind of here. It’s improbable, to say the least, but it happened. Somehow, rocks and minerals collided into each other, randomly and improbably, in such a way, that some time later, we had this planet and all of its delicately interdependent creatures living on it in perfectly calibrated, collaborative harmony.
Under this philosophy, this calibration comes from an unthinking, largely unconscious process called evolution that is guided entirely by a violent principle called competition. All of these processes work without discernment or deliberate design. The laws of the universe work perfectly because that’s what laws are: functional, unfeeling, unconscious mechanisms for controlling creation and movement that simply exist and always have. They don’t have a source or a designer. They randomly appear based on what is needed.
Within this philosophy, we live and we die, and we’re meant to try to enjoy it to the best of our ability. We’re meant to have cool experiences, fun adventures, love one another, and try not to do bad things.
We’re just here. This is just happening.
So enjoy it!
Don’t think too much about it, because that usually leads to organized religion, which usually leads to cultish behavior or war. The idea of a male God(s) in the sky commanding us how to live and punishing us when we break a rule is too ridiculous, and that’s all that we’ve been taught as a plausible explanation for these mysteries of existence, so there’s probably no alternative.
As I’ve grown and explored different parts of the planet, connecting to different cultures, relationships, and ecosystems along the way, I’ve come to see how this belief system is a sneaky product of colonization, empire, and capitalism.
The more we believe that the world is unconscious and unfeeling, and merely a set of functional laws, the more we can feel comfortable pillaging & exploiting all forms of energy & matter for our personal gain.
What I’ve come to understand, so far, with my small glimmer into the undercurrent, is that we are much more than this single human experience, with its start and end date so clearly delineated by this space-time and by this body.
multi-realm thinking
Here’s another take:
We come to life, sometimes on earth, sometimes in the form of human bodies, as infinitely varied fractals of the universe experiencing itself. She wants to understand what she is: what life itself is. What consciousness itself is. There is a deep, unshakeable pleasure in understanding, just as there is a deep pleasure in mystery. Through our infinitely varied experiences of life, we learn more, as parts of the whole, of what the infinite itself is made.
The “infinite” is terminology to describe something we can’t imagine, a form of energy that is also a source of creation. It creates planets and beings and life forms and spirits of every imaginable variety. It has created earth. It has created humans. It has created imagination.
Earth is a special place. We know this from many mystical texts. It is a place where we are separate, where we are raw, and where we can suffer. It is a place of forgetting. When we are born, we forget what and who we were before we got here, how we got here, where we go afterward, and what our purpose is in being here.
Earth is a place where we can forget, and then remember, who we are and why we are here. The journey of remembering can bring us mystery, elation, clarity, and joy beyond our wildest dreams.
Earth is a place where we can feel & see with sharp, eye-watering clarity through the lens of raw, cutting suffering.
Earth is a place where we can move through life with numbness, anxiety, despair, and separation. We can learn the most saturated depths of what connection and joy are through this devastating voyage to the poles. When we are all connected, in a soup of formless, shoreless love, we do not have the clarity of duality, which teaches its lessons through opposites. We enjoy the soft, formless bliss, existing in eternal divinity.
But can we deeply know the gift of formless non-dual connection without having suffered the mind-bending loneliness of separation?
As we learn to identify these gaping holes in our sternums -- the ones that reach down into the sacrum, morphing from hole to contraction in different parts of our bodies -- we are experiencing different manifestations of separation.
disconnection manifested
in the body
Our necks and traps contract as we experience the high intensity stress of separation: we are required to figure out how to survive alone. For most of us, it is our individual duty to feed, clothe, shelter, and strengthen our bodies - we all have separate flesh suits for our spirits. This separate duty can be even more stressful under colonial capitalism, an experience where survival is considered a meritocratic competition.
Our sternums open up and swallow our hearts, creating the feeling of heartbreak: we are feeling into the human experience of duality in love.
Our sacrums contract and our lower backs ache, the muscles around our spines spasming: we are feeling into the disconnection from our earthly roots. We are experiencing duality not just in our separation from one another, but from all of our relations on this planet. We are part of the soil, the grasses, the leaves, the trees, the birds.
For many of us, we no longer sleep on the earth or wake up to the horizontal glow of dawn. Now science gets to tell us through exciting breakthrough studies all of the amazing benefits of grounding (uninterrupted bodily contact with the free ions of the earth’s surface) or looking at natural light in the morning or bathing in the sounds of the forest. We already knew that. Our bodies have been telling us.
Our bodies are portals for experiencing the lessons of duality that we are on this earth to understand.
stay connected with me for part 2, where we link the clarity of polarity to earthly collapse,
& where i share a new metaphor that has truly guided my understanding.
a note
Welcome, new and old friends.
I post 1-4 times a month here, always aiming to share the most pressing, urgent topics on my mind about other ways of being. I am so grateful you are here, joining me on this journey of re-connection.
If you benefit from this labor in any way, the greatest acts of reciprocity you could offer include:
leaving a comment or reaching out to me individually to tell me your thoughts
I love this
sharing the substack with friends and family
including a note about why you think they might enjoy it
contributing to the project financially
each article takes ~4-12 hours to compose
Sending heaps of love to you as we navigate the earth realm together.
Thank you for this Maris. It already resonates and will grow in meaning with successive reading.