NO.

You are not going crazy. You just have a mind that is far, far more based on innocence than you might realize. We are tender, naive folk. Detecting deception, according to our ancient Gnostic ancestors, is not even our natural proclivity. It seems that we were born to inevitably fall into ditches. And yet, we were also born with a 'divine spark' (the epinoia) which is linked to the imaginative faculty but is much more, I believe. I believe it has something to do with our ability to adapt; to innovate, not just external technology, but internally to even reconfigure; the ecstatic thrust to evolve and ever-transform. Thus, deception is not so despairing an experience. In fact, it might just be a damn good workout for our soul power (satyagraha, as Gandhi decried).

2020 has been a collective cup of Ayahausca and we are really just in thick of, say, the 2nd hour, when purging is commonplace, exorcisms also, and truly the dark night of the soul is being forced upon us by the ferocious compassion of the Dark Mother aspect of Goddess (who Ayahausca devotedly invokes). Chaos is becoming that much more real. Systemic collapses are no longer just on the horizon but are trembling the very ground we stand upon. There's an ancient trigger for civil war brewing in the USA but really think of it as projection and then what civil war is breaking out within our souls.

Deception has done a number on us, for sure, and it's seemingly impossible to know what the fuck is true in the media miasma, the corrupt corporatism, the circus of politics, the tsunami of dishonesty, the viral divisiveness, the emotional plague (kudos for that one, Wilhelm Reich). I swear there will come a breaking point where we will realize as a collective species that perhaps our silenced and persecuted ancient ancestors were right all along: that we have been collectively possessed by nefarious extra-terrestrials (Gnostics dubbed them Archons). Moreover, it will become acutely clear how vehemently important truth is to be discerned and conveyed; how shamanic societies knew this and devoted whole systemic cultural methods to make certain that mindfulness practices were pervasive so that we could hold to sanity and resist the insanity that becomes us as we are victimized by the duplicity of psychic invasion. The truth is stranger than fiction couldn't be more understated. Not now. Not ever. It's why mystics were closest to truth, teetering before what appeared madness to those impregnated by the status quo. The true spiritualist is always a sacred weirdo but for those who are woke to the beauty of an individuated being, weirdness is something to revere. Is it time to get collectively freaky?

I daresay if I was President I'd hold nation-wide ecstatic dances, make psychedelic medicines available to all, administered by integrative shaman-doctors. I'd bring back the Hieros Gamos rite, meaning every would-be King would have to be ultimately tested by a High Priestess in a special ritual where he would have to make love to her and bring her to the highest ecstasy of sexual and loving bliss to display both his power and tenderness. If he wasn't able, he wasn't fit to rule. The ancients knew some things, did they ever. I'd do much more too because by Goddess if we are really going to enter into a time of healing (as some callow politicians are currently advising) it will take a revolution of love, not bland mediated soundbytes by those who are most culpable in our mass manipulation. Have we had enough of that yet?

Maybe we are going crazy after all...Eckhart Tolle diagnosed us as collectively insane after all in the friggin' introduction of The Power of Now in one of the most sobering spiritual presages I've ever read. But truly, what is more important to remember is that despite whatever collectively instability is fever-pitching right now, our essence is something altogether mighty and noble. We are defiantly good. I believe it to the marrow of marrows. Our essential goodness is our original nature. And even the dastardly ET predators are just part of a drama of our unfolding and their own. My take is that they are teaching us something of vital importance and vice versa. Some Gnostics even said they are our teachers and my own enduring contemplations on the matter have convinced me that they are indeed testing our spiritual mettle only to have us turnaround to mentor them once our own soul powers have been vivaciously unleashed. When I consider what drew me after all to spirituality almost 20 years ago it was simply how heroic and amazing spiritual humans seemed to be, as if they'd figured out a secret path to unfolding the most excellent aspects of our humanity, becoming radiant beacons of virtue, timeless wisdom keepers and even supernaturalists of miracle magic.

It was no irony that my spiritual awakening was paralleled by the epilogue of my Media Studies at university which awakened me to the profound dark conspiracies afoot in the military-industrial complexes of our corporately fascist civilization. It seemed to me we were powerless before great lords of doom. And yet, before the spiritual masters, I felt hope; hope in the power of love and goodness to deconstruct all the demagoguery with the imperial simplicity of unrelenting kindness and spiritual sciences of oneness that sliced through all the vicissitude of egoic knavery. I knew, with great tears streaming from my eyes, that if we just were good to each other, despite it all; that if we just loved, heaven would become earth, by the single beat of a fully open human heart...

Naive? Probably. Childish? Guilty. Hippy dippy? I suppose. But on the other hand, yes exactly. We are, as I stated, born naive, innocent and those of us most individuated from my observation reclaim something of our child that never should have been exiled by the cunnings of social conditioning anyways. Remember that once? That unabashed lovingness? That uninhibited, constant laughter? That wish to continually embrace. The cuteness that hides still irrevocably, adorably, behind all this civil armour. I think we have far less to defend against than this world would have us believe. I think if we all just denuded in a field together under the warm sun, danced to some beautiful music and allowed our bodies and minds to be free we might believe in God all at once, together, in a united eruption of terrestrial joy...

I love you all. Whatever fucking side you're on, my gosh I just love you. Because I've gone deep enough in my own self-inquiry to find that field Rumi was talking about. You know the one, right? The one beyond right and wrong? The one where we are all naked, human and just naturally beautiful? We gotta lean into that, so hard, so fearlessly now. Our world depends on it. Now. More than ever. Forever...