I woke up this morning feeling mellow and relaxed.
The shopping and wrapping are mostly done.
We roasted chestnuts (in the toaster oven, not on an open fire) last night.
In spite of the fact that our son is now a newly minted legal adult, he joined us for our yearly watching of the 1964 classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. We all laughed at the fact that in this particular portrayal, Santa and most of his other minions are self-absorbed jerks…just like we do every year. It was nice.
Waking up and feeling mellow is great, but it can also mean that the fire—the fire that tells me what to write—just isn’t there.
Hmm…
I could go #Redpill and talk about something horrible in the news. For example, did you see what the Colorado Supreme Court did—ruling that Donald Trump cannot be on the ballot there because he led an “insurrection”?
Unlike most people, I neither love nor hate Donald Trump. He is what he is. I don’t even much care about mainstream politics anymore. But I certainly know that what happened on January 6th, 2020, was not an insurrection, nor did Trump lead whatever it was. The only insurrection here is what the Colorado Supreme Court are doing.
Nah—that’s too dark for this lovely almost-Christmas morning.
I could, of course, continue my efforts to #Freepill the world. I could piggyback on the Colorado story and start talking about how even if the Supreme Court there had done the right thing, democracies, constitutional republics, and any other governmental or legal systems to which one does not explicitly consent are all morally impermissible. I could even justify it all with carefully constructed logical syllogisms.
But most of you lovely subscribers have heard me hit those notes a lot recently, and for my new subscribers…trust me, you’ll be hearing it a lot more!
So it has to be the #Happypill. But what happy or fun thing to talk about?
Stomach grumbling, I grabbed a big bowl of my homemade granola and sat down to read an article from
(one that I had wanted to read yesterday, but time got away from me). It is titled Affecting the Consciousness of Humanity Rhizomatically, by Demi Pietchell, and I strongly commend it to you.I recently heard Jordan Peterson mention that Friedrich Nietzsche once said that he could accomplish in a single line of text what most people do in a paragraph, a page, or a whole book. I was reminded of that while reading this piece. I could think for a week about every sentence. It is the kind of article that needs to be read a dozen times.
And ultimately, this article is a major Happypill.
In brief, Ms. Pietchell discusses various ways in which individuals’ consciousness, choices, and actions can interact to form collective-consciousness phenomena.
At first, this did not make me especially happy. I could write a monograph as to why, but I have a big day ahead with family, so I will just provide one brief example:
In 2020–2021, whatever sanguine feelings I had about “humanity” in general were washed away in a tide of compliance, cowardice, and blind acceptance of the narrative.
I had expected Americans would never bend the knee to tyranny. They did. I had no idea that so many people could be so easily hypnotized. They were. I had no idea how fragile our “free country” really was, and how easily our people could fall into the typical totalitarian hierarchy.
Call me arrogant, but I am not feeling especially disposed to being rhizomatically connected to everyone. If there is some sort of human-energy analogue to the mycelial network through which trees exchange chemicals and information, some part of me does not want to be a part of it. I would much rather choose my connections.
That may sound rude, but…well, I’ve always been honest with you, and that is, in part at least, how I felt while reading the first half of Pietchell’s piece
.
I mean, think about it: Do things feel right to you at the moment? Or do they just feel…off? If there are scientific reasons for collective zeitgeists, then, based on what happened during covid, what hope do we have? Indeed, the whole history of the world does not cushion the blow of that thought. The collective conscious has a lot to answer for. Do I want to be connected to that?
What’s more—I believe that our nature as social animals can so easily become pathologized and tyrannical, and the notion of a collective consciousness doesn’t really make me feel much better in that regard.
But then came the Happypills…
If humanity's consciousness unfolds through the interactions of living minds, then collective change requires personal transformation. Shifts in mass consensus evolve from the bottom up. Just as roots nourish the plant, it is the awakening of individuals that enables society's flowering.
That is good. It means that each of us can do something about it.
And we have reason to do the right thing:
Each person we touch then propagates change through their own networks. When new perceptions spread organically from heart to heart, they can ripple through collectives and communities. Conscious relationships weave the individual into the social fabric in a way that uplifts everyone. The more goodwill flows between us, the more humanity's roots flourish.
I write about something similar in a book I am finishing up…
The things we do, both good and bad, can impact people far beyond the first recipient of the action. We can devise any number of imaginary scenarios to illustrate this phenomenon…
It’s lunchtime, and Person A sees restaurant leftovers in the break-room fridge at work. The leftovers are clearly labeled with someone else’s name, but Person A chows them anyway.
Person B only had a short time between meetings to eat, but someone ate his leftovers. No time to get anything else. By the end of the day, he’s really hangry, but he needs to beat the traffic, so he doesn’t stop. In an effort to make a light, he cuts someone off, and when he hears a honk of protest, sticks his middle finger out the window as he drives away.
Person C just got cut off, and then flipped off, by some bozo. He had already had a bad day—now he’s really irritated. The traffic, not to mention a couple of other insensitive drivers, seals the deal. By the time he gets home, he’s in a foul mood. But this was the night his wife had chosen to try to rescue their struggling marriage. He finds her standing in the dining room in a red dress, beside a candlelit table, with a lovely dinner all ready to go. Before he can stop himself, prompted by his lousy mood, he makes a thoughtless comment. Devastated, his wife runs from the room. That, as it turns out, was the pivotal moment. From that point forward, their marriage goes downhill and soon ends.
Of course, nice gestures can reverse the outcomes. Person A could have shared his food with Person B who later smiled at Person C and let him go in front of him at the light. Person C then arrives home in a pleasant mood and, upon seeing his wife’s gesture, says just the right thing…whereupon she throws herself, red dress and all, into his waiting arms. It’s the first moment of the rest of their lives.
Ripple effects are real!
Still, it wasn’t until this moment in Pietchell’s article that I felt genuinely happy:
By working skillfully with relationships, we can develop growth that flows against the tide of mass consciousness. Even as dysfunctional patterns dominate society, we can focus upon building more enlightened foundations. A change in culture emerges through collaborations of awakened individuals. Our lives become growth medium for each other's development.
This is the moment where Pietchell gave me hope that even though “dysfunctional patterns dominate society,” a small group of us can form our own node of connections that “flows against the tide of mass consciousness.”
Whether or not such a node might one day have an effect on the larger body of consciousness, I do not know. I don’t really want to impose any way of thinking on anyone else.
Indeed, if I could impart one idea into the collective consciousness, that would be it:
Stop trying to force everyone else to live the way you think they ought to live. Just live your way and, if it be a good example, others can choose to follow.
I think we’re still a ways away from broad acceptance of that as a human axiom. However, believing that we, as a small group, have the power to walk together in that direction is a hopeful thought.
I have not decided yet how many more times I will post before Christmas Day, so if this is the last time until then, then let me just say that I am happy and proud to be forming a local node of consciousness with all of you here on Substack!
Thank you so much for these reflections - I'm so glad you saw where I was going with that. As someone who works by teaching and by practicing what I preach, I pretty much reached the same conclusion you did, but I paired it with the fact that, if I am a node, I can be a hub, and as a hub, I can be a strong sender and help others to think through and slough off the programming. The other *really cool* way that it works is how we were both thinking the same thought at the same exact time yesterday even though we had no way of knowing that would occur. To me, that's not sending/receiving - that's resonance. Having resonant frequencies with those around you often produces that same result. And it was amidst discussing how our points of view resonated. So I saw that as a clue to what was going on there. Fascinating stuff!
Thank you so much for the lovely piece and for the shout out! Cheers! 🙏🏻💜💫
Great piece Christopher. Consciousness really is it! Our mind, heart and emotions go out and affect others. Once that’s understood along with Natural Law principles and we are united within in the way we think, feel and act; change can come about through consciousness. If this can be done at a mass scale, tides would turn. We just have to keep doing the work on ourselves, with each other and the people who want to be free but don’t have the framework yet. I really enjoyed reading this and I hope you have a great Christmas with your family. Look forward to reading more of your work in 2024.