[SPEAKER_00]: You're on Team Human, Conscious Intervention in the Machine. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Douglas Rushkoff. [SPEAKER_00]: Today, we're going to talk about escaping the simulation. [SPEAKER_00]: Please subscribe on YouTube or your podcast app, or even better, join through Patreon to get access to ad-free audios and videos, the Team Human Discord, invitations to premieres and exclusive live video salons with me, and free access to our live events when I'm on tour.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I just had my first vacation in like 25 years. [SPEAKER_00]: The last time I went away, or just me, was New Year's Eve, 1999. [SPEAKER_00]: And everyone thought that the Y2K bug was gonna mess up all the computers and planes would fall out of the sky. [SPEAKER_00]: It's a long story, but those of you who missed it, most computers, back then they had these clocks with only two numbers for the year. [SPEAKER_00]: like 98 or 99.
[SPEAKER_00]: And no one knew for sure how those systems were going to deal with representing the year 2000. [SPEAKER_00]: Would they think we were back at 00? [SPEAKER_00]: So I spent the turn of the millennium in a cabin on the beach in Tortola, resetting my soul as the world reset its computer clocks. [SPEAKER_00]: And 25 years later, I realized I was in need of a break. [SPEAKER_00]: Not a break from life, but from the Google calendar. [SPEAKER_00]: And [SPEAKER_00]: all the pings.
[SPEAKER_00]: As many of you know, I've had a pretty hard couple of years with family health stuff and other life changes. [SPEAKER_00]: And I did make some really profound shifts in the way I see things and process them. [SPEAKER_00]: My approach to activism has become less, less diactic and more alive. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm less an agent of change and more an agent of care.
[SPEAKER_00]: enacting social justice in as many little real life ways as possible instead of exclusively arguing about issues at scale. [SPEAKER_00]: But I still I needed a break and I also wanted to explore this more embodied somatic approach to experience more deliberately. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm a PhD in media theory but a perpetual [SPEAKER_00]: Tantra, breathing, and metabolizing. [SPEAKER_00]: So I signed up for a week-long workshop in Chamanic spirituality down in Costa Rica.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't easy to make that choice. [SPEAKER_00]: It wreaks of privilege, jet fuel, retreat, self-indulgent, new age, altered states, [SPEAKER_00]: But some good friends of mine had done this same workshop and genuinely believed it would be of benefit to me in particular.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that it would give us a shared vocabulary for a different level of experience, one that isn't really captured in the language of technology and social change, political activism, or even literature in the arts. [SPEAKER_00]: I justified it as a teacher going back to class to learn some of what I missed and that it would make me better at what I do. [SPEAKER_00]: Even beyond that, am I allowed a week with everything going on in the world and in my life and I said, fuck it, I am.
[SPEAKER_00]: That choice alone to take the time and space to get good with my existence, to get my shit straight, you know, it may have been the most important part. [SPEAKER_00]: I've been doing some workings here, a bit of magical practice and pauses to meditate on things for a moment at a time, but not really it's more like an occasional yoga class. [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's great that I get a lot of stuff [SPEAKER_00]: done and help lots of people or answer a lot of email anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's also a little disrespectful to this incarnation, not to live in appreciation of the physical reality I'm being afforded. [SPEAKER_00]: air, gravity, touch, the people in this room, right now, operating the equipment to bring this to you, right? [SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, I took a week to reclaim my body, my breath, my vital energy, and my arrows, and it was spectacular. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it is spectacular.
[SPEAKER_00]: From the outside, I guess it looked like a bunch of people doing psycho-drama enactments and exercises during the day and more tantric, shamanic openings in the evening. [SPEAKER_00]: But there's no need to go into the details. [SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't drugs or sacred plants, but practices that involved some touch and energetic exchange, not like dating, but what you might call, [SPEAKER_00]: transpersonal experiences.
[SPEAKER_00]: Still, they were intimate, the same way doing mushrooms in a small group is intimate with everybody combatabalizing everyone else's traumas. [SPEAKER_00]: Only here, we were combatabalizing with some joy and opening along with the traumas. [SPEAKER_00]: But more important for me, living in the body, led by more somatic impulses than the ones in my head, it changed something for me. [SPEAKER_00]: I stopped strategizing, manipulating and controlling things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, in these mental and physical spaces, there were no street signs to read or maps to negotiate. [SPEAKER_00]: Navigation or sensibility. [SPEAKER_00]: I decided to just let what was going to happen happen. [SPEAKER_00]: I had a really good time in opening, sharing, and being, and even just dancing in ways I hadn't before, at least not in front of other people.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was one person there who created, kind of, a field around them that made it feel so much easier to do this. [SPEAKER_00]: They were just connected to the earth of a moon or whatever it is. [SPEAKER_00]: And the mirror, [SPEAKER_00]: Presence of this person kind of created a permission structure for being real and vulnerable, open, least for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was this one big exercise, one shamanic experience that I had heard about beforehand that I was kind of nervous for. [SPEAKER_00]: It was an intimate thing on a whole lot of levels. [SPEAKER_00]: And while I love all humans, there's limits to what I and my current state of development feel great about all those humans doing with me or to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: The facilitators, they set up this ritual through which partners for the ceremony were selected [SPEAKER_00]: put pairs of matched items from the jungle on a big platter and you picked an item off a plate where you're blindfolded and then everyone else takes off their blindfolds and holds up the leaf or flower or whatever they took and then look around to see who got the other one. [SPEAKER_00]: That's your partner for this thing. [SPEAKER_00]: And sure enough, it was them.
[SPEAKER_00]: This creature of light. [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm thinking, oh, damn, they're going to be bummed, you know, and they were crying. [SPEAKER_00]: Not because they were bummed, but because they'd been hoping it would be me. [SPEAKER_00]: And in that moment that little lucky coincidence, it hit me that the universe really has my back.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether it's Anayah, the Archangel that my previous guest art in late connected me to, or or God, or just the fractal order of things, I've been held all this time. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, the experience itself, well, thank God it was this person who I trusted could hold me in these ways. [SPEAKER_00]: It was an art deal on the order of a heroic dose. [SPEAKER_00]: And I was totally emotionally and physically overwhelmed.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I felt, I felt this buzzing electricity, like a numbness in my hands and head, like when you hyperventilate, except [SPEAKER_00]: then it turned into this surge, like a sustained electric shock going from the base of my butt, right up my spine up the top of my head, I thought I was maybe having an attack of some kind, and I ended up curled up in a ball on the floor as this stuff just like cycled through me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the facilitators, they said later that it's called a Kundalini Awakening where all this dormant coiled up energy at the base of the spine, it rises and rewires the nervous system. [SPEAKER_00]: But it happened at the right time in my life and the right place and connected to a person in a moment so profound, I felt like I hadn't carnated during the same lifetime as them in order for that moment to happen between us. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I get it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It sounds like just a high. [SPEAKER_00]: But the heightened state, any heightened state, particularly when it achieved through a practice rather than a chemical, it isn't inaccurate. [SPEAKER_00]: It's just specifically revelatory. [SPEAKER_00]: And this experience or opening or whatever it was, created for me a new reality tunnel. [SPEAKER_00]: One that suggested something about the way my whole life and I'd argue all life works.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, so throughout my life and definitely more in my awareness right now, the right opportunities have opened at the right times for me to grow and become alive. [SPEAKER_00]: And the right challenges come at precisely the moments I'm ready to confront my shadow. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, there's a way in which the universe has been perfect to me. [SPEAKER_00]: It has my back, and that doesn't mean I've always recognized it, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: To the contrary, any true success I've had in this life has occurred in spite of my best efforts to resist it, or to make something else happen. [SPEAKER_00]: I got that loud and clear from this experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: But more importantly, I started to become aware of this other way of perceiving and navigating the world, a different compass, you know, the practice of so many of the guests on team human, Mitch Harowitz, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, [SPEAKER_00]: This other way of perceiving and navigating the world, that we may have been calling magic because it's not so easily identifiable, what's making it work, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it a spidey sense ESP, somatic awareness, retrocosality, shamanic wisdom, and [SPEAKER_00]: I want to be so bold as to assert that this shamanic, somatic awareness I'm talking about is the natural state. [SPEAKER_00]: It's not weird as spiritual or religious. [SPEAKER_00]: It's not made up of symbols or superstitions. [SPEAKER_00]: It's a level [SPEAKER_00]: before that, like below that, pre-linguistic and pre-symbolic.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the feeling you get when you put your palm on a tree trunk, you know, or you feel physically drawn towards something or someone you can't even see until you turn the corner.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or conversely, it's a feeling you get when you know you're off track that gentle Nudge from the universe like the Nudge you get from the seat of a fancy rental car when you drift too close to the lane divisor You know, and it kind of pushes your your seat a little [SPEAKER_00]: Now, there's this farmer, I know, who picks up a rock in order to know where to plant or find water.
[SPEAKER_00]: As if the rock knows or that holding the rock puts the farmer's body back into relationship with the entire history of the field on some elemental level. [SPEAKER_00]: language, math, and symbols. [SPEAKER_00]: They are great inventions, but they are maps, not territories. [SPEAKER_00]: They have their own biases, and they necessarily draw our attention off the lived experience and into the many grids of interpretation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even spiritual systems do this, spheres with names and levels of awareness and diagrams and phases with colors, it's great stuff, but not what I'm talking about here. [SPEAKER_00]: I believe there's an alternate way of navigating reality that involves finding one's core, heart, gut, Kundalini, whatever you want to call it, and then using it to lean into what's in harmony.
[SPEAKER_00]: and I don't mean to sound esoteric here, because it's really quite tangible and intuitive compared with the way we usually calculate our choices. [SPEAKER_00]: It's subtle and inexplicable, but quite natural, like the way the upper branches and crowns of trees and a forest will avoid mashing into each other. [SPEAKER_00]: They somehow sense each other and create gaps, so they won't collide as they grow and sway in the wind.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, people can do this using a modality of one sort or another, like, you know, taro or e-chang or even looking for those overt signs as they move through life. [SPEAKER_00]: And that's cool, but it still involves an interpretation layer. [SPEAKER_00]: does that black cat mean wrong way or right way? [SPEAKER_00]: Is it on the left or is it on the right? [SPEAKER_00]: Does the storm mean danger or cleansing?
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean if I'm going to play that game, I'd rather get the acknowledgement like a wink or affirmation after something than some sign from the ether I'm supposed to be actively decoding beforehand. [SPEAKER_00]: or a set of signs that makes sense to me after something had come to fruition, like a validation.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the phenomenon I'm trying to describe here, it's more of a real-time thing with no thought layer, like standing in the ocean and feeling the warm current [SPEAKER_00]: And it's there in every choice from what food to put in your mouth, if you're privileged enough to have that choice, to which gigs to accept or who to sleep with. [SPEAKER_00]: It's a subtle sensibility or a sensation at first, but it gets really loud, really fast.
[SPEAKER_00]: Doing the wrong thing starts to feel intolerably off. [SPEAKER_00]: And once you do the off thing, oh, you can feel it ripple through the rest of everything. [SPEAKER_00]: For me, it might be agreeing to do some podcast interview because I think it'll get me something silly, like exposure instead of because it's something I really want to do then of course.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the very same time slot, I'll get an opportunity to meet someone or do something special and it'll just throw my Google calendar out of sync if you know what I mean. [SPEAKER_00]: Leading to this cascade effect where every appointment's now in the wrong place and time and I can't even go to the best stuff, like a parking lot, where all the cars have to fit together just so and just one in the wrong place means you're going to have to move all of them, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: and these tools, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Things like Google calendars, but even more so that the maps and GPS metrics like wealth or any numerical value system, like likes, they all suggest we make our choices and navigate our paths, experience our success or satisfaction through external measures. [SPEAKER_00]: One's devised by people who do not have our best interests at heart and cannot even know our hearts.
[SPEAKER_00]: systems that can't know what we find beautiful, how it is we can best contribute to the collective welfare, how we can harmonize with the greater organism and play our part in everyone else's shamanic journey. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like a dance, but with no official steps.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our AI-driven world, it's a pseudo-reality, a symbol system based on a symbol system, on a symbol system, right, predictions based on written language, based on mouth noises, or opportunity based on agency, based on worth, based on jobs, based on corporatism, based on interest-bearing currency. [SPEAKER_00]: ones life becomes about making oneself legible to these systems through credentials or metrics or cash.
[SPEAKER_00]: And those who have become successful in those terms have a vested interest in negating and repressing the subtler but ultimately much more powerful ways the natural world really works. [SPEAKER_00]: You can only disinfect nature for so long. [SPEAKER_00]: You can only repress the feminine for so long. [SPEAKER_00]: The indigenous, the Kundalini. [SPEAKER_00]: It's more powerful than the prison of metrics with which we try to contain and control it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We look at its signals and nudges as noise to quiet, paranoia to ignore rather than love and light guiding us to more harmonious ways of being. [SPEAKER_00]: where two busy talking to shut up and start resonating, which is paradoxically louder and more impactful. [SPEAKER_00]: Our whole modern, technologized world is a symbol system. [SPEAKER_00]: We learn about in school so we can navigate or manipulate it as adults.
[SPEAKER_00]: We learn the street names instead of the terrain, the job titles instead of the social contributions, and pursue growth over wellness. [SPEAKER_00]: And that's a great example. [SPEAKER_00]: Why do we pursue growth? [SPEAKER_00]: Because we use interest-bearing currency, a money system devised by monarchs to turn cash into a utility they could charge for. [SPEAKER_00]: Nations care about the GDP growth, because it means banks can get paid for lending us the money we use.
[SPEAKER_00]: but it's a metric that guides choices and ways that don't serve the planet or people or anything. [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes even the best intention of us can make our choices and measure successes the development goals based on metrics, reinforcing the dominance of the maps that got us out of alignment in the first place. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm aware of how this feel your way through, use the four slew, Joseph Campbell, follow your bliss approach to reality, can come off as privileged.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, of course it is, it's privileged and while I'm not saying it's impossible for a person in a refugee camp to surf the shamanic waves effectively, it's a whole lot harder. [SPEAKER_00]: This hierarchical tyranny under which so many of us live was constructed to make it harder. [SPEAKER_00]: And I've navigated the maps well enough and was born lucky enough to get to a place where I have the latitude to make choices.
[SPEAKER_00]: But given that I do, if anything, it's not my privilege, but my obligation to make choices in ways I feel are consonant with the greater or more essential reality in which we live together. [SPEAKER_00]: If a tree is struggling to just grow, it may not have the energy or wherewithal to engage in the dance of crown shyness I was describing before, but those that do end up providing that struggling tree with a gap of sunlight in which to fortify itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yes, it's fun and rewarding to move through life in that shamanic way, and if you don't have to work on someone else's schedule or live in a prison or beg for charity, it's a whole lot easier to let go and let the universe sweep you up in her arms and bring you to all the right places and people and experiences.
[SPEAKER_00]: You still have to spend energy and effort and overcome obstacles and metabolize trauma, but you get to do so with the prevailing sense of rightness and integrity of being. [SPEAKER_00]: And the benefits they extend to others, because once you start moving through life this way, you come to understand how coordinated this whole dance is. [SPEAKER_00]: If you seize the privilege to act appropriately in any situation, [SPEAKER_00]: You're letting the calmic dance do its thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're removing the points of friction, lessening the exploitation, reducing the overall quotient of striving, lowering the collective cortisol, and freeing yourself to help metabolize everyone else's suffering. [SPEAKER_00]: If anything, not acknowledging and celebrating one's privilege in the moment for however long it lasts is the affront to those who don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you're privileged enough to turn off the pings on the phone or to schedule fewer bad meetings or earn less money, Yadam well should. [SPEAKER_00]: This whole capitalist and technological infrastructure has been fine tuned for its ability to keep us off the path and alienated from our deep sensibilities.
[SPEAKER_00]: A person with a mortgage is a more manageable citizen, just like a person with an Instagram account [SPEAKER_00]: and all those systems feed on each other, fast, packaged food, industrial agriculture, adolescent colon cancer, medical debt, click counts, AI, teen suicide. [SPEAKER_00]: And that's not even the real world. [SPEAKER_00]: That's the virtual world, the world built on language, money, politics, power, metrics, and other dead things.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the world, our media, and technology, and corporatism, and colonialism want us to mistake for reality. [SPEAKER_00]: It's the supposed real world we return to after watching a great movie or ceremony or having a dream or making love, but it's not. [SPEAKER_00]: It's the enforced illusion, the grid pattern of the city, the worth of retirement plan, the notifications on the smartphone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those of us who've had the privilege of escaping that virtual reality for moments at a time, for moments long enough to navigate solely and semantically rather than selfishly strategically, yes, we ought to do it, because it's not even a personal activity. [SPEAKER_00]: What you quickly realize is that we humans and other life forms are navigating this wave collectively. [SPEAKER_00]: How well we do is dependent on how many of us can retrieve these more essential sensibilities.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ratio of free living people to captive or unconscious ones. [SPEAKER_00]: We don't have to rely solely on propaganda to convince people to make appropriate choices. [SPEAKER_00]: Effective means no. [SPEAKER_00]: Not when we have effective means. [SPEAKER_00]: When we act with compassion and resonance in appreciative surrender to the way things are trying to unfold, we model something else.
[SPEAKER_00]: A collective shamanism, a shared awe, a glimpse of what it feels like to live on [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for being on Team Human. [SPEAKER_00]: Please subscribe on YouTube or your podcast app or even better, join through Patreon to gain access to ad-free audios and videos that team human discord, invitations to premiers, and exclusive live video salons with me, and free access to live events when I'm on tour.
[SPEAKER_00]: Team Human is produced by Joshua Chaplin and edited by Luke Robert Mason. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Douglas Rushcoff and you've been on Team Human our last best hope for Peeps.