Greetings,

I’m really tired of being used by a corrupt system to keep it generating more corruption. And that is too much of how debt is used in this country.

In this episode, my guest is Marie Megge, a Michigan-based debt counseling expert who is not easy to find because she doesn’t use your money to prop up her company through expensive ad campaigns. But once I did find her as sought help to come out from under insurmountable debt post-divorce, I wanted to offer a way for my audience to find her, too.

Marie and I discuss a range of issues related to the debt industry, but the primary focus here is how you can use her knowledge to help yourself become unstuck from a corrupt system that is all too willing to let you suffer so they can profit.

I do want to give you the heads up that not all of the aspects of the industry that I had wanted to cover made it into this podcast. So, I will do a follow up!

In this episode, Marie and I discuss:

* The moral injury the debt industry hinges upon

* How to ensure you don’t get scammed by debt counseling firms who can be jsut as evil and predatory as the banks!

* How much energy and hope can return to your life when you have help facing an industry designed to make you feel badly about yourself

* How long it takes to restore your credit rating once you’ve entered into debt settlement negotiations

* The process of debt negotiation itself

What I will circle back to is:

* How and why banks assign our credit ratings using secret metrics that allow them to justify whatever interest they want to assign.

* How interest rates often are irrelevant to the lenders’ calculus

* How they remain profitable regardless of whether we ever pay off our credit cards.  

Thanks for listening. Please share this episode with as many people as possible.

Peace,

Whitney

And if you’re curious what News from the Ensouled Universe is…

Greetings,

You would not be wrong to count me among the astrologers who have proclaimed the ingress of Pluto into Aquarius as a time when power will shift to the people.

But what the heck does that mean, and if power isn’t already with the people, where is it then? And how did power get where we aren’t the ones who have it?

In this conversation with Australian astrologer, Cassandra Tyndall, I explore these questions and get Cass’s fresh, frank take on the Plutonic potentials for people to liberate themselves from trauma, from mind control, and from empire.

First things first, according to Cass: we must reckon with the ghosts that are returning, the pain points of colonialism, the secrecy hidden at the top of trickle-down templates. But also, we must admit our inability or unwillingness or both to take personal responsibility.

The problem, says Cass: “People aren’t ready to be challenged, yet.”

To that end, you might be surprised to hear our respective views on the cosmological underpinnings of “cancel culture” and how the next two decades of Pluto in Aquarius might not be as rosy and calm as some astrologers — myself included — have initially proclaimed. This conversation offers a peek at a recalibrated calculus of the steps we must dance if we’re to obtain the freedom we seek.

I am still certain we will get there, “there” being a place where we are liberated from our conditioned responses to see each other as other, and will instead just grow the f*ck up and get on with kindness and innovation, not anger and blame.

More likely, it will take these next 20 years to till and seed the ground for Pluto in Pisces when universality will be the astro-tone.

And we will then be ready to responsibly handle the power we say we want.

The inspiration for this interview comes from a YouTube video Cass released earlier this year, where she challenged the prevailing astrology community to reconsider that Pluto in Aquarius will not be all that we have thought, but will instead force us to confront the tremors of feudalism. It’s something we address in this interview.

This is a longer than usual podcast, and yet there was so much more we could have explored. Thankfully, Cass has agreed to return later this year. I hope you will be as excited as I am to welcome her now and in the near future to deliver her take on the news from the Ensouled Universe.

To learn more about Cassandra’s work: CassandraTyndall.com

Still to come…

T. SUSAN CHANG

Coming soon to the docu-mental podcast is a disscussion with the astoundingly polymathic T. Susan Chang, whose approach to her many disciplines, which range from policymaking to sewing Tarot-themed comforters, to teaching creative writing, to cooking, and more, is derived in part from her Classics training at Harvard University.

Although Susie’s voice might be familiar to many in this audience as a food commentator and cookbook reviewer at NPR, we’ll primarily be discussing her expertise in archetypal mythology as made practical for every day living through her latest book, The Living Tarot.

My hope is that our discussion will give you ideas for how to reframe our quotidien existence, with all its trials as well as triumphs, as an endless psychodrama where we encounter ourselves by way of encountering the Gods.

Use the Substack app for easy navigation of all your favorite content

The Substack app aggregates all your Substack interests in one place. And if you have any questions, you can contact me through this email and I will be happy to help out, too.

Here’s the link to download the app:

Thanks for listening!

Peace,

Whitney

Greetings,

It’s a bit of word jazz on this episode of the docu-mental podcast. I wanted to have Ethel on last year when he was nominated for a Grammy for his spoken word album, Black Men Are Precious, but the time wasn’t right for either of us.

So, instead, we have a little spoken word back and forth of our own, debating whether it’s the Christonationalfascists who are winning, or just whomever is clever enough to turn off the infostream long enough to hear themselves think.

Two particular bars of thought music worth noting in this episode are the reveries on rediscovering our myths vs. reimagining everything all over again; and, whether AI will force us out of our old stories and into being present for the now.

And if you pay attention, you will hear the strains of me confessing my ETs on earth theory, or at least a significant portion of it.

Ethelbert has been prolific of late, publishing about a book of poems a year since the pandemic, the latest being We Eclipse into the Other Side: Twoness Poems, a collaboration with poet and translator, Miho Kinnas.

Previously, Ethel was a two-time Fulbright scholar in Israel, the chair of the Institute for Policy Studies, and for more than 40 years, was the director of the Afro-American Resources Center at Howard University.

Peace,

Whitney

docu-mental: mapping the american states of mind is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Greetings,

What’s the point to life if there is no joy, no beauty, no clean dirt to play in?

Such a line of questioning is the current that runs through this conversation with novelist, podcaster, and all-around muckraker, Greg Olear. It’s Greg’s second visit to the podcast, this time to talk about Sunday Pages, the pause for reflection he offers in between his other work uncovering the “fuckery” of fascists as part of PREVAIL, his home on the Substack platform.

Greg and I laugh a lot as we enter into a deep — and deeply irreverent, yet never irrelevant — conversation about the importance of art and beauty in politics in order to “recharge the spirit”, and why today there is a movement afoot to quash and control the words we use.

It’s an erudite conversation, but not a stuffy academic one. And there are a few salty words, which makes things tasty.

We discuss the rise of fascism in the US, whether it’s been there all along, and whether and how it might continue. We muse about the role of the Roman Empire in spreading Christianity and how that impacts our public policies today, prompting me to posit my theory that we might be “misremembering” the actual nature of the birth of Christ and all that was supposed to mean for humanity, a theory that scandalizes the Jesuit-educated, Catholic-raised Greg (but only for a moment).

Plus, Greg reads a few lines of poetry and shares a funny story about a bar in Hoboken, New Jersey and a little ditty called Jessie’s Girl, and we agree that residents from the Garden State tend toward a certain practicality we’d all do well to aspire to…

Which is why we agree that in a democracy, even fascists should have a voice, regardless of whether it’s dead wrong.

Thanks for listening!

Peace,

Whitney

docu-mental: mapping the american states of mind is a reader-supported publication. Podcasts are free to all, but for access to all content, please consider becoming a patron subscriber.

Greetings,

It’s great to be back with another season of the docu-mental podcast!

In this episode, I asked Dr. Gwilym Morus-Baird, a professor of Celtic mythology and Medieval literature, and founder of the Celtic Source series of courses, how he views the utility of ancient myth as an effective counter to today’s propaganda.

Think dragons and magical swineherds vs. Tucker Carlson or Don Lemon.

I wanted to know whether myths of old can clue us into what systems of governance our ancestors found effective before empires, including media empires, came in and smashed everything to bits.

Dr. Morus-Baird and I end up talking about direct democracy. We also talk about how pre-empire there were morals and beliefs that did indeed work. We just have been trained to forget them because previous systems, if left intact, will eventually threaten the status quo held in place by the Powers That Be.

The key to power is narrative, according to Dr. Morus-Baird. So, I wanted to know: What narratives in the myths of old still resonate with power we’ve yet to reclaim? How do we get that power back? And, once we do, how do we wield it in order to liberate us from the current dumb s**t we’re force-fed by the corporate media, by our politicians, by our corporations, by anyone who thinks they can get away with disempowering us because we’ve shown them that they can?

It’s a discussion that flies by, so be prepared to listen close and to consider how when you think you’re catching up on the news, you’re just getting indoctrinated.

All power is myth, says Dr. Morus-Baird. And I say, all power is apolitical.

Keep that in mind as we consider how a “love of the land” is far too often turned into jingoism and hatred of others instead of a way to express love and support for the earth and all those who live upon it.

And surprisingly, because they cling to the same top-down paradigm, so-called sustainability proponents themselves only perpetuate an exhaustion of the earth, not a regeneration of it.

Why? Because without myths and language that reflect an inside-out understanding of how we actually come from the land, we won’t ever treat it with respect. As long as our mental constructs hinge on hierarchical, empircal thinking, we will continue to view the land as separate from us.

For example, what are “sacred lands”? Why isn’t all land sacred? The languages that preceded the Romanization of our thoughts with the relentlessly left-brained Latin, told of one world: Nature. There was no super-natural. Everything was natural.

I just love this conversation. It’s fun, smart, and provocative, and kind. We leave behind the angry derision in that “tone” the Department of They, as in the “they say” folks, all seem to speak with these days.

I think you will enjoy it, too. And best of all, you will start to notice the manipulation all around you, if even just a little bit more. And then, you can decide to ignore it, or better still, think beyond it.

The questions are yours for the asking. All you have to lose is nothing. All the Powers That Be have to lose is your attention…and their hold over your mind.

One last thing, don’t forget that on May 15, much of the content in docu-mental will live behind a paywall. This is my job, and you are my investor. What is this effort of helping you test your truths to develop deeper mental roots worth to you? If you are unable to invest financially, please share these posts and podcasts with others and leave comments below. It all adds up! Thank you.

Peace,

Whitney

Greetings,

At long last, the promised interview with Alice “Ace” Sparkly Kat, author of Post-colonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor.

It’s an important piece in our examination of the sentiment that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of Capitalism, the end of the hierarchy we have invested in, yet which cannibalizes us all in the end.

I tried to keep the conversation focused on the book’s innovative way of viewing the deleterious impacts of hierarchy, being mindful of not alienating my non-astrology audience.

However, for context, just know that as far as astrology goes, Ace deconstructs what the various planets in our Ptolemaic solar system (the 7 heavenly bodies we can see with our naked eye) have been assigned to represent pre- and post-Roman Empire.

She asks us to consider whether the assignments are actually helpful to us as we develop relationships with the greater forces in our lives, with ourselves, and with one another. If these assigned meanings are not helpful, why not, and what other interpretations make sense to us instead?

This interview is an excellent follow-on to the podcast I did with author Brian Muraresku about his book, The Immortality Key, a New York Times bestseller linking psychedelics to Jesus, but also to the way the Roman Empire quashed access to the Eleusinian mystery ceremonies where psychedelics were featured, and where women priestesses guided initiates to the world beyond, the one that once we are reassured exists, imparts meaning to our lives lived here.

From my perspective, it was at that moment in history that whatever evil there is in the universe that seeks to stamp out the glimmers of human liberation and continual reunion with the Source, found its foot soldiers in the Roman Empire.

They trashed the Republic, stamped out Antiquity’s emerging democracy, orchestrated the hostile take-over of the Eleusinian mysteries, and established hegemony through the Empire’s subsidiary, the Roman Catholic Church, which sold to us the Eucharist as a sanitized version of the mystery that was more like a bait and switch: “Come for the communion, be separated from your true self by the holy hierarchy!”

Yes, the Roman Empire engineered sewers, sanitation, roads and running water, but did so on the backs of slaves and others, all of whom they forbade to partake in the woodland Eleusinian mystery ceremonies that the Eucharist is based in. Thus, the Roman imperialists achieved subjugation by separating the people from themselves, orienting them instead toward the Roman leadership, or as Ace says, “towards capital,” and away from their internal governor, the one that naturally regulates one’s longing for commune with the Greater Source.

In other words, an orientation towards capital/the capitol is unnatural. But we’ve been conditioned to think it is the only state of existence to which we can aspire, if not through the church, then certainly through our system of Capitalism packaged as the only way to ensure democracy.

Is there any wonder, then, why we feel so much anxiety and depression here in the US? We know instinctively we are not living in our natural state, but we don’t know how or why. It’s been so long, across so many generations, that we’ve been conditioned to accept that we can only access higher truths — and liberation — if someone packages these things and distributes them to us first.

And all the while, we’re told we’re free, simply because we are Americans, or that as Christians, we will be “saved” because we are obedient. Obedience is not freedom.

These are the kinds of questions and considerations that make Ace’s book not just culturally relevant, but important. As I say in this interview, to one degree or another, as long as we do not consider the origins of our stories, then we are all living a lie, even if we are not liars.

Race and astrology as forms of ‘magical thinking’

Even if you never give a glancing thought to the stars, it is possible to consider what Ace posits, namely, that just as astrology is a language of symbols and myth-making, so too is race a product of fantabulous mythologizing — a form of “magical thinking” says Ace — using agreed upon symbols to construct stories that ultimately turn into policies, which then become oppressions, because the symbology supports only those empowered by what the symbols are said to represent.

Or, as Ace writes in her book, “Both astrology and race are social constructs and are rooted in the circulations of culture.” Ace’s work suggests that those who insist upon seeing racism as merely an “interpersonal phenomenon, rather than composite matrices of domination that limit access and freedom,” are in essence abnegating their own powers of imagination, instead submitting themselves to the will of “the powers that be” rather than take ownership of their lives.

Which is why I love this book as an American cultural critic first, an astrologer second.

It challenged me to re-consider how we use and relate to symbols as ubiquitous as the Sun, for example, which we equate symbolically with power. The Sun is the source that allows everything to exist. It is also used to justify total surveillance, power over, and extermination of what is “dark”, as in dark-skinned. While I might never have explicitly attributed these meanings to the Sun, I have never thought to challenge how they are implied when we accept them without questioning their etymology.

For example, as Ace points out, royalty throughout history has always equated the Sun with gold. They have also tended to hoard that gold, burying it in the ground. Thus, royalty and gold, as well as the power of the city-state where the gold was buried, have been implied by the Sun.

Following a global gold mining boom in the late 19th century, the mineral was circulated briefly as a currency up until the first half of the 20th before being taken out of circulation and once again buried in the ground in vaults, primarily beneath London and New York, where it remains.

Once again, the implication is that gold is therefore artificially scarce, and so artificially exclusive, all while still being associated with the Sun. The result is that the Sun is considered both life-sustaining, but also exclusive. This helps justify at whatever conscious level it might be to some, why some humans “deserve” access to resources, and some do not. It is also therefore, justification at whatever conscious level, for why some humans “deserve” to live and some do not. Ergo, racism, and in the extreme, genocide.

Original Sin: hierarchy v. white supremacy

One question which came up in our conversation was the notion of Original Sin in the context of which came first, hierarchy or white supremacy.

The logic I follow, derived from the years spent mapping our national conscience through this publication and podcast series, suggests that hierarchy came first as a default mode, and all manner of subjugation hence flows from it, including white supremacy, and thus racism. Is this the correct framework? I don’t know.

Either way, I state unequivocally that for us to believe racism is merely a “personal” perspective and not an institutionally enforced one is to believe a pernicious lie. Racism is real because our policies continue to acquiesce to it. They do so, because our foundational beliefs, represented by the symbols our hierarchy has collectively agreed represent “reality”, command them to.

Regardless of whether white supremacy supersedes hierarchy or if it is the other way around, our reasons for its existence must be interrogated. Indeed, philosopher and professor George Yancy writes that racism is our ontological reality.

That is why patching “fixes” like Affirmative Action, for example, onto our policies without first asking ourselves the underlying rationale for the policies that hold the system in place, is ultimately useless.

Racism’s damage to the collective is real. Tinkering incessantly with our broken system without addressing the precepts it was founded upon is a waste of time when we have no time to waste.

Lies sanctified by society without question, such as that the Sun equates with some of us being worth the time and energy, and others not, also wastes human resources.

To not question our systems of faith-in-action is literally a matter of life or death.

The infinite resource of mind

Regarding the heavenly spheres anew caused me to do some thinking out loud in the interview, and I appreciate Ace’s patience as I considered familiar things as though for the first time, verbalizing both my epiphanies and my misgivings.

This interview with Alice Sparkly Kat once again stresses for readers of docu-mental the notion we’ve been exploring, that we stand to lose far too much power the more we allow others -- the news media, the church, the digital giants, any cult that seeks to brand us -- to aggregate our attention and distract us from knowing and using the power of our own minds and imagination.

How much gatekeeping to the Beyond do we actually need?

The question returns us to how the Roman Catholic Church used the language and the ceremonies of the people Roman emperors wanted to subjugate. It took the same words about liberation and hope for the life beyond, and used them to keep people enslaved.

Reorienting away from capital, from Capitalism, does not mean poverty or whatever dismal and demonic scenario the hierarchical top spooks us with. It simply means we become the gatekeepers to our imagination, the only infinitely renewable resource on earth, and the gateway to what lies beyond this life. It means we re-orient to ourselves.

If there is a lesson here, it is that perhaps it is easier to imagine the end of Capitalism than it is the end of the world. That in fact, to not do so is to ensure the end of the world. That we’ve not imagined such a future for ourselves collectively is a fait accompli of the hierarchy who stands to lose access to our hearts, minds, and lives if we do imagine a future that is not mediated.

That is why toppling the hierarchy begins and ends with our imagination, and why we must guard it as though it is as precious as the Sun.

The liberation of a post-truth world

What these past five years in the US have shown us is that we live in a post-truth world. At first, I saw this as terrifying. But now, I find it liberating.

We can untether ourselves from truths that are lies, but not the consequences of our actions taken as a result of adhering to the lies as truths.

That we have or have not done something will always be the fact of any matter. Saying something didn’t happen when it did is not changing our mythology, it’s lying.

But we can change our shared truths, our national myths, and thus help shape our actions and their consequences, by understanding that cultural precepts like race, like astrological symbols, like political parties, like gender (yes, gender — one’s capacity for sexual reproduction is biological, gender is not), are nothing more than agreed upon stories. That our cultural truths might be “fabricated” or “made up” does not negate their power nor its meaning, since they are attempts to describe what is ineffable – the eternal Real of existence.

Instead, the more we consciously participate in infusing our symbols with meaning, the more meaningful they will be, and to more people.

We are making it all up, but whatever we choose to create, it will matter.

And that is the truth.

Peace,

Whitney

The podcast for this is linked at the top.

The video is here.

Time stamps/chapters of podcast are below.

About that comment on Jung’s racism and sexism in this podcast…

One thing which came up in my conversation with Ace was her take that Carl Jung, considered the father of Depth Psychology and the world’s most “famous astrologer”, was racist and sexist. Many would agree with her, while others might suggest he was simply a product of his cultural moment.

Either way, he certainly made statements about the planets and the unconscious that were categorically binary, and made questionable comments about the nature of the unconscious, even though as Ace’s own investigations show, such statements were not always justified.

I think it is worth having a more thorough discussion about this, since both Jung and Sigmund Freud respectively were, along with William James, progenitors of American psychology and psychiatry. Since this is about mapping the american states of mind, I am looking into who can come on the podcast to address the larger context and considerations of Ace’s statement. More to come…

W

Timestamps for Alice Sparkly Kat and Post-colonial Astrology:

0:00 Intro and discussion about the name Alice Sparkly Kat

5:00 Myth-making depends on who controls the language that frames access to the archetypes

8:18 Race is not real, it is not biological; begins with religion.

12:30 The “traditional” mythology of the Sun

16:45 Why do we consider astrology as “western”?

21:00 The exciting phenomenon of deconstructing astrology while also using it to build community

31:00 Is astrology spiritual or habitual?

39:00 Mental health definitions “are made thought a middle class (male) white lens”

48:00 Colonizing the moon for “real”

52:00 Astrology’s appeal to fascists and neo-liberals

59:00 Resisting the colonization of our minds

1:06:00 The liberation of living a life not “received” but examined

Greetings,

This podcast episode with Acyuta-bhava Das, an ayahuasca vision quester and now a spiritually focused astrologer and bhakti yoga practitioner, is the third and final in our series exploring the intersection of mental health, psychedelics, and democracy.

The tone and feel of this conversation is cozy and inviting, largely because of the energy of my guest. When I re-listened to it before posting it, I was yet again captivated by Acytua’s positive wonder at the world, inflected with a deep wisdom gained not just from being in more than 100 ayahuasca ceremonies, but also from having a mind and body trained on what truly matters in life. Best of all, as Acyuta and I discuss, this peace of mind and state of hope and expectation is available to all of us.

Born Adam Elenbaas, Acyuta grew up a Methodist preacher’s kid in a family haunted by various personal demons, as he describes in his book Fishers of Men: The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest. An addiction to opioids and other drugs along with a spiraling depression eventually culminated in a dabble with psychedelics. Whereas he thought he would have fun taking the novel drugs, instead Acyuta (then still known as Adam) had a “magic mushroom” induced spiritual crisis that led him to want to know more about what was beyond what we perceive only with our eyes.

It was then that he sought help from ayahuasca shamans in the Amazon, where use of the bitter purgative brew is contextualized through ceremony and spiritual practice.

The psychedelic ceremonies helped Acyuta end his addictions and depression, and inspired him to become a bhakti yogi, a spiritually focused astrologer and teacher, and a noted expert on responsible psychedelic use.

I have been so blessed to bring you all three of these conversations about psychedelics, as each has been nuanced, rich, funny, and also mind blowing. The “mind blown” quality not just because they are about psychoactive drugs, but because this entire series has opened new lines of questioning that even I didn’t anticipate. It has shaken apart the ossified structures of old beliefs and pressed for us to think how we might build new, more flexible, authentic ones.

Even though my online journal’s full name is “docu-mental: mapping the american states of mind”, I really hadn’t understood how intricately linked our mind is to democracy.

What brought that home hard for me was the conversation with author Brian Muraresku about how the Greeks of the Antiquities could have brought us science as well as democracy, while also serving up all the strange tales of Gods romping with humans, sexually and otherwise. It seems it was their use of psychoactive substances that took them from the “logical” to places where wisdom was gleaned from the gods in fantastical ways, simultaneously metaphorical yet real, and in that way the most “real” of all. In other words, the Greeks were the ones to access and translate for us the archetypes of earthly existence, an essential understanding for humans if we are to evolve.

This is why being in possession of our minds is essential. If we keep outsourcing our innerspaces to the attention merchants who aggregate our minds, then profit from them by dimming our capacity for imagination and authenticity and instead making us slaves to the various cults of branding, we will never achieve democracy. We will never be free.

So, then. What can psychedelics teach us about how to be and stay free? That is, even if personally, we never choose to use these drugs? (And, as I mention in all three interviews, I have not ever used psychedelics and so do not speak from direct experience.)

That is the focus of my discussion with Acyuta. The funny thing is, we never really talk long about the psychedelics themselves, but instead, about the greater lessons learned from allowing there to be more than one paradigm of reality.

The questions raised in this interview still have me thinking about how to frame reality in a post-truth world where liars and visionaries can be hard to tell apart.

My conversation with Acyuta truly is the most enlightened and enlightening discussion about the nature and necessity of hierarchy I personally as yet have been fortunate to have – and one which I am doubly fortunate to be able to share with you in this podcast.

I so highly recommend you listen. It’s an opportunity to spend time with a person who is real in ways that are beyond “real”. The discussion will inspire you to think differently about what matters in your life, and whether you are emphasizing those things or letting them slip away.

But it will also give you hope that creating a meaningful life is always, always within your power.

The time stamps/audio chapters for this conversation are listed below.

Here are the other posts and podcasts relevant to this conversation:

Why you should care who controls psychedelics - docu-mental (substack.com)

Howard University exemplifies cancel culture, but not without our help - docu-mental (substack.com)

Jesus, psychedelics, and democracy: how to clear the 'soul rot' between heaven and earth - docu-mental (substack.com)

Peace,

Whitney

Time stamps for audio chapters:

0:00 Introduction

1:41 What does name Acyuta-bhava mean?

3:50 Story of what led him from being a preacher’s kid who’d become an opioid addict, to a psychedelic vision-quester who inspired his sister and preacher father to also use psychedelics

9:45 Description of what using psychedelics feels like, and how it changes one’s perception of self and of world

11:23 The adventure of mind v. escaping pain

14:18 The group experience of the same visions during psychedelic ceremonies emphasizes importance of ceremonial context v. recreational or therapeutic without care for soul

21:50 Not respecting context will lead to “colonization” of psychedelics, and will have dire consequences

25:00 True “shamanism” v. New Age b******t

32:10 Illuminating discussion about how and why science being “neutral” is still a proactive stance. “Every paradigm, including science, creates things, has a point of view, and so has ramifications.”

35:55 Nature shows us the way to play with our myths, stories, and ceremonies to make them relevant to each new era

37:30 The implications of this for policymaking

41:00 What questions are necessary to ask if we are to go around Big Pharma to control our own access to resources of transcendence?

45:00 Earth in peril because science can’t cure greed.

47:00 Description of hierarchy in action: being ayahuasca ceremony listening to things being killed and eaten in rain forest. Understanding of hierarchy as a necessity, and as something to learn to engage with, not conquer. Discussion of what happens when trying to overtake hierarchy.

52:00 The importance of “spiritual technologies” such as yoga, to move us beyond thinking in only one paradigm.

54:00 Progress without spiritual evolution leads to cynicism.

57:00 Current disruptions to our paradigm such as new UFO info, other events, demonstrate need for new tools, but how learn without indoctrination?

1:04:00 The essential nature of kindness to evolution and to working with the gods. It invites them in, among many other things discussed.

1:10:00 Narcissism and kindness are antithetical.

Greetings,

He demurs when I say it, but this podcast is my interview with our era’s equivalent to Galileo, Brian Muraresku.

Whereas Galileo challenged church doctrine that the Earth is the center of Cosmos — and so was put under house arrest until his death — Muraresku similarly has challenged church doctrine by connecting the dots across many specialties to convincingly argue that the Christian church is predicated on the Dionysian mystery cults for which hallucinogens were essential. (Of note: he had the Vatican’s help in doing so.)

The time stamps for this podcast are listed below if you want to get started listening right away. Otherwise, read on for more about this book and its author.

Muraresku spent nearly 15 years in search of this personal Holy Grail, a quest he scintillatingly recounts in his New York Times bestselling book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name (St. Martin’s Press).

The relatively young classicist and practicing lawyer has illustrated that the mystery of Christ’s transubstantiation, known to Catholics and others around the globe as the holy Eucharist, is aligned with Greek Eleusinian and Dionysian mysteries where the “wine” of Holy Communion wasn’t an alcoholic beverage, but an herbal, psychoactive brew, known in Greek as pharmako.

Muraresku cites plenty of sources from the Antiquities indicating that drinking the special brew led to initiates experiencing a sort of rapture where they communed directly with the All beyond what is mortal, and found they no longer feared death. Further, through his impeccable research, Muraresku illustrates not only is there a through line of psychoactive substance use running from these ceremonial mystery rites, through the early secret cult of Jesus, to today’s psychedelic trials, such as the ones discussed in the previous episode of docu-mental, but that what has kept that line humming is the experience of divine communion.

But wait.

Muraresku has also rigorously connected the dots between scientific and other evidence to rightly interpret the Gospel of John to suggest the Church as it is today wasn’t exactly what Jesus had in mind. Instead, it was the plant “kingdom” and its administration by women — particularly mature women — of its mediating properties that were the rightful ones to bridge heaven and earth.

While Muraresku does not say this, I suggest in our interview that if what his scholarship points to is true, and I think it is, that makes the founding of the Church predicated on a lie.

That is to say, the Roman Catholic Church deliberately misinterpreted the Eucharist, paving the way for the linear hierarchies that have lead to today’s existential angst globally.

While I found the whole book exciting, I was particularly taken by Muraresku’s citation of an obscure Roman Eleusinian mysteries initiate, Praetextatus. It was he who successfully, if only temporarily, defended the mysteries from the Christian emperor Valentinian, who wished to end them in 364 (AD). Praetextatus claimed that the Eleusinian mysteries “[held] the whole human race together” and that life without them would be “unlivable”.

In the end, however, the Roman authorities eventually did do away with the mysteries, at least as they were administered in homes by women, typically the “grandmothers” of the group who had the correct herbal knowledge. Instead, the emperors et alia outlawed the priestesses, did away with the hallucinogens, and made it illegal to worship at home. Then they developed a male-only rite of the Eucharist which was wine without the psychoactive substances, and made it available only in the church.

In essence, the hierarchy domesticated the mysteries.

I suspect that through these mysterious rites, grounded in the worship of Demeter, goddess of grains and the harvest, the seeker Praetextatus had a vision that prophesied precisely where we are today. That is to say, by having domesticated the mystery, we have also domesticated the Goddess/Mother Nature, an act that has led to the increasing unlivable conditions on Earth, where the rate of extinction has wiped out nearly 60% of all global wildlife in the past half century, and climate catastrophes regularly now decimate the biosphere.

As docu-mental has covered in these past three years, this original act of domestication has now played out over the centuries not just as monolithic religious authority, but also as late-stage Capitalism, Socialism, Communism. It doesn’t matter what name it takes, it’s just one big story of how a pervasive authoritarian blob has seen to the perpetual enslavement of humans everywhere, whether literally or figuratively, oppressed by the top line who has all of the power, but ultimately takes care of itself, rather than show it feels a responsibility to any of the rest of us.

We feel it as anxiety and depression, a swelling of existential depression. The Earth feels it as death.

The Jesuit-educated Muraresku still avers his Catholic upbringing and admits that a globe full of faithful Christians is testament to there being something of God in the church. At the very least, it suggests that not everyone needs to use psychedelics in order to seek God.

And while I left organized religion years ago, and never fully felt committed to it when I was a part of it, I see beauty within it. I believe in the goodness of Pope Francis, and that if any modern era pope were ever to “get it”, it would be him. I also believe in the sincerity of many other ecumenical leaders. I certainly believe in the sincerity of those who find comfort within the church.

And yet, the hierarchy must go. It’s not real. It’s not what God, Goddess, All That Is, nor apparently even Jesus intended. And it’s killing us and our planet.

How it came to be that any human ever got a notion that it was okay to ever own another human being is a question for another day, but that itself seems in these pandemic times the real virus, the cancer of the mind. As I ask my guest in this interview: What is the point of having power over everything if the natural conclusion of doing so is the destruction of everything? Please don’t be so facile as to say that it will be at that moment rapture happens. I’m no biblical scholar, but neither am I simple. And neither is the answer to this question.

What is the solution, then? How do we engage with one another so that we can dismantle the deadly structures and create better ones that do not enslave us to them? So that we can allow the planet to evolve as Mother Nature intended, not obsessively bend her to our will?

We start by asking the question of what our actual heritage is as Americans. Is it Greek or is it Christian? And if as a democracy it’s Greek, why do we not insist on citizens having a classical education? Why are Latin and Greek barely taught in this country, and why do we know virtually nothing of the Antiquities which provide the moral foundation of our Constitution?

And I also think we might put ourselves in the shoes of those living during ancient times when slavery also existed, but so did the mysteries. Where might their civilization have evolved had hierarchy not usurped the fledgling spirit of true democracy? As has been pointed out by a previous docu-mental guest, American University associate librarian, director of research services, and Hellenic High Priestess, Gwendolyn Reece, PhD, equal justice — not enslavement — for all was essential for democracy to work.

It’s a perilous time, frankly. It’s a time when one of the most celebrated Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Howard University in Washington, DC, has just announced it is dissolving its Classics Department, as Muraresku reminds us in this discussion.

This is troubling not just because the black community has been at the forefront of leading this nation from its Greek and Christian roots, as evidenced by the writings of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who turned to Socrates as inspiration for his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, but also because, as Harvard professor Cornell West wrote recently, “Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture.”

Talk about “cancel culture”.

Without the classics to inform our soul, we might as well do away entirely with privacy, too. We won’t need our hearts, minds, and desires. We will be entirely at the mercy of the hierarchy.

My final thought on this is to share something Muraresku’s book elucidated clearly for me in my constant quest for what could bridge our current divide between soul and science.

By posing the question, as he does, as to why a society as highly sophisticated as the Greeks, who not only would discover and develop the foundations of today’s science, but who also were engaged in developing a democracy that, given a chance, might eventually have led to women and slaves being given the same rights as men, would also engage in the so-called silliness of gods and humans comingling.

The answer was in the mysteries. Put plainly, the Greeks had a very sophisticated form of spirituality that had the potential to work hand-in-hand with a democratic government to effectively balance heaven and earth. The silliness was the sublime.

I take that to mean that democracy would only work if the feminine principle was kept in balance with the masculine one — neither is more important than the other, just different.

Practically speaking, that means if we don’t respect nature and see her through the eyes of sustainability, democracy is moot. It’s impossible. The cycles of nature and the women who represented those cycles were the fulcrum of understanding we are part of a larger story, that we do not actually die when we die, that it was not the male-dominated church or any other hierarchical, linear construct that would ever make that truly possible.

As Muraresku himself suggests (p. 73 of the hardback version of his book), the bridge to the Great Beyond and back is only possible when the wild is in balance with technology. There is no one or the other. There is no hierarchy if we want to survive. There is only both at the same time, in balance. As Praetextatus warned us, the mystery is the only way.

Science. Mystery. Soul. Not science trumps soul. Not soul trumps science. There is only the integrated whole where all parts matter, regardless of their intrinsic nature. Hierarchy kills. Domination is deadly. Dominion, peace, and kindness, however, are not only possible, they are the only way to support life on earth indefinitely.

E pluribus unum.

This is why at a time when psychedelic research is poised to make possible the scaling of their use for the masses, particularly for those who report existential depression, I hope enough of us will pause to ask better questions. Who should be in charge of these drugs? For what reasons? What does their power to deliver transcendence imply not just for individuals, but for the societies where individuals find themselves existentially troubled? Is it prudent to offer the power over these drugs to the very systems that perpetrate the existential depression?

I suggest it is only classically, critically educated minds that can skillfully ask such questions about where we’ve been and why, and whether where we are headed is in fact aligned with democracy.

To not rigorously challenge the status quo’s version of history —whether it is that of the Church, the corporation, or a political party’s line — will mean that with the re-emergence of psychedelics, we are ready to let the hierarchy insert itself between us and God all over again.

We might as well kiss democracy goodbye, and hope future generations will be lucky enough to have their own Galileo and aren’t so stupid as to let the moment pass.

Peace,

Whitney

The time stamps of this podcast:

0:00 Introduction

2:00 The “best kept secret in history”

4:10 The Road to Eleusis, by Carl Ruck, Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, published in 1978: the first public statement about paleo Christian psychedelic use

7:30 The three pillars to the work: the Eucharist as a continuation of the pharmako and Dionysian mysteries; the Pagan continuity theory; and the idea that through the mysteries “We can die before we die so that when we die we do not die”

13:00 What does “blood of Christ” actually mean; the implied and literal cannibalism

15:00 The Gospel of John’s symbolic language for equating the Eucharist with the Hellenic Dionysian ceremonial mysteries; John 6:60

17:30 Dying before death (the immortality key), while also achieving communion with other worshipers, with God, and with the Earth

22:00 Today’s psychedelic drug trial participants overwhelmingly report that just one psychedelic experience is the most meaningful, spiritual one in their entire lives; what they report seems to mirror what occurred during the Dionysian mysteries.

24:00 The Roman Catholic Church usurps, and domesticates the mysteries “inserting” itself between the people and the pathway to know God

25:00 Psychedelics are a way to “die before death” so that death no longer becomes a fear because there is an understanding that when we die, we continue on in a different, non-material form

32:00 Why would the Greeks, the founders of democracy, of philosophy, of science, also have the soap opera-like tales of the Gods and not see any issues with integrating all three? Because they had access to the mysteries through the use of the pharmako, which we now call wine, but which was far more that just a wine as we know it today. It was more like the psychedelics of today.

34:00 The current crisis in our democracy is relevant when framed according to what the Greeks were able to achieve by being mature, spiritual adults who could work with the complexity of science, soul, and mystery.

34:30 The Gospel of John was an invitation to be both an initiate into the mysteries of Jesus/Dionysus, as well as a democratic participant in a society that was still developing democracy while also struggling with the question of slavery and inequality for women.

37:00 Praetextatus’ prophecy, which might have been a vision from the pharmako, now coming true: killing the mysteries, kills the planet.

39:00 The importance of not alienating humans from nature, the importance of kindness and group consciousness were demonstrated by the Dionysian mysteries. All of these things are essential to democracy, and are synonymous with health.

44:00 What would happen if we micro-dosed everyone on Capitol Hill? Would it grow our leaders up?

45:00 The importance of ritual as container for other-worldly experiences

48:00 Jesus sought to preserve, not domesticate, these mysteries, and was essentially the first heretic by urging his followers to worship in their own homes.

49:00 What is the true American heritage? Greek or Christian?

51:00 Greeks had democracy, science, and a very advanced sense of spirituality that accepted there is an afterlife. Classical education for our citizenry now would make this possible for our democracy now.

57:00 Fears of turning pharmaceutical companies into the next mediators of our capacity to touch the face of the divine.

59:00 The coming First Amendment challenges spawned by psychedelics.

1:01:00 The dangers of handing over power to the very systems that have for centuries been the ones to keep us “domesticated”.

1:04:00 Giving away the power to define what and how we experience the “immortality key” seals our fate as slaves to the System. Conversations like this one are what can alter that fate.

1:05:00 The importance of teaching how to be citizens through the classics.

Additional Resources:

Exterminate All the Brutes (hbo.com)

Howard University’s removal of classics is a spiritual catastrophe - The Washington Post

How Settlers Convinced Themselves They Were the First Owners of America ‹ Literary Hub (lithub.com)

The use of ritual to help clear the "spiritual pollution" of our democracy and start again - docu-mental (substack.com)

Why you should care who controls psychedelics - docu-mental (substack.com)

Healing 'mind cancer' - docu-mental (substack.com)

What stopped the FDA from taking tougher action sooner in the opioid crisis, and why it will happen again - docu-mental (substack.com)

Erratum: I mention in this episode that next week’s guest Acytua-bhava Das experienced about two dozen ayahuasca ceremonies. It was, in fact, over 100.

Greetings,

Continuing with our look at what we might have lost of ourselves and our traditions through the brutal, national acculturation process over the centuries, is this tender and provocative conversation with Delta David Gier and Emmanuel “Bull” Black Bear, two members of the Lakota Music Project.

Based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the project began in 2009 when Maestro Gier, artistic director of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, sought ways to serve the community at large. The result was a partnership with various members of the Sioux Nation, primarily those living on the Rosebud Reservation. Bull is a member of the Ogalala Sioux and is the leader of the Creekside Singers, a drumming and singing group from “the rez” that also now forms approximately half of the LMP’s total musicians.

Until the pandemic made performing impossible, at least for now, the LMP performed widely across the state, bringing their blended form of Western and indigenous music to audiences of all races, and in so doing, helping to effect inter-racial harmony throughout the region where racism against American Indians and indigenous skepticism of white “gringos” are prevalent.

I first was introduced to the LMP in 2019 when they performed here in Washington. I wrote about my experience attending this concert, and how it reminded me of time spent in Indian Country (and native Hawai’i as well), where time is a state of mind, not a linear construct to help us achieve progression from point A to point B.

How would it be possible, I wondered, to combine the music of a culture that responds to its environment, with the music of a culture that is predicated on controlling its environment? In fact, as both the maestro and Bull describe in this interview, it was not easy, but the difficulty was where they found their success. By putting aside egos and accepting that the point was less perfection than it was to build relationships, the LMP has created cultural bridges between the worlds of red and white, and still another bridge to a place where race is irrelevant: the place music takes us when language is limited.

It is in this place that the two leaders of their respective musical ensembles realized they shared the same goal. By assuming the mantle of what Gier calls “professional listeners”, together, he and Bull built trust in one another, their communities, and a way forward to peace an understanding that would not be possible without including the traditions of the past.

And that is why I think the LMP has much to teach us now, in this moment when our institutions have largely failed us all, rending our nation in tatters, leaving us to wonder how we ever will advance with a clear idea of how all the disparate parts of our multi-racial selves fit together.

My specific area of interest this year is in our traditional medicine, but it is deeper than that, as you likely have noted. My interest includes not just the ways we have traditionally treated illness in this country, but how the choices we have made around medicine and healing have never been in a vacuum, even when we have forgotten this fact.

We are never isolated, even when our commitment to what is shiny, fast, and novel might give us that impression. Instead, we either function within our environment, or become dysfunctional when we lose touch with our place within that environment.

I do not profess to have more than a neophyte’s appreciation for the sounds of native drumming and singing, and I am deeply reverent of my own Western musical traditions. Each moves me when I listen, but with different effects on how it engages my senses. Both ultimately will deliver me to a transcendent place, but the former is organic while the latter is measured.

As humans, we need both. It is our nature to make sense of things, to order and name them. But when we do so at the expense of remembering that ultimately, we are all connected to that which we parse, that nothing exists beyond the circular continuum of being, even if we are ingenious enough to lay it out on a timeline so we can experience it incrementally, then we come to believe the lie that we are separate. Our current legacy of healthcare demonstrates the expense and inefficiency of this approach.

The truth is, we are all connected, and we live within a world holistically. The need for reform is the evidence-based proof of how we have left too much of our elemental power behind in our focus on advancement. Jung might say it is time for us to look back now, and to retrieve the shadow of our former selves if we are to continue that advancement.

Dr. Victoria Sweet told us about how Slow Medicine is the way to exist and heal within the circle of life outside of the moments when the need for direct, acute response has passed. Physicians and healthcare systems that have access to both of these rhythms, I believe are the ones that are best equipped to treat and heal communities to their fullest, most complex potential.

It is this lesson in harmony and humility I was confident the LMP could offer us in our examination of what a compassionate and effective healthcare system of the future might look like. In my vision, it is a system of care that remembers we are all part of the environment, where each of us needs the right amount of rain, sunshine, fresh air, and nutritious food, a place where when we are denied that balance, we suffer and fail to thrive. My vision also recalls that while our modern health technologies are also essential – and inevitable, given that being human is to create and innovate – conquering and dominating the environment where we seek to effect healing is not.

We need both, but the importance of one – the ego, if you will – cannot precede the necessity and importance of the other.

Below are the video chapters in this short podcast/video.

Don’t forget, later this month (exact date TBA) — Ensouled: the online journal of applied and cultural astronomy.  It’s an anthropological approach to humanity’s relationship to the heavens over the eons.

Also to come later this Spring…

I have begun conducting interviews with prominent members of the vanguard of psychedelic medical research. First up will be a truly provocative interview with Scott Aaronson, MD, clinical research director at Sheppard Pratt in Towson, Md., one of the nation’s oldest psychiatric facilities, and now home to the Center of Excellence for psychedelic medical research for treatment-resistant depression, sponsored by the mental health company, Compass.

There is a lot of debate in the venture capital community currently, as to whether there should be proprietary gains from therapeutic molecules found in nature, and I will address that in time, but my conversation with Dr. Aaronson centered on the implications of taking people on trips, so to speak, when the guides in charge might not be sure of how to navigate the mind-blown-wide-open terrain.

Thanks for reading and listening.

Peace,

Whitney

The Lakota Music Project Podcast and Video Chapter Markers:

0:00 Introduction

5:00 Partnership decision made to create better, more just world for Bull’s son

8:30 Difficulty to come in on just the right note

11:15 Music as a process of feeling, not counting

14:08 How two worlds come together

18:00 First you trust, then the music just happens

20:33 The marriage of two traditions improves the lives of those from each

28:21 Belief and faith in the process of each other brings integrity to all

30:55 The role of a “professional listener”

32:50 Music is what our souls hear and helps us thrive and heal

35:00 The death knell of music’s power is when it is commodified

Greetings,

This weekend, I have been watching a series of military troop transport aircraft fly past, including the spooky tiltrotor MV22 Osprey, and a few other assorted planes. Some fly up and down the Potomac, others fly across the city, likely to Langley, but I am not sure where they are headed. I’ve spoken often about the choppers, but in going on a decade of having a window over Washington, I haven’t ever seen the troop transport planes fly from West to East over the city.

So, you know. Normal times.

But astrologer Elisabeth Grace, who specializes in reporting the news through the lens of what is called “mundane” astrology, tells me not to be too sad about what appear to me to be fascist times. It’s all part of our nation’s growing pains, according to her.

“Part of our growth as a nation is to finally own what we said we were all about,” Elisabeth says in this recording (the podcast version is linked above, just under the headline).

Mundane astrology is the study of how planetary movements signal shifts on earth, and how those shifts have the potential to play out in our politics and economies. What we’re experiencing now in the US, including the insurrection, might not have been predictable in terms of an exact event, but that there would be sedition and refusal to accept reality was predictable, according to Elisabeth.

In this recording, which features Elisabeth in her second docu-mental appearance, this one exclusively for patron subscribers, we examine in great detail how to see the final weeks of the Trump regime in context, including his cultish followers, his Russian and Congressional enablers, his coming financial and legal woes, his daughter’s potential rise to greater power, and the energy flavors of the incoming administration. Naturally, we’ll also explore what to expect from the inauguration this week, and what it will signal to our allies and enemies alike, as well as what energies will befall the QAnon crowd, and why they want to believe what they do.

Elisabeth also explains some basic astrology terms for the uninitiated, and discusses the US Constitution’s own natal horoscope and what to expect as it also faces energies of change.

There are plenty of reasons to be scared, worried, and angry right now, and for the next several years, she does admit. But! There are far more reasons to be excited, optimistic, and hopeful.

I hope you enjoy this fun, zippy, and alternative take on news of the world. If you are inclined, leave your comments below.

Thank you for being a patron subscriber. Special note: all that healthcare and medicine stuff I am promising…it’s in the works, and it’s coming. But times are troubled, and I don’t want your mind to be.

Peace,

Whitney

Show notes:

Elisabeth Grace Astrology

Hiding in Plain Site: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of Democracy in America by Sarah Kendzior

Gaslit Nation, the podcast with Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa

Dirty Rubles: An Introduction to Trump/Russia by Greg Olear

Olear’s article on members of Congress known as the “Moscow 8” who are in Putin’s pocket

A game theorist’s analysis of QAnon

Note: docu-mental’s coverage of The Blacksmith is a joint venture with DC Metro Theater Arts. You can read a slightly different version of this feature and review/preview of Opera Lafayette’s production of The Blacksmith, here. The video interview above and the commentary in this feature is exclusive to docu-mental.

Greetings,

Take any decent road trip through the American West and you’re bound to pass half-a-dozen old opera houses in varying states of disrepair, or repair — if there happens to be a local renaissance underway. That’s because contrary to what you might expect, opera houses were essential for offering respite to the dusty rustiness of life on the frontier, being as they were the venue for itinerant entertainers, politicians, preachers, lecturers, and other speakers with news from back East.

Put another way: outside of the saloon, especially if a settlement lacked a strong enough contingent of righteous folks to see to there being a church erected, the opera house was the Old West’s quintessential all-comers meeting place.

And so it is with Mancos, Colorado, where a downtown rebirth  is underway, the centerpiece of it being the opera house built in 1910, when the frontier was still rough. It’s a movement co-led by ranchers and artists, many of them retirees from the rat race, or newcomers fleeing fire-ravaged coastal areas. The collaboration is worth noting since, even if so far, there haven’t been any shoot outs, there has been plenty of hollerin’ over what constitutes correct land use and water rights, pitting oldtimers against the newbies.

Still, the shared vision is that the opera house will become a thriving performing arts and community center, a small business incubator, and all-around place where differences can be put aside and friends and enemies alike can come together, learn from one another, and focus on the future, while not forgetting their past, whether or not is a shared past.

Standing ovation from the socially-distanced audience for a performance of Opera Lafayette’s The Blacksmith, at Reddert Ranch in Mancos, Colo. Photo: Paul Boyer.

Enter into this fray, the Washington-based Opera Lafayette, which earlier this year was set to premiere its Old Westernized version of The Blacksmith (Le Maréchal ferrant), an 18th-century French comic opera composed in the mid-1700s by François-André Danican Philidor with libretto by François-André Quétant. OL stage director and musical arranger Nick Olcott along with OL founding artistic director and violinist, Ryan Brown, set their adaptation of the work in an 1890s American frontier town.

The premiere was intended as the restored opera house’s gala fundraiser opening night back in May, but then ol’ covid came riding into town and busted up the whole shindig. Of course, the show must go on, and so it did, even if a little later than planned.

This past October, with audience members seated on hay bales placed 6 feet apart, the show premiered on the Reddert Ranch just outside Mancos, the working cattle farm that has been in Brown’s family for generations, and where he has spent nearly every summer of his life.

Turns out, Reddert Ranch is also home to an historic blacksmith shop that served as the perfect backdrop for two well-attended, late afternoon performances, both of which were held on behalf of the Mancos Cattlemen’s Association and the Mancos Creative District. Each performance ended just as the sun was setting over the La Plata Mountains, not far from Mesa Verde National Park.

Full cast (L-R) Sarah Shafer as Jeannie, Arnold Livingston Geis as Cody, Dominique Cote as Marcel the Blacksmith, Joshua Conyers as Eustis, Pascale Beaudin as Claudine, Frank Kelley as Slim MacBride. Reddert Ranch outside Mancos, Colorado October 2020. Photo Credit: Paul Boyer.

The Blacksmith is typical 18th-century comedic opera fare: father arranges marriage for his daughter, daughter wants to make her own choice in love, daughter wants man who also happens to be her aunt’s object of affection, a fight breaks out, daughter accidentally “kills” their mutual paramour, chaos and comedy ensue, the dead comes alive, everyone sings about how they will now all live and love happily ever after.

It’s silly, but it’s human. And of course, no one lives happily ever after, they just live their lives, and everybody knows it, too. That’s why comic opera works, and why, once this particular show was re-worked to reflect the local memes and meanings, folks went nuts for it.

But there’s more to it than a good time was had by all. It was performed on the land, and above all else in the West, it is the land that matters.

Opera Lafayette founder and artistic director, Ryan Brown with musician and horsewoman, Lynne Lewis. Photo: Whitney Fishburn.

That’s what makes this interview with Maestro Brown and his friend and fellow rancher and musician, Lynne Lewis (who also plays guitar in the adaptation), so special to me. It’s a talk about music but it’s really about the place that we romanticize as the heart and soul of what America “is”: the Old West. And it’s a place that is finite, and people know that, too. Ain’t no one making any more of it, no matter how many of us want a piece of it.

It’s that scramble for limited resources that turns one group against another in our nation, forcing us to ask who deserves those resources more.

And yet, there is another way, we just don’t want as a nation to admit it: a return to how most indigenous peoples see the land. That is, that we belong to it. It does not belong to us. It is what hosts us, feeds us, provides for us.

This interview, the sixth video in the series docu-mental: healing the american states of mind, takes us back to the first and second videos where we considered how to move forward as a soulful nation, we need to own our sins, which include how we have treated the indigenous of this land, and enslaved black Africans.

It also connects with our third video, where we discussed how the performing arts can help us to create the necessary rituals for us to come together as a nation, but also as micro-communities, where it is easier to find common ground and values that bind, even if they do so in overlapping circles, where we might share a love for our local land, but not share a love of the same political point of view.

In that spirit, in this conversation, through the lens of a Westernized version of a French comic opera, with thoughts from two musicians, yes, but also two ranchers, we get to the heart of what’s been bugging all those other ranchers and newcomers to Mancos: who is entitled to the land and all it has to offer.

It’s important for the integrity of Brown and Olcott’s actual artistic intentions, to state that a discussion about land use wasn’t the point of their adaptation. That was more along the lines of how to succeed at the challenge of whether the use of cowboy vernacular and American folk tunes to “break the fourth wall” that separates the audience from the stage was possible.

Yet, what they have achieved offers the opportunity for anyone who cares to take it, the chance to consider what’s really at stake.

Some in this nation love what land like that in southwestern Colorado, and so many other places, can do for them, and so don’t really love the land itself, but the idea that it can confer power that others then can’t have, hoo-howdy! That’s sexy.

But, if you have been as lucky as I have been to spend a fair amount of time out West, riding, singing, hiking, or just visiting with folks who live on land, it’s impossible not to notice that these people really love the land. They also respect it. They have to! It’s beautiful, but it’s also dangerous. And even if they wouldn’t say it outright, they understand what it means to belong to the land and not the other way around. Howdy boy! That’s sacred.

It might not be in our respective lifetimes that it happens, but I envision there will be a day where, in part because we are moving to an increasingly virtual world, it will become natural to live according to the belief system still inherent to the indigenous nations of this continent, the one that doesn’t have us dominating the land, but living in dominion with it, and we will create economic systems and policies accordingly.

One reason I believe this is because, without the land we die. Enough of us are starting to understand at a basic level that simple, obvious, critical fact. It might take a while before those who want power over instead of partnership with the land die out, lose their grip, or otherwise get out of our way, but I believe it will happen.

And we can live at peace with our national soul again.

Although Brown demurred in an interview to affirm or deny whether his opera had outright helped heal the divide in his mountain town, he did acknowledge the feedback from The Blacksmith attendees was overwhelmingly positive, and described other opera projects he is hatching to more directly address what he called “hot button issues” on the minds of his fellow Mancosians.

“Everyone was all smiles and happy about what they were there for,” says Lewis. “Yeah, there’s a unity there. Not that it’s permanent, but it’s the kind of thing we need.”

Which is why once again, my faith in the power of the performing arts is redoubled.

Anytime opera demonstrates its power to tell stories that show how rifts can be mended, even if it’s with humor and silliness, we have the opportunity to remember what is possible once we put aside our differences: peace and prosperity.

When you listen to this interview, keep an ear open for the cattle lowing in the background…they’re there!

Tickets and other information for Opera Lafayette’s online production of Philidor’s The Blacksmith (Le Marchant ferrant) are available here. A live, one-time event on this Sunday, November 15, 2020, 2:00 p.m. (EST), includes a pre-show discussion with Maestro Ryan Brown, a virtual screening of the show, and a post-performance conversation with the artists.

On-demand access to the show runs from Nov. 16 through Nov. 29, 2020.

Here are the timestamps for this interview:00:00 Introduction

11:30 By internationalizing opera, we've removed it from its power to speak to local audiences

12: 38 Opera's role in reminding communities what they have in common in times of culture clash

13:00 How opera can help bridge the old time ranching and newcomer crowds in Mancos and elsewhere

15:00 What happens in the communal experience of attending an opera

19:00 How opera gives us a lighthearted way to vet our culture wars and fights over shared resources

20:51 Ryan tells a story of how a Native American Indian shows a middle way to seeing past the problems created by our current cultural views on land ownership

23:30 How our system gets in the way of our mutual values and love of the land and what can we do about it?

30:00 The enduring power of money in the arts and how that impacts the future

32:33 How has our romancing the West helped to ruin it?

39:00 How micro-communities and their forms of entertainment helps foster decency among neighbors and lengthens and deepens the experience.

43:00 What we have lost to the past we can re-discover and merge with current technology to strengthen our communities

If you enjoy docu-mental, please take a moment to consider others whom you think might also like to learn more about the different ways we americans are finding peace and mental stability in these less than stable times and forward to them this or others of your favorite issues of docu-mental.

In the past year, we’ve covered a range of topics to do directly with mental health, as well as our spiritual and soul needs as a nation. Please take a ramble through the archives for podcasts, videos, and essays such as:Etsy for your mind: the world’s first marketplace for mental health tools

Brain science is showing us what ‘normal’ is. Can it also help us evolve?

The use of art as ritual to help clear our country’s spiritual pollution

Democracy doesn’t evolve us, but it requires evolution

Ending ‘spiritual bypassing’ to build a better nation

Thoughts on complexity, god, messiahs, and the ‘Magnificent Work’

9/11, Coal Country, and what it means to be great

There’s still more to come before the year is out, but looking ahead to 2021, you can expect improved production values and more in-depth interviews, including with avant-garde musicians and composers who are deliberately making a statement about the mental, spiritual, and soul status as americans, as well as from cutting edge researchers and others investigating ways for us to find peace and balance. I’ll be bringing news from the frontiers of science, history, and other fields to you, and also sharing the ways you can access it without intervention from third parties whose primary goal is profit.

And if you’d like to become a patron subscriber, or give a gift subscription, here’s where to find the details:

You’ll get more content — shorter, but also more personal, quirky, and often lighthearted — like this outtake from the interview above that includes Lynne Lewis, rendering her version of The Blacksmith, along with Maestro Brown sharing his thoughts about the challenges and rewards of repurposing opera using American vernacular.

I also like to talk a lot about birds, so if you’re a bird jock, you will enjoy my spring migration updates for Washington, and other thoughts about nature, which for me, is how to heal ourselves. Nature never judges itself. It just is…and that’s some powerful juju to experience first hand, especially since we’re so filled with meanness these days.

Thanks for your time and attention.

Peace,

Whitney

Greetings,

It’s rare that docu-mental publishes on Sunday, but that is the way things turned out in this week of ghosts, goblins, and now with this issue, astrologers. Today for many is known as El Dia de los Muertes — The Day of the Dead, also All Souls Day (although apparently, some calendars claim it is tomorrow). And of course, Tuesday, November 3rd, is our election.

What do all these events at this time have in common? It is not the spookiness, the goons, nor the horror, but the liminal. It is a time of the in-between, when what comes next is either a continuation of what was, or a chance to pass through a portal to what has never been.

And so, I thought it was time to offer something completely new and perhaps unexpected to my audience.

But first, a story.

Cum hoc ergo propter hoc

“Just because two things occur simultaneously does not mean there is a cause and effect,” the head of the National Cancer Institute once boomed at me from across his desk. “Cum hoc ergo propter hoc. It’s Latin for, ‘With this, therefore because of this,’ but it isn’t, and I don’t see why the authors of this paper want to say that it is, so this interview is not worth the time.”

The doctor glared at my video crewman.

Thinking quickly, I dropped the offending study I’d been sent to discuss with Dr. Rosenberg, and changed the topic to the latest research coming out of the NCI – research where cause and effect had been established, and which would go on to be covered widely – and so managed to get some footage of the doc, even if it wasn’t what I’d been assigned to cover.

Aside from the incident being a reminder that an alarming amount of crap science gets published and routinely makes it past those of us who should know better, even if I’d already understood that just because two things are true doesn’t mean they are causative – a core tenet of scientific research -- being reprimanded by one of the nation’s top scientists helped ensure the maxim is always top of mind any time I examine data.

Yet, I have found that over-emphasizing the need to prove causation also runs the risk of missing the bigger picture. Things we might perceive as true, and so accept as part of the fabric of our lives might never reveal to us their true “cause” despite the most painstaking evaluation. For example, I cannot prove a causative correlation between the rise of our reductionist materialism and our national epidemics of anxiety, depression, and suicide, but my observations that their trajectories correlate is are certainly worth study.

We can know how things work, without ever fully understanding why they do.

Put another way, we might not ever know why two things might be true, even if we can show that they happen simultaneously. In philosophy and religion, such analyses form the basis for questions of fate and fortune. Economics, history, and sociology also rely on noting how patterns and cycles might co-occur consistently, affording a fair degree of confidence in forecasting future trends, and thus alerting us to our choices in how we might respond.

In this interview with mundane astrologer Elisabeth Grace, whose newsletter tracks and correlates planetary movements with world events, I explore this notion of correlation vs. causation. Just as I believe there is a correlation between economic cycles and our mental health even if I cannot prove causation, Elisabeth knows how to correlate how the orbits of Saturn and Pluto to predict say, the rise of authoritarianism globally, and especially here in the US, even if she does not know why this is so. These kinds of correlative observations of world events and astronomical events form the core of the field of mundane astrology, and yes, it is an actual scholarly field, even at the university level in some countries such as the UK.

By the time I discovered Elisabeth’s work, I was already familiar with the work of Richard Tarnas, author of Cosmos and Psyche, the seminal work on mundane astrology. The tome tracks the orbits of the planets through history, drawing attention to distinct patterns of planetary transits occurring at the same time as historical events such as the rise and fall of authoritarian regimes, world wars, pestilence and plagues, and good stuff too like the Renaissance of the early 1500s and other re-births of the arts and humanities.

It’s part of his larger operating theory that these events are evolutionary, and are part of a larger plan that we do not know, but which involves the evolution of the Cosmos itself through its Psyche. Why this might be so, that is a mystery, but it calls him to wonder and suggest that our current insistence upon the reductionism of cause and effect means we are missing the larger point of our collective experience.

Why does Psyche want this experience? We do not know.

Tarnas is a student and colleague of Czech psychiatrist, Stanislav Grof, a pioneer of transpersonal psychology, especially the use of psychadelics such as LSD to lower conscious barriers in order to conduct as much as possible, an unfettered exploration of the human psyche. Tarnas and Grof, formerly of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, now are both associated with the Department of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where they have written and lectured extensively about what they call the “enchanted world”, the cornerstone of their ultimate conclusion that the human mind is of the same “stuff” as the mind of the universe; that it is ultimately all one consciousness. Put another way, our human consciousness is a cosmic phenomenon, and does not arise from biological processes, but that biology arises from it.

As an aside… Tarnas’s research into the history of Western thought, world events, and planetary movements came after establishing that there were some in those early psychedelic studies who would have really “bad trips”, and others who would have positive ones. Also, sometimes the ones who had good trips would suddenly have bad ones. Why? After noting the correspondences between planetary movements and the study participants’ charts, Tarnas et al concluded it was because, essentially, sometimes the stars truly did not align in support of a person altering their mind/consciousness at that time.

To my way of thinking, the enchanted world theory is not the same thing as the Intelligent Design movement which seems to me to have become an Evangelical Christian flavored system of reductionism, claiming to have the universe all sorted out. However true to a scientific method geophysicist Stephen C. Meyer, creator of the Intelligent Design theory, himself might be, proponents of his pro-Intelligent Being Universe Creator theories seem to me to want to use his work to justify their belief in a masculine god and their entitled claim to the hierarchical status quo.

The levels of guilt, shame, and fear necessary to keep that “truth” locked in place is not only absurd, they are as nihilistic as reductionism, in that they demand stasis, which is of course antithetical to growth and change. It cuts across all areas of our lives: in religion it manifests as a fear of being alienated as a sinner at best, eternal damnation at worst. In science, it’s the fear of being wrong.

Whether sinner or errant scientist, there are very real punitive consequences, whether it be ostracization or zero grant money. Yet, none of these consequences seem to be handed down from heaven or up from the petri dish. The punishments are always distributed by other humans.

While Tarnas et al do not assign gender to the greater consciousness they say exists, they do insist it is there, and that human consciousness exists within it, that all is interrelated. If I am going to reject randomness, which I do, then with Tarnas’s findings as the larger context, it is far more possible to believe that each of our individual lives has meaning, and that even if we do not know what that meaning is, the search for it is in itself as important as any proof of causation to life because the journey brings us that much closer to the Source.

In that way, we can choose to imbue our lives with the fruits of what we learn, and know that it mattered that we valued the opportunity to direct our teensy speck of consciousness toward something of our own choosing, something of our own design, using both observational data and that of cause and effect to help us course correct.

Although the Harvard educated Tarnas is also the author of The Passion of the Western Mind (2000), a classic text in collegiate history programs nationally, upon the publication of Cosmos and Psyche (2006), he, like Meyer routinely has been, was dismissed and excoriated by the intelligentsia. In the Wall Street Journal, the reviewer seethes as though personally offended by Tarnas’s temerity to suggest an enchanted world view:

“Mr. Tarnas's examples steadily build into a game of free association that will try the patience of any reader burdened with sanity.”

He ends with this zinger: “Among the unexpected lessons to be drawn from Cosmos and Psyche is that the tyranny of science may actually be preferable to the tyranny of superstition. In any case, count your lucky stars it's not assigned reading.”

Okay, Mr. Smarty Pants. You can be the smartest guy in the room. Every room. All the rooms.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of four years of our national Avatar of Id rampaging across the land, infecting some, depressing many more, and exposing the actual insanity of much of the rest, here’s me on the eve of our election, in my apparently deluded and idiotic state, reading Tarnas, along with works by the late Joseph Campbell and James Hillman, and others, and finding myself inspired to think of how we as a nation might move beyond our reductionist thinking at all levels of policymaking, especially in healthcare and medicine, without abandoning logic and reason.

Their ideas inform my closely held belief that policymaking which supports an explicitly purposeful view of life could offer important public health benefits and help staunch our rising tides of unrest, which the coronavirus has only exacerbated. After all, what is the point to life if there is no point to life?

With this in mind, it’s worth noting that while there is a trend among some Democratic leaders and pundits alike to say that this election is about reclaiming the “soul of our nation” – something I have been saying independent of these talking heads, because I really mean it – they also insist on Science, especially since science is what does convenient things like, say, effectively and predictably control pandemics.

Since the pursuit of causation is essential to stopping pandemics, I support the Democratic ticket. But as far as their claims to be the soul retrievers this country needs, I am skeptical. If these folks are going to say the word “soul” as though it is something desirable, that means it has value. Either the two –science and soul – work in tandem or they are incongruent, and if they are incongruent, then how can the Party logically claim to be invested in both?

The only way out of this dilemma I can see is to balance the causative with the correlative, and really mean it. In that way, the burden of reductionism is reduced, the pursuit of soul can be real, and both science and mystery can once again balance and support our sanity. If we allow ourselves that as a possibility, then hierarchical thinking will have to collapse.

What would policymaking have to look like then, if not one based strictly on cause and effect, deserving and undeserving?

For some, sadly, the answer will be found in conspiracy. But the magical thinking necessary to link non-causative, non-correlative events in order to make something “true” that isn’t, will only result in confusion, suspicion, and worse, dangerous delusions. The QAnon conspiracy is proof of this: it offers not one single demonstrable and replicable example of if A then B, nor is there any body of observational data that can even closely be said to correlate, and yet its adherents make wild claims and take just as weird actions to defend them. Same goes for the so-called deep state.

I don’t really know how re-imagining governance without hierarchy would work, frankly. When I was in college in the mid-80s, I was mightily confused by the then Zeitgeist of deconstructionism, where nothing seemed to fit back together once relativism, also popular among my professors, was injected into the equation. I still don’t see fully how to resolve that riddle.

But if not linear, and not relative, then what?

As we search for the answer, some of us will be wrong. That is the true way of science: experiment, evaluate, correct, repeat. Hierarchy prevents this; it robs us of the humility to ponder being wrong, stifles our curiosity, and inhibits asking new questions.

Yet, some, thankfully, persist.

In his brilliant and utile book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli writes:

We are an integral part of the world that we perceive; we are not external observers. We are situated within in it…We are made up of the same atoms and the same light signals as are exchanged between pine trees in the mountains and stars in the galaxies. As our knowledge has grown, we have learned that our being is only a part of the universe, and a small part at that…

We believed that we were on a planet at the center of the universe, and we are not. We thought that we existed as unique beings, a race apart from the family of animals and plants, and discovered that we are descendants of the same parents as every living thing around us…Mirrored by others, and by other things, we learn who we are (emphasis mine).

Our popular thinking, and thus our policymaking needs to catch up to science. But science also needs to be rescued from hierarchy and returned to the boundless world of curiosity where I like to think soul lives larger and more fully than our puny selves do.

So, back to the astrology. Mirrored by others, and by other things, we learn who we are.

As described in excellent detail, complete with a PowerPoint presentation (a first here on docu-mental!) Elisabeth’s is a system with its own language developed in scientific pursuit of cause/effect knowledge that we began to discard when materialism took the reins, circa 1700 with Newtonian Physics. To the extent that there is any explicable cause/effect, it is that which is borrowed primarily from Aristotelean physics, although the study of the heavens predates Aristotle, stretching back approximately 5,000 years to Mesopotamian times. Astrology describes the how within the why, but leaves the why an open question. This forms the basic tension between fate and fortune, destiny and free will.

To my understanding, mundane astrology is not a personal system whereby the planets take an interest in either helping or condemning humans, so much as they are just connected energetically to life on earth because the material elements are the same: mineral, fire, water, gas.

Because it is a system of physics intended to logically demonstrate the interrelatedness of all matter, including that which comprises the planets and stars, and how regardless of the remoteness of things, all are in the process of becoming and decaying, but not in a vacuum, it does have logic.

Although science has moved past the old ways, maybe valuable knowledge was left behind. Plenty of ways of being and thinking that were at one time discarded in favor of materialism but now find themselves in the ascendant include what has become the multi-billion dollar hand crafts movement (think Etsy) as opposed to disposable goods, as well as the slow food movement which includes the resurgence of farm-to-table, sustainable agriculture in favor over industrialized farming.

Among the more telling shifts is as Rovelli intimates, the growing willingness among biologists and others who once mocked “anthropomorphism” to now admit that animals do indeed have intelligence, emotions, and systems of communication designed to express their need for love and connection.

These ways of detecting and delineating life were not ever proven wrong, just incompatible with one particular perspective, that of the extremely reductionist, strictly cause and effect one.

Again, Rovelli:

The world is complex, and we capture it with different languages, each appropriate to the process that we are describing. Every complex process can be addressed and understood in different languages and at different levels. These diverse languages intersect, intertwine, and reciprocally enhance one another, like the processes themselves. The study of our psychology becomes more sophisticated through our understanding of the biochemistry of the brain. The study of theoretical physics is nourished by the passions and emotions that animate our lives.

Think of science then as German, and astrology as French. Neither is wrong, both explain the world around us. Each exists in parallel, yet knowledge of one enhances the utility of the other. Or, as Elisabeth says, “Astrology is a language with its own jargon to explain human consciousness through space and time.”

Like Rovelli, I believe the human race on earth will eventually become extinct; should we remain dedicated to our materialism, this will occur sooner than it might otherwise have done, exhaustive of the earth’s resources as materialism is. But to suggest that because our race is part of merely a chapter of existence on a middling planet in a small solar system in a boundless universe, it should mean we might as well abandon any attempts to derive personal meaning from the experience distresses me, the way I suspect it distresses many of you.

My personal sense is that since we do not know what becomes of our consciousness when we leave this plane, we should attempt to imbue this opportunity to be separate from the All with as much meaning as possible, lest we find it turns out to make for a richer Cosmos.

Rovelli:

Nature is our home, and in nature we are at home. This strange, multicolored, and astonishing world that we explore – where space is granular, time does not exist, and things are nowhere – is not something that estranges us from our true selves, for this is only what our natural curiosity reveals to us about the place of our dwelling, about the stuff of which we ourselves are made. We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, and when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy, we are being nothing other than what we can’t help but be: a part of our world.

By that logic, when we die, we don’t leave, we just shift forms.

Who knows what we then become and whether the knowledge we will have obtained will inform that new thing? Could what we do while we’re conscious precipitate how matter and consciousness takes shape when we’re “gone” (dead or extinct)?

If so, then the Why of Psyche’s How will have occurred through the existence of each one of us. Those of us who choose to ask why we are here, and then seek to answer that question in a meaningful way, perhaps we are the ones in whom there might be a faint glimmer of understanding of the larger Why as it unfolds. The sheer power of this possibility blows my mind.

I hope you enjoy Elisabeth’s illuminating explanation of how mundane astrology works. Below are all the time stamps to highlights of our discussion, including what we might expect from this election, and its aftermath, as well as resources for further information. This is available as both a podcast and a video, but the video has a nifty PowerPoint and lots of charts with explanations for how they work.

Thank you for reading. I am grateful to you for your support of this newsletter. Please be safe this week and throughout the rest of this epochal year. If you enjoy how I approach mapping our minds through these shifting times, and think others might like it as well, please forward this email to them or consider giving them a gift subscription.

Peace to every one of us,

Whitney

0:00 Introduction

6:00 Why might mundane astrology have utility?

8:30 No one knows why this works

17:31 The futility of "sun sign astrology"

19:20 Astrology is a language with its own jargon to explain human consciousness through space and time 21:50 Difference between Eastern, Western schools, and the misapprehension of Processions of the Equinox 25:45 The horoscope of Queen Elizabeth II as example 30:00 When we know what a person needs, we can predict how they will act 32:50 What is the "horoscope" of the US? 38:00 What does it say about the psyche of the nation and what might need to happen next? 43:00 The American Dream built into our psyche and our “tough guy” image45:00 What might be the fate of the American Dream? 51:30 An explanation of mundane astrology in action 53:00 How planetary cycles of the 1960s impact us now; did they predict 2016 and 2020? 1:00:00 Was 2020 "necessary" and what now? 1:00:09 The NYT agenda to discredit astrologers, even when astrology predict they will discredit them1:12:00 What can we expect in the US 2020 presidential election and beyond? 1:22:00 Do things look good for Kamala Harris? 1:25:00 How do things look for the next Congress? 1:27:00 What might happen to patriarchy and The Powers That Be? 1:34:00 Will the US stay in the same form? Will it break apart? What will the next 30 years bring?

Visit here for more information about Elisabeth Grace, or to subscribe to her newsletter.

For more about the Precession of the Equinoxes on earth, here’s a good explanation

Photo: Égalité devant la mort (Equality Before Death), 1848, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Musée d'Orsay

Errata: This post was updated on 11/1/20 to reflect a change from the word “correlative” to “causative”.

Greetings,

If you’ve been reading docu-mental for a while, you are aware that I don’t see the mondo bizarro criminal behavior of the current occupant of the White House as the cause of our national woes, but as the ultimate manifestation of our damaged collective psyche, the one we have forced for the past half century to carry the burdens of a patriarchal and thus hierarchical system predicated on an ethos of “to the winner goes the spoils”, and everything else as well.

And really, that is why I think cries of “defund the police” are useless. It is “old world”, not “new world”. The old world is angry and us v. them, and protestors and reformers who want to see changes in law enforcement but who do so in the same martial tones they oppose will get nowhere.

The new world is much more collaborative, forced as we have been to learn new ways to work together by the covid-19 crisis and by so many global catastrophes, including climate change-induced migration and dwindling resources.

But the new and old words do have some important things in common, the first being a shared history that must be healed, the one of systematic extermination and resources stolen from this continent’s indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of other human beings, namely black Africans.

The second is a need for some kind of enforceable structure and order. How else to build without a reliable scaffold?

In our current paradigm, LAW AND ORDER is yelled at us by red-faced and bullying federal and executive figureheads, which would be laughable except that the man in the White House is inciting violence in our streets, fomenting hatred between whites and others, and putting our law enforcement in the crosshairs of what many, myself included, fear will be a terrifying and violent election day and beyond.

That’s not funny in the least.

Yet, to me, it seems a last gasp at trying to stay in control when the skywriting just doesn’t seem to vaporize and vanish, the unmistakable message being “Time’s Up!” on hierarchy and iron-fistedness.

As a mother, despite the actual verdict, what I will always view as the cold blooded murder of Trayvon Martin still haunts me in particular, as I know that my son or any mother’s son would have had no reason to suspect that a handful of Skittles dribbled into his mouth as he innocently walked home from the convenience store one night, would be his last thanks to the derangement of a self-styled law and order gun nut; yet watching the lynching of George Floyd changed me forever.

It proved the tipping point for me to embrace publicly my growing personal ethos that I have been documenting here since I began in 2018 by trademarking and copyrighting my materials under docu-mental. My plan had been to document and explore solutions for the national increase in mental health crises, never suspecting that it would turn out I would be chronicling the end of extreme Capitalism.

And yet, as a practical minded, erstwhile Capitol Hill policy reporter who has written primarily about clinical medicine and healthcare economics for much of her career, I believe wholeheartedly it’s time to talk about things that aren’t quantifiable, and to insist that they not be relegated to the side lines as frilly and silly.

It’s not that I ever denounced it, but I was always too cowed to stand tall and say so, even though in my private life, I admitted it was true: this world needs more love, more softness, more feminine energy. Not more women per se, more Goddess.

And it needs the women in power to say so and demonstrate this, too.

There is nothing left but death when something reaches an extreme. Where else is there to go? Our system of Capitalism is at that point. It can take law and order with it as our system decays, leaving us vulnerable in an existential way. Alternatively, we can revive and reshape that masculine ideal buried under the propaganda we’ve heard in this nation for so long that “might makes right” and parlay that into what will work in the coming paradigm of peaceful collaboration: we can let our strong men and women in uniform be the ones who are vulnerable in an empowering way. We can humanize them.

And make no mistake, the new paradigm is coming; in fact, it’s here. How on earth will it be possible to crush and dominate in the old ways when this new virtual world’s power hierarchy is based on having access to others’ privacy and data, not their land and other resources? That is the new warfront, and it does not take shooting people or having the right skin tone to triumph; anyone can hide behind a digital screen, and anyone can steal your numerical soul and turn you into a digital slave. Yet, because the Information Age is free flowing, the hierarchy is easier to infiltrate.

Yet the need for familiar structures remains as we navigate the new ways of being. To me, that is an obvious call for our communities to focus on how to empower their respective law enforcement organizations to be flexible, breathable, ready to change as necessary.

In this video in the on-going series dedicated to healing the american states of mind, I speak with three people who know well how masculinity in the extreme has the ironic effect of eroding one’s masculinity, and perhaps even killing the person who bears the weight of it, maiming the souls and spirits of those left behind.

My guests are:

Chief John Morrissey of the Kenosha, Wisconsin Police Department (Ret). After 33 years as an officer, 28 of them in Kenosha, Chief Morrissey retired from the force in 2016, but is still intimately involved in what happens on the streets of Kenosha as city administrator, a job he took just before his hometown erupted in violence after three Black Lives Matter protestors were shot by 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, killing two. While leading the police force, Chief Morrissey lost two officers to suicide in less than 6 months. Mr. Morrissey has been actively involved in suicide prevention since 2010. In 2017, he became leader of the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention Public Safety Taskforce. He also serves as a member of the Workplace Suicide Prevention and Postvention Committee, and is a member of the IACP National Consortium on Preventing Law Enforcement Suicide. 

John Marx, CPP, was a law officer for 23 years, 19 of them as a hostage negotiator with the Westminster, Colorado Police Department. Marx is now the executive director of The Law Enforcement Survival Institute and founder of CopsAlive.com. He is the author of several books and training manuals that take a wholistic approach to law enforcement training and wellness. When a fellow police officer and good friend of his committed suicide at 38, Marx decided to dedicate his life to helping law enforcement officers serve and protect by learning to first protect their emotional needs and those of their colleagues.

Sally Spencer-Thomas, PsyD, lead editor of the mental health for men series of books, Guts, Grit, & the Grind: A Mental Mechanics Manual, and the creator along with the Colorado Department of Health and others, of Mantherapy, a very funny series of videos challenging what it means to be manly and to hide emotions behind a moustache. Sally began her career studying the effect of trauma on first responders, and has been actively engaged in suicide prevention since her brother took his own life in 2004. She is now the president of United Suicide Survivors International.

The take-away from our conversation is that calls to defund the police or even to abolish it, as Colin Kaepernick is now doing through what I believe is his impressive and well-reasoned co-venture with the publishing platform Medium,  LEVEL: Abolition for the People, are actually aimed at the same goal as many visionary law officers want to achieve: and end to lethal law enforcement encounters for black men, a reduction in violence overall, and a healthier citizenry through the direct involvement of the community in their local police force.

As stated in earlier docu-mental posts, law enforcement has had to take on far more societal ills than they are equipped to handle, and guess what? They burn out. They snap. They underperform. They stop being manly men, even if they’re women.

My guests address this problem and explain why defunding the police will make this worse, not better.

But I don’t let it stay there. Providing better training, less tasks, and more opportunities to be emotionally vulnerable might make better cops, but if it doesn’t change the fact that young black men are two and a half more times likely to be shot than a white man the same age,

then it is a white vanity project.

I also pointed out the FBI’s findings that there has been an infiltration of white supremacists in law enforcement over the years, something my guests claim they were not aware of, but did not downplay.

Credit goes to all three of my guests for their candor about the different ways blacks and whites view the police, and I give them credit for hanging in there when I suggested the Jungian concept of there needing to be more feminine character, not women, in the force.  I think all my readers, many of whom are involved in policymaking and politics, as well as all of us thinking deeply and carefully about this moment in our nation’s history will be intrigued by this dialogue.

Thank you for continuing to support docu-mental, whether materially, or by being a faithful reader and sharing it with others whom you think will be stimulated to think differently by my thinking out loud.

Below is the annotated list of places in the audio where you can hear highlights of the conversation, and also a list of links to the resources and data citations made in the discussion.

Peace,

Whitney

Annotation:

3:00 John Marx and John Morrissey on the mental health challenges of policework

12:00 Mental health burn out on the job 14:30 Statistics on lethality of police encounters with blacks

18:20 The need to balance hardness with softness in law enforcement

27:30 The causes of mental health crises on the rise

29:30 How this reinforces built-in bias, and impacts crime, police response to minorities, and black communities' fears of law enforcement

34:00 Is law enforcement a cover for white supremacy?

41:00 There is less enforcement now that police are less proactive and more reactive now

 42: 30 Is the system not changeable from within?

45:00 The harmful impact of the media on law enforcement-community relations 46:00 What Trump and Biden could do but aren't -- Chief Morrissey

52:00 Would more resources for law enforcement mean less deaths for black men?

55:00 Communities no longer in touch with reality in expectations for law enforcement

57:20 Community policing is ideal and here's what it requires

Additional Resources:

JAMA: Prevalence of Mental Illness and Mental Health Care Use Among Police Officers

LEVEL: Abolition for the People from Colin Kaepernick

Washington Post: Trump, Biden and masculinity in the age of coronavirus

Law Enforcement Survival Institute

Cops Alive Magazine

International Association for Suicide Prevention

Pew Research Center: From police to parole, black and white Americans differ widely in their views of criminal justice system

ACLU: The war on marijuana in black and white

Just Security: White Supremacist Infiltration of US Police Forces: Fact-Checking National Security Advisor O’Brien

National Academies of Science: Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity, and sex

Journalist’s Resource: Black men 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police

21st Century Cures Act and addressing mental illness in law enforcement

Neighborhood Defender Service: A community-based, wholistic approach to public defense and law enforcement

NYT: Opera Grapples with Race

docu-mental: McMindfulness

docu-mental: Batman is not coming

Police b roll footage by Kelly Lacy at Pexels.

Greetings,

This past Tuesday marked the 401st anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the ship called The White Lion at Point Comfort, now Ft. Monroe, off the Virginia coast.

Today is the 57th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream Speech, part of the peaceful March on Washington. It’s also the 65th anniversary of the disappearance in Mississippi of black teenager Emmett Till, found dead three days later, having been not just murdered, but gruesomely tortured and disfigured by two vigilante white men who believed the lies of a white woman who’d said the 14-year-old had made advances on her. She eventually admitted she’d lied. The woman paid no price but perhaps with her own conscience. The murderers went free.

Also 156 years ago today, the Union was debating what to do with the swelling ranks of black men and women who were fleeing to the protection of Union forces to become contraband of war, in hopes it would lead to their freedom.

Ultimately, on January 1, 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation which did not free slaves so much as encourage them to flee the clutches of their “owners” and seek protection from the Union Army that desperately needed ranks to continue fighting the rebellious South.

It wasn’t until December 1865, after the Civil War had ended, and the 13th Amendment was ratified, that slaves were actually, legally freed in the US.

The adoption of that amendment began with the actions of three enslaved Africans who did not want to be sent away from their families by their “masters” to build fortifications against Union troops. Instead, they escaped to Ft. Monroe near Hampton, Virginia, and asked protection from Union Major General Benjamin Butler, who cannily sensed an opportunity to punish the South, but which ultimately rewarded all enslaved Africans.

The names of the three men who sparked that fire: James Townsend, Shepard Mallory, and Frank Baker.

Why are blacks ‘invisible’ in America?

When my son was younger, he worked a series of manual labor and service jobs. Many of his coworkers were young black men from less affluent communities. My son observed how he was treated by managers and customers compared to the treatment they received.

“Mom, I don’t think whites actually see black people,” he said to me one day. “If they did, they would notice how hard they work, and how much nicer and more attentive they have to be to others so they don’t get their ass kicked. But then they get treated like they’re not even there.”

My son went further. “Considering the b******t they put up with every day, you’d think there would be more black violence against whites.”

There is a profound truth packed into my then 17-year-old’s impression of how America works. Namely that white America has gone about its business without much consequence for our inability to “see” our fellow citizens with darker skin.

It was in 1952 that black author and social observer Ralph Ellison published his novel, Invisible Man, a fictional account of the very real phenomenon of how a black man making his way through white America post-WWII and before the Civil Rights movement, was largely ignored and disrespected. It won the National Book Award the following year. Yet it was in the last decade that my son, who had not read the book by the way, shared his observation with me, signaling not much has changed for the better.

Black Americans today, with protests in the streets and professional athletes taking a knee or refusing to play altogether, certainly have our attention, even amidst a sizeable portion of the nation being on fire, another being under water, still another huge portion clearing the rubble from powerful windstorms, and all of us under siege thanks to the political war raging, the economy collapsing (Wall Street gains are not the economy), and a plague inundating our hospitals and upending our lives.

But attention is not what black Americans are looking for, according to my guests in this interview. Aside from an end to unjustified murders and harassment of black men by some white authorities, what is actually at issue is empathy. Black Americans want to trust white Americans are with them, that we won’t abandon them in their pain, and especially that we will not make their pain worse than it has to be.

What is their pain? It is the pain of being ignored en masse, of not being remembered in the calculations for who gets access to resources in this country, and of being made to suffer unnecessarily as a result. In particular, it is the pain of being promised something in return for loyalty and sacrifice, only to have the terms change, the promises broken.

That is what is explored in this interview with three officers from the Contraband Historical Society, a Hampton, Virginia-based nonprofit educational group focused on the contributions to American freedom made by the contraband slaves in the US Civil War. My guests are Pamela Holley, a contraband slave descendant and research advisor to the Society; Phillip Adderley, president of the Contraband Historical Society and a board member of the Citizens for Fort Monroe National Park (CFMNP). His efforts helped lead to the proclamation by President Barak Obama that May 24th is now “Contraband Day’. And also, Dr. William Wiggins, a former history professor and assistant dean at Columbia University, who is the Society’s historian. The Society was founded more than 20 years ago by another contraband descendant, the late Gerri Hollins.

Who were the Contrabands?

As detailed in this video, the original contrabands were three slaves who fled for their lives to Ft. Monroe near Hampton, Virginia at the start of the Civil War. When their “owner” demanded their return, the Union general in charge countered that if the men were someone’s “property”, then they could be confiscated, making them contrabands of war.

This became known as the Contraband Decision, and it paved the way for what ultimately became 200,000 enslaved Africans leaving their bondage and joining the Union’s fight against the South, attending to the needs of the white soldiers, as well as fighting alongside of them in hopes of being made truly free.

Why should we care?

The contraband slaves’ story is important because it contains the key to how the Civil War went from being a fight over economics and keeping the nation intact to being centrally about emancipation and freedom. These Africans’ bravery and loyalty forced the Union to consider the unvarnished question, “What do we do with all the black people?”

The path to civil rights for blacks in this country eventually might have happened some other way, since, as Dr. King said four days before he was murdered: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” an optimistic view of humanity if ever there was one.

However, it is this view that black Americans largely have held from the beginning of their time on this continent, beginning more than four centuries ago.

Who best exemplifies the American ideal of ‘freedom’?

It was because black men who, despite having been enslaved by some white men, chose to put their trust in still other white men, and believed that through their service they and others like them would be recognized as humans. That they would be free. That other men would treat them justly, would allow them to live in a just universe.

As a result, I can only conclude that the freedom I have considered my birthright as an American woman began resonating not with the Constitution, which was directed at white men even if its spirit was expansive enough to eventually include me, but with the trust and actions of these black human beings who understood the nation’s spirit, perhaps better than any other white man living or dead who’d ever tread foot upon this land.

That is why we need to care about this story. It is not just black people’s history, it’s all of ours as Americans. To bang on about freedom without acknowledging and respecting that it was black men who made sure we focused on its promise, is to fundamentally misapprehend what Land of the Free, Home of the Brave actually means.

‘What would Jesus do’?

When we speak of reparations for the ancestors of the enslaved in this country, many in the white community become angry and defensive. Some of us claim there are not enough resources to retroactively “cover” the price admittedly paid by blacks. Others of us are upset to be placed on the hook for past actions none of us in the present day had any say about. Others claim that since they aren’t racist, they should not be made responsible for racist actions.

These sentiments are collected loosely within the argument that if America were a racist country, we would not have elected a black president, and perhaps might soon elect a black vice president. The argument also contends that there are plenty of prominent black Americans such as Gen. Colin Powell, Sen. Corey Booker, former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, or former National Security Advisor Susan Rice (no relation), so it’s impossible to claim racism is a barrier to equality in America.

Although a plausible defense, it’s a naïve one, one that ultimately deflects taking responsibility for the nation’s original sins of genocide of the indigenous Americans and enslavement of Africans, two sins of our fathers that are so irrefutable, no one dare seriously say otherwise, not even MAGAs.

To that end, and especially for the self-proclaimed evangelical Christians who make up just under a third of our total population, I offer an insight that undercuts this position of “not my problem”: If Jesus died for all our sins, and then commanded that to gain entry into heaven, we be like him, then it’s time for us all to clear the spiritual miasma of our nation’s sins by taking responsibility for them, even if we think we had nothing to do with them. That’s my answer to WWJD (“What would Jesus do?”).

Many Evangelicals do think this way, thankfully. Well, some of them. There are those who are going off like rockets because of the also indisputable fact that the Black Lives Matter movement is overt in its opposition to all pillars of our white-built hierarchical structures, and states clearly its alarming intentions such as to disrupt the “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”.

And yet, are we so critical-thinking impaired that we can’t see the personal and societal benefits of treating black Americans with empathy, regardless of what a political movement — including those enmeshed with the religious ones — also says about it? Just because the BLM organization, Evangelical churches, Republicans or Democrats, or (fill in the blank), has anything at all to say about the intrinsic value of a human life, we somehow need some organization to spin it for us?

How about we forget everything that any of these groups say and just get back to the basics of what all successful societies across time have said in one form or another: do unto others as you’d have them do to you.

That’s not synonymous with letting others think for you. Spiritually mature, thinking adults can whole-heartedly support and embrace that life matters across any and all demographics without having to wait for some group to clarify that moral imperative.

In my case, not being an avowed evangelical anything, I confess that because I had black friends, my initial reaction to my son’s insight was that it didn’t apply to me. But after I thought more about it, I realized that because my friends and I were all roughly equal in our social standing, it just made the existence of racism harder for me to see.

Once sensitized to it, however, I began noticing how I often did ignore black people outside my usual sphere, or how I tended to prefer interacting with whites over blacks in my everyday life. If I had a choice on a train to sit with a white person or a black one, the white person usually “won out”. If I had a choice to be served by a black person instead of a white one…and so on. It wasn’t because I hated anyone, or because I consciously thought of myself as “above” black people, it was because I was acting according to what was familiar to me.

As for our having elected or “allowed” black people to prominence in this nation, why should we think that pointing to these aberrations is proof that the norm they flaunt doesn’t exist?

My black friends might seem to enjoy the same fruits of their labors as other Americans such as myself who have seized whatever opportunities we could. But the fact remains they are more in danger of losing what is theirs than I am simply because they are black. Life is hard for everyone at one time or another, that is true, but white Americans are less likely to be killed or harassed by those in power than are blacks. That is a fact, and saying racism doesn’t exist because “look at all those successful black people” doesn’t change that fact.

Neither does it change the fact that statistically, when we talk of social ills in this country, they predominately center on black communities where material poverty and blight might not be evident, but where education, housing, job access, and nutritional foods are poor. This is also a fact, and it is to do with how our hierarchical, not democratic, system so often explored here in the pages of docu-mental, naturally makes it so.

Who leads us along the ‘arc toward justice’?

In this week of important anniversaries in American history, there is an irony afoot. This week has also been that of the Republican National Convention, replete with so much red, white and blue theatrics so as to become a patriotic burlesque, all aimed at a distinct demographic of Americans who, like so many black Americans, feel certain their needs have not been met.

This group, the MAGAs, have invested their hope in the future in a white man whom they call “the people’s president”, a moniker that was thumped over our heads more than once during the convention festivities, and one that was cheered by these Americans who love their leader because he has flaunted the so-called kingmakers of both our political parties, appealing to their sense that they too have been left behind by someone and now need someone to look out for them, a phenomenon with which I don’t quibble, but unlike the MAGAs, lay fault not at the amorphous “Radical Left” but at the feet of the white men in Congress and on Wall Street who have by various means, stolen MAGAs’ dreams, a phenomenon also explored often in these pages of docu-mental.

In any case, these are the Americans who believe that their chosen leader will not bow to The System, or so it would appear anyway as he tweets and tweets without subjecting his thoughts or unilateral policymaking to a formal vetting process. Take a knee? Never. There is far too much humility in that.

And this is what is so striking: whether it be through protesting in the streets or taking a knee on the field, or even refusing to take to the field, black Americans are choosing through their lawful, humble actions to refuse to play the game of being seen as inferior.

Is there looting and rioting and burning and resisting arrest right now in the black community? Yes. Is it warranted? No, but I understand the rage and opportunism behind it, and I note that it is not being condoned nor committed by the leaders of the black community. Therefore, are whites in danger of being attacked and brutally murdered by black mobs? Nope. Are blacks at a heightened risk of such attacks? Sigh. What do you think?

Black America is putting its faith in our democracy, in our common goodness and decency. They continue to trust that in time, as the moral universe continues its arc, we will do the right thing.

Meanwhile, white MAGAs who feel aggrieved by being seen as less-than by the powers that be have responded by celebrating as their leaders knowingly and repeatedly break the law.

Putting aside all known and debated other violations of the law by this POTUS, every single night of the RNC Convention was knowingly performed in full violation of the Hatch Act which bans political leaders from campaigning on federal property, among other statutes. When asked about it, the acting White House chief of staff said in a stunning moment of candor in a year full of such moments from the pack of law breakers in this administration, “No one cares.”

So, there he was, P45 and his entourage, all week unlawfully using the people’s house indeed, as well as the White House Rose Garden, and even the resources of our State Department to campaign for a return to America’s past, the one that no one, not even MAGAs, will deny is a past predicated on breaking the Mosaic commandments of not coveting, stealing, and killing. A sinful, painful past.

And as we have seen and documented here, that past is in fact The System, the very one that has begun to erode the privileges of every American except those at the very tippy top, and the ones in power whom we allow to flout the law. Which is to say, it is a system that if we continue to support will eventually crush not just black Americans, but all of us.

What is the road to reparations?

Seen this way, to not take responsibility for our nation’s original sins is as costly or more so than if we refuse to atone for the inherent evil within all our institutions, or to refuse to offer reparations for the resulting harms.

But let’s be sure we even know what we mean by that.

My way of making reparations was to change my behavior. It wasn’t hard. I committed to looking black Americans in the eye when I encounter them and to say hello so there is no mistaking that I see them, that I recognize them.

I don’t wave signs, I don’t yell at the police, and I don’t look specifically to support black causes, although each of these actions do have their time and place. I didn’t even have to admit I was wrong, nor feel as though I were taking on the burden for all of white America, even though I do accept that my awareness of the burden is the same as being responsible for it. In any case, all I had to change was my way of seeing.

It is a reparation that costs nothing, but means everything. For this small investment in other Americans, I have been repaid with smiles and warmth. People respond positively to being seen as people. Imagine: if this were the norm, blacks would not be placed in the demeaning position of having to insist, yet again, that they matter.

The road to reparations does not start with calculations but with empathy, with admitting we have a shared history and then bothering to learn from it. The idea of freedom that we cling to in this nation isn’t the one that we wave our flag around the world professing; it’s the one that black Americans have fought to secure right here under our noses and always to everyone’s benefit, definitely mine as a white woman.

Maybe there will be a time for writing checks, but until we listen and hear with our hearts, writing checks will only serve as an attempt to buy off black America in exchange for our continuing not to pay the real debt: remorse and sorrow for our nation’s foundation being set firmly upon abject inhumanity, for our forefathers having broken God’s laws, and for our white privilege arising from those sins, regardless of our either professed or true ignorance of this fact.

This interview is an opportunity for us to consider how freedom for all Americans was secured by the actions of enslaved Africans before, and how it is reinforced by African Americans now. It’s an opportunity to listen without being defensive, and to learn to see the love of freedom for all reflected in the faces of every American.

Links of interest:

Sacred Ground: The Episcopal Church’s response to racism

The National Park Service’s Ft. Monroe and Point Comfort history pages

Thank you to the patron subscribers who helped make this video series possible. With your support, I purchased video editing software, and some other tools to help continue improving the production values of all the docu-mental media. It remains a work in progress, but I am committed to your commitment in me, and grateful to you for it. If you are a regular subscriber who’d like to become a patron subscriber, here’s a link to how you can do so:

Next month, video number 3 is a conversation with IN Series Opera company director, Timothy Nelson, who will discuss what role the arts have in helping society create and perform meaningful rituals that bring us together through catharsis, common stories, and a shared vision of a peaceful future.

Thank you for exploring these topics with me.

Whitney

Ritual is the way to connect to the sacred in all relationships; they help us live out our meaning on a daily basis.

-Gwendolyn Reece, PhD, High Priestess of the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel

Greetings,

Baptism of fire. Dark night of the soul. Wrestling with the angels.

There was a time when the advent of a spiritual crisis, one that challenged our sense of what matters in life, was viewed as an honorable experience that marked the intersection between our human struggle and the divine. Crises once were widely seen as opportunities to move forward in our understanding of ourselves in relationship to our soul and spirit, to others in our lives, and to the world at large and all things seen and unseen, within it.

Not a religious person, nor one to speak in terms of God, I do believe that as I have aged, I have witnessed a national calamity where the more materialistic and reductionist we have become, the more our spiritual crises have become a cause for shame. Frequently, they are even cause for diagnosis.

Yet, there will never be enough pills or mental health personnel to meet the demand for help through the acute existential crises so many of us are experiencing right now while the coronavirus, our pathetic response to it, and the teetering economy, have all laid bare just how shallow our sense of national purpose is, and has been for some time.

We are all living in communities fractured by the angry identity-driven rhetoric from across the political spectrum, by the fall-out of misappropriated resources, graft, corruption, and too few solutions for problems that therefore seem insurmountable.

Too many of us do not feel empowered, and so we feel hopeless. Feeling hopeless is a well-established signal of suicidality at the extreme, or more likely, depression.

This publication was founded as a way to discover why anxiety and depression, particularly the existential kind, are so rampant in this nation. Through two volumes and nearly 100 essays, I have docu-mented policies and political stances, showing how the crises are due to how we have focused too hard for too long on the material, but not on what matters. We’re not even sure any more what that means: we know something is wrong, something is “the matter”, but what?

And why does not knowing seem to hurt so much?

How do we restore hope? How do we prevent losing it? I believe these questions are inextricably tied to our sense of mattering as a nation, our communal raison d’etre.

By nature, spiritual crises are disorienting. But I believe they are especially chaotic in our society now. That is because such crises mark times of weakness, and after years of having to grind it out, especially after the financial leveling we took in 2008, in order to survive, weakness of any kind has become a liability. Our national fear of being vulnerable started becoming pathological, I would suggest, after 9-11 when we were attacked on our own soil, scaring us to bits and riling us up in search of those we could punish. These are not the only events that have brought us to this point, but as we have docu-mented over the past two years, they factor largely in why we have a presidential obsession with winning.

A pathological fear of weakness is our national sickness, not just his.

But ironically, all this winning, and especially this fear of being “soft”, has left us that much more at risk: we don’t know what to do when we are broken, and so when something like the coronavirus hits us in the face, we are easily smashed to bits.

Rituals, just like rites of passage, used to be what our ancestors used to contain the chaos of having one’s world view shattered. Rituals offered us tools to move through, to reconnoiter, and to heal.

I believe it’s time we consider how ritual might help us as a nation weather what has befallen us and what is yet to befall us. These crises may come through no fault of our own, and at other times, very much by our own choices, however ignorant or calculated they may have been. The point is not to blame, but to heal and become wise.

A national soul retrieval is certainly not where I intended this online journal/journey to take us when I initially began it in early 2019, fresh off my career as a health policy and economics reporter, but here we are.

If you’d like to read the more policy wonkish stuff, and also listen to the very policy-oriented podcasts, please do go through the approximately 100 essays and podcasts in the archives, because they give a good foundational understanding of how we here have mapped and docu-mented the connections between bad policymaking and lack of soul and spirit. 

Now, let’s focus on what was lost to our fixation on the material and on winning. What healing tools, soulful questions, character traits, and positive vulnerabilities have we left behind, forgotten, or stashed away where no one would dare suspect we keep them? Let’s retrieve those things. What is still useful? What, after careful examination, can we discard? What do we need to develop that we don’t already have? Added together, how might these tools help us frame what truly matters, ground it, and move forward to develop it?

My first guest in this series intended to heal the american (little “a”) state of mind before we return to mapping it, is Gwendolyn Reece, PhD. She is a high priestess with the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel, a pagan organization in the mid-Atlantic region. Dr. Reece, who is also an associate librarian at American University, is based in Washington, DC.

Among the many important tactics for this soul retrieval mission that Dr. Reece and I discuss, these are the highlights:

* The concept of a national miasma, or “spiritual pollution” and how art as ritual helps clear it through collective catharsis.

* How ritual was used to clear the miasma in the first Western democracy, Athens.

* That ritual and policymaking must be applied in concert if there is to be effective cultural change.

* How democracy, once cleansed, must maintain justice for all by putting all before the law.

* The importance of separating church and state, and how the ethereal works together with science to improve society.

* Why staying local to solve problems is more effective than too-large enttities, and how what happens locally filters up.

* The critical nature of asking the right questions that will direct us toward our national purpose, the relationships that will support that, how to build community around these relationships, and how to solve the paradox of many visions with only one nation.

* Practical examples of what starting with ritual and then leading to policy changes might look like, such as with food and water supplies, or labor force structures, might look like.

* The dangers of “lofty talk” about being spiritual, but in actuality not demonstrating care and kindness for one’s neighbor.

* The importance of starting “where you are” to affect change.

* The notion of politics as applied ethics and how discussions about value are the an antidote to identity politics.

* How can Pagans, Scientists, and Evangelicals work together?

* What examples of systematically living in an ensouled society do we already have, including Rudolf Steiner’s Waldorf Schools?

* And more.

If you’d like to learn more about the classical Greek tradition of ritual healing through theater, this concise video by Dr. Reece discusses how this is achieved by Aeschylus in The Oresteia.

Here is a New York Times feature on the use of the Oresteia in particular, and Greek tragedy in general, to help heal war-torn cities such as Mosul, Iraq.

For more about the Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy, his comprehensive system for building and sustain an “ensouled” society, visit here.

To learn more about the sacred rite of initiation across many cultures, and how it might be applicable to a new America, visit Dr. Reece’s video here.

For more about the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel, visit here.

For more on Dr. Reece’s own work dedicated to Athena and Apollo, visit here.

And, to learn more about how the Wiccan tradition builds community, there is a conference scheduled in 2021. Learn more here.

A dystopian short story I wrote years ago and published in 2018 in the fiction anthology Grace and Gravity, speaks to the idea of a collective catharsis. Here’s an interview I gave about the piece I wrote, and information on how you can obtain a copy of the anthology where it appears.

The transcript of this conversation will be available soon for patron subscribers. These videos are not “quick hits”. They are neither rushed, yet neither do they meander. They take the time necessary for subscribers to learn new ways of thinking, new questions to ask, and new processes to consider adopting. My intention is to create an entire library of such videos that soon will live behind a paywall. Not a formal curriculum per se, but a collection of topics that together add up to a comprehensive line of inquiry on how to rebuild a better democracy. For now, this is freely available to the public. As you probably noted, I have also included the audio only, in case you prefer to continue just listening to podcasts.

Thank you so much for your time and interest.

Peace.

Whitney

Greetings,

It was 2017. I was in a posh conference room at a five star hotel in Scottsdale, Arizona. An elder statesman of the psychiatric community who’d recently stepped down from his post as leader of one of the nation’s oldest and most venerated mental health hospitals and research facilities, was giving an honorary address. The room was filled with esteemed psychiatrists. I was there to report.

Among the man’s many startling claims was that psychiatry was broken, and was likely to get worse before it got better, especially if the field continued to view patients as pathways to profits instead of persons in need of succor. I had never heard anyone in the profession take such a public stand before. One psychiatrist in attendance, not unsympathetic to what the speaker was saying, nonetheless referred to it in conversation with me later as a “fever dream”.

Most intriguing of all was the speaker’s assertion that by 2067:

“Most physicians will be employees of one out of four major health care nonprofit corporations that are vertically or horizontally integrated systems of care…managed care will be perceived as a regrettable experiment of the late 20th century ending in the first part of the 21st century. With the enactment of a universal single payer system of care, the high-cost intrusive middle management of carve-out behavioral health care companies will become moot… [Further,] significant advances [in science]…will make the prior 200 years of psychiatric care seem crude, quaint, and absurd.”

More than a decade before this, the psychiatrist and noted humanitarian, as president of the American Psychiatric Association, had chastised his colleagues for allowing a dissolution of their professional values, and thus a loss of credibility in the eyes of the public. In particular, he’d called out the need to reverse the influence of the pharmaceutical industry the field, and declared war on his fellow psychiatrists’ reluctance to fight for the rights of their patients across many fronts. He also called out the lax standards of scientific inquiry in the field.

As the speaker re-iterated in an interview with me later, he was deeply disappointed in his colleagues for not sharing his alarm over the drop in psychiatry’s professionalism. What struck me then and stays with me now is the sense that the speaker was genuinely broken hearted over what he had seen his beloved profession become.

I thought about his sorrow as I was editing this podcast episode of docu-mental. It occurred to me that whether or not he realized it, what he was describing was the erosion of freedom in psychiatry.

Freedom’s erosion looks like this:

It is the insurance industry with their need to deliver shareholder profits, not psychiatrists with their clinical judgement, that has ultimate say over the treatment algorithms, the time spent with patients, and the length of time for treatment. With help from the pharmaceutical industry, insurance got and keeps that power to determine treatment through policies held in place by legislators. Why do they put such restrictions in place? Because too often, as I have also seen firsthand, the legislators don’t really understand what they are agreeing to, and take at face value what the lobbyists tell them makes sense.

The lobbyists justify their position with scientific data derived from studies designed in favor of their interests. When there is protest against their findings, they claim that science is science, and their results are scientific.

Yes, science is indeed science, but there are many ways to occlude the whole of the scientific findings. One is that when outcomes aren’t favorable, too often they are kept quiet, never to be seen by the public, despite calls to publish them in a public database.

The result is drugs that are marketable, in part because their efficacy can be proven in some cases (if not all), which results in treatment that is quicker and often cheaper than less metric-laden methods, which helps insurance tighten the noose even more on the necks of psychiatrists who know that other methods also work, even if they take far more time but are ultimately more enduring if the end point is a reduction in anxiety and depression, a will to live and connect.

Why aren’t those other methods studied? Some will say they are too difficult to measure. But that is a half truth. Measurement, while important, is too often tied to money, and the power of so-called “interventions” and “treatments” like listening, connecting, and empathy are immeasurable, and so offer no profit margin. In healthcare now, money matters more, no matter how often we hear the protests that is not true.

I’ve heard those protests from (mostly) men with their academic and industry affiliated credientials, standing at those podiums in those posh five star hotels in glamorous locations, paid for in part by sponsorships from drug companies. The story coming from the men and women standing at the podiums in the less luxurious conference rooms where meetings of community psychiatrists — the ones you and I might ask to help us if we can gain access to them — is that there is a lack of resources being made available for people in crisis, and they, the mental health professionals trying to help them, are starting to feel pain themselves because they feel helpless to do so.

That is a loss of freedom.

All that money, they argue, such as the National Institutes of Mental Health’s 4.5 billion spent to study things like whether schizophrenia has a specific genetic code — something we will not know for years, if we ever know — could be put to better use now, in this moment, to help ease the pain and suffering of so many patients with schizophrenia made worse by the lack of basic safety net provisions for them once in place in this country, such as housing, food, basic healthcare.

This causes moral injury to the psychiatrists who are forced to act not in the best interests of their patients, but of The System.

What actually is The System? I don’t have a fancy definition for it. I just see it and have experienced it as the collected mass of agency and power we give over as individuals when we don’t ask good enough questions about how our assent to something that enriches some now will rob us later. That mass becomes too solid for us to push against as individuals. To break it down will take the force of enough of us waking up to our lost power and pushing against that mass all at once until it disintegrates, at least enough to break through, reclaim the good, and rebuild.

There was a time before psychiatry was so subsumed by the blob that is The System. It was the time before the discovery and industrial manufacture of psychotropic drugs, a time when there was less at stake financially for clinical psychiatric researchers. That was the time the speaker that day in that fancy conference room came of age in the field. He was describing not a distant utopia, but his non-fevered dream of the potential the field once had to help people not just heal their pain but grow and become more humane.

Like any field of study or industry, at a certain point, when the system becomes The System where “everybody does it”, whatever “it” is, then resistance becomes, if not futile, then nearly so. In medicine, this places psychiatrists and other clinicians in a situation where it is hard to uphold their oath to do no harm. This erodes freedom.

This intersection of the American notion of freedom and how mental healthcare is delivered is of keen interest to me. I see a national cognitive dissonance when we are told by our leaders that America is a free country, when held at the mercy of monopolistic entities such as insurance, pharmaceutical companies, and also policymakers, we clearly are not.

I believe there is a way to reverse this conundrum. It begins with waking up to what has happened, to how we’ve outsourced ourselves to The System. That’s when we can ask better questions, find better pathways.

In this episode of docu-mental, I speak with Paula J. Caplan, PhD, a clinical and research psychologist at Harvard University’s Hutchin’s Center, and the author of several books including They Say You're Crazy: How the World's Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who's Normal. Dr. Caplan is also the recipient of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry’s 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award, among numerous other accolades. As a research psychologist, Dr. Caplan also was a committee member involved in creating the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), before she resigned in protest (the DSM is now in its 5th edition).

Dr. Caplan takes a bold stance against psychiatry. She believes that the field causes more harm than good, and that the harm begins with diagnosis. I find some of Dr. Caplan’s claims problematic, and I do not believe psychiatry as a field is inherently harmful, as you will hear me explain in this episode. And despite my misgivings about the pharmaceutical industry overall, I also have seen where drug interventions are positive, life saving even, which is why, unlike Dr. Caplan, while I do not believe drugs should be in the ascendant, I do think they are important treatment options.

Still, Dr. Caplan is utterly correct to say that the problems which do exist in psychiatry will not be adequately addressed from the inside, as the speaker that day hoped, but by lay people such as you and me. Change will begin when we educate ourselves and ask better questions about just how much power we give up once we enter the mental health system at any point, not just through the door of psychiatry.  

During this podcast, we do not name any specific individuals, as I am not interested in blaming or fighting. I am interested in finding avenues for change. I also chose not to name the speaker, although his remarks, name, and affiliations are listed below, if you want to read what he said for yourself. Just as he urged psychiatrists from the inside to stop playing the game, I suggest you can, too. See your part in the madness. Ask questions. Reclaim your freedom.

Dr. Caplan shared many resources where you can begin to do just that. They also are listed below.

Next month’s episode of docu-mental will feature an interview with a former head of research at the NIMH, a psychiatrist now in private practice specializing in treating persons with psychosis and schizophrenia. Whatever didn’t get addressed in this episode, I intend to address in the next.

Thanks for listening and reading.

Whitney

Here are links referred to in this post:

The Future of Psychiatry by Steven Sharfstein, MD

Incoming APA president Steven Sharfstein urges reform

The Good Pharma Scorecard

Here are the links referenced in the podcast. I do not endorse any of them, but offer them as a follow-up to what Dr. Caplan shared:

Website of Paula J. Caplan, PhD

The Icarus Project

The International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry

National Association for Rights Protections and Advocacy

Ending Harm from Psychiatric DiagnosisMad in America

Illustration: John Hain

Updated March 6, 2020 to reflect that we did not name any specific members of the field intentionally during the podcast.