Virtual Insanity
At the beginning of every dystopian film, there’s always a story about how a society or civilization reached its breaking point. We have now entered our own dystopian reality. Our lives have been upended, although for many, our daily demands of family, work, school and other responsibilities continue. The world as we know it appears more or less like it had on the surface, yet it has now become an empty shell waiting to be filled.
This is our world changing. It’s our reality shifting from a space of fear to a void of possibility. But to understand all the possibilities that can arise means really understanding what our fears represent. While our fears may present differently on the surface and play out in myriad ways through our insecurities around money, faith, relationships, work, and self-worth, they are ultimately the way in which we’ve chosen to experience separation.
Our history and stories point to how we’ve existed in separation. The haves/have not’s; slavers/enslaved; lords/serfs; kings/subjects. The hierarchies in which we’ve lived contributed to the polarities that maintained the separation. And it’s around these polarities that we’ve structured our laws and rules. There’s good/bad; virtue/vice; right/wrong; worthy/worthless.
We’ve lived along the spectrum of polarity throughout our lifetimes, facing ridicule or shame if we couldn’t meet the standards that define whether we are fit to live in society. And while separation has dictated how we live, judgment has underpinned the very nature of our existence. In order to fit in, we had to make ourselves worthy by judging those parts of ourselves that didn’t fit within society’s narrow standards. And in turn, we judged others by the same standards, not just to perpetuate the false sense of safety that the worthiness ensures, but to prop up our own esteem around our very worthiness.
Thus, we created a vicious cycle of judgment and shame that kept us locked in a state of separation.
Confronting this isn’t easy. While compassion is the solution to heal the separation within it’s not necessarily the blanket solution to what ails our world at the moment. But it is the simplest one to grasp because compassion allows us to be in step with ourselves. It reminds us that we matter, our pain matters and our very existence matters. To be in step with ourselves means acknowledging all of who we are, even those seemingly broken parts that we had once deemed unworthy because we were made to believe they were wrong.
When we come into compassion with ourselves, we come into wholeness, able to piece back together a part of our being that had been left behind out of shame. And when we heal shame, we heal judgment; and when we heal judgment, we heal separation and enable peace.
However, even when we come into compassion, there’s still another piece missing that our dystopian story is showing us. That is trust.
Separation doesn’t allow for trust because it isn’t possible when we live in judgment. We’ve conformed to the point that we don’t trust ourselves to know what is best for us and to live according to our own values. We’ve been taught that to do so would be selfish and lead to our destruction, so we’ve traded our individual knowing for the collective knowing in order to ensure our security.
When we exist in a world of separation, we rely on assumptions to inform the probable outcomes. If I do X, then Y will happen. “If I go to university (and even take out a lot of loans to do so), it means I will get a job that will afford me a comfortable life.” Or “If I marry someone with a solid career, I will be financially secure and therefore happy.” Or “If I look like X celebrity or do this to my appearance, then others will find me attractive and desirable.”
From superficial logic to deeper reasoning, we have all lived according to established, and even unspoken ideals that have governed how we live and how we relate to one another. Yet, as we become more conscious of how they no longer serve us, we wake up to the many possibilities that exist beyond the outcomes we believed were black and white.
When we choose to trust and take risks, we choose to dismiss the expectations that come with separation. And the fewer expectations we have, the more we can allow ourselves to move beyond the fear that informs those expectations in the first place. And when we are no longer ruled by expectations, our experiences become richer and more meaningful because when we can trust and allow that everything that happens is somehow for our highest good, we are able to perceive the magic beyond everything we’ve ever known.
And while this pandemic has managed to highlight more than a few deficiencies and social issues, one of the biggest takeaways is how weak we’ve become when it comes to being agents in our lives and determining our own fate. And when our perceived safety or security appears threatened, we collapse into our fears and allow them to dictate our choices. And so we wind up circling back to a space of disempowerment because we look to others to tell us how to live, how to act and how to decide right from wrong. Most of all, we expect others to act on our behalf and save us because we bought into the myth that we are not capable of taking care of ourselves.
And it’s this very state of disempowerment that has us running for cover, looking to others to tell us what to do and shaming those who fail to follow the rules or do the “right thing”.
Yet doing the “right thing” is what has brought us to this very point in time. Our efforts to be “good citizens”, righteous followers and heroes has turned us into victims scared for our very own fate. And there are a multitude of influencers, leaders and vocal advocates perpetuating the fear for their own gain. And when we buy into their agendas and their limited solutions, we wind up surrendering our freedoms for the illusion of safety that cannot really be guaranteed or promised.
The only way out of fear is to recognize it for what it is. It is the directive that points us to those areas that need healing in order for us to realize our power. It provides an opportunity to come into our power by healing it rather than avoiding it. And now is the time to come into our power. Now is the time to listen to ourselves and to understand the truth that wants to emerge and to trust that it will not destroy us.
When we react out of fear is when we really risk hurting others and ourselves. That is because it comes from a place of pain and separation that tells us we are not good enough to survive our fears. But when we act out of love, and when we can truly trust that we can discern what is in our highest good, our actions don’t interfere with the lives of others because it means we’re in harmony with them.
This is where trust comes in because we will have to trust that there is another way through our reality than the limited options we’re being sold. And that it’s time to trust that we will survive the destruction of our soon-to-be outdated reality because we always knew this was going to happen at some point. Because this is why we are here. Everyone who is in body at this given time is meant to support this transition to a higher consciousness. We’ve been preparing for this since 2016, when we began to finally wake up to the fact that anything is possible.
And since 2016, we have seen the dismantling of so much of our polarity as more and more constructs became challenged. All the systems that supported separation such as religion, government and greed have been in our faces for us to question and imagine new possibilities. While everyone has a role in supporting this transition, it may be that some are here to help with the destruction of the old world, which is just as important as the rebuilding because someone has to do it. So as much as people want to blame and point fingers, the reality is that it’s useless.
We are all in this together. And we had years to prepare for this (without even realizing it)—to unlock our own knowing and to begin to be aware of what it means to come into our power.
Since 2019, we’ve been in a state of mild panic and anxiety as our issues began to emerge for us to deal with them in order to get us to see where we’ve given others our power. Because we’ve surrendered it time and again.
But to come into our power has nothing to do with taking power away from others, nor does it mean feeding off the teet of those in positions of power, but rather owning who we are, gathering up all those parts of ourselves left in disarray that have made us impotent or scared of our own shadows. And trusting that we can do this because no one else can or will do it for us.
It’s when we come into our power that we can begin to transform our lives. Yes, this pandemic can be seen as an opportunity in many ways. The end result can be freedom. The path can lead us to a greater awareness and consciousness than the world has seen before. We can experience greater abundance because greed will eventually become a thing of the past. Relationships that survive this period will only grow stronger because we’ve been forced to prioritize the ones we value.
But the reality is that path will likely not be a smooth one if we fail to understand how each and every one of us has a role in how this plays out. Not by staying in, #socialdistancing, self-isolating, quarantining, going into lockdown, and giving into the peer pressure and shame but rather by waking up to the fact that our lives and the way we’d been living had been one big illusion in the first place. And that in trying to abate one level of suffering we’re merely prolonging it.
What is demanded of each and every one of us now is that we begin to own the fact that we face a choice. Either we keep feeding the fear or choose to embrace the uncertainty with all the fearlessness we can muster, and wake up to the fact that this world and our lives are ours to create not conform. Only when we do that will we really understand that we didn’t come into this world to be victims but rather creators. First we must trust in ourselves—trust in our purpose and trust in our power.