Yesterday I wrote about reconciling with the past, before charging into the future.
Today I want to present two very different ways of thinking about the future.
Door 1: Continuing the past into the future, with small mods, tweaks, and adjustments. This is the default mode for nearly everyone in most years. This was me, for 50+ years of life.
Door 2: Building a foundation for something better, starting now. Understanding that, like a kitchen remodeling, the “tear down” phase is messy and uncomfortable. We’ve been in tear down phase, collectively, for a while now. Sometime it will end.
A New Year is a chance to reflect on what we will choose.
There is nothing special about it except for that chance to reflect. We can make a different choice in any moment, so this is not a “pressure” situation.
Door 1 above comes from a long-held acceptance that “this is the way things are, and so how they must be.” It is an adaptation, though not a healthy one.
I remember my younger years, growing up in a world that often didn’t make sense.
My childhood friend Chris, who loved to throw snowballs – and sometimes rocks, dirt, or even metal bolts – at passing cars, was so confident in who he was. Despite the toxic things he did, I looked to him because I was lost, deeply un-confident, because nothing made sense. And here he was, clear about who he was. So for a time, I thought he had it figured out, even though I was hesitant to join him in destructive actions (and only rarely did).
I’ve done that kind of looking up to “authorities” many times, with many people, because I never felt I had it figured out.
It didn’t and doesn’t make sense.
I wondered, and still do: Why would people war with each other? Why do people manipulate each other? Why do religions that espouse being for “Good” and “God” often spew so much hate towards anyone who is different than their ideal? Why does science often act like a religion, and perform required worship at the altar of concepts like randomness, meaninglessness, and sometimes hopelessness?
Why did the magic of life that I experienced when younger seem like something that had to be hidden away in a chest under the floorboards in the darkest closet, in the name of “growing up” and “becoming an adult?”
Why do institutionalized sciences often suppress anomalies that don’t fit existing models? Why do so many religions disavow and actively suppress any hint of “magic”?
For those who doubt this pattern, notice how little serious attention is given—within mainstream scientific or media channels—to the many unresolved oddities of the interstellar visitor 3I/Atlas. Anomalies that resist existing frameworks are not explored neutrally; they are minimized, ridiculed, or quietly ignored.
This is not a failure of intelligence. It is the defining behavior of authority-preserving belief systems.
What is the trouble that religions have with any hint of magic in the air?
Though I don’t know answers to many things, I have come upon a developing answer to this question.
The answer is: control.
By “magic,” I don’t mean metaphor or fantasy. I mean real forces, capacities, and modes of creation that exceed what our current rational frameworks can explain. These are limits of explanation, not limits of reality.
Religions are control-optimized institutions. If they convince you that your magic does not exist, they can control you. If you discover that your magic and your power do exist and are real, you no longer need them.
By doing this, step by step, I no longer need the Chris’s of the world to “show me the way.” Learning to tap into inner magic, inner clarity, and inner truth makes them unnecessary. I can tell what is aligned and what is misaligned. I know who I am, and what I stand for.
This leads back to the choice of the two doors. The first door is one of acceptance of the way things are.
Much of that “way things are” – the systems we rely on – have been built or corrupted by people operating without an internal compass, incentivized by systems that reward extraction. These are people who would throw rocks or bolts at a passing vehicle, just for fun. People who will take, and take more, and then take more on top of that, just because it’s amusing to do.
They are people who have no compass, except for the ones pointing them to more money, more power, more deception, and more suffering for others. This isn’t a moral judgment; it’s a structural outcome of feedback loops that reward these behaviors within the systems we’ve built.
Such people exist on all sides of politics, and they exist in many religions of God and in the religion of Science. They exist in academia, finance, banks, education, healthcare, and many more places.
For those of us who never “got it,” who never understood this approach, this callous disregard for the heart, for compassion, for caring for humans and the creatures of this planet, we make a choice, each and every moment.
Do we continue to “play along” with it? Do we continue to “accept the truth of it?” Do we implicitly support it by going along in resignation?
Or do we finally choose door number two, the door where we say “ENOUGH ALREADY”. This is the door where we let the old systems crumble of their own weight, a process well underway.
We don’t have to do all that much to help them along. Systems built on greed, deception, false authority, supremacy are always bound to self-destruct.
It is inevitable, and it is happening now.
Choice number 2 is like the choice when you’re driving down the busy freeway at a high speed in traffic, and you see a big crash on the other side. You can turn your head and focus in on the crash, putting yourself at risk of getting in your own crash in the process – or you can focus on where you’re going.
Door 2 is about focusing on where we are going. What will we put into place, after the crash on the other side is complete?
Don’t be fooled. This is not about a single political party. It goes so much deeper than that.
It is for example, our economic system – the very way that money gets created in the US and many other countries, is designed to make us into debt slaves, favoring almost always the holder of assets over the person who works for a living.
Since money is debt, and debt is created by banks who decide who is worthy of debt and when, we live as literal slaves to these banks.
What do we do when the banks fall?
I bring this up, not to go on a sidetrack, as it is worthy of much more writing than is room for here. I bring it up to show that if we are to truly choose door number 2, we can’t only think that electing some different people will fix things.
The rot in the foundation is too deep for a surface level fix like that.
This may sound like a dire piece.
If I was still convinced in the lack of magic, if I hadn’t spurned most of that brainwashing, I would feel like it’s dire. I did feel that, for many years.
Yet I have come back to again believe in magic. It is a magic of people, who come together to envision and build something better. It is the magic of intuition and inner knowing of what is right and true, and what is not. It is in the perseverance of the many oppressed peoples throughout history, many of whom are still standing up despite many costs of doing so.
It is also deeper than just a metaphor. We live in a magical world, a magical universe, and each of us has power. Power to do good, and power to do bad. Power to create, power to destroy. Power to imagine, and power to reason away our imagination.
The latter is the worst manipulation of all: convincing us that imagination is just meaningless kids play. Imagination is where all the true magic we hold begins.
We have been told we don’t have power, or that if we do, all power is bad. In being thusly convinced, that power remains hidden to most of us. This has been done so the people who understand their power, can continue to lord over us. That is what option one entails.
I for one am ready for door number two.
It has taken me great inner turmoil and outer turmoil to get there.
Yet I know that, individually we are powerful, and together we are unstoppable.
If we decide to build a new and better foundation, we can do so. We can let the good, the true, the compassionate win out.
We can envision and build better systems to support that, because without better systems, we will simply fall back into the old patterns.
This is how new futures are built: one clear choice, made repeatedly, inside better architecture.
