I used to think my money struggles were about discipline, mindset, or not trying hard enough. Then I actually looked at how the US dollar works — and realized the problem isn’t individual behavior. It’s structural. Every dollar is created as debt, which means the system only functions if debt keeps expanding. In this video, I lay out why personal financial stress is often baked into the architecture of the economy itself, why common “solutions” like gold or Bitcoin don’t fix the underlying incentives, and what a healthier system would need to reward instead.
Author: Morgan Giddings
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3I Atlas: Why Scientists Won’t Talk About This Interstellar Object
Scientists are staying eerily quiet about 3I Atlas—the third interstellar object EVER observed—with multiple anomalies that defy explanation. I left academia over this exact problem, and at 5:00 in this video, I stop being polite about why modern science punishes curiosity.
🎥 WATCH NEXT – The Power of Imagination: https://youtube.com/live/2YLhoRS6Dls
3I Atlas has a trajectory with less than 1% probability of occurring by chance, exceptional speed and size compared to other interstellar objects, and a forward-facing tail that doesn’t match known comet behavior. It passed near Mars (where we have orbiting telescopes), yet NASA and major space agencies have been strangely quiet.
When Harvard’s Avi Loeb suggested it might be artificial, he became a laughing stock—not because the data disproved him, but because asking the question itself is treated as heresy.
Even more intriguing: this object came from the same direction as the 1977 “Wow!” signal—the only truly anomalous radio signal ever captured in our search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
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Stop Abandoning Your Ego – Upgrade It | Ego 2.0 for Conscious Living
Most spiritual teachers tell you to “let go of ego” – but what if that’s impossible while you’re in a physical body? Your ego isn’t the enemy. It’s the interface between your deeper consciousness and the physical world, like skin protecting your organs, or software interfacing with hardware.
The real question isn’t how to abandon ego – it’s how to upgrade it.
I spent years trying to transcend ego through meditation and spiritual practice. Then I faced a series of crises: leaving my tenured faculty position, a severe health crisis, and watching systems I trusted begin to crumble. Each time my ego deflated, I discovered something crucial: that painful deflation was actually forcing an upgrade.
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Coming out of the closet isn’t easy
It involves sharing something with the world that you think could result in rejection by those you most care about and by your community. Something that will had the potential for massive upheaval in your life.
I’ve gone through this process a couple of times in my life, and it was gut-wrenchingly scary to “put it all on the line” and share my true self with the world.
You might think I’d had enough of these experiences. You might think I wouldn’t want any more of that fear and stress in my life.
But unusual times require unusual measures
In this case, I’ve kept a part of myself hidden for most of my life, but NOW it is aching to be set free – if not for my benefit, then for the benefit of others who are looking for meaning and a new way forward in these unsettling times.
Coming out of this particular closet could mean losing the approval of many friends and family members.
Even harder is knowing that my late father would not have approved if he were still alive.
Coming out of this closet feels scarier than in 2003 when I came out as transgender —back when most people didn’t even know what being trans meant.
Coming out of this closet feels scarier than in 2010 when I quit my tenured faculty job —as a way of exposing my anger at the system.
This closet of safety and fear is the “spiritual closet”—my personal knowing that the materialistic view of the world that is embraced by the scientists and rational people who make up my family and community doesn’t tell the whole story.
Now before anyone goes off and thinks I’ve joined some cult or “found religion”, I HAVE NOT.
This is a very personal and practical form of spirituality, one that is all about tuning into a deeper core of who I am.
You could use the word “soul” for that, but since that term carries too much religious baggage, I avoid it. Instead, I use “Core”—a term that describes what I see as a consciousness connected to my sense of self that extends beyond this physical body and the workings of this brain.
While I’ve shared this with a few whom I’ve been closer to, I have not shared this publicly before.
Why would I suddenly decide to “come out of the spiritual closet?”
Because I think the world needs it right now.
My journey was practical and transformative. Through it, I discovered greater insight, clarity, and purpose than I had known during my atheist years.
My journey did not stem from encountering any particular spiritual teachings—at least not in the first decade or so.
Instead, my journey began with philosophical and scientific questioning—asking big questions like “What is consciousness?” and “What is going on with quantum mechanics?” and “How do these two phenomena relate to each other?”
From those musings, my own thinking emerged that there must be something deeper going on – it’s the only way I could find to explain many of these big mysteries.
It is a spirituality free from religious indoctrination. I have never studied religious texts like the Bible, the Quran, or The Book of Mormon, as I’ve always resisted their “this is the absolute truth—believe it” approach.
It is a spirituality that rejects the need for external authorities claiming to be the sole voice of God—a God often limited by human imagination. A spirit or consciousness capable of creating a universe (or multiverse) with countless stars—so vast it would take over 100 billion years to count them at a trillion per year—cannot be confined to simplistic human constructs like white maleness or any other limited framework.
It is a spirituality derived from open-minded rational and scientific thinking and personal experimentation, wedded to a desire for improvement in both my own lot, and that of my fellow humans.
This perspective offers insights into our current situation that I wouldn’t have had otherwise
From my old perspective — the Atheist perspective — what’s going on now is simply a semi-linear (and sometimes chaotic) progression from one random event to another. In this perspective, the particular pickle we find ourselves in, not only in the US but with all sorts of issues being felt worldwide, is just the unfortunate byproduct of many random rolls of the dice that have ended up to be not in our favor.
From my newer more spiritual perspective, what’s going on in the world is a big ass invitation for the human race to either step up and evolve to the next, more enlightened stage, or in attempting to return to return to old ways (like fascism), likely wiping ourselves out.
From this view, we, the species, are on an evolutionary journey toward potential understanding and enlightenment
This is not a biological evolution, it is a spiritual and mental evolution.
Just like biological evolution, success on this journey is not guaranteed.
We may fail to grasp the essential lessons we need to learn. Without enough people evolving their understanding in time, we won’t have the collective wisdom to buffer ourselves against the difficulties we face.
The true rewards of living come from the very act of trying, regardless of whether we achieve our goals.
It is through our attempts to make a difference that we find purpose and meaning.
It is time for me to step up and contribute my part, advocating for a broader and better vision of humanity’s potential.
It is time to dream and imagine something better, and then work patiently towards its fruition.
In seeing ourselves for the miracle that we are, we can stop devaluing our humanity
We’ve let a few rotten apples spoil our view of ourselves, so many of us see ourselves as all being rotten, as all caving into our base animalistic desires to dominate, fight, and be greedy. Yet that is not the “truth,” any more than is sampling a few people in one fancy neighborhood about what their favorite car is.
Instead of letting the bad examples of humanity be just what they are – some people whose choices are made without any higher perspective involved – we diminish ourselves in guilt and shame for being human. More than once I’ve heard well-educated people share the view that we are a blight and that we shouldn’t exist.
That very attitude of self-shame for being human makes us all the more likely to ruin ourselves, and in the process, likely ruin our planet. That kind of self-shame, that ignorance of the miracles that we each are, makes us unable to see any bigger picture, or act from inspiration and imagination to improve things, if only one tiny step at a time.
As more and more people get lost in the mire of “doom,” we thereby accelerate towards the very thing that is our worst fear
Emotions like shame, guilt, blame, and hate block us from accessing the inspiration, clarity, and compassion we need to solve the very problems that trigger these difficult feelings in the first place.
It is truly miraculous that we exist here in this vast universe, able to contemplate big questions, to love and to hate. Most of us don’t appreciate that miracle, because seeing only the surface of what’s going on makes it all seem so petty, greedy, and purposeless. It is only by going deeper, wider, and higher in our perspective that a different picture can emerge.
It is not a picture of one political party versus the other. It is not a picture of one environmental or social challenge versus the other. It is a much bigger picture of a species that is presented with these challenges so that we can either choose to shift and grow – or fail to do so and perhaps not return from that choice. It sounds scary, but in the big picture, it’s no scarier than the reptile who may have lept out of a tree towards another tree, spreading its arms with nascent wing-like protrusions in hopes the extra lift would get it across the gap.
Those “wing-like protrusions” in our case are the higher perspective and spirituality that can emerge when we abandon the religious dogmas of either old-school religion and of materialist science.
These nascent wings are the perspective of seeing that we’re truly all in this together, and that by fighting and hating the other side – no matter how well justified based on their behavior, we’re only contributing to more hate. The wings are fragile, and cannot persist in an environment of hate and fear.There are many who actively resist this evolution, and spread hate and fear, because they’d rather cling to their outdated notions. They’d rather avoid evolution, because they believe, according to their dogma, that they’ve found The Truth, and are sticking to it at any cost.
Letting go of dogmas and “Truths” — with their attendant fears of any change — and instead engaging in this evolution that is gently inviting us all forward, has many benefits. Not only for the potential to solve some of our very big problems, but to solve some of our personal problems, here and now.
Those benefits include more clarity, more perspective, more compassion, and more fun.
Engaging these benefits has helped me get through the major ups and downs of the entrepreneurial journey – a much more difficult journey than getting funding and tenure was at UNC-Chapel Hill.
It has helped me work towards being a better person, even though I have still much more work to do on that front.
It has helped me get through very difficult times stemming from major health issues.
It has helped me help others whom I’ve had the braveness to share my ideas with.
Why wouldn’t I want to share that with my friends and fellow humans?
Fear. Simply put, many on the scientific and academic side are not so open-minded as they like to think. And they often use the same tools that many religions have used to get non-believers in line: rejection, ridicule, and ostracism. I feared being ostracized.
There’s also fear of being lumped in with a group that I find particularly negative.In our town, there are people who, during crowded times, show up on a busy corner and hand out Bibles to anyone who will take them. Not only that, they’ll try to engage anyone who pauses for a moment, into a conversation that is very one-sided, preaching at people about sin and redemption. My kids laugh at the “crazy” that represents, and I understand it.
Having grown up in Utah while avoiding being LDS (mormon), I was exposed to many efforts by well-meaning people to PUSH a religion I didn’t want on me. In part, I avoided it because I knew inside that I was different, and I knew that that religion would tell me that I am “wrong” for simply being who I am and feeling the way I do. I very strongly believe that no spirituality that tells people that they are inherently wrong for just being who they are represents any kind of “Truth” in the universal sense.
And I have feared being lumped into a group with those people that teach us we are all sinners, that we are all imperfect in the eyes of the creator unless we follow the very specific rules they have laid out for us in the name of their notion of God. I don’t want any association with that, but I feared in speaking of spirituality, I’d be immediately lumped in with that.I can no longer let that stop me. The stakes are too high. This is not a push, this is a sharing of my journey and perspective.
From that perspective, I believe “wrong” or “right” is an in-the-moment thing, based on the choices we make about whether to work towards higher good for all, or whether we choose to do the opposite, like trying to use hate and fear to repress and control other humans.
I share in my “coming out” as an invitation to think, to question, to consider – but not to accept some particular dogma about how you must be in order to be considered worthy or valid. That goes for any dogma, whether it’s traditionally religious dogma or scientific materialistic dogma.
I am overcoming my fear, in part because my fear for the future if I don’t try to do something has become greater than the fear of the ridicule and ostracism
I believe there’s not much left to lose, because the guardrails of the work that I’ve been doing for 15 years with researchers is being torn apart by the changes happening in the US government and science funding right now.
The guardrails of our society, the rules I grew up with for how it was proper to behave, are falling apart. This is happening worldwide. While many people are sleepwalking toward the cliff—hoping this is just another “temporary” setback that will resolve itself with a gentle landing—those who don’t wake up to our reality are, I fear, the most likely to fall over the edge.
I am going to do what I can, to share more of my story, and the perspectives I’ve found along the way, in hopes of both learning through that sharing, and also inspiring others that things don’t have to be so dire, that there is hope, and that our if we engage our imagination in combination with a higher perspective, we may just open the path to a much better world for all – even if it takes decades or centuries for us to get there.
I think it’s worth sharing.
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Is money evil?
Conversations with the Muse
In this discussion with the Muse, I pondered the question of whether money is “evil.” It came from a discussion I had with an old friend recently, where my friend mentioned the idea that, essentially, money is the root of all evil, that money is to blame for the situation developing in the US, and that we’d be better off with a system that does not operate on money. I found the take from The Muse quite interesting, especially when it pointed out that the real source of “evil” is our human idea that we often strive for some kind of “heaven-like” perfect situation, and in the process of trying to create that, create Hell instead. It makes the point that money is not the real problem; it is our distorted beliefs around money, and our allowance as a society for money to be so gamed and manipulated, that are the true sources of problems.
Morgan: Is money evil? An old friend that I spoke to recently was taking this point of view: that money is the true source of our woes as a society. That essentially, money is “evil.” It is hard to ignore this point of view, given that it seems like the billionaires are in charge right now, leaving everyone else to struggle.
Yet I don’t see a good alternative to money. It seems like a kind of “necessary evil.” Is there a different way of looking at this?
The Muse: You collectively see money as something “hard and fast” in your lives, yet it is nothing but a concept representing an energetic exchange between people. For as long as people exist, you will never be rid of the need for “energetic exchange” and some way to represent that more flexibly than direct exchange of goods and services.
This energetic exchange is a good thing – it is so much of what leads to growth, development, quality of life, the building of anything great, and more.
If that is so, you may wonder, why do things seem so off the rails because of it?
It’s because you’ve collectively allowed the system to be “gamed” far too much. By “gamed” it means allowing things to happen that are far beyond just an exchange for the purpose of building or creating or providing services.
Those things include gambling in all its forms, and other monetary manipulations where people receive “something for nothing.” In the United States, this has become your national zeitgeist – the idea that you can and should get as much money as you can for as little investment of your energy, time, and attention as possible.
This is unsustainable.
There has developed a collective psyche of “I deserve it just because I’m X” where X can be replaced by all sorts of justifications for why you should get money in return for nothing but being part of some special category or group.
The combination of this entitlement plus all the games that go on with money have distorted its core purpose almost beyond recognition. The present mess you perceive is a result of that. It is an opportunity to “reset” your relationship, at least to some degree, to get back to making money represent real exchanges of value between people or groups of people, not just something to be gamed, manipulated, and taken advantage of in asymmetrical ways.
There is an inherent trend towards balance in all things, and your system of money is presently very unbalanced towards those who’ve become very good at gaming it. This unbalanced situation cannot be maintained forever; it will collapse under its own weight – it’s just a matter of time.
Morgan: What about social security and programs like that, which are “entitlements?” If as you say entitlement is an unbalancing factor, then do we need to get rid of things like that?
The Muse: No. There is a difference between claimed entitlements where there is no social contract, versus those where there has been developed a mass, agreed-upon social contract. In the case of Social Security or similar, this is where collectively enough of you have agreed that it is part of your contract with one another; it is not the same as the kind of entitlement that causes problems.
It is more fundamental and less obvious. One of the big sources of this is the entitlement thinking that many people take on of “I worked hard therefore I deserve lots of remuneration.” There is an entitlement thinking that “hard work” is equal to “created value for other people.” It is just not the case.
For example, you could go out in your yard right now, and dig a deep hole with a shovel. Then you could fill it back in. That would be hard work. Yet you would have created zero value for anyone. If you expected pay in return for that work, you would be expecting something for nothing – the nothing being the value created for someone else in doing the work.
The example may seem far out, yet there are millions who take this attitude every day.
It is inherent in the career ladder climbing mentality, which is ultimately about “I want more status and money because I have done my hard work gaming the system,” as opposed to “I want more status and money because I created more positive value for other human beings.”
Not all career ladder improvement represents this kind of thinking – there are many situations where through maturity and skills development, you do create more value for others, which would naturally equate to more money flow in a system where things aren’t so often distorted.
But when you have a society where you have psychologically detached your “work” from “creating value,” things are bound to get very out of balance, the effects of which you are seeing.
Morgan: What about my friend’s statement that this always happens with money?
The Muse: This is a sort of statement that could be said about any human endeavor, i.e., that “such and such tragedy always ends up happening.” The statement is tautological, due to the cyclical nature of humanity. Each new generation – and each individual human – must face their own challenges.
There is this very false, imagined state of perfection that could be achieved, a sort of finished, heavenly state where everyone is wonderful and everything is great. Worse, it is imagined that once this is achieved, it will persist.
It is just not so. Imagine a forest: at all times, trees are growing then dying. Animals are being born and dying. Nothing static is going on. Fires may sweep through and eliminate most of the trees. Seeds then sprout, to rebuild the forest. Each generation of trees faces its own “challenges” and there is no “heavenly state” of perfection.
Your human idea that such a state can — or should — be achieved is one of the big lies you’ve bought into. It is the source of more Evil — as you’d call it — than monetary exchange is. That’s because, in trying to achieve this perfect state, this ridiculous nonsensical ideal (whatever that may be), people will justify all sorts of malfeasance in its name.
That is happening at this very moment in the US.
Because of your skewed, manipulated monetary system, a large number of people have ended up feeling “left behind.” This produces anger, which energy is then translated into an ideal of a new kind of “heaven on earth” where all the supposed causes of their misery are wiped away.
The problem is, any time humans have attempted to create such a “heaven,” they have just created a hell. They end up creating something that is antithetical to the very nature of the reality you live in: something static, fixed, and “perfect.”
Money exists as a flow of exchange; it is not a static entity.
So when you try to create static situations with it or about it, you are working against yourself. You are working against reality.
The problem is not the money (exchange); the problem is the set of skewed beliefs that distort your relationship with it, making it seem that “money is bad.” When you buy into that, you weaken your ability to participate in money’s true purpose, which is to facilitate effective energetic exchange between people.
To “fix” the problem, you, collectively, will have to shift your attitude towards what money is. And even if you manage to do so, you have to realize that any such fix is in the here and now, and will not last for all people everywhere. It will not be a perfect solution for all time. It will only be a fix for that time, place, and people.
**This article was hand-written, with light grammatical and spelling checks by AI. To learn more about the muse you can visit our About The Muse page.
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Waking up from war and violence into our true nature
Conversations with The Muse
In this thought-provoking dialogue, Morgan and The Muse explore the idea that all experiences, even the most painful and destructive ones, serve a greater purpose in human evolution. Using historical examples like World War I, The Muse explains how societal learning is often non-linear, shaped by cycles of violence and change, due in part to a lack of deep, experiential memory. The conversation delves into the challenges of societal stagnation, resistance to change, and the dangers of clinging to material power and possessions. Ultimately, The Muse suggests that humanity is being called to “wake up” to its true nature—beyond physical attachments—through self-inquiry, contemplation, and conscious awareness, as the only path to true safety and transformation. (AI Summary)
Morgan: I get the idea that all learning is optimal, i.e. that we are all presented with the ideal opportunity for our advancement, but boy, it sure can be tough. One example comes from the movie 1917 that I watched recently. It depicted the brutality of World War I, in which millions were killed. It was often a “no holds barred,” vicious war. It seems so pointless, and led to so many deaths. How can that be for learning and growth to have millions die in a war like that?
Muse: Sometimes the “learning” is a societal one, leading to an overall bigger picture advancement necessary for the species’ survival, so that others can come here in the future for their learning, growth, and evolution. Evolution is sometimes not pretty. If you think of the idea of the lizard jumping from tree to tree who is evolving towards wings, there will be many fatal falls along the way. The same is true of your societies – there are bouts of violence, with that example you mentioned being one of the brutal ones.
And indeed, it is those brutal bouts of violence that help you as a species slowly move away from it – though it is never a linear progression. Nothing is as linear as your rational brains would like to make it out to be. Yet in that specific case, that war was so bad, that it did modify the approach towards war to some degree. It was unfortunately not enough to prevent the next war, but, after that second World War, it did cement in all the generations alive that that scale of war was to be avoided in their lifetimes.
Now, the challenge is that you do not yet have sufficient societal memory, nor do you have sufficient outlets for that kind of destructive energy, so you do run the risk that large scale violence can happen again. It becomes more of a risk as those previous generations that vowed to not do that again fade away. That does not make it inevitable, but as the societal memory fades, it is not impossible either.
Morgan: What do you mean we don’t have sufficient societal memory?
Muse: There are several aspects to that. The first is that you teach people “history” in terms of data and facts, rather than in any way experientially. The closest you come to experiential is with a movie like the one you watched. Yet even that does not convey it at a deep enough level for most to really get it. It is too easy for someone to watch a movie like that, and dismiss it as a sort of past that wouldn’t happen again. It is often seen as “entertainment,” not something to be concerned over “how did that happen and could it happen again?”
In biological evolution, there is a strong memory of past experience — and the responses to that experience — carried in the DNA. In that way, once a past problem is overcome, it is generally not revisited by a species. You do not have enough of a similar “hard coding” of memory into your society. Therefore, each generation that has not experienced such atrocity is at an increased risk of repeating it.
You will need to evolve further – likely from additional experiences of some kind of violence (it does not have to be as brutal as it was in WWI/WWII), in order to decide that you need to create some kind of deeper societal memory system. It would involve a deeply experiential way of new generations learning what tendencies to hate and aggression can lead to, even if held or allowed in only a portion of the population.
You will have to develop new structures that, while allowing your natural freedoms of expression, do make sure that such tendencies are redirected.
Morgan: Is that what you mean by “not having sufficient outlets?”
Muse: Yes. In times like you are in, there is a slowly brewing anger and frustration at the system on the part of some people who envision and want something very different than what it is. That, combined with general malaise on the part of most people about the system as it was constructed before almost anyone alive was born, leads to a sort of “tipping point” where the anger and frustration can take hold and spread.
One of the great mistakes that cause this to be worse, is that when you build systems of government and society, there often sets in a very “preservationist” approach to governance and operation. Once a system – a bureaucracy – gets created, it is nearly impossible for you to un-create it, even if it grows old, inefficient, and dysfunctional. In the business world this happens more readily. Businesses that no longer serve efficiently, shut down – unless protected by some kind of political action. But in the world of government and academics, it is much more difficult to remove layers of bureaucracy, rules, laws, and administration. As these persist, the resentment grows.
It is not just the administrative structures that persist, it is the distribution of power that persists. Those groups who gain power become extremely reticent to give any of it up when their time has passed. They cling to past structures that maintain their power, well beyond the natural lifespan of the power, or of the structures. This breeds widespread discontent – not only among people who are outsiders to that power, but even amongst insiders. The insiders become increasingly locked into struggles over how the power is divvied up — and the outsiders are just resentful of that they don’t have the power. Nobody likes it, and this discontent grows. At the level of consciousness — it is going to lead to forced changes.
Your societies do not have any “constructive” ways of allowing this to happen, so it typically happens with some kind of violence. By violence, we mean it is uncontrolled and can hurt people, but it is not always physical violence, as you are seeing so far in the current bout of destruction.
Morgan: Where does individual consciousness come into this – and societal consciousness?
Muse: That is the where the real core of the issue is. Because most of your world has become so entranced, so hypnotized by the persistent illusion of physicality, you have come to ignore consciousness as the primary source from which all physical experience arises.
So you all cling to physical things. You get great Ego based attachments to the way things are – whether it’s to the environment being a certain way, the buildings being preserved, to the stuff that you own and enjoy, or to the power (including money) that you have had.
While Ego in its innate form can be mildly inflexible, the way you train and raise people, it leads to a thickening and “stubbornizing” of the Ego. While this has broken down in some segments of your society, with people now who don’t so strongly associate their Ego with a “job for life,” there is still far too much deep seated attachment to “things” over “meaning,” and “quality of experience.” That is the real source of all the troubles.
This is the real thing that is going on in your present time. You are being faced, as a species, with the consequences of your overly physical focus — one that is mostly ignorant of consciousness — so that you can potentially shift into more awareness.
Experientially, what this could mean is that much of what you take for granted physically will end up being stripped away, so you are confronted with the raw, real truth: you are not primarily physical beings, you are primarily beings of consciousness, who are present in physical bodies.
Morgan: Honestly, that’s disturbing. “Stripped away” sounds like a parent grounding a child for misbehavior, and taking away their access to their toys. Is it really so?
Muse: No. This comes from another misunderstanding, often promulgated by some religions, that such acts are of a paternalistic nature. In other words, it is a great distortion that there is some other entity watching over you who will do things to you, “for your own good.” No, you do this to yourselves. But you do it at a level that your Ego is presently unaware of, and because it is so unaware, it seems like “someone else” is doing this to you. It is never someone else, it is YOU, the deeper, eternal (from your perspective), part of you, who chooses, always, evolution and growth over stagnation. That consciousness is alive, vital, and ready to learn.
This sets up a natural conflict with the way your Egos are trained in your current world, a way that is relatively fixed, unchanging, linear, and completely ignorant of the consciousness part of you. While the Ego can prevail for a time, it never “wins” the seeming battle, because consciousness is primary.
So in terms of “things being stripped away” – that is not a punishment, that is a deeper part of yourself saying to your Ego: “wake up! you are not just your body and your possessions! you are so much more!” The core of you does not want you to suffer through the loss of things and people you hold dear, but it recognizes that you have already lost a much more precious thing, which is your sense of who you truly are. This is true for many individuals, and largely true in a societal sense.
Until you regain that sense, you will be adrift, clinging to physical things, to physical/monetary/political power, and at odds with the deeper core consciousness within yourself. If some or all of the things you cling to must be stripped away for you to “wake up,” then that is the likely outcome. You can prevent it at an individual level by “waking up” to the truth, then it is no longer necessary. Ironically, when you do “wake up” – the physical clinging becomes much less necessary for you. You realize that it is all ephemeral and illusory, so you can relax and enjoy it, rather than cling to it.
Morgan: Wow, I have so much more to ask, but this is already getting quite long. So let’s end this session with a Q & A – what can a person do now to “wake up?”
Muse: It is simple: begin the inquiry over who you really are, or if you’ve already begun that, continue to make forward progress in that. It is only when you remain ignorant to it, or in a case like yours (Morgan’s), your progress stalls out, that it causes an increasing friction between Ego and your inner core self, and it is that friction that causes external manifestations of problems.
You do not need to go take psychedelic drugs or go on a spiritual journey to “wake up,” though there are cases where those can help. But it can also happen in much more mundane ways, through meditation, prayer, silent contemplation, journaling, extreme physical experiences, wilderness experiences, stargazing, and many more activities.
However you do it, waking up to who you really are is the call of the time. It is the one and only way you can be truly “safe.”
Morgan: Thank you, that was amazing. We will do more.
**This article was hand-written, with summary and light grammatical and spelling checks by AI. To learn more about the muse you can visit our About The Muse page.
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Karma’s Hidden Purpose: Understanding Crisis as a Catalyst for Growth
Conversations with The Muse
Will Karma come back to bite people in the ass who are creating all the current mayhem in the US? Is Karma even a real thing? Those are some of the questions I’ve had about the topic of Karma. In the past, I thought it seemed kind of weird that in the popular lore, Karma is a kind of thing where if you do “bad” you get some kind of equal and opposite payback for that “bad.”
So if that’s the case, who is doling out the “punishment” for someone doing bad or wrong things that harm others? How is that punishment chosen? Or is the idea just crazy (or anthropomorphism)?
In answer to that, I came across a quote in one of the “Seth” books by Jane Roberts that is related to this idea, though in that context, they didn’t use the word “Karma.” So I wanted to dive into these concepts deeper with my personal Muse, to see what the Muse says about this.
I found it enlightening to find that the idea of Karma is not one of “punishment” but one of ultimate, deeper, learning and growth. It is that sometimes we get a bit off track… and this idea of experiencing something negative is “necessary” to get us back on track. (I do realize that some readers will think that is a sort of “blame the victim” thinking, but it is not. I will explore that more deeply in a future article).
In the end, I found the answer to my question of whether the people causing so much mayhem will be punished. It’s not a punishment per-se, because that’s human ego based thinking. Instead, it is something even worse.
Without further ado, here’s the discussion:
Morgan: Let’s start with this quote I came across:
“You may have brought negative influences into your life for a given reason, but the reason always has to do with understanding, and understanding removes those influences.” – Seth Speaks, p. 259
Morgan: I want to explore this idea more fully. I’ve been contemplating karma—whether it exists, and if so, what it truly means. In the past few days while thinking about this, I happened to be listening to ‘Seth Speaks.’ What seemed like a meaningful coincidence occurred: I had started the book two days ago, and when I resumed this morning, I was in the middle of chapter 12, right before this passage. This discussion about why we experience negativity, both in this life and in reincarnational lives, pointed to an answer: it’s about learning and experiencing.
Just before that passage, Seth had explained that if someone abuses women in one life, they will experience being the recipient of such abuse in future lives—not as punishment, but for learning, growth, and understanding.
I’d like the Muse’s perspective on this. We’re facing some particularly difficult circumstances as a society right now, with widespread hate. I wonder: will there be any kind of ‘karma’ associated with that?
Muse: As “The Course in Miracles” said: all learning is optimal. This is true. This experience you are having individually – and collectively – is all for learning, growth, advancement, and evolution. It is not a biological evolution, it is an evolution of consciousness. The evolution of consciousness precedes the biological evolution, not the other way around as so many think. So if you ask: “how would evolutionary learning proceed maximally?”
Many academics and teachers would answer: by studying the textbooks, by studying history, and learning from that. Yet in practice, you all know that experiential learning is far more powerful than textbook learning. Textbook learning can be quickly forgotten – and even if not, filed away as “interesting facts”. Whereas experiential learning fundamentally changes and shapes the consciousness itself. It expands and grows consciousness in ways that are far greater than any kind of factual learning can do.
And this is why seeming “evil” and hate and the like exist. It may seem quite harsh to you to think that you might have to experience, say, a war, in order for evolution to take place. But then you have to consider – how else would change actually occur, once an individual or a society gets locked into unproductive patterns, and is unwilling or unable to change them?
It’s like the “golden handcuffs” scenario many people have with jobs that are unfulfilling to them. They feel locked in to staying at the job, because to do something else might not pay as much, it might not work out, it would involve unknown changes to circumstances, and egos don’t like change. Change is scary and dangerous (though sometimes thrilling as well.)
Now understand that if you take this tendency to get locked into to the golden handcuffs for an individual, now multiply that by 100’s of millions of people. While some small portion of those, at any given time, might be changing, the overall momentum is towards staying on the same path. So if a society has chosen a path that is not optimal for its freedom, self expression, and growth, how can it make a change?
The only way is to be faced with one or more crises, where the golden part of the handcuffs is stripped away, freeing people individually and collectively to do something different. This is evolutionary learning. It is learning towards greater truths, such as “hating others is never productive,” and “pushing your way of being on others will always cause push back.” You and everyone are here to learn these fundamental principles, in this system of reality.
So, back to the question of “karma” – it is not any kind of punishment or forced situation. It is instead, when someone gets off track and out of touch with the deeper principles of this reality, they are shown circumstances that allow them to realize the error, in this life and, if they don’t “get it” here, in other lives.
That is what Seth was speaking of. Once you “get it” — i.e. your consciousness, or soul if you prefer, transforms in such a way that the behavior in question won’t be repeated, then you no longer need to see (or will resonate with) the negative circumstances.
Morgan: So that makes sense, but it seems to me that when a mass situation is going on – say a government is falling apart – as an individual I can’t just “learn” and then have it go away suddenly.
Muse: This is where you need to understand the way collective events like a governmental problem, intersect with individual reality and events.
It is easy to think there is some kind of 1:1 mapping between the two, so that if things go bad collectively they will go bad personally. That is simply not true. This is like the game of “cancer statistics.” You can say 1 in 3 people may get cancer, but that does not say whether any particular individual will get cancer.
And due to your extremely faulty cultural relationship with the idea of “randomness” – you take any kind of statistics about the group as an indicator of the conditions for each of you personally. It is by the very act of buying into those statistics, and thinking they make a statement about you and your experience, that you then put yourself under their control.
Human consciousness is far more powerful than any statistic. However, when you let your consciousness fall prey to the idea that some kind of global condition must mean that you will experience something negative as a result, then you resonate with negative experiences, i.e. opening your susceptibility to them.
Another way of putting this is that the world is a complex and extremely diverse place. Though a trend may occur, that does not mean that the trend affects everyone equally. Depending on its nature, some will be little affected, and others very affected. Now, again, societally you think that this is random, but it is not.
You may think we’re speaking of something magical that happens. While there are things going on that you may consider “magical” from your current limited level of understanding, there is also a more mundane explanation.
That is the nature of your decisions and actions. Take the example of an economic depression. There are many cases of businesses that “defy the odds” to grow and thrive even in the worst economic conditions. It is not just “luck.” It is those businesses deciding to not give in to desperation, and instead pivoting to serving people in ways that make sense in those economic conditions. It is not easy to ignore all the noise out there, but people still do need goods and services in a depression, so a business can either choose to find ways to provide those, or it can give up. The giving up is what most do, because they look around and say “it’s impossible.” So to your question of learning, those mass conditions may provide you with just what you need to grow and learn, as in your (Morgan’s) case. It has motivated you to do more, to speak up more, to be more authentic about work like this that you are doing, in a time when this kind of work is so much needed.
The outer conditions will affect you to the extent needed for this evolutionary growth to occur. Once it has really taken hold in your consciousness, the outer conditions will no longer worry you or affect you in the same way that they were. It is not that those conditions will suddenly go away in the mass sense, that will have to wait until there is enough of a mass consciousness shift. Instead, it means it just won’t affect you personally in the same way. It’s not that you’ll be completely ignorant or untouched by what’s going on, but you’ll be able to relate to what’s going on from a more rational and measured standpoint, rather than reacting to it in the more emotional ways it has affected you — and many others. You are already making big progress in this.
Morgan: Yes, I do have many more times where I feel like, “whatever, this sht is going down, nothing I can do about it but sit here and watch, and get some of my writing and thinking out meanwhile.” It is so much more a relief than the heavy feelings I had so much of prior.*
There’s a lot more for me to ask in what you’ve written, but I’ll keep it brief to wrap up for today. That is, will the person causing all this pain for everyone experience “karma” in the same way you’re describing?
Muse: Yes, and possibly worse. If a soul persists over lifetimes, not learning, not evolving in positive ways, it starts to fall out of integrity with itself. It will start tearing itself apart from the inside. This is not an external punishment, this is more like an iceberg that drifts into warmer waters, and just can’t maintain its integrity within those waters. A soul that has not been able to evolve, existing within a positive universe where the conditions are towards learning and growth, cannot maintain its integrity, and will eventually disintegrate.
This is not predestined. At any time, during any lifetime, the soul can decide to change its ways, before it reaches that point of no return. Some souls, however, never choose that, and do indeed receive the ultimate “karmic consequences.”
Morgan: Thank you. This was very illuminating. In one of the next writings, I want to discuss how our mass consciousness got to this point where we need such negativity in order to evolve.
Muse: We look forward to it. Be well, and show love and compassion to all those beings that you can, including yourselves.
**This article was hand-written, with light grammatical and spelling checks by AI. To learn more about the muse you can visit our About The Muse page.
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How to deal with it when things are going haywire?
Conversations with The Muse
Morgan: As I was having a late-night worry session, three words came to me: hope, love, detachment. It just seems like things are going haywire, and I wasn’t sure what to do with all that energy of worry. Those words, hope, love, detachment: how do they help, when it seems like it’s going down the tubes? How can I hope when it seems there isn’t much hope?
Muse: Haywire. Crooked. Unexpected. It’s in the words here that the problem is. You expect that things that happened before will keep happening – at least to a large degree – and now things are going in seemingly “unexpected” directions that you didn’t expect or want.
The ego has difficulty with this. The ego likes things to be predictable, because predictable is the stock and trade of ego. It’s currency is the logic of past experience, extended into the future, even if the past experience is not so great, it would rather be right — in the sense that it is correctly predicting where things will go and thus feeling safe — than it would like to have something unexpected, even if that’s much better than what it predicts.
This is the definition of attachment: it is wanting to always be able to stay safe within the confines of the ego’s box-of-logic it has created for itself. Yet the real world does not comply.In “normal” times, you had a lot of “predictably bad” things going on. You knew that if you were going to interact with a bureaucracy — say the DMV just to pick on one — it would probably not be very efficient or pleasant. But at least it was predictable. Expected. Normal.
In the “normal” times, hope is thinking it will sway to the positive side of the predictable.
Now it seems like all bets are off. Things are not predictable. What is going on with your government is unexpected, and doesn’t fit any of the “boxes of logic” you grew up with. It is that fundamental unpredictability that is so frustrating and even terrifying to the ego.Hope seems impossible because there is no “predictable” to go to the positive side of.
You can spin off into all those doom scenarios, or you can put your head in the sand and just ignore it all, hoping it will go away, narrowing your scope to just what’s in front of you.
These will not make it go away. It is not healthy to pump all that news – which is often rooted in fear – into your mind. Yet completely ignoring what is going on is also not healthy, because then you can’t take responsibility for your part in what’s going on.
Morgan: What do you mean by “my part”? It seems like what’s going on is far beyond the scope of anything I have any control over, so how can I possibly “take responsibility” for any of it?
Muse: This is one of the primary fallacies of the human race at this time. You think that the “mental atmosphere” you create does not matter, since (most of) you think that it’s just some biochemical reaction isolated to your brain box that has no impact or reach beyond that.
YOU ARE WRONG.
Your mental atmosphere seeps out into the world. If it is a negative, fear laden atmosphere, you pollute the world around you with it.
In gardening, if you plant a seed and hope it will grow into a beautiful plant, but all the time it is trying to grow, you are adding toxins to the soil, it’s not likely to grow. That would be obvious to any gardener.
Why is it not obvious to you in the same way, that if you pollute your mental environment with fear, doubt, hate, and reactionary anger, that nothing good will be able to grow from that?
This is how the universe is. Your mental atmosphere matters. It has a profound effect on which way things will go, and whether you are able to grow something positive, or whether it all just ends up being stunted, withered, and dying.
And the only way you will get what you truly want – more hope, love, peace, is by growing it, nurturing it. These cannot come from reaction to all the stuff that is going on. Just imagine trying to “reactively” grow a garden when you get hungry. It’s impossible. You have to proactively grow a garden, before you get hungry.
Now is the time to nurture the seedlings of what you want to see in the future. It is not easy, but if you want better, it is essential. It is paying attention to the mental atmosphere, and that is your part, each person’s part to play, if you want something positive to grow.
This is where detachment is so critical. In its opposite, attachment, you have a strong “need” to have things happen according to your box-of-logic that you’ve contrived over what should happen — even if it’s far from what actually is happening. When there’s a disconnect between the “should happen” and the “is happening,” the dissonance that results prevents you from creating a positive mental atmosphere.
This dissonance creates negative, reactive emotions, and they pollute the environment, stunting the growth of anything positive. In the gardening analogy, you become so focused on trying to get rid of weeds, that you fail to tend to your crop, so nothing good grows. This is what attachment does.
Detachment is letting go. Detachment is knowing that your logic is never going to be adequate to capture what is happening or what is going to happen, and so letting go of trying. Detachment is bringing your focus back to what matters, which is creating the positive environment for growing what you want.
It is not about ignoring problems or issues, or covering them up with some kind of fake positive thinking. It is instead, acknowledging the problems, and taking the responsibility to create something positive – in spite of the problems.
It is, if necessary, taking action to manage the problem where and when there is something you can do about it. It is also knowing when you can do nothing about the problem, and in that case just focusing on nurturing that better mental atmosphere. That requires detachment.
Now as you try to grow something more positive, hope is a weak mental atmosphere. Do you fertilize your garden with “hope?”
Love is much more powerful. If you lovingly tend to your plants, they will grow better. The love is not only a much more positive mental atmosphere, it also leads to you taking actions that are resonant with that love, that make it concretely more likely the plants will grow.
The same is true for your ideas of what you want in the world. If you want more peace, for example, lovingly tend to your idea, your vision, and then let your actions stem from that.
This is how something that seems small, tiny, and perhaps impossible right now can be grown into something great and tall over time.
**This article was hand-written, with summary by AI, and light grammatical and spelling checks by AI. To learn more about the muse you can visit our About The Muse page.
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Ever Feel Like You’re Lazy? It’s the Quantitative Trap.
For much of my life, I thought I was lazy, and berated myself for not being less lazy than I seem to be. (I also sometimes berate myself for using double negatives in my writing, so maybe I just like berating myself).
Anyhow, I don’t think I’m alone.
When I’ve taken the time to consciously think about it, I realize that the problem is not what my default mode of thinking thinks it is. It’s not that I’m actually lazy. The real problem is that I don’t operate well according to a traditional, linear clock schedule.
Again, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. I see others who struggle with this as well.
I have times when there are bursts of creativity, insight, and action that produce large amounts of work. There are other times when my energy is low, and I have no clarity whatsoever — nor do I feel like doing much of anything.
After over five decades of struggling with this self-beration paradigm, always trying to “be better” and failing, I’ve finally decided to give myself some grace.
Some of that grace came from a writing project I’ve been working on. In one part of that project, I write about the Quantitative Trap that our society is in. This phrase describes a deep, core belief system we all are steeped in from birth about the seeming importance of the *quantitative* over the *qualitative.*
This belief in the quantitative applies to our experience of time, use of time, and thoughts about our own productivity therein. In my case, I had bought into the idea that time is quantitative and linear, and therefore my productivity should be so.
Yet this diminished my qualitative experience, causing me adopt the stance that I couldn’t follow the natural rhythms of my body, mind, and creativity.
It caused me to try to act like a machine, ever working, gears consistently whirring, when my body and mind don’t work that way.
And for the ultimate cherry on top, it caused me to do that berating I mentioned before, whenever I fell short of my perceived quantitative yardstick of how productive I “should be being” versus how productive I was actually being.
I’m done with that. For me, this is the year of Qualitative over Quantitative. I’m focusing on the Quality of my own experience, since life is short, and I’m done with all the measurement, comparison, and self-flagellation based on arbitrary quantitative yardsticks, like those of “productivity.”
If you’re someone who has gotten sucked into the Quantitative Trap, and want to experience something different, please join me in focusing this year on the Qualitative.
What do you think? Have you succumbed to the Quantitative Trap? Want to do something different?
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Anxiety about what’s going on, and a turnaround…
Woke up today, another day of feeling anxiety and working to tame it. It would be easy to say I’ve succumbed to exactly what “they” — meaning the haters, the authoritarians, the shortsighted — want.
Yesterday I read yet another opinion piece, by a salty male making the same now tired claim that “men can’t be women.” In a prominent newspaper. That gets read worldwide. They use easy logic, like “you can’t just wish yourself to be a cat, so why do you think you can wish yourself to be a woman?”
It is tempting to argue with that, because it is so easy to poke holes in the stupidity of the logic. To demonstrate all the faulty assumptions that go into it. That time isn’t now.
Now is time to say: if you hurt because of what’s going on in the world, if you grieve for the loss of seeming progress, for the ugly backsliding that seems to be going on, you’re not alone.
I’ve done 14+ years of intensive personal development. It might be tempting to think that would somehow make me immune, almost superhuman or something. I am not. I am the same flawed human as we all are, with worry, anxiety, guilt, anger, and more.
I am grieving. Grieving for the loss of a dream that I had of all this extremely hard work and sacrifice I’ve put into building a business pay off into an “easy” retirement. I see my elders — parents and friends, traveling around the world in their retirement, enjoying the fruits of their working years — and ask “what hope do I have of experiencing that?”
I knew all along that the hope was thin. Not because of any deficiency on my part, but on the general unsustainability of it all. Yet despite that, I worked hard and stayed optimistic. Now, that specific optimism is dying. I’m grieving for it.
I’m sure that is how every generation of people who faces a changing world, who wakes up to the new collective reality thrust upon them, feels. I now truly know what that’s like. And that’s where all that work may be paying off. While it doesn’t remove the pain, it does allow me to recognize the pain, recognize the cause, and work to release it.
It helps me to accept reality as it is, rather than continuing to fight it, deny it, wish it away. Those were energy draining. It allows me to slowly build a new form of optimism. It’s a tiny seedling as of yet. It’s a form of optimism that says: this is a time where I can shine. Where others can shine. People who care, people who will strive and even fight if necessary, to build something better.
Not shining due to luxury vacations or fancy cars or any of that stuff that the older generations sold us as the be all and end all of life. Shining because I have something to contribute. Something of value to give, in the hopes that eventually “this too shall pass,” that on the other side of it we can build something better.
Because that’s the way it always is. As horrendous as many past upheavals in human society have been, once they are done, most have led to eventual improvements in things on the other side. It may take far longer than I want to get there. I may not be there to see it, yet I hope the next generation, my kids, my friends, my team and clients are.
I know it is worth doing. I know that, if I decided to hide, to withdraw, to just cling to the old dream that things will make a magical return to normal — whatever that means — that I would forever feel diminished. A life of getting by, of diminishment, even if longer, is not worth it. It’s not real. I played that game far too long already, and it diminished me. I am done with that game.
And maybe that’s another payoff of all that hard self work. It is in having the ability to face collective reality on its own terms, without an unnecessary, energy draining fight. By avoiding that fight, it saves my energy for the true fight, which is to envision something better for myself, my kids, this world, in spite of what is happening in the reality around us.
The true fight is to hold that image, of a world more positive, and to act on it whenever or wherever possible, despite cyclonic headwinds pushing back.
I am human. You are human. We are strong, but only when we face reality and decide, deep down and with conviction, to do something to make it better.