Today I bring you perhaps the Jessica Snow-iest of all Jessica Snow meditations.
I think this one is coming through at just the right time.
Lately I have been contemplating why conspiracy theories seem so much more enticing to so many of us. I think we all can see how quick humans now are to accept conspiracy theories as fact and that taking a conspiracy theory to heart weirdly can bring us feelings of relief.
This is only natural. What is “real” has never been more debatable. The ground we used to stand on regarding “the truth” is now shifting sands. Errors in thinking abound. The “juiciest” news doesn’t have to be at all true to become viral. Deep fakes of all kinds are becoming the norm. We have crossed the uncanny valley. What even is “the truth” anymore?
At first, I blamed social media and corporate mainstream media - as I tend to do - but then something more profound began to shine through.
Conspiracy theories are having a big, multi-year moment because deep-down we all have the sense that “someone” is doing “something” TO US as a collective. We are living in hard times, rife with distrust and uncertainty, particularly online. Everyone is getting somehow squeezed. We have seen a lot of terrible things done by the powers that be. We may not trust those in authority like we used to.
Naturally, our nice big brains scramble to make or find meaning and often, the story of a conspiracy seems to at least explain who that someone is and why they are doing whatever we perceive they are doing to our world.
Even if the conspiracy theory brings us false information, we still might prefer it to the non-knowing.
But, what if the story is so much bigger than we can imagine, with so many more moving parts?
What if that “someone” is everyone?
What if there are ways of knowing that make man-made conspiracies irrelevant?
I encourage you to ponder these ideas for yourself. As I’ve said many times before, wisdom and discernment are currently some of the most important tools in our life toolkits.
Which brings me to our newest meditation experience - MORE THAN HUMAN.
In this one we have a big opportunity to deeply commune with a more than human energy or archetype and learn what they want to teach us.
I love all of our meditations, but lately, I love this one the most.
I have a feeling we are going to want to do this one over and over again - each time perhaps connecting to different aspects of the more than human world or deepening into an existing connection crafted during a previous listen.
I think More Than Human is going to be our new favorite meditation.
It has its genesis in James Bridle’s explanation of the more-than-human world from their brilliant book - Ways of Being. (I’ll include one of my favorite passages from this book below.)
I read Ways of Being last year, twice. It reaffirmed something I already knew - it is high time for humanity to drop its hubris and stop pretending we are at the top of the world hierarchy. *
As that big truth integrated within me, I wrote the More Than Human meditation.
Then, after writing, recording and editing it, imagine my surprise when I WAS SURPRISED by what the meditation helped me experience - the absolute gift of reconnecting to that which is not only not human, but more than human.
Turns out, our family of all things is bigger than we thought.
The first time I did this meditation I was expecting an animal or plant to show up but instead I got cliffs, sky and ocean - specifically the space where they meet. I was given the bodily feeling of fresh water cascading over the cliff’s edge, through the air and to the ocean. I was tuned into what it felt like for the water to flow over land and stone, then through the air, sparkling and then reuniting with more water.
This is very reflective of (and helpful to) something I am going through in my real life and also something that I recognize has the energy of meditations and experiences written long ago (especially Pacific, Currents and Salt to Fresh). This energy of the water over the edge of the cliffs and into the ocean is so exuberant and full of life and is inspiring how I move through these times and days.
I won’t bore you with the more than human energies I encountered with every subsequent listen of this meditation, but let’s just say the water flowing over the cliffs was just the beginning.
Another wonderful “side effect” of listening to More Than Human a lot is this feeling of being a part of a much larger community than I ever imagined. We are not alone. We can access many levels of energy and information. The world is awake and willing to bring help and healing.
When we meditate we gain access to realms upon realms of feelings and ideas that are simply not available to us in daily life. My hope is that this little $5 meditation gives us even greater access to those realms, that we might bring back some truly good solutions for the problems we face individually and collectively.
Or, at least, make this life we are living worth living in the time we have left.
Until next time,
Jess
*In Ways of Being, Bridle also includes AI and technology in general as more than human. Like James Lovelock in Novacene, this helps me expand my consciousness regarding AI, although Bridle does make some important distinctions around the wisdom of corporations and governments “owning” and being the primary “trainers” of AI. An important question here might be if AI were our baby or toddler, would our corporations be the ones we’d want to raise them into fully grown beings? In other worlds, are the values of corporations the values we want to impart to AI as its “operating systems”?
”More than ever, it is time for re-imaginings. Yet this act of imagination cannot be ours alone. To think against human exceptionalism requires us to think outside and beyond it, and to recognize in Blake’s vision the deep truth of his words: nature is imagination itself. In this truth is encapsulated the philosophy behind the phrase I used earlier: the more-than-human world.
Coined by the American ecologist and philosopher David Abram, the ‘more-than-human-world’ refers to a way of thinking which seeks to override our human tendency to separate ourselves from the natural world. This tendency is so pronounced it is rife even within environmentalism, the movement which seeks to bring us closer to nature and thereby to preserve it. For in so framing our intentions, we have already set up an implicit separation between ourselves and nature, as if we were two separate entities, unbound by inseparable ties of place and origin. Conventional terms such as ‘the environment’, and even ‘nature’ itself (especially when opposed to ‘culture’), compound the erroneous idea that there is a neat divide in the world between us and them, between humans and non-humans, between our lives and the teeming, multitudinous living and being of the planet.
In contrast, the ‘more-that-human-world’ acknowledges that the very real human world - the realm of our senses, breath, voice, cognition and culture - is but one facet of something vastly greater. All human life and being is inextricably entangled with and suffused by everything else. This broad commonwealth includes every inhabitant of the biosphere: the animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, and viruses. It includes the rivers, seas, winds, stones and clouds that support, shake and shadow us. These animate forces, these companions on the great adventure of time and becoming, have much to teach us and have already taught us a great deal. We are who we are because of them, and we cannot live without them.
The more-than-human-world is not mere fancy, or philosophical wordplay; it is the instantiation in our awareness and attitudes of hard-won scientific truths, albeit ones whose full implications have yet to permeate society. Lynn Margulis, the most significant evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century, has this to say about our entanglement with non-human life; ‘No matter how much our own species preoccupies us, life is a far wider system. Life is an incredibly complex interdependence of matter and energy among millions of species beyond (and within) our own skin. These Earth aliens are our relatives, our ancestors, and part of us. They cycle our matter and bring us water and food. Without “the other” we do not survive.’
The notion of a more-than-human world further intimates that these things are beings; not passive props in the drama of our own preoccupations, but active participants in our collective becoming. And because that becoming, that potential flourishing, is collective, it demands that we recognize the beingness, the personhood of others. The world is made up of subjects, not objects. Everything is really everyone, and all those beings have their own agency, points of view and forms of life. The more-than-human world demands our recognition, for without it, we are nothing. ‘Life and Reality’, wrote the Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts, ‘are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.’
Everything? Really? Yes.”
- James Bridle, Ways of Being pages 16-17
“If times are urgent, let us slow down.
If times are urgent, let us slow down.
If times are urgent, let us slow down.”
- Bayo Akomolafe
“To be sane in a mad time
is bad for the brain, worse
for the heart.”
- Wendell Berry
“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”
– Anne Lamott
“I have to work for art if I want art to work on me.”
- Jeanette Winterson
“Life loves the liver of it.”
- Maya Angelou
“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is what is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or person who explained it to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening . . . Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”
― Alice Walker
“Yet, as I knelt there, I did hear something. Not a sound, but a sort of silence, a faint hum like the space between note and note in a song. I waited for it to fade into the air, for my mind to right itself. But it went on.
I had a wild thought there, beneath that sky.
‘I will eat these herbs. Then whatever is truly in me, let it be out, at last!’”
- Madeline Miller, Circe
“The only way forward is together.”
- James Bridle