Kimberly Steele

The Christians are not OK, and the latest evidence of this is a Rapture that was supposed to arrive by September 23 or 24, 2025. A man in South Africa had a vision that the Rapture would arrive with this year’s Feast of Trumpets (whatever that is) and Rosh Hashanah. More than a few American Christians took this prediction as a new gospel, walking away from their jobs, selling their cars, (allegedly) giving their children to DCFS, attempting to arrange permanent caretakers for their pets, and generally flocking to social media with the good news that they were going away.

The internet could not resist such delectable cringe, and naturally there were at least five parodies for every two-cent Rapturetok influencer who assailed the general public with smug, fake tears about the glorious future that only applied to them and a few other saved souls. Predictably, Kingdom Come failed to arrive on schedule, the loudest of the crows deleted their TikToks in shame, and many more kicked the Rapture can down the road, re-setting the date for another arbitrary goalpost.

For me, September 23 was just another equinox marked by my usual solitary, occult hygiene practices and unusually lovely weather. I worked that day. I made lunch. My husband made dinner. I swept the floor and washed dishes. I did yard work. Mainstream media exploited September 23 for its various psyops and mass hypnosis attempts. I ignored all of it.

Tomorrow never comes

The term provisional living was the Jungian analyst H.G. Baynes, who used it to describe a special sort of immaturity in an adult person. Jung thought of provisional living as an aspect of Puer aeternus, the inner child who, like Peter Pan, refuses to grow up. Jung described provisional living as “the modern European disease of the merely imaginary life” and considered it a form of neurosis. Though I wholeheartedly agree with Jung about provisional living being a form of immaturity, it is also contains a misguided form of discipline which has more to do with Senex than Puer. I also think it is a dire mistake to think of provisional living as confined to the West.

The essence of a provisional life is to wait. Those who live provisionally cannot truly enjoy the now. The current moment is always a bridge (a broken, precarious structure at that) between yesterday and a far more exciting future.

In order to talk about the latest Rapture misfire, it is useful to understand that it is one in a long series that neither began nor ended with William Miller, the 19th century Protestant preacher who had his own vision of the world ending on October 22, 1844. Biblical-literalist Miller crowed about the Second Coming from 1831 onward, garnering a crowd of approximately 100,000 believers who sold their belongings, walked away from prosperous farms, and threw their lives under the bus in order to join his doomsday cult. Newspapers and the penny press (yesteryear’s equivalent of tabloids) had a field day satirizing Miller and his movement, calling him out for personally profiting from his lectures and lambasting his devotees as future insane asylum patients.

I wish the Rapturetok people had done a tiny bit of digging on Google to discover the story of the Millerites. The aftermath of Miller’s failed prophecies was called the Great Disappointment. The Great Disappointment gathered too much steam to go out with a whimper, and the massive egregore it grew ended up birthing both the Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Adventists and the Witnesses are proselytizing doomsday cults that are remarkable among mainstream religions (this is a real achievement considering their competition) for their prolific abuse of children and the rampant, barely-contained psychoses of their congregants. I have yet to meet an Adventist or a JW who is not deeply unwell, and more often than not, they are plagued with provisional living that comes from their religion’s fetishization of a golden city that is always a few weeks, months, or years in the future.

Coronapocalypse: when faith fails, make your own Rapture

The Left cannot help to imitate what it hates. The Left, headed by a bunch of psychopathic gay luxury communists, fomented its own Rapture in the form of overreaction to a manufactured virus that was said to have “escaped” LOL from a lab into a nearby Wuhan wet market. The crazy thing about the Coronapocalypse is it almost worked, mainly because it delivered Rapture to a small set of lucky, upper-middle class people in the form of home confinement and telecommuting.

In lieu of a New Jerusalem, the Bathroom Class got to stay home while the masked, lumpen proletariat delivered their pad thai to them by car. Unlike those gullible Christians, the Bathroom Class got their Paradise immediately, paid for by the suffering and disenfranchisement of regular people who lost their businesses, those who stroked out from the mandatory vaccine and lost their jobs anyway, and those who were not allowed to enter the hospital to hold grandfather’s hand one last time as he passed out of this world into the next. Their City of God was the living room, binge watching Netflix on the flat screen as the world burned. Their baptism rite was the Covid vaccine. Their altars were any screen with an internet connection.

Coronapocalypse actually delivered, and that is why it had to be stretched out. At first it was three weeks to flatten the curve; this quickly morphed into three years. They pretended the apocalypse had not yet truly happened while it was ongoing. Situations were always being depicted as worsening even while nurses and doctors had ample time to choreograph elaborate dance routines in empty hospitals. Even while they luxuriated in stimulus money that for them was not exactly the difference between living and dying, they lived provisionally, anxiously awaiting the real luxury communism revolution when Covid rules went permanent, everybody had Universal Basic Income, and all of life’s necessities were delivered mysteriously and magically to one’s door by drone. They remained an anxious lot, quaffing copious Zoom-doctor-prescribed antidepressants (among other substances) and trying to squelch/outrun that nagging feeling that something was very, very wrong.

The moral of the story is that some people will never be happy in the moment no matter how many goodies they acquire.

Not just for kids

Like I said earlier in this essay, it is a mistake to think of living provisionally as a hundred percent childish. It’s not all Puer all the time. There is quite a bit of Senex in provisional living, because it involves imposing strict limits upon oneself to satisfy the requirements of the future. Jung attributes provisional living to Puer and the element of air because of its rootlessness and Puer’s dislike of commitment, but I would argue provisional living is all about commitment. The commitment of living provisionally is not to the world around them, nor is it to live in the moment, no matter how hedonistic some of them may be. The focus of someone who lives provisionally is laser-accurate — it’s on the future. The future is what drives them above and beyond normal limits. The future is what causes them to abuse and neglect their children. It is why they are terrible to all of the people around them and why they do not appreciate anything or anyone they have. It is why they are all signal and no virtue. They are always putting the current moment on layaway for the future, and 99.9 percent of the time, they die paying for a product they never get to put their hands on and enjoy.

I knew a religious woman for whom the disease of provisional living was incurable and acute. She lusted for an Apocalypse that never arrived, goaded on by the Protestant Christian cult that told her it was on a nearby horizon. She had loved ones, half of whom she alienated with provisional living behavioral tics such as conning relatives into buying her large ticket items and then selling those items to people who lived in her apartment complex. She was always on the make with such schemes, and when she was not preoccupied with interfamily con jobs, she was complaining about her aches, pains, and other horrors of age. She did not complain about the Rapture. For one day, she was confident she would be scooped up to the clouds with the other chosen ones to sit at the right hand of Jesus. She would be without pain and made perfect as she sat next to her Creator.

Strangely, when she got old, she was afraid to die. Though she had fantasized about rejoining the other side since girlhood, when the time finally came, she was absolutely terrified.

Putting the mori into hikikomori

The provisional life is full of fantasy, and it is not of a sort that winds up being productive. The future can never be real because it is always out of reach, and the provisional life takes place in the future, whether that is the Golden City of the Rapture or some other place. I am not a fan of video games (a.k.a. games) because they take Puer’s infantile fantasy of a perfect, idyllic world and make it real enough and full of dopamine triggers that keep him or her trapped and useless until he or she is a hikikomori — still technically alive but otherwise dead in almost every meaningful sense of the term.

The provisional life is full of excuses. When those truly affected with provisional living syndrome have jobs, it is either by some nepotistic/convenient miracle or it is an extremely temporary condition. They cannot stand to work because work takes them away from their intoxicating fantasy worlds. We cannot claim that the provisional life is for the lazy; actually it takes more work to live under threat of homelessness because of dedication to an absurd dream than to stay on the straight and narrow and collect a reliable paycheck. I saw one provisional Puella Aeternis bounce through several homes (one paid for in cash by her father) until she died homeless on the streets of Los Angeles. She never gave up hanging out at the goth clubs though, no matter how sick or immobile she became.

Jung suggests Puers get a job — any job — and to stick with it no matter how bad or unsuitable, in order to break the cycle. I wonder if he ever got any of his patients to do this, and if so, how did it work out?

The Rapture, or whatever ideal lies just down the line, in the afterworld, or next life, keeps its victim saying “not yet, not now”. There is no point in getting anything done or investing any part of one’s real self in a human relationship because it is all an illusion and it is all temporary. I have no idea what ancient Gnostics were like nor do I have any way of speculating, but if they were like the modern day black-pilled crew who think the world is run by evil Archons, they are annoying gits. It’s not worthy of them being genocided of course, but I can at understand the impulse. There is an element of holier-than-thou about provisional living — if only we denizens of the “real” world could measure up to the lowliest NPCs of the fantasy, the gameworld, or the Golden City, then the hikikomori would come back down to Earth and join the living again.

The Great Awakening

I barf a little in my mouth when I see the term "Great Awakening" in print, and I truly do not like to vomit. Humans are never going to collectively ascend because humans are not that bright of a species. We are somewhere in the lower middle between plankton and angels, and with the huge influx of animal souls into our teeming, nearly 10 billion large population, we are not getting smarter anytime soon. Humans have been engaging in the same stupid foibles since our beginnings in trees and grasslands as recent ex-chimpanzees. We have always formed groups and violently raided other groups for resources just as our chimp cousins like to do; we are actually more stupid about it now because we have nuclear weapons. Everyone from dippy-hippie-trippy New Agers to New Right podcasters thinks we are on the precipice of mass enlightenment, and this merely proves that spiritual retardation is at its all-time worst.

This is the most materialistic age the Earth has ever seen. There is only one thing special about our era, and that is how decidedly obtuse most people have become to the subtle planes. We live in an age of spiritual leprosy where almost everyone, including myself, is born with a set of spiritual impediments that shut us out of the kind of self-development past mystics were able to take for granted.

The Native Americans found this out quite horribly when white men marched on them, took their land, and were able to wipe out their civilizations with betrayal and smallpox. Their magic failed them and not for lack of trying. The strength of materialism and capitalist greed proved to be stronger magic, at least for the time being. Materialist enchantments still hold the land and will not let go until the last plane falls from the sky and the last car sputters to a halt on the last intact asphalt road. That time is coming and with it, the old ways will re-establish themselves. They are not coming in great proliferation anytime soon; this is not the cycle for them. Living for that era is not a good idea because it is a long way off.

People who live provisionally are jerks

Living provisionally is expensive, both literally and figuratively. When a person does not consider pulling their own weight as important as say, going to the club, playing the latest Roblox game, or being at home during the scheduled time allotted to this year's Rapture, everyone around her is going to have to work double time in order to keep her afloat. I wrinkle my nose in disgust whenever I pass a certain recently rebuilt McMansion in my old hometown. I know the McMansion’s owner: she is the mother of a drunk/drug addict. I am pretty certain she had an attached guest house built for her ne’er-do-well child so that child can pretend to live an adult life while staying regularly inebriated and sleeping until 3:38pm. There is a young mother on TikTok who ought to be more concerned that she was fired from her job after fervently praying to be home on September 23 and trying to take time off that her boss would not allow. My friend who died homeless in LA often acted like a deranged stalker if a band she liked came to town. 

There are many Rapturetok believers who clearly were not about to take their pets or children with them when they were to be swept away by Jesus. That sort of perversion takes both an unwillingness to commit to children and pets and an extreme commitment to some random South African dude’s vision. Being a jerk takes commitment, and let's not even go into what Coronapocalypse believers were willing to do in order to extend stay-at-home mandates.

Guilty!

You don’t have to be a Rapturetok, Millerite, or a Covidiot cultist to live provisionally; not by a long shot. If you’ve ever fantasized about gaining a windfall, winning the lottery, or “making it”, you've probably been a victim of the provisional lifestyle. If you have ever held on to a piece of clothing that does not fit because you have delusions of losing weight, you have lived provisionally. If you have ever stayed with someone you hate because he or she was "good enough" until you got someone better, you have lived provisionally. Living provisionally is miserable. I know this from personal experience.

To my own chagrin, it has taken me over a half century to understand that I too make the mistake of living provisionally, and to add insult to injury, I still do it. My entire youth was misspent in princess/girlboss fantasies egged on by my own milieu’s demented secular religion of Disney movies (this is back when they were good), sitcoms, magazines, pop music, public schools, and other forms of upper-middle class conditioning. I was taught that going to college would fulfill all my dreams, and though I survived intact, it did not deliver anything near what it promised.
I have credit card debt that is the direct result of taking on expenses I had faith I would one day easily pay off. The day has come for me to pay off my debts and it has not been easy. I have had to train myself to go to the bathroom when nature calls, because I am the sort of dumbass who ignores her own biological signals in order to stay in whatever zone I am in, whether that is work or play. To ignore the need to pee because a task “needs to get done” or because some important person cannot be interrupted is profoundly stupid and a form of living provisionally — “I will listen to my body’s needs someday when I am not so beholden to others”. Ugh...It’s garbage. Listen to your body now, not someday.

I wish these were the only examples of times I have lived provisionally… No, they are not, and I have many that are much, much worse. In order to stop living provisionally, we must first catch ourselves doing it and recognize it as a defense mechanism.

Provisional living is a defense. To live provisionally is an attempt to protect oneself from the “real” world that is perceived as hostile, horrible, and disappointing. The Great Disappointment was a fascinating and apt term because the truth of living provisionally is disappointment. The woman I mentioned who lived for a Rapture that never came, yet was afraid of death, is someone who lived in constant disappointment. Nothing on this planet was good enough for the likes of her, and the second it was, she tried to sell it or whined about how long it would take to get more. People who live in disappointment die in disappointment: the goofy idea among provisional livers that the state of death changes consciousness that is simply untrue. The karma of being constantly disappointed is to continue being disappointed until you learn not to be disappointed.

Once again, the solution is simple but not easy: gratitude. There is only one way to extricate oneself from aspects of Meatworld life being so consistently disappointing and that is to take yourself out of the Roblox game, to exit the Society for Creative Anachronism LARPs, to rip yourself out of the visions of your sandaled feet on streets paved with precious gemstones with that entity pretending to be Jesus, and to start appreciating what you have, exactly where you have it.

That means staying with your job as long as they will tolerate you, reframing the relationship with your children and mate as permanent and not just a stop on a way station going somewhere better, and thanking the bed you sleep upon. It means being thankful for the strip mall being open when you need a quick snack instead of being full of anger that it is ugly and used to be a lovely field of wildflowers before it was paved over. It means sweeping your floor in the morning and washing your own dishes. It means replacing the urge to escape with the determination of making the best out of what is here and now. It means seeing the good in what is all around you and being thankful for what you have. It means being humble and not feeling that the world owes you a living. It means you have to stop asking God for favors and then pretending the small signs you are being given are meant to fulfill your wishes. It means understanding that the will of God is not going to be what you want exactly when you want it.

Being grateful is extremely hard work and it takes great determination. It is worth it. Life begins when you stop living provisionally. Life begins when you get rid of the old stuff you no longer use. Life begins when you go to the bathroom when you need to go. Life begins when you hang the ugly wallpaper merely because it makes you happy. Life begins when you stop waiting for someone else to clean your room and make your bed and do it your damn self. Life begins when you say “thank you” instead of planning your escape.

Aside from the usual trade of oxygen for carbon dioxide, trees have saved my life on more than one occasion. When I was sixteen years old and ready to kill myself, the oak trees around my parents’ house told me not to do it because I had important work to do in the future. At that time, I had no idea how to properly talk to trees and any time I did, I was winging it. I also had no inclination to believe the experiences were real, which was a product of my casually Christian upbringing. At least I did not think of talking to trees as demonic — my friends at the time with overbearing Christian parents would have probably had to deal with that sort of attitude.

My parents bought a cottage in Michigan in the 1980s. The cottage was on the shore of a small lake. Though the property was the size of a small, ranch house with a detached garage, we still called it the cottage. The cottage was considerably larger than the house I live in now, where I wrote Sacred Homemaking.

I had a love/hate relationship with the cottage. Though it was a restful, tranquil place, it isolated me from the few friends I had at that age. At the exact time my few female friends were going on group dates and getting boyfriends, I was stuck in a remote-yet-luxurious cabin in the north woods. They kissed under the bleachers while I read Jane Eyre.

The cottage and lake were adjacent to a managed forest of white pines. The pines were planted in rows so they could be easily harvested. The rows were organized in grids separated by fire breaks. I spent a great deal of my lonesome adolescence walking those fire breaks. In the middle of the forest, behind the ring of cottages and houses around the lake, there was a patch of meadow that had been left gloriously alone for at least a hundred years. In it were the remnants of an apple orchard and a few huge maple trees, giants from an earlier era with trunks that dwarfed the largest oaks of the posh neighborhood in which I grew up. The best memories I have of the cottage involve time spent under the great maple tree. There was a huge bed of creeping periwinkle underneath it which was likely planted sometime between the World Wars. I often talked to the maple. I named it the Wishing Tree. At the time, I thought of myself as somewhat crazy for talking to the Wishing Tree, not understanding that talking trees would one day become my normal.

My teenage torment over the plight of trees was a large part of the reason I became vegetarian in my teens. Sting and Peter Gabriel did a world tour for Amnesty International, and though I neither attended the concerts nor knew of the tour while it happened, I became obsessed with a documentary made about the concert series and the liberal causes it championed. One of these was the Save the Rainforest campaign, and since the British rock stars were plonking themselves down in South America to sing and strum, I became upset that the Amazon rainforest was being devastated for cattle farming. My bleeding teenage heart broke for the trees of the Amazon being mowed down for McDonalds hamburgers. I stopped eating meat despite neither Sting nor anyone else on the Amnesty tour being vegetarian (nowadays Sting eats meat and Peter Gabriel eats fish, back then I have no idea what they ate) I took up vegetarianism and tepidly convinced myself I was doing my part for the trees.

College arrived and I had no more time to go to the cottage or to hang out with trees. I spent the majority of the time either commuting on the bus and train or indoors. Predictably, college was a miserable time in my life, marred by insomnia and various forms of blind groping. I would mostly forget about trees until my forties, when I took up the practices of revival Druidry around the year 2015.

Must love trees

Druids come in all sizes and shapes. There are Christian Druids, atheist Druids, and Hawaiian Druids. There are the original Druids whom we know very little about because they refused to write anything down. Perhaps the only thing all Druids have in common is we all must love trees.

My college experience was crap because I did not spend enough time wandering outside looking for trees to hug. I was too preoccupied with the busywork of life, not realizing most of my sorrows could be ameliorated by touching a tree. The three daily practices of Revival Druidry, discursive meditation, the Sphere of Protection banishing ritual, and divination had the weird effect of drawing me back into the forest preserve. As a post-college atheist, the few walks I took in the forest preserve felt odd and a little bit frightening, like a botched attempt to recapture the enchantment of the Wishing Tree in Michigan. I felt good after I walked in the forest preserve, but it took me a great deal of planning and motivation to get there. It felt like exercise — an activity that I knew I should do because it was “good for you” yet I did not feel I truly needed. It was easy enough to put it off or not do it at all. When I walked in a forest preserve, I was encapsulated in my own bubble world of self-concern, worry, petty irritation, and anxiety. In short, I was more like the majority of humans who sped on bikes or jogged by me as fast as they could go with helmets, ear buds, and expensive arrays of specialty gear. An alien who landed in any of the preserves would have thought the forest preserve district instituted a yuppie dress code.

(Though a stained T shirt and jeans would be more than adequate on the forest preserve path, the affluent and wannabe affluent wish to be both protected and seen. For them, nature is an outdoor gym where the goal is to take selfies to prove they got their steps in. This is how they attempt to win the perceived game of life, by being well-equipped, driven, determined, and fabulous. They exert Herculean, grueling effort in order to stay fit, never slowing down or turning off the techno beats long enough to hear the sound of sandhill cranes or to see the rare hummingbird moth land on an open mallow bloom. They might as well ride a stationary bike in an air conditioned basement somewhere, with a virtual reality headset providing an AI simulation of the world outside. This would certainly be safer than spinning down actual Meatworld paths where trees fall and create surprise death traps for speeding bikes, but I digress…)

Discursive meditation led to deeper thoughts about my own experiences with trees and helped me to rediscover my childhood memories of the great oaks around my parents’ house. The deciduous oak groves of the upper Midwest are the providers of the web of life in any lands where prairie does not rule. They are what mangroves are to swamps and what grasses are to grassland. Though imported white oaks came to supplant the native red oaks, the relative newcomers absorbed the spirit of the land just as the Wishing Tree embodied the Michigan lakeland.

I was the luckiest girl on earth when I was adopted at a week old to live among the trees in the white oak grove. Instead of being marooned with my mother by birth who hated me from the moment I was conceived, I was spirited away to a paradise of generosity where I could walk among pussy willows in Spring and fly in my nightly dreams through the canopy of sheltering oak giants.

For even as an atheist, the trees reached out to me. In the deepest cloak of godlessless, I had recurring dreams where my feet lifted off the ground and I flew up to the branches of the huge oak trees of my hometown. Between each gap of oak branches yawned a dimension door to a new dream world. This was not unlike Dr. Strange comics and movies where Dr. Strange and his mystical brethren conjure escape portals to other worlds. The main difference was that I did not conjure the dimension doors — the oaks did. I had the dreams for long enough that when I was truly suicidal, the oaks intervened, asking “If you go, who will talk to us from your plane? Who will see us?”

I am a slow learner and an even slower worker. It took me over ten years to write and (badly) produce an album of songs called the Dream of Flight, which centers around a leitmotif I had during one of my tree portal flying dreams. Nevertheless, the oaks got their album. I hope to rework and re-produce all the songs again someday.

Druidry reoriented my focus from trees as dream portals to the trees themselves as personalities and collectives. Trees are individuals as distinct as you and me. They have preferences, love, hatred, and intention. Most are friendly towards us humans and most of them want to talk. Some do not.

As you can probably guess, I found this out by spending plenty of time with trees. Like a former recluse who decides to start introducing himself at gatherings with low expectations, I found myself outside a great deal more after picking up Druidry. I went on walks, often forcing myself despite feeling rather stupid. If I found a tree of interest, I stopped at it and stared at it for a moment, opening myself to any impressions that came up. I went home and studied my observations. I meditated on various trees, often meditating on the same species of tree over and over again for its features, its history, it uses by mankind, and its lore. I wondered what the tree would say if it spoke human language. I began doing Druid tree rituals, which sound fancy but are nothing more than sitting with one’s back to a tree for a few minutes.

Cedric, the tree who changed my life

I was fewer than five years into my daily Druid practices when I met Cedric the Eastern cedar. At the time, I was still teaching music out of a rented commercial space in a small storefront in Naperville, a busy suburb of Chicago. I often hung out on the rickety back porch of my bit of commercial rental. The porch, which was little more than a catwalk, faced a scraggly out lot and the backs and dumpster areas of other nearby buildings. Near my building, there was an Eastern cedar that was growing so close to the building that a large chunk had been shaved off. I began talking to this tree when I went out there. I called her Mama. One cold and slightly rainy day in late winter/early spring, I spied a tiny green growth sticking out of the base of the building near a power box and a mess of incoming tubes with cables in them. As I drew closer, I could nearly hear Mama shouting at me, “SAVE MY BABY!” Against my own better judgement, I went inside where I just so happened to have a small, orange plastic garden shovel. I spent the better part of twenty minutes slowly digging around the Eastern cedar seedling, knowing that one false move could get me electrocuted. As I dug, I could see the visions of horror Mama was trying to put in my head of the seedling being uprooted and thrown in the dumpster, poisoned, or chopped. He was destined for death and the bigger he got, the worse his fate.

I mentally yelled in my head “I GOT HIM!” once I had extracted the seedling, scooping him into a cracked plastic bowl because I did not have a plant pot. I took him home that day and planted him in front of my little house in the light rain. I named him Cedric because he is an Eastern cedar. Get it? Ced-ar. Ced-ric.

After Cedric was safe in my yard, I asked Mama if she missed her baby and I assured her he was doing well. She said she knew he was doing fine because the network of trees would always connect her to him even beyond their deaths. Years later, Cedric is a big boy. He is thriving. He still converses with his mother and other trees in the tree network, which works better than any human communication system in existence.

Going native

Talking to trees and Cedric especially broadened my perspective. If I could receive primary, specific directives from individual trees, perhaps I could do the same with other objects, including objects that most people do not consider to be alive. Perhaps I could do the same thing with spaces. Cedric and his mother showed me that it wasn’t the world that had always been dull, it was me who had been dull all along. The trees, places, and even my toaster were sentient this whole time. All of the things and beings are infused with what Native Americans called the manitou or Great Spirit. When I opened my eyes to the concept of non-human beings having intention and will just as I have them, I became part of the great whole instead of a squeaky cog presuming it was the entire universe. A productive member of an ecosystem is one who does not try to dominate that ecosystem, but instead assumes her tiny part in making that ecosystem a better place.




Cedric in 2020



Cedric in 2025

I have often said we live in a Dark Age of the spirit. Seldom has it been more difficult to take up genuine spiritual work. All the religions are corrupt, all of the prophets are false, and for most of us, there is no source of guidance save a small, flickering, constantly endangered candle deep within the cloudy windows of the soul. Demons, those shifty beings who feed off human sorrow and pain and wait for opportunities to parasitize the weak and greedy, are having a field day. Any kind of spiritual work such as basic prayer or the creation of genuine community is almost impossible in these heavy times.

It is estimated that seventy-two percent of the global population received at least one dose of the Covid vaccine. In other words, nearly three quarters of our eight billion person population took an untested, unproven, extremely rushed MRNA concoction for a flu that killed fewer than one percent of the people who caught it. If there was ever any doubt the human race is not collectively all that bright, the Covid response sums it up. The stories of people who wore masks while in their car while alone will live in infamy. To this day, I still see people who most likely have post graduate degrees wearing masks in grocery stores. Very few (fewer than three out of ten) were intelligent enough to ask “What could go wrong?” with the infamous shots. They are now finding out the hard way. Not smart.

The New Normal, ever the same as the Old Normal

To be a normie is to take the path of least resistance. Sometimes the path of least resistance is wise. On various occasions, there is no choice. For instance, if you live in North Korea, you are regularly limited to the choices of a North Korean. Though it is often argued that driving a car is an choice in suburban America, I would dare anyone with friends, relatives, and a job that provides necessary income to try it for a year. Sometimes you have to go with the flow. The MRNA vaccines were an attempt to force a Satanic communion rite upon the last few holdouts like myself who had to make bleak decisions such as “Am I willing to literally die over this?” I was and we were... are. I was willing to go berserk. I was and am willing to go full Asami Yamasaki on the biohazard-suited goon who somehow topples my last barrier, finds me in my remote hidey hole, and comes at me with a syringe. I won’t harm a hair on their heads unless they back me into a corner, but if and when they are foolish enough to bring vaccine rape to me personally, the consequences they reap for themselves will be a gory and festive homecoming. At least one of them will deeply, bitterly regret it.

Normies are zombies. Just as perfectly kind grandmas and innocent children can be made into ravening, black-mouthed brain-eaters, normies can turn into armies of monsters when the stimuli and circumstances are right. It is easy to become a Nazi, a Stalinist, or a Maoist if everybody is doing it. When we look at how force collects and flows on the astral plane or the plane of images that is both shared and individual, certain sets of images become prominent. For instance, the image of SAFETY became a collective obsession. Those infected with SAFETY in the form of a comfortable, remote work, salary class, Door Dash-ordering, isolated but not lonely, status signaling heaven could not understand why anyone would desire to live outside that image for any reason. They clung to SAFETY even though there was a tiny, niggling, mostly-unheard voice screaming from the oubliette of conscience warning that SAFETY is not free. SAFETY, as wonderful and heavenly as it was and as virtuous as it felt, carried a steep price.

Before I go any further, let me say for the umpteen-millionth time that I could be wrong. I am a rando on the internet. I am a crackpot occultist who was atheist ten short years ago. My only redeeming quality is that I never claim my truths are infallible. So do not come at me. I am only speculating here.

Hell is not eternal. Hell is not even warm. Hell is Hel, a temporary bus depot between incarnations where you sort out your crap and ready yourself for another round. And before someone says “Prison planet! Archons!” Let me say you retarded gnostics ought to give beings who are smarter and better than you a chance — not every entity is trying to cockblock you from your warped materialist vision of eternal bliss. But I digress. Hel is a place for normies. As I mentioned in my previous article in this series, heroes go to Valhalla.

Imagine a shallow ocean made of liquified clouds. The ocean rushes towards a great cliff. The liquified clouds rush towards the cliff edge and tumble off, creating a waterfall that becomes a deluge. Now imagine that you are a patch of cloud within that shallow ocean. The more one you are with the clouds, the more likely you are to flow off the edge of the cliff with your brethren. If you are amorphous like the other clouds, you will have no choice but to be dragged along to the abyss yawning beneath the cliff. The abyss is Hel.

Apocalypse anxiety

The human race has always been obsessed with apocalypse myths and has indulged in them since God was a boy. I think the reason for this is because Normies know they must rush off the edge of the astral cliff in a great hurry and spend quality time in the abyss before re-emerging in a mountain spring or at the bottom of the ocean once again. In the case of the Covid vaccines, it felt like a huge test and a great divider of souls. Souls that chose to melt into the crowd and go the path of least resistance were marked, not just physically via their Meatworld bodies but via their eternal selves. I think they knew, deep, deep down, and that is why they were so crazy dissonant about those who chose not to vaccinate. If they were damned, then all should be damned. If everybody chose to flunk, then perhaps the test itself would be scrapped, or at least not graded on a curve.

I believe one of the possibilities for the vaccinated is that they are sequestered for a time or given no choice but to reincarnate as animals as the current extinction wraps. Of course I could be wrong. Despite being unvaccinated, I wholly believe I could go back to being incarnated as an animal. I believe I was a series of geese and cats before making the jump to human thousands of years ago. I have no problem with going back to animal incarnation. There are wonderful things about being an animal just as there are wonderful things about being human. If I do go back to being a bird, I hope I get to finally do a turn as a hawk or some other cool bird of prey.

I don’t think reincarnation as an animal is anything to be worried about. (Many of us could be reincarnated dinosaurs, and perhaps this could explain almost every child’s fascination with dinosaurs? I dunno.) It’s Hel normies should be worried about, because this iteration of Hel resembles an apocalypse, with an extraordinary number of souls falling prey to it. The trouble with this version of Hel is that as always, Hel reflects the consciousness of those destined to go there via their lack of resistance. Our era has been materialistic to the extreme. Our ideals have been mired in stuff, stuff, and more stuff. We have people who claim to be holy men who live in mansions. The Dalai Lama, a man whom I firmly believe will go to Hel, is a child molester who enjoys foie gras. Men who regularly quote the Bible believe they need to become crypto millionaires to measure up. Yet Jesus said:

Matthew 7:13-14 (NIV)

There are three aspects of spiritual work regardless of religion or lack thereof that are a Get Out of Hel card. They are differentiation, diligence, and humility. I will be discussing all three in future essays.

Differentiation is the process of extracting ourselves from the ocean that cannot resist compelling forces. In short, we must learn to think for ourselves and go against the grain when necessary. That is why I don’t believe Luigi Mangione or killers like him will go to Hel or hell. Luigi Mangione is not a Normie, at any rate. To differentiate is to see when the crowd is and to stand against it at great personal risk, including risk of death. Differentiation requires courage, and like a fruit that is carried far from the tree, it can culminate in a dead end or a new beginning.
Diligence is the daily, hourly, and often minutely commitment to our own convictions. We cannot just believe in our differentiation, we must constantly prove it by remaining true to it in our daily actions and thoughts. I believe everything is sentient, so I clean my floor and toilet everyday because spaces and things have consciousness and can talk. They enjoy being kept clean and and in ship shape. It is not enough for me to write a book called Sacred Homemaking, I must live as a sacred homemaker. A follower of Jesus is not worth his weight in poop unless he lives like Jesus — poor, generous, and forgiving.

Humility is the admittance we are not gods or demigods. When we think we are the smartest ones in the room, we quickly become insufferable. Gods are patient and they give us all the rope we need to hang ourselves, plus multiple lives so we can do it again and again. Humility is ironically a shortcut to the Divine, because by admitting we are not gods, we take the first steps towards improvement.

Anyone can choose to differentiate and follow up with diligence and humility. Vaccination status is irrelevant to this. Hidden choices abound, even in North Korea. In my next article in this series, I will be talking about a road not frequently taken. This road is the one I consider to be the best of the three. I call it the Alternative.

Well, I have already lied... you can neither save nor destroy the planet. The Netflix TV series Love Death + Robots was a sort of comic book in cinematic form of CGI, animation, and puppetry presented as an anthology of short films. Much like the 1977 magazine Heavy Metal, its themes obsessively rotated around speculative sci-fi futures, sexuality, and violence. Love Death + Robots was especially fixated upon the leitmotifs of zombies, apocalypse, space travel, and the destruction of Earth. One semi-memorable episode featured tiny zombies overrunning Earth, causing a nuclear war, and blowing the planet into large chunks held together by a loose semblance of gravity. We humans have high opinions of ourselves and it seems our every fantasy these days is that we can destroy the Earth with one false move. Yet even catastrophic nuclear annihilation would result in a long nuclear winter and a reset where it is possible some humans might survive. Sure, their lives would be hell, but chances are their pale, etherically starved descendants might crawl up from underground cities like cockroaches to rule the planet again. Or not. It seems baked into the cake that humans will be gone entirely in a billion years. Ninety-nine point nine percent of life on Earth has gone extinct. We are a hardy species, but we aren't exactly tardigrades or jellyfish.

Humans are in love with the idea they have domination of Gaia, whether it is to destroy her or to save her. There is the delusion we can foment our hatred enough to make it substitute for action, or that if we aim one group against another, we can "save" ourselves from them. Paul Wheaton in his book Building a Better Backyard (Instead of Being Angry at the Bad Guys) puts it best:

"For each person who actually does write a letter or confront the bad guys, there might be a hundred people who simply develop an ulcer."

Building a Better Backyard is a must read and I highly recommend it as well as Permies.com, the website it often cites. I own a copy of the book that I am willing to lend by mail for free to anyone who wants it in the Continental US. That said, the book does descend into some regrettable Holier Than Thou awards, lauding various environmentalists for their "negative" carbon footprint because they go "above and beyond" according to the author as environmental influencers. Yet there is no such thing as a negative carbon footprint here on Meatworld. The main takeaway from the book is that we should turn instincts of anger that nobody is doing anything into personal, concrete action. Yes, I agree.

Environmentalism gets nowhere fast because it is so centered around shame. Though it feels good to point out hypocrisy in others, it does absolutely nothing as far as influencing the average person to change, especially when perfection is the goal. Case in point, Greta Thunberg, who has ricocheted from vegan climate activism to inserting herself in the Palestine situation. She's a perpetual child in more ways than one who believes that her anger makes a difference because she feels it so strongly. Her legacy will be a meme about impotent outrage.

In my upcoming book Sacred Homemaking, I emphasize the importance of starting small and where you are. The only way we are ever going to make positive change in this world will be if we discard perfection and appreciate and work with what we have right now. This means looking at what positive things we already have in place and building upon them instead of making a fetish of someone with a "perfect" approach. It means making do with what we have instead of freaking out, even when we are still making do with toxic inputs from industrial sources.

You may already be doing a great deal to help Gaia without realizing it, and you can use Sacred Homemaking's approach of building upon and amplifying the positive in order to go even further. This article will mention only a few bullet points, but I hope that it will inspire you to list what you are doing right and to pile up positive upon positive until your environmental beneficence is overflowing.

Living with family or roommates

The stigma of living with relatives used to be very strong. My husband and I lived with my parents no less than four times before moving to our little house in the western suburbs of Chicago, and each time we felt acutely judged by all and sundry, including ourselves. For him, it was deeply emasculating not to be the master of his own domicile. For me, it was profoundly painful not to have a space I could call my own. Yet the fantasy of an eco-cabin on the edge of wilderness is far more environmentally expensive than a shared house or apartment where people live cheek to jowl. For one, apartments don't require much climate control -- when my husband and I lived in apartments, we almost never turned on the heat in winter. For those who don't live out in the country, your close proximity to stores and work means that you're not driving anywhere near as much as your stranded rural counterpart every time you need something or go to your job.

Going the extra mile

Get in the habit of both saying and "doing" thank you to the people you live with. During the four times my husband and I lived with my folks, I never left a room messier than I found it. During the last two year stint, I cooked at least five communal meals a week, plus snacks and treats the entire time. I made sure I was contributing even when I did not feel like contributing. As a result, living with my parents was an experience for which I was grateful and will always be grateful. I am especially grateful for the times with my father, who is no longer with us. I got into the habit of saying "thank you" as well. "Thank you" starts awkwardly, but once you are used to the habit and don't allow any good deed to go unrecognized or unthanked, you will find the energy reverberates through your life and dramatically improves it.

Eschewing junk and buying used

We have unofficially entered the era of paring down. Boomer excess with its fine china, curio cabinets, figurines, vacation homes, grounded boats, and storage facilities is giving way to a new age of thrift, re-use, and Make Do or Do Without. Whenever you buy used, whether it is cars, clothing, silverware, or furniture, you are giving life to an item that was headed straight for the landfill.

Going the extra mile

Join a local Buy Nothing group and give things away even if you don't want any of the stuff other members are offering. When you give an item away and free it to its destiny, you say to the Universe that you're not into hoarding and that you would prefer that others make use of your stuff rather than it rotting in your hoard. It's a middle finger to the accumulation Wendigo.

Eating less and eating homemade

Unless you are part of the high riding Bathroom Class that is currently helping to ruin everything with the copious help of private equity firms, you cannot afford to spend a dollar more on groceries than you're already spending. You're eating in most or all of the time, not for lack of desire to have a meal you didn't cook but because you cannot afford it. A meal at home, as basic as it may be, saves gas, labor, and food waste. If you cook your meals, have done the brave work of mitigating or ending your dependence on convenience food, and that may be an act of necessity but it is also an act of extraordinary willpower.

Going the extra mile

To increase your knowledge as well as your palate, learn to forage your local weeds. Learn which are edible and which are poisonous and everything in-between. Once when I was working in a commercial building, I forgot to pack a lunch and I had no money or time to make a meal. Luckily, it was summer and there was purslane growing in an area where there were not any pesticides being regularly put on the ground. I gathered a bunch of it and that was lunch. Purslane is a superfood, containing more Vitamin C than oranges and an array of Omega 3 fatty acids.

Phasing out commercial cleaners and personal hygiene products

One of the funnier parts of Sacred Homemaking is the inclusion of a recipe for a household surface cleaner that triples as a leave in hair conditioner as well as a noxious spirit repellant. It works to clean countertops, detangle hair, and to repel demons all at once LOL. Using natural cleaners and deodorants saves tons of money, reduces plastic waste, keeps toxic phthalates and dioxins out of the water and air, and promotes your health and that of those around you.

Going the extra mile

Make the homemade equivalent of one cleaning or personal product this week. In my case, I make my own hairspray out of sugar and water: it's simple syrup with some drops of eucalyptus essential oil for scent. Combine coconut oil, arrowroot or cornstarch, and a pinch of baking soda to make a simple deodorant that can be used anywhere on the body. Make the afformentioned triple use surface cleaner by combining one part vinegar to one part water with a dash of essential oils for scent. Always know that almost any commercial product you use can be replaced with a cheap, nontoxic, homemade equivalent.

Not having kids... or having them!

If you are one of the many people in my boat who chose not to have children, congratulations, you just did the most impactful thing a human can do to reduce their environmental "footprint". According to a 2008 study, adding a child to the planet can add up to 9500 metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Children come with a lot of stuff: diapers, toys, packaging, housing, and the eventual chance he or she will replicate by having more children!

The logical thing to do is to advocate that we humans go voluntarily extinct, right? Well, that has been tried before. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, founded by Les U. Knight (let's unite, get it?) is still floundering along to this day, despite having been a mess of interpersonal dramas since its 1971 origin. VHEMT envisions a genteel end for the human race where everyone gets a vasectomy or a tubal ligation and enjoys what is left of civilization as we voluntarily bring it to a screeching halt. It's the movie Children of Men, minus the panic, and it isn't going to happen. The implosion of VHEMT was predictable. I myself chose not to have children. I had myself sterilized in my early thirties. Nevertheless, what is right for me is not right for everyone. If you want kids, please have them.

As Whitney Houston crooned in her song, the children are our future. We cannot get by without them. If you do have kids, bless you. You are doing the world's most difficult job.  If you are blessed with children, please do your level best not to raise them as entitled, spoiled products of their age.

Going the extra mile

Embrace different strokes for different folks. If you chose not to have children, shut up and appreciate those who were willing to take on the hard work of parenting. If you do have children, shut up and appreciate those who did not and freed up resources so you and your children could live more richly. Whether you are childfree or childfull, appreciate people for their differences and realize that if everybody made the same choices as you, life here on Meatworld would suck a great deal more, not less.

If you are turning listless anxiety into real environmentalism, choosing to make small improvements instead of spinning your wheels worrying about the machinations of the "bad guys", then you have taken the first steps in the journey of ten thousand miles. Stop feeling bad about what you have not done or what you cannot do and smart small and where you are. Give thanks compulsively.

Earth will take care of herself... eventually. Your job is not to oversee Gaia but to keep yourself in moderation and balance. Stay humble and always strive for small improvements.

The term 401(K) comes from the tax status of the earnings.  A 401(K) is a type of adjacent bank account that siphons savings away to play the stock market.  Supposedly this form of gambling is safe.  

Though the term Black Friday has come to be associated with Christmas shopping orgies in late November, the "black" part of the moniker used to apply to stock market crashes.  September 24, 1869 was one such crash.  It was said to be caused by two greedy investors named Jay Gould and James Fisk.  The investors bought obscene amounts of gold, driving up the price due to scarcity.  President Ulysses S. Grant tried to put a stop to the shenanigans by selling a large amount of the US Treasury's gold which in turn caused the stock market to crash.  More crashes came and went during the Belle Epoque until the Great Crash of 1929, which led to the Glass Steagal Act of 1933.  Glass Steagall was a set of banking reforms that put the kibosh on any bank's ability to use its customer's money to play the stock market.

Glass Steagall was repealed in 1999 by President Bill Clinton, which

"opened the door to an orgy of financial mischief so arrant and awful, and to a plague of corruption so broad and deep, that American life is now pitching into a long emergency." -James Howard Kunstler in 2015

The Bathroom Class

The middle class that President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to protect in 1933 is clinging on for dear life in 2025.  In one corner, we have the lower eighty percent comprised of the working poor and their dependents such as the elderly, children, the disabled, and those on welfare.  All of the above (or should I say below?) live hand to mouth and paycheck to paycheck if they are lucky enough to have one or more jobs and hustles.  Theirs is a game of robbing Peter to pay Paul for the last thirty years; an exhausting runaround of managing debts.  There is no "saving money" for the lower eighty percent.  It does not exist.  Every time they get ahead enough to maybe purchase a one month backup supply of off brand Kleenex, the car needs a three thousand dollar overhaul or a tooth decides to go full root canal.  Every time they go to the grocery store, the products either shrink in size or inflate in price.  A loaf of bread cost seventy five cents in 1992.  Nowadays a half loaf of bread costs $3.50.  Wages have not risen in a way that is anywhere near commensurate to what life costs.  Anyone who still works retail or fast food, and there are quite a few working retail and fast food, is making $13-15 dollars per hour.  I worked in the local shopping mall in 1990 and I made $12 an hour... that was considered poverty wages back then and bread only cost seventy five cents.  

The upper twenty percent has many names: Professional Managerial Class, salary class, stockholders, laptop class.  They are truly in a class to themselves.  Unlike those below them, they feature retirees who do not have to work until they die.  They are shareholders and trustees.  They enjoy safe neighborhoods with good schools that are perpetually on the up and up, with older, more modest homes being gutted or outright demolished for spacious new construction and the latest in countertop trends.  They always have luxurious, new bathrooms.  We might as well call them the Bathroom Class because they have more luxury toilets per person than any clique in history.  As much as I castigate them, I count the Bathroom Class among my friends.  Many of them are hardworking, helpful souls.  Many of them have earned their retirements, and the only difference between them and the non-Bathroom class is that they actually have money to retire.  Whatever virtues the Bathroom Class might possess do not hide the fact that investment dividends are not earned wealth.  Investment is speculation for financial gain.  Speculation for financial gain is gambling.  Unless the investment is a personal and uncontracted agreement of trust, it is what the Bible calls usury.  The repeal of Glass Steagall and a list of other factors means that investing in the stock market, including with the "safe" 401(K), is playing fast and loose with the meager pennies of the lower eighty percent and their earned wealth. That sort of usury may not hold any consequences in the present incarnation where all subsist in a spiritual Dark Age of ignorance and Greed as God, but it does not bode well for future incarnations as things balance out.  

Most investment dividends come indirectly or directly from private equity firms such as Blackrock and Blackstone.  These firms are corporate goliaths that control the media, drive up home prices, and perpetuate the System of child trafficking that keeps the world trapped in low vibrational consciousness.  There is nothing inherently good about the System or the private equity firms that keep it running.  

Quiznos and Smashburger, a Tale of Private Equity

In the early 2000's, Quiznos was the fastest growing sandwich chain in America.  Though I always thought their sandwiches were mediocre, my husband loved their new (at the time) concept of roasting the sandwich under a broiler before adding the final lettuce and sauces.  Quiznos, like many fast casual strip mall restaurants, was a franchise.  Each store was run by someone who had bought into the franchise with his or her own money and in return gained the suppliers, the name, and the opportunity to up their class status by ostensibly becoming a business owner instead of an employee.  Quiznos took off and its franchises began popping up on every corner.  There were approximately 4500 Quiznos franchise locations at the restaurant's peak. Sometimes a Quiznos would pop up across the street from another Quiznos, literally within three to four hundred yards, as if they were competing gas stations.  The private equity firm that owned Quiznos not only allowed this, they encouraged it, wantonly pitting franchisees against each other in a race to the bottom. My husband noticed that our local Quznos degraded in quality, often running out of ingredients, skimping, or substituting with poorer quality food.  Little did he know what was going on in the background.  The private equity firm allowed many Quiznos to cannibalize other Quiznos, following the catastrophic failures and losses with a promise to reform, which was (of course) a fake out.  The private equity firm lured its surviving franchisees into an exclusive supplier contract, which at first brought back affordable purchasing for those left standing.  If you guessed the private equity firm also owned the supplier and promptly jacked up prices so more franchisees went under, you guessed correctly.  Once Quiznos was fully cannibalized and transformed from the leading sandwich seller to a barely-there also ran of closed restaurants and broken dreams, the private equity firm consolidated and sold off its debt, offshored the profits, filed for bankruptcy on all except the intellectual property, which it kept.  These ill-gotten gains from Quiznos franchisees's hard work, sweat, and tears was repackaged and used to open a fancy burger chain called Smashburger.  It was like Quiznos never happened for all except the franchisees.

Young couples who wish to buy homes and start families nowadays cannot because a private equity firm has either already bought the house and turned it into an eternal rental or Blackstone has raised the overall price of housing around the globe.  I am reminded of a scene in the first Resident Evil movie, a film about an evil Umbrella corporation that unleashes a zombie virus.  In one scene, a group of characters is forced through a laser room where they must play a macabre version of twister to avoid lasers slicing off various body parts.  Spoiler alert: in the end of the laser room scene, the cleverest guy gets sliced into neat little cubes when the laser turns into a mesh.  It is the movie equivalent of a brute smashing the chessboard because he was losing the game.  Private equity is the Umbrella Corporation.  It owns the laser room and it does not like to lose.  

A rising tide raises all ships, but it devours any who cannot afford a boat.  I know many people who regularly go on fabulous international vacations and who have trained their children to embrace the same grandiose lifestyles.  These people are not the direct trustees of private equity firms, but their wealth is private equity money all the same.  Private equity is invested in almost every major company at this point.  It is rarer to find an area of life where private equity is not in the process of cannibalizing wealth.  When people derive income from investing, they give the private equity firms more license to roam free and unchecked in their cannibalistic benders.  Since private equity is the latest form of wendigo, no amount of misery or destruction will ever be able to glut its appetites.

When Covid rule descended and small business owners like me were cannibalized so that more wealth could be transferred to the Bathroom Class wendigo, stockholders sat in their well-apppointed homes and ordered food delivered to their door while bingeing on Netflix, Hulu, and online games.  The Bathroom Class benefited from Covid rules and the lower eighty percent footed the bills and did the work once again.

They Say the Meek Shall Inherit the Earth

I could be wrong but I don't see things going well for some of our current high riders in the far future.  The infuriating bit is that for now, those who choose to enjoy wealth that was earned by those they considered beneath them are not about to change status.  The consequences of human behavior seldom if ever play out at the human scale... at least not immediately.

I believe that everyone who does serious spiritual work eventually comes to the realization that there is a Law of Wealth that exists for humans and perhaps any species that develops an extremely abstracted wealth system.  The Law of Wealth states that the person who amasses and keeps unearned wealth merely agrees to earn that wealth in a future lifetime.  There are a ton of mitigating factors that get thrown into this seemingly simple karmic equation.  Generosity, for instance, sublimates by exponents.  If your actions were compulsively generous in one lifetime, you can manage to repay major chunks, if not all of your unearned wealth.  Generosity pays with compounding interest of the soul.  If you fill your life with good works, gratitude, and humility, you can rectify a massive amount of "bad" karma.

As I have speculated and hypothesized in other essays, I believe many human-incarnated souls are going to wind up in animal forms as the current Holocene extinction is followed by the next great explosion of life on Earth.  The unique part of our era is its prolific number of incarnated human souls.  In the stripe of Hermetic Druidry to which I subscribe, this means that there are many formerly animal beings running aroud the planet at the moment.  The cycle of evolution is not just for matter, it is for spirit.  I was standing by my piano one day when I asked a wandering entity "What's it like to be a god?" The being, which I believe was a god though it's anybody's guess which one, gave a cryptically comical answer:  "It is like turning an amoeba into a pianist".  In other words, it is a long, slow process in geological scales of time to gradually complexify a spark of life in a tiny amoeba and put it through existence after existence until it is a human being who can manage a piano sonata.  When a being gets to the pianist stage, it is a true coming of age.  Not that the pianist is the final event in the chain -- of course not! -- but what has occurred is that cellular consciousness has become animal consciousness and then human animal consciousness.  This takes many, many trips around the sun.  The addition of fine motor skills such as music means that layers of sediment have built to mountainous heights.  The etheric body became an astral body and now the astral body develops a mental sheath.  Gods went through this process long ago, possibly in other universes.  They earned their mental bodies (body is a terrible, inadequate, and primitive word for the phenomenon of which I speak) as well as spiritual bodies that are much more intricate and masterful than our fledgling mental bodies.  Some gods deign to take an interest in human slugs like you and me.  From my experience, they are far more likely to interact with those who do not presume to speak for them personally or through a book or to be on equal footing with them, but I digress.

With such an excess of human-incarnated souls as we have now, we have a natural excess of humans who were wild or domestic animals fewer than a hundred years ago, which is not much in the span of geological time.  Though I believe vaccination and its aluminum adjuvants has been the primary gasoline on the autism dumpster fire, there may be other, deeper reasons why so many autistic people are being created.

The development of a full etheric body is the precursor to the development of the astral body, which is the body that animals are working on and the one upon which humans have a fairly decent grip.  Complex astral skills include written language, architecture, philosophy, music, computing, and large scale urbanization and warfare.  None of these phenomenon make humans any better than rocks, trees, animals, or bugs, but they indicate we may be more skilled in the astral plane than some of the previously mentioned things.  

So if you've made it this far in a long essay by a fringe occultist who talks to her toilet, you may be one of those who feels surrounded by stupid people.  Please keep in mind many of those people were quite literally cows, sheep, birds, cats, mice, crocodiles, fireflies, and squirrels a mere five to one hundred years ago and keep sympathy in your heart.  Like you, they are doing the best they can.  Energy is neither created nor destroyed.  It only changes form.  This is true for soul sparks of billions of animals who die are are quickly reincarnated as humans in the frenetic, overpopulated schedule of today.  

There is nothing wrong with being an animal.  It is neither inherently better nor worse than being a human.  Though our Faustian culture wants to push us to see reincarnation as success or failure where the superior human "wins" by ascending to non-embodiment, the kind of Buddhism and gnosticism that craps on all incarnation as essentially worthless is toxic.  Human life is hellish.  Being an animal is also hellish.  Both are also heavenly.  It depends on where you focus.  In my own case, human blackness and despair had me wanting to end my life.  I have fond memories of being a goose.  I was flying with my flock, the wind lifting my wings and my beak straight ahead.  We knew where we were going.  

As this era of overpopulation recedes like a tide -- and I would argue this is already happening -- some souls will bubble off into non-incarnation, stepping off into a new set of responsibilities that likely do not include anything like holding down a job or harvesting food.  This is not to say they won't have responsibility; I am almost certain they will and those could be difficult to handle.  In my own case, if I ever leave incarnation (I do not believe this will happen anytime within the next six hundred years at the minimum) I think I will become a Bodhisattva.  If I go back to being a cat or a goose as I was thousands of years ago, I don't foresee having a problem with it.  

I have spent a few years looking into what might happen to the vaccinated in their afterlives, and I was recently intrigued to find a couple of other people who are doing the same thing, Bernard Guenther and Thomas Mayer.  Guenther and Mayer are both heavily influenced by the work of Rudolf Steiner and hold him in high esteem.  Steiner had odd things to say about vaccines long before they were as de rigueur as they are today.  He said that vaccines will be responsible for the retardation of spiritual development in many humans and I believe he is correct.  Guenther and Mayer mainly that they can cause separation, detachment, and damage to the subtle bodies and they can make it much more difficult to engage in spiritual work.  For many years, I have had dim perceptions of the same phenomena. Guenther and Mayer speculate that recipients of Big Pharma protocols like MRNA vaccination and chemotherapy face becoming earthbound in the afterlife, which is to say that their etheric and astral bodies seem to end up tethered to the incarnation in which they vaccinated or became inundated with drugs via chemotherapy for an unusually lengthy period, but not forever.  Because these speculations are about the dead and based on unreliable communications with them, nobody knows if any of it is true and there is no way of proving it.  

From my own experience of communicating with the dead, I believe there is a glut of possibilities in the afterlife for the average Joe and Jane that is so vast, a retard like me could not hope to speculate it with any accuracy.  Obviously this has not stopped me from trying.  One possibility is that a large number of human-incarnated souls will return to non-human animal incarnation as wilderness subsumes Gaia.  Another possibility is that many souls will choose the accelerated evolution of spiritual work and become an army of non-incarnated beings themselves, having evolved beyond the need for physical manifestation.  

A Special Kind of Stupid

Somewhere between seventy and eighty percent of the world's population vaccinated, and many who did either died while still in the salty phase of trying to force and coerce others into the vaccination pyramid or are still pushing the vaccine narrative today.  Due to the nature of vaccination dislocating the subtle bodies as well as the karmic consequences of forcing others to do what you want (you will be in turn forced to do what you don't want to do) it seems logical that many vaccinated individuals will become earthbound after death.   But even they have the possibility of being redeemed and spared depending upon their vibe and openness to change. 

There is a special set who embody the rejection of spiritual evolution.  For instance, I have often said Sean Combs, also known as Diddy, seems doomed to reincarnate on a comet.  When I gave it some thought, I could easily see him ending up earthbound, almost content in that state because his etheric body would be able to wander its local area (provided he was not cremated) and vampirize people much like he did when he was still alive.  Diddy's astral body is most likely to remain earthbound, which will give him plentiful opportunities to enter nightmares and wreak havoc.   There are plenty just like him.  This is why everyone needs a banishing ritual.  Those who reject the Light at the end of human life and its companion, the Darkness of Judgement, stymy and delay the reincarnation process.  The Earth is currently teeming with formerly human spirits of this nature who could not let go and who also cannot pass into the next realm: that is how we get the most common of negative hauntings.  All of these stuck spirits had a choice.  They were shown (as you will be shown) a glimpse of the higher planes without so many blinders.  Like you, they were given a choice to go towards the light, which represents the higher self along with the higher selves of their particular soul swarm.  The cosmic ushers known as Bodhisattvas were there showing the path towards a natural progression of lives.  Their souls were given the chance to rest and digest the hard lessons of Meatworld among friends.  

Souls like theirs rebelled in the worst sort of way in life and they continue the path in death.  Having betrayed their soul swarm while in Meatworld, they run away, thinking there is someplace else to go.  As in life, they try to take the lazy way out in death, believing themselves to be entitled.  It is at that point where they are thrown to whatever demons they are tied to via the bargains they made while alive.  Demons, infection, disease, and narcissism overlap.  One leads to another.  For instance, a propensity towards alcoholism may be exacerbated by a little voice inside the future alcoholic's head whispering "Have another drink... it will be fine".  If you think that voice always came from the person's own head every single time, you are too naive to be helped.  Before long, the alcoholic's benders make her prone to both physical and nonphysical infection: disease.  On the more subtle planes, she is host to colonies of etheric larvae that feed off her diseased energy. She is also a vector of astral infection as she pleads for others to join her alcoholic astral pyramid in the form of drinking buddies.  Her energy is hungry and wants joiners.  

Unearned wealth is the ultimate addiction, which brings us full circle to the private equity firm CEO owner of Quiznos and Smashburger.  It's not that his human soul will ever amass enough power to become a demon, nor will that happen for Diddy after he dies.  As much as a power and money hungry human wants to assume the mantle of a superbeing in life or death, the hungry human is never going to be the owner of the casino.  Instead he will be merely another player.  The following, like the rest of this essay, is pure speculation.  The CEO of Quiznos/Smashburger (there have been several) is going to have the usual reception by their soul swarm shortly after dying.  They will be given a brief glimpse of rest and bliss before being sent to feel all that they put others through, and to sort wheat from chaff when it comes to the lives they touched.  If they had many good works that we know nothing about, those will be taken into account and balanced against the wealth they stole from their franchisees.  The balance between those things and their attitude towards it will determine where they will spend time between lives.  I believe people with obscene amounts of unearned wealth cannot hope to balance the scales in their favor, and it is also my belief that the CEOs of private equity firms will spend an inordinate amount of time earthbound and caught in a limbo as a result of running from accountability.  They will act in death as they did in life, avoiding responsibility for what they have done.  They are going to be against the natural law that forces them to earn every penny they stole, and that will mean finally becoming empathetic to emotional pain of the sort they inflicted and a lineup of existences as everything from a sweatshop slave to a dray horse.  Earn it back, earn it back. They will haunt the earth as hungry ghosts until they incarnate as humans in a much different and harder era, and they will not be born as queens and kings.  If they don't get enough redemptive human incarnations in before the Holocene era wraps, they will be reincarnated as non-human animals for the foreseeable future.  If they piss off the gods and powers well enough, they just might end up having to start over as plankton.  Now you see why I want nothing to do with unearned wealth!  I could be wrong, but I also could be right.