The Grid is Not the Ground

Escaping the simulation for the somatic

I just had my first vacation in 25 years. The last time was New Year’s Eve 1999, when everyone thought the Y2K bug was going to mess up all the computers and planes would fall out of the sky. (It’s a long story, but for those of you who missed it, most computers clocks back then only had two numbers for the year. Like, 98 or 99. And no one knew for sure how those systems would deal with representing the year 2000. Would they think we went back to 00?) So I spent the turn of the millennium in a cabin on the beach in Tortola, resetting my soul as the world reset its computer clocks.

Twenty-five years later, I realized I was in need of a break. Not a break from life, but from the Google Calendar and all the pings. I’ve had some success with yoga and other practices, and wanted to explore this more embodied, somatic approach to experience more deliberately. I’m a PhD in media theory, but a perpetual beginner in metabolizing.

So I signed up for a weeklong workshop in shamanic spirituality down in Costa Rica. It wasn’t easy to make that choice. It wreaks of privilege, jet fuel, retreat, self-indulgent New Age altered states…. But some good friends of mine had done this same workshop and genuinely believed it would be of benefit, while giving us a shared vocabulary for a different level of experience: One that isn’t captured in the language of technology, social change, political activism, or even literature and the arts. I justified the expense as a teacher going back to class to learn some of what I missed. This would make me better at what I do. Even beyond that, am I allowed a week? With everything else going on in my life and in the world? And I said, fuck it, I am.

That choice alone, to take the time and space to get good with existence, may have been the most important part. I’ve been doing some workings here, a bit of magical practice and pauses to meditate on things for a moment. But not really. It’s more like an occasional yoga class. It’s great that I get a lot of stuff done and help lots of people (or at least answer a lot of email) but it’s also a bit disrespectful to this incarnation not to live in appreciation of the physical reality I’m being afforded. Air, gravity, touch, even the people who built the servers and devices to bring this to you. So yeah, I took a week to reclaim my body, my breath, my vital energy…and my eros.

And it was spectacular. It still is spectacular. From the outside, I guess it looked like a bunch of people doing psychodrama exercises during the day, and more tantric, shamanic openings in the evening. There’s no need to go into the details. It wasn’t drugs or sacred plants, but practices that involved some touch and energetic exchange. Not like dating, but what you might call transpersonal experiences. Still, they were intimate — the same way doing mushrooms in a small group is intimate, with everyone co-metabolizing everyone else’s traumas. Only here we were co-metabolizing some joy and opening along with the traumas.

But more important for me, living in the body and led by more somatic impulses than the ones in my head, changed something for me. I stopped strategizing, manipulating, and controlling things. In these mental and physical spaces there were no street signs to read or maps to negotiate, so I started to trust a different navigational sensibility. I decided to just let what was going to happen, happen.

I had a really good time, opening and sharing and being and even just dancing in ways I hadn’t before — not in front of other people, anyway. And there was one person there who created a field around them that made it so much easier to do this. They were just connected to the earth and the moon or whatever it is. Their mere presence created a permission structure for being real, vulnerable, open. At least for me.

And there was one big exercise, one shamanic experience that I had heard about beforehand that I was kind of nervous for. It was going to be intimate on lots of levels, and while I love all humans, there’s limits to what I — in my current state of development — feel great about all those humans doing with me or to me. The facilitators set up a ritual through which partners for this ceremony were selected. They put pairs of matched items from the jungle on a big platter. You picked an item off a plate while blindfolded, and then everyone takes off their blindfolds, holds up the leaf or flower or whatever they took, and then look around to see who got the other one. That’s your partner.

I picked my leaf, opened my eyes, and looked for my partner. And sure enough, it was them. This creature of light. And they were crying. Not because they were bummed, but because they had been hoping it would be me. And in that moment, that little lucky coincidence, it hit me that the universe really has my back. Whether it’s Anael, (the archangel that my Team Human guest Arden Leigh connected me to, or God or just the fractal order of things…I’ve been held all this time.

The experience itself, well, thank God it was a person who I trusted could hold me in all ways. It was an ordeal — on the order of a heroic dose — and I was totally emotionally and physically overwhelmed. I felt a buzzing electricity, a numbness in my hands and head like when you hyperventilate, except then it turned into this surge, like a sustained electric shock going from the base of butt right up my spine and out the top of my head. I thought I was maybe having an attack of some kind, and I ended up curled up in a ball on the floor as this stuff cycled through me. One of the facilitators later said it’s called a “kundalini awakening,” where all this dormant, coiled up energy at the base of the spine rises and rewires the nervous system. But it happened at the right time in my life, in the right place, and connected to a person in a moment so profound — it felt like I had incarnated during the same lifetime as them in order for that moment to happen between us.

Yeah, I get it. It sounds like “just” a high. But a heightened state — particularly one achieved through a practice rather than a chemical — isn’t inaccurate, it’s just specifically revelatory. And this experience or opening or whatever it was created for me a new reality tunnel. One that suggested something about the way my whole life, and I’d argue all life works.

Throughout my life, and definitely more in my awareness right now, the right opportunities have opened at the right times for me to grow and become alive. And the right challenges have come at precisely the moments I was ready to confront my shadow. There’s a way in which the universe has been perfect to me. It has my back. That doesn’t mean I’ve always recognized it. To the contrary. Any true success I’ve had in this life has occurred in spite of my best efforts to resist it or to make something else happen. I got that loud and clear from this experience.

But more importantly, I started to become aware of this other way of perceiving and navigating the world. A different, somatic compass. This other way of perceiving and navigating the world that we have been calling “magic,” because it’s not so easily identifiable what’s making it work. Spidey sense? ESP? Somatic awareness? Shamanic wisdom?

I want to be so bold as to assert that this shamanic/somatic awareness I’m describing here is the natural state. It’s not officially spiritual or religious. It’s not made up of symbols or superstitions. It’s a level before that, below that. It’s pre-linguistic, and pre-symbolic.

It’s the feeling you get when you put your palm on a tree trunk. Or when you feel physically drawn toward something or someone you don’t even know is there until you turn the corner and see them. Or conversely, the feeling you get when you know you’re off-track. The gentle nudge from the universe, like the nudge you get from the seat of a fancy rental car when you drift too close to the lane dividers. It’s another way of orienting to the world. There’s a farmer I know who picks up a rock in order to know where to plant or find water. As if holding the rock puts the farmer’s body back into relationship with the entire history of the field. On an elemental level.

Language and math and symbols are great inventions, but they are maps not territories. They have their own biases, and they necessarily draw our attention off our lived experience and into the many grids of interpretation. Even spiritual systems do this. Spheres with names, and levels of awareness, and diagrams, and phases with colors. Great stuff, but not what I’m trying to share here. I believe there is an alternative way of navigating reality that involves finding one’s core — heart, gut, kundalini, whatever you want to call it — and then using it lean into what’s in harmony. Sorry if that sounds esoteric, because it’s really quite tangible and intuitive compared with the way we usually calculate our choices.

It’s subtle and inexplicable, but quite natural. Like the way the upper branches and crowns of trees in a forest will avoid mashing into each other in a behavior called “crown shyness.” They somehow sense each other and create gaps so they won’t collide as they grow and sway in the wind.

Many people will try to access this sensibility in an explicit way through a modality of one sort or another. Like Tarot or I Ching or a pendulum, or even looking for those overt “signs” as they move through life. And that’s cool, but it still involves an interpretation layer. Does that black cat mean wrong way or right way? Is it on the left or the right? Does the storm mean danger or cleansing? If I’m going to play that game, I’d rather get the acknowledgment like a wink of affirmation after something than some sign from the ether I’m supposed to be actively decoding beforehand. I don’t want to be so actively "reading” phenomena all the time. Feels more like paranoia. I’d prefer a set of signs that make sense to me after something had come to fruition. Like a validation.

The phenomenon I’m trying to describe here is more of a real time thing, with no thought layer. Like standing in the ocean and feeling the warm current. And it’s there in every choice, from what food to put in your mouth—if you’re privileged enough to have that choice - to which gigs to accept or who to sleep with. It’s a subtle sensibility or sensation at first, but it gets really loud, really fast. Doing the “wrong” thing starts to feel intolerably “off.”

And then once you do the “off” thing you can feel it ripple through the rest of everything. For me, it might be agreeing to some podcast interview because I think it will get me something silly like “exposure” instead of it being something I really want to do. Then, of course, at the very same time slot I’ll get an opportunity to meet someone or do something special. And it will throw my Google Calendar out of sync, leading to a cascade effect where every appointment is now in the wrong place and time, and I can no longer even go to the best ones. Like a parking lot where all the cars have to fit together just so, and one in the wrong place means you have to move all of them.

These tools themselves, apps like Google Calendars, but even more so, maps and GPS, or metrics like wealth, or any other numerical value system—Likes—they all suggest we make our choices, navigate our paths, experience our success or satisfaction through external measures. Ones devised by people who do not have our best interests at heart, and cannot even know our hearts. These are systems that can’t know what we find beautiful, how it is we can best contribute to the collective welfare, how we can harmonize with the greater organism and play our part in everyone else’s shamanic journey.

When it’s working, it’s a like a dance, but with no official steps.

Our AI-driven world is a pseudo-reality. A symbol system based on a symbol system based on a symbol system. Predictions based on written language based on mouth noises. Or opportunity, based on agency, based on worth, based on jobs, based on corporatism, based on interest-bearing currency.

One’s life becomes about making oneself legible to these systems, through credentials or metrics or cash. And those who have become successful in those terms have a vested interest in negating and repressing the subtler but ultimately much more powerful ways the natural world really works. You can only disinfect nature for so long. You can only repress the feminine for so long. The indigenous. The kundalini. It’s more powerful than the prison of metrics with which we try to contain and control it. We look at its signals and nudges as noise to quiet or paranoia to ignore, rather than love and light guiding us to more harmonious ways of being. We’re too busy talking to shut up and start resonating—which is paradoxically louder and more impactful.

Our modern technologized world is a symbol system we learn about in school so we can navigate or manipulate it as adults. We learn the street names instead of the terrain, value job titles instead of the social contributions, and pursue growth over wellness. And that’s a great example: Why do we pursue growth? Because we use interest-bearing currency, a money system devised by monarchs to turn cash into a utility they could charge for. Nations care about the GDP—growth—because it means banks can get paid for lending us the money we use. But it’s a metric that guides choices in ways that don’t serve the planet or people or anything. Sometimes, even the best-intentioned of us can make our choices and measure success—development goals—based on metrics, reinforcing the dominance of the maps that got us out of alignment in the first place.

I’m aware how this feel-your-way through, use-the-force-Luke, Joseph Campbell “follow your bliss” approach to reality can come off as privileged. Of course it is! And while I’m not saying it’s impossible for a person in a refugee camp to surf the shamanic waves effectively, it’s whole lot harder. This hierarchical tyranny under which so many of us live was constructed to make it harder.

I navigated the maps well enough, and was born lucky enough, to get to a place where I have the latitude to make choices. But given that I do, if anything, it’s not my privilege but my obligation to make choices in ways I feel are consonant with the greater, or more essential reality in which we live together. If a tree is struggling just to grow, it may not have the energy or wherewithal to engage in the dance of “crown shyness” I was describing before. But those that do end up providing that struggling tree with a gap of sunlight in which to fortify itself.

Yes, it’s fun and rewarding to move through life in this shamanic way. And if you don’t have to work on someone else’s schedule, or live in a prison, or beg for charity, it’s a whole lot easier to let go and let the universe sweep you up in her arms and bring you to all the right places and people and experiences. You still have to spend energy and effort and overcome obstacles and metabolize trauma, but you get to do so with a prevailing sense of rightness and integrity of being.

And the benefits extend to others. Because once you start moving through life this way, you come to understand how coordinated the whole dance is. If you seize the privilege to act appropriately in any situation, you’re letting the karmic dance do its thing. You’re removing the points of friction, lessening the exploitation, reducing the overall quotient of striving, lowering the collective cortisol, and freeing yourself to help metabolize everyone else’s suffering.

If anything, not acknowledging and celebrating one’s privilege in the moment—for however long it lasts—is the affront to those who don’t have it.

So if you are privileged enough to turn off the pings on the phone, or to schedule fewer bad meetings, or earn less money, you damned well should. This whole capitalist and technological infrastructure has been fine-tuned for its ability to keep us off the path and alienated from our deeper sensibilities. A person with a mortgage is a more manageable citizen. Just like a person with an Instagram account, or an immune disease requiring a biologic.

And all those systems feed on each other, fast packaged food, industrial agriculture, adolescent colon cancer, medical debt, click counts, AI, teen suicide.

And that’s not even the real world. That’s the virtual world. The world built on language, money, politics, power, metrics, and other dead things. It’s the world our media and technology and corporatism and colonialism want us to mistake for reality. It’s the supposed “real world” we return to after watching a great movie or doing a ceremony or having a dream or making love. But it’s not. It’s the enforced illusion, the grid pattern of the city, the worth of a retirement plan, the notifications on the smart phone.

Those of us who have the privilege of escaping that virtual reality for moments at a time? For moments long enough to navigate soulfully and somatically rather than selfishly or strategically? Yes. We ought to do it. Because it’s not even a personal activity.

What you quickly realize is that we humans and other life forms are navigating this wave collectively. How well we do is dependent on how many of us can retrieve these more essential sensibilities. The ratio of free living people to captive or unconscious ones. We don’t have to rely solely on propaganda to convince people to make appropriate choices. Effective memes. No. Not when we have effective means.

When we act with compassion and resonance in appreciative surrender to the way things are trying to unfold, we model something else. A collective shamanism. A shared awe. A glimpse of what it feels like to live on Team Human.