docu-mental is becoming part of the Ensouled Universe
vol. 3 issue 36
Greetings,
After three years of pursuing the reasons for our rising rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide, and concluding they are rooted in existential crises precipitated by the presiding paradigm of hierarchical thinking that begets racism, classicism, shame, “othering”, isolation, and the cannibalistic consumption of ourselves through the destruction of the planet, I don’t have much else to say about it.
I feel satisfied I have interrogated and elucidated the correlations between this rigid world view and our epidemics of mental distress, even if I didn’t scientifically prove causation (but if you are looking for that, health economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton are your team).
What I now have plenty of interest in, is exploring the many ways we might dare to think – and live – with an awareness that supersedes hierarchy, even if it includes it.
What fixed this as my new line of inquiry was the series on psychedelics I did back in May of this year.
The three take-aways from that series for me were:
From my conversation with Shepard Pratt/Compass clinical director Scott Aaron, MD, the question of who will control access to these drugs as they increasingly prove effective in outright ending depression, particularly the existential kind; should it be Big Pharma? The federal government? Priests trained in “tripping”? No one…?
From my conversation with classicist and author Brian Muraresku, the idea that if the ancient Greeks could give us both democracy and science, why not trust their esoterica? For my guest, it was the Greeks’ apparent use of psychoactive substances to commune with the life Beyond. For me, this question has turned into a program of formal tutelage with a teacher of Greek cosmology, including the works of Plato, Pythagoras, and the Hermetica.
From my conversation with astrologer, yogi, author, and teacher, Acyuta-bhava Das, whose decade-long use of the psychoactive brew ayahuasca, administered to him ceremoniously by curanderos in the Amazon, showed him “irrefutably” that there is an intelligence animating this world and that there is certainly consciousness beyond this life we currently live.
I have thought a lot about what my guests had to say, and included some of it in a presentation I made earlier this month where I argued that being true to one’s self is the ultimate form of activism, which if practiced relentlessly, makes all other forms of activism moot. Advocacy is another story, but activism and all the isms that attend it, are necessary only as a reaction to hierarchy, from what I can see.
And once I realized that, I realized I was done with the first leg of this journey.
If docu-mental was born to question why Americans experience towering rates of mental anguish, Ensouled’s naissance is to explore what happens when we do something about that, and specifically, what happens when we author our lives, unmediated by hierarchy. I anticipate great things can come from an exploration of “What is the matter?” followed by our individual and deliberate assignment of meaning to that matter.
I’m not interested in “anti-hierarchy” so much as I am in relationships, since true relationships are what hierarchy prevents, and why we feel our lives are stripped of meaning.
When our minds aggregated, packaged, and sold, and when no resource is too precious for consumption, we’re divorced from authentic relationships, whether it’s between us and our bodies, us and our children, us and our partners, us and another, us and our communities, us and our planet, us and the cosmos, us and our spirit, us and ourselves.
What I intend with Ensouled is to help de-habituate ourselves from thinking we are separate, and prompt us to remember ourselves and all that we are a part of instead.
E pluribus unum, “out of many, one”, is a guiding star for Ensouled.
Here’s the docu-mental timeline for the rest of 2021:
This month’s interview yet to be conducted with author Dax-Devlon Ross will air in September
October and November will be the erstwhile promised look at how the status quo has industrialized birth and death
December is still TBD
docu-mental will continue to be published throughout 2021 under its own banner, but will become a special channel as part of the Ensouled Universe in January 2022. Other channels will include essays, podcasts and interviews, arts and culture reviews, and analyses of astronomical events, including space exploration. Patron subscribers will be offered exclusive deals, which I am currently pilot testing now. Ensouled, which is primarily bi-monthly now, will become weekly in 2022.
If you’re already an Ensouled subscriber, you don’t need to do anything.
If you’d like to become an Ensouled subscriber now, here’s where you can do so.
When the full switchover happens, you’ll be given a choice to subscribe or opt out altogether.
When I started docu-mental, I wasn’t sure what the path would be. But, one foot in front of the other, and now three years later, I have a regular readership including a handful from across four continents, and open/read rates that continually surpass industry standards. docu-mental also has a knack for finding an audience each week with people who don’t subscribe, but who find it through social media. Thank you so much for this kind of dedicated following. I mean, wow. Thank you.
I hope you all will continue on this next leg of the journey with me. I promise it will be fun and inspired, and above all else hopeful, but I wish you all the best if you choose to get off here.
Underneath the stars, go gently.
Peace,
Whitney