The TLDR
In a machine world that’s lost it’s soul, we embark on a SoulQuest to heal our wound of separation, discover our unique purpose, and transform crisis into crossing.
HEAL: Humanity is in crisis, as we witness the erosion of public health, the collapse of meaning, and the devastation of Earth’s ecology.
DISCOVER: This crisis is our call to adventure—an odyssey to surrender our old form and answer our unique calling from soul.
TRANSFORM: As soul-initiates, we plant the seeds of cultural renaissance and planetary regeneration, ushering in a new era—The Regenaissance.
The Eagle and The Condor
Let me tell you a very old story.
It’s the story of an ancient prophecy from the Amazon, and it goes something like this:
Once upon a time, in the distant mists of pre-history, humanity lived in harmony with nature and soul. We hunted and gathered the abundance of the Earth as the tribe. Each night, we would tell stories around the sacred fire, watched over by a great sky of infinite stars.
But then one day, humanity split and went down two separate paths—the path of the Eagle and the path of the Condor.
The Condor people dwelled in the South. They embodied intuition and the feminine wisdom of the water. They followed the path of the heart and the sacred plant medicines. The Condor cultivated harmonious balance, and deep insight into the interconnectivity of all beings. They walked softly on the animate Earth, as stewards of the garden.
Meanwhile, the Eagle people soared in the North. Head-centered and logical, they harnessed the masculine power of the fire. These prometheans followed the path of the mind and of technological innovation. The Eagle found focused vision, radical capacity, and creative manifestation. But they forgot their connection to nature and began enforcing dominion over all they encountered. They subjugated the land, domesticated the animals, and extracted the resources of the Earth.
Then, as the prophecy foretold, the Fourth Pachacuti began—a deadly period of 500 years. Beginning with the arrival of a man named Columbus, the Eagle’s dominance nearly extinguished the Condor’s wisdom. The indigenous peoples where killed and enslaved, their land stolen and raped for resources. With each genocide and atrocity humanity’s connection to soul faded.
However, the Condor wisdom survived, retreating into the heart of the world. In remote mountains and jungles, the sacred medicines and ancient wisdom was kept alive.
But then, the Eagle people unlocked liquid starlight. They pulled black fuel from deep within the Earth and their fire-power exploded to new heights. Burning hotter and hotter, they built a global machine that manufactured novelty.
For five centuries, this industrial colonialist machine expanded across all continents, conquering all in its path. The Earth grew sick, her waters poisoned, her air filthy. And her children began to die—species by species.
Then came the weapons of mass destruction and the atomic age of existential anxiety.
Then came the intelligent machines and the age of digital slavery.
Then came the dark night of the soul and the collapse.
Trapped in a tragedy, all seemed lost.
Until one day, the Fifth Pachacuti arrived—a prophesied time of regeneration and healing. For it was told that the Eagle and Condor would fly in the Great Sky together once again, giving birth to higher consciousness.
Moloch
Welcome to the madness of modernity—the machine age.
We stand at a confluence of existential crises (a poly-crisis), most notably in health, meaning, and ecology.
Hundreds of millions starve while billions more face food and water insecurity. Wars rage on and genocides are televised.
Meanwhile, even the privileged suffer from diseases of affluence and despair. Riddled with addiction, obesity, and loneliness, there’s no bio-hack back to health, when the ecology itself is collapsing.
And then there’s the meaning crisis. Caught between the disempowering poles of fundamentalism and nihilism, we oscillate between a prison of conformity or the screaming abyss of the absurd. Our gospels of salvation don’t quite slap like they used to, yet no amount of money can fill that god-sized hole in our hearts.
Meanwhile nuclear war encroaches closer than ever, the climate catastrophe worsens, and the AI arms race accelerates, as we race towards some kind of armagedon.
All this is to say… we are in a fucking pickle.
So I’m going to give this poly-crisis pickle a name: Moloch.
Far from a tasty snack of crunch and dill, Moloch is a Canaanite deity from the Bible, associated with child sacrifice.
“You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Moloch, and so profane the name of your God…”
— Leviticus 18:21
This post was already dark, and now there’s child sacrifice is in the mix. But before you swipe back to the dopamine drip, I promise this isn’t a nihilistic soap box rant. It’s an invitation. However, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. So hang in there.
But seriously, what better way to characterize what is happening to the Earth right now than as child sacrifice? We are destroying our home planet and sacrificing our future generations to feed Moloch’s bottomless hunger.
Moloch is the hungry ghost of industry, the paranoia of nuclear militaries, and the corporate machine consuming the world. He’s turning the world into money…and pickles. Not a good dill.
“Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!”
— Allen Ginsberg, Howl
Moloch is the multi-polar trap, the coordination failure of negative-sum competition and the archetype of lose-lose games. He’s like a titty-twister contest in which everybody loses. Well, everyone except the masochists. 😈
“Moloch is the personification of the forces that coerce competing individuals to take actions which, although locally optimal, ultimately lead to situations where everyone is worse off.”
— Scott Alexander, Meditations on Moloch
Moloch sucks our attention, draining our life-force with algorithmic indifference. Zombified, we sludge through a haze of hyper-normal stimuli, swiping our literal brains out.
“Tried to lose myself in the primitive
In Yosemite like John Muir did
But his eyes were blue and mine are red and raw
‘Cause the modern world is a sight to see
It’s a stimulant, it’s pornography
It takes all my will not to turn it off”
— Conor Oberst, Barbary Coast
We merge with cold machines through glowing screens—trading “windows to the soul” for the red-eyed infinite scroll.
Moloch revels in our despair as the generations fragment—separated into classrooms, cubicles, suburbs, and senior living facilities. We drift from box to box as we play out scripted lives of quiet desperation.
Moloch requires tribute. The blood sacrifices of our alienated adolescents will do. Suicides and mass shootings keep the Master pleased. Unable to look away, yet unable to metabolize the grief, we drink down our Soma—one vice at a time.
Moloch feasts on the wild commons. 8 billion mouths fed from the factory farms and mono-cropped wastelands of previous prairies. He grows fat on processed foods and packaged products—shitting out the microplastics of a tortured supply chain.
Devouring entire ecosystems and species, He burps up the trash, forever chemicals, and toxic metals of our broken world.
The custom concern for the people
Build up the monuments and steeples to wear out our eyes
I get up just about noon
My head sends a message for me to reach for my shoes and then walk
Gotta go to work, gotta go to work, gotta have a job
Goes through the parking lot fields
Didn’t see no signs that they would yield and then thought
This’ll never end, this’ll never end, this’ll never stop
Message read on the bathroom wall
Said, “I don’t feel at all like I fall”
And we’re losing all touch, losing all touch, building a desert
—Modest Mouse, Custom Concern
Damned rivers.
Stripped soils.
Polluted air.
Plastic oceans.
Landfill nations.
Moloch laughs past tipping points and planetary boundaries. A cancerous tumor, He consumes everything, growing at any cost.
Even the cost of total collapse.
A Terminal Diagnosis
Cancer doesn’t give a shit.
It devours it’s host with indifference, eventually destroying the very substrate upon which it survives. Then it dies, along with the host. Yay.
Take colorectal cancer for instance—the third deadliest cancer. The butt-stuff of nightmares, it eats the ass of it’s victims until they eventually succumb to a brown-bagged shitstorm called death.
Not a fun way to go, no matter which way you swing.
Tom Laughlin, was a Jungian-trained psychologist who worked with terminal cancer patients. He transformed end of life palliative care by observing that butt cancer (and all terminal diagnoses) triggered profound psychological shifts.
When someone get’s that poopy prognosis, priorities instantly transform as the trivial becomes meaningless and the meaningful becomes essential.
In other words, when you find out that you’re being sodomized by cancer and you have mere weeks or months to live, the proposition of going back to your cubicle to grind through your sales calls so you can marginally increase a number on a screen seems, well, fucking absurd. When you realize you’re in the ultimate pickle—being retired from life early, the thought of spending your remaining days working, just to add a few more shekels to your Roth IRA sounds like a pretty bad dill. Not that trading your life for money wasn’t a shit-dill before, but now you see this pickle with painful clarity (and painful poops).
So, you seek meaningful ways to spend the rest of your days. You trade the drudgery of your day job for the giggles of children. You forget your Amazon wish list and dust off that unlived bucket list. You replace the infinite doom scroll for the peaceful nature stroll.
According to Laughlin, this transformation characterizes Jung’s concept of shifting from Ego to Self.
The Ego is our conscious “I” that manages daily life. The Ego climbs the corporate ladder, perpetually puts off those pesky fantasies of the Soul, and actively ignores the blood in the toilet.
The Self encompasses both the Ego and the Unconscious—the domain of dreams, intuition, and archetypes. The Self knows our deepest inmost desires and seeks to manifest our most meaningful life.
Jung called this “individuation,” the evolutionary process of becoming who we are.
Laughlin (and many other depth psychologists) have helped patients live this transformation, guiding them to pursue their “unlived lives.” The end-of-life guide reminds you of your meaningful soul-work, points you back towards forgotten passions, and calls you to that long-deferred art project.
Laughlin was essentially playing the role of the herald, calling dying hero’s to the adventure of their lives, before it was too late.
And the crazy part is… in many (anecdotal) cases, a “miracle” would occur: the cancer would go into remission. When patients finally began living that “unlived life,” they would begin healing.
“Is it possible that the disease itself evolved as a consequence of actions taken or not taken in our lives? Could our unlived lives have exacted their vengeance upon us in the form of cancer? And if they did, can we cure ourselves now by living these lives out?”
—Stephen Pressfield, The War of Art
Some patients might even fully recover from their self-denial, finally breaking free from their shackles of conditioning to explore the great backdoors. 😜🍑
All pickle and butt jokes aside… we actually do have a terminal diagnosis, right now.
Moloch is the poly-crisis pickle of a late-stage cancer.
And the only way out is through. Just like the cancer patients Laughlin worked with, the only way to reverse our global cancer is to finally start living our unlived lives, remember our deepest desires, and find our souls—one by one.
Let that sink in.
You have an unlived life. How many years have you not been living it? How many decades?
When you allow yourself to feel the emotions beneath the scripted justifications, a sacred wound will begin to break you open.
“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”
—Khalil Gibran, On Pain
Time to snap out of the hypnotic tech-trance and remember. Remember the wisdom of your heart. Remember who you are. Remember the unlived life that’s calling you.
A more beautiful world is possible. You know this in your bones.
Grieving fully will metabolize your fear and depression into courageous action.
So lament. Cry out. Unravel. But weep, don’t whimper.
“The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.” —Joanna Macy
Behind the distractions and escape strategies is a deeper yearning—an inner calling. Perhaps only heard as a faint whisper at first:
“It’s time for an adventure.”
Follow the muse beyond the threshold of the known, and venture into the wilderness of soul.
The Regenaissance
“If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”
—Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
We live at the dawn of the Fifth Pachacuti. And it’s time for the Eagle and Condor to soar together once again.
The psychedelics renaissance is here, and sacred plants are traveling beyond their origins. From Andean mountains to concrete jungles, the Eagle peoples are remembering the way of the heart (and tripping balls 😵💫).
Promethean technologies are now ubiquitous around the world. The Condor peoples are learning the ways of Eagle while sharing their wisdom and weaving together new structures.
Indigenous elders gather in council with wanderers and pioneers, sharing ceremonies with all walks of life. Rainbow Warriors are building bridges between science and spirituality, uniting traditions to restore balance to a tragic world.
Pockets of curious seekers and courageous innovators are forming all across the planet. We are exploring and experimenting, dreaming about the possibilities of a more beautiful world.
When Eagle and Condor fly together, a new consciousness emerges, honoring both rational brilliance and heart wisdom, balancing analysis and intuition, tempering power with wisdom. We are finally beginning to remember our sacred obligation: to live in reciprocity with all of our relations and the great web of life.
This union creates technology rooted in ecology, communities co-creating in natural rhythm, and liberating structures of stewardship rather than extraction.
The Great Work of our time is underway—to heal the separation between mind and heart, between humanity and nature.
“The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.”
—Thomas Berry, The Great Work
We stand at the threshold of a new dawning. A time between worlds. The liminal space of metamorphosis.
As consumerist caterpillars, we have grown to unprecedented size and capacity. 8 billion strong, we have terraformed the planet, extracting resources, devastating ecologies, and eradicating species.
Forced by an evolutionary imperative—the imminence of our own self-destruction—we must now embark on a hero’s journey…
Into the cocoon of cultural renaissance.
Into a transformative era of regeneration.
Into the Regenaissance.
A Regenaissance to revive culture and restore nature.
A Regenaissance to harmonize technology with ecology.
A Regenaissance to plants the seeds of a more beautiful world.
“Out of this darkness, a new world can arise, not to be constructed by our minds so much as to emerge from our dreams. Even though we cannot see clearly how it’s going to turn out, we are still called to let the future into our imagination. We will never be able to build what we have not first cherished in our hearts.”
—Joanna Macy
Heal, Discover, Transform
This poly-crisis pickle is the catalyst for our crossing. Evolution has forced us across the threshold, into the crucible of our metamorphosis.
Like a child just before birth, we’re trapped in a claustrophobic womb. As the catastrophes proliferate and the arms race accelerates, the walls close in around us.
We are being initiated—pushed by The Great Mother into the birth canal—our passage into a new age and a new humanity.
The only way out is through.
Or as the Stoics say: the obstacle is the way.
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
So how might we surrender to our fate (Amor Fati) and ease the passage?
Heal, discover, and transform.
Healing is the first phase of our hero’s journey.
Addiction, complacency, and fear prevent us from answering our call to adventure. We need to get out of our own way, metabolize our grief, and begin the long trek back into wholeness.
Behind our protective egos is a wounded child. Below our addictions and escapist strategies is a repressed shadow. These unacknowledged parts lie in the unconscious, awaiting our attention. Integrating these seeming contradictions holds the key to our healing and “whole-ing.”
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 51
It’s time to un-plug from the techno dystopia of our machine world and un-fuck our modern lives. This healing work breaks the addiction cycle, restores our bodies, and calms our minds.
Most importantly, our healing path leads us into soul-discovery. As we turn inward and explore the inner frontier of psyche, we remember our inner nature and discover our uniqueness.
“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes”. —Carl Jung
This inner discovery is essential to address the meaning crisis of fundamentalism and nihilism.
Fundamentalism has kept us trapped in a story of conformity, suppressing our authenticity and agency. Domesticated and indoctrinated, we cling tightly to the shallow meaning and false certainly conscripted to us by our parents, religion, and culture.
But a deeper knowing awaits us in the depths of psyche.
Nihilism throws out the fundamentalist story, along with everything else. It paralyses action, keeping us in a malaise of meaningless monotony. Cynical and jaded, we lose purpose and numb out the deeper longing within.
But a new story lies just around the corner of our post-modern deconstruction.
This inner discovery leads to soul-initiation: the antidote to fundamentalism and nihilism.
Soul-initiation is a transformational quest in which a person’s life becomes rooted in the unique purpose of their soul. It marks a shift from the adolescent consciousness of an ego-centric identity into true adulthood.
Soul-initiated adults prioritize authentic soul expression over societal conformity and belonging. It is a sacred rite of passage, characterized by an expansion of consciousness and the emergence of a more authentic identity and way of being.
“The journey of soul initiation is the path to true Adulthood—to becoming a cultural visionary and evolutionary—and true Adulthood is essential to a genuinely healthy, mature culture.”
—Bill Plotkin, The Decent to Soul
It’s time to drink from the wellspring of soul, discover who we really are, and infuse life with profound meaning.
Outer transformation is the final phase of this journey to Regenaissance.
Ecological collapse, nuclear catastrophe, AI dystopias, and other existential risks are at our doorstep. We must transform culture and civilization if we are to survive and thrive. And to create any meaningful change, we have to start with the root of the problem.
The foundation of any society is story.
Story is the super-structure that binds us all together. It weaves together the myths, memes, and metaphors that create our world-view and the lenses through which we see the world.
Our current paradigm of separation drives division and accelerates the apocalypse. This is a story of dualistic individualism—a worldview that imagines the individual as an atomized, autonomous entity existing in fundamental separation from others, the world, and any transcendent reality.
At its core, this paradigm emerges from what philosophers call the “Cartesian Self,” a conception developed by René Descartes that establishes a radical distinction between mind and body, subject and object, self and world.
“I think, therefore I am.” —René Descartes
This failing story comes in two shitty flavors.
The fundamentalist flavor inhabits a two worlds mythology. This dualism posits two distinct ontological realms: a temporal, fallen material world and an eternal, perfect spiritual realm. Each separate self requires divine intervention to escape from one’s fallen state.
In other words, you are a soul stuck on probation, trapped in a sinful body on a broken world, and you must be saved by a higher power (Jesus).
The nihilistic flavor expresses as a materialist determinism. This philosophy responds to the self’s predicament (of separateness) by deconstructing everything and denying any objective meaning at all. All human experience is nothing but biochemical processes devoid of any agency, and all frameworks of meaning are silly stories that we tell ourselves to fall asleep at night.
In other words, you are nothing more than a bunch of particles that randomly emerged out of a mechanized universe (for no reason), and your agency, meaning, and life’s purpose are all dellusions.
Neither of these stories are very empowering IMO. But luckily, there is more to discover.
Individualistic dualism leaves out the profound insights of non-dual states and unitive consciousness.
As the sages have been telling us for ages: we are one.
“The kingdom of God is within you.”
—Jesus [Christian Tradition]“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the ocean in a drop.”
—Rumi [Sufi tradition]“Only in being lived by the Tao can you be truly yourself.”
—Lao Tzu [Taoist Tradition]“There is no separate self! We are a current. We are a stream. We are a continuation.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh [Buddist Tradition]“Tat Tvam Asi” (Thou Art That)
—Chandogya Upanishad [Vedantic tradition]“Each one of us is part of the soul of the universe.”
—Plotinus [Platonic Tradition]“At the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit. And that center is really everywhere. It is within each of us.”
—Black Elk [Lakota Tradition]
I could go on quoting sage wisdom all day, but you get the point. This is a perennial insight that has emerged across the ages and from virtually all cultures.
Stories evolve, just like everything else. We can tell new stories that radically empower individuals while also weaving us together in a greater field of value.
Rational Mysticism is one such story.
It reconciles the dualistic paradigm of separation and the non-dual unitive consciousness of all enlightened sages.
Rational Mysticism pulls from the wisdom of all traditions, harmonizing science and spirituality.
It’s time to tell a new story for a new age.
“We must now collectively weave a cocoon for the metamorphosis of our own species.”
—Bill Plotkin
From Crisis to Crossing
My SoulQuest began in 2012, with a faith crisis.
A naive and spiritually broken 20 year old, I left my Christian-Mormon worldview and community behind, wandering into the wilderness of the unknown. I didn’t know it then, but I was embarking on an odyssey that would utterly transform me.
Now, 13 years later, I’m ready to tell the tale.
From fundamentalist faith to existential dread, I fell into a vacuum of meaning. I stumbled along the hedonic treadmill of a Las Vegas consumer culture, traversing the snares of the rat race.
After 5 years of aimless earning, I removed my golden shackles, quit my job, and answered my call to adventure.
I backpacked around the world, exploring different cultures and ways of being. I cultivated a yoga and meditation practice, got dismembered and blessed by psychedelics, and spent 1000 hours exploring the inner realms of psyche in the float tank.
I healed physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I kicked my addictions to alcohol, sports, and video games. I lost 50 pounds, began rock climbing, and got into the best shape of my life. I removed a metal screw from my hip and healed a lifelong injury.
I climbed mountains, faced demons, and was ripped open by the wound of the world. I lamented and grieved the loss of my old self and the immeasurable loss of our poly-crisis predicament.
I studied wisdom traditions and learned from the sages of all ages. Absorbing philosophy, psychology, mythology, and anything that could feed my curiosity and inner longing.
I fully deconstructed, braving the screaming abyss on my decent down into the depths of soul.
Dissolving my adolescent identity, I emerged as a soul-initiate. And after years of reconstruction, I return from my odyssey with a boon for my people—a new story.
This is SoulQuest—A Hero’s Journey from Crisis to Crossing.
This story will play out in 6 chapters: Moloch, Sanctuary, Psychonaut, Cocoon, Holon, and Regenaissance.
I hope you’ll join me on this quest.
Thank you for curiosity and attention. Stay tuned for the next one.
Much Love,
Christian
Las Vegas
P.S. If you would like more of my backstory as context for this journey, you can read the prologue here: