In the Book of Genesis, human existence begins in a garden. There, man walks with God. He is naked, but feels no shame. All is in communion. All is in harmony. All is in balance.

In the middle of the Garden grows the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God forbids man from eating the fruit of this tree, warning him that to do so would kill him. However, a serpent tricks man into eating the fruit by saying, “When you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Man gives into this temptation. He eats the fruit and begins to see. First, he sees that he is naked and covers himself up with leaves. Then upon hearing God approach man hides in the bushes. “Who told you that you were naked?” God asks. Realizing he has eaten from the tree, God exiles man from paradise and curses him so that he, his children, and all future generations will aimlessly wander the earth, toil in the dirt, suffer, and die.

This story is usually referred to as the Fall of Man. It is a mythological story, meaning it should not be understood as a retelling of historical events but as a metaphorical interpretation of the origins of humankind. In other words, the Fall of Man is a symbolic commentary on the emergence of consciousness, the impact it had on our species, and how that consciousness resulted in the world we live in now.

And that commentary is counterintuitive. Rather than ascending into paradise and living like gods, the myth tells us that consciousness had the opposite effect: we fell out of paradise into an existential wasteland, beginning a long, painful quest for meaning and a lonely search for home.

But why? Why would becoming more aware, more capable, and more intelligent result in a cataclysm for our species? A disaster? A Fall?

Our ape ancestors lived in a Garden, just like in the Genesis myth. Maybe not a literal paradise—where everything was hyper-pleasurable and all your problems were solved—but a kind of spiritual paradise, where our ancestors were one with the natural world and, more importantly, one with their own nature. They existed in a perpetual harmony with both the external environment around them and the internal one within them.

Put another way: our ape ancestors were living the way they evolved to live, in the world they evolved to live in. All they had to do was follow their basic instincts and their instincts would lead them exactly where they needed to go. There was nothing but the Torch and passing the Torch was simple: band together with your loved ones; seek out lush, beautiful environments; hunt for meat, find water, gather fruit; fall in love, have sex, and produce descendants; raise them up and show them how to live; fade away knowing they’ll carry the fire and keep it burning long after you die.

It should not be controversial that when people live this way, even now, they feel at home. Close to nature, grounded in their bodies, doing things that feel meaningful, surrounded by loved ones of many generations, in service of something transcendent and timeless. This feels good, feels right. No loneliness, no alienation, no nihilism, no depression, no angst. Yeah, you suffer, and shiver, and starve, and die. But you live. You bite into the heroic flesh of existence. You’re thrown into the fires of the real. To live any other way would never even occur to you. That is a spiritual paradise. The Garden of Eden. And it’s how our ape ancestors lived for millions of years.

But all of that changed when our evolutionary trajectory was tempted by a novel, ferocious innovation. Like a serpent whispering in the ear, the Darwinian potential of techne was too sweet to ignore; a fruit so revolutionary, so powerful, it could not be left on the tree. With the ability of techne—the ability to create and therefore manipulate objects—our ape ancestors were able to slice-and-dice reality into pieces, which could then be assorted and repurposed into machines, both psychological (like skills and methods and systems) and material (like tools and structures and cities).

The apes took a bite of that sweet, sweet fruit and awakened. Sure enough, as God had warned, the animal died and the human was born.

With techne, the apes’ psychology began to change much like a human infant’s changes during its first few years of life. Infants are not born conscious. When they come out of the womb they are completely uninhibited, completely at-one with the world, with their surroundings, with their own nature. That’s why they have no reservations about being naked and will poop themselves, publicly, without a second thought. They have no notion that others exist—no notion that anything exists—and therefore no separation between them and other, them and world. There is no Ego furiously chopping reality up into narrative objects and re-assorting them into a story of ‘Me’. There is no future with all of its potentials and worries. There is just pure experience, unconsciously guided by pure instinct. And this is how it was for our pre-conscious ape ancestors in the Garden. No techne. No objects. No-thing-ness.

But as infants grow and their psychology develops, they instinctually begin to objectify the world around them, to differentiate it into pieces: “mama”, “ball”, “doggie”. These are their first objects. This is techne hard at work, slicing-and-dicing so that we may become more capable of manipulating the world, more powerful to influence it, and better at adapting to it.

Objects are the first Fall, our first displacement from our spiritual home in the Garden. And the first Fall is a psychological one, a kind of alienation from oneself.

Because to create an object, we differentiate the world. The phenomenological one-ness with nature becomes two-ness. First, there was the All—pure experience—then we differentiate “mother” from the All, the first object. Perhaps the second object we differentiate is “father”. Then “ball”. Then “doggie”. Objects and language are basically synonymous, so you can essentially observe objectification developing in real-time in infants, signified by the words that begin to emerge from their mouths. New word, new object. This is a differentiation of the world: separating one thing from another, dividing reality up into discrete pieces so those pieces may adaptably be repurposed into tools, systems, and machines. In doing this, we convert the forest into trees—which is useful—but this leads to missing the forest for the trees.

To illustrate, imagine that when you listen to music, rather than simply experiencing the piece on an emotional felt level—dancing around like a crazed animal to the gorgeous vibrations, allowing yourself to ride the emotional and aesthetic rollercoaster—instead you rationalize the music: you take out the tweezers of techne and differentiate every single note, every single instrument, and every single lyric. In other words, you objectify the crap out of it, maybe so you can pedantically explain the significance of these fine details to someone at a party. “See what Chad is doing here is recording a dog barking underwater, and then using the XP20 compressor to time-stretch it, then blend it in with every snare hit. Yeah he basically invented the barkwave genre...”

Maybe you think this will impress people; maybe you pride yourself on your prowess with techne. But instead of letting the power and beauty of the music course through your body as you dance around to the rhythm, you stand there differentiating the song into little pieces. Sure, this might be useful: you can now take apart the music the same way you can take apart a car. You can systematize it, articulate its various components and discuss it with others, or repurpose the pieces into your own composition. That’s all to say: you can use the music for something productive. But in doing so, you’ve cut yourself off from its ancient, unconscious, and embodied beauty. What was once vibrant and full of life is now a box of inanimate things to be used for parts. You have missed the forest for the trees. You have missed the All for the objects; the one-ness for the many-ness.

That’s because the power of objectification does exactly what it sounds like—it turns the world from a living, breathing ocean of meaning into neutral, inanimate objects. Stuff. Things. That is powerful, obviously, because we can use those objects to build machines, develop technology, and engineer ourselves out of the Stone Age into a modern city that is plentiful in food, shelter, and safety. But in the process, we exile ourselves from the beauty and awe of a one-ness with nature—with our own nature. A song becomes a science. A poem becomes a product. And this is the direction things began to move once our ape ancestors became conscious: a cold mechanizing of the world, each other, and ourselves.

As children begin formulating objects, they also begin establishing connections between objects: “mama” has “food”; “ball” is at the “park”; “doggie” can “bark”. As they do this, they ingrain these objectification pathways into their psychology—kind of like ‘muscle memory’ or ‘second nature’—building systems of objects and their associations that eventually no longer require conscious thought, like how you learn to speak English or drive a car without needing to think about what you’re doing. This progresses and complexifies over time and once the nexus of associations between objects has become tight-knit and refined enough, a toddler will begin to grapple with the meta object of ‘Me’.

“I am.” This is the second Fall.

The child becomes self-conscious. They develop an instinct for the gaze of others. “I exist. And others exist too. And they can see me. Do I look stupid?” The child, like Adam, no longer wishes to be naked, to have his bare body exposed and gazed upon, and so he puts on clothing. Previously he pooped himself without a care; now he begins to question his actions. “Maybe I am making a mess. Maybe I am embarrassing myself.” The child becomes inhibited, and now endeavors to regulate himself, to maintain a presentable image, to ensure likability and appropriate behavior.

Animals don’t do this. They just exist. They follow their drives, intertwine themselves with the natural world, and do exactly what their instincts tell them. Animals are naked. Meanwhile, humans fuss about identity and image. They experience social anxiety and constantly inhibit their basic instincts in favor of behaving more ‘appropriately’ or ‘attractively.’ In this sense, they are separating themselves from their own body, their inner-animal, their inner-child. While toddlers joyously run around and scream and play at the park, groups of their parents solemnly sit and chat about meaningless, safe topics, for fear of what might happen were they to say the wrong thing, were they to come off as weird or troubled or weak, were they to deviate in any way from the realm of perceived acceptability.

This can get pretty bad in some cases, where people cut themselves off from their own feelings and desires and needs so aggressively that they develop a large Shadow: a kind of psychological blindspot where someone cannot see a large part of who they are. One’s Shadow can often act as a kind of spiritual dungeon where one locks away all their painful, undesirable, or ‘inappropriate’ feelings, ideas, or memories. Relationships can develop Shadows, with lovers hiding their true selves from each other; communities can develop Shadows with topics that cannot be discussed and feelings that cannot be expressed. It is a uniquely human fracturing of self into disconnected containers.

The formulation of oneself as an object also becomes perverted and inflated manifesting as narcissism, selfishness, or solipsism. “I am” can quickly warp into “I am all there is” or “I am all that matters.” The Torch can fade into obscurity in favor of maximum self-actualization, maximum self-promotion, maximum masturbation. The internet greatly exacerbates this by encouraging the Ego to construct a digital avatar out of its own projection of itself and then fondle that avatar in cyberspace alongside other virtual-reification-of-the-Ego fondlers. That’s essentially what an internet account is: a projection of who your Ego thinks you are, or aspires to be, freed from the shackles of having a body and existing in physical space. That is a uniquely human alienation from one’s body.

The third Fall is time.

Time is an artifact of consciousness. Animals and infants have no concept of time, no notion of yesterday or tomorrow. They do not ruminate on the past, they do not worry about the future. Time means dwelling on that bad experience you had as a child at the expense of being present with your own child. Time means fussing over your retirement plan at the expense of living right now. The capacity for entertaining the past and the future means an alienation from the present, a differentiation away from the one-ness of the Now, an exile from the spiritual paradise of living in the moment which we often try to return to, artificially, through drugs and alcohol and escapism.

With time comes work. Animals do not work. Work is the sacrifice of the present for the future. Once we understand this concept, we start experimenting with innovations in work, innovations in sacrificing the present. “Maybe if I stop having so much fun right now, I can make more money in the future. Maybe if I stop spending time with my less ambitious friends right now, I can become a successful businessman in the future. Maybe if I give up my weekends now, I can out-compete my colleagues and get promoted in the future.” Obviously, work allows you to accomplish some pretty remarkable things, for a monkey, but it also tends to stretch us, wear us down into functional machines at the expense of living souls. People often describe their jobs as ‘soul-crushing’. Animals and infants don’t engage in soul-crushing. We only subject ourselves to it because we know what it can accomplish, because we can simulate a potential future, because we are conscious. We alienate ourselves from being by working; we exile ourselves from the Garden of the Now for the potential treasure that awaits us in the Machine of Tomorrow.

The fourth Fall is ontological paradox: the contradiction between what we evolved to feel or believe and what we inevitably discover through the observations of consciousness.

Techne is the power to map objects onto an undifferentiated unconscious reality, but specifically in service of constructing useful machines—tools, skills, methods, systems. The whole point of techne is to convert the world into something useful, something that can be adapted to whatever we might need, in whatever environment we might find ourselves. It’s what allows humans to find forty different uses for a tree branch and spread to every ecosystem on the planet.

The only way to accomplish this conversion of reality into something usable is to constantly be scanning for useful patterns in the world—namely patterns with the highest predictive power. The more successfully a pattern predicts the future, the more we pursue it, the more real it becomes to us. That is what consciousness is doing, all the time: trying to get more and more in touch with ‘real’ patterns in the world, that will help it build bigger and better machines.

So techne becomes this powerful, new innovation in our evolutionary trajectory. “Oooooweee look how adaptive this is!” says evolution. “We better invest more and more resources into techne!” Brains get bigger. Tool-use gets more advanced. Fire. Language. Torchbearing gets supercharged: better hunting, better gathering, higher reproductive success, growing tribe. “Gimme more consciousness,” says evolution. “MORE!”

But something unexpected happens: these developments start to yield strange and difficult psychological byproducts. As we objectify the world more and more, as we discover more and more ‘real’ patterns, as we stare more deeply into the fabric of reality—differentiating and differentiating—the world paradoxically starts to withdraw from us. Questions begin to emerge about the nature of things, questions we never would have considered as primitive apes. “Why does the sun rise and set? Where does the rain come from? How big is the world and where does it end?” The more we see, the less we feel like we know, the more we have questions, the more the anxiety-inducing unknown appears in everything we look at. Objects become like black holes, dark phenomenological caves receding into the depths of reality. “What am I? What is my purpose? What is the point of it all?” We never wondered what was lurking down in the cave before, because we never knew the cave was there. Now we see it and we wonder: “What the hell is lurking in that darkness? And what does it mean? What might it do to me?”

‘Death’ is such a black hole, a kind of anti-object, meaning: a thing we objectify into our reality but have no idea how to contain within a neat, usable package. A ‘ball’ sitting in front of us is easy to objectify, easy to assert its properties and boundaries and function. Our own inevitable demise is not something whose properties, boundaries, and function are easy to assert. “What happens when I die? Do I cease to exist? Does everything cease to exist? Forever? What does it mean to not exist?”

These questions never arose before apes became conscious. Where they once lived mindlessly, as though all was infinite and endless—as if there were no tomorrow and every day would be like the previous day, again and again forever—now there is contradiction, a paradox: “I feel as though this life shall continue forever, but I see that it won’t. I feel as though the trees have spirits within them, now I see it’s just wood. I feel as though Earth is the center of the universe, now I see we’re just one of many specks in an infinite darkness.” This will continue throughout history. We’re still reeling from it now. This confrontation with the paradox produces anxiety, leaves us feeling confused, sometimes horrified. The more we gaze into the fabric of reality, the more we are confronted with the unknown. The once seemingly immaculate one-ness of existence begins to reveal its stains, cracks, and deformations. The shining light of consciousness paradoxically introduces darkness.

The fifth Fall is evil. With consciousness comes agency, which means the ability to make choices, which means being responsible for one’s actions. In other words, consciousness means the emergence of morality: the capacity for good and evil.

Animals are not capable of evil. When a bear kills another bear, we don’t interpret this as an ‘evil’ act—the animal was simply acting according to its nature. When a human kills a human, it’s murder. But what’s the difference? The difference is that the human is conscious, has agency, and therefore has a choice. He knows what he’s doing. He chose to kill someone—unlike the unconscious bear—and so he has committed an amoral act, an evil act. Consciousness means the potential for good and evil. Animals are capable of neither.

When Adam became conscious, saw he was naked, and put on clothes—he realized that he was vulnerable, unprotected. He understood all the many ways in which he could be hurt, suffer, and die. Because humans realize their own vulnerability, their own mortality, they also realize the vulnerability of others, what will hurt them, what will make them suffer. Sure, animals will eat each other, but there’s nothing like humans’ capacity for brutality, cruelty, and torture. You won’t see animals nail each other to crosses or burn each other alive.

Likewise, though animals can be sneaky and lay traps in their hunt for food, they are not capable of lying, deception, manipulation, or abuse in the way that humans are. And what’s so challenging, so compromising, so corrupting, is how tempting these acts can be for humans, how easily one can get ahead in the world if they’re willing to be amoral. Why labor tirelessly to grow your own food when you can steal from someone else? Why pay someone for their work when you can just enslave them? Why serve a king, when you can murder him and take his place? Consciousness means humans become extremely resourceful and innovative compared to their chimpanzee relatives, but history will show us that they don’t use this ingenuity to erect bastions of love, liberty, and peace. Instead they use it to repeatedly conquer the known world, tyrannize its inhabitants, and commit genocide. Is that an improvement upon living in the bush and eating ants? Hard to say.

The final Fall is environmental: consciousness leads to technological innovation, which leads to reproductive success, competition, arms races, and war, which rapidly change the world into something we never evolved to live in. The experience and surroundings and lifestyle of our ancestors began to feel more and more alien as the centuries progressed. Their basic instincts made less and less sense. They had to stretch themselves further and further to get by in the world.

The Garden was a state of existence that entailed creatively transmuting a natural wilderness into a habitable order, in tight-knit kin groups, in service of the Torch. That’s what we were born to do, what all of our drives are calibrated to, what all of our instincts are pointing to. When we’re in this context, we feel spiritually at-home. That was the prehistoric world of the Pleistocene. With techne came technology; with technology came tools, weapons, dwellings, villages; with these technological advancements came increased survival, increased reproductive success, more children living longer and producing more children; with increased reproductive success came higher populations, more crowding, less land to go around, less resources; with more crowding and less resources came competition within tribes and between tribes; and with competition came war and conquest, on scales we were never mentally or spiritually prepared for.

Humans are not built for high levels of crowding. Dunbar’s number is low, about 150 people, showing that our minds are designed to only sustain the amount of relationships that might have existed in a prehistoric tribal setting. Throw us into an environment with thousands of people around us and it cannot be stable, safe, or cohesive—operating in a positive-sum manner towards shared goals—without laws or rules being enforced through threat of punishment. That means that when things got crowded as a result of higher reproductive success due to the innovations of consciousness, our instincts stopped being a good guide on how to behave. High population density was an alien context to us, a kind of exile from the spiritual paradise of small kin-groups, where the only people in our life were our family and closest friends, the people we knew and loved and trusted.

Humans are not built for war. Men are certainly built for violence and conflict, but only on a small scale. The kind of all-out tribal warfare and, later, conquest, genocide, and slavery that gripped the world are not a state of existence that humans evolved to understand or process. Two men fighting over a woman, or two tribes skirmishing over a contested watering hole, at least make intuitive sense to us—we know what to do and how to interpret these situations; we can feel the proper instincts arise in us to either mediate the conflict, cheer on our team, or get out of the way. But full-scale, all-out war makes no sense to the tribal mind; it does not compute; and it is certainly not a lifestyle that any of us would willingly choose.

But this is what started to crop up around early humans in the aftermath of consciousness: novel, emergent patterns of competition and warfare of a scale that became terrifying, nightmarish, and beyond comprehension. We were exiled out of a coherent, relatively peaceful way of life into an ugly, brutal landscape of zero-sum hostility, despair, and displacement. And throughout history, even now, it has never stopped.

It can be hard to get an outside perspective on how utterly alien our lifestyles have become to the natural drives and feelings and interpretations that accompany us out of the womb. We are looking for an epic wilderness but instead find gray walls and asphalt. We are looking for the ever-present tribe of fifty but instead find two adults and one sibling if we’re lucky. We are looking to tame a wild landscape through the creative exploration of nature, deeply in tune with our bodies and souls, but are instead shoved behind a desk in a dark room and forced to memorize symbols on a page.

The moment we are born, we are lost, we are fallen. We have been exiled to some strange alien existence that makes no sense to any of our natural drives, desires, or needs. The Ego adjusts its narrative in order to get by, but our bodies are souls are like, “Where the fuck am I?”

All of this is to say:

The moment we became conscious, we entered a fallen world, and we have been living in it for millennia. The moment Adam became conscious he was exiled from paradise. His sudden and dramatic increase in awareness, adaptability, and intelligence did not result in him ascending to the heavens and becoming a god, but the opposite: he fell and fell and fell. He chopped a living, breathing reality into neutral inanimate objects, abandoning his one-ness with nature for power and productivity. He began to tell himself stories about who he was and what he should become and banished his blissful and innocent inner animal into the dungeons of his psyche. He began to sacrifice the current moment for the glittering promises of the future thereby inventing work. He discovered his own mortality, and killed the gods, and dispelled the spirit. He discovered lying, and manipulation, and torture and became tempted by grand ideas of power. He invented weapons and conquered tribes and built empires and burnt down the world and then rebuilt it again and again until nothing of the Garden remained. None of us have ever been to the Garden, but our flesh remembers. And it forever yearns to return to a place it will never see again.

Consciousness exiled us into the Shadowlands. It de-homed us, displaced us. And it’s still doing it, still chopping up the world, reassembling it into more and more complex, more productive, more powerful machines. Yes, most of us are safe, well-fed, and have access to the miracles of modern medicine, but we are wounded, and starving, and diseased in other ways. This is the story of humans. The crisis of consciousness. The trauma of technology.

A flaming sword now guards the entrance of the Garden. Even if we found our way back, we could not re-enter. We are conscious. The genie is out of the bottle. There is no unbuilding the machines we’ve built; no unknowing what we know; no disentangling the wires we’ve snaked into every corner of the globe. We are exiled. Forever condemned to search for a new home somewhere out there, east of Eden.

Shakespeare in the Park is a series of plays performed in public green spaces around the world. The sets are usually minimal; sometimes they’re non-existent and the actors simply perform on a stretch of grass, encircled by an audience sitting on blankets, eating sandwiches they made themselves, while their children play tag amongst the trees.

Despite the non-existent sets; despite the fact that you can clearly see other members of the audience lounging around having picnics; despite the characters all speaking in ridiculously well-timed, perfectly crafted poetry; despite the plot revolving around a shipwreck, an island, a wizard, and the magical creatures that serve him, the audience attending these performances buys into the action in front of them and finds it compelling.

But why? How can they buy into it when it’s so unrealistic? There’s no such thing as wizards. Nobody, regardless of time period, speaks with such beauty and musicality. And the people performing in front of them are clearly not on an island.

We confuse ourselves when we think that the reason plays, novels, and films are compelling to us is because they reflect the ‘real world’, that we pursue our media because it adheres to the kind of ‘scientific’ or ‘material’ reality that supposedly exists around us. But that is clearly not the case.

All of our most popular film franchises—Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and so on—depict characters, plot lines, and universes that are absurdly unrealistic. You’re not fooling anyone into believing there’s a School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, or that Sauron and his Rings of Power are an important part of world history, or that a raccoon can speak English and fire a rocket launcher. And yet, people consume this media like crazy; they obsess over it; they can’t get enough of it.

The reason we enjoy these stories, these characters, and these universes, is not because they depict the ‘material world’ around us, but because they constellate the archetypal realm within us.

To understand archetypes, we must first consider the concept of instincts. The simplest way to think about instincts is that they are the psychological side of our biological nature. Humans are not blank slates. We are born with predetermined mental structures, proclivities, and tendencies. We come out of the womb with our minds already mostly hard-wired, well prepared for the ancient tribal environment of the Garden that’s supposed to await us.

If we consider the physical body, it should be obvious that it’s born with predetermined structures and growth patterns: every healthy human has a head, two eyes and two ears, ten fingers and ten toes, and a spine with 33 vertebrae. We can somewhat influence the shape of our bodies—for instance, giving ourselves an upside-down ‘triangular’ shape through extreme weight lifting, or a ‘pear’ shape through poor diet and lack of activity—but we cannot will ourselves into a tree or an octopus. Our physicality has a very specific blueprint that cannot be unwritten.

Our mind is the same: somewhat pliable—through learning, conditioning, experience—but overwhelmingly predetermined. These predetermined structures of the mind—the psychological analog to two eyes, ten fingers, and 33 vertebrae—are what we refer to as instincts.

Instincts are systems of readiness for action: they wait for a certain pattern to arise in the environment and, upon registering that pattern, activate a certain behavior. For example, upon smelling something rich with fat and sugar (pattern), we decide to eat it (behavior); upon grabbing a frying pan and feeling a burning sensation (pattern), we let go (behavior). These instincts are built into our bodies. We do not choose them or acquire them and we cannot dispense with them—they simply are. We can work with them—or we can exhaust ourselves trying to work around them—but we cannot remove these predetermined structures from our mind any more than we can remove our skeletal system from our body.

Instincts are ancient: they are our ‘lower’, more embodied psychological nature, whose wiring dates back before our ancestors were squirrel-like creatures living in trees. With the dawn of techne, when our ape ancestors first began projecting objects—embarking upon the evolutionary journey that would birth technology, language, and consciousness—those animal instincts were exapted up into a higher realm of images, ideas, and narratives. That ‘higher’ psychological nature—the intellectual analog to embodied instinct—is what we refer to as archetypes.

Where instincts work through lower animalistic pathways, archetypes work through object, image, and story, because that is the realm of techne—the thing that makes humans what they are. While instincts are systems of readiness for behavior, archetypes are systems of readiness for objectification. That is why—while instincts seem to manifest as behaviors—archetypes seem to manifest as image, concept, and narrative: like the ‘magic sword’ or the ‘great mother’ or the ‘hero’s journey’.

Let’s explore an example of both instinct and archetype:

The infantile instinct to ensure one’s security through the protection of a mother-like guardian may result in behaviors like: wanting to constantly be held, crying when being put down, and getting anxious when mother leaves the room. The archetypal analog to that instinct may manifest as images or stories of an ideal mother and over time may be collectively, culturally distilled into shared daimons which embody that ideal mother: like the Virgin Mary or Demeter.

But it’s important to note that the Virgin Mary is not the archetype itself, rather she is the product of an archetype. And that’s where things get confusing. We cannot see instincts themselves, only the behaviors they produce; likewise we cannot see archetypes themselves, only the objects, images, and ideas they produce. It’s also important to note that many different instincts and archetypes interweave and fold upon each other to produce the complexity of human behavior. We can’t know precisely which ones are being constellated at any given time and to what degree.

For example, the behavior of ‘going out to a restaurant’—as many humans are driven to do—is almost certainly a combination of many instincts: craving food, craving novelty, craving human interaction, craving liveliness, and so on. It’s not clear where one instinct begins and another ends or how they influence one another.

Likewise, archetypes tend to blur together. The Hobbit clearly embodies a rich archetypal pattern—that’s what makes it so popular and compelling—but it cannot be reduced to a single archetype: Does the mountainous and forested setting convey the archetypal adventure environment? Does Bilbo convey the archetypal hero? Smaug the archetypal beast? Gandalf the archetypal mentor? Gollum the archetypal... slimy... wretch... thing? Is The Hobbit the archetypal hero’s journey due to all these nested archetypes within it? What happens if we remove Gandalf or Gollum—is it still the archetypal hero’s journey? Is The Matrix also the archetypal hero’s journey? How can it be, when its premise and setting are so different?

Archetypes, like instincts, are not that clear-cut; we cannot disentangle the phenomenological world into distinct, properly labeled containers. We simply see the products of these inner psychological structures in the world around us, and try our best to theorize about what those products might mean.

Consider that instincts function by scanning for patterns in the environment, which then activate the instinct and trigger an associated behavior. Or those patterns constellate an archetype and trigger an associated idea. That means we are constantly projecting a kind of instinctual or archetypal ideal onto the world around us, onto which patterns can match weakly or match strongly.

In other words, we can think of every pattern we encounter in the world as having a fidelity (a faithfulness) to an instinctual or archetypal ideal. A pattern with low fidelity to an archetype will not activate the associated idea; a pattern with high fidelity to an archetype will activate the associated idea.

For example, a root dug up in the wild and a can of Coca-Cola both have sugar in them (a pattern). If consumed, our sugar-craving instinct will be activated by both: the wild root has sugar, but very little, and therefore tastes bitter (low fidelity to the sugar ideal); the Coca-Cola has an extreme amount of sugar and therefore tastes very sweet (high fidelity to the sugar ideal). Therefore, upon tasting the root, we might not eat it; upon tasting the Coca-Cola, we might find ourselves happily guzzling it, because it has such a high fidelity to the instinctual sugar ideal; the pattern matches strongly.

In a different example, an ‘old man working in an office’ and an ‘immortal god-warrior with a magic sword’ could both serve as the hero of a story (a pattern). Our hero archetype will be constellated by both: the old office worker could fix the copy machine that’s been giving all his co-workers trouble and that would be kind of heroic I guess (low fidelity to the hero archetype). Contrastingly, the god-warrior could sacrifice his immortality to defeat Malkon, Devourer of Worlds, saving the entire universe and that would seem very heroic (high fidelity to the hero archetype). Two different patterns playing upon the same archetype, constellating it to different degrees. A movie about the office worker might get turned off after the first two minutes; a movie about the god-warrior might gross a billion dollars at the box office.

This potential for varying fidelities when activating an instinct or constellating an archetype is something that can be cleverly manipulated by human ingenuity, and we have been doing this ever since we became conscious. In fact, the experimentation, innovation, and manipulation of the potentiality of instincts and archetypes may be the core feature of consciousness.

To illustrate, the instinct for sugar guides us towards finding and consuming it, but is calibrated towards an ancient wilderness where food was scarce and the prevalence of sugar was extremely low: the sweetest thing you might find would have been a piece of fruit. With the advent of techne—and our human capacity for engineering our own products, environments, and stories—we began to craft artifacts like Coca-Cola—much, much sweeter than anything we would have encountered in the prehistoric world; much, much sweeter than our heuristic instinct for sugar was ever designed to interact with. Coca-Cola goes beyond what is natural for our instinctual and archetypal faculties.

This going beyond is what I will refer to in this series as magic.

Magic is supernatural—beyond the natural—beyond what our torchbearing heuristics were ever designed for. Magic is higher in fidelity to instinctual and archetypal ideals than what is standard or expected by the body.

Instinctual magic manifests as luxury: like cheeseburgers, hot tubs, and pop music—sensory experiences that go beyond what our instincts were designed for. Archetypal magic manifests as fantasy: like films, novels, and video games—narratives and imagery and ideas that go ‘beyond’ what our archetypes are designed for.

Dragons are not ‘real’, but they play powerfully upon an archetypal pattern of ‘the beast’ or ‘the avatar of nature as destroyer’. For this reason, dragons are magical creatures, something beyond what we find in the ‘real world’. Similarly, wizards are not ‘real’, but they play powerfully upon the archetypal pattern of ‘he who wields the logos’ or ‘he who creatively transmutes the chaotic wild into habitable order’. In this way wizards are magical; they can do things with their hands or minds that are beyond what we find in the ‘real world’.

So, early on in the human timeline of innovating with fantasy, of playing with archetypal magic, of increasing the fidelity of various narrative artifacts to the archetypal ideals at which they aim, we see the emergence of mythology.

Ancient mythology is a product of this capacity for going beyond, and it emerges in human populations as a captivating, powerful way to explain the world—how it works, how it came to be, and where it’s going—in a way that can easily be retained and transferred between minds from generation to generation. At this point in history, fantasy is an innovation in cosmology and cultural cohesion, and does this by way of archetypal magic.

Greek mythology, for example, is magical. Looking at it through a modern lens, it doesn’t seem to make much sense, be very logically consistent, or adhere to any kind of scientific worldview. But it emerges millennia ago as an early attempt to explain our world through archetypal patterns: ”Gaia gives birth to Uranus, who then mates with her, producing eighteen children, but Uranus hates them, so he hides them inside Gaia’s womb, but Gaia doesn’t like that very much, so she persuades the youngest child Cronus to castrate his father with a sickle, which makes Cronus the ruler of the cosmos, then he marries his sister, and they have children, but Cronus eats those children...”

Like Shakespeare in the Park, you could complain that Greek mythology doesn’t seem very ‘realistic’—so how could anyone possibly believe it?—but you would be missing the point: mythology is not an exercise in science, it is the product of collective, intergenerational experimentation with archetypal magic. It plays with the phenomenological potentialities afforded by our torchbearing instincts, which evolved for life in the Garden, and does so in service of creating a primitive—but useful—shared metaphysics.

We can think of it like this: Our instinct for a motherly presence within a tribal setting generates a Gaia-like figure, from which all life originates, from whom Uranus, the representation of the older generation in the tribe, is born, and he is perpetually rebelled against and eventually overthrown by the younger generation, represented by Cronus. It is the dramatization of a universal tribal pattern of intergenerational dynamics: the younger males must take on the bearing of the Torch from the older generation, through a power struggle from which the strongest (and therefore best suited) faction will emerge as leaders, all against the backdrop of subtle female mediation and guidance. This is perhaps a simplistic reduction of primitive tribal dynamics, but something kind of like this is still observed in tribes of chimpanzees today.

Chimps don’t have a ‘science’, they have instincts which drive optimal torchbearing, and the experience of those instincts is the ‘reality’ they live in. The push and pull of these drives are the walls of their subjectivity. Humans are those very same chimps, only that these instincts have sublimated into the realm of consciousness—into imagery, ideas, and stories—and our early mythologies reflect this sublimation; a direct bridge between instinct and archetype. While chimps directly act out the phenomena of torchbearing in the wild, humans additionally dramatize and mythologize it, producing all the imagistic and narrative artifacts of the ancient world.

As the collective consciousness and technological prowess of human society progressed over time, so did their innovations in archetypal magic. The fantasies of today do not resemble the mythologies of the ancient past. While the cosmogony of Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus may represent a primitive people grasping at archetypal patterns in order to explain the nature of their world, blockbuster franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe demonstrate the extreme distillation of archetypes for the purpose of recreation, entertainment, and generating capital.

While the average person might have trouble making it through the Illiad, or the Book of Genesis, or the Codex Regius, modern audiences have no trouble watching hours and hours of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter. These mega-popular franchises are such money-making successes because they take archetypal patterns and distill them down into their purest forms. Like Coca-Cola—whose fidelity to the instinctual sugar ideal is very high—blockbuster fantasies distill archetypal patterns into such high-fidelity objects, that they become almost too compelling. Too sweet. Fans will wait hours and hours in line for the premiere of a movie, spend thousands of dollars on collectibles and memorabilia, and exert a great deal of effort basking in that archetypal glow with other fans on the internet.

When archetypal artifacts such as these become so isolated, so purified; when their fidelity to the archetypal ideal is so high; when they border so close to archetypal perfection—these artifacts have a tendency to possess us. To capture us. To control us. Like a junkie possessed by heroin, or a fly possessed by a floodlight, artifacts of such high archetypal purity can get inside of us and take control of the steering wheel.

I will refer to these possessive, high-fidelity, hyper-magical artifacts as omegas.

An omega has such high fidelity to an instinctual or archetypal ideal that it overwhelms the psyche and comes to possess it. The higher the fidelity of an artifact, the more transfixing it is, the more it pushes other archetypes out of the psychic spotlight, causing us to become imbalanced and experience neurosis. Like a drug, it’s too pure, and we become addicted, losing our agency and behaving in ways we do not wish to behave. An omega is an archetype exploited.

To illustrate, humans—like all living things—have strong drives towards reproduction. To achieve that aim of reproduction, these drives point us towards finding a partner and engaging in the sexual act. That means we crave sex (instinct), are attracted to anything resembling the ideal sexual partner (archetypal image), and frequently formulate sexual fantasies in our minds (archetypal narrative).

In the Garden, these drives would have served us well in our torchbearing journey: we’d seek out a mate with ‘good-enough’ fidelity to our archetypal ideal (“she resembles an intelligent, healthy, fertile female”), produce descendants, raise them well, and pass the Torch.

In the Shadowlands, however, we’ve cleverly invented pornography, which features humans and sequences and aesthetics so distilled, so perfect, so high in fidelity to the archetypal ideals underlying sexuality, that they have the power to hijack us. Pornography is an omega: an artifact too archetypally pure. Like a drug. That’s why porn is very addicting; why a large portion of men watch it daily; why they waste their money on webcam girls; why it can ruin their romantic relationships, even cause them to ignore real women in favor of the virtual goddesses of cyberspace (which may soon not even be real flesh and blood).

Similarly, the archetypes pointing us towards successful hunting of game and gathering of resources are distilled into the omega of video games, also very addictive. The archetypes pointing us towards tribal self-regulation, cohesion, and a natural wariness of competing tribes we would have encountered in the wild are distilled into sociocultural warfare in the omega of social media (also very addictive). The archetypes pointing us towards securing resources and agency in a harsh ancient wilderness where both were scarce are distilled into wasteful rat races for the omegas of money and status. Also. Very. Addictive.

In the Garden—the environment we evolved to inhabit—omegas didn’t exist. Without modern technology, it was not possible for any one archetype to be so radically distilled. And every archetypal pattern was always counter-balanced by a multiplicity of other patterns, always diluted by a complex and varied phenomenological landscape. You had meat, but not cheeseburgers. You had voices, but not pop music. You had stories, but not blockbusters. You had lovers, but not porn stars.

Whether the distillation of instincts and archetypes has brought on an evolution in consciousness, an ascent of the imagination, a wonderful wide world of art and beauty and wonder—or a phantom planet of obese zombies so absorbed in simulations of the ‘good life’ that they’ve forgotten to live their own—is hard to say. As with everything, civilization finds itself somewhere in the middle: both utopia and dystopia, enlightenment and idiocy.

There is a war in our minds between the archetypal truths we were born to believe, the scientific truths we must adopt to survive, and a darkness that wants us to dispense with the notion of truth altogether. How on earth did we get here?

And so ends Shadowlands Part One: Our Origins. We will begin to venture an answer the question above, as we journey from the ancient world all the way to the 21st century, in Shadowlands Part Two: Our Fall Into History…

In the film Memento by Christopher Nolan (2000), former insurance investigator Leonard relentlessly pursues the man who murdered his wife. He tracks the man all over California, moving from town to town investigating tips and pursuing leads. This proves difficult, however, as Leonard suffers from a brain injury that prevents him from forming new memories. He has anterograde amnesia, meaning he can remember his entire life before the injury, but nothing after, and cannot keep track of what’s going on around him for more than five minutes before he forgets it all and becomes disoriented.

To continue his pursuit of the murderer, and function in daily life, he relies upon constantly taking notes and photographs to remind himself of his current situation and plan: where he’s been, what he’s doing right now, and where he’s going next. Rather than being able to rely on memory, he must constantly, manually update his timeline—his self-narrative.

Throughout the film, Leonard (and the audience) are repeatedly confronted with the suspicion that his notes and photographs might not be reliable; that the people around him are not who they say they are; and that the self-story he’s written out for himself may be a lie.

The film is notable for having a strange and novel narrative structure: it’s backwards. The end of Leonard’s story is shown first, then the film progresses chronologically in reverse, until the beginning of his journey is revealed at the end of the film. The result is a satisfying unraveling of the mystery of why Leonard is on his current path in the first place.

Memento is compelling, and fun, specifically because it is a narrative puzzle. The reverse chronology forces the audience to pay close attention to every detail, and piece together a strange and confusing timeline, mirroring Leonard’s disorienting and fractured reality. Every scene is a new piece to the puzzle, and the audience must rapidly figure out where to place that piece in order to complete the story.

What’s interesting is that the film’s narrative puzzle, and how it works, is not explained to the audience beforehand—we are simply thrust into the confusion of a story playing in reverse. But despite the counterintuitive structure, despite the lack of instructions, the audience knows how to put the pieces together in the proper order and complete the narrative in their heads.

But how? How is it that we can be given a garbled mess of images, characters, and dialogue, and somehow arrange that information into a coherent, linear timeline purely by instinct?

Because we are doing it daily, everywhere we go, all the time. I am doing it right now as I write this chapter. You are doing it right now as you read it. Humans, in their very nature, are authors and consumers of narrative. It is the water we swim in. Reality, as we know it, is not just a landscape of objects, but a landscape of time, where we fluidly arrange those objects onto a self-perpetuating timeline—a self-narrative of past, present, and future.

When our ape ancestors developed techne—began to objectify the world, develop language, and slowly emerge into consciousness—they also developed a relationship with time. We began to project time-objects into our reality, like ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’; or ‘yesterday’, ‘this morning’, and ‘tomorrow’; or thoughts like “Wait...”, “Save some food for later...”, “The snows will melt four moons from now...” and so on.

Techne entails problem formulation, which entails getting from your current state to a desired state, which entails the concept of time, which entails the phenomenon of narrative. Problem solving is not much different than formulating a story about: where you are, where you’re trying to go, and how you’re going to get there.

Therefore, this capacity for narrative afforded powerful, never-before-seen problem-solving capacities. It made humans very adaptable: the ability to keep track of how long ago something happened, how many times you’ve tried something, or how long you might have to wait for something to appear. But more importantly, it afforded the ability to constantly, fluidly adjust those timelines in your mind. Just like humans can find 40 different uses for a tree branch, they can project 40 different timelines into the future, and choose whichever trajectory makes the most sense given the current context.

This allowed humans to constantly innovate novel solutions and powerfully adapt to any and all environments throughout the world. For instance, the rhythms of surviving in the British Isles may have been different than the rhythms of the American plains; you may have needed to hunt game weekly and fish every morning in the former, check your traps every two days and move camp monthly to follow the buffalo in the latter.

Additionally, if you had to abruptly change your mode of existence in order to survive, changing your narrative allowed you to do that. “I was a hunter... now I am a warrior in an army... and now I am a retired farmer” are all different self-stories that allow someone to abruptly change gears, implement a new mode of existence and leave an old one behind. Animals cannot make these adjustments; there is no story; there is simply instinct conformed to a specific natural habitat. Move an animal out of that habitat and they die.

Being able to objectify time—to slice and dice it, to organize and rearrange it, and most importantly to predict it—would have been powerfully adaptive; the difference between life and death. And so humans evolved complex faculties for narrative, for arranging the objects of consciousness onto a timeline of past-present-future.

The thing responsible for weaving these narratives is the Ego. The Ego essentially formulates objects, arranges them onto a timeline, and then feeds that timeline back into the body. In doing this, the Ego creates a path for us. It creates a linear trajectory for us to follow, which allows us to move swiftly and effectively through our existential surroundings, to be adaptable, decisive, act with purpose, and get things done.

This linear, coherent timeline is our self-narrative. Everybody has one. It is unconscious, a priori, preceding and giving rise to experiential conscious reality. We maintain, adjust, and follow our self-narrative very closely, though we hardly realize we’re doing it.

In Memento, Leonard’s Ego is broken: he cannot make updates to his self-narrative. In order to know what to do next, to know what path to follow, he must update his narrative manually by taking notes, snapping photographs, and drawing maps. He must write out the facts about where he’s been, what he’s doing right now, and what he needs to do next.

Our Ego does this automatically by creating memories, using those memories to constellate some kind of notion of now, and simulating a multiplicity of potential realities that stretch into the future so that we may create a linear, decisive trajectory for action and—most importantly—share that trajectory with others tribemates through language.

To do this, firstly, the Ego weaves the past. It creates memories: interpretations of where we’ve been and what we’ve done, in service of guiding future actions. Memories are not ‘objective’ recordings; they are tools; they are the past's advice for the future. Accordingly, the past may be updated over time—optimized—by things we encounter later in life. For instance, if a woman suddenly learns that her husband has been cheating on her the last five years, she will begin to unpack her memories and possibly rewrite them, from a pleasant and content period of time to one of deception and tragedy. Even the ‘facts’ may change. Maybe she will update her self-story to include several occasions where he disappeared for long periods of time, in which he must have been cheating. What ‘really happened’ may not matter as much to the body as having evidence that she needs to leave this man and protect herself from it happening again. Motivation and guidance over fact.

Secondly, the Ego weaves the future. The future is a complex of simulations we run in order to optimize our decision-making in the now. I might imagine a future where I live in the forest by a waterfall, writing books, raising my family, and think to myself, “Cool.” I confirm this simulation—this potential future—and begin taking whatever actions will get me there. This narrative becomes my problem-space, a framework for my projections, through which I filter all incoming situations. Family-man-writer-living-in-the-forest becomes my context, and the objects of the world take the form of ‘helpful’ or ‘hindrance’ in relation to that context.

Lastly, the Ego weaves the present, which is kind of like the border between past memory and future simulation. The present is constantly slipping both into the past becoming memory, and into the future by virtue of time moving in the forward direction. So we exist in this kind of narrative borderlands, a collision of timelines, a liminal space in which the Ego is hard at work objectifying the world, weaving both memory and simulation. In this way, the Ego is the mediator of time. And that mediation is what we experience as the now.

But it’s important to note that our self-narrative is not only a timeline, but an identity: a coherent complex of ‘Me’ by which we live by. It is an autobiography that’s always ‘on’, always being constellated by the conscious mind.

“I am.” “I exist.” “I become.”

Identity is uniquely human. Animals do not have an identity because they do not have narrative. Even animals that respond to the name we’ve given them are just reacting to a command pattern. Your dog does not think to itself, “I am Spot, Guardian of the Backyard,” because your dog has no self-story—it only has instinct. If you sit your dog down in front of Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, it will not follow the plot, because a dog has no Ego, no techne, no language, no capacity for narrative.

Because the Ego is charged with maintaining a coherent, linear path for us to follow, it can be very resistant to contradiction. It wants to keep our existence moving in a focused direction, rather than flailing, splintering, or collapsing under the weight of paradox. And so the Ego is constantly paying attention to everything that’s happening, objectifying the world, ingesting loads and loads of information, and using that information to augment, perpetuate, and confirm its master self-narrative—to confirm that we’re on the right path.

For instance, if my story is “I’m going to be a professional soccer player”, I will look to confirm that I am consistently competing at the highest level, that I am climbing the ranks in sports competition, that I am still young enough to make it, and that people in my position have demonstrated the ability to make money in this sport. If all the evidence points to ‘yes’, my story of “I am going to be a professional soccer player” is confirmed, and I will continue on with the path my Ego has laid out for me, continue to formulate the problem-space according to that context.

However, the Ego occasionally runs into evidence that is contradictory to its self-narrative—evidence that it may be flawed or even wrong—and then is prompted to adjust the self-narrative accordingly. “Coach has removed me from starting the last few games (contrary evidence); perhaps I need to train harder and live a healthier lifestyle (narrative adjusted).” “Every time I try to dribble straight to the goal, I lose the ball and fail to score (contrary evidence); perhaps I need to pass the ball and rely on my teammates more (narrative adjusted).” The self-story gets adjusted, altering the problem-space, resulting in a different course of action.

But these adjustments require egoic labor. The Ego has to expend energy rewriting the narrative, and it doesn’t always want to do that. Adjusting the narrative is also risky: it changes our path, it changes our problem-space, resulting in different decisions. What if we make a bad adjustment that results in bad decisions? That could mess up our lives. In the ancient world, that could have easily killed us.

For these reasons, the Ego is cautious about adjusting the master self-narrative. It is resistant to making changes. It may even refuse to make changes. If a friend were to tell us, “You’re 35 years old now; if you haven’t made it as a professional soccer player yet, you’re probably not going to,” we may respond angrily. We may stop talking to this friend. We may ignore this evidence completely, not even register it consciously, in order to maintain the self-story of “I am going to be a professional soccer player,” and keep on living our lives the same way we’ve been living for the last fifteen years, in pursuit of the dream.

We see these egoic patterns at play in confirmation bias: only registering evidence that confirms our narrative while ignoring evidence that contradicts it. We also see it in cognitive dissonance with psychological stress or mental discomfort experienced by a person confronted with holding contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values. That’s because the egoic labor required for narrative adjustment manifests as pain. It can even be agonizing if the adjustment is radical enough.

The woman confronted with the fact that her husband has been cheating on her experiences a radical contradiction to the self-narrative of “I’m in a happy, functional marriage.” A radical contradiction is very painful. It involves a ton of egoic labor: she might scream, bawl, lash out at her environment; she will likely be in a traumatized and fragile state for quite some time, maybe even the rest of her life, as she endeavors to dismantle the old self-narrative, and make the painful adjustments to who she is, how she got here, and where’s she going next, now that her marriage is over.

Which is why—even when the evidence seems overwhelming—people are tempted to simply ignore what’s happening, refuse to believe the obvious, to deny all self-narrative contradictions. “My husband is out late, again, because he works long hours,” “My husband smells like women’s perfume because he works with someone who uses it,” “My husband doesn’t touch me anymore because he’s so tired and stressed from work.”

In a different example, we often hear the story of the person who hits rock-bottom, and only then realizes they need to make a change and get help. The Ego tries desperately to maintain a narrative of “this is fine” or “nothing needs to change” or “go ahead and have another drink.” It sometimes takes something truly shocking—radically contradictory with overwhelming evidence—for the Ego to shatter its narrative and scramble to construct a new one: “Jesus Christ, I woke up in the gutter this morning covered in my own vomit. I really have a problem. I need help.” That’s why the first step to recovery is usually admitting you have a problem: stop denying the contradictions to your self-narrative; accept the evidence that your story of “everything is fine and normal” is wrong.

Building off of chapter 2, I’ll further divide the self into three interpretations: the Ego, the Soma, and the Torch. The Ego is an autobiographical narrative-weaver, objectifier, and language user. The Soma is loosely the ‘body’; everything that might be said to encapsulate our physical, corporeal existence; the thing that existed long before the Ego ever did, and gave rise to it. The Torch is the intergenerational, tribal, biological and cultural entity that each individual—Ego and Soma—is born out of, and tasked with protecting, augmenting, and passing off into the future. So something akin to: mind, body, and tribe.

These three selves relate to each other kind of like a Matryoshka doll, with the Ego nested inside the Soma, and the Soma nested inside the Torch. If the Ego is dissolved when you’re blackout drunk (no longer weaving memories) the Soma carries on without it, for the Soma transcends and includes the Ego. If the Soma dies of old age, the Torch carries on without it through the Soma’s children and culture, for the Torch transcends and includes the Soma.

So when we’re talking about Ego—when we’re talking about our mythology of self, our autobiographical identity, our story of where we came from and where we’re going—we are talking about what we generally consider to be conscious reality. As you sit at your computer reading this chapter, the thing that is ‘experiencing’ the world, that has a sense of “I exist”, a sense of time, a sense of being-there—is the Ego. You—the thing I am addressing right now—are the Ego. You are the autobiographical, social, conscious self. But you are not, exactly, the Soma, the physical body. And therefore, you are not the one in charge; you are not the one making decisions.

And this is where things get weird, confusing, and perhaps even a little bit disconcerting. The Ego—the thing we experience as ‘I’, the thing that seems to be living out ‘reality’—isn’t in control of anything, other than objectifying and weaving a narrative. It then feeds that narrative back into the Soma, which may or may not consider the Ego’s story when making decisions.

You see, when our ape ancestors evolved the capacity for techne and language over several million years, the brain did not abruptly rewire itself to hand over complete control to this emergent new thing called consciousness. Rather the Ego evolved because it did something useful for the Soma, which was useful for the Torch.

Though techne and language probably took hold very quickly, their evolution is still along a continuum. It’s not as if one moment we could not formulate objects, then the next moment we could build machines. We are animals, and this capacity for language and technology emerges like a little seed out of our deeply embodied, animal existence—it does not simply erase that embodiment, that several billion-year-old system that drives us to do the things we do; it’s merely an add-on, a feature that assists us in achieving our torchbearing objectives.

So the mind serves the body, not the other way around. The Ego is consulted by the Soma to help problem-solve—not to decide ‘what’ to do, but ‘how’ we might do it, and—most importantly—how to explain it to our tribe mates.

The Ego can do several useful things for the Soma: it can weave a past-present-future timeline, allowing the Soma to make better decisions in the now; it can wield techne and language, which can drive the creation of skills and tools and then deploy them to help the Soma pass the Torch.

But most importantly, the Ego acts as the spokesperson for the Soma, even though it doesn’t necessarily know what the Soma is thinking. The Ego whips up stories for the Soma. It is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for the Soma’s actions, and finding ways to justify whatever the Soma wants to do next—whether or not those justifications are accurate.

For instance, if the Soma is afraid of going up on stage to sing karaoke in front of a crowd, the Ego might come up with a story, “Karaoke is stupid.” Or if the Soma wants to have a romantic relationship, but without any expectations or accountability from peers, the Ego might whip up, “We are just friends who sleep together.” Or if the Soma is in a toxic relationship, but is afraid of being alone, the Ego will come up with, “Regularly being beaten and insulted is just how people resolve their differences and is perfectly normal.” The Soma has irrational needs, and the Ego finds a way to rationalize them. It will lie, bend the truth, and use faulty logic to achieve this if necessary; it will weave a bullshit story to cover the Soma’s tracks.

This is because once humans developed language and began to use it to engage in tribal politicking, it became valuable for Somas to carry around a full-time public relations agent. This is also why we are so good at lying, acting, and deception. The Ego evolved to serve the strategic purpose of managing our reputation, building alliances, and recruiting followers to support our side in the disputes that are common to tribal life.

At the end of Memento, Leonard comes to realize that his self-story—that he is heroically pursuing the murderer of his wife—is flawed; that not only is he living out a lie, but he’s constructed that lie himself, intentionally—from his notes and photographs and tattoos—to construct a fake timeline that gives himself direction and purpose.

What’s creepy, is that we are likely doing this ourselves: weaving a story to rationalize our situation and clinging to it tightly, ignoring all contradictory evidence, in order to avoid a difficult truth, the pain of narrative collapse, the agony of having to build a new story of “who I am,” “where I’m going,” and “what my life’s about” from scratch. The prospect of narrative collapse—that my self-story is bullshit, that I am out of touch with the world, that I am living a lie—is terrifying. So we avoid it at all costs, regardless of the evidence.

But allowing our narratives to collapse is not only necessary, but healthy. That is why a major sign of wisdom and maturity is the capacity for entertaining contradiction. People who tend to handle themselves well in the world, make good decisions, skillfully problem-solve, and adapt to any situation usually have a highly developed, highly integrated Ego. In other words, they are skilled at writing, maintaining, and adjusting a healthy self-narrative, even if that means occasionally tearing it down.

These individuals readily admit when they are wrong about something; they know when to apologize to someone; they know when they do not know something. They can deftly handle egoic labor, and do so willingly; they change their self-story skillfully: not weakly conceding whenever someone tells them they’re wrong; not stubbornly refusing to accept that they might be; but having the discernment to know when their narrative is flawed, and the will to make the necessary adjustments to get in proper touch with the world, reorient their existence, and carve the proper path forward.

Such individuals also understand the subordination of the Ego to the Soma: that we operate body-first; that most of the psyche lies within the unconscious; that we need to have a loving, communicative relationship with our bodies, with our inner-child, with our inner-animal. That the irrational, emotional self is not the enemy; that it does no good to deny its existence or repress its needs; that if we cut off communication with the unconscious body it does not subdue it, it only gives it the freedom to act independently of the rational mind, to burst forth at inappropriate times, in inappropriate ways, and make us do things we regret.

Such individuals know that we must accept the Ego as a mere passenger riding in the backseat of the Soma (who’s riding in the backseat of the Torch), and willingly, lovingly offer directions, without demanding control of the steering wheel which we can never truly reach. That is wisdom; that is maturity; that is the way.

Later in the series, we will come to see that the Ego has become inflated in the modern world. Not only is it engorging itself on a scintillating landscape of archetypal decadence, fondling a projection of itself through online avatars frolicking in a virtual pleasure house, but we’ve come to develop an entire worldview that reifies the Ego as the one true self, the ultimate truth-sayer, the king of the real. Meanwhile, the Soma is relegated to a gross inconvenience anchoring us to an unpleasant earthly prison, and the Torch reduced to a ghost, haunting the halls of a forgotten temple buried beneath the sands of time.

In the survival film Cast Away by Robert Zemeckis (2000), systems analyst Chuck is marooned on a small tropical island after his plane crashes down in the Pacific Ocean. There are no other survivors. Chuck struggles with the harsh conditions of his new surroundings, unable to find fresh water or catch any food. But the most difficult aspect of Chuck’s situation is the isolation. He is utterly, painfully alone.

So he creates another human. Partly through accident, partly through unconscious compulsion, he counteracts his isolation by shaping a bloodstain on a volleyball into the shape of a human face. He names this newly created being ‘Wilson,’ and proceeds to develop a complex emotional relationship with him over the course of several years.

They have conversations. Wilson offers Chuck advice and criticism. They discuss survival strategies and go over plans for escaping the island. Wilson’s physicality is subtly expanded throughout the film, with Chuck attaching reeds to the volleyball to mimic hair, and constructing a body of driftwood, complete with arms, upon which he can rest Wilson’s ‘head.’

Wilson’s personality, richness, and realness increasingly develop over time as Chuck engages with, and more complexly objectifies, his own projection of a human-like companion.

Of course, the audience never witnesses Wilson move, speak, or exhibit any forms of agency or animism. This is not a fantasy film. Rather, the entire relationship with Wilson happens inside Chuck’s head, as a coping mechanism for his isolation, and Chuck employs this coping mechanism specifically because he is human. Because humans are—more than anything—social, tribal beings.

But what does that mean exactly?

As explored in the last chapter, humans evolved to inhabit the ancient environment of the Garden—specifically to pass the Torch in a highly chaotic natural wilderness, in tight-knit kin groups of around fifty people. And so the true human entity is not, and never has been, the individual; the true human entity is the self-perpetuating collective of the intergenerational tribe.

What that means is that humans are wired to behave as a network; all of our drives and instincts are calibrated towards cohering with others, working with others, and operating collectively as a single entity. We are extremely social creatures.

But this tribal sociality doesn’t just dictate the way we see things, it dictates the very things we see. In other words: the shape and quality and structure of reality—as we know it—take a distinctly human form. We project the human likeness—face, body, and voice—onto everything around us.

For example, pareidolia is a term describing our tendency to project meaningful objects onto ‘random stimuli.’ Most commonly, these ‘mistakenly’ projected objects take a distinctly human form. Like perceiving a face in the clouds:

Or in a tree:

Or on a rock:

The mind plays these projective ‘tricks’ on us because the human form, especially the face, is deeply ingrained into our psychology. We project it everywhere—we are looking for it everywhere—because the social, tribal object is foundational to our existence.

The human face is the window of culture, the opening through which we share objects with other tribe mates. Expressions, emotions, and language are all borne of the human face; so it makes sense that we would be hyper-vigilant about plugging into facial patterns, that the face would be hyper-salient to our projective faculties, that our consciousness would be constantly scanning its surroundings for any human form—and its associated cultural information—at all times.

In this way, we are always primed for sociality, always looking for hooks on which to hang our social projections.

And so in Cast Away, Chuck’s marooning creates for him a social vacuum. The tribe-shaped-hole in his heart—which his rich community of friends and family and lovers used to occupy—is now empty. And so as he gazes into this bloodstained volleyball, the subtle red resemblance of a face is enough to house a human shaped projection, and Chuck instinctually fills that projective container by creating Wilson. He projects a being into his reality, hanging it on the hook of the volleyball and, in doing so, fills his tribal vacuum.

He does this as a coping mechanism—because he has to—because the tribe is the way in which we are wired, the way in which our psychology is designed to function, the way in which we are programmed to process our experiences and orient our reality. If we don’t—if humans leave that tribal object empty—we begin to short-circuit; we break down.

As I said, if the true human entity is not the individual, but the self-perpetuating collective, it would make sense that it would be adaptive for every member of the tribe to work well with every other member of the tribe; for the individuals to cohere as a whole; for the collective to self-regulate, process information, and adapt as a single unit.

To best achieve this, each of us is born with a powerful instinct to socialize—to regularly share our experiences, ideas, and feelings with our tribe mates; to mutually regulate each other’s patterns; to mutually orient each other’s perceptions and beliefs; in service of a functional, coherent tribe that successfully passes the Torch. And you can see this behavior—this compulsion for mental-networking with others—at play in our daily lives:

We instinctually form close relationships with others whenever possible (tribal strengthening). We feel driven to repeatedly connect with these people through conversation, projects, and shared experiences (tribal bonding). We’re compelled to ‘catch up’ or ‘stay in the loop’ by regularly meeting or calling each other on the phone (exchange of information, behavioral and ontological alignment). We find ourselves regularly gossiping about others (tribal self-regulation). We find ourselves needing to vent to someone after a stressful experience, or share the details of a novel or humorous event (tribal processing and integration).

If you live in an urban area, and you walk outside, you will see is tons and tons of people socializing, all the time. Constant, spontaneous cultural exchange and tribal networking. No other living thing does this. And we do it so obsessively because it is adaptive for individual tribe mates to mentally network with each other and keep that network updated and healthy. That is the Torch’s brain thinking, problem-solving, and learning through us. And we evolved to readily, joyously participate in that pattern.

A different way in which you can observe this distinctly human-shaped, tribal phenomenology at play is in blame: our tendency to project inanimate causality in the world onto the people around us; usually our spouses or romantic partners. We find ourselves pretending that they are responsible for everything going wrong, everything troubling us—especially our own neuroticisms, bad habits, and fears, because we naturally disown and hide these patterns from ourselves.

Similarly, whenever something goes wrong in the world, people instinctually ask, “Who is to blame for this?” Even when the event is the product of a complex, mysterious collection of circumstances. We don’t like not understanding the cause of something, not having some human-like thing to blame, and so we almost always point fingers.

When the Titanic sank in 1912, and 1500 people died, who was to blame? Was it the White Star Line for hubristically commissioning too large of a ship? Was it J.P. Morgan who financed it? Was it Captain Smith who failed to heed warnings of icy conditions in the area? Or the lookout Mr. Fleet who didn’t warn the bridge fast enough upon spotting the iceberg? Or the crew that failed to properly fill the lifeboats to capacity? Or the nearby SS California that never came to the sinking ship’s rescue?

If we explore the details deeply enough, blame can become quite gray. It can begin to feel as if there actually is no one to blame—as if blame itself is a fallacy. Something happened because of some strange mechanical chain of events, because of some mysterious unfolding of the forces of nature, and your loved ones just happened to be in the crossfire. Most people find this explanation to be deeply dissatisfying and will instead seek revenge or compensation, anywhere they can find it.

Even if we try to trace the causality of something seemingly less complex—like the actions of a friend or partner—we still usually find the ‘source’ to be mysterious.

“Is my sister to blame for the way she treats me? Or is it our mother’s fault who physically abused her? Or is it our mother’s father’s fault who physically abused her? And was that due to a difficult economic situation back in the 50’s? Or a prevalence of macho culture and alcoholism in Ireland at the time? And who’s to blame for that?”

Once again, we find that blame—throwing the root cause or responsibility for something at one person’s feet—is problematic; the world is more gray than that. But in the moment, we are tempted to simply blame our sister for everything she’s done wrong, because we instinctually reduce inanimate, mechanical patterns in the universe down to distinctly human form, and then hang those human-shaped projections onto the humans around us.

Perhaps we are so wired for social interaction, for a tribal reality, that in the Garden it was adaptive to always seek social, tribal solutions for all events; that if something was wrong—even something out of one’s control, like a drought—it was productive to galvanize the tribe towards action, towards movement, towards rearranging the leadership hierarchy and perhaps placing someone else in charge. Distinctly social, tribal solutions for each and every problem.

If you combine the social fallacy of blame—the reduction of complex inanimate reality into human-shaped projections—with the human propensity for tribalism, you can get some powerful, often catastrophic, effects.

Just like we can be quick to reductively place blame for our situation on a spouse or parent—a singular anthropomorphic object—we are similarly quick to blame entire categories of people. It is intuitive to project into our reality the object of Them: a phenomenological tribal container into which we deposit all of our blame. We feel wronged by Them—the vague ‘Other’, the vague ‘judger’; the vague ‘enemy’; the vague ‘oppressor’; the vague source of ‘evil’ in our lives. We readily hang this projection of Them onto the hook of any category of strangers who even remotely fit the bill.

After that, it becomes easy to rationalize a purge of said category. This is the scapegoat mechanism, where we ritualistically eliminate our troubles through the execution of a physical object of blame. The collective agrees upon the source of the troubles—whether that be a person or group—then executes it. This allows them to wipe their hands, say “There, now our troubles are gone,” and move on with their lives pretending they’ve actually solved the problem of evil.

Humans participate in this pattern so readily, so enthusiastically, that it makes them easy to manipulate for political purposes. With the right nudges, they can be galvanized into supporting the persecution, displacement, enslavement, or outright execution of a target group. The most well-known example of this is the Nazis, who rallied the German people, united them into a more coherent, focused, nationalistic force through the scapegoating of Jews.

“Are you mad about your lives? Are you frustrated at the state of your nation? The complexity of these troubled times can be reduced, compartmentalized, and projectively hung onto the hook of the Jewish people. Forget the complicated history of Europe; forget the complexity of World War I; forget the complexity of the Great Depression; and cram all of that gray mess into a nice neat black-and-white package of: ‘It’s their fault. Them. The Jews.’ Since that is the one source of our troubles, we can easily resolve things by removing them from society.”

But in the same way that our human-shaped phenomenology can pump individuals and groups full of demonic negative energy—reducing the complex inanimate reality of our troubled situations to the humans around us—we can also do the opposite: we can raise others up as angelic, god-like heroes, pumping them full of a similarly undeserved positive energy.

The cult leader, the political leader, the celebrity actor, the professional athlete, the rock star, and the spiritual guru are all examples of individuals whom we have inflated with social, tribal projections of positivity. Instead of purging those we blame like demons, we hoist up those we worship like angels.

This is because the tribe survives when we rally behind leaders; not just strong-man warrior types, but spiritual and cultural leaders; those who are wise and creative; those who have discernment and vision. This could be a masculine ‘chief;’ it could be a feminine ‘matriarch;’ it could be a liminal realm-traversing ‘shaman’ or ‘priestess.’ Whatever it is, the leader takes point on important matters, and it is adaptive for a tribe to unite around them in order to produce coherent, focused endeavors as a cohesive unit. Otherwise, the tribe dissipates, it splinters around an infinite amount of ideas or directions, and ultimately fails.

So just like we have a distinctly human, tribe-shaped hole in our hearts—which we readily fill with the people or groups available to us in our immediate physical or virtual vicinity—we have a tribal-leader-shaped hole, into which we readily plug the sexiest, strongest, wisest, funniest, most beautiful, most talented, or most heroic individuals. The instinct is something like: he or she who is best at cultivating the Garden, or he or she who is best at the creative transmutation of chaotic wilderness into harmonious, habitable order, is the one we should rally around; is the one we should support and allow to make decisions for the tribe.

However, in the post-Garden world, this archetypal drive is easily inflated: there’s an entire industrial machine dedicated to transforming people into mega-tribal-leaders, with god-like charisma, presence, and prestige, and then monetizing our evolutionary propensity for rallying around them. We obsess over celebrities, their drama, their opinions on things, their lifestyles. There are celebrity gossip magazines, celebrity endorsements of products, celebrity posters on our walls. Women will sleep with rock stars they have never met and will never see again. Men will sexually engage with a virtual representation of a celebrity at the expense of having a real partner.

And just like the scapegoat mechanism, our angelic human-shaped projections of goodness and heroism can also be inflated and manipulated for political purposes. The cult of personality is an effective political trick to raise an individual up onto the level of a god. This was utilized in ancient times, for instance, to sanctify the rule of a King, to inflate him up into something divine and untouchable. It is still used today in places like North Korea, where the previous ‘Dear Leader’ Kim Jong Il was supposedly born atop the sacred Mount Paektu, wrote 900 books, scored eleven hole-in-one’s on his first attempt at golf, and was capable of teleportation.

Good and evil, angel and demon, our reality is distinctly moral and distinctly humanoid, with inflations of tribal psychological projections rippling upward and downward, across multiple perceived planes of existence, and churning out a living, breathing world of personified shadows and anthropomorphic light. And if we take that concept of tribal phenomenology even deeper, we will see that our propensity for a social reality results in the strange phenomenon of daimons: autonomous human-shaped projections that are seemingly independent of any ‘physical’ human. We project these autonomous humanoid daimons onto the forces of nature, onto our explanatory narratives, onto our moral and cultural structures, and—most importantly—onto our own unconscious inner world.

Firstly, there are personal daimons, personifications of our inner world that are unique to us, such as: the inner child, the inner demon, the higher self, the anima figure, and so on. These are not mapped onto any physical humans around us, and they aren’t simply metaphors for emotions, or elements of fantasy. They are autonomous beings within us; human-shaped objects dwelling within our unconscious world.

Sometimes they take over in moments of stress or weakness. Panic attacks can find us regressing into a child-like state, even speaking from that child’s point of view, as if there is an autonomous infant-like being living inside us. Some forms of psychosis can resemble a demonic force taking over our body and making decisions for us; making us do things we would never do; making us say things we would never say. It’s not as uncommon as you might think, even in people of seemingly good mental health.

Hallucinations of human-like entities—both visual and auditory—are very common with schizophrenia. They are also frequent in other neurocognitive disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Psychoactive drugs like DMT seem to routinely produce an experience of being visited by human-like entities, often resembling extra-terrestrials. And, of course, we regularly project human-like entities into our dreams, which serve as a kind of phenomenological playground for our inner beings, swept clean of the external stimuli of the waking world upon which we normally hang them.

Internal Family Systems is a psychotherapeutic modality that deals with personal daimons explicitly, developing a system for communicating with them, developing greater awareness around them, and bringing their often exiled or fallen nature back into place of harmony. Many people find this approach very powerful because a human-shaped inner world is far easier to access, far easier to engage with than a cold, inanimate collection of abstractions.

The personal daimons I’ve highlighted thus far are almost always unconscious, but—strangely—you can intentionally create your own, just like Chuck created Wilson in Cast Away. Projecting human qualities onto inanimate things makes them more ‘real’, and can make engaging with them more powerful, dynamic, and effective.

For instance, when we name our pets we are creating a daimon. We may not realize we are doing this, but we are giving them human-like qualities, pumping them full of projective material to give us a more powerful, more meaningful relationship with them. Most of us can probably rationalize slaughtering a cow for food. But if, instead, we have projected a daimon onto a cow by naming it Bessie, and refined that daimonic object over the course of five years through daily companionship on the farm, we might feel less comfortable pulling the trigger. Surely the death of our beloved bovine friend would be devastating, possibly on par with losing a human friend. But why? Because we’ve projected a being onto the cow; it is no longer an animal, but a tribe mate, housing our projections of complex human-like subjectivity.

Even more strangely, you can project daimons onto inanimate objects. Children do this all the time with stuffed animals and dolls. You can actually play with this by doing something like naming the oven; maybe unpacking its latent personality based off of arbitrary aesthetics, like “Omar the Oven is clearly jolly and stout with a deep, friendly voice” and then repeatedly opening and closing his oven door like he’s talking to you. You can actually go around personifying all kinds of things around your living space and, before you know it, you’re living in a world like Pee-wee’s Playhouse—something alive and vibrant and mystical—rather than a cold, mechanical warehouse of expedient tools.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, this is the default world for human beings: an anthropomorphic one, where all perceivable aspects of reality are keenly human-like. And in the past, our emergent abilities of techne and language—which allowed us to share objects between minds—allowed us to also share daimons, and therefore create interpersonal collections of them we could pass from generation to generation. These would evolve to become a kind of pantheon: an exhaustive mapping of both the inner and external phenomenological worlds in the form of a human-like collective.

This daimonic mapping of reality allowed us to develop a more complex, nuanced relationship with the world. It specifically allowed us to bargain with the world, allowed us to transcend our animal instincts and need for immediate gratification in favor of patience, sacrifice, and work. It allowed us to innovate with our reality the same way we might innovate with other members of our tribe.

For instance, I might say to a personification of the sun, “If I refrain from gluttony, laziness, and lust; if I stay disciplined and focused and work hard every day for the next several years, will you reward me with good health, long life, and a strong Torch?”

Or “Oh great river, if I respect your domain, if I refrain from dumping my trash in you, refrain from absent-mindedly playing on your slippery rocks, refrain from getting greedy, and only take the water and fish that I absolutely need, will I stay in your good graces? Will you reward me with the resources I need, season after season?”

From a modern perspective, this may seem silly. We may think it obvious that hard work and sacrifice results in good outcomes for one’s life; we may think it obvious that if you trash your natural environment, it will eventually stop providing for you. But it wasn’t to first wielders of consciousness. They came from a purely social, relational phenomenology of the Garden, and had to innovate all the strategies and wisdoms and systems of today over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. Even now, the scientific worldview continues to perplex us; it fails to land with us. We find the daimonic, personified world much easier to digest, much easier to have a meaningful, interactive relationship with. Scientific materialism, on the other hand, is a newcomer and must worm its way into each individual’s psyche by force.

Additionally, by integrating powerful and watchful shared daimons into the social fabric of the tribe, humans were able to outsource their need for selflessness, hard work, and sacrifice into a transcendent realm with much stronger cosmic implications for one’s actions, than simply that of one’s peers. Shared, transcendent daimons helped scaffold a more and more powerful culture, that could be passed down intergenerationally, by saying, “It’s not only the tribe matriarch that wants you to stay focused and responsible, it’s the immortal goddess of the moon who wants it as well.”

The obvious eventual product of shared transcendent daimons, who personify all aspects of reality in a kind of living, evolving pantheon, passed down from generation to generation, is polytheism.

It started off as an instinctual, unconscious mapping of one’s phenomenological reality into easily digestible, human-like objects—a description of the world—and progressed into intergenerational pantheons through which we built powerful, digestible, sustainable sets of customs, ethics, rules, and guides to outsource the tribal wisdom of effective torchbearing into a transcendent, untouchable realm—a prescription of the world.

Eventually, some of these cultural threads would evolve into a kind of ultimate, singular, meta daimon—the One Daimon. Something like: a prescriptive human-shaped encapsulation of the entirety of our existence as torchbearing agents. But that is for another chapter.

Reality, as we know it, is a landscape of social, tribal objects. We have a distinctly human-shaped phenomenology. We personify our world; we anthropomorphize it. We are wired this way—it is built-in—because our existence is fundamentally predicated on a social, tribal network constructed around passing the Torch. This daimonic place of human-like entities was our home: the pantheonic wilderness of the Garden. Through the advances of techne, and the development of the scientific method, we began to increasingly dispel this anthropomorphic perspective in favor of an inanimate, mechanical worldview. Whatever kind of progress that yielded for humankind, this dehumanization of the world has left us spiritually de-homed.

When the fairies of the forest are just wood to be cut, the voices in the wind are just variations in air pressure, the spirits of our ancestors are just hallucinations, and Mother Earth is just a rock with a virus clinging to it floating through nothingness, existence can be a lonely place, betraying us of the beauty and vibrance of the rippling, breathing, animated world we so readily bring to life around us.

In the short story, The Machine Stops, by E.M. Forster (1909) humans have built a giant, all powerful machine that solves all of their problems and takes care of every need. Kuno, a resident who lives inside the Machine, hates this. He does not want a sterilized existence, where everything is handed to you, and longs for a life of struggle and adventure outside the boundaries of the Machine. Eventually the Machine breaks down, but because it’s been centuries since its construction, no one alive knows how to fix it and trouble ensues.

In the film, The Edge, by Lee Tamahori (1997) a group of city-slickers crash land their plane into a remote lake in the Alaskan wilderness. Charles and his comrades struggle to build a fire, fail to catch any food, and are relentlessly pursued by a man-eating grizzly bear as they attempt the perilous and meandering journey back to civilization. By the end of their trek, three of them are dead and the traumatized Charles only survives due to a chance rescue by helicopter.

So in The Machine Stops, Kuno finds himself in a place that is too tame, too domesticated, too solved; he wants to bust out of civilization and escape into the wild. In The Edge, Charles finds himself somewhere too chaotic, too dangerous, too unsolvable; he wants to escape the wild and return to civilization.

However, they don’t want to switch places: Kuno doesn’t want to freeze to death or be eaten by a bear; Charles doesn’t want to confine himself to a small room to be coddled by machines. They both want something that’s not too ordered, and not too wild, but somewhere in between.

They want a garden.

A garden is a middle place, with both aspects of the untamed wild—brimming with life and potentiality—and aspects of the man-made machine—deconstructed and conformed to human productivity. Though a garden has vegetation and greenery, it is not an impassable jungle. Though a garden has walls and walkways and trellises, it is not a mechanized factory. It is a place where a human can creatively cultivate a harmony between wild nature and man-made order.

Because that harmony is what we tend to find meaningful.

Typically, the most desirable places to live have a great deal of natural beauty combined with a great deal of ordered civilization. People generally prefer not to live in the middle-of-nowhere and not to live in the center of urban activity, but something more like a park: man-made structures, conveniences, and affordances, shaded by trees, speckled with flowers, surrounded by abundant green space, mountains, and trails.

A brick wall covered with vines. A bedroom littered with potted plants.

That’s because neither the extreme of sterilized order nor the extreme of overwhelming chaos can house a living reservoir of meaning. Rather, a reservoir of meaning is borne out of the creative transmutation of one into the other. And you can see that creative transmutation—the successful channeling of chaos into order—in virtually all things that people find purposeful, invigorating, or fulfilling.

A good game of chess is not being demolished by a super computer (overwhelming chaos), and not wiping-the-floor with a toddler (boring order), but playing someone at your level (where creative transmutation is challenging, but doable).

A good music composition is somewhat predictable and somewhat unpredictable: otherwise the piece feels wooden and cheesy, or jarring and incoherent. A good film has a plot you can follow, but is novel and fresh: otherwise it’s cringe and boring, or too avant-garde and confusing. A good romantic relationship is both stable and adventurous: otherwise you swing wildly and break up constantly, or you get restless and become tempted to cheat.

Take, for example, the hobby of skiing. A route down the mountain that is too difficult—too chaotic you might say—is no fun; a route that is too easy—too tame, too solvable, too orderly—is also no fun. A skier wants a route that is somewhere in the middle: chaotic enough to be challenging and novel; ordered enough to not be constantly falling over, crashing into things, or injuring herself.

Because, specifically, the skier wants to actively participate in the transmutation of the little pockets of disorder thrown at her—the unpredictability, the varied terrain, the steepness—into the embodied order, which gets integrated into experience and skill. That’s what’s engaging and fun. That’s why she goes skiing in the first place.

She doesn’t want to fast forward to the part where she’s at the bottom of the mountain. She doesn’t want to fast forward to the part where she’s already mastered all the routes. She wants to actively swim through the untamed wilderness and subdue it into embodied order. If she repeats the route enough it becomes fully mapped—fully ordered—and loses its thrill over time. There’s no more chaos to transmute. So she moves onto a new route, which will present a new source of novelty, a new untapped reservoir of meaning.

You can see these dynamics of meaning at play over the course of people’s lifetimes, coming and going, crashing and receding like ocean waves. In the throes of vibrant adventure—where constant creative transmutation is required—meaning can rush into our lives, filling it with exhilaration and wonder. At other times we can be left barren—in a kind of meaning vacuum—when the act of creative transmutation between chaos and order isn’t available, or isn’t possible.

People often experience that momentary vacuum, for instance, when they retire. They’ve had decades of work—where they are constantly, creatively problem solving—and then, abruptly, that fertile wellspring of disorder disappears. They often phrase this as “being put out to pasture”: the feeling of being exited from a meaningful and purposeful vocation into a fully ordered emptiness, where nothing needs doing, where nothing requires creative transmutation.

The consolations of retirement money, of being on perpetual vacation, of not having to get up in the morning and go to work, are often not consolations at all. People don’t like having nothing to do, no problems to solve, no one in need of their experience and expertise. Because of this, many people will wisely seek out new wellsprings of novelty—situations where they can exercise their powers of creative transmutation—by volunteering, taking on a community project, writing a book, or caring for their grandchildren.

In a different example, an individual may be stuck in a job where creative transmutation is blocked: perhaps they are micromanaged to death and prohibited from engaging in any decision-making or problem-solving. Generally speaking, people hate this, and will usually take a serious pay cut if they can be allowed more autonomy, more freedom to explore their creative faculties. There’s a reason artists choose their path, despite the meager financial incentives.

So no one wants to live in a maximally chaotic war zone; no one wants to live inside an everything machine that solves all your problems for you; rather we want the active, ongoing mediation between disorder and order, the creative transmutation of the dangerous wilderness into the habitable living space. That existential in-between place, that liminal arena where we find meaning, is where we feel at home.

We want to live in a garden.

Our ancestors spent hundreds of thousands of years living in a kind of existential garden; a middle place between wild nature and human ingenuity. It happened during a geological period called the Pleistocene and lasted from about 2.5 million years ago to about 12,000 years ago. It looked like this:

Small tribes of hunter-gatherers, living in the wilderness, surviving together, creatively improvising against the forces of entropy, and collectively carrying a bio-cultural Torch. It wasn’t just ‘living in the woods’, it was being deeply embedded in an ancient, intergenerational, social, cultural, tribal matrix. It was very direct, very embodied participation in active torchbearing as an ongoing, all encompassing way of life.

It was the constant chaos of the natural world, both the cosmic provider of water, and meat, and shelter; and the cosmic destroyer, eating away at your life force with constant barrages of cold, starvation, and disease. But it was also the brilliant and beautiful adventure of transmuting those entropic forces into a habitable order, constant creative problem-solving, pathfinding, hunting, building, mythologizing, and ritualizing, directly and viscerally tied to the passing of the Torch. There were no problems of nihilism or boredom, no crises of meaning. There was just pure, deeply engaging, all-encompassing torchbearing, all the time.

For our purposes, we’ll call this historical state of human existence—both an external way of life and internal configuration of consciousness—the Garden.

Our time in the Garden forms the bulk of human history by a wide margin: hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and gathering in tight-knit tribes of around fifty individuals, deeply intertwined in an intergenerational biocultural matrix of passing the Torch. By comparison, humans have been living in some form of civilization for less than 1% of that time.

Accordingly, all of our heuristics for successful torchbearing—all of these drives and behaviors by which we instinctually attempt to protect, promote, and propel the Torch—are designed and optimized for the Pleistocene. That’s where our distinctly human psychology and physiology were calibrated and finely tuned. Essentially, the mutations that were selected through the process of evolution—that were passed onto the next generation—were selected because they were advantageous to hunter-gatherer life in the Pleistocene.

Put another way, the things we find most meaningful and fulfilling and ‘real’ are re-creations of activities, behaviors, rituals, and mythologies that would have helped us pass the Torch 100,000 years ago. And it is when we’re actively participating in these prehistoric torchbearing patterns—in the way we did during the Pleistocene—that we feel like we are where we’re meant to be or doing what we’re meant to do.

Generally speaking, people find things like camping, hiking, swimming, mountain climbing, kayaking, fishing, hunting, and all around being-in-nature to be—not simply enjoyable—but spiritual and grounding. It’s not exactly the most addictive or pornographic of activities, but there is a sense when people walk through river valleys, surrounded by snow-capped mountains, that they are returning somewhere, that they are going home.

Nature is a gateway back to the Garden. And so we find it beautiful—usually in some inexplicable, unspoken way—because it’s where we belong.

Mix that with being in the presence of your closest people, actively exploring and creatively problem solving—like on a backpacking trip through Europe, or a school camping trip with your classmates—and you generate some of the most memorable experiences of your life.

These patterns of the Garden are being played with very directly with things like Burning Man: a collective of friends brave the entropic forces of a remote desert landscape, united by a common project of building a functional camp from scratch and exploring an unmapped, mysterious territory of novel artwork, parties, and performances, with relatively loose, autonomous jobs, all deeply intertwined with the heavy, very real project of collective survival. People who attend Burning Man often describe it as the most meaningful and impactful week of their lives—not because it easy and comfy and everything is taken care of for you—but specifically because it is hard, you suffer, you struggle, you’re pitted against the wild forces of nature and forced to creatively transmute those waves of chaos into a habitable order in collaboration with other people.

You see the Garden at play in our modern mythologies. What is Lord of the Rings, other than a band of tribesmen navigating a beautiful and mysterious natural world of forests and rivers and mountains, creatively transmuting an incoming army of chaos into habitable order of peace and prosperity? That transmutation is presided over by the ranger—master of the wilderness—Aragorn. He is the archetypal creative transmuter of chaos into order, otherwise known as the Hero. We’re compelled by the myth, we even long to live inside its universe, because it taps into the life we feel we were meant to live, a life in the Garden.

The Garden is on full display in our video games, where our most popular and possibly most addicting titles simulate the Pleistocene. Zelda, Elden Ring, Diablo, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, and Skyrim quite literally simulate hunting and gathering: you hunt down monsters and gather treasure, which help you grow stronger, and you heroically do so to save your people, or save your kingdom, or save the world, which are all mythological stand-ins for saving the Torch.

What is considered a ‘healthy lifestyle’ usually involves a re-creation of our lifestyle in the Pleistocene in terms of nutrition and exercise. Meat, fruit, and veggies (the products of hunting and gathering) are considered healthier than processed carbs (the products of civilization). The amount of exercise humans ‘need’ is perfectly tailored towards how much they would have gotten, had they been on their feet all day hunting and gathering. The body is designed for this, expecting this, anticipating this. When we don’t follow these patterns, the body gets confused, its mechanisms get out-of-whack, and weird things start to happen like obesity, cancer, and depression.

In all these ways—body and mind—we are constantly yearning to return to the Garden, to return to a place of epic wilderness, where we creatively transmute the forces of the chaotic natural world into a habitable order, in direct collaboration with a community of tribemates we deeply trust and love, in service of a biocultural Torch.

So why don’t we return to the Garden? Why don’t people just leave the cities and walk off into the mountains to live more meaningful lives?

Well, they do. In Jon Krakauer’s non-fiction book, Into the Wild, Chris McCandless attempts to forgo modern civilization in favor of living a simple ascetic existence in nature. Then he dies from a combination of sickness and starvation in the Alaskan wilderness. Though he re-created much of the natural beauty, rugged lifestyle, and meaningful struggle of the Garden, he did not re-create the more important intergenerational, social, cultural matrix of torchbearing; he didn’t re-create the tribe.

Okay so why not try it with a tribe of people?

They do. Sometimes we refer to them as communes or cults, and they almost always fail. Some of the more prominent cases—the People’s Temple of Jonestown, or the Branch Davidians of Waco, or the Rajneeshees of Oregon—may not be the most positive or representative examples of an attempted tribal re-creation of the Garden, but they illustrate the unforeseen complications—and potential for disaster—that arise when doing so.

Again, the Garden is not just ‘living in the woods with my friends,’ it’s an inherited cultural matrix of survival knowledge, skills, customs, traditions, ethics, and rituals from an ancient lineage that evolved over the course of millions of years. And virtually all of that—the living, breathing cultural Torch of ancient peoples who conformed themselves to the rhythms of the prehistoric natural world—is lost. If you demolish a temple that took millions of years to build, you don’t reconstruct it over a few months—when it’s gone, it’s gone.

Lastly, even if you could hop in a time machine and return to the Pleistocene to rejoin tribal living, it would not resemble the fantasy paradise it may sound like I’m describing. Lord of the Rings is obviously not a depiction of the Pleistocene; it’s an archetypal maximization of our torchbearing heuristics; it’s akin to Garden pornography. Just like literal porn taps into our archetypal sex drive and exaggerates reality to tickle the senses, our fantasy media exaggerate what it may have been like to live in the past.

Life in the Pleistocene was extremely difficult; it was brutal; in a way that’s virtually impossible to imagine with our modern sensibilities. You were always cold. Food was scarce. Disease and infection were rampant. Nature was always trying to kill you. If you fell and broke your leg, you were dead. Women regularly died during childbirth. Only a fraction of children ever made it into adulthood. Life expectancy was less than 40 years.

So, yes, the Garden calls to us. Yes, all of our drives and instincts are finely tuned to that prehistoric environment. But just like all archetypal potentialities, we tend to mislead ourselves with visions of perfection. We convince ourselves of the best, most exaggerated image of a thing (camping and hunting in a river valley paradise with my best friends and family) while ignoring the harsh reality that comes with it (starvation, cold, disease, violence, and death).

Would you choose a meaningful existence that came packaged with struggle, suffering, and an early demise? Or a bland, unfulfilling one that came with comfort and security? Don’t be so sure you know the answer. People from the past didn’t have a choice—they simply lived it.

With the dawn of techne, humans began to irrevocably change their world, and this happened way faster than our torchbearing heuristics could keep up with. We are the same humans, genetically, that lived 100,000 years ago. We were born to heroically inhabit a natural world overflowing with novelty and beauty, but instead we find ourselves living within a neon machine, a node inside a tangle of wires, utterly dependent on its sprawl of pavement, pipes, and pixels.

The Garden was our home, but we left it for the Shadowlands, and we can never go back. The only way out is forwards.

The science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Stanley Kubrick (1968) begins with a critical moment in human history, in which our primate ancestors broke away from the rest of the animal kingdom onto an evolutionary track that would eventually produce consciousness, language, and technology.

The movie calls this the ‘Dawn of Man’: the moment that humans are born.

In the film, a tribe of primates wanders an African grassland scrounging for food. They toil through the dirt, competing with local fauna for measly shrubs and roots, and are regularly killed by predatory cats who rule the land. The primates are not at the top of the food chain. They are barely surviving.

At their watering hole, they are chased off by a rival, more dominant tribe of apes and forced to retreat to their dwelling on the side of a cliff.

When they awake the next morning, a large black monolith (presumably put there by aliens) is standing upright before them. Terrified at first but overcome with curiosity, they each come to place a hand upon the alien artifact, which brings about a change in their psychology. It flips a switch. It plants a seed. It incepts an idea that will forever change their evolutionary trajectory, and the world.

One of the changed primates goes on with his normal routine, roaming the grasslands and scrounging for food. As he scavenges amongst a pile of bones, he pauses, entranced by something he’s never seen before:

A thing. An object. Something external to himself that he can use.

The ape picks up a tapir’s leg bone. However, he doesn’t see a ‘bone,’ he sees a ‘tool,’ and after swinging it about a few times, he comes to see a ‘weapon.’

This is the great moment of transformation.

It is the birth of techne: the ability to create—and therefore manipulate—objects.

What do I mean by this?

The very first sequence of 2001, before this ‘Dawn of Man’ first act, is several minutes of black screen and eerie choral music, conveying the nothingness of preconsciousness.

No-thing-ness.

Prior to their contact with the monolith, the primates see no-thing; they are not yet conscious; they are not yet the thing that makes humans human. After touching the alien artifact, they begin to see things; they begin to differentiate things out of phenomenological fog of being; they go from no-thing-ness to thing-ness.

So where the apes once followed their instinctual, unconscious programming day-after-day, never registering any thing around them, they’ve now interrupted that programming to register an object: something external to their unified oneness with nature; something external to their unified oneness with the unconscious; something that can be used for any number of purposes. In this case, a weapon.

Soon, the whole tribe of primates awaken, discovering their capacity for techne, and return to the contested watering hole. This time they come armed with clubs and beat the leader of the rival tribe to death, driving them out of their territory for good.

The first act then concludes with one of the victorious awakened apes hurling their club into the sky. The shot abruptly changes to that of a man-made satellite orbiting the Earth, millions of years later, and so begins the second act of the film.

The implications are that what started with a club made of bone, eventually leads to interplanetary space travel, and that the thing that accomplishes this—that sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom—is techne.

The power of techne quickly comes to dominate the ecosystem, with these awakened apes rapidly outcompeting everything around them, adapting to every environment, spreading throughout the entire planet, and eventually giving birth to technological marvels such as computers and space ships.

Meanwhile, to this day, their closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, still reside in small kin groups in the same forests they’ve been living in for millions of years. We went to the moon while they stayed in the bush, all because of this powerful and mysterious psychological innovation of techne: the ability to create, and therefore manipulate, objects.

Techne means ‘art’ or ‘craft’ in Greek. The machines produced by techne—whether concrete or mental—we usually call ‘technology.’

But what do I mean by the word ‘object’? How does that lead to technology? And how does it relate to things like language and consciousness?

First, we’ll start with what objects are not: they are not made up of matter; they are not material in that sense. Rather, they are psychological projections we throw onto the material world in order to manipulate it. That is because we do not perceive the material world itself, we can only use our senses—like sight and touch—to take in information and try our best to predict ‘what is there’ and how we should engage with what is there.

So reality, as we think of it, is a landscape of projections, rather than a landscape of physical matter. It is not something we simply open our eyes and observe; it is something we actively generate.

To illustrate, let’s say you’re out hiking and, off in the distance, you see what you think is an animal. As you cautiously get closer, you realize that what you saw is in fact just a tree stump.

How can that be?

The material thing that was ‘actually there’ did not transform from a deer into a mass of wood. Rather, you predicted two different things—an ‘animal’ and a ‘tree stump’—based on your proximity to the materials and, consequently, the amount of sensory information you were able to work with.

We know this. It happens to us all the time: we think we see something or hear something or feel something, only to realize later that it was something else. ‘Reality’ is not simply observed, it is projected.

An easy way to play with this is the optical illusion, in which the brain is ‘tricked’ into projecting a pattern that isn’t there:

Look at the image below. The squares marked ‘A’ and ‘B’ look like they’re different colors, different shades of gray. Square A’ is clearly darker than square ‘B’, right?

However, the next image shows that they are, in fact, the same color:

For this next one below, the background is a gradient from dark to light. The gray bar in the middle looks like it also has a gradient… but it doesn’t—it’s actually one solid color. Try to observe yourself succumbing to the illusion in real time.

With this one, the lines are parallel to each other, perfectly horizontal, but they appear sloped due to the positioning of the black squares. Your projections are showing!

Here, try moving your head towards and away from the screen, back and forth, to perceive the wheels as moving. The wheels, of course, are not actually moving, the pattern is messing with your projective faculties.

These optical illusions are simple, but effective in demonstrating the fallibility of our projections, in demonstrating the fluidity and fuzziness of reality. We don’t just observe what is there, we actively predict what is there—and we often predict wrong.

So reality, as we think of it, is a landscape of projections.

Returning to objects, consider that the world upon which we throw these projections is overflowing with information. It’s noisy. So when we we try to predict what’s there, the incoming sensory information all blurs together, which makes it difficult to work with. How can we follow a conversation if dozens of people are all talking at the same time? How can we make out an image if it’s been overlayed with hundreds of others?

In order to navigate a noisy reality, we reduce the incoming unconscious information—we compress it—into conscious compartments that we perceive as ‘objects’. We reach into the fog of being, the undifferentiated phenomenological backdrop of no-thing-ness and pull out a thing. This compartmentalized world is now easier to navigate, easier to manipulate, easier to conform to our needs.

We can now engage with our surroundings in a dynamic, adaptable manner, which is what humans do. Put a human into any habitat, and he will deconstruct and reconstruct it to fit his needs. That’s what allows him to live in almost any environment on the planet.

Though most of our psychology is ‘built-in’, objects are not. They must be actively created by each individual. Therefore, each of us carries around with us a unique collection of objects that we’ve personally created over time, instinctually, from the moment we were born.

To illustrate, if you’ve ever found yourself in a situation where you lack expertise, another way of saying this is: you haven’t yet created the objects relevant to this particular context, domain, or medium.

Let’s say a carpenter is working on your house and asks you to hand him a ‘jigsaw.’ You don’t know what that is—you have no ‘jigsaw’ object, you’ve never needed to create one in your mind because you’re not a carpenter. He then asks you to hand him a ‘speed square.’ What the hell is that? You’ve never created that object either. How about a ‘monkey wrench’? Well now you’re just making things up!

Realizing your lack of expertise—your lack of objects relevant to carpentry—he takes you over to his collection of tools and points to the first one. As you follow his finger to this novel thing, and hold it in the spotlight of your mind, he says the word, ‘jigsaw.’ As he does this, you create a new object in your mind, called ‘jigsaw.’

Now you can identify a jigsaw next time you see one; you can learn how to use one; you can go to Home Depot and buy one; you could even theoretically build one yourself. That is all to say: your creation of the ‘jigsaw’ object allows you to interact with and manipulate your reality in a way you couldn’t before, just like the ape in 2001 did with the bone.

Also, objects are hierarchical, meaning they have other potential objects nested within them.

For example, the ‘guitar’ object has nested within it a ‘neck’ object. The ‘neck’ object has nested within it a ‘frets’ object. The ‘frets’ object has nested within it a ‘5th fret’ object. And so on. Objects within object within objects.

By breaking down objects hierarchically, we can refine them, map them out, and integrate them into our physiology. We usually call that ‘learning.’

To illustrate, imagine your child—a toddler—has never actually seen a guitar before. So first, you teach them the meta object of ‘guitar.’ Maybe you then break the ‘guitar’ object down into ‘strings’ and ‘frets.’ As they get older, you break the ‘guitar’ object down even further for them: ‘E string,’ ‘B string’, ‘G string’... ‘1st fret’, ‘2nd fret’, ‘3rd fret,’ and so on.

As they internalize these objects—nested within the meta ‘guitar’ object—they build upon them to create more complex objects, ‘D chord’, ‘A chord’, ‘G chord,’ which themselves are made up of the ‘first string’ and ‘second fret’ objects plus the ‘second string’ and ‘third fret’ objects... and so on.

As they repeat this process, they ingrain the objects into their physiology: they place fingers on the appropriate string objects, and the appropriate fret objects, and then strum. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat. Objectifying, and objectifying, and objectifying.

By repeatedly breaking the guitar object down into mesa objects (‘2nd fret’), then synthesizing them back up into refined meta objects (‘guitar’), they learn how the object is structured and how it functions, and expand and refine its utility by developing an increasingly complex relationship with it.

The more they objectify and engage with the ‘guitar’ object, the more conditioned their interactions with it become. The object gets etched into their physiology with each projection, with each engagement, each repetition, and their relationship with the object can become so developed and complex that it eventually becomes a skill.

Eventually the complex hierarchy of objects is so ingrained, they no longer have to consciously objectify at all. It just becomes second nature and they can play without even thinking about it—much like an adult speaks English or drives a car.

Through repeated, progressive, hierarchical mapping of the guitar object, your child constructs the personal machinery—the technology—of guitar-playing. That is the power of techne, a power mastered by humans, that defines what they are.

Things get a little stranger, and less intuitive, when we come to realize that objects are not restricted to external, ‘physical’ things in our environment—like ‘chair,’ ‘cup,’ or ‘guitar’. That they can be things of the ‘inner world’, purely abstract, mental, or even fictional.

For instance, if we watch a movie like Star Wars for the first time, we create the new objects ‘Darth Vader,’ ‘The Empire,’ ‘Leia,’ ‘The Rebellion,’ and ‘Luke.’ We do this in order to follow the story and make sense of what’s happening. If we didn’t, there would be no narrative—no movie—it would just be aesthetic noise. Luke using the force to destroy the Death Star wouldn’t induce any kind of emotional climax or narrative catharsis if you couldn’t keep track of who the ‘Luke’ object was, or what the ‘Luke’ object had to overcome.

Someone showing up late to the movie—having no opportunity to create the proper narrative objects from the beginning—would demonstrate that lack by saying things like, “Who the hell is talking to Luke in the X-Wing? Some kind of ghost? What’s ‘the Force’? Why did he blow up that space station?” Another audience member might have to catch this person up, specifically by giving them the narrative objects they missed. “Well the ghost talking to Luke is ‘Obi-wan’ (new object) and the space station is called the Death Star (new object)…” and so on.

The key point is that these objects aren’t ‘physical’, I can’t reach out and touch them. Sure, I can focus on the objects ‘Han Solo’, or ‘Tatooine’, or ‘The Force’, or even the history and lore of the Jedi, but I can’t sit inside the ‘Millennium Falcon’ object or hold the ‘lightsaber’ object in my hand. And that makes the nature of their existence confusing.

See, even though Luke is an immaterial fictional character, I’ve still projected him onto my reality. ‘Luke’, the object, has a white shirt, blonde hair, and a blue lightsaber. He’s a teenager who grew up with his aunt and uncle. He’s brave, heroic, and a good pilot.

I can engage with ‘Luke’, the object, by drawing a picture of him; I can do an impression of him; I can quote him; I can dress up as him for Halloween... and yet he’s not a material thing. Though there are many representations of him scattered throughout popular media, he does not exist anywhere in any physical sense. He is an object of fantasy.

That is to say, techne is not restricted to projecting objects into the physical world around us, but is the ability to create actionable units of reality that occupy the realm of ideas, concepts, and narrative. In fact, we will come to realize that most of our objects are like this: they lack a specific, physical manifestation, and instead occupy a place of abstraction and metaphor.

As we explore the concept of techne more deeply, we’ll come to notice that it’s strongly associated—you might even say synonymous—with language.

That’s because techne is a distinctly social innovation. It evolved because our primate ancestors needed to work together as a tribe in order to survive.

See, techne not only helps us compress and manipulate the world around us on a personal level, but—more importantly—helps us do it with others. Instead of each individual having to objectify the world in a vacuum, from scratch, we can objectify the world as a team, with other minds working in concert, creatively innovating with these objects, developing them, and exchanging them.

That is why techne and language evolved together, simultaneously, in a kind of evolutionary feedback loop; the creation of objects yielding language, and the innovations of language yielding more objects.

The best way to understand this is to simply observe that words are objects, by their very nature. Every single one. If there’s a word for something, it’s an object. If an object is exchanged between minds, it almost always has a word slapped onto it.

The realness, or concreteness, or utility of that word can vary wildly; but if there’s a word for it, it’s an object.

We use words to organize our reality, to distinguish objects from one another, to differentiate objects away from what they are not, but especially to exchange these objects with other minds.

Let’s say I’m an ancient ape, and there’s an object I’ve created, one I’ve projected onto a tapir bone. Unconsciously, implicitly, the object is something like ‘thing-that-smashes’. But to breathe more life into the object—to make it more useful, powerful, wieldable, and shareable with others—I’ll make the object explicit, I’ll bring it into consciousness, by giving it a name: ‘club’.

Now that I’ve named it, I can refer to the object out-loud, with others. “What is that? It’s a club.” I can better organize my objects when they’re named, by doing things like referring to the object on my to-do list: “Find more clubs”; or journal about the object: “Today, I accidentally broke my club. Perhaps I should be careful not to accidentally swing it into the ground.”

Giving an object a name, making it explicit, makes it more real. But most importantly, I can now engage with this object in cooperation with other humans, I can share my reality with another mind: “We should find more clubs and teach others how to use them.“ “How did you repair your club after it broke?” “Can I borrow your club for a moment?” Through these words we can share the ‘club’ object with each other, refine it, discover its properties and through that process make more and more sense of the world as a place of objects—an objective reality.

Importantly, once techne gives you language, it also gives you culture.

Objects that can be passed from mind to mind, through language and demonstration, yields a collection of objects over time that the tribe maintains, augments, and refines. Just as they pass this collection back and forth to their peers, they pass it down to their children. In doing this, you get a set of objects that is now intergenerational; a living, breathing landscape of ideas, stories, skills, knowledge, ethics, and rituals that gets passed on from generation to generation. That’s what culture is.

If objects are mentally generated, rather than simply observed, then what decides the nature of these objects? What decides their features and qualities, the way they reveal themselves to us? What decides their aesthetic properties—like color and smell—or moral qualities—like ‘appetizing’ and ‘beautiful’?

Just like we confuse ourselves into thinking objects are physical, material things, we confuse ourselves into thinking that objects are neutral or hollow containers without a moral component—but this is wrong. Reality is moral. Objects have a kind of should or should-not built into them. And that moral component of objects comes from their perceived utility, purpose, or relationship to our existential goals.

In other words, objects—by their very nature—are tools. That is why the ability to create objects is called techne and the machinery we produce from objectification is called ‘technology.’

What do I mean?

Every object has a kind of usefulness to us. Maybe its usefulness is positive, meaning it helps us get what we want; maybe its usefulness is negative, meaning it prevents us from getting what we want. Whatever the context, the utility of a thing is what makes it what it is. It is, specifically, what makes a thing appear to us the way that it does, what determines the nature of our projections.

The monkey’s ‘club’ object, for instance, is not just a neutral material thing—it’s a tool, it’s a package of affordances. What makes it a ‘club’ is that the monkey understands it can smash things, that it’s not too heavy to wield, that it’s not too fragile to break, that it can lead to food. It serves a purpose for the ape—that’s the only reason it even notices the thing in the first place, the only reason it differentiates the object out of the fog of unconsciousness. If it was ‘neutral’—if it had no utility—it would never have been noticed, it would never be differentiated, it would never become an object in the first place. As far as the ape is concerned, it wouldn’t exist.

A cup is not a neutral thing, it’s a ‘liquid-holder’. A hat is a ‘shade-provider’. A car is ‘thing-that-transports-me-to-where-I-need-to-go’. These are all defined by their affordances.

Because of this, the nature of an object—the way it reveals itself to me—can fluctuate based on the problem-at-hand. Change the context, change the utility, change the object. A fallen piece of wood is not simply a ‘branch’—this neutral, empty thing—it is whatever tool I project onto it. Maybe it’s a ‘club’; maybe it’s a ‘spear’; maybe it’s a ‘walking stick’; maybe it’s a ‘flag pole’; maybe it’s a ‘fence post’; maybe it’s ‘firewood’. The materials stay the same throughout each example, but the object projected depends on its perceived utility to me.

Contrastingly, the same object might be projected onto many different materials: a stool, a bucket, a tree stump, and a boulder can all have the object ‘chair’ projected onto them. They’re all very different materials, but when the problem-at-hand is ‘finding-a-place-to-sit’, they all become ‘thing-to-sit-on.’

By projecting objects onto the environment, we transform it into actionable units that can be engaged with, repurposed, and adapted to our needs. Without objectifying the environment, we are like animals: we cannot adapt our surroundings into tools. We still have all of our preconscious circuitry and instincts to guide us—like a dog or bird—but we cannot take a stick and project 40 different uses on it; the stick simply recedes into the noisy backdrop of unconsciousness and remains undifferentiated scenery.

But if we formulate objects according to their utility, what is that utility based upon? What governs it? If objects take a certain form that reflects their use to us, what exactly are they useful for?

The nature of all objects—not just the way we see things but the very things we see—is dictated by its relationship to the Torch. Objects are tools, and the tools we see are what they are based on how they help us pass the Torch, how they help us protect, promote, and propel our package of genetic and cultural information into the open future.

Essentially, everything we see, everything we perceive in the world and the way we perceive it, appears to us as it does for the purpose of optimizing our collective ability to make babies, teach them things, and ensure they survive.

I project ‘liquid-holder’ onto a cup because holding liquid is useful to me, because I need to drink fluids, because I need fluids to survive, and I need to survive so I can pass the Torch. I project ‘thing-that-cuts’ onto a knife because cutting food helps me eat, because I need to eat to survive, and I need to survive so I can pass the Torch. I project ‘music-channeler’ onto my guitar because creating music is useful to me, because its a social cultural glue and narrative device that keeps the tribe in cultural resonance across generations, and keeping the tribe in resonance helps the tribe survive, and the tribe needs to survive to keep the Torch alive.

The very colors, and textures, and smells we perceive are tools. They are projected utilities. When we talk about ‘aesthetics’ we are recognizing that the qualities and properties of things we perceive have value baked into them. If something has a positive relationship to the Torch, we might project beauty or attractiveness onto it; if something has a negative relationship to the Torch, we might project ugliness or disgust onto it.

A woman who will help me carry the Torch, make it grow bigger and brighter, and ensure it gets passed onto a new generation is going to be very beautiful to me. A mountain of rotting trash that is full of bacteria and disease, which could spread to me and my tribe and snuff out the Torch, is going to be very ugly and repulsive to me.

That is to say, what we call ‘reality’ is a landscape of utilities, compressed into discrete tools, whose structure, appearance, and vibe is reflective of its usefulness towards passing the Torch. The Torch not only structures the way we see things, but the very things we see; the Torch not only structures what we perceive to be ‘real’, but reality itself.

So, techne is what makes humans what they are, what made them break away from the rest of the animal kingdom, what made them split from their chimpanzee brethren seven million years ago. It changed everything: humans became tool-users, language-speakers, culture-wielders, and took over the planet.

However, their capacity for techne introduced novel and complex problems, because recognizing the world as a place of objects eventually meant recognizing the object of ‘me’, recognizing the object of ‘time’, and recognizing the object of ‘death.’

It also led to the development of technologies so powerful they exploded population densities, trashed the environment, radically transformed lifestyles, and brought about repressive social structures. And there is no going back.

The moment humans became technological, they began the long march out of the spiritual oneness of the preconscious Garden and into spiritual splintering of the Shadowlands.

"Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth? ... When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" -Book of Job 38:4-7

The experimental epic film, The Tree of Life, by Terrence Malick (2011) begins with a mysterious floating light flickering in a vast darkness.

In the next scene, it’s the 1960’s and Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien are informed that their 19-year-old son, R.L., has been killed. The news sends the family reeling. They ask God why it had to happen. Why him? What does it mean?

The film then jumps to 2010 where R.L.’s older brother, Jack, wanders through a modern urban landscape, depressed, reflecting upon his life and work which lack fulfillment and beauty.

The film then takes another abrupt leap to a montage depicting the Big Bang, the birth of the universe, the formation of the Earth, and ultimately the dawn of life.

Later we witness the coming-of-age of the O’Brien brothers in the 1950’s, against a backdrop of epic natural beauty intermixed with family drama, spiritual musings, and dream sequences.

The film’s final act shows the adult Jack experiencing a vision resembling the Rapture, where he reunites with everyone he knew as a child, then finds his brother and brings him to his parents who kiss him, say goodbye, and willingly send him off into the bright and beautiful unknown.

After the vision, Jack exits the cold and colorless office building where he works, and smiles as he looks around at his surroundings, noticing again, for the first time since he was a child, how beautiful and glorious the world is.

The film’s last shot is the same as the first: a mysterious flickering light floating in darkness.

The Tree of Life is a strange but brilliant movie; the kind that only gets ‘1/10’ and ‘10/10’ ratings on IMDB. People think it’s genius; people think it’s pretentious trash. I think it’s a poem projected onto a screen which attempts to convey—aesthetically, rather than explicitly—the nature of existence itself and, simultaneously, what it’s like to exist.

Terrence Malick surely intended the film to come off as mysterious and defy analysis—just like God’s works mystified Job—but I am going to, of course, endeavor an analysis anyways.

The mysterious light depicted in the opening and closing shots is the Torch: the thing we inherit from our ancestors and pass down to our descendants; the energy of becoming that flows within all things; the thing that ties us to the past and links us to the future; the thing that connects each and every living thing to the same ancient origin and, therefore, each other.

The film seems to convey, repeatedly, that everything is connected.

And the film muses on that interconnectivity by jumping around a lot—from person to person, time period to time period, cosmic event to cosmic event—as if to say: the death of a boy and the birth of the universe are part of the same story; that the evolution of dinosaurs and a man’s mid-life crisis are actually linked. As if to say everything in existence is just one big pattern, one big entity—like many branches of one tree.

The Tree of Life spends a surprising amount of time depicting the birth and ensuing growth of the universe. As if to say that the cosmos—which at the time of the Big Bang was smaller than a grain of sand, but grew into a universe 15 billion light years wide—has the same divine force propelling it as a tiny seed that grows into an enormous redwood. That the little primordial pin drop that began all of existence, wriggled and danced into a complex constellation of galaxies and stars, like golden fruit dangling from the celestial branches of a great cosmic tree—the Tree of Life.

Some of those golden fruit ripened into planets, and then that divine fractal planted new seeds, which sank their roots into the primordial ooze and sprouted self-perpetuating molecules that branched and branched and branched into all the species of plant and animal life that roam the Earth today.

The film implies that the galactic tree, the phylogenetic tree, the family tree, and the literal tree are all expressions of the same cosmic nature, the same spiraling spark, the same stream of existence that wills itself further and further along a divine and mysterious path to produce the world we see around us.

And we are part of that path, part of that transcendent spirit unfolding in the cosmos. We are a tree.

But what is a tree?

There is a pervasive myth—or perhaps a confusion—that would have you believe that a tree is an individual. That a tree is just this discrete physical object, no different than a telephone pole or a street light—but that’s wrong. A tree is more than an individual physical object: it’s a living pattern. It’s one link in a chain of trees stretching back to the dawn of life. It’s a superficial manifestation of a living entity that is over 3 billion years old.

The tree came from a seed, which came from a tree, which came from a seed, which came from a tree—a pattern that goes all the the way back to the first self-replicating molecule. The tree will produce seeds, which will grow into trees, which will produce seeds, and the chain will continue, indefinitely.

So it’s more accurate to say that the ‘true’ entity is not the individual tree but its lineage, this stream of life that’s been traveling, growing, and unfolding for billions of years. And that this specific instance of the tree, this individual body, is just a part of a whole, something that’s been constructed around the lineage to ensure its survival.

To illustrate, there is a species of tree, tachigali versicolor—also known as the ‘suicide tree’—that reproduces only once in its lifetime and then dies. This tree lives in the rain forest and grows to around 100 feet tall. Its life cycle is like this: it grows from a seed for about five years and gets very tall, then it flowers once, then within a year it dies, and falls over.

Why? Doesn’t the individual tree want to keep living at all costs, for as long as possible? Doesn’t it want to protect its ‘self’?

Yes, but the individual body of this single tree is not the ‘self.’ The self is the lineage. When the parent tree dies it creates an opening in the canopy—a breach in the forest ceiling—that gives the seedlings an opportunity to receive valuable sunlight and take their parents’ place. The parent tree sacrifices its individual existence to propel a future generation, to pass the Torch onto the next manifestation of the lineage.

The body of the tree—this construction of wood and bark and branches and leaves—is a suit of armor protecting that true entity, the Torch. And you can see that in everything the tree does, everything the tree is. The leaves absorb light and the roots drink water, so the tree can grow strong and produce seeds and the seeds can sprout roots and leaves and the cycle can begin anew. Seed to tree to seed to tree to seed, as if there really is no beginning or end to the being in question, as if it’s all one entity, one chain of energy, spiraling through the timeline, reaching further and further for the heavens.

Once the individual tree has passed the Torch, once it has reproduced, the tree’s ‘mission’ is complete—it has fulfilled its biological design, its purpose—and then the tree dies. However, that death is not the end of its chain, and therefore shouldn’t be interpreted as ‘tragic.’ It’s simply part of the cycle, a mechanism built into the Torch.

The animal kingdom lends us even more striking examples of this concept, often because the lack of individualism is so abundantly clear.

With honey bees, for instance, each bee is one member of a hive, and each hive is one iteration in a lineage of hives. The individuals do not live ‘every bee for themselves,’ they display a very complex cooperative behavior which benefits the hive. This does not mean the individual bee’s existence is unimportant or meaningless, it simply means the bee is part of a whole.

And, again, that whole is not just multi-individual, it’s multi-generational. It’s more than just a single, physical hive, it’s an ongoing string of hives that link back to the first life form and extends onward into the future for many hives to come.

To illustrate, honey bees will sting attackers, often killing themselves in the process. The stinger gets ripped out when they do this, which ruptures their abdomen, and they die. If bees were truly individuals, why would they kill themselves? Wouldn’t they instead opt to keep living at all costs? Wouldn’t they quit being a worker, leave the hive, and go snort pollen in their own private flower bed?

No, because if the bee could be said to have a ‘self,’ it would be more accurate to say that self was the hive. In stinging an intruder, the bee protects the hive, therefore protecting its ‘self,’ even though it dies in the process. It’s deeply counter-intuitive to our modern sensibilities, right? That something could protect itself and die at the same time.

However, it would be even more accurate to say the self is not the hive, but the bee’s Torch. The bee doesn’t only sacrifice itself to contribute to the success of its hive, but all future hives, to pass on what was handed to it by all previous hives, to protect—you might say—the great posterity of ‘beedom.’

Another example is that certain species of ground squirrels call out when a predator is near, to sound the alarm for their kin. In doing so, the individual gives away its location to the predator—making it far more likely to be found and killed—but protects its relatives, protects its descendants, protects its Torch.

In certain species of spider, the female eats the male after they mate! Again, how could one possibly help ‘itself’ by dying in the process? But it does, because the real entity is the lineage of spiders. By mating, the spider passes the Torch and, therefore, completes its mission—even though it dies in the process.

So life is an entity that defies the eroding sands of time, a pattern that perpetuates into the future by passing its genetic code along a chain of material manifestations. It’s a precious package of energy that builds itself into a temporary protective avatar that can carry that package and pass it along to another avatar before the current one disintegrates.

That avatar might be a grove of aspen, it might be a fungus colony, it might be a pack of wolves. All of them are defined by the bundle of energy they carry, which all of their traits and behaviors are designed to protect and pass along to the next generation, who will then pass it to the next generation, and so on, forever.

And so we arrive at the crux of our argument: what about humans? Do they follow this pattern? Are they burdened by the responsibility of the Torch? Do they behave—not as individuals—but as part of something greater than themselves?

Of course they do. Though many of us seem to resent it. Humans are a form of life. All of their traits, structures, and behaviors are aimed at something like ‘survival,’ but not specifically the survival of the individual, rather the survival of their children, survival of the tribe, survival of the Torch.

It makes sense that men will risk their lives hunting to provide for their family. It makes sense that women will risk their lives in childbirth. It makes sense that they will both break their backs laboring all day to take care of people other than themselves. Humans readily sacrifice their individual bodies and lifetimes for the lineage which transcends them, which extends beyond their material existence.

Their bodies, their minds, their morality, the very objects they perceive all revolve around making sure this Torch gets handed off to the next generation. They might not be conscious of it, they might not say it out loud, but that’s what they’re doing.

For instance, there is no escaping the fact that we obsess over sex, that we crave romance with a deep passion, because it is the act of reproduction, because it is the act of passing the genetic Torch, which lies at the heart of our existence. If participating in the propagation of a lineage, if existing as a manifestation of sacred stream of energy that transcends us, were not a thing—if we were truly individuals—sex wouldn’t exist. There would be no need for it. We would just be egos floating around, masturbating in space, doing things simply because they feel good, and trying to live forever at all costs.

But we are not that. We are that which passes the Torch. We are life.

However, there’s an important wrinkle here we cannot forget. Humans are life, but they’re different than other forms of life, and this is key: humans have culture. They’re conscious; they pass knowledge and ideas to one another through language; they convert their environment into tools; there’s entire systems of ethics that they maintain, share, and pass on to their children.

So, for humans, the Torch is not just genetic, it’s cultural. Their behavior, the way their bodies and minds are structured revolves around reproduction, yes, but also around a collective enculturation between kin and their offspring—developing language, technology, craftsmanship, art, rituals that will all aid their descendants in their mission of carrying the Torch, and then passing that Torch onto their offspring, and so on.

Beyond that, humans aren’t solely securing the reproductive success of their children, but their tribe—their siblings and cousins and their cousin’s children. Humans are tribal, and the tribe is an entity that is multi-individual, multi-generational, that transcends any one physical manifestation. Everyone in the tribe will die someday and, yet, the tribe keeps going. Every brick in the cathedral will crumble and need to be replaced, and yet the cathedral keeps standing.

And because humans are tribal and cultural, this means that humans have that great responsibility of carrying the Torch, whether or not they have children: they have a responsibility to cultivate and pass on good culture. And they can find immense meaning in this, they can discover powerful ways to contribute to the Torch outside of the realm of parenthood.

Think about Gandhi’s cultural contribution to the Torch. Or Plato. Or Jonas Salk. If they had been childless, would it really have mattered? No one can doubt the ripples they cast out into the world, well beyond their lifetimes.

So this distinctly human Torch is a great interweaving of biology and culture into a multi-individual, multi-generational package that we all contribute to with every breath, action, and word. This package is alive, blowing in the harsh winds of nature which is always trying to snuff it out. It can grow brighter and brighter as we innovate, develop, and feed it; it can easily become dim and weaken if we become negligent or narcissistic. If it weakens too much, it can extinguish; and if the Torch extinguishes, it’s gone.

We are all leaves on a tree—the Tree of Life. Come winter, we’ll turn brown and blow away with the wind. But we’ll take solace in knowing we got to feel the sun’s rays, that green leaves will sprout anew and take our place, that the Tree will keep reaching its branches further and further towards the stars for many seasons to come, that we participated willingly in the mystery of life.

In the film Children of Men by Alfonso Cuarón (2006), human civilization is on the brink of extinction. The year is 2027 and nations around the globe have collapsed from a combination of civil unrest, famine, disease, and nuclear war. Warlords and gangs roam Europe. People in South America fight to the death over dwindling food supplies. Major cities on the American East Coast have been leveled by atomic bombs.

Only Britain soldiers on, the last country left with a functioning government, but the island nation is flooded by waves and waves of asylum seekers fleeing the chaos, radiation, and plague from other parts of the world. In response, the country has become a police state with the army rounding up, imprisoning, or executing all incoming immigrants.

Outside of the immigrant camps, free British citizens live out depressing, meaningless lives. Most have turned their back on reality through a combination of alcohol, drugs, and escapism. Others have taken their own life through various, commercially-available suicide products.

It is the end of days. Human civilization, as we know it, breathes its last breaths and slowly descends into a dark pit of chaos, despair, and death.

Why?

Because there are no children. Eighteen years prior to the events of Children of Men, humans mysteriously become infertile, meaning the youngest person alive is now an eighteen-year-old adult. Over the course of two decades all of the children have grown up, and no incoming babies are around to replace them. So instead of a self-rejuvenating continuum of life, existing perpetually and cyclically, the human race begins to age rapidly. Before the end of the century, it’ll disappear entirely.

The key subtext to Children of Men is the suggestion that the result of this knowledge—that human existence is coming to an end—is specifically what causes civilization to collapse. That the ubiquitous experience of childlessness—the nonexistence of youthful energy; the lack of juvenile innocence, wonder, and joy; the absence of the incoming generation—drives the world into a kind of overwhelming and violent anxiety, which rapidly results in global destabilization and multiple crises of war, famine, ecocide, and mass migration.

But why would this happen? Why would the disappearance of children result in such a collapse? The number of working age people around to keep society functioning hasn’t changed. There’s still food, and electricity, and roads, and laws, and entertainment. It’s not as if anyone alive is in immediate danger or going to die any sooner.

What’s changed other than adults are now freed up to do whatever they want? They can party 24/7 without needing a sitter. No more screaming babies on airplanes, amiright?

No, society collapses because widespread, absolute infertility and the disappearance of children represent an immense spiritual crisis, the most immense spiritual crisis possible. It casts the human race into a kind of Shadowlands.

Whether or not we know it, we exist inside a matrix of human perpetuity; both an unspoken narrative and ontic reality that is predicated on the cyclical, never-ending nature of our existence: our parents’ generation came before us; they gave birth to us and raised us; then we give birth to and raise up the next generation, which will inherit the world and keep it all spinning long after we die. This continuum—as far as we’re concerned—has always existed and will keep existing, keep renewing itself cycle after cycle, generation after generation, forever.

This matrix of human perpetuity is the water we swim in: most people have children and a great deal of their sense of purpose and fulfillment stems from raising them, providing for them, teaching them, and seeing them flourish. And even those who don’t have children still have a sense that someone else has children, that there’s an incoming generation that will inherit and maintain and steward everything around them, that human existence will perpetuate beyond their individual timeline, that life will go on.

Now, if you were to displace a person from this matrix, if you destroyed the narrative of human perpetuity—say, by telling them scientists figured out that the sun will explode in a few years—this would change their outlook on life. To say they would be ‘devastated’ is putting it mildly: their entire sense of reality would be annihilated. They wouldn’t know what to do with themselves, much less process their own existence. Undoubtedly, they would stop working towards things, stop sacrificing their time and energy for the ‘greater good', stop investing in the future. They would think to themselves, “What’s the point?”

Now this would be true even if they knew the event would occur after they die. Perhaps the blow may be softened by the notion that they would avoid a fiery death; perhaps they would still get several decades of recreation before they kick the bucket. But the sun exploding in, let’s say, a hundred years is still going to change their outlook on life. It’s still going to make them think, “What’s the point?”

Why?

Because our entire physiology, our entire phenomenal reality, everything that makes us what we are, is grounded in the notion that something transcends us, that our efforts contribute to the ongoing project of our family’s or our people’s or our species’ or the human spirit’s existence. That together as humans, we carry a torch and it keeps burning long after we die.

And so what happens in Children of Men is: that torch is extinguished. No more children, no more next generation; in eighty years every single person will be dead and humans will disappear from the cosmos, forever. This abruptly and violently shatters the meaning of life. It murders the future. And the world can only get darker, colder, and die.

But that’s not the end of the film.

Enter the protagonist, Theo: a cynical government worker who wanders through the remainder of his life doing the best he can to ignore what’s happening around him. Like everybody else, he is waiting to die. He is too cowardly to kill himself. He regularly drinks himself into oblivion.

But that all changes when he encounters Kee, a West African refugee, who is miraculously pregnant with the first known child in almost two decades. Theo is immediately transformed by this discovery and commits himself to getting Kee and her baby to the Human Project, a rumored underground group of scientists working on a cure for human infertility.

So even though Children of Men presents a fallen world—one that is bleak and depressing and meaningless—it also presents a path to rebirth and redemption, highlighting the thing that makes life so meaningful in the first place.

The discovery of Kee has profound impact on Theo’s sense of purpose, on his self-narrative, on his reason for existence. He goes from demoralized drunken nihilist to courageous guardian and hero. This is best symbolized by Theo taking out a flask of his last remaining whiskey and, instead of drinking it, using it to sterilize his hands before delivering Kee’s baby.

And then he shepherds this baby like a torch—this tiny little flame that must not go out—through the darkness of the dying world and into the salvation of the Human Project, where Kee has a chance of curing infertility and therefore reigniting the engine of life that forms the very core of our existence.

Children of Men is one of my favorite movies—not just because it’s incredibly well done, well acted, and has great action sequences—but because it beautifully illustrates and engages with the concept at the center of my philosophy, The Torch, and the spiritual crisis that arises when we lose contact with it, The Shadowlands. This series of essays will dive deeply into both.

Let’s explore the Torch:

The Torch is the thing we inherit from our ancestors, that we carry and protect and nourish, and then pass on to our descendants.

This, of course, partly refers to genetics. We are the children of our parents, who passed us their genetics. Then we have children, passing on those same genetics. The genetics get passed on from generation, to generation, across millennia.

And, obviously, the passing of genetics is the source an enormous amount of meaning for human beings. This shouldn’t be controversial, as we see it everywhere in our society.

The simplest example of genetic torchbearing being meaningful is sex. Humans love sex. We more than love it, it’s this mesmerizing, sacred thing that utterly captivates us. There’s a reason sex plays such an impactful role in our society, as an object of focus, as an attractor, as a driver. There’s a reason people go to great lengths to get laid. There’s a reason people watch so much porn on the internet. There’s a reason sex sells movies and magazines and clothing and perfume.

This meaningfulness of genetic torchbearing is also demonstrated by the fact that we willingly have children and, historically, have as many children as possible. There’s a reason we’re so intense about our children; so protective; so activated by teaching, guiding, lifting them up; so compelled to hand down to them every last drop of our energy, knowledge, and capital.

There’s a reason the loss of a child is considered the worst thing that can happen to somebody. There’s a reason people seem to feel more at peace with retirement, about getting old, about dying when they have many healthy descendants to carry on after them.

There’s a reason we consider family to be so important, a reason fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters are usually the most important people in our life. There’s a reason we tend to be biased towards kin, more likely to favor and support those who are blood-related over those who are not.

But the Torch isn’t just a metaphor for genetics, for making babies—and this is the key point—the Torch is also a metaphor for culture. There is a cultural continuity that separates humans from other species and—just like the genetic Torch—passing the cultural Torch provides us with an enormous amount of meaning. It is a huge priority to us.

Humans are not static objects, we’re patterns of culture rippling through time, which is why we find creating, directing, and consuming these patterns to be so meaningful. There’s a reason we love creating art. There’s a reason we thirst for knowledge, stories, television, and music—all these information-rich phenomena that we impulsively stuff into our brain. There’s a reason our phones are so addictive, a reason we often spend hours a day sifting through texts, social media, ebooks, music, and videos.

There’s a reason we find meaning in teaching things, in having our culture spread and be adopted by others. There’s a reason we find meaning in sharing information, in telling a friend about our day, in venting to another human about something bothering us, in sharing memorable experiences with loved ones.

There’s a reason we’re so driven to be part of something bigger than ourselves, why we so readily join religions, cults, radical movements, and fan clubs. There’s a reason why we enjoy being in the presence of others at festivals and parties and bars—basking in the vibe of other people—even if we never actually talk to anyone. There’s a reason we crave a shared narrative, a shared way of life, a feeling of being plugged into a powerful network that’s vibrant and alive and popular and going someplace.

There’s a reason we love the idea of having an impact on the world, of leaving behind a legacy, of being remembered after we die. There’s a reason we don’t like the idea of our heritage disappearing, our people’s way of life dying, the family name being forgotten, our cultural lineage being extinguished.

All of this is to say:

We deeply desire to participate in both a genetic and cultural continuity, a genetic and cultural Torch. That’s where meaning and purpose come from: carrying, passing, and participating in that biocultural continuity. That is what our lives are about. That’s what humans do, what humans are.

And just like in Children of Men, we find ourselves in a fallen world, experiencing a major spiritual crisis, our crisis being that we’re cut off from this Torch, cut off from all the things I just listed, or in poor relations with them. We feel severed from that ancient continuity. We feel we’ve been exiled from that cosmic stream of life.

The Torch is our children, but many of us—for all kinds of reasons—aren’t having children, or aren’t having very many. We are without anyone to pass down to.

The Torch is our family, but a lot of us have wounded relationships with our family, maybe we don’t see them very often, maybe we don’t want to, maybe our extended family has shrunk so small that we’re the last of them. We are without brothers and sisters with which to share in the passing.

The Torch is our tribe, but many of us don’t have anything remotely resembling one. We might have a recreational social scene, or professional colleagues, or a club, or a social media community, but these aren’t people with which we share our life, with which we are spiritually bound, intertwined in the beautiful mystery of survival. We are without a people.

The Torch is our ancestral or indigenous culture, but for many of us that culture has been lost, destroyed, disowned, or forgotten, with nothing to replace it besides crumbling spiritual communities or the crippled pseudo-religions of consumerism and politics. We are without a culture.

The Torch is our homeland, but most of us urbanites don’t live for very long in any one location, nor do we feel any loyalty to any one city, or even any country. We’ve lost connection with the natural world outside of the occasional hike or camping trip, and even then we’re largely tourists, not stewards soulbound to the ecosystem. Others much less fortunate have had their land conquered or destroyed, they’ve been kicked out or displaced. We are without a land.

The Torch is our legacy, but most of us do work that lacks any feeling of long-term purpose, any notion that it will be appreciated or remembered. We are without a role to play.

In all these ways, we are losing our connection with the Torch. We find ourselves exiled into the Shadowlands, severed from that ancient chain of being, that cosmic continuity, that warm transcendent flame. We wish to carry it, we wish to feed it, we want it to shine out into the world. But instead we feel the fire burning low, flickering like a match in the wind.

This state of darkness we’re living in, this fallen world, hits surprisingly close to the world of Children of Men: war, pandemics, migration crises, falling birthrates, rampant depression, anxiety, suicide, feelings of meaninglessness… We exist in similar reality; an existential crisis born of the same spiritual failures, the same disconnections from the Torch. Children of Men presents us a mirror of our own modern world.

But, accordingly, the film also presents a way out: pick up the Torch, commit yourself to protecting its light, and shepherd it to safety. In doing this, Theo is transformed into a passionate hero with a reason to live. In the depths of darkness, he recovers the flame, discovers it has not yet burnt out. He finds that if he can summon the courage to pick it up, maybe that fire can grow, maybe he can jumpstart that engine of life, and deliver it into the hands of the unknown future, bigger and brighter and more beautiful than it was the day before.

I believe we are capable of this as well.

During these essays, I’ll explore the Torch, describe its properties, and discuss the implications it has on our lives. At the same time, I will take the readers on a journey through the Shadowlands of our modern spiritual crisis, explore how we got here, where we might be going, and maybe what we can do about it.

I don’t put forward the ideas that follow as any kind of absolute, unquestionable truth, but rather a public disentangling of my thoughts; an attempt to grasp at the ultimate questions of life as I teeter at the edge of my thinking and creativity.

To all my readers, I hope this series will provoke some insights, maybe breathe some air under the wings of your spiritual journey, and inspire those who feel lost to pick up the fire and find their way out of the shadows.