We Go Alone Together (Thesis Summary?)

I recently learned that humans are the only animals who go through a second gestation. For another nine months after birth, our brains and nervous systems are still developing. Other creatures get to do this inside the comfort of the womb, where all needs are automatically attended to; where care and feeding happens automatically, parent and child communicating telepathically, no need for evacuation even; just floating in the amniotic fluid, dreaming. 

It’s why humans need so much holding. Essentially, we come out before we’re done. So we have to help each other stay alive in an environment we really aren’t equipped to handle. Other animal babies are pretty much self-sufficient within a few days, but not us.

We’re intensely vulnerable, susceptible to our surroundings. When we’re held well and our needs are met, this helps us develop our capacity for empathy, but when they’re not, it can also become the darker sides of the archetype, becoming narcissism and codependence.

Too much- and not enough-ness.

I heard in a psychedelic journey that “the days of partying from the outside in have been reclaimed; now we’re partying from the inside out.” I suddenly feel this is about the way humans uniquely develop. we have to finish gestating outside the womb: we come out before we’re ready and have to finish cooking on the outside. 

Interestingly, the reason it happens in the first place is because of the PELVIS—the part of my body that I shattered in the injury, not accident, that put me on a path of quantum healing that also led me to this PhD program. Our pelvises had to become more narrow to accommodate bipedalism; standing on two legs didn’t allow enough space for those fetuses to get any bigger and still be born without destroying the mother. So, nature does what it does, and brought in symbiosis. 

Bipedalism is also what enabled us to evolve our musical abilities, says Liverpool University professor of music Michael Spitzer in his book The Musical Human: our larynx lengthened to expand vocal range; our strides gave us rhythm. I believe this is part of why music is so key to healing and transformation. 

And we really need that, because it’s uniquely hard to be a person. But it’s also uniquely amazing. 

Because we are not done cooking when we are born, and have another nine months of gestation before our brains are fully formed, we need a lot of holding, says Gabor Maté in his book Scattered Minds, which outlines how ADD develops, and is currently helping me understand a lot of things about my life and process. Essentially, humans need to recreate the conditions of the womb outside that cave of comfort. We need our every need attended to and understood in a language beyond words; we need perfect emotional attunement from at least one caregiver whose world revolves around us, and with whom we have a direct, always-on connection. 

Sound familiar? It sounds a lot like God, the Divine, whatever you want to call it. 

Coming out of the womb too soon is deeply traumatic, so we spend our whole lives trying to recover from it. But before the healing comes traumatic re-enactment: when you play out the conditions of your initial wounding unconsciously, over and over, in your life and relationships. 

The Gnostics say that in the beginning of the Universe there was a grand split where Sophia, the divine feminine, separated from the masculine, because she wanted to experience this cosmos to the fullest: by embodying it through every possible configuration. So the demiurge spun up the rest of the world and humanity to enact this play, this dance, over and over again until all its creatures awaken and come home, and the feminine and masculine are rejoined in divine union.

So we humans enact the pattern, re-creating the cosmic divorce, this grand split, over and over: in our families, communities, cultures, civilizations, and now that we’re globally interconnected, across the planet. This means we need healing at an equally intense scale, on every level, from the collective to the personal. 

But if we know how to separate, we also know how to heal: Our bodies store sense memories of pain, but they also store memories of wholeness; mechanisms and moments of reconnection and merging with the one, where boundaries dissolve and we feel less alone. 

In this dimension, these incarnations, such moments come through the five senses, because that’s how our bodies, these vehicles for navigating Earth, operate: the portals to awakening come through what we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, and feel. It’s why William Blake called the five senses “the chief inlets of soul in this age.”

It’s why you can travel through time when you hear a certain song; experience a sense of merging when you stand on a mountaintop at dusk and feel the cool breeze on your cheek as you gaze upon the beauty of a sunset or look at a cute squirrel in a pine tree (as happened in my first experience of nonduality). It’s why we feel less alone when we share a meal or libation that’s sourced and prepared from whole-earth ingredients and practices with someone: we’re taking the environment into our bodies through our senses into a moment of shared consciousness.

Trauma is when these bonds are fractured; when our bodies remember how things are supposed to be, but we have to go against it. When to get along in a family, a culture, a job, a relationship, or whatever it is, we have to shut down our intuition, the sensations and feelings that always tell us clearly what we need; that body memory that screams silently: Yes! No! or Get me the fuck out of here!! 

Humans have two basic needs, says Maté: attachment and authenticity. Both are necessary to be healthy. But for a half-cooked baby to survive, when we have to choose between one or the other, we’ll sacrifice authenticity for attachment every time. We gaslight ourselves, just like our abusive cultures and caregivers: when our bodies say no, we tell them yes; we make ourselves repress our true needs and desires, even when our health is compromised. When your spend your whole life learning to tune out that voice of intuition, of course you no longer know at a certain point who you are anymore, what you want, or where you’re going, how to heal yourself and be healthy, how to live in harmony with other creatures and the ecosystem; how to be reciprocal instead of just taking. 

This happens at individual, familial, cultural, and species-wide levels. But we still know, deep down, somatically. Our bodies remember. Our minds just have to catch up. 

There are lots of ways to do this; ways we used to know. Many of them involve working with plants, trees, and animals, whether it’s psychedelic journeying or using food and drink as medicine. We forgot these in the Anglosphere and Europe, but slowly, gradually, we’re rediscovering our roots. The Indigenous cultures ours tried to extinguish survived, and some of them are most generously sharing their practices, for the sake of the whole planet and collective. 

We are also remembering our own weird legacies, reconnecting with the medicines of those we burned at the stake as witches; reclaiming the knowledge and practices of the queer ones, the ones who know: remembering our own traditions of shamanism, and fusing them in syncretic fashion with the new-to-us practices we’re learning. It’s the way human cultures have always been formed, but in today’s world, we have to be very careful to cite our sources; modern capitalist society does not come equipped with the concept of reciprocity, it operates on scarcity, so we must learn from those who came before us; give more than we take, honor those who share their medicine, protect them, and give back.

In Quechua, the language of the Shipibo people whose plant medicine traditions started the processes that are saving my life, they call it ayni, or reciprocity, but a more direct translation is:

“I am because you’re living.”

Because humans are the only ones who finish gestating on the outside, and we need so much holding, we have to work in symbiosis with the world around us; it’s the only way we don’t die or go crazy. We used to know how to do this; it’s how we got this far to begin with. But then we stopped listening to the voices that aren’t very loud: the spirits of the natural world, the animals and plants and trees, the weirdos and queers and witches. We evolved consciousness, which was a necessary step on the evolutionary trajectory of the universe – but the tool becomes a weapon, the greatest strength is also the greatest downfall, so that intellect became our trap, and now we’ve ensnared ourselves in it. We forgot that that key to the whole fucking thing is interconnection, working together, and that means with everything. So the planet is rebelling, reacting, trying to awaken us, to get us back on track.

Not because we’re a curse or a cancer, but because we are actually the key to the whole universe evolving. 

As humans started walking on two feet, and began making music and developing speech so we could communicate our many needs as we continued to gestate all over the place, we also started coming together in rituals that helped us connect—that allowed us to, however briefly, make the womb appear again to hold us collectively. The only universal human drives that transcend all cultures, says National Geographic Scholar-in-Residence and paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, are as follows:

-Spiritual rituals reflecting an awareness of our own mortality. -Some form of complex language, whether musical/tonal or spoken. -The use of consciousness-altering substances.

All of these are evidenced in sites all over the world, dating back to humanity’s earliest days and even before, as Berger found in burial sites for Homo naledi, an early human ancestor. Many involve transcendent collective experiences of death and resurrection, like the Eleusinian Mysteries and ayahuasca and huachuma ceremonies. The pre-Stonehenge site of Gobekli Tepe provides evidence of the hypothesis shared by the likes of researchers Brian Muraresku and Carl Ruck and Western psychedelic trailblazers Albert Hofmann (who first synthesized LSD) and R. Gordon Wasson, whose experience with the Mazatec medicine woman Maria Sabina put psilocybin on the mainstream map (destroying her culture in the process; besides, he only knew about mushrooms because of his wife, Valentina).

Rituals like these brought early humans—who were nomadic and essentially what we would now call polyamorous, sharing all resources, including sex and parenting, in common—together more and more often. As gatherings grew more frequent and larger, they needed a way to reliably produce more of the sacrament, which if Gobekli Tepe and Eleusis are evidence of, was a sort of psychedelic beer. This led to the domestication of grain, meaning the Agricultural Revolution was actually, as Muraresku says, the Beer Revolution. 

Whatever you call it, this led to nomadic people settling down, which also led to a gradual deterioration in quality of life as temporary camps became settlements, cities, and towns—and all the problems, from sanitation to warfare, that come with groups of humans living close together. This birthed the separation culture, the concept of private property which was eventually extended to things previously inconceivable of being held except in common, from land and animals to women and children. And eventually, this control extended to every kind of direct experience, including spirituality, which was replaced by organized religion, gatekept by the same people who were taking control of everything by force, straight cisgendered men—and the pagan practices and their keepers, shamanic healers and medicine-makers, all the weirdos were exterminated, and the rest is history.

However. When humans started living closer together, something interesting happened. In order to live in community, our brains had to develop the ability to predict other people’s behavior, and sense what they were thinking and feeling. But this ability also turned inward, giving us the blessing and the curse of analyzing our own thoughts, feelings, and behavior. This development happened in the prefrontal cortex, the “youngest” part of the human brain–which is also where the default mode network rests, which neuroscientists and mystics alike call the domain of the ego. 

Consciousness.

But just like we have individual consciousness and memories, humans also have a collective one. We’re not in any of this alone. And collective memory transcends species. This is where biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance comes in. There are morphic fields created around organisms that have the same experience: dogs and their owners; people and plants; even psychedelic spaces, morphic fields created between everyone who has ever had a certain medicine experience or engaged with a given plant, the keepers of those traditions, and the spirits that facilitate and hold the space. 

According to thinkers like Sheldrake and David Chalmers, the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, creating new information, which also translates to new matter. The gasoline for that fuel, they posit, is human consciousness itself. To me, it seems consciousness developed because we have to help each other stay alive as we come out of the womb too soon, learn to be a separate organism, and individuate, which means returning to the whole—stuff that all the animals and plants come into existence knowing how to do without even trying. 

But if the universe seeks to know itself through every possible configuration, and it’s all a big cosmic game of hide and seek, death and resurrection, remembering and forgetting, then maybe that’s the key to the whole thing. 

Knowing that it’s going to hurt, and doing it anyway. 

Because doing it brings not only pain and suffering, but joy and transcendence. 

Because me living helps you exist.

Plants help each other stay alive, Sheldrake says, partially through the use of woody tubes where nutrients gather and pass water. These are built up through decaying organic matter, released when plants die. They spend their lives growing these nutrients—then quite literally commit suicide so they can be released to support other plants. 

This is beautiful, in a sense—but maybe part of the evolution of an expanding universe is that it doesn’t have to be like this. Maybe we don’t have to kill ourselves and each other to exist. 

Maybe the entities that people encounter when they sit with DMT are actually versions of ourselves in a different onion-layer of reality, future yous and mes that quantum-consciousness-accelerated into a better, more peaceful and evolved future, reaching through the astral fabric to lend our past selves a hand, because time isn’t liner, it’s a spiral.

After all, the psychedelic experience is just you talking to yourself, which is kind of what life it. The collective consciousness, according to psychologist Carl Jung’s hypothesis, is formed by archetypes: universal energies, concepts, and experiences; the images and impressions that together form all of human experience. Personas. 

The word “person” is Latin for “a mask, as in a play. 

I think the archetypes are akin to what Sheldrake calls morphic fields: collections of vibrations, energetic patterns, experienced in infinite different ways across individuals but universal in their expression. Images of morphic resonance. The so-called “laws” of nature, he says, are not actually fixed, but are more like habits, things that organisms do over and over because they learn from each other. And habits can change.

The archetype of Cain and Abel is a big one. Two siblings locked in a battle to the death for dad’s blessing and mom’s attention. The men kill each other; the women and queer folks kill themselves. We are the unseen unheard children, we’re gonna keep talking until you listen. 

The transmutation is that nobody has to die to get our parents’ attention. Because we are creatures that gestate outside the womb, we can help each other stay alive a little bit longer, until the others get here and we can put the fire out, then walk each other home. (This was a mantra I received in a psychedelic journey at a theosophical monastery on top of a mountain in California, the first time I camped and made a fire all by myself, just a few months before breaking my pelvis.)

For this, we need consciousness. We need the ability to map each others’ minds; to anticipate what someone else is thinking, feeling, and doing. We need empathy. But we also need boundaries. Hence, the universe is one big game of narcissism and codependency—and finding the balance between extremes.

Systems tend toward equilibrium, and the universe will always return everything to balance. But because everything is always changing, it only lasts for a moment, and so the spiral keeps continuing, as long as we all agree to keep playing the game of the third dimension.

Matter is memory, vibrations frozen in a moment, appearing at rest, forming the things the morphic fields tell us how to make. It’s how trees become acorns, and people become trees; how we create rituals that call in the spirits of things unseen and rewrite individual and collective histories. It’s how we create new timelines and destinies, decision-trees that generate new universes, in which we make even more choices. 

According to Maya prophecy, in the beginning, the Maize Lord sacrificed himself and turned into a cacao tree, which was also a World Tree: an anthropomorphic arboreal being formed when the human flipped upside down, hands planting in the soil and becoming roots; feet rising into the astral and turning into branches. In doing so, the World Tree gave rise to all the other life-giving plants, and therefore beings, on earth. 

It’s why we feel at home when we plunge our hands in soil. 

It’s why, when I tried to kill myself, the thing that brought me back was the silent whisper of cedar branches overhead: the morphic resonance, the archetypal impression of my origins as one with everything reminded me that it was good to be alive. 

Sure, I thought about my mom and my friends during that whole life-review thing, but the thought that finally got me to get up and run for help was: I don’t want to never see trees again.

One day, the Maya prophecy said, humans would abuse the plants and overstrip our resources, and the cacao tree would get up and walk out of the forest. But we are trees, we are the Earth, as Indigenous leaders the world over remind us. If we are not separate, we are abusing our own bodies in this process. So the path to turning the whole thing around starts with healing ourselves; remembering that it’s good to be alive, and making the choice every day to stay that way. And then, once our cups are full, once we’ve finished gestating, helping other beings do the same thing 

There are lots of ways to do this, from talk therapy to psychedelics, but all of it is really just a magic feather, a tether, and the thread holding it all together, the archetypal image connecting heaven and earth through the core, the center—that’s you, the axis mundi. It’s you on your individuation journey. It’s humanity accelerating the evolution of the universe. It’s the ancient habits of organisms coming to guide and remind us.

They’re saying, shh. They’re saying, we’ve got you. It’s okay. You’re safe. And slowly, gradually, almost imperceptibly, we learn new morphic habits, and things start to change.

In the end, it’s all about perspective, whether you are hero or villain, martyr or victim, it’s all a matter of who’s telling the story, and what narrative they’re weaving. This is both trauma and healing, planetary wounding and cosmic evolution: when we take the same old pattern and form a new morphic habit, creating a third thing. It’s 1, 2, 3, queer alchemy: Holy Hermes, Mighty Herm-Aphrodite, the union of opposites, when it’s not a choice between eternal suffering or some ecstatic bliss, but something in the middle. There is always a third way.

But it takes those of us who have learned new patterns to help others find their magic feather, so they can be empowered to save themselves, then go back for the others. But I believe that we can get there.

For we go alone, together.