§1. Society creates shame, and then provides pathways, such as being productive, being beautiful, making people laugh, for how to relieve that shame. Some people think that they are rebels for rejecting the cure, but rejecting the poison is really where it's at.
§2. An important thing to note is that rejecting (toxic) shame makes you look like an immoral person to most (similar to Nietzsche's Ubermensch, but not to the same degree), because most people's "moral" compass is essentially shame and the pathways provided by society to relieve it. This is why being fine with being seen as a bad person is so important to lead a conscious life, because it allows you to escape cracks-in-a-bucket dynamics, and instead ground in your own truth, rather than what people think of you.
§2b. This is why in the chakra system, shame is seen as a major manifestation of an energetic blockage in the third chakra (solar plexus), the one linked to one's own power. The way out of oversocialized shame is to become fine with disapproval, which is a somatic process much more than it is an intellectual move, it's the kind of thing you learn to feel and stay present with, rather than something you try to undo through positive affirmations (even if they can be useful of course).
§3. Shame is a big part of social dynamics because it signals who feels bad for doing bad things. There is some good in that. Imagine someone who never feels bad whatsoever about anything, even if they harm others. We could say that there is toxic shame, and healthy shame, or perhaps conscience. The problem is that feeling a lot of shame doesn't make you a good person, but culturally, this is what is incentivized! (similar to Goodhart's Law: the signal is not the thing you care about ultimately) (also similar to Nietzsche's slave morality: people trying to one-up one another for having the most shame, or being the most dysfunctional, or having the worst problems, because it makes them the victim of the situation, which brings sympathy in a culture that favors underdogs)
§4. What do people typically feel shame about? Not being productive enough and scrolling away on social media. Not having a job that is very inspiring. Being 'behind' in the typical script of university-job-marriage-house-children. Not being social enough. Not being motivated enough. Not exercising enough. Not being attractive enough. Having addictions. Not doing enough for the world (environment, politics). Having interests but not being very good at them. Not having had sex. Not having a good relationship with your parents. Not feeling like a good enough parent. Feeling stuck in life. Feeling uninspired in your projects/creativity. Having gone through traumatic events (and feeling like you are to blame for them, for trusting the wrong people, for not acting quickly enough). Being cringe, saying cringe things, doing cringe things. Being clumsy. Feeling like you learn slowly. Feeling a lot anger while being surrounded by 'nice' people who don't express their anger. Not being intelligent enough. Knowing too little about history/geography/culture. Not feeling like the world is as beautiful as others around you say it is. Making the same mistake several times. Feeling disorganized, in your space, or in your time. Being injured and depending on others. Asking for help. Not meeting the expectations of those around you.
§5. On top of the moral compass pointed at in 2), shame is also the main source of motivation for most people. The problem is that it is motivation away rather than towards, which doesn't just feel bad on the inside, but it also creates a lot of mental shatter to push away the bad feelings. A lot of people unconsciously build mental programs whose main purpose is to distract them from something they don't want to feel, which is typically shame or fear, so that their attention can go in another direction. This is how a lot of addictions are maintained: it's not so much the activity that is addictive, but it's rather an avoidance mechanism. (I might write a post about distraction loops to substantiate the idea)
§6. Shame is such a common social force across cultures and across time because it's probably the easiest way (in terms of cultural resources, not in terms of the individual) to get lots of people to play the same game.
If you imagine someone, let's say Bob, who has no shame whatsoever about anything, but who also isn't a psychopath, then you still run into the issue that it's very difficult to coordinate anything with them. Imagine trying to agree on a time to meet with Bob, but half an hour before your meeting, he got invited to play in the pool with his friends and totally ditches you. You then later meet with Bob, and ask him what happened, and he answers "oh yeah, I felt like going for a swim with my friends", and you can tell that there wasn't any bad intention in him, even if he doesn't seem to show any sign of feeling bad about ditching you, it's just that Bob is very impulsive and totally lives in the present, following whatever he feels compelled to do in the moment. People like Bob might not exist, and to the extent that they do, I wouldn't say that they are bad people, but I hope you can also see that there are certain acts of coordination that couldn't happen with people like him.
§6b. On the other side of the spectrum, you have people who are so afraid of disappointing others, or simply of punishment, that they do everything that they can to never arrive late at anything. The people who show up one hour early (at least) to everything because the prospect of being the guy who everyone is waiting for is essentially death to them. They often are quite neurotic, the complete opposite of Bob, and this tends to trickle down into their personal life, but companies tend to prefer people like that, because you can expect them to do their job right, or at least well enough.
§7. In my opinion, point 6) describes the main structural reason why shame shows up again and again in our societies. Young children, before they go to school, just want to do what they care about, like playing with their friends, walking in the woods with their parents, drawing their favorite characters, and learning about the world around them, but society is not very keen on this type of spontaneous, and (from the point of view of society) undirected way of living life, it's rather incredibly structured, to the point that the structures become more important than what they're supposed to serve (the tyranny of bureaucracies).
§7b. Our society is part of an evolutionary process which, whether we like it or not, has rewarded the competitive types, for the simple reason that winning short-term conflicts tends to eradicate the losers (maybe not immediately, maybe not totally, but eventually, and especially their aspects which make them bad at competing with others) of that conflict. It happens not just in short-term wars, but it happens in the long-term, with how empires conquer and then spread their ways of living onto other countries, oftentimes forcibly.
Shame, in that context, is one of the most scalable ways of getting lots of people to abide by the same structure, because it's much easier to make someone feel bad about not doing something they 'should', rather than inspiring them towards something good (more in later points).
§8. Another set of strategies, rather than the 'away' type of motivation, would be a 'toward' type of motivation, but the problem is that there is no mechanical way to inspire someone, which means that it doesn't scale as easily. Of course, when it's done well however, inspiration, love and nurture are significantly more powerful forces than the 'away' forces, which is why the great figures of love and courage of the past are still remembered to this day (though it's fascinating how the teachings of Christ have been co-opted into a tradition which is almost obsessed with shame, in the form of Christianity) but the strategy with the higher ceiling doesn't necessarily win if it's harder to execute.
To be an inspiring teacher for instance, you don't just need to know your subject very well, you also need to be good at helping those who are new with it to become familiar with it, and eventually master it (or at least be good enough with the basics to be able to figure out the rest when they need to), but also have the kind of presence that makes people want to listen and learn from you. Being a good teacher is really the reflection of an entire life that is aligned with that vocation, and the same can be said about being a good artist, or parent, or partner, or scientist, you name it.
§8b. It is so much easier however to just stick to your role, do the bare minimum, and punish anyone you have power over if they don't do as you say. Hierarchy structures are such that it is not rare to see situations where people with more power are hardly punished if things go wrong in their management methods, and instead all of the blame is shifted to the bottom. This is one way of describing privilege in a social environment: the extent to which you can blame others, versus how much you can be blamed when things go wrong.
§9. Shame can be described as fusing your sense of self, and your sense of worth, with what you do, and what problems you have. Instead of just being a dude with some problems that you're working on, shame makes you feel that you are a screwup, and that even if you could solve those, you would remain unhappy/unlovable/unworthy. It's deeper than just an idea, or even an emotion, it's really a pattern of attention, when the attention narrows down on yourself, and all of your faults, which is why swinging the pendulum to the other side of extreme narcissism doesn't resolve the fundamental issue, because the attention in that case is still stuck on you.
§10. Another common pitfall with trying to address shame lies in telling yourself that there a bunch of things that you 'should' do in order to solve that problem, with the implicit sense that if you don't, you are worthless, lazy, a piece of shit, etc. It's tricky to undo that self-recursion, because again, it's a pattern of attention more than just an idea, one that focuses on judgment rather than observations (and if you say to someone: 'don't judge yourself', it feels very much like a judgment!).
But I would say that being in tune with body sensations is a very tangible entry point for undoing the main loop, because it puts you in touch with your own, unalienable truth, even something as 'simple' as "my feet are touching the ground" is the kind of truth that no one can take away from you, and it also puts the focus away from you, how you feel about yourself, what you do, what others think about you, and gently redirects it towards your body, the sensations that you feel.
Of course, even that can be misinterpreted through a lens of shame, something like "oh, that's meditation, but I can't do meditation because I can't focus, I am so distracted, I can't do anything right!"
§11. Another way to approach the unwinding of shame is to see if you can be curious about what is going on, as much as possible, including in the things that you feel shame about. As mentioned above, shame makes us turn to judgements rather than observations, such as "I am stupid", or "I can't do anything right". You can't force or judge yourself to be curious, but see if you can access that capacity in whatever way you can. "I can't seem to exercise consistently, I wonder why is that? What do I feel when I exercise? What do I feel when I am thinking about exercise? Can I make this more fun for myself?"
See if you can ask yourself questions in this tone of curiosity, of wanting to understand something you're interested in, rather than something you 'have' to figure out, or else bad things happen. This applies to positive things as well, curiosity is a great thing to feel into in all sorts of contexts. "I wonder how my water supply actually works? What are my pipes connected to?", or "I wonder how glasses are made?", that kind of question is good to get out of the 'survival' mode that can stay with us from when we were children, didn't feel safe in our environments, and had to constantly go through strategies to feel safer.
§12. I think a good sign that someone is undoing their shame is that they are more and more comfortable dropping their defense mechanisms, and their tendency to control everything, especially how other people see them. This cannot be forced, if your defense and control mechanisms are present in your life, then it's probably because you are not comfortable with feeling something, and that capacity cannot be forced into existence. But I think it is a good check to see whether one is living more from their authentic core, rather than a need to impress others in increasingly convoluted ways. It's very possible for someone to be successful, in the ways that our society talk about it, and then realize that it wasn't all that it was cracked up to be, only to pivot into another version of trying to impress others, either through art, or through spirituality, that kind of things. Fundamentally, the orientation towards meeting the expectations of others hasn't changed.
§13. Another component of undoing shame lies in the ability to holding healthy energetic boundaries. Being able to stand your ground in the face of others is not really a matter of physical strength, but one of 'energetic strength' (though the two are related to one another to some degree), it's the ability to stay present, in an expansive, relaxed manner, even when external circumstances make it tempting to contract and tense, and look for ways to relieve those sensations. Through presence, it's possible to feel when other people are pressuring you to change, or feel bad about yourself or what you did, and nonetheless stand firm and refuse to yield. Again, this is a somatic capacity much more than a mere idea.
§14. People with poor boundaries often have problems with shame because and because they are bad at accepting their own limits. They might look at people who seemingly 'have it all', and feel bad for not being as successful as them, without realizing all of the tradeoffs that went into such success (and also how much people put on a nice appearance on social media to convince themselves that their life is good). It's impossible to have it all, but people bound by shame often internalize this perfectionist attitude in them that compels them to be excellent in everything they do, be on top of all aspects of their life, and even go past that.
Striving for excellence can be great of course, I am not one to promote mediocrity and complacency, but the problem that shows up again and again in this piece is that shame-bound people internalize expectations that are not theirs, which is why the most important thing to figure out is not "how good am I?", but rather "what games do I want to play?"
§15. Another thing that people with poor boundaries are bad at is knowing what is in their control from what isn't. Quite frankly, the entire discourse on 'saving the world', and the clusters of socio-political-environmental activism strike me as being very steeped into shame, both in the people who believe in those causes, and also in their ways of getting other people on their side. This doesn't mean that the causes and ideas are wrong, but it means that there is an energy which is very unclean and which actively prevents them from having any meaningful form of impact on the world.
Many people cannot put it into words, but there is something that feels coercive and unkind about how activists talk. It's because their ideas themselves might be kind, compassionate, sensible, but it is their energy, their tone and way of relating to people, which is the problem. Activists talk with a lot of self-righteousness, agitation, and are quite willing to shame other people to join their causes, because of how important they view them to be (and they are right: the causes are important, but to me, this is not an excuse to use subtle forms of coercion).
I would say that a lot of people can feel that the energy is wrong, but because our 'rational' world puts more emphasis on (decontextualized) ideas and arguments than tone, people cannot simply call out the energy which feels wrong and that they do not wish to inhabit. This is why, in my opinion, a lot of people turn to worldviews that outright deny the problems of our world, such as climate change denial, because they have to convert their valid experience of being coerced by activists into more 'rational' arguments, because that is the only thing that they can use in the current landscape of discourses. The problem of course is that the arguments aren't good on their side, but their sentiment is very real and very important to keep track of.
§16. In general, blaming and attacking people is a common pitfall that people bound by shame may fall into. It certainly feels better in the short-term to have a target for all of your problems and internalized hatred, better than hating yourself, but the problem of course is that blame hardly solves anything. This is why we could say that shame needs to be metabolized in order to be transmuted to something healthier.
Both self-flagellation and external blame are ways to bypass metabolism, to avoid feeling the shame and integrate it into something more coherent and wholesome. But they both provide the illusion that they address the problem that they pretend to. As mentioned above (point 3), feeling bad about yourself doesn't make you a good person, it doesn't mean that you will do the right thing more often than not, and it keeps the illusion that fuses your sense of 'you' with your problems, that problems are not just something that exist in your life, but say something bad about who you are.
The same thing is true for blaming others, which doesn't turn you into a good person, because obviously responsibility is antithetical to it. Moreover, blame also maintains the fusion of self-and-problem, but now it redirects the attention onto other people. Instead of "I have this problem because I am a bad person", the logic is that "these problems exist because of these bad people".
I am not saying that there is no such thing as a bad person. What I am saying is that responsibility is more important than judgements, whether they are directed externally or internally. Undoing shame requires responsibility for one's life, but the illusion that the prison of shame creates is that feeling bad about something magically turns you into a more responsible person. It really doesn't.
§18. Social media has, unsurprisingly, accentuated shame a lot, for a bunch of reasons. For one, it puts a lot of attention on the outliers, who become so over-exposed that they become, in some way, the norm, or rather the perceived norm. From what I can tell, it was quite a rare thing for most people in the past (1960s to end of 1990s notably, but also basically everything post-industrial revolution) to be so lean and muscular so as to have a six-pack, and yet nowadays it almost feels like that's what expected from you as a guy to be considered 'healthy'.
A second factor is that there are so many more eyeballs on everyone, which creates this bizarre omni-digital-panopticon where everyone both feels observed by thousands, if not millions of people, but is also the observer of everyone else. Unsurprisingly, this creates a lot of internal conflict, because it puts more weight on impressing others, the anonymous mass of people on the internet, over simply being yourself. Again, this highlights the importance of having good boundaries.
§19. Another notable aspect of social media is in the way that it has led to a systemic fracture of real-life social interactions, which together with the progressive disappearance of third spaces, create a society where an increasing number of people feel lonely, starved for personal relationships. It's very tempting once again to blame oneself for the erosion of one's social life, and again there is much that one can be responsible for, but it's very much a systemic trend that individuals aren't in control of and can't be blamed for—it would be like blaming people for the fact that there are so many cars on the road, when most people are simply following their incentive structure, and getting a car because they need it for their job.
This is part of a general trend in society: systemic trends lead to problems in people's lives, such as a difficulty in staying physically healthy because work has increasingly become mental, and those problems are then seen as personal failures, something which then accentuates the shame in people, and keep them stuck in their sense of powerlessness, afraid of reaching out for help, guidance, or simply of admitting that they have a problem.
§20. Shame tends to lead people to engage more with their mind, because it allows them to not feel the unpleasantness that comes with shame (same thing with cringe, uncertainty, boredom, or fear), and redirect their energy towards solving problems, focusing on narrow aspects of one's life that can be manipulated towards an outcome.
There is nothing wrong with the mind, or with problem-solving, but the problem is that this dynamic more often than not is an escape strategy that arises from an inability to metabolize the shame. It is especially problematic because many of the plans devised by the mind are then implemented in a top-down fashion, with the body having to yield to what the mind orders, which feeds a cycle of internal conflict: "I have a problem" -> "My mind comes up with a plan, with steps A, B and C" -> "I can do A but I struggle with B for some reason" -> "I just need to do B man, I just need to do B, I just need to do B ..." -> "I have a problem"
§21. What this shows is a fundamental limitation of the mind, which is that it is unable to work with, and certainly not generate, energy. I mean here energy as in 'somatic energy', the sense of vitality and excitement about doing things, and on a more tangible level, what you want and what you like.
Of course, it's possible to use your mind to help with motivation, through visualization, affirmations and that type of stuff, but the bottom line is that energy is felt from within, and then acted upon, it is not merely a thought or a plan that you can come up with. You can't think your way into figuring out what you want, and if you try, you will find again and again that it doesn't really work. You might like something that your mind tells you is good, but it's unlikely that you will love it, because love is embodied, not mental.
§22. The mind can create structures, which can be very useful to get things done, but structures by themselves do not infuse you with energy. This is why schedules can feel so tyrannical, because they give you restrictions on how you spend your time, and how your energy flows, but more often than not, those structures go against your moment-to-moment energy, which puts you out of touch with what you may want to do. 1
§23. Shame can be described as the gap between a mental structure, that of an institution, or the idea that you have of your 'perfect' life, or your 'highest' self, and your current reality. That's what a 'should' is, something that exists in your mind, not something that sits right in front of you in your experience.
We are made to prioritize mental structures over embodied realities, such as what you feel like doing right now, because the power of our society comes from top-down relationships, which prioritize mental structures above everything else—the commandments of a religion, the profits of a company, the words of the 'scientists'.
This is why letting go of them is so scary, because the control that those structures afford feels so safe, powerful, and ... real. But the problem is that those structures also hardly work in the long term. Every complicated set of rules aimed at promoting order leads to a bunch of people who aren't able to follow them because of how complicated they are, or who fall between the cracks of the system, or to malignant actors who abuse the system for their own benefits. And every 'perfect' system of productivity runs into the basic reality that your energy cannot be channeled on command and at the same pace every day, because we are embodied, cyclical beings. 2
§24. A personal form of shame I have seen very little of on online discussions is with regards to doctors and one's medical problems. As a child, I used to feel a terrible dread at the prospect of visiting doctors. I am not talking of being afraid of dentists, which didn't affect me much even as a young kid—though I can totally understand why some people feel very dysregulated from that experience, the noise, the harsh lights, and being forced to stand still amidst that are all very hash, somatically speaking—I am talking about a sense of shame about visiting the doctor.
To me, there was an implicit sense of a personal failing on my end for being sick at all, especially because as a kid, I had pretty bad allergies, some problems with my breathing, and a pretty bad eyesight, 3 on top of a strange condition with my left eye which took many years to even detect and diagnose (I didn't know about it because I was used to it my entire life). I would feel bad when the doctors ran the tests and told me just how many allergies I had. I felt bad when they gave me an inhaler to deal with an asthma attack. I felt bad when they told me to read the letters on the screen and I wasn't able to.
A lot of doctors experience frustration in those moments, particularly the ophthalmologists when you can't read something very well, and as a sensitive child I was very, very attuned to detecting when adults were frustrated or not, because it signalled to me whether I could feel safe or not. So I was ashamed of going to the doctor, because it felt like I was a 'bad case' that they were forced to treat.
§25. A more obvious manifestation of shame lies in the fear of asking for help. I actually remember several situations as a student, in both high school and university, where I was almost on the verge of tears when I couldn't figure out something, because it felt to me that asking for help was again a sign that there was something wrong with me.
School very much felt like hostile territory, and I think it is for a lot of people. You feel like you are forced to do things you don't want to for most of your pre-adult life, and that you are essentially 'fighting' against an authority figure in order to get out with a degree that you can use to eventually earn money. This is why many people cheat in school, because the institution reduces down the act of learning, which is incredibly valuable, to essentially an adversarial game between you and the teacher, in the form of tests and punishments. There is no focus on the elating feeling that comes with understanding something in school, instead it's all about the pain that comes from not being good enough.
§26. Some people are so afraid of asking for help that they implicitly adopt all kinds of roundabout strategies to be in situations where they never have to ask for help. For instance, being so excellent that they never have to rely on anyone else. Or obsessively preparing for every contingency and every possible problem, so as to never have to ask anyone for help. Or being good at masking their problems and pretending that everything is fine. Or procrastinating on a task or a decision that involves someone else, to push away the 'confrontation'. Or isolating themselves and building an identity of being a social misfit, so that they can have an excuse for never reaching out for help (and potentially being rejected).
Or when they do ask for help, they do so in a very, very unclean manner, like beating around the bush and expecting the other person to read their mind about what they need help about (or the fact that they need help at all), or essentially insulting the other person for not helping them when they felt like they needed help, (despite not signalling it) again putting the blame on someone else instead of being able to metabolize their own shame about the situation.
§27. Shame is not just the elephant in the room, it is also the room itself, the frame from which many things are phrased and understood. We are sold scripts for how to live life, in the implicit script of university-job-marriage-house-children that makes so many people 'feel behind' in life, and yet it's quite obvious that many people who follow it to a T are still dissatisfied, because many older people, including our parents, did follow it, and yet here they are!
It doesn't mean that any of those things, schooling, jobs, marriage, getting a house, having children, are wrong, it's that the typical reason for why people strive for those is not rooted in conscious desires, but rather in mimetic desires, and in avoiding the shame that comes from not having those. Shame is the engine of our society, and walking away from it is not just difficult because it is found everywhere, but because it requires a different form of motivation to compensate from it.
This is why becoming a more conscious person often comes with a sort of limbo period, where the previous directions and landmarks fall apart, and many of the things we considered as being obviously valuable simply don't make any sense to us anymore. Caterpillars don't become butterflies through a linear, predictable and additive process, which is usually how people think of 'progress': doing more reps, working harder and longer, having more money, all quantified, additive increases to the same ego. Instead, the caterpillar has to essentially die inside its cocoon, dissolving into an unappealing goo, which then somehow, quite miraculously when you think about it, morphs into a butterfly.
Deep change often feels insane on the inside, and totally unreasonable to people who witness it, and this is very, very true for people who want to live free of toxic shame. Try to talk about shame with most people, and you are met with the proverbial fish which is clueless that is swimming in water, because 'normality' is rooted in shame.
The following points were written right after point 8), to expand on why 'away' strategies for motivation tend to be so much more common than 'towards', but they feel a bit too 'systemic' rather than heart-felt, embodied, and too removed from the personal experience of shame. But here they are anyway, because I think there is much truth to the systemic dynamics that they trace.
§A. Another reason why punishment and nastiness are so common is due to the incredibly complex, and large-scale nature of our society, that creates an incentive for people to abuse systems in order to get ahead, rather than care for something more than themselves. Here is how it works:
§B. The reason I mention all of this about local incentives, and how they lead to horizontal and vertical 5 competition instead of cooperation, is because it leads people in power to systematically neglect how those under them feel, because again, they have no incentive to do so. In particular, to come back to shame, it is much easier to blame students for being stupid, rather than for the teacher to take responsibility for their shortcomings, or even deeper than that, for the education system to 'take' responsibility.
The problem is that systems don't have a face, because they are not real, they are abstract clusters of people and ideas that we reify in order to make sense of them, which is totally valid, but the thing is that they only change if the people within them also change, but they ... don't have an incentive to do so. When everything is ruled by local incentives, a social phenomenon emerges where hardly anyone looks after the well-being of people besides themselves, and certainly not to people outside of their small ingroup.
As such, the teacher focuses on going through the day easily. They might have started their career with much enthusiasm about helping the next generations grow up and be educated, but then over time, they feel like their energy goes to waste, and they slip to doing the bare minimum: give the information to the students, make tests, grade, and punish the people who are causing trouble. Their local incentives are such that they don't really get punished for making a student feel really bad about themselves, but that might be 'good' for the teacher in the sense that it makes one person less of a trouble during class.
The same thing often happens with parents, though it is different here because parents spend much of their life around their children, which is not true for teachers. A parent has a sort of 'local incentive' to only care about how well their children do in school, or how much money they end up earning later on, and not about the emotional health of their children. This leads to a bunch of punishment strategies when the child struggles in school, rather than helping them figure out what is happening with their study and how they feel, because again, that is hard to do, and punishment is just much easier in the short-term.
1 There is a tricky thing where being totally spontaneous is probably not a good idea in our modern landscape of addictions, such that there is a form of structure (time and space) that is aligned with healthy energy. I can only write so much here however, but obviously the relationship between structure and energy is not a simplistic 'good' versus 'bad' dichotomy.
2 My general impression of Astrology, as someone who hasn't looked at it very deeply, is that it attempts to describe the cyclicality of a human life, in increasingly longer time spans, and in increasingly subtle levels of details. Whether it's successful at that is another question, but the basic idea is certainly interesting and important to our lives. For instance, the most basic observation is that we are strongly influenced by the day-and-night cycle, and the cycle of the seasons. We tend to be more energized during the day and in summer becaues of the sunlight, and less energized but perhaps more contemplative during the night, and in winter. We can try to work against the cycles, like trying to be as productive all throughout the seasons, but in the long-term it is unlikely to be successful. We need a cycle of activity and rest, and in practice we can't maintain constance for a very long amount of time. Of course this just describes our cyclicality with regards to the Sun, and Astrology tracks a lot more than just that, it looks at the Moon, at Mars, Venus, Mercury, and so on, which come with more subtle (and symbolic) qualities.
3 Worth noting that those three problems have been addressed outside of the medical system for me. My allergies and mild asthma got better once I learned to breathe properly, which is to say in a more relaxed and deep manner, through the nose, practicing the Buteyko method to undo my chronic (and subtle) form of hyperventilation. And while I didn't heal my eyesight, I know very well that relaxation and expanded awareness are a key factor in how well you see, something which the channel Myopia is mental describes and which is confirmed in my experience.
4 Interfacing means that instead of interacting with Reality as-it-is, you interact with 'screens' essentially: metrics to optimize for, resumes for job applicants, profiles on a dating app, etc.
5 'Horizontal' means between people at the same level of hierarchy, 'vertical' means between people of different levels of the hierarchy.
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2026-06-24