How to thrive in a declining empire

No one knows the future, so I suppose it’s presumptuous for me to proclaim that we are living in a declining empire. Not one of us, not even that super-smart podcaster or well-coifed talking head, truly knows how the world will be in ten years, much less 100 or 500 years. However, the empire in which I grew up is unravelling, no doubt. So, how do I thrive in this?   

If you operate by the empire’s old rules, “thriving” during the decline involves seeing enemies and threats everywhere, and seeking the protection that money and weapons promise. When I’m in my fear, I’m tempted by that. When I get tired of fear, I think “anger is holy,” and I fantasize about training to become a ninja assassin of oil company CEOs and neo-Nazi leaders. But I don’t think an old dude who gently carries spiders out of the house really has that in him.

When empires decline, they begin to “amuse themselves to death,” as Neil Postman wrote of our culture in 1985. Amusing yourself to death takes on the structure of any addiction. At first, it’s fun and feels great. The spirit of addiction dresses up seductively to woo us at first, but after it has us, it doesn’t even bother to put on deodorant, and one day we find ourselves shocked at how we ended up toothless in this rusted out trailer.

Perhaps the most widespread, destructive spirit of addiction operating nowadays is “the algorithm.” This is the technology that social media uses to send us ads and posts relating to the same kind of stuff we’ve already clicked on. Every single one of us lives in a world shaped by this invisible spirit. Not only shaped, but shrunken. The algorithm spirals our reality down into an ever-tighter circle. This is how we get sucked down holes. If you really want to work on a huge, world-changing political level, start working to make the algorithm illegal in social media.

Can I choose not to amuse myself to death? How do I do it? It begins with knowing the difference between beauty and pleasure.

This has been a huge topic in philosophy, theology, and ethics for 5,000 years. Neuroscience tells us that the same brain centers are activated when experiencing profound spiritual beauty, eating a taco, and having sex. So, is beauty pleasure, and pleasure beauty? No – and conflating them or confusing them is the pathway to amusing ourselves to death.

Pleasure connects you to the immediately physical, what Aristotle called hedonia, (where the word hedonism comes from). Pleasure feels good. One of my very wise teachers is fond of saying that our best spiritual life can be simply guided by feeling good. If it feels good, it means you’re on the right track with Spirit. I bristle when he says that, and I wonder if that’s just my old Protestant imprinting: “Work! Work! Only work, not fun, makes you right with God.” So, I’m hoping that my wise teacher is actually talking about beauty, not pleasure, as being the marker of being on the “right path.”

Beauty does two things. First, it holds together the grief of life and the praise of life. Pleasure tries to wipe out the grief of life momentarily and only receive the praise of life. When we seek that all the time, it becomes the addiction. We begin to amuse ourselves to death.

So, we need to work with the grief of life – the uncomfortable and scary – which our addictive culture constantly tells us to ignore. All spiritual bypassing involves a refusal to honestly grieve. But the grief of life must be held together with the praise of life. And our hip, cynical culture tells us that the praise of life makes us shallow. Cynicism and nihilism are a refusal to praise life. This holding together of grief and praise is what Aristotle called Eudaimonia, or “good spirit.”

Many of us are stuck in a place where we are afraid that if we grieve, the floodgates will open, and we will be overwhelmed and die. And we have not been taught how to fully praise life, but we’ve been well-trained in how to analyze our lifelong fear of praising life. So, we float in this liminal space: lost, anxious, depressed, visionless, weak, tired. So: Netflix, wine, and another $29 webinar on how to “manifest.”

The other important thing beauty does is connect us to the larger story of our existence than just the physical level. Declining cultures sink down into a small and ugly cosmic story that shrinks life’s meaning – for example, imagining a Creator of the entire universe as just a bigger version of ourselves, with the same hates and desires we have. Or insisting that the entire universe is a mere chance-cocktail of dead chemicals, as our scientific model often proclaims. Beauty takes us far past those small Creators, those puny gods. Beauty takes us into our “unknowing” as a place of wonder. 

Again, neuroscience: it turns out that, when we experience beauty, another area of the brain is activated along with the pleasure center – so beauty is pleasurable, but not merely pleasure. What’s happening in this other brain center?

Mystics and wisdom carriers throughout time have said that our power only comes from the now – the present moment. All addictions sap the energy out of the now and make the now small. Beauty expands the Now. It connects us to a far larger, more spacious present moment. Thriving in the declining empire has to involve coming fully into the most expansive present moment possible.

For me, the way we do that is by opening our huge, sacred imaginations. Everything I’ve mentioned above- addictions, the algorithm, the spiraled-down, compacted, ugly comic stories – all of them rely on shrinking the imagination. 

Shamanic practice is a spiritual path of expansive imagination; imagination as the sacred meeting place between the mundane world and the ineffable; imagination as medicine for body and soul, and imagination as the energy field that opens one’s connection to higher purpose.

Not that long ago, humans spent a lot of time telling stories to each other where each person had to imagine the details of each story. As movies, TV, CGI, and super realistic digital animation evolved, we no longer need to imagine anything. Nowadays, when we are asked to imagine, it is by politicians and marketers, which chiefly urge us to imagine fear and greed.

Not really that long ago, the main way the Bible was interpreted was as metaphor. Only in the last few centuries – a fearful reaction to the rise of fact-based science – has the literalistic interpretation become so widespread. Literalism kills imagination, and people with dead imaginations have an easier time bringing literal death into the world.   

It is not a mistake or surprise that our declining culture devalues the imagination. (Bad) science says imagination is useless fantasy and logic is the only true, reliable filter for reality. (Bad) religion warns us to only imagine certain, pre-approved images and stories; all others are evil. (Noxious) religion seduces us with a God of love, but we find ourselves shooting up daily with the god of judgment, guilt, and shame. (Thin) spiritual paths placate us with confidence that we are the better ones, smarter ones, the saved,  the older souls, the more loving, than those other people. (Bad) education slices the arts from the curriculum. (Bad) amusement feeds us all the images and ideas so we don’t have to summon any of them for ourselves. Amusing ourselves to death happens when we stop imagining life into our life, when we refuse to grieve and when we refuse to praise equally.

So, my recipe for thriving is very simple: find ways to open your imagination and use it. Be aware that the empire’s voice will always try to stop you (“What a waste of time and money,” “Maybe you’re crazy,” “You are courting the devil…”). The empire has always sought to shrink, smash or twist the sacred imagination, and to try to make you live in a small and false universe. Commit yourself to spending time each day imagining just how huge creation is. There are billions of galaxies spinning all around you, right now. What does it feel like to be here, now in this immense creation? Feed the spirit of beauty at least as much as you feed your pleasure, and try to not confuse them as the same exact thing.



Keep playing your drum

Calling, calling. For now, you have been kissed by the Holy -

the touch of Spirit on the body.

The lily opens and the wild darling appears.

Each wave crest dissolves with a sigh into the sea.

The great song rises in the throat

To sing, through you, the terrible and lovely melody of life.

All is now. All. Is now.