January 1, 2050
Holy hell, we did it.
It’s been 30 years, a full Saturn cycle, since the COVID pandemic appeared in 2020. Saturn, planet of time and form, is just 22 days short of re-entering Aquarius, one of the great humanitarian signs, and the second third (or quarter?!) of my life has been filled with a journey that has led to the eve of my elderhood. Global cooperation is no longer a pipe dream, but a reality. Somehow, in less than 30 years, we managed to alter the frequency of our planet.
I’m grateful to have played a part. In the early 2020s, a few years after the start of the pandemic, I moved my Millennial self from California to Nebraska, where I could start healing and grounding with some freedom from the constraints of the relentless capitalism that permeated that age and building my own foundation. Everyone wondered how I’d ended up in the Midwest, thousands of miles away from the people and places I knew.
The fates moved me along that line of geometry. “No choice!” as one of my teachers would say. Throughout my twenties, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but when I met destiny, I knew it. I remember sitting in a cafe in Los Angeles one weekend, scrolling through a list of “jobs of the future.” One job in the search results was a memory surgeon.
I’d scoured every job on the career sites, and I’d found a few candidates.
But a memory surgeon? I was hooked.
At the time, I didn’t understand the significance of being a memory surgeon. Now, in 2050, I recognize that my encounter at the cafe was no accident and that I was wired to alter the collective psyche. A coach, confrontational activist, and comedian, I now recognize that my participation in the rebalancing of the world was as a memory surgeon—one who altered the collective memory and helped to maintain the integrity of us all through the power of forgetting.
I have always been paying attention to collective problems, studying anthropology, politics, and neuroscience. I was always reading and analyzing essays on art and propaganda, learning about the anatomy of the body and brain, or actually applying them in the field and telling stories about our culture to alter behavior. Somewhere I knew there was an off-switch in a world that was always on, always chasing, and rarely still or understanding.
Like a nerve in the brain, how could I find and flip that switch?
Toward my late 20s, I recognized the switch is all around us, and the key to flipping it is knowing how to apply the right levers. As I saw the world change, particularly in the years leading up to and including the year 2020, I kept noticing three problems keeping our planet in chains, and found myself asking three questions to point to what I could do about it:
Problem 1: There was a huge gap between humanity’s aspirations and development.
I’ve often said that we don’t rise to the level of our goals; we fall to the level of our development. Many people, locked in fear-based paradigms, didn’t even have high aspirations and were locked in deeply limited views of what was possible for humanity and the earth. Those who had the aspirations frequently didn’t have the scaffolding or resourcing to pull it off. For us to complete the task, the vertical had to get horizontal, and vice versa. The people with the highest ideals and levels of consciousness had to get on the material plane and the people with the most material consciousness had to be introduced somehow to higher principles.
How could we create sustainable scaffolding for the development of humanity? In my case, it was empowering, connecting, and positioning a diverse network of leaders who were unified in their message, and from there, simply pointing and directing people to where they needed to go. There’s no way that I could have lifted the world on my shoulders, but I had the right story and I could give people the option to choose. The American scientist and author B.J. Fogg says that B = MAP (behavior is motivation + action + prompt). By formulating this at a large scale that was easy, obvious, and attractive for a variety of characters and communities, we started to shift.
Problem 2: There were major gaps in most people’s perceptions and worldviews.
Of course, herding a “wide variety of characters and communities” was no easy feat. At the time, most of the population held worldviews that were not integrated, that were fragmented or divisive. Polarization was rampant, creating a missed opportunity that turned everyone’s potential contribution, in the face of complex system stresses and breakdowns, into a source of dysfunction, animus, hatred, and backsliding toward collective division and separation.
How might we help more people expand and restore their perceptions to be unique and differentiated, but whole? Besides partnering with fellow 360° thinkers and getting practical—sharpening our edges to include all the levels of the “spiral” which came before, not just in theory (philosophers love theory!) but in practice—I also started teaching about this activist goddess who was excluded from the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and our psyches and our society at large. I thought, if Marianne Williamson began taking notice by reading an article alone—if that article could answer so many of her questions, who else would need to know about her? So I set about making Eris famous. And through her methods, I began to show people how they could learn to value and appreciate the entire spiral of humanity—to project a little less and to see things as they really are a little more.
Problem 3: Most of the world’s problem solvers were disenchanted and tired.
The problem creators had plenty of energy to keep the status quo. But the problem solvers? Boy, they were tired. Many of them lived lives of martyrdom and struggle, instead of the coolness, passion, and freedom that was theirs. With everyone, including those with spiritual sensibilities, feeling tired and joyless, I knew there had to be a way to help us discover life amid all the harsh realities and painful difficulties we had to face (Eris is a tough cookie and she requires it!). I knew there had to be a story, a transmission, an energy, that would get the blood flowing again, a reminder, a nudge in the direction of resilience amid a cataclysmic era.
How might we offer people the Whole Truth underneath the challenges of a world moving through a metacrisis of epic proportions? Well, I started doing stand up comedy (in rooms with clean air and far-UVC, which few of us had in the early 2020s). High-frequency, exorcist comedy for spiritual folk that somehow didn’t scare away people from other tribes. “There’s something about this person I don’t understand, but I’m not looking away,” these people thought. And while I was cracking alien spiritual jokes, the underlying message you could feel in your bones was, “Wake up. It’s time for a new era.”
How I Did It: Empowerment, Connection, Humor
I had known from the beginning, when I was tuning the collective psyche in East Asia, that my genius was to provide 360° perspectives in the service of life, and my mission to protect the balance of life through the promotion of integrative philosophies. As a trickster tricks people into higher truths, so I became a content creator, ironically leaving Los Angeles to set up my studio, softbox, and DSLR and talk, teach, laugh and cry my way to global cooperation.
I never thought that I would be able to do it by teaching or by being funny, or that funny was going to alter memory. As I evolved from talking my way out of difficulties to talking my way through them, I realized the same was true for the metacrisis. We couldn’t talk our way out of the metacrisis, but we could talk our way through it. And as a shapeshifter, I could choose to stay in the shadows or use my skills to help people alchemize darkness and create light. My only function was to transmit, to transmit well, and to transmit correctly.
It took a huge amount of work, but it was all worth it. I set out on a course of study and practice, to integrate everything I could get my hands on — especially things that seemed in opposition — and transmit that gestalt of worldviews so others could, too. I learned everything from how to win at capitalism (you mad?) to astrology to deep history to the great religions, not just on a theoretical level but at a deep level of practice so I could live it and teach it. I figured that if I could merge everything we had experienced as an evolving consciousness — to be an open vessel and then synthesize it — I could tune more people into the frequency that would change the world. I’d disrupt and shatter paradigms, and in time, help people experience the blessed rebirth of absolute consciousness.
Years earlier, I was sitting with my friend in the car, crying, saying, “I think I’m gonna have to say some things that are going to upset some people.” I sure upset many people in the last 30+ years. But as I grew, how things changed — it wasn’t either/or anymore, but both/and. I could upset and comfort people, challenge them and support them, give them this perspective and that — and because of it, nothing could stop the expansion of consciousness. I lived all the extremes in the Tao of paradox. I transmitted and gave leverage to the expansion of consciousness by growing down, bringing the higher consciousness into practical form.
I am a coach, a writer, and a speaker. I have always dealt with the invisibles, the things you can’t see or touch. But what I’m most shocked and delighted about is that all I needed to do to change the world was to be myself. As I took my light and laughter into the right networks and pulled the right levers, we saw the collective consciousness turn.
That’s the part I played: enabling new routes through perceptual transmissions, doing it well, and making those transmissions attractive and so damn funny. The second 30 years of my life have been about honing and amplifying this message. Really talking to people with a mythology that reflects the reality of who we are and where we’re going. When the message hits the heart, it absolutely alters the frequency of the collective. That’s why my work is called Spoken Generation: when the right message strikes, you will never be the same again.
I am a 58-year-old comic who began with drama. A person whose life began with tears and who turned it to laughter not to escape the drama, but because I encountered the 360° Almighty and became Whole. For me, it was a transmission, a philosophy, an approach that unified all these fragmented pieces, along with a bit of good marketing, that did the trick. And through my practice, lived example, and teaching the mechanics of evolution at scale — with a mic and a quiet apartment in the Midwest — I would give more people a taste of the bigger story.