The Only Sane People in the Room.
Field Notes of Nobody’s Ghost - 20261023-S10
What came to help came with talons, and the one who called it put a hand up in alarm. Nothing obliges a rescue to resemble the one in need from inside the life raft.
Before 2019 I wouldn’t read the kind of content I produce. If I ran into it by accident I scoffed, out loud if anyone was around. After 2019 someone, something, flipped a switch. I seek it out, I’ve gone further inward to find it, and the people who dismiss it now seem to me ruthlessly stubborn, full of fear, and willfully blind to what’s right in front of them.
That’s the default percept, and on the individual level it needs no explanation. Not everyone grows up to be spiritual, but the transmutation from dismissal to engagement seems to happen on its own and gets felt one person at a time.
On the collective level something similar seems to track the times. Before 2020 was the old “normal”, even with the obvious cracks showing everywhere. 2020 onward has been a slow unraveling of the systems we live inside, the dark brought into the light, which is what apocalypse originally means in Greek: unveiling. Before 2020, speaking publicly about presence, the now, anything spiritual, got you mostly mocked and called delusional, “woo-woo”. After 2020 it’s been, gradually, the opposite.
So the short version I arrived at: when times are good, spiritual voices aren’t broadly taken seriously and appear insane. When times are bad, they’re taken more seriously and appear like the only sane people in the room.
I sat with that, and I actually think it’s neither direction. The variable isn’t good times or bad times, it’s whether the consensus story is paying out or falling apart.
When the official story delivers, matter does everything, the institutions work, the paycheck clears, then the controller (the part of the mind that manages the how and demands a mechanism before it will look at anything) gets certified at cultural scale. Anyone proposing a different frame reads as insane by definition, because the room has a working reference and that frame doesn’t align with establishment.
When the story stops delivering, the veil begins to slip and fall. The spiritual voice didn’t get saner in 2020; rather, the room lost its reference. Anyone with a frame that still cohered looked sane by contrast.
That’s in part what I was noticing. The other half is that the same gate drop lets in everything. Hard times make the mystic and the grifter look equally sane for a while, because sanity is being measured against a reference that just failed, and in real time. The discernment load goes up, not down, and a crisis supplies the opening.
The history fits this version better than the good-times-bad-times version. Spiritualism peaked in the Gilded Age. The sixties explosion happened in the richest decade this country had seen. Those weren’t bad times. They were times when the official story was visibly thin for a lot of people at once.
And 2020 is confounded anyway: it was bad times and the end of the gatekeepers’ monopoly on distribution in that same year. Everyone is home, everyone is (more) online, everyone watching the institutions fail, once again, in real time. I think the second is the mechanism and the first is the weather it happened in.
My own switch is the subjective data point, because the order is wrong for the bad-times reading. Late 2019 I was done being unhealthy and started rebuilding the instrument, this physical body, with no idea what I was doing it for. By the way, when this happens, everyone loves to ask for a reason that you decided to be fit, healthy, and overall a better person. That always makes me chuckle, as if there absolutely has to be a reason that you decided to finally feel better.
Two years of that, and then one winter evening I found myself outside, nothing on my mind, and yet something arrived. It was accepted because I was finally ready to receive; whether I understood it fully or not is another topic. The bad years didn’t drive me inward; they happened to show up while the work was already underway.
I’ve written before about dismissing the chakras out loud until they turned colors from within me, all the way from the crown and down. The scoff was, and still is, my own guard. The energy you spend marking something as beneath your attention is proportional to how close you’re standing to it, which means the stubborn ones are the ones closest to the door, perhaps even “truth”.
An Aside: A word on “practitioner”, since I’ve been using it loosely. When using that term, I don’t mean a spiritual leader, a teacher, or anyone with followers. I mean someone who is curious themselves: holds a belief long enough to reach for an experience, has the experience, keeps what it leaves behind as knowledge, and brings that knowledge back when it’s needed. The practitioner takes nothing and refuses nothing on an institution’s say-so. Both of those outsource the evaluation. The practitioner keeps it in-house, at every input, and in their own instrument.
When the consensus story holds, the practitioner looks insane. When it breaks, everyone outside the story looks sane, and the only thing separating the practitioner from the rest of the room is that they never stopped noticing, never stopped questioning, never stopped exploring.
That’s what I named Agile Awareness after, the seat that watches the stages and keeps them honest. It doesn’t care whether the times are good or bad, it’s always running in the background.