illion blindness
detail from a recent SoulCollage® card entitled - “they are ruining everything with a gold bulldozer”
For last weekend’s Sag full moon I was really pumping us up to go for Truth with a capital T.
And recently, while meditating, the phrase came to me – “illion blindness”. It is like blush blindness, but instead of cosmetics, think capitalism.
Illion blindness refers to the fact that we see, or are encouraged to see, a million, a billion and a trillion as one “big” number.
We are made blind to the BIG DIFFERENCE between those numbers that all end in “illion”. I believe this is on purpose.
Listening to the amounts that this administration has stolen from the people or listening to what is spent on war each day, I don’t think we are really clocking the actual amounts. If we were, we’d all be out, screaming in the streets and refusing to pay our taxes. Our collective illion blindness reduces anything that ends in illion to just a big number.
As we potentially are approaching our first individual “trillionaire*” I want us to understand the truth of that number, what it actually means.
There is a really big difference between these “illions”, these big numbers. Metaphorically, there is something as big as the Grand Canyon between a million and a billion and something bigger than earth between a billion and a trillion. Even though these words rhyme, they do not mean the same thing.
1 million seconds is about 11 days.
1 billion seconds is about 31.5 years.
1 trillion seconds is more than all of recorded history (just under 32,000 years).
A millionaire is has much more in common with someone who has zero dollars than he is to a billionaire.
I feel like we are all the frogs in a big, slowly boiling pot of water; all thinking we are at the spa - that it is millions that this administration has stolen, not billions; or that that we are spending a million/day for the war in Iran, not a BILLION/day. And so on…
Illion blindness isn’t the only kind of blindness they are pushing on us. Let’s look at another kind of blindness…
If you went outside right now, and asked a kid “what comes from the Amazon?” – they would likely think of delivery trucks, an e-commerce website, and cardboard boxes.
But actually, truthfully, many important things on earth (carbon sequestering, biological diversity, water, air) come from the Amazon – none delivered though in cardboard boxes by an exhausted delivery person.
You can probably think of many more everyday blindnesses.
What things mean, in truth, is important to me.
I know things are baffling right now, particularly online. Each of us wakes up each day at the top of the rollercoaster drop and we might feel all we can do is ride it out.
But, this IS a good time for magic - this little window of the next few weeks.
And, I just want to remind us – when we sit still and listen – the truth just comes and “rolls at our feet”.
It does take effort to be still and listen until we hear the truth.
But it is so worth it, and in this era we MUST.
Just like every time we rely on corporately-supervised machine-learning (a more truthful name for AI) it results in cognitive slippage, every time we take a lie (or omission) for the truth, it just makes it easier for them to lie to us.
Why am I banging on about Truth? Because we are now really entering a good time for magic. I want the magic we make to have its foundation in the Truth.
The Free Page is here if you need it.
Until next time,
Jess
*now we all know I am anti-billionaire, so you can surmise that I am also anti-trillionaire
“‘Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will.’ It’s similar but subtly different from one attributed to Alistair Crowley: ‘Magic is the art of causing change in accordance with will.’ Both could serve as a definition for politics”
- Starhawk
“They assume my position is positional, that my ambition is a title or a seat. And my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.” She then lays out some specific, concrete pieces of that vision: single payer health care, a living wage, workers’ rights, women’s rights. And then she proceeds to tell us how she makes decisions: “I make decisions by waking up in the morning, looking out the window and observing the conditions of this country. And saying what move or what decision can I make today that is going to get us closer to that future, stronger, faster, better than yesterday.”
- AOC
“Not using Spotify and also not using Insta or social for half a decade and at the height of my ability to turn my fame into cash, thus losing out on hundreds of thousands but really millions of dollars in free audience building in exchange for my mental health and ethics and soul.” But how do you say that about Instagram, on Instagram? IDK. But it did get me thinking a fuck ton about the people who have done extraordinary things to divest from the machine at great cost, who we don’t hear from because they have left. And there are a lot of them.”
- Holly Whitaker
“Lévi’s central concept is the Astral Light — a universal medium in which all magical operations take place. The Astral Light is the medium of imagination, of vision, of will; it records the impressions of every event and every thought; it is the substance of which spirits and ghosts are made; and it is the tool with which the magician works.”
- Daniel Pinchbeck
”The great biologist E.O. Wilson says that humans aren’t just social like dogs and chimpanzees, we are ultrasocial, like bees and ants. We have a massive division of labor. And we love to do things that put us in a mindset of “one for all and all for one.”
Yet our hives aren’t made out of wax. They are made out of shared culture and shared experiences.”
- Jon Haidt
“There is clear scientific evidence that digital tools impair, rather than enhance, student learning.”
- the Karolinska Institute
“Beware of artificial relationships for minors. Give them nothing that conveys that it understands the child, or that it cares. Because it doesn’t.”
- Jon Haidt
the three rules of techno-skepticism:
Protect brain development through puberty.
Prioritize people and books in education, not screens.
Beware of artificial relationships for minors.
I think techno-skepticism is the right attitude for people today — especially for parents and legislators. Because when it comes to children, these companies have earned our distrust.
Techno-skepticism means that from now on, we put the burden of proof on them. Let them prove that their products are safe. We treat them like any other maker of potentially dangerous consumer products: we make them prove that their products are safe before they push them out into the world. And we hold them responsible for their safety lapses.
In conclusion, human beings are ultrasocial creatures who need to matter to one another in order to flourish. We are so brilliant that we’ve invented technologies that can replace us, that can take us out of each other’s lives.
But human connection is not optional. It’s who we are. So we’re going to have to fight for a future in which our children can grow into flourishing, connected adults.”
“Water-hungry, power-hungry machines are being built while weather gets warmer, while power gets scarcer, while water becomes even more precious. It feels essentially sacrilegious to me, that our rulers offer up endless gallons of water to these false machine gods, that our rulers are sacrificing the water we need for our crops and our bodies.“
- Margaret Killjoy via Nic Antoinette
“So sure, everyone has the right to do what they want with their own body. But I’m done pretending that the choice to participate in all of this is neutral, that it doesn’t extend beyond the individual. Nor do I think it’s remotely intellectually honest to frame the choice as somehow feminist.”
- Rosie Spinks
“Ritual helps us call what is smoldering in the ashes of our imagination into our daily reality.”
- Amanda Yates Garcia
“creative inspiration has given me this zest and excitement for life that I haven’t felt in a long time. Being alive is magical when you have a sense of purpose and the privilege to pursue it. On the other hand, with the spark has come moments of heightened anxiety and occasional tinges of existential dread.
I wonder if sometimes the reason we don’t follow our dreams is the same reason we self sabotage or avoid true intimacy in relationships. When we embody our truest selves and love unabashedly, we are reminded that this is all very fleeting. We are forced to acknowledge that we don’t get to be here or feel this way forever.”
- Jenny Clark
“In our culture, we tend to gather information in ways that do not work very well when the source is the human soul: the soul is not responsive to subpoenas or cross-examinations. At best it will stand in the dock only long enough to plead the Fifth Amendment. At worst it will jump bail and never be heard from again. The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.
The soul is like a wild animal — tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek.”
Parker Palmer
From birth to death time surrounds us
with its intangible walls.
We fall with the centuries, the years, the minutes.
Is time only a falling, only a wall?
For a moment, sometimes, we see
not with our eyes but with our thoughts
time resting in a pause.
The world half-opens and we glimpse
the immaculate kingdom,
the pure forms, presences
unmoving, floating
on the hour, a river stopped:
truth, beauty, numbers, ideas
and goodness, a word buried
in our century.
A moment without weight or duration,
a moment outside the moment:
thought sees, our eyes think.
- Octavio Paz
“Truth lies in our myths, in our songs; that’s where the seeds lie. It’s not possible to constantly hone in on the crisis. You have to have the love and you have to have the magic. That’s also life.”
- Toni Morrison