[This article has a 7/10 Woo Rating]
There are some rare times in my life when everything seems to be conspiring for me to pay attention to something new. It’s even rarer for it to be an obscure topic that I wasn’t really that interested in beforehand.
Right now that topic is sound, vibration and harmonics. My synchronicity-filled trip to Portugal made me realise how central sound and vibration was to the world’s great mystery schools. I also found myself asking why their initiatory technology was so often associated with goddesses. Whether it’s Mary Magdalene, Isis, the Black Madonna, Persephone or Sophia, the divine feminine was seen to be a secret source of wisdom and transformation.
In a secular, scientific world, the concepts of goddesses and the divine feminine can feel irrelevant and outdated. But I think they may reveal the destiny of the West, an optimistic future for technology and a path to individual transformation.
The Destiny of the West
The “divine feminine” may be a romantic way of framing the generative field of consciousness that appears to underlie so many areas of leading edge science. This field seems to be intimately linked to vibration, energy, and frequency; forces increasingly recognized as foundational to the structure of the universe.
Cymatics experiments that run sound through sand and water, show that higher frequencies produce more complex patterns. If the cosmos is evolving toward greater complexity, as many physicists and systems theorists suggest, then it may also be evolving toward higher frequencies. But as cymatics shows, for a new, more complex pattern to emerge, the old one must partially dissolve.

The transition to a higher frequency requires a return to the field: a decomposition and recomposition at a higher level of complexity. This is the archetypal cycle of death and rebirth.
This generative field may be accessed through the brain’s right hemisphere. For many years, I have intuited that this transition from “masculine” left hemisphere-dominant to “feminine” right was the hero’s journey rebirth Western culture is currently experiencing.1
And this may have been the point all along.
The epilogue of Richard Tarnas’ sweeping epic The Passion of the Western Mind is available for free online. I have read the final section many, many times.2 Our collective psyche is defined by a sense of separation that is wreaking havoc with our health and environment. Tarnas makes the compelling argument that our split into alienated masculine consciousness was a deliberate prodigal departure. We became separate so that we could learn individual power and conscious agency. We can now reunite with the feminine from a position of greater strength. But this reunion requires an ego death for the masculine to surrender control. We’re dropping to one knee in a deliberate proposal of alchemical marriage. Because the present power of our masculine energy is unlike anything we’re aware of in our prior history, the unfolding reunion with the divine feminine will produce something more complex. At a societal level, this isn’t a backwards step towards magical thinking, but a new integration of the powerful intellect into a broader field of intelligence.
The Dawn of “Goddess Tech”
In its optimal form, “Goddess Tech” will help us reintegrate our powerful but dissociated technological tools into this greater field of intelligence. It’s very early days, but it seems like bioenergetics, vibration and frequency is going to be at the forefront of a new era of technology and healing.
For example, pioneering biologist Dr. Michael Levin’s “regenerative medicine” focuses on reprogramming the body’s bioelectric signals in order to guide healing, regeneration, and even the growth of new organs.3 He describes cancer as “a dissociated energy disorder of somatic intelligence.” Put in archetypal terms: the masculine needs to be reunited with the feminine field of intelligence of the body.
In business and technology, those brave enough to pursue reunification with the field of intelligence may gain access to a relational force that’s likely to remain superior to anything our narrow intellects can produce, maybe even the best of artificial intelligence. Geopolitical strategist
Malmgren has poignantly described this as our “heartware.” Having spent the last few years exploring these tools and practices that rebalance our hemispheres,4 they don’t need to be high tech, but I expect technology to play an increasingly significant role.In a well-researched recent piece on “Spirit Tech 3.0,”
outlined the potential for field-based technologies to enhance our interoception, intuition and coherence.5 And, as part of the universe’s seemingly relentless desire to beat me over the head with these themes, ’s most recent podcast was a discussion of whether vibration, enhanced by technology, can help cure anxiety and mental illness.6Given our absolutely dire historical track record with powerful technology, my default reaction to the promises of Spirit Tech is caution. I have raised my acute concerns around the manipulation of our free will. Presumably these initiatory technologies were kept secret for centuries for a reason. Imagine what misuse of frequencies could do to influence people at scale.7 But technology is likely a part of our future no matter what, so we need to soberly explore what healthy integration looks like. My simplistic bias at this point is to favour technologies that diminish the influence of the left hemisphere in order to help us gain greater access to the forces that work through the right. I recall the experiment where just fifteen minutes of hemispheric suppression on ordinary subjects could either shift their mindset towards psychopathic detachment towards living things or animist engagement with the world.
Sacred sites were apparently built to harmonize with and amplify Earth’s magnetic fields. It was alignment with, not power over. In this week’s essential, otherworldly podcast on the nature of power (and sound, because of course),8 The Emerald’s Josh Schrei says:
Yes, the whole universe is power, is energy, and ultimately in its pristine non-dual state, all of that energy is one and available to everyone everywhere. But the important part for any traditions or cultural subgroups that are interested in actually working meaningfully with relational power is how it expresses, how it delimits itself, what its waveforms are, where it gathers and congregates, what makes it dissipate, what helps it coalesce, and how can we call it into our ritual spaces? How can we create architectures that hold it and alchemize it and embody it over time?
The secret societies and mystery schools likely understood something we seem to have forgotten: the transformation of consciousness needs an incredibly robust container. Even the most powerful psychedelic technologies are consistently being stripped from context and lineage. Just because you can get ketamine through the mail or smoke DMT in a Brooklyn loft doesn’t mean you should.
Moreover, I believe this imminent individual and collective rebirth will require more suffering and disruption than most of us are used to. Up until now, technology has mostly been used to shield us from that process, rather than facilitate it. I doubt that AI chatbots optimized for engagement are going to casually suggest you need to descend into a living hell in order to die to the false self. In fact, the new oracles seem more likely to feed the spiritual narcissism of the ego and generate messiah complexes.9
Without integration we risk turning necessary suffering into unnecessary suffering. Whatever the shape of our future from here, I urgently believe that more chrysalises will be needed.
The Metachrysalis for the Metacrisis
The point that I feel is missed by many is that this unfolding reunion is something entirely new in human history. But it seems like only those who have personally suffered through this transition already can communicate the shape of this future to others.
For example, I believe
is one of the best writers around right now. His recent emergence from his own dark night, and willingness to embrace “the necessary descent,” has seemingly made him capable of both great simplicity and wisdom. A recent piece10 beautifully articulated the central role of “feminine” containers in this transitional moment:I must confess something that feels almost embarrassing after years of intensive training, studying countless modalities, living in a monastery, and devoting an unreasonable amount of time to understanding human transformation: it really is this simple. The essential movement of healing - creating safety for what's been fragmented to emerge, and meeting it with the qualities of secure attachment - is the essence of every approach to transformation I've encountered. [Emphasis added]
You will immediately see the connection between Daniel’s insights and the goddess principle.11 At an individual level, transformation happens in a safe space where the old fragmented pathologies can dissolve and a new level of integration and complexity can emerge.12
Ultimately, this is the purpose of the new “World Wise Web” communities that are rapidly springing up. They are a new space for the powerful and intellectual to explore the mystical and experiential in safety and privacy. When people ask what I want from The Leading Edge, it’s a container safe and loving enough to allow for the transformation of consciousness. One of the primary goals of these new digital-physical hybrid communities should be to raise the frequency of interaction so that the transformation can happen in a secure environment. Higher frequencies are generated by safety, love and trust. I spent last weekend at a remote retreat in Colorado with a similarly high-agency community of investors and founders called Frequency (because, again, of course they were). They also had a dedicated “coherence” team ensuring intimacy and safety was kept to a maximum. This requirement for real human interaction means these individual communities are likely not scalable, so they lack the sexy exponential payoff VCs look for. However, I anticipate an explosion in mini mystery schools that will be experimenting with old practices and new technology. We just owe it to each other to do it responsibly.
Decomposed to Recomposed
While writing and researching this piece I was repeatedly drawn back to a video of Jacob Collier and Chris Martin from Coldplay. Something remarkable happens around the four minute mark when Collier starts conducting the crowd. The whole O2 Arena harmonizes. The result brings a tear to my eye every time. It’s even more appropriate that the song is titled “Fix You.”
But chrysalises don’t fix caterpillars, they create butterflies.13
One summer morning five years ago, I was sitting on the beach in Montauk, Long Island. It was the middle of the pandemic so I was entirely alone with my one year old son. We were watching whales swim alongside the shore, while I listened to a transcendent classical song by Max Richter.
Like Jacob’s Ladder, Richter’s strings seem to spiral endlessly upwards towards heaven. I suddenly realized, for the first time in an eternity, I could hear beauty again. Up until that point my depression was marked by a pane of glass sealing me away from the world. No emotion could penetrate that shell. The song’s title is “Recomposed (Spring 1).” Simply perfect for someone who had just emerged from a hellish two years of decomposition into a new spring of integration and hope. Perhaps this is also the destiny of our culture.
For the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its being. The driving impulse of the West's masculine consciousness has been its dialectical quest not only to realize itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also, finally, to recover its connection with the whole, to come to terms with the great feminine principle in life: to differentiate itself from but then rediscover and reunite with the feminine, with the mystery of life, of nature, of soul. And that reunion can now occur on a new and profoundly different level from that of the primordial unconscious unity, for the long evolution of human consciousness has prepared it to be capable at last of embracing the ground and matrix of its own being freely and consciously. The telos, the inner direction and goal, of the Western mind has been to reconnect with the cosmos in a mature participation mystique, to surrender itself freely and consciously in the embrace of a larger unity that preserves human autonomy while also transcending human alienation.
-Richard Tarnas
Thanks to Jeff, Will, Allison, Synne and Mona for their help with this piece.
Here’s my longform article for Epsilon Theory explaining why, using The Matrix as an example.
I especially recommend from “Bringing it all back home.”
Here’s a remarkable recent lecture that explains the idea in more detail.
Check out my Accelerating Wisdom Series for 11 tools and practices.
Spirit Tech 3.0: Can We Meet the Moment? “To briefly summarize where we are in the narrative: Spirit Tech 1.0 sparked curiosity and laid the foundation for integrating modern tech with ancient spiritual practices. Spirit Tech 2.0 focused on access and scale, bringing these practices to the mainstream. Spirit Tech 3.0 will be about precision and personalization, using real-time interoception to guide people into deeper transformation at scale.”
Can Vibration Cure Anxiety and Mental Illness? (Dr. Dave Rabin, Apollo Neuro). These comments from Rabin were especially relevant: “it became very clear that safety was the core theme and that MDMA from the animal trials and from the human work was showing that MDMA therapy works by amplifying safety cascades in the emotional brain that helped to reduce the fear response and help people feel safe enough to effectively remake meaning around past traumatic events and remake meaning about yourself and remake meaning about the world. And so that was really interesting to me. And this word safety just kept coming up. And so I mapped out, went back to the lab, mapped out the entire neural pathway of safety in the body, how safety is induced by soothing touch, soothing music yoga, mindfulness, meditation, deep breathing, all the natural techniques, and then compared it to MDMA and lo and behold, they're basically targeting the same systems. And so I thought, well, what if we could use technology to send the right signal to the body that just reminded us that we're safe and present and comfortable in our bodies? Would that do it? Would that get us to the point of just feeling some of that safety that MDMA gives us that's potently healing and therapeutic for people.”
I recommend
‘s new short story, inspired by my own trip to Portugal, that raises these concerns in a way that’s probably more true than we’d like.One of my favourite podcasts of the year so far: On Powers, Great and Small
Appropriately, he discussed this in greater detail in his piece The Architecture of Safety. This powerful passage illustrates the central importance of pursuing the exploration of mystical worldviews:
“The materialist worldview creates existential anxiety—a bone-deep sense that existence itself is fundamentally unsafe. The sacred cosmology leads to a felt sense that we belong here, that reality can be trusted.
The relationship between these two dimensions of safety reveals something crucial: when our nervous system carries traumatic patterns, entertaining a sacred cosmology can feel threatening because it highlights the gap between our lived experience and the view of cosmic welcome. Yet this same dynamic makes sacred cosmology a powerful healing tool. Within a materialist framework, our defensiveness makes perfect sense—of course we should be skeptical and guarded. But when we consciously adopt a sacred worldview, our defensiveness creates friction with the reality we've embraced, and this tension naturally draws us into intimate contact with whatever wounded material lives in that gap.”
I enjoyed this article from
on field intelligence in therapy: “We can seek to understanding biological mechanisms, attachment patterns, and trauma responses, while also recognizing that the therapeutic relationship creates a conscious Field that transcends the sum of its parts.”I really enjoyed this line from
’s article “It's like a caterpillar holding onto a vision of being a bigger, jacked caterpillar with cool hair and a six pack. He, uh, he was never gonna be that.” When I went back to copy it I noticed the article’s title was: “Destabilization & the Frequency of Values.” Ha.
Have you listened to The Emerald podcast "For the Divine Mother of the Universe" yet? Joshua is brilliant at mixing sound and story in a way that really evokes the divine feminine/anima mundi... https://www.themythicbody.com/podcast/for-divine-mother-of-universe-remixed-reissued/
Goddesses also play an important role in both Hindu and Buddhist tantra, something I've written a bit about on my stack and hope to more in the future. In fact, I'll be attending a Red Tara empowerment next week, so this one is good timing for me.
in mother nature, father future.
for father future, mother nature.