Obsession, Prophecy and Authenticity

The universal story behind the most profitable movie of all time

This summer’s horror movie, Obsession, is already the most profitable film of all time. Made on a minuscule $750,000 budget, it has currently grossed nearly half a billion dollars.

As you will know by now, I am fascinated by which stories grip global attention, and why.

[Slight Spoilers]

Obsession is a simple-yet-horrifying “be careful what you wish for” myth. The protagonist is the lonely and love-lorn Bear. He wishes for his childhood crush Nikki to reciprocate his love. He gets what he wishes for, but the result is a bloody trap of his own manifestation. The main reason Bear ends up in this predicament is that he’s too afraid to tell Nikki the truth about his feelings for her.

One of the topics that has been incredibly alive in all of my conversations over the last few years is authenticity. This theme has accelerated meaningfully in recent weeks.¹ Hundreds of people that I speak to are stuck at their desks doing something that they know is ultimately pointless, but do so out of a fear of presenting their own authenticity to the world. As a result, they keep manifesting lives devoid of the one thing that matters most: genuine love. They are ultimately afraid that, if they admit this to themselves or other people, the false safety around them could evaporate. Moreover, many people don’t know what their true gifts are yet, or they suspect that if they offer them to the world, they’ll have nothing like the same kind of financial value and safety. Like Bear, they are terrified that if they reveal their authentic self to the world, they will be rejected.

I’ve recently been exploring a simple theory, and it goes something like this. The later stages of personal evolution, that we typically reach in midlife, are defined by greater energetic sensitivity. Our subtle senses and intuition become much more important in navigating the world. We get better at allocating our energy and attention to the places that matter. This is wisdom. Greater sensitivity requires a more robustly functioning “energetic grid” in our bodies. Some parts of us can get shut down due to trauma. As we reach the points in life where we need to reopen them, we confront these failed or outdated coping mechanisms. This can create crises as we are forced to face old psychological and physical blockages.

A perspective I’ve read is that dreams are one way we try and release these old patterns and traumas. Seemingly as a result of learning this, my dreams have been going absolutely bonkers. In only the last couple of months, I’ve now had the same dream nine different times (something that has never happened to me before). Every single time find myself sitting in my old equity sales job on a trading floor with a client list to call in front of me. I have a deep knowing that it’s all just a waste of time. I’m afraid to admit to anyone that it’s pointless because I’m scared about losing my job. In real life, I was so stuck I retreated back to the same increasingly stale role three times. I felt intrinsically worthless outside of my professional identity. My fear of revealing my emerging passions meant I remained in a dying relationship.

I’ve obviously been wondering a lot about what this dream might be about. Having recently been told that the fascia and muscle structure around my lower back and my kidneys is frozen, I can’t help but make a link. The kidneys are the source of both fear and intuitive knowing. One theory I have is I might be trying to release an old pattern in my body that no longer serves me. But I also have another interpretation; it’s a symbolic message relating to a fear I still have: it may be unsafe to speak what is intuitively known to me. At the end of a transcendent bodywork session recently, I had a clear sentence appear in my mind:

“Will I be safe if I tell the truth?”

This is a historically valid fear for me to have! When I was on Wall Street back in 2015, I started to become interested in broader themes like AI, exponential tech, and even consciousness. I simply couldn’t stop myself from talking and writing about it to my clients and within the firm. Eventually, management realized I had no interest in the mundane specifics of my job anymore and laid me off. It was devastating at the time. And once again, recently, I realized that the meaningful, but “fringe,” topics like reincarnation, psychedelics, and Earth School were inappropriate for the wealth manager where I worked, and I had to strike out and found The Leading Edge. My commitment to following, and sharing, my curiosity has repeatedly blown up stable home and work environments, which created significant disruption, but it also led me eventually to glorious new, more expansive vistas. Essentially I was following my curiosity, my intuition. But in ways that were consistently scary to me because they led me down unknown paths. The person that I was becoming was no longer appropriate to the life that I had created.

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Why We Don’t Talk About Bruno

My daughter recently performed a song from Disney’s Encanto at her pre-K concert. As a result, my entire family has been singing songs from the movie for the last few weeks. Given the way I feel reality sometimes communicates with me (music and movies), I’m certainly paying attention. Encanto is a fairly transparent allegory for Internal Family Systems. It’s about a family that lives in a magical house. Each of them has specific paranormal gifts. The family’s magic is dying, and their enchanted home starts cracking. The heroine Mirabel’s quest leads her to uncover buried family secrets, especially around her missing and judged uncle Bruno. She eventually finds him hidden behind the walls of the house. It emerges that Bruno is actually precognitive. And yet he gets blamed for causing the events he forecasts. It’s not safe for Bruno to talk about what he sees coming. It’s not safe for him to tell the truth. As a result, he gets repressed. “We don’t talk about Bruno” is deservedly the movie’s most famous song. Bruno’s reintegration into the house leads to it being destroyed, but then subsequently rebuilt in a state of greater harmony.

This allegory makes me wonder if we hide these overwhelming intuitive parts of ourselves in the walls of our own house; the parts of our body that get shut down energetically and then reopened later in life. The truth can only be buried so long, until the tension starts pulling our house apart.

This process can often reawaken a deeper sense of unconscious knowing, and it might be telling us things we don’t always want to hear. Things we have hidden in the fog. The latin origin of the word fate is “that which has already been spoken.” Bruno doesn’t speak the truth into existence, it’s right there waiting to be uncovered. And, as Joseph Campbell said “we must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.”

What’s most interesting at this present moment in time is that many of the gifts I see emerging among the “normal” professionals around me are also unconventional and emergent, even paranormal. There’s always something a little bit scary about intuitive gifts, even when they are your own. In many cases it’s why we shut them down when we are younger. They are stigmatized and dismissed by society and threatening to our controlling but limited left brains. They often cannot be successfully contained within the rigid confines of our traditional jobs and relationships.

For many of us, I believe this is actually the central lesson in the hidden curriculum for Earth School. It isn’t a mistake that so many Western professionals find themselves in these situations. Late stage capitalism is an amazing classroom! According to many mystical traditions, the purpose of our incarnation is to learn about the power we have to manifest with our thoughts and words. And yet our fear of rejection and sense of disconnection and worthlessness leads us to manifest these lives without love. At this point in our evolution, we mostly use money as a proxy for self-worth, but it also quickly becomes a prison. In contrast, as you reveal more of your authentic self, and create from that place, reality gives you more of what you actually need. I regularly repeat the quote “love is mutually accelerating disclosure.” As we open up to the world and face our blocks, our gifts also manifest more fully and more obviously to us. In my experience, the world also responds to these gifts and makes it abundantly clear that we are held if we are willing to make the first move.

As I like to say, I believe your present suffering is directly proportional to your future potential. And why would that potential manifest in the absence of an equivalent challenge? The greater the fear, the greater the gifts. And sadly, often the greater the disruption and suffering required to get to them.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been exploring this topic, a close friend sent me a rehearsal video for the song This Is Me from the musical The Greatest Showman. It gave me goosebumps from head to toe. I’m not much of a crier in general, but the first time I saw it, I had to lean against a wall on the streets of Manhattan and lower my sunglasses so nobody could see my teary eys. I recommend you give it a watch.

I am not a stranger to the dark
"Hide away, " they say
"'Cause we don't want your broken parts"
I've learned to be ashamed of all my scars
"Run away, " they say
"No one'll love you as you are"

But I won't let them break me down to dust
I know that there's a place for us
For we are glorious

-This is Me

1. I’ve recently enjoyed Founder Lost and Self Found by Bob Gilbreath, My Disclosure Day by Ben Katt where he reveals the reawakening of a dormant consciousness capacity in himself; the surprising ability to speak “light language.” Jeff Williams The Hour Is Later Than You Think: “The whole point of Earth School is learning how to become the fullest possible expression of a human being.” Synne ☀️ at the Fusion Note revealed her identity alongside a poem that illustrates her amazing gift at finding neglected rabbit holes.