As global wealth hoarders meet to shape our future and wave around symbols of opulence in Davos, the race is on to fold every single aspect of human life into the data-driven economy. Having squeezed every last drop of “value” from the Earth, and with no more lands to settle or markets to discover, capitalism is looking for a lifeline by creating a virtual copy of itself, where intellectual property supplants physical property and human biological and behavioural processes are recast as a grotesque form of human labour.
Efforts are now underway to “translate” the real world into a digital counterfeit that can provide financial markets with the figures and statistics it needs to execute the contracts of human capital markets – an insidious new form of capital assembled from our human behaviours, relationships, genetic code and other kinds of data that will form the basis of a financialised wonderland, enforced by blockchain technology, and constantly monitored, updated, and nudged through the burgeoning global biosecurity state.
This new face of capitalism intends to function under what is referred to as the “Impact Economy” — an idea that arose out of the ashes of the controlled demolition of the global financial system in 2008, which paved the way for hedge funds to replace banks as the dominant force in the world of global finance. That world is currently ruled by The Blackstone Group Inc. (not to be confused with BlackRock which started as part of Blackstone) which controls a mind-boggling half a trillion dollars under asset management, not to mention having the distinction of being the world’s biggest landlord and, ominously, the owner of the largest private DNA database on the planet.
“In the panopticon, you might be under constant observation, except you can never be sure whether someone is watching or not, so you wind up following the rules anyway.”
― Robyn Schneider
Escaping the Panopticon
Yes indeed, led by the world’s most powerful hedge funds and transnational corporations, the Great Reset amounts to little more than a campaign to turn humanity into ones and zeros. Datasets that can be used to create more profit for predatory FinTech and their clients. The global elite parasites aim to eventually turn the masses into social machines; literally, machines that can be monitored, managed and adjusted to conform to the expectations of the market or be discarded if we refuse to play the game. They want our relationships to be mediated through technology so they can maintain power over the masses. To be an offline human connecting with other offline humans risks toppling nefarious plans they have so carefully laid. To disconnect today is a radical act. For now, the so-called global elite doesn’t quite have enough to make it happen which means we still have the power to make sure they do not.
The predator class anticipates a future where stable careers that pay a living wage will become increasingly scarce. Automation and virtual agents will creep further and further into service sector jobs like teaching, medical treatment, therapy, and aged care. In this future, human-robot cooperation is set to be normalised in manufacturing settings. As digital economic systems take hold through the widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain smart contracts, global supply chains will continue to evolve. Corporate interests will be operating from a globalist perspective. The real world and virtual worlds will meld in ways that disrupt current conceptions of human capital and supply chain management.
“The mind that is open for questions is open for dissent. In the totalitarian regime the doubting, inquisitive, and imaginative mind has to be suppressed. The totalitarian slave is only allowed to memorise, to salivate when the bell rings.”
― Joost A.M. Meerloo
Guilty of Thought Crimes
A malleable workforce with the proper mindset will best serve the interests of the elite. That is why we are seeing a growing emphasis on capturing data on students’ non-cognitive skills. People must be acclimated to the premise of “lifelong learning” in which they will be constantly reskilled to effectively interface with cutting-edge automated systems. Having a population of independent thinkers will not benefit those at the top of the economic pyramid. In fact, independent thinking of the type encouraged by self-selected reading over algorithmic online education modules may even be perceived as a threat. There will only be a small group at the top who will have access to humane instruction, but the masses must be conditioned towards dutiful acceptance of their fate. Of course, they will be placated with digital entertainment and monitored through the deployment of ubiquitous surveillance being incorporated into “smart” city designs.
“To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing”
― Raymond Williams
The Old Crumbling Paradigm
Most organisations view power as the perception of “control” over future outcomes. It is central to the old industrial paradigm that, by exercising command and control, outcomes can similarly be predicted. However, this correlation is not a reflection of real life. As with any abstract simplification to a limited set of variables, the true complexity of human nature – how we connect, collaborate, and communicate – has successfully defeated the best-laid plans and projections of management teams for decades. The old top-down, command and control paradigm is crumbling because those organisations are fear-based and comprised of silos. They are not capable of receiving, processing, sensing, and responding to incoming needs and demands fast enough to meet today’s accelerating rate of market and global change. It is through decentralised and distributed authority that the organisation as a living system can react to emergent changes and threats in real-time. This is why we are witnessing system-wide breakdown.
After years of flavour-of-the-week programs, development agendas, transformation initiatives, and course changes (each comprised of tools, platforms, methodologies, theories, principles, practices, training, and all the meetings that go along with these) most employees are numb to the endless parade of change and salvation offerings imposed top-down by C-Suite-inspired decision-making. This is also reflected in our society as similar sentiments bubble up into the highest ranks of our poorly governed countries. The result is a tremendous amount of skepticism, distrust, and materially diminished engagement and enthusiasm in the population. Rehabilitation of individual agency, empowerment, enthusiasm, and authority to step up, step in, and contribute; on a self-motivated and vested generative basis requires full commitment. The jig is up. Once you see the system of domination, and how it has been so assiduously woven into all levels of business and government, you cannot unsee it.
Consider what it would mean to live in a future where education, work, government and social behaviour are subject to nano-technological programming hidden in a Metaverse. We are already a planet of amnesia. The energetic “current” running through blockchain digital currency is meant to make us all forget who we are… forever. The predator energy needs for us to willingly give consent to become part of their engineered, man-made network. It must be our choice to give up our birthright, our place in the divine web of creation that has existed for all eternity. Crypto is the cheese for their mousetrap. Once we understand the game is about domination through mental programming and economic control, humanity will rise out of the ashes like a phoenix.
“Don’t give in to your fears. If you do, you won’t be able to talk to your heart.”
― Paulo Coelho
Up in Flames
Phoenix Leadership is for those who do not accept a dystopian future of perpetual serfdom. We need people who are serious about regenerative change, those who recognise that outer transformations grow from inner transformations, and who understand that adopting techniques without understanding their scientific and philosophical foundations is a trap. To deal with symptoms without adequately addressing root causes is very much part of today’s flawed logic. We know we cannot solve today’s challenges with the same consciousness that created them. Yet, to actually shift our consciousness requires a radical undertaking. This radical undertaking is not easy, and one many may wish to turn away from. However, it is a simple one. It is nothing more, nor nothing less than us becoming more attentive, more aware of how we are being.
Evolving our perceptions is key right now, as well as looking at what we can do differently or better in our communications and connections of all kinds. This deepening – or raising – of our consciousness may be uncomfortable and unnerving because it brings light to our habits, outdated beliefs and the masks we hide behind. However, is also a liberating and rejuvenating undertaking. Conscious leaders allow our ordinary everyday activities to become doorways into a sense of the innate sacredness of life and its enchanting wisdom. This elevation in consciousness responds to our present crises by recognising that without including a spiritual/sacred dimension to our response, we run the grave risk of becoming trapped in their game of merging man with machine. Consumerism is merely a by-product, a symptom way downstream from a soulless materialistic worldview that undermines our deeper sense of place and purpose within the world. So, we find ourselves caught up in economic activities and ego drives that are largely cut adrift from any deeper meaning. Here we are lost, rudderless, tossed this way and that by our whims, cut adrift from our true authentic nature and the wisdom of life.
“To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest centre of human existence… You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.”
― N. Scott Momaday
10 Practices to Reawaken the Sacred
There are 10 simple yet profound practices Phoenix Leaders do to bring the sacred back into our daily lives. Only from the foundation of this right relationship can we attempt to bring the world back into balance, out of the Oligarch’s clutches, and to heal what our present culture has destroyed and desecrated. As above, so below. As within, so without. Phoenix Leaders begin to change the world by radically transforming our everyday worldview through small steps of love, grace and wisdom. In this way, we also attend to the downstream effects of our prevalent crises. Even during dark times, these practices centre us in a sense of the sacred.
10. Walking
Conscious leaders treat each step as a walking meditation, an opportunity to listen in to our bodily sensations, to our stillness or impatience, to our receptivity or reactivity. By deepening our receptivity with each step, we return to the sacredness of life. Preferably with shoes off, each foot can touch the ground with conscious awareness and loving intent. Whether we are walking along a city street or next to a babbling brook, we can still feel our feet touching the ground, the rhythm as we walk, our arms swinging, our breath in and out, the birds singing, the sky above, and the Earth below – our relationship with what is around us and the sensations inside of us. This sensing into our walking allows us to become more conscious, more alive with each step. Simply walking without expectation, with attentiveness; an attitude of openness and gratitude as we let go into the ground, each step becomes a reconnection.
9. Breathing
Conscious leaders know that breath is life and that breathing is a primal rhythm. How we breathe is a reflection of how we live. Are we breathing deeply, consciously, with full awareness? Or are we breathing shallow, barely aware of our breath due to the busyness we are caught up in? Each breath carried out consciously can be like an internal massage for our inner organs, rejuvenating and replenishing every cell in our bodies. Breathing is a love affair between spirit and matter, a continual tantric dialogue, a dance of inner and outer. Without due attention to our breath, we lose the conscious connection between our inner soul and the wisdom of Nature. When we deepen the awareness of our breathing we allow the conscious flow of life force through our bodies, and we enliven ourselves and our surroundings.
8. Gardening
Conscious Leaders understand the value and healing balance just being outside in nature brings and gardening is one of the quickest and easiest ways to ground our energy. It reminds us of the interrelational nature of life: the fungi and flowers, bees and berries, microbes and minerals. Gardening is a co-creative relationship with all the elements. It helps us gain first-hand experience of the natural spirals of the great web of life – the rich tapestry we are a woven thread within. As well as being incredibly rewarding, gardening helps us to become more conscious of life. Each and everyday experience can be an act of gardening, of cultivating the sacred within the inner-outer gardens of our lives. Gardening is a conversation, a dialogue, where Conscious Leaders can become receptive to what is going on at our fingertips, and also of our own inner dialogue, frustrations, constrictions, sensations, and projections.
7. Seed Stories
When you hold a seed in your hand, you can be touched by the wonder that something so small tells the story of the soil and the sprout. That tiny seed contains the flower and the fruit. By becoming more receptive, slowing down, listening in, and attuning to what is emerging within and all around us, we can sense the deeper mystery and sacredness of the seeds and stories unfolding in life. Unfolding evolution contains myriad stories, each of us tells our own unfurling story. The seed needs the soil to grow. It is patiently waiting for the right conditions to break open and become more of who it is destined to be. Likewise, our own human evolution needs the stories of creation lived through us, and the right conditions nourished by our attentiveness to life.
6. Cooking With Love
Cooking with awareness, cooking with attentiveness, cooking with the intention to nourish self and others. Cooking with love is a meditation that brings outer and inner purity. This cooking with attentiveness helps bring our heart into the activity, our being into our doing, head-heart-hands, and the food responds. Love is alive. It is so much more than just the feeling we call love; it is the animating force of life…the very nature of love is to move and flow. The more it flows, the more it serves. It grows as it is given. Cooking with love is natural, because through cooking we give. Cooking and serving food is one of the most ancient and basic human gifts, and through our loving attention we can create more ways for love to flow. Through this loving attentiveness, we can reorientate our approach to each daily activity, from one of efficient mechanistic outer ‘doing’ to effective inner-outer being-and-doing. We welcome in the sacred through our daily errands.
5. Cleaning
The art of cleaning has been demoted to a chore, something to be mechanised or outsourced away. However, there is so much power in cleaning your own space with loving attentiveness. It deepens your relationship with your surroundings, your life and home, your neighbourhood and our Earth. Cleaning is healthy. When animals do it, it means they are content. When they don’t do it means they are unwell, or mentally ill. It is healthy to regularly clean both inside and out, to clean away the thought forms and psychic debris that has accumulated within ourselves and our physical space. In a clean space, the inner and outer worlds come together and relate to each other more directly. We are free to love and care for our surroundings, which hold that love and reflect it back to us. We more easily step into the living whole that nourishes us in so many ways.
4. Simplicity
When we are honest with ourselves, we might see how cluttered our lives have become with possessions, desires, activities, agendas, demands, attachments, perspectives, view-points, personas, and even masks. The result is that we undermine the connection with our inner source of being, and seek even more outer attachments to paste over this inner sense of loss. A vicious cycle begins. Enter the contagion of consumerism, the epidemic of mental illness, the rise of eating disorders, and attention deficit disorders – all arising from a lack of stillness, attentiveness, and love. To honour the simple things is to bring more space for the grace of life – whether it be cleaning our teeth in the morning with loving attentiveness, or eating our breakfast with appreciation, drinking our coffee mindfully, or saying a heartfelt hello to someone in the street. In moments of grace we create with our attentiveness, we let the light in, we welcome in life-force, and we help the evolutionary potential of life to unfurl through us.
3. Meditation
Meditation or prayer is a communion of the inner and outer and the Earth’s rhythms and resonances. Meditation is fundamental to our connection with and participation in life. It does not have to be a formalised religious undertaking; it can be listening, watching, and becoming receptive to life with our whole being: holistic awareness. In this way, we can attune with the sacred through walking, conversing, sitting in nature, meditating, cleaning, cooking, or working. Meditation is a quality of heartfelt attention, a practice of turning inward and intentionally cleaning our inner space, letting go of grasping thoughts and tense feelings, if only for a few moments, so that a living graciousness can flow through. We open the door to the infinite while easing our dis-ease. As our cacophony quietens we commune with the creative source of life.
2. Death
You cannot fully say ‘yes’ to life unless you also say ‘yes’ to dying. Conscious leaders explore the season of winter and how its decay, breakdown and death are vital for spring’s breakthrough and rebirth. To make space for new innovation and growth, we need to allow things to die. Life without death is gridlock. Life is the embracement of cycling rhythms of death and rebirth. Just as the seasons cycle all the time, ‘the soul too has its seasons.’ Phoenix Leaders, by their very nature, are free to change and transform themselves. We are not afraid of death and mystery. We feel the enormity of what is taking place in the world today – the joy and the pain – in order to access the power and grace that are guiding this collective death and our rebirth.
1. Sacred Purpose
Life is sacred. Our unfolding story is sacred. We each play our sacred part in this story, whether consciously and attuned or sometimes unconscious and distracted. To sense this sacredness is not a quality we need to learn, it is fundamental to who we are. We simply need to make space to sense this sacredness within us, to bring our awareness into our hearts, out of our busy heads. Then, we move ourselves from the surface of things into the real substance so we can sense the depth of meaning in our lives. Meaning is what calls from the depths of the soul. It is the song that sings us into life. To have a meaningful life depends upon whether we can hear this song, the primal music of the sacred.
“Not everything set on fire will rise.”
― Darnell Lamont Walker
Wings of a Phoenix
Today, amid our busyness, we all too often drown out this song of the sacred without being conscious of what we are doing. Our culture encourages this drowning of the soul. In this way, we become easy targets for the parasite’s data capitalism control grid. Collectively we have become cut adrift from any deep sense of meaning. The economy survives by stimulating consumer spending and household debt. What is the purpose of today’s economy? To serve our evolutionary potential? At the moment the economy lacks any deep meaning, and it winds up undermining not just our humanity, but the very fabric of life on Earth. Remembering the sacred is foundational to our present and future. The meaning is in the moment, and our deeper truer dharma shines through in the synchronicities and subtly lit signs. It is this sacred ground that is calling to us, that needs our living presence, our attentiveness.
This reawakening of the sacred in everyday life is a reconnecting with our own soul, and with the World Soul of Nature. It is a primary act, the radical act, of revolutionising our worldview – sacred activism from the heart. Choose to become the Conscious Leader of your own life and explore the natural world, learn, make friends, and don’t give up. Conscious leaders are here to elevate humanity beyond the predator class madness by listening to our intuition and demonstrating the changes we wish to see in the world. If needed we will walk through the zombie apocalypse, knowing that the Valley of Love is just beyond. Choose to live your life so that you will be an ancestor worth claiming. In a time of profanity, choose to channel the sacred. Together we rise!
“Hear me, X-Men! No longer am I the woman you knew! I am Fire and Life incarnate!
Now and forever – I am PHOENIX!”
― Chris Claremont