Midlife Mid-Polycrisis (Part 1)

The ClearPill alternative to panicking about apparently imminent doom.

Given the state of the world, I’m choosing to demand to be allowed a midlife crisis in every birthday text I receive today. 

It’s my 35th.

Of course, the objections of many of my well-wishers are predictable: “Midlife? It’s too soon!” 

To be honest, I think 70 is stretching it.

The average life expectancy in the United States has already begun to decline, and there’s plenty of sensational reasons it might get worse.

Surely the White Supremacists’ race war, the sequel to the civil war, or the already-in-progress world war will kill me before I get to 70. 

If not, surely insane and unprecedented climate disasters—like a tornado here in Silicon Valley, where I’ve always believed they were impossible—will finish me off. 

Maybe it will be another plague, this one antibiotic resistant, bred in the crucible of our factory farm system. 

Could be that technofascists decide one day that I’ve said one too many troubling things online over the years. 

Capitalism could collapse. AI could rise up. MIT robots could be upgraded to out-of-control murderbots.

Godlike transhumans could go on a supervillain rampage to destroy the species from which their new branch shot off. It happened to the Neanderthals. You ever think about that? They coexisted with Homo sapiens… albeit briefly.

Or my crisis could be personal. 

Maybe I won’t get the alcoholism under control and the strain on my liver, when amplified by my psych meds, will be too much. Maybe long covid will give me heart disease. A dozen years of pack-a-day smoking—though now behind me—could result in lung cancer. I could be done in by my love of steak.

Or perhaps my crisis could be something incredibly unexpected: our electromagnetic soul energy could be hunted down, farmed and harvested, or otherwise consumed by extraterrestrial plasma beings. 

More on that later. 

There’s a lot of ways to die.

Something I’ve been flirting with though, since discovering Paul Selig’s channeled transmissions from the Melchizedek, is that once you accept that you’re going to die, it stops mattering so much how it will happen.

For a lot of my life, I’ve been tantalized by the anti-aging prophecies of people like Aubrey DeGrey and Ray Kurzweil. I thought a cure for aging might be invented in my lifetime. 

Before Douglas Rushkoff had ever coined the term, I had developed my own Insulation Equation: a desire to earn enough money to be protected from the consequences of earning money the way I did.

I’m reformed though!

And wait, let’s back up. The reader may have noted I just casually mentioned that I’ve been taking a clairaudient medium seriously as if no one was going to be interested in challenging it.

The first time I heard Selig channel his Guides was on the Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast. I had just scrolled heedlessly through the archives and stopped on a random episode I’d never heard. This technique is practically a podcast version of divination and it nearly always produces interesting synchronicities between the content and whatever has been stewing in my hyperactive mind.

Listening to Paul Selig was no different. I heard something really strange happening. Something I couldn’t quite pin down or explain.

Selig’s style of transmission is to whisper the words that he hears from his Guides quietly, and then quickly repeat them again out loud. My dad called it a neat parlor trick. 

Maybe it is. I had the sense, though, that something interesting was happening, whether I believed that it was really a collection of beings without bodies speaking through this man or not.

I still haven’t fully decided whether to believe that Selig really channels these Guides or just has an incredible memory, a dexterous tongue, and a vast knowledge of perennial wisdom.

What’s most important to me, as a polygnostic believer in many things simultaneously, is that something about the Guides message simply, deeply resonates with me. Listening to the guides preach tolerance and civility toward our political opponents on that first DTFH episode, their voice was immediately appealing in the way a good substack is: they have the power to sharpen the ideas that I’ve arrived at intuitively.

Of course, they also often introduce some new ideas that harmonize with my intuitive worldview. 

In fact over time, even though I didn’t really see it happening, The Guides appear to have radicalized me. A stereotypical Silicon Valley atheist, I’m finding myself arguing the woo perspective more and more. Somehow I’ve taken one logical step after another into the superstitious, immature, frivolous and laughable belief that God exists. 

(At least as long as we agree to define God as the underlying consciousness that acts as the ontological primitive that projects all matter into reality in a theory of metaphysics that Daniel Pinchbeck often calls analytic idealism.)

Perhaps most impactfully, however, I’ve become the kind of New Age extremist who barely believes it matters how you die.

It’s a welcome message for someone approaching midlife mid-polycrisis

The Guides’ metanarrative is similar to the one expressed by the short story, The Egg by Andy Weir: we’ve all taken human incarnation in order to learn lessons that can only be grokked on a plane where there is just enough suffering and just enough bliss to provide the friction that propels us into the Dharma.

Some New Agers I’ve discovered, in my post-Selig, post-belief-in-the-Divine life, like to refer to Earth as a Soul School. 

A place where the “Universe can experience itself” as Alan Watts said. 

A place we incarnate into in order to have specific experiences that help our souls—those little nodes simultaneously in union with and springing off of The All—encounter the emotions, scenarios, and ideas that help us attain a level of wholeness. A reunion, in the sense of bringing things back together—with our divine Source that allows us the maturity to matriculate from the realm of mere matter into the bright expansive energy of pure being.

According to Selig’s Guides—or if you prefer, the neuroscientist, Eben Alexander’s first hand Near Death Experience—the experience of dying is actually painless. The Guides often say that any teaching of Hell, or even any teaching that promotes fear and shame, is a false teaching.

Looking forward to reuniting with The All in the liminal afterlife and experiencing its infinitely abundant unconditional love and acceptance, you can see why death might not be so scary. From the perspective that we’re here to learn Soul lessons and burn off karma, the perspective that everything is unfolding exactly how it must because it can unfold no other way, a greater peace with the polycrisis emerges naturally. Acknowledging that human incarnation is a sticky hallucinatory dream that we willingly submerged ourselves into, you can begin to understand why it doesn’t really matter how we die.

This is a step above redpilling. While taking the Morpheus’ Red Pill will give you insight into all the ways our reality is illusory, through framing it in the language of us being controlled and exploited, it gives “The Elites” too much power and promotes a false dichotomy between good and evil that doesn’t hold up when the myth of separation, the ever-popular victim mentality, and the myth of pure evil melt away. 

What Selig’s guides promote is the Clear Pill: everything may be illusory, but it’s all perfect exactly as it is. No matter how counterintuitive that may seem.

If everything is perfect, what is there to do with this last half of my life?

It may seem like the Clear Pill gears up believers into the sort of surrender that allows disasters, degradation, exploitation, and harm to continue without protest or intervention. 

That actually isn’t the case.

What comes from accepting that reality is already perfect is liberation from the emotional reactivity that would encourage me to project false narratives onto the world. These narratives, which are truly based in my own externalizing of sensations alive for me in the visceral internal realm of my emotions, tend to limit my efficacy to enact change simply because they’re inevitably inaccurate.

They’re often worse. They often lead to overreactions that create an entrenched pushback that emboldens the exact problem I’m attempting to solve.

As Ram Dass said in Be Here Now, “Hippies create police, police create hippies. If you're in polarity, you're creating polar opposites. You can only protest effectively when you love the person whose ideas you are protesting against as much as yourself.”

In reality, that clear-headedness enables a sort of “Yes-And-Ness”: a relationship with reality where we acknowledge, “Yes, this is the way things are, I can’t change the present moment” while also saying “AND, I’m going to do everything I can to change what is in my power to change.” 

It’s the serenity prayer in a word. A balancing of active agency and receptive surrender.

What actions are available to me as someone who has accepted that reality is already perfect, despite the horrors that I’m confronted with every time I browse the news? 

Actions that might make my eternal Soul tastier to an alien Plasma being.

Ok, yes, I promised I wouldn’t RedPill you. I’m here to provide the ClearPill alternative to Midlife Mid-Polycrisis. 

But still, next time, I have to share this juicy bit of horrifying woo that landed on my feed.

Stay tuned!