Is Nothing Actually Real?

Did "Lockdowns" Kill the World?

My mom said, Just tell them the truth. Tell them why you have been afraid to write.

I still need to tell you why I have been so frozen.

Yes, this is another “things I am afraid to write” essay.

To be a writer — to yield to that almost physical urging forward in speech and in time, to engage with that urge to express — you need to see humanity as being always in the process of creating a coherent civilization, to which you are adding your small piece of consciousness or critique, or even of hope.

You also need to see reality as being unitary.

In other words, in order to speak new ideas into being to a community of human readers, a writer needs to believe that we all, in spite of our differences and subjectivities, inhabit, in some essential way, a shared dimension of reality.

You also have to believe that reality is, well, real.

I’ve been feeling as if — I’ll just say it — as if reality is no longer that real.

So it is hard to write about anything else, without first somehow tackling this huge hermeneutical sh—storm. Even if only to ask questions about it.

I feel….increasingly….like the color palette of the earth, has shifted.

It makes me so sad that some days I hardly wish to do anything but mourn this fact, and exhaust my loved ones’ patience by endlessly pointing it out to them.

If you follow me on social media, you know that I am often posting images of the sky. There is a real thing that is being done to our skies — a set of technologies about which I have been reporting since 2017. Geoengineering is omnipresent; I can batter you into the ground with the onerous facts I have accumulated about this often-mocked reality.

Harvard, among other universities, funds it: the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Program, for just one example. Harvard also has a research investment group, the Keutsch Group, which funds the evil Dr David Keith’s program called ScopEx, or the “Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment.” (This project has been used to spray sulphur dioxide over Arizona from a Native American reservation. The venue was important as it allowed the scientists to circumvent laws against this in the United States.) The Carnegie Foundation also heavily funds geoengineering technologies, and exerts pressure for global governance (meaning, legalization): The Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative pushed for both Solar Radiation Modification and “Stratospheric Aerosol Injection.” The Foundation’s website is full of cartoon graphics showing how their efforts to spray pollutants and toxins in our skies, will save a sad planet, and make it happy.

Intellectual Ventures, the prestigious IP firm, holds patents: “Even commercial companies are starting to develop technologies for climate control. One such company, Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, Washington, has filed for several patents for climate-altering technologies, among them a proposal known as StratoShield that would involve using a long hose suspended from balloons to waft sulphates into the atmosphere.”

Geoengineering takes many forms — from the practice of “cloudseeding” all over the West, which shoots silver iodide into clouds and drenches the landscape with this chemical that make fires burn hotter; to the “solar radiation management” activity mentioned above, which sprays sulphur dioxide, a pollutant, into the atmosphere from drones, planes or balloons. There is also “marine cloud brightening” technology, which pumps salts into the atmosphere via the emissions of ships at sea. Britain, which is being driven quickly into the graveyard of empires, announced that geoengineering was now to take place in order to block sunlight; British people in some areas report months without sunlight.

So people now post images of their perverse and hideous skies all over the world. More and more people are waking up to the fact that the skies we knew a couple of decades ago, are gone; and gone too are bees, insects, and golden sun.

But this essay is not about geoengineering. It is about fakeness. It is exploring the various factors that may be contributing to this sense I have — and that many other people are starting to express — of unreality.

Geoengineering puts a giant intervention, a screen, of fakeness onto the most sacred, most profound, most holy connection we have to our planet — our connection to weather, which is God’s speech and theatre; and to what both the Old and New Testament called “the kingdom of the skies.”

So — could the murder of God’s weather and light be one factor in this draining of the realness-feeling of the world?

The world’s colors went from showcasing lush green foliage — so green the green was at times blue-green or lime-green — sapphire skies in daylight — shafts of sun like melting gold, and ruby-colored flowers, and clouds like frolicking living cotton or, if the day was overcast, like surging, moving steel — to the daily this.

The dimensions of the world flattened along with the colors.

Dry grey, flat skies, two-dimensional as a roll of black-and-white film. Or wet, sodden-looking, grey, flat skies. A greyish pall over city streets, or, in the country, over hills and rivers. Formerly vibrant colors now look like a filter is over them, a faint charcoal wash.

The golden round sun of the recent past, which embraced us with all of its exuberance, is gone. The sun today? It no longer really cares about us. Can you imagine being a primitive human, and worshipping that thing? You’d as soon worship the Down button on an elevator.

What is that light in the sky, anyway? It feels like a cathode tube or an LED feature: a silver-white sun, now, weirdly pentagonal at times, and often targeted now with blurring, crisscrossing plane emissions. A sun that sometimes warms us still but never really holds us, never heals us down to our bones, as it used to.

I am not saying the sun is unreal. Don’t take my words out of context, please.

I am saying that it feels less real.

And it’s not just that the colors got switched off, or dialed down.

The thing is, I remember our world. This all would not hurt so much if I did not remember our world.

I remember what things felt like, til about June of 2020.

It’s not just that colors were far more saturated then.

It’s also that everything then still smelled like itself.

Grass smelled grasslike. Earth smelled earthy. If you held a pencil near your face, you could smell the eraser, the lead, the wood; the varnish on the wood. The scent of a pencil itself was complex. If you entered an old wooden house, you smelled the age of the wood, the years of wetness in it; the dust, the mold. Stones smelled like stones. Steel smelled metallic. Copper had a smell — pennies smelled like pennies. Every human being had a unique scent, for better or worse, that encircled him or her and that signaled to your brain that this was another human. Wool smelled like wool. Fruits — my God. Breaking open an orange used to unleash a heaven of citrus.

Now — and maybe some of this is part of aging, but really, this all came on so fast, I don’t think that that alone can explain all of this — most things barely smell like anything. When you do hold up a bunch of lilacs to your face, it feels as if someone behind the scenes somewhere — managing the matrix? — is switching on some kind of functionality: “Now, emit the scent of lilac.” While life “Before” involved a rolling tapestry of scents unfolding throughout your day, and humans enfolded you in scent continually as you passed them or spoke with them, now, if you think about it, you might experience just four or five strong or signature smells in the course of a day. Coffee! Cinnamon! A pet! Chinese food! Husband! Bath salts! But beyond those minimal markers, the flow of scents that made up human life experience — is no more.

Another thing that feels changed is dimension. The world “before” felt so solid. There was a sense of eternality to eternal structures. Forests, temples, skyscrapers — they had mass, volume, weight.

In contrast, things now seem — two-dimensional. Filmic.

You remember when you were fourteen or fifteen, and the second or third time you got high on marijuana, you suddenly felt: I am behind my eyes, but in front of my eyes I am watching a movie!

Remember that feeling?

I feel it all the time now, and I don’t want to, and I don’t take drugs.

I feel myself now moving through this world as if the world itself, the physical, material, historical world, exists still; but at the same time, now it is also somehow hypothetical.

It’s hard to get passionate about the hypothetical world.

I still feel the spirits of those I love near me, moving through this dreamlike world, but it is their energy mostly that I feel, their souls, their love; not the reality of their mortal presence in a real physical world, so much, as I used to.

It is as if we are all already physically dead, while still connected emotionally in some kind of moderately engaging afterlife; as if the images and scenarios of our living prior stories are still playing out, like spools of a movie reel; as if someone forgot to cut the film of our lives, and roll it up and put it away.

This sense of unreality is so strong that Brian and I have actually wondered — we had this discussion in the back of an Uber — if we had all shifted into a slightly different dimension, in what has been described by physicists as the infinite potential layers of dimensions, but one in which everything is slightly “off”, which possibility is an actual hypothesis in physics. Our driver, who could barely speak English but who had studied physics in his home country, was so ready to participate in this discussion that he joined in.

Honestly, I confess I have also even wondered about CERN, the Franco-Swiss particle physics research facility, with its Large Hadron Collider, a 27 kilometer ring of magnets that smash particles, located 175 meters underground. CERN’s own stated mission is even more unnerving than are conspiracy theories about the facility; and the organization acknowledges that it is daily pursuing experiments with the very material from which reality is constituted. I can’t help noticing that one of CERN’s new primary missions is “diversity.” I am all for diversity, but maybe not in replacing meritocracy, when a team is handling the essential nature of reality. Is it possible that our world vanished, and was replaced with something grimmer, because someone made a spectacular mistake, or took an “experiment” in an unsustainable direction?

Seriously, what happened to our world? To reality? All questions must be on the table.

I feel as if the “lockdowns”, especially for that year and a half from about June of 2020 to the end of 2021, may have caused the extinction or the diminution of the previous world. Maybe it’s not a physical change. Maybe, rather, culture changed physics, and they are inter-related.

I wonder about this.

Were we driven inside for eighteen months for a reason that had nothing to do with a virus — but that may have had something to do with an intention to tamper with reality? Or even with the occult?

Were we “locked down” for eighteen months and isolated from one another because those with the globalized, synchronized idea of “lockdown”, which they communicated in messaging that was replicated uniformly all over the world, knew, from some source unavailable to the rest of us, that separating us, and killing off our community and our rituals — might actually alter or suspend or drain life in some ways from the physical, material world?

Did it take eighteen months — for our world to die?

Here’s what I mean: we were separated from one another and forbidden to pray together, to sing together and to dance together. And when we eventually emerged, the world had changed, and its force field had weakened.

We also got tuned into screens for hours and hours more every day. And when we emerged, we began to carry our little screens with us everywhere.

What if this separation from one another, this murder of dance, music, prayer and ritual, and the substitution of screens for one another, a change that is still with us —

is what has changed our world?

In other words — what if the world needs our consciousness and attention to survive? What if, as the physicists and mystics have been trying to tell us, consciousness is, and affects, reality?

What if we reinforce the solidity and reality and beauty of the physical world, via dance, prayer, music, and attention to one another? What if ancient communities knew that, and knew how important it is, and we have forgotten?

And what if, when those last chords of connection were between us all were broken, the world broke too?

Many cultures have the notion that human as well as divine activity is needed to reinforce the presence and sustenance of the material world.

Every religion prays for rain, for instance, and sees the heavens as responding to human prayers. Many cultures believe that divine creators and human must interact with the landscape ritualistically, in order to bring blessings, harmony and even materiality into being:

“[M]any Chinese people still believe in "dragon lines" and feng shui. The Incas used "spirit-lines" or ceques with the Inca temple of the sun in Cuzco as their hub, marking the routes with wak’as, stone monuments that represent something revered. For the Aboriginal people of Australia, songlines, also called "dreaming tracks", are paths across land and sky, which mark the routes followed by localised "creator beings". The paths are recorded in traditional songs, stories, dance and painting; by singing these songs in sequences, indigenous people can navigate the deserts of Australia's interior.” In Australia, aboriginal people believe that creators’ active dreaming, brings order out of the void.

Orthodox Jews also believe that the world is sustained anew every day via God’s active choice to think it into being again, and that human supplication plays a role in this sustaining of reality. When you wake up, you are supposed to pray, “Blessed are you, Oh Lord our God, who in your great mercy has returned my spirit to me.” God had a choice about this.

It’s not only marking the landscape ritualistically and worshipping in specific sacred locations that many cultures believe orders and reinforces the material world; it is also that certain kinds of music and dance play a role in sustaining the planet’s wellbeing. Almost every culture has a circle dance that has sacred qualities; in Native American cultures, this is called the “Round Dance”.

South Koreans have Gangangsullae, danced for a bountiful harvest:

The Dabke dance is common in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine:

Many cultures have dances that weaves humans into patterns of a collective, such as cowboy line dances, or Scottish reels. One could go on and on.

The point is, for eighteen months we were forbidden from dancing in these ways, or walking in these ways together, or praying in these ways together. Instead our attention was redirected into screens that substituted fake reality for lived reality.

What if all those changes — the suspension of human interaction and ritual, and the imposition of a device sucking up and coralling human attention toward fakeness — meant that reality itself was affected?

What if it takes attention — to the land, to one another, to God — to sustain the earth and its solidity and dimensionality?

What if destroying that attention, that ritual — was the point?

What if the rituals we were forbidden to engage for 18 months — the churches and synagogues we were forbidden to attend — the church bells we did not ring — really do something in harmonizing reality?

We could not dance. But, recall, the nurses danced. Millions of dollars or euros must have gone to coordinating and shooting those scores of “dancing nurses” spectacles. Why? Who invested in that elaborate phenomenon? Did anti-human group dance have a power that changed the world for the worse, especially while sacred dance and song were banned?

I recently found myself attending a women’s sacred circle at an event space on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I thought we might just meditate, or have a sound bath, enjoy some herbal tea — I was anticipating something familiar, benign and relaxing.

But I soon found that I was in the midst of a rigorous act of ritual derived from a tradition alien to mine.

The group was led by a Bulgarian teacher, who had trained in a mystical tradition founded in 1897 by Bulgarian theologian Peter Deunov. (This group still gathers annually in August in the Rila mountains, to bring “light and peace” to the world via their “Bulgarian tai chi” practice.) This teacher taught the group of New York women at the event space, “paneurhythmic” steps and movements, in a circle dance.

I found I could not keep up with the circle dance, due to an injury, and excused myself to sit outside the group. But the teacher insisted I rejoin the group, and said that since I could not dance with the group, I should lie down and, as she put it, they would heal me.

I did not want to cause a scene, so I lay with some apprehension parallel to the altar in the center of the room. (I had just finished reading Numbers 26, about the horrible things that happen when people worship at alien altars, so I was especially jumpy).

This altar had a lit flame; some yarn encircling it; some wishes and intentions written on scraps of paper; milk in a carafe; and other offerings that I do not recall.

It was not the right setting for me, to say the least. I was increasingly uneasy. I was lying on the floor surrounded by dancing strangers. It was a little scary. As I looked up at the group, I joked nervously, “Are you going to sacrifice me now?”

I wanted to dismiss what I was experiencing as silly or meaningless. But I couldn’t. I became extremely nervous and uncomfortable because something was definitely happening - to the air, to the room, to the relationships, to material reality.

I could feel, as the women danced in semidarkness in a circle, the intensity of the energy that concentrated itself in the center of the group, and built up around the altar.

I could feel the isolated individuals, who had not even spoken to one another, merge energies, and become one thing, one entity, one community.

But my point is that, even though this was an experience that unsettled and upset me, the circle dance, the altar, the movements, the offerings — clearly did something.

They did something real. Reality was moved, was changed. The circle dance did order energies and change things. It did not evoke energies with which I was comfortable, but the point is, it evoked energies. So did those anti-human dancing nurses also evoke energies?

Did the old world get destroyed because no one danced sacred dances, or gather to pray?

I have been to two places in which the old world still survives. One was Delhi, in India. I was overjoyed from the moment I got off the plane, in 2024; overjoyed every minute I was in that country — delirious with happiness in Agra, in Jaipur. The colors were as I remembered from the prior world; the light, the warmth of the sun, and even the smells were rich and intoxicating.

India is a country in which ritual, music and dance are part of everyone’s daily life. The country also did not “lock down” “successfully” for long, compared to other nations in the West that are now besieged with “the sense of unreality”; by June of 2020, many venues and institutions in India were open.

I also experienced the sense that the “old world” survived in, of all places, Houston, Texas. I went there recently for the Rodeo; a completely different setting, of course, than are the cities of India’s Golden Triangle; but the Old World had survived. The earth released its scents; the clouds released rain that smelled like rain; people laughed; couples of all ages did the two-step, and danced in line dances, in bars; crowds had human solidity and physical warmth; the vibrations of everything were solid and steady. The only guess I can make about all this is that people are still very religious in Houston, and very community-oriented, and that they ended “lockdowns” and all COVID restrictions before other states — Mar 2021; that they still pray and talk to each other and go to the rodeo - that is, join collectively together — and they still dance.

But truly all this is just a guess and a wonderment.

Brian and I talk about the hypotheticals of this sense of unreality that is so pervasive outside of those joyful islands. It is a pervasive enough feeling that both of us — and some of our friends — try to talk about it too.

Does the world host different dimensions, different layers of reality?

Has the “old world” been destroyed for much of the world, to survive in certain blessed locations? Is that too a function of consciousness?

Of course, we lack a specific language. But maybe physics has the answer. If consciousness is reality, then by tampering with human attention and connection, as the “lockdowners” systematically did, evil people who likely know more than we do about occult or metaphysical mysteries — you may actually damage reality.

Maybe — maybe — understanding all that — if there is indeed any truth to this hypothesis, which I can’t presume to know — means we can bring the old world back —

Dancing, praying, gathering; putting down our phones, and looking into one another’s eyes.

Maybe we can dance, pray, sing, and love, the old world back.