The Reason You Can’t Stop Feeling Like Something’s Wrong
When a caterpillar spins its cocoon of transformation, it begins a process that is a supreme metaphor of our times.
It has to spin a cocoon, a tight boundary and threshold between it and the world. It must go into a state of death. Death to everything it was, including its identity.
The biology of the caterpillar breaks down entirely into an undifferentiated goo. Meaning, simply, that each cell of the goo is the same, similar to our origins, where we start with undifferentiated cells that then, magically, transform to become heart cells, or lung cells, or neurons.
After a time, we get differentiation, and a few imaginal cells begin to show up.
They are seen as a threat by the undifferentiated goo, and the goo gobles them up.
But they persist.
Life persists.
The weeds will find a way to occupy the cracks.
Eventually, some unknown threshold is crossed, and there are enough imaginal cells to tip the scales, and they become safe in the goo, which rapidly also transforms into imaginal cells.
The imaginal cells become the elements of the butterfly.
No amount of examination of the caterpillar can predict a butterfly. We can only know by bearing witness.
I want you to imagine you are a caterpillar. All you know is catepilar. Your caterpillar world is right.
One day, or over a few days, or years, something in your world is breaking, not making sense.
Who are you?
Why do you believe this or that?
What stories are yours from experience or from culture?
Why do you do what you do?
At first, you might ignore these questions and urges.
But eventually, they cannot be ignored. So you build a cocoon, a barrier from the world, a place to go inward.
And then the disintegration, the fracturing of all that you thought real.
Every single part of you, your identity, goes to goo.
For humans, this process of breakdown challenges every part of us. Depression. Confusion. Rage.
Yet out of this goo arises a different you. But it is too hard to confront, to face. So you knock it back.
It persists. Until it is impossible to ignore.
Painfully, you become a butterfly.
Now imagine that the world is the caterpillar.
And that it is in the goo stage right now. Being broken down so thoroughly. Through the pain of stunning inequality, no recourse to justice for anyone except those who get away with anything, being led by liars and rapists who profit obscenely from their power, told to climb a ladder only to find the ladder is rigged.
It feels hopeless.
You are smart and well-read. The hopelessness becomes unbearable. You feel like you are trapped in the goo.
So you raise your head, using violence or the intent for violence. You assassinate the CEO of some big pharmaceutical company, knowing that this CEO and company have profited off killing people, crippling people. Or you storm an event, with guns and knives, aiming to bring down the administration.
Not because you are crazy, or drenched in conspiracy.
No. Not that. You simply cannot stand it any more.
In 1976, the movie Network, starring Peter Finch, had this unforgettable scene.
The issues were different, but the sense is the same.
In times past, assassination attempts by humans on presidents or CEO’s was the domain of those captured by conspiracy theories.
We are seeing the rise of attempts by people who are surprisingly normal. They are just mad as hell and do not want to take it any more.
I am not saying this is the right path to take. It is not.
However, in witnessing this, you see the rise of a pattern of metamorphosis.
It is a tale as old as time. Suppress, oppress, kill, torture, enslave. You can only get away with doing this to people for so long.
Eventually, there will be an uprising.
The imaginal cells of Cole and Luigi are gobbled up by the goo.
There will be others. Until a threshold is crossed.
In Network, we are invited to open our windows and scream into the night. I am mad as hell, and I am not going to take it anymore.
I invite you to take your rage, which at the least means you have not slipped into the stupor of hopelessness, and act. Non-violently. Through protest. Art. Music. Writing. Speaking.
The more of us doing this, the sooner the number of imaginal cells will cross that threshold where there is no going back.
There is a possible future for humanity, a butterfly future.
If you are in your breakdown into goo stage, please take heart. There is a next; the story is only half written.
The world, in its breakdown, needs us, the imaginal cells, to rise in unison.
Only together can we become a collective butterfly.
