So my whole career, I’ve been dealing with people who are undergoing that. And it could be that something terrible happens—your house burns down, something wonderful happens—you win the lottery, something—you just grow too big for a relationship and need help getting to the next place. These are all times of personal metamorphosis, but there’s something happening nowadays. The pandemic is the first time in human history that all of us from around the world, the incredible international scope of this one little gathering, that wasn’t possible before a few decades ago. And during the pandemic, for the very first time, people were all coordinating their actions, not just in friendship groups or meeting circles or anything, but around the globe, all looking at the same thing. Not everyone was reacting the same way to the pandemic, but everyone was affected by it. And those of us who were sort of in the know, we realized there was a pandemic and we were thinking similar thoughts at similar times.

So this is kind of the ultimate catalytic event. That’s what I call an event that makes it impossible for us to maintain the same identity. We have to change who we are at a very fundamental level. And the pandemic happened, and that was a global catalytic event.

What I’m seeing now is that there will be more global events that do that, and it’s not necessarily, one hopes, going to be about pandemics. We are about to enter a phase of—well, phase—we are about to enter what I think will be a series of phase transitions. So a phase transition in physics, it’s a time when an element changes its state of matter. States of matter are like gas, liquid, solid, right? So, and I think plasma is the other one. But if you take… I’ll give you an example. Say you were born on a planet where the temperature never goes above like 20 degrees Fahrenheit. What would that be? Like five degrees Celsius. Okay. It’s very low. Never gets above freezing. Wait, no, it’d have to be negative then for Celsius. So it’s a very cold planet and it’s a water planet, but it’s always ice. So you get a message from your doppelganger off in this planet and he says, “What’s your planet like? ” And we say, “Well, we have a water planet. It’s water based. Life is water based.” And this alien says, “Oh, that’s great. I also come from an H2O-based planet. Yes, I’m going to come visit.” And so wait, I mixed up the metaphor because I was talking about you being born on that. But say you have a friend who was born in this ice planet and they come to visit and it turns out that here the temperatures are much higher and so water is liquid.

So okay, now I’m still in an H2O-based planet, but everything’s acting completely different. And then you say to someone down the line, “I’m going to come to your planet.” And they say, “Yeah, it’s an H2O-based planet.” And you say, “So is mine.” But when you get there, it turns out that all the temperatures are above 100 degrees Celsius, 212 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s always steam. There’s no liquid water, there’s no solid water. So think of all this happening in one planet.

You think that you know how to navigate the world. It’s always been ice, so you have crampons and you have picks and you have good cold-weather clothes and you go about in this world of solid H2O. Then everything warms up—and I’m using this metaphorically, although it could be literal. So everything warms up and suddenly you’re in water and you’ve got heavy clothing and ice picks and crampons on your feet. It’s not going to work, right? And you may think that everything’s going to hell in a handbasket, and it will, except that you have the capacity to metamorphose yourself. So a phase transition is going to be a catalytic event that makes you go into metamorphosis. Oh, I’m just blending up a huge blend of metaphors today. They’re just so mixed.

And then imagine that you get to be really good in the water. You take off your crampons, you get swim fins, you get an aqua lung, you’re swimming through the water, you do deep dives, you’re a water baby, you love it. And then there’s another phase transition and suddenly it’s steam and you’re still surrounded by it, but there’s nothing to push against. There’s nothing holding you up. So what are you going to do then? Well, not even bringing in the problem of temperature. Let’s say it’s just all steam and you’re still healthy and comfortable. You’re going to need to exchange your swim fins and your aqua lung for things that allow heavier than steam flight. You’re going to have to grow wings. You’re going to have to have maybe hollow bones like a bird. When you metamorphose, you will be a creature that flies.

So that is what I was thinking today as I anticipate the changes that will come to pass in the next not very many years. Depends, you know, futurists are conflicted about it, but one thing everybody agrees on, and that is that there has never been as radical a social change as the changes we are about to experience. We’re already experiencing them at a level that is pretty much part of a phase transition already. Nobody knows anymore how politics work. Nobody knows anymore what exactly computers are about to do and what they can do. Nobody knows exactly how this very medium, social media, is going to affect anyone. There are so many unknowns, it really is as if the world has gone from a solid, reliable ice block where you know where it’s going to be and you know what it’s going to do to something that’s so liquid and chaotic. Everything is happening. Things are going up and down in dimensions they didn’t have when the world was ice. And it’s… The one thing that’s not going to happen is we’re going to go back to the ice world. We’re not about to go back to the world the way it was. 

We are going to go forward into something like the steam world where things are even less solid and even more chaotic. The word “chaotic” is scary for us psychologically, but what if we take a step back? And again, as I always suggest on this podcast, let’s look at ourselves as spiritual beings having a physical experience who planned this, who bought this ticket. All right?

So those of you who are my age or older, we were kind of born into the ice world. Things were still really reliable. There were three TV stations and that’s where we got our news. And if you wrote somebody a letter, it would get to them probably inside two weeks. It was much slower. It felt much more reliable. Then we lived through this rapid change that we’ve all lived through and oh my goodness, there are a thousand new technologies we’re supposed to know.

Nobody uses any of the old fashioned gizmos that we learned to use when we were youngsters. All we had was gravel, dammit, we didn’t have these laptops that the kids are into. But most of us have kind of adapted to that. The temperature keeps rising. The chaos keeps mounting. The connectivity is higher and so is the unpredictability. So our spirits, which I believe had a vote in this, have said, “I will not only choose to live through the melting of the structures I thought were real, I choose to live through the disappearance of the things I thought were real.”

So when the water becomes steam and it’s just vapor, especially if it gets warm enough, you can’t see the droplets in the air. The water’s all still there, but it’s invisible. I believe that we’re going to a place where our spirits will feel much more at home and our bodies may struggle to catch up.

If you’ve read my book, The Way of Integrity, you know, I follow Dante’s Divine Comedy and he goes through the Inferno, which is very solid. It’s a terrible physical hellscape and the devil is encased in ice at the center of it. It is literally the ice world. It’s not the flames. It’s the ice that have the devil. And then he gets up to Purgatory where he has to climb and he can move in more dimensions and things are easier. And then he gets to the top of Purgatory where he’s sort of figured out how to make himself whole. And when he gets to the gates of Paradise, everything changes and he starts to rise up and become a flying thing and he doesn’t even really know how.

As you look forward at the changes that are coming, don’t just be afraid. Let your physical self say, “This is scary. This is chaotic. The things I’m used to might actually disappear, the conditions I’m used to, the way relationships work, the way public life works, it all may disappear. But I can go to the level that remembers paradise. I can go to the part of myself that is no thing.” And we’re about to do the Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation which takes us to this place where our deepest selves are no thing. And in that space of not being, as things become more chaotic, more invisible, more airborne all the time, I will start to expect things like feeling the energy of people who are on this call right now as something that physically affects me, even though I couldn’t take it out and measure it. I can feel it as a tingling. I can feel it as a sense of lightness. I can feel myself rising.

As things become more chaotic and less visible, I will be able to help and connect with the world just by being, just by resonating the energy of my soul self into this much more, much more thin-textured reality, much more a world made of energy and spirit than flesh and bone, water and stone. As I go into this phase transition that is still occurring, I will be capable of things I cannot now even imagine, but they will be like the difference between walking and flying. All of this is just to say, don’t be afraid. When, in sacred texts, one of the first things that all the divine forces say when they show up to announce a miracle is: “Fear not. Don’t be afraid. Something is about to happen that you’ve never seen. It will knock apart your experience of reality. It will convince you that things are magical and it will terrify the part of you that is used to a solid world. Fear not. Don’t be afraid.”

So what I’d suggest you do if you’re facing any kind of change in your own life right now is realize that we are in a series of phase transitions—from walking to swimming to flying—and see if you yourself can find a way through a personal change in your life where you allow yourself to become less restricted, less structured, less icy; more fluid, more flexible, more relaxed; and then more intuitive, more magical, more in touch with Spirit with a capital S, and therefore with all spirits all around this beautiful planet of ours.

So fear not as we go into this. It’s just as wild as you think it’s going to be. It’s going to happen to all of us at the same time, and I believe it’s what we signed up for. So let’s do a version of the Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation that is designed to look at the changes we face today. And some of them are horrifying in the news, and some of them are like, “Whoa, technology has just taken a new chunk of what couldn’t be done and made it possible.” There are all kinds of things happening. Whatever change you’re facing, whether it’s the most personal or the most global, let’s learn to navigate it by going to the essence of the self that is not physical, that is not solid or water or even steam, but something more fluid still.

So take a deep breath, blow it out, think of a place in your life where change is coming and you’re scared. Allow that thing to rest in your consciousness, feel the fear you have around it, and then ask yourself the weird question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the space inside the molecules between my eyes? Can I imagine the space that is held by the atoms of my entire torso? Can I breathe into the empty space that is most of my physical body? Can I imagine the stillness in which all physical things are held and in which everything moves? This stillness that never moves. Can I imagine the silence beneath every sound I can hear?

Can I feel myself as the silence, stillness, and space that cannot be threatened because nothing, nothing can confront it, nothing can conflict with it. It conflicts with nothing, so nothing can conflict with it. And this stillness, silence, and space, this is my being. This is the core from which I see, from which I hear, from which I laugh, from which I love. Can I imagine the same space, silence, and stillness inside my body, holding every other being on this podcast, on this planet? Can I imagine myself relaxing into this no thing that can navigate every thing? And can I imagine that it is all made of love?

Now, as you go into that, I believe, certainly metaphorically and maybe even physically in some strange way, that you are creating a phase transition. You are creating the ability to move in an environment that’s far more fluid than anything we’ve ever seen before. I could feel very intensely the energy of people joining me in that meditation. Could I measure it? Can I show it to you? I’d have to make some kind of machine, but I don’t need to make it to know it’s real. I feel it. It’s not—it’s like I’m in a chair. I know I’m in a chair. I feel it.

So I hope that you felt it too, and that it makes you feel like, yeah, no matter what happens, I’m going to be able to go from walking to swimming to flying to whatever comes next, and it’s going to be kind of a joyride. Okay, let’s go to some questions.

Question: “I’ve written my hundred person list for a partner multiple times, just out of enjoyment.” So this is where you write down a hundred qualities you want in a partner. And it could be a romantic partner, but it could also be like a business partner or a creative partner or whatever. So you write down a hundred things, you get very specific. And this person says, “Along with focusing on my own metamorphosis, what else would you suggest to keep the faith?”

I suggest that you… There are times on the podcast when I talk about how good things come faster and stay longer if you say, “You can leave, you can go. I don’t need you.” And you realize you don’t need them right now. You’re alive and kicking. And so you say, “Oh, you can go, you can go.” And weirdly, that brings them closer. If something’s there that you love already and you really want certain things, like you think this one person may be it, or you’re going to meet them next week or you get very attached, notice yourself attaching to that and say, “You can go, you can disappear.”

Did I just say… Yeah, the negative of it is the things that you don’t want, the loneliness, that it won’t happen and everything. You can say to that part of yourself, “You can stay.” So you’re allowing things to actually get looser. Everything about the truth is about looseness and relaxation. And what I keep hearing in my own meditations and all through the day is softer, softer, relax, relax. This entire phase-transition time is about—we master it through relaxation. There is no clinging in it. And it’s like we’ve all been taught to cling and push and pull. It’s like Walt Whitman says, “Apart from the pushing and hauling stands what I am, stands watching with a half smile, both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.”

So look into the chaos of yourself, look at the clinging, realize that softening all the clinging and allowing chaos, allowing softness, allowing things to go from solid to liquid to steam, that is how you speed up magic. You get softer, you get more relaxed, and you do that by not pushing and not pulling. Let it go.

All right, next question: “Martha, I want to deepen my community’s bonds as part of my own response to this chaotic time, especially through the form of play and joy. What are your weirdest ideas for how to do this?”

Well, I don’t know about weird, but I know that I would just take whatever I think is fun and start popping it up online. Like how many people out there love to know that otters have favorite rocks and sometimes they save them for their entire lives? Put out something that you love that is a little bit not what you would have publicized about yourself. It’s not what you think is important, but it fills you with joy. Put that out. I would go online, but if that doesn’t float your boat, put a notice on a bulletin board at the town library or something. Just start gathering people to you who share your wacky fascinations.

A wacky fascination is way better navigation in today’s world than a profession you’ve been educated to master. Otters love rocks—that to me is a more compelling, forward-moving. community-gathering force than, “Well, I have now created a structured community.” Although if you want to, Ro and I created a structured community, Wilder, and it’s really fun. And we do talk a lot about otters, so you might want to come. But anything that you put out there, just make sure it’s your loosest, goofiest, silliest, most joyful self. And if you’re not joyful, let it be the most relaxed self you can possibly be.

If you’re suffering chronic pain and you’re not relaxed at all, you can say, “You know what? Does anybody want to show up and just not deal with an illness without having to fight all the time? Can we just hang together instead of trying to…” We have to advocate for ourselves. We have to do things to make the world a better place, but let’s just get together and hang. “Hanging” is going to be one of the great, compelling social forces of the next iteration of the phase transition. So yeah, get weird since you love the word weird.

Question: “Do you think that this magic has always existed and we haven’t seen it, or do you think our spiritual capacities are actually shape shifting?”

How interesting. I used to think it was always there, but we couldn’t see it. But now I think that consciousness is developing new ways of playing by watching our own souls develop. I’ve come to believe that the reason we’ve taken physical form is to experience things that consciousness has not experienced yet. And because it learns things it’s never experienced by showing up in these monkey suits, it’s able to create more interesting magic all the time. So I actually think it’s a cyclical thing where it’s feeding itself new experiences, creating conditions that force us to metamorphose. And then as we go through that experience of metamorphosis, consciousness itself wakes up to a new level of joy, a new level of love, a new level of delight.

I really think that’s what we’re doing here. And I think it’s just getting better at a universal level all the time. And it really means, I mean, the magic that we used to think was magical, it’s so ordinary to me now. It happens so much to me now. I just, I’m like, okay, that’s part of an accepted reality. Now I’m going to go do some other weird stuff and see if that’s real too. And that’s the game. Most of it’s not real, but some of it is. And that’s the game.

All right: “Are you reading Dr. Sue Morter’s new book?”

No. No, I have not read it. I don’t know who that is, but I would love to read it.

Next question: “I’ve lived in several countries. I don’t think my body likes America, though I’m here. I know I want intentional community, natural building, etc. How do I find the land that will sing to me?”

If by land, you mean country, I don’t know exactly which will sing to you, but I will tell you that I’m coming to you from a place in upstate New York where we moved just because we had my family shared a feeling that we were supposed to move, and this was a good place to move. I talk about how the old magic feels so ordinary to me now. When that happens, when you start living in it and you get so many synchronicities and miracles and magical coincidences and crazy things happening, but they’re real and you accept it, you have to start living by swimming as opposed to hiking. So when Ro, one of my partners came home from Kingston, New York, and said,” It’s an amazing place. I really feel like I want to live there someday,” Karen and I, our other part of our throuple said, “Yeah, that sounds right.” And then we just uprooted our entire life and spent a year trying to find a place here. It wasn’t an easy move, but that’s the level of commitment that I’ve developed from testing the magic and coming to see which things are real.

It’s not a crazy gamble to me anymore. It’s actually a crazy gamble not to do things when you feel in that embodied, almost inspirited way,”Oh, that yes, this is where I need to go. This is what I need to do.” And then nobody’s going to give you a whole bunch of help. Once you’ve got the idea, you still have to thrash around and get to it. I mean, that’s kind of the joy of the phase transition: totally different conditions, thrashing around trying to figure it out, and then realizing, “Oh, a new thing works here that never worked before. This is amazing. Okay, this is a real thing.” And there’s not just three. I’ve been talking about ice to water just steam, but there are many, many phase transitions, and each one gives us the opportunity to go, “Oh my God, that works now?” Yes, that works now. It’s really, really real. It still blows my mind. Life is so wild, y’all, and I never thought it would get this magical, but it just keeps getting more magical.

Someone asked about “the importance of creativity in this transitional phase.”

It’s all about creativity. I wrote, my last book Beyond Anxiety is all about how the creative process is what keeps us out of anxiety and allows us to confront totally new problems in ways that are incredibly, physically, logically optimal. It’s not about fairy woo-woo stuff. It’s about things that actually will work in the new conditions where we find ourselves. Political conditions are what they are? Okay. How do you conduct yourself in a world where political opposition—or in a country, I’ll speak for myself, where opposite voices are becoming so extreme and the structures of cooperation are breaking down. How do I get creative about that?

How do I do that? For me, for example, the Wilder community, forming an online community so I can go there and be with people I really enjoy, that was one of those. It was a solution to that issue, to polarization and the splitting of people’s deeply held values. Yeah. So creativity, if you stay in it, will keep you from being anxious and we’ll give you the tools to move forward into the new phase, whatever that is.

One more question, I’m just going to do this: “Do you have any advice for people who resist routine? I do some things every single day, but following a routine is difficult. I think it would be good for me, but it doesn’t feel natural.”

If it doesn’t feel natural, don’t do it. There are some things you do every day. All right, you got it; you’re doing routine. And doing more doesn’t feel natural to you. This is the thing, y’all. The rules we were taught were for the ice world. It’s the water world now—not like the movie, just like this metaphor. You have to be freer and looser. It’s probably something inside you saying, “Okay, you’ve got enough routine. Now you need freedom. Now you need novelty. Now you need improvisational skill.” Okay, that will feel natural if it matches the environment.

So just to sum up, we’ve always had metamorphosis changes happening, but now we’re in metamorphosis changes that are about transitional phases that will affect us all. And the only way that we will survive those is to get more and more fluid and flexible. And as we pay more attention to our spirits and less to just sheer materialism, we are going to be able to make these leaps and the adjustments and cognitive explosions and new ways to be together and move forward. It’s about to be…Oh, it’s about to be a world where we can fly, and it’s coming right up.

So fear not. Don’t fear the change. Instead, look forward and say, “Oh, ho, ho, I’m going to a whole new world.” Because we are. So I love you all very much. I’ll see Wilder people at the meditation in half an hour. And I love you. I see you later on The Gathering Room. Bye.