I love this story because it feels true in my body. And because it maps almost perfectly onto my experience, particularly over the past 15 years.
You can read more about my personal journey here.
But this page isn’t about me. It’s about us. Myths like the one above are powerful because, while on one level they speak to the journey of an individual soul, they can and do just as easily apply to an entire culture.
We are being invited to remember.
An Invitation to Meet the Times
In individual healing, change and remembrance is often precipitated by what’s called a healing crisis. This may show up as depression, anxiety, injury, illness. If we ignore one signal, another pops up. And then another. Until it can’t be ignored.
As a society, as a civilization, we are in a healing crisis. There are lots of signs of it: environmental collapse, economic and social and political instability. Social isolation and loneliness. The emergence of generative AI and, specifically, its impact on human cognition, the world of work, and the environment. ‘Polycrisis’ has become a popular term to hold all of it.
I see these not as isolated eruptions, but as a constellation of concurrent wake-up calls. Our collective soul calling out for us to remember so that we can meet the times.
A Common Root, a Core Wound
Environmental collapse, loneliness, political instability all have their root in the same core wound: separation.
This is not a new idea. Jack D. Forbes wrote about it.1Columbus and Other Cannibals (1992; rev. 2008) Edgar Villanueva points to it.2Decolonizing Wealth Vanessa Andreotti writes about this wound.3Hospicing Modernity
Villanueva frames separation as intrinsic to what he calls the ‘colonizing mindset.’ Here’s how he expresses this worldview from the individual perspective:
The boundaries of my body separate me from the rest of the universe. I’m on my own against the world. This terrifies me, and so I try to control everything outside myself, also known as the Other. I fear the Other. I must compete with the Other in order to meet my needs. I always need to act in my self-interest, and I blame the Other for everything that goes wrong.
— Edgar Villanueva
When I first read that passage, I felt an internal click of resonance. That sense of needing to control my environment to create a sense of safety felt incredibly familiar. The nervous system braced for everything to be taken away without warning. I had always personalized it as a psychological deficit that I could address through individual practice or healing.
Villanueva’s framing placed my experience into a larger context. What I had interpreted as a personal deficit is a feature of the culture I live in.
Jack D. Forbes went even further. Writing in the 1970s, he identified this colonizing mindset not merely as bad policy or faulty logic, but as an active form of soul-sickness and collective psychosis. What emerges from his analysis is a story not of ‘good’ vs. ‘evil,’ but of a way of thinking that spread across the world like an epidemic.
Forbes names this epidemic the wetiko psychosis, a reference to Wetiko, a Cree term that refers to an evil spirit that terrorizes and cannibalizes other beings.
Whether we’re aware of it or not, we’re living within an entire socio-economic and political structure afflicted with this virus and we all carry some degree of the infection.
The infection has progressed. Its latest, most technologically sophisticated expression doesn’t look like open conquest or direct resource extraction.
It looks like code that promises miracles.
The AI of It All
If the core wound we carry is the separation of mind from body, and body from spirit, generative artificial intelligence takes that separation a step further.
In the four years since it has emerged on the public market there are already indications that AI is deeply affecting our ability to reason, deeply impacting our creativity,4“Study explores how AI use affects performance on math and reasoning tasks”, UC Berkeley News (Oct 2026) and having environmental impacts that may not become totally clear for years.5“Energy, water use and pollution of AI and data centers rival most countries”, PBS NewsHour / AP (June 2026) There is a whole lexicon of terminology evolving to describe these effects. Cognitive surrender.6“MIT Report Finds That AI Is Leading to ‘Cognitive Surrender’ Among Students”, Futurism (Sept 2026) Semantic bleaching.
By its nature, AI, at least in its current iteration, is disconnected from consciousness. The large language models that fuel generative AI take words and phrases, break them into code, execute incredibly complex calculations that generate more code, then reassemble that code into ‘natural’ language.
They separate language from the vibrational field that birthed it.
I sense a deeper invitation in the AI conversation. Not ‘is it good or not good’ or ‘how likely is it to destroy us’ but rather: what is intrinsic to humanity? What type of intelligence belongs uniquely to the living world?
It’s not our ability to reason. It’s not our ability to speak eloquently.
If we take off the table everything that AI can do, all the forms of intelligence that it’s good at (synthesizing large amounts of information, pattern matching, regurgitation, looking backwards to plot a way forwards), then what’s left is the capacity to connect to genuine emergence and inspiration, to connect to a field of relationship, a field of consciousness. And to tap into it, not just to get information or guidance, but also to interact with and impact it directly.
Vibrational Intelligence belongs uniquely to the living world. It may not be uniquely human. Whales might be able to do this as well. Elephants certainly have consciousness as do octopi. Other beings beyond the human have consciousness and awareness and can tap into this vast field of vitality that’s all around us.
It’s not something that a server farm can connect with.*I want to be clear that I’m not anti-AI. I use it regularly and have developed strict boundaries around my engagement with it. The negative impacts are real as are the benefits. This website, for example, would not exist without AI’s coding capabilities. That said, I fully own that, in using AI, I am participating in a technology predicated on the very separation and extraction that I believe lies at the root of so much harm. There is no 100% ethical way to engage with AI. For me, the question is one of awareness and accountability. Grey rather than black / white.
Where VQ Fits In
Weaving these pieces together, the invitation of the polycrisis is towards reconnection. With ourselves. With each other. With the larger universe and the living world. Not just through our actions, but by changing our minds. Not our ideas. The actual way our minds make sense of and navigate the world.
To move from a way of being predicated on a tacit assumption of separation to one supported by the cellular level remembrance that we are intrinsically connected with all life. In his wonderful book Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, published in 1998, Martín Prechtel calls for a new language to revive the heart of the world:
It shouldn’t be a language of oneness, not one language, not a computer tongue of homogenization, but a diverse, beautiful, badly made thing whose flimsiness and inefficiency force people to sing together to keep it well-spoken and sung into life over and over again, so that nobody forgets to remember. We need to find gorgeous, unsellable ritual words to reanimate, remeasure, rebuild, and replaster the ruined, depressed flatness left by the hollow failure of this mechanized, orphaned culture. For this, we need all peoples: our poets, our shamans, our dreamers, our youth, our elders, our women, our men, our ancestors, and our real old memories from before we were people.
We live in a kind of dark ages, craftily lit with synthetic light, so that no one can tell how dark it has really gotten. But our exiled spirits can tell. Deep in our bones resides an ancient, singing couple who just won’t give up making their beautiful, wild noise. The world won’t end if we can find them.
— Martín Prechtel
Vibrational Intelligence is one way for us to attune to all of this and more. To find that diverse language. A new container for very old ways of knowing, being, and (re)connecting.
When we attune to the unique song of our individual soul, we’re reconnecting at multiple levels simultaneously. On one level, it just feels good to make the music only we can make. It’s part of the journey of remembrance that begins the moment Angel Lailah presses her finger to our lips.
On another level, that reconnection doesn’t just nourish us, it helps us become stronger leaders, parents, partners, and neighbors. The nervous system that once braced for everything to be taken away begins to soften. Rather than trying to control a situation or force solutions that intellectually seem correct, we move from a place of grounded clarity, working with its energy to find the next right move. Our discernment sharpens so that we can more accurately sense deeper currents in our teams, families, and communities. And we do all of this while feeling more resourced and connected in the midst of chaos. This often happens so quietly that we don’t notice until someone close to us brings it up.
On yet another level, we’re reconnecting with all of life. We’re reweaving ourselves into a tapestry of vitality and interdependence that we can never fully understand. But that we can feel in our bodies. In our breath. In our hearts.
This reconnection brings us closer to the soul of who we are, and with every step closer, we heal. We come back into wholeness. Our candle flickers back to life and we remember.