Guardians of the Edge of Chaos

The what, why and how of my sustainability origin story.

Photo by tabitha turner on Unsplash

Dear Myka and Luca,

Before both of your were born, your Mama and I took a road trip to Manchester to see your cousins. Mama spent the entire journey singing songs but swapping key lyrics with the word “poo.” This is where family classics like “Poop Operator, pooooop operator”, “I just called… to say… I poo-ooped”, and my personal favorite, “Papa don’t poop, I’m in trouble, please” were born.

As you know, poo is a completely normal topic in our household, we hold no shame in it. In fact, my friends will confirm that I love casually bringing up poop in conversation. Partly because I love doing things I'm not supposed to but also because it's one of the few human experiences everyone on this planet shares. Asking people how there last poo was should be a standard welcome gesture in society, "Good poo to you today sir", "and good poo to you too!".

So it should come as no surprise that my sustainability "origin" story involves poo, here is a clip of me explaining it in one of my earlier talks, but also let me summarize it here:

My wife and I decided to use "cloth napies" (for my American friends, Diapers) for our son. Unlike disposable napies, you can't just wrap them up and throw then away, you need to deal with the poo. They basically make you confront poo face-to-face, and I mean literally on your face.

You get very used to dealing with poo, you end up with poo everywhere, on your hands, on your clothes, on your face. I'd find myself in Zoom meetings where someone would say "Asim, what's that on your face?" I’d touch it, lick it, and respond, “Oh, don’t worry—it’s just poo.”

Then one day, I had an epiphany. I realized I was willing to deal with poo—daily, sometimes eight or ten times a day—in the name of the environment. I did it without hesitation, without complaint, because it felt like the right thing to do. And yet, in my entire professional career, I had never raised my hand in a meeting to ask, “How can we make this software more sustainable?”.
Drum roll, green software... yada, yada.

It's funny, especially the part where I fake-lick poo off my face, that gets a lot of laughs... it's just that... it's not true.

The truth is a lot deeper, it's a lot more personal. I need to tie dozens of threads together between psychedelics, spirituality and sustainability.

I have to be a lot more vulnerable to explain it, funnily enough though... it still involves poo.

Why

Let's start with "Why", why am I writing these letters? To do that I'm going to talk about two great philosophers of the 20th century. Let's start with Nietzsche.

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

That line from Nietzsche cuts both ways. On the one hand, if you’re fueled by a deep sense of purpose, you can endure just about anything life throws at you. But on the darker side, if you're scared enough, you'll be willing to accept almost anything to feel safe again.

Behavioral science backs this up. In a study by Lerner & Keltner (2001), researchers saw that people who feel fear perceive the world as riskier. Put someone in a fearful state and they’ll jump at “safe” options, even if those options aren’t really in their long-term best interest. In Paul Slovic and Colleagues (2000), Slovic propose the Affect Heuristic. The stronger the fear or anxiety, the more likely we are to ignore rational thinking and reach for whatever might save us in the moment.

As I look around the sustainability community, I see fear simmering just beneath the surface. In quiet trusted moments, people ask me, “Are we gonna be okay?” I’ve lost count of podcasts ending with that question, not realizing that just by asking the question they’re amplifying the very fear that’s causing so much anxiety in the first place.

Fear & Greed

I used to work in investment banking. At the end of my five-year stint, a young, successful trader at the end of a trading day told me something that still rattles in my head. “People are driven by fear and greed, that’s it.” It’s not a pretty take on human motivation, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

What is the news industry other than a steady drip of reasons to be afraid—or ways to make a quick buck. Then there’s advertising, which I worked in briefly and where I met your mother. They prod your worries—“fear of missing out”, "fear of social rejection"—and they stoke your greed—desire for money, status, power. Politicians do the same thing: fear of “the other,” fear of change, fear of threats, plus promises of a stronger economy or personal gain. Fear and greed, fear and greed.

I'm just as guilty. When I first jumped into sustainability, I tried the scare approach myself when giving talks on stage. I used many tactics, one thing I used to do was talk about how the Guardian newspaper had officially changed their language around climate change to call it a climate crisis instead. As if all we needed to do was to change a word, that's the solution! I'd explain how weapons manufacturers anticipate that "demand for its military products and services as security concerns may arise…as a result of climate change". How we're likely on the precipice of an extinction level event.

I thought if I just cranked the fear dial, people would get it. And sure, some folks leaned forward in their seats, a little anxious. But the others? They tuned out—eyes glazing over. I used to think they just didn’t care, but now I think their fear-button is just maxed out, they are numb from the onslaught.

Now we’ve got whole communities set up for people experiencing “climate burnout”—not just activists, but regular people who can’t take the barrage of existential dread anymore.

The best of us, with the best of intentions, fall into line being a cog in the fear-greed machine thats built into society. It's how the powerful maintain order, it's how they have always maintained order. Everyone, is pressing the fear button for everything, it's not working as it used to? Press it harder, press it faster.

Darkness

Which leads me to our second great philosopher of the 20th century, Yoda.

“Fear leads to anger, anger leads to the dark side.”
—Yoda

Who’s your “why” for, anyway? We're told to make sustainability "personal", don't show pictures of "polar bears" show pictures of "people". That means make the fear "personal". If you’re scared for yourself or your inner circle only, then you’re going to solve the problem for them, and maybe leave everyone else hanging.

I used to believe that if things got bad enough—if the crisis really hit the fan—humanity would pull a Hollywood-style move, band together, and save the day. But life isn’t a blockbuster. When people get scared, they don’t become more compassionate; they get tribal. They circle the wagons, push “outsiders” away. Take that a few steps further and you land at eco-fascism: the same ugly ideas of fascism, but now “justified” by environmental reasons. In the best-case scenario, that might look like using climate change as an excuse for tightening borders. In the worst? Ethnic cleansing, forced sterilization, eugenics—anything to shrink humanity’s footprint. In the dark corners of the de-growth community hide the de-population community. The question becomes: Who gets to survive, and who makes that call?

If you think I'm being hyperbolic let me tell you a chilling story your grandmother once told me about the partition of India and Pakistan. She said "everyone said to be afraid of your neighbors, but these were your friends, people you had known your entire life. Then one day neighbors started killing neighbors, and everyone dropped everything and ran. Some had to abandon their own parents just so they could save their kids". It’s the kind of horror you think can’t possibly happen until it’s there, staring you in the face, and by then it’s too late.

And if you two are ever caught in a nightmare like that, please, choose your children over us. The point is, fear can drive decent people to commit atrocities you wouldn’t imagine they were capable of. That’s why I don’t buy into the theory that scaring everyone into action is the solution. Fear has a way of flipping the off-switch on empathy. Once that happens, all bets are off.

It's the reason the foundation I run has a policy never to use fear to motivate. We focus on the solution, not the problem, we give people hope, not hate.

Fear drags you into dark corners like that. And it’s messy because fear isn’t just in sustainability—it’s everywhere. Wars, politics, the news cycle. It’s easy to get pulled into a spiral.

I believe we need another "why", one that's not based on fear, one that's based on love.

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Religion

You boys know me well enough to guess where I stand on religion. I was raised in a Muslim household, but even as a kid, I never really bought into its doctrines. So it might sound odd that I’m about to launch into a story that starts with the Bible—specifically, Genesis 1:26–28. But trust me, there’s a reason.

"Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."
(Genesis 1:26–28, ESV)

To paraphrase: “Humankind shall have dominion over the Earth.” This one little word—“dominion”—is the heart of everything I want to talk about right now.

Genesis belongs to the Old Testament, which is also the Torah (the holy book of Judaism). Islam, as part of the Abrahamic faith family, essentially continues this lineage—adding another prophet after Jesus. That’s why all three faiths share common threads. About 54% of the words population identify as one of those faiths.

The word dominion is translated from the Hebrew word "Radah", however Radah can have multiple meanings depending on context.

• Ruling with authority—implying responsible management, care, and respect.

• Ruling by treading down—domination in a harsh, exploitative sense.

These two interpretations couldn’t be more different. On one hand, we have a caretaker’s stewardship. On the other, a conqueror’s tyranny. This distinction resonates strongly with the modern conversation about sustainability. Are we stewards of the earth, or are we exploiters?

If God’s intent was for humanity to dominate and exploit, there were stronger words in Hebrew for that. For example:

• Darak: To trample or tread upon.

• Mashal: To oppress cruelly.

Because those words weren’t used, it suggests the intent wasn’t domination but stewardship.

What makes more sense?

A God who creates the oceans, teeming with life from plankton to whales; forests that function as the planet’s lungs; intricate ecosystems balanced in perfect harmony—and then couldn't care less if humanity destroys it all?

Or a God who creates all life on earth and entrusts humanity with the responsibility of looking after it?

It seems far more plausible that God intended humans to be caretakers, not looters.

Jewish teachings back this up. In the Midrash (Rabbinic commentary), humanity’s authority is paired with responsibility:

“See My creations, how beautiful and exemplary they are. Everything I created, I created for you. Make certain that you do not ruin and destroy My world, as if you destroy it, there will be no one to mend it after you.”
(Midrash Kohelet Rabbah 7:13)

In Islam, the Qur’an suggests a similar role for humanity:

“All living beings roaming the earth and winged birds soaring in the sky are communities like yourselves.”
(Qur’an 6:38)

If I believed in the devil, I’d argue that it’s the devil who's convinced humanity to exploit and destroy god’s creation.

But let’s be clear, it’s not “humanity” as a whole that’s exploiting the earth. It’s the top 0.1% exploiting everything and everyone else. The majority of humanity is just as exploited as the forests, oceans, and animals. Choosing exploitation means embracing a brutal, materialistic race to the top. A system where everyone except a tiny minority loses.

There’s a deep, fundamental sense of wonder we all share when we truly observe the world around us. That’s spirituality for me, a reverence for life’s interwoven majesty. And from that reverence flows a responsibility—a drive to protect and preserve. If there is a cosmic plan—divine or otherwise—it probably doesn’t involve paving paradise.

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Spirituality

People often mix up spirituality and religion, but they're not the same thing. Both tackle the big questions—like why we're here, what's right and wrong, and what happens when we die. Both can give people meaning, comfort, and a sense of connection to something bigger. But the way they approach these things is very different.

Religion is organized and communal. It's built on specific doctrines, sacred texts, and traditions that followers are expected to stick to.

Spirituality, on the other hand, is deeply personal. It's about exploring your own path, finding your own meaning, and connecting with something greater in a way that feels authentic to you. There are no rigid rules or one-size-fits-all doctrines. It's a self-guided journey of discovery.

Tom Greenwood puts it well in his article Is Spirituality the Missing Pillar of Sustainability, describing spirituality as:

"The process of exploring the mysteries of the self and the universe, and believing that there is more to life than material survival, even if we don't know what. If the material world is what we can observe with our five physical senses, the spiritual world is everything else."

Senses

I think the idea of describing our senses as "transducers" is fascinating because it opens the door to so much more than we currently understand. A transducer is something that converts one type of signal into another. A microphone, for example, converts sound waves into electrical signals. Our senses work the same way, they take in sensory input and convert it into signals our brains can process.

Our five senses, sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell help us perceive the world, but they only give us a tiny fraction of the information out there:

• Sight: We see just a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum—what we call visible light. Snakes can see infrared, and bees can see ultraviolet, but we miss most of the spectrum, like radio waves or X-rays.

• Hearing: Humans hear from about 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. Elephants pick up infrasonic frequencies below our range, and bats use ultrasonic frequencies above our range to navigate.

• Touch: We sense temperature, pressure, and texture, but in limited ways. Before thermometers, it was widely accepted that there were only four temperatures, "very hot, "hot", "cold" or "very cold" (Vincent, Beyond Measure, 2022).

• Taste and smell: Our taste buds detect five main flavors, and our sense of smell, while powerful, pales in comparison to animals like dogs.

Humans are stumbling around a dark cavern with a tiny candle, convinced that the world is only what we can see in that small circle of light. But the reality is, what we can perceive is just a sliver of what's out there.

Beyond these senses, some animals can perceive things we can't even imagine, like magnetic fields or bio-electric signals. If animals have those abilities, is it so crazy to think humans might have transducers beyond the five senses?

Recent studies on consciousness point to microtubules in the brain, which seem capable of detecting quantum phenomena like entanglement.

Gifts

Myka, the moment I knew for sure that you were musically gifted was the day we played a game with Mama (who's also musically gifted). She would sing a note, and you had to copy it. Every single time, you nailed it. Then it was my turn. I'm musically incoherent. She sang a note, I took a moment, "let it ring before you sing" was a mantra my old singing teacher drummed into me, and I tried my hardest to match it. Before Mama could even laugh, you started laughing uncontrollably. You didn't need her reaction to tell you I was off; at just five years old, with no formal training, you instinctively knew I was bad. Luca, you're still little, but Mama says there are signs your even more gifted than Myka, and that's a talent you both get from her and not me.

Your ability to tune into musical frequencies so perfectly is extraordinary—your audio "transducer" is operating on a whole other level compared to mine and most people on this planet. It makes me wonder: what if there are transducers for energies or signals outside of the five senses? And what if there are people who can tune into those energies as effortlessly as you tune into music?

A great example of this idea is the TV show See. It's set in a world where everyone is blind—except for two children born with the ability to see. Imagine growing up in a world where no one even knows sight is a thing. The blind have adapted in incredible ways, like becoming silent and odorless to avoid detection. There's a scene where two blind women, almost like ninjas, are following other blind people and eavesdropping. But to the sighted, they're obviously there. It's a striking metaphor for how limited perception shapes our understanding of reality.

We're like two blind fish swimming in an ocean we can't perceive. A whale passes close by, tossing us around—flipping us upside down, buffeting us left and right. Afterward, one fish says to the other, "Wow, I must be sad!"

That's how limited human perception can feel. We experience the effects of forces and energies we don't fully understand, but we interpret them in ways that make sense to our limited senses.

Awe

For me, spirituality is all about awe. In the paper Approaching Awe: A Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion, researchers Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt define awe as having two key elements: vastness and accommodation. Vastness is about experiencing something much larger than yourself, while accommodation is when that experience shifts how you think and perceive the world. When you successfully process that shift, it can lead to enlightenment; if you can't, it can provoke fear.

So, spirituality is essentially about contemplating vastness—whether that's the universe, a profound idea, or the natural world—and letting it change you. You can feel awe for science, art, people, or nature.

Spirituality is often seen as being at odds with science, but I don’t think that’s the case at all. Science explaining something that feels spiritual doesn’t take away the awe—it deepens it. Understanding how something works doesn’t diminish its beauty or its impact. I can break down the process of human gestation in detail, step by step, and understand it on a scientific level. But none of that stops me from being utterly awestruck by the experience of your gestation inside your mother or the moment you were born. In the same way, I can grasp how gravity is the effect of mass curving space-time, but that doesn't take away from the awe I feel when I think about gravity itself. Some things are just bigger than knowledge—they're felt.

What science does challenge, however, is religious dogma, because dogma relies on fixed ideas and unchanging truths. But spirituality isn’t rigid like that—it’s fluid, personal, and open to change. That’s why spirituality and religion, despite their overlap, are fundamentally different things.

The world is vast and layered with things beyond what we can perceive. Spirituality is about stepping into that mystery, letting it humble you, and exploring the unknown. It's about the awe of existence, and it's that awe that makes life richer.

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Psychedelics

Myka, you were recently in a nativity play at school. You played one of the Wise Men. Latvia doesn't have a culture of nativity plays so Mama did the best she could and dressed you in smart shirt and trousers thinking that's what "Wise Men" must wear, right? I noticed last minute, and in a rush grabbed you a cape from your pile of costumes and drove you to school. That's why instead of wearing the traditional robe and crown like the other two, you were wearing your vampire costume.

There you were on stage, twirling around in that black cloak with the red lining, absolutely owning the moment. I know I should have been horrified but I admit I loved it also. I hate conforming, when they say jump, duck, when they move left, move right.

While you were on stage I was thinking about how the Wise Men who visited baby Jesus were from an eastern sect of mystics called the Magi. It's actually where the English word "Magic" come from. They were the kind of people who dealt in ancient potions, alchemy, and, yes, magic. And those gifts they brought to baby Jesus? They weren’t just symbolic. Frankincense, for example, has compounds that can reduce anxiety and elevate your mood. Myrrh was used for pain relief.

You were playing a magician on stage, a magician of potions. That vampire cloak wasn’t as out of place as it seemed.

The world those Magi lived in was so different from now. Back then, using plants, resins, or whatever natural substances you could find wasn’t some big taboo—it was just normal life. There were no corner pharmacies, people went to their gardens to find medicine or even intoxicants. Pine resin cleaned wounds, fennel helped with bloating, and pennyroyal regulated menstruation. There was even "beaver testicle juice", aka "castoreum". It was used to treat headaches and fevers because beavers ate willow bark, which contains salicylic acid, the stuff aspirin is made from.

In ancient Greece the terms "to practice medicine" and "to administer drugs" where synonymous, both came from the same word, "medeor". Sticking to an etymological theme, the greek word "opium" actually just means "the juice". Opium use was so common that ancient greeks just refereed to it as "juice", just as marijuana today is euphemistically known as “weed”.

Even wine back then was different. It wasn’t just fermented grapes; it was often mixed with all kinds of inebriants. Fermentation can only bring the alcohol percentage of wine to 14%, yet, there are many references to wine being so strong that it requires dilution by at least 8 parts water. There are warnings that drinking wine "straight" could literally kill you and three cups of "diluted" wine was enough to bring the drinker to madness.

Is this how Jesus turned water into wine?

The idea of outlawing plants or natural substances would’ve been absurd to the Greeks or Romans. For most of human history, plants like these were respected. They were part of life, part of culture, even part of spirituality.

Poetry

Did you know the term “psychedelic,” was coined in a playful exchange of poetry between Humphry Osmond and Aldous Huxley in 1956 (yes, the same Huxley who wrote Brave New World).

Huxley wanted to call mescaline phanerothyme (which loosely translates to “manifesting the spirit”) and wrote a clever rhyme to Osmond:

To make this trivial world sublime,
Take a half a gramme phanerothyme.

Osmond replied:

To fathom Hell or soar angelic,
Just take a pinch of a psychedelic.

While “psychedelic” has become the popular term, the word I prefer is entheogen. It comes from the Greek words entheos (meaning “god within”) and gen (denoting “becoming”). It perfectly captures what these substances do: they help you become the god within.

There’s a whole range of entheogens out there, each with its own unique origins. Psilocybin comes from certain mushrooms, LSD was derived from the ergot fungus, mescaline is found in the peyote cactus, and DMT is a key component of ayahuasca—and fascinatingly, it’s also produced naturally by the human body.

But entheogens are not party drugs. They’re powerful medicines designed to help you connect with something greater than yourself, experience awe, and let go of the ego. They’re tools for transformation, not escapism.

The first scientific exploration of entheogens as facilitators of spiritual experiences came in 1962 with Walter Pahnke’s Good Friday Experiment. Twenty Protestant seminary students attended a Good Friday church service, half given psilocybin, the other half a placebo. Those in the psilocybin group reported an enhanced sense of sacredness, a transcendence of time and space, and experiences so profound they struggled to put them into words. Follow-ups twenty-five years later found those spiritual insights had endured.

Fast forward to the 1990s, and Rick Strassman’s groundbreaking research on DMT revealed its capacity to elicit similarly transcendent experiences. Participants described feelings of unity, the dissolution of self, and encounters with what they perceived as higher beings or realms.

In 2001, researchers at Johns Hopkins University revisited psilocybin’s potential in a modern context. Their study of 36 volunteers, conducted under rigorous double-blind, placebo-controlled conditions, became a cornerstone of today’s psychedelic renaissance. 60% of those who received psilocybin experienced what they described as a “complete mystical experience.” Many ranked the session among the most meaningful events of their lives, on par with the birth of a child or the death of a loved one. Months, even years later, the significance of these experiences persisted.

More recent studies show that between 66% and 86% of individuals who undergo psychedelic experiences in supportive, therapeutic settings consider them among the top five most meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of their lives.

For me, spirituality isn’t tied to doctrine or dogma—it’s about awe. And entheogens are a shortcut to awe. Awe renders the ego defenseless. It dissolves, and with it, the illusion of separateness. What remains is a profound connectedness—to yourself, to others, to nature, to the universe itself.

Entheogens are tools—just as caffeine gives you a boost, aspirin soothes a headache, or a ruler helps you measure distances. They’re instruments for understanding the complexities of life, navigating its challenges, and connecting with the divine spark within.

Spirit Molecule

Rick Strassman famously called DMT the “Spirit Molecule” for its ability to evoke deeply spiritual experiences. It’s fascinating to think that this molecule is not just something external—our bodies are capable of producing it naturally. While we’re still piecing together where DMT originates in the body, Strassman suggests the pineal gland could be the source. This tiny, enigmatic gland sits at the very center of the brain, it's uniquely singular, unlike all the other structures in the brain that have mirrors on the left and right hemisphere.

The pineal gland’s spiritual significance transcends time and culture. René Descartes, the philosopher-mathematician of the 17th century, called it the “seat of the soul,” believing it bridged the physical and the spiritual realms. Ancient Egyptians might have shared a similar reverence—some interpret the Eye of Horus as a representation of the pineal gland, symbolizing protection, insight, and spiritual vision. In Hindu philosophy, the pineal gland is linked to the Ajna chakra or “third eye,” representing intuition and a higher state of consciousness. Taoist traditions connect the third eye to Shen, the spirit that governs mind and awareness.

I’m excited about your future. The stigma that has shadowed entheogens for so long is beginning to dissolve, and as it does, we’re rediscovering something ancient. For most of human history, these compounds weren’t feared—they were celebrated. They were woven into the fabric of life, culture, and spirituality. What we’ve seen in the modern era is an anomaly—a brief interruption in humanity’s long and sacred relationship with these tools. It’s a blip, one that we’re finally starting to move past.

And with that, I think you now have enough context to understand my real sustainability "origin" story.

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Chaos

Myka, the night you were born was a storm of chaos and wonder all at once—something you’ll want to look up for yourself one day. We’d planned for a home birth here in the UK. Usually, you have this safety net of midwives who come to your house—plus layers of backup upon backup. But on that night, every single backup fell through. "Something" happened at the local hospital and all the midwives we're called in and couldn’t come out as planned. They finally sent an ambulance, but the paramedics got here five minutes too late. Your mama ended up delivering you herself, right there in what’s now her home office. I caught you—me, your dad. I was the first skin you felt in this world. I’ll admit I was terrified, but all of us were in the midst of a deeply raw human moment I’ll carry with me for life. Luca, this didn’t stop us from going for a home birth for you. This time we weren't going to take any chances and paid for a private midwife. Less terrifying but no less beautiful or awe inspiring.

Not long after Myka was born, I went to my third ayahuasca ceremony. That’s when things got wild in a way I’d never experienced before. Usually, my experiences are mental—lots of thinking. This time, it became all body, all animal. At one point, I was on all fours in the communal area, repeating, “What the fuck is happening?” over and over. The guide who was looking after me just grinned and said, “Ayahuasca is happening!” Eventually, in this surreal scene that felt like the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I gave birth to myself. My ego just dissolved. Suddenly, I was a newborn, pure consciousness floating in a cosmic void.

I forgot how to speak. I didn’t know words or language, but I felt life inside me and a powerful fear of not existing. It’s like the first line of code we humans come with is simply “survive,” and everything else is layered on top. I remember my throat hurt—I was thirsty. I realized I could make sounds with it, so I cried. Someone came over with a straw, gave me water. That tore me in two afterwards once I'd digested what happened. Babies cry for milk because on some level, they think they’re about to die.

I remember the shock of discovering I had feet—i loved just wiggling them from side to side. I kicked a door, and when it made a loud noise someone would come see me. That’s how my ego started rebuilding itself: learning ways to survive, layering on behavior after behavior. And I realized that’s really what ego is—all the stuff we pick up so we can keep going. The best and the worst person you’ve met is just acting out learned survival strategies.

Children are born psychedelic, they are pure spiritual beings. Everything is awe, everything is vast and all of it requires accommodation. Over time, we start building up that armor—our ego—and we lose some of that raw spiritual spark. But from the moment we open our eyes, there’s this primal drive to stay alive, to be conscious.

Do all beings feel this way when they are born? Perhaps all animals are born with exactly the same primordial consciousness, I could just as easily have realized I had paws instead of feet and my ego would have learned to survive life as a cat.

A few months later, I felt the pull again and went back for a fourth ceremony. The same guides opened the door, shouting, “What the fuck is happening!”. We hugged, and in I went. I had no clue why I was there, just this sense that there was unfinished business. In ayahuasca circles, that’s what they call the calling, like your subconscious is solving some puzzle you can’t articulate.

When you drink the brew, they talk a lot about set (your mindset) and setting (where you are). You set an intention—like a guiding star for the journey. I was blank. I had no idea what I’d say. But when it was my turn to speak to the group, out came: “Show me the man I want to be.” It was so clean and concise—no rambling, no overthinking, just a surge from deep down.

A few hours later, yep, I was on that floor again in the communal area, in agony like I’d never known. Tony (not his real name) knelt next to me, holding my hand, repeating that everything would be okay. My notes from the day describe it as a twisted mix of orgasmic release and some kind of horrible, head-stomach nausea. Definitely not the graceful, magical journey I’d hoped for. I could barely speak, just croaked out, “Make it end,” every once in a while. Tony misheard it as “A-maze-ing,” so he thought I was having the time of my life, while I was certain he’d already called an ambulance.

And in that delirium, Tony—a total stranger—kept holding my hand, showing me real compassion. That’s when this sudden insight hit me, the Earth wanted me to show her the same compassion Tony was showing me. I agreed, and in that instant, the pain vanished. My hand uncurled, my body melted. Then.... I carried on relaxing.... and relaxing.... and... "Papa don't poop, i'm in trooouuuuble please!"

Tony threw a towel over me. Later on, when I’d scraped myself off the floor and scuttled to the bathroom, Tony cleaned up after me. The carpet eventually had to be replaced, but he just laughed it off when I offered to pay.

No burning bush, no ethereal choir, no voice of God. Just a quiet decision I made that rewrote everything from the inside out. They always say after a ceremony, don’t do anything drastic—no face tattoos, no dramatic life changes—because you’re in that afterglow. But months went by, and the resolve still burned strong. I’d promised something, and I needed to honor it, even if I wasn’t fully sure who—or what—I’d promised.

Could it be that DMT acts like an amplifier for a sense we barely use—something that brings energies or frequencies into sharp focus when they’d normally hover on the edge of our awareness? Sometimes I wonder if those quantum microtubules in our brains—these tiny, mysterious structures—connect us all together in a universal shared consciousness, like a quantum WiFi network. I’ve got a million questions.

It did force me to contemplate something incredibly vast, and my decision to help was the accommodation. I had a mystical, deeply spiritual experience that still fills me we awe to this day.

I’m an engineer, so I process my experiences differently than, say, an artist who would paint swirling visions or a musician who’d write a symphony about it. I try to figure out how the machine works. That’s why I’m writing this all down—trying to decode the puzzle of life, Earth, consciousness.

Where is everybody?

There’s this question that’s been rattling around human heads for decades: Where is everybody? That’s the Fermi paradox, first posed by physicist Enrico Fermi back in 1950. Our galaxy—the Milky Way—has about 400 billion stars, and we now think a surprising number of them have planets that could be Earth-like. Rough math puts it at 10 billion such planets, just in our own galactic neighborhood. The Milky Way stretches about 120,000 light years across. Even at sub light speeds it's possible for a civilization to spread across the galaxy in a million years and the Milky Way has been around for over 13 billion years.

So if even a tiny fraction of those worlds were home to intelligent beings, shouldn’t we be seeing—or hearing—some sign of them by now? We’ve scanned and probed, pointed radio telescopes at the sky, listened for cosmic signals. The most hopeful hint we found was in a tiny meteorite from Mars, which seemed to hold microscopic fossils—just a few nanometers wide. That turned out to be non-biological. So, yeah. Where is everybody?

One idea is that there’s a “great filter event” lurking somewhere in the timeline of a civilization’s development, snuffing it out before it can get very far. Earth’s own record is peppered with brutal extinction events—five major ones that we know of. The Permian–Triassic die-off alone wiped out about 96% of all species on the planet. There’s talk that a sixth extinction is going on right now, driven by us humans. So it’s not a stretch to think advanced life might get knocked down before it ever makes contact.

Another theory points to our own biochemical blind spots. Imari Walker and Lee Cronin’s Assembly Theory suggests we can’t recognize truly “alien” life if it doesn’t match the patterns we know—so maybe it’s out there, but we’re just not seeing it.

And then there’s the simplest possibility: life is unbelievably rare, and what happened here on Earth is one huge cosmic fluke. We might just be the lucky ones in a sea of barren planets.

What is life?

Let’s talk about Erwin Schrödinger—you know, the physicist with that famous thought experiment involving a cat that’s both alive and dead until observed. Turns out, he gave a series of lectures called “What Is Life?” where he explored how living things fit into the usual laws of physics. One of his big contributions was the concept of negative entropy—sometimes shortened to “negentropy.”

There’s a universal tendency—outlined by the second law of thermodynamics—for everything to move from order toward chaos, or to put it another way, from high energy states (minimum entropy) to low energy states (maximum entropy).

Imagine putting a hot ball into a box. Eventually, that heat spreads out, and you end up with a uniform temperature everywhere. That’s entropy, the energy spreading out from a fixed point to everything else, from order to disorder aka. chaos.

The Earth’s equator sits closer to the Sun than the poles, which means it soaks up more of the Sun’s energy. That gap—more heat at the equator, less at the poles—is what sets our weather in motion: wind patterns, storms, ocean currents, you name it. It’s all the second law of thermodynamics at work—the Earth is shifting energy from high to low until everything evens out.

Zoom out far enough, and you hit one theory for how the universe itself might end: heat death. Over trillions of years, entropy takes hold, and everything drifts toward one uniform, lukewarm temperature—no differences in energy left at all. Once the whole cosmic stage is the same temperature, nothing can happen. That’s the slow fade into universal sameness.

But Earth bucks that trend. It somehow has created a self-sustaining pocket of order in a chaotic universe. Think of seeds sprouting into intricate plants, or cells organizing themselves into living creatures. Schrödinger’s idea was that negentropy is how living systems momentarily push back against entropy, against the drift toward chaos.

I remember connecting this to a lecture by Joseph Campbell (the mythologist behind The Power of Myth). He talked about two common archetypical forces across many mythologies and cultures: the Divine Feminine—all about creation, growth, the spark of new life—and the Divine Masculine—associated with stillness, meditation, entropy, and endings. The divine feminine is negentropy, the divine masculine is entropy. You’ll find echoes of it in nearly every spiritual tradition. In Hinduism, it’s Shakti representing the feminine and Shiva the masculine. Celtic mythology has Danu and Dagda. Egyptian lore speaks of Isis and Osiris. And in Taoism, there’s Wuji and Taiji. These pairs reflect a cosmic dance: creation on one side, dissolution on the other, and the universe hums along when the two forces meet in harmony.

It's complex

Picture a cup of coffee with a layer of fresh cream on top. At that moment, everything’s neat, orderly, and at a kind of “minimum chaos.” But then you start to stir. Suddenly, the coffee and cream swirl together into these intricate patterns—spinning ribbons, tiny eddies, all sorts of mesmerizing shapes. That’s where the complexity starts climbing. Eventually, though, it all blends into the same uniform brown, and that’s maximum chaos, maximum entropy—no more intriguing shapes, no more swirling drama. Just a flat, homogenous liquid.

This idea, called the complexity hump, sits right between total order on one side (cream not mixed at all) and total chaos on the other (fully blended brown liquid). It’s at that halfway point—where coffee and cream are in the midst of merging—thats the complexity peaks.

Researchers say this peak of complexity is where creativity thrives, because the system is both structured enough to hold patterns and free enough to allow new, unpredictable forms to emerge. It’s in that narrow band between order and chaos that interesting things can happen.

Whether you’re looking at living cells, the immune system, financial markets, or bio-diverse ecosystems like Earth, each one seems to live in that delicate balance. Too much order, and nothing changes; too much chaos, and everything collapses. Stay right in the sweet spot, and you get evolution, innovation, resilience.

Researchers have named that swirling middle ground—the edge of chaos. I believe this is the same energy I felt that night, lying on the floor in a communal residence in the Netherlands. A sliver of divine feminine (negative entropy, creation) and a dash of divine masculine (entropy, destruction). Call it the balance between Shiva and Shakti, or the yin and the yang—it’s that razor-thin margin where all the magic happens.

Earth lives right on that edge of chaos. A delicate balance of negentropy and entropy, the divine feminine and masculine, shiva and shakti, yin and yang. Picture the planet covered in pavement and concrete, no forests, just one monocrop as far as the eye can see. That kind of uniformity can’t adapt; it can’t respond when things go haywire. But when everything is teeming with diversity—different species, ideas, energies, thoughts—it’s like a perpetual waterfall of life, always mixing, always swirling. That’s what makes Earth alive and resilient: it’s bursting with possibility, barely holding the line between order and chaos.

And from everything we’ve seen, we might be it—the only place in the universe that pulled it off, either by sheer fluke or some kind of intelligent design. However it happened, life here managed to generate just enough negative entropy—that spark of divine feminine creation—to keep us going on this spinning rock in space.

In the end, to me it doesn’t matter whether this is an existential fight or not. I feel called to guard that precarious balance even if it wasn't under threat. After all those ceremonies and all that soul-searching, it turns out that’s the man I wanted to be—a guardian of the edge of chaos.