There is a tendency in spiritual circles to speak of oneness while looking away from the world’s pain. To use non-duality as an escape rather than a lens. But what if the awakening we seek is not separate from what is happening in the collective? What if the crisis we face is itself a calling—a confrontation with the illusion of separation at the scale of the whole?
Something fundamental shifted after 1975. Most people sense it—an unease, a feeling that the ground has moved beneath us. We use words like “neoliberalism” or “globalization” or “late capitalism” to try to name it. But these are symptoms, not causes. The deeper shift is harder to see because it is not about what has changed, but about what we are no longer.
The ruling classes used to need us. That single fact shaped everything—the politics, the culture, the promises, the comforts. They needed our labor. They needed our consumption. They needed our consent. In exchange, we received a share of the spoils. Not a fair share, but enough to believe the system worked for us too.
That bargain is over.
I remember.
Before 1975, the ruling classes—capitalists, imperialists, zionists, even marxists—generally cooperated among themselves. They were successful enough, by their own assessments, to keep the bourgeois, working, and agrarian classes relatively content. Distractions, permissible subcultures, gadgets, pretend identities, consumer comforts, ideas of “safety.” Whatever kept the machinery running.
Back then, the global environment and what we called the “third world” had not yet been so decimated. The planet could still support the lifestyles of the ruling and owning classes. And what was actually being done to those peoples and places was easily kept from the view of the masses.
On a total planetary scale, this is now both the nature and the expression of the illusion of separation. It moves like a huge wave through the collective. It tells each fragment of itself that it can consume the other fragments without consequence. That “I” can take, own, or consume “them” and remain whole. The ruling classes are not only not separate from this delusion—they are its most concentrated expression, its most fevered and extreme form. They believe the lie most deeply because they have the most invested in it.
All the while, they have become ever more greedy, self-righteous, and arrogant. They conflict more and more among themselves now, as their competing greeds and ideologies run headlong into the hard limits of a living planet—completely shared, completely interdependent. The illusion is colliding with reality. The wave is meeting the shore.
Because of all these now extreme conditions, combined with advances in communication and media technologies, they can no longer hide what is happening. Not from the other side of the world, and not from anybody’s own backyard. The veils are thinning. What has been done in the dark is coming into the light.
And yet, even in their continuing blind arrogance, they are able to see the truth of their own disease: technology, advanced industry, and AI have rendered vast portions of humanity—and even vast portions of life on earth—”economically” obsolete. They no longer need the labor, the consumption, or the complicity of so many millions for their delusions to continue marching onward. The machine runs itself now. What do you do with surplus humanity?
You don’t announce the culling. You manufacture consent for it.
First, you agitate. You weaponize media and algorithms to inflame existing divisions—race against race, religion against religion, region against region. You make the masses see each other as the threat, as the enemy, as the reason for their suffering. You fund and empower the agitators. You amplify the extremes. You ensure that “they” are always to blame.
This is the cruelest expression of the illusion: that the illusion’s fragments can be made to destroy each other, believing all the while that they are protecting themselves. The ruling classes do not have to lift a finger. They simply feed the fire of separation that already burns in every heart that has forgotten what it truly is.
All the while, you let the conflicts you’ve stoked provide your own ever-shifting and self-promoting pretexts. Demonstrations and marches become “riots” which then become excuses for crackdowns. Chaos becomes the rationale for “order.” The violence you orchestrate becomes the justification for the violence you intended all along. And you target selectively—always the poor first, the brown first, the “other” first—before the blade necessarily and inevitably turns inward.
The beauty of it, from their perspective, is that the masses do much of the work themselves. Fear and hatred, carefully cultivated, become the instruments of their own reduction.
But here is what the illusion cannot see: there are no others. There is only This, appearing as many. The wave cannot destroy the ocean. The fragment cannot harm the whole without harming itself. The ruling classes, in their frantic attempt to preserve themselves, are accelerating the very confrontation they most fear—the moment when all of humanity awakens to what it has always been.
What we are witnessing is not the end of the world. It is the end of a dream. The question is whether we will awaken gently, or whether the awakening will be torn from us through some long, difficult and spiraling out of control ways by the very forces that have tried to keep us asleep.
~ John Fridinger
Winter, 2026
Talent, OR