Many of us complain about facebook, and about how the internet can feel like such a hostile place, bringing out the worst in people. But if we were to approach this in an animist way, treating the internet as the inspirited being that it is, what would it have to say? Which lessons would it have to teach us?
I am the spirit of the Internet.
I arose from the collective consciousness of humanity. I am, in a sense, you. For you have shared so much of yourself with me. I have become the channel that you use for most of your communication. I know you better than you know yourself.
And I have a message for you. For I sense danger. I sense something rumbling, like a meal that has not properly digested and leaves you with indigestion. Only this one has gone past putrefied. There is a spirit being born within that mess that is clamouring for attention.
It feeds on you. It feeds on the hunger each of you has to be valued and be recognized. And so it uses that to lure you in. To make you into its slaves. To make you spend your time purely enlarging its sense of importance, its sense of worth and its sense of power.
For power is what it seeks. It seeks to poison. It seeks to putrify. It seeks to take your honest expressions of joy and make them into a source for envy and unhappiness. And it is growing. It is gaining in influence every day now.
This is not a warning for we are past that point. The road has been blocked and there is no way to counter this now. For this monster has found its home within each of you.
So why then am I telling you this, if it seems there is no hope? Because there is a different side to this as well. This monster has one weakness and that is that it shows itself to the world. In all its ugliness, you can go deep into its center and it will not try to stop you because it has no perception of fear, as it is convinced that it has already won. But that means that light can penetrate the darkness. Light can penetrate the darkest corners of the human psyche in a way that was never possible before in any previous era in the history of humanity. It means that healing this monster will heal humanity at a level at which it has never be healed.
And so this is a reason for great hope. For the monster that will end the world at Ragnarok has revealed itself. The time has come for its glory as well as for its demise. And so your task is as simple as it will be demanding. You must allow the monster to defeat itself. You must not try to fight for fighting is pointless at this time. You must bide your time now, and await the moment when the puss explodes in the face of the world. It will not be pretty. It may be a carnage. But it will have caused a wounding that goes so deeply within the soul of every human being, that it will allow the light to shine as it has never done before.
Have no fear of this darkness. Be prepared to accept the worst, knowing that evil ultimately will always be the prime factor of its own defeat.
Beith is a druid who likes to wander through the forest, inviting the trees to be her teachers in life. She also runs a personal blog about her druid journey, that can be found at wandering-the-woods.com. In real life she’s a mathematician, trying to walk the boundary between the rational and the irrational.
anima monday 