Doug Scott, LCSW, MA 

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A note before I begin: A friend sent me a recent New York Times essay, “We Are Sliding Back Into the Middle Ages” by Katya Ungerman (writing under the pen name Katherine Dee), describing what the author calls the “re-enchantment” of American life.¹ The piece catalogs Tucker Carlson’s claim that a demon physically attacked him in his bed and left claw marks on his ribs, a FEMA official’s claim of teleportation to a Waffle House fifty miles away, the surge of conversions to Catholicism and Orthodoxy this past Easter, Melania Trump walking a humanoid robot down a White House red carpet, the rising rates at which Americans consult astrology and tarot, and a former intelligence official’s sworn testimony that the United States has been retrieving and reverse-engineering crashed UFOs and recovering nonhuman “biologics.” The author’s diagnosis is that life has begun to feel “medieval” — governed by forces beyond our understanding, knowledge that cannot be verified, and authority that is distant and suspect. She names three causes: digital information overload producing false pattern-detection, AI-fabricated evidence collapsing the standards of proof, and institutional decay generating reasonable distrust.

What follows is my reply. I am writing in my own voice from my own contemplative-theological frame, drawing on twenty-five years of clinical practice as a psychotherapist, formation in Franciscan and contemplative Christian spirituality, and a long study of the Law of One material. I hold all of it lightly. This is my limited, partial, open-handed offering. Take what is useful. Leave what is not.

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I. THE VANTAGE POINT

My way to get a handle on this will be from a levels-of-consciousness point of view. This framework is already inaccurate — every map is inaccurate — but it is my best way to understand what is happening.

The New York Times and most center-left publications I read and learn from (the Atlantic belongs in the same family) arise from the modern and postmodern bandwidths of consciousness. From those vantage points, they can critique the levels below them with real accuracy. Modernity emerged from the excesses of the traditional pre-modern mind — what looked, from inside modernity, like superstition, oppression, ignorance, and manipulation. Postmodernity emerged from the excesses of modernity — its blindness to the way power shapes what gets to count as knowledge, its instrumental reason, its hollowing-out of meaning in the service of measurement. Each successive level was an earned correction.

The Levels And Their Blind Spots

What the modern and postmodern mindsets generally cannot do, however, is recognize that they themselves are operating at a particular level. They are not aware of levels of consciousness as such. And because they are not, they cannot critique their own level, see their own shadow, or notice the structural blind spots that come with their vantage point. They also cannot critique the levels above them — or rather, they often do critique what is above, but they critique it as though it were below, because they cannot tell the difference. Genuine spiritual depth, contemplative interiority, the felt recognition that reality is nested in natural hierarchy, the lived experience of the numinous — these get pattern-matched to pre-modern superstition and dismissed accordingly. The postmodern frame critiques what it does not understand, and what it does not understand includes everything above its own developmental ceiling.

Most American liberals and progressives are operating somewhere in the late-modern to postmodern bandwidth. The post-postmodern* level — the one that can hold the gifts of every prior stage while seeing their shadows, including its own — remains a vanishingly small slice of the collective. Most people have not arrived there in most areas of their lives. And there is a further complication that level-of-consciousness theorists have to keep flagging: development happens along multiple lines in a single person, and the lines do not move together. A person can be quite advanced spiritually and remain early-stage psychologically. Another can be deeply developed intellectually and entirely undeveloped spiritually. This explains a great deal of what the article describes. Different people advanced along different lines are encountering re-enchantment with the equipment they happen to have — which is often the wrong equipment for what they are encountering.

Orange-Ray Blockage

One specific pattern of developmental unevenness is going to come up repeatedly in what follows, and it deserves a name now. I will refer to it as orange-ray blockage² — a term from the Law of One material that names the second of seven energy centers, the one that governs personal identity in distinction from other-selves. A blockage at this center produces a self that cannot stabilize without an external Other to define against. Dominance, possession, identity-through-opposition, the conversion of relationship into power-over — these are its signatures. In more conventional psychological language, this is the developmental presentation in which a person may be advanced along certain lines of development (intellectual, vocational, professional) while the overall sense of self continues to operate at a much earlier stage — reactive, dichotomous, externalizing. Such a person may be chronologically a middle-aged adult yet psychically adolescent in the structural sense: rigid notions of victory and defeat, purity and contamination, holiness as separation rather than wholeness, and a sharp, frequently theologized division between “good guys” and “bad guys.” This pattern shows up in the politics of the present, in much of the religious landscape, and — if I am honest — in parts of my own interior life still being worked on.

The New York Times article correctly describes a phenomenon. What it cannot do, from the vantage point it occupies, is evaluate the phenomenon from within. It can name re-enchantment as a sociological event. It cannot ask whether some forms of re-enchantment are developmental regression and others are developmental recovery, because postmodernism’s relationship to the numinous is structurally suspicious. It deflates. The conservatives and traditionalists who are most certain that this is the End Times — that Carlson really was attacked by a demon, that the UAPs are demonic, that the secular state is satanic — also correctly describe a phenomenon, and also cannot evaluate it from within. They concretize. They commit what Alfred North Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness — the error of mistaking an abstraction or a symbolic-relational reality for a literal concrete object simply located in space and time. The traditionalist takes a real spiritual phenomenon and crashes it down into a horned creature with claws.

Only from something like a post-postmodern vantage point is it possible to hold both that the universe is genuinely enchanted and that much of what is being called re-enchantment in contemporary American life is distortion. From inside the postmodern frame those two claims cancel. From inside the truncated-traditionalist frame they collapse into apocalyptic literalism. The post-postmodern move is to keep them both.

*Some terms for the post-postmodern include meta-modern, integral, or the “yellow meme” in Spiral Dynamics.

II. POSTMODERNITY’S GIFT AND SHADOW

I want to defend postmodernity for a moment, because the move I am making could be misread as dismissal. It is not.

Postmodernity’s great gift is the hermeneutic of suspicion — the disciplined ability to look at any system of power (economic, social, political, religious) and ask whose interests does this serve, what has it concealed, what voices has it silenced, what victims has it required. This is not a small gift. It is what allowed us to see colonialism for what it was, to see patriarchy for what it was, to see clericalism and abuse inside religious institutions for what they were, to see the way scientific knowledge production has been shaped by funding and ideology rather than being the pristine view-from-nowhere modernity imagined. The hermeneutic of suspicion is a developmental achievement, and the work it has done has been necessary and, in many cases, sacred.

Postmodernity was not supposed to provide a universal perspective. That is precisely what it critiques. The refusal of grand narrative is its constitutive move. And this is also its shadow. A consciousness organized entirely around suspicion cannot itself construct anything. It can only deconstruct. It cannot offer a vision of the good life, because vision-offering is what it has trained itself to suspect. It cannot provide community, because community requires shared affirmation of something, and shared affirmation is what postmodernity reads as the smoke of someone else’s power-play. When postmodernity is the only consciousness available, what results is what many spiritual writers have called the crisis of meaning in late capitalism. Everything is suspect. Nothing is solid. The hunger for meaning, purpose, tradition, and community remains — because those hungers are not cultural artifacts, they are constitutive of human consciousness at any stage — and finds no nourishment from a frame whose only food is critique.

Holarchy And The Recovery Of Hierarchy

What comes after postmodernity is not a return to pre-modern certainty. It is a developmental move into the post-postmodern stage, and one of the most useful concepts available there is Arthur Koestler’s notion of holarchy. Koestler coined the term to distinguish natural hierarchy — the nested orders we see everywhere in nature and consciousness — from dominator hierarchy, the social structures of power-over that postmodernity correctly critiques. A holarchy is a hierarchy of holons — entities that are simultaneously wholes (in themselves) and parts (of larger wholes). An atom is a whole, and a part of a molecule. A molecule is a whole, and a part of a cell. A cell is a whole, and a part of an organism. A person is a whole, and a part of a community. A community is a whole, and a part of a civilization. A civilization is a whole, and a part of a planetary consciousness. And so on, all the way up and all the way down. Ken Wilber has built much of his developmental theory on this distinction: virtually all growth processes proceed via natural holarchies, orders of increasing wholeness, where each level transcends and includes the prior one.

The post-postmodern recovery is not the abandonment of postmodern critique. It is the integration of postmodern critique into a renewed appreciation for natural hierarchy — for the felt fact that reality is nested, that some things really are higher and lower in the holarchic sense (more inclusive, more developed, capable of more), that authentic spiritual traditions point toward genuine ascent, and that the suspicion of dominator hierarchy does not require the dissolution of all order. This is the move postmodernity cannot make from inside itself, because the move requires trusting something, and trust is exactly what postmodernity has trained itself to defer.

III. THE CONVERSIONS

This brings me to the conversions.

The Times article notes that this past Easter, Catholic dioceses across the country welcomed the largest classes of converts they had seen in fifteen years or more, and that Eastern Orthodox parishes are reporting unprecedented growth, particularly among young men. One Antiochian Orthodox priest told the Times, “In the whole history of the Orthodox Church in America, this has never been seen.”

I want to read this carefully, because there is a lot going on inside the conversion surge and it deserves more than a single interpretive move.

The Hunger Is Sacred

First and most importantly, I want to honor what is real and good in it. Many of the people walking into RCIA classes and inquirer programs are genuinely hungry for authentic and deep community — the kind of community in which there is shared solidarity, shared practice, shared meaning, and shared willingness to be known and to know others over time. I believe this kind of community is genuinely possible. I have experienced it. It is often found inside faith-based groups, and that is no accident: liturgical traditions have, over centuries, developed practices specifically designed to form people into communities of solidarity — the weekly gathering, the shared meal, the common prayer, the rhythm of the liturgical year that holds people together through seasons of joy and grief. What gets people in the door at Catholic and Orthodox parishes right now is, most immediately, the fruit of the hunger that postmodernity has left them with — a longing for rootedness, for tradition, for a community that does not dissolve under the next cycle of critique. The hunger is sacred. I do not want to be heard as dismissing it.

As a student of spirituality and a professional theologian and a clinical social worker in practice for twenty-five years, I also believe the surge reflects, in part, exactly the developmental movement I described in the previous section — the postmodern recognition of its own insufficiency, and the reaching for the holarchic, the sacramental, the embodied, the rooted. People are correctly registering that postmodern late capitalism cannot meet the hungers that constitute being human. They are reaching for tradition because tradition has something the secular frame cannot manufacture — communal liturgy, embodied practice, intergenerational continuity, a story that situates the individual life inside a holarchy of meaning. The Eucharist holds something that no Pew survey can measure. So does the Divine Liturgy in the Orthodox tradition. So do the desert fathers, the hesychast prayer practice, the Marian devotions, the contemplative Christian mystical lineage I was formed inside.

I am essentially an optimist at heart. If these traditional moves can help people achieve a real re-enchantment and a real contemplative interiority, then I am for it. The Christian tradition contains everything anyone could need for the journey I have been describing. It contains the discernment apparatus the truncated-traditionalist frame has lost. It contains the contemplative practice that can hold the encounter with the numinous without collapsing it into either materialist deflation or apocalyptic literalism. It contains a real Jesus — an immigrant, poor, nonviolent, non-scapegoating, social-activist Jesus who was killed for the company he kept and the things he said to power — at the center of its memory. The tradition is still alive. I go to Mass. I believe very fervently in the Eucharist and in the Body of Christ as the gathered people.

What Is Absent From The Parishes

But I have to be honest about what I see, because honesty is part of what discernment requires.

The parishes and faith-based communities I have encountered do indeed provide genuine love and care for their members. That is real and I do not want to diminish it. And I have to say what I notice is largely absent from those same communities, because the absence shapes what people are converting into.

They are not talking about the Catholic Church’s deep history of social engagement and the social teachings that emerged from it — Rerum novarum, Quadragesimo anno, Gaudium et spes, Populorum progressio, Laborem exercens, Laudato si’, Fratelli tutti. They are not talking about the Church’s sustained critique of unregulated capitalism and of the kind of nationalism that fuses Christ with empire. They are not talking about the deep respect for other faiths that Vatican II articulated clearly in Nostra aetate. They are not talking about systemic racism or the oppressive social structures maintained through our economic and political institutions. They are not offering grounded psychospiritual lenses through which to look at our present collective condition.

Instead, when I go to Mass, the significant majority of the time I hear some form of Catholic apologetics from the priest or deacon. The homily is about the necessity of following Jesus, obeying the Church because that is the surest way to know him, and bringing other people into the Church. It is never quite this black-and-white, but it is also rarely deeper than this. I hope I am not being unkind in saying so, but it is my experience, and it is what resonates with the average Sunday-going person in the South, where I attend. The tradition in the deeper sense — the Catholic Worker tradition, the liberation-theology tradition, the contemplative-mystical tradition, the social-teaching tradition, the interfaith-dialogue tradition — is largely not present in the parish life I encounter. What is present is the apologetic surface of the tradition, and that surface, however lovingly delivered, cannot do the work the deeper tradition is built to do.

In my personal experience of Catholicism in Texas, where I live, most of the converts and most of the growth I observe seem far more connected with culture than with an encounter with the actual Jesus of the Gospels. The Jesus being encountered, in many of these conversions, is a cultural-political Jesus who legitimates the existing order, the existing economic arrangements, the existing racial hierarchies, the existing gender norms, the existing nation-state and its violences. He is not the Jesus who walked with the poor, ate with the despised, refused the empire, and was executed by it. The conversions I see are very often into Christian nationalism. Sometimes — not always, but often enough that I cannot pretend otherwise — they shade into the darker Hegseth-Thiel-Vance end of the nationalist spectrum, with its dominionist theology and its sanctification of state violence as Christian witness.³ Members of my own family of origin cheer this administration’s Christian nationalism as holy and from Christ. It baffles me that there is such an incredible lack of capacity to discern spirits, but such is our planet at this hour.

The Discernment The Tradition Already Knows

This is the discernment work that needs to happen, and it cannot happen from the postmodern vantage point (which can only deflate the conversions) or from the truncated-traditionalist vantage point (which celebrates them indiscriminately). It can only happen from inside the tradition itself, asking the tradition’s own ancient questions: Whom does this convert serve? By their fruits ye shall know them. Is this the Jesus of Matthew 25, or a different figure given his name? The Christian tradition has always known how to ask these questions. The Desert Fathers asked them. Augustine asked them. Catherine of Siena asked them of popes. Bonhoeffer asked them in Nazi Germany. Romero asked them in El Salvador. The questions are still available. The apparatus is intact. What is needed is the willingness to use it, and not all of the new converts I see have shown that willingness.

So I hold the surge with two hands. The hunger that drives it is real and good. The destinations vary. Some converts are entering the contemplative depth of the tradition and being formed by it in ways that will bear genuine fruit. Others are entering a culturally-coded version of the tradition that has been hollowed out and refilled with the orange-ray dominance theology I will continue to describe. The work of discernment is to tell which is which, case by case, fruit by fruit, life by life.

IV. STEEL-MANNING THE ANTI-LIBERAL CRITIQUE

Before I move into the cosmological frame that does most of the analytic work in what follows, I want to spend some time honoring what the contemporary anti-liberal right has seen correctly — what its diagnosis of late liberal modernity gets right, and what makes its critique resonate with so many sincere people. I am not in the habit of agreeing with the figureheads of this movement, and what I say next will not change that. But the post-postmodern frame requires me to honor a partial truth wherever it lives, including in places I find otherwise alarming. Steel-manning is the practice of presenting an opposing view in its strongest form before responding to it. The Christian tradition has always known this practice as a form of intellectual charity, and I want to offer it here.

First, what is being attacked. Classical liberalism — the political-philosophical tradition that runs from Locke and Montesquieu through Adam Smith, Madison, and Mill — is the framework that shaped the American constitutional order and the post-war international human-rights regime. Its core commitments are familiar: individual rights as prior to state authority, limited government bounded by constitutional law, separation of powers, the rule of law applied equally, free exchange under conditions of fair competition, religious toleration, freedom of conscience and speech, and the consent of the governed. The Declaration of Independence’s formulation — that governments are instituted to secure these rights — is the classical-liberal proposition in compressed form. Rights are natural and inalienable; government’s role is to secure them through procedural-democratic structure. This is the political achievement of the modern era, and it is what is currently under attack from multiple directions.

Neoliberalism: The Legitimate Grievance

There have, however, been legitimate problems with the excesses of the liberal experiment, and the most consequential of these is the emergence of neoliberalism — the political-economic order that has dominated globally since approximately the 1980s. Neoliberalism took the genuine goods of classical liberalism (individual rights, free exchange, limited government) and severed them from the corresponding goods classical liberalism also affirmed (the common good, social solidarity, intermediate institutions, the moral economy that disciplines and limits market activity). What was left is a hollowed-out individualism functioning primarily as legal cover for transnational capital. The scholarly literature is substantial — David Harvey, Susan George’s work on the “shadow sovereigns,” Leslie Sklair on the transnational capitalist class and the rhetorical granting of “corporate citizenship” to global corporations, Katharyne Mitchell on the fragmenting of citizenship rights and the production of “surplus populations” — and the documented harms are severe: wage stagnation, the collapse of intermediate institutions, the privatization of public goods, the conversion of every dimension of human life into a market transaction, the systematic extraction of value from communities by entities that bear no responsibility to them. The anti-liberal right is not wrong to name this. The legitimate longing for a different order — for a politics organized around something more than aggregate consumer preference and shareholder return — is a moral perception, and it is correct.

From within a post-postmodern frame, this is exactly what one would predict. The excesses of any developmental level eventually generate revolt from below and resistance from the next level up. The excesses of liberalism, especially in its neoliberal phase, have produced exactly this double revolt: the postmodern left has critiqued neoliberalism from one direction (deepening the analysis of power, naming what neoliberalism has concealed, calling for democratic-egalitarian correction), and the anti-liberal right has revolted from another direction (rejecting the liberal order itself and reaching for substantively religious or civilizational authority as replacement). The diagnostic agreement between left and right on the harms of neoliberalism is one of the genuinely striking features of the present moment. The prescriptions diverge catastrophically, but the diagnosis often does not.

The Figureheads Of The Revolt

Here is where the steel-manning ends and the discernment must begin. The figureheads of the contemporary anti-liberal revolt are not in the business of repairing classical liberalism so that it can again serve the common good. They are in the business of dismantling it altogether. I have mapped this coalition in detail in my recent essay Who Is Whispering? The Influencers Behind the Masks of the Collective Bellicosity Thoughtform, and I will only summarize the architecture here.

The figureheads run across four doctrinally incompatible but operationally aligned streams. Alexander Dugin, the Russian philosopher whose Fourth Political Theory proposes itself as a deliberate alternative to liberalism, fascism, and communism, frames Russia as the katechon — the restrainer of the Antichrist — holding back the encroachment of globalist liberal modernity. Steve Bannon, working from the Traditionalist lineage of René Guénon and Julius Evola, frames the present as the Kali Yuga — the Hindu concept of a dark age — and argues that modernity must be broken so the cosmic cycle can turn. Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame and Adrian Vermeule at Harvard Law supply the Catholic-integralist intellectual architecture: Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change (2023) call for the “peaceful but vigorous overthrow” of the liberal ruling class; Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism (2022) explicitly cites Carl Schmitt and proposes “strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good.” Peter Thiel — who in 2009 wrote that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible — funds the technological infrastructure for what he calls exits from democratic politics. Curtis Yarvin, writing as Mencius Moldbug, has proposed replacing democratic governance with monarchy or CEO-style executive sovereignty, and his “RAGE” blueprint (Retire All Government Employees) is operationally embodied in the Schedule F executive order. Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget translates the architectural plan into federal budgets and personnel actions; he has described himself publicly as a “Christian nationist” and has said he wants federal employees “traumatically affected.”

The religious wing of the coalition is where the anti-liberal critique gets its mass-political force. Paula White-Cain, Senior Advisor to the White House Faith Office, supplies the charismatic-Pentecostal framing in which Trump is a divinely anointed figure under the New Apostolic Reformation’s Cyrus Anointing doctrine. Lance Wallnau provides the Seven Mountains Mandate — the teaching that Christians must dominate seven cultural spheres including government, media, education, and business. John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel supplies the apocalyptic-dispensationalist Israel theology that converts geopolitical events into prophetic timeline markers. And Doug Wilson of Moscow, Idaho — the pastor of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), influenced heavily by R.J. Rushdoony’s Christian Reconstructionism — teaches explicitly that the establishment clause of the First Amendment does not require church-state separation and that only Christians are qualified to hold political office. Wilson is Pete Hegseth’s pastor. Hegseth has publicly thanked Wilson for his “mentorship.” Wilson delivered a sermon at one of Hegseth’s monthly Pentagon worship services. Russell Vought operates in the same Wilson orbit. The Christian Reconstructionist theology that the United States military and federal budget should be operationalized inside biblical-law parameters is no longer a fringe academic position. It has working access to the Department of Defense and the Office of Management and Budget.

These streams — Dugin’s Russian Traditionalism, Bannon’s American Traditionalism, the Deneen-Vermeule Catholic integralism, the Thiel-Yarvin neoreactionary stack, the NAR charismatic stream, the dispensationalist Christian Zionist stream, the CREC Reformed Reconstructionist stream — would have anathematized each other in earlier centuries. Catholic integralists and Reformed theocrats spent the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries killing each other’s communities. Russian Traditionalism rejects the Christian claim to exclusive revelation. NAR’s Pentecostal spiritual-warfare framework would strike a CREC elder as borderline heretical. What holds the coalition together is not shared faith. It is a shared opponent: liberal pluralist modernity, called by different names in each stream — secularism, the failed liberal order, the Cathedral, the Antichrist system, the Kali Yuga, Babylon, the demonic network.

The National Mall Ceremony

On May 17, 2026 we witnessed the operational expression of this coalition at scale. On the National Mall, the White House sponsored an all-day prayer event called Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving, part of the celebrations for America’s 250th anniversary. Speakers included Trump (via video, reading from 2 Chronicles 7), Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, evangelist Franklin Graham, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, and The Chosen’s Jonathan Roumie. Apart from one rabbi and one retired Catholic archbishop, almost all of the twenty listed faith leaders were evangelical Protestants. The stage design was significant: arched stained-glass windows set underneath grand columns resembling a federal building, depicting the nation’s founders alongside a white cross. The visual argument was that the Capitol is a church and the nation is a religious body.

Hegseth, in the promotional video before the event, said: “Our founders knew two simple truths: Our rights don’t come from government, they come from God, and a nation is only as strong as its faith.” He framed the event as an opportunity to “rededicate this republic to God and country.” Earlier this spring, at the National Prayer Breakfast, he declared that “America was founded as a Christian nation.” Rubio said from the Mall stage: “From our country’s beginning, for as long as America has embodied freedom and exceptionalism, the soul of our nation has been rooted in the Christian faith.” Trump’s video reading of 2 Chronicles 7:14 — “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land” — is the classic Christian-nationalist proof-text, used to fuse America-as-nation with biblical Israel-as-nation. Sociologist Sam Perry of Baylor University, observing the event, called it a quasi-official Christian-nationalist rally. Rabbi Jonah Pesner of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism noted before the event that the “Judeo-Christian” framing on display is often used “to co-opt Judaism and subsume it within a triumphal view of Christianity.”

The Hegseth move on rights is the clearest illustration of what the anti-liberal right is doing. Classical liberalism, as I noted earlier, holds that rights are natural and inalienable and that government is instituted to secure them through procedural-democratic structure. Hegseth’s framing strips the institutional structure, leaves only the divine-grant claim, and thereby licenses substantive religious authority — specifically, the religious authority of the coalition standing on the stage — to take precedence over the procedural framework. “Rights come from God” is technically a classical-liberal premise. But classical liberalism also holds that the institutional securing of those rights must be procedurally neutral among religious traditions, precisely because no human religious authority can be trusted with the unmediated administration of divinely-granted rights. The framers’ establishment clause was written for exactly this reason. The Hegseth-CREC-Wilson architecture being installed inside the Department of Defense is the systematic dismantling of that procedural neutrality from within the federal executive.

Diagnosis Right, Prescription Catastrophic

This is the post-postmodern reading. The contemporary right has seen something real about the failures of neoliberal modernity. Its diagnosis at the level of what has gone wrong is partly correct. Its prescription — the dismantling of liberal pluralism in favor of substantively religious or civilizational authority — is catastrophic. The post-postmodern move is not to defend neoliberalism (which is indefensible) and not to abandon classical liberalism (which is to surrender exactly the framework that protects the most vulnerable from being crushed by power). The post-postmodern move is to complete the modern-postmodern arc toward a holarchic order in which the procedural-democratic securing of rights is held inside a renewed appreciation for the common good, the moral economy, intermediate institutions, and the felt fact that reality is nested and that some hierarchies are natural and good. The work is not regression. It is integration. The catalyst the coalition is generating is forcing this work into view, whether the coalition intends it or not.

V. WHAT IS ACTUALLY GOING ON

With a conviction that would baffle the modern and postmodern minds, I believe in alien disclosure as a real planetary event. I have written about this for years — most thoroughly in Alien Disclosure and the Conspiring of Wholeness and in Swept Into the Maelstrom, both at cosmicchrist.net. The short version is this. There have been governmental coverups. There are black programs working with technologies the public has not yet seen. Non-human intelligences have been engaged with humanity for a very long time — some positively oriented, in the Law of One framework called Confederation; some negatively oriented, called the Orion group. Disclosure has been unfolding gradually for decades. It started with science fiction softening the cultural imagination, moved through the Roswell narrative and the abduction literature, escalated through the 2017 New York Times AATIP exposé and the Navy’s official release of the FLIR videos, and is now at the stage of congressional hearings and the Trump administration’s PURSUE document release on the war.gov website. The trend line is real and the broader process is genuinely emerging.

Trump As Negative Adept

I also believe — and this is where the post-postmodern frame becomes essential — that the Trump administration is using the disclosure narrative for its own purposes, and that the actors riding the wave are not necessarily good actors. I have come to believe that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are negatively polarized beings — humans who, whatever their stated beliefs, have oriented their will-vector toward service-to-self and away from service-to-others. Trump in particular I read as what the Law of One material would describe as a negative adept, possibly unconscious of his adepthood, capable of significant unconscious magic through sheer concentrated will. The Ra material describes Genghis Khan and Taras Bulba as figures of exactly this type — “bent single-mindedly upon service to self, sparing no efforts in personal discipline to double, re-double and so empower this gateway” (Session 11.11). Trump’s particular gift — and gift is the right word phenomenologically, even when the polarity is negative — is the near-total absence of internal contradiction. Most people’s will is diffused by self-doubt, by conscience, by empathy for those who would be harmed by getting what they want. Trump has very little of this internal friction. The will moves outward without resistance from within. This is the structural condition that produces the doubling effect Ra describes.

The Deep-State Mirror

There is also something darkly comic in watching Trump manifest what he most loudly attacks. The deep state he campaigned against may well have been a real thing — opaque institutional power operating beyond electoral accountability is a fair description of several federal apparatuses he inherited — but what he has done is build another version of it. A deep state that mirrors the one he attacked, except more centralized, more personalized, more loyalty-filtered, and in the polarity sense almost certainly darker. Schedule F (the executive order that reclassifies tens of thousands of career civil servants as political appointees who can be fired at will), the Vought architecture (the operational blueprint emerging from Russell Vought’s Office of Management and Budget for using federal budget and personnel authority to discipline the executive branch), and the Yarvin operational blueprint (Curtis Yarvin / Mencius Moldbug’s “RAGE” doctrine — Retire All Government Employees — which proposes replacing the procedural federal workforce with a sovereign-executive structure) — these are the same dominator-hierarchy structure with the polarity vector tilted further down. Trump and Hegseth I read as negatively polarized in the technical sense; they have made the Choice toward service-to-self and are progressing along that path. Negatively polarized beings are not lost souls. They have chosen, and along their chosen path they are doing the work. The cabinet around them, however, is a different matter, and arguably more consequential at scale. Most of them, I suspect, are not negatively polarized but unpolarized — what the Ra material calls truly helpless (Session 19.18): “those who have not consciously chosen but who repeat patterns without knowledge of the repetition or the meaning of the pattern.” The orange-ray blockage produces those patterns reliably: dichotomous loyalty, identity-through-opposition, the conviction that dominance is righteousness from inside the blockage. They are being used by the negatively-polarized adepts at the top precisely because they have not polarized and therefore cannot resist the field.

The mirror dynamic shows up everywhere with Trump himself. He calls others fascists; the apparatus he is building is structurally fascist. He calls others corrupt; the family enrichment is unprecedented. He calls others demonic; the operational theology of the May 17, 2026 ceremony was the closest thing to state-sanctioned spiritual warfare we have seen at that scale in American history. The orange-ray blockage projects its own structure outward and then attacks it as though it were located in someone else. This is its native operating mode.

None of this means that the underlying disclosure movement is spurious. The cosmic and the political operate at different scales. A negative-polarity actor can ride a positive-polarity wave for as long as the wave serves their purpose. This is exactly what one would expect during a planetary harvest window — a service-to-self adept positioning himself in the slipstream of a genuine planetary unveiling and bending it toward personal aggrandizement and dominance. The wave is real. The surfer is opportunistic. Both true. Different levels.

VI. THE MICRO-MACRO MIRROR

The therapeutic frame is doing real work here, and I want to name it.

In clinical practice, what is hidden in the unconscious — repressed material, disowned shadow, ancestral inheritance — does not stop operating because it is hidden. It operates more freely when unacknowledged, because it is unmetabolized. Good therapy is, at its heart, a disclosure process. Hidden material is brought into the light, not to be condemned but to be integrated, forgiven, balanced, opened to more love. Jungian individuation tracks this. The Desert Father tradition of discerning logismoi tracks this. Richard Rohr’s “necessary suffering” tracks this. The Ra material’s balancing exercises track this.

Disclosure As Planetary Individuation

If the macro mirrors the micro — and I believe it does — then a planetary civilization approaching harvest is undergoing something structurally analogous. Hidden things are coming into the light. Coverups are unraveling. Technologies kept in black programs are surfacing. The fact of non-human contact, suppressed for generations, is moving from suppressed-and-ridiculed to acknowledged. Disclosure as planetary individuation. The shape of the curve over the past fifty years is what acclimation looks like at scale.

Why The Surfacing Looks Like Collapse

When a blockage that has been operating unconsciously begins to surface, it does not surface looking better. It surfaces looking worse, because the patient is now seeing nakedly what was previously operating in disguise. The “I had no idea I was that angry” moment. The “I just realized I’ve been recreating my father in every relationship” moment. These are progress markers, and they feel like collapse. The orange-ray blockage at the planetary level is doing exactly this right now at the collective level. It is becoming visible to itself. Trump is so disorienting because he names what was previously hidden under polite surface. The earlier polite surface was the same dynamic operating in disguise. The current open dominance theology, anti-immigrant rage, anti-Muslim hatred, anti-trans violence, “ordo amoris” doctrine of contracted love — these are not new. They are the underlying blockage now visible to itself. Necessary surfacing, and catastrophic in the lived sense, simultaneously.

The catalyst keeps coming until the orientation is forced into the open. The orange-ray surfacing is what the catalyst is for. The BASH — what I have been calling the planetary egregore of bellicosity that gets fed by collective fear — is intensifying because the surfacing is intensifying. This is not a failure of the system. It is the system working.

VII. THE QUIET HORROR

The Ra material has a passage I cannot stop returning to. Don Elkins asks why Earth will harvest to fourth-density positive when the surface evidence suggests an overwhelmingly negative population. Ra answers, “The Earth seems to be negative. That is due to the quiet, shall we say, horror which is the common distortion which those good or positively oriented entities have towards the occurrences which are of your space/time present. However, those oriented and harvestable in the ways of service to others greatly outnumber those whose orientation towards service to self has become that of harvestable quality” (Session 17.23).

That phrase — the quiet horror — has stayed with me for years. I want to name what I mean by it as precisely as I can. The quiet horror is the felt-sense that something is very wrong, and that we feel powerless to right this wrong. It is the lived texture of being a positively-oriented soul inside a social complex whose ambient distortion runs the other way. The wrongness is real. The powerlessness is also real, and it is not a failure of agency or courage. It tracks something structural in the cosmic mechanics and something structural in our planetary institutions.

Window Balancing

The Ra material is precise about the first part of this in Session 16.6. Don asks whether the Confederation’s “window balancing” — the principle by which Guardian influence must be calibrated against Orion influence to preserve free will — prevents the Guardians from simply shielding humanity from negative contact altogether. Ra answers that yes, this is partially correct: “In effect, the balancing allows an equal amount of positive and negative influx, this balanced by the mind/body/spirit distortions of the social complex. Thus in your particular planetary sphere, less negative, as you would call it, information or stimulus is necessary than positive due to the somewhat negative orientation of your social complex distortion.” The implication is severe and clarifying. Because Earth’s social complex is somewhat negatively oriented, proportionally less negative influx is needed to maintain the cosmic balance than positive influx. The positively-oriented soul living inside that social complex is therefore steeped in an ambient field that the Law of Free Will requires the Guardians to permit. The Guardians are not failing to protect us. They are precluded from protecting more, by the very Law they serve.

Institutions Born Inside The BASH

There is a second structural layer underneath this one, and it is the layer that does the most damage. Many of the religious institutions, economic institutions, and cultural frameworks on Earth were themselves born inside the Great BASH, and they continue to be maintained and nurtured by it. They carry orange-ray dominance theology and orange-ray social structure inside their constitutive forms. A positively-oriented soul who naturally seeks formation through institutional channels — their church, their tradition, their political community, their workplace, their family of origin — often finds that the channels available to them are shaped by the field they need formation against. The very places one would expect to find spiritual nutriment turn out, on closer inspection, to be transmitting the BASH in the costume of tradition.

The consequence of this is one of the most sobering teachings in the Ra material, and it has been a long meditation for me. A soul can choose service-to-others at the core of their being, do real positive work in the world, identify sincerely as Christian or as patriotic or as a person of good will, and over many lifetimes polarize toward service-to-others without ever progressing toward fourth-density harvestability — because the institutional forms they have been formed inside cannot teach them universal love thoroughly enough. They remain in the positive range, lifetime after lifetime, less-negative but not yet harvestable. This is the Patton phenomenon at scale. It is not failure. It is the predictable outcome of attempting to develop fourth-density consciousness through third-density institutions that were built inside the BASH.

This is what the quiet horror knows, often without language for it. It is the positively-oriented soul registering not only that the ambient field is hostile but that the channels of formation are compromised, that the apparent escape routes from the field turn out to be inside the field, and that the work of becoming harvestable to fourth density on this planet at this time is genuinely difficult — not because the soul lacks willingness, but because the institutional supports for the work have themselves been colonized by what the work is against. It is not paranoia, not depression, not pathology. It is reality being registered accurately by a soul whose core orientation is true. It is what most of my counseling clients carry without language for it. It is what my friend who sent me the article feels when she reads about claw marks and teleporting bureaucrats and humanoid robots at the White House. The quiet horror is a diagnostic feedback signal, not a psychiatric symptom.

The Horror As Navigational Instrument

This is also why the discernment work I am trying to model in this letter matters at the level it matters. Not because my framework is special, but because the work of sifting which parts of which institutions carry genuine fourth-density signal and which parts carry BASH-borne distortion is exactly the work the quiet horror has been trying to point us toward all along. The horror is a teacher. It is telling us what needs to be discerned. The institutional supports that can carry the fourth-density work still exist; they are just rare, and recognizing them requires the very capacity the BASH-borne institutions have not been able to give us. We have to develop that capacity ourselves, often outside the institutions, sometimes within them in small contemplative pockets, and almost always by paying attention to the quiet horror as a navigational instrument rather than treating it as a symptom to be medicated.

What Ra adds, and what is severe in its implications, is that positive identification is not the same as positive polarization. The majority of souls on Earth are positively oriented at root. Most are also operating beneath polarization threshold, dragged by the ambient field into a less-negative-but-still-negative register. Someone can identify as Christian, as patriotic, as family-oriented, and still operate at net-negative polarity if the actual energetic content of their daily orientation is fear-of-Other, contempt for the outgroup, will-to-dominate, scapegoating. A self-described Christian whose daily psychic activity is anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-trans, anti-Democrat hatred is not on the positive path regardless of the cross around their neck. They may be less negative than someone with no orienting tradition at all — which keeps showing up in my framework as the Patton phenomenon, polarizing more positively along a vector that nevertheless makes the green-ray Choice harder, not easier. Less-negative is still in the negative range.

VIII. THE TUCKER CARLSON QUESTION

A specific case will help. Tucker Carlson said publicly that he was attacked by something unseen in his bed, that he woke bleeding, and that the entity left four claw marks on each of his sides and his left shoulder. The New York Times article presents this alongside the FEMA teleportation claim, the AI-God case, the conversion surge, the UAP testimony, and the humanoid robot — as if these were all instances of one phenomenon, “irrationality returning.”

They are not the same phenomenon. The post-postmodern move is precisely to not let them aggregate.

A Fractal Who Broadcasts

I do not believe Tucker Carlson is negatively polarized at his root. I assume — and this is an assumption, not a knowing — that he is positively oriented like most of the larger psyche he serves as a public figure. What he is, more precisely, is intellectually capable and psychically untrained. He represents a fractal of his constituency, which is also intellectually engaged and psychically unawake. Whether his psychic unawareness is chosen is not something I can know from the outside, and not something Ra would adjudicate either. Some people choose chosen ignorance. Others cannot go there because of trauma, formation, religious socialization, or simple incapacity. The interior of another soul is not available to me.

What I can say is that he broadcasts. He transmits not only his experience but his interpretive lens, to a constituency that largely shares the lens. The constituency then receives the broadcast as confirmation of what it already half-believes, and the resulting feedback loop reinforces the warfare-disclosure mindset across a large group. The fractal pattern intensifies. This is how positively-oriented souls operating beneath polarization threshold can collectively feed a negatively-polarized thoughtform without intending to.

The Phenomenon May Be Real

And the phenomenon itself may be real. The Ra material is explicit that what it calls dark angels — negatively-polarized entities of the inner planes — operate in this planetary field, that they tempt and accentuate, and that they can produce physical traces on a human body when conditions allow. The contemplative tradition has known this for two thousand years. Evagrius Ponticus organized an entire spiritual technology around the discernment of such encounters. So did John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, the desert mothers, the whole apparatus of diakrisis. The phenomenon is not novel. What is new is that the contemporary American public square has full receptivity to the supernatural without the navigational equipment. Carlson reports the encounter through the only frame available to him — the truncated-traditionalist demon category, stripped of the contemplative discernment that would have asked five other questions before settling there. The result is real phenomenon, real attack perhaps, and misinterpreted broadcast, and feedback loop, and intensification of the BASH egregore through the resulting fear.

The Ra material is also explicit that negative entities cannot create imbalance in a person. What they can do is accentuate pre-existing distortion, with effectiveness proportional to the person’s lack of self-knowledge. The mechanism is precise. Carlson’s pre-existing distortions — whatever they are, and I do not need to enumerate them to make the structural point — are the leverage points. The accentuation is real. The interpretation flows downstream of the accentuated state. The audience receives the broadcast already primed by their own parallel distortions. The whole loop is structurally negative-polarity-feeding, regardless of the conscious intent of any participant.

This is the move that the postmodern frame cannot make and the truncated-traditionalist frame cannot make. The postmodern says, “It didn’t happen, it’s psychological, it’s symptomatic of digital information overload.” The truncated-traditionalist says, “It happened, it’s a demon, the world is in cosmic war between absolute good and absolute evil.” The post-postmodern position is that the encounter likely happened, that the interpretation is wrong in a specific and consequential way, that the broadcast feeds the very dynamic it claims to expose, and that the whole pattern is recognizable because the same dynamic operates in different forms across the entire planetary collective right now.

IX. THE FEAR FACTORY FARM

I want to add one more layer, because without it the analysis stays too clean — too located in other people’s distortions and not enough in our own.

The Ra material describes the Orion group operating through several vectors: through actual fourth-density entities that have come through quarantine, through thought-forms in the lower astral that feed on fear, through dark angels of the inner planes that tempt and accentuate, and — strikingly — through second-density creatures within the Earth’s surface that perform symbolic-magical operations like the cattle mutilations. Ra explains that the body parts removed in those mutilations correspond to the energy centers of human mass consciousness, that the operation is symbolic-magical rather than random predation, and that “the thought-form entities feed upon fear; thus they are able to do precise damage according to systems of symbology” (Session 43.6).

The Karmic Imbalance

This is one mechanism in a much larger pattern. The deeper layer is that humanity carries a vast karmic imbalance with the second-density beings it has placed under its care. We know, intuitively and almost universally, that livestock animals are sentient — capable of relationship, capable of love, capable of recognition. Children know this. Anyone who has lived with an animal knows it. The contemplative streams of every major religion have always known it. And we have built a planetary-scale industrial system that systematically prevents that recognition, that hides the conditions of factory farming from the eater, that subjects billions of sentient creatures to lives of unmitigated suffering, and that converts the resulting unmetabolized fear-energy into the substrate through which negatively-oriented thoughtforms can speak into the human collective unconscious.

The pathway is open because we opened it. The Orion philosophy of dominance — some beings exist to be possessed and used by others; relationship is not required; the dignity of the other can be ignored — is already operating in the human collective unconscious as a result of how we treat the second-density beings under our care. The internal habit of not-knowing what one knows about the cow becomes the internal habit of not-knowing what one knows about the immigrant, the trans child, the prisoner, the Iranian civilian, the Palestinian family. The dissociation is one dissociation, operating across multiple objects. The food system trains the psyche in the very practice of subjugation that then plays out at the political and theological levels.

We Are All In The Mirror

This is why the analysis cannot be located only in other people’s distortions. We are all in the mirror. The karmic imbalance is ours. The factory farm is not a distant scandal; it is a daily liturgy we participate in, often without noticing, while we wonder why the political shadow keeps surfacing in ever more grotesque form. The same density-transition pressure that is forcing UAP disclosure into the open is forcing this disclosure into the open too. The slaughter floor, the feedlot satellite image, the broken relationship between the human and the cow — these are part of what is being unveiled. The question is whether we will see it or whether we will continue to look away.

X. THE HERMENEUTIC OF WHOLENESS

In Alien Disclosure and the Conspiring of Wholeness I named two hermeneutics that I see operating in the current disclosure conversation. The first is what I called the conspiracy of malicious intent. This hermeneutic frames reality as a war between a hidden cabal of luciferian elites and an oppressed humanity. It locates redemption in exposing and defeating the enemy. It is the warfare-disclosure mindset that I see in the David Wilcock / Corey Goode / QAnon / Christian-nationalist apocalyptic stream. It produces conviction without integration. It feeds the BASH egregore directly through its insistence that hope requires hostility.

The Conspiring Wholeness

The second hermeneutic — the one I try to write from, however imperfectly — I called the conspiring of wholeness. Looking back, I wish I had titled the piece the conspiring wholeness, without the of. I have come to think of wholeness as God’s own nature — the divine pouring itself into the illusion of separation, breathing with this third-density bandwidth of consciousness, becoming metabolizable, integrating itself into what we experience as the material world. Wholeness does this not because it has to but because it wants to. It is the ultimate potentiality, the One Infinite Creator under one of its primary aspects. In that sense, conspiring must be heard from its etymological roots — con-spirare, to breathe with. The wholeness is the breathing, and the breathing is what is making everything one. In the conspiracy of malicious intent, hidden actors are con-spiring against us. In the conspiring wholeness, every actor — humanity, the Confederation, the Orion group, the dark angels and the bright angels, the Wanderers and the negatively-polarized adepts, the second-density beings under our care and the third-density beings doing the caring — is breathing together in service of wholeness-making, even when some of the actors are operating from negative orientation. The negative-polarity vector is part of the harvest mechanism. The catalyst of bellicosity is what forces the orange-ray blockage to surface, become visible, and become workable. The positively-oriented soul does not defeat the negative; it accepts, loves, forgives, balances, and opens to more love, which is the Ra-material formula and also the Franciscan formula and also the contemplative-Christian formula and also the formula of every adequate therapeutic practice.

This is the hermeneutic that allows the New York Times article and the Carlson claim and the conversion surge and the UAP testimony and the factory farm and the Trump administration to be held as parts of one unfolding, rather than as discrete scandals. They are all expressions of the same density-transition pressure forcing what was hidden into the light. They are all catalyst. The question is not whether the surfacing should be happening — it is, and it must. The question is what each of us does with the catalyst as it lands in our particular life.

XI. LOVE IS THE GREAT PROTECTION

The Ra material returns repeatedly to one simple instruction, given in the context of unrelenting psychic attack on the channel Carla Rueckert. Don Elkins asked, over and over, what they could do to protect her. Ra’s answer in Session 63.5 was, “Continue in love and praise and thanksgiving to the Creator. Examine previous material. Love is the great protector.” And again, in Session 64.21, “As always, love is the greatest protection.”

A Different Frequency

I find this maddening and clarifying in equal measure. It is maddening because it does not offer technique, ritual, weaponry, or any of the things the warfare mindset wants. It is clarifying because, after twenty-five years of clinical practice, I know it is true. The negative-polarity field that surrounds us, that operates through the BASH, that feeds on factory-farm fear and political-tribal hatred and apocalyptic certainty and the broadcasts of unawakened public figures — this field has no purchase on a heart that is genuinely opened in love. It is not that love acts as armor in the warlike sense. It is that love operates at a different frequency, a different bandwidth of consciousness, where the negative-polarity field simply cannot reach. The Ra material is explicit that highly-adept negative entities, with magical capacities far beyond our own, are baffled by love and quietly withdraw. They do not fight love and lose. They do not engage love at all, because there is nothing in love that their philosophy of separation can grasp.

This is the deepest answer to the New York Times article, to Carlson’s claw marks, to the conversion surge, to the Trump administration’s PURSUE files, to the factory farm, to my own family’s enthusiastic Christian nationalism, and to the National Mall ceremony of May 17, 2026. The work is to keep opening the heart, more, and more, and more. To love the people who are getting it wrong, including the ones in my own family. To love the second-density beings under our care, and to change what we can about how we treat them. To love the parts of ourselves that are still entangled with the orange-ray blockage we keep diagnosing in others. To love, in some genuine way, even Tucker Carlson and Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump — not by approving of what they do but by holding their souls in the light alongside our own and refusing the warfare frame even toward those who broadcast it.

This is not naive. It is the most powerful position available in third density, and the Ra material insists it is the only position that ultimately protects anything at all.

XII. A WAY FORWARD

What is the practice, then? I have written more on this in my framework called Metanoism, which I will not lay out fully here. But the basic shape is simple.

We enter into solidarity with the other — including the other who interprets the world through a frame radically different from our own. We listen for the operative worldview, the image of God, the source of meaning, without rushing to correct. We cultivate hope by inviting the other into curiosity about what has worked, what has surprised them, what might be the next small step. We surrender to process, because all things and all beings are in process, including ourselves, including God.

Love’s Metric

We pay attention to love’s metric — which is how we treat those who do not benefit from our systems of power. The poor outside us mirror the poor inside us. The orange-ray blockage in our own psyche mirrors the structural cruelty in the social systems we participate in. The factory farm mirrors the political dominance theology. The unkindness toward the marginalized other mirrors the unkindness toward the marginalized parts of our own interior life. The work in one direction is the work in every direction.

Holding It All Lightly

We hold what we find lightly. The Ra material is quite explicit on this. The seeking of specific information is not the problem; the problem is the importance placed upon it. The grass blooms and dies; the love and the light of the One Infinite Creator continues. Be interested. Follow the curiosity. Read the New York Times article and the cosmicchrist.net post and the Ra material and the cattle mutilation reports if they call you. And then go out and serve the actual people and beings in front of you, because that is where the harvest is being worked out, one act of recognition at a time.

— • —

The world we are moving into will not look like the one we grew up in. The author of the Times piece is right about that. Whether it looks more medieval or more genuinely whole depends on what we do with the unveiling that is already underway. Enchantment is not the problem. Enchantment without discernment is the problem. The discernment apparatus exists. It has existed for millennia in the contemplative traditions. It is being recovered now, in ways that include the Times essay, my friend’s letter, this reply, the Ra material, the testimony of the Navy pilots, the conversions to Orthodoxy and Catholicism among the seeking young (with all the discernment questions those conversions raise), and the slow agonizing surfacing of a planetary shadow that no one will be able to look away from much longer.

Love is the great protection. It is also the great teacher, the great solvent of the orange-ray blockage, the great reconciler of the postmodern critique with the holarchic recovery, the great work of third density, and the destination toward which the entire density transition is bending us. Everything else is method.

This is my limited, partial, open-handed offering. Take what is useful. Leave what is not.

— • —

ENDNOTES

1. Katya Ungerman [Katherine Dee], “We Are Sliding Back Into the Middle Ages,” New York Times, May 17, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/opinion/supernatural-religion-reality.html. The author writes the newsletter default.blog under the pen name Katherine Dee.

2. Orange ray is the second of seven energy centers in the Law of One framework, corresponding roughly to the sacral chakra in the Hindu-Tantric tradition. It governs personal identity in distinction from other-selves — the self as a discrete being in relation to specific others. Healthy orange-ray functioning supports a stable sense of self, the capacity for one-to-one relationship, and the metabolizing of power dynamics. Orange-ray blockage produces a self that cannot stabilize without an external Other to define against, expressed as dominance, possession, identity-through-opposition, and the conversion of relationship into power-over. See Don Elkins, Carla L. Rueckert, and Jim McCarty, The Ra Material: An Ancient Astronaut Speaks (Louisville, KY: L/L Research, 1981–1984), particularly Sessions 32, 41, 47, and 49. In more conventional psychological language, this is the developmental presentation in which a person may be advanced along certain lines of development — intellectual, vocational, professional — while the overall sense of self continues to operate at a much earlier stage, often through a reactive and dichotomous register. Such a person may be chronologically a middle-aged adult yet psychically adolescent in the structural sense: rigid notions of victory and defeat, purity and contamination, holiness as separation rather than wholeness, and a sharp, frequently theologized division between “good guys” and “bad guys.” The disjunction across developmental lines is well documented in Ken Wilber’s integral writing — see Integral Psychology (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), chap. 1 — and the broader phenomenon of mature-presenting adults operating from earlier ego-organization is standard clinical material. The political and religious expressions of orange-ray blockage are what I have been tracing in my Great BASH Series throughout 2025–2026.

3. I have developed the orange-ray-overlay analysis at length in a series of essays at cosmicchrist.net. The Great BASH Series specifically: Part 1, “How the Egregore Great BASH Shows Itself at the Threshold of Human Shift” (March 10, 2026); Part 2, “A Self With a Planetary-Sized Auto-Immune Disease: A Diagnosis of Terra in the Time of Density Transition” (March 16, 2026); Part 3, “Peter Thiel, Opus Dei, the Great BASH, and the Counter-Voices of Contemplative Christianity” (March 18, 2026); Part 4, “The Prayer of the Pentagon: The Great BASH in Real Time” (March 31, 2026); Part 5, “Trump’s Egregore Easter: Good Friday through Easter Tuesday, 2026” (April 7, 2026); Part 6, “Carrying the Name?: The AI Jesus, the VP Who Lectured the Pope on Theology, and Hegseth’s Pulp Fiction Prayer” (April 16, 2026). Companion pieces from the same period: “Our Collective Bellicosity Thoughtform: The Great BASH and the Current Planetary Shift,” presentation at the IIPSGP / Global Vision 2000 Joint International Conference (April 5, 2026); “Who Is Whispering? The Influencers Behind the Masks of the Collective Bellicosity Thoughtform” (April 18, 2026); and “The Charlie Kirk Event and the Great BASH” (September 19, 2025), the earliest formal articulation of the BASH framework. Foundational orange-ray-overlay essays from earlier years: “Earth’s Third-Density Experience: How has the cosmic green-ray energy affected our mass consciousness?” (February 19, 2022); “Earth’s Unique Third-Density Experience (6.13, 10.6): 75,000 years ago to ~1936” (February 16, 2022); “The Law of One and the Patton Phenomenon (34.17): Polarizing More Positively But Decreasing In Harvestability?” (March 12, 2022); “Swept Into the Maelstrom? A [Law of One] Reflection On How the Most Popular Form of Disclosure Advocacy Contributes to Our Current Collective Situation” (February 26, 2022); and “The Green Ray Energy Center: Living the Law of One Wholeheartedly” (April 13, 2021). All available at cosmicchrist.net.

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Doug Scott, MA, MSW LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker and psychospiritual counselor in private practice in Dallas, Texas. He writes at cosmicchrist.net and hosts the Building 4th community. Earlier posts referenced in this essay include Alien Disclosure and the Conspiring of Wholeness (2023), Swept Into the Maelstrom (2022), The Law of One and the Patton Phenomenon (2022), The Mirror of Disclosure (2025), Satan, Sin, and Scapegoating: Three Nuances of the Same Bandwidth of Consciousness (2020), Love is the Great Protector (2017), and the Great BASH Series (2025–2026).

• Cosmic Christ