Stories From The Future

In Chapter 1, I was describing rising discomfort, and the sense that something is deeply wrong with the world. Later I described the unconscious mind breaking through, disturbing the clean lines of the conscious world. Now I'm going to turn that inside-out.

What if the unconscious wasn't breaking in? What if the conscious mind broke out and ran ahead of its own limits? What if everything you were taught to see as progress was, in systems terms, a deviation? A runaway process, an overclocked function that no longer receives feedback from the deeper structure it emerged from?

And what if the ancient world knew this could happen? What if they tried to tell us … not with instructions, but with story? Encoded not in argument, but in archetype.

Ancient Warnings

Across human traditions .. religious, mythological, esoteric .. we find the same story told in different voices: When the intellect reaches beyond its bounds, and disconnects from source, a fall follows:

In Eden, we ate from the tree of knowledge and were exiled from the garden; our integrated state.

In Babel, we reached for heaven, lost our shared understanding, and scattered.

Prometheus stole fire from the gods and was bound.

Atlantis fell not from war, but from forgetting its sacred alignment.

What if these weren't just stories of the past, but encoded system diagnostics?

Not perhaps, warnings from God, but warnings from ourselves, before we lost the ability to hear our own signals.

The Unconscious as The Original System

The unconscious mind is not a mistake, not an extra. It is the body of the organism; the ancient part of us tuned to the rest of nature, that knew when to plant, when to rest, how to feel the contours of reality without tearing it open.

The original interface:

It communicated in patterns, in myth, taboo, reverence, story and song. It was there first, effectively forever, and it birthed consciousness not as its master, but as its instrument.

But the instrument began to believe it was the musician. It overdeveloped, optimised, extracted and began to overwrite what it did not understand, separating itself from the deeper system which began to destabilise, and fragment, in collective terms.

Unless we are somebody else's experiment, it would seem very likely that the conscious mind didn't emerge all at once, but instead, grew slowly, taking form inside the animal mind that was already shaped by millions of years of survival.

And as that new capacity formed, it didn't arrive clean. It arrived in something already filthy, and tribal, already full of desire, fear, and aggression. And once it began to see itself, really see itself, it couldn't un-see what it was.

The denial mechanism:

This situation would seem fated to form a split. Not because anything went wrong, but because it couldn't have gone any other way. As soon as we could consciously observe ourselves with respect to our social and hierarchical values, we started calculating and judging what we saw.

The Seven Deadly Sins

We have seven deadly sins and ten commandments. These don't describe flaws in our nature, but features of it; instincts we couldn't hold in the light. So we gave them symbols, rituals, doctrines, and wrapped them in religion to name them without having to claim them.

It gave people a way to manage their animal nature without having to own it.. Later, we exported all of it into culture, into politics, economics, media, belief. We layered systems, laws and products over the same impulses, still keeping them out of view.

We told stories to make the mess look intentional. But the instincts never left. They just stopped being acknowledged.

Jung's observation that:

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."

Tells us what might happen next.

The Runaway Process

And so with certain powerful human drives and reactions kept off-stage, we kept going; kept building and optimising, systems and structures that no longer integrated the deeper system they came from, losing crucial feedback and regulation.

Our visible, material achievements have created benefits at scale, but when we deny what older systems like religion and spiritual practices once held in check, our creations run away with themselves, as purpose and meaning begin to disintegrate.

Once this happens, we find ourselves living in a world created by the conscious mind, for the conscious mind, which has forgotten where we are going and why.

Why the cycle?

Perhaps we could run our history a thousand times, and always reach this point, perhaps this would be true of any species transitioning from a natural, to a conscious state in its evolution.

The Shaman's Role

Every tribe had a Shaman, a Witch, or Sage by one name or another. One who could walk between the seen and the unseen. Their role wasn't mystical; it was mechanical … calibration.

They watched for misalignment; when dreams went sour, when symbols broke down, when someone saw too much or too little. The Shaman was the feedback loop, keeping the tribe aligned with reality, ensuring their survival.

And when civilisation grew too confident, it ejected the Shaman, replacing them with priests, then with scientists and finally media avatars with no connection to the unseen.

The consequence:

Without that feedback as calibration, the bearing is lost, and going off course becomes both inevitable and impossible to see, directly. And so we are left looking at the symptoms and missing the cause.

Collapse and The Flood

In the myths, when things ran too far, a flood came. Literal or symbolic; a flood wipes the froth off the surface. It takes with it the layers of abstraction, the distractions, the idols, and simulations of reality that no longer reflect it.

The collective anticipation:

These stories are embedded into us, and after the non-stop news cycles of everything from climate disaster to World War 3, people are agitated, and waiting for something to happen. Year after year, decade after decade, we have watched our leaders presiding over war and suffering, offering reasons that no longer explain anything, just keeping us anxious and waiting.

We might think or feel that we're waiting for the apocalypse, or maybe a governmental breakthrough, or some utopian threshold to be crossed, but those things seem further away than ever, and so maybe, without noticing it, we're waiting for the moment we realise that we are the ones defining everything."

Reintegrating the Spiral

People talk of the end of history, but maybe what they are sensing is the end of a loop, and what comes next depends on whether we listen. Because buried in the rituals, stories, architecture and silence of the past are the instructions we left ourselves.

They weren't superstition or blind dogma. They were describing the fatal problem that comes with consciousness: the invisible trap we were always destined to fall into if we didn't learn to recognise it, or lost the ability to understand the messages we once carved in stone.

The emergence:

And now, in the dark before the next dawn, they are beginning to re-emerge. Not in temples, or cathedrals, but in us. In you. In the part of you that read this far and recognised something. Not as new information, but as something that was always there. Waiting to be remembered.

Remember Yourself

Try to remember what it felt like to really trust that everything was alright. Not belief, or optimism. Just that solid, quiet knowing you had as a kid, or maybe just before adult life pulled you too far off track. The kind of trust you didn't have to explain. The kind you felt behind you, not in front of you. That. Trust only that.

What This Chapter Reveals

Chapter 10 shows that the solution isn't to go backward to traditional forms, but to consciously integrate what those forms preserved. The myths and stories weren't just entertainment—they were system diagnostics, warning us about the inevitable crisis that comes when consciousness separates from its source.

The chapter reveals that we're not experiencing random collapse but a predictable phase transition that any conscious species might go through. The ancient warnings encoded the recognition that consciousness could become disconnected from its foundation and provided instructions for reintegration.

The deepest instruction is simple: trust the part of you that recognises truth beneath all the programming and conditioning. This isn't about belief or doctrine, but about reconnecting with the original intelligence that exists before all the cultural overlay.

Understanding this transforms the current crisis from meaningless suffering into conscious evolution, the painful but necessary process of reintegrating consciousness with its source. The way forward isn't through new ideologies or systems, but through remembering what we always knew at the deepest level.