There is a very uncomfortable place where all of this begins, and most people would rather decorate it with spiritual language than actually sit inside it. But the truth is much more physical, much more raw. If the chemistry of your life feels off, chaotic, misaligned, it is not because the world is broken. It is because your spirit has not fully landed in your body. The real alchemy is not somewhere above you, not in some abstract enlightenment. It is in that precise point where spirit agrees to enter matter and take responsibility for it. Not to avoid it with wonderful words on righteous suffering... 

And here is the part no one wants to say out loud. When your body was forming, when you were nothing more than a cluster of cells, the first structure that began organizing itself was not your brain, not your heart, not your “higher consciousness.” It was your asshole. Yes, literally. The body anchors itself before it expands. Which means you don’t get to escape into light without first being rooted in reality. You don’t get to transcend before you learn how to be here (THIS LIFE MATTERS). There is a biological memory in you that already knows this, even if your brilliant mind keeps trying to bypass it scaring you.... 

So all this talk about enlightenment while avoiding responsibility for your own mess… it collapses. You cannot rise if you are not willing to sit in your own shit. And that is not poetic. That is very functional. That is how life actually works. Flowers do not grow in sterile environments. They grow in soil that has been fed, decomposed, transformed. Manure is not separate from beauty. It is the very condition for it.

Which is why this obsession with separating darkness, labeling parts of yourself as "wrong", cutting them out, pretending they do not exist… creating comfortable stories about them... it is completely anti-life. You cannot run a living system that way. You cannot grow anything real that way. The moment you exile your darkness (or prefer to never look at it), you also exile your capacity to transform it.

And here it becomes almost absurdly obvious, even in language itself. We call lies “bullshit,” as if somehow truth is clean and everything else is dirty. But even that metaphor betrays us. Because what grows out of shit? Life! Even mushrooms. Then it becomes holy shit! Entire ecosystems grow. Transformation itself. So what exactly are you rejecting when you reject it? The very process that would evolve you.

There is something almost cosmic in that irony. This whole existence is built on cycles of breakdown and regeneration, and yet the human mind, especially those brilliant minds, still clings to the fantasy of being pure, untouched, moral, spiritual and above it all. Nobody wants to be “the asshole,” because it is uncomfortable, it is messy, it is not socially rewarded. But remove that function, and the entire organism collapses. You don’t get to pick only the pleasant roles and still expect the system to survive!

This is where the conversation about darkness becomes real. The things you are horrified by in the world, the corruption, the manipulation, the violence, they do not exist somewhere “out there” as a separate category of reality. They exist as potential within the same field you are part of. The only reason they were hidden for so long is because they were too uncomfortable to face collectively. Now they are surfacing, not because the world suddenly became worse, but because there is finally enough pressure to see what was always there.

And the only way through that is not judgment. Judgment keeps the split alive. The movement forward comes from something much more difficult. The willingness to see it without collapsing, without denying, without turning away. To recognize that your shit smells too. Everyone’s does! The danger was never in having darkness. The danger is in pretending you don’t... 

Because the moment you refuse to look, you enter denial. And denial is where everything stagnates. It takes an enormous amount of energy to maintain blindness. That is why breaking through it feels like a shock. It takes time to get there, but once it cracks, everything begins to move very quickly. Patterns become visible. Reactions start making sense. You begin to see how what you judge outside is often what you have not allowed inside.

And here is the deeper layer most people miss. The system is not only external. It is neurological. Emotional. The way you process reality itself can be destabilized. When your nervous system is overloaded, when you are constantly exposed to intensity, fear, outrage, trauma, your inner “control tower” starts to malfunction. In neuroscience, this center is known as the amygdala (Mary Magdalene), a small structure in the brain that regulates emotional response, threat detection, and the capacity to feel. 

Under constant pressure, it does not sharpen. It burns out. And when it burns out, something very specific happens. You stop feeling... Compassion drops. Sensitivity dulls... You are still reacting, but without depth, without discernment. It is like a tower collapsing. You no longer clearly register what is coming toward you.

So when your truth aka your own shit floods the system, the question is not only whether it is true. The question is what it is doing to your capacity to feel and process. Is it awakening awareness, or is it overwhelming your system to the point where you disconnect? Because a broken emotional center is just as dangerous as ignorance. You may see more, but you feel less. And without feeling, there is no integration.

Which brings everything back to the same point. You don’t evolve by escaping the darkness. You evolve by learning how to metabolize it. Not romantically and ESPECIALLY not intellectually, but physically, emotionally, consciously. By staying present with what is uncomfortable without shutting down or projecting it away. Seeking the discomfort and learning from its stories. 

That is the real alchemy. Not becoming light. Becoming whole. Become asshole first!