Catastrophic Success

The collective heart is forming

Lately I haven’t been able to shake the idea of catastrophic success, not since reading about a lab experiment conducted by Dr. William Bengston.

Bengston was running a controlled study on energy healing using a particularly aggressive strain of cancer in mice, the kind with a 100% fatality rate before day 29. He had developed an energy healing technique that performed remarkably well. Perhaps too well.

The problem wasn’t that it failed. The problem was that the energy proved contagious. It didn’t just heal the treated mice. It healed the controls. And not just the controls. It bled into unrelated experiments across the lab. Every mammal study in the university had to be scrapped and restarted.

That’s catastrophic success: when something works so powerfully it overwhelms the very framework designed to measure it.

I’ve recently been experimenting with Bengston’s method myself and have already gotten some intriguing results in a short time. Forgive the vague posting. I’ll have more to share in a future article once I’ve had time to process what’s happened.

But the method itself isn’t really the point of this piece. The point is the principle. What would it mean to be catastrophically successful in your own life?

I’m not talking about material success, or even healing success, though those could certainly follow. I mean something deeper: what would it look like to create a spiritual catastrophic success?

The Prison We Don’t Know We’re In

There’s a good reason spirituality and psychology have become so entangled. Our psyche is inherently our most spiritual gift, the gateway between body and soul. It contains heart, mind, and body, and yet our experience of them is fragmented. That inner fragmentation projects outward, splitting us from each other and from the world.

This is why George Gurdjieff judged over 99% of humanity to be walking machines, asleep to themselves and to reality. It’s why the world’s great calamities, war, starvation, ecological destruction, persist despite nearly everyone knowing they are wrong. Knowing isn’t enough when the knower is asleep.

So what would catastrophic success look like against such a bleak backdrop?

We have precedents. Take Jesus. His life carried an extraordinarily contagious message of love. That message has been corrupted over the centuries through the same mechanical patterns of thought that keep us enslaved to our fragmented state. And yet I’m still amazed at how many lives it continues to change, even now, even through the distortion. That’s a kind of catastrophic success: a signal so strong it survives millennia of noise.

We could multiply examples. Buddha, Gandhi, countless saints throughout history. The pattern is the same. Their contagion reaches far, yet it hasn’t reached far enough. It hasn’t triggered a critical mass of awakening.

Thirty-three years ago, Thich Nhat Hanh offered a prophecy: “The next Buddha will be a sangha.” In other words, a community. I believe this is the direction we’re heading.

Gurdjieff once said:

Two hundred conscious people, if they existed and if they found it necessary and legitimate, could change the whole of life on the earth. But either there are not enough of them, or they do not want to, or perhaps the time has not yet come, or perhaps other people are sleeping too soundly.

He was right, at least for his time. People were sleeping too soundly, and there weren’t enough awakened individuals connected to one another to reach the threshold.

But conditions change. And while our current conditions appear rather dire, it is precisely within that negativity that transformation becomes possible. Gurdjieff also told us: “The worse the conditions of life, the greater the possibility for productive work.”

Chaos is afoot in nearly every domain of modern life, even as we experience the dizzying acceleration of technological progress. The wonders and the horrors proceed together.

It is within this crucible that the next stage of consciousness evolution is being forged. But it won’t happen by itself. Almost by definition, the only way consciousness can progress is consciously. Through intention, through deliberate inner work, and through collaboration with others who share that intention.

One disadvantage of Gurdjieff’s era: they didn’t have the internet.

The internet has undoubtedly accelerated many of the dangers Gurdjieff warned about, humanity’s deep tendency toward unconsciousness. Mind viruses and social contagions now grip collective attention in a vice. But this very vice may contain the seeds of its own undoing.

Here’s the thing about a vice: as it tightens, the pain increases. And pain, unlike comfort, is noticeable. If you weren’t aware you were trapped before, you might become aware now. Awareness is the first condition of escape. As Gurdjieff pointed out, how can you escape a prison you don’t know you’re in?

The prison we find ourselves in isn’t made of steel and concrete. It’s far more subtle, a prison of conditioned thought and emotional reactivity. There is no way out unless we change the underlying structure through which we perceive and respond to what is.

It’s hard enough to transform our own mental and emotional architecture. But how could we possibly do this at a scale large enough to shift society? This may be the most important question of our time.

The answer may lie in an obscure Gurdjieffian principle: impressions as food.

Impressions as Food

Gurdjieff taught that the human organism takes in three types of food: physical food and water, air, and impressions. All three are metabolized and blended together within us. Each carries different levels of quality, but it is impressions that hold the greatest potential for the evolution of the organism.

The energy of impressions can serve as an alchemical catalyst, producing higher grades of spiritual and emotional energy within us, provided we can identify and acquire the right impressions, the ones genuinely nourishing for our particular psyche.

Garbage in, garbage out. Is it any wonder our society is floundering? The slop we feed ourselves through social media and legacy media is a genuine crisis of psychic nutrition. Quality material exists for those willing to dig, but these are rare gems in a rising sea of brain rot.

This lens opens up new ways of seeing society. Think of humanity as starving for real impressions and yet malnourished and obese from gorging on junk.

People are hungry for impressions. In other words, they are hungry for stories. We seek them continuously. I challenge you to find a corner of human life where stories don’t penetrate. Television, film, memes, books, news, biographies, even “real life.” Everything tells a story, carries a narrative, encodes a lesson. We rarely encounter facts in isolation; even those arrive wrapped in context, in some larger arc. Science itself is not immune. From the Big Bang to string theory, stories govern how we see the world and therefore what we find in it.

You can tell a great deal about a society by the impressions it produces and consumes. Is it any wonder we’re so materialistic, given the stories our science tells? Whether this is cause or effect is an interesting question, but it may be beside the point. What matters is that it’s a self-reinforcing loop.

Consider a pop-culture example. Remember when the anti-hero was all the rage? One of the defining figures of that era was Walter White from Breaking Bad. Many viewers took him as a role model to emulate. But what was the actual lesson? He died alone. His empire was decimated. The one thing he sacrificed everything for, money, turned out to be mostly useless. His family didn’t want his dirty fortune; they wanted a father who was present and who cared. Given the choice, they would have taken a kind dad who died of cancer over a man who destroyed their lives in an egomaniacal quest for power.

Perhaps the show resonated so deeply because it was exactly what the collective consciousness of the West needed to hear: your money is worthless if it isn’t earned in harmony with your family and community.

So how do we harness the power of impressions to transform ourselves and society? On an individual level, it means cultivating a garden of nourishing impressions, and for those who create, building products, services, and content that carry genuinely healthy stories into the world.

This is important work, but it’s slow, and it must compete against a vast ecosystem of content that is more addictive but far less nourishing.

So how might we accelerate the process?

What Are We Feeding?

Here’s where we need to ask a harder question. When we consume and produce impressions at scale, when millions of minds fixate on the same stories, the same fears, the same desires, what exactly are we feeding?

In a previous essay on egregores, I explored the ancient esoteric idea that collective thought doesn’t just dissipate. It accumulates. It takes on a life of its own. An egregore is a collective thoughtform, an entity born from the shared intent, belief, and energy of a group. The term traces back to the Greek egrēgoroi, the “watchers” of the Book of Enoch, and over centuries it evolved from celestial being to something more like a living pattern sustained by human attention.

This isn’t purely mystical. Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic fields suggest that patterns of behavior and form are stored in a kind of cosmic memory, and that these fields shape future behavior through resonance rather than direct causation. Egregores could be understood as the conscious expression of these fields, the “faces” of the patterns that guide us. Donald Hoffman’s theory of conscious agents points in a similar direction: combine two or more conscious agents and the mathematical structure of their interaction satisfies the definition of a new, unified conscious agent. Minds combining to birth larger minds, all the way up.

This is what makes the impressions framework so consequential. We aren’t just feeding ourselves when we consume stories. We are feeding egregores. Every click, every shared outrage, every collective fixation strengthens a macro-entity that then feeds back down, shaping our perceptions and behaviors in return. Capitalism, nationalism, the attention economy, these aren’t just abstract systems. They are living patterns sustained by our participation, and they exert a gravitational pull on our consciousness that most of us never notice.

The metacrisis, the converging catastrophes of our time, starts to look different through this lens. It isn’t just a failure of policy or technology. It’s what happens when billions of people unknowingly feed egregores that operate against their own wellbeing. We are cells nourishing organs we didn’t choose and can barely perceive.

Psychic Superfood

There is a passage in the new testament that has been badly translated and thus misunderstood. It is the phrase in the Lord’s Prayer which has been translated as “give us this day our daily bread”. The word for “daily bread” comes from the original Greek “epiousios” which is a complex word that more accurately means “supersubstantial”, in other words a “superfood” rich in spiritual nutrients.

This fits well into Gurdjieff’s idea of impressions as food, the idea being that there are certain types of impression that carry vastly more spiritual nutrition than common impressions.

So what does this have to do with fostering a catastrophic success?

So far we have been discussing the idea of impressions as food from the perspective of incoming energy, but what about outgoing energy? In other words if impressions are food for our personal development, could we use this principle to enact change on larger scales?

Take the bio-electric network for example. It’s likely that there are induvial bioelectric fields that overlap into collective fields, covering all life on earth. Michael Levin, probably the world’s leading expert in bioelectric fields, describes the bioelectric network as the cognitive glue that connects minds and goals.

A goal is a type of impression, when minds combine to share a goal it seems that energy is amplified. The way the Bengston energy healing method works is by rapid image cycling. You take 20+ “goals” in form of images and you rotate through them at hyper fast speed. This seems to generate an immense amount of energy. Kirlian photography for example has shown burst of energy up to 100k times normal energy levels.

Lynne McTaggart wrote a book called “the power of eight” where they did healing intention experiments with groups of eight or more. Consistently they got results of not just miraculous healings of different ailments but it also often created a group bliss experience which was shared among all the participants.

In my last article i mentioned the National Demonstration Project of 1993 where a group of 4,000 practitioners of Transcendental Meditation gathered in Washington D.C. with the specific intention of lowering the crime rate through collective focus.

By the end of the study, violent crime in D.C. had dropped by 23% below the expected baseline. The statistical probability of this happening by chance was calculated at less than 2 in 1 billion.

The Heartbeat

Perhaps Gurdjieff’s vision of 200 conscious people changing the world isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. But to understand how, we need a better metaphor than “reaching critical mass,” because what we’re describing isn’t an explosion. It’s something more like an organ coming to life.

Think about how the heart develops in an embryo. In the earliest stages, you have individual cardiac cells, each one beating to its own rhythm, uncoordinated, scattered. Then something remarkable happens. As more cells join and begin to communicate, they start to synchronize. There is a tipping point, a threshold number of cells beating in harmony, and suddenly the whole structure contracts as one. A heartbeat emerges. Not because any single cell decided to lead, but because enough cells got in sync that a new, higher-order function became possible.

This is what I think we are approaching. The individual spiritual practitioners, the small groups doing intention work, the scattered communities pursuing inner development, these are the cardiac cells. Each one pulsing with its own rhythm. The internet, for all its toxicity, functions like the connective tissue, the biological matrix that allows these cells to find each other and communicate.

We are not building a machine. We are growing an organ.

The egregores we currently feed, the ones driving the metacrisis, are like an organism running on malformed signaling, cells responding to the wrong chemical gradients, building structures that work against the body’s health. But the same principle that allows destructive egregores to form also allows constructive ones. The same capacity for collective synchronization that produces mob mentality can produce collective awakening. The infrastructure is the same. The difference is the quality of the signal.

What Bengston stumbled into in his lab was a signal so coherent it couldn’t be contained. What the TM meditators generated in D.C. was a signal strong enough to measurably alter the behavior of a city. What McTaggart’s groups of eight discovered was that you don’t need thousands. You need enough synchronized intention to cross a threshold.

The Network of Networks

Here’s where it gets practical.

Around a year ago Tom Morgan invited me to join a community he called The Leading Edge, built around the shared pursuit of inner development, and has now begun connecting it with other similar communities. A network of networks.

His observation is timely: there is an enormous and rapidly growing population of high-agency professionals who are quietly pursuing the evolution of their own consciousness, each one convinced they are alone. The infrastructure to connect them is only now beginning to form.

Tom’s model maps perfectly onto the cardiac cell metaphor. Each community is a cluster of cells beating in local synchrony. The network of networks is the tissue that connects those clusters. And the “energy” flowing between them, what he simply calls Truth, is the signal that could eventually synchronize the whole organ.

Now think about what happens when you layer intentional energy work on top of that connective structure.

I’m going to be experimenting with a group healing project within my own network using the Bengston method. A small group, focused intention, rapid image cycling directed at specific healing goals. Based on what Bengston, McTaggart, and others have demonstrated, even a single group working with coherent intention can produce results that defy conventional explanation. I’ll report back with results as they develop.

But what if it wasn’t just one group? What if multiple networks across this emerging web ran similar experiments simultaneously? Some using the Bengston method, some using other forms of shared intention, all synchronized around complementary goals? If a single group of eight can produce measurable healings and shared bliss states, and if 4,000 meditators can drop a city’s violent crime rate by 23%, what happens when dozens or hundreds of networked groups generate coherent intention at the same time?

This is where catastrophic success stops being a lab curiosity and becomes a real possibility. The contagious energy Bengston discovered didn’t respect the boundaries of his experiment. It leaked into every mammal study in the building. The question is what happens when that kind of energy has an actual network to travel through, when the “leaking” isn’t accidental but designed.

We don’t need to speculate entirely. The precedents are there. The theory is there. Anyone remember the dancing plague of 1518?

Conscious states are contagious. What if we intentionally built better ones?

The connective infrastructure is forming right now. What’s been missing is the deliberate, coordinated use of that infrastructure for consciousness work at scale.

The cardiac cells are finding each other. The clusters are beginning to synchronize. The connective tissue is growing. What remains is for enough of us to choose to beat together, to stop feeding the egregores of fragmentation and start generating the coherent signal that pulls the rest into rhythm.

Much like Bengston’s catastrophic success in the lab, this kind of energy doesn’t respect boundaries. Once enough cells synchronize, the rest get pulled in. That’s not a metaphor. That’s how hearts actually form.

I’m doing my part to experiment with ways to bring this energy sync more mainstream. To that end I’ve developed a prototype site called heal manifest:

www.heal-manifest.com

If you feel the pull, come find us. The heart is forming. It needs your beat.