 Hiya! Are you ready for the New Year? This year, we decided to create a bit of a yin-yang shift with our New Year's content. So between the New Year, before and after, we're going to have a two-part dialogue about the benefits and dark sides of the pandemic and what it's doing for humanity. And so today, as a close for 2021, we're starting with the dark side. And next week, we'll start the New Year off with the benefits. Now that being said, making a video about the dark side of the pandemic is hard. One of the most difficult aspects is that if we say the wrong thing, mainstream social media will censor us. This has happened before with our conspiracy theory of everything, which was removed from YouTube because we discussed QAnon and the Deep State, and we had to clip it out before re-uploading, which you can find here on our channel. Truly though, it is sobering to look at the darker stuff like this once in a while. I mean, some people feed on it, thriving on bad news, but many others will generally just try to avoid it entirely. But when we're able to be with the darkness within us or in the world, we're able to help it transform into something more aligned with what we really want in our hearts. You might be familiar with a spiritual and psychological practice called shadow work, a part of personal spirituality that encourages us to look at the shadows and darkness in our lives and call it out for what it is and even do something about it. While there's tons of videos out there on how to do shadow work for yourself, very few seem to be talking about its power on a society-wide scale and what it can do for the collective consciousness. If we're too afraid to look at ourselves or speak our truth, then throughout society we create disconnection with our very roots. But it doesn't have to be that way because there's no inner or collective wounding that we can't heal. We just have to be brave enough to face it. One of the biggest issues to have come out of the past two years is one that's extremely close to all of us. The world has entered a full-blown mental health crisis and the media is almost completely silent on it. I don't think people realize just how bad our headspace collectively is right now. As people become more and more depressed on a personal level, that intention and energy is unwillingly pushed out into others, who then push it out further and we end up with a feedback loop that feeds on and creates that mentality and locks us into the cycle even further. What's worse is that mental health issues aren't confined to any one age bracket or generation anymore. We're feeling it on every level of society. Levels of stress have been rising among college students, especially with those who went away to university for the first time in September 2020. Due to lockdown requirements, some students were holed up in tiny one-room flats, isolated from their families and friends for months, and their only source of outside interaction was coming from Zoom calls. Just think about that for a second. When you go off to college, you don't just go for the lectures or learning. You make lifelong friends, apartment share, and even learn to cook and look after yourself for the first time. Sometimes, you're even in an entirely new city and get to explore and network with new people. Students during the pandemic have had that entire experience stripped away, so it's no wonder they're more anxious, depressed, and sedentary than ever. And today's students are tomorrow's investors, scientists, professors, or whatever else. What kind of precedent is that setting for us as a culture? For other people, I think most of the anxiety and depression is coming from financial stresses. Across the United States, between 30 to 50 percent of people have reported being in an economic crisis. The furlough scheme of government assistance recently came to an end, putting pressure on employers to pay late wages, along with many COVID benefits for the less fortunate stopping along with it. In other words, a pretty hefty part of our society right now is struggling to pay basic living expenses. In fact, following Dr. David Williams at Harvard, a recent study of over 5,000 people showed that over half of them reported some kind of mental health issue as a result of the pandemic. 13 percent of people increased their use of substances, whether alcohol, cannabis, or other kinds of drugs, to cope, and 11 percent of people had seriously considered suicide in the past month. Now again, this isn't being shared to upset you, but there is a significance to being open to the reality of the situation. It's the first stage of shadow work. Looking at the CDC's morbidity and mortality weekly reports from August of 2021 and on, we see nearly 26 percent of people ages 18 to 24 have been considering suicide genuinely as a result of the pandemic. That's one in four, a whole quarter of young people. The numbers are even higher for unpaid caregivers, with surveys reporting nearly 31 percent of them having considered suicide, along with 22 percent of essential workers, the people who are keeping the economy going right now. This isn't even considering the racial or sex issues that have spawned due to COVID, often regarding access to mental health resources, therapy, or other forms of discrimination. Why is no one talking about this? Now, moving to the other end of the age spectrum, a study from Scotland ended up looking at the effects of social distancing on the elderly, and found that they struggle with feelings of loneliness, even during normal times, but COVID requirements made those feelings much worse. During the last year, the social groups available to elders shrunk, and the time spent in the company of others tailed away, leading to huge feelings of loneliness, isolation, and despair. It's no surprise then that, given all the fear, conspiracy theories have exploded. It's well known that alternative narratives thrive during times of crisis. They grow out of fear and scarcity, and truth sometimes, and act as a paradigm of belief that provides order when the world around us is getting more and more chaotic. Historically speaking, conspiracies always come about after or during some big event, and were just as popular in the period during and after the Black Death, the French Revolution, the Russian Flu, and the Flu of 1918. So it makes sense then why COVID conspiracies are so easy to spread. And I mean, it's not like we didn't play our part in that too. On a giant scale, as a species we see a historical pattern with events like this, consistent movements of time of pandemics, revolutions, renaissance, and conspiracy. This pattern will play out endlessly until we heal and release the wound in our collective consciousness. This is coming up now because the pandemic has dredged up darkness publicly, revealing it to the world in a more clearly defined way. We really have two ways of looking at it. We can drown in the dark as it consumes us, or we can face it and discover gifts and wisdom that may benefit all. Neither of these are easy to do, but the choices we make today become a part of our human story for ages to come. Really, conspiracy theories are powerful because they are participatory. They often spread like a virus just like fear does, though commonly intertwined with the search for truth. But truth is veiled and confused, often not just by powerful institutions, but the collective human mind itself. In an environment where trust and confidence in political institutions is failing and engagement in democracy is highly unequal, conspiracies create communities and provide an easily accessible and engaging alternative to mainstream political participation. At its most extreme, conspiracy communities become another mask of tribalism, and the me versus you that we already see in the mainstream media, as both sides continue to attack and denounce each other. We're seeing this in so many different ways right now. First it was whether COVID was natural or lab made, then it was the great reset, both of which we've covered extensively in our conspiracy theory of everything right here on YouTube. And now it's people fighting over whether or not they should get the vaccine, and even then whether it's right to force someone to get a vaccine in order to participate in society. On a core level, the energy is no different than voting for one party or another, and hating everyone in the other camp. What we really need is a united polarity, where we can learn to disagree but realize that we're all still human having the same experience in different bodies and all learning different lessons. Now another major thing to manifest as a result of the pandemic is the we are the virus mentality that many have held since the pandemic started. Historically, humans have struggled with arrogance, selfishness, and sometimes an overinflated sense of ego. There are aspects of ourselves that have behaved like a virus. In some ways, Agent Smith was right. But the problem with believing the we are the virus mentality is that if this is true, then we're never going to stop destroying everything we touch, and maybe we should all be obliterated, right? But from a more holistic way of thinking, while part of us might behave like a virus, sometimes, by the virtue in our hearts and the goodness of our being, we are also the cure. We can never forget this, lest we doom ourselves by creating the path to annihilation. As a result of the pandemic, people's own subconscious fears are being projected onto the world at a rate we've never seen. People are afraid of each other, afraid to get within six feet of each other or even hug someone else, because our sense of connection has been separated and locked away in a cage, replaced with social distancing and Zoom calls. This spread of fear has been driven by a change in how we communicate with each other, such as with social media. Given all the marketing algorithms, we are constantly bombarded with ad after ad, many of which are sponsored by agencies who are using our data without our knowledge. Especially during lockdown, when all of us were trapped inside, social giants saw an opportunity to turn up their marketing machines and color our perception in unconscious ways, both socially and politically. We've become so oversaturated with content lately that so many now are finding their brains struggling to properly focus on anything for longer periods of time, creating a subtle, global disempowerment. This is certainly not helped by the mass addiction to process sugar, but that's a conversation for our Healing with Food movie, which you can watch over here on our channel. As far as content goes, the algorithms today are designed to tap into that three to five second window at the forefront of our awareness and manipulate it to grab your attention and hold it. Because of this, a lot of people are finding their attention spans are shorter in the post-Covid world. It's going to take a serious digital hiatus to detox that fast-release dopamine that we get from flicking our fingers through posts and videos, getting likes, and having everything we want available on demand. I mean, this isn't new to the pandemic, it has been building for a long time, but the pandemic amplified it even louder. Now of course, there are tons of theories and ideas out there that all of this is intentional. That all of the division, the global disempowerment, disconnection and fear are subtly breaking us down so the lizards or whoever can wiggle in with the great reset or something and trigger the new world order. To that end, yes, a new world is coming. There is no two ways about that. The world of pre-March 2020 is gone and our lives are fundamentally different now. We need to stop trying to return to normal because even that normal was just as messed up, though a lot more of it was out of sight, festering under the rug and congealing like a bad soup. If you're afraid of someone imposing a new world on you without your control, now's the time to step up and claim your own. When those in power throw nothing but suppression, disconnection and fear at you, that's when you need to respond with love and compassion and wisdom and courage more than ever. In doing that collectively, we do the shadow work together and descend higher into the light. This is a bit easier said sometimes. I mean, how do you talk about conspiracy theories that seem to have a basis in reality when they are censored off the internet as soon as they come up? We cannot restrict the legitimate questioning of authority that is essential in any democracy or free society. But in order to do this, something in society has to change. For today, as long as we're spreading fear in whatever form, we are acting in the same way as a virus, hurting ourselves and our environments. But we're also a lot more than that, and it's easy to forget that sometimes. Those random acts of kindness that go unnoticed when you're only looking at the bad stuff are what is going to pull us through, I think. It isn't really about who we are, or even who we think we are. It's about what each of us believes when we wake up in the morning and how that drives us through life. We all have that voice inside that pushes us to go further when everything is falling apart. That whisper that says, keep going, when we hear something that breaks us. When every eldritch horror has been unleashed from Pandora's box, we still have hope left, even if it's hard to feel right now. Through it, we learn a fundamental lesson. We're going through all of this trauma because we're strong enough to get through it and learn the lessons it has to teach us. We just need to stand back up and see everything for what it is. And next, we'll show you some of the good things to have come out of the pandemic. Even this dark cloud has a silver lining, so toodles for now and have a happy new year.