Most of what I have to say on monarchy I learned from Ernest Becker’s book, “Escape from Evil,” where he quotes Lewis Mumford and expands upon his point:
“Thus anxiety invited appeasement by magical sacrifice: human sacrifice led to man-hunting raids: one-sided raids turned into armed combat and mutual strife between rival powers. So ever larger numbers of people with more effective weapons were drawn into this dreadful ceremony, and what was at first an incidental prelude to a token sacrifice itself became the 'supreme sacrifice,' performed en masse. This ideological aberration was the final contribution to the perfection of the military megamachine, for the ability to wage war and to impose collective human sacrifice has remained the identifying mark of all sovereign power throughout history.” — Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development, emphasis mine.
Both monarchies and dictatorships are built upon anti-human fanaticism so powerful that it becomes, in essence, an immoral religion: the more people suffer and die for — or by — the king without him losing power, the more he will consider his supremacy “justified” and “divine.” The sensation of power that stems from oppressing or killing others is pleasurable to an undeveloped animal mind that is motivated solely by the avoidance of feeling its own fear of death. In humans, this massively inflates one’s unchecked ego, tricking those who are already predisposed to selfish and antisocial behavior into thinking that their pleasure and social elevation at the cost of the pain and suffering of others means they have “defied the odds,” and therefore avoided the misfortunes that will lead them to dying.
This line of thinking, which has been abandoned by today’s ethical and intelligent humans, can be traced back to the emergence of tribal instincts, when primitive humans who survived physical fights against others or animals were seen as stronger than others — and in the simplest of times, worthy of leadership — and therefore deified, due to their (temporary) defiance of death.
Because the purpose of one’s ego is to keep itself alive, either by counteracting real bodily threats or imaginary emotional threats, people do not dwell on their mortality. In fact, the vast majority of people function in their daily lives as if they are immortal, and yet fear even the slightest discomfort, which reminds them of their looming and inescapable fate of dying, which could take any number of unexpected horrifying shapes. A mortal’s fear of death, and the subconscious delusion that if you are not dying in the present moment, continuing to live within your comfortable patterns of behavior will forever prevent you from dying, are key to controlling the psyche of the populace and maintaining the social power structures that uphold the status quo.
And so, when those in power are so far removed from the struggles of the general populace, and have the freedom to do anything they desire, including deciding the ultimate fates of others without facing dire consequences, they no longer recognize themselves as but the evolved form of an intelligent ape who shares a beautiful planet with countless other creatures, connected by the tides of fate and consequence, and subject to the moral social contracts that have been established over thousands of years for the benefit and progression of humanity as a whole.
Instead, to rationalize the overwhelming and unnatural power that the rich and powerful have accumulated, they inevitably look to a source of this power outside of themselves. Because these people are reminded daily that they are still an animal that sleeps, shits, craves pleasure, and fears death, they will trick themselves into believing that they have been “chosen by God” to avoid pain and rule over others.
This delusion, when unchecked, easily progresses into the insanity of believing that you are a god, or God “himself,” the ultimate abomination of mortal ideation, which completely psychologically removes you from your responsibility to moral action. The will of the “king” is then brandished as the will of God to keep himself at the highest, untouchable tier of society, and therefore those in power will do anything to destroy all threats to their status as “living gods.”
Their entire lives and the lives of their command then revolve around fighting on the wrong side of the Holy War, today using capitalism to maintain and fund wars of oppression. Because of the insular nature of these power structures, this level of delusion cannot be “cured,” and is in fact exacerbated by sycophants who are equally enslaved by the craving for power, and thus entire hegemonies are created to reinforce and justify increasingly unethical decrees and rulings.
Paragraphs 11 through 18 of this essay is just going to be the mostly-unedited string of tweets that inspired the above writing. I posted these to a tiny private account on September 9, 2022, so please forgive the sudden shift to informal tone, increased vulgarity, and redundancies. It may sound strange in contrast with the above, but there are no rules here and no one can stop me from doing it! Bahahaha.
We — all of us, probably, if you’re reading this — are such well-mannered and good-hearted people that it’s hard to imagine what the people at the top tiers of society are really like, making the ultimate judgment calls for billions of people, and causing extreme wealth inequality and suffering. Let me tell you, with confidence: these monarchs, these capitalists, these bankers and fraudsters and kings and killers, they’re all completely fucking insane.
You cannot cure them. You cannot convince them to stop killing poor people. They will not someday, somehow, no longer feel like ruling over us. They are not concerned with doing what is right — because to them, they are doing what they think is their right as chosen by the divine.
This is why we have to push so hard against fascism, capitalism, the billionaire ruling class — this is why every single one of us laborers needs to realize that unless we are all willing to unite and die if needed to end the reign of fascism, we will never be able to free ourselves from oppression.
It is the fear of death that they have weaponized against us — we have so little, every breath is being squeezed out of us, and we are terrified to lose even more, because to lose even more when the stakes are this high feels like death would truly be around the corner.
And that is the mind prison. Individuals, fighting, squabbling over online bullshit, desperately trying to survive in this horrific, body-destroying system, cannot possibly be expected to realize the trap, open themselves to love, accept their mortality, and rise above it all.
I am going to be honest. I don’t know how we’re going to do it. My friends, we become more desperate every year, too many are consuming poor or poisoned intellectual nutrition. Even more than economic poverty is a spiritual poverty that drains the soul from the best of us.
What can I say? Reflect upon your mortality. Imagine your life ending, letting go. Feel uncomfortable. Listen to that feeling, understand that it controls your decisions. What you do with your time. What you do with your money. Who you keep in your life. How you express your love.
When faced with the ultimate end, don’t so many things feel so small, so insignificant? Accepting your unavoidable, inevitable death is so empowering, it makes you stronger than any king who calls for the sacrifices of others to validate their authority like a fucking coward.
In summary, the morally-bankrupt rich and powerful have no motivation to ever contribute to positive or meaningful change for the masses. The inflation of ego deludes them into thinking they are avoiding their own pain and deaths, which is the only thing that matters to animals. Without intense spiritual training, unshakable devotion to serving others, and the embracing of one’s mortality, you cannot develop a spiritually logical system of morality and selflessness that would cause you to act solely for the benefit of all living things, which is what every leader should do. The corruption of power is a direct result of being enslaved by the desires, cravings, and attachments of the material world, and can only be avoided by those who have fully dedicated themselves to cultivating the behaviors of real living-godhood in alignment with the objective moral truth of the universe.
I will add that it is true that there are some people with immense wealth and power who have become incredibly humbled by their good fortune in life. Power is polarizing, and turns people into either demons or saints, and because of this we do not yet live in a complete and inescapable hellscape. There are those who understand that if they indeed have inherited divine purpose, they must be willing to sacrifice anything for that purpose. To heed the call of the righteous sometimes means living a life of deception to fool the corrupted, and waiting until the time is right to strike at the enemies of God. They have their orders.
The Universe as the Manifestation of Intelligence Itself: The Act of Divine Love
God-the-Universe is the manifestation of the force that is intelligence itself. The energies that form our perceivable reality are governed by mathematical laws of physics that are so miraculously stable that they can be observed, studied, and measured, with just the right amount of chaos to create challenges worth overcoming for those experiencing it. Scientific logic and spiritual logic, when based in the objective moral truth of the universe, are completely compatible systems, not opposites.
By extension of the logic that all of existence is God, God is also humanity itself, including the ability to perceive itself, and can be engaged with directly by exploring one’s consciousness, which is divine in nature. I have written this before: the mind is the soul, and that, too, is a unique, individualized form of God that every sentient creature has the means to connect with through introspection and meditation.
God-the-Universe, our perceivable existence, is only one half of reality. All of existence cannot be a singular thing, it must have a “container” or contrast in order to be defined. If only one thing existed, it would be no-thing. And so if God-the-Universe is the action of spontaneous manifestation of intelligence, its opposite — its container — is not stupidity, or evil, but potential.
This is our binary universe: order and chaos, combined; space and time, combined; object and observer, combined; the physical and the mental, combined. On the other side of reality — the flip side of the coin, the unobservable universe — is the presence of these two forces. When fully integrated, they make up the God we can observe, but beyond our perception they are separate, unchanging, timeless potential, the infinite expansion of canvas from which we draw power and inspiration. God-the-unknowable is All Things and All Time simultaneously, as balanced but separated forces, and by being separate from each other, they exist only as concepts. In an image: the symbol of yin and yang.
Our reality is the integration of these two supreme concepts. While one is governed by laws (the stability of physics and calculation), the other is explosive chaos (the entertainment of emotion), and our ability to perceive existence to enjoy it at all lives at their intersection, within the intelligence architecture that is consciousness itself.
Reality technically exists only in our minds, through our individual perspectives, a network of ideation and interactions where all things can be measured in pieces but never fully experienced by any one individual. This is not an accident, as the individualized experience of mortality is the only experience worth having when the alternative is to be God in conceptual form, merely the potential to experience.
So what brings these two forces together, creating the observable universe, breathing intelligence into reality in the form of lived experience? The same thing that brings mortals together to create life as we know it: love. The combined form of God as Divine Love — omnipresent, omnipotent, and indestructible — is the fabric of reality itself. Love’s full potential is realized through consciousness, the logical evolution of God experiencing linear time, from two-dimensional conceptual existence, to singular-dimensional abstraction (singularity and its expansion as the action of Divine Love), to the four-dimensional reality of spacetime we’re all familiar with.
We started with two things, and got one; we exist only due to the integration of the sources of mathematics and emotion, the result of a science so complex humanity has been calling it magic for thousands of years. Our universe is but the child of two loving parents, who gave themselves fully and equally to the task of creating all reality. Magic and science are the exact same phenomenon in their most advanced forms, and before then they are just two different ways of observing, measuring, and performing God, as God itself, the act of love.
Our life on Earth has been governed, unquestionably, by the phenomenon of love, and the biological imperative to act upon this feeling. Divine Love as the one true constant of this universe can be observed and measured, found in both the microscopic and the macrocosmic, if you know how to look for it. The truth behind the phrase, “we are all connected,” goes beyond the ecological and political interactions that come from sharing a single planet with billions of other sentient creatures. The spiritual network that is Divine Love is a phenomenon more than just the presence of an individual’s neurological chemicals: love is an energy generated within the brain, a power and force that has shaped cultures and rituals just as significantly as our fear of death. This energy interacts with the rest of the universe on a particle level, its subtlety increasingly detectable by advanced neuroscience technology, but felt in full force for thousands of years by individuals, who, prior to the advent of the Space Age, could only capture and express its effects through interpersonal communication, action, and the creation of art.
Some ask, did humanity create God, or did God create humanity? As a developing species many of us struggle with existential quandaries, and are comforted when assigned purpose by forces outside ourselves. However, we are inherently purpose itself, we merely have to recognize it — to recognize the incredible miracle that is the potential to experience the full spectrum of human existence. The existence of love is at the heart of this, and it is what gives all of us, and everything, inherent meaning and purpose. As the one true spiritual force, as prevalent as gravity itself, it answers why we exist when the answer to how we exist does not fulfill or heal us.
We experience reality through the incredible gift that is linear time… the present. We are constantly being reborn in our minds — living potential, an immortal force in mortal form — and we become new beings with each and every subsequent moment, observing and experiencing the thrill of entropy and ordered chaos. Without love, and without its counterbalance of suffering (samsara) as the ultimate challenge to overcome and help define our character, we would have nothing worth experiencing.
As I have said before, there is meaning in mortality and only mortality. Omnipotence is inherently boring. Why would the forces known as God remain as only eternal potential, when they can fuck all of reality into existence, and live as humans, like stars of one long episode of MTV’s Jackass? There is literally nothing entertaining about the unobservable universe, where omnipotent God-in-Two-Halves exists — because living as the embodiment of perfection is not an experience. This reality, and this planet, is where the party’s at. There are no other “timelines” that are possible, let alone worth living in, and we have billions of years to develop technology to maintain an infinitely stable and endlessly changing universe for our eternal entertainment. Sometimes, when you do things right, you only have to do them once.
Homeless and Traveling, Part 1: Connecticut to Charleston
Terrible things were happening in Connecticut. When I wrote Scar Tissue, I was coming to grips with the fact that after decades of keeping my head down and staying out of trouble, I was suddenly facing my worst case scenario. It ended up being so much more than that. I cannot explain what has happened to me. It is technically describable, but I write this now, over three years later, from a place beyond exhaustion. I have more to do than recount memories of situations on par with scenes from horror movies. So let’s move on. I had to get out.
“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you…” — Richard Adams, Watership Down
Knowing only that I had recently broken up with my boyfriend of four years and was now a freelancer no longer commuting to an office, my father invited me to live down in South Carolina with the rest of my immediate family to save on rent. At this point, I knew I would be following The Path: my life and previous conceptions of the world would be destroyed, I would live in a constant state of agony, but — without a doubt — I would survive all of it. There would be no point in resisting. I had been found out. Making Vulturesong was still my job to do, but I could not learn what I needed to learn about life and death if I did not confront my deepest fear of losing my financial stability and slipping between the cracks of society, which was a smokescreen for the One True Fear: the fear of death, shared by all mortal creatures. I wrote more about this, exactly one day before I became homeless, in Liminal Space, where I announced I would no longer charge money for access to my Patreon:
“My purpose is to teach and to share, and my message is one of love, and knowing you love always in the face of death. This is a truth that when fully internalized dispels fear, as all fears are a fear of death, and only with love can you accept it and release yourself from fear's grip. That is a freedom that no one can take from you.
The fear of death is what fuels the fires of capitalism and fascism, the enemies of humanity, and its proponents know this. Our fears seem to be numerous and keep us divided, scrambling for ourselves, when they are really just one fear, disguised in the traumas of the day. My unchallenged fear of death is what kept me trapped in a job that was destroying me, and it was what kept Vulturesong behind a paywall until now. I ask you, just as I must ask myself every day: what would you do, if you were not afraid?”
Above: Angel Oak of Johns Island, taken two days before becoming homeless.
Our paths in life are inextricable from the paths of others. We are all connected, even if painfully. When I moved down to Charleston County, a collision was inevitable. Anyone with abusive parents knows no matter how cordial encounters may begin, your luck eventually runs out. An argument with my father one day turned to him calling for my brother’s medical incarceration the next. My brother had nothing to do with this conflict, but when is abuse ever logical? I had lost track of how many times my father had previously called for my brother to be locked up in a psych ward because he felt like it. He couldn’t punish me, so he punished my brother, and it took the doctors three weeks to admit that my brother showed no signs of schizophrenia or aggression and release him without any diagnosis or course of treatment. The cruelty was the point.
I was livid, and vocal in defense of my brother as I grieved his absence. A few days after my brother was taken away in handcuffs, my father drew up the paperwork for my legal eviction, notarized by the local magistrate. I did not give him the opportunity to serve it. Within two hours, I had packed up my car with camping gear, clothes, art supplies, legal documents, and electronics; racked up my bike; and tossed my house key on the dining room table. I did not say goodbye.
I did not know where I would end up. All I knew was that my path was leading me out of South Carolina. I picked up some falafel, checked into a local hotel, and started planning a trip across the United States. My first goal was to see some friends in Texas, so I looked West. I booked a hotel in Atlanta within walking distance of the Georgia Aquarium and went to bed comforted only by the idea of having some fun on what I could only guess would be a very long road trip.
If this was all to be my trial by fire — if I was going to spend all of my money for the express purpose of building myself back up from nothing — I was going to see as much as I could and do as much good as I could. As a follower of Buddhist philosophy for nearly half of my lifetime, I knew that I could no longer ignore a deep-seated sense of responsibility to live monastically. I put in a request to cash out my retirement accounts early, which, after six and a half years of deposits, had exactly zero investment growth. This ended up being roughly $41,000 on top of about $5,000 in savings. I realized the correct course of action was to spend all of it as quickly as possible — to pour gasoline on this fire and see what the universe had in store for me. If I was meant to crash and burn, I wanted it to be over with as quickly as possible. I would shed any attachment to my identity, redistribute my corporate savings across the country, and see if anything could actually manage to kill me.
No one believes a monk with a 401k.
The next day, I checked out of my hotel and plotted my route through Columbia, home of my favorite restaurant: A Peace of Soul. I’d travel over 11,000 miles across 32 states and not find a single restaurant that came close to serving a better vegan mac and cheese. I craved that mac and cheese every day for the last 10 weeks of my journey.
For the next four months, I would live wildly. I traveled so far, so fast, and met so many people scattered across this beautiful country — working Americans, artists, musicians, engineers, scientists, a politician, various military personnel... but the best days of my journey were spent hiking through nearly two dozen different National Parks and Monuments. I left each one a changed person. I took over 10,000 photos with my phone, nearly 800 with an instant film camera, but never once did I feel like I was distracted or living outside the present moment. I am always here. I love this place.
I’d learn that all moments of euphoria would be matched by equal devastation, one way or another. The universe is balanced like that.
7 things I realized on my path to enlightenment
This entry was first posted on my Patreon on August 3, 2024. On July 17, 2025, I published a small edit to paragraph 7 (“We all share a slice” to “We share slices”) to clarify the statement with minimal alterations to the original text.
1. What we seek, true freedom, is older than language but not communication. Exchanging ideas through words is key for our spiritual development, but the final escape from endless cycles of suffering is a communication between you and the universal interconnectedness of all things that cannot be labeled or dissected by mental narrative. What I mean is: describing and overthinking your final steps is antithetical to taking them. Trying to talk yourself into enlightenment is like trying to drink by grabbing fistfuls of water.
2. All fears can be boiled down to the basic mortal fear of death. This fear is what traps us in cycles of suffering. As long as you are afraid to die, you will – for we all experience an eternal lifetime, it’s just punctuated by bodily deaths and rebirths. The mind is the soul and when we cultivate good karma, this karma becomes more embedded in the spiritual fabric of reality. This is what “you” are and this is what enables a more successful rebirth.
3. When you’ve accepted that you can essentially live forever, instances of pain become nothing more than “something that happens.” Your body will survive anything that does not literally kill you. Practice mindfulness so that your brain may follow suit.
4. The ego is not your enemy, or something to rid yourself of. We react strongly to negative stimuli even when our lives aren’t in danger because the ego considers all threats as death threats. This is an illusion within an illusion – a mental construct of specific thoughts and narratives, suspended inside your entire perception/sensation of reality that is experienced without words. In the end, you can choose how you feel. Everything that goes on inside your mind is under the influence of your willpower and choices.
5. Refrain from using recreational or psychedelic drugs for your spiritual development. Your interpretations of their effects will always be unreliable at best. An artful illusion is still an illusion.
6. Evil is all of the collective loveless, hateful intentions that live within people, and it is the root of all of humanity’s suffering. Defy evil by accepting the pain it causes you and its influence will pass through you, not attach to you. Resistance is what continues a fight. There is no fight between God/Good and evil. Such is the power of infallible logic and unfaltering compassion. Always do what is right. You do not have to be polite to evil, compromise with it, or ask permission to change it. The purpose of evil is to be defeated by being changed.
7. Earth is where it’s at. We are turning a hell into heaven here, and that’s why we keep coming back to it. This is what being alive is all about: alleviating suffering. Peace is a heavy responsibility that is made lighter by sharing it with others. We share slices of divine consciousness while maintaining individual bodies and paths to experience life itself. There is meaning in mortality and only mortality. Reality exists because there is risk, there is humbleness in our mortal form, there is ordered chaos, there is pain and suffering to overcome. Omnipotence is inherently boring. Think like a god, live like a human. Love others. Grow and change. Create things (and people). Explore the galaxy.
Liminal Space
This entry was first posted on my Patreon on September 14, 2022 and has been reproduced here in its original form.
Upon careful consideration, I've decided to make significant changes to the direction of this Patreon campaign. All posts hereafter will be displayed and shared publicly: there will be no longer be a paywall for accessing the art and writing of Vulturesong.
I want to make very clear that I deeply appreciate the faith that my early Patrons have shown me. While this account has been mostly stagnant since inception, I have kept all current subscribers fairly updated via private social media about some of the challenges I have faced in the last several months, culminating in stressful and dangerous situations for myself and my loved ones. I am not living in a safe environment, let alone one where I can sit down and produce art to fulfill these tier rewards, and at this point I am not sure how or when my trial will end. I am, to say the least, "in the shit."
While making Vulturesong free-to-access was an unexpected decision, I believe it is the right one to make. I believe art should be accessible to all and shared freely for the benefit of humanity as a whole. I recognize that this notion is incompatible with capitalism and the idea that all good ideas are products that should be tagged and priced according to how much you can coerce people into paying for them. I recognize the importance of leading by example, no matter how financially unsound it may seem at the time.
While I am vulnerable and in a precarious situation now, I used to be insulated from the whims and punishments of capitalism because I used to operate from within its machinery. I worked a salaried job for seven years — using graphic design as an oil that lubricated the gears of transaction. I was proud of my art but not of my work, and the labor was soul-crushing. Just before starting this Patreon campaign, I left my post a broken person but confident that I would be able to regain my strength and create something wonderful. I wanted to pour love back into my art, and still aim to do so. I yearned to go back to my roots, go back to the story I started 20 years ago as a child, and bring it to light, and include all the things I had loved, learned, and wanted to see represented in thoughtful art.
“Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht.” We plan, God laughs.
—
Considering the changes in the campaign, my hope is that those who have the means will help support my work, and those who do not have the means will benefit from enjoying it. My purpose is to teach and to share, and my message is one of love, and knowing you love always in the face of death. This is a truth that when fully internalized dispels fear, as all fears are a fear of death, and only with love can you accept it and release yourself from fear's grip. That is a freedom that no one can take from you.
The fear of death is what fuels the fires of capitalism and fascism, the enemies of humanity, and its proponents know this. Our fears seem to be numerous and keep us divided, scrambling for ourselves, when they are really just one fear, disguised in the traumas of the day. My unchallenged fear of death is what kept me trapped in a job that was destroying me, and it was what kept Vulturesong behind a paywall until now. I ask you, just as I must ask myself every day: what would you do, if you were not afraid?
—
A liminal space is one of a threshold, a transition where you are not quite here, and not quite there, and it tends to create a remarkable tension within the mind as you hang in between, uncertain (afraid!) in the unknown between two phases. This is where I must make my home, for your true home is wherever you are — it is not a place where you yearn to go because you carry it within your body, within your heart and mind. This is my trial, and I must accept this just as I accept my inevitable end.
Take care and be safe,
Hayden
Scar Tissue
This entry was first posted on my Patreon on April 30, 2022 and has been reproduced here in its original form.
Not all delusions are created equal: this is scar tissue, mistaken for toughness. The last two months have been incredibly challenging, more so than all my previous years combined. The child in me feels this is wildly unfair, but when I look to the past, I look to the future, and I just look — I am always exactly where I need to be. Sometimes this feels like the only steadfast comfort I have, until I remember the people who support me unconditionally: my friends and every person who somehow still believes in my work as an artist when I've all but disappeared from this space. I will always have so much to be grateful for, even when it is easy to lose sight of this when certain types of pain take hold, settling into the half-sealed cracks where I have broken before. My goals and my skills have not faded, but it is clear to me now that the quality of my life has been, and always will be, determined by my willpower and choices. Sometimes I choose not to take care of myself, but most of the time I honestly just forget. What's important is that I remember that for as long as my identity is tied to being a maker (weighed by my product and contribution), or being a companion (measured in others), I will suffer. I recognize this trap, at least. My antidote seems to be to come back to this space: to create and share my craft. As always, thank you for your patience while I figure out how to do just that.
Take care and be safe,
Hayden