Defending the Otherworld Commons

Google’s Harmut Neven was likely engaging in boastful speculation when he suggested that the company’s Willow chip may have accessed other universes in the process of solving a seemingly impossible math problem, writing:

“Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10²⁵ or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.”

Nevertheless, I found his words chilling – and eerily resonant with the sense I have been getting from the gods and spirits I work with that what we are doing in this world is echoing through the Otherworld as well.

My awareness of this impact began to grow strong when I learned about the massive amounts of water being drained from Irish aquifers to cool server farms – Ireland hosts a disproportionate number of them because of the degree to which successive Fianna Fáil/ Fine Gael regimes have allowed tech companies to dictate national policy in order to attract investment. The demands for water to cool servers are likely to grow with the rise of artificial intelligence, since AI demands exponentially more resources than ordinary computing. These same aquifers feed the holy wells which have brought blessing and healing to people since the Neolithic. The old stories tells us that when a holy well is disrespected, the Otherworld withdraws its blessing and its waters.

The water from Saint Gobnait’s well that sits on my altar, the stones beneath me that are part of the same granite spine that runs beneath the Atlantic and connects with the hills of Ireland, and the ancient ones with whom I speak tell me that my instinct is right – that the draining of the aquifers that feed the holy wells is experienced as an assault on the living world and on the Otherworld. So too the mining of lithium, rare earth minerals, uranium and coal, and the drilling for oil and gas. The shockwaves are felt in all worlds – all worlds except the new, abstracted world the increasingly disembodied human creators of these technologies seek to escape into.

My late friend Stephen Buhner referred to the habit of mind that is the mental/emotional/somatic manifestation of the cosmology of rationalist materialism – the cosmology which views the world of matter as a world of material to be utilized in production – as “dissociated mentation.” Dissociated mentation disconnects us from sensation and emotion, rendering it difficult or impossible for us to be in relation with the rest of the living world.

In our own time, it has reached new extremes, with economies once based on physical exchange that grounded them in some way in the world of matter now being based largely on exchanges of electronic currency and virtual goods, and even erotic connection becoming increasingly disembodied de-eroticized by the ubiquity of pornography and the advent of AI “lovers.” All of this appears to occur in a completely abstracted realm, and the deeper we become involved in that realm, the less aware we become of the fact that its existence depends on the destruction of forests and rivers and mountains and deserts and the unspeakable misery of the desperately poor humans conscripted into that work.

(It is striking in this context that the dissociative visionary drug ketamine is so popular in the tech world. And while psychedelics that hold greater potential for connection with the living world, like psilocybin and LSD are also popular in Silicon Valley, they are treated as tools for increasing the efficiency of the ways in which human minds work with the silicon simulacra of mycelial webs. Set and setting – intention and context – determine the shape of psychedelic experiences. Dissociated minds tend not to take the life of the body or the lives of other bodies, human and wild, into account when shaping their intentions. Those who engage psychedelics with an openness to the experience of “oceanic boundlessness” tend to emerge with deeper connection with the rest of life, and the positive side effect of healing. Those who engage them with the intention of going deeper into the cultural games now afoot tend to emerge otherwise. The latter is its own kind of looting the Otherworld commons.)

Like most dissociative states, the dissociated mentation that has become our default cultural mindset -- like the mindless consumption that is its hungry ghost mirror twin – was born of trauma. In this case it was the collective trauma of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -- forced displacement of rural people, the colonization of Africa and the Americas and Ireland and Scotland – the violent severing of relationships to human and ecological communities and to the living land itself that also meant a severing from the Otherworld, from the gods and ancestors and spirits who blessed the land and the people and inhabited sacred places. That trauma has been repeated as capitalism has advanced – and now under late capitalism it brings the draining of the holy waters and the mining of sacred mountains to power incursions into other worlds just as its earlier forms involved the destruction of the Irish rainforest to build the ships that would be used by England to invade the Americas and to kidnap people from Africa.

In the time of the rise of capitalism, those still connected with the land rose up – with support from the Otherworld. In England, weavers smashed looms in the service of General Ludd – a ghostly figure who bore the same name as one of the princes of Annwn. In Kerry and Cork, na Buchaillí Bána rose up against the landlords in the name of the ghostly Queen Sadbh, mother of the Eóghanacht Tribe.

I don’t know what sacred resistance looks like in our time. But I know it begins with listening to the voices of the living world and the Otherworld, and making alliance with them in defense of the Otherworld Commons.