A Note Before This Post
Numinous Waves has always lived close to the mystics — sitting with the Upanishads, with Abhinavagupta, with the quiet architecture of consciousness rather than the noise of current events. This piece breaks from that, and I want to tell you honestly why.
I am eighty years old. I have spent more than fifty of those years in some form of contemplative practice, and I have watched enough decades pass to trust that the world’s noise usually settles, given enough time, into something the inner life can hold without much disturbance. This year tested that trust. I sat with real unease — not performed concern, but the actual weight of watching trust between nations fray, a warming world go untended, and the ground beneath ordinary lives feel less solid than it has in my lifetime. I didn’t feel honest continuing to write only from the garden while I could see smoke from it.
So what follows isn’t a departure from the inward path. It’s what happened when I refused to let that path become a hiding place from what a human being living through this particular chaos actually feels. I went looking for whether the same lila that has held every age before this one is still holding this one — even now, even here. I found an answer I could live inside. I hope you find your own.
What follows traces three fractures happening in plain sight right now — the fraying trust between nations, the retreat from our climate obligations, the thinning confidence beneath our currency. I believe all three are real, measurable, and worth naming without flinching. Nothing here asks you to look away from them. What I want to offer is a frame large enough to hold them without collapsing into despair.
The traditions I love most — Kashmir Shaivism above all — hold that all of manifest existence is lila: the Absolute’s own self-referential play, contracting into apparent limitation and expanding back into recognition, endlessly. Contraction is not a mistake in this view. It is half of a rhythm. Spanda, the pulse itself, requires both movements — the closing fist and the opening hand — the way a heart requires both systole and diastole to keep a body alive. This essay is an attempt to read this decade through that pulse: honest about the fist we’re currently inside, and trusting — not naively, but on the strength of a very old pattern — that the hand still opens.
The Fraying Web, Before It Is Rewoven
What if the world’s declining trust in a single center is contraction clearing space for something more distributed to be born?
The data here is unambiguous: allied confidence in American reliability has fallen sharply across dozens of countries, formal withdrawal from international bodies continues, and old alliance structures are visibly straining. I’m not going to soften that. A decade of this likely means real instability — more regional conflict without a stabilizing hand, more countries forced into hard choices about who to trust, real human cost paid by people with no say in any of it.
But lila asks a harder question of me than optimism does: what is this contraction making room for? A single hegemon holding the world together by its own gravity was never, in the deeper view, a stable final form — it was one phase. What comes after a center loses its grip is not automatically chaos; historically, it has also been the passage through which more distributed, more resilient forms of cooperation eventually get built, forged by necessity rather than granted by a single power’s goodwill. That doesn’t happen without a hard passage through the fist first. I don’t think we’re past that passage yet. I think we may be entering it.
The Ember Beneath the Ash
What if the very act of forgetting the earth is what will finally force us to remember it?
Here too, nothing softens: the retreat from climate commitments, the rollback of emissions protections, the abandonment of climate aid to the nations least responsible and most exposed — these are not going to reverse quickly, and the physical consequences will compound for a long time regardless of who governs next. I want to say that plainly rather than wrap it in comfort it hasn’t earned.
And yet the mystics I trust most on this point — the Vedantin as much as the Shaiva — would say that avidya, forgetting, has never once been the final word in any story humanity has told about itself. It has always, eventually, been the very friction that forces remembering. A decade of ecological forgetting is a decade of accumulating consequence, yes — heat, flood, displaced people, real suffering that a spiritual essay has no right to minimize. But consequence is also, historically, the thing that has finally moved humanity to act when persuasion alone could not. The ember is not extinguished by the ash covering it. It waits.
The Test of the Golden Thread
What if a currency losing its unquestioned trust is inviting us toward a truer measure of what we actually value?
The debt is still the debt. The deficit is still widening. The dollar’s reserve status is genuinely more contested than it has been in generations, and a decade of this could mean real hardship — higher costs, tighter margins, harder choices for people with far less cushion than the markets hedging against it.
But I notice something when I sit with this one longer: a civilization’s currency has always been, in part, a mirror of what it collectively believes is valuable. A reserve currency built on eighty years of assumed permanence was also, in its way, a story — an agreement everyone believed until they didn’t. When a story like that thins, it is genuinely painful for the people living inside it. It can also be the exact condition under which a people is forced to ask what wealth actually is, beneath the abstraction — a question every wisdom tradition I know considers more important than the one markets ask. I don’t offer that as consolation for anyone facing real financial strain in the next few years. I offer it as the longer arc inside which that strain sits.
The Pulse That Cannot Stop Beating
What does the soul become on the far side of contraction?
This is the section I actually believe, underneath everything above.
I do not think the Absolute contracts by accident, and I do not think it forgets how to expand. Every tradition I’ve spent my life inside — Bhakti’s surrender through hardship rather than around it, Shaivism’s spanda, the Christian mystic’s dark night that precedes rather than prevents union, Jung’s insistence that the shadow must be met, not bypassed, before wholeness is possible — says the same thing in different languages: darkness is not the opposite of the light’s progress. It is frequently the mechanism of it.
That doesn’t make the next decade painless. People will suffer through the specific, documented hardships in the sections above — displaced trust, damaged ecosystems, strained finances — and it would dishonor them to pretend otherwise for the sake of a tidier ending. But I don’t believe suffering is where consciousness stops. I believe — not as wishful thinking but as the conclusion of everything I’ve come to know through this path — that a decade of contraction is not evidence against the Absolute’s movement toward light. It may be exactly what that movement looks like, mid-pulse, before the hand opens again. We are not outside this lila watching it happen to someone else. We are the hand.
Addendum: Trust Without Bypass
I want to be careful here, because there’s a version of this essay that would be a disservice to you and to anyone who reads it — one that uses “it’s all lila” to quietly excuse looking away from real, near-term harm. That is not what I mean. The contraction described above will likely deepen before it eases; people, ecosystems, and institutions will bear real costs in the meantime, and no amount of trust in the ultimate direction of consciousness should be used to minimize that or discourage anyone from working to ease it. Genuine non-dual trust, as I understand it, has never asked us to stop caring about the relative world’s suffering because the Absolute is fine either way. It asks us to hold both at once: full presence to the difficulty of this passage, and full trust that the passage has a far side.
Epilogue
The fist closes. It always has, in every age that came before this one. And the hand has always opened again — not because history guarantees it, but because the Absolute has never once forgotten how to breathe. I do not know how long this contraction lasts. I know only that I am not watching it from outside. I am the pulse, closing and opening, and so are you.
Sources & References
- Pew Research Center, Trump Gets Negative Reviews Internationally in 2026, Fewer Say US Is Reliable Partner(June 23, 2026)
- Axios, Trump foreign policy sinks U.S. trust abroad, Pew poll finds (June 23, 2026)
- Foreign Affairs, The World Is Giving Up on America
- Foreign Policy, What Trump’s Last-Gasp Foreign Policy Means for the Global Order (March 2026)
- Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Trump 2.0 Enters 2026 in Full Force
- Center for American Progress, Trump Global Weakness Watch and How Trump’s Unilateral Foreign Policy Has Eroded American Power
- Bloomberg, US Exits Paris Agreement: What Trump’s Withdrawal Means for Climate Change (January 27, 2026)
- NPR, Trump’s EPA will end the basis for federal climate actions (February 2026)
- CNBC, Trump revokes EPA finding on greenhouse gas threat (February 12, 2026)
- Columbia Climate Law Blog (Sabin Center), Trump Administration’s Unified Agenda Suggests Major Reversals on Climate Safeguards (July 2026)
- Yahoo News/AP, So long, Paris: US officially leaves landmark climate pact
- Tax Foundation, Tariff Tracker: 2026 Trump Tariffs & Trade War by the Numbers
- Fortune, Trump tariffs are generating only 25% of the revenue needed to pay interest on national debt (June 16, 2026)
- Fortune, Trump’s $200 billion tariff hit swells budget deficit to $2.1 trillion for 2026, CBO confirms (August 2026)
- Fortune, Dollar sinks as Trump’s new tariffs raise fears about U.S. debt and reserve currency status (January 18, 2026)
- NYC Comptroller’s Office, Taking Trump’s Tariffs Seriously: The Fiscal and Economic Impact for NYC
Publication Note: This essay was composed in collaboration with Claude (Anthropic), grounded in reporting current as of August 2026.
