Two worlds exist simultaneously — one of sacred stillness and deep healing, one of wild and ungovernable chaos. The question is which one we choose to inhabit.
Mountain images are sacred in all cultures. Like the earth’s oldest prayers, they remind us that things were ancient long before we arrived, and will endure long after we are gone!
In the Filipino culture, the sacred mountain of Banahaw holds the kind of silence that speaks — the kind that finds you only when you have stopped running long enough to listen. I had the privilege of co-running a weekend retreat there, and what unfolded was nothing short of alchemical: a gathering of women deciphering their dreams, finding their feminine voices through movement and weaving the quiet miracle of community.
At night, we gathered around bonfires under a full moon whose light turned the clearing silver. Stars pressed close. Someone drummed. We danced, someone wept, hearts stirred at an energy so ancient. By the end of our retreat, something had shifted, quietly and irrevocably, in the interior weather of the women present. That is what the mountain does. It is a transformative space, timeless and generous, and it asked only that we showed up with the willingness to be changed.
And then we came back down. It happened at brunch, that last morning — the unwilling return to the other world. Phones emerged from bags. Scrolling began. And what greeted us from the flatlands was the Senate of the Philippines in full, feral spectacle: senators arrested on plunder and corruption charges, lawmakers shrieking at each other across chamber floors, a majority bloc simply refusing to show up for work while the minority dug in and waited, a comedy of flight and farce playing out in the very halls designed for statecraft. The jungle had come to find us, even on the mountain.
The Senate now has the energy of the jungle. This low frequency energy is everywhere now. The jungle does not negotiate. It does not deliberate. It sprawls, it cannibalizes, it devours whatever order dares to root itself in its path. What we witness in the Senate chambers was not merely political dysfunction — it was the jungle in full expression: primal, loud, ungovernable, deeply indifferent to anything resembling the common good. Statesmanship, we agreed over our plates, has become a word belonging to nostalgia — filed away alongside other beautiful, obsolete things.
Someone at the table asked me, knowing my work in astrological cycles: When does this end? My answer was honest, if uncomfortable. It ends when the institution has reached the absolute bottom of its breaking. And we are close — perhaps already there. This is not pessimism. It is the nature of transformation at scale: before the new can take root, the old must fully exhaust itself. The crisis is the passage. The breakdown is, in a strange and terrible way, the point.
Let’s zoom out further and see the same duality play across the world. The global jungle is the wildest it has ever been. Information travels faster than truth. Artificial intelligence transforms images, manufactures realities, animates the impossible until the possible becomes unrecognizable. With the same faces are fake news and real news. We cannot tell the difference!
The daily scrolling we do with our cellphones is a feverish dream of sensation where we see in succession — outrage, turmoil, war, beauty, catastrophe, miracle, creativity, imagination all flattened into the same restless feed designed not to inform but to agitate, to keep us in the low vibration of reactivity. This is the jungle. Where animal instincts tear into the other and the strong seem to survive…for a while…
Meanwhile, the mountain calls from within that same screen—images of extraordinary beauty, voices of genuine wisdom, communities of care and creativity finding each other across distances. Both live in the same device, the same platform, the same thumb-flick. The jungle and the mountain are no longer geographically distinct. They are simultaneous. The choice between them is no longer a matter of travel but of attention.
The contrast was too stark for mE — from the peace of the mountain to the intensity of the jungle chaos.this energy needs to be understood so we can move through both with the same equanimity.
What the mountain taught me — what it teaches every time, to anyone willing to ascend — is that clarity is not a luxury. It is a survival skill. The mountain insists on depth, on rootedness, on the kind of community that holds rather than consumes. It insists on the dream, on the feminine intelligence that moves through the body rather than around it, on fire circles and full moons and the radical act of sitting still long enough to hear your own voice again.
The jungle will always be there. Chaos is not going anywhere. The systems are still breaking, the institutions still fracturing, the noise still rising. But the mountain is also always there — in the retreat, yes, but also in the quality of a conversation, in the discipline of discernment, in the choice to not be swept into hysteria simply because hysteria is loudest. We are each, at every moment, choosing which world to inhabit.
I have decided to go for the mountain. Not as escape — because it’s not like I am abandoning the world — but as orientation. In the mountain I have learned to root myself in its clarity before descending. To carry its stillness back down. And to run back to it when the jungle closes in, when the Senate spectacle and the doomscroll and the AI-generated unreality begin to blur the edges of what is real and what matters. To understand the play of this duality now at its extreme is to understand that wildness is not chaos but a deeper, older kind of intelligence.
In the perfection of the universal order there is a greater plan unfolding. The intensity of duality of the world is showing itself, and we will see more… But with the promise that once the old is totally broken, we can build the new.