Emerging From the Cocoon: An exploration of music's trickle-down effect in love and the subsequent universal state of suffering

I had my first float tank experience today.

I did not have much of any idea of what to expect to come from it. I received a tarot reading a few weeks ago that I would be healing myself with water and salt, so when I stubbled upon this company with float tanks during my daily escapades last week, I knew it was something I had to choose to do.

There was a caveat in that my hair at the time was purple. Fresh hair dye is not allowed in the tanks, for it can damage the equipment. The option they gave me was to wait two weeks to float. About an inch long, it took me less than one minute of thought to decide I would just shave it all off. 

So here I am, 5 AM on a Monday morning, grappling with the thought of letting the last bit of my hair identity go. It was not hard.

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

Confidence increased.

Beauty increased.

Self love increased.

It was meant to be.

I left home for the tanks at 11:06 AM, sharp. 

I was slightly nervous about being alone in a small, quiet, and dark enclosure for an hour. How could I possibly make due for an hour of time without an ounce of stimuli?

Well, news flash to the past version of myself, it was quite literally the best thing I could have done for myself at that moment of time.

I will paint my float tank experience as an experience akin to a butterfly going through metamorphosis.

Before I stepped into the tank, I had to take a shower.

The shower handle moved in a circular motion, with the hot water being on as soon as the bar began to go up, and gradually getting colder as the handle continued to move.

There was an inner knowing that I would come out of the cocoon anew. I didn’t know exactly what to expect, nor how I would get there, but it was a deep feeling that my soul was ready to experience such a thing.

I asked God for what I wanted out of the experience. Although I am only typing this two hours after my experience, I have already forgotten what my requests were, other than that I wanted to see what my next immediate steps should be.

After making about four or five requests, I began to see visions of my life. 

“Too far out and too unrealistic”, I thought.

“Just let yourself see.”

So, I let myself see. 

“Why do you think this is unrealistic for you? What has made you believe that you can’t achieve what you can see? If other people have it, what makes you think of yourself as less than them to not be able to have the same?”

A wave of calm understanding hit.

A key point of remembrance from my float experience is that for a good amount of time, I kept my eyes closed. The tank felt small; I kept bumping into the sides of it.

“I want to see”, I thought.

So I opened my eyes. It was pitch black. The previous view of a light line of yellow light shining in from the gap between the top and bottom parts of the tank enclosure was gone. The barely there light shining an outline of the handle bar and top of the tank was gone. I saw nothing but black.

“That’s strange”, I thought, but that is where my thoughts stopped. I did not allow myself to think much about it. I continued to float, trying not to think, but rather to just be.

My eyes were heavy, but they remained open. I was no longer bumping.

This was being.

I was walked through some basics of where to begin exploring the societal impacts of.

The first idea to explore was music, a distraction I had vowed to give up last summer. Classical, jazz, and EDM have since become commonplace in my listening rotation. I did recently open myself back up to listening to music with lyrics in it. At the beginning time of my flotation experience, I had to spend some time getting myself to stop singing song lyrics in my head. It was a constant loop of melodies. Words that I have never spoken were being thought as though they were integral to my being. 

Since it was proving difficult to go straight from the love song that was in my mind to nothing at all, I decided to switch to an affirmation song that I enjoy.

“Please let me feel, inner peace. 

From the center,

from the center of me.”

Love songs are a constant expression of outward love and longing. What would the world become if lyrics were to mainly speak of the love one has for themselves? What if instead of being conditioned through childhood that your life must be spent determined to find a singular person to spend it with that will fulfil every humanly need that you have possible, we are instead conditioned with the idea to find fulfilment with the absolute only person we are guaranteed to be with until death, being ourselves? 

So many people spend their lives changing themselves in the aspiration of someone accepting them to be their romantic love interest.

They go to the gym.

They get haircuts.

They obtain high-paying jobs.

They work on healing their inner wounds.

However, rather than doing said things for themselves, there is a background belief within themselves that if they do this said thing, then maybe, finally, someone will choose them.

Societal constructs towards men push them towards acquiring as many sexual partners as possible.

Societal constructs towards women push them towards finding a life spouse as soon as possible.

A key plight of the human condition of suffering is that we are brought up to desire another human being who desires something completely different than ourselves.

Children are currently being brought up to sexualize life. According to some, it is okay because we have the birth control pill now. Women are able to sacrifice their emotional, hormonal, physical, and mental health for the benefit of being able to now obtain Life Plans (™). Here is where another plight of suffering comes in.

Planning for the future is an obtuse way to set oneself up for a life of misery. You don’t know what will make your future self happy. The absolute only guarantee of happiness is what will make you happy in this exact moment, right now. Does reading this article make you happy? Great, then keep reading! If you believe that you are getting some instantaneous benefit out of your being in the very moment of life that you are in, then that is what you are receiving. Nothing more, and nothing less. You can do all the “right” actions, by the book or by the words that others have told you to do, however, they guarantee absolutely nothing. You may luck out and find that pot of happiness gold you spent your life vying for. You may draw a strike and damn yourself to further unhappiness. It’s unguaranteed. It is well understood that you should not gamble with your finances, so why would you want to gamble with your time, which is in fact the only real thing that you are guaranteed on this planet?

As women were now able to embark on their Life Plans (™), massive shifts in the economy occurred. Rather than roughly half of adults having an opportunity in the wage-earning-labor market, now every human being had the same shot at earning an income. The feminist journey was a long and hard fight that sought to build on top of an already universally unfair system. According to Karl Marx's and Frederick Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, the formation of the monogamous family unit was one that was created for the purpose of giving wealthy land owners a direct heir to their land. For such reasons, women now needed to be tied to a specific man, so that it was well known who his lineage was.

“Monogamous marriage was a great historical step forward; nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth, it opens the period that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others.”

Where we saw steps forward in women being able to pursue education and careers, we saw steps backwards in little changes being made to the structural support of family life, leaving the load of earning an income and taking care of children to women. Since the workforce had now effectively doubled in opportunity, the cost of living effectively rose to the prices of what would require two incomes to support a single family, rather than the single income that had previously been able to do the same.

So while you have the match-making occurring due to media brainwashing, as well as the match-making occurring due to economic strains, you now also have the match-making occurring because of the perceived illusion of freedom that the birth control pill has now provided. Add dating apps to the mix, you now have a society that has amplified this illusion by convincing humanity that love is something to be commodified and can be found with something as simple as swiping on an image and a two-sentence self-made description on a 5-inch screen. 

Before dating apps came into existence, social circles provided accountability for the behavior of two humans entertaining the idea of romance. Individuals typically found each other through family, friends, jobs, and meandering through their neighborhoods in areas of their interests. Now, with people having the option of meeting with those who are incredibly disconnected from anyone who would ever appear to them in real life, someone who may face reputational consequences for acts such as disrespecting or ghosting someone else, now get off the hook with nothing but an annoyance to their day and a mark of trauma to someone elses.

After several occurrences of mismatched values and lack of social checks, humans become emotionally burnt out and end up dissociating from the game that modern society has turned romance into. Individuals get in their minds that they must “succeed” at the dating game before either all of the “good” people are taken or before they get so exhausted with disappointment that they choose to give up altogether. 

In a world without social media and dating apps, being “good” or “the best” in a “dating market” doesn’t exist. There are markers of being a good human being, and then there are markers of manipulating a romantic interest into thinking you are a good human being with a facade that is not bound to last the rest of your life, for which is the length of time of the vows that the path you are heading down has you set to declare.

In the act of manipulating your core character, you are lying to not only others, but to yourself as well. Do you think you will be happy in ten years if you go to the gym to get a mate who loves gym partners, but you actually deep down hate going to the gym? You have not even succeeded today because your influx of dopamine comes from a brainwashed mindset that you have choked down because of other toxic resources telling you that this is what will make you happy. 

You trust other people more than you trust yourself. You have not seen a day in your life that acquiring a multitude of sexual partners will make you happy because you have never a day in your life successfully had a multitude of sexual partners. So, rather than building off of what your intuition desires and knows to be markers of happiness and success, you allow random people who have lived lives unknown to you in their current unknown states of happiness to tell you what to do to make you happy. Meanwhile, you are acquiring universal debt, numbing yourself to the true joys of human connection, training yourself to sexualize every interaction with the gender that you find sexually attractive, and wasting time on a task that has no net gains.

For those who are constantly in the search of their next partner, they will stay in a mindset of lack until they break the cycle. Mindsets in one area of life often trickle over into other areas of life. They will lack in love, joy, peace, friendship, happiness, career, family. There is a deep sense of loss that comes from not understanding that you are whole on your own. You do not need another human to complete you. However, with the introduction of birth control, we now see our biological desires being pushed further and further back in the timeline of our lives. It is hard to solve an issue on your lonesome when the whole entire world is telling you that the issue is the correct way to live. Thus, humans remain stuck in a cycle of soulful karmic debt, chained to the illusions of the world, farther and farther away from the light of universal truth. 

Truth: Taking a hormone-altering substance every single day of your life for 10+ years is not normal.

Truth: Fulfilling your sexual desires through a screen with a human who looks completely different than the last every single day is not normal.

Truth: Basing your daily activities on the acquisition of a new romantic partner rather than doing what resonates with your soul is not normal.

Truth: Basing your self-worth on being perceived by a large percentage of the gender you are sexually attracted to as being attracted to you is not normal.

Fixing the problem begins with helping the next generation not grow up to live the consequences that we are seeing scarily play out in real time. Only with the next generation, the effects will be absolutely detrimental to humanity, seeing as they have never seen anything different than the toxicity that is currently running Mother Earth.

I propose introducing a new educational framework as the main educational model of youth, with international recognition being paramount for universal success rather than just a nation-based, false sense of superiority.

The first philosophy would be changing the music that is commonplace in the youth’s lives. For comparison, the Waldorf education framework bans all media until around age 12, which is when it is then allowed in at extremely low doses. While yes, everything has its pros and everything has its cons, I think back to my time in the float tank. I had to subvert my lyrical thoughts to ones that were more beneficial to my sense of self. If I, a grown woman who has been walking the mystical path for longer than I care to count right now, struggle with going media free, there is absolutely no way I would expect a young child who lacks impulse control and whose self-image depends a large amount on acceptance of their peers to do so. The truth is, we are in a highly technological world right now. Expecting a child to steer completely clear of technology to only use it when an adult tells them it's okay is confusing, at best.

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To find more information on the philosophical concept of Conscious Music that this writing promotes, click here.

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I will explore this topic further in future posts. Akin to the universal spiral of life, my depth and detail on topics will deepen as I cycle back around to it. For now, take this, ingest it, and tune yourself to the new frequency it provides.

I will follow up to edit this post with linking to the subsequent topics I was shown to explore in my float tank experience and further explorations on any of the topics detailed in this writing.

All Coming in Divine Timing!