Super Chill Beach Hang — Alchemist Society

Dear Alchemists,

It is my pleasure and honour to deliver you this message.

The world is changing. The old ways are collapsing under the weight of unsustainability: the mechanistic, materialist paradigm that treats consciousness as accident, nature as resource, and intuition as delusion. This worldview has severed humanity from a cosmos that is alive, responsive, and relational—a world we used to be in conversation with, not standing apart from.

We became detached observers — measuring, exploiting, extracting — rather than participants in a sacred dialogue. When shamans, oracles, or mystics engaged in ritual, prayer, or divination, they weren’t performing superstition — they were participating in dialogue with a living field of intelligence. Reality wasn’t a machine to be mastered; it was a relationship to be tended.

They understood that thoughts, emotions, and actions ripple into the world. The world, in turn, communicates back through signs, dreams, synchronicities, and the behaviour of natural elements. You don’t observe reality from the outside; you co-create it through your awareness.

The mechanistic, reductionist worldview that replaced this sees the universe as a machine made of inert matter, operating by mathematical laws, separate from the inner world of consciousness. Gravity pulls, electrons repel, organisms evolve, stars burn out—and none of it has aliveness or interconnectedness.

Before the scientific revolution, most cultures saw natural forces as expressions of living intelligence—spirits, gods, ancestors, archetypes. But when Newton, Descartes, and their peers formulated the laws of motion and mechanics, they described a world that could be predicted and controlled without reference to consciousness. It was a breakthrough for technology and medicine, but it came with a trade-off: the world stopped being a conversation partner and became a set of equations.

That’s why many people sense a split between “science” and “spirit,” or between “facts” and “meaning.” A universe governed by impersonal laws can feel empty. You can live in a universe and feel alone whereas you can live with a cosmos and feel connected. The participatory cosmos is the universe experienced as meaningful relationship — where you sense the intelligence within matter, the communication behind coincidence, the order inside apparent chaos. That’s why the present day loss of meaning, ecological destruction, and loneliness feel so intertwined: when we stop seeing the cosmos as participatory, we lose our place in it.

In the participatory view, everything possesses some degree of consciousness or inner aspect that isn’t fully captured by external description — stone, tree, storm, animal, star, human. It’s not that “nature has spirit”; it is spirit expressing itself in infinite forms. This is the worldview in which omen-reading, astrology, prayer, and healing make sense — because the boundary between subject and object is permeable.

The widespread disconnection of the present day may not be a mistake but a stage: perhaps we had to forget the aliveness of the world to develop individuality, reason, and scientific clarity — and now, we’re tasked with remembering aliveness again, consciously, rather than unconsciously as our distant ancestors did (ie. without reflecting on it as a concept).

So the participatory cosmos isn’t about returning to old animism; it’s about entering a new, conscious partnership with existence — one that includes both science and spirit. The modern task is to integrate the two—keeping the clarity of science while restoring a sense of relationship and meaning.

Many of you feel the shift. Some of you have been through through hell to be able to feel it. You chose courage and bravery repeatedly in the face of difficulty, ridicule, alienation, exile, uncertainty, and you did not give up on what you know to be true in your heart.

That makes you leaders of New Earth if you choose to be, and its dawn is here.

——

The veil is thin in this Scorpio season, especially as we move closer to Halloween. What a great time to have our very first event. We will meet at the Spit Dog Beach, at the spot in the photo just to the left of the pier by the water. No agenda. We will openly discuss whatever is on our hearts and minds.

You are welcome to bring food, snacks, dinner, drinks. Maybe a picnic blanket. It shouldn’t be too cold but maybe a jumper. I’ve got no issue with alcohol or substances if you feel so inclined. This is a social circle after all. More than anything, we’re here to get to know each other and have a good, relaxed time. Guests are welcome.

I look forward to meeting you all :)

Pete