When the World Feels Like It's Coming Apart
What if the chaos you are witnessing on the world stage is not random collapse… but a rhythm playing out on a scale too vast for most eyes to see? What if the oligarchs tightening their grip, the widening gap between the few and the many, the despair humming beneath everyday life… are not the final state of things, but only a crest in a much older wave? And what if, hidden beneath the headlines, beneath the algorithms, beneath the fatigue… a quieter rhythm is already pulsing… the one that says:
The Principle of Rhythm… From Cosmos to Collapse
In Hermeticism, the Principle of Rhythm is simple in its wording and profound in its reach:
Everything flows, out and in… everything has its tides… all things rise and fall. The pendulum swing manifests in everything.
We usually meet this law first in our inner life. Moods rise and fall. Energy comes and goes. Hope… despair… confidence… doubt… all move like tides through the shoreline of consciousness.
But Rhythm is not just personal psychology. It is a universal law.
Seasons turn. Civilizations bloom… stagnate… rot… and crumble. Markets inflate… crash… and rebuild. Ideas become dogma… then compost… then soil for something unthinkably new.
Hermeticism invites us to see that:
- The same rhythmic intelligence that moves your breath in and out…
- Moves the fortunes of nations…
- And the lifespans of empires…
- And the birth and death of myths.
This is where Rome, Greece, and every fallen empire walk onto the stage.
The Echo of Fallen Empires
Rome did not fall in a single news cycle. It unraveled over generations… Corruption calcified… wealth concentrated… the center hollowed out while the spectacle grew louder. Sound familiar?
Greece burned through its golden age of philosophy and art… then slid into faction, war, and decline. The stories change… but the waveform is strikingly similar.
Today we look around and feel that something is… off. The oligarchic class tightens its hold while the 99% scrambles for air. Rights once assumed as permanent feel strangely conditional. Surveillance is ambient. The floor beneath "normal life" trembles.
This is Rhythm at a civilizational scale. Not because the universe wants us to suffer… but because everything that reaches an extreme must, by universal law, begin to swing back.
Rhythm is not moral. It is structural.
And that can feel terrifying… or liberating… depending on how you relate to it.
Rhythm, Oligarchy, and the Edge of the Wave
From a Hermetic lens, the oligarchic pressure cooker we are living in is not an anomaly. It is a late stage.
When power centralizes to an extreme… When wealth stratifies so sharply that life becomes untenable for the many… When institutions serve the few and drain the rest…
Rhythm whispers: this cannot hold.
- Rome thought its glory was permanent… then overreach and rot took their quiet toll.
- The aristocracies of Europe assumed divine right… until revolutions swung the pendulum with brutal force.
- Industrial barons wrote the rules… until labor movements and crises forced renegotiation of reality.
Our moment is another crest.
The danger is real… so is the opportunity.
Hermeticism does not say… "Relax, the universe will fix everything while you sit on the couch." It says…
"The pendulum is always in motion. Do you want to be dragged by it… or learn to work with it?"
Which brings us to mental alchemy.
How to Work with Rhythm in an Age of Collapse
Mental alchemy is the Hermetic art of using consciousness to transform experience. Rhythm gives you the raw material. Mental alchemy teaches you how to shape it.
We cannot instantly stop wars or dismantle oligarchies with a thought. But we can change how we:
- Perceive the cycle
- Position ourselves within it
- Participate in what rises from the ashes
Let us ground this in very real, everyday practice.
Inner Rhythm… Refusing to Drown in the News Tides
Your nervous system is not built to hold the full suffering and chaos of the world, 24/7, in your pocket. Every headline spike… every doomscroll wave… is a mini pendulum swing jerking your mind from hope to despair. Working with Rhythm here looks like:
Conscious intake cycles
Create your own "news tide." Choose specific windows when you engage with current events… and specific windows when you absolutely do not. This is not denial… it is choosing the rhythm of your awareness.
Emotional wave-surfing
When you feel despair flood in… name it as a tide, not a truth. "This is the low swing… not the whole sky." Ask: If this is the trough… where is the next crest beginning, even if I cannot see it yet?
Counter-rhythms of care
For every unit of exposure to collective chaos… introduce a counter unit of nervous system nourishment. A walk without your phone. A ritual bath. A simple breath pattern. These are not luxuries… they are how you stop being an unconscious node in the empire's anxiety grid.
This is Hermeticism at the level of your nervous system… not just your bookshelf.
Social Rhythm… Micro-Acts Against Macro-Despair
Oligarchic systems thrive on two things: distraction and despair.
Distraction keeps you from noticing the pattern. Despair convinces you that noticing does not matter.
To work with Rhythm socially is to introduce small, stubborn counter-movements in your immediate sphere:
In communication
When conversations spiral into "everything is doomed"… gently add rhythm to the narrative. "Yes, this is dark… and historically, moments like this have also preceded major shifts. Where do you see small signs of that?" You are not sugarcoating. You are widening the timeline.
In community
Support mutual aid projects, local organizing, co-ops, neighborhood efforts. These look small on a global map… But they are like seeds in a burned forest. Remember… everything that grows after a fire starts as something tiny.
In how you use platforms
Social media amplifies the chaotic swing… panic to outrage to numbness. Mental alchemy asks: are you helping that wave… or quietly bending it? Share one thing that restores agency or perspective for every thing that shocks. Invite people into reflection, not just reaction.
This is manifestation under universal law… not the "think positive and ignore reality" version. You are shaping how consciousness participates in the cycle… starting where your influence is real.
Career, Money, and the Rhythms of Empire
Economies are rhythmic creatures.
Booms… busts… austerity… stimulus… consolidation… disruption.
In times when oligarchs seem to own the game board, it is easy to feel like a pawn. Hermeticism invites a different stance:
Know the wave you are riding
Is your industry in expansion… stagnation… or quiet decline? Naming the phase reduces the gaslighting. You stop taking systemic contraction as a personal failure.
Diversify your streams with Rhythm in mind
In ages of concentrated power, resilience often lives in multiple small flows rather than one massive one. Side projects, skills, collaborations… even if they are small now, they are like feeder streams waiting for the river to change course.
Align your work with what rises, not what clings
Ask: Is my effort feeding the ossified crest… or the emerging wave? This is not always black and white. But even small shifts in what you choose to build, whom you choose to serve, and how you choose to use your gifts… matter.
Rhythm guarantees the current configuration will not last forever. What you build now can be part of what takes root after the swing.
The Phoenix and the Ashes… Rhythm in Mythic Clothing
The mythical phoenix is Rhythm wearing feathers and fire.
Burn… die… ashes… rebirth.
End… void… spark… ascent.
The phoenix is not a promise that destruction will feel good or be fair.
It is a reminder that in this universe… nothing finalizes at "ruin."
Rome falls… but its roads, languages, philosophies, and mistakes compost into the soil of future cultures. Greece collapses politically… but its ideas echo in law, art, and science millennia later.
Likewise, whatever current civilization we inhabit will not simply "end." It will burn through its unsustainable configurations… Its worst excesses will cost us dearly… And yet, from those ashes… ideas, structures, and ways of being that we cannot fully imagine yet will rise.
We are not just victims of this cycle… and we are not just spectators. We are participants in what the phoenix becomes.
So return, for a moment, to those opening questions…
When you feel the oligarchic choke… the surveillance… the crushing economics… Can you also sense, even faintly, the rhythm underneath it… saying: this too is a crest, and every crest contains the seed of a breaking wave?
When you witness systems failing… can you ask not only "How bad will this get?" but also "What might be able to grow once the spell breaks?"
This is not spiritual bypassing. It is Hermetic sight … the ability to hold both the fire and the future in the same gaze.
The Principle of Rhythm does not ask you to be naïve.
It does not excuse injustice… or suggest that suffering is "fine" because some future age will benefit.
Hermeticism is not an apology for empire.
Instead, Rhythm offers you a strange kind of spiritual weapon:
- The knowledge that nothing… no oligarchy, no economy, no regime… can escape the tide.
- The capacity, through mental alchemy, to steady your inner pendulum even when the outer world is swinging wildly.
- The invitation to participate consciously in what rises after… not only in what collapses now.
So as you move through this moment in history, ask yourself...
- Where can you choose your own rhythm instead of letting algorithms set it for you?
- Where can you plant phoenix seeds… in your work, your relationships, your community… even if the forest still smells like smoke?
- When you look at the arc of your life inside this collapsing… transforming world… who do you want to be in the story of what comes after?
