Ocean of Elephants: Embodiment, Trans Women & Digital Otherworlds

How the tension between abstraction and embodiment is changing culture

I’m running a special event with Josh Schrei of The Emerald in London on June 17. It's already 60% sold two days after launch, so book soon if you want to come! I’m also running a one day retreat on May 17 in London with my friend Clive Selwyn called Polarity and Partnership, an embodied process exploring healthy polarity between the sexes. If you want to host a screening of the first Kainos documentary ‘Crossroads’ for your friends or community in June, let us know through this form.

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Immigration. Belonging. Sex. Money. Madness. Something strange is happening as you read these words. As your eyes flicker over abstract symbols, they c-o-m-b-i-n-e into bundles of context. Your visual cortex shoots them into your brain where cognitive processes that evolved to process sound, spatial awareness and emotion are repurposed to extract layers of meaning. Abstract thought arises.

Abstraction is a strange thing. If you read about hundreds of elephants swimming in the ocean, for a moment you’re there, watching them tread water with their trunks held high.

But you’re also here. As you read, you’re breathing some of the twenty-two thousands breaths you’ll take today. If you pay attention, you can feel your feet, your hands, your beating heart.

Being human means living between embodiment and abstraction. The political, social and spiritual upheaval we’re experiencing today is caused in part by a battle over which of these polarities is more real. The end of globalism, Europe’s ongoing struggles with immigration, and the UK Supreme Court’s ruling that trans women don’t have identical rights to biological women all express this tension. They are unique issues with complex causes, but each points us toward a rupture between embodiment and abstraction.

What is more real, a stock derivative for corn futures or a field of corn? Is belonging to a country about cultural identity, or is it about your reliance on the land for survival? Is the ocean of elephants more real than your breath?

For decades, many of our cultural institutions have told us that our abstractions are more real than what we can see and touch. During the 2008 crash, millions of people lost physical homes because a financial system of abstract derivatives failed. Fast forward a few years, and millions voted for Brexit and Trump to reject the idea of a ‘global village’ because it jarred with the reality of life in rural Britain and America. At around the same time, TV shows, HR departments, and politicians started declaring that theories about what a woman is were more real than biology.

But the problem with abstractions is that no matter how real they might seem, they will always be subsumed by physical reality. It’s why people buy gold in response to economic uncertainty, and why one of the most common deathbed regrets is that we’ve lived our lives to fulfil the expectations of other people instead of being true to ourselves. The essence of who you are is more real than the conceptual expectations placed on you by society.

The guy in the feather cap is clearly trying to get him to sign up to a deathbed crypto scheme. Read the room, bro.

Collectively, we’re going through something like a death, in which over-abstraction is crashing into physical reality. The liberal world order is gone, and across multiple domains, from education and economics to immigration policy and climate change, we’re wrestling with what it means to let go of ideas about what should be and face what is.

This is happening in part because society has been changed so radically by social media, and we are waking from a digital fugue state to realise just how much we’ve lost. We are still in the midst of that waking, but if we move in the right direction we can learn from it to create a more compassionate and authentic culture.

The first step is to re-establish a healthy relationship between our bodies and our abstractions. We can do that simply by remembering that our bodies are more real. As I explored in recent conversations with Iain McGilchrist and Andrea Hiott (available for paid subscribers), cognition isn’t an abstract process happening in our heads, but inseparable from our physicality and our environment. All our mental concepts come from our bodies, and understanding what that really means that can help us reconnect to authentic conversations, re-establish trust in the social contract, and kick-start cultural evolution.

Crossroads

My thinking on this topic owes a lot to producing the first Kainos documentary, Crossroads. It’s been an intense and inspiring process, and is the reason I haven’t written a piece like this in about five months. What began as a 45 minute video essay has grown into a feature-length documentary featuring

Yanis Varoufakis

,

Nora Bateson

,

Douglas Rushkoff

, John Vervaeke,

Minna Salami

, Alexa Firmenich and Josh Schrei, as well as two very talented dancers, Alex Gomez and Mirabel Huang-Smith.

I’ve been lucky to work with a world-class documentary editor, Whetham Allpress, and we’re now in the last few weeks of editing. There’s an aphorism that documentaries come to life in the editing suite, and I didn’t know how true that is until I embarked on this project. It’s in the process of weaving together many voices along with your own that the real story emerges. In the case of Crossroads, two key themes have come out in the editing suite that I didn’t expect would be as prominent.

The first is the need to heal the effects of what John Vervaeke refers to as the ‘Trust Apocalypse’ and re-establish trust in the social contract before we can make meaningful cultural change. The second theme is a cause of the first: we’ve become lost in our abstractions, and unable to have meaningful social dialogue because of how much time we spend online.

As these themes have emerged, they’ve affected how I want to release Crossroads. I’ll be putting it out here on Substack and on YouTube in the early summer, but it feels like a performative contradiction to launch it online. Instead, I want people to watch it together first and use it as inspiration for authentic, connected conversations that take us somewhere new. Not sitting alone in our rooms, but gathering, breathing, thinking and disagreeing together.

And we need your help to do that. The plan is to premiere Crossroads in grassroots screenings around the world in June before we release the documentary online. If you’d like to host a screening, we’d love to hear from you through the form below. It could be as simple as getting some friends over in your living room, or you might be involved in a community you think would enjoy it. If you have access to a venue in a major city that has a screen or projector, we’d love to hear from you.

All you’ll have to do is find the others and gather them: we’re creating a screening pack including discussion topics and conversational practices, and if you gather over 30 people I’ll zoom in for a Q&A. We’ve never tried anything like this before and looking forward to seeing what happens. If you feel inspired to get involved please fill out this short form or click the button below.

Beyond Duality

Coming together to watch and discuss isn’t a process of rejecting abstraction. I’ve noticed myself falling into black and white thinking around this: embodied human connection is good, abstraction is bad. That’s not the case. As Iain McGilchrist noted in our recent conversation, modern culture struggles with the false belief that if something is good, more of it is better. In practice, too much of anything is bad.

The question we’re facing today isn’t ‘embodiment or abstraction?’. We need both, and we are both. Instead, it’s about how we balance the reality that we are bodies present and embedded in our environment, who nevertheless have the capacity to dream, imagine and craft conceptual realities that don’t exist.

Abstract thought is essential; the issue comes when it disconnects us from a contextual reality. McGilchrist put it beautifully: abstraction can be viewed as the removal of context in place of a false certainty.

In reality, nothing exists outside of its context. However, choosing abstraction over reality isn’t a uniquely modern sickness. Much of human history has been defined by this tension. Political and religious ideologies are conspiracy theories which try to avoid dealing with complex, dynamic realities by claiming everything can be explained conceptually. Becoming trapped in our ideas to the point where they blind us from seeing one another and the cosmos is nothing new.

What has changed over the last three decades is the medium through which we develop and communicate our ideas.

Digital Otherworlds

The internet is a realm of abstraction. As Josh Schrei and Doug Rushkoff put it in Crossroads, it is best understood through the mechanisms of trance, as a kind of drug we’re all taking all the time to enter an altered state.

The trend forecaster Sean Monaghan recently posted about growing reports of Artificial Schizophrenia, the notion that AI is driving people crazy by feeding their grandiosity and paranoia, creating a new kind of dysmorphia very different to what we’ve seen before:

“If social media makes everyone feel like a loser, will artificial intelligence make everyone think they are a god? AI isn’t immiserating us. It’s giving us delusions of grandeur.”

This idea that technology is decimating our mental health is ascendent right now. Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book The Anxious Generation woke a whole generation of parents and educators up to the extent of the damage caused by screens and social media on young people, and marketers have been arguing that early-adopting Gen Z’ers are increasingly rejecting dating apps and chasing social status through likes and shares, and are instead seeking out real-life experiences.

These trends all point to a growing understanding that social media isn’t just addictive, it also warps reality. It is an otherworld. In mythology, otherworlds are filled with danger and opportunity, but aren’t places you should live. The internet, like most otherworlds, is a place where the normal rules don’t apply. A place where identity can be unbound from the body, and abstraction is all that’s real.

The proliferation of disembodied, abstract notions about identity online was a major driver behind the gender ideologies that have defined so much of culture wars. As Katherine Dee and others have argued, many of the ideas that made it into HR room policies about gender came directly from the messaging board Tumblr. Meanwhile, Tumblr’s masculine counterpart 4chan (which was destroyed by hackers in April 2025) channeled male adolescent insecurity into increasingly extreme political ideologies.

I would place Curtis Yarvin’s Dark Enlightenment ideology as an indirect offshoot of the 4Chan mentality. Yarvin is now the unofficial philosopher in residence of Trump’s Whitehouse, an influence on JD Vance and his champion Peter Thiel. He believes that democracy is dead, and the best response to that is a form of corporate monarchy.

I met Yarvin at a private dinner a few years ago, and had a chance to grill him on his ideas. I’m of the strong opinion that like many other internet ideologies, his ideas only make sense in that otherworld, where context can be cherry-picked through hyperlinks and can’t stand up to the complexity of real life.

Yarvin represents the polar opposite to Wokeness, but as I argued in my book The Bigger Picture, his ideas are a different form of the same thinking; there is an all encompassing thought-virus that we have to overcome to be free. My conversation with him was eye opening in that it suggested to me that his ideas are smoke and mirrors, poorly researched and in some cases disingenuous. It’s no surprise, because abstract ideas that thrive primarily online don’t often survive in physical reality, which is at the heart of my (abstract) theory that we live in the Age of Breach.

This notion that what emerges from otherworlds can’t survive here is old wisdom. Fairy lore, and its modern counterpart the UFO phenomenon, is full of creatures from an otherworld trying to breed with humans but creating failed hybrid offspring. There is a message in that; our dreams are not reality. You can try to mix them all you want, but you’ll end up with something sickly and uncanny that can’t survive in the fresh air.

I’m not one to kink shame, but… Jesus Christ…

So what is most real? Your body. Our bodies are our shared context as human beings, no matter who you are or what your background is. Our senses are what connect us to reality, and to one another. Nothing else ever can, nothing else ever will. This is why embodiment is the antidote to the postmodern fallacy that all truth is relative. It reminds us that the land is more real than the idea. Touch is more real than thought. Grief is more real than theory. They are all real. But they aren’t equally real.

Waking Up

As we wake from our internet-induced trance we remember, once again, that our beating hearts are more real than our Instagram feeds. Having seeded so much of our agency to that otherworld, the switch is jarring. It’s where we go to speak with our friends, to get a mortgage, to find a date, to ask for help. The internet has convinced us that our abstractions are real, so as we jolt awake, it’s natural to wonder where we’re waking into.

In short, nature. When we talk about embodiment, we aren’t just talking about being in our bodies. As I discussed with philosopher and cognitive scientist Andrea Hiott recently, implicit in our embodiment is also our embeddedness in our environment, how we enact our agency, and how our cognition is extended through others.

How we think and feel is an evolving dynamic process inseparable from how we move through our environment and connect with one another. We aren’t just in nature, we are nature. This was the theme of the excellent Small Giants Wisdom & Action forum I spoke at in Melbourne in early April, and during the workshop I ran on the first day we inquired into that question. What does it actually mean to say ‘we are nature’? Is there anything that isn’t nature?

The answer that arose in our session was ultimately everything is nature. When you imagine an ocean of elephants, that thought is as natural as a stream. Nature is imagining the elephants through you. It might be more useful is to talk about levels of abstraction, because that helps us to identify when our concepts become detached from reality. When they no longer explain our embodied experience, but take us into another world that tries to convince us of its reality.

There are Four Lights

There is an episode in Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Captain Picard is imprisoned by the Cardassians and psychologically tortured. His captor, Gul Madred, simply forces Picard to stare at four lights, and offers him better conditions if Picard tells him there are five lights. It’s gripping, and brilliant in its simplicity. If you can force someone to agree with your abstraction over what they can see with their own eyes, you’ve captured their mind and their dignity. As Picard is freed at the climax of the episode he screams, ‘There are four lights!’

You wouldn’t be enjoying their antics if you knew what they did to the Bajorans.

The explosion of tweets stating ‘there are two genders’ in the wake of Trump’s victory, and the UK Supreme Court’s ruling that trans women do not legally classify as women within the Equalities Act, echoes Picard’s scream.

However, this is the real world, so things are more complex than a Star Trek script. Those tweets also ignore a nuance that isn’t present in Gul Madred’s torture. Overlooking it means throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and falling into the trap of believing that biology is the only thing that’s real.

There are two sexes, and gender is closely bound to sex. Gender is also contextual, culturally influenced and fluid within the confines of a biologically-determined spectrum. But try and put that on a bumper sticker.

The issue is that authoritarian elements on the right and the left (as I explored in a recent conversation on the Woke Right with Helen Pluckrose) are equally likely to fall into cognitive dissonance because they aren’t sophisticated enough to hold multiple overlapping contexts.

The fallacy of Wokeness (and all ideological positions) is that it claims that a particular interpretation of reality is true across every context. However, the only thing true across every context is the sacred, which is by definition that which can’t be contextualised.

As I argued in my piece The Bright Forest, social justice ideology is a form of context-absolutism that looks like something else at first glance. A way to be a good person with a deceptively simple structure: hyper-relativity combined with contextual rigidity. In this way, it is much like nicotine, which is both a stimulant and a depressant. It was addictive to the social body, because it seemed to offer a way to be a good person while also scratching the guilt of capitalism and colonialism. Both a balm and a flagellation, educated elites couldn’t get enough of it.

As with all addictions, it didn’t need to make sense. You weren’t allowed to ask why trans-racialism wasn’t acceptable if identity is truly fluid. Or to critique the clinical evidence supporting why gender dysmorphia in children should be celebrated while body dysmorphia should be pathologised. Too many vested interests needed the abstractions to be more true than the reality.

The 2024 Cass Review critiquing gender-affirming care for children was the first nail in the coffin, while the Supreme Court’s ruling in April 2025 that trans women don’t have the same equality rights as women sealed the deal. In the UK, and certainly in Trump’s America (albeit in a different context), the Overton Window has shifted.

Reading through the Supreme Court’s ruling, it’s clear that the key determinant was the deeper reality of biology over abstraction. For example, one section outlines rights that trans women would be entitled to under the Equalities Act that don’t make sense when viewed through the lens of the body.

“The protection afforded by these provisions is predicated on the fact of pregnancy or the fact of having given birth to a child and the taking of leave in consequence. Since as a matter of biology, only biological women can become pregnant, the protection is necessarily restricted to biological women.”

While trans activists often argue against ‘biological essentialism’, it was a legal ruling upholding the reality of biological essentialism that brought policy back into balance. It is the ultimate example of our shifting social conceptions around abstraction and embodiment, specifically because trans activism attempts to enact abstractions on the body. This is a key reason it has created such an intense cultural response.

While it is true that human identity and sexuality are fluid and contextual, it is more true that only people with a uterus can bear a child. However, for years the general public has been forced to claim there are five lights when there are four, often under threat of social ostracism or legal persecution. It is one thing to choose to claim this to be supportive, and quite another to be forced to.

As trans writer Andrea Long Chu puts it, trans identity relies heavily on what she calls the ‘structural generosity of strangers.’ In short, people ignore what they’re seeing to be kind. However, this puts it on shaky ground. As feminist writer

Louise Perry

put it in a recent piece:

“The ability to recognise the sex of another human being is hardwired into us. We clock cues like forearm length, hand size, and hairline shape without conscious thought. You can coerce people – just about – into saying what you want them to say. But you cannot coerce them into thinking as you want them to.”

It was a mistake to try, and a crime for governments to attempt to encode this fallacy into law. However, the opportunity in this moment is to choose love, and use the trans debate to balance embodiment and abstraction within the social body.

Right Relationship

Re-establishing the right relationship between these two aspects of our experience can help us self-correct in a compassionate way. Instead of a pointless pendulum swing into biological reductionism, we can instead hold two nuanced positions. Gender is fluid, and heavily influenced by culture in ways that disenfranchise some people who don’t fit into a neat box. Gender is also heavily influenced by biology, and our sex hormones change our behaviour and bodies in profound ways that in turn affect culture itself. As one study points out, the different hormones in men and women have an effect on “mood, cognitive function, blood pressure regulation, motor coordination, pain and opioid sensitivity.”

Despite this, there is a complex interplay between biological differences and culture that can have a significant effect on our agency and wellbeing. Some people find solace in gender-reassignment and where possible, a fair and compassionate society should accommodate and support everyone equally. For that reason, it is unjust to create a special class of people at the expense of another if that requires denying reality. Protecting the rights of women is of a greater importance than protecting trans rights, because as the UK Supreme Court ruled, biology is more real than gender theory.

I am not arguing that gender critical theory has no bearing on reality at all, or that it has no value. Nor am I arguing that trans people should receive anything other than love and support from society and their governments. I am, however, arguing that this can’t come through forcing everyone to claim there are five lights when there are four.

It is impossible to establish a coherent social contract if there is a policy that forces us to claim abstraction is more real than embodiment. And this position, like so many I believe will become ascendent as society re-evaluates tensions like this, requires us to accept that truth exists, and that we can measure it in part by degrees of abstraction from embodied reality.

These are challenging issues prone to misinterpretation, and in the spirit of this piece, my friend Clive Selwyn and I are running a one day retreat in London to use embodiment practices and breathwork to have a new kind of conversation around these topics. All are welcome and you can sign up here.

Touching the Earth

Debates around gender identity are just one example of an ongoing cultural re-evaluation of how we navigate degrees of truth between embodiment and abstraction. I’ll be exploring this topic in future pieces, particularly how it relates to debates around immigration and cultural identity, building on the issues I explored in The Mythic Rebellion: Why the far right keeps winning.

What I find strange and surprising about this moment in history is that this awakening from the trance-state of the internet isn’t guaranteed to take us toward a fairer, more loving world. We have to avoid swinging from the primacy of abstraction into the exclusivity of physical reality and the body. Instead, our opportunity is to open a new conversation, and move away from the philosophical dead end of postmodernism.

How we do that is more important than doing it. One thing postmodern theory gets right is that it asks who is gaining power by establishing or maintaining hierarchies of truth. As Foucault argued, the institutional power to decide who is sick and who is well is a terrifying thing, and social justice activists are right to challenge it. In the same vein, the social justice theories that point out how a dominant culture can subvert individual expression in subtle ways are valuable.

The challenge is to take these insights into the future alongside the much older insight that there are hierarchies of truth that transcend human culture. As the story goes, when Siddhartha Gautama sat beneath the Bodhi tree in his process of awakening, he was confronted by the demon Mara. Mara is the personification of illusion and desire. First Mara tries to tempt the Buddha through sensual pleasures. When that doesn’t work he threatens him with physical violence. Still, the Buddha won’t be distracted from his awakening. Finally, Mara challenges the Buddha with the pressure of social convention. Who will witness and validate his awakening?

Remember, that fear of social pressure so many of us regret listening to on our deathbeds? But instead of caving, the Buddha touches the earth with his right hand, calling it to bear witness and simultaneously demonstrating that it is more real than social convention.

And thus, he was awakened. And thus we might all awaken, if we can work together to come into right relationship with one another and the cosmos.