Please Don't Feed the Egregores...Unless They're Positive

These are the thoughtforms we feed…until they begin feeding on us while quietly becoming our masters

Narrated by author

Happy Summer Solstice! 🌞

Woohoo! Today is my one year anniversary on Substack! What a great year and wonderful experience it has been to hang out here and meet so many cool, thoughtful, and intelligent people. 😎

What I’m sharing today is an important topic to me for several reasons. The funny thing is, most people have never heard of it. I, myself, hadn’t either until 2020 when I was introduced to some new philosophies while trying to sensemake what I was seeing happen in the world during covid. That was a crazy time!

Why is this important?

It’s important because I’m quite interested in personal energy management - also known as self control - which we’re seeing less and less of these days…and it’s making things worse.

Sadly, this is tearing us apart when it really doesn’t have to.

There’s a better way.

If we start paying more attention to how our words - spoken and written - ripple out affecting the world, we can start to ease some of this heavy, divisive pressure we’re all feeling.

Because let’s be honest, “they” aren’t going to be the ones to pump the brakes. They’re too wrapped up in a system that’s benefiting them while dividing us and they’ll take us down with it, if we let them. But we won’t because…

…we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

So, it’s up to us to step up to be our own heroes.

This also matters to me because, if we don’t stop feeding these energies by unconsciously reacting, reposting, and getting pulled into the same old drama, I genuinely fear we’re going to tear ourselves apart in ways we might not be able to mend for a very long time.

I’m concerned that we’re in a Humpty Dumpty situation where all the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t be able to put us back together again… because they’re too arrogant to admit know they might not be as wise or in control as they think they are.

“They” are the ones who create the conditions, laws, and working conditions that we’re living under, regardless the party affiliation.

They’re tinkering with tattered government and social systems while being driven by the hunger for power and greed trying to hold this house of cards together with duct tape and denial as they kick the can down the road.

And Superman’s not coming to save us.

Meanwhile, we’re teetering on the edge of a cliff unlike anything we’ve faced before as a species with AI infiltrating all segments of our lives without our permission - a godlike invention that NOBODY understands, not even its creators.

I see far too much hubris for my liking as we’re pushed forward into something with nary a guardrail to protect us from going off the cliff due to FOMO and not being the first one out of the gate to rule the world with money and power and so they bend the rules in their direction.

Meanwhile, instead of facing it together, we’re busy arguing about Taylor Swift or whatever new distraction they serve up to keep us from noticing the sleight of hand happening just out of view.

I’m not about living a dystopian future so I’m trying to bring awareness to things that feel imbalanced to me as I contribute something positive as a counterbalance to a world that’s far too lopsided and heavy on the shadow side for my comfort.

So, I’m sharing about egregores while pleading for us to be more aware of the monsters - or the angels - we’re creating and feeding through our actions.

Egregores are here, there, and everywhere

Negative egregores are everywhere these days, especially the political ones. There are positive ones as well, but our screens, the legacy media, and social media algorithms seem to primarily create and concentrate on the negative ones that set our nervous systems afire from the uncertainty of it all.

I’d like to see as many of us as possible step up to change this trend by understanding what they are while consciously choosing not to hand feed the monsters while starving off their supply with a lack of participation.

So, what’s an egregore?

An egregore is a "belief-entity" co-created by groups of people. It’s a spiritual concept that refers to a collective consciousness that arises from the shared thoughts, emotions, and beliefs of groups of people.

It’s like a symbolic fire that’s built from the shared thoughts and emotions of a group. The more people feed it, the bigger it grows. Eventually, it burns so brightly that it starts to transform taking on a life of its own where it, in turn, begins to influence the thoughts and actions of the individuals within that group.

It’s a kind of like a psychic feedback loop - the more attention and energy egregores receive, the more powerful and autonomous they become. Without belief and attention, they dissolve.

There are both positive and negative egregores, but they’re primarily talked about from the more negative side.

What creates an egregore?

Passion + identity = egregore fuel

Examples of egregores can range from positive egregores (like collective love, hope, or the spirit of a compassionate movement) to negative ones (fear-based ideologies, mob mentality, toxic nationalism, even corporate or religious entities detached from their original ethical roots)

What kinds of egregores are there?

There are all manner of egregores. I’ll just touch on a few.

Consumerism - The unconscious drive to buy, own, and define one’s self-worth through material wealth is a deeply ingrained egregore that shapes global economies and social norms.

Political movements and patriotism/nationalism (MAGA, Wokeism, QAnon, Democratic Socialism) - These are self-perpetuating energy fields fueled by belief and identity. They can take on a life of their own influencing behavior, ethics, and even coaxing sacrifice in their name.

Spiritual and new age (law of attraction, 5D ascension) - This is the collective energy around manifestation, unity consciousness, and sometimes spiritual bypassing which can become its own self-perpetuating entity.

Sports, movies, and celebrities - These fanbases can become deeply charged collectives that enforce norms, reward devotion, and punish heresy. Devotees pour emotion, money, and identity into a collective entity that exists over and above the original entities.

Personal growth & healing (self-optimization, pop psychology, & wellness cultures) - Things like biohacking, breathwork, keto etc., can eventually morph into identities, rituals, and belief systems rather than simply tools. Terms like narcissist, trauma-bond, and gaslighting take on distorted meanings due to overuse which causes them to drift away from original meanings.

Mass fear, outrage, and doomscrolling - These things whip us up into collective panic or rage. These waves of emotion can form and feed something larger - often fear - that can keep people locked in cycles of anxiety, depression, and powerlessness.

Mindfulness, non-violence, earth stewardship, grassroots generosity - These egregores can be nourished by inner peace, protecting the environment, decentralized kindness, and even collective resilience. They often value compassion, reconciliation, and the dignity of all people.

As you can see, egregores come in all varieties, shapes, and sizes. They can bring positive or negative energy to the world to build upon. Their existence relies upon our individual choices to feed those that we wish to support feed and grow while hopefully starving off the ones we don’t want to encourage to flourish by managing our emotional urge to participate in them.

But this requires conscious attention for awareness as to what we’re manifesting in the world.

What births, builds, and feeds egregores?

Egregores thrive on attention, emotion, and participation. Whether consciously or unconsciously, individuals continuously call them up by speaking about them, reacting emotionally to them, energetically aligning with them (even in opposition), or acting in accordance with their narrative.

For example:

• A fearful populace constantly talking about “collapse” may energize a dystopian egregore.

• A global wave of people meditating for peace or healing helps energize an egregore of collective calm, compassion, and coherence.

• Social media outrage loops often act like feeding grounds for polarized, divisive egregores.

• Communities rallying around acts of kindness or mutual aid contribute to an egregore of generosity, resilience, and shared humanity.

In energetic terms, every thought, word, and action is a vote of power. When many people feed the same energetic pattern, it builds momentum and begins to shape reality on subtle and overt levels.

As these collective energies gain traction, they can grow beyond the confines of their origins detaching from any single person or group while taking on a life of their own.

At that point, they no longer merely reflect the contributors, they begin to direct them. What once was an idea becomes an invisible architect of behavior, culture, and perception which nudges people toward choices they may not even realize are being influenced.

The egregore becomes self-perpetuating and magnetizing drawing in more energy, belief, and action to maintain its existence.

Familiarity can play a key role here. The more often we encounter a thought, emotion, or behavior - whether in our social media feed, our community, or our internal narrative - the more “normal” it starts to feel to us.

Repetition breeds comfort —> comfort then breeds acceptance—> and before long, what was once a novel idea becomes just how things are. We begin to confuse the echo of the egregores with our own inner voice.

This is how our collective conditioning slips beneath our conscious awareness. It wraps itself in our language, aesthetics, and rhythms of familiarity until questioning it starts to feel uncomfortable and sometimes, even disloyal. We don't just follow the pattern. We get hijacked and we become it.

Big contributors to creating and nurturing egregores

In the digital age, memes and virality are like jet fuel for egregores. Together, they are handmaidens and doulas birthing the fastest-growing tools for creating, sustaining, and mutating egregores in our time. They affect us like a mass psychosis which nurtures hive minds and echo chambers.

Memes aren’t merely jokes or images, they’re carriers of concentrated meaning, emotion, and symbolism that can spread instantly across vast networks through high speed internet. Virality is the mechanism that lets them replicate like energetic spores embedding themselves in the collective psyche as they light up all of our screens.

One way to think about it is that memes are compact belief systems that encode emotion, judgment, and worldview into quick and easy shareable formats. Each like, repost, or remix they receive acts like a modern ritual offering attention and energy that feeds a larger collective pattern.

The more we see them, the more they shape what feels normal, funny, offensive, or true - not just reflecting our thoughts, but actively rewiring them.

Over time, memes reinforce group identity that can help egregores spread far beyond their origin transcending platforms, cultures, and even generations.

What begins as a simple image or phrase can evolve into a powerful collective force that directs perception and behavior through the repeated rhythms of familiarity often fueled by fear and anger. The more we see something, the more “real” or “true” it feels to us, whether or not it's actually based in fact.

Don’t be fooled. Sharing memes isn’t a passive act. You’re not simply “posting something on social media”. It’s an act of participation, allegiance, and amplification. It’s an energetic offering to feed that particular egregore.

Memes have become sigils of the digital age that summon, feed, and evolve egregores with virality which is the ritual that energetically activates them.

Whether it's political polarization, cancel culture, hustle mentality, beauty or body image standards, or even mass hope (#BlackLivesMatter, We Can Do Hard Things, or mutual aid memes), they are all shaped and sustained by meme-driven attention loops.

Memes don’t just reflect culture anymore…they create it.

Two common egregores

Hustle Culture

From a very young age, most of us are taught - explicitly and implicitly - that success means productivity, busyness, and measurable achievement. The 9-to-5 grind becomes the default rhythm of our lives.

Phrases like “rise and grind,” “no days off,” or “I'll sleep when I'm dead” aren’t just motivational, they're cultural mantras that reinforce a collective egregore around work and success as one’s main measurement of personal value and worth.

Over time, this rhythm of constant striving becomes so familiar that slowing down, resting, or redefining success can feel lazy, wrong, or even threatening. Questioning it might even bring up guilt or shame, not because it's true, but because we've been conditioned to equate value with output.

So, we often don’t just participate in the hustle culture, we become it.

Our identity merges with it while the system continues to feed on our attention, effort, and allegiance. If we allow ourselves the option of considering that it should be a different way, we often turn on ourselves in a negative way deeming ourselves lazy and when we don’t do that, we can be sure that the culture will go all crabs in the bucket on us to pull us back down.

We can even look crazy to others because we’re now swimming against the current of what “everyone else already knows” - success = working hard.

---

---

A video that talks about hustle culture etc. - Modern society promises progress, freedom, and happiness, but what if much of it is an illusion? In this eye-opening video, the great deception is unraveled that underpins our world today: how systems, culture, and technology mask the truth and keep us trapped in cycles of distraction, conformity, and false security.

---

---

The Healing Addiction Path

In the world of personal growth, healing is often celebrated as a lifelong journey, but what happens when the journey becomes a destination in itself?

I love the Substack Old Man Talks. He’s got some fabulous sharings so I’d like to encourage you to check him out.

I thought I’d share his poem that addresses how healing can morph into an identity over time. This poem explores the quiet, often unspoken truth about the shadow side of self-work when the process of healing turns into a comfortable hiding place. It’s a reminder that healing is a path, not a permanent identity.

The Part of Healing No One Talks About

Nobody warns you about this:

Healing can become its own addiction.

At first, it's beautiful.

You face your wounds.

You break old patterns.

You finally feel like you're becoming whole.

But then…

the work becomes your identity.

The one who is healing.

The one who is always progressing.

The one who needs just one more layer

before they can finally live.

I did this for years.

Safe inside the work.

Avoiding the risk of simply being alive.

Because healing feels noble.

Safe. Infinite.

But real healing was never meant to be endless.

It’s a bridge, not a permanent home.

At some point, you have to trust living,

more than preparing.

Not because you’re fully fixed.

But because you don’t need to be.

You don’t heal to keep healing.

You heal to live your best life.

~By Old Man Talks

We have an individual and collective responsibility to do better.

For those of us that consider ourselves conscious beings who are often walking a spiritual path - although not always - we are called to be sovereign, responsible, and spiritually discerning with the energy we put out into the world.

How can we consciously counteract egregores?

Name them consciously - Bringing conscious awareness to an egregore weakens its unconscious grip.

Starve them - Avoid feeding them with emotional reactivity, obsessive focus, or unconscious amplification.

Discern before reacting - Ask, is this anger mine or am I being pulled into a larger energy field by my triggers? We should push away from the screen when triggered emotionally. Yes, this is one place you should “should” on yourself.

Choose our attention wisely - What we focus on grows. Are we empowering peace, compassion, and clarity or division and fear?

We can engage with intention - If we must confront negativity, we should do so consciously and as neutrally as possible without amplifying chaos.

What you resist will always persist

For those who are interested in subtler, more energetic concepts, one might wish to consider that even resistance to an egregore can feed it, if that resistance is emotionally charged. This is why non-reactive awareness like that found in mindfulness or heart-centered responses is such a powerful act.

Transmuting Collective Energy

If we want these negative culture trends to turn around, each of us has a spiritual and energetic responsibility to manage our energy and not feed destructive egregores. This means that we learn to master our reactions being more mindful of where we place our energy when we interact with others publicly.

We have a responsibility to not just automatically buy into whatever serves our belief system against them, but to engage with content across the spectrum of beliefs in an attempt to cultivate clarity in the face of collective shifting currents.

If you’re curious as to how you can begin to do this, I highly recommend the Substack Stoic Wisdoms which helps us all better understand how to cultivate better self control.

Birthing positive baby egregores

It’s important to remember that we’re not powerless in regard to negative egregores. We can birth constructive egregores of our own in response to counterbalancing the negative.

We can create prayer or meditation circles to ground ourselves to energetically affect the collective.

We can propagate and encourage shared visions of a regenerative and sustainable future.

We can create healing collectives where people gather with good intention to make a positive difference in the world.

We can create movements grounded in love and integrity.

We can create safe spaces for people to gather and give voice to the truth of their confusions and lived experience.

When we gather with others in conscious intention, we build energetic fields that can counteract the chaos and magnetize others into a more coherent, life-giving vibration.

And when we can’t gather with others, we continue to manage our own energy trying to bring more balanced things into the world instead of getting triggered and reacting in angry, projecting ways.

Here are a few positive egregores I’d like to see fed because they are doing solid conscious work in the world. I hope you’ll check them out and subscribe to them.

The Bathrobe Guy
New Moon Sisters
Hey Friend. Keep Breathing
Mystic Heart
The Society of Problem Solvers
The Builders

Let the alchemy begin

These energetic currents we swim in - seen and unseen - are not neutral. They respond to us. They mirror us. They feed off of us. And in return, they shape the fabric of what we call reality.

Every scroll, every word, every breath we give to fear or hope is an offering on an altar we may not even realize we’re kneeling before.

But we are not powerless. We are creators. We are alchemists. With every conscious choice, we either breathe life into monsters or into movements of love, grace, clarity, and wholeness.

The invitation now is to remember this. To step out of the trance. To see what we’re feeding and who we’re becoming in the process.

The future isn’t just arriving. It’s responding.

So, watch where you point that thing…

Keep radiating, my friend ✨

I’m curious…

Which egregores do you notice yourself feeding - intentionally or not?
If you wonder, look at your social media history which will give you a clue.

What patterns are you seeing in yourself or the world that feel worth shifting? I'd love to hear your reflections.