How Consciousness Shapes Reality — And Why Colonization Fears It.
“What if the greatest mystery in the universe has always been right in front of us — sung into existence by our ancestors, hidden in plain sight, and feared by systems of control?”
Dust: The Spiritual Matter of Consciousness in The Golden Compass
In The Golden Compass (2007), adapted from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, we meet a force called Dust.
Dust is described as golden particles floating invisibly through the universe — drawn to consciousness, curiosity, creativity, and maturity.
But in the world of The Golden Compass, Dust is feared by the Magisterium — the ruling religious authority, symbolic of the oppressive Church. The Magisterium teaches that Dust is dangerous — a sign of sin, free will, and corruptible thought. They seek to sever children from their daemons (spiritual soul companions) to prevent Dust from settling on them.
“Cutting a child from their daemon is cutting them from their soul.”
Dust in Pullman’s story is more than fantasy — it mirrors ancient spiritual wisdom about the energy that connects all things.
In many ways, Dust reflects what modern physics calls dark energy— the invisible, limitless life force that fills and expands the universe. And what Indigenous cultures have known for millennia as Spirit.
What is Dark Energy?
Dark Energy makes up about 68% of the known universe.
It is:
• Invisible.
• Everywhere.
• Driving the expansion of the universe.
• The opposite of gravity — it pushes everything outward.
• Mysterious, powerful, and still largely misunderstood by science.
(Source: NASA, Dark Energy, 2019)
But Indigenous cultures didn’t need telescopes to understand it.
They felt it.
They worked with it.
They sang with it.
They became it.
Indigenous Wisdom Always Knew of This Force
Long before European science discovered “dark energy,” Indigenous, Aboriginal, and African cosmologies were built around the understanding of invisible energetic forces.
In Aboriginal Australian culture, this was known as Songlines — spiritual pathways that connected the land, sky, ancestors, and people. These lines were sung into existence, mapping both physical and spiritual geography.
In the Yoruba and African Diaspora traditions, this force is called Ashe — the sacred life force energy present in all things, from humans to plants to words.
Native American teachings speak of Spirit Wind or The Great Mystery — an all-pervading force that flows through life itself.
In Ancient Kemet (Egypt), there were the concepts of Ka (vital life force) and Ba (soul essence), both energies that moved within and beyond the body.
This was not mythology.
They were teachings about real energy systems that governed life — systems colonizers neither understood nor respected.
They were not simply metaphors — they were sacred technologies for aligning with universal energy. This was spiritual science — intimate knowledge of the energy that flows through all life.
Colonization: The Severing of Spirit
Colonization was not only about stealing land. It was about disconnecting people from the spiritual matter that rooted them to the universe.
Like the Magisterium in The Golden Compass, colonizers targeted:
• Indigenous knowledge systems.
• Female-centered spiritual power.
• Rituals that honored land and spirit.
• Sacred sexuality and body sovereignty.
It was a war against Spirit.
It was a war against Dark Energy — the wild, sovereign, feminine, sexual, intuitive, creative, and untamed flow of universal life force. And colonial systems attacked everything that connected people to this flow.
They banned rituals.
Destroyed languages.
Demonized women.
Vilified sexuality.
Shamed sensuality.
Outlawed ceremony.
Cut people off from land.
Severed humans from Dust — from Dark Energy.
Why?
Because connected people are sovereign people.
Colonizers specifically targeted knowledge systems that connected people to their souls, their ancestors, their land, and their power.
They erased Indigenous languages, which carried encoded cosmic knowledge. They demonized women — the primary carriers of spiritual and creation wisdom. They forced shame around sexuality and the body, disrupting sacred life-force energy. They replaced living spiritual practices with rigid religious dogma that disconnected people from their inner daemons — their personal connection to Spirit.
And they created systems of constant stress, poverty, violence, and shame to block higher consciousness and spiritual connection.
This was nothing less than spiritual warfare.
This is the real-world version of cutting a person from their spiritual connection.
That is spiritual warfare.
Why Stress & Fear Block Spirit
Indigenous practices are designed to keep people aligned with spiritual matter:
• Ceremony
• Fasting
• Dreaming
• Song & Dance
• Nature immersion
• Community connection
Colonizer systems replaced these with:
• Work obsession
• Individualism
• Shame-based religion
• Addiction & consumerism
• Environmental destruction
All to sever people from their connection to the planet and their power — from the spiritual dark energy of the universe.
Where Indigenous practices were designed to elevate consciousness — colonial systems replaced them with systems of oppression.
They offered work obsession instead of rest, individualism instead of community, guilt instead of joy, consumption instead of creation, and environmental destruction instead of reverence for nature.
All of these methods are designed to sever human beings from their spiritual alignment — from dark energy — from the spiritual web that holds life together. That connects us to source, health and happiness.
The Double Slit Experiment: Modern Proof of Ancient Wisdom
Modern physics accidentally confirmed what Indigenous wisdom has taught for thousands of years — through the famous Double Slit Experiment.
→ Consciousness changes reality.
In this experiment, scientists shot particles at a barrier with two slits.
When unobserved, the particles behaved like waves — spreading, merging, creating infinite possibility.
But when observed — consciousness directed at them — the particles behaved like matter, collapsing into a single outcome.
Observation changed reality.
Where attention goes, energy flows. Where energy flows, life responds.
This is exactly what Indigenous cultures understood:
→ Consciousness affects matter.
→ Focused awareness shapes reality.
→ Ritual, prayer, song, and intention align human beings with universal forces.
This is exactly how Indigenous ceremonies, prayer, ritual, and dreaming work.
They are practices of observing and directing Dark Energy — shaping reality through consciousness.
Colonization, The Magisterium & The War on Consciousness
The true goal of colonization was always spiritual control.
By severing Indigenous people from:
• Land
• Song
• Dreaming
• Ceremony
• Sacred sexuality
• Female leadership
• Ancestral language
They severed them from the flow of spiritual knowledge and power.
Forbidding people from enacting and implementing their rituals, their songs, their dreamwork, their sexual sovereignty, and their land — colonizers and their religious belief systems limited indigenous communities the ability to observe and shape their own reality.
The Magisterium’s war on Dust is the same as colonial systems and religious oligarchs attacking Indigenous spirituality.
Because a connected person is a sovereign person.
And sovereign people cannot be controlled.
Reclaiming the Spiritual Web
The good news is this: Dark Energy — Dust — Spirit never left us.
But reconnecting requires:
• Returning to land-based living
• Reviving Indigenous languages and ceremonies
• Embracing feminine and creative power
• Healing the body and nervous system
• Restoring sacred sexuality
• Honoring ancestral memory
• Relearning spiritual science through Indigenous wisdom
We reclaim the spiritual web when we return to land-based living, revive Indigenous languages and ceremonies, embrace feminine and creative power, heal the body and nervous system, honor sacred sexuality, remember our ancestors, and learn spiritual science from the wisdom of Indigenous people.
Every act of remembrance draws Spirit back to us.
Final Reflection: Spirit Is the Original Science
“The universe is full of invisible currents of life. We once knew how to feel them, to follow them, to sing with them. The war against Indigenous peoples was a war against that knowledge. But the remembering is rising.”
References & Sources
1. NASA, What is Dark Matter?, 2019 — https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy/
2. Pullman, Philip. His Dark Materials Trilogy, 1995-2000.
3. The Golden Compass (Film), 2007, Directed by Chris Weitz.
4. Rose, Deborah Bird. Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Aboriginal Australian Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
5. Gordon, Edmund. Ashe: Ritual Poetics in African Diasporic Literature. Oxford University Press, 2022.
6. Amen-Ra, Muata. The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani. 2008.
7. Deloria, Vine Jr. The World We Used to Live In: Remembering the Powers of the Medicine Men. Fulcrum Publishing, 2006.
8. Feynman, Richard P. The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 3, Addison-Wesley, 1965. (Explains the Double Slit Experiment)
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