While Our Beds Are Burning

Reason, Trauma, and the Second Religiousness of Our Time

This essay is a bit different, but the song I’m writing about really gave me the feels and I rushed this together… hope you like it!

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The Sound That Stopped Me

I was standing in Whole Foods when I heard it.

The air hummed with the usual background sounds—refrigerators, conversation, the checkout scanners—and then a guitar riff cut through all of it. Sharp. Urgent. Familiar.

Beds Are Burning.

Midnight Oil, 1987. I hadn’t thought about that song in years. But suddenly, there it was—pulsing through the speakers, uninvited, and electric. The energy in it felt out of place, almost violent against the calm of the store. It was as if the sound itself had remembered something the rest of us were trying to forget.

Later that night, I looked it up. A protest anthem for Australia’s displaced Indigenous people, written to confront the theft of land and the moral amnesia that followed. But what I felt wasn’t nostalgia, or even political sympathy. It was something deeper, older—the vibration of truth spoken through rhythm, the feeling of conscience breaking through the noise, the anger transmuted into motion, still alive inside the art

The time has come / to say fair’s fair / to pay the rent / to pay our share.

It’s about land, yes—but I couldn’t shake the sense that it was about something else too.

It felt like the whole world had been sleeping in the same bed, pretending not to notice the smoke.

The Fire Beneath the Comfort

Every civilization builds its bed—a place to rest, to forget for a while that the world underneath it is alive. Comfort is a structure. It’s made of rituals, screens, distractions, ideals. It promises warmth but asks for blindness in return.

The fire is what happens when reality refuses the bargain.

Today that fire is no longer just physical—it’s psychic. It burns through information, through attention, through the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Our institutions smolder with fatigue. Our leaders mistake sedation for stability. The digital mind hums with constant stimulus, but no signal.

We keep saying the world is on fire, and it is—but so are our minds. The outer flames mirror the inner ones; both are symptoms of a system that’s lost its balance.

How can we sleep while our beds are burning?

The question isn’t poetic anymore. It’s a demand. An alarm that refuses to be snoozed.

Control as a Kind of Relief

In neurotherapy, we see what happens when the system can’t regulate itself. The brain begins to tighten. Rhythms that once flowed start looping, firing the same patterns again and again until flexibility is lost. It’s not laziness or weakness—it’s protection. The mind confuses rigidity with safety.

Societies do this too.

When coherence breaks down—when the different regions of the brain or of a culture stop communicating in rhythm—the signal becomes noisy and erratic. Coherence simply means that the parts of a system are oscillating together in balance, each distinct but harmonized. When that balance fails, both minds and nations reach for the same crude solution: control. They tighten around familiar narratives, old hierarchies, simple explanations. They silence what they can’t understand. They mistake uniformity for peace.

Authoritarianism is that reflex written at scale.
A civilization curling into itself, trying to keep its signal from disintegrating.
And like any trauma response, it feels soothing at first.

Silence feels like rest.
But it’s the stillness before collapse.

The Second Religiousness

Oswald Spengler, a German historian and philosopher writing in the early twentieth century, saw this pattern long before us. In The Decline of the West he argued that when a civilization’s creative vitality fades—when reason can no longer explain the most pressing questions of life—it doesn’t stop believing; it starts believing again. Not in new gods, but in old ones resurrected for comfort. He called this return the second religiousness.

But it’s not just religion that returns.
It’s everything that functions like religion.

The appetite for simple stories.
The rush to conspiracy and savior narratives.
The longing for a world that makes emotional sense, even if it’s false.

You can see it everywhere—the rise of myth disguised as news, influencers as prophets, nostalgia as politics.
It’s not stupidity. It’s exhaustion. People aren’t drawn to falsehood because they love lies; they’re drawn to simplicity because they’re tired. When reason fails to explain the world, fantasy steps in to soothe it.

That’s what Spengler missed. The second religiousness isn’t a return to temples—it’s a return to a sense of certainty.

And that kind of certainty is a lie. It closes the mind instead of opening it. It is anesthesia.

The Return of Living Reason

But there’s another possibility.

The problem isn’t that we reasoned too much—it’s that we reasoned shallowly. We built a kind of logic that could measure everything except meaning. No wonder people fled from it. The cold precision of empirical reason leaves no room for the warmth of inner truth, so the mind retreats into story, into belief, into tribe.

What we need is not less reason but living reason.

A reason that feels, that connects, that reveals pattern instead of severing it. Ontological Mathematics points toward that rebirth. It begins from first principles and builds upward—demonstrating that the universe, the soul, and the structures of thought all share the same mathematical foundation. True reason doesn’t stop where science does; it continues until everything fits. Religion gestures toward truth through story. Mathematics arrives at it through necessity.

Out where the river broke / the bloodwood and the desert oak…

The lyric describes the fracture—the split between nature and mind, between what we see and what we are. The mathematics closes that gap.
Sine and cosine, thought and form, the real and the imaginary—each eternally in motion, each the other’s reflection.
Reason isn’t the opposite of mystery.
It’s the language mystery speaks when it wants to be understood.

The Pattern of Healing

If reality is made of mind, then healing is not a metaphor. It’s how reality restores itself.

A dysregulated brain is a miniature version of a dysregulated world—both caught in loops of noise and fear, both forgetting how to modulate, both mistaking rigidity for safety. Healing, whether personal or collective, is the process of recovering coherence: the ability to shift, to balance, to move in rhythm with what is.

That’s what neurotherapy really is—metaphysics disguised as medicine. It gives the brain a mirror, a way to see its own patterns and gradually retune them. The same principle that restores the brain can restore a civilization: feedback, flexibility, and the courage to feel again. We heal by allowing signal to flow where control once froze it, by letting awareness do what force never could.

We evolve not by learning to live in the fire, but by learning to listen to what it’s trying to teach before we walk beyond it.

The Moral Physics of Fire

So yes, Beds Are Burning was about land. But it’s also about the terrain we’ve abandoned within ourselves—the interior landscape of attention and meaning, the psychic soil where coherence either deepens or decays. We’ve paved over that inner ground with noise and called it progress, built empires of distraction and named them freedom. And yet the lyric still echoes:

How can we dance when our earth is turning? / How do we sleep while our beds are burning?

That’s not protest. It’s a warning. The heat we feel in the world today—social, political, ecological—isn’t random. It’s feedback. It’s the collective mind signaling that something fundamental has fallen out of sync.

The fire beneath everything we call crisis is fear—ancient, inherited, often invisible. Unresolved trauma carried through generations. Irrational beliefs disguised as certainty. All the forces that twist perception until empathy looks naïve and control feels safe. What we see on the surface—division, injustice, corruption—is just the visible pattern of that inner turbulence.

But coherence is possible. Healing isn’t sentimental; it’s structural.

The Dream of Matter

That’s the purpose of The Dream of Matter: to introduce a different kind of reason—one that can hold both science and soul—and to offer practical ways of applying it. Through neurotherapy, through the tools of coherence and feedback, through the discipline of awareness that reconnects thought to feeling, we can begin to realign the nervous system with the logic of the universe itself.

The task ahead isn’t merely political or technological. It’s psychological. It’s spiritual. It’s learning how to think clearly enough—and feel safely enough—to rebuild the living framework of civilization from the inside out.

If we can do that—if we can treat the mind not as a battlefield but as an ecosystem—then the fire ceases to be destruction. It becomes transformation. It becomes the light by which we finally see ourselves whole.

Lyric excerpts from “Beds Are Burning” written by Peter Garrett, Jim Moginie, Rob Hirst, and Midnight Oil (1987). Used here for purposes of commentary and analysis.