Nozomi Hayase, Ph.D., is a prolific writer in the Bitcoin space with a background in psychology and human development. She is a contributing writer for Bitcoin Magazine. She focuses on Bitcoin’s incentives and its psychological and philosophical implications. In her independent publishing platform, “The Way of the Heart“, she explores the Bitcoin rabbit hole experience as a cultural phenomenon that fosters profound individual transformations. Follow @nozomimagine on Twitter.
Personal bio
I was born and grew up in Japan after the post war era, where the country has gone through rapid economic growth and Westernization. Since I was a little girl, I was aware of a dimension of life that was hidden in a busy modern everyday life. I found it in children’s fantasy books and nature and maintained its connection through imagination.
As I grew older, I succumbed to the pressure of Japanese society and gradually lost my capacity to imagine. My visit to the Grand Canyon in Arizona during college reopened a door to the other world that I had left behind. Magnificent nature that I experienced on this holy site of Native Americans freed me from the constrains of narrow and rigid identity defined in my culture.
After graduating from a college, I moved to the United States. As I learned to adjust myself into a new culture, I grappled with what was experienced as a schism between my cultural self and universal human being that goes beyond it. This aspiration was translated into my striving to become fluent in English, transforming this foreign language into my own unique mother tongue.
Like many others who came to America in search for freedom, I too was inspired by the American ideals of liberty and equality. To me, ‘American Dream’ presented a realization of a multidimensional self that transcends culture. It was to fill the gap between myself as a Japanese native and as a human being; to embody what is universal in a concrete physical form for a creative expression of myself.
In 2010, with WikiLeaks publication of the Collateral Murder video, my aspiration for the American Dream had found a larger struggle for liberation. I became aware of the force of oppression that denies and restrict individuals’ right to freedom of expression. Over the next decade I engaged in journalism, writing, and researching to advocate social justice and freedom of speech.
In 2016, a fairly traumatic event took me to a dark night of the soul. During this time of crisis, I engaged in intensive self-inquiry through meditation, studying shamanism and the sacred wisdom of indigenous people. The illness of my loved one that followed in subsequent years deepened my spiritual awakening and his death catalyzed my own transition into a new life.
A complete new reality has opened up. I have come to a realization how the outside world is a reflection of what is inside, and that only through each person’s transformation within can we bring a collective social change. This profound experience of ‘turning inside out’ helped me rediscover the Other World buried underneath Corporate America and connect with a true impulse behind my American Dream.
I was able to see how the Western hegemony in a form of US imperialism expelled all from this original harmonious state of the world. It divided the world into the first class nation and the third world. We were made to believe that we are separate, being placed in institutional hierarchies defining each other as superior or inferior.
As a Japanese woman, who has become an immigrant in America, I too was exiled from the world as it is. I now understand that my striving to speak freely was my deep longing to return home; find my own place in a world that made me a foreigner. Through offering my experience of overcoming challenges and coming into my own personhood, I aim to assist others in their journey of coming home.
