Just This!

Reweaving a World in Crisis

The world is in spiritual crisis, a destabilizing social, political and ecological storm. These are the self-inflicted wounds of separability, rationalism, materialism and individualism, the ontology of ‘shoot first’ instead of surrendering.

Beyond ideology, supremacy and the self-made fortress of an objectified world lies a new vision. Just This! explores the micro-and the macro experience of non-duality as the weave of a different world. Non-duality is the seamless, relational attunement of the whole. It transcends binaries, hierarchies, and the hallucinations of modernity. Non-duality is the nature of nature, our nature. Its openness is vast, inclusive and suffused with compassion.

A responsive and responsible culture of life is the only sustainable path to livable future. Just This! looks through the eyes of non-dual ‘tough love’ to address law, sovereignty, migration, property, finance and development in the Anthropocene. An ecozoic era will grow out of dualistic capture to rituals of recovery, to breathing with planetary rhythms, and a transformation of global institutions. A thousand generations await. Let us be ancestors worthy of their regard. 

Table of Contents                                                                                
I. The Dismemberment of Culture                             
II The Spell of Becoming                                             
III Getting There & Being There                               
IV  Seeing Through Duality                                          
V     The Nature of Nature                                                 
VI   The Listening Body                                                
VII The Architecture of Wholeness                           
VIII Kali’s Totem: The Anthropocene                          
IX   Water, Space & Light                                         
X    Law as Tensional Integrity          
XI   Migration: Humans Being Illegal                         
XII  Naturalizing the Human                                         
XIII Property as Rupture                                               
XIV Development’s Double Bind                       

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Introduction (excerpt):

If the human drama were a spaghetti western, non-duality and duality would meet on a dusty street in the center of a ghost town under a blistering sun. Duality would think, ‘This town isn’t big enough for both of us.’ Non-duality would feel just the opposite. ‘I see you,’ she says to herself. Sweat glistens. A trumpet wails of missed opportunities and final reckonings. In perpetual duel, duality, in his arrogance, thinks non-duality must die. Non-duality feels no threat. She is not defensive in the least. She has no gun, no bullets. She holds duality blameless for his violent tendencies. If duality should fire, the bullet boomerangs. Non-duality is unscathed. The truth dawns: duality, noticing his wound, realizes it is self-inflicted. Beneath patterns of thought, attachment and denial, this drama is repeated many times a day in the bodies and institutions of modernity. We are just beginning to realize what we have inflicted upon ourselves. But deep inside, we know. By shooting first instead of surrendering, we defeat ourselves. Yet still, we bear the wound, desperately wanting to heal. 

This is a book about some of duality’s bullets, fired in so many circumstances that the hail is ongoing, confusing, blinding, and painful. Each bullet is a contraction into a worldview that has reached its limit and now unravels in plain sight. The root of the deepening political, ecological and mental health crises now threatening civilization is the bullet of separation: dualism. Dualism has brought us so many wounds that we now stand in a storm of distress, fear and delusion we call the meta-crisis. A counter-narrative of a world in profound relational order is rising in response to the cognitive confinement of Anglo-European modernity.¹ ‘Order’ is perhaps not the most appropriate word to put next to ‘relational’ because the relational view I speak of is unconditional. It is non-dual. The non-dual order is relational in disorderly fashion. Its process is not so easily captured by the word order because its ‘stability’ is paradoxical, a coherence of incoherence, uncertain, impermanent. 

We will walk through the narratives of dualism and engage with the transformative openness of the non-dual response. As the global zeitgeist shifts away from capital’s harms, modernity remains incapable of taking a serious look at itself. Instead, the news is full of its increasingly invasive, violent and controlling gestures as it grasps for continuity. The hyper-rational bullets of technocratic competency, financial hegemony and cultural dominance sustain the modern dream, as if governance believes it can lock in the social order in the same manner as an algorithm is stamped on a microchip. This is the vision of AI, to quantify, manage and control all interactions through hyper-miniaturized arrangements of Earth minerals. This worldview never seems to wonder if the minerals are programming us. America’s willful blindness to planetary crises combined with its own bullets of military adventures, economic abuse and diplomatic overreach follow the identical ideology, repeating past errors while continuing to claim innocence. Its unshakeable faith in human exceptionalism and its denial of Earth’s limits remain its prime directives. 

The Western order is the most extreme expression of dualism as it anchors the world-as-object and the illusion of human control. It lives in a polar universe populated by binaries within linear time. It depends on the infrastructure of certainty and unreflective gestures of aggrandizement. Above all, the image of humanity’s ultimate ascent beyond complexity and conflict is so woven into consciousness and language that not much else can grow. The economic system pursues yield in ever more aggressive, intrusive and extractive ways to achieve growth at the deepening expense of equality, rights, relations, health, safety and ecological resilience. Material commitments to future generations find no footing here. Living systems either approach irreversible tipping points or are already past them. The drumbeat of collapse meets increasingly rigid, shrill, aggressive and authoritarian denial. 

Where is sanctuary to be found? Countering the violence of the self-terminating worldview is a radically departure, one that lives in the indeterminacy of relational flux, in a fluid field of discovery, where boundaries are mutable and certainty is non-existent. The relational flux steps outside linear time, beyond the categorizations of race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and even species. In this domain, we are woven together in intra-active evolutionary emergence, a subtle interpenetration in a field of mutuality. Just this! is the call of the moment. Conventional boundaries become permeable membranes in which personal, ethnic and national identities are thin categorizations that serve but do not separate. The most significant property of this novel emergence is the tangible sense that love is its origin and its infrastructure, the connective tissue of all existence. Can such a vision revitalize a world so removed from nature, from its own nature? Who must we become to grow into the seamless nature of existence?