garyhorvitz

Dissolution

After touring the grounds of Shugsep nunnery, in July, 2017, I walked inside the darkened and silent main sanctuary. Everything was completely undisturbed; no one else was present. I noticed the colors, the familiar designs, the empty seats marked by the heavy woolen robes collapsed like ghosts on the benches, the teaching throne. Everything was in its place; there was only my breathing.

Then, in a slow wave, all the “things” in my view became one thing. All objects knit together into a single object. Everything became one teaching. Down to the smallest detail, even the fake flowers were a teaching. The decaying fresh fruit, the wooden bowls, the gold, the fading paint, it was all teaching; a single non-conceptual communication that had no words. It was entirely uniform, as if everything became tuned to a single harmonic to which I myself was becoming tuned. Everything was in its place; nothing was out of place. There was no other place for anything other than where—and what—it was. It was all an intricate code, like pieces of a puzzle suddenly, upon assembly, becoming a coherent image, conveying a single message.

All the activity outside the temple space was teaching. Everything beyond was also teaching, the weather, the mountains, the pilgrims on the way. Everything in every living moment is the same message. I was inside the space of all teachings, all schools, all teachers, all of the past and stretching into an undefined future, a vast dynamic universe of infinite nuance, the tiniest ripples part of a vast ocean, having no language, no structure, no predetermined activity.

I wasn’t expecting this.

I dissolved into all of it, again, in communion with the heart-mind of the victorious ones. “I” was a part of it, even as “I” no longer existed. The barrier between the perceiver and the perceived dissolved. There was no Other. Everything was image. Not many images; one seamless continuous image encompassing everything. Nothing I saw had any solidity, any material quality or substance whatsoever; it was none other than teachings, a uniform message available to all who would listen.

There were no words for or about anything; not the deities on the walls, the colors on the ceilings, nor the figures by the altar; neither the hands that crafted those figures, nor the statues of teachers nor the teachers themselves. Nor even the Buddha himself.

There were no words–or thoughts, or concepts–at all. There was only a simple, unitary and direct knowing, an all-knowing that needs no words, that could not find words if it tried; without a source, a wind blowing across centuries, populated by an infinite number of beings, uncountable know-ers who didn’t (and mostly still don’t) know that they know, permeating everything and every one, “my” thoughts, all thought, my body of light, the same light from the doorway, the sky beyond. There was no differentiation between words and thought and knowing.

There was no time. The truth, the seamless image of truth lives outside of time. It permeates the construction we call time and it is not time at all. Then again, neither is it other than time. I was not standing there at that moment, not in any discrete moment—or any moments. I was standing there my entire life, from beginning to end and without beginning or end, standing in every “event,” as if discrete events ever existed, and though “in” events, also not separate from any event.

The material nature of a temple, a sutra, a speech or treatise, the perceptual apparatus that produces them all, the sky, the mountains rising to that sky,…it is all the same, a dynamic display of color for which there is no name, only nuance beyond comprehension. It is generation itself, just as I had first seen at Mount Madonna Center in 2013, rising and disappearing in every instant.

There is no longer anything I can call not-teaching, anything that stands apart from the essence of truth, anything other than a bottomless knowing that cannot be spoken. The sacred may not always be apparent. But it does not lie at the edge of or beyond or within…anything. We may imagine that reality is just beyond our grasp, that a ‘crossing over’ is necessary. But from what, into what? It is already everything….without any edges, living beyond the illusion of being separate.

It is all mandala. It is all Buddha-field. It is all Buddha. Nothing is other than Buddha, not the suffering of the lost, the greed of the wealthy, the deceit, the derangement, manipulation or ruthlessness of the powerful, the striving of the seekers, the violence of the deluded, the nobility of the compassionate, nor even the amorality of the psychopath. Every look on every face is a changing color in the ever-shifting magic mural of the living dharma. It is all Buddha. It is all perfection. There is nothing out of place. Nothing “happens” at a wrong time.

No decision we face can ever be postponed or avoided. We are always coming home and we are always at home. There is no place that is not home. There is no place to go. There is no away. We are home. There is no remote cave of feeling, perhaps blocked up for decades, generations or even lifetimes that is not worth exploring. There are no chambers of the heart to be abandoned. There is no dead-end of relationship.

There is no limit to a commitment to truth or to the invitation always present. There is no wrongdoing that cannot be faced, no darkness that can remain unseen, no search for justice to be abandoned. There may be exhaustion, but there is no sleep that cannot be interrupted. Nothing exists outside the temple. The temple is everything. Everything is the temple. The Buddha field is everything. We cannot give everything–or anything–to it. It is already everything we are. We have nothing. Our absolute poverty is our true nature. We have everything we need, we already are everything we need in every moment.

We may still retain will. Or at least that is what we imagine. We both exercise it and surrender it to realize essence nature. Not “our” essence. Essence does not belong to anyone or anything. It has no source. Yet, it is not other than everything. We exercise will to pursue what we do not yet believe we already are. Will, entwined with self, is both freeing and also a form of bondage. The exercise of will releasing bondage is the great surrender, the great paradox, the Two Truths in operation, inextricable, inexplicable, perpetual and ineffable, without condition or attribute. The Great Mandala. The Great Perfection.

Jem Bendell Q&A with Joanna Macy

Deep Adaptation II

Jem Bendell arrives at his assessment of existing climate conditions to conclude that near term social collapse (within 10 years) is a certainty, mid-term catastrophe is likely and species extinction is possible. That’s his core platform. He is now the principal progenitor of what is being called the Doomasphere. Yet for us to proceed as if this is the only possible scenario is silly. Each of us may come to a very different subjective assessment on the issues of collapse, catastrophe, personal impact, timeline or helplessness/hopelessness. Every person will make their own assessment, regardless of its rationale, and arrive at a personal ‘temperature’—what they expect will happen over the next 10-50 years. This will become the basis of further inquiry, examining our assumptions and refining our perspective.

Second, Bendell’s reference to collapse and catastrophe only hint at the wide range of possible differences each of us may face depending on our location, climate and social conditions. An urban dweller will face different issues from a rural farm site. I have unpacked them and created a process to look deeper at our own attitudes about these issues and to form an outlook to address these possibilities in our own communities. However, as Bendell says very clearly in his initial paper, denial gets in the way of seeing clearly and moving forward. Hence, though it’s not as simple as we might imagine, denial in its many forms must be addressed.

Third, Bendell also alludes to values several times in his video interviews. But again, he is not explicit–nor do I think he should be. We have an opportunity—perhaps an obligation—to come to consensus about what we hold most important, particularly as we might anticipate conditions that will cause conflict. This is the territory of Reconciliation, determining what principles we will hold and measures we will create to reduce conflict.

I understand Deep Adaptation to be about reducing suffering. The deeper we go into the values, intentions and objectives for developing personal and collective local responses to the advance of climate disruption, the more clear it becomes that this is the primary directive.

Finally, as Bendell also indicates in multiple communications, the possibility of extinction implies the onset of rising fatalities due to displacement, the loss of infrastructure or support systems—the possibility of mass death, being personally impacted by community or family vulnerabilities, even our own death. That possibility may be very slim for some people and quite daunting at the very least. But again, here is where denial enters the calculations.

Imagine receiving a personal diagnosis of a condition, which, if left untreated, would definitely be terminal. Beyond the initial shock and grief, what would become most immediately important to you–a commitment to the treatment, the values on which you can no longer compromise or procrastinate, defining your community, deciding how you wish to live? Humanity is being given that diagnosis. Bendell has cut though a great deal of chaff to define the territory. It is up to us to explore it. That’s what Deep Adaptation means to me—discovering how we wish to respond.

Where Did Deep Adaptation Come From

Jem Bendell is a professor of sustainability and leadership at the University of Cumbria. In July, 2018, he published a paper, Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. Based on his assessment of all available climate data, he reached a conclusion that Social Collapse is “inevitable” within 10 years, that climate Catastrophe is “probable” in the mid-term and human extinction is “likely.”

His paper received a dramatic response, all the way from highly critical reviews from scientists, social psychologists and others, to viral circulation and positive responses from the general public. Since that moment 18 months ago, over 100,000 people have downloaded the paper and many around the world have quickly become involved or connected in some way to this approach.

A Deep Adaptation Forum emerged in March, 2019, providing 10 different categories of engagement including an active community forum. The principles that drive Bendell’s approach are the 4Rs: Resilience, Relinquishing, Restoration and Reconciliation. In order, he’s talking about saving what we need, restoring what has been lost, letting go of what we don’t need and what needs to be done to reduce conflict as we enter more extreme climate conditions.

The issue of Deep Adaptation has significant personal and collective implications. What needs to be done individually; what needs to be done to build trust and confidence among people who wish to become involved at this level and what needs to be done collectively to address the world that is coming? These are not simple issues to untangle. But there is a vein of rational assessment, emotional clarity, creative potential and spiritual hunger that is being galvanized by this approach. I feel it and I’m in.

What I intend to be doing on this issue is to explore many questions arising around this approach to the climate emergency, finding clarity for myself and offering the same to anyone else who cares. I will also be exploring what needs to be learned, how to craft an accessible and fulfilling approach to Deep Adaptation for those wishing to become more involved and active in their communities.

Resonance as Resilience

The principles of Presence, Resonance and Inter-Being may be well known even now. They just haven’t been applied to the Deep Adaptation context to the extent possible. Resonance, the deep state of inter-subjective communion, may be called a shared experience of emptiness. It isn’t a total leap into a mutual experience of non-dual awareness, but it is a window into ‘awareness of Awareness’, a moment in which the true nature and presence of Being intrudes into the mutual common discourse of beings. This is a glimmer of the absolute, a moment of non-duality within duality.

In entering Resonance/Inter-Being, Self and Not-self do not exist independently. They are more like the Tao, continuously folding into and out of each other as polar expressions of a single reality, instantaneously and continuously trading places at the forefront of influence and awareness. We are just as fully in our ego-selves at all times as not. We are thus not capable of entering Resonance only if we are able to dissolve ego—as if only then can we enter mutual or group Resonance.

If we examine our experience of Resonance, we would acknowledge our heightened sensitivity to its appearance and disappearance—or, perhaps more correctly—the continuously fluctuating relative dominance of Self and Not-self as a feature of the field. Thus the field is not uniform; it is constantly changing in every way. But that doesn’t make it any less real. Just the opposite. We are not failing to achieve or sustain our intention. We can still choose to direct our attention, just as we do in solitary practice.

And where shall that attention go? Personal attainment does not depend on a permanent achievement of selflessness, but rather a capacity to live in a continuous awareness of appearance and emptiness as One. Likewise, the field awareness of Resonance is not at all about Not-self, but an ability to hold both Self and Not-self as immanent, timeless and unchanging, which is to be both–and neither–in every moment.

This quality of awareness implies the larger reality, Inter-being. We enter a quality of relationship enacted by whoever is present. Thich Nhat Hanh reminded us we are connected in ways we either do not normally notice or cannot (yet) consciously access. He suggested we learn to do so because Inter-Being is always at play, always enacting itself in the forms and formlessness of our relations at every fractal of the Whole.

From this vantage point, what we do in communion with each other, whether in dyads or groups, in the suspension of timeless inter-subjectivity, is perform mutual transfusion. We reflect to each other our essence; we tune in together at a cellular level of exchange; we sustain each other on a precipice of possibility; we nourish each other in the midst of decay and collapse; we recognize and empower each other in our grief within the unending cycle of birth and death; we relinquish the illusion of personal agency, leveraging it on behalf of the collective; we hold space together for what is to come without attempting to define what is not yet here.

This quality of Resonance is a message from Inter-Being, the message of Inter-Being; it is a bridge to Inter-Being. Entering Inter-Being consciousness at any scale is poietic, a productive and juicy flow of awareness of Awareness often flooded with rich and dynamic imagery. To do so in a group is a palpable shared entrance into the timeless paradox of Self and Not-self fully and simultaneously.

By whatever method or approach, we glimpse our true body, the trans-corporeal body of Inter-being, a deeply loving and forgiving and compassionate space of relationship, the source-less source of everything: emptiness. In other words, Deep Adaptation can be an induction into Inter-Being as an embodiment practice, accessing the clarity and unlimited creative potential of our fundamental and true nature. Justice, Values and Governance informed by this view are a future worth creating.

Resonance: An Emerging Ethos

We are currently being driven deeply into every remote crevice of consciousness, to every hidden root of clinging to the past and into the disintegrating present. As we talk of changing the collective Story, we focus on an emerging ethos. A new ethic springs forth, outlining the features of justice and the governance we so dearly seek. The past cannot be changed. We can’t fully imagine a future that is not yet. What we can do is attend honestly and rigorously to the present. Rather than spinning a yarn about a possible future, I would look at some of the relational foundations of future scenarios, the principles and proficiencies necessary to build right now. We are familiar with some, but perhaps not all.

Rather than imagining Events or Things, we might start with the most basic process of relationship. Part of this journey is to re-envision wholeness. The terms taking center-stage in this drama increasingly center on Presence, Resonance and Inter-Being. We are talking our way into dialogic process accessing or generating inter-subjective field phenomena. The experience of Resonance is a foundational feature of Resilience. It may be applied to what is discovered in the inter-subjective field with intent to generate impulses arising from communion. Such field phenomena have been called collective intelligence, morphic resonance or energetic manifestations of increasingly intimacy characterized by courage, trust, compassion, fearlessness and love.

Inter-Being is an intrinsic portal to potentials evoked spontaneously or by deliberate group interaction. Whether it’s psychological or spiritual or evolutionary depends on whom you talk to. The full potential of Inter-Being remains unexplored and virtually unlimited. Diverging from formal hierarchies, we explore the potential of We-Space/Inter-Being to facilitate direct interactive non-conceptual experience, functioning as a matrix connecting diverse collective awakening practices or to highlight the limits of–if not overthrow–the paradigm of scientific materialism. But that is the grand design, is it not?

Such development is analogous to long-term solitary spiritual practices or parallel development of religious or sacred philosophies. Group practices are exploding out of a rapidly growing knowledge base resulting from deep and creative explorations with roots reaching back five decades, driven by an intuition that solitary practices may be leveraged to group process.

The intention and language of Deep Adaptation evokes emergence, coherence and authenticity and the attendant heart-opening practices permeating that world, driving our progress and building a durable foundation. We are struggling to comprehend what we are called upon to know and do in a world collapsing around us. Whatever excitement we have about our gains is tempered (and driven) by the torrent of grief underlying the urgency.

In short, we are learning about communion, to become agents of communion. In so doing, communion becomes a force driving us as its agent. We have already cultivated the passive arts of accepting, embracing and allowing. But we can be tourists no longer. We must move further into becoming and owning a process of forging the persona and systems of Deep Adaptation, even as we remain explorers. In this sense, we become professionals, increasingly attuned to impeccable relations—professionals deepening our embodiment of the emerging ethos. As professionals, we fully accept our obligation to drive further into the coda of presence, resonance and inter-subjectivity, evoking Inter-Being as it influences and shapes a possible future, deliberately framing our communications as a message to that future.

Buddhism says the union of appearance and reality is complete, permanent and unchanging. When we consider whether and how this view operates in relationship, we enter a new domain. We already know something happens when people come into a deep and trusting connection. We call it empathy, authenticity or synchronicity. An interactive quality of openness and exchange occurs, immersing us in a larger field; as if an altered state can envelope each one and the augmented communication within that envelope takes on an extraordinarily enhanced quality. In this realm, the object disappears. The sense of Other dissolves. Two subjects become One.

Another feature of Resonance is its timeless-ness; the future and the past fall away and all that exists is this moment. Surely there are biological markers of this condition such as a parasympathetic response. Consciousness of threat abates and defenses dissolve into an intrinsic state of mutual trust, safety and unbroken availability for more. Boundaries become mutable. In such a moment, karma falls away. There is opportunity here like no other. It’s a delicate restorative condition, but one that can be cultivated, particularly if we have a better understanding of its elements and principles. At the very least, we are reconciling the divisive influence of modern society.

Weathering Each Other

The signs are more frequent and stronger now. Climate change is accelerating. To many, the sensation of being personally effected is inching forward and becoming more immediate. Those who might have imagined themselves immune or safe are seeing the floods, feeling the lapping of rising water, the storms, the heat and the fire.

To many more beyond the view of western media, climate change is already as real as the droughts, floods or rising seas already a part of their daily existence. The pace of change is accelerating. But while the distance is narrowing between an intellectual grasp of the issue and a direct intrusion of a destabilized climate into our lives, climate disruption remains an abstraction for many. Even so, it’s becoming obvious that to remain distant from the issue of climate change is to remain utterly dis-embodied.

Our bodies, being of the natural world, are materializing just as the planet is materializing. The weather is not happening “out there.” We have always been weathering each other. Only now is it becoming clear what that means. Being fully entangled with the natural world; the inner processes of our bodies are not separate from the outer conditions in which we grow and change.

But we’re not talking solely about bodies here. Consciousness is evolving and is equally entangled with the evolution of the planet. The boundary we imagine between inside and outside, between appearance and reality has never truly existed. It is a figment of our imagination. We can say the same about climate and the natural world. Weather and climate are not phenomena in which we live at all–where climate is some natural backdrop to our separate human dramas–but are rather of us, in us and through us.

We are subject to climate change in our bodies and psyches. We are expanding our view of the perplexing complexity of our connections, becoming aware of the trans-corporeal matrix, the body that sees through its own skin, to and through other bodies, the migration patterns of fellow creatures, the crystallization of water on rock walls, the curling toes of climbing animals, the rhizomal conversations of wild plants, the stories archived in the weathered rings of trees. We are literally one with the biological. All is being processed and recorded, the entire experience of emergence, in the transient, elliptical and toroid story we create and which is creating us.

How is that so? What seems to separate us as biological creatures, our physical boundary, is far less solid and more mutable than we normally imagine. Likewise, the psychic boundary, the consciousness differentiating us is far more real. We are “viscous porosities,” neither solid nor liquid, no more than temporary aggregations of a host of life forms, structural elements (collagen), an energy interface (ATP), a replicative blueprint (DNA) and intra-communication networks, participating with the environment in the creation and exchange of sugars, temperature, moisture, evolution and extinction, even light transformed by chlorophyll.

In fact, all communication is intra-communication. There is no objective separation between any elements of the biosphere. All communication occurs within that realm. There are no side conversations. Everything is part of the whole. At the same time, we are individual contractions of climate, “intra-acting” precariously with the planetary system, each according to our geography and culture, a fractal of the macro-dynamics of planetary change, biology and the micro-relationships in which we live every day.

As trans-corporeal beings, we are making the weather and the weather, created by our human partners, is making us. The idea of ‘externalized’ costs of climate change is a construction of the capitalist economic model. It has no reality otherwise. Those ‘costs’ do not appear merely as respiratory diseases, auto-immune disorders, disease vectors, lost species or degraded atmosphere, but also as cellular deposits, tissue invasions and incipient mutations.

Weather has always been a fundamental factor of our relations, crossing all imagined boundaries between bodies and species. In industrialized societies as in much of the emerging world, we are mostly insulated from weather in our shingled, weather-resistant, secure, durable and isolated domiciles. We want to keep the weather out! Being able to retreat into our vented and layered temperature-controlled shelters provides an illusion of control.

We are distanced, psychically and emotionally, from the realities of those who live much closer to and experience more directly the subtle and constant nuances of weather such that disruptions of the larger cycles of climate are more apparent. In fact, those very temperature control mechanisms that protect us from weather contribute to the very weather we are attempting to protect ourselves from.

To remain distant from climate change is to remain distant from our own bodies and from the community of bodies and non-human species. Yet, the notion of being a weather-maker, creating enhanced cyclones, drought and flooding as well as the internal consequences for others by our daily actions throws the ethics of personal responsibility into sharp relief.

I don’t know about you, but I notice simultaneous hyper and hypo-affective responses of my own, at times feeling urgency and at other times wanting to distance myself from awareness of the impact of my decisions–like air travel, especially–that are surely making others’ weather. At times I feel acutely responsible for all life and am thus aware of the minute decisions I make throughout any given day. At others I will deny any possible personal impact because I want no part of that burden.

Whether we want to know or care makes no difference. The ways we each create weather have, at micro and macro levels, an effect on everyone else’s weather. How do we negotiate or respond to the weathering we are receiving from others? Do we just insulate the attic? Turn up the AC? When the Philippines calls out Western nations for balking at compensation for cyclone damage, when the Third world demands compensation for the weather they are receiving or when the Marshall Islands are slowly subsumed into the Pacific, Western nations treat the equation more as a legalistic abstraction than a contemplation of direct (though delayed) responsibility for their losses–or even the loss of our own coastal real estate.

Likewise, the continuing objectification of nature permits us to release toxic chemicals in the belief that they will either be sufficiently diluted or that significant time will pass before any meaningful contact with humans will occur. Neither of these views accounts for a trans-corporeal planet. This is analogous to the way we view the linkage between environmental pollution and cancer rates. It is all couched in hyper-legalistic terms of denial that resist the quantification of linear causality or the assignment of financial culpability. The political modeling we get–influenced by energy interests, of course–is that we can continue to create your weather while forgetting that it is also our own bodies that are changed by it. The ethic of individual responsibility is overrun by entitlement.

When Hurricane Sandy hits, a drilling platform explodes in the Gulf of Mexico or parts of Bangladesh are submerged, it’s happening somewhere else to someone else. But when your house is consumed by a wildfire in California, all entitlement dissolves. It is no longer someone else’s problem. And you might become acutely aware of how your weather has been created by the collective action of your neighbors.

The line between “acts of God” and acts of men is increasingly blurred. In fact, the larger dynamic of climate change will continue to undermine and, if not substantially thwarted, will eventually render obsolete assumed or constructed political, economic and social boundaries we take for granted: such as nation-states and money. Increasing conflict will be inevitable to the extent it is believed national boundaries, national character, cultural norms, tribal roots and even language are sacred and must be preserved.

When we ask “was that (climate catastrophe) caused by climate change,” we are weighing responsibility. On our trans-corporeal planet, how do we deal with knowing that as we retreat into our self-contained shelters and isolated thoughts, we are creating distant conditions that are driving others out of their own such shelters?

We are not doing well with this.

How do we accept eating pesticides, depositing pharmaceuticals into each other’s water supplies, causing extinction among creatures that cannot adapt as fast as conditions are demanding? It’s all well and good to attribute agency to nature and to imagine the ways we are impinged. But the capacity of nature to act is constrained by time. Nature does not act as quickly as humans act.

Thus, the times are urgent. Let us slow down.

Trans-corporeality is a denial of denial-ism. Denial-ism denies human agency, non-human agency, and the collectivism at the heart of legislative remedies. Propagating the idea of human intra-action is slow. Yet it should not obstruct focused efforts to influence policy, which is to design instruments that materialize collective responsibility, broaden and hasten abatement of the uncounted damage, anticipating and adapting to the dissolution of so many boundaries along the way. Short of a universal adoption of trans-corporeality, such would be the best means of materializing an accounting that has so far been so elusive.

A generative collective response to the weather dilemma does not depend on a single social or political approach. We need multiple measures, even if they arise from within the paradigm that still objectifies nature. As our common dilemma upsets more of what we know and reveals more of what we don’t know, living and acting in both old and new paradigms simultaneously will still be an effective human way of ‘being there while getting there.’ Ultimately, what we will require is much more than policy to get ‘there.’ We will need a healing view reflecting the true nature of our entanglement with each other and the world.

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