突破: Breaking Through

I have wandered off from the campfire. I’m roaming in the dark, placing myself at the mercy of beasts of the night, divorced from camaraderie, landmarks, scents, ancestors, teachers, children, the whirling firmament and the community of souls that brought me here.

There have been moments when I’ve fancied myself a writer. It wasn’t always that way. I crept into it slowly, writing casually for entertainment, correspondence or popular appeal. Certainly, there were moments of personal disclosure when I would be navigating complex feeling, intention, memory and association. I didn’t particularly seek those moments, but neither did I avoid them. Along the way, I found a groove, enacting devices to engage, provoke or inspire. Writing arrived with the glib pouring forth of words to describe a travel experience or when I was either so angry or sad that I didn’t have to think what to write next. Or else I fancied myself at least a passable expository writer who could present a detailed subject with some clarity.

But I am no longer traveling, and my outrage button has become exhausted, replaced by disgust at the extreme performative nature of public dialogue and a nagging resignation about the future. It all resides in a cavern of helplessness that seems to have numberless rooms to explore, places to get lost, where scant light ever ventures. If you’ve ever been in a vast cave, lit only by the artificial kind, you might already know how boring it can quickly become, especially if you tire of being reminded, everywhere you look, of how small you are in the great unwinding of time in silent darkness.

As far as expository writing is concerned, I must finally admit it’s too barren. It cannot come close to communicating the diversity and complexity of the real lives we are living in this time of the great unraveling—or how we are being lived by events and each other, by the warming oceans disrupting the primary currents, the disappearing ice. It’s thus just plain boring. I’m not journalist. It’s not my job to bring you the news in that familiar way and it’s about time to stop trying instead of using volumes of words to defend vague ideas in an impersonal way.

But where does this place me? I must learn something new all over again. Maybe I’ve been that journalist, that academic, that remote observer, that pretender to some ivory tower. But now, deciding what kind of writer I am not is not the same as becoming the kind of writer I will be. Because, really, when we get down to it, we’re talking about what kind of person I will be, how I imagine myself, how I am connecting (or not) to the world. And right now, it’s the ‘not’ connecting that’s haranguing me from the back rows, which is to say, I have wandered off from the campfire. I’m roaming in the dark, placing myself at the mercy of beasts of the night, divorced from camaraderie, landmarks, scents, ancestors, teachers, children, the whirling firmament and the community of souls that brought me here.

I haven’t been a storyteller. I’m not sure I ever set out to become a storyteller or if I even knew what it really is to tell a story. And that right there is the story, the poverty of my course, the dubious credentials I’ve claimed so far. Telling the story is not solely about someone as it is about a time, a place, a multi-dimensional thread of events creeping in from all directions and from distant peoples and times. It’s about the teachers we would not normally recognize. It’s the sensory, the cognitive, the relational, the mysterious and the unseen coming together in dynamic play, in evolutionary unfolding, in paradoxical awakenings, in pregnancies delivered just in time. Because that’s the nature of the lives we are living. Nothing will ever be straight again.

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that nothing was ever straight to begin with, even though we clung to a biased fantasy of some narrow empiricism, the exclusion and violence at the heart of coloniality, the subtle catechism of modernity that all things have a place and must stay in their place as they are defined by science, religion and politics. We’ve been walking through these things as if in a hall of mirrors, wishing to see ourselves reflected back, confirming the ‘way things are.’ The entire enterprise resides in a fixed epistemology that always yields the same conclusion—the muting of nature and the supremacy of the (white) human and western ways of knowing. There, we never have to worry about the entire deck being thrown up into the air—as it is now—all the time.

When the way seems blocked, it’s time to break the mirrors. All bets are off. Empire is the Anthropocene monster eating its own tail, an exhausted enterprise shedding all but its most desperately loyal supplicants. The more they cling, the more they deny and pit themselves against the relentless and now accelerating de-westernization occurring throughout the global south and Asia, the greater the danger to us all. This beast of a nation will surely, under an authoritarian president, start an(other) entirely cynical and thoroughly corrupt (forever) war to reclaim its fantasy of supremacy, dragging a generation into hot conflict, brutalizing all dissent along the way, distracting from the rot within and the advancing consequences of its own extravagance. This will be the death throe of America—an economically and ideologically cornered giant drunk on its own self-dealing delusions and doubling down on its primary addictions.

The stage is set and the time for pretension is so over; the time to own up to my own pretensions is long past. Perhaps that’s why I am feeling so lost. Perhaps that’s why my recent gestures toward expression have felt so stale, so limited, and uninspired. Maybe it’s because the fire of my own truth burns as a small ember. I have retreated into my own incarceration. I am the jailer and the jailed. I am forgetting what I belong to. I am the sole party to the severance of my dependencies, my alliances, my symbiosis with the world. It’s time for oxygen, a return to (dare I say it) authentic spontaneity, time for a jailbreak, to explore the green glimmers of foreign and still hardy epistemologies, biding their time, and if it’s not too much of a cliche, breaking through the concrete of the dying order, revealing our true nature to ourselves and to each other.

Offering Mandala

Isn’t that the whole point of the mandala offering–to give up everything for the sake of realizing we never had anything in the first place?

The Middle Way pursues the embodiment of wisdom and compassion. The Great Vehicle of these attainments is parsed as a progression toward the fruition of altruistic intent and the transformation of all sentient beings such that consensus reality ultimately dissolves into unwavering non-conceptual blissful awareness: Dzogchen. The Great Perfection.

A tall order, indeed.

Wisdom is a reference to emptiness. To perceive the true nature of phenomena is called pure perception. A Buddha field is a pure realm manifested as a product of pure perception. Such a field would include everything we see, think or know, everything that happens ‘to’ us, everything we ‘have’ or “do.”

From the Vajrayana perspective…the understanding of Buddha fields is a deeper one. The root of the Vajrayana is “pure vision,” or the perception of the perfect purity of all phenomena. To enact this purity of perception, we do not perceive the place where we are now as just an ordinary place; we imagine it to be a celestial Buddha field.” — Dilgo Kyentse Rinpoche

By offering everything we have to the spiritual home of Buddha, we are affirming it is all Maya, an illusory projection dissolving under the scrutiny of pure vision.

In other words, in Vajrayana, the celestial Buddha field is here & now in this moment. It encompasses everything in every instant. It is our everyday experience illuminated by the Dzogchen vision. The deliberate creation of detailed visualizations to further transformative experience is called Guru Yoga, a cornerstone of Vajrayana practice. Silly rhetorical questions like “where is a Buddha field to be found?” or “how would we know?” carry little weight against the benefits of engaging directly in a personal practice of developing pure vision, creating your own Buddha field, also realizing that the essence nature of everyday experience is already pure and exists whether we deliberately create it or not.

The offering of mandala is a related practice dating back to the origins of Buddhism whose rituals, detailed in the Kalachakra Tantra, are intended to accumulate personal merit and thus ultimately escape cyclic existence and gain entry into the pure vision of a Buddha realm. The outer form of this practice employs a physical representation of the universe, all its worlds and continents. The universe we know as well as incalculable other universes we don’t know are considered pure lands to be offered.

A more internal intent of the mandala-offering practice is to self-purify by offering all possessions, all property, including one’s pleasant and unpleasant experience, one’s very body, to the pure realm of the Buddha field with a clear altruistic intent.

By the virtue of offering to you… visualized before me,
This mandala…resplendent with flowers,
– my body, wealth and enjoyments–
Adorned with Mount Meru and the four continents,
As well as the sun and the moon,
Without any sense of loss, I offer this collection.
May all sentient beings enjoy this perfect realm….

This shift in perception to recognizing our entire existence is suspended within an omnipresent projection of Buddha-mind, pure and transparent in quality and depth, momentarily breaks the grasp and completely overthrows our limited habitual view. We come into an immediate personal encounter with its illusory nature, which is telling us we don’t truly “have” anything at all.

Isn’t that the whole point of the mandala offering–to give up everything for the sake of realizing we never had anything in the first place?

Seeing everything arising as a Buddha realm renders “being” and “doing” as flawed constructions, relying as they do upon a dualistic view imputing actions and possessions with intrinsic substance. Being, since it implies the existence of non-being, is already an objectification. Doing implies the existence of a doer. The very nature of these references to something that cannot be rationalized or categorized holds us in the sway of illusion. Maya creates the language and language reinforces the illusion that there is any material reality whatsoever to objects, possessions or thought, including every conception about thought, including the very notion of Maya itself!

And yet, at the same time, we live in a world of consciousness and intent. The Two Truths are said to be completely interdependent, inseparable, and timeless, yet even these categorizations are also illusory. The Two Truths, we should recall, convenient though they may be, are neither Two nor “True.” We might even call them the Two Lies, or better yet, The One Lie.

Things, material realities, states of consciousness, arise and cease in every instant. Phenomena are both material and non-material in nature in each moment, like water at precisely 32F—neither solid nor liquid. Arising from a constant and changeless ground, they simultaneously exist and do not exist. They do not conform to any intellectual description. Nor can they be reified as constant states such as is light when we are (or are not) looking. The essence of phenomena is beyond conception, always empty. Materiality exists as an energetic manifestation of emptiness simultaneously and constantly, timelessly, without beginning or end.

Rendering everything–and it must be everything–to a Buddha realm potentially opens the pure vision of a Bodhisattva, the fruition of the Middle Way, the non-binary view in poetic dance, always becoming its opposite, destroying, and reinventing itself continuously in every moment, cause melting into effect and effect into cause.

The one in whom this altruistic intent becomes stabilized is no longer lost in the material view of contaminated Maya, resting instead in a radical openness and supreme unity, yet also finding a bottomless well of compassion for those who do.

COVID in the Land of Smiles

We encountered no other passengers, no open businesses, no other airport employees other than uniformed medical or police personnel. Under normal circumstances, Suvarnabhumi airport is one of the busiest in the world. Now it’s mostly silent and desolate.

I arrived in Thailand from Qatar on a flight barely 20% full. The word is out that Thailand is not ready for tourism. The exception is that tourists are now, if they meet certain entrance criteria, submit to regular testing and adhere to restrictions, allowed to enter several prime destinations such as Phuket, Ko Samui and Hat Yai without quarantine. That the Thai government would carve out exceptions to the stringent rules now applied to all other locations is testimony to either opportunism and a need for cash or careless inconsistency in applying prudent public health measures.

As we somewhat bedraggled passengers ambled in the early morning through a series of moving walkways down a long empty corridor and past entirely empty departure gates, we encountered cones and taped-off areas directing us toward a public health screening station on the way to immigration. We were met by a swarm of nurses and other functionaries, fully gowned with protective gear including shields, caps and gloves, who lined us up in appropriately spaced rows of chairs to await an interview and document inspection. Everyone was ready with their Certificate of Entry, already provided multiple times to airline authorities as we boarded our connecting flights, our proof of hotel booking in one of the state sponsored quarantine facilities, proof of travel health insurance should we require any treatment or hospitalization, our proof of vaccination, passports and two other documents now required to enter Thailand.

We were grilled about symptoms as the nurses filled out pink forms to include in our handful of papers as we were processed and checked out and allowed to progress toward the usual immigration inspection and baggage claim, another 300 meters away. We encountered no other passengers, no open businesses, no other airport employees other than uniformed medical or police personnel. Under normal circumstances, Suvarnabhumi airport is one of the busiest in the world. Now it’s mostly silent and desolate.

Having entered or departed Thailand perhaps a dozen times in the past six years, this immigration experience was the most unusual I’ve ever encountered. Immediately inside the immigration control area, we were directed toward a long desk with a glass barrier where a dozen immigration officers sat six feet apart. We passed all our documents through the barrier for them to examine, presumably to verify that we just went through health screening. Our documents were compared to an online database which I suspect already had our travel information recorded. This encounter lasted about 5 minutes as documents were inspected and stamped.

From there we proceeded to the regular immigration screening normally encountered upon entry. An officer examined the visa and all documents again. Oddly, this uniformed officer was not gowned, capped or gloved. Strictly the regular uniform. All documents were photographed and stamped again. From there we go to baggage claim, which normally occurs at one of a dozen large carousels in a cavernous transition area as big as a football field. But now there is only one carousel operating and the rest of the floor is off-limits.

I grabbed my bag and headed through customs and into the arrival area, all deathly quiet and empty except for a small group of hotel drivers holding the usual signs. I was met by someone—again, fully garbed in protective gear–with a clipboard which had my name on it and the hotel where I’d be staying. She quickly herded me to the check-out desk where I was met by an escort who carried my luggage out to the hotel vehicle and driver. Altogether, between the aircraft and the shuttle vehicle, I had now encountered no less than seven different personnel in protective gear and one immigration officer in uniform. Inspection of documents had been repeated four times.

The hotel shuttle had been outfitted with a glass barrier between me in the back seat and the driver up front. My compartment included an air filter and no air passed between the front and back. Check-in at the hotel included an interview with a nurse from a local hospital and the normal check-in process with a hotel employee, except this encounter included a review of quarantine policies and procedures in a 12-page document in English and Thai, an opportunity to enroll in a local telephone plan and instructions how to order meals to be brought to my room. Leaving the room for any reason is prohibited.

There is a schedule for multiple daily temperature readings to be reported by telephone app, a schedule for multiple PCR tests during my stay, instructions for laundry and trash, supplies of disinfectant, soap, bottled water, linens, and other essentials—like coffee–for the duration of my stay. There is no other access to any of the hotel facilities whatsoever. The only time you leave your room is to be tested.

One might assume from these encounters that Thailand is managing COVID well. But let not the extremity of it all be deceiving. Thailand is struggling mightily, with case rates and deaths climbing to new highs. More deaths are happening at home and are likely not being counted accurately. The military government led by Prayut Chan-O-Cha backed itself into a corner by its hubris and conflicts of interest, believing their salutary response to the initial wave was sufficient and not ordering nearly enough vaccine when they had the chance. They were then saddled with an exclusive contract with a vaccine manufacturer with no experience and coddling certain interested parties by steering income in their direction.

Then they tried to recover by buying Sinovac, which proved itself not up to the task and which, whether justified or not, then ignited mass refusal to accept it—to which the government announced a plan to combine two different vaccines by adding a shot of Astra Zeneca on top of Sinovac. Otherwise, the strategy seems to be to withdraw into an opaque silence in hopes that things will eventually calm down. Meanwhile, the economy tanks and the threat of more COVID from out-of-control Myanmar rises.

Thailand is not smiling now. Suicide rates are unusually high, as is violent crime, petty theft, mass fear and economic desperation. Hospitals are full and oxygen supplies are scarce. A tsunami of community support is rising as Thais generously come to the aid of their fellow citizens. But social media and mainstream news are alive with their anger and speculation is rampant about the return of the banished populist former prime minister, Taksin Shinawatra. The only thing keeping the streets empty of protest is the fear of the delta variant, which probably suits the government just fine. But overall, the recent response, garbed in layers of protective measures similar to what I encountered at the airport, appears to be haphazard overcompensation by a government desperate to inoculate itself against its own incompetence. Short of a spontaneous and fearless mass uprising, only a definitive gesture from the notoriously disengaged king is likely to change the political and public health course now. Thailand is waiting for him to show his cards, but I don’t think anyone is holding their breath.

Afghanistan

Sometimes they say the dharma is not pretty
which means that one day you will know
maybe many lives from now
that lock and load is not the road
to our survival.

As the long-overdue departure from Afghanistan approaches, here’s something I wrote 16 years ago upon the loss of 2000 American soldiers there:

The ones who cannot stand to weep

are the ones who say that I must keep

my mouth shut when I penetrate their spin

while they bring comfort to the enemy within.

They say a citizen must ignore the bureaucratic fuel of war

the official juggernaut of Right exercised under cover of night

twisted to their purpose

out of sight.

I have to wonder how they hide as the storm of conflict roils inside

that must be silenced lest the voices bare

their fantasies of greed and fear so empty of the urge to free

themselves for any nobler purpose than extinction.

I am not your enemy I say I am your mirror with this scarred half of me

the missing leg below my knee the plates inside my skull

I’m not quite here and yet aware with halting gait and forever stare

searching for my lost parts anywhere I can find them.

I look into a stranger’s eyes and ask if I am known.

He asks if I am somehow lost and then my cover’s blown.

I try to tell him of the cost that makes me but a rumor now

of the man that has been lost.

The past will not leave me be and the future can’t come too soon.

The doctors say that I’m all right that I can live a normal life

but they can’t see what I have seen and cannot see me now.

Rockets blast my dreams each night and a python tightens

round my chest robbing me of sober rest.

A life digested. Sweet sleep if I can get some.

I’m sorry to disturb you from your reverie but a soldier’s bleeding in the streets.

He is my brother or your son or a sister loved by everyone.

They are my nation fallen.

Each day’s supply of coffins flown in silence to some distant home

When you close your eyes at night you never see the fading light

of lives undone. They come from Idaho or Montana from Texas and Looze-iana

their dreams pumped with your sad fiction

the vice of economic conscription.

How many more will have to fly before the chaff of falsehood

separates from the truth that made them.

Sister Cindy Sheehan tore through your carpet of rhetorical bombs

broke through the frosted glass of pious platitudes echoing through

the mighty marbled bunkers of government

Her fighting vehicle was not made by Bradley her ammunition not in

short supply her simple question pierced the armor of official aplomb.

Why?

From that day more eyes were peeled to see your naked lies revealed

A million more converted to the truth that cannot be diverted.

You can take the nation into your storm of oedipal complaint

without reason or restraint but you cannot hide

from Jesus on your shoulder. And now no matter where you turn

sound bites.

Sometimes they say the dharma is not pretty

which means that one day you will know

maybe many lives from now

that lock and load is not the road

to our survival.

State of Excess: II

The extremes to which which Qatar must go to create or procure the basic requirements of life combined with the rising risks of the entire Q22 effort are reminiscent of an off-world simulation, the illusion of abundance surrounded by an unforgiving landscape.

The Beautiful Game

The original plan forthe 2022 World Cup (Q22) called for nine new stadia in addition to three existing stadia. Since the approval of the plan in 2010, the building agenda has been scaled down to seven new stadia of varying capacities. A new metro system with a total length of 320 km will be completed in 2021. The entire effort will be a showcase for Qatari architectural design, engineering, urban planning, sustainability, transportation systems and fiscal management.

The design of the stadia will reflect aspects of Qatari and Islamic history and tradition such as a retractable roof in the shape of a tent, another reminiscent of traditional dhows used by Qatari fishermen as well as a design in the shape of traditional (male) Qatari headwear. There will also be geometric intricacies integrated into the designs echoing traditional art from across the Islamic world. Most of the new stadia will be repurposed after the Cup, turned into educational, sporting, healthcare and commercial uses with some components donated to sporting programs across the world.

All stadia will provide optimal conditions for players, match officials, spectators and media as they are equipped with retractable roofs and ultramodern (and in some cases solar-powered) refrigeration technology permitting year-round use. Each stadium will be a cocoon of comfort, preventing hot desert winds from penetrating while maintaining temperatures of 20-23ºC on the playing pitch while outside temperatures average 37ºC.

The dark side of accomplishing this massive task is that construction companies in Qatar hired manpower recruiters in numerous counties, Nepal among them, to dangle the benefits of working in Qatar. In a multi-year frenzy of semi-legal activity, these agencies charged recruits for costs, health checks, work permits, visas and airfare, in extreme cases totaling as much as $9000 each, an enormous sum for workers from one of the poorest countries on earth. The Qatari government was actively involved in this effort as well. A Nepali government investigation revealed direct (illegal) links between Qatari diplomats and the recruiting agencies. When the workers arrived in Qatar, they were already indebted to their employers who then paid only one-third of what they promised or in some cases withheld payment entirely for extended periods.

As of May 2017, over 400,000 Nepali migrant workers, half originating from a single indigenous group, had entered Qatar. They’ve had the lowest per capita income of anyone in Qatar. The $4B in remittances sent back to Nepal each year equal 20% of the entire Nepali national GDP, roughly equivalent to sixty minutes of economic activity in the USA. As the infrastructure build-out for Q22 is completed, further employment opportunities will dry up. This will have a significant impact on the Nepali economy, especially since Qatar and other Gulf states are seeking to diversify their labor base and raise the skill level beyond the primary sources of labor they’ve employed for the past decade.

Working 10-14 hours per day in extreme conditions without proper rest, sanitation facilities and living in sub-standard housing (often without wages), workers sustained an estimated 6500 deaths (from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh) over a decade’s time, compared to a combined death toll of less than 30 construction labourers involved in the two previous World Cups. True, many of these deaths may not have been directly related to construction work. Nevertheless, that’s five workers from these countries dying every week since 2010 when Qatar was selected for the World Cup. Qatar barely investigated many of these deaths, classifying them as due to ‘natural causes.’

Even after the disastrous 2015 earthquake in Nepal, Qatar refused to allow workers to return to attend funerals or to care for their families. For years this modern-day slavery and indentured servitude went unchecked. In Qatar and the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council states, until 2018, according to the kafala (sponsorship) system, all of this was essentially legal. Domestic help is treated the same way, and not only in Qatar.

Despite rising global criticism, as recently as 2019, a German broadcaster revealed video evidence that few of these practices had changed. Qatar started reimbursing recruitment fees to some workers in 2018 and enlisted over 200 contractors to comply. But determining the actual fees paid and to whom they were paid was a complication guaranteeing the number of workers reimbursed fell far short of the total deserving them. Some of the restrictions on worker movement were eased in 2020. Wages were increased 30% and employers were enjoined from retaining worker passports. Kafala was being dismantled. But as recently as March 2021, the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund declared they would be investigating questionable labour practices across Asia, including Qatar and those specifically related to Q22.

Meanwhile, in the boardrooms, university departments and government institutions, Qataris crow about staging a carbon-neutral world-class event. Carbon-neutrality, however, does not magically appear in a carbon-neutral way. The financing, sourcing and procurement of materials, however sustainably produced, is entirely dependent on revenues from extraction: the sale of offshore gas and the labour extracted to build the venues, the metro system, the parks, the new airport, the hotels and all the other amenities and accommodations of the event.

There are multiple initiatives such as ‘Green Hospitality,’ investments in appropriate carbon offsets and ‘sustainable operation practices’ to support the ultimate carbon-neutrality of the World Cup. But it all depends on visitors using the metro, recycling all waste and using recyclable plastic water bottles, marking a turning point in the standards of the local tourism industry. Qatar is leveraging the World Cup to push the hotels to elevate their game. Fair enough. In this respect, Qatar is indeed implementing progressive climate initiatives, but only at great cost to human and natural capital.

Qatar As Off-World

The extremes to which this nation must go to create or procure the basic requirements of life combined with the rising multiform risks associated with the Q22 effort are reminiscent of an off-world simulation, an artificial biosphere, the illusion of abundance surrounded by an unforgiving landscape, barely sustainable except by extreme measures. Surely there are few places where the interdependence between humans and the natural world is more clouded. Qatar defines the combined rituals of extraction and separation, the mechanics of it, the exploitive nature of it, the psycho-spiritual harm, the mass psychology of compartmentalization and denial to such an extreme that here, life itself is turned into a resource to be mined, leaving devastation in its wake. There is nothing new here. Instead of treating human capital as foundational to a successful society, it’s being used the same way as their offshore gas. Burned.

And here also is where the product of that denial emerges as multiple jaw-dropping architectural temples of sport, a gleaming futuristic skyline, steel and glass offerings to the gods of permanence, every comfort either accessible or constructed for the micro-managed spectacle of ‘earthly’ competition, sponsored by all the same ubiquitous multi-planetary corporate brands to be simulated and broadcast in endless detail back to the proletariat, attended by the international glitterati, entirely compatible with an artificial ethos of extreme resort living, creating new standards of excess, but without the inconvenience of interplanetary hyper-sleep. This is not some dystopian future. This is now.

Qatar and the other Gulf States are in a special class of nations driving the global legacy energy system, where the belief in their own illusions is reinforced at every turn while the reality of barely restrained plunder and its real-world consequences is cloaked in PR campaigns and market-speak. By the extremity of their lifestyle, they symbolize an apotheosis of Western nihilism, the radical divorce from ecological foundations and our headlong drive to collapse. There is only a contorted facsimile of belonging here.

One might argue that Qatar is doing everything right. They are conserving their natural assets, diversifying their $300B sovereign wealth fund to hedge against oil price fluctuations, investing in prime real estate in London and New York, shopping malls in Turkey, renewable energy projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, private and public companies throughout the world, venture capital and global tech. They’re catering to international tourists. They’re aggressively reducing methane leakage from their drilling platforms, redesigning their desalination plants, planning for their future and building their renewable portfolio. But at the same time, as their national carbon footprint falls, the risks are not disappearing: inundation by a rising sea, draining what little aquifer they still have, poisoning the life of the Gulf, human rights, the rights of nature, the living nature of earth.

Bismillah-ir-rahman-ir-rahim. In the name of Allah, The Most Gracious and Compassionate, The Most Merciful…

This sacred phrase, known throughout Islam, is repeated throughout the Qur’an. It is said to contain the essence of the entire Qur’an, even the essence of all religion. With the most receptive heart, utter devotion and with the purest of intentions, practicing Muslims speak these words on a daily basis. It’s not that Qatar is pursuing selfish gains or profit for its own sake. In a devout Islamic nation such as this, largely governed by Sharia Law, leaning into the Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia and the community of its brethren nations, that would contradict religious teachings.

I began by calling Qatar an extreme example. Yet who is to say any nation cannot pursue the benefits of its wealth, share them among its citizens and showcase their skills and generosity to the world? Therein is the advancing and crushingly poignant reality: Qatar, like virtually all nations, no matter how many times the words may be repeated with utmost sincerity, is not on a trajectory to lasting peace or beauty as the Qur’an might have us believe. It cannot reconcile its extractive practices with the costs. Qatar, like the rest of the world, to a greater or lesser degree, is stuck in the same cycle of addiction and shortsightedness. Even with all its so-called wealth, it cannot save itself. This is our ultimate poverty.

State of Excess: I

If there were a single place, a petri dish of the fatally hedonistic culture of extraction, consumption, and the gaping wound of interrupted reciprocity, sustained by an illusion of abundance, it might be found among the Gulf States of the Middle East. Qatar is one of these.

The extractive economy is a daring game of chicken we’re playing with ourselves. It’s always been a necessary part of our micro-reality, but only recently have we reached a scale of malignant self-destruction doing irreversible damage to the living environment. We take it for granted as an indispensable feature of modernity. The term ‘climate’ should rightly include extraction among its many references. If applied to the whole of life, climate is not solely about atmospheric or oceanic conditions or the many thousands of other biological effects; it is also about our external and internal worlds reflecting each other. The climate of earth is collapsing. And we are collapsing with it.

If we trace the acceleration of the global warming effect, the loss of ice, acidifying oceans, the threats to food chains, the Sixth Great Extinction, wild tantrums of weather now commonplace, all are paralleled by massive concentration of wealth, the degradation of civil discourse, attacks on science, the corruption of democratic norms, the influence of dark money in politics, feudalization of the economy, spiritual malaise, the destruction of capital in all its forms and the ever-intensifying jockeying to secure vital natural resources. It is a hollowing. Earth as an object of hostile takeover. None of us can truly breathe anymore.

If there were a single place, a petri dish of the fatally hedonistic culture of extraction, consumption, disconnection and the gaping wound of interrupted reciprocity, sustained by an illusion of abundance, it might be found among the Gulf States of the Middle East. Qatar is one of these, perhaps second only to the United Arab Emirates for a standard of living supported entirely by extraction yet deeply insulated from the consequences. Qatar is a parable of earth.

The citizens of Qatar are not oblivious to the issues. Popular sentiment clearly acknowledges the primacy of global warming, the causal relations between fossil fuels, pollution and climate change. They are acutely aware of urban congestion and resource management. Even though government officials, academics and civil society share a consensus that something must be done (not only about the traffic!), personal lifestyle adjustments hold limited appeal. Qatar produces 7000 tons of trash daily. Yet no recycling program, no matter how expertly designed or promoted, can mitigate the emissions from local plants producing 20,000 tons of cement every day. Such a functional disconnect is the definition of un-sustainability. In this semi-constitutional absolute monarchy, ruled by a single family for nearly 200 years, the Emir, Abdullah bin Hamad Al Tahni, has the last word. There are no democratic mechanisms to shift policy as far or as fast as it must go.

The marvel of climate change can be reduced to numbers, but they don’t—and can’t—plumb the depths of the flawed outlook, the psychological mechanisms of denial, except perhaps by applying an analogy of autoimmunity. We are attacking ourselves. The sensual appeal of lifestyles are so comfortable that the thought of any substantive shift in priorities never reaches critical mass. In Qatar as much as anywhere, an inexorable series of self-destructive and irreversible decisions are being made. They are now accompanied by promises to change, failure to change, the cycle repeating with rising guilt followed by self-deception and dissociation. These are the behaviors of an addict. Not all of humanity is addicted, but the addicted are leading the rest of us into the abyss.

Qatar is small. Its total area is only three times greater Mumbai or half the size of Vermont; or, if you prefer, seven times the size of greater London. The amount of arable land per capita is a vanishingly small .005 hectares. The population, having grown 400% since 2000, is still less than three million, but only 12% are citizens. The remaining 88% are foreign workers, largely from South Asia, including hundreds of thousands of unskilled and skilled labourers who came to participate in the promise of Qatar’s selection as the site for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The influx of expats is the reason 70% of the population is between the ages of 25-54 and the reason Qatar has the highest ratio of men to women in that age group in the world, 5:1. But perhaps there’s another reason. In this small group of patriarchal states, restrictions on women’s behavior and movement and the absence of laws clearly criminalizing domestic violence are driving women from these countries altogether.

Qatar is living a schizophrenic culture of extremes—at a precarious edge between the inevitable consequences of extraction and the countervailing abundance it provides. There is world-leading prosperity, the fourth-highest per capita income behind only Macau, Luxembourg and Singapore. There is high growth, and to the degree possible with average summer temperatures exceeding 40ºC, an illusion of separation from the elements, from anything remotely related to the lived experience or diversity of a jungle, a coral reef or a wooded mountain.

It’s also a tourist destination of mega-theme parks and giant shopping malls, man-made islands and a soon-to-be opened aqua resort with underwater hotel suites. It is known for its architectural design and cultural beauty, and as the leading financial service center of the Middle East. Qatar boasts world-class universities, sports venues, a highly educated technocratic class and its own stunning collection of ancient and modern Islamic Art. The unemployment rate is a microscopic 0.08%. Even though it imports most of its food, it has reclaimed thousands of hectares of desert through irrigation schemes to produce hothouse crops.

L’Essence de Vie

The impact of less than three million people on the global condition may be miniscule, yet the impact of Qatar is far greater than its small numbers would suggest because of extreme energy inefficiency. How is that irrigation supported? Qatar has near-zero surface water and less than 100mm/y in rainfall, 80% of which runs off into the sea. Natural renewable water resources have been estimated at 71m³/per year per capita, far below the water poverty line of 1000m³/y/ca.

Ninety-nine percent of municipal water is produced by energy-intensive conventional thermal desalination. Qataris use 500 liters of water per day per capita (132 gal/d), twice the global average. The water coming out of the tap, the water for washing $2B worth of cars (more than one for every two people) every day, the water for swimming, water for the fountains, the landscaping, the reflecting pools, the water for wudu (ritual cleansing), every bit of water used in Qatar including most of what is used to grow food is also bringing the Persian Gulf closer to becoming a dead zone. And even though Qatar claims the tap water is safe for drinking, most everyone drinks only bottled water.

Sixty percent of all global capacity for extracting fresh water from the ocean is in the Gulf States. There are over 1000 desalination plants ringing the Gulf from Kuwait to Saudi Arabia, from Bahrain to the UAE and Oman. As demand continues to rise, new and larger ones are constantly being built. Together they are impacting the salinity of the Persian Gulf, releasing hyper-saline water with chlorines into an ocean that already has a 25% higher saline content than the average ocean. By 2050, the salinity of the Gulf will be more than twice that of either the Red Sea or the Mediterranean.

Desalination plants also release sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere in quantities exceeding international standards. The Persian Gulf is already a shallow sea, averaging less than 50m deep. Combined with a high evaporation rate, insufficient freshwater replenishment and multiple sources of dumping such as animal farms, sewage, oil spills, industrial outfalls and fertilizer factories, along with desalination along the entire coast, not to mention the millions of gallons of oil deliberately released by Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, the Gulf is slowly becoming a dead sea. Algal blooms known as the Red Tide, generated by heat and an influx of nutrients from anthropogenic sources, are reducing oxygen content, killing fish and intermittently forcing temporary shutdowns of desalination in some areas.

In recognition of the precarity of water resources, Qatar is building five mega-reservoirs, intending to store emergency supplies according to estimated demand in 2036. They will likely convert the surface of these reservoirs to floating solar installations, further dropping overall carbon emissions. But alas, only a drop in that bucket.

Climate, Energy & The Environment

Qatar has the highest per capita CO₂ emissions of any nation except Kuwait, again, partly because of extremely inefficient consumption. Emission levels also reflect the extremely low natural biocapacity of the nation to produce the basics of survival, yet the population is entirely divorced from the costs. Water is free. Energy is free. Education and health care are free. Only one nation, Iceland, uses more energy per capita than Qatar, though Iceland’s energy is 90% geothermal, which delivers 4-5 times the energy of fossil fuels.

Qatar’s wealth derives from the third-largest proven natural gas reserves in the world (25 trillion cubic meters), mostly offshore, providing 85% of its national revenues. It also has 15 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and is a major exporter of petrochemicals and fertilizers. Unfortunately, Qatar considers natural gas to be “clean energy.” In fact, it’s only half as dirty as coal and emits as much as 10x more carbon than some forms of biomass—of which Qatar has none.

The government, in concert with twenty-two members of the Pan-Arab League, intends to diversify its energy base. This is a progressive plan, but it’s been slow to develop. There was no renewable energy base as recently as 2015. The current goal is to reach 20% renewables by 2030. This is not solely out of environmental concern, but part of a drive to save its natural gas for export instead of domestic consumption. A huge solar installation, Siraj-1 (700MW, 10 sq. km), is slated for commissioning in August 2021 and will be used in part to power a ‘carbon neutral’ World Cup. Siraj-1 will produce the cheapest utility-scale solar energy in the world. On the other hand, dust driven by desert winds will likely make it the most difficult solar plant to keep clean and operational at peak capacity.

Qatar’s obligation to the UNFCCC and the Paris Accords was, as with all other nations, to submit Intended National Defined Contribution statements declaring a commitment to sustainable practices, education, research and implementation of improved technologies to reduce emissions. The fact that 10% of its land area is no more than one meter above sea level, that 18% is no more than five meters above sea level and that 96% of the population lives in that zone is a stark reminder of Qatar’s vulnerability to sea level rise.

Nevertheless, the music continues, and even more loudly. As with so many other signatories to the Paris Accords, specific emissions targets were never declared, and all intentions were entirely voluntary and subject to change to any time. While they are demonstrating a commitment to mitigation and adaptation, the key statements in the INDC, virtually identical to similar statements of other nations, provide loopholes to choose development over environmental concerns at any time.

The Unmasking Continues

Covid is a warning shot, a harbinger of things to come. If we imagine our response to the pandemic as a practice run for future crises, we are doing rather poorly.

Covid has been referred to as a portal, a re-boot, a mirror, a hoax, a metaphor of everything good, bad or ugly about capitalism and modernity. There’s not really much daylight between many of these interpretations. Another comprehensive and enduring metaphor is that we’re in the midst of an unmasking, which is the definition of apocalypse-a removal of the veils obscuring a clear view of the present reality. As the pretense of stability fractures, we encounter a storm of feeling and response. And as the Delta variant now sweeps through nations, ignoring borders, class and threatening to ignore vaccines, we must ask again what is being revealed.

There are those who believe we will regain momentum on some imagined trajectory to normalcy, reinstating the familiar rules and laws of commerce, that all hierarchies and differential privileges will be retained, boundaries and binaries we take for granted (or don’t even notice) will be restored, the eternal rules of economic gravity will be reinstated, upon which we can return to the serious business of inequality, denial, extraction and ecocide.

Covid is a test. The presumption that modernity can manage it all, the ideologies of sustainability, ‘freedom,’ medicine, the engines of mass communication, public relations, mainstream journalism, public health, the entire narrative of progress, the veneer of corporate social responsibility, equality, even the fantasy of mass spiritual awakening, all of these lie bleeding on the sidewalk, unmasked in a quickening drama of collapse. The airwaves and social media are filled with hollow discourses, dissociation, sophisticated ego-driven delusional schemes by which we entertain ourselves and by which huge sums and resources flow to a minuscule number of individuals, increasingly tired systems of indoctrination, dominance and control. The structures of the dominant paradigm are trembling and the costs some are willing to pay to prop up the game is bleeding into savagery. The empire has no clothes.

Covid is intensifying and accelerating the dialectic. The protestations of those who most closely believe in God’s plan are reaching the level of medieval religious hysteria. Which part of God’s plan is at work here? On the other hand, the media/corporate/public health/medical axis has been desperate to assert control of the narrative, that Covid was an accident (do we really know that?), that following a few basic guidelines will manage and contain the spread of the virus, and primarily that the virus is an enemy to be battled through vaccines, responsible behavior and will be solved by following scientifically validated protocols. Many are drawn to the hygienically rational (unbiased?) legally protected pronouncements from the inner sanctums of Big Pharma.

We are moving so far beyond all of this.

Shunyamurti, 2013:
Is it just that every narrative circles hopelessly around its own apocalyptic core, like the moth spiraling toward the flame? Is the Word no longer God? [Now words eclipse the Word], until the words all begin to implode into nonsense and face us with the falseness of their meanings, the labyrinth of delirious signifiers that have created a sound barrier between consciousness and Truth.

Driving all of the above is the 40-year advance of the oligarchic agenda promoted by political parties, think tanks, organized religion and mass media attempting to cleanse national security, foreign policy, civil rights, law enforcement, medicine, higher education and the nation state of all but true believers. We are witnessing deepening cracks in the dominant narratives. The timid voices of integrity and credibility are now making space for bad actors to use vast political and media resources to drive sophisticated messaging to trigger fear and anger: bifurcation for its own sake, promoting versions of reality serving their personal, corporate, financial and political benefit. Collective psychosis, brought to you by the neofascist international crime syndicate

The stock market is an apropos example illustrating the increasingly threadbare fabric of economics and culture. We say the market is not the real economy, but such pronouncements don’t penetrate the bastions of the linguistic managers. The message perpetrated by central banks, five or six major investment banks and politicians of both parties is that everything is (or will be) OK. Yet the financial benefits of monetary policies meant to prop up and maintain the facade of growth and prosperity do not reach 80% of the population. It’s mostly gaslighting to protect the investor class. Mainstream economists are trying their best to convince us that risk is diminishing while the moral hazard in the largely opaque shadow markets increases month by month and the remaining measures to sustain the unsustainable shrink to a perilous few. This is a deadly game of musical chairs. The music is getting louder and the song is nearing its end.

Covid is a slowly unfolding series of shocks, revealing the trauma of conventional rationalism upon the collective consciousness. What is unmasked is the spiritual monoculture modernity has become–down to the vacuous micro-level pseudo-authoritative presentations in social media and TV, the tone of voice, the appearance, the time (or character)-limited delivery of information, the rapid segues from ‘bad’ news to ‘good’ news, the sequestration of subjects, the appeal to only a single level of comprehension. This is a continuation of progressive disembodiment that began very early in our lives. It is incremental developmental trauma.

You can avoid reality. But you can’t avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.—Ayn Rand

The combination of manufactured distrust of government combined with actual lying to the public by the government has inflicted cumulative trauma ever since at least the origins of the CIA (and likely well before). The effects of that trauma on civic trust is reaching its apotheosis in the spreading cracks in consensus reality, all of which is producing a culture in which, as James Kunstler has said, ‘anything goes and nothing matters.’

Covid is a warning. If we imagine our response to the pandemic as a practice run for future crises, we are doing rather poorly. Trump’s response to the pandemic in the US will be one huge reason for our failure. And the failure to investigate and prosecute Trump’s response will be another. We have resistance to sharing vaccine technology and we do not have mechanisms to make sure all nations, regardless of economic status, can be included in a global response. We don’t have a public conversation about the long-term trajectory for vaccine research or the implementation of practices that will reduce the likelihood of another virus emerging in the future. Capitalism is proving inadequate to deal with these long-term issues because it’s so focused on short term private profit. In fact, we might even say that capitalism has brought us the virus in the first place. How do we imagine capitalism is the solution to a problem it created?

How is that mask going to ripped off?

Burma: Women Are the Revolution

Re-blogged from Engagedharma.net : This article was originally published in TIME Magazine

Myanmar’s Women Are Fighting for a New Future After a Long History of Military Oppression

BY MIMI AYE MAY 31, 2021 11:24 PM EDTAye is the author of award-winning cookery bookMandalay: Recipes & Tales from a Burmese Kitchen. She was born and brought up in the U.K. by Burmese parents, but regularly visits friends and family back in Burma. Aye also hosts the food and culture podcastThe MSG Pod.

The world will have noted that women have been on the front lines of the revolution in Myanmar, with activists, elected officials, and journalists such as Ei Thinzar Maung, Thinzar Shunlei Yi, Wai Hnin Pwint Thon, Daw Myo Aye, Naw K’nyaw Paw, and Tin Htet Paing playing significant roles.

Many have assumed that this is a newfound feminist ferocity, but from ancient Queen Pwa Saw, to the first woman surgeon Daw Saw Sa, who qualified in 1911, Myanmar women have always been as strong as, if not stronger than, our men. The sad truth is our cause was set back by over 60 years of brutal and misogynistic oppression by the Burmese military.

I spent last Tuesday reviewing evidence from a Myanmar women’s group for submission to the U.K. Foreign Affairs Committee’s inquiry into the Myanmar crisis. Just reading about the atrocities committed by military forces meant I slept badly that night. Nearly 50 women have been killed in the protests so far, and around 800 women have been arrested. Sixty percent of the people involved in the Civil Disobedience Movement, a peaceful protest designed to shut down the country, are women, and they continue to face sexual violence, harassment, abuse, and threats from the junta. Many, including beloved film stars such as Paing Phyo Thu and May Toe Khine, have been charged under Section 505A of Myanmar Penal Code—a disproportionately punitive piece of legislation, and a hangover from colonial times that basically criminalizes freedom of speech. In prison, military forces have subjected women detainees to more violence, humiliation, and even torture.

A huge part of this is a horrific reflection of the misogyny—cloaked in patriarchy—that the military holds dear, having beaten it into the hearts and minds of the people of Myanmar. The military declares itself the father of the nation, but one that deems its female children as lesser human beings.

Before Myanmar, then called Burma, first fell to military dictatorship in 1962, its women enjoyed an unusual measure of freedom and power. In 1919, the first women’s association Konmari Athin, was formed; in 1932, Daw Hnin Mya was elected as the country’s first woman councillor; and in 1952, Claribel Ba Maung Chain became the first woman government minister. Burmese women kept their maiden names and property, they handled financial affairs, and voting rights were granted to them in 1922, only 4 years after women in the U.K. got the vote. Melford Spiro, the famous anthropologist, wrote: “Burmese women are not only among the freest in Asia, but until the relatively recent emancipation of women in the West, they enjoyed much greater freedom and equality with men than did Western women.”

Many successful businesses were owned by women, including the Naga Cigar Company founded by my great-aunt Naga Daw Oo and the Burmese Paper Mart, founded by my grandmother Daw Tin Tin, who was also a senior member of Upper Burma’s Chamber of Commerce. Another great-aunt was the famous dissident and writer Ludu Daw Amar, who founded the newspaper Ludu Daily. Shortly after the coup in 1962, all of their businesses, along with those of countless other women, were either shut down or requisitioned by the Myanmar military who were adamant that women should no longer have such power and influence.

Angel a 19-year-old protester, also known as Kyal Sin, lies on the ground before she was shot in the head as Myanmar’s forces opened fire to disperse an anti-coup demonstration in Mandalay, Myanmar, March 3, 2021.

The women’s liberation movement in the country was far from perfect. Even some of our most progressive women, such as author Daw MiMi Khaing, still saw men as spiritually superior, thanks to outdated religious views. But the movement was on the right track until it was derailed by the dictatorship. It then entered what writer Kyaw Zwa Moe referred to as a “feminine ‘dark age’”—an era in which the military and its hardline clerical supportersreinforced dogma for their own regressive agenda.

For example, every Burmese man is deemed to have hpone or glory. An ancient fable relates that men will lose their hpone if they walk under or come into contact with women’s sarongs (known as htamein) or undergarments; according to the military, this was because women are inferior or unclean. This is, however, a subversion of the original superstition which was that women are sexual temptresses; when I had my first period, I was told that I could no longer climb pagodas in case I toppled them with the might of my vagina, and that only men could ever be innocent enough to ascend to the highest plane of nirvana. This concept was just as sexist, but it at least recognized that women were powerful rather than pathetic.

Shortly after the February coup, Myanmar women gladly took advantage of these attitudes to use htamein as barricades against the military. Even the junta knew that it was being ridiculous: If you need any further evidence that the Myanmar military does not really believe that htamein are unclean, its members have been known to wear them at special events because their astrologers once told them that only a woman would rule Myanmar.

The idea of a woman being in charge was so loathsome to the military that when it came to pass, in the person of Aung San Suu Kyi, the generals banned people from saying her name or displaying her picture. During decades of its rule, the military not only sidelined women in terms of financial, cultural, and political power, even worse, they also brutalized them in war—especially women from minority groups like the Rakhine, Shan, Rohingya and Kachin—using campaigns of rape and other forms of violence and terror. It should come as no surprise that women fight alongside men in the ethnic armed organizations, whereas the Myanmar military has no women in its combatant ranks.

But the flames of female resistance never really died down in Myanmar, despite the military’s worst efforts. In 2007, there were notable women activists in Myanmar’s Saffron Revolution, including Nilar Thein, Phyu Phyu Thin, Mie Mie, Su Su Nway and Naw Ohn Hla. At the time, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners estimated that since the 1988 Uprising, which also saw many women take a prominent role, more than 500 Myanmar women had served prison terms because of their political activism. In 2015, Phyoe Phyoe Aung, general secretary of the All Burma Federation of Student Unions, was one of the student leaders whose protest against the National Education Bill was violently suppressed by military police in Letpadan.

This time around, women activists such as Thinzar Shunlei Yi and Ester Ze Naware again at the forefront, women lawyers such as Zar Li have been working day and night to ensure the release of detainees, and women journalists such as Naw Betty Han and Nyein Lay are risking arrest and injury to report on developments in Myanmar. Even the first death of a protester was that of a 19-year-old female, named Mya Thwe Thwe Khine.

Since Feb. 1, hundreds of thousands of other women have exchanged their work tools for daily protest marches. Medical workers, teachers, and garment workers are on strike and are all from sectors dominated by women. Tin Tin Wei and Moe Sandar Myint are, respectively, an organizer and the chairwoman of Myanmar’s Federation of Garment Workers, and have spoken out against the coup so vociferously that the latter has gone into hiding for her own safety.

The most promising sign of a much-needed return to gender equality in Myanmar is that the National Unity Government, made up of ousted lawmakers in hiding, has appointed several women ministers, including human rights advocate and former political prisoner Zin Mar Aung as minister for foreign affairs and Ei Thinzar Maung as deputy minister of women, youth and children’s affairs—the latter appointment being groundbreaking in more ways than one, as she is the youngest minister ever at the age of 26.

After decades of misogynistic and violent oppression by Myanmar’s military and its cronies, it finally looks like the women of Myanmar might be taking back everything that we lost and more. The Women’s League of Burma is an umbrella organization of 13 women’s groups, such as the Shan Women’s Action Network, who are working together to enhance the role of women of all backgrounds and ethnicities at a national and international level. A global, growing feminist movement called #Sisters2Sisters has even been set up, through which more than 80 civil society organizations are demanding an end to the violence against women in Myanmar and the immediate release of women human rights defenders.

Whatever happens, we will always have hope, and long may we continue to rise.

Burma: Art & Protest

We wanted to celebrate the power of the people, and the uniqueness of this movement. It was also curated so as to be accessible to outsiders just learning about #WhatsHappeningInMyanmar

Re-blogging from Engage!

“10 Ways to Resist a Military Regime” .@ThetHtarThet1 and I collaborated on this series. We wanted to celebrate the power of the people, and the uniqueness of this movement. It was also curated so as to be accessible to outsiders just learning about #WhatsHappeningInMyanmar

Present as Prologue

We are in the midst of an awakening, a rough transition from the dream of modernity and the emerging reality of its failing, if not wholly false, promises of universal prosperity and abundance.

When I think back over the past couple of decades and ask how was it and when my thinking shifted from imagining it was possible to find the political will to confront climate change to realizing social collapse was far more likely, I can point to a number of inflection points. It’s not quite so easy to assign specific turning points, but there are some events marking the passage toward my current position.

In 2012, Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone published a book called Active Hope. The subtitle was ‘How to Face The Mess We Are In Without Going Crazy.’ Segueing from anti-nuclear activism that began in the 80s, Joanna has spent the past forty years helping people access deep feeling for what is being lost and then to watch a fresh and grounded conviction to act emerge. But seeing that particular book appear was a signal to me that she was acknowledging our intensifying circumstances and the increasing difficulty of not only processing all the emotions associated with the incremental decomposition of nature and culture, but also of realizing a positive outcome of The Great Turning. I wondered when active hope or, if you will, radical hope becomes desperation? If we imagined hope as a regenerative resource, is it inexhaustible? When does active hope become hopium– an intoxicating strategy of pacification, helplessness and rising delusion?

To add some context, Obama’s weak stance and the failure of negotiations at COP 15 in Copenhagen in 2009 were also part of my turning, particularly upon learning that the fossil fuel propaganda campaign was deliberately targeting that event. In 2013, I was also collaborating on a political strategy to promote a carbon tax in the USA, submitting it for critique and confronting the obstacles to that effort. Ultimately, I found that process to be deeply dispiriting.

Not too long after that episode was the Paris Agreement of 2015, when the INDCs, Individual National Declared Contributions (to global decarbonization) were declared voluntary. Of course it would be naive of anyone to imagine nations agreeing to self-generated required contributions and submitting to enforcement, whatever that could mean. But voluntary contributions were also guaranteed to expose the entire effort to be more platitude than action, particularly in the case of the biggest polluters, which of course meant the United States. And it was.

These are moments I’m calling inflection points. They all had antecedents, a series of episodes dropping like grains of sand on one side of a scale until suddenly their accumulation shifts the entire balance away from the probability of avoiding systemic collapse to one of guaranteeing it. Accompanying all of this is a process of letting go of hope, similar to the five stages of grief. But I’d be wary of trying to fit myself into boxes that might be too small. Regardless, that negotiation with all the familiar names is about the ultimate acceptance of endings, the contemplation of mysteries we enter most gingerly.

So here we are. As with grief, the entire process is not one of giving up so much as opening to something new, regardless of its mystery. When do we let go of bargaining? When do we loosen our grip on a false future of endless beginnings or, to put it another way, step outside the law and induced conventions sustaining a false future to expose ourselves to the truth (and terror) of something far less familiar, but which is becoming ever more likely?

And anyway, was that even the future to which we were–or are–clinging? Or was it the past? A past in which the so-called promises of modernity could become ever more inclusive and the fantasy of personal and collective prosperity could continue indefinitely? In those terms, we’ve not been headed into the future at all. Our increasingly desperate grip has always been on the past–the conveniences we enjoy and particularly the ideology of endless growth. The culture war, the current battle of narratives is between those who deny it altogether, those who believe we can manage climate change without really giving up very much, that we can keep most everything we have and still call ourselves ‘sustainable’-and those who believe we must explore and design radically different lifestyles based on a new definition of abundance. What if nature has another agenda entirely?

The real future, if we can stop lying, is so overwhelming we may not fully grasp what is virtually imminent. Thus, we turn our gaze to the past, the recent past, to preserve the fantasy of human omniscience, the fantasy of our unlimited capacity to manage our way through every obstacle, every rising tide, every rapid in the downstream flow of history. Party like it’s 1999! All of this is fueled by vapid pronouncements from the technology sector, the advocates of bioengineering and the offices of politicians bought by fossil fuel interests. In fact, we have no idea precisely what will finally convince us of a collapsing biosphere. But we know the signs are all around us.

Releasing our grip on the future—telling the truth of the moment—is a landmark principle of psycho-logical health—admitting what is—allowing us to deal with ‘reality.’ At the same time, we are also trying to modulate extreme emotional responses, rising solastagia and deepening disorientation, which are negotiated in a specific system of the brain devoted to survival. While we don’t want to trigger impulsive, personally damaging or anti-social behaviors, we do want to retain enough forebrain function to generate positive corrective measures.

We–and by that I mean we in the US–may be a single extreme climate event away from triggering a mass shift in public attitudes about what is on the way (several are already underway), what mass media is still timid (or worse, negligent) about addressing. But this is where we find ourselves wading into a swamp of uncertainty, disagreement and potentially dangerous outcomes that were wholly unanticipated at the beginning. We don’t want panic to become even mildly contagious–like the pandemic. And besides, a significant segment of American culture is already being bombarded with triggering messages generating anti-social behaviors against their own interests, which are also threatening the collective well-being of the nation.

In trying to temper the information flow to avoid elevating mass anxiety, fear or contagious hopelessness, we remain deeply embedded in the territory of complacency. When Greta Thunberg addressed the annual World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019, she said, “I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day, and then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”

Meanwhile, managing social behavior, refusing to form a vision of a collective response to the realities upon us or being determined to ‘both sides’ it all is robbing us of the opportunity to convey clearly how fragile our situation really is. Everything matters more than ever if we ever expect to become someone’s ancestor, because everything, the wake-up call and the suffering of the past 18 months, the dislocation, the uncertainty, the disruption of commerce, the loss of stability, the political and economic inequalities, the creative energy and social innovation, the conflicting moralities and the redefinition of community are all just a rehearsal for a rapidly advancing future.

The following is an obscure Facebook post from 2017, written by a nameless founder of the Into The Wild Festival:

And finally the great ancient god of nature, of the wild places, of the muddy-brooks and the golden hills, of the damp forests and the hidden glades, the protector of beasts, of horned and hoofed, he of the wild-lichen eye-brows, musk-eared pungent aromas swelling in through the ether, playing his deep octave of enchantment on his bone flute from beyond the veils, from under the other worlds. He curls his misty eyebrow towards humanity once again, reminding them that their tiny insignificant lives are mere dew-drops on the vast garden of existence. All their self-help seminars and self-important narcissistic endeavors are nothing but the froth of waves under the infinite sun-rays of existence.
You can wash your hands, but you cannot wash away the wild, the mysterious, ravaging ferocious tenacity of the world. You can try to blame it on 5G or 4G or GG. You can create as many concepts as you like, but in the end, nature will rule with wild and ecstatic bloodthirsty longing to take us all home to where we began, the deep dark emptiness where everything arises and begins, time without end. Pan, the original horned god will once again step out of the shadows with his name on the tongues of all beings, pandemic, pandemonium, panic, panacea, all bursting forth like wild flowers yearning to kiss the sky.
In this realm there is no good or bad, high or low, rich or poor, just the wild abandoned expression of life and death forever dancing in the orgasmic Milky Way of existence, radiant in its potential. So, we are nature in our deepest dreaming, before we civilized ourselves into square boxes of ready meals. We are life and death. We are the earth-woven lovers of the wild. We are that radiant mysterious emptiness. We are Pan. We are all people. Listen to the call of all beings deep in the dark of night, at the cusp of dawn or dusk and you will hear your ancient voice forever singing you back home.

We are all Pan, as god, as archetype, as a voice of the irrational. Pan travels deep in our psychic underworld. Nature is Pan, both beautiful and treacherous. By exiling him from our natural terrain, by dislocating or repressing the divine Pan from the pantheon of gods, we are dishonored. We lose ourselves. Eventually we suffer the consequences of that repression in the form of emerging tortuous pathologies.

We are in the midst of an awakening, a rough transition from the dream of modernity and the emerging reality of our failing, if not wholly false, promises of universal prosperity and abundance. That was never really part of the deal and now, with all the Pan-words dancing before us, the true costs are mounting.

How will it all Pan out?

Author: garyhorvitz