Category: Deep Adaptation

Chaos, Complexity and Emergence I

Everyone knows that one of the primary imperatives of life (at all levels) is to increase security, reduce threats and reduce unpredictability. Our early upbringing, our education and all the adult experience that follows is largely devoted to these objectives. If there’s one thing that motivates us, it’s to avoid chaos. Whether it’s the appearance of threats, insecurity, unexpected obstacles, digression, and breakdown, whether it’s interruption of our plan of the day or being diverted from our life-course — we hate chaos. Every time events start spinning out of control, which is always a possibility, we are reminded of how easily we become attached to the expectation of smooth and unimpeded execution of our plans. We are also quite familiar with the choices and the behaviors we find most natural and comforting.  These are the moments when we feel conscious and connected.

Despite all our efforts, chaos and disorder are guaranteed parts of life. We know that if we avoid such turbulence, we can reduce suffering. We spend a great deal of time either attempting to control the appearance of or devising ways of responding to chaos. Because we know our control is limited, that strategy becomes part of our lifetime project of self-improvement, a recurring meditation on how we meet impermanence and loss.

Just because we may find ourselves in the middle of chaos, we don’t have to be chaos. But no matter what we do, we are cruising down the river of predictability toward the waterfalls of unpredictability throughout life. There is much that reminds us that nothing in life is guaranteed. And yet, no matter our past, our education, our general comfort in life, chaos seems never to be very far away. That’s not such bad news. Trungpa Rinpoche called chaos very good news.

Chaos theory and what we call chaos in our lives may be two different things. Chaos theory says ordered nonlinear processes produce outcomes which are not directly determined by prior events. Causality is unpredictable. This is true at the micro scale of the individual, or the macro scale of the planetary or the universe level. It is also true at the cellular, atomic, and even the quantum level of phenomena. It says that the smallest changes, events that may be far beneath our direct awareness (or detection) in any system can produce huge changes later. The classic illustration of this principle is the butterfly flapping its wings in Argentina causing a tornado in Texas three weeks later (Edward Lorenz, 1963).  That’s the nature of chaos. Moreover, the difficulty in predicting the future is that we don’t know which events determine the outcomes we are most interested in.

Chaos theory is the science of surprises, of the nonlinear and the unpredictable. It teaches us to expect the unexpected. While traditional science deals with supposedly predictable phenomena like gravity, electricity, or chemical reactions, Chaos [and Complexity] Theory deal with nonlinear things that are effectively impossible to predict or control, like turbulence, weather, the stock market, or brain states.—Fractal Foundation

So really, an event that appears to have a direct and identifiable cause may be entirely beyond our capacity to prevent because its root cause is much smaller or much older than what appears before us in the moment. Our efforts to control events cannot take all these hidden ‘causes’ into account and are therefore practically useless. Since chaos theory primarily looks at small-scale systems with a small number of variables, like what happens when a rubber ball is shot against a wall or when a hinged pendulum swings, the pattern of resulting events may seem to lend a predictability to them. In this sense, determinism, the predictability of future events, is also a feature of chaos. Investigations of chaos examine the zones of predictability and randomness in the behavior of such small systems.

Complexity

Complexity theory is concerned with larger systems with many, including unknown, variables. Complex systems are dynamic in the sense that there is likely to be feedback between subunits. As demonstrated by chaos theory, small changes in a dynamic system, such as when you force your way up the down escalator in Macys on December 24, can have larger (and unpredictable) consequences (fisticuffs?)—illustrating the relationship between a small change and the larger outcome.

Examining and predicting events in larger social systems becomes far more complicated because there are so many more variables operating. Most importantly, complexity theory examines the self-organizing nature of ordered nonlinear processes, which is to say, there is a constant expression of intrinsic intelligence, adapting to internal and external influences to achieve equilibrium at a higher order of complexity. Hence, events are unpredictable.

Social systems made of many subunits undergoing a unique evolution are both complex and dynamic. They are deterministic in some sense because some of the underlying systems operate in generally predictable ways, such as human physiology or photosynthesis. Without any perturbations of their operation, evolution might even take a predictable course. But environmental perturbations are occurring all the time, so clutching for predictability is an attempt to reduce a complex unpredictable system to a more deterministic (predictable) system. This is a denial of the intrinsic properties of complex systems to respond to changing conditions and thus (to a degree) determine their own future.

The unique evolutionary path of any individual subunit of a social system follows the constant and unpredictable influence of ‘external’ events, large and small. The evolution of physiology, brain function, and even the physical boundaries (of cells or the skin) of any individual are always under reformation because the variables influencing that system and the automatic decisions made by any sub-systems of that individual are also always adapting and reforming. The complexity of situational and long-term patterns of response render predictability under most circumstances impossible. That’s a good thing because it means that system is not a machine. It means the diversity of adaptation is not limited by rigid rules. In such a case, the adaptive capacity of the larger system is enhanced.

For the complex, unpredictable nonlinear composite system we call a human, chaos is the unscientific name we might use when uncertainty becomes unmanageable. Circumstances impinging on our survival are going beyond the existing database of adaptive capacities created and embedded over a lifetime. Whatever our dominant patterns of decision-making may be, our secure handholds are lost. We are not in control. There is no default stabilizing act. Immediate adaptation using all our intelligence is required to determine a path forward that appears to restore order. We call this resilience. But such decisions are not guaranteed to work. Adaptation to such instability necessarily becomes a continuous, rapid, ongoing process of trial, error, learning and integration. How successful we are at adaptation is determined by the rewards that follow, unless we already have some record of successful adaptation supported by previous actions. But in every instance of unpredicted unpredictability, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

We are less comfortable with uncertainty and tend not to view the unexpected as an unforeseen opportunity. So, we develop strategies to support our preferred version of reality, reducing the probability of unanticipated events disrupting our plans or expectations. At the same time, trying to improve what is by setting an objective of creating what is not yet is also a complicating factor in the flow of decisions based on the best data we can verify. The deeply embedded social imperative that says we are on a continuous and lifelong trajectory of improvement (a micro version of the macro growth imperative) establishes a pre-existing bias in the way we interpret events. With such a bias, events may appear to be facilitating or blocking our pre-determined objective. The appearance of such randomness in a system is why we give the name chaos to unexpected or unexplained events.

Emergence

Complex systems are very different [from] the systems studied in Chaos Theory.  They contain constituent parts that interact with and adapt to each other over time.  Perhaps the most important feature of complex systems, which is a key differentiator from chaotic systems, is the concept of emergence. Emergence “breaks” the idea of determinism because it means the outcome of some interaction can be inherently unpredictable.  In large systems, macro features often emerge that cannot be traced back to any event or agent.

Nature is a complex system. There are a virtually infinite number of complex subsystems nested within the whole. Nature’s response to the evolutionary challenge of continuous adaptation to environmental stress is to reorganize itself at a higher level of complexity, thereby transcending the immediate condition and expressing the intelligence gained from exposure to those conditions. Emergence is the unpredictable flow of such self-organizing events arising from the ongoing synthesis of predictable interactions at all levels of the natural world. Humans are included in that process, constantly becoming our own versions of emergence. Each adjusted level of organization transcends and includes the previous state. When a flock of birds settled in a tree are suddenly alerted to danger, that all birds will take flight may be predictable. But how the alert is detected and transmitted, which birds lead, which direction they go and how the flock organizes in flight are all subject to ongoing refinement.

The intrinsic nature of emergence is a spontaneous self-organizing interactive expression of intrinsic intelligence. Its most elemental stirrings may not be conscious, but there is no superseding intelligence, no memory, no sense of past or future, no sense of ‘other’ in its application. What we see at all scales of life are creative responses arising from creation knowing itself, acting as itself because it cannot do otherwise. It is the most intimate character of life, a constant flow of resilience, independent of rationality, beyond any specific identifiable cause. Emergence is a spontaneous, natural creative phenomenon. We may identify it in any number of situations involving living entities of all types, from the hot crushing pressures of deep ocean trenches to the rarified atmospheres of icy peaks. Life exhibits all manner of adaptive strategies. But we also empirically understand that unpredictability is inherent to all of it. We may imagine or even sense that whatever we call ‘emergence’ among our fellow humans is a phenomenon beyond reckoning, beyond comprehending, until sometime after the fact. We expend mental energy, emotional or psychic energy responding to the incomprehensible or to gain insight into the ineffable.

Greg Fisher elaborates the meaning of emergence this way: Physics or chemistry can determine the properties of a single hydrogen or oxygen molecule, but the properties of water cannot be predicted from that knowledge because water is more than the sum of its parts. All living complex systems are more than the sum of their parts. That’s why emergence is even possible. In most cases, ‘reasoning upward’ (predicting the properties of water knowing only the properties of its components) is not possible. Water organizes itself under radically different circumstances in ways that are not predictable merely from the knowledge of its component molecules. As water is central to how all species organize themselves and express adaptive capacities, its presence (or absence) has highly variable long-term effects on social organization and culture as well.

All living systems must adapt to changing conditions of life, from system-level to subsystems, to the microscopic and even the molecular or the atomic level. For many, those adaptations occur at a rate slower than the pace of change. But regardless of the scale, living systems possess a natural ‘computational capacity,’ a self-reflective capacity to absorb environmental information and determine what is the most advantageous response. In the case of climate change, we may run any number of computational simulations, but the ability of science to predict how humans will adapt to the empirical impacts of climate change or the long-term ingestion of pollutants or micro-toxicities remains rather shallow. Those changes are only now appearing on a mass scale, haunting us with their monstrous portent.

Stay tuned for part II of this post.

Nonduality & Meeting the Meta-Crisis IV

The Crisis of Being

March’s Parts level is the most elementary. But the examination of raw data cannot by itself get us where we need to go. If we make inferences from data, ecological simulations, stripping out social, economic, or political conditions, what we get from NASA, the USGS, the UNFCCC, is a systems level report on climate and planetary overshoot. If we look to social science, economics, population studies, politics, public health, or the American Psychological Association, we get reports implicating a much wider field of crisis. If we back out even further to an evolutionary view, we get much closer to a contemplation of the unquantifiable, something much deeper than objective measures can reveal. Buried in the human psyche, nonduality merges the philosophical, cognitive, subjective, inter-subjective and spiritual dimensions of a micro and macro-crisis of Being.

That crisis of Being is the dualistic view itself. It has accompanied humanity throughout history, most recently accelerated by the Enlightenment. At its heart is what Terry Patten calls the Cornucopian Myth of endless material abundance. Each of us is integral to its creation and propagation, most especially to the modern supposition that we are rational actors separate from the world, that ‘problems,’ disturbances, imbalances, are identified and can be solved in a techno-bureaucratic way. The fact that many now identify duality as a mother principle is a long-overdue signal of its demise. Indy Johar speaks of duality as self-terminating; it contains the seeds of its own demise. To fully engage with nonduality, not to mention science, helps us see the depth of our entanglement with each other and the world and how deeply we are embedded in dualism. It is our default first principle, the primary delusion. We are automatically dominated by it.

Dualism is reaching exhaustion. There seems no end to the negative externalities, the violence it has wrought and continues to wreak. We want to believe the ethic of Enlightenment, rationalism, Cartesian dualism, can be uprooted, or at least that we must override it before we destroy ourselves. Despite all the benefits we now take for granted, we begin to realize that the world has never conformed to such an imposition and is now demonstrating in ever larger and immediate ways this flaw in our framework of reality. Continued exclusive reliance on duality as a first principle does not serve the biosphere. Persistently seeking solutions based on the premises of the past are only accelerating our descent toward collapse. To remain actors shackled to this Prime Directive took on the character of insanity long ago.

Since the world reflects to us that it is beyond our control, we must dispatch a critique that regards the world as manageable. Since political commitments derive directly from epistemic conditions, we need a radical reformation of our critical framework, not a renewed resolve to address single issues in tired piecemeal fashion. That is the sense in which duality is the crisis, because it induces us to misinterpret the nature of phenomena, which then gives birth to secondary delusions. We may find guidance in this unattributed observation, “If you don’t have a critique of capitalist modernity, you are contextually irrelevant. If all you have is a critique, you are spiritually impoverished.” In other words, a grasp of the nondual view is a platform for action required to unwind from duality in authentic, spontaneous, creative, and inclusive ways.

The Great Unraveling, as the Post Carbon Institute calls it, in its cultural, philosophical, metaphysical, economic, political, and social dimensions, is entirely the consequence of the dualistic view. A swamp of delusions is inexorably swallowing us up in an apotheosis of profound conflict. The familiar signposts that help us address it are disappearing. We must consider ourselves lost. I am often reminded of an observation made by Tom Atlee, an environmental, peace and social activist:

Everything is getting better and better and worse and worse, faster, and faster.

Yes, there have been a multitude of benefits flowing from the dualist view. And there may be disagreement about what is getting better and what is getting worse. But ‘faster and faster’ does not go on forever. Duality has brought with it rationalism and innovation but has also brought privatization and the growing weight of externalities. Add to this the more recent relentless, destructive, and increasingly intrusive commodification of even basic human needs (seed, land, and water), pandemic anomie, the surveillance state, the loss of anonymity, all of which decontextualize us from the sacred, from history, further separating us from nature and our nature. These aspects of the current social order are not accidents. Their roots may be subject to debate, but they are clearly sustained and amplified by an increasingly sophisticated daily avalanche of sympathetic stimulation, algorithms inducing repetitive dopaminergic behaviors along with deliberate deployment of the strongest human emotion, fear, triggering instinctive acts of self-preservation. All of it fosters continued separation. The current order propagates mass neuro-biological arousal and a deepening impairment of our decision-making apparatus, all reinforced by increasingly coercive forms of monetary extraction.

There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges – the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light. 

— Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

Continuing regression into tribalism and fundamentalism of all kinds, religious, nativist, economic, ethnic, social, and ideological, threaten to unravel built-in constraints on the current social order. Bigotry, whether ethnic, racial, nationalist, or religious, is fundamentalism. All of it is conceptual. It may be explained by science, but none of it is supported by science. The nature of the conflict has become an aggressive, ‘my fundamentalism is stronger than your science.’ The world is either parsed into sharpening binaries to define allegiances in the global culture war as truth itself is systematically assaulted. All conceptual frames are inherently divisive. To express the nondual view is to step entirely out of every category of choice even while acknowledging the underlying motivations.

Since we continue to treat the natural world as a soulless resource, we believe we are entitled to continue cannibalizing it. We live and die at the altar of Growth. We are assaulted by the mantra of a positive future even as we see it being torn from our grasp. There is pervasive disenchantment with the world and a deepening regression into purely subjective pursuits of well-being. This is March’s Parts process, the most reactive character of culture to the illness afoot, becoming a profoundly malignant mass psychosis.

The compounded effect is the atomization of culture. We are turned into isolated units of production and consumption, while Process, the trust, unrestricted learning, community, collective resilience, social cohesion, and faith in our collective capacity is ignored, undermined, or even suppressed. Backlash is also afoot, wherein elites unleash the secret police (with and without badges) tasked with locking in the social order, primitive as it is, locking out dissent, radical new ideas, and the possibility of a more equitable balance of resources. According to Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, a new techno-feudalism is imposed, further stripping meaning from life. If we do not see the psychosis, we are complicit with it. Even when we do see it, it’s virtually impossible to extricate ourselves from it.

We are trapped in a context of meaninglessness, defined by consumerism. But the underpinning of that ethic is that we’re destroying every fabric of life, every aspect of the biosphere. We are infected by a toxic positivity—as well as our entitlement to reap the benefits; the belief that all problems can be solved by human rationality, human exceptionalism, the reduction of reality to statistics. This is the source of the need for ‘hope.’                                                  —Alnoor Lhada

Not that we must redefine hope away from its modern origins. In Lhada’s definition, hope becomes a product of disillusionment and a tool of disempowerment. It’s a derivative delusion distracting us from–or even rejecting–the present, a reversion to an imaginary future based on helplessness and a muddled comprehension of the present. I don’t mean to be simplistic. Hope is quite complex. It could be called fatalism, a conceptual escape, a failure to source our action in embodied experience. There’s an element of denial in hope resulting from an inadequate diagnosis, clinging to an idealized future, a rationalization for what we do not understand.

The nondual view is immediate. Its fullness leaves nothing out. It arises independently of time; we are unconcerned with the past or the future. We are concerned with the timeless. From that view, there is no room for hope. For that matter, there is also no room for fear because both hope and fear draw us away from the immediacy of meaning. Without meaning, we are adrift, “prisoners of context in the absence of meaning,” as Lhada puts it. Nonduality—choosing presence in the presence of hope and fear—becomes the only reliable source of meaning.

The collapse of faith in institutions is real, a result of deliberate intent. Extreme income inequality is the result of deliberate manipulation of tax codes, law, and money. The rising consequences of climate disruption are a result of deliberate poisoning of civic dialogue. War, hunger, and nativism all reflect intentional imposition of systems of dominance, exclusion, and neglect. If we witness the destruction of any common standards for truth-based dialogue, it is the result of intentional manipulation of information systems for the sake of profit over people. On and on. Even the definition of legitimate knowledge is a battleground. This is the world regressing into the most materialistic cognitive frame of reality, not quite, as March would have us believe, edging into the liminal space between the Parts and Process level of engagement with life.

Poverty is the result of manipulation of money systems. By money-power, we mean the constellation of people, organizations, rules, and resources that control the form, issuance, distribution, and demands of monetary systems. We have been manipulated and coerced by that money-power to objectify, commodify, dominate, compete with, externalize, use up, trash, discard and feel numb about life on Earth, including each other’s lives.                

–Jem Bendell

Humankind is honed to a wheel of unending labor. We are captivated by the image of an arduous path of redemption and salvation. We are captured by an impossible utopian ideal: ultimate deliverance into a life of abundance, prosperity, and leisure. Indigenous cosmologies may be exceptions because they are not slaves to growth, but the basic story of modernity is a dogma of separation, aspiration, ascension, and ultimate release from the suffering of the world. Growth, which does not account for impacts on life-support systems, is pursued with the magical thinking of religious fervor. Virtually every aspect of modern culture is predicated on this principle. Economic and social philosophies bend at the knee of perpetual growth and align with a top-down spiritual ethic of continuous improvement.

Progress is the taproot of duality, the primary fuel of the meta-crisis based on the centrality of the individual, an aspiration to become something we are not yet, to nurture and enhance personal well-being at the expense of the collective. The growth principle of perpetual expansion, improvement, and innovation is aligned with and reinforced by religious dogma. In that world, we never fully arrive. We strive to get there, to fully inhabit our exceptionalism. Standing still, the end of aspiration, the end of growth, equals death…or even hell. In Buddhist cosmology, never having enough ishell. The spiritual ideal remains perpetually beyond our grasp. For many, it may only be realized upon death. On the other hand, realization is depicted in Buddhist science as a shedding more than an accumulation, an unwinding, a return to innocence, a relaxation into union with the world, becoming who we are from the inside out. What’s more, in the upper reaches of spiritual accomplishment, instantaneous realization is immediately accessible. There is no attainment. It is here, now.

It is impossible to achieve authentic sustainability with our prevailing economic, political, and cultural operating system if we continue to see the planet as dead matter upon which we impose our organizational talents. In late-stage capitalism, this assumption has become an unsubtle (and de-stabilizing) self-destructive form of control: inverted totalitarianism. The demise of the world is thus prophetic, self-fulfilling. Under the current corporate-state regime, the corruption and termination of planetary life-support systems is pre-ordained.

The nature of reality, the nature of mind, is the opposite of the growth imperative. The whole does not grow, does not seek to grow, nor does it shrink. It is a state of dynamic balance, the transmutation of energy shifting resources back and forth.The emergent nature of our entanglement with the world and each other is not denied. Instead, we are embedded.To embody nature is to be driven to act on behalf of the steady state, the equitable, balanced management of resources to serve and sustain the health of the whole. That steady state is a razors edge between attainment and attachment, a subtle coexistence. Which way we fall in any given moment will determine whether our approach sustains the culture of death or affirms life. That balance is intrinsic to nonduality and liberates us from ongoing insidious colonization by an ideology that extracts and organizes dead matter. We are once again granted meaningful experience.With this guidance, we can elaborate a multitude of ways to manifest this condition.

Nonduality & Meeting the Meta-Crisis III

A literal interpretation of meta-crisis suggests a combination of interdependent factors combining to create stress, most likely leading to, if we do nothing, unmanageable breakdowns. Complexity reaches an ungovernable state, suddenly and unpredictably reverting to a lower level. The various forms of stress reflected in crisis leave considerable leeway concerning its identity, scale, and impact. But one thing is likely: meta infers a superseding principle on a planetary scale. 

The current crisis is an internal one, referring to the collective mind, combining cognitive, philosophical, and spiritual factors having to do with the human relationship with the world; namely, our objectification of it. We have placed ourselves at a distance. We have created conditions categorizing the world as other, permitting us to reject others, to reject waste, to carve up the commons, to create registries of property and to accept the ongoing externalized violence committed in the name of progress.

To look at the crisis within returns us to the world and restores us to its indivisibility. To imagine the planet as more than a visualization, we enter a sensing, intuitive, feeling level intra-action with planetary life beyond the human. Connecting at this scale is the nature of the transition we are in. We are feeling ourselves between worlds now. We’ve not left the old world behind, nor do we see more than the outlines of a new world emerging. But we surely sense ourselves in transition. We are in a liminal, fragile, some might even say treacherous, terrain. What are we to do? A Nigerian proverb declares, “To find our way, we must first become lost.” We cannot embark on any real journey with certainty about where we will arrive, especially when we are wandering between worlds. In some sense, arrival itself is a quaint notion, serviceable at times, but in the broadest sense, not so much. Perhaps we will never arrive. The case of humanity encountering profoundly disturbing and threatening conditions is also not far removed from either the transition of birth, or from receiving a terminal medical diagnosis. Our attention is immediately drawn inward. Shall we live or shall we die? What must die for us to live?

The feelings arising in this circumstance mostly align with what we expect. Feeling our way into an advancing radical condition elicits a flood of anticipation, fear, disorientation, helplessness, confusion, denial and even despair. It’s dawning on us that our lifeboat, the Ark of earth, has been cast adrift. We are tempest-tossed in the sea of the unconscious, reflexively reaching for guidance, for solutions. Ironically, accepting such an analysis produces an inexhaustible supply of abstractions as we grasp for meaning, much of which merely reifies the dilemma. It may be the way our minds work, meta-upon-meta, but abstractions do not explain the heart of the matter and distract us from exploring our innate capacities and a full view of our condition. So, we may resist the first impulse to grasp for medicine. Instead, becoming lost in not-knowing may be the most appropriate first response.

With an initial grasp of the nondual view, we can examine our responses, addressing systemic issues with a measure of confidence and vision. We may realize that while we are on the Ark, we should understand that we arethe Ark, we builtthe Ark. We have made the storm! Humanity is the flood!! There are plenty of signs of breakdown already before even touching the question of flawed human thinking. We can look to Nicholas Lattanzio, Terry Patten, Zak Stein or Daniel Schmachtenberger for deeper context. Many refer to it as a proliferation of rising existential threats. And since the term meta-crisis cannot be reduced to any single one of those threats, it is only by viewing them as interdependent that we arrive at the meta-view. While any of these perspectives may reference a seamless reality, wholeness, the essential definition of nonduality is too often stripped of spirituality with the notable exception of Steve March.

A Developmental Model for Meeting the Meta-Crisis

Steve March is a professional coach and founder of the Alethia Project. He takes a developmental view to coaching and applies it to humanity’s status, which he sees reflected in his model. According to that framework, we are already on a path of realizing deeper states of being and releasing ourselves from the destructive trajectory we are on.

He outlines a hierarchy of four cognitive states with the deepest being nondual awareness. It’s immediately apparent that overlaying this hierarchy upon the meta-crisis also reveals parallels with the common description of experiencing critical illness. We can readily interpret the planetary process as an immersion in a critical illness diagnosis reaching existential proportions.

March’s four categories represent distinct stages of attention and capacity both at a personal and a collective (or cultural) level. They are indicators of ways of thinking and ontological limitations on our grasp of our circumstances. These seem to be so clear and relevant as indicators of background awareness. We sense their potential as a means of intervention, as ways of expanding beyond the limits of category to a deeper comprehension of our condition: wholistic awareness, or nonduality.

March’s Levels of Attention:

·       Depth of Parts: Everything is experienced as separate. Things are nameable, things are structure. Very attached to identity. Assumption that there’s nothing deeper. The inner experience is of parts of self that feel different things, but none of them define us – there’s plenty of room to be more than any single state. Parts work can be very effective in opening more space for hidden sub-personalities to express themselves and become known, to be discharged, helping us become more available for access and participation in a wider field of emotional response.

·       Depth of Process: With a more fluid view of world, everything, including identity, is in constant flux. Internally we connect with a flow of experience. We have a somatic sense that is meaningful, rich, complex – so multifaceted that it’s not easily put into language. The parts level might correspond loosely to a left-brain function. It represents the common rationality of seeing the world as a collection of objects other than oneself, as well as seeing the self as a collection of parts. Even so, gaining objectivity about the Process level, the identity and behavior of those parts can be quite liberating, leading to greater integration of the whole self, more freedom to feel.

·       Depth of Presence/Presence and Absence: In this depth we land in innate wholeness and completeness, that not only can we love but we’re made of love or compassion or relatedness, resilience, creativity, and intuition. This is a realm of innate virtues or qualities that may be acquired or trained on a (superficial) self-improvement path. The deeper path is that we now understand these things are intrinsic. They are what compose us. They can be unfolded, but not diminished or taken away. This level can be viewed as an integration of brain functions, a transcendence of both left and right brain, neither becoming dominant.

·       Depth of Nonduality: At this depth there is no separation. This is the level of source, of oneness. At this level we fully relax into the body, the mystery, without a need for anything to happen. This is the realm of mystical unity and ultimate freedom. The world, experience, are experienced as uninterrupted subject, held in unwavering absolute trust and confidence.

Thinking further about these spheres of contemplation and action, we can glimpse a few of the questions humanity is exploring just now to address the crisis/illness:

·       Self-improvement vs self-unfolding: must we become better people, improved people? Or must we become our authentic selves? Is the crisis or disease process revealing a need to improve how we implement known strategies for addressing dysfunction or that we need an entirely new strategy?

·       Stability vs instability: The meta-crisis is destabilizing. Yet it also calls into question whether there has ever been stability. What is it we are chasing as we pursue stability? A false security? What do we see reflected in our responses to crisis/illness? Can the strategy be modified if it doesn’t seem to be working? Maybe we must redefine stability to become more resilient.

·       Simplicity vs complexity: How do we define these terms? Where do we find balance between them? How do we come down in a measured way off the mountain of complexity into the plains of simplicity?

·       Control vs surrender: If remaining in relationship is a primary value, how does that influence our responses to crisis/illness? What are we surrendering to?

·       Centralized vs decentralized power: Where does our personal or collective agency lie? Are we deluded about what real agency is? What sustains and legitimizes power? How does power become transformational?

We can see the potential to develop a flow of perpetual inquiry to focus attention on these polarities and to explore deeper levels of imagination as either ego or eros drive our responses to the meta-crisis and in the critical illness space. Most people are thinking/experiencing the present moment in relation to crisis at March’s elementary Parts level, with fear, confusion, and reactivity. We are solution-oriented in the most reductive ways, seeking management models without much inquiry into how our view of reality has gotten us here. It’s disembodied.

The Process level of experience, by focusing on somatic responses, a feeling level flow of responses over time introduces a deeper level of inquiry. Seeing ourselves in an ongoing nonlinear, layered experience is also freeing, but it’s still not fully stepping into wholeness. The Presence level is a much more realized way of being that recognizes intrinsic qualities implied and activated by adversity. We can readily see a flow back and forth between these two initial levels in a dynamic process. The character of this balance between parts level and the process level mirrors, according to March, the larger cultural impasse.

Ultimately, developing nondual awareness is the deepest integration of experience—which, ironically, transitions into an escape from ‘experience’ altogether, entering a supreme unity with all, uncontrived, unaffected, living in trust, confidence, and benevolence. This model need not be formalized, although it may become a personal guide to discerning one’s patterns and responses to the shifting circumstances of an advancing illness/crisis, to become more mindful of the opportunities to elevate one’s awareness to a more inclusive, wholistic view.

Despite the psychological nature of March’s model, there can be no doubt that our drift is a spiritual crisis. Others may have differing root beliefs about the dysfunctions driving it all, of overcoming separation, and technical solutions are so appealing. March’s developmental approach addresses the transformational potential of nonduality. The nondual view is personal, spiritual, and collective, transcending and including the dominant cognitive frames of our time.

Nonduality & Meeting the Meta-Crisis II

From Zero to One

To embody the non-dual view is to realize that a separate and unique identity dividing the world into subject and object is a figment of the imagination. To enter the nondual becomes an act of assuring the mutual destruction of the separate self and the world ‘out there.’ I say mutual in the sense that the world is an actor upon us just as much as we are actors in the world. Entering nondual space confirms both the agency of the world upon us as well as the flimsy basis of any notion of separation. In a relative sense, we absolutely participate in the primary delusion and ongoing attachment to the idea of identity, the idea of self. But neither self nor other truly exist in any substantive sense. Not only do we know this from biology, from the philosophical view of emptiness, but now we know this empirically when we realize what Lattanzio calls the ‘false self’ system, the ongoing centralization of a self that ‘takes it all personally.’ He adds, ‘The deconstruction of the false-self system is the only path to embodying nonduality.’

This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of non-dual reality for us to assimilate. We believe ourselves to be material. Our existence is harnessed to our physicality. But really, as we view the self from the imperturbable seat of timeless awareness, we realize any reference to self is a matter of simple practicality, a convenience for the sake of navigating materiality. I distinguish between the eternal awareness associated with this body and the impermanent nature of the body itself. While this temporally limited manifestation is my personal vehicle of existence, I also realize consciousness engages in intimate and profound relationship with everything. In fact, consciousness already is everything. Turning self into ‘nothing’ becomes our engagement with everything just as it is now. Past and future fall away.

When the illusion of being a separate identity collapses, all that’s left is a sense of a body-mind organism that functions. But there isn’t any sense of experiencing or knowing what is happening here. There is only what is happening here. Nobody is doing anything.                                                                                            —Tony Parsons

For practical purposes, we manage our relations in the world which contextualizes our existence. We are constantly driven to re-assert that context in myriad ways throughout life depending on our relative attachment to identity. ‘I’ is the puppet of ego. We are engaged in an ongoing accumulation of useful and necessary ornaments of identity, patterns of behavior and thought throughout life, creating ‘me.’ Some of it is rewarding. Some of it is not. Some of it is transcendent; some of it is tragic. But we continue to grasp for context because without it, we are lost. We seem to have no other choice. Context makes us ‘somebody.’ We are continuously engaged in recreating ourselves in the image of the identity we believe ourselves to be. It’s all quite convincing.

If there is no separate self, what is there? Other commentaries may refer to nothingness. Such references may be based in western philosophical tradition or to what eastern traditions refer to as emptiness. But even though we can’t say that ‘I’ truly exists, neither is there any such thing as nothingness. Transcending ego, experiencing the dissolution of self does not throw us into nothingness at all. It’s a realization of everything as One Thing, a vibrant living dynamic condition of the unending emergent multiplicity of creation. It’s the opposite of a Nietzschean void.

If there is no unique self, there is also no Other, any thing that remains separate from us. There is only an ongoing promiscuous fluid engagement with multiple materialities at wildly different scales, constantly breaking rules in a field of reciprocal influence. There is nothing fixed about any of it. Suddenly we are in relationship with all. Appearance and emptiness remain in inseparable union. Our temporal and eternal nature remain in union until death. Or, as Vajrayana would say, nondual realization is the union of the bliss of Oneness with the world of suffering.

There is only uninterrupted and indivisible union between what we mistakenly regard as two. Objects, thoughts, sensations, and perceptions are realized as both real and illusory—yes, emanating as a being, but not the essence ofBeing. To experience the unity of all things is to reveal how squishy, how imprecise our notion of identity, or self, truly is. But even more than that, we witness in all things and embody the intrinsic, vibrant aliveness of that realization. This aliveness is an expression of intrinsic potential, always renewing, always in flow, always pregnant with possibility. Things are not things at all; everything, despite superficial appearance, is embodied potential.

We may realize the empty nature of things, the intrinsic Absence of any identity within everything, what we may call its zero-nature. However, though we may arrive at an indestructible faith in the equality and union of everything, we are not granted a mandate or permission to remain passive, marinating in our private spa of realization. The call is entirely otherwise. To realize the zero-nature of phenomena is a prerequisite for acting with the empirical integrity of nonduality. Zero-nature is not merely experiencing the inherent lack of substance to material appearances, it is the platform from which the compassionate impulse arises. We are inspired. Reality inspires us; we are enveloped in a cloak of natural ease.

As the illusory nature of our identities becomes apparent, as we settle more deeply into connecting with ourselves as a hologram of earth, with a spacious and infinitely inclusive heart, we find our egos, clever as they may be, to be illusory as well. Something greater than personal gain, recognition or ‘self-actualization’ now drives us. The self-improvement project becomes something else—an unfolding entry into intrinsic nature. Having experienced the radical impermanence of our ego-identities, we gain a measure of freedom. Spiritual materialism is seen for the contrivance it is. We become fearless, even free of the fear of death. We are awakened to act for life.

Because we are of the world, precisely because materiality is real as well as illusion (which is to say duality and nonduality fully interpenetrate), we are constantly presented with opportunities to respond deliberately to the dynamics of appearance since the union of the two is integral to an ongoing embodiment of our realization. We are bound to act on behalf of the whole because we experience the world as whole. Morality and ethics apply precisely because in realizing both emptiness and the material nature of phenomena, we are given a clear choice about how to be in the world because the discrepancy between the two is so dramatic. From the view of emptiness, the roots and mechanisms of personal suffering are clearly apparent as never before. We are moved to render balance. True presence (Oneness) requires nothing less. To realize intrinsic absence within all phenomena commands us to realize presence as they arise together. We reside continuously in the paradox of separateness from and union with everything, in the intrinsic aliveness and potential of every moment. This becomes an imperative for ethical living.

Whatever moments we spend in the dualistic view, we are accepting the limitations of a relative view of time. In the nondual view, time is no longer linear. Past and future are undivided. There are no discrete ‘events.’ All events arise simultaneously. Therefore, there is no moment in which we are separate from nature, no Ground, no Path, and no Fruition. Just Being. A continuous, uninterrupted, unitary state of total inclusion, spontaneous, free, empty of any intrinsic quality or nature, connected with everything, as everything, infinitely creative, and warm. A space in which nothing need be done, or even could be done, constantly changing at high frequency.

To have an authentic experience of essence nature is to realize a unique and extraordinary embodiment that supersedes every prior version we might have known. Being is experienced as an inexhaustible naturally effervescent source of love and compassion and a vision for a new justice. We become an intrinsic comprehension of the perfection of Being with a natural impulse to generate justice, even though acting from the nondual view is to realize our view of justice may diverge from the commonplace (dualistic) definition. Our motivation is not to simply transcend suffering, but to alleviate it.

How is this possible? Because the nondual perspective attunes us acutely to the sources of suffering. Transcending human suffering is not necessarily the object of this journey. It is to realize the depth and nature of suffering and to reflect another view. Suffering does not arise from duality itself, but from failing to recognize the unity of duality and nonduality. In recognizing that unity, all acts become expressions of balance, a compulsion to seek balance because we ourselves embody balance. We are driven by a natural, visionary total comprehension and compassion for the poignant journey in which we are all captive, a total and bottomless love for and commitment to the welfare of all beings. Any distinction between one’s separate nature and an impulse to act on behalf of the welfare of all beings has been entirely extinguished.

Having realized the unitary nature of Ground (View), Path and Fruition (Conduct), the inseparability of appearance and emptiness, we are morally and ethically bound to act on behalf of all beings according to the ethic of the nondual view and the bodhisattva imperative, to become the mind of enlightenment, bodhicitta or, if you prefer, agapé or Divine Love. This becomes our meditation, to address the many ways the prevailing interpretation of phenomena wanders from those principles and generates more suffering in the world rather than less. There is no refuge to be found in ignoring material realities even if we reside in the emptiness of material nature. After all, we embody that knowing. We are rooted in it, sacralized. That is the whole point.

We are here, more so than we could ever articulate. It is that very being here that demands a fulfillment of the Path in the way we conduct ourselves in the world. Our mandate is to realize the natural guidance of Fruition extended into the (non-existent) ‘post’-meditative state of non-meditation (Conduct). We are compelled to act according to the profound entanglement and continuous change inherent to quantum reality. No longer do we inter-act with Others or Things. We explore a far wider definition of self. We enter a domain in which humans may no longer be considered the sole holders of agency in the world. In realizing an irrevocable union with the world, we also come to know ourselves within a matrix of mutual influence. According to Karen Barad’s agential realism, we intra-act with the whole, as the whole acting as itself, acknowledging and celebrating that unity. From this view, we make no distinction between short-term, parochial, or individualistic agendas commonly identified as the basis of identity politics or with a more subjective definition of justice. On a nondual level, since we are One, we seek justice not for the few or even the many, but for the One.

Nonduality & Meeting the Meta-Crisis

Below is the first in a series of posts, perhaps five, on what the non-dual view implies for our outlook and behavior in relation to the deepening global crisis we are facing. It is meant as an exploration, not necessarily a definitive conclusion.

Humanity is in the grip of a rising confluence of conditions which are becoming more evident, more palpable, and more pressing by the week. Some of these conditions have reached existential proportions. Taken together, they reflect a flawed worldview, a grand delusion generating deep trouble for life on earth. That delusion has us believing, as in the past, that all contingencies will coalesce into a drama wherein we will create new ‘solutions’ to address old problems. This has become magical thinking. I hope, as this commentary continues, it will become clear that this framing itself ispart of the crisis. Not as though we are ineffectual when it comes to exercising influence in the world, just that our earnest efforts cannot continue to spring from within the imaginal realm in which we live. Fortunately, our vision is clearing. We are discerning the magnitude of the consequences of our actions. But we do remain captured by a conception of who (or what) generates influence and how it is propagated. Quite simply, how we see the world is always becoming the world we see. This is the central concern. 

The primary issue addressed here is nonduality. What is this view and how does it implicate action in the world? If embodied nonduality were to replace our old ways of doing things, becoming a primary critical framework, representing our true nature as well as the necessary shift in worldview, then that embodiment, since it implies an end to separation from nature, would naturally direct our action. We would be embarking on an extended, if halting, return to sanity. Perhaps not so immediately away from a dualistic view, but deliberately integrating the non-dual into a wholistic perspective on our presence, which is what Buddhist philosophy says we are already doing anyway. Moreover, that embodiment would not rightly be characterized as a manifestation ofnonduality. We would be exploring the totality of Being itself. It is not even our nature we would become; we would be realizing the nature of nature, becoming actors aligned with the nature of reality itself.

To fully realize the nondual view, though, is not a conceptual event. It is not something to be attained. Just the opposite. It is innate. Few, if any of us, will make such a total and immediate transition to a nondual view of Being. Transition will be gradual, filled with moments of regression and confusion, carefully monitoring our habits of thought and noticing how deeply we are captured by linguistics. But along the way, we will divest ourselves of the very idea of attainment or, for that matter, non-attainment. Nonduality can be described and lived, but it is not an object of persuasion. It arrives with the collapse of intellect, of any distinction between self and the world, between so-called internal and external experience. Granted, this is a radical proposition, but not beyond our grasp.

Acting from the nondual view does not require grounding in any spiritual tradition. But we recognize there is something intrinsically spiritual about it because of this principle of embodiment. There is something deeply resonant about establishing an energetic coherence between earth and sky, between mundane existence and the Divine, the micro and the macro-universe. This is the implication of full embodiment. To establish that coherence is to approach the supreme union found at the heart of all spiritual traditions. That union is expressed in the awakening of the heart itself. No world view nor any conceptual filter is required to enter nondual mind. It is accessible to anyone at any time. Yet also, nondual mind is not just another ‘experience’; it exists beyond experience. Trungpa Rinpoche said our attachment to ‘experience’ is the medium of our capture by the world of suffering. Spiritual development is entirely about interrupting the reflexive (and almost instantaneous) attachment to the matrix of values and beliefs that drive our lives. The issue is also not solely how the nondual view may inform our expression in the world, but also how a worldview confines and inhibits our expression.

Approaching this topic therefore requires three things: 1) that we comprehend the nondual view 2) that we define the Meta-Crisis and realize its mechanics 3) that we understand how the two are related and formulate a new approach to being in—and aligning with—reality.

The Nondual View

Articulating the nondual view is the first principle to resolve toward a more effective engagement with everything. My immersion in nonduality occurred through Vajrayana and Dzogchen practice. According to that tradition, any description of the awakened state defies logic. Its nature transcends logic entirely. But we may apply a simple nomenclature to our experience which can help us grasp the essence of nonduality. The Vajrayana framework of awakening provides perspective on delusion, suffering, the self, happiness, and all the neurotic or self-limiting behaviors and obstacles we face in this interval between birth and death. That framework is distilled into three elements, or ways of understanding our individual and collective journey: Ground (View), Path (Meditation), and Fruition (Conduct).

The Ground is defined as the pure, unconditional, uncorrupted nondual nature of reality, the ontological nature of mind, deeper than any definition of self, undermining the centrality (and existence) of self altogether.  It is the truth of what Buddhists call emptiness, the ultimate nature of phenomena (lacking any intrinsic nature). The Ground is the foundation, the embryonic source, the preconscious substrate in which we are ultimately held. It is the fundamental unity of all things and from which all phenomena spring. Everything is subsumed within it. It is wholly positive. Its nature is unwavering stillness, confidence, and trust.

Path is our experience in the world of form, where we become aware of our internal responses to experience. The evolution of awakening is applied to the interval between birth and death, piercing ignorance, delusion, working with all dimensions of our internal process, arriving at an ever more refined comprehension and resolution of the elements of personality (sensations, perceptions, mental activity, and consciousness) which contribute to deluded states of clinging and repetitive habits we experience as suffering. These elements of what we call personality, our flawed and biased ego-identity, are the primary temporal limitations of our individual and collective lives.

The Fruition is the full realization, the awakened state, the choiceless condition, reflected in our intra-active presence with the world. It is the arrival of supreme confidence and trust in one’s capacities, knowing that, in the words of Nicholas Lattanzio, “you can’t really make a mistake because there is no ‘you’ that could choose to make a mistake.” The culmination of traversing a Path of awakening may take a single life or many lives, even eons of lives if we were measuring by the standards of what we imagine as time. It is the accomplishment of resolution and release from the elements of personality arising in meditation, the dissolution of habitual mental patterns, from the cycle of self-defeating interpretations of sensations and perceptions, of thought and consciousness.

This interval from the first breath to the last is the karmic realm, governed by the law of return. If we look at this seemingly linear course of events through the nondual lens, we realize that in an absolute sense, there is no such thing as isolating a View to cultivate, no Path to traverse, no Conduct to undertake, no Fruition to achieve. Such distinctions are artificial. They are all equally present and completely interpenetrating. To focus on achieving any state of realization is a relative phenomenon, not an absolute. To indulge in such phenomena is part of the ‘self-improvement project’ which captures so many of us. It is the familiar application of antidotes, conceptual remedies (solutions) to what we regard as our flawed view. For the nondual viewer, there is no linear quality to experience whatsoever. To think otherwise would be a self-deception. Within the logic of nonduality, the essence of every phenomenon is none other than the Ground, the nondual state itself. There can be no distinction between such things as ground, path, or fruition. No personality project can exist because everything is already perfect.

This awakened state is the essence nature to which all nondual teachers refer. It can be found or lost to everyday awareness, but since it exists out of time, as the substrate of everything, it is always present, always true. It cannot be lost. It can only be found. It is the bright and empty and fecund interval within every instant, always shining in uncreated beauty, transcending every form of suffering we may inflict upon ourselves. It is a resting place between raw direct experience of the world and the instant of identification with experience, safely labeling and categorizing everything so that it fits within our comfort zone.

Though uncreated, it is intrinsic to all experience. It has no identifiable source. To be more precise, ground, path and fruition are all happening simultaneously. There is no progression from one to another. There is no objective barrier preventing us from experiencing the unity and inseparability of all three, the clarity intrinsic to all three. We cannot even say there is any such thing as experience since it implies a distinction between an apprehend-er and that which is apprehended (subject and object), neither of which can be found.

In this same sense, we can even say there is no such thing as meditation since meditation implies a meditator and something to be meditated upon. In this way, subject-object duality reigns. In nonduality, no such division exists. Even so, in a relative sense, meditation reveals the nature of the world or the nature of mind. We can conjure images of the world we want or focus neurotically on self-improvement. We can extend gratitude, love, healing, and compassion to ourselves or others. We can project a multitude of things.

Meditation is entering the process of creation. Sitting like a mountain I become the sea, then the tree then the silence of abstraction. All mental and existential exigencies climax into a death rattle. Meditation is entering the process of creation. The exact moment of birth of bud to flower, of cloud bursting into rain. It is a natural process in its movement into creativity.

The ground zero where eureka manifests is meditation. It is that swampy Sundarban where man-eating tigers prowl looking for errant minds. Meditation is the moment of the big bang which sent matter oscillating into orbits creating planets and ecosystems, milky ways and blackholes. Meditation is a time warp where thoughts run parallel and in accompaniment falling off the cliffs of illusions. Then there is no parallel left.

Meditation is like the Pied Piper leading away the rats of Hamlin into the sea of ubiquity. Where the cobra folds its fangs and burrows for the winters, there is meditation. Where the sunning cat ponders the dancing wag tail, there is meditation. All that is in the big bang moment of creation, which is also destruction, there is meditation.

      —Meenakshi Negi, Dehradun, India, 2023

The nondual condition has no object of being, no experience-er, nothing to be experienced in an absolute sense. If ground, path, and fruition are in perpetual union, there is no one to meditate, nothing to meditate upon. Whatever we imagine meditation may accomplish, it is already here, arriving directly in the disguise of relative experience. If from the nondual view there is no such thing as meditation, then there is also no such thing as post-meditation. Any division between a moment when we are focusing on relative attributes, any intention, or witnessing all qualities of separation between phenomena dissolve is no longer separate from any other moment. No division of the indivisible can be found. Linear time has dissolved. Our access to the nondual view is complete and uninterrupted. Every moment becomes a meditation or, more accurately, non-meditation.

All binaries collapse. There is no such thing as freedom since there has never been bondage. There is no rest since there has never been fatigue. There is no clarity because there has never been confusion. The same can be said of every apparent polarity by which we distinguish between phenomena, good and evil, friend or foe, pleasurable or painful, constructive, or destructive acts. As we fully examine this field of being, looking beyond duality for the moment, we see no intrinsic value structure nor any means by which to measure phenomena, no code, and no law. All phenomena are thus equal, arising independently and spontaneously from an origin that is no origin whatsoever. Every phenomenon is equal to every other phenomenon. This is not a denial of the imbalances of the world as we know it. It is the basis of the uniform nature of nondual awareness.

Quantum theory supports this view. Karen Barad, in her comprehensive Meeting the Universe Halfway, claims no evidence to confirm phenomena exist prior to our engagement with them. We do not engage with the world because it exists. It exists because we engage with it. This claim is the result of decades of meticulous experiments interpreted by our finest minds. Since our engagement with and influence in the world is irrevocable, no singular phenomenon can be identified nor referred to as an isolated event. ‘Phenomena’ refers to an emergent relational flow of co-creation, an ongoing mutual engagement. There cannot be any such thing as a singular phenomenon. How could it be isolated, or even exist, if there is no thing to intra-act with it?

When we say all phenomena are equal, we are referring to ongoing intra-active mutual creation. This is an animist view of the universe, attributing agency to what the material view would regard as the inanimate. We are received and conceived by the world in equal measure. As this is so, we must accept that we exist as a holographic universe, each of us the whole manifesting as a part just as other ‘parts’ within our field of existence are expressions of the whole. What appears to us as the material world has agency, just as we imagine in our supreme arrogance, that humans alone possess agency. We are removed from our pedestal of supremacy.

Being and Becoming

Despite the widening fissures in the foundations of modernity, the failure of conventional reductionist thinking to account for the truth of our social and biological entanglement, the manifest deconstruction of artificial binaries such as gender, race, and even truth and falsehood, the stripping away of mythologies of growth, the free market and identity politics, being and becoming remain co-arising epistemologies—ways of knowing the world that continue to pester and confound. One predates the Enlightenment and the other arises from it. Yet another binary is erected—as if being is a stabilized way of interpreting the world, adhering to the imperative of Reason, while becoming is a more fluid—and honest—representation of the ongoing mutability of reality. Yet, as quantum mechanics informs us, the implied stability of being can only be artificial and unassailable objectivity has never existed. 

This is a tough pill to swallow if one’s entire worldview depends on a belief in immutable laws, that everything has its place and shall remain there. Yet critiques of our current condition remain at odds with the apparent difficulty of stepping beyond the deep tracks culture has already laid down. Differentiating these two conditions is foundational as long as we don’t get too attached to any of it. If we are to pursue honest critique, we must dance away from carelessly interpreting new information to fit into what we are already disposed to believe, avoiding contradicting even unconscious boundaries erected and defended to make ourselves comfortable, and toward new information potentially undermining everything we think we know. 

These two ways of knowing the world, being and becoming, either by assuming, in accordance with the primary Anthropocentric principle, or by de-centralizing humanity and recovering a capacity to experience deep entanglement with all life, that being is already formed, and becoming is still being formed, are not so much mutually exclusive as they are a shifting continuum. Like living and dying, they imply each other and cannot fully exist independently. One must be, or at least imagine stability to exist, to even conceptualize not yet being. And vice versa. The order of nature is neither one nor the other, and simultaneously both, so much as an emergence of possibilities within perpetual transition, becoming apparent depending on–as quantum theory tells us–where one is standing…and when. 

It bears repeating that the paradox of the particle or the wave is only part of the story. The rest of the story is that the observer is an inseparable part of the measuring process and the measuring instruments employed to observe a moment of reality. Taking the entire apparatus, the observer, the instruments and the observed into consideration, the entire intra-action becomes a unique phenomenon in which neither the observer nor the observed can be regarded as independent pre-existing determinate factors, but only become determinate in their intra-action. Neither do time or space pre-exist phenomena. They are created by phenomena which themselves establish apparent separability which did not pre-exist the event. 

The core human propensity to imagine a better future comes to mind. Here again we encounter Homo Prospectus, a theory that says habitual human focus on the future, being rooted in the belief in endless growth, that the yearnings of homo prospectus are driving our demise. It seems simplistic to assume this drive was born with the concepts of modernity or the philosophy of perpetual growth. This drive did not likely rise in the Enlightenment but is probably much older, if not intrinsic. But there is no doubt that over time, the pace of improvement, the rate of change, has hastened considerably along with the geometric increase in population. Regardless, we could designate religion in all its forms, indigenous to institutional to generic spiritual, as driving the need to expand, to fulfill some spiritual (if not exclusively economic) imperative, to aspire to a moral ideal, all for the sake of aligning closer to divinity. 

The impulse to improve on the present is intrinsic to the dominant religions of the world: Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam. We—well, most of us—transform our acts in the world to fulfill what is assumed to be a universal moral ideal and to address primal questions about why we are here. We imagine we are bringing ourselves closer to God to create a world in which all beings are perpetually liberated from suffering: Tikkun Olam. Is this not the thread of history, the continuous striving or at least the persistent expectation that we can always improve, that we are always becoming something we were not already, repairing our flaws, or perhaps uncovering something about ourselves that was previously hidden? 

Of course, there is great divergence on the methods of improvement which, by the way, are defined by reason. But still, we climb an endless stairway, building our personal, tribal, and national iconography of achievement, all for the sake of reaching a remote and ever distant objective. These religious principles, aspiring to something greater than ourselves, coming closer to God, pre-suppose we are not already good enough. We are not pure. We are fallen; we are flawed. We are not there yet. Is this not the cultural manifestation of the personal spiritual imperative? To establish being, to get there? 

This striving, whether native to the species or not, illustrates again the paradox of the Two Truths popping up through these chapters. Divinity or presence or a state of gnosis is depicted as an unattainable ideal yet also already here and now, though mainstream Christianity does a very good job of putting it off, even denying its accessibility in the moment. What’s more, a categorization of whiteness and western culture as a limited, transcendent, exclusive condition, projecting itself as the establishment and stability of being itself, contrasts with older, polytheistic cultures of becoming, in which we sense the degree of entanglement, dynamic play and intra-dependence upon the web of life as a continuous processional emergence of relationships, shifting, upsetting one another in a rhythmic ongoing parade of exchange and revelation. That is the opposite of the Christian vision.

Christianity is most closely aligned with the perpetual growth principle of capitalism in the sense that perpetual expansion and improvement drive behavior and innovation. In both, standing still, the end of aspiration, the end of growth, equals death…or even hell. And yet, in Buddhist cosmology, never having enough is hell. If there is a sense of being, of being stuck in an ideology of presumed existential independence, control, exclusion, and stagnation, it becomes a snapshot taken at a particular moment. The Enlightened vision of modernity is concretized and sanctified as a prop symbolizing our aspiration to being the most important species, to our presumption of exceptionalism, divinity, dominance, and permanence. That vision is rooted in whiteness and conveniently includes the presumption of white dominance.

Capitalism is aligned with and serves as the economic equivalent of religious dogma. By imagining our individualistic, unique, and exclusive relationship with a monotheistic divinity and eternity, we align ourselves with God while excluding ourselves from the world, imagining we are the shapers of events. Nothing about any of this squares with quantum reality or Barad’s agential realism. The world is transformed into the (cracked—and dying) mirror of our ascension. Its demise is therefore prophetic, preordained, and self-fulfilling. When that reference is unbound and expanded, the option and opportunity to see one’s life from a wider view of becoming is more accessible. But we might well ask, becoming what?

Again, a principle driven home to me many years ago in my own spiritual pursuits is the paradox (ironically, referring to ‘enlightenment’) of being-there vs getting-there. Deliberately living this paradox means acknowledging the intermingled realities of both being and becoming as constant and shifting influences. The definition of being refers to reality as an assemblage including everything. It might even be referred to as the truth of all appearance. Boundaries merely delineate ephemeral functional identities. There is no such thing as an isolated event. There is no convincing rationalization for being separate from the world. 

The sole intrinsic driving force of all ‘events’ is relationship in a vast and open matrix of spontaneity. The implication of such a state is the opposite of stable, the opposite of any reified identity or anything remotely referencing stasis or exclusivity. This is a restatement of the truth of emptiness, of infinite creative possibility. At this end of the continuum, Othering is complete illusion. All presumed binaries are false, nonexistent. The characteristics of becoming (in the world) are openness, inclusivity, spontaneity, and unity. These attributes ‘de-territorialize the binary’ quite completely and succinctly. There is no fixed space to be. There is only continuous, unpredictable becoming.

The myth of liberal humanist autonomy, the enshrinement of the individual, dissociates us from these pre-personal, greater-than-individual forces and conditions around us, presuming and affirming continuous and reflexive delineation (and destruction) of the world into subject and object. Comprehending reality as an assemblage in constant flux from which nothing is excluded is a conceptual leap. We are trying to escape the orbit of liberal humanism. Perception being hard-wired as it is, even if we are convinced of the futility of that trying, we gain perpetual refreshment by acknowledging that events appear to be separable only by our participation in them.

Thus, individually, we perpetually live on the edge between aspiration and arrival. At the cultural level, we in the West are still stuck in the story of modernity, perpetual growth, accumulation, coloniality and whiteness despite the irrefutable evidence of how violent and destructive this ethic truly is. We remain vulnerable to its entrenched and tenacious ideologies and ineffectual at confronting its purveyors. We continue to impose, even if inadvertently, the values of modernity on the transformational process we imagine or yearn to traverse by adopting a destination, an outcome. The destination itself becomes an obstacle. The journey to becoming is without destination, without resolution. We can never fully arrive. That is what being there means, perpetually arriving at a non-existent destination. Instead, we mutate, leaping from language toward a somatic molting unrelated to materiality as we currently know it. Mutation may turn out to be the discovery of an as-yet unknown cellular knowing, existing outside any conventional definition of transformation. An algorithm yet to be written. But there is no way there. There is no getting there. There is only there. 

The Inner Commons

Fortunately, attention is not a commodity to be plundered like a vein of raw material. It’s a renewable resource whose value never diminishes. The domain of the inner commons is where precious resources may be buried but not tarnished.

I’ve long thought we should all be compensated by social media for our contributions to their bottom line. Considering they regard my digital activity as a commodity to be harvested, I thought I deserved a kickback, or royalty, if you prefer. But alas, I never got one.

I thought it might be difficult, but disconnecting from sources of distraction to follow wherever my inner process might lead me was far more important; as we all know so well, it’s also necessary. Even more than necessary, with the distractions intensifying and the algorithms ever more refined as they reach into my amygdala or give me shots of dopamine, the act of unhooking has practically become an act of sedition.

Fortunately, attention is not a commodity to be plundered like a vein of raw material. It’s a renewable resource whose value never diminishes. We have the capacity to regenerate and explore the intangible wilds, connecting to the depth of existence, anticipating the unknown, a birthright of being human, where all we are and all we know becomes a springboard to all we can imagine. Deliberate acts of renewal sustain our imagination and creativity.  

Neglecting to swim in the sublime inner worlds of feeling and imagination generates distorted, disconnected, and addictive behaviors. Just as going into the enveloping silence of wilderness reveals an abundance so often ignored, or worse, never known, so descending into silence reclaims the inner wilderness. The domain of the inner commons is where precious resources may be buried but not tarnished. Continuously regenerating a capacity for uncluttered presence sustains our access to the vital wholeness and emergent nature of life.

If you think about it, competition for our attention has been ongoing forever but has only recently accelerated in reach and sophistication. The Catholic Church may have been the original multi-national corporation, as Dara Malloy calls it in The Globalizating of God, seeking broad and lifelong influence upon an individual psyche. Its function was (and remains) to define spirituality in its own image, to define religious thought, faith and ritual, to deny other manifestations of spirituality, to literally own God and influence how we focus our attention in all relations. The Church was the original wave of what is now called modernity. The Pope himself was the one who carved up the New World and decided which monarchs would receive the spoils. That enterprise presumed itself the zero-point of knowledge and morphed into the multitude of manifestations defining the vertical integration of attention and consumer behavior. The marginalization and extinction of outlying traditions was a cornerstone of empire and foretold the dominance of religion and its hegemonic designs on the inner terrain we continue to see today.

The simple act of turning off the cacophony of modernity to focus our reverence and awe on anything other than patriarchal monotheism is now a battleground. Institutional religion remains central to that conflict as a symbol (and instrument) of coloniality and exclusivity. In its most radically conservative forms, Christian Nationalism, the ‘originalism’ of Wahabbist Islam, even among ultranationalist Buddhists, it is the status quo, it is business as usual. It promotes an increasingly tortured tribal definition of prayer as devout and uncritical submission to (male) authoritarian hierarchy.

On the other hand, prayer and ritual have been part of how humans inhabited the world in all times and places we know, though it’s much more than mere submission, supplication or asking for personal favors. Prayer is invariably attended by silence, at least implicitly. It resounds with silence regardless of whatever sound, rejoicing or lamentation, may (or may not) accompany it. Supplication and prayer are all infused with stillness, a return to the primordial womb of creation. If modernity is all about doing, then prayer is a recovery of being. Prayer is an act of love, especially self-love. It leads us into the realm of paradox and movement, uncertainty and inquiry. It’s an act of reclamation and connection, bringing us closer to earth and closer to the deity, to the unity of each, whether mythological or material.

In its loosest definition, prayer is a catchword for humility, surrender, devotion and wholeness. It is an affirmation of belonging, reminding us of our place. Prayer can be a sensory adventure into hidden realms of nature, our nature. Laughter is prayer. Joy is prayer, by which we reach beyond ourselves, not to remind ourselves of a presumed personal relationship with an omniscient and omnipotent force, but to re-embed ourselves in relationship, in belonging with. It’s a perpetual doorway to the unseen. To pray is to open your heart and get out of your mind, whether nourished by ancient history, last week or this moment. It’s an invocation of the gifts of ancestors who continue to deliver their wisdom in a continuous release seeping into the soil of culture.

Rituals of allegiance and submission have become the objective of corporate presence in every aspect of life nowadays, to substitute for what once was an immediately accessible connection with our spiritual home. While churches turn increasingly into corporations, corporations have turned into churches. Instead of allegiance to a deity, we now declare fealty to brands, products, to the ubiquitous presence and seduction of ritual consumption, now framed as delivering all the same benefits we once received through family or community ritual practices restoring connection, wholeness and renewal.

This is the tragedy of the inner frontier. Such values are now associated not with places or group practices or the most intimate sanctum of mind, but with products. Patriotism substitutes for spirituality with America as the product. Starbucks is the ubiquitous church of the caramel soy latte. The supermarket houses myriad distortions of our primary connection to the true source of nourishment. Amazon has become the god of all gods, greater than Odin, Ares, Esu or Tutankhamen. Thou shalt have no other gods before me! Kneel!

(So, if you’re an agnostic, where do you go for a cup of coffee? Where do you buy a book or…….anything?)

In some quarters, the formalized practice of prayer or any of the common forms of mindfulness are being coopted as instruments of control. No wonder church attendance is declining so rapidly. There are also fewer blessings, offerings or sanctifications and a poverty of rituals grounding secular life in any ecumenical framework. Certain cultures or sects remaining true to such values, in which protecting the inheritance of overtly mystical practices in which God is immediate and personal, are deemed foreign, extreme or even dangerous. We need reminding that the nature of our god becomes the nature of our world. And it is these very disagreements about the nature of the deity, who owns it and how we use our attention to connect with wholeness which are hastening the collapse already upon us.

When our actions in the world are founded on devotion to a zero-sum lie, they become either rough, halting or tenuous. If we can face how disconnected personal and collective actions have become, we find ourselves circling around the truth of our brokenness–how truly heartbroken so many of us have become in this time of loss. Getting on our knees, figuratively or actually, may not be the (only) answer. But how do we imagine our actions can be entirely divorced from our beliefs about God, a supreme being, Pachamama, InterBeing, the Most Merciful One, ineffable spaciousness without beginning or end–or whatever its name may be? Which of your actions would you argue can be separate from any of that?

If we lived your lives connected to the inner wild while remaining connected to the outer world, how would that look? Or feel? Sitting with this question, I cannot help but see many of the expressions of devotion all around me as more bewildered and confused surrender, more disempowerment than prayer, most likely salved by another ritual visit to one of the new churches of our broken world.

Re-inhabiting the inner wilderness may not heal a broken heart, but it’s a start. It would surely remind us there’s so much more to lose, and to save.

The Easy and the Impossible

But honestly, tell me you can look into the eyes of stranger or even someone you know intimately without having this experience. Maybe not all the time, but with rising frequency. What do you see? A desperate search for signposts or guidance or truth or any modicum of trust?

My ex-wife used to say sex was either easy or impossible. There was no in-between. That was quite a declaration coming from a sex-therapist who helped people work through buried assumptions and emotional obstacles to healthy sexual relationships. I’m thinking the same principle applies to writing. It’s either real or it wanders off into strange and strained territory to become something else, like a mannequin, needing more and more layers of make-up to appear real, when actually, contrivance can never replace the spark of life. Even so, breaking through contrivance to live in reality requires more than a wish.

So it is with living nowadays as well, apparently. As the unraveling around us continues, the despair deepening and the warnings arising from diverse quarters, I spend another restless night processing the turbulence of the day in dreams, sensations, and images. I awaken without words to frame new (or ongoing) feelings, rising with aches and pains, old and new. I, like everyone else I suppose, continue to ride the rising tide of challenge and increasingly complex and fraught sense-making going on everywhere. In fact, it seems we’re all being continuously triggered and probably don’t even realize how vulnerable we’ve become.

I can’t look at anything anymore, food or energy prices, the tsunami of waste, the latest manifestations of systemic racism, nihilistic political agendas, vacuous declarations of so-called experts on cable TV, the creeping security state, looming mass evictions, the arrogance of empire giving oxygen to old tropes, the economic puppet show, the building wave of global (and domestic) refugees, the deepening divide over vaccination and especially the accelerating frequency of extreme weather events without looking at everything. Earth has a fever—we are all under its sway —and our behavior is approaching delirium.

I am unable to keep the blinders on or act unaffected. More and more comes packed into less and less, such that even the smallest encounters, like a simple hello, are loaded with import. If I applied the original adage to my current circumstance, I’d have to say with civic dialogue descending into chaos and governance hanging by a thread, with most everything we take for granted in upheaval, that life is approaching impossible. And it’s impossible to look away. If there is an answer, it’s to meet our vulnerabilities with unflagging courage, not retreat into a cocoon of falsehoods, to permit ourselves to be exposed, just as any sex therapist would suggest, remembering that hastily following impulses is a dangerous path and that love is stronger than fear.

But honestly, tell me you can look into the eyes of stranger or even someone you know intimately without having this experience. Maybe not all the time, but with rising frequency. What do you see? A desperate search for signposts or guidance or truth or any modicum of trust? Knowing we’re all undergoing a something in common, everywhere from your bedroom to your community to every place beyond, we are thirsting for the sparks of life breaking through the mirrors, the robotic or performative nonsense, and we are drawn to them instantly.

Amidst all the talk and the growing awareness of our predicament, I wonder if what I am feeling (and seeing) is the true nature of collapse. I can’t imagine how you are metabolizing this ongoing trauma overtaking us, but it’s become a pandemic in its own right. Not only are our primal rhythms under assault, but water cycles, growing seasons, the jet stream, soil viability, ocean currents, all are wavering and fueling increasing damage and desperate grasping for stability. All the boundaries that define us, most of which are enactments of coloniality, are blurring in a storm of converging data from biology, neuroscience, psychology, and spirituality, not to mention political ecology.

We are trying to birth ourselves into an as-yet-undefined world beyond right and wrong—or at least we’d better be– because nearly everything previously defined by the sham religion of modernity as right and wrong is part of the prison in which we are all held. Right and wrong are being brutalized, stripped of meaning, contorted, ignored, rendered inert by capitalism and the nation-state, shuttled off to a state-run home for advanced cases of moral equivocation. No wonder the maps are blurring and there’s extreme behavior all around us.

Are we seeking something new or are we reclaiming something as old as earth itself? Are we diverging of converging–or both? As a white person living in a (formerly?) white dominated world built on the bones and ashes of non-white cultures, where do I look for guidance? The world I grew up in, when the polarities seemed clear, when it was easy to say which side I was on, is dissolving. How we think, how easily we are triggered, the default psychic frameworks we relied upon are under reconstruction. Justice and injustice. Racism and so-called equality. Authoritarianism and so-called democracy. Sexism and so-called gender equity. Even war and peace wear rhetorical masks mocking their convergence. We can’t not notice that virtually every principle we once thought clear, activism, the definitions of problems and especially solutions all exist within the framework of modernity now under challenge. That template, with its innate violence, exclusion and systems of control, arbitrarily drawn international borders, sacred systems of law, language, commerce, faith, ritual violence and spirituality is just not working anymore.

Where are the signs of life coming from? Who knows better than anyone about the malignant appeal and tenacious grip of modernity? Who stands in starkest contrast to whiteness as the standard of humanity? Who embodies the visceral legacy of enslavement, throwing white privilege into high relief, and gives voice to the necessity of becoming a fugitive from the hegemonies of western culture? What happens to our bodies as conflict rises, as we perceive deeper layers of conditioning, peering past the constrictions of cultural and linguistic structures to a multi-colored coat of a new way? Even if I declare a tenuous independence, that my body is not for sale, to be occupied or even subtly directed, that my body cannot be taken or its treasures plumbed as just another profit center, I don’t yet fully know what that means. I only know that going deeper into the sensations of change with a willingness to notice and feel everything is required.

Very little is easy anymore, not even hello, but we have yet to arrive at a new functional baseline. But one thing is crystal clear: the impossibility of modernity, which has taken 500 years to realize, externalizes more and more and offers only faux benefits increasingly removed from lived experience. Quo bene, as they say. Who still benefits from that ongoing construction? Only a vanishingly small minority.

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.

Read more: How Myanmar’s Protests Are Giving a Voice to LGBTQ+ People

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.

Read more: The World Has Failed Myanmar, So Now It’s Youth Is Stepping Up

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.

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?