Tag: resilience

Where Did Deep Adaptation Come From

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

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

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

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

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

Resonance: An Emerging Ethos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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