The Anthropocene is named in recognition of the role and impact of human presence on the planet. On one hand, it credits the ideologies of objectification, manipulation, and control while giving lip service to renewal and restoration. It acknowledges humanity as a geologic force, capable of terminating itself. But as the engine of modernity is driven by the increasing precarity of debt and profit, the motive to preserve those elements is overriding anything more than half-hearted gestures toward real solutions. Maybe we truly need to collapse to find our way again.
Ironically, being predisposed to see ourselves separate from the earth is returning to haunt us in the form of directly harmful effects. All the progress, innovation, new technologies, consumerism and even the politicization of scientific inquiry are returning to us in the form of a poisoned atmosphere; micro-plastics in breast milk, human organs, and clouds; nitrogen fertilizer residue in arctic ice crystals; toxic deposits in our bodies. ‘Forever chemicals’ are in rainwater everywhere. Our capacity to reproduce is steadily diminishing. Addictions of many kinds appear, along with pandemics of psychological disorders such as depression and anxiety, ‘cured’ by Big Pharma to profitably micro-manage behavior. Those who refuse to recognize or participate in this entangled world are finding increasingly extreme, exclusionary, rigid, anti-social and violent ideologies ever more appealing. Instead of celebrating or even investigating the end of the solitary and unique self, there is widespread and increasingly threatening retrenchment into selfhood.
Surrender
Here the dance between complexity and simplicity becomes more apparent in the evolving possibility of entering March’s third level of development, Presence, discovering our intrinsic nature, stepping out of striving for self-improvement. The inertia of the prevailing system is great, even if slowed by advancing vulnerabilities. We cannot retreat into the fortified redoubt of the mythic old man clinging to the throne of power. Just as in the possible ways we might address a personal journey through critical illness, we are faced with a choice to cling to the past, regardless of the increasing risk of sudden and unpredictable adverse events. Or do we let go of the ideology of control in favor of a wholly different quality of being, surrender? Even though we are increasingly aware of the deep fragility, the illusory nature of control, exploring surrender leads us to unfamiliar territory. The option of loosening our grip presents itself when we sense a mounting resistance to the complexity of this time of profound grief, loss, and great upheaval.
To expand into surrender brings us closer to experiencing things as they really are. We return to simplicity. When we contemplate surrender, we relax into a more open space. Our descent into grief is deliberate, even as our increasing intimacy with the atrophy of the biosphere becomes unbearable. An absolute space of unconditional compassion glimmers at the heart of all we know, as if we are walking into a river, step by step, sinking ever deeper until we allow ourselves to be swept away into something much bigger than we could ever imagine.
Imagine how it might feel to slip effortlessly deeper into the enveloping embrace of compassion expressed as the inertia of the meta-crisis--or whatever the terminal condition might be, even with the possibility of disorientation or even pain. Perhaps we will open to the true nature of life as the incomparable, dynamic, troubling, bewildering ongoing play of compassion. This is an essential element of the non-dual perspective. If we can cultivate that knowing and learn to return to that space, what do we find there? I’m not speaking about resignation or collapse or helplessness. I’m speaking of fully opening to the truth of our nature and to life itself. In surrender, whoever we imagine we are, all the complications and baggage and story we’ve accumulated and carried around for a lifetime dissolve into an essential wisdom. We come closer to connecting with the wisdom that bore us into this world as well as to the unmetabolized grief for the losses, the unwinding of life systems we are enduring.
Net-Zero
Even though we have clearly entered a post-humanist, post-dualistic age, corporate marketing continues to purvey the tortured linguistics of ‘sustainable growth.’ Industrialized nations are abusing the promise of reconciliation between nature and technology while doubling down on ‘profit-oriented bio-economics,’ continued environmental and social devastation, and the reification of economic and agrotechnical dominance. Even the ‘green economy’ has been co-opted by this attitude. The monetization of nature and the creation of bogus financial instruments (there is no way we can plant—or trade--enough trees to offset our emissions) by ‘fake green globalists’ to capitalize on ‘ecosystem services’ has put the green economy on the path toward expanded privatization of land and water, all of which is foundational to the devastation we are witnessing.
Corporate messaging lauds Net-Zero as if sustainable growth is a thing. Such doublespeak is proffered as an acceptable human objective. It’s another example of how our addictions cloud our judgment and entice us to address ‘problems’ in ways that repeat the errors of the past, offloading negative externalities to distant unborn peoples and ecologies. Net-Zero simply re-frames, delays and clouds our determination and ignores the intimacy of the world. What we require is a full accounting of the ongoing violence, an investigation of the net-zero of Net-Zero. This is a much deeper search, a more difficult, but more honest approach to concocted neoliberal delusions.
The ethic of perpetual progress continues to operate as if the world can be contained. When the trance of presumed technocratic control is broken, our compulsions come sharply into view. The artificiality of so much of modern life begins to emerge in high relief. The option and opportunity to see one’s life indelibly connected to all life in a living matrix becomes more accessible and can never be sundered. We are immersed within the living whole as the whole and sustained only by the whole. This is the knowing that drives Presence.
Collective sympathetic arousal based on a model of scarcity and competition is gradually entrained to a lower harmonic. We approach a new cognitive and neural baseline. This is not the invention of a ‘Third Way,’ out of the deep divisions of modern politics. It’s more like ‘no way,’ a condition to which none of the standard labels apply. The way of ‘no way’ steps entirely out of the field of choice into another dimension of action. Nonduality heralds the end of sacrificing the commons for the sake of corporate convenience, the end of monoculture, wherein we plough the monochromatic flatland. It stands in sharp contrast to any exclusive personal relationship with an externalized divinity. It augers the end of growth for its own sake, the end of time, even the end of death. This is the gateway to tantra, the dissolution of dualism. We enter the cycle of continuous renewal in which death is not an end, nor is birth a beginning. We have yet to see evidence of a mass shift toward this quality of commitment to a culture of life, but it is only a primary principal of full-cycle aliveness that will enable a truly sustainable future.