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.
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 is hell. 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.
Presumably March has a first name? Apologies for not being in the know, but I'd love more context so I can seek out additional information about this "Parts" paradigm this person apparently came up with.
Thanks much...