Emotional resilience

OPENING TO COLLAPSE

By Seemorerocks

The whole question of denial of the reality of humanity’s current predicament is one that has bothered me - especially in recent times when people from within the Transition and green movement - people that I always thought should know better, have tried to turn the whole conversation away from Peak Oil and catastrophic climate 

I have recently had another look at Carolyn Baker’s “Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilisation’s Collapse”  and found more than enough to reflect on - and to help me answer the question of why so many people are in denial.

She quotes people who who have written to her in the following way:

“I’ve just unsubscribed to your email list.  Your website is filled with negative stories and articles, and I need a positive attitude and do what I can to make my world better”.

She asked herself what the tone of such of a letter was - disappointment, anger, fear?  Perhaps some of all of those emotions, she concluded; but the main word she found to describe the reader’s perspective was righteousness.

She describes righteousness in this context as being a false sense of doing or feeling the “right thing”.  

The main problem with this attitude is that it leads to detachment from reality, illustrated by Barbara Bush (wife of Bush Snr) not wanting to trouble her “beautiful mind” with statistics about troop or civilian causalities in Iraq.

One example of this wishful thinking I encountered this last weekend when a good friend lectured me that you ‘can’t change the world’ so the best thing to do is to ‘look after yourself’ (‘you can’t make a poor man rich by making yourself poor’) - and everything would look after itself.

This comes pretty close to the ‘self improvement’ movement which says that the best thing is to unfailingly maintain ‘prosperity consciousness’ and ‘positive thinking’ which says essentially that if  things don’t quite work out then obviously I haven’t thought positively enough.

A lot of these attitudes are very related to Judeo-Christian thought and ultimately to a very deep fear of death.  Any thought that allows even the tiniest admission of our mortality (or that of human civilisation)  is seen as ‘negative’.

It is at its base a refusal to see our nature as animals and as an integral part of nature.  It is therefore ‘human-centric’.

To talk about the collapse of human and industrial civilisation, about the destruction of the world that we live in and depend on, is seen as a form of mental illness; ecologists are seen as ‘hating’ their fellow humans.

Carolyn Baker compares this addiction to ‘positive thinking’ as being akin to a situation in an abusive family where abuse is actively going on where a member of the family insists on ‘thinking positive thoughts’ and resents anyone who points to the truth of the situation.

Carolyn Baker in her book advocates a spiritual approach to the collapse of industrial civilisation that is based on being fully anchored in reality, taking on the emotions that arise and letting go -  denying nothing.

This involves fully recognising the truth, the way things are - to look at reality in the face.

This is going to bring up all sorts of emotions of fear, anger, denial, doubt etc.

We need to be able to accept these emotions, to give them space and to let them go.

This gives us the space for acceptance and provides us with an inner strength that allows us to act in a way that is free of fear.

Many people who have accepted Collapse have said that it has opened up areas in their lives that were not available to them before, that “I have never felt so alive before”

This comes from accepting and letting go rather than trying to suppress the ‘negative’ and replace it with the ‘positive’.

Carolyn Baker talks about this in the context of accepting the inevitably of our own mortality  as well as accepting that no species on this earth that has been so successful and reproduced to such high numbers has ever lasted forever.

The reality of all life is birth, maturation, decline and death.  In the realm of nature there is no ‘positive’or ‘negative’ associated with this - it simply IS.

She gives the example of the Dalai Lama who, most people will agree is a positive individual who is able to inspire many.  His spiritual practice is one of contemplating death every day.  It is precisely (as well as the development of compassion) this that allows him to be so positive. 

Another teacher, Stephen Levine says:

There seems to be much less suffering for those that live life in the wholeness that includes death. Not a morbid preoccupation with death but rather a staying in the loving present, a life that focuses on each precious moment. I see few  whose preoccupation in life has prepared them for death. Few  who have explored whatever might come next be it death or sickness, grief or joy”.

In conclusion, as Carolyn Baker says , there is nothing we can do about collapse, but there is plenty that we can do with collapse.  It can open up a whole new realm where we open up to other dimensions that have the potential to bring a sense of fullness and even joy into our lives.