THE QUAGMIRE

The ancient Dhammapada (300BCE) warned: “We are what we think: with our thoughts we make the world”.

Canada’s Mark Carney named it at Davos: the post WWII international rules-based order under US hegemony is over. The global pattern of nation states’ alignments and allegiances are shifting into new geo-political arrangements. Liberal democracy, under the sway of market-based neo-liberal economic orthodoxy, is waning. Right wing populism and authoritarian systems are on the march.

Many are asking whether the very idea of nation states is now obsolete. That as we seek to pivot to the idea of bio regional sustainability, drawing on ancient First Nations knowledge systems, should we instead be looking for new political systems, such as the Rojova experiment in the Kurdish region of North and East Syria?  Said to be inspired by the ecological-anarchist writings of Murray Bookchin. He warned: “The private ownership of the planet by elite strata must be brought to an end if we are to survive the afflictions it has imposed on the biotic world, particularly as a result of a society structured around limitless growth”.

Far from being a mere wartime anomaly or a localised ethnic uprising, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria represented a deliberate, mass-scale implementation of a radical alternative to the capitalist nation-state. For over a decade, this region operated as a living laboratory for a political theory that basically severed the concept of democracy from the structures of state sovereignty. Rojova showed that current human societies can organize themselves, on a large scale, around the principles of ecological balance, gender liberation, and decentralized cooperation even under conditions of total siege.

Canberra Senator, David Pocock, named it on ABC Insiders. The electorate can see that the current system is not working for them, but instead for vested interests. The tax system has driven investment into residential housing, increased the burden on workers (income tax) over investors (capital gains tax) and accelerated structural intergenerational wealth inequality. From a ‘workers’ paradise’ of the ‘fair go’, Australia has become a nation of winners and losers.

The winners don’t want to give up any of their privileges – be it tax concessions, subsidies, or government funding of private schooling for their children, to ensure their continued access to the corridors of influence and power.

The losers are angry and scared. They know the system is rigged and not in their favour. They are flailing in the slipstream.

Maybe it is time to think in terms if biomes: a future shaped by bioregional adaptation to a rapidly changing world, wrought by climate change and technology.  How do nation states and geo-politics fit into this scenario?

RUPTURE

Meanwhile, underpinning it all, even when denied, is the growing dread of existential ecological rupture. Global warming and climate change. Degradation of soil and water resources. An industrialised ultra processed food system that delivers obesity, immune disorders and actively degrades our health and wellbeing. An economic system of ‘churn and burn’ that delivers increasing levels of anxiety and depressive disorders, intensified by the wellness industry claiming to ameliorate it.

And then, the next big disruption. Big Tech and AI. The arrival of the Robots (Intelligent Agents), the new seductive weapons of platform capitalism. Promising greater 24/7 efficiency, productivity, convenience and efficacy to consumers. While Big Tech rakes in the profits, we wake up to monster data centres in our suburbs, gorging on scarce electricity. Biotech engineers offering the seduction of genetically designed offspring, not just to defeat inherited disease, but to create enhanced humans.

BUT MEANWHILE

The old economic mantra of achieving ‘small government’ and budget surpluses by using private capital to fund investment—in energy, infrastructure, housing, education, health, aged care and child care, has produced entrenched systems of wealth extraction through what economists call rent seeking. And what ordinary folk call scams—both legal and criminal. Tax evasion and minimisation strategies, profit shifting to tax havens, vested interest lobbying (think gambling, family trusts and resource taxing). Criminal scams in government outsourced services (think NDIS, aged care, child care, education).

It is why the Liberal Party mantra of small government and rewarding aspiration (the winners) now falls on deaf ears. As they divert attention to cultural blame warfare (harnessing the losers rage and despair —immigration, welfare, First Nations, gender diversity, youth. . . ),  the Murdoch Press champions their call to arms, and that old cultural warrior, Tony Abbott, seizes the reigns as the Comeback Kid.

Meanwhile the demand for government expenditure grows exponentially: for infrastructure investment, defence, the energy transition, improving sovereign capability in economic resilience, addressing entrenched disadvantage in First Nations communities, and most of all in the care economy: health, education, aged care and social services. Trying taking that away from the electorate!

Something’s gotta give.

As we can see, even the small changes to rebalance the tax system somewhat are being met with fierce resistance from the ‘winners’ in the name of ‘the losers’—the well-tried illusionist trick of political spin.  We all want these government services and subsidies, but we fail to address the question: how can we collect the revenue to fund them?

DISRUPTION

What we are witnessing across the world, in the surge of rightwing populism are the forces of reaction. The default from fear to anger, to blame.  Whether this is among the ‘privileged’ populations of the First World economies, or the structurally marginalised of the ‘Third World’ in the criminal and terrorist gangs of Africa, South America and elsewhere, and the ever-present opportunists of the criminal economy of the Dark Web and drug funded terrorism.

In Australia we see these forces at work. The One Nation surge around their working class heroine, Pauline Hanson even as she wings it in her new private ‘sexy’ aeroplane, a gift from Gina Rinehart, the arch resource capitalist of Australia. This peculiar mix of vulgar ‘white’ authenticity married to ostentatious wealth (you too can be a winner like me) that has been so successfully championed by Donald Trump through his MAGA movement.

A triumphant declaration of Australians getting the benefit of their resource wealth, being announced at the Gas Conference and welcomed by the multinational gas industry.

The illusionist trick par excellence.

ADAPTATION

Jim Bendell has championed the idea of Deep Adaptation in the face of the existential ecological rupture that is engulfing us. To counter the default to anger, depression and exhaustion, which has marked climate change activism, he has identified how to RECKON with what many see as a slow moving civilisational collapse for humanity, through six strategies of adaptation.

R  reality facing toward the collapse/polycrisis

E  emotional literacy through relationality to self and others

C  critical wisdom through logical reasoning, mindfulness, intuition and critical literacy (how language shapes perception)

K  kinship responsibility to all of life and the Earth itself

O  being responsive to situations through fluid organic meaning (ie not ideologically fixed) frameworks

N  numinous (spiritual) adaptability and realisation.

A BUDDHIST PERSPECTIVE

I think Bendell’s RECKON is a pretty good approach to the challenge of adaptation on a personal and socio-cultural level. However my own response to this is influenced by my personal journey within Tibetan Buddhism, which aligns closely with many of these strategies.

When my Enlivenment Network colleague, Mik Aidt, who is a long-term climate activist, said he wanted to explore the idea of JOY as part of his In Service of Life approach, it caused me to reflect on what we mean by ‘joy’; how this intersects with Bendell’s strategies of adaptation, and the very real challenges we face to enact them meaningfully.

I think a simple way to think about joy is delight, whereas happiness relates to ideas such as – contentment, pleasure, satisfaction. And in a relational world, such delight must be through a lived sense of interbeing; not causing harm or suffering to others.

And that’s the challenge. It is where our personal spiritual journey intersects with the socio-economic-cultural worlds in which we are embedded. Perhaps because of my intellectual background as a sociologist, specialising in technological change and cross-cultural perspectives, I have long been dissatisfied with a purely personal approach to the spiritual life.

I agree with the feminists. The personal IS the political.

But I also agree with the Buddhists that socio-cultural structural change is not enough, if we don’t address the foundational issues of our human embodiment. Jim Bendell’s six strategies enable us to include these.

However, the way in which we do this will determine how effective they can be.

From the Buddhist viewpoint, we are already inherently joyful (the qualities of our inherent wisdom nature, replete with compassion). All that we have to do is to get rid of the afflictive mind states which block us from realising this inner, inherent potential.

In the very first teachings that Prince Siddhartha gave in Deer Park near Varanasi, some 500 years BCE, he shared his insights from his own Awakening through meditative insight (by which he became known as Buddha, the Awakened One).

These are known as the Four Noble Truths:

• The Truth of Suffering (Dukkha), which includes pervasive frustration, subtle and gross
• The Causes of Suffering (Afflictive Mind States – emotional and cognitive)
• Cessation of Suffering (freedom from afflictive mind states)
• Eightfold Path to end Suffering (methods to attain such freedom) as developed in all the different vehicles (yanas) of Buddhism: Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana, in both their philosophical reasoning, moral codes and experiential practice traditions that we find across Asia, and now transposed and translated into modern Westernised culture.

RECKONING

From a Buddhist viewpoint, R (reality facing) towards the existential ecological rupture, which we face, requires us to also face our own psycho-social reality. This has two dimensions, which in Buddhism are known as Absolute and Relative.

The Truth of Cessation reveals that it is possible to become free of afflictive mind states because our own inner inherent nature is free of them and it is possible to experientially realise this within our very lifetime. This is known as the Absolute Truth and realising this is known as enlightenment, the ‘clear light mind’ of pervasive and limitless wisdom and compassion.

This dimension involves what Bendell calls N (Numinous adaptation), a spiritual journey that rests on our progress across the other dimensions. But there are many perilous false steps and misdirections on this path. Most of us need a well-tested guide.

The viewpoint of the Relative Truth is how things play out in the socio-cultural world shaped by humanity at the mercy of our afflictive mind states. In particular, for me, the long tail of the Enlightenment of 18^th century Europe (the new vision of reason, science and individual liberty), and its impact on my own subjective world. Here we are grappling with both E (emotional literacy – our intersubjectivity), and C (critical wisdom—logical reasoning, mindfulness, critical literacy, intuition).

For we inheritors of the Enlightenment’s legacy, we people of the modern era, it means understanding the way in which the flowering of logical analytical reasoning based on empirical investigation, rather than received religious doctrine, underpinned the Industrial Revolution and the rise and rise of the global techno-scientific cultural hegemony of the West.

—A logo-centric world of abstract universal categorisation and measurement, shaped by humanity as the objective ‘outside observer’ of our world, including our own sense of self, increasingly an object of marketing frenzy.

—A strengthened binary of mind (mentation) versus body (materiality); of ‘man’ versus ‘nature’; of ‘reason’ versus ‘intuition’; of individualised ‘self’ versus objectivised ‘other’.

—A world where instrumental reason trumps morality; where the end justifies the means. Where enough is never enough in a world based on endless growth and consumption, and the use of science and technology to feed human ego-grandiosity – whatever the cost

—Where we must understand how language shapes perception, including our own subjectivity. Where we face the full consequences of the modernity/coloniality complex.

But the Buddhist focus is not this outer socio-cultural world of our embodied inter-beingness, but the way the afflictive mind states work in our own particular circumstance, our own subjectivity to shape our world.

This takes honest introspective awareness (not just mindfulness to address anxiety disorders). Letting go of them takes many skilful means of transforming their energies into wisdom and compassion, as they often have deep unconscious roots in our childhood and are reinforced in our culture of competitive individualism and hyper-consumerism.

The Buddhist viewpoint is far from nihilistic. Its optimism, courage and resilience, which gives us the means to face and transform these afflictive mind states, is our growing confidence that they are adventitious. They can be removed: they are not inherently fixed, even if deeply habitual.

Inner freedom from them is possible and this is what constitutes spiritual enlightenment. Not some higher state to be ACHIEVED, but a natural state to be realised/actualised within – a state that is replete with limitless joy.

And for those of us, fortunate enough to have met and received teachings and guidance from spiritual masters who exemplify this, we have seen how this is indeed possible.

The Buddhist path is not about ‘Getting’ divine knowledge or ‘obtaining’ a Higher State of Consciousness. It acts counter to the whole thrust of modern life—of ambition and acquisition, of fame and recognition. It rubs up against the main tenets of modern culture,

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, one of the first Tibetan Buddhist teachers to engage with Western ways of thinking about the world, wrote a book called ‘Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism’, which addresses how ego-ambition is our spiritual ‘enemy’, the temptation we must forgo. So much of the religious world and new age spirituality is infected with such spiritual materialism – the search for, the getting, the wanting, for ME and MINE.

Instead, N (the numinous spiritual journey) is about losing, letting go of ambition, coming home to our true inner ‘self’ which is the ‘non-self’.  We discover, experientially, that we are not trapped as an isolated individual in search of fixed identity and affirmation through success and reputation. Instead we live in flow, moment by moment. Change is possible.

It is only by overcoming this egoic spiritual materialism, and increasing our capacity for wisdom and compassion that we can truly embrace K (compassionate kinship relationship with and responsibility for all of life on Earth) and O (organic meaning-making, cosmologically in tune with the impermanent, fluid and open nature of quantum reality).

MAKING IT PERSONAL

One of the driving forces of my life has been the desire ‘to know’, even to understand what ‘knowing itself’ is. This is what brought me to Buddhism and informs my interest in the work of our Enlivenment Network. The shift from the logo-centrism of Western enlightenment thinking to the embodied relationality of Enlivenment thinking and practice. I call this the ontological shift that is slowly bubbling away beneath the noise of mainstream media and the techno-scientific world. Like a mycelium network of fungi beneath our feet.

I was lucky enough to find a spiritual teacher whose first instruction to me was to NOT read up on Buddhist philosophy, but to read the life stories of the masters (to soak myself in their lives and get a feel for the spiritual journey and its mysteries and unknowability). To embrace not-knowing, rather than pursue my habitual pattern of intellectual reasoning. But nor did his teachings ask me to abandon this. Instead, they offered me a rich mixture of the analytical, the experiential, and the embodied mystical that became comfortable with not-knowing. However, for those of you who know me, I still easily fall into being opinionated when it comes to the socio-cultural world. So, the habit is strong.

BUT

This gave me the confidence to realise the journey was about freeing myself from my human vulnerability to afflictive mental states – destructive emotions (from the subtle to the gross – anger, greed, pride, envy, jealousy, prejudice, indifference) and distorted views (all the way from scientific materialism, the false prophets of new age spirituality, to right wing conspiracy thinking and religious dogma).

The JOY comes from this process of freeing, and the gradual opening up of a new way of being in the world to face life’s many challenges both personal and societal as we RECKON with our existential rupture, both personal and societal.