[Music]
Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing
series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We've done nearly 700 of them now. If this
is new to you and you would like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P,
and look under the past interviews menu. This program is made possible through the support
of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to help support it,
there are PayPal buttons on the website and a page that explains alternatives to PayPal.
My guest today is Professor Cem Bendel. He is a world-renowned scholar on the breakdown of modern
societies due to environmental damage. Downloaded over a million times, his deep adaptation paper
is credited with inspiring the growth of the Extinction Rebellion movement in 2018
and created a global deep adaptation network to reduce harm in the face of societal collapse.
He completed his PhD at the University of Bristol and his geography BA with honors at the University
of Cambridge. For decades he has worked on sustainable development as a researcher and
NGO manager as well as a consultant to businesses, political parties, and UN agencies. One of his
His specialism since 2011 is pro-social currency innovation, with his TEDx talk from that year
explaining reasons for Bitcoin and similar.
In 2017, he co-led the development of the UK Labour Party's communications plan for the
general election and co-wrote speeches for their top politicians.
Although recognized in 2012 as a young global leader by the World Economic Forum, Cem has
has been increasingly critical of the globalist agenda on sustainable development.
Away from that work, he is partner in an organic farm school in Bali, and supports meditation
retreats at the main Buddhist temple on the island.
You may think that that last sentence I read is the reason why I'm having him on Batgap,
because usually we're talking all about spiritual things, but there's more to it than that,
you'll see as we get into this conversation. Incidentally, his latest book you can see over
his shoulder there, Breaking Together, I listened to the entire thing as an audiobook, it's about 18
hours long, thoroughly enjoyed it. I listened to the introduction twice, the introduction alone
took over an hour to listen to. But there's a whole background in my thinking and understanding
of why this idea of societal collapse is pertinent, and I'll elaborate that as we go along.
but I want to give Jim a chance to say hello and introduce himself and give us the elevator talk of
What he's all about let's pretend
There's a societal breakdown happening and they were stuck in an elevator for two hours
And you can give us the talk but we can start with a more
condensed version
Thanks for the introduction Rick. Yeah, and those who have joined us. That's good or watching later. Hello
I'm joining you from my
I'm back in my dad's apartment back in the UK. I don't live in the UK, but this is where I spent quite a few months
Particularly last year
Writing the book in fact, so I'm actually looking almost with a bit of nostalgia around the room
Just that process of writing the book for example. I open the book talking about my dad's
parents my grandparents and
The way they used to chat and that's because I've got pictures of them
I just that was basically why I did that because I was sitting underneath a picture of them as I started writing and you have
to start a book somewhere and
That was why an elevator pitch about me or the book of the book
Okay, the book's called breaking together and it has a twofold hypothesis
First is that um the foundational systems of modern industrial consumer societies are
breaking, they're collapsing into each other. So we're already within that
process that can't be fixed and therefore I make the case that collapse
is the accurate word for that even though collapse is an unfolding process
will go on for some time and it will be experienced differently in different
places. But the second part of the thesis in breaking together is that we can
break together rather than apart in that context by which I mean the fact that
all the systems, the institutions are breaking, it's somewhat of a judgment on
their legitimacy and that therefore can invite us to rethink all our previous
assumptions, preoccupations, things which kept us busy, stuff we hoped for or
believe might happen one day. It brings us very much into the present moment as
rethink our values, how we choose to live in this time, who do we want to be.
So that bigger societal breaking leads to an inner breaking which can actually allow
us to be something incredible.
And so in the second half of the book I talk about lots of people who I'm impressed by
and the way they're responding to this.
So that's also why the subtitle is a freedom loving response to collapse.
I recenter human freedom, personal and collective, as important to a value to
maintain as things get tough because the thesis in the book is that it wasn't
human freedom that led to this carnage but the fact that we have been
manipulated from birth to death through something I call imperial modernity
pumped up and maintained by an expansionist monetary system basically
encouraging us to behave in ways where we feel numb about the damage in the world
and we are tough with ourselves, with each other and with nature. We feel life
is tough and I go into great detail about what I call the money power and
how it's promoted those dynamics and fed those aspects of ourselves that we
wouldn't consider to be that great, that positive, to an extent that it then hit
ecological limits and ultimately is collapsing the societies that it's helped
build. So yeah it's promoting something what I call
eco-libertarianism. So it was an attempt to make, what should we say, an offer of a
political philosophy and framework for an era of collapse, one that's a political
philosophy that's solidarity based because I see a lot of authoritarianism, a lot of
nostalgia politics, conservatism, all sorts emerging as people get more and
more nervous about their lives becoming more and more difficult and the future looking
more and more bleak.
So I wanted to offer something else into the mix as we try and make sense of this new era
of collapse as I call it.
Okay, let me give you my perspective which I already did in an email.
I think you agree with some of it and not with all of it but we can play back and forth
and try to arrive at a common understanding.
As many of my listeners will be aware, a lot of people who would consider themselves spiritual
or interested in ancient traditions, the wisdom traditions of the world, have been feeling
that we're due for some sort of big upheaval, that the current systems are not sustainable.
You know, many of them believe that this upheaval will be necessary and that on the other side
of it, we'll have some better world, you know, some more enlightened world, and so on.
I've been thinking this way since the 70s, not as a certainty, but as a theory of how
things might unfold.
And I see all, like you mentioned, monetary systems, I would consider all systems, political,
monetary, agricultural, technological, everything that's a product of human beings, to be a
reflection of the mentality or the ambient level of consciousness of the people in the world.
And obviously, some people are more powerful than others, more creative in producing things than
others, but basically, it all reflects human mentality or human consciousness. And what people
think, what various prophecies have predicted for many years, going back to the Babylonians and the
the Hopis and the Mayans and so on, is that some kind of big shift is going to happen
in collective consciousness.
And when that happens, and I do believe it's happening now, all these systems won't work
anymore because they reflect a lower level of consciousness.
It's like a kid who's growing quickly and trying to keep wearing the same clothes, they
get too tight, he has to bust out of them and it destroys the clothes.
That's my view in a nutshell. I've been meditating, as many people know, for most of my life,
and I've been interviewing hundreds of people, all of whom are undergoing really profound
shifts in consciousness and their awareness. And I buy into the notion of collective consciousness,
perhaps reminiscent of Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious, but that consciousness
is not just a product of the brain, it's a field, and brains are more like sender-receivers
that interact or tune into that field, and I believe a shift is happening in collective
consciousness. Perhaps not so much created by people, but actually people are more like surfers,
they don't create the waves, they ride the waves if they're able to do so, or they wipe out
if they aren't able to do so. And I think you're correctly predicting and explaining in detail
how a lot of structures are wiping out, but there are others who are skillfully surfing the waves
and actually experiencing a kind of a spiritual renaissance within their own lives as a result of
this upwelling of, you could say, enlightenment in the world. So that's enough of that and let's have
your response to it and I'm not in the least bit sensitive if you want to disagree with any or all
all of it. Yeah, thank you. You've covered quite a lot. So I'll start at the end.
What you just said that a lot of people are experiencing some kind of spiritual
upwelling, renaissance, whatever, precisely because of their recognition of the
amount of trouble in the world and possibly if they're unlucky they've been
through a hard time because of ecological damage and various different
implications there from because we know that hurt, we know the tragedy, we know
the grief and despair even can be a very powerful means of people letting go. So
in psychology the theory is called positive disintegration which is actually
about oddly the even the benefit of proper clinical depression in part of
that spiritual transformation and that's as you say you mentioned ancient wisdom
So even in the Tao Te Ching, they talk about the path to illumination is through the dark.
So you can find it in all spiritual traditions, the importance of this dark night of the soul.
So yes, I would say that's happening a lot.
The guy who introduced us, Reverend Michael Dow, that was a big part of his message
and that was what he really was dedicating the last years of his life to.
He passed away recently, very recently and very suddenly, unexpectedly.
It's amazing to see how many people really were impacted powerfully by him.
The clarity of his post-doom message that you can't avoid the despair
once you realize how much carnage has happened already, happening now, going to happen,
why it's been done and how we knew for so long but didn't change.
all of that pain. You can't just sidestep it and make it go away.
But there's something else on the other side of that, the pain of that realization,
which is, yeah, to live in wonder, gratitude, recommit to service, creativity, live your life,
try and be the best ever person you can be, precisely because you have that feeling of
essentially mortality on your shoulder. Again, back to spiritual wisdom, Ram Dass talked about
living with death on your shoulder and love in your heart. So just at the end
of what you were saying I just want to connect with you on that and say
absolutely at an individual level that's something I'm noticing and then
therefore at a community level because a lot of those people are connecting to
help each other and to realize that people can respond not necessarily in
that way that I've just described but just some kind of ego transcendence
because of this realization. People can respond almost like with ego affirmation
and psychologists call it worldview defense. There's something called terror
management theory, I don't know if you come across it, but whereby where people
feel threatened, they feel their safety threatened, they therefore feel their
identity and worldview threatened and they can double down on it and become
quite illogical about it and ultimately violent. And the theory arose from
analyzing the rise of religious fundamentalisms but I think it applies
very much to looking at people within modernity than, for example, some scientists who are
very committed to the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, doubling down on
how good it is, that methodology, and how perfect it is according to scientific norms,
despite current temperature measurements.
Which methodology are they doubling down on?
The desire for consensus.
IPCC there's a desire for consensus where there needs to be a preponderance of
information published, peer-reviewed, for it to then be considered acceptable.
However, what that means then, for example in my book I talk about it, it meant that
in 2014 in their big report they were talking about future sea level rise and
the lowest range of the projection was actually lower than measured sea level
rise from satellite measurements that year. And that was because there had been
dispute over how much melt from glaciers on land was going to contribute to sea level rise compared
to other things, basically thermal expansion of the oceans. So because there was dispute about how
much it would add, they disregarded it altogether. So that is one example, but it shows you if there
wasn't consensus, they would disregard it. And there's huge complexity, for example, around
tipping points and therefore very difficult to agree that and so a number of positive,
so-called positive and self amplifying feedbacks were also
set aside, not all of them. But it's that desire for consensus.
So the thing is, now, September's was 1.8 degrees
Celsius above pre industrial average temperatures, which is
decades ahead of official consensus scientific
projections of the past. And yet we still have some people in the
field of science doubling down on their view that people like
me, and there are many people like me who five years ago said,
this looks really bad and much worse than what the IPCC have been telling us.
They're doubling down on that we were wrong, we were reckless, we were unscientific, we were naughty,
we were upsetting people unnecessarily, and that we should just stick with the consensus
establishment science. They're saying that now even though it's obvious. I'll say as plainly as that,
people like me who were trying to spot what was most salient, so for example I was looking
specifically what the oceanographers studying the Pacific were saying,
but we were right and the people who were slavishly following IPCC
were wrong. Now that doesn't need to just be seen in terms of vindication. Science,
when it's siloed and institutionalized, it's self-restricting in how well it can understand
what's salient to society. There's a huge amount of literature on that.
So, about consensus. Obviously, science is supposed to work by consensus, but scientists are all very
siloed because they have to specialize in their little niche in order to advance the field,
and a lot of them just don't communicate with each other. And scientific consensus,
even if it's broad, can be wrong. For instance, the predominant paradigm is that consciousness
is an epiphenomenon of brain functioning, whereas a growing number of people like David Lormer and
the Science and Medical Network and many others feel that consciousness is fundamental and everything
arises from that. And if they're right, then the whole scientific edifice is upside down.
And you talked about the Pacific just the other day, a tropical storm turned into a Category 5
hurricane in 12 hours and devastated Acapulco. And yet, half the politicians in the United States
won't admit that climate change is a real thing and don't want to do anything about it. Trump said
it was a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to gain some economic advantage. And occasionally I hear
from some climate denier who brings up Judith Currie. I don't know if you've heard of Judith
Currie, but she's this woman who has credentials and who says that there is not a like 99%
agreement that climate change is being caused by human beings, but that scientists are
cowed into towing the line in order to get funding and stuff. And if they were to
dispute the predominant narrative, they would lose their careers and so on.
So anyway, that's a few different random points.
When I was talking about this issue of what terror management theory tells us about
worldview defense, and there can be this doubling down on your worldview and identity
in ways that become illogical and quite aggressive. And I said, that's not just
religious fundamentalists. That's also or it can be climate scientists, and we're beginning to see
that. So the reason I was making that point is that the response to the
terrible situation we're in for the world's biosphere and the implications
for societies and ourselves and everyone we love, the terrible situation we're in
can lead to the ego transcendence. It is a spiritual invitation and
some people can respond to that invitation. However my view is and my
experience of that and also psychology research I believe shows that. That's not
certain at all and in fact I published in a psychotherapy journal on this. In fact
it's when people feel very unstable and threatened they can also become
authoritarian because what you do is you try and find a new identity structure, a
new form of safety, a new kind of belonging. You have this generalized
and anxiety, you're told where to run to and who to trust and who to hate, who to blame.
So Hannah Arendt and others say that that was what was happening through the Industrial
Revolution and changes to society which led to fascism rising in Europe. So we could see
some of those same potential responses today. So not only the breakdown of societies, but
the recognition of just how bad it is, the terror associated with that deep existential
terror. The loss of a sense of meaning can be either a moment of spiritual
transformation or it can be a moment of derangement, being manipulated by
populist authoritarians, becoming aggressive and leading to lots of
violence. So I believe there is a role to play for people who've done their own
work, who can find a way of being calm within this storm and help people
through this and so yeah with the deep
adaptation forum that I started we
kicked off I think in March 2019 I
worked with it for about 18 months and
then left it but very much it was
focused on how can we help each other be
with this really emotionally tough
realization rather than rush to oh we'll
fix it with nuclear power or I don't
know a billionaire will fix it or we
can't do anything blame the Chinese or
it's a hoax yes just hoax they just want
controls. We just wanted to help people be in the pain, support
each other, work through the emotions and think what the
options for the future for them, their communities might be. So
that was the initial focus of that. And that was why. So you
can see already that no, I do not agree with you that this
will make almost like an inevitable collective
transformation of human consciousness to a higher level.
Now I didn't use the word inevitable, by the way, but
continue. Okay, but some people do, some people do. So what I see is that there
are different ways of responding and part of the way I can feel okay with my
understanding of the world as I see it, the way I can feel okay is to try and
help more people respond curiously, kindly, creatively, bravely. That gives me a sense
of meaning and a sense of joy and I don't think I would have any other way of
of responding. So I want to go back to what you were saying about poppy prophecies and
the idea that we're going to go through a lot of trouble, but that's just almost like
a rite of passage basically, like a maturing of the human species in our consciousness
to emerge into a spiritual and ecological civilization perhaps.
For some reason I was reminded of Rudyard Kipling's poem, "If", you know, "If you can
keep your head while all about you are losing theirs". As you were saying that, I was on
a boat ride with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1974 and he was talking about this phase transition,
as he called it, that was going to happen.
And it was sounding a little scary and someone said, "Well, how can we survive this?"
And he said, "Hold on to the Self."
And by that he meant kind of capitalist self, you know, in the Advaita sense of realize
your true nature.
So I think this is where spiritual practice comes in because you were talking about how
different people react to societal chaos in different ways. Some go scampering to the
dictators and others find it as a catalyst to spiritual awakening. I think that whatever
else one does, and I believe you follow this advice, if you have some kind of effective
spiritual practice or orientation or something, it's going to help because you'll experience
that there's a deeper dimension to life that is unperturbed by the chaos that happens on
the surface and it'll help you whatever happens, even if you die, it'll be good to have that
inner presence as an anchor, as a foundation.
Yeah, so I've found a number of things helpful myself.
I learned a lot through doing a Vipassana and doing it with a monk who really, it was
was just a wonderful experience because I think there were only about six of us
and we had quite a while every day then in dialogue one-to-ones with the monk
and this unpacking, this disaggregating of stimulus, reaction, emotion, thought, new
emotion, disaggregating all the stuff that goes on and then realizing wow I
I can have different mind states which will make me more able to just witness and let go.
A calmer, open, more loving and gentle to myself and to the world mind state.
Or I can have a more fearful one or a grumpy one and how that all influences that chain of events
between stimulus, feeling, thought, feeling, thought, action.
I guess another way of talking about it is just recognizing the extent to which
we ourselves and everyone is a bit bonkers and if you can just slow down
the process so that we breathe and we can witness what's going on then within
that there's a chance for more wisdom doesn't necessarily mean there's
more wisdom but there's the chance for it so obviously yeah mindfulness
meditation and also for me discovering something called authentic relating and
circling and I use that a lot in my teaching on these topics because it's
basically doing meditation but in dialogue because you're witnessing
what's going on with you as you're engaging with another and in Buddhism
it's also as some people call it insight dialogue these techniques. I was blessed
to have discovered those two processes in order to therefore not just be
consumed by my feelings and I've had periods of panic looking at some of the
science over the last five years and then looking at the news of what's
happened with more, I don't know, 30 degrees in the Arctic Circle of tundra
forest fires and permafrost melting and stuff. It does trigger in me often these
waves of a kind of panic but at least I can witness it and see it as these
things are just happening to me. The other stuff of course is any spiritual
tradition invites us into a different sense of time. So we're not so bothered
with either like what am I doing this year or what am I going to achieve in my
life even. It's just realizing there's an eternal flow so that sense of expanse of
reality can also help. In my case and in many people's cases there is what is
known as faith to many people which is that no matter how bad things are, no
matter how unnecessary the amount of suffering and destruction that's
happened and is happening now and is to come, there's some kind of deep ultimate
rightness and it's a faith which is not super logical, it's experiential, it's
connected to mystery and wonder and just going wow isn't it bizarre and amazing
to be alive and that existence exists. So for me that's a faith which is also
sustaining and I know that can sound a bit odd to some people like oh that's
just your privilege speaking when you're really suffering is that really going to
be there but I hear from people who've had terrible suffering that that faith
has stayed with them so connect immediately on that point. But you
mentioned some other things there are two things you mentioned you mentioned Judith
Curry and current denialism, do you remember? And you mentioned ancient prophecies and the
fact that there are lots of people who have since the 70s realized that we're
living in an unsustainable industrial consumer society and there will be a
collapse and there will be a transformation and yet they've had
this in sort of a way of this is what we need to go through and then we'll reach
the promised land perhaps in the end. And then you mentioned, what an amazing phrase to say
that you were on a boat with Maharaj. Great, anyway, that one. Okay, so I'll just start
with Judith Curry because that's the least interesting. Should we get that one out of
the way?
You have a good memory, by the way, I appreciate that you recall all these points and you're
coming back to them.
So actually, Judith Curry is a bit right and a hell of a lot wrong. She's a bit right that
there is institutional pressure on climate scientists who want to succeed and get funding
and climb up the career ladder and that they have had what's called carbon tunnel vision.
She and John Christie and others are right that there was a huge attempt to make it all
about carbon dioxide and play down other factors that influence not only climate in the past
because of course climate was influenced by all manner of things before humans
influenced it, but also to play down other possible
impacts on climate right now and in the future.
So my chapter in the book actually says yes you're right
Judith Curry and John Christie and the others that
there was a little bit of massaging of the data sets in order to produce the
hockey stick graph to make the medieval warm period not
appear and to ignore the fact that actually prior to human influence, temperatures rose,
global average temperatures rose, hundreds of years prior to carbon dioxide levels in
the atmosphere rising. So this is called the carbon lag and they hit that. Now that doesn't
mean that we don't have a massive problem. It means the opposite. It means the problem
is far worse. It means that because we put more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 50%
CO2 in the atmosphere in the last 200 years, it is without doubt a gas which
traps infrared heat and will warm up the planet. But what that means is we've done
that, we've raised temperatures and what the paleontological records show is that
means we have committed carbon, meaning as the oceans warm up they will release
more carbon dioxide, as the soils warm up they will release more carbon dioxide, as
as the forests get hotter and drier and more diseased, they will burn more and
they will switch from being sinks to sources of carbon dioxide and that's
being shown already for many of them world's most important forests. So it's a
lot worse than what mainstream climatologists say. So I say to the
climate skeptics like Curry and Christie and the rest, you're
right and therefore it's a hell of a lot worse. So it's not what you're saying it
The other thing is the carbon tunnel vision meant that we didn't focus on the hydrological cycle and how it's very clear that forests now play a global role in seeding clouds.
So for example, the pollen and the bacteria given off by the Amazon will not just seed clouds above the Amazon through evapotranspiration locally, but will actually seed clouds in Tibet.
And what this means is that the world cloud cover is influenced by the amount of forest
cover on the ground.
And we have trashed forests.
We've cleared as much in the last 200 years, I think, as in the previous 9,000.
And this rate went up massively since the 70s through economic globalization and basically
spreading consumer capitalism around the planet since the 1970s.
And so that correlates with a rapid rise in temperature.
And so, yeah, in my book I talk about how we need to broaden our understanding of the climate
emergency. It's not just carbon, it's also methane, it's also forest cover. And we have
to accept that actually it might well be totally catastrophic for life on Earth, including
our own species already, and we can't do anything about it because of the committed carbon,
because of the amount of heating that we've already started. We're already looking at
1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial in 2023, decades ahead of when the official projections
were. So a lot of people hear that and they think immediately because they maybe haven't
disaggregated the thought, emotion, reaction, mind state and critically analyzed their culture
because they're totally wedded to consequentialist ethics. They think, well, that guy who's just
said that he's telling me to give up he's telling me not to try and cut carbon
draw down carbon restore ecosystems no I'm not I'm not saying that at all I'm
saying don't do that with any fairy tale that we're fixing the climate and we're
getting out of this mess so do it absolutely let's do as much as we can
but don't be attached to the outcome and most people if they allow the despair
I'm talking about environmentalists who work on this stuff allow the despair. They don't just quit then I say I don't care anymore
I don't want us to you know
Cut carbon or restore wetlands and forests and get toxics out of our food chain and whatever
They don't they go back to it. They go back to it with a passion, but without being so attached to
stories of techno salvation everything getting fixed so that's my answer to
Judith Curry and all that lot and that's why I really recommend people who are interested in climate change read chapter 5 or listen to it
Like you did for free on SoundCloud or download it for free. You can gem bend all comm
EPUB, so you can put a link to it on your back at pace
So I'm a contrarian on climate because in the same way we talked earlier about the problem of institutional and siloed
or any science it has its limitations and there are silos there are hierarchies
there's cultural influences so yeah I am persona non grata with people like
professor Michael Mann who Curry and Christie hate because they were I think
fighting with him in the early days of the IPCC stuff about all this and he won
basically and they lost and so they're pissed off with him but yeah Michael
man hates my work because he wants to keep it, you know, this
is a gradual warming. And as long as we have the right
technologies and the right policies and the right
entrepreneurship, the right leadership and all the little
people do as you're told, then we'll fix it. That's probably
believes that. Well, that's been his narrative and I have not
talked to him. I have no idea what he really believes, but he
maybe he absolutely believes that I have no evidence to say
doesn't believe it. You know what I wish? I wish that there were public debates properly moderated
so people aren't just shouting at each other quite lengthy like this interview on various issues,
you know, COVID vaccines and climate change and gun rights and abortion and all the issues that
are tearing society apart because otherwise it's like, you know, here in the states some people
are listening to the extreme right-wing media, others to the extreme left-wing media, and they
they just get their assumptions reinforced, but there's no communication.
And there is probably some truth on both sides, although as Stephen Colbert puts it, I think
he said that the truth has a liberal bias, at least that's my bias.
But in any case, I wish there were public dialogues where people could engage in really
learning and hear both sides and give people ample time to rebut each other.
That would be so healthy.
I agree and we've got the opposite of that as you said and what's extremely painful for
me having spent almost three years working on this book, so the first 18 months were
commissioning research papers from specialists in various areas and then working with them
because it's covering all manner of areas of scholarship and then a year writing it,
is that for example there's a whole chapter on free will. I spent a long time looking at
that and that's also based on previous years of interest and reading on it and
someone will send me a one-minute tick-tock video from someone who I may
have finished her undergraduate but she labels herself your friendly
neighborhood neuroscientist who's saying no there's no free will because a study
shows that it there is no free will yeah because they measured that there was a
impulse from I don't know in the arm to tell the hand to move before the brain
and send it to the arm and I have I talked about that study yeah I talked
about that study just last week in my interview with Ruth Kastner who's a
physicist that study has been thoroughly rebutted and totally rebutted and yeah
it doesn't take you very long you could just type in to Google that what was the
study you could use AI now what was the study that showed this it would come up
with the name of the study and then you just go to Google Scholar even you don't
even have to use any in the morning you were scholar and just type it in and then
see who's referenced it. And then you'll see the number of
rebuttals or people who tried to do the same study or proved how
it was wrong. And no one else has managed to do a good
neuroscientific study disproving free will. And it's precisely
because no one have managed to create a good study,
experimentally disproving free will with neuroscience, that
people keep referring back to that one, which is old and
debunked. And guess what? No, it's fresh now has got a million
hits on tik tok. And I'm being sent this by my friend. It's
like, since when did you decide that this is how you're going to
learn about the universe? Which is kind of cute. Oh, is that why?
Okay, well, I'm probably not going to be a TikTok star. I'm
not cute enough. So yeah, we are going in the wrong way in that
sense. But what I've realized is, if you are more than an
armchair observer, if you are engaged in any issue of public
note current affairs, more than just wanting to feel good about yourself, get a dopamine
hit, get a few likes on Facebook, you're more involved in it than wanting to feel angry and
self-righteous in order to have a bit of escape from your general anxiety or dull feeling of
meaningless life. If you're more involved in an issue, whatever it is, than those reasons,
want to know, you want to dig and inquire, you want to hear differences of opinion,
you want to check and double-check your understanding and therefore for me the
people who've most committed to really understanding this are the people who
have decided to risk arrest and going to prison. The climate activists in
Extinction Rebellion, five years ago when they decided that they were going to glue
themselves to trucks or whatever, they had to really convince themselves of what
they were doing was based on a fair analysis of the science. And
they really, really looked into it properly. And they were
right. And what's amazing is three of the exile co founders
extinction rebelling co founders just published a letter saying,
well, they should have just said is, Hey, everybody, we got it
right. And all you sort of careerist climatologists who
slagged us off in the mass media made us out to be extremists
who got the science wrong. Well, you were wrong. But no, they
were basically saying we got it almost right but we had a bit of carbon tunnel vision,
we should have been thinking about aerosols, we should have been thinking about forest
cloud seeding, we should have been realized that ocean health matters massively to the
climate, we should have realized it was a broader agenda, we tried to talk about it
as a broader agenda, the ecological crisis not just climate, we tried to stick to the
idea that this is a near and present danger for us and our loved ones but we had all these
climatologists with all the power of sitting on IPCC committees, and all this
sort of "we want to help you, we want to help you be more scientific" and we
watered down our analysis and our message and we shouldn't have done because
actually they were wrong and we were right. So yeah, there was a public letter
and then in response to that 70 scholars from around the world, 16 countries, I was
one of them, we signed a letter saying the scientific community needs to learn
from its mistakes. It needs to realize also when it's badly disparaged
scholarly activists now who are facing prison and an apology would be the least
way of making amends. As far as I know the many many climatologists who've said
many derogatory things about climate activists in the last five years haven't
come out and apologized and said actually they were right and I was wrong.
I agree with what all these climate activists are saying and I agree with
what you're saying, and who am I to agree, but based upon my paltry understanding, I
think you're right. But I do take issue with throwing tomato soup at artworks or gluing
yourself to stuff. I mean, that just makes these people seem crazy, and I think it weakens
their credibility to most people. Do you agree with those tactics? I mean, surely it makes
headlines, but it makes headlines like, "Wow, these people are nuts."
So, yeah, well the tomato soup wasn't actually on the artwork itself.
They chose the ones that had glass pane covers.
Oh, that was nice of them.
Yeah. The thing is that many... I mean, that's the Just Stop Oil campaign,
a spin-off to Extinction Rebellion.
Many of the activists in Extinction Rebellion do many, many things.
And it is interesting that the ones we've heard of are the ones you've mentioned.
Now, would you have heard of all the other things that they've been doing if the ones
didn't throw the tomato soup on a glass-covered painting?
This is the problem with the way our media communications are in the world.
These stunts seem to be the only things that you'll get to hear of.
So if they didn't do it, you wouldn't hear about what Extinction Rebellion is doing otherwise,
really.
I don't waste my time.
I don't participate in those kinds of nonviolent direct actions, disrupting
sports events and stuff, it's not my bag, but I am aware of, and I acknowledge,
I acknowledge the argument of people like Roger Hallam, who say that people like
you, Rick, and people like me, if we really believe this to be an existential
crisis, that will fundamentally change everything and damage everything and
cause awful, awful, already is but will cause a lot more awful problems in society.
His message is get out on the streets and okay do something else but it's non-violent civil
disobedience and the only reason why they're doing these high profile stunts is because
there aren't enough of people like you and me alongside people on the streets causing
havoc in a peaceful way.
That's his message, I acknowledge it and I believe it's equally valid to my view which
is I don't think there's much point in doing that. I'm much more interested in
getting ready in communities for the collapse which I believe has already
begun so I'm more interested in turning to neighbors who where I live to try and
prepare for the breakdown of industrial consumer way of life and to learn from
this and to resist authoritarianism in all its forms and I actually think some
of these activists stunts actually sort of help legitimate authoritarianism
because it means leads to more draconian policing, more draconian laws, more I
think undemocratic use of the court systems by judges. I can't go into that
too much because those ridiculous behavior of judges in the UK to restrict
proper trial by jury. So yeah I acknowledge his argument and I disagree
with it. I'm choosing a different path. Okay should we go back to those
prophecies and whether... Yes, good, you read my mind.
Anyone today in a Western, or even though let's not even say Western, anyone today
in a modern urban culture reading about ancient civilizations and their
prophecies, reading about or learning about indigenous peoples and communities
alive today, any of us looking at that, we're bringing our own mental models
from modernity and that means although we think we might be learning we're
actually projecting from our culture on to their own forms of wisdom. So I talk
about that in the book as well. Some of the habits of modernity which are very
deeply ingrained is this idea of anthropocentrism or anthroposupremacy
the idea that somehow reality exists with us at the center. That's one thing.
Another is that we're always progressing either materially or in some other way.
So like what is new can be better, will be better than the past. So just let's
just take two of those things. With that you can end up coming up with the ideas
in conscious evolution where it's like, well, it's our destiny as humans to evolve to a
higher consciousness. And I think the opposite could be what's happened because there is
such incredible wisdom in indigenous societies. And also, I think about it, I think I may have
mentioned it in my email to you, I can't remember. I'm working not with that many, but with a
few farmers in Bali in my organic farm school and they don't have all the
education and they don't really know about all manner of things. It would be
weird to talk about a planetary future for the whole Homo sapiens and that's
all just weird blah blah. I don't think they are any less awake. In fact I think
there might be more awake than the people who write blogs and send emails about a global brain
awakening and planetary consciousness emerging. I really don't like what I think is the implicit
modernity and patriarchy, anthroposupremacy, that's sort of lingering in that worldview,
that we are all going to come together in a global consciousness that's awakening and progressing.
Yeah, it's patriarchal. It's like, no sod it. Why can't you just be happy that...
What is really frightening, I think, for a lot of people in Western modern culture is
that, no, it's our culture that is omnicidal. That humans lived for hundreds of thousands
of years without screwing up the planet in the way that we've done in 200 years. And
even today, 4% of the world's population is indigenous and where they live, there's over
about 80% of the world's biodiversity.
Now, what does that tell you?
And if you look again, it's also a bit annoying to hear for some people, but
so much of the archeology and anthropology of the past years has been racist.
So basically it's, it's assumed that the first peoples were somehow not stewarding
and working with their environments.
And actually looking at it again, for example, now we know that the Amazon
was not a wild untouched environment, but a wild garden one and that hundreds,
if not thousands of species in the Amazon because of millennia
of human settlement. And there are many examples of that in
North America, too. So no, there was incredible complexity,
incredible wisdom, and trashed by Eurocentric culture,
originally colonialism, but then that became this sort of what I
call imperial modernity and taken to the extreme, like all
of that on cocaine because of an expansionist monetary system.
and a lot of people, older people, privileged people, often white, living in
the West, are attracted to stories which absolve any sense of guilt. And I think
you don't need that, but I know a lot of people do. So be like, oh this was
predetermined overshoot, any species would do this and it was just, what was it in
the William Catton book, natural exuberance. No, not at all. That's not what
the latest scholarship shows. So just because our culture, our system, when I
say our I mean modernity, which came from colonialism originally and just because
of that is at fault for Omnicide doesn't mean that we sort of just get lost in
self-hatred. An interest in an aversion to blame and shame is itself an aspect of
modernity and the Abrahamic religions that modernity was built on. You can just
let all that go. And that's what I've also loved from my own Buddhist reading and
sinking into this and this notion of pre-forgiveness because the way somebody
else is, the way I am, is just the same consciousness having a different life
experience. So there's no possibility of damnation of self or other in some kind
of deep level. So you don't need to worry about shame and blame. I actually believe
that the stories of the problems of our time being necessary to go through to
some sort of higher consciousness, I see that as culturally very specific, pretty
racially and culturally insensitive and the people who like it tend to be people
of privilege in a particular culture because it makes them feel better about
the horrors of what's happened and what's to come. So yeah that's my take on
that and the positive side of it I would say is and how it relates to a more sort
of beautiful heart opening kind of philosophy is simply nature and the
universe is perfectly imperfect. We don't need to think about any transformation
to get somewhere. We label things good and bad. This is a human thing that we do
but life is unfolding and we don't really understand why and all the destruction
is super painful but if there is eternity then life will come again both
on this planet and elsewhere in the universe and if we believe that organic
life or complex life even if it's not organic is is somehow deeply meaningful
in the universe then the possibility for that always existed to create what we
are today, so it still exists. So for me actually, what I've learned from my
reading of Buddhism is just is this deeper acceptance of everything that we
might label good and evil, good bad, dark, light, just sort of is. So I want to be as
present to it and as engaged with it. I want to witness it and I want to be
there for other people as much as I can be and not lose myself too much into
stories of sacrifice and service. I want to also have fun, therefore not be bitter about anything.
Okay. You may be aware of Brian Thomas Swim, you know Brian? I interviewed him a year ago, maybe.
He has a nice little quote, which is that you leave hydrogen alone for 13.7 billion years and
you end up with giraffes, opera, and I don't know, rose bushes or something. And illustrates nicely
a point which I believe, which is that the universe itself is one huge giant evolution machine.
Greater and greater complexity is arising out of simplicity. And in so doing, forms are
being created through which the primordial intelligence that gives rise to the whole
thing can become a living reality through you and me and mosquitoes and angels or whatever
else may exist, Indonesian farmers. But everything's evolving. I would say everything's evolving.
You said in your email to me that these farmers in Indonesia don't need to evolve spiritually.
That's just a matter of philosophy, I think, but I think everything is evolving spiritually,
like it or not.
Everything, everyone.
And this thing about the ancient cultures, firstly, again, there's no inevitability.
I didn't use that word.
My friend Dwayne Elgin made a little video in which he outlines several different possible
scenarios of how things might go.
of them involves breakdown into chaos, but the first one would be continuing chaos for a long time.
Second one would be some kind of AI-driven, Chinese-style authoritarian world. And the third
one would be that we do experience a spiritual renaissance out of the ashes, so to speak,
and this collapse will be seen as having been necessary for that to come about, because under
the current systems and structures, it really couldn't come about.
To Dwayne's one, I would add a fourth, which is this idea of collapse going for a long
time. But there will be good and bad, there will be spiritual renaissances and the opposite
of that, all happening at the same time. So for me, I see a future for the human race
this century of there being a lot of beauty, joy, love, spiritual transformation, and also
a lot of hate and violence and stupidity, ignorance, delusion, derangement.
As there is right now. So many people living these blessed lives, you know, and then there's
all hell breaking loose.
I talk about this in the book, is that okay, so some people say, yeah, okay, what you said
sounds right but don't you have a vision? I said well yes I do because I believe
that so much of the suffering is as a result not of human nature, not as of our
freedoms but because we've been so oppressed through an expansionist
monetary system and the way it's shaped us and I talk about it in great detail
in chapter 10 in the ways that it's shaped our experience of reality and
encouraged us to behave and feel and think in certain ways and not others and
And so, yeah, my vision is that where we are freed, more and more of us are freed from
that in order to be more of ourselves.
Which what does that mean?
Well it means to be more in discovery of what it is to be us and to be in connection with
others and to be in connection with nature.
And for some people that might include experiencing non-ordinary states of consciousness which
which might affirm their sense that consciousness just isn't in here, but is shared.
It might include them realizing that maybe there's some sort of universal consciousness.
They may label it God, they may label it the Akashic Record, they may label it an Atman
or an Anatman or whatever, you know, loads of words out there, concepts, framings out
there and I've got to the point of thinking that if you start getting attached to those
stories then you're back in fear, you're needing order to latch on to. Some people
won't, some people will have joyful caring loving lives and they won't necessarily
have had an altered state of consciousness where they've experienced
we space or universal transcendent being and they will think that when they die
that's it they're just skin and bones and they're gone. And then they'll be
pleasantly surprised. Well yeah but also they'll just be loving caring good
people anyway? Sure, yeah, absolutely. I know people who have been meditating for decades
who are absolute jerks. In fact, there's, I think, a spiritual egotism that often happens
with people who think they're superior and intolerant.
I had this very recently, because death of a loved one really, really helps bring this
into focus. So you know, my dad just died, what, three days ago, and I'm sitting by his
lifeless body saying goodbye I said out loud so dad I don't know I don't know
whether I'm speaking to you as a consciousness right here right now which
is like a congruent dad consciousness and if it is I want to say this and then I
don't know if you're just merged with the universal consciousness already I
whoa what a trip that is so you've like rejoined like wow lucky you I mean
That's weird. Look, there I am next to my dead dad.
But if that's true, wow!
And then, oh, geez!
But even in that way, there might be an imprint on that Akashic Record
that is dad's consciousness, Peter Bendel consciousness,
that will be reincarnated in a new life form.
It's like, wow, you've got an amazing trip ahead of you.
Or, you're just, that's it.
None of you exists anymore apart from the impact you've had on people.
and the ability of people like me to now have a conversation in my head with my idea of you
which I've been doing which is fascinating to find I was having this conversation with my dad
in the hours before I got to the nursing home knowing he'd passed. So it was almost like he'd
come alive as a being for me to talk to but maybe that's the only way that he's still alive which is
so just in in people's memories of him and then I thought well if that's the case this is what I want
want to say to you. And I think even if I have more we space moments and more
periods of experiencing collective consciousness and telepathy and so I've
had all of those. I'm lucky I've had those in my life. I say I'm lucky because
it means I know there is more. I'm not quite sure how there is more. I don't
know what words are best for describing it. I don't think my dad wasn't as
lucky. I don't think he ever had any of that. But I think I'd be okay with that
not knowing the way I've just described it. Because if we get attached to the stories,
as you were saying, people who meditate for decades as well, I think it takes us away
from being nice and kind to each other and ourselves.
I think that's the bottom line. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I don't think
that if somebody's been meditating for decades, it means that they're more highly evolved
spiritually than some simple farmer or anybody else. We all come in at different levels.
So there was another point I was making there when I said that, which is that basically
an Indonesian farmer like Kadek, he's our farm manager, his carbon footprint and ecological
footprint is infinitesimal compared to the many people who will be pontificating about
some great spiritual revolution after the collapse and carnage of the biosphere and modern societies
which they've contributed to far more than Kodak.
Which doesn't mean they're not right. There might be some spiritual revolution even though
they're polluting like heck.
Yeah, but you see what I mean? It's like, well, maybe Kodak doesn't need a spiritual
revolution. What I'm saying is it's a very culturally specific story. This is it. Stories,
become popular amongst specific people and groups because they serve the person in some
way. And for me mindfulness can be connected to this what I call critical literacy in the
book which is actually deconstructing these frames and these narratives and saying well
who's being served by this and who's not. So for me I often think well a lot of these
stories in the western spiritual community or now the western doom-a-sphere can actually
just be helping people change nothing in their lives and carry on consuming and
just feel a bit less bad about it. So this is with Michael Dowd I was always saying
very interested to explore this with him always which is that you know he's
spreading the good news that actually after collapse acceptance there can be
joy and he was also not wanting to pass any judgment on what that might mean for
people and yet if through collapse acceptance you just want to fly around
around the world and go on cruises and fly first class and drive your SUV then
for me there's something going wrong there. There's a numbing that's coming
from collapse acceptance. So this is why I say there's work to be done to help
steward each other and help each other through this waking up to just how bad
things are and why they got this way and what our options are and how we wish to
be. And it does require, as you were saying earlier, you know good critical
conversations between people who are happy to disagree, not take it too
personally, not try and cancel each other if you disagree. That's what I liked
with Michael because we could talk about these things and he totally got
what I was saying and he was just super exuberant about the joy of collapse
acceptance as well. He was actually after my interview with him his wife made an
edited version of it she said you're one of the first interviewers who ever
managed to slow him down enough to interject questions and things like that
because he just gets so exuberant. But I just had a thought while you were saying
that your whole idea of collapse is a theory but it's a very well researched
theory. You offer a lot of evidence in the book, chapter by chapter, how each
individual area is unsustainable. And I would say that my notion or others
notion of some kind of enlightened age coming down the pike is also a theory, and it's more
difficult to quantify. You know, you can't measure temperatures and this and that in
order to provide evidence for it, but my measurement is in the realm of my life's experience, but
so many conversations with people who are undergoing a spiritual transformation that
might not at all be evident on the surface, but that it makes me feel like something of
this nature is epidemic in the world. It's a global phenomenon that doesn't come anywhere
close to making the news or even showing up in a very manifest way anyplace. It's more
of a subjective experience that's happening among growing numbers of people. But as I
said in the very beginning, I think our subjective state is the fulcrum or the ultimate cause
of whatever ends up manifesting on the surface. I think that if this subjective state becomes
more the norm, we used the word extraordinary earlier or something, so if it becomes more
ordinary, then I think that all the surface structures of life will necessarily have to
change, and as we've seen, most of the people who run these structures don't change willingly,
And so there's going to have to be some kind of cataclysmic collapse in order for something
new to arise.
So just carrying on from what I was saying earlier then.
So there's two ways I could respond.
One is to talk about the theory and the evidence for it.
And then we would talk about, well, if that's happening, so what?
Let's think about it.
But another is to look at where the theory is coming from.
Which theory?
The one you just mentioned.
My theory?
Yeah.
a spiritual awakening under the surface that has momentum.
Okay, let's talk about where that comes from.
So what I'm interested in, would your life feel as good if you didn't believe that?
It's kind of a moot question because my life was going to shit before I learned to meditate.
I had dropped out of high school and gotten arrested a couple times and I was starting to use hard drugs.
And then my life underwent a dramatic turnaround and has been, you know, had its ups and downs,
but has been continually enhanced ever since over the last 55 years.
And that's what has formed my opinions about many things, just my own experience.
But then that could be just your experience.
And the theory that there is a spreading awakening, spiritual awakening, and there's momentum,
not necessarily that it will add up to, you know, whatever,
But where would you be if you didn't believe that there was this momentum, this spiritual awakening in other people and that possibly the opposites occurring?
I might be sort of more depressed.
I might be pessimistic.
But since I have been in touch with thousands of such people over the years, I feel like that phenomenon is occurring and it gives me some optimism.
So what I'm getting at is that there is a tendency in all of us to look for what we want to see in the world
according to our identity and our stories of reality and our assumptions and the culture and life experiences.
Yep.
And so for example, if you yourself have experienced really tough unbearable pain, emotional, psychological,
and you got through that through meditation and through a spiritual awakening, then you know that pain.
So when you see other people suffering in that pain, that must potentially, you must feel
it hard and it will therefore be a useful story to think that, yeah, but at least more and
more people are getting out of that.
So what I'm pointing to is that to become aware of how different theories of reality
are ones that we can be choosing because of what they're doing for us.
But what I've got from my spiritual inquiry, if you call it that, is just to become more
of a witness to like, "Oh, that idea, that appealed to me.
That calmed me down.
Oh, that one, I didn't like that idea."
So whenever I start to hear a theory of what's happening in the world, I wonder what it might
be doing for someone and why they might like it.
But the other thing is I'm also a sociologist and I'm very critical of modernity.
so I'm immediately spotting the deep stories of our culture such as progress
and the idea that there needs to be or there always will be a progression and
therefore that would be associated with scale. It wouldn't be just like one human out of
eight billion who progresses to enlightenment. No, there needs to be scale.
There needs to be progress. There's the possibility that the opposite is the
natural flow of life. There is the possibility that human extinction
through a degrading of the spiritual awareness of more and more humans is
exactly what was meant to happen. There's the possibility that's exactly what was
meant to happen. There's the possibility with the fact that they have a quantum
dance that bees are closer to enlightenment and higher consciousness
than Homo sapiens and that actually the universe just needs to get rid of us.
Possibly, I'm not saying that because I don't want to dismiss all those incredible indigenous peoples who lived
fantastically in harmony with nature for millennia, but possibly the natural future of homo sapiens is to become less awake, more numb,
more aggressive, more stupid, more separate and fearful and more deluded in our own.
Maybe, you see, maybe. And what I'm getting to is that I don't know,
but I'm okay with the not knowing and what's still true, what's still true for me,
is if I can be mindful, if I can be loving, if I can be courageous, if I can be curious,
if I can be creative and I can help other people that way too, and it might not add up to much.
But for me, not being attached to outcome includes not being attached to the idea that humanity awakens.
Okay, let me jump in here. So yes, I think not being attached is very important.
there's a verse in Bhagavad Gita which goes, "You have control over action alone, never
over its fruits. Be not attached to the fruits of action, nor attached to inaction." And
yet, we all have all kinds of ideas. I mean, you have ideas that you're very, quite certain
of, and quite committed to, and so on. It doesn't invalidate them that you're committed
to them, nor does it validate them. It's just you have a lot of evidence, based on your
experience and understanding and research and so on. So, the things you said about the philosophical,
more philosophical spiritual type ideas that I've been espousing, the same thing applies.
They're based upon my personal experience, my observation of other people's experience,
and then there's traditional cultures who talked about these things and prophesized that this or
that might happen. In the Vedic culture, for instance, they have this cyclical understanding
a history of you goes you know where it gets better then it gets worse then it gets better then it gets worse.
There are various arguments as to which point in that cycle we might be.
I just wanted to make that point about in the book I call it critical wisdom which is becoming aware
of our attachments to stories because we're entering a period where there's going to be
generalized anxiety and a lot of derangement and so how can we be as kind and wise in that context.
So one of them is to try and look at our deep stories and whether that's just, we're just
thinking what cultures made us think that makes us feel better in the moment or not. So I just
wanted to make that point with that. But the other thing is, I love your theory. I love the idea
that Homo sapiens, I don't like the idea that Homo sapiens and I reject the idea that Homo sapiens
are the most important form of consciousness on the planet. We don't know, we just don't know.
There's that bit about complexity that I mentioned earlier. A human nervous system is a lot more
complex than a bee's nervous system. Of course, the bees are essential and critical and we'd
probably all die if they all died. That alone could do it. But there is something to be said
for a more sophisticated nervous system being capable of greater reflection or expression of
the primordial intelligence that underlies and pervades the universe.
Maybe, but also if we think of life forms as having a collective consciousness, then the
capacity for interrelationship between a swarm of bees may mean that there's some kind of
consciousness there, which is highly complex.
I agree.
I love this is a fantastic.
I couldn't have this interview with a swarm of bees, though.
No, but then maybe our interview is nothing compared to the amazing stuff that the swarms of bees are doing.
But there's the idea again from our culture that the brain is so important in mind and yet there's some really weird studies.
Like there are individuals that had hardly any cerebral cortex.
Oh yeah, I know that.
They were like a coconut.
There was just some brain cells around the skull and the rest of it was liquid.
Yeah, and they were carrying on normal lives.
I know, but there's quite a few examples of that, which completely challenge our notion
of where intelligence lies in the body, or even if it's just in the body or not.
Anyway, so I'm saying yes, maybe, maybe humans are special, maybe.
But also maybe we're special to create the way for the really special species, which
comes after we wipe out 95% of life on Earth, which it looks like what we're doing.
And so maybe it's the future swarm of bees or colony of ants in 20 million years, who's
actually, you know, that's where it's at for consciousness expressing itself through planet
Earth.
Who knows?
But anyway, if we go with your theory, then I am a researcher and I say, well, you know,
you have a little bit of confirmation bias going on because you love talking to people
who like talking about these things.
And so you could triangulate that with data on consciousness that people are experiencing
and behaviors and all sorts.
And then there's a whole debate there about what would be the objective indicators of a
spiritual awakening.
That's pretty difficult.
I've got one for you.
I was in the TM movement for a long time.
And one of the premises there was that collective consciousness is a thing and that it can be
enlivened or influenced by large groups of people meditating together. So, I participated
in groups as large as 8,000 and at some point we went to various, I spent three months in
Iran, you know, with a group of people meditating just before the Shah left. And researchers
did a lot of studies on societal indicators, economic and crime and various things and
claimed to find, I think they had a vested interest in making TM look good, but they
They claim to find a correlation between the existence of these groups and measurable changes
in these indicators.
And they claim that the p-value or whatever was very strong, that these studies really
showed something was happening.
So I'm saying this with a little bit of uncertainty because I think there was that agenda to make
TM look good, but on the other hand, maybe there's some truth to it.
And there's guys like Rupert Sheldrake and some of his colleagues who tried to do research.
Rupert wrote a book called Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home.
And they used all sorts of careful methods of controlling that the dogs had no way of
knowing that the owners were coming home very randomly.
I'm pretty Sheldrake-ian, if one can...
Has anyone said that?
Sheldrake-ian?
That's a good word.
I lost my cat recently and I was very upset.
I had telepathy with my cat and I know that can sound a bit wacky but...
I believe it.
When my cat was stuck up a tree, it was the only time in my life with the cat in two years
that I thought, "It's daytime, for some reason I need to go and look for Buki."
I had to go out.
And I found him, you know, 80 meters away, stuck up a tree.
And that's just one example.
There is weird stuff that I would just accept, "No, that's not chance.
That's some kind of telepathy."
So I'm not arguing against anything you've just said, but I'm saying neither of those
two things are evidence that there's a momentum towards a widespread human awakening which
will affect the destiny of life on Earth or Homo sapiens. And I would be able to marshal
lots of evidence. For example, in my lifetime, 50 years on Earth, over 60% of wildlife has
been wiped out. We're now down to wildlife on planet Earth constitutes 4% of all mammals.
rest of it's humans are pets and livestock and the carnage is extreme.
And so if a spiritual awakening is somehow happening, that doesn't look very good.
Well yeah, but I've agreed with you from the outset that there seems to be a terrible collapse
taking place.
What we're possibly disagreeing on is what may follow this collapse and I'm saying perhaps
this will be, like you said, a dark night of the soul, a dark passage of some kind, and
there'll be a bright future on the other side of it, but also perhaps not.
And I wanted to make that point because you mentioned the word possibility a little while
ago and I just want to make clear that I don't deal with absolutes or certainties.
I take everything as a hypothesis and I give everybody the benefit of the doubt, but I
also take everything with a grain of salt and proportions vary.
If somebody tells me the earth is flat, and I'm actually aware of such people, that's
all salt to me.
The earth is not flat.
There's too much evidence that it isn't.
But if they tell me some other things, like, well, maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong.
But I really am not wired in a way to be adamant about any particular idea, including all the
points I've made today.
And I think that's a scientific attitude.
That's the way scientists should think.
And I'm not a scientist, but that's the way I think.
Yeah, if someone comes in with the knowledge that I have, and it's not just I'm predicting collapse,
I have a whole chapter, chapter one, which is talking about all the data going in the wrong direction since 2016, for human societies.
The Human Development Index has been going down in the majority of countries outside the rich world since 2016.
It's been going down including in OECD countries, the majority since 2019.
and some of that data is collected two years prior to being put into the index
and lots of other indices show the same thing. So we're talking basics, life expectancy, morbidity
before the pandemic and because it's global it shows therefore a global set of processes are
happening to cause that. It's not just like one bad leader, oh you know we shouldn't have elected him
or her or whatever or that war or that was a mistake. No, this is global, it's happening everywhere.
So it's happening already.
Let me ask this question that came in.
This is from PG Woodhouse's grandson.
No, I don't know about that, but it's Ro Woodhouse from London.
How long was the Holocene meant to continue before we destabilize the biosphere?
Oh, a technical question about climate.
How long was the Holocene meant to go on for?
Tell us what the Holocene is because...
The answer could be answered by someone who looks at ancient climates and
Kondratiev cycles and all sorts.
What is the whole thing?
Explain that.
So I guess it would have been thousands if not tens of thousands of years.
But I don't know. I didn't look into that.
Google it. Look at how...
Google it.
Come back and tell us. Unless this is meant to be a rhetorical question. I don't know.
I also believe that ideas are what ideas do.
Stories are what stories do.
I'm always interested in the implication and so with the understanding I have that we are
already within an era of a creeping collapse of modern societies. If someone over here is saying
I want to tell you that this is the beginning of the age of Aquarius and we're going to have a
whole spiritual up and all that stuff. Oh really? I haven't heard that before. Okay.
You know but isn't it? Then someone over here is saying this has broken my heart. I find it
really difficult. I'm so sad about the difficulties that my children are going to face. I'm heartbroken
that they don't want to have kids and I completely agree with them, but I'm heartbroken about
that. I want to do as much as I can to reduce as much harm as possible, to resist aggressive,
authoritarian, nasty policies, to try and help have a better quality of life for as long
as possible with least impact on the planet, relocalize supply
chains, become less vulnerable to external shocks like a
financial crisis. So we've got someone over here saying, Oh,
this is just the nasty stuff we've got to get through to the
global awakening and homo sapiens will finally reach their
destiny as the higher consciousness species. And
someone over here who's just being a bit more ordinary, and
kind and loving and heartbroken. I'm going to go over there.
And I would say to that that somebody could be both of those
somebody say, "I'm going to do everything I can to mitigate the suffering," and at the same time,
I think, you know, there's a good chance something ultimately good is going to happen. In fact,
I think some of these spiritual teachers who've been coming out to the world in the recent decades,
who actually gave voice to some of these predictions, maybe their mission was to minimize
the chaos to some extent by helping to accelerate the rise in collective consciousness, to minimize
the suffering to some extent. Maybe they felt it was inevitable, but they just wanted to
make it a little smoother if possible. Yes, so I'm not entirely against people being
fully committed to doing all they can to encourage more and more people to awaken to a deeper and
higher reality, spirituality, whatever we call it, I'm for that. But what I'm more
for is love beyond hope. And for me that was a core thing I got from Buddhism
where the Buddha in one of his teachings said there's three kinds of people in
the world. The man with hope, the one without, who's hopeless and the one who's
done away with hope, who sees it as drawing our attention to the future and
therefore drawing our attention away from the present and therefore getting
bound up with stories and aversions and cravings. So I am trying to live and I'm
excited by living hope free. It doesn't mean I don't try and work out what might
help. Another way of talking about it is activism and social contribution, whether
that's through doing what you're doing or working in community on organic
permaculture or whatever is your chosen contribution. Doing it as a gift and a
A gift doesn't need and doesn't expect an outcome or a return.
It's just this is me sharing what's in my heart and what I want to do and what's me being most being me.
So yeah, love beyond hope and social engagement as a gift and not being attached to outcome.
And because of that, I'm a little bit allergic to some of these stories about,
"Oh, this is just the trouble we've got to go through to get to the other side."
Well, it's not trivial. I mean, the way you're saying that makes it sound like, "Oh, there's a little bump in the road."
You could wipe out, you know, 90% of the world's population, and that's not going to be pretty.
And it's not very pretty in Gaza and Israel right now, you know.
It hasn't been very pretty in Syria after the ecological disaster spurred that upheaval.
And anyway, on your comment about hope, I think I might be kind of where you're at in that respect.
When I'm saying these things about a possible bright future, I'm not dwelling in hope or
hanging my emotions on that possibility.
It's more like a hypothesis, again, to use that word, and I see evidence to suggest it
might be the outcome, but if it isn't, then it isn't.
And I don't really have a lot invested in that as an outcome.
It's not like the fundamentalist Christian just staking everything on going to heaven
after they die or something. We'll see how it turns out. And like the Beatles sang in
the revolution, we're all doing what we can and I'm doing something I feel is having an
impact and you're doing something you feel is having an impact and we can't all do everything.
So, you know, we're all ultimately on the same team, I think, and we'll just see where it goes.
It's interesting you mentioned the Beatles. You know, they're reforming because Yoko Ono found a
a tape recording of John Lennon singing one of the songs.
Oh, yeah, they're using AI to make it all work together. And
yeah,
I'm actually secretly hoping it's really rubbish. Otherwise,
I'll be sad that my dad who was a Beatles obsessive, missed the
final. Really, really, really bad.
I was a bit of an obsessive myself. I can sing all the
songs and with lyrics, although not very well, and all the
harmonies. Yeah, I love the great I was
there when they were some originals. He's got from the 60s
just over there are singles.
It was very exciting in those days. I mean, when I was in high
school, and I want to hold your hand came out all the kids would
like open the car doors of their cars and blast their radios and
they play that song every morning at the same time and
people would be dancing in the parking lot. It was just like
this cultural breakthrough after breakthrough with each new album
that came out throughout the 60s.
Yeah, there isn't quite that shared experience anymore.
Everyone's...
It's all Taylor Swift.
When I say shared experience, I mean, yeah, okay, maybe there is a shared experience for
younger people musically.
There is with some of them.
I'm just on my own musical journey and I got to thank SoundCloud and typing in ecstatic
dance into SoundCloud and putting it in there to get me to get the second half of the book
done just working late into the night listening to these down tempo
electronica. You actually wrote that book? Yeah there's no words really it's just
you might have some Native American stuff or some Indian I don't know.
Getting a little silly here did any more question oh a question came in so we're gonna ask
that in a minute. Listening to music is deeply serious. Yeah it is I just find it
divides my mind unless I'm doing something really mindless.
Okay.
There's a couple of questions.
This is from Sundaria M. in India.
Sometimes coming across people who suffer, victims, makes me suffer more than them, even
though we are strangers.
How to break this pattern, especially in today's world where something or the other is going
on in the world?
Well, I've never heard that put in that question. What was it? Sundar, did you say?
Sundarya. She or he feels that they have so much empathy that they suffer even more than the person who's suffering.
I'm a bit stumped by that question because we don't know the extent of another person's suffering or another animal's or other sentient creature's suffering.
We don't know, we can guess, but our suffering, meaning our emotional distress at witnessing that suffering,
is actually a human virtue. It's one of the Brahma-vihara, one of the four natural ways of being.
What I loved about the Brahma-vihara set of virtues is it's not saying what we aspire to,
it's saying what's natural prior to injury, emotional, psychological injury of our culture.
we are naturally empathetic and compassionate. And so I would say well
it's very human and okay that you feel pain, suffering, at another suffering. But
there's a however, which is it sounds like you're feeling so affected by it
that it's causing you a problem and I don't know what in whatever way. So this
often can be a trauma response, so there's unresolved emotional pain and
and psychological injury, wounds that haven't been healed and we've all got them,
but it means that we witness something and that's not making us feel that way,
but it's triggering something because of our own life experience and what we haven't healed in ourselves.
Because it's great to feel compassion and some pain.
The opposite would be awful, but if it's triggering a trauma response, it's becoming overwhelming,
it's interfering with the rest of your life and interfering with making wise choices
to promote joy and reduce suffering in the world as you can, then that's an issue.
What to do about it?
The key thing is so many people are getting into doom scrolling, as it's called, as you've
got a word now, doom scrolling, just paying attention to all the tragedies in the world,
all the latest bad news about the climate or the hurricane here or the disaster there.
And it is a way of not being present.
It might feel like you're being present to the world's suffering, but it's not.
a distraction from it. And often a lot of people will doomscroll, they'll then share that stuff
on Twitter or whatever and it's a way of just screaming "Ahh!" about it rather than just
"Okay, there's pain and suffering in the world, there's a lot of it to come, how can I allow
that somehow as part of my reality without me becoming obsessed by it or it destabilizing
me so I can't get on with the rest of my life?" And there is healing to be done in order for
for one not to have a trauma response.
And it may mean you need to switch off
from seeing other people suffering
and focus more on self-love for a time.
Comes in waves.
There's only so much of the world's tragedies
and suffering that we can take on board.
So maybe just spend more time with self-love
and healing your own injuries and traumas.
And then be happy with the fact
you feel pain and another's pain.
- That's a good answer.
One thing I would add is be an ocean.
If you try to dissolve some mud in a glass of water, it just really muddies up the water.
But if you dissolve a handful of mud in the ocean, it's just dissipated.
So if you can become oceanic in your consciousness, in your heart, in your inner reality, then
you can feel the tragedies of the world, but not be overwhelmed by them.
And you can probably contribute more to helping mitigate them in some way.
Like you need to be a good swimmer to be a lifeguard.
All right, next question from Petra in London.
If you are saying we don't know what's for the best in the long run, then why do our
best to stop the collapse?
So we can't stop the collapse.
That's my analysis.
It's already begun.
It's a creeping collapse.
We don't know how fast it will go.
I'm talking about a collapse of modern societies.
associated also with the rapid degradation of the biosphere, so ecosystems all around
the world and the derangement of the climate and we don't know how bad that's going to
get. We don't know if anything we do will make a difference. So the question then you
asked is in that case, the rhetoric was why do your best, but why do anything to try and
make a difference in that case? It shouldn't be a rhetorical question. I actually think
it's an example of the habit of modernity that we assume consequentialist ethics.
It's normal in all wisdom traditions that you choose to do things because
that's the right way to live. You try to live a good life, reduce harm where you
can, promote joy and love and care where you can. You try but it may not work.
So Rick, you mentioned the Bhagavad Gita. It's in there, it's in Buddhism, it's in
all wisdom traditions. So it's the rise of consequentialist ethics, so where you do
something because of a story that it's definitely going to have a positive
impact. That's just an issue of the dominance of consequentialist ethics is
an aspect of modern culture. So I realized that doesn't help you then in
choosing what to do. There's another question very, very close to the one that
Petra you asked. Is it Petra or Petra? It's P-E-T-R-A. I don't know how they
pronounce it. Okay Petra. Another question is how do I know what to focus on to try
to help if I believe that my way of life is breaking down and will continue to do
so and when I don't know how fast that's gonna happen? Well there's no good answer to
that. There's no one answer to that because we do not know in complex
systems, how quickly it's going to break down and where. We don't know. So I'm not
going to give you a simple answer to that. What you can do is know what will help
you be more kind, wise and action-oriented come what may. So you know that
mindfulness and meditation will help. You'll know that having worked out what
your sense of the purpose and meaning of your life is and your values are will
help you so you know you can't just postpone that anymore. We might be in a
terrible situation standing in queues for rations with a World War three on
within a couple of months even. So you can't postpone these deep questions
about the meaning of life anymore so don't postpone it, get on with it. What is
really important to you? How can you cultivate the way you wish to be? There's
lots of things of that. How can you not postpone these deep questions about the
meaning of your life and what you believe in and then okay what's next?
Well what comes next depends on those values so some people will think well I
do actually want to try and give me and my kids more years of quality life
that's really important to me and it's probably more important to me than
helping wake up all my friends and colleagues to the predicament or it
It might be, I want to do what I can to try and give humanity a better chance with climate
change.
So I want to help reforest the world and cut carbon emissions and draw down carbon.
And I think that maybe trying to push government to act through climate activism is what's
for me.
And then, okay, go and do that.
But you can't skip those first two things that I've just mentioned.
anyone who comes along and tells you for certain this is what's going to happen, this is what
you should be doing and this is because of what the results will be, they're just talking
nonsense. We're in a highly complex, unpredictable situation now apart from knowing that things
are breaking down. Yeah, and we all have roles to play, different
roles as we said. Petra's question reminded me of that story of the starfish. I don't know
if you've heard this one, but a man and a boy are walking along the beach and the tide
has gone out and there are just thousands of starfish stranded on the sand and they're all
going to die in the sun. So as they walk along, the man keeps reaching down, picking up a starfish
and throwing it in the water and they walk a few more steps, he does it again, he keeps doing that,
and finally the boy says, "What difference can that make? There are thousands of them."
With that, the man picks up another one, throws it in the water and says, "Made a difference to that one."
Yeah, that resonates with me a lot. And as you say, people have different roles to play.
So somebody somewhere on that beach might be sitting in front of a computer trying to
work out how best to get as many of those starfish back into the sea. So they may be
then trying to use Twitter or TikTok to get a whole bunch of people down to the beach.
And then they might be calculating how long would it take to get that many people down
and will the starfish have died? Because how long are the starfish going to live before
they die, so how therefore what should be the scope of my ambition for how many
people to get to the beach? You know, someone who loves being nerdy and
calculating all that will do all that and that might help too. Yeah, he might get an
army of people down there and save all the starfish. Or he might be too ambitious
and managed to get a thousand people from London to show up but they took till
tomorrow to show up and all the starfish are dead and it would have been better
for him to just join the guy on the beach and chuck a few starfish in. So, we don't know.
Good, we had a couple more questions but I'll let them go and thank you so much,
Jem, for your time. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed talking to you. I enjoyed
reading your book and I'll be in touch. I'll send you a follow-up email with a couple of thoughts.
Yeah, thanks for the invite and yeah, to everyone who's watched this, interested,
Please check the book out. I'm quite proud of it. It took a long time.
It's a free download, right? In addition to buying a physical one,
you can just download the thing and read a PDF if you want to.
Exactly.
I prefer to listen to things and it's on audible. Matthew Slater reads it, a friend of yours,
and he does a really good job. All right. So thanks for those listening or watching. And
thank you, Jim. And my condolences on your father's passing. And we'll be in touch.
Thanks for all you're doing. Thank you. Cheers Rick. Bye-bye. Keep up the amazing work with this series. I'll try to bye
Bye.
(upbeat music)
[Music]