Michael Dowd Interview

Summary

Michael Dowd presents a science-based spirituality centered on reality, evidence, ecology, and humanity’s responsibility to the future. The discussion examines how religious worldviews, economic systems, and attitudes toward nature can either support or undermine a healthy planet.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can spirituality and religion be grounded in science and evidence?
• Why should caring for nature be understood as a spiritual responsibility?
• How can people with different religious and philosophical beliefs work together for a sustainable future?
• What causes societies to sacrifice long-term ecological health for short-term economic gain?

Key takeaways

• Reality, evidence, and ecology can serve as foundations for a modern spiritual worldview.
• Religious ideas should be judged by whether they help protect life and the future.
• Nature is not merely a resource; it is the living system that sustains us.
• People need not share one theology to cooperate on ecological and social goals.
• Economic systems become destructive when they reward present gains by harming future generations.
• Ecological limits are not obstacles to life but conditions that life depends on.
• A pro-future ethic asks whether today’s choices improve or diminish the world of those who follow.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, and my guest today is Michael Dowd. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done nearly 300 of them now, and if you’d like to check out the archives, go to batgap.com, and you’ll see them categorized in various ways under the “Past Interviews” menu. There’s also a “Donate” button there, and this show is made possible by the support of generous viewers.

Reverend Michael Dowd is a best-selling evolutionary theologian and pro-future evangelist whose work has been featured in the New York Times, L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Newsweek, Discover, and on television nationally.

His bridge-building book, Thank God for Evolution, was endorsed by six Nobel Prize-winning scientists, noted skeptics, and religious leaders across the spectrum. Michael and his science-writer wife, Connie Barlow, have spoken to more than 2,000 groups across North America since 2002. They’ve done that because they live primarily out of a camper van and are on the road continuously.

Michael has delivered two TEDx Talks and a program at the United Nations. In 2010, he interviewed 38 Christian leaders across the theological spectrum—all of whom embrace an ecological, evolutionary worldview and are committed to a healthy future—as part of a series entitled “The Advent of Evolutionary Christianity.”

Most recently, he interviewed 55 experts on climate change, peak oil, and sustainability as part of an online conversation series titled “The Future Is Calling Us to Greatness.”

Dowd’s passion for proclaiming a pro-science message of inspiration—what he calls “the Gospel of right relationship to reality”—has earned him the moniker “Reverend Reality.” He speaks prophetically in secular and religious settings alike about the generational evil of anti-future, anti-Christian policies and the necessity of co-creating a just, healthy, and sustainably life-giving future for humanity and the larger body of life.

So, Michael, welcome.

Michael: Thank you, Rick. Good to be here.

Rick: I’ve spent a marvelous week listening to hours and hours and hours of your talks that you’ve given in the past, Connie’s talks, even some Thomas Berry talks and poems that he was reading—all sorts of things. I’ve read some articles that you’ve written and a good chunk of your book, and I must say that everything you talk about really excites me. I mean, I literally got goosebumps at times.

I think what you’re doing is really important, and so I’m thrilled to have this conversation with you.

Michael: Cool. Well, I’ve been looking forward to this, Rick.

A second axial age

Rick: Good. So, there’s so much to cover, I feel. You cover so much in the things you say. And I really want to do justice to it and make sure that both of us, after this interview, say, “Wow, we really nailed it. We got everything in there.” So don’t let me lead you astray or down little side alleys. Make sure that we’re covering everything that is dear to your heart and most important.

And maybe the best way of starting to do that is for you to just start with the highest first, if we could call it that. If this was a one-minute interview, what would you want to start with?

Michael: That we’re in the largest transformation of religious sensibility in perhaps human history—a second axial age. I call it “the evidential reformation,” where all the religions of the world are coming to realize that there is no future for humanity or for their faith if we don’t come into a right relationship to reality, which includes coming into a right relationship to nature and time.

It’s exciting. I sometimes say, “Reality is my God, evidence is my scripture, and ecology is my theology.” Said another way, any understanding of God that doesn’t include what we today mean by the word “reality” isn’t God.

Reality is Lord. That’s not a belief; it’s a fact.

That is, everything submits to and is accountable to what today we would call “reality”—what’s real, whether you believe it or not. And any understanding of scripture that doesn’t include evidence is not God’s word! Evidence is the main way reality is revealing truth to us today. Not only the evidence of our own experience, but also scientific, historic, and cross-cultural evidence. So that needs to be lifted up as a realm of divine revelation, or God’s word, or scripture.

And then any understanding of theology that doesn’t include ecology—that is, the science of living in a right relationship to time and nature, to the aspects of reality that are inescapably real—is also a theology that our grandchildren will condemn us for. So it’s the greening of religion, but that also has to happen for us to green the economic system.

We have an economic system that’s demonic. In fact, I just wrote a blog post last week called “When Religions Fail, Economics Becomes Demonic.” And what I mean is a system that rewards the few at the expense of the many and forces all of us to harm the future. I mean, if the word “demonic” has any meaning in a modern world, it’s got to include that. And we have an economic system that does exactly that. It measures progress, growth, and success by how fast we can take nature and turn it into pollution, and in the process condemn the future. So, the distinction between pro-future and anti-future.

We’re at the place now where all our institutions and activities, and theologies, and religions—everything needs to be discerned by: Does this assist humans in coming into a mutually enhancing relationship with the natural world, or does it hinder or harm the future? So, pro-future versus anti-future.

And when I speak in a Christian context, I say pro-Christian, or Christian—that is, saving the future—or anti-Christian, that which is condemning the future.

Rick: It’s ironic that a lot of Christians deny climate change, and so we’ll get into that and the underpinnings of why that might be.

God, nature, and the clockwork universe

Well, one thing I heard you talk about quite a bit in various talks was the notion of God as external to nature, external to the universe, kind of a divine clockmaker, to use that metaphor, and thereby viewing the universe as mechanistic and sort of devoid of the divine essence, if you will. Versus seeing God as immanent and seeing that everything is in God, and God is in everything—there’s just no separation, it’s a seamless merging. Kind of like water and a sponge, although even more than that, because I would go on to say that it’s not just water and a sponge, but that the sponge and the water are both God.

So maybe we could play on that a little bit, and how that worldview has created so much trouble.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, what you’re pointing to is that our metaphors matter. The analogies and metaphors that we use for reality matter. They shape our attention and put our consciousness on a certain track. They can be either life-giving and pro-future, or life-damaging and anti-future. And our concepts of God can do the same thing. In fact, secular people are attacking many—some of the new atheists and secular folks are often attacking religion and saying religion is a problem because they even have a God concept. Well, I suggest that’s missing the point too.

The word “God” can either be thought of as pointing to some supernatural entity who lives off the planet and outside the universe, who blesses some and smites others. That’s a trivial, impotent, inconsequential god. Or, the word “God” could be understood from a science-based perspective. The one science-based understanding of God is that all God-talk, all gods and goddesses, are personifications—that is, giving human characteristics to something that’s inescapably real.

I mean, Poseidon wasn’t the god of the oceans; Poseidon wasn’t the spirit of the oceans. Poseidon was a personification of the incomprehensibly powerful and capricious seas.

Gaia was a personification of Earth, not the goddess of the Earth, not the spirit of the Earth. Helios was not a god of the sun, but a personification of this inescapably real reality that gives us light! So, if the word “God” is not personifying inescapable reality, then it’s a trivial god that actually—if we think we can worship God and trash the environment, or treat others in an unjust way, we’re out of touch with our reality.

So our concepts of God matter. And yes, as you say, this idea points out that if we think of God as a clockmaker outside a clockwork universe—which is pretty much the worldview we’ve had in the last 500 years—we’re going to be, first, desacralizing nature. Nature is no longer a vow to be related to, honored, and respected. Nature’s an “it” that we can exploit, or we think we can exploit and use for our benefit, with no consequences to us. That’s a catastrophic mistake.

It also trivializes God. God is no longer immanent and omnipresent—you know, there’s no place that God stops and something else starts—but God is thought of as a being outside a clockwork universe that you can either believe in—theism—or disbelieve in—atheism.

And so you’ve got this debate, thousands or maybe millions of people debating whether or not God exists, or whether or not God is real, when the one real God—namely, reality—personified or not, we’ve been out of right relationship to, and we’re now about to experience consequences of biblical proportion. So our views of God seriously matter.

That’s why I like the nesting doll, like Russian nesting dolls. This is a fundamental truth that we know through science, through evidential revelation: The universe, or reality, is comprised of nested spheres of creativity. Subatomic particles within atoms, within cells, within organisms, and so on and so forth, all the way out. And so any understanding of God that doesn’t include a name for that one and only creative reality that includes all others, yet also transcends all others, is a god that doesn’t deserve to be honored and, in fact, will lead us down a destructive path.

Rick: There are about four main points in there that I want to go into in depth with you.

Michael: Sure.

Rick: And probably when I start going into the first one, you’ll give me four other main points, because this stuff is so great.

Michael: I’ll keep my answers shorter!

Rick: No, it’s all right, it’s all right. We’ll get to them all. The first is, one thing that amazes me, and always has, is that scientists and surgeons and people like that, who look really closely at nature, could be atheist, or could regard what they’re seeing as mechanistic. Because, I mean, you look at anything closely—it’s easy to take stuff for granted if you just waltz through your day, living your life, doing your stuff, but if you start looking closely through a telescope, through a microscope, with an educated understanding, you start seeing this miracle in every cell and every galaxy. I mean, there’s this incredible thing going on. How can that be random billiard balls running into each other?

Michael: Yeah, but see, I’ve got to jump in here, Rick, because, you know, I don’t often find myself in the position of defending atheists, but I’m going to have to in this moment. Most nonreligious people, or people who don’t feel comfortable with traditional God-talk because it’s all this otherworldly, supernatural stuff, if all the people in your life who use God-talk use it in a way of a supernatural being who is on the side of this group of people and condemning this group of people, then an atheist is simply someone who says, “I don’t believe in that being.”

Rick: Yeah, no, I agree with that.

Michael: But most atheists and secular people that I know who are really into the science don’t see it as billiard balls; they see this emergentist perspective. Michael Shermer is a friend of mine—head of Skeptic magazine. Connie’s known Richard Dawkins for decades. I mean, these are people who don’t have a mechanistic worldview; they’re emergentists.

That is, it’s not either determined—God preordained it and put it all together—or chance; it’s creative. We have a creative reality, a creative cosmos that emerges. A greater complexity keeps emerging out of lesser complexity.

So I just feel a little awkward because I don’t want to be dissing people, saying that they believe this and asking how they could be so dumb and stupid, because that’s really not what they believe anyway.

Rick: No, that’s good to know, and I appreciate that. I’m trying to get an interview with Sam Harris. I’m going to keep trying. But one of the things I said in my letter to him is, “I don’t believe in the same God you don’t believe in.”

Michael: Yeah, right, exactly.

Rick: So what do these people—Shermer and Dawkins and Harris and so on, if you could speak on their behalf—what do they make of this creativity that they see, this emerging creativity? What do they think that is?

Michael: They basically think that it’s reality, it’s holy, it’s sacred, it’s whatever—but they don’t attribute some supernatural intelligence as the one who created it. They see the whole thing as divine. I mean, some of them wouldn’t use the word “divine,” but they see the whole thing as worthy of our deepest respect and honor and commitment.

Frankly, this isn’t necessarily a direction I’m that interested in, because we don’t have time to convert each other over issues of theology or metaphysics. We need to redesign our economic systems globally, which is going to take a level of cooperation across ethnic, religious, and political differences in the service of a healthy future. Otherwise, we are literally condemning our children and grandchildren to hell and high water.

Pro-future cooperation

So my focus lately, the last two and a half years, has been really big on climate change. I don’t even call it global warming; I call it radiation entrapment, and that’s what it is. It’s solar radiation, and we’re entrapped by it.

That radiation entrapment is going to create a lot of chaos. Everywhere isn’t going to get warmer, as the United States experienced last year. As a direct result of radiation entrapment, we had practically the coldest winter on record, and Alaska was baking with the hottest winter on record.

Rick: Sure, because the jet stream was pushed around—the polar vortex.

Michael: Exactly. The jet stream was doing this loopy stuff, and it’s global weirding! But because one season may be brutally cold, the next season may be brutally hot, the next season may be brutally dry, and the next season may be brutally wet—that’s global weirding, and that’s going to screw up the climate patterns. It’s going to make it very difficult to have food that feeds as many people as need to be fed.

And so I’m tending these days to focus a lot less on theology and metaphysics, and a lot more on, “Okay, we don’t agree on that? No problem, let’s set that aside. What can we agree on so that we can work together to ensure a healthy future?” That’s sort of the bottom line for me these days.

Rick: But one thing I think you’re doing, though, is that you feel the more fundamental a level at which you can operate, the more effectively we can change things—you know, the principle of the fulcrum. So what can we get down to that will shift the course of things? I mean, an ocean liner has a little rudder in the back—little compared to the size of the ship. If that turns just a little bit, the whole ship turns.

So if we want to really change people’s behavior, what’s the most influential, what’s the most pivotal level at which we can function in order to do that? And I think that when we can ask that question, we have addressed the metaphysics a little bit. Changes in our deepest understandings of the way nature works are going to ripple up in terms of the way we behave.

Michael: Exactly. No, I completely agree. My only point is that if what we need to do is live individually and collectively in such a way that, decade by decade, the soil is getting healthier, the carbon is being reduced from the atmosphere, and the forests are getting healthier—in other words, if that’s what we need to do—there are going to be lots of different metaphysical, theological, and philosophical ways of getting there.

There’s not going to be one right way—the only way to think about the nature of reality—that helps us live in a right relationship to reality.

Now, I personally am rather passionate about what I call “the path of factual faith” or “sacred realism.” I’m a religious naturalist. I have no supernatural or otherworldly beliefs. But that’s just my worldview.

There are close friends of mine who do have supernatural, otherworldly beliefs from a lot of different traditions, and yet they’re also committed to permaculture, sustainability, reducing our carbon footprint, and living more lightly on the planet.

Rick: So what’s the common denominator between you and those friends?

Michael: We’re all pro-future. We’re all pro-nature and pro-future. That is, our individual lifestyles and our collective impact on the natural world—on what I call “primary reality.”

I mean, primary reality is that which gives birth to life, that which sustains and nurtures life, and that which receives life at its end. And whether you call that God or the goddess, or universe or cosmos, or whatever—Buddha nature—we are all part of that, what I call divine reality, and we need to honor it as divine.

We are all part of divine reality, and we need to honor it as divine.

So we have not, for the last few hundred years, been honoring the soil, the water, the air, the forests, and other life forms as divine, as sacred, as precious, or as worthy of our deepest respect. We’ve been treating all of that as merely resources for us to use, and it’s a short-sighted vision of the future.

The fact that we allow corporations, for example, to buy a hundred acres of land, build all these factories, put all their waste into that soil, and then move to some foreign country without being responsible for putting that land back the way it was beforehand is insanity! We have an economic system that’s insane because it’s all about using nature with short-term lenses.

We’re not thinking in terms of the seventh generation—that we should behave and act and decide, and live our lives in the present in a way that’s a blessing for seven generations. We’ve been so unsustainable. And the words “unsustainable” and “evil” both point to the same thing!

God’s fundamental law—that is, Life’s fundamental law for all species—is: don’t live in the present in ways that diminish or destroy the future. But we’re doing exactly that, and we have to shift that.

And I think we’re going to need a lot of people. We’re going to need Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, atheists, and everybody to work together to move forward. That’s why I’m more interested in that practical stuff.

Ecology as the new theology

Rick: Yeah. And so I guess one question would be, why do we do that? I mean, what is it about our corporate mentality, or collective mentality, that causes us to destroy nature and squander our resources without regard for future consequences?

Michael: Well, that’s a really good question, Rick, and I don’t know that I have a great answer, but I have done some thinking on this.

Rick: Because if we’re going to stop doing it, it might help to know why we’re doing it.

Michael: Right. Well, one of the things Martin Buber, the famous Jewish theologian, said decades and decades ago was that if we treat nature as merely an “it” to be used and exploited by us, rather than as a “thou” to be honored and respected in its own right, not only is the divine not present, but we will cause our own extinction.

We can no longer afford to do that. Nature will be respected, or we will suffer the consequences. Not as if nature were a cute bunny that needs our protection—no. Nature is the presence of God, and if we don’t begin to respect—we don’t humble ourselves and respect—the natural systems upon which we depend—the carbon cycles, the nitrogen cycles, the carbon dioxide cycles—basically, we have to learn from nature as if nature is the voice of God, and if nature’s laws are God’s laws. We either need to abide by those laws, or we suffer the consequences. We will create hell for ourselves and our children.

So I think the biggest thing is to learn ecology. I think ecology is the new theology. Different people and different religious traditions will come at it in different ways, but the science of ecology—the science of learning to live within limits—God is in the limits! We have to honor ecological limits.

This idea that we can have an everlasting, growing economy when the quality of the air, water, soil, and life upon which that economy depends is declining—that the primary economy of nature is decreasing, contracting in health, vitality, and vibrancy, and yet we think we can have a never-ending economy—it’s insane.

So what we can agree on is learning ecological principles. That’s why I consider the single most important book in print today to be this book: William Catton’s

Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change .

It was written in 1980, and I consider it not only the most important book of the twentieth century, but currently the most important book, in my opinion, in print.

Rick: More important than the Bible, I suppose.

Michael: Well, I treat this like modern-day scripture! I treat it as if God—reality—is speaking through William Catton. And it’s not just me.

The interesting thing is, if you just search for “William Catton tribute,” my page comes right up, and I’ve got quotes and longer tributes from these amazing scientists and environmentalists who were virtually all saying that this is one of the top two or three most significant books they’ve ever read in their lives. And some of them, like Derrick Jensen, say it’s the most important book of the twentieth century.

Rick: Not only that, but you have you and Connie reading it on your website, don’t you? One can listen.

Michael: Yes, I’ve unofficially recorded the audio of this, and I only give it out to a few close friends.

Rick: Oh, sorry.

Michael: Well, I actually called the publisher, and it looks like they’re going to have me do it. So there will be an official audiobook, with me going into a studio and doing it.

But the version that I have up online right now—you can hear, in three chapters, that at the end of the chapter you can literally hear me crying, and Connie crying on the couch, because we were that moved by this book. But yes, William Catton’s Overshoot—I highly, highly recommend it.

Rick: Great. Let me come back to “I and thou.” I think it’s a key thing. And I think we can take it a step further, because if God is really omnipresent, then there is nowhere where He—and I’ll just say “He” for convenience’s sake—is not.

And therefore, ultimately, the reality of creation is a unified wholeness. “I and thou” still sounds rather dualistic to me. It sounds better than “I and it,” but it’s still rather dualistic.

And so, when we are destroying the rainforest, it’s not just that we’re destroying God’s lungs; we’re destroying our own lungs. When we’re poisoning the rivers and oceans, we’re not just poisoning God’s blood; we’re poisoning our own blood.

And that’s an even greater intimacy, I think, with nature than thinking of “I and thou,” where there’s some distance between, you know…

Michael: Just gawking at itself like, whoa, you know? A biology student looking in a microscope is the planet Earth learning with awareness, with consciousness, how it has functioned unconsciously and instinctually for billions of years. So there’s that sense: I am that, thou art that, that whole sense. Absolutely, there’s a sense that nature’s not separate from me, that I am nature.

As John Seed says, “I am not John Seed protecting the rainforest. I’m the rainforest protecting itself through John Seed.”

Rick: Yeah, ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. So yes, absolutely, there’s how we think about the Divine and how we think about our relationship to nature. There are times when I am so present, outside symbolic language; I’m just in the experience of this oneness, this “I am this reflecting on itself.” I am no different from it; I’m completely a part of it. And for me to protect nature is the same intimacy as if I stopped you from trying to cut off my arm—it’s like, me we’re talking about.

And there’s also the “I-thou,” where that’s the Divine other—there’s some of the humility that comes from this larger reality giving me birth. And then there’s also the “I-it,” which is that there are times when we actually think of resources in terms of copper, gold, silver, or food—you know, where we get our food—and we can step into that “I-it” and “I-thou” as well. But I think all three of these ways of thinking need to be honored, and so I appreciate you for pointing that out, because I think it is vital. I think it’s important.

Rick: I think that’s what Christ may have meant when he said, “Whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.” Any of us could say that, actually.

It’s like, whatever we’re doing to anything, we’re doing it to ourselves.

Michael: Right, exactly.

Rick: Don’t worry, we’re going to keep coming back to ecology and climate change and all that. It’s very important to me. I just want to touch on the personification point that you made a little bit.

Michael: Great, I was hoping you’d come back to that. That’s great.

Rick: Okay, great. Perhaps you could just quickly recapitulate what you said about that, and that will give me a springboard for asking you a question or two.

Michael: Sure. If I were to try to describe what I consider to be the single most important scientific discovery about religion in the last hundred years—and I know that’s a big claim I’m making, but I think it’s true—it can be summed up in the one word, “personification,” or “personalizing.”

That is, we now know—again, we don’t believe this; we know this—that our brains are inherently relational. We can’t not relate. Our brains are instinctually programmed to relate. And we typically relate through human categories.

Throughout human history, we’ve treated the river, or the soil, or the oceans, or whatever, in a personified way. And all gods and goddesses are personifications, not persons. And as I said, Helios—what Connie and I call “Great Sol”—S-O-L. So we don’t relate to what most people call “the sun”—little s; we relate to that reality as “Great Sol.”

So in the morning we sing, “Hi, hi, Great Sol”—we’ve got this little song that we sing. And then at night we sing, “Bye, bye, Great Sol”—that’s a little song that we do.

Nora is our personification of North America. We don’t call this continent North America; we call this reality Nora. That is, we give human characteristics to this continent. And we have this intimate, personal love relationship with this continent.

Angel is our van. We personify our van as Angel. It’s our bedroom on wheels. We actually don’t have an RV; we live out of the generosity of others who open up their homes to us, and we’ve got, sort of, our bedroom on our back—in Angel.

But we also personify our relationship. There’s Connie, there’s Michael, and then there’s Jasmine. And Jasmine is the mythic personification that we’ve given to us, or to we. And sometimes it’s really clear what Michael wants to do, and it’s clear what Connie wants to do. But when one of us asks the question, “What does Jasmine want in this situation?” it allows me, as a man, to not be attached to my position. And I can even go with something Connie might have suggested in the first place, but I don’t feel like she’s won and I’ve lost. I feel like I’m proud that I’m doing what’s good for Jasmine.

So this personification is so vital, because—here’s a classic example. This is actually a really good example. If I think of gods, if I think of God, or any god or goddess throughout human history as a separate, nonmaterial entity floating around somewhere, then I’m going to miss the power of the personification. I’m going to miss the inescapable reality. Like I say, Helios is inescapably real. Poseidon is inescapably real. Gaia is inescapably real. You don’t have to personify those realities, but the realities they point to are inescapably real. And that’s why I love the fact that Hollywood has just gotten with the program in a major way!

Anybody watching or listening to this, just go to natureisspeaking.com.

Rick: Yeah, I think I saw those. It’s great.

Michael: And there are these videos that have been done. Julia Roberts, for instance, speaks as Mother Nature. She doesn’t speak about nature; she’s nature, given voice. Harrison Ford speaks as the oceans—you could say that’s the voice of Poseidon today. And, I mean, these videos kick butt! Some of these videos have had millions of views. They’ve gone viral because they tap into the power of personification. And so for me, God is a personification of reality.

God is reality with a personality, not a person outside reality.

Rick: So Uncle Sam personifies the United States. Santa Claus personifies Christmas.

Michael: Well, no, Santa Claus doesn’t really personify Christmas. Santa Claus, in some ways, personifies the generous spirit, or whatever. But Santa Claus is less of a personification than, say, Uncle Sam. Could you imagine how bizarre it would be if you walked into a room and heard two people debating whether or not Uncle Sam is real, or whether or not Uncle Sam exists?

Your first thought would be, They don’t get it. Uncle Sam is a personification of the government. Of course the government is real, but of course it’s not literal.

Rick: But we all assume, when we talk about Santa Claus or Uncle Sam, that there really is no such person. It’s just a symbol, or a representation…

Michael: A personification.

Rick: So that’s what you’re saying with regard to

Jasmine: There is no such thing as Jasmine…

Michael: But this is it. I want to stay with this for just a second. There really is.

Rick: Well, that’s what I would argue.

Michael: Relationships are real! There is a reality. Whether we call that reality Jasmine or not, there is a relationship between me and Connie that is not just our differences. It’s the whole that is more than the sum of the parts, or the whole that is different from the sum of its parts. And by giving that reality a name, it allows us to have a healthier relationship to that reality.

So by giving North America, the continent of North America, a mythic name, we have a more intimate, personal relationship. And by giving what’s inescapably real—what’s real whether you believe it or not—and I think time, nature, mystery, whatever else reality is, it at least includes time, nature, and mystery. So for me, God is inescapably, undeniably real—or the goddess, whatever you want to call it. But for us, the word God is like a name, a proper name, a sacred name for reality as a whole. And the first thing that we know when we study, when we learn about reality, is that there are limits that are real.

In fact, what I sometimes think is that, by not honoring our ecological limits, we’re creating hell. That’s why I interpret the mythic story of the fall of Adam and Eve not as the disobedience of one human being disobeying God, but humanity dishonoring God’s limits. God says, “Okay, all this is cool. Stay away from that tree.” That’s God’s limit. We dishonored that limit, and by dishonoring the limits of nature, the ecological limits, we take ourselves off the path of paradise and put ourselves on the path of hell. And that’s what we’re doing now. And the only way of salvation—again, using mythic language—but the only way of salvation is to come back into right relationship to reality, and that’s the path of integrity.

And so for me, Christ is not a supernatural person floating around somewhere; Christ is the incarnation, or embodiment, or personification—a personification of integrity. You may think there’s some path to right relationship to reality that bypasses integrity, but you’re deceived. There’s no way.

And so Satan is not some disembodied spook; Satan is a personification of everything that would lead us, or could lead us, to be out of right relationship to reality. Everything that would lead us to be anti-future, personified. So from that vantage point, Satan and Christ are inescapably real. They’re not supernatural beings; they’re personifications of that which would have us destroy the future, or that which would have us save, or help, or be a blessing to the future.

✨ Nested creativity and collective consciousness

Rick: Cool. I want to stay on this personification thing for a bit.

Michael: Cool.

Rick: And I think it also relates to nested creativity, in the sense that, like a jellyfish is more than the sum of all the little things that make it up, or our body—ten thousand trillion cells—is more than the sum of all its parts. It can do things and know things, and whatnot, that no individual cell can do.

I would suggest that there’s a collective consciousness to you and Connie—that you call Jasmine—which is more than the sum of you and Connie. And the same holds true of families, towns, nations, the world. You get, sort of, wholes that are more than the sum of their parts, at every level.

Michael: Yeah, well, before you go on, because it’s a really important point. A dear friend and colleague of mine, who died just a few years ago, Walter Wink—W-I-N-K—wrote a series of books on naming the powers and engaging the powers. And what the series was all about—what the Apostle Paul and others in the New Testament, in the Christian Scriptures, refer to as “powers and principalities”—were personifications of what we would call corporate personhood, or corporate personality. I mean, cities—if you would personify a city or personify a corporation—that is, a group of people making decisions collectively, there’s a whole new level of evil that’s possible, where you get the ruling elite that tilt the playing field in their favor. All the laws and things are in their favor.

And today we use secular language, of course, to talk about that, but when the Apostle Paul in the New Testament and Christian Scriptures speaks about powers and principalities, he’s speaking, basically, of the personality of this city, or the personality of that city, or the personality of Rome, or whatever.

Rick: And they do have personalities. I mean, you go to a different city, and there’s a whole different feeling.

Michael: Exactly.

Rick: On this point of personification, I don’t think we’ve milked everything we can out of it yet, and I want to throw something in that might be a stretch for you, but maybe not. And that is that when we talk about the vastness of the universe, let’s say, and the vastness of time, in a way it’s like—to me, it’s like talking about the vastness of the Pacific Ocean by measuring its breadth and width without taking into consideration its depth.

And what I mean by that is that, in addition to the spatial and temporal vastness, there are subtler strata of creation, subtler dimensions. I think this relates to your nested creativity thing, but perhaps in a way you may or may not have considered.

The whole historical talk of angels, for instance, to me is not mythical; it’s literal, and it has to do with the fact that some people were able to perceive the subtler strata of creation on which such beings reside. And I have many friends alive today whom I talk with regularly, for whom that’s the norm, as normal as it is for you and me to see people walking around the mall. They see them everywhere, and they commune with them sometimes and are told things, and this and that. And these are normal people running businesses and stuff.

So when we talk about personification, I would suggest that when you have something like the sun—Helios, or Sol, or Surya, as the Hindus called it—it’s not only a hydrogen-fusion reaction, but it’s actually an embodiment of intelligence, intelligence that’s taken a concrete form. And that concrete form, on the gross level, has its corresponding strata on subtler and subtler levels, such that that form can actually be a conscious being.

So Gaia can actually be a conscious being, Surya can be a conscious being, with bodies very unlike what we consider to be life-sustainable, biological bodies, but which are as much conscious beings as we are. And this would kind of apply to the large and the small, and all sorts of different things. How does that strike you with regard to what you’ve been thinking about personification?

Michael: There are a couple of things. One is that that is a physical perspective that some people find tremendously inspiring, and it matches their own experience. There are others for whom, either metaphysically or experientially, they’ve not had that experience. They don’t see or interpret the world that way, or they would interpret those things in a more metaphorical way, or whatever.

I don’t have a stance in terms of the rightness or wrongness. My hunch is that most angels and fairies, spirits and spiritual entities, are again personifying some relationship that’s actually quite real. And there is value for people for whom those experiences are real, and that helps them live in right relationship with the water, the air, the soil, and the life forms of their bioregion. Man, I am in a deep bow of gratitude and honor for that.

But for those people for whom those spiritual experiences cause them to discount nature, or discount the importance of living in a sustainable, life-giving, mutually enhancing way with their bioregion, then I think it can be problematic.

So I view that way any spiritual or metaphysical beliefs or experiences. I mean, people can have profoundly real, subjective experiences where God or Reality tells them to go in this direction. Well, how do you discern whether that’s your own self-deceptive nature, whether that’s your addictive nature, whether that’s all the kinds of things that could be harmful to others, harmful to yourself, or harmful to the natural world?

I mean, okay, I have a profound, inescapably real, subjective experience that tells me to go kill this person. Well, on what basis? So we have to honor that one of the things that God, Reality, has been revealing through evidence—through evolutionary psychology and evolutionary brain science, among other disciplines—is that we have self-deceptive instincts, and that’s why we need the collective.

Scientists are just as prone to self-deception as anybody else. But the community of scientists, where there’s motivation and incentive to prove each other wrong, is usually a good thing in the long run, in terms of helping our theories and our understandings of reality come into closer alignment with the way reality really is.

Interpretation, evidence, and humility

Rick: Now, I agree. And obviously, someone could be saying something and it sounds like they’re having mystical experiences, and they could be psychotic or something.

Michael: Right, and one of the things that, again, for me, is among the great sacred responsibilities that we have as humans is the responsibility to interpret life in ways that serve our larger communities, in ways that serve the future, and in so doing, also serve us.

So there’s that—interpreting life generously, or mythically, or relationally—because we don’t experience reality as it is. We experience reality through the lenses of our interpretation, which can’t be distinguished, because we live in a world of symbolic language.

All animals interpret. In fact, you could probably argue that all plants interpret. But certainly when you start moving into the realm of symbolic language—that is, words that create worlds by how we interpret—our interpretations matter.

And so if I interpret that the universe is out to get me, if I interpret that the universe is conspiring against me, or reality, or whatever, and those are the lenses through which I interpret, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even if somebody’s nice to me, I’m going to interpret it like, “Yeah, what are they out to get?” I become cynical and skeptical.

But if I interpret that the universe is conspiring on my behalf, it’s just an interpretation, but I’m going to filter everything through that. So even when difficult, challenging, painful things happen, rather than judge it or say, “Ah, why is life condemning me?” it’s like, “Oh, okay, how’s this God blessing me in disguise? How is this the universe conspiring on my behalf? How can I grow, or learn, or evolve through this?”

It’s not like one is true and one’s not; it’s just that one is profoundly serving of my life and the world, and so I choose to interpret that the universe is conspiring on my behalf. I don’t honestly think I can argue and compellingly convince my friend Michael Shermer that that’s the case objectively, but what I can say confidently is I know that’s the most kick-ass way to live my life.

Because if I live my life as if the universe is conspiring on my behalf, I love my life, and the people around me find me to be a more generous, compassionate person who gets over difficulties really quickly. Because I’m filtering through, “How’s life conspiring on my behalf?” It’s just a useful stance, but for me it’s one of the most useful stances that there is.

Rick: No, me too. And if you see life as having this sort of evolutionary imperative toward higher expressions of creativity, higher consciousness, or however you like to define it, then you see everything as ultimately being in service of that, and it makes the universe a lot friendlier a place.

Michael: Right, but there’s a difference. If I take it as an objective metaphysical truth rather than a subjectively empowering, useful belief, that’s a big difference. I know a lot of friends—several very close friends—in the New Age, New Thought movement. They’re now in bankruptcy; they’re now in crisis because they were living beyond their means. But they had this magical view that the universe—if they just had the right beliefs—was going to be like this bank machine that was going to keep flowing blessings. And I think the universe would just as soon kill us.

I don’t think the universe cares one way or the other about us as individuals. But if I act as if the universe does care, then I’m going to live my life in a generous way.

But the important thing is—again, this is what God, this is what Reality, is revealing through evidence—we know of 24 complex civilizations in the last 5,000 years. There may be others that we just don’t have the evidence for, but we know of 24 complex civilizations. They all rise differently, but they all fall the same.

There are certain patterns where what happens is that a civilization or empire grows beyond what it can afford to maintain and starts feeding on itself. It’s called catabolic collapse. And in the early stages of catabolic collapse, virtually all the evidence that we have is that people believe that evolution—or, if they didn’t have the word evolution, let’s just say history—was sort of all leading to them. They’re the pinnacle of evolution.

And they’re not aware that they’re about to experience 400 years of contraction, hard times, and difficulty. Because empires and civilizations don’t collapse like that; it typically takes two or three hundred years, in a stair-step fashion, to go down.

And so the idea that evolution has led to our complexity and our civilization, and therefore it’s all sort of uphill from there, is without recognizing that we are in the declining decade, or two or three, of the American Empire. We are in the declining century or two of the kind of rapacious industrialism that we’ve had, and for most of us—and our children and grandchildren—things are going to be more difficult in the future than we, or even our parents, experienced.

But we’re not going to get that if we think there’s this arrow of evolution, that complexity can only occur when there’s energy there.

And we’re now in a place where we’re running out of the kind of cheap, abundant, easily transportable fossil fuel that’s a one-time gift from this planet. Solar energy and wind energy are a lot more diffuse, so we’re going to have to live simpler lives. We’re going to have to live less wasteful lives. We’re going to have to rely on our neighbors again and help our neighbors out, and they help us out.

So we’re going to see the emergence of localism and community. And this idea that we get grapes from Chile shipped up to New York, or whatever—this kind of globalization that has been so fossil-fuel-intensive—is going away.

Overshoot and the future of civilization

Rick: And so many things to say, as usual, in response to everything you just said. Either we’re going to do that willingly—we’re going to kind of wise up and begin to cooperate, and so on, and do the things you just said—or we’re going to be forced into it.

So if we go through hell and high water—as the U.S. and Western civilizations collapse—I wouldn’t see that as contradictory to the notion that there’s an evolutionary imperative guiding the universe. I would say that Mother is cleaning the dirt off us. We need to go through that in the service of our evolution.

Michael: I like that. I mentioned that William Catton’s book Overshoot—somebody might just be coming in—is the book that I think is the most important book in print.

But there are two other books that I want to highly recommend. Both of these people that I’m about to recommend have also grounded. They both consider Overshoot to be one of the best books they’ve ever read in their lives.

Rick: That’s one of the advantages of living on the road: You have a lot of time to read books.

Michael: Exactly. Richard Heinberg’s latest book is called

Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels . It’s not just doom and gloom. It’s about a positive vision of the future, but it’s also in touch with reality. So I highly recommend Richard Heinberg’s book Afterburn .

And then my favorite author in the world, John Michael Greer. I’ve read ten of his books in the last two years. His blog posts—like 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 people every week read his blog posts on the Archdruid Report —and this is Collapse Now and Avoid the

Rush: The Best of the Archdruid Report . So I highly recommend John Michael Greer and Richard Heinberg, in addition to my main mentor, William Catton.

Rick: Now, a few minutes ago you spoke of us being lenses, and that we all see things differently because we are lenses. Here’s a quote from William Blake that I’m sure you’re familiar with:

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is—infinite. For man has closed himself up till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

Rick: I would say, and this comes back to the whole notion of spiritual development and the possibility of there being universal truth, or universal reality that we’re all seeing partially, as blind men feeling the elephant. I would say that if we all—theoretically speaking—cleansed our windows of perception a whole lot, to the point where they were clear, then there would be pretty much universal agreement about some of the things that we now just have to grant a lot of latitude for: “Well, my friend believes this, I believe that, whatever—we’re friends.” We could actually get right down to a scientific, experiential verification or rebuttal of many things that we now consider metaphysical.

Michael: Yeah, I don’t know about that, Rick, because the only way that I can think of that human beings en masse—the whole of us, lots of us, or even just a few of us, for that matter—can totally cleanse the lens of our perception is to totally live without language.

Once we use symbolic language, we’re in the realm of interpretation, and those interpretations fog our view, shade our view, focus our attention. And even the idea of the infinite is a human construct. It’s a category; it’s a way of thinking. And certainly, I think the idea of limitlessness, the idea of infinity, the idea of unlimited possibilities served us at one time in human history, and I don’t think it serves us anymore.

We need to honor—that’s why I say God is in the limits—we need to honor the fact that the water and the soil, and the health of the soil, and the ability of our atmosphere to absorb carbon dioxide, and the ability of our oceans to absorb our waste… Nature is not unlimited, and nature is not infinite.

Yeah, you can talk about perhaps at the scale of the universe as a whole; I don’t know. But in terms of this planet, let’s just start here: there’s not an unlimited or infinite amount of resources that we can take from the natural world. There’s not an unlimited or infinite ability for this planet to absorb our waste and our refuse, and all that kind of stuff.

And so I think that I would rather say, I don’t know if we can cleanse our perceptions and whatever; I do think that we need to at least have as clear-eyed an understanding as possible of ecological reality. That’s why I love William Catton’s book Overshoot so much. We can then say, with humility, “Okay, as an individual and as a member of different collectives, different groups of people, I’m committed to doing everything I can to be pro-future, to live pro-future, to vote pro-future, to work toward a healthy future as a sacred responsibility.”

And that doesn’t necessarily require us to cleanse the lens of perception, because I don’t know that that’s possible, given that we live in a world co-created by symbolic language, where words create worlds. That is, the worldviews within which we live and move and have our being are co-created by the language that we use.

Rick: Well, let me respond to that. Here’s some more from Blake:

To see a world in a grain of sand And heaven in a wildflower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.

I think what he’s referring to, he’s not referring to the non-fact that natural resources are infinite, or anything like that; what he’s saying is that infinity is intrinsic to creation. It’s the essential stuff; it’s the essential nature of creation. And quantum physicists will tell you that, too: that which appears to be a finite pen on my desk, if you get right down to its ultimate reality, is an infinite something.

Michael: And the natural world—I mean, take a pen, or take a tree, or a flower. If you have what my wife, Connie Barlow, and others call “deep-time eyes,” if you have eyes informed by what God—Reality, if you don’t like the word God—what Reality has revealed through science about deep time and evolutionary history, then when Connie is in a forest, she isn’t just seeing in the way that an uninitiated person who, let’s say, meditates a lot but doesn’t have any evolutionary understanding sees. She’s thinking, “Okay, this species of tree has been around 275 million years. This species of tree has been here and there and in different places.”

When you have a deep-time understanding—that is, an evolutionary understanding informed by science—Connie actually has a more intimate relationship with forests than I do, in most cases, because she has a depth of knowledge. It’s almost as if she understands the biography.

If you and I just met, we can have a really wonderful relationship. But if we’ve each taken two or three hours to share our life stories with each other, all of a sudden there’s an intimacy. There’s a way that I’m seeing you in a deeper way, I’m experiencing you in a deeper way, with some understanding of your history. And the same is true for all life forms.

So when you understand these various species of squirrels or raccoons, or various trees, those deep-time eyes give us a way to quote that Blake poem again, “To see heaven in a grain of sand…” and all that kind of stuff. We have those sacred eyes. So deep-time eyes and sacred eyes, I think, will definitely serve us in helping us move into a healthy future.

Rick: Yes, and that’s in a way an intellectual understanding—deep-time eyes, and big history, and all that stuff—but it gets sort of imbibed into our mentality to such an extent that I think it kind of begins to color everything we see spontaneously, without our having to think about it, right?

Michael: It can, as long as we also have the humility not to just think that what we’re studying is a machine, like a clock, where we take apart the clock and break it down into all the component parts, and then you can put it back together again, and you’ve got a clock!

No, nature isn’t that. If I take a squirrel and take it all down to its parts, I can’t put it back together again. There’s this—what I call divine mystery. There’s this divine, sacred something, this emergence, that makes the whole squirrel a functional squirrel. The squirrel prior to death is different from a squirrel that’s died, and from that essence that had that squirrel alive.

So there’s a humility, there’s a generosity, there’s, again—sacred eyes is my shorthand for it. But there’s a way that, if we had the humility to know that we are part of nature—we’re not the controllers of nature, we’re not the masters of nature—and, in fact, if we don’t regain the kind of humility that all Indigenous peoples had in the face of this reality that some people call nature, some people call the goddess, some people call God, whatever, then we’re missing something vital.

And in fact, it may be—it may be that the only way that we can truly usher in a just, healthy, and sustainably life-giving future is to regain that sense of humility. I see it like the prodigal species. You know, humanity—the prodigal species—we’ve squandered our inheritance. We’re waking up to our predicament in the pigpen, as it were, and we’re coming home to Reality, to God, to the Father—whatever metaphor you want to use.

But we’re coming back home to reality, and there’s that humility and those sacred eyes that I think are going to be vital in that process.

Rick: Yeah, and I want you to elaborate more on what humility and sacred eyes mean, but let me just throw in something here from the Bhagavad Gita, which is—I forget which chapter—but that “the enlightened person sees all beings in the Self, and the Self in all beings.”

Michael: Amen.

Rick: And what that means is that you and I are actually the same person. Superficially, there appear to be two of us, but when we get right down to it, we are the same consciousness. You know, it’s like the electrical field: it shines through this light bulb, it works through this camera, it works in this iPod, and it’s the same field expressing itself through different instruments.

So you and I are different instruments, but different sense organs of the Infinite, we could say, expressing, reflecting… Well, or another analogy: the sun, the same sun, shining on a bunch of different things. It reflects this way off a pond, this way off a mirror, this way off a diamond, and yet it’s the same light reflecting differently through different reflectors.

Michael: Right, and we’re both being breathed by life. I mean, we talk about “I’m breathing,” “you’re breathing,” but in a way, I don’t have to think about it. Life is breathing through me. There’s one life that breathes through all creatures.

There’s ultimately not the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Mississippi River; there’s one water system on Planet Earth. And that same water system flows through our veins and comes down our face when we cry.

So that’s, again, coming to the awareness that we participate in what I call sacred reality, that we need to live in right relationship to reality. That’s what I call my message these days: the gospel of right relationship to reality. That is, the good news that’s only possible when we honor what’s fundamentally, undeniably, and inescapably real. And whatever else that means and includes: nature—my outer nature, my inner nature, my social nature, and my interpretive nature.

And so being in right relationship with nature means honoring that nature, not dishonoring that nature. And we dishonor nature when we think we can continue to use the air, the water, and the soil as a garbage can.

Time is real. Now, I know some spiritual people say the only thing that’s real is the present moment. Horse shit. The 13.8 billion years of creativity made this moment possible, and so the past is real. Yes, the only place that you can experience or think about the past is in the present moment; that’s true, but that doesn’t discount the reality of the past.

And the future—if we act as if the future is not real, we will condemn the future. So being in right relationship, that is, honoring the reality of time, means acknowledging that the only place I can be grateful to the past, and the only place that I can be a blessing to the future, is in the present moment. Amen. But that doesn’t make the past or future less real.

And so dishonoring time, I would say, is somebody who thinks time isn’t real or, more potently in this Western culture, is somebody who says, “The past only goes back a few thousand years, and who cares about climate change? I mean, Jesus is coming back again.” And so that’s dishonoring time.

And then, finally, dishonoring mystery. Because, again, I think time, nature, and mystery—whatever else the word reality holds, it at least means time, nature, and mystery, because those are real whether we believe it or not.

In fact, I love this quote from Philip K. Dick. He says:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

Mystery is real to that degree. Not just the realm that we don’t know, but the entire realm that we don’t even know that we don’t know. So living in an honorable relationship to mystery is to recognize that we don’t have all the answers; that there’s an intelligence, there’s a reality larger than us that we’re an expression of.

We’re not separate from it, but we don’t have access to the wisdom of the whole and the intelligence of the whole. So there’s that humility.

And to dishonor mystery is to think that we are at the end of knowledge, that we know everything, or we can know everything, or we can control everything, and that kind of hubris. I love John Michael Greer’s definition of hubris: “The overweening pride of the doomed.” Love it.

Rick: That’s great stuff. When you speak of humility, what that gets right down to for me is misappropriating the authorship of action and the ownership of who we actually are. I mean, if I think that I am just this person, and that I came into existence at such and such a time, and that I will go out of existence at such and such a time, and that I am actually in total control of my life, or I am trying to be, and so on and so forth, it automatically means that I’m going to insist that things happen a particular way, that I’m going to try to box all sorts of understandings into my little head, rather than honor the mystery, as you say.

But if I recognize that I am this deep, vast intelligence which is eternal, expressing itself through this particular instrument, at this particular time, then I think that automatically enables me, or anyone, to live in a humble way.

Michael: I completely agree. And what this reminds me of is the whole topic that a lot of people think religion is mostly about—though I don’t think it is. Religion, if it’s doing its job, is to help us live in right relationship to the fundamentally real, undeniably real aspects of our reality. That is, the limitations of our ecological context and the challenges of living in community—because there are challenges to living in community.

All religions have promoted personal wholeness and social coherence by a variety of ways of doing that. So one of the things a lot of people think religion is mostly about is death, or the after-death, or the afterlife, or what happens when we die, and that sort of thing. And just speaking as a religious naturalist, I bow in gratitude to whatever metaphysical or theological ways that people have of thinking about death. That’s fine.

But I visit graveyards a lot. Connie and I visit graveyards a lot. And one of the reasons we do it is because it promotes humility. I mean, you don’t have to read too many gravestones before you realize it wasn’t very long ago that a lot of women died in childbirth, and a lot of children died under the age of five. And so we’re fortunate that this is not the reality for most of us today.

But it also gives me a perspective that I find hugely valuable, and that is, I’ll look at a gravestone and I’ll read the name and the dates, and if this person is there with their husband or wife, or whatever, one of the things I’ll say to myself often is, whatever this person may have believed about his soul or spirit or consciousness—whatever transcended death, that may have inspired them to live a great life, no problem, fine—but from the perspective of every life form in the universe, this person is everlastingly dead.

And pretty soon, I’m going to be just as everlastingly dead. That is, this Michael Dowd, in this form, with this consciousness, and these thoughts and feelings will—from the perspective of every life form in the universe—no longer exist in that way.

I have one life to leave a legacy! I have one life to make a difference, and I don’t want to put off the things that are my legacy work.

And what that does for me is, paradoxically, it’s just deeply inspiring. I have one life to leave a legacy! I have one life to make a difference, and I don’t want to put off the things that are my legacy work, my mission, my sense of my life purpose—like, “Where can I make the most difference for the future and for the planet?” I don’t want to put those things off.

I went through, I think you may know, five or six years ago, a very serious bout of cancer. I had a tumor the size of my fist in my spleen. And I had ten rounds of chemotherapy, then I had my spleen removed. And there was a period of about a month, a month and a half, where we were looking at the possibility that I could die in the next six months to a year.

And even when that was the case, I had what religious people call “the peace that passes understanding.” Now, I did have one afternoon—I was diagnosed on Thursday, and on Saturday afternoon I had some serious fear. But after that, from Saturday evening on to this day—that was five years ago—basically, the two emotions that I was flooded with: one was gratitude. When I looked to the past, I had this tremendous gratitude that I had lived, at that time, 51 years—that I was graced to have lived that long.

My kids—my three children—are doing really well, so my genetic legacy felt like it was in good hands. My memetic legacy—my ideas—my book was doing well, my ideas were getting out into the world. And so I felt this gratitude, like, “Oh my God, I’ve lived already probably longer than most of my ancestors.” So I had this gratitude when I looked to the past.

And then when I looked to the future, including a future that didn’t include me—like if I die in the next year—I had this trust. And for me, that’s what faith is. Faith for me, real faith, is trusting that whatever happens on the other side of death is just fine.

And so that gratitude for the past and trust for the future have allowed me, for these last five years, to be in this place where, even though I’m cancer-free, and I’ve had three CAT scans that showed no signs of cancer, and to my knowledge I’m 100% healthy, I don’t take my life for granted anymore.

I choose to cherish every season. And like we were talking about earlier in our conversation, Connie and I personify the seasons. So at the end of spring, for example—not long ago; actually, technically we’re not in summer yet, until the 21st of June—but at the beginning of June, we personified spring.

And we said, both of us—we were out watching the sunset; we’re in northern Michigan right now—and we watched the sunset and we said, “Thank you, spring, for being such an amazing season this year. If one or both of us don’t experience you again”—and we actually hold in our minds and our hearts the possibility that one or both of us could die before springtime comes again next year—“if one or both of us don’t experience you again, we just cherish what a gift you’ve been.”

And then we’re silent. And often, one or both of us will start crying. We just don’t want to take our lives for granted.

So that, as a religious naturalist, as a sacred realist, it seems to me—at least, this is my worldview; you and your viewers and listeners may be different—but to my mind it seems pretty clear that where we go to when we die is the same place we came from before we were born.

And whether you speak of that as “coming from God and returning to God,” or “coming from mystery and returning to mystery,” or “coming from nothing and returning to nothing,” I think all those are legitimate ways of thinking about it.

But as I sometimes say, not just jokingly, if where I go to when I die isn’t the very same place that all the plants and animals and bacteria have gone, I’m gonna be pissed! I don’t think we humans get to go to some special place that the rest of nature doesn’t get to go to. So, that’s just my worldview.

Practical truth and factual truth

Rick: You and Connie and I have a mutual friend in David Sunfellow, down in Sedona.

Michael: Oh, David, yes, a beautiful man.

Rick: You’ve probably seen his documentary on near-death experiences.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. This is one of the areas where David and I have a different worldview. It’s a really important thing for him, this whole idea that human consciousness is somewhat different from all other forms of consciousness, and that we survive death in some real way.

Rick: Well, I think he says cats and dogs do too.

Michael: Okay, that’s cool too.

Rick: Or whatever—amoebas—that we’re all sort of evolving entities, and that we’ve all had many lives, and we’ll all have many lives, and there’s a lot of evidence for it. It’s not something that you need to believe in, or anybody needs to believe in, but it could work that way. Let’s take it as a theory.

Michael: Right, and there are different ways of thinking about that. You can believe, as some people do, that there are these individual entities—spiritual, nonmaterial entities—called souls, that go from one to another to another to another. There are others, like Carl Jung and others, who see this more in terms of the collective unconscious that we tap into.

Rick: Yeah, take a bucket out of it and that becomes a life.

Michael: Right, right, exactly. So I don’t happen to hold the belief that past lives or future lives, in a literal sense, are real, but that doesn’t mean I can’t bow in respect and honor to those of my friends who do have that belief.

Rick: Yeah. Regarding beliefs, personally, I regard all beliefs as theories that are open to investigation, and there are means and tools for investigating them. But scientists get all hot and bothered if some other scientist has a theory that they don’t happen to ascribe to. They think, “Well, let’s test it, you know? Let’s all test it and see how it works out, and maybe I’ll change my mind and maybe I won’t.” And obviously, a lot of scientists aren’t quite as flexible and objective as that. As someone said, science progresses by a series of funerals—ideally, at least.

Michael: Well, religion doesn’t even do that! Because of our idolatry of the written word, idolatry of the otherworldly, and idolatry of beliefs—what I call the triple idolatries.

Idolatry of the written word is where you think God’s best guidance—that is, our best map of reality—is frozen in time. Idolatry of the otherworldly is where you think ultimate value, ultimate holiness, or reality exists only outside time and nature. And idolatry of belief is when you think that any one belief system is the only right way to be in right relationship to reality.

Those triple idolatries make it such that religion doesn’t even proceed by funerals, whereas at least science does!

Rick: At least science does, yeah. But still, what do you think about the idea that anything anybody cares to believe in, or not, doesn’t need to be taken rigidly, but could be regarded as a potential theory? So, do angels exist? Does reincarnation exist? And throughout history, there have been people who have had all sorts of experiences in which they spoke about and discussed these things.

Well, there’s this show on TV called The Ghost Inside My Child, about little kids who clearly remember a past life and come up with all kinds of details that they couldn’t possibly have known otherwise. So, if it’s possible for some people to have these experiences, maybe it means that we have the innate capacity to have them, and any and all of us could develop that capacity, and thereby use our own mind and nervous system as a scientific instrument to systematically investigate whether this, that, or the other thing were in fact true.

Michael: And my basic response to that is: So what? In other words, this is one of the metaphysical things that can be distracting, because what we most need to focus on now is how we get our energy, how we grow our food, how we live our lives, and how we shift this demonic economic system that is designed to reward a few at the expense of the many, and designed to make almost all of us harm the future.

Rick: So for you, it’s like angels dancing on the head of a pin, or something?

Michael: Yeah, exactly. It’s like, who the fuck cares? Excuse my language.

Rick: It’s all right.

Michael: If your belief systems, if your metaphysics, inspire you to be of greater service to the future and to live in a more humble, less carbon-intensive way, then I bow in deep gratitude. If your belief system thinks that you can continue living high on the hog, in a carbon-intensive way, and who cares what things are going to be like a hundred years from now, then I’m going to say your beliefs are not serving you, and your beliefs are likely to allow your children and grandchildren to condemn them.

So I tend to focus a lot less, at this time, on these sorts of metaphysical questions. And David—you mentioned David Sunfellow—I love David. Another David I hugely value, love, and respect is one of the world’s top scientists in the whole field of biology and evolutionary biology, and that’s David Sloan Wilson.

Edward O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson are two of the leading evolutionary theorists, and they actually agree on a whole lot more than either one of them agrees with Richard Dawkins, who is another leading evolutionary theorist. But David Sloan Wilson has this really important distinction between practical truth and factual truth, or practical realism and factual realism. And it’s really simple: practical truth is a belief or way of thinking that, if you act as if it’s true, serves your life and serves your community. In other words, it promotes personal wholeness and social coherence. It’s practical truth.

It’s a way of thinking that, if I act as if this is real, or act as if this is true, the fruit of my life, individually and socially, is good fruit. It’s what religions traditionally have specialized in—practical truth. Factual truth is what science specializes in, but factual truth can kill us if it is not interpreted in ways that also promote personal wholeness and social coherence. And, from an evolutionary standpoint, David Sloan Wilson makes the point that practical truth will outcompete factual truth every day if they’re up against each other.

So that’s why one of the important tasks that we attend to now is how to take the factual truth that we’re gaining through evidential revelation—that is, what God, Reality, is revealing through evidence—and make sure that we interpret it in ways that also serve us individually and collectively, and are pro-future. Again, how does it serve the future? So I think that distinction between practical and factual truth is a very, very useful one.

✨ Spiritual awakening and ecological action

Rick: Yeah, it is, and I think there are some really exciting and powerful implications to what you’re saying here. We have a tradition of wanting to know things—as human beings—and wanting to accomplish things. We wanted to get to the moon, right? And a lot of people argued against doing that and spending the money: “What practical value does that have? It’s just a bunch of rocks.”

But it turned out that the effort to get to the moon not only gave us Tang, but it brought about all sorts of innovations and technological developments…

Michael: It helped us look back and look at the Earth as a living, one, creative, living reality that we either need to learn to live in right relationship to, or we’re screwed.

Rick: Yeah, and now we’ve built this huge particle accelerator in Geneva, and we’ve discovered the Higgs boson, and people are saying, “So what? What’s the Higgs boson going to do for us?” But somehow the effort to know ends up, more often than not, having all sorts of unforeseen benefits and consequences, and also, of course, gives us the capability of destroying ourselves.

Where I’m going with this is that I sort of feel like it doesn’t have to be an either-or situation. I mean, I know there are spiritual people who just marinate in their experiences and could give a damn what happens to the environment, and it’s very narcissistic, self-indulgent, and a waste of time. But I also, at the same time and in the same breath, feel like somehow the unfolding of deep mystical experience, and the commonality of that which I see blossoming all over the world as I interview people week after week—people with sometimes no prior interest in such things are just waking up to this profound depth of experience—has important implications for what you’re so passionate about in terms of changing societal systems, changing the way we treat the ecology, and all.

I think there’s a connection there that you might be glossing over. You might feel like, “To heck with that metaphysical…”

Michael: Well, no, no, no. I don’t discount that; I don’t undervalue it. I think that we are shaped by our experiences. Whatever we call spirituality—for me, spirituality is the practices and exercises, the heartset and the mindset, that help me live in right relationship to reality.

There are profound experiences that are possible for the human animal that help us feel our deep connectedness, our relatedness, and our at-homeness. They also inspire us to live with greater integrity, greater generosity, greater thoughtfulness, and greater care. I am not in any way underplaying or disvaluing that.

I’m just suggesting that I do know some people who are so caught up in the pursuit of those states of consciousness that, for them, they downplay the fact that fifty years from now, the generations alive—the people living fifty years from now—and my granddaughter, who is four years old, almost five years old, will be one year younger than I am now, fifty years from now.

What my granddaughter is going to care about, and what her generation is going to care about, isn’t how much I meditated or what my beliefs were. They’re not going to care whether we did all the things that we think are important. The thing that’s going to matter most to them is: Do they still have soil to grow food? Do they have a climate that is not so punishingly cruel that it’s as though they were condemned?

If our spiritual practices don’t serve us to be a blessing to the future, then what the hell are they about?

That’s what I mean. If our spiritual practices don’t serve us to be a blessing to the future, then what the hell are they about? It’s just spiritual masturbation.

Rick: I totally agree with you, and that’s why I was so excited about having this interview with you, because you put your money where your mouth is. I was at that Science and Nonduality conference a few years ago, and somebody, David Lloyd—a Buddhist teacher, whom you may be familiar with—got up on the mic and was asking a teacher who was up on the podium: What about ecology, and what about the Earth, and all that stuff?

And this guy, in a very detached way, answered, “Well, you know, it’s just a speck of dust. It doesn’t matter in the big scheme of things.” And David was like, “Come on!” He kept pushing the guy.

I think there has to be a complete, holistic package. So let’s talk about the situation with the environment. We have a government that is owned by corporations, which is making stupid decisions, and half of which denies that there’s even a problem, and we want to change that. Let me just finish—so we’ve got that on the one hand.

On the other hand, I see this upsurge of spiritual awakening taking place all over the world, and I connect the two. I think that nature is giving us a lifeline. It’s responding to the dire situation that we’ve gotten ourselves into with a solution that maybe most of us don’t see coming, but which is ultimately fundamental and will ripple up in terms of changing the mindsets of people in the world, such that we can actually begin to see change in policy matters, corporate behavior, and stuff like that.

So, in other words, what I’m saying in a nutshell is that spiritual awakening is the ultimate solution to greed and stupid behavior that’s wrecking the world.

Michael: Yeah, I agree with part of that, and I’m not sure I agree with all of it. Because again, when we take a careful look at the 24 complex civilizations that have existed before ours, all of which have declined and fallen, one of the things that we see is that at the height, and within the first several decades of the decline of that civilization, many people…

There are these religious movements that are all seeing a leap in consciousness, a transformation, some large-scale shift where everybody’s going to get it! And so this is where I come to ecology as the new theology. That’s why William R. Catton’s book Overshoot is, in my opinion, the most important book in print, because what he talks about are some of the fundamental ecological realities.

When you understand human history from an ecological standpoint, you realize that not only have these 24 civilizations, but other less complex societies have often met their downfall when they didn’t honor the ecological limits—living in a way that was within the carrying capacity, to use ecological language. Every bioregion, every continent, and every land base has a carrying capacity. That is, it can support so many of this kind of animal living in this kind of way.

Now, Earth can support so many human beings—that is, Homo sapiens—but now we’re not dealing just with Homo sapiens. We’re dealing with what Catton calls Homo colossus. That is, each one of us is now living—we are using resources and exuding waste—like 20 human beings did 500 years ago. That’s Homo colossus.

So we have overshot—this is a fact—the carrying capacity of the planet severely. And the only reason that we haven’t seen a die-off, which is common to all species that are in overshoot, is that we are taking nonrenewable resources from this deep, old, sequestered carbon and putting it out, and sustaining us that way. But, A, that’s not infinite; we can’t do that infinitely. And the more we do that, we’re actually lessening the carrying capacity.

So over the course of the next 100 or 150 years, when there’s a decline in population, as there absolutely has to be, we will see, hopefully, whatever emerges on the other side. The forms of religiosity won’t be otherworldly, because those will be condemned.

People living 50 years from now will be condemning the religions that didn’t stop the kind of chaos that we’re dealing with. That’s why we need to have—again, as we’ve talked about several times in this conversation—this humility and ecological sensitivity, where we come back into a mutually enhancing relationship with the air, the water, the soil, and the life of our region, and we honor God’s limits. That is, we honor nature’s limits.

Ultimately, I’m hopeful. When you step back and look at things from a big-history perspective, I think that we’ll be seeing this little blip of time where we thought that we could control nature, we thought that we could dominate nature, and we thought that we didn’t have to worry about our consequences. We’re going to experience the catastrophic results of that in the next 10 to 15 hundred years. But there will be a restabilizing of the climate, and there will be a restabilizing, probably at a very different level than now.

For the next—let’s say humans have been around for 200,000 years; Homo sapiens, using symbolic language—the next 200,000 years, a thousand years from now, or even 2,000 or 5,000 years from now, whatever, it’s going to be humans once again, as we did for 99% of our history, up until just 10,000 years ago. We lived in a mutually enhancing relationship, or we suffered the consequences.

We lived beyond the carrying capacity of our bioregion, and there was a die-off. So ultimately I’m hopeful in a longer-term sense, but I think we’ve got some purgatory, some burning off, and some challenges from having been out of right relationship to reality. It’s a terribly exciting and terrifying time to be alive, but I personally don’t hold out hope that there’s going to be some massive consciousness shift that’s then going to immediately translate to systemic institutional shift, sparing us from dealing with the consequences of our actions for the last several hundred years.

There are going to be consequences. We’re going to have to deal with them, but hopefully people living a hundred years, two hundred years, three hundred years, or five hundred years from now will be grateful for the fact that humanity was backing into this intimate, personal relationship with God, with the Goddess, with Reality, with Nature.

A long-term hope

Rick: I actually agree with you. I do think there’s a massive consciousness shift, but I also think that might actually precipitate the collapse of all kinds of institutions, businesses, and corporations that have no place in a sustainable world. Or perhaps it will buffer the change—make it a little bit smoother.

That there’s a big consciousness shift is kind of undeniable when you begin to see how it’s proliferating.

Michael: Well, certainly in terms of—I mean, Ken Wilber and others speak about how we go from self-centeredness to group-centeredness, to nation-centeredness, to planetary and global. There’s this consciousness that’s expanding our sense of in-group. I mean, we cooperate today with people our grandparents feared and hated.

So there’s this sense of greater cooperation, greater compassion, and greater empathy. Whether that is able to be sustained on the other side, when fossil fuels are but a distant memory and we don’t have that kind of global cooperation and global transport, I don’t know. But I do agree that there has been, in these last several hundred years—and longer than that—an expansion of consciousness, an expansion of how we interpret and experience reality, that hopefully will not be lost.

Part of how I see my own life purpose, my own mission, is to ensure that whatever forms of religiosity emerge on the other side of the coming challenges, they be deeply grounded in our best evidential understanding of reality. So evidence is modern-day scripture, evidence as divine guidance, evidence as God’s word—not just ancient texts. But also a deeply ecological relationship to God, or to theology. That’s why I speak of “ecology is theology.”

Rick: Well, when I say consciousness shift, the title of this show kind of indicates what I mean: Buddha at the Gas Pump, which is that there are Buddhas awakening everywhere, in ordinary circumstances. It’s no longer a rare, unattainable thing. And such people have an impact.

I totally agree. I mean, I don’t want to give you the impression that I don’t, or that the things that are foremost on your plate aren’t critical. If spirituality has any value whatsoever, it has to contribute to the solution of those types of problems.

So let’s shift it a little bit right now and talk about people like Bill McKibben, who are saying we can’t go over 350 parts per million, and now we’re already past 400. People are saying we can’t go over two degrees centigrade, and it looks like we’re going to shoot right past that. People like yourself are running around saying, “We’ve got to change, we’ve got to change.” When you lay your head on the pillow at night, do you think, “Well, are we going to change, or am I just shouting against the wind here? There seems to be this huge momentum, and little guys like me aren’t making a dent in it.”

Michael: I don’t feel that way at all. I feel like I’m making the biggest difference I’m capable of making at this time in history, given my unique gifts and limitations.

Rick: But is it enough? Will it be enough? You and people like you?

Michael: Will it be enough to save industrial, rapacious civilization? No.

Rick: No, we don’t want to do that.

Michael: Will it be enough to prevent us from experiencing the consequences of where we’ve been radically out of right relationship to nature for the last several hundred years? No. But will it be enough to help ensure that there will be many of us—millions of us—who move into the future consciously, with big hearts and a big sense of commitment, so that the seeds are planted and a healthy human-Earth relationship emerges over the course of the next 50, 100, 150, or 200 years? Yes.

I do think I can make that difference. I do think we are. And the work you’re doing, and the work that so many of these colleagues—these 55 people that I interviewed as part of The Future Is Calling Us to Greatness—are doing, is making a difference. In fact, anybody who’s watching or listening to this, just put “The Future Is Calling Us to Greatness” into Google, and you’ll get there.

I interviewed 55 of the world’s amazing leaders in terms of sustainability, climate change, peak oil, and a sprinkling of spiritual leaders who can help us hold this scary stuff in ways that don’t just freak us out, but inspire us to be in action. And these conversations—about a dozen of them—brought me to tears.

I was so moved by these Skype conversations with these amazing people. You can watch any of them for free online, and I think you can get the transcripts for free. But if you want to download them to your computer or your iPod so you can listen on your own time, I think it’s just 25 bucks for all 55 interviews, so it’s really quite affordable.

Rick: So you would say, then, that despite the fact that the petrochemical or petroleum industry is massively wealthy and massively powerful, and that so many laws and things seem so deeply entrenched—so many ways of doing things—that it’s a David and Goliath situation, maybe? Their power and invincibility are a lot flimsier than they may appear, and they’re going to fall.

Michael: Well, they will fall, but some of them will transform. For some of them, it won’t be so much a matter of falling as, in the coming years and decades, the selection pressure changing.

Okay, I’m an evolutionary theologian; I’m an evolutionary evangelist. For me, it’s about viewing things through deep time and through our best evolutionary understanding. The environmental conditions of the last 100 years benefited the way we’ve been doing things. We’ve been living in a wasteful way. We had an abundance of energy, more energy than we knew what to do with, but those conditions have now shifted.

So now we’re living in a different environment, and that environment is calling forth something new. The things that will survive and thrive in the next 50 years are not the same things that survived and thrived in the last 50 years, or that will survive and thrive 50 years after that.

The environment is radically changing, and we will see our economics change. Just last week, I was with a whole group of some of the top ecological economists in the world down in Southern California, along with other people. There was this big conference that I was just at. There is some radical rethinking of how we do economics, how we do politics, how we do law, and how we do medicine.

I mean, law—the idea that all rights and privileges go to humans and human corporations, and that humans and human corporations can do anything they want to nature—that’s insane. We currently have a democracy. A democracy is a conspiracy against the natural world. We have to have a “biocracy”; that is, we have to allow the voices of the natural world and natural systems to be reflected in our jurisprudence, in our laws, and in things like that.

So we’re going to be seeing radical shifts over the course of the coming decades. Some of it will be collapse, and some of it will be endings, but some of it will be transformations and evolutions. Whatever form of law exists 50 years from now, whatever form of medicine exists 50 years from now—the first concern of medicine needs to be the health of the bioregion, the health of the Earth, and the health of the land, water, and soil. Because without that, you can’t have healthy humans in a sick and dying world.

So all of our institutions will be shifting, and evolutionary drivers will drive that. I expect, in the coming decades—I agree with John Michael Greer—that there are two major mythologies in which most people are stuck, and that keep them disempowered and keep them from being in action. One is the myth of perpetual progress: We don’t need to be in action because things are just going to keep getting better and better. The other is the myth of the apocalypse: We don’t need to get engaged or involved because the whole thing is going to hell in a handbasket anyway.

The truth of the matter is that we’re in an evolutionary process, and there will be elements of blessing, goodness, and wonder, and then there will be difficult, challenging things. So I expect that in the next decades, 20 percent of the worst of humanity will show up, and I expect 80 percent of the best of humanity to show up.

Again, we see this often when we understand the rise and fall of civilizations: They all rise differently, and they all fall the same. And we’re now in this contracting process.

That’s why I love Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush by John Michael Greer, and Richard Heinberg’s

Afterburn: Society After Fossil Fuels . These are people who help us hold the scary stuff in ways that keep us in action, while avoiding these two mythologies.

Fighting chance translates as long odds, but good company. So let’s just start with the best style and spirit that we can muster, knowing that there’s only a functional difference between the root and the flower. They’re both a part of the same abiding faith. So dig in!

Rick: It’s great that you have these quotes memorized like that. I guess you’ve said them so many times.

Michael: That particular one I actually haven’t said in, gosh, probably eight years.

Rick: Not bad. So when you say that you expect 20 percent of the worst of humanity to show up and 80 percent of the best of humanity to show up, what does that mean in terms of the daily news? Are you talking about things like ISIS and terrorist activity bubbling up and becoming more strident, but at the same time all kinds of great technological innovations and democratic developments, women’s rights, and all that stuff flourishing?

Michael: A little bit of both. I think we’re going to be seeing—I think that when you step into the mindset of fundamentalist ISIS, for example, you realize that what most people want is just a stable life. They want to be able to grow their food and do their things, and the challenges of living in a world of overshoot—we have overshot the carrying capacity—create stressors and antagonism. There are all kinds of stressors that we’re feeling.

It’s not a surprise to me that we see fundamentalist elements of Islam that are violently opposed to the influence they see Western culture having on their youth. I’m not condoning or justifying that or saying that it’s good, but I am saying that it’s not a surprise that we see these kinds of conflicts.

And so what I’m meaning a little bit more is that, as things contract in an economy, a civilization, and an empire—that is, where 5 percent of the species enjoys 25 percent of the world’s resources, energy, products, and stuff like that, and that’s no longer sustainable—as all that contracts, I think we’re going to see people being generous, involved, committed, engaged, and working with each other. This is what I mean by the 80 percent of the best of humanity.

We’re also going to see self-centeredness, greed, and arrogance. That’s also going to be there, but I don’t see that in the majority. I see that as significantly in the minority because of some of the breakthroughs in consciousness, awareness, and in our hearts and minds—how we think and feel—that have occurred over the last centuries.

Michael: I think that’s creating a platform where it’s not going to be all good, and it’s not going to be all bad. Again, part of this comes out of just understanding the way past civilizations have risen and fallen, but I think we’re going to see that the difference between those and now is that we also have a climate that is going to be changing things. I mean, the last 5,000 years, which is where all those 24 civilizations arose and fell, didn’t have to deal with the kind of extreme climate that we’re going to have to deal with in the next 50 to 100 years.

Rick: Essentially, when there’s a big snowstorm or hurricane or something, a certain faction gets out and starts looting the stores, but a large faction—and this speaks to the point you just made—becomes very neighborly and compassionate, and does stuff to help people they otherwise would never even speak with.

Michael: Exactly, and that’s what I mean by the 20/80 percent. It may be 10/90 percent, or it may be 40/60 percent—who knows? But I think far more often, we’re going to see the better side of humanity, the better side of our angels, emerge. We will see less of that, but we’ll also see some real challenges, greed, and the dark side of humanity.

Rick: Yeah, sometimes when something’s existence is threatened, it really starts to fight much more than ever before. There are a lot of things in our world—a lot of technologies, corporations, and whatnot—which, as I said earlier, don’t really belong in the kind of sustainable, wholesome world that you’re talking about.

Well, you said it, actually: BP could really get into solar power, and that’s happening. There are some companies that are fighting the installation of solar panels and see it as a threat to their business model, and there are others who think, “Hey, this is the future; let’s get on board with this.”

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. This again is where humility is useful: in a world that is evolving through a process of emergence, it can’t be predicted ahead of time. We cannot know ahead of time, and we will always be surprised by what emerges, especially in a global civilization that is this complex.

So anybody who thinks they can say with confidence that this, that, or the other thing is going to be the case 10 years from now, or 20 years from now, or 30 years from now, they don’t get emergence. But there are certain patterns that we can glean. That’s why I so appreciate the historic wisdom and the ecological wisdom of somebody like William Catton, John Michael Greer, or Richard Heinberg. They really ground everything they say about the future in that historical understanding.

I see that there will be things that surprise the hell out of us—not just technologically, but socially and in every other way. But again, it’s not like I’m pro-technology or anti-technology. It’s not like I’m pro-progress or anti-progress. There are forms of progress that are pro-future; that is, progress where there will be a healthy future—healthy soil, healthy land, healthy forests. And there are ways of thinking about progress that involve only human progress while nature is getting worse. That’s not progress in any definite sense.

There are ways of thinking about technology. There are technologies that will be pro-future—technologies that will enrich the future, that will help us live in a closer, more intimate relationship with nature. Those are pro-future technologies. And then there are anti-future technologies—technologies that diminish, destroy, or damage the future.

So, as with anything—I mean, my great mentor, whom I mentioned, William R. Catton, is just a recent one. My other great mentor was Thomas Berry, and I studied Thomas Berry’s work for years. Every time we were near anywhere he lived, until he died, we would go visit him. He called himself a geologian, not a theologian, and he was, sort of, the next incarnation, if you will, of Teilhard de Chardin. He took the universe story—the story of everyone and everything, now called “big history”—physical evolution, biological evolution, and cultural evolution—as our first and only globally produced, evidence-based creation story and our foundation.

He said something not long before he died. He said that our current predicament and our way into the future can be summarized in three short sentences.

The first sentence is that, in the 20th century and early 21st century, the glory of the human has become the desolation of the Earth. Meaning that things have gotten better and better for a lot of humans, but at the expense of what we depend on, what we rely on—that is, nature. So the glory of the human has become the desolation of the Earth.

Rick: And at the expense of a lot of humans, too.

Michael: Exactly. The second sentence is that the desolation of the Earth is becoming the great shame of the human. Therefore—and this is the third sentence, which points our way to the future—given that, all programs, policies, activities, and institutions must henceforth be judged primarily by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship.

So basically, everything we do from now on, everything that we do and everything we create, has to be judged, first and foremost, by whether it’s pro-future or anti-future, whether it leads to a more intimate relationship with the natural world upon which we depend, or to a more antagonistic or controlled relationship with it.

I think he just nailed it with that. That’s why I say that from now on, our theologies, our philosophies, our metaphysics, our beliefs, our laws, our politics, our economics—everything that we do as humans—must be judged by whether it is pro-future, whether it leads to a healthy future two, three, four, five, six, or seven generations down the road, or whether it’s anti-future, whether it is harming or likely to harm future generations two, three, four, five, or six generations down the road.

Rick: Sounds great, but it sounds idealistic. I mean, you say it must be judged, but it isn’t being judged. How do we get to the point where it is being judged?

Michael: This is where I think religion has been asleep at the wheel. Religion has been failing in its most fundamental task, which is helping us live in right relationship to primary reality. Part of that is because, at least in the religions of the West, there has been this otherworldly orientation. That’s why I call these triple idolatries: idolatry of the written word, idolatry of the otherworldly, and idolatry of beliefs. These have caused religions to ignore God’s evidential revelation.

Let me speak in religious language. We’ve been blind and deaf to what God has been revealing for 500 years through evidence. As Thomas Berry says, we’ve been spiritually autistic. We don’t listen to the rivers, we don’t listen to the wind, we don’t listen to the climate. What are those realities telling us about how we need to live our lives?

We thought God spoke to us in the distant past, in these old books. We thought that where God resided was not in the forest, in the soil, or in the land; we thought God resided only outside nature. So we thought we could treat nature however the hell we wanted, because our true home is somewhere else when we died anyway.

So we’ve been spiritually autistic, and we’ve not developed an economy that is pro-future. In fact, almost everything about our economy and our ways of doing law is anti-future. That’s why the biggest task in the coming decades is: How do we shift those things? How do we transform them? How do we evolve them in ways that help us become more intimate with nature?

That’s where humility, and the ecological wisdom of the kind that William Catton talks about in his book Overshoot, and Richard Heinberg talks about in Afterburn, are absolutely essential.

We have to humble ourselves and learn from God’s word as revealed through evidence. Our understanding of theology must include ecology, and our understanding of God isn’t just some supernatural being outside time and nature, but a sacred proper name, a personification of reality—what’s real whether we believe it or not—and we’re part of that. We’re an expression of that.

👨‍👩‍👧 Chaos and the great homecoming

Rick: So what’s going to get us to do that? Tell us.

Michael: Chaos. The shit’s going to hit the fan, and that’s what’s going to catalyze us. Again, when you understand the history of all complex civilizations, one of the things you realize is that when things are going well, or when people can convince themselves that things are going well, there’s no motivation for any major change. It’s the status quo.

It’s only when the poop hits the fan, when things become difficult and challenging, that some of that denial begins to break down. The more challenging things get, finally, the more willing people are to make the kinds of changes that everybody knew they had to make anyway, but there was too much vested interest among powerful entities.

John Michael Greer, for example, just in his last five blog posts in The Archdruid Report, has a series on the five major stages in collapse, going from the era of pretense to the era of impact, this sort of thing. I don’t remember all five of them off the top of my head, but his latest series is related to that.

So I think that we can trust that there are challenging things coming down the pike, and that while they may be challenging, while there may be suffering—necessarily, there will be difficulty—it will also be the absolutely essential thing.

I sometimes say we cannot avoid the great reckoning. The great reckoning is where humanity has been out of right relationship to reality—whether you use divine or secular language for that. We’ve been out of right relationship to reality, and we’re now about to experience really difficult, challenging consequences.

But it’s also the great homecoming: the prodigal species coming home to reality, to God. So there’s good news and bad news, and I tend to focus on the good news because I think the bad news is actually going to catalyze and force us to make the changes that we had to make anyway.

I think the whole body of life is rooting for us. I see this as myth, but I see the entire body of life rooting for us to make this change.

Rick: Beautiful. That’s so well put. In the way you just put it, the bad news is actually part of the good news. It’s just the dark side of the good news, in a way.

That, I think, gives hope to people who feel like the government is so screwed up, and we’re never going to get them to change, and they can’t even agree on anything, and nothing’s getting done, and we’re subsidizing the oil industry.

Michael: But all that’s real! That’s why I think we need a popular movement. I think I’m one of those people who think that we will see an activist community—you can call it revolutionary, but mostly nonviolent, I expect—a revolutionary movement that will make the 1960s look puny in comparison.

But again, it’s not a matter of making the business community wrong, because I think there are a hell of a lot of businesses and business leaders who get this. That’s why Tom Friedman says, “If you only read one book on climate change, make it Paul Gilding’s book, The Great Disruption.”

Paul Gilding’s book, The Great Disruption, has the subtitle: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World. He sees the business community being at the forefront of the transformations, and we’re this close.

As soon as the dam of denial breaks—which could happen this year, next year, or the year after—it’s not going to be much further out than three years, at most.

Michael: Once that dam of denial breaks, the floodwaters are unstoppable. And again, I think this emergence will see 20% stupid, inane stuff, but we’re going to see 80% of stuff that’s just going to blow our minds.

Rick: And big changes can also happen quite unexpectedly and abruptly. I mean, look at the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Soviet Union. No one really saw those things coming. And boom, overnight, they came.

Michael: And it doesn’t always usher in everything good; there are challenges also that get ushered in. But I do think that this is an exciting time to be alive, as long as we’re awake, as long as we don’t just stay in denial, but stay awake.

This is why Joanna Macy, another one of my great mentors, says, “If we hold the pain of the world in our hearts and express it to others, we then experience our profound interconnectedness with life. And yes, our hearts break, but they break open with compassion, and that compassion can unite us.”

So even though I don’t have a copy of it to show, I also highly recommend Joanna Macy’s book,

Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy . She’s a Buddhist, as you know, and

How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy really allows us to stay present to the challenges, present to the chaos, present to the difficulties, but from a place of finding out where our joy and the world’s needs could intersect so that we can be a blessing.

But in the same process of us being a blessing to others, we are also blessed in that process.

Finding your calling

Rick: I just need to retire so I can start reading all these books you recommend. I have a new book every week because I have a new guest every week. And there are so many of them that my eyes are bigger than my stomach. There are just so many wonderful things to consume in this way.

Okay, I have two pages of notes here, of questions I might ask you in an interview, that you sent to me, actually, and I think we’ve probably covered most of them.

Michael: I think we’ve covered most of them.

Rick: But is there anything we haven’t covered, without even looking at your notes? Is there anything, scanning back over the course of this conversation, things that are dear to your heart, that are important, that you’d like people to hear, that we didn’t touch upon?

Michael: Well, just that I would encourage everybody to do this exercise. I just alluded to it, but take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle, so you’ve got two columns.

On the one side, list all the activities, the projects, the things that you’re good at, the things you love to do, the things that light you up, that give you joy, that give you a sense of energy and fulfillment and happiness, the things that you’re good at—or that other people tell you that you’re good at, or whatever. Just list all that, and on the top of that list you put, “My Great Joy.”

And then on the other side of the paper, list all the things that you’re aware of in your community or in your world where you feel the world’s needs. Not just where you intellectually know about it, but where you feel it. Where do you feel upset, frustrated, fearful, but especially, where do you feel compassion? Where does your heart just break over something that’s happening in your community or in the world? And you list all that.

So you get two lists: “My Great Joy” and “The World’s Great Needs,” or “My Community’s Great Needs.” And then you just pay attention to your heart. You don’t even have to call it prayer or meditation if you don’t want to; just pay attention to this part of your body.

And what you’re trying to do is play mix-and-match. Like, where are the intersections between what lights you up, what gives you joy, what gives you energy, and what the world’s needs are, or your community’s needs, or the future’s needs, as you feel them?

Where your joy and the world’s needs intersect, that’s your calling, your mission, your vocation.

And those places of intersection, where your joy and the world’s needs, or your joy and the future’s needs intersect, that’s your calling, that’s your mission, that’s your vocation at this time in your life. Whether you can make money at it or not is irrelevant; it’s finding those places where you can be a blessing in a way that blesses you.

And in addition to that, I would say, it’s kind of like

John Michael Greer: collapse now and avoid the rush. Use less energy, drive less, fly less, eat lower on the food chain, begin to live your life—or continue, take it to the next steps—where you can feel good about how you’re living, and frankly…

Rick: Are you a vegetarian?

Michael: I was a vegetarian for four years. I now eat some meat, but I always try to get it organic and not support factory farms, and that sort of thing.

Rick: Sure, just because I’m told by some people that the meat industry is worse for the environment than even the petroleum industry.

Michael: The agricultural industry as a whole is. But yes, the meat industry, in terms of the amount of water that’s used, absolutely. So, eat a more plant-based diet. Whether you become a strict vegetarian or vegan is another thing, but at least reduce that and try not to support factory farms.

Rick: Yeah, sorry to interrupt.

Michael: But get to know people on farms. I mean, when the Great Depression happened, there were still a lot of people who could move back to the farm. That’s not the case now.

And so do the work of preparation so that when the difficult times happen, if we go through another economic shockwave like 2008 or worse, which is very possible, have a sense of security about how you will eat and live, such that if you don’t have that much income, or have no income, get to know your neighbors.

Get to know people on farms. In other words, build trusted community with others who share your values, such that when difficult times come, you’re not freaking out; you’ve prepared for that so that you can be a blessing to others, so you can be a blessing to those who are freaking out, who don’t know what to do.

So yeah, that would be the last thing I would say: know that the tough times coming down the pike are not necessarily bad. From God’s perspective, from life’s perspective, and from the body of life’s perspective, they may be really, really good.

And just find those places where you can be a participant in what life is doing, in a pro-future way.

That’s going to nourish your soul, no matter what religion, metaphysics, or philosophy.

Closing thoughts

Rick: Fantastic. Well, I really appreciate what you’re doing; I appreciate your enthusiasm and your energy.

Michael: Thanks, Rick. I appreciate what you’re doing. You know, these conversations could be inspiring to a lot of people, so just a deep bow of gratitude to your work.

Rick: Well, thank you. We’ll be in touch. I’d love to meet you in person someday, and I don’t know, we’ll see what happens.

I’ve subscribed to all three of your podcasts, I’ve downloaded all the episodes, so I’m going to start listening to those, and I’m going to read all these books you recommended.

Michael: Again, the most important one of all is this one: William Catton, Overshoot.

Rick: All right, that’ll be first. I really appreciate having had you on the show. I think listeners are going to appreciate it. It’s a little different than some of the conversations I’ve had, but that’s good. I think people get tired of hearing the same old thing.

Well, first of all, before I run with you some general points, in terms of how people can connect with you. I’ll obviously be linking to your website, but is there anything else you want to say in terms of people—what you want them to read, what you want them to do?

Michael: So basically, if people want to communicate with me, the best way is probably via email: Michael@thankgodforevolution.com. Michael@thankgodforevolution.com.

Our main websites are thegreatstory.org—thegreatstory.org—and michaeldowd.org. So either one of those.

Rick: Good, and I will be linking to those from your webpage on BATGAP.com, and I’ll link to your book on Amazon.com and all that. And you’ve got a new book in the works.

Michael: Yep, got a new book in the works, but it’ll be another six, eight, or ten months before it’s out.

Rick: Let me know when it comes out so I can add a link to it.

So let me make some general concluding remarks. I’ve been speaking with Reverend Michael Dowd, and you know a lot about him by now, so I won’t reiterate what he’s about.

This show is about spiritually awakening people, and I believe, as Michael has beautifully explained, we live in a spiritually awakening culture. And that doesn’t just mean abstract metaphysical awakening; it means all sorts of ramifications in terms of changes we’re going to see in the world.

If you found this conversation interesting and would like to check out other ones, I do a new one every week and I’ve done nearly 300, so go to BATGAP.com—B-A-T-G-A-P—and check out the “Past Interviews” menu. The “Future Interviews” menu includes all the ones that we have scheduled so far.

There are several other things you can do. You can sign up to be notified by email each time a new one is posted. You’ll see a link for that.

There’s a podcast that you can sign up for. We’re having some technical difficulties with it, but some people are signing up successfully and getting it every week. So we’re still working on making it work properly for everyone.

There’s the “Donate” button that I mentioned in the beginning, which is critical for our being able to do this. That just about covers it.

So thanks for listening or watching, and we will see you next week.