Shadow Blooming

Collapse Acceptance as things fall apart.

Things are getting worse. The temperature is higher. World War looms. Another plague threatens to break out. On every side, evil idiots rule. The attention of humanity is captivated by meaningless shrieks from the electronic entertainment machine, overdriven by algorithms and ulterior motives.

(Where is the strong White man who will save us? What dismal creature of unrelenting power and pitiless amorality will rescue us from this doom? Let me vote for him! Let me send him money! Let me mortgage my immortal soul to him in ransom for salvation!)

Everywhere, it is the brutes and bullies who rise: police officers, military commanders, Prime Ministers and Presidents. These are the men whose orders are followed by legions of the obedient, who see in their leaders an image of what they themselves would become: the lords of creation and controllers of the Universe. We now know, seeing the end of history, that what they offer us in the end is only misery, mass extinction, and collapse.

I don’t expect to escape. I don’t know for sure whether I will succumb to direct heat, to a police officer’s caprice, or to starvation in a filthy cell. Somehow, at some time, the collapse will cease to be a distant threat and become an immediate reality. For now, I dwell in a state of suspension, poised between the magic privilege of advanced civilization and the onrushing tides of natural reequilibration.

Collapse Acceptance is simply letting go of the notion that we can survive. It is close kindred to the idea that nothing is permanent, including ourselves. When we allow the precious specifics of our individual lives to float buoyantly in the onrushing flow of All That Is, we understand that the world is not in our control. We are responsible only for our individual sphere of influence, which is in almost every case clearly perceptible, though we blind ourselves with delusions of grandeur and insignificance.

I have responsibilities and I try to discharge them. Some responsibilities I would prefer to shirk, and, fascinatingly, those are usually obligations to myself. I prefer to solve other people’s problems, leaving my own to fester and decay until they are intimidatingly unmanageable, thus encouraging further neglect. I have heard this is a common syndrome, and that the solution is to hand over control of my unmanageable life to a Higher Power. This is plausible, and I’m trying.

I object to “God,” though. I think it is a feint and a weakness to offload our sins onto an objective “other” who supposedly bears responsibility for the whole creation. I believe that “Thou Art That,” i.e. that each of us is a tiny droplet of the ocean of living consciousness. Each of us, therefore, bears an infinitesimal bit of responsibility for how the world is. We must each do our best within our tiny sphere of influence. In the words of a familiar story, we must each bear our tiny sliver of the Cross.

The Higher Power, to the extent it can be described in words, is the collective soul of all beings. It is as varied as Nature and as pervasive as Light. The closer we look at it, the more elaborate it gets, as when we see a teeming world of microorganisms in a drop of seawater, or a multitude of galaxies in a eyelash-width of the sky. And when we look inside ourselves we find the Higher Power there, too, in all its multivariate glory. Our specific individual life is one crystal in an infinite net of crystals, each one reflecting every other crystal and all the reflections in all the others. One spark sets the Universe alight.

Between us and undiluted glory there lies the shadow of ignorance, delusion, and forgetting. What is the source of this darkness? I cannot say that I know. By reason, I conclude that Light itself is the cause of shadow, for neither light nor anything can exist without its companion opposite. This may be satisfying intellectually, but how does it help us when we see innocents savaged by beasts, buried under rubble, dying of thirst and hunger? What is the intellectual explanation for deliberate, savage, cruel torture? And when I have explained it, am I then to retire to my safe and comfortable home, to climb the steps of my ivory tower to the aerie of privilege, to gaze in quiet contemplation across the landscape of suffering, and to fall asleep untroubled in the soft sheets of my welcoming bed?

What goes around, comes around. What you do to others, you do to yourself. I assume that in due time I will receive my portion of suffering. I think there is nothing more certain than this.

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Photo by Shahzin Shajid on Unsplash.