The Trauma of the Self

Posted on September 13, 2023 by Dave Pollard

This is a partial, edited transcript of a meeting held by Tim Cliss in 2021, on zoom. Probably not of interest unless you are intrigued by the message of radical non-duality. At the end of the transcript, I ponder a bit on the subject of human trauma. 


“The Dissolution of the Self” by Midjourney AI; my prompt, photoshopped

Tim’s introductory remarks:

We’re talking about life, being alive, aliveness. Whatever we want to call ‘this’, it’s not in parts, Parts are an illusion, and the central illusion is that “I am apart” (from everything) or “I am a part” of something larger. ‘Life’ is whole and complete. There is no ‘oneness’ to be found or become ‘one’ with. There is nothing ‘apart’ or ‘becoming’ anything. This is the end of the possibility of becoming. Everything is exactly as it is ‘already’ in every way. The sense of self is a sense of being apart, excluded, separate.

There isn’t anything ‘in place’ of ‘me’. When ‘I’ am no more, there is nothing instead, or better. There is no ‘you’ to be replaced, so the seeming absence of ‘you’ isn’t even noticeable, because ‘you’ already are not what you feel and believe your self to be, which is apart.

The (terrible) term ‘non-duality’ is just pointing to the illusion, the mistake, the misunderstanding, that ‘you are’. The problem with ‘I am’ is that that felt sense of being separate, ‘inside’, with everything else ‘outside’ is so convincing it seems impossible that it can’t be true. The conviction that ‘I know who I am’ becomes so powerful that it becomes the centre or lens through which all other happenings and experiences are filtered ‘in relation to me’.

Because ‘I’ have this felt sense of being absolutely real, I believe my story is real, and in that is most of what we call suffering. “I am real and I did something yesterday and I could have chosen to do otherwise or differently. And because I will exist tomorrow I need to work on ensuring that I do better tomorrow, and that I keep myself and those I care about safe now and tomorrow.” These misunderstandings arise as anxieties and neuroses and insecurities.

It can happen seemingly that this illusory sense of ‘I am’ can dissolve, or fall away. It isn’t ‘seen through’, or ‘realized’. It just no longer appears. That can be slow and excruciating or instantaneous. That’s the whole message: Self isn’t real. ‘This’ is not something that can be known or seen or been.

There is a longing not to feel that sense of separation. But ‘this’ is not at all what the self wants or imagines. The ‘me’ wants to know, and in the absence of ‘me’ nothing can be known, or learned, or obtained, or achieved, or lost. And the equality of everything can then feel like love, but not a love for someone, or a love that has conditions. It is a love that simply, unconditionally, is.

…..

[after the above introduction, Tim answered questions from the meeting’s attendees; in the edited transcription below, I have abridged many of his answers, and grouped answers to related questions by topic, even when they occurred at different times in the meeting]

Money and Power:

Separation feels very unsafe; this tiny me in this vast universe. Money and power are sought by some because they give the illusion of greater security. But it’s just an illusion. And with more money and power come more choices and responsibility, more to lose and hence more suffering. But nothing is separate. There is no one to have anything. But absolute poverty and powerlessness is unthinkable to ‘me’. Yet there is only ‘this’ and it can’t be found or achieved or lost. There is no ‘you’ to have things, and no things to have. There is no poverty greater than that.

The ‘Me’ versus the Body:

‘This’ is the ‘not turning up’ of the one who is attached to, inside, and having, a body. Without ‘me’, the seeming body is just allowed to be as it is. It’s not ‘mine’,
When there is no ‘one’ to be attached to the body, there is no longer any judgement or criticism of the body. The entire ‘self-improvement program’ disappears. Everything, including the body, is just accepted. It’s easier with the body when it’s not ‘yours’.

For a lot of selves the body is like a prison. But the body is already empty, and perfectly capable of looking after itself without ‘me’. There is no ‘experience’ of the body being empty; there’s just no longer any inside or outside — it’s all just empty.

All the body-obsession associated with being a physical ed teacher, and the related vanity, is gone. The body pursues pleasure, whether that is ‘good for it’ or not, since the body is no longer ‘my’ body. The body is subject to its conditioning of course. ‘I’ have nothing to do with what it does.

Getting ‘This’:

It can seem really heartless to say that there’s no path or process, nothing the self can do. But once bitten with this message, there is no antidote. You can’t leave it alone.

When there’s nowhere else to go, when ‘this’ is it, and there is no possibility of being anywhere else, it’s the end of any effort to be or do otherwise from what is.

Everything is just what it (apparently) is, and what ‘you’ called ‘yourself’ is just ‘being human’. And everything is just the same ‘being’.

The Loss of Motivation:

One apparent result of the self no longer turning up is an apparent laziness. There is no longer a ‘you’ urging that things be done. So there is less inclination to work or to concentrate doing things. Yet there’s probably more love of stories, because they’re just indulgence, enjoyable for what they are, which is just stories. They don’t ‘mean’ anything.

Even ‘my’ story becomes more enjoyable to tell. There are still emotions attached to the story, rooted in memories, but there is no longer any attachment to the story, even ‘my’ story.

It is such a relief that, without ‘anyone’ around to ‘allow’ or not ‘allow’ anything, life is allowed to just be as it is. This is not saying ‘your’ life will be better or worse. There is no longer a ‘you’ to ‘have’ the life, and judge it.

How the Unraveling of the Self Might Appear:

If ‘self’ dissolves, unravels, becomes more transparent, and starts to feel insecure as ‘the ground starts to fall away’, and you’ve never heard this message to give you context for it, you might even be hospitalized (as suffering from a serious dissociative disorder). If you’ve explored and been attracted to this message, however, so you have the context and language to describe it, it might be less devastating.

With the loss of the sense of self, there can be great fears about ‘losing yourself’ or becoming disconnected from the people close to you. Or there may be just a carrying on as if nothing had happened. With the realization that there are no real relationships between family members (they are part of the loss of everything) this can be overwhelming. And in Tim’s story this ‘dissolution’ was excruciatingly slow, and terrifying.

Yet after all the overwhelming fear and excruciating terror, it was realized that there was and is nothing to be afraid of. Self is afraid of not knowing, but the abyss of not knowing is completely benign. There is bliss in going to sleep now; just a falling into the embrace of nothing. But the fullness and wonder of life is exactly the same as the emptiness of the embrace of nothing.

The End of ‘Personal’ Love and the Emergence of Unconditional Love:

There is no one to be ‘in love’. There is just love. But while there is no longer love ‘in relationship’, ‘this’ is in a way more loving. There is no longer love out of need or expectation or negotiation. In place of such ‘transactional’ love there is unconditional love.

Since there is no ‘you’, ‘you’ can never fall in love. There can be ‘falling in love’, but it doesn’t need a ‘me’ or a ‘you’.

Causality:

There is no causality. Things are the way they are, but not ‘because’ of anything. There does not need to be a reason or purpose for anything.

Being with Other People:

There is seemingly less interest in pleasing and compromising with other people, but conditioning of the body is what it is. It was never ‘me’ doing anything anyway, so very little changes. But it is not terrible being alone anymore. Though being alone with others is somehow more enjoyable than being alone without them.

Trauma:

‘I’ loved the Eckhart Tolle model of the ‘pain-body’ for awhile because it let ‘me’ off the hook. It wasn’t ‘me’ causing the suffering, this model tells us, it was my ‘pain-body’. But the truth is that all humans suffer trauma, deeply and repeatedly, especially in our ‘defenceless’ childhood. It’s just that that trauma isn’t actually ‘yours’.

[end of transcript]

…..

Dave’s thoughts:

I have been profoundly affected by Tim’s comments on trauma over the years — he’s a trained and experienced psychologist, and therefore brings a unique and compassionate perspective to this ‘radical non-duality’ message.

He explains that trauma has a profound affect on all of us, on our conditioning, and on the fears, neuroses and suffering we all feel. The ‘injury’ of that trauma doesn’t magically disappear if the sense of self and separation drop away — memories and conditioning remain. Gradually there may be less neurosis, less anxiety and fear, though the fear of a sudden close call or great danger will still arise instinctively in the body. But by taking ‘ownership’ of ‘our’ decisions, experiences, and judgements, we actually inflict and prolong the suffering and trauma that comes from them, which is tragic. But we have no choice but to do so. You don’t have to have a ‘self’ to be traumatized — but it helps!

So what is trauma, exactly? Psychologists define it as our reaction of profound emotional shock stemming from one event (acute trauma) or repeated events (chronic trauma) that are simply too stressful and horrifying for the person to deal with. It can result in lifelong, debilitating, unpredictable emotional (and sometimes physical) reactions to triggers, dreams, memories and flashbacks, and lifelong incapacities like PTSD, unmanageable addictions, dissociation and depression.

Gabor Maté, the renowned Canadian psychologist and addiction therapist, agrees with Tim’s assessment that we all suffer from trauma; it’s just that some of us handle it better, and some of us are more aware of what it’s done to us. His argument is that (especially in our modern stress-filled world) while it happens to everyone, those who have an emotionally stable infancy and childhood, sufficient to develop a sense of healthy attachment and a sense of autonomy, are better equipped to deal with it, but that our modern society deprives most of us of that early stability and development opportunity. Trauma, he says, is not “what happens to you”, but rather “what happens inside you” as a result of the traumatic event(s), how you self-adapt to its occurrence, to protect and support yourself. That may be suppression of emotion, denial, dissociation, addiction, or some other coping mechanism.

I’m still trying to sort out how trauma, which is ubiquitous in humans, ties into the unique belief of humans, which apparently emerges very early in life, that they are separate beings with selves that control and are responsible for ‘their’ body and ‘their’ lives. Hence giving rise to emotions like shame, guilt, low self-worth, chronic anxiety, indiscriminate and irrational hatred, and so on — emotions that wild creatures, lacking this sense of self and separation, apparently don’t feel.

But, horrifically, humans have induced all the symptoms of stress-related trauma in wild creatures in the laboratory. So trauma is not uniquely human, even though the ‘self’ apparently is. The common variable, of course, is acute or chronic stress. What does all that mean for the effect of (the illusory) self on humans’ unique proclivity for gleeful violence, and for such disconnection from the natural world that we have irrevocably destroyed our planet’s capacity to sustain life, including human life? I have no idea. Maybe it’s a question that cannot be answered.

Posted in Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will | Comments Off on The Trauma of the Self

What Does Chaos Look Like?

Posted on September 7, 2023 by Dave Pollard


Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework (2021). Adds liminal domains, points of uncertainty or paradox, notably the aporetic domain, from whence, notably, NZ’s Jacinda Ardern chose to cede decision-making authority to health experts as being better equipped than politicians to determine the most sensible next steps to deal with the pandemic, buying time in a chaotic period of crisis and keeping options open.

Chaos, in its social rather than mathematical sense, refers to the absence of effective constraints.

What that means in a human political, economic or social system, is that no one pays attention to any accepted rules governing the system, which are therefore unenforceable. In ‘chaotic’ economic and political systems that means oligopolies, bribes, extortion and other ‘officially illegal’ activities may prevail without limit. In some cases, organized crime actually substitutes its own laws, rules and constraints, to deal with the chaos.

What I think we are starting to see this century is gradually increasing levels of chaos in much of the world. In fact, the increasing number of the world’s economies that are dominated by oligopolies and organized crime might actually be a little less chaotic than countries that are still trying to play by the rules. In countries ruled by oligarchs and organized crime, you at least know who you have to pay off, and how much, and the consequences if you don’t. That may be despotic, but it isn’t chaos.

If the system collapses to the point that even oligopolies and organized crime cannot maintain order, then you have at least short-term chaos and possibly anarchy. Immediately, in order to get essential things done (like food and energy distribution), ad hoc systems will emerge. Dmitry Orlov has described how this happened with the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the ruble: A system of commerce emerged based on a combination of tribute (giving to those you respect), barter (trading reciprocally for something of value), gifting (giving without expectation of compensation), and scrip (effectively, IOUs signed by someone known in the community that become a replacement ‘currency’ that others agree to accept). Such systems, of course, do not scale.

In political systems, a descent into chaos means that, especially in the early stages of collapse, and largely thanks to ubiquitous corruption and broken electoral systems, those in power may not need to have the support of citizens to stay in office nearly indefinitely, and they are hence free to ignore the citizens and their wishes and needs, other than propagandizing them through the media. And they can accept money for implementing laws and regulations written and paid for by moneyed interests.

But that tends to only last a short while, as citizens lose respect for these “officials” and start to disobey their laws as well. And then, if the police and others charged with enforcing the laws become as disenchanted as the rest of the citizens, political chaos is likely. That means, among other things, that people will stop paying taxes, will overtly disobey laws and rules set by officials they no longer respect, and that there will be a huge jockeying for power and authority among those seeking to fill the power vacuum. Politics and economics, after all, only function when there is broad agreement to abide by the rules; coercion and propaganda can only achieve so much in its absence. Currencies, in particular, are based in trust that they can be redeemed for their face value, and when that trust is lost, the currency quickly becomes worthless, as citizens of many countries can attest.

Once you get political and economic collapse, and these systems devolve into chaos, social collapse may ensue, as people take things into their own hands and refuse to trust anyone else. As Dmitry explains, social collapse and social chaos are disastrous, as they preclude everyone’s attempts to restore some sense of order. Civilizational collapse then becomes pretty much inevitable.

My sense is that this situation is well advanced in many poorer countries, and becoming much more evident in many countries in the west, to the point I currently believe global civilizational collapse is nearly inevitable over the coming decades, and this will occur even without the multiple ecological crises that are compounding the polycrisis.

Once an entire civilization crumbles, collapse historically has followed one of three pathways: devolution, with the making and carrying out of decisions radically relocalized to the family, tribe or small community level (as larger and more centralized systems just cease functioning or are no longer recognized as legitimate); absorption, where the members of the collapsed societies scatter and join other still-functioning cultures, if there are any; and/or abandonment, where the citizens just ‘walk away’ from systems that no longer function and re-band together (in the same or some other location) into cohesive social groups and self-organize to create order within those groups and in relation to other groups. They then self-impose new constraints and hence achieve some sort of self-governance.

We may see all three, or some new alternatives, in different parts of the world as collapse deepens. One of our greatest challenges in many parts of the world is that most of us are completely dependent on the centralized, specialized, fragile systems of modern capitalism, such that few of us still have the competencies and skills to meet any of our basic needs without support from “the system”.

We can learn much about coping with collapse and the resulting chaos, from studying past civilizations, and from studying how those in poorer nations (and impoverished parts of more affluent nations) have already been dealing with the essential collapse of their political, economic and social systems.

Many of these collapsed societies and sub-societies have effectively self-reorganized around tribes (in the broader sense of the word: “families or small communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties, often with a common culture and dialect”).

In many cases, the economies of these ‘neo-tribal’ societies are substantially what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing in her brilliant book The Mushroom at the End of the World has called salvage or scavenger economies. During the reign of an industrial capitalist economy, salvage activities are marginalized and usually feed back into that capitalist system (eg collecting recyclable containers and selling them to commercial buyers, or selling privately harvested crops to commercial enterprises). Anna’s book, which describes how the salvage/scavenger economy works already today in parts of the world, is essential reading for anyone wanting to imagine what our post-civ economy and society might look like.

When the industrial capitalist economy crumbles, just about every activity carried out then becomes a salvage operation, since there is no longer a reliable commercial/industrial system to sell the salvaged goods to. So as Big Ag collapses (as farmers in the Great Depression found out), there is no longer a market for large volume monoculture crops, and all food and resource harvesting at every level becomes a salvage operation. You then ‘harvest’ and sell just what’s needed, just in time, to whoever near you needs it — copper for repairing broken machines for example. And at that point you give up reliance on large established markets ordering stuff in large quantities in advance, because they’ve disappeared.

We will all become salvage operators. A lot of industrial economy outsourcing and offshoring has already made much of the economy into a salvage operation — ‘independent’ truckers replacing commercial fleets, Uber/Lyft drivers, and ‘gig’ economy, offshored and outsourced work are all, in a way, forms of salvage work that currently sit at the periphery of, and feed into, the industrial economy. As that industrial economy collapses, we will all be doing salvage economy work, except we’ll be meeting the needs of our fellow community members, not those of big corporations which will no longer exist.

The issue in a salvage/scavenger economy is not “Who will buy my product or service?” but “What does my tribe/community need today, and where can I salvage it from?”

Ronald Wright’s somewhat dystopian cli-fi novel A Scientific Romance envisions what a salvage/scavenger economy might look like. But personally, I need look no further than outside my window, where I see throngs of crows, every day, thriving in such a self-evolved economy, drawing on the things humans throw out.

And before our invention of killing tools and fire, humans scavenged for everything we ate, and many anthropologists would assert they lived happier and healthier lives than we do. (Mind you, there were not eight billion of them!)

Economic collapse (and the resultant chaos) will likely come much more quickly than ecological collapse, at least for most of us. Even then, it will not be an overnight occurrence. To modify the famous Hemingway expression, collapse will happen slowly, then suddenly all at once, and then it will slowly tail off until the system, and those dependent on it, disappear. Think of it like the right side of a ‘normal’ (bell) curve, or the descent of a roller coaster. For most of us in the west, we’re still in the first of these three phases of collapse.

So what do we do as we slide into the second, chaotic phase, as everything starts to fall apart and then does so “suddenly all at once”?

We cannot possibly know. It will unfold very differently in different places. The key word for coping with collapse into chaos is not sustainability or resilience or regeneration — once you’re on the way down, none of those is an option. Instead, the key word is adaptation. Some of the means by which we can position ourselves to better adapt are:

  • acceptance: The sooner we are able to get past the ‘blame game’, and appreciate that things aren’t going back to the way they once were, the better off we’ll be.
  • increasing our collective competence: We don’t all need to become individually expert at growing and harvesting our own food, but collectively, depending on who we define as our community, we will have to acquire and build on a whole suite of self-sufficiency competencies. They include the basic “know-how” of how to make/provide/manage our own food, clothing, shelter, water, energy, resources, tools, livelihood, infrastructure, health, education, art, recreation, and stories, and a host of ‘soft’ skills like conflict resolution, mentoring, persuasive and facilitation skills.
  • learning from those experienced: In collapse, theoretical and conceptual skills will take a back seat to practical skills, so once it happens, we will need to identify those in our community who have hands-on experience doing essential things, and then learning by watching them and trying it ourselves.
  • being pragmatic: We humans tend to be really attached to our models, ideas and ideals of how things “should” be done. We will likely have to settle for less ideal ways of doing things that work in the moment and in the situation we find ourselves in. Sometimes the perfect can be the enemy of the good, and of the “good enough for now”. Rigid commitment to some new ideal “how we’re going to live together” plan, especially if it isn’t “safe-to-fail”, could prove perilous. Increasingly, we’ll be looking for “adjacent possibilities” that will make things marginally better.
  • drawing on the “wisdom of crowds”: As we face novel and unexpected situations, our personal specialized expertise is unlikely to serve us as well as a mechanism to draw upon the collective knowledge, ideas, and experiences of the whole community.
  • collaborating: Few of us have experienced working in (often spontaneously) self-organized environments where there is no hierarchy, and where decisions are arrived at, and actions are taken, collectively by consensus and appropriate delegation. That kind of experience will soon be invaluable.
  • exaptation: Exaptation is the accidental or deliberate repurposing of something from its original function to a new and useful function. The classic example is that birds evolved wings for warmth and cooling, and only later did these wings evolve for purposes of flight. Most scavenging and salvaging activities are inherently exaptive, repurposing activities. When we can’t get what we need “ready-made” we’ll have to cobble it together, exaptively.
  • abductive thinking: Abductive thinking entails the capacity to see things from different trans-contextual perspectives, to listen empathetically and pay attention to outlying thoughts and perspectives and draw on them to imagine novel approaches and ideas, to draw on the “logic of hunches” and intuition, to rest in uncertainty and welcome and play with ambiguity, and to combine well-considered, pragmatic theory with direct experience. It requires lots of practice, good attention skills, and rigour. And a practiced capacity to hypothesize, and to test out hypotheses, and hold several hypotheses simultaneously. And a capacity for “small noticings” — recalling things you noticed in a different context that just might apply to the issue at hand. Few of us are very good at this.
  • finding our community: While the community that we find ourselves in as collapse reaches the “suddenly all at once” stage, may be able to acquire and share the skills and resources needed to become a true community, it might well not. If not, we may have to keep searching until we find a community in which we usefully and comfortably ‘fit’. We are all likely to become ‘homeless migrants’ at least once in the coming decades, until we find it.

These skills and methods, the more we can acquire and practice them in the years to come, will help make us more competent at navigating collapse and chaos and co-establishing and building sustainable communities with just enough of the right constraints to be viable and healthy.

We cannot ‘prepare’ for collapse and chaos, because we have no idea how specifically it will play out where we live. But we can start, anytime, I think, acquiring the skills, knowledge, connections, networks and capacities, so that, regardless of how it happens, we’re able to adapt ourselves, and co-adapt with those we’re with, to cope as well as humanly possible.

Posted in Collapse Watch | 5 Comments

Outside the Overton Window Looking In

Posted on September 5, 2023 by Dave Pollard


image by Midjourney AI; my own prompt and photoshopping

At various times over my 20 years of blogging I’ve found myself taking a controversial position on some issue, usually political or economic, but occasionally social or ecological.

I was surprised that my articles “against” love, “against” hope, in support of polyamorous relationships, and asserting our lack of free will, turned out to be less controversial than I’d expected. I was equally surprised at the relatively hostile response of some readers to my position on healthy veganism (including a death threat), my opposition to western involvement in the war in Ukraine, my strong support for masks and vaccines, and my occasional ridiculing of religions and ‘spirituality’ (including CBT and ‘mindfulness’).

But generally, people have been pretty tolerant of what people write on their blogs. They are, after all, just opinions, and no matter what you believe, you can find a blog or a group somewhere that will reassure you that what you believe is right, and that anyone who believes to the contrary is misinformed or worse.

For most of those 20 years, I’ve hewed to a fairly consistent ‘progressive’ party line on most issues, to the point early blog listings categorized me as a ‘radical lefty’ blogger. I think in many ways I am even more so now than when I started blogging, though I’m a lot less doctrinaire and idealistic than I was. I rarely tell people what to do any more, or even proffer advice or “solutions”. I write more in the first person singular, and add “I think”, or “it seems to me” to qualify what I am saying, so I think my opinions are expressed less categorically than they once were, no longer implying that “this is obviously what any smart, informed person would believe”.

Some of the principles that govern my writing are:

  1. I try to remember, and state as often as possible, that I don’t know much on a lot of topics, and my “thinking out loud” is rarely more than “this is what I think, tentatively, for now, and why”. I keep track of when I change my opinion on things, and try to own up to how and why I believed what I did. I’m not a very humble person, but I try not to be arrogant. And I try to be honest when I say what I believe on the basis of the “preponderance of evidence”, and admit when I am not an expert. I’d rather be useful, or at least interesting, than popular.
  2. When it comes to a few issues, I see no virtue in “both-sidesing”. Sometimes you just have to take a stand. That doesn’t mean that adversaries are “evil” or “insane” or “wrong”, it just means that the danger they seem to me to present to people and the planet outweighs, IMO, their right to be taken seriously and given airtime. The recent mutterings of RFK Jr are an example.
  3. I try to appreciate the inherent complexity of all things, especially anything that is social or ecological, and try not to simplify things that are not simple, even though that means living with uncertainty and ambiguity and expressing that in my writing. In most cases I am suspicious of simple models, answers, diagnoses and “solutions”.
  4. I recognize the immense power of stories, and therefore deliberately do not tell stories (particularly the emotionally-charged ones that mainstream media increasingly rely on) when there’s anything much at stake in how they’re taken. Many awful atrocities have been facilitated by manipulative story-tellers. When I write stories, they are usually labeled up-front as fiction.
  5. I try to avoid writing “me too” articles. If I haven’t got something — new information, new perspectives, new insights, new possibilities — to add, I don’t see much point in writing about a subject.

Some of these principles are on occasion in contradiction to each other, and then it’s a balancing act. Chronicling collapse is an exercise fraught with challenges, especially when the future is unpredictable and when so much is unknown.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of the Overton Window, it is essentially the range, across the political spectrum, of ideas that are currently considered acceptable for airing in public. Especially in the blogosphere, that window has always been reasonably broad. In the mainstream media, it’s always been much less so, and is quickly getting much narrower.

So for those who are exposed to blogs, the political writings of Noam Chomsky, the disclosures of whistle-blowers like Julian Assange, the deep and knowledgeable historical background offered by people like John Mearsheimer, and revelations such as those of award-winning investigative reporters of the calibre of Sy Hersh, for example, are pretty readily available, and often appreciated. They serve as an antidote to the much narrower and more right-wing views that now dominate publications like the NYT, WAPO, Guardian, New Yorker, Atlantic etc, publications that pointedly refuse to publish or even acknowledge the existence (except as crackpots or criminals) of people like these four extraordinary men.

If you read any of the above publications, it’s pretty clear that the Overton Window for these corporate media is very narrow, right-wing, and driven by a specific ideological agenda — substantially US exceptionalism, US/NATO unipolar imperialism, and neoliberal economics. On non-political, non-economic, non-military issues like gender rights and identity issues, they open the window slightly wider because these issues don’t threaten their core political and corporate sponsors, so they can appear to be more open-minded.

But recently, the Overton Window everywhere seems to have narrowed. Perhaps this is the effect of the mainstream media, which have become more doctrinaire even while pretending to maintain their ‘progressive’ credentials, and which now regularly pass off editorials and blatantly slanted reporting as real ‘news’. Perhaps it’s the effect of social media, which have been eagerly demonetizing, banning, using down-ranking algorithms, and just outright censoring and deleting writing and videos from people outside their perceived Overton Window, their ineffectual and ham-fisted way of “combatting conspiracy theories”.

Or perhaps it’s just an indication of how what used to be known as ‘the left’ or ‘progressives’ has fractured over the past few years over issues that pit leftists against each other (and that’s not entirely due to the mainstream media, and academia, harping on these issues).

I first noticed this trend a decade ago when trans rights activists got into battles with radical feminists. I’m not going to get into the issue here, but the upshot was a lot of ‘canceling’ of (and even physical assaults on) important progressive speakers like Derek Jensen. It was basically impossible to support ‘both sides’, and the animosity was so strong that if you supported one you were cut off from the other.

Since then, that malaise has spread. On issues such as the homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction problems in San Francisco that led to the recall of Chesa Boudin, for example, leftists couldn’t win no matter what position they took. This splintering of the left over social and ‘identity’ issues has continued, and it seems to have torn the left apart in the UK and Europe as well, particularly on issues such as immigration. And during CoVid-19, progressives throughout the Euro-American Empire have further split on issues like vaccine and mask ‘mandates’ (and even on the ‘Lab Leak Hypothesis’), much to the delight of the more unified right.

Again, I am not going to get into these issues (or at least, not again), because it would take a long article to explain the split on each one. The point is, the “range of positions and opinions acceptable in public discourse” has become incredibly complex, depending on which section of the “public” you are talking about.

So what we have ended up with is essentially three Overton Windows, one for conservatives, which is moving steady right towards rabid populism and fascism, and two (or more), often mutually exclusive, for progressives. So, for example, if you oppose US/NATO involvement in the war in Ukraine, you will have to deal with a large majority of self-described progressives who support the war (as happened in previous wars like the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, which, along with the mainstream media, most progressives also supported), and who find any opposition to the latest war intolerable.

As a result, as a blogger, I’ve found my positions on many issues attacked as often by those who would probably consider themselves progressives, as by conservatives (who generally don’t read my blog anyway).

So I know collapsniks whom I agree with on almost all issues, except on their belief that the government response to CoVid-19 was an excuse to increase power and surveillance over citizens. I know bloggers who are progressive on social and economic issues who fervently support supplying billions of dollars in gruesome weapons to the Ukraine army, and also support preparations for a war against China over Taiwan or Xinjiang or some other issue. My support of radical feminism has resulted in me being labeled a TERF. My belief that trying to prevent or mitigate economic, ecological, and political (and hence civilizational) collapse is now futile, and that it makes more sense to focus our attention on adapting ourselves to its realities, has been assailed by some progressives as defeatist and dangerous.

I have found myself adding blogs to my blogroll, newsletter or RSS feed lists, based on an excellent article on some issue, only to find myself deleting them when their author goes off on some (to me) bizarre and embarrassing tangent on another issue. And then I end up adding them back when someone points me to some new insightful writing of theirs. It’s exhausting! Oh, for the days when the people on my blogroll agreed with me on just about everything!

So perhaps the whole idea of the Overton Window has lost its meaningfulness as the complexity of public discourse increases. There are no simple left/right lines anymore (and some would say there is no ‘left’ anymore). And no part of the ‘window’ seems to be open to all major constituencies of the citizenry.

The concept of the Overton Window originally applied only to the acceptable range of government policies that the electorate would tolerate. Now government policies are largely, as Aurélien has explained so well, performative exercises in saying the right thing to the party faithful, rather than doing anything at all, while the policies that are actually enacted are substantially written by corporate donors, wealthy lobbyists, the defense establishment, and other powerful administrators not beholden to any party, or to the citizens.

So the original Overton Window has become relevant only for wording the carefully-crafted talking points, rallying calls and scripted op-eds in the mainstream media by the governing and opposition parties of the day.

As political collapse continues, this does not bode well. Coping with collapse of all types is going to require, as I wrote earlier, a focus on acceptance, adaptation, competence, experience, pragmatism, and collaboration. That will require a lot more tolerance than most people seem currently willing to show. Whether this will get better or worse as collapse deepens is anyone’s guess.

In the meantime, we bloggers are likely to be seen, more and more, as being outside the window of acceptable opinion and discourse, especially as the number of issues we feel compelled to be knowledgeable about (and have an opinion about) increases. Most people want things to be simple, in which case they’re going to find the blogosphere an uncomfortable place, perhaps best avoided entirely.

Me, I’ll just stick to my principles, write to try to make sense of the world and to chronicle civilization’s collapse, and invite others interested in my musings to follow along and respond as they will. That sense-making is likely to be complex, tentative, and counter-intuitive, and will probably often introduce new possibilities that may challenge, annoy or even outrage.

But perhaps, if we’re all finding ourselves increasingly on the outside of the window, looking in, we might look together, compare notes, and see if we can make more sense of it that way. We don’t have to agree. Two eyes give you perspective, and two heads are better than one, and all that.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 16 Comments

Moving Beyond Ideologies — continued

Posted on September 4, 2023 by Dave Pollard


screen cap from one of Sabine’s recent videos

One of the mailing lists I’m part of (thanks to Paul Heft) has been debating physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s controversial recent video in defence of capitalism. I’m a huge fan of Sabine’s scientific work, and I think her use of scientific methods and principles to “do one’s own research” is well-founded, even when it’s outside one’s area of expertise.

But I would argue that her video, entitled “Capitalism is Good”, should have been more modestly titled “The Ideas of Money and Capital are Good, in Theory”. She sees the problems with capitalism as stemming from poor governance and lack of proper regulation, rather than from the theory itself. But that assumes that systems of proper governance and regulation are possible in a massively complex world. My study of complex systems, and human systems in particular, suggest they are not.

This is how I replied to the mailing list group, in response to their heated debate over the video:

I think one has to consider that Sabine, who is a world class theoretical physicist, is an expert in exactly that — theory.

She is absolutely correct in that the invention of money and ‘capital’ was (and is) essential to large scale industrial production, without which many of the inventions and products we enjoy today (and many of the resultant problems) would never have occurred. They are great ideas in theory. So is Marxism, in theory.

The real problem is that we live in a society in which everything we do is part of a massively complex system, and such systems are essentially unregulatable. We think we can introduce a system that is governed by a theory or set of principles and then control and regulate its application. We cannot.

That is why all of our theories and -isms ultimately get us into trouble. Not because they aren’t good theories, but because we cannot control their application.

Capitalism is a great theory that is also one of the major causes for almost all aspects of the polycrisis. If we had 8 billion humans living under an economic system based upon some other great theory, like Marxism, or the Gift Economy, or even feudalism (which in theory is not as bad as we’re taught), it is almost certain that we would be facing a different but equally intractable polycrisis, and be in roughly the same stage of collapse that we are facing now.

My article last month on “moving beyond ideologies” was focused on political systems, but it applies equally to economic systems. As Tyson Yunkaporta said: “All you can do is foster the conditions for emergence and allow it to emerge and just behave with integrity, and, you know, maybe others will do the same. But the minute you have an idea and you think this is an important idea, everybody should know about this, everybody should be doing this — as soon as you do that you’ve made an ideology and you’re [fucked].”

Human beings, beyond the level of tribe, small community and autonomous confederation (in the indigenous sense of the term), seem to be simply politically and economically ungovernable. Despite all attempts to make us into homogenous robots, that is not who we are.

It’s a shame, because our brains are great at inventing theories and ideologies. You know, things that work brilliantly, in theory.

I will probably write more about this in future, because it’s critically important, but I think that’s enough for now.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

No Meaning or Purpose

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Dave Pollard

For the hard core interested in the subject only. This is a partial transcript of Jim Newman’s answers to questions about radical non-duality, from his meeting in Amsterdam in March 2019. It was one of the last in-person meetings on the subject before CoVid-19. I thought his answers that day were particularly articulate. 


Midjourney AI attempts to capture the essence of “nothing has any meaning or purpose”. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether it succeeded. 

In this meeting we’re going to talk about — and whatever I say from now on, I mean “apparently”, ie it’s neither real nor unreal [only an appearance] — we’re going to talk about two things:

First, a pointing to what can’t be known; and that’s what’s happening. ‘This’ is what’s happening; ‘this’ can’t be known. It’s indescribable. It’s the ‘absolute’; it’s trying to describe what can’t be described. There is no word that can say what ‘this’ is, what ‘is happening’. Because there’s no distance, space or time in what’s happening. It appears there is but that’s not real. So we’ll be pointing at what can’t be known.

Second, the reason we think this meeting is happening (it’s not really happening; it’s only apparent) is because there’s an experience [a ‘me’] that arises in what’s happening that says “I know what’s happening.” And that experience “I know what’s happening” seems to be separate or distinct from ‘what’s happening’. It’s not. It’s an illusion, a trick. But that’s the experience. And it’s because this experience arises, that this meeting apparently happens. As that experience arises it says “I am separate from everything, separate from what’s happening, I am real, I was born, I have a life, I’m going to die” — and that’s problematic [for the ‘me’].

So ‘I’ need to find a way out, a way to be fulfilled, to feel whole. I need, through my experience I have of being real, to use my free will and choice to make my life better. To find whatever it seems to be that’s missing, which is, always, something else — the next moment, the next instance, the next experience. So the situation is, you have an experience, that arises in ‘what is’. That experience seems separate; it’s not.

Experience is an illusion. It assumes two “what’s happenings”. “What’s happening here” and “what’s happening there”. And there isn’t a “What’s happening here” and a “what’s happening there”. Experience is a sort of knowing; it’s a subject-object relationship. That’s what experience is. There is no subject or object. “Knowing” is the absolute appearing as knowing. Everything that arises is the absolute. Whatever you can name or say is the absolute. It’s not actually separate.

What’s being pointed to is that the knowledge or experience ‘I am’ is illusory. It’s the illusory experience that there’s separation.

You can’t say what this is. You can call it anything — you could call it ‘oneness’. It’s not oneness, it’s not non-duality, It’s not a thing.

There is no ‘you’, and there is no ‘there’, there is only what’s happening.

.     .     .     .

When somebody experiences the senses [experiences are different from sensations that are just what’s happening — the senses are just a function], such as when ‘I’ look, ‘I’ see an object. When no one is looking there’s only the infinite, the singularity of what’s happening. There’s no witness, no knower, no actor, no one outside of it. There’s just what’s happening. It’s complete, it’s everything, it’s whole. It leaves no space for there to be a witness, or a knower or a perception or a perceiver.

The thought that there is something else beyond what is happening is [also] what’s happening. The individual separates it, as if there was another reality. Nothing happens really, only apparently. ‘You’ is the experience of separation, that there is another reality. That there’s an experiencer, that there’s what’s happening and something else that’s happening. That’s the experience of duality; that’s an illusion.

There is no separation. The paradox of this is that it cannot be explained because there is no separation. It only seems paradoxical because of the [me’s] need to understand and explain it.

.     .     .     .

The apparent solidity of the individual gives the impression that this whole thing is coming from somewhere, that time and space are real, that this is a part of a continuum that has a beginning, a middle and an end. That’s a dream. There is only what’s [apparently] happening. There isn’t anything outside of what’s happening. But for the [illusory] individual it all seems real. For the individual, words are real. But there is no individual, just appearance. There is no experience, no experiencer, there is only [raises his hand] nothing [apparently] “hand-ing”.

.     .     .     .

There is no you. You, wanting to leave, is nothing, appearing as an individual saying “I’m real and I want to leave.” Nothing is hidden. There is nothing to find, nothing that has been lost. It’s only the illusory individual that has the illusory experience that there’s something lost. There is nothing lost.

The individual is an experience of being inside the body, with buttons and levers that ‘I’ call my free will, to be able to ‘deal’ with what’s outside the body. When ‘I’ arise — that experience of position inside the body — it arises simultaneously in everything else. And then the appearance, and ‘my’ life, are, [to the ‘me’], ‘real’. That experience is illusory. There isn’t anything in here [points to body]. There isn’t anything that ends at the skin. And there isn’t anything outside. There is no inside or outside. There is only what’s happening.

You don’t live in an illusion; ‘you’, the sense of being an individual, are an illusion. There is only the absolute, [everything]. There is no space for a question [‘why’]. There is no ‘one’ to ask.

.     .     .     .

Nothing is ‘known’. There is only what’s happening. And that can appear as ‘knowing where my hotel is’. It can even appear as the experience of being separate.

.     .     .     .

‘You’ don’t have a life. You’ve never made a decision. The ‘me’ doesn’t actually do much of anything. It doesn’t have thoughts or feelings; it takes ownership of what arises and says “that’s mine”. It arrogates everything to itself, in its illusory experience.

.     .     .     .

The memory of ‘you coming here’ is what’s happening, but ‘you’ didn’t do it. There is nobody ‘in there’. Nobody ‘makes decisions’. The entire experience of being an individual with free will and choice is an illusion. Because the illusion of the individual is ‘the absolute appearing as the illusion of the individual’, there is no why. There is just what’s happening. ‘Why’ only arises if there is real separation and somebody trying to find reasons. It’s all just the absolute. There is nowhere to go. Nothing moves. There is nowhere for a ‘why’ to arise and nothing for a ‘why’ to direct anything to, because there’s only what’s happening — apparently.

.     .     .     .

This is not a philosophical exercise. There is only what is happening. It’s not a philosophy, so it’s very difficult to talk about it in philosophical terms. It’s not a theory. It’s just what’s being expressed. It’s obvious. ‘This’ isn’t saying that there’s no individual as a theory, this is saying there’s no individual because [it’s obvious] there’s no individual. This isn’t saying that this [points around him] appearance is the absolute appearing as a room as a philosophy or theory; it’s just obvious that that’s all there is. So there’s no ‘room’ to philosophize about it.

This is like a film without a screen. And nobody watching.

.     .     .     .

When the ‘I’ [seemingly] arises [in very early childhood], it doesn’t immediately make sense of everything; it just makes everything ‘real’. Over time [in the story] it builds up a belief system around the solidity of ‘I am’ that makes sense of what ‘this’ is about for it. It needs to ‘make sense’ because it’s on its way somewhere. It feels like it’s on a path. It grows up and leaves home and Mom and Dad and loves God (another Dad) to make it feel good — somebody who knows what is going on. It’s a very insecure existence. It’s a frightening, contracted existence — it’s a dream, it isn’t real. But that’s its experience.

.     .     .     .

There is nothing excluded from what’s happening. No way to get closer or further away from what’s happening. It’s already everything. That’s why it’s suggested that the experience of being an individual is illusory — It’s not happening.

So when it stops happening, it’s obvious it never did.

For the individual, everything is really happening [to it]. The experience apparently happens to the individual, it’s apparently real to the individual. The individual can’t say it’s not real. To it, it is. [It’s the individual that isn’t real.]

.     .     .     .

There’s nothing to gain, and nothing lost. The experience of the individual is that something’s missing. It keeps adding experiences to itself, but never fulfils that gap of separation. It can’t solve the problem of itself.

.     .     .     .

Death only appears for the individual. It only has a reality in the experience of separation. There is no separation. There is no death.

.     .     .     .

This [pointing to his body] doesn’t actually see people, so it’s quite obvious there isn’t anybody in this room. [The fact that the individual sees people in the room is] just a dream. There isn’t personal responsibility. There isn’t anybody who could make a decision. There isn’t anyone. There is no ‘you’.

.     .     .     .

If there is the appearance of a sound [such as someone asserting something], it’s the infinite ‘sounding’. But the individual will try to make sense of what it’s ‘about’ because it’s on a journey and will want to give it meaning and purpose, hoping that it means something important. It doesn’t.

The hope is that in the future, something is going to happen to make ‘me’ OK. But there is no future, and there’s no need for hope, because there’s nothing ‘wrong’.

Nobody knows this. This [pointing to his body] doesn’t know anything. Knowing isn’t what this is about. The concepts of this are very simple to understand. But understanding doesn’t help the individual. Though that experience of the individual just might end [the same way it started happening, for no reason], revealing that it never happened, then that is just what’s happening. But the concepts are useless. “I know that this is the absolute” has no relationship to the fact that this is the absolute.

.     .     .     .

The individual may take what is shared here as some kind of practice. But it’s completely useless. [The ‘me’] is convinced it will be part of its own solution. But there is no real separation, there is nothing to overcome, nowhere to go. There is only ‘home’ — everything, ‘what is happening’.

This appearance is absolute chaos.

.     .     .     .

The individual thinks there is something missing, thinks that the solution has to be something added on to make it complete and whole. That’s an illusion. There is nothing needed to be added.

Meaning and purpose comes immediately when the individual arises; it’s part and parcel of the experience of separation, of being an individual.

All there is is the absolute — this, everything — appearing. There is no individual. Nothing is real (or unreal). There is no meaning or purpose.   

Jim’s style of speaking can strike some people as being a little brusque. For a contrasting style with the same message, this is one of Tim Cliss’ best meetings, IMO, an online interview and Q&A from April, 2021. The last half is especially good, with some really thoughtful questions from attendees. Tim is a retired teacher and psychologist, and quite compassionate. I may produce a transcript for this meeting, too.

Posted in Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will | 4 Comments

What’s Going On (Thoughts on a Train)

Posted on August 31, 2023 by Dave Pollard

injuredimage: creative commons CC0 license from pixabay

The mass of [humans] lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called ‘resignation’ is confirmed desperation. Unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of [human]kind. There is no play in them, for this comes only after work. [And the work never ends] — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

This body is on a train. Like most of what passes for infrastructure, at least in this part of the world, the train, the tracks, the staff and their training, the internet service, the electrical outlets, and the cafeteria with its ghastly non-nutritious menu, all are unreliable. I don’t count on getting where I’m going anywhere close to on time, or even arriving on this vehicle rather than a replacement.

When I left this morning, the main elevator in my apartment building remained out of order for a third week, waiting for parts to be shipped from who-knows-where-or-when. Across the street at the mall, the main escalator has been out of order for almost a month. Several stores in the mall are closed due to lack of staff. Many ferries have been cancelled, for the same reason, or because a ferry broke down despite ‘preventative maintenance’, and there are simply no replacements until it gets fixed. Everything seems to be slowly falling apart.

This body, by comparison, seems to be operating very well, especially considering it’s now well past its ‘best by’ date.

My last post of each month is usually a meandering story about my recent travels in the community where I live, but this month, until today I haven’t been out much, thanks to seemingly endless heat waves and smoke from nearby forest fires. And there’s nothing terribly interesting happening on the train.

So instead, I am contemplating, and now writing about, what I think is going on in the world. I’m thinking about how someone from the distant future, or from a far-off planet, might summarize what has been happening on this planet since the emergence of our species. Not with the goal of predicting ‘what comes next’, since there seem to be few possibilities left, and all of them start with the letter C. But rather just to place what’s apparently happening in some kind of context, to see how we ended up in this strange situation, with 8 billion seemingly traumatized and slightly deranged apes running around in funny costumes, unintentionally, collectively, and rapidly destroying the environment on which our health and existence depend.

So: What’s going on here? How did we get to this hopeless point?

My sense is that what we are seeing is behaviours stemming from ubiquitous mental illness; we are a species that, like a cancer, has lost its bearings, its connection to the rest of life on the planetary organism of which we are merely a part.

The mutual conditioning of our species, which for a million years kept us thriving as a well-fitting part of the ecosystems in which we emerged, is now driving us to behave in dysfunctional ways — producing extreme overpopulation, endless violence against each other and against the planet, fierce competitiveness, mindless and unsustainable consumption, and desensitizing us from acknowledging the harms and suffering that are happening everywhere.

How did that happen? I have a number of theories, but my two current favourites are:

1. The maladaptation theory

Our forced exodus from the tropical rainforest (destroyed by massive prehistoric cosmic radiation) where we once fit naturally and comfortably into our environment, led to a situation of extreme, unnatural and chronic stress as we spread across the globe in search of the kind of way of living we had lost. To survive in these places we had to construct (and we had the brains to do so) completely prosthetic environments. But these environments alienated us from everything we were a part of, and forced us to live in ways which, though we could ‘successfully’ live in them (ie physically survive, until we run out of space, air, water, energy, soil etc), they were not the way we were ‘meant’ to live — by which I mean that, since that time, we’ve had to live in ways we were never naturally suited, evolved, and adapted to live (in trees, as scavengers, like bonobos and chimps). Primatologists have claimed, for example, that if you filled a small space like an airplane with 50 members of any primate species, even if it were equipped with abundant food, the primates would begin killing each other within hours.

Our maladaptation to these prosthetic man-made environments has left us lost, scared, bewildered, and ultimately mentally ill. Our conditioning of each other now reinforces this mental illness, seeing the resultant behaviours (war, self-domestication, and civilization) as somehow ‘normal’, since it’s all any of us has ever known. Like wild creatures locked forever in small, unhealthy cages, we beat our heads against the bars, sensing something is terribly wrong, but with no idea (or possibility) of righting it.

2. The evolutionary misstep theory

At some point thousands of years ago, probably as our local environments and hence our diet changed, our brains evolved (perhaps as an accidental ‘spandrel’ as the circuits of our brains morphed from bicameral to entangled cross-cameral) the capacity to imagine and conceive of unreal things as being real. At that point, we changed from being perceptual creatures (like most or all other creatures on the planet) to conceptual creatures. Among the first conceptions of this rewired human brain must have been the concept of the self being real and separate from ‘everything else’, and ‘everything else’ likewise being conceived of as being real and separate.

As soon as we saw ourselves (our ‘selves’) as separate and apart, it would not be surprising that we would find this terrifying. Suddenly, we were ‘responsible’ for this seemingly separate body we conceived our selves to be located in, and hence responsible for its safety, security, and beliefs and behaviours. This is a different form of mental illness, but its consequences are the same: Instead of just being a part of everything, we now became preoccupied with protecting our selves and ‘our’ bodies from everything else, every imaginable danger, in a competition to the death with others. Yet our belief that we can and do control ‘our’ bodies’ behaviours and actions is completely illusory. This had to be crazy-making.

Either way, our species went mad, went rogue, and the current state of our world reflects that collective insanity.

Whether this was a result of extreme chronic stress and maladaptation, or an evolutionary misstep in the development of the human brain, does not really matter. The malaise is not going to go away, and it is a predicament with no solution. And either way, none of this is ‘our’ fault. The dice rolled badly for our recent evolution, and now it’s playing out the only way it can.

It’s anyone’s guess, when, centuries or millennia from now, after civilizational and ecological collapse have hopefully led to some new equilibrium, and if there are any humans left, whether they will remain afflicted with a mental illness that renders them incapable of fitting into whatever new ecosystems have emerged at that time. We can only hope they won’t.

. . . .

Meanwhile, this body seems to be managing just fine, despite this self’s endless and futile attempts to affect its behaviour. It does what animal bodies do — it seeks pleasure, in its own peculiar ways, and seeks to avoid pain. It doesn’t much care or worry about collapse, or its inevitability, or about things already falling apart. As it gets older, its wants and its needs become fewer, and simpler. And of course, compared to most of the 8 billion human bodies, it is extremely privileged and fortunate.

So it will enjoy the music, and the scenery, and the comfort (most of the time) of the gently rocking train. It will engage in many types of play, from imagining possibilities and writing stories to flirting and wordplay, if and as opportunities arise.

This body watches the other humans on the train with a growing sense of sadness; they seem hopelessly dissatisfied, trapped, distracted, lost in the past or the future, uncomfortable, and worn down. Perhaps this is what Thoreau meant by “lives of quiet desperation”. This body is curious (circling them figuratively like the wild creature it has always been) and it is compassionate, but it is not terribly patient with those caught in these terrible traps. Maybe it thinks them lost causes. Too little pleasure, too much pain is found, it seems, in consorting with most people. More trouble than it’s worth.

There’s an opportunity for clever banter instead up there, at the front of the car, perhaps, or some new interesting learning about an unfamiliar culture back in the car behind us. This body gravitates to them, not to the majority seemingly caught up in struggle. So cruel, so selfish, this body! Why can’t it care about others’ apparent suffering? So insensitive! Uncivilized, even!

The hopelessness of what’s going on in this world no longer causes ‘me’, this self, any despair, either. This is not a Hollywood movie, after all, with that sad part just before the happy ending. What fills me with joy, and wonder, instead, is that there is no ending to Gaia’s story, even if you measure time in billions of years. This time we presume to be living in is just a blip, the curve of an apostrophe, in this story. We only get to glimpse one small part of one chapter. But wow, it has a Great Extinction event, and a lot of action! We might even witness how this part ends! But as for the longer arc, we can only imagine.

So this body and my self seem simpatico these days. Both are increasingly accepting of what is and is not possible. They’re not ‘resigned’ in the sense that Henry David Thoreau described. More like equanimous. Content with playing our apparent parts in this remarkable story.

Though perhaps it’s a good thing “what’s going on” is, apparently, maybe, only a story.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | Comments Off on What’s Going On (Thoughts on a Train)

Conditioned Incompetence

Posted on August 27, 2023 by Dave Pollard


“The New Leader Holds Court”, by Midjourney AI; my own prompt

Aurélien has been writing lately about how much of the malaise of our crumbling modern systems can be attributed to the incompetence (defined as inability to do the job) of those administering them and working in them. The horrific and growing failures of our education system, for example, surely cannot be attributed to deliberate, evil, insane, malicious teachers out to miseducate and fail their students.

Mostly, this malaise is due to the sheer unworkability of systems that are so huge, bloated and sclerotic that even when everyone knows what needs to be done, it still cannot be done — examples being the US failure to adopt the metric system, or to dispense with the nonsense of daylight saving time. And in part, they’re due to the incompetence of the people working in those systems, mostly the people ‘at the top’.

That incompetence has several dimensions. Firstly, in large organizations, most executives and administrators have never done the job of their subordinates (they were parachuted in from MBA or other ‘professional’ schools, or moved laterally within the organization). The ludicrous assumption seems to be that if you did reasonably well in ‘management’ courses in university, or in some simple on-the-job management task, you’ll be good at managing anything you’re assigned to do.

Secondly, modern post-secondary educational organizations do not attract people with excellent, practical skills and experiences. They reward academic ‘achievements’ (as assessed by other academics), such as publishing articles about their theories in journals, not skill at teaching, facilitating, or mentoring. How can they possibly be expected to teach anyone how to do anything, let alone run a department or an entire organization?

So you have a situation where the people running the show, making the key decisions and mandating that they be followed, are inevitably making incompetent decisions, with inevitably poor, and even (consider our ‘management’ of CoVid-19 for example) catastrophically poor results and outcomes. They simply don’t have the skills and experience to be competent. This is arguably true in all of our systems — political, economic, educational, health etc.

And, making matters worse, these incompetent decision-makers are working within codependent hierarchies that are echo chambers, where being a sycophant is rewarded and where challenging incompetence is “a career-limiting move”. So total bone-heads like Antony Blinken, Rochelle Walensky, Larry Summers, Victoria Nuland, and Jerome Powell (not to mention the two most recent US presidents), for example, continue to hold positions of power year after year and in position after position, despite having long records of dangerous, uninterrupted, staggering incompetence.

And not only do we have massive systems incapable of change or response to change, and incompetence up and down the hierarchy, we have the ‘players’ in each system conditioning each other to believe that what is in fact utter incompetence, is actually outstanding competence — “Look: my beloved boss and my friendly colleagues and my dutiful, obedient staff, and these consultants we hired, all say I’m wonderful, so I must be, right?”

As a result we have not just incompetence, but conditioned incompetence — incompetence that is rewarded and immune to challenge because all the ‘players’ are telling each other that they’re stellar performers and that what they’re doing is the right stuff. And so we have executives earning obscene incomes for mismanaging organizations in all economic sectors, taking credit for others’ work and for brief good fortune, and accountable only to others in their echo chambers.

No surprise then, that at all levels in all sectors of our society all over the world, both private and public, we see, to put it mildly, lousy leadership and fawning followership. Incompetence up and down the line.

And though you may be tired of hearing me say it, none of this is anyone’s fault. No one set out to create dysfunctional, crumbling systems run and operated by incompetents. It’s the inevitable result of our lack of essential skills and experience, our conditioning of each other, and trying to function in systems that are so huge and complex that they are unmanageable, and thus quickly and inexorably begin to collapse.

Look at any of the systems of industrial civilization and you’ll see, everywhere, the signs of inherent unmanageability, a dearth of real skills and experience, and conditioned incompetence. The decline of our education systems into expensive, dysfunctional, and irrelevant baby-sitting services. The decline of our political systems into competing gangs of short-sighted, power-crazed, sociopathic liars. The decline of our economic systems into vehicles for the organized theft from the poor, sick and lower castes by the obscenely wealthy. The decline of our health systems into overburdened, bankrupt, expensive, administratively-bloated shells of incapacity. Same goes for our transportation systems, our public infrastructure, our systems of trade, and all the other systems on which our civilization utterly relies.

All of them led and staffed by incompetent people doing their (awful) best to make inherently unmanageable and unsustainable systems work, when they cannot.

This is what collapse looks like. There is no ‘fixing’ these systems, least of all by replacing the ‘leaders’ with other incompetents. These systems are in the advanced stages of collapse, and in a few decades they will be gone, as extinct as the systems of ancient empires.

What will take their place is unpredictable and perhaps unimaginable: New types of feudal systems, perhaps; systems of barter and scrip; cobbled-together apprenticeship systems for learning essential skills; community-owned medical clinics run by nurses? Or perhaps, as the long collapse deepens, even more anarchic systems: economies without money, politics based on ad hoc citizens’ assemblies, health care systems without pharmaceuticals, and education systems without teachers? We will do what we must. It’s going to be interesting.

Once these systems have fully collapsed (perhaps many times, as naive replacement systems also fail), in a few centuries or millennia, if there’s any of us left, we will likely see the emergence of some viable, sustainable new systems, almost inevitably much more local, small-scale, practical and low-tech. Instead of experts and specialists, we’ll have become, and will rely on, experienced, competent generalists.

If we are able to do that, we’ll have relearned some of the capacities that enabled human societies to thrive for a million years, in the same ways societies of wild creatures have always thrived — tribally, collaboratively, skillfully, and in concert with the rest of life. Fit, again, and at last, for the more-than-human world in which we live.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 6 Comments

As Fit As I Was In My 20s?

Posted on August 26, 2023 by Dave Pollard


I confess: I hate exercising. I’ve been doing it, on and off, for more than 50 years. Partly this is out of vanity, since I do look better for doing it. And partly it is because I just feel better — healthier, less creaky, more resilient — when I do it. But whether it’s outside or in the gym, the guy dragging himself out of my apartment to exercise is not a happy person.

I am also something of a statistics nut, and I’ve been tracking my running times (and walking times, when I wasn’t up for running) over various distances since I was a teenager. That has helped greatly in figuring out the role of exercise in recovering from various ailments over the past five decades.

And fortunately, there are other statistics geeks among runners as well. One of the most valuable statistics I’ve been tracking is something called WAVA (now renamed WMA). What it represents is your average speed for a particular distance as a percentage of the speed of the top performers in the world of your age, over the same distance. One number tells the whole story.

Generally speaking, if you have a WAVA/WMA score of 60%, you’re going to put in a good showing in a fun run — probably in the top 20% or so of your age cohort. If your WAVA/WMA score is 70%, you could probably perform credibly in regional events, and if it’s 80%, you might qualify for national events of your age cohort. There’s a calculator if you want to compute your own score.

Here’s a chart showing for men (m) and women (w) what your time in minutes for a 10k run would have to be to meet the 60%, 70% and 80% thresholds. (World record time is 26:11 for men and 29:01 for women, both held by African runners, unchanged after this week’s world athletic championships; for runners over age 50, world record is 30:04 for men and 34:14 for women.):

I am not metabolically a distance runner. I was one of the fastest sprinters in the 100m and 200m in my high school, and my WAVA/WMA % at those distances was (and probably still is) in the 80-90% range. By the time I get up to a 5k run, however, I have to work to keep my WAVA/WMA % score at 60% or higher. But as the table at the top of this post shows, I seem to have been able to keep achieving that score with sufficient exercise. In 2006, when I was levelled by colitis, and in 2021, when I came up lame with repeated leg sprains (for reasons still unknown), I did have to face a slow rehab to get my score back over 60%. And it’s been there for the past six months, with nary an ailment.

There is of course another important number in fitness, and that’s the number of calories you burn. Common wisdom is that men on average burn 2,000 calories/day and women 1,500 calories/day without exercise, and that good health requires burning an additional 500 calories/day (2,000-3,000 calories/week) through strenuous exercise.

Unfortunately, the numbers just don’t add up to support this contention. One calorie of consumed food does not equate to one calorie of energy burned through exercise or other activities. The general rules of thumb ignore the complexities of how different types and paces of exercise contribute to fitness, and about what form the calories we consume are in, and even about what time of day we eat and exercise.

Nevertheless, the WAVA/WMA % only describes the intensity of exercise you’ve achieved, and calories, alas, seem to be the only measure that also considers the duration of the exercise. If you want a rule of thumb for computing calories burned (sorry, Americans, this only works in the metric system) here it is:

your average speed (km/h) x number of minutes exercised x weight in kg /55

So for a 72kg runner, 40 minutes at 10 km/h (fast jog) burns 530 calories. There’s your 500 excess calories per day, if that’s your intention. Equivalents would be 50 minutes at 8 km/h or 60 minutes at 6.5 km/h (slow jog). If you don’t like math or can’t manage metric, here’s a calculator for calories burned.

No matter how you calculate it, 500 excess calories per day, at least five days a week, is a lot more exercise than most people get in a normal week. And the above calculation is only for jogging and running. If you want to burn your 500+ excess calories a day walking at an intermediate 5.5 km/h speed, you’ll have to walk for two hours a day to do it. As the chart at the top of this post shows, there have been times in my life when I’ve gotten this target amount of exercise, and other times when I’ve fallen short.

Oh, and one more thing: You may have learned the rule for a safe maximum heart rate as 220 minus your age, in beats per minute (bpm). That rule is obsolete, especially for older people. The new rule is:

211 – (your age x .64)      bpm

So for a 40 year old the new limit is 185 beats per minute, and for a 70 year old it’s 165. Of course, it depends a bit on your height and weight, so here’s a more precise calculator for your maximum heart rate (HRMax, which, the site explains, you should stay 8-10 bpm below). Sorry, it’s metric too. It also calculates your BMI, which can be handy to know.

My gym’s treadmills monitor heart rate, and I’ve found this calculator to be very helpful. When I was middle-aged, I used to slow down if my heart rate exceeded 185. At my current pace at age 72, even after 40 minutes at 10 km/h my heart rate rarely exceeds 155. Those just feel like the right maximums to keep to.

So, I guess the answer to the question post in this article’s title is:

  1. Yes, I am as fit now as I was in my 20s, and have been intermittently throughout my life.
  2. But when I worked out only 3 days a week, or relied on an hour a day’s walking for my exercise, my fitness level dropped considerably. It’s just not enough.

I won’t annoy you this time around with my thoughts on diet, which always get me into trouble when I write about them. Though I will say that I have been following something called the 16/8 intermittent fasting diet (eating only between noon and 8pm each day) for several months now and found it has (1) reduced my late night food cravings and (2) also unintentionally led to a significant but not unhealthy drop in my average weight to the exact midpoint (21) of the recommended BMI range. I have no idea why it seems to work for me.

I think that’s more than enough maths and statistics for today. I hope you found some of this stuff interesting.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 6 Comments

Lost in the Moment

Posted on August 25, 2023 by Dave Pollard


the pictures in this post are Midjourney AI’s attempts to mash-up two selected elements of my Ikigai; other than these three images, Midjourney did not do particularly well; these are my own prompts

I’ve written several times on the subject of what we pay attention to. Much has been written about how what we “choose” to pay attention to determines what we do and ultimately who we are. 

That’s an appealing sentiment, but I think it gets it precisely backwards. It’s our conditioning — biological and cultural — that determines what we pay attention to. It is not a “choice”. The only thing ‘we’ can do about it is to be occasionally aware of what we are (and aren’t) paying attention to. (And of course, if you want to go further down that rabbit hole, we have no choice about what we are aware of, or become aware of, either.)

The people closest to me — those who I suppose have had the largest impact on my conditioning over the past decade or so — have generally been quite forward, and quite articulate, in telling me when I have not been paying attention, and pointing out what I have apparently missed through my inattention (or misdirected attention). 

What I have missed, mostly, I think, is what Annie Ernaux calls “the pure immanence of the moment” — not the external analysis, memory or making-sense of the moment, but its simple ‘beingness’, independent of mental constructs about it and what it might ‘mean’. Perhaps this is what Russell Hoban meant when he wrote about “the moment under the moment”, which a reviewer of his work describes as “the reality underneath the one we’re aware of”. Though my sense is that this reality is not so much ‘within’ or ‘underneath’ what we conceive of as real, as it is the ‘natural reality’ that is staring us in the face but is veiled and concealed from us by our sense-making selves ‘protecting us’ from it, in all its raw, inescapable, uncontrollable and awesome wonder (and sometimes horror). 

So though I seem inherently inattentive (and I could make up a dozen explanations for that tendency, mostly having to do with life-long conditioned fear), my conditioning lately seems to be to ‘catch myself’ not paying attention. That doesn’t make me any more attentive, but it seems to be useful to know a little bit more about how this strange body, and stranger self, appear to function.

And I sense that I get closest to the ‘pure immanence of the moment’ when I am, for whatever reason, being my most attentive, and least caught up in my thoughts and in my head.

As an example of this: One of my joys these days is combining two aspects of my Ikigai (defined as the list of things that make me want to get up and start my day, and that bring simple pleasure and joy to my life):

  1. my favourite music
  2. hedonistic pleasures (eg hot baths by candlelight; Ayurvedic massage)
  3. just being in a state of equanimity, curiosity, and discovery
  4. clever humour and theatre
  5. play (board games, flirtations, exploring ideas, clever exchanges, challenging puzzles, pick-up sports where no one keeps score, and collaborative creative activities)
  6. the view from my apartment
  7. tropical ocean beaches and tropical rainforests
  8. my few true friends and small blog community
  9. the more-than-human world
  10. gentle, joyful, exceptionally bright/perceptive people
  11. reading and writing in order to learn new things 
  12. my creative writing (words and music)

So often at midnight, with the day’s chores behind me and my body starting to relax and think about sleep, I stand by my living room window and look out at the city lights spread out below, and listen to “My Station” — an endless list of songs that Apple Music draws partly from my music library and partly from its recommendation engine, so I never know what song is coming next. And there is a period when I’m thinking about the music — the lyrics and what they might mean, and the memories the song stirs up. And then that thinking seems to stop, and I’m actually just listening to the music. Noticing the instruments coming in, the harmonies and counterpoint and the change in tempo or key, that I’d never noticed before. Not in an analytical way, but simply in an attentive way.

Something strange happens then. When I’m thinking about the music, I’m prone to hit the ‘forward to next song’ button when a song doesn’t immediately appeal to me. But when I stop thinking and just listen, every song suddenly seems beautiful, artful, and astonishing, and I have to stop myself from adding them all to my music library (and later suffering ‘buyer’s remorse’). 

When I am just listening, I cease to be aware of myself, of time passing, or of anything else that is self-referential. At these (immanent?) moments there is only what is happening. There is no ‘intervention’, no sense-making, no ‘relating’ the music to my experiences or memories or mood.

And I realized, looking at my Ikigai list, that there is something almost everything on this list has in common: Almost all of these things can dissolve, and even temporarily erase, my sense of self, and what is left, without ‘me’, is  a world that is boundless, edgeless, timeless, and utterly astonishing. I think we’ve all had ‘in the moment’ experiences like this.

Engaged in these activities, ‘I’ — by which I mean this sense of separateness and physical substance and agency that presumes to inhabit and control this body — just disappear. ‘I’ get lost in ‘the moment’. What is most remarkable about the “immanence of the moment” is that, apparently, there is no ‘one’ there. 

And nearly everything ‘I’ seem to love to do (though it is probably actually this body that loves to do these things) seems to require ‘my’ absence. That is perhaps why ‘I’ am so drawn to the message of radical non-duality. 

The strangest thing, which I only appreciated after I spoke to those (relatively few) who have permanently lost the sense of self and separation, is that the self is never missed. The body does just fine, regulating its billions of cells, and its resultant behaviour, without any need for this vexatious self that thinks itself so indispensable to the body’s safety and survival.

These ‘moments’ don’t seem to occur any more frequently than they ever did, but I do seem to notice them more. And damn I’ve tried a lot of ‘practices’ to try to learn to pay better attention to what’s happening in the moment, but I’ve largely given up — my self stubbornly insists on getting in the way, and it has shown no signs of leaving the building. I’ve even tried ‘not trying so hard’.

Somehow, though, it’s enough to just notice. The moments, I think, will always be there, just waiting for our attention. Waiting for us to get lost.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will | 5 Comments

The Love of Weary Animals

Posted on August 23, 2023 by Dave Pollard


cartoon by Michael Leunig, of course

Turn away from your animal kind,
Try to leave your body just to live in your mind.
Leave your cold cruel Mother Earth behind. Gaia.
As if you were your own creation,
As if you were the chosen nation.
And the world around you, just a rude and dangerous invasion. Gaia.
Someone’s got to stop us now, save us from us, Gaia!
No one’s going to stop us now.
— James Taylor, Gaia

I walk along the river shore
as crows (with no ‘free will’) sweep by:
just bodies being, nothing more —
you do not need a ‘self’ to fly.

So sorry, world, we’ve come to this:
our fractured species, our disease.
We all know something is amiss —
collapse at one-point-five degrees.

Regretting all we ‘should have’ done.
lost, scared and helpless, ghastly ill,
our long decline has just begun
and most are in denial, still.

I find that, now, I dare not care
about your trauma, dread, and shame.
I know your heart still cannot bear
to hear that no one is to blame.

What can I say? I offer just
compassion, but not empathy.
As all things turn from dust to dust
“the thing to do is just to be”.

The damaged, frightened souls in power
act out their conditioning.
The doomsday clock chimes out the hour:
sixty years since ‘Silent Spring’.

“If only we’d just all done…” more? —
We do our best, and we pretend
it makes a difference, toward
the only way that it could end.

These bodies do what they will do;
they make ‘our’ choices, and retain
the core of us we never knew —
the animal that we remain.

So here’s to deranged apes! We tried
to be what we could never be —
domesticated, civilized,
when our true nature’s wild and free.

And now, I have to go outside —
and smile, and run, and play, and sing.
We’re all just part of Gaia’s slide
of nothing into everything,
(so might as well enjoy the ride).

Fare forward, weary comrades all,
the die is cast, still much to learn
before the heavens start to burn:
Our last hurrah before the fall —
The fire next time. The dragons’ turn.

Posted in Creative Works | 1 Comment