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How To Be Happy At The End Of The World

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Join me on a journey of self-discovery, awakening and reconnection as I learn How To Be Happy At The End Of The World. <a href="https://howtobehappyworld.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">howtobehappyworld.substack.com</a>

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June 30, 2022

How To Be Happy At The End Of The World #5

Hey fellow Pathfinders, it’s Rob with another way to be happy at the end of the world.In this one I’m going to hit you with something hard (sorry) and then I’m going to make it feel better than ever, so trust me and stick around to the end.Here goes…This civilisation is finished.And that’s OK.Because in our blood are the memories of our ancestors who have survived ice ages, floods, famine, war, pestilence and every horror imaginable. We wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t.We’ve done this all before. “Perhaps”, a part of me says “but it still hurts”. Of course it hurts, but it needn’t hurt in time. Deep down, I reassure myself, this pain is all bound up in perception and attachment both of which I have the ability to affect.So I tell myself a little story to try it out and it goes like this…Our privilege in the West is catching up with us. The fear instilled in us by the thought of our civilisation being over is the same fear that we have instilled in others for several centuries by painting the leaves and people of the world in White European thought and culture. Now that everything is so thoroughly painted over, many of us have known nothing else than painted leaves on dying trees and we wonder where all the birds went.And so I remind myself of the paint and I see it for what it is: a way of seeing the world, a creation, conscious or otherwise, based on the perception and belief of the painters who see (and have for a long time seen) the world with a detachment and arrogance that leads them to think that they can improve it. That they must improve it and make it in their own image. That things as they are, people as they are, life as it is and the cosmos as we find it to be, is not enough. And so they set to work painting over it. And we’ve all been painting ever since, even when those we seek to paint over tell us the folly of our efforts and predict with startling accuracy how it will all end in tears.I see too that my own perception is a two-way thing: I project out into the world a light that is coloured and distorted by my thoughts and beliefs, which bounces off of all the things I perceive, right back into my eyes, my mind, heart and soul where I often falsely assume that I am seeing something entirely outside of me and for the very first time. But it’s a reflection. And what’s more, the more I look at it the more I realise that my interpretation of that reflection does not have to be unconscious, that I can in fact participate in it. I can choose. I can also, it turns out (after making countless mistakes and enduring a great deal of self-inflicted suffering) choose what kind of light I send out, what I bounce it off of and how I interpret it when it comes back. And in doing so I am an active participant in the creation of my own reality.If I’m awake to it. And so often I’m not because I find it incredibly hard at times to be that responsible - it’s exhausting. It’s also incredibly fun to learn about the world, but it’s hard.I say it’s hard but to be more specific, what is really hard is the letting go; an incredibly simple act in itself perhaps - just stop doing what you’re doing - but it’s incredibly hard nonetheless because deep down, letting go is the relinquishment of known, experienced, relative safety, for an unknown; for an uncertainty. It so often feels far safer to stay where I am than to let go and jump into another way of seeing and being in the world, to let go of my long held beliefs and to create new ones, even though I know I can no longer stay where I am because I realise that helping to paint the world doesn’t serve me.I know that letting go will set me free and yet I hesitate. So I take a look at freedom and imagine what it is and I see that perhaps it is nothing more than a feeling of no longer being bound by all the fears that stop me letting go. So as I look at the end of civilisation I ask myself what it might take to let go of any and all the thoughts and beliefs, frames of reference and ways of perceiving the world that lead me to feeling scared and unsafe. What would it be like to let go of any fear and doubt, limitations, blocks and trauma that are triggered when I look at it? What would remain when they are all gone?Love.Unconditional love for all life, all people and myself. Acceptance, surrender and love.What would it take to love it all, to love everything unconditionally? To fall in love with the world, all of it, every little bit? I’d have to let go of my fears and doubts.Which leads me to ask some practical questions for my life: how do I do that? How do I cultivate conditions within me to perceive the world in such a way that I see the world and everything in it with unconditional love?Perhaps with more gratitude, compassion, forgiveness and appreciation.And most importantly of all: how can I create conditions within me to perceive the world in such a way that enables everyone I encounter to be fearless expressions of their own true nature, full of unconditional love for themselves, others and all of life? And for me to love them, no matter who they are, no matter how different their expression of their own true nature is from mine.How do I do that?I don’t think that question can ever be fully answered, in fact, it might even take a lifetime of asking and the answers I get may well be different every single day.Maybe that’s enough for here and now, for me at least.Maybe I could even tell myself that in loving life unconditionally, with a collapsing civilisation or without, I am even helping to create conditions conducive to life. Because maybe, after all, that’s exactly what love is. So if we want to know if we are on the right track, doing the right thing, creating the world we need and want, living the lives we want, helping to regenerate the Earth, all I need to do is check how I’m feeling and ask “Is this love?” and then change the way I’m seeing, thinking and acting until the answer is inescapably “yes”.Perhaps that’s enough, perhaps that’s a start at least. Perhaps The Beatles had it right all along - love is all you need. Get full access to How To Be Happy At The End Of The World at <a href="https://howtobehappyworld.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">howtobehappyworld.substack.com/subscribe</a>

June 17, 2022

How to Be Happy At The End Of The World #4

Welcome to Part 4 of the How To Be Happy At The End Of The World series.In this instalment I’d like to share something I’ve just submitted to Adbusters magazine. I want to share it with you as well because it brings together a lot of the ideas I’ve been writing about on my Substack and in the podcast and I thought you might enjoy it.It’s a lot more poetic than normal and is usually the sort of thing I write in my journal but never share so I thought for that very reason I should start sharing that kind of thing.The stuff that makes me a little hesitant to press ‘Publish’ on as it feels so personal.But here goes….I’m standing at the kitchen sink doing the dishes, lost in thought as my wife is trying to get my attention. Apparently I was ignoring her. She’s looking at me with a mix of scorn and then concern and she asks me what’s going on.I’ve just spent the last few weeks down a rabbit-hole of climate science in preparation for an interview with the world’s foremost earth systems scientist. Standing here at the kitchen sink I’ve still got the numbers from his paper ‘The Future Of The Human Climate Niche’ reverberating inside me.How we’re on course for 3-4°C temperature increase by 2070 and that failing mass migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience mean annual temperatures of >29°C currently only found on 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara. How the habitable area of the world is going to dramatically shrink. So much so, he concludes, that one way or another, be it by transformation or collapse, this civilisation is finished.Rapid, almost miraculous transformation or billions will watch as hundreds of millions die. Crop failure, famine, wet bulb heat domes. Death but out of all proportion from anything I can fathom.I take my hands out of the water and rest my weight on the edge of the sink, my head drops down and I stare at the water. Hearing the same numbers as I say them to my wife, she tries to reassure me that all I have to do is look after the kids.“That’s just it” I reply. “I can’t. Not from this”. And I just break open and cry. Shoulder shaking, eyes screwed up, kind of crying. I gasp a little for air as I settle myself back down again.A few days later I’m folding my 3 year old daughter’s clothes away in her drawers as she’s playing behind me on the bed and I cry again, this time silently but just as full of love and grief.From what I see in the mainstream media, people seem to think that eco-anxiety is some strange abstraction that only affects young people who are too naive to know better and who must have got things out of all proportion. As far as I’m concerned, eco-anxiety is just plain old fear and it’s not limited to anyone based on their age. Its only limits, as I can tell, are awareness, compassion and the ability to experience and adequately deal with fear.Fear is 100% the right reaction to our predicament. Fear is all bound up with control. Fear is what it feels like to not be in control, especially in high risk situations.This is a high risk situation. The highest of all risks - existential no less.And we as individuals understandably do not feel as if we are in control right now because no matter what any one person does to turn this around, it’s not enough. What matters is what we do together. A painful lesson within this grief is that individually, everything we do is both necessary and woefully insufficient at the same time. What we do together is everything. What we’re currently doing together and have been doing for some time is the problem. It’s our culture, our values, our identities, our very way of seeing and interpreting the world.Our shared stories that provide the unchecked lenses through which we make sense of the world and everything in it.Right now our stories are no longer believable. The stage is flooding, the backdrops are on fire and the cast and crew are all too busy checking their phones to act or change the set between scenes.Our stories don’t hold up anymore. I can no longer suspend my disbelief.Go to school, go to Uni or College, get a job, work your way up, build a career making widgets or selling insurance, retire and get some sun, have some Grandkids and enjoy the fruits of your lifelong labour. Buy stuff, cool stuff, fill your new-build house with it, express the inner you through mass consumption and repress your fear. There is nothing to be scared of. Keep on shopping. Shop til you drop. The universe is a cold, dead, chance occurrence, devoid of meaning, nothing more than an empty void with some pretty lights that one day too will fade. You are all that matters so consume, consume, consume. You’ll be dead soon too.B******t.Fear is the right reaction to our predicament, and as my pain points me to the source of my anxiety being control, the only thing I can do now in order to be happy at the end of the world is to give up trying to control any of this. To give up running from the fear. So I let it catch up with me, fully aware. I look it in the eye and let it know that I’m here. I let it watch me. I let it know exactly who I am because there simply isn’t enough time nor tears to put this off any longer. And as it gets closer to me, and I get closer to it, instead of shaking into a blubbering mess its mountainous shadow starts to shrink until it's the exact same size as me. It’s just a shadow. My shadow.As we talk without words I realise that it wants me to stay alive. It loves me and needs me to live. So I listen to it as it silently speaks. I take the letter from its black-smoke hand and I let go of whatever has been holding me back from reading it. I read the words. Two words, nothing more: “WAKE UP”, in black, dripping letters. Written in oil.Wake up, it tells me, to the idea that all ideas are made together in community, all ways of life are shared experiences, all cultural norms are handed on. That all that seems so toweringly huge and insurmountable in this civilisation of growth and oil is built on nothing more than shared belief in a crumbling status quo. And that in between the cracks of the pasted-on smiles of fake tanned celebrities, billionaires and Presidents, life finds a way to come through. All roads lead home after all. The cracks will deepen and converge, the monuments will falter and tilt. The ground will give way with a tug of the rug beneath it. And yes, finally, the woodcutters that we’ve become will fall with the cut of the last branch that supports us and as it drops we will come to realise what’s always been wrong. That there is no escape from being entangled. There is no separation - there is no ‘here’ without ‘there’.We’ve never been in control. We’ve never been separate individuals. We’ve built all this together. Each of us a whole and a part in the story of the world. A story that is changing because it no longer holds. We’re all waiting with bated breath for what will happen next. Where will this story go? How will it end? How will the next one begin?There are whispers in creation. There are clues in the ground itself, buried beneath the layers of the Anthropocene’s ‘wealth’ where a different kind of treasure has been waiting for milennia to be found. Where both XX and XY have long marked the spot to dig, with clue after clue leading us to find that every atom in us was forged within a Sun. That everything we know and love has been drawn together by the magic of the stars, watered by the ocean and nurtured by the land. That a spreading out of the branches of life from one shared source, sprawling in all directions across the globe, has been weaving everything together for 3.8 billion years. Nature’s intelligence running more imperfectly perfect than any AI, learning to know itself as it creates the very conditions conducive to itself in all that it does.And that as it explores and learns, it has in us, folded in on itself as if pressing its face into a mirror for the very first time. It learns to live upright. It builds everything we know, have ever known and all that is lost. It stands here now in you and I just as much as it does a tree. And it wants us to live so it makes us scared. It chases us across the landscape of our souls until finally we succumb to ourselves and take the letter from its black-smoke hand and read the words aloud, so loud they reverberate across the seas, the land and sky, rattling every star-forged soul in creation with: “WAKE UP!”Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Get full access to How To Be Happy At The End Of The World at <a href="https://howtobehappyworld.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">howtobehappyworld.substack.com/subscribe</a>

May 23, 2022

Why We Won't Solve the Climate Crisis

Why won’t we solve the climate crisis?Because the climate is not the problem - we are.Our worldview, the way we interpret the world and each other, what Herman Daly calls our ‘pre-analytic vision’, or what other’s refer to as our paradigm or our culture -that’s the problem.Our current crises serve to show us that our whole way of understanding our shared reality is faulty. This understanding is foundational to our entire civilisation and has been for thousands of years. Which is what makes the current predicament so monumental and why plastic straws just aren’t going to cut it.This shared understanding has gifted us immense wealth and prosperity and has freed so many from so much suffering but it’s based on an understanding of the world and ourselves as separate. We are not separate from each other or from nature - we are nature.Yet we see ourselves as somehow distinct and detached, isolated and alienated from the world around us; somehow we’ve become discrete actors on a stage with everything else serving only as a painted, fixed backdrop.It’s a lie. An unconscious one but a lie all the same. We are completely entangled in countless systems. Not only is everything we do entangled in such systems but so too is everything we think as well, because living in these webs means that everything is constantly being determined in relationship to everything else. Everything we think and do is co-created in a giant dance that seems messy and chaotic but is playing out in nested systems where the distinction between parts and wholes is no longer as useful as principles, functions and relationships, all co-evolving in one giant self-regulating system that is the earth, itself a part of larger systems all the way up to the universe.The problem isn’t the climate, it’s us. It’s our inner world, our stories, our ways of seeing and making sense of the world. We are seeing the world askew, through distortions and misperceptions and we can’t address our climate and ecological crises until we transform the way we see the world and ourselves.We are not separate from the world. The universe is not a cold, dead place. Your consciousness itself is evidence that the universe is conscious because it is not separate from you - you are it, it is you.The climate isn’t the problem, it’s that we’ve somehow lost our souls, our roots and our connection to the world and all life on it.How else could we cut down the Amazon, burn fossil fuels, and kill each other?It is a problem of our minds and their perspectives and a problem of our hearts and their disconnection. Both have been programmed by our stories. Stories of scarcity, hostility and separation. Stories of machines, of parts, of false competition and duality of mind and body, of us and them - stories of the ‘other’ when there is only one.Stories of how we were made and put here. Of nature as a cold, harsh beast and of the human as even colder and far harsher when left to express our true nature.Stories that no longer serve us.Separation drives a wedge of division between us and all things like a stake through the heart. What we do to the world, to each other and all living things, we do to ourselves. It is only our worldview that tells us otherwise, a story that enables mass destruction. A story that is nothing more than an illusion, a misperception and a distortion. It is a story that confers great power to the teller, which is why it continues to be told - we’ve built our entire civilisation on it after all.But it is just a story.Our solution doesn’t lie in carbon capture and storage technologies that don’t yet exist, or anything for that matter in the external world. It lies in the changing of our minds and in the reconnection between ourselves and all life that flows as a result.It lies in the wiping of our eyes to remove the distortions and misperceptions that keep us from seeing the world as it truly is: infinite and full of love, all the way through.Such a transformation is inevitable, it is the lesson of the climate crisis.The question is simply one of: how long will it take us to learn it as a culture? How long will it take to assimilate what our sciences are telling us, into the stories of who we are and how all this came to be? How long will it take us to realise just how miraculous, wonderful and entangled we all are? When will our stories become one?This lesson will cost us dearly to learn. Just how much it ends up costing us is up to us and our appetite for change. I’m often told by my coaching friends that people only change once it becomes more painful to stay the same than to transform (aka hit rock bottom), a rock bottom that is either achieved or imagined, depending on the individual’s beliefs and values.So what will it be for this civilisation? Will we transform overnight following a great realisation? Or over many decades as we find rock bottom? This is for us all to decide.The fact that we’ve been born at a time where such a choice is possible is unbelievably rare, perhaps even unique and the consequence of this choice has implications not only for all life on earth but on the nature of human consciousness too. It is a call to a level of self-awareness we’ve never experienced before, an awareness of our oneness, of our entanglement in all things, of a different way of seeing ourselves and all life. This choice is yours, it’s all of ours and we shouldn’t be scared to make it. It’s easy and there are no wrong answers, whatever we choose to do. Why? Because we are not separate from it, everything we do we are doing to ourselves, this is Karma.Even at times of great crisis and chaos, upheaval and change, everything is always absolutely perfect as it is because it is you.So in making your choice of the story you want to tell of the world you are in and how you want to respond to it, you define yourself because you and it are not separate.Which equally means that in defining yourself, you define the world and every entanglement you have with it.If we want to change the world, we need only change our selves by changing our stories. The stories that define us, that shape our beliefs and our identities because it is these stories that programme the way we see the world and how we see the world determines how we interpret it and how we act.The climate isn’t the problem that needs solving, it’s us. Get full access to How To Be Happy At The End Of The World at <a href="https://howtobehappyworld.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">howtobehappyworld.substack.com/subscribe</a>

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What is How To Be Happy At The End Of The World?: Join me on a journey of self-discovery, awakening and reconnection as I learn How To Be Happy At The End Of The World. <a href="https://howtobehappyworld.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">howtobehappyworld.substack.com</a>
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Does this podcast accept guests?: Yes, this podcast regularly features guests.

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