Exploring Deeper Acceptance, Part Two

 

Gum Gap Overlook, Grandview, Tennessee

“Any human being exists only as a member of the wider community of life, air, water, and soil. We have no existence apart from the earth. We are the earth. What we do to the earth, we do to ourselves.”

“The biosphere is a greater THOU, not a lesser it.”

~Michael Dowd (1958-2023)

The last two entries here were focused on acceptance. So much can be written and shared about it that didn't fit into two rather large articles, so I'm continuing this one along the same lines so that additional material can be included. Realizing the inevitability of certain facts usually results in acceptance of those facts for most people (although not always). Michael Dowd did so much for the community of post-doom thinkers, and his passing stunned most everyone. I am forever grateful for his presence in my life, as he encouraged us all to not only reach acceptance but to embrace it fully and pass these messages on to others to reduce the suffering which grief always brings. May his messages and videos continue to help those just awakening to the set of predicaments we find ourselves in. 

Another link I used in my last article deserves to be printed right here, as I have featured articles from Bodhi Paul Chefurka in the past with good reason; they are excellent:

"Those of us who have been following the unfolding global crisis - the converging, interlocked "wicked problems" of energy, the environment, economics and social justice - have become intimately familiar with the painful progression through the Five Stages of Grief described by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross.

1. Denial — "This can't be happening! There's been some stupid mistake."
2. Anger — "This is simply not fair! Who is to blame for this?"
3. Bargaining — "I'll do anything for a chance at a few more years. Anything!"
4. Depression — "I can't do anything about it, so why bother with anything? What's the point?"
5. Acceptance — "Well, I can't fight it, so I may as well prepare for it."

As I have worked within Stage 5 for the last few years, I've come to realize that Kübler-Ross stopped one stage too soon. There is an important stage even beyond the clear recognition and acceptance of What Is Really Happening. Often when we arrive at acceptance we are so relieved just to be free of the pain of our grief that we stop looking to see if any new possibilities may have been revealed.

There is a fundamental principle in deep inner work that the greatest gifts are always found in the darkest places. The acceptance of an inevitable ending, whatever it is, can clear our vision and allow us to see previously unnoticed things that become the launch pad for new growth - for a kind of rebirth.

The bigger the change, the greater its potential gift, if we can just look at it with new eyes. We may find ways of moving beyond our old habits, expectations and judgments. We may realize that our old ways of seeing the world held us back. We may give ourselves permission to live authentically, as our true selves.

As a reminder to keep looking for those opportunities, I invite you to add a sixth stage to the Kübler-Ross model:

6. Finding the Gift — "Wow, look at the opportunities this change opens up! I may not be able to go back, or even forward in the direction I wanted, but just look at all the other possibilities that have suddenly appeared!"

At first, I wanted to change things. I hoped to help put out the “fire on the roof of the world” or at least show people how that might be done. Later on, I wanted to wake people up to the fact that the roof was on fire in the hope that they would find a way to act. Both of those hopes have turned out to be forlorn.

Now I have turned my attention and energies closer to home – to my immediate circle of community and my own inner preparations. My involvement with the global aspects of the crisis has largely shifted to watching it unfold, to making sure that any new developments are seen and understood by others, and generally acting as a shamanic witness to humanity’s transition.

If we follow this shift in our attention and values, we will discover the opportunity to explore the sixth stage of grief, and we will begin to find the gifts that such great challenges always hold. These gifts include:
Understanding that humanity is a special animal, and that both our specialness and our animal nature must be a factor in all we do;

• Realizing that we are a part of nature, not apart from her;
• Learning that our sense of control is an illusion born of fear, and that the fear itself is an illusion;
• Recognizing our personal and collective limitations, and reorienting our action within them;
• Awakening to the fact that change is not the enemy, but the nature of reality;
• Accepting that what humanity faces is not a set of physical problems, but the turmoil that always accompanies a transition from adolescence into adulthood.

It is time for us to stop thinking in terms of fixing things that can’t be fixed. It’s time instead to begin imagining the best ways to live happy, caring, cooperative, altruistic, mindful, joyous, and even sacred lives in the midst of a world we have defaced forever.

In closing, I would like to say that there is a very good reason that the concept of Surrender is at the core of all the world’s sacred philosophies. Unlike the Western interpretation of the word – “the acceptance of defeat” – this use of Surrender asks us simply to accept that there are indeed some things that cannot be done. If we surrender to the truth of our reality in this way, we are suddenly released from our attachment to the impossible, free instead to do the very best of those things that can be done.

In this surprising reversal of meaning, surrender becomes synonymous not with final defeat, but with the opportunity for true victory. That opportunity is to find the gifts of insight that wait hidden in even the darkest corners of our experience.

Grant me this day
The courage to change those things I can,
The serenity to accept those things I cannot change –
And above all, the wisdom to know the difference.

May your journey be filled with hope, joy, liberation and love.

Bodhi Paul Chefurka
September 29, 2012" 

When one takes our lack of agency into account, we're all doing the only things we can do, all courtesy of all of our conditioning and prior decisions influenced by said conditioning. This surrender is precisely what so many people equate to "giving up" when in reality, it is accepting the truth and releasing attachment to that which cannot be. Believing in fairy tales and fantasies is fine when one is a child. When one matures out of those beliefs, one holds a wiser outlook on life and realizes what is possible and what is not. He or she comprehends that the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, as cute as they all are, will not save us from overshoot, climate change, or anything else. My goal in writing these articles is to point out these realities so that others can understand (or at least try to) these facts and use them to come to their own conclusions on how to proceed. One thing that should be made perfectly clear is that technology will not help us. This is a logical flaw I continue to see over and over again. Technology use is precisely the cause of the predicaments we face. One cannot solve anything by utilizing the same tool causing the issue or issues. Furthermore, predicaments are different from problems in that they do not have solutions, they have outcomes.

My own conclusions on what needed to be done took a very noticeable turn from the path I had previously followed. I began to look deeper into the predicaments we face and began to notice a pattern of mass denial and delusion within society. I began to realize that all the hype, marketing, and advertising from industries and governments tasked with working to reduce symptom predicaments such as climate change wasn't working and that emissions continued climbing. It really was a rather stark transition for me and it is still ongoing. One of videos I watched early on that promulgated serious and deep thoughts about the set of predicaments we face is What a Way To Go: Life At The End of Empire. Timothy Scott Bennett, the creator of this movie, is another person I am forever grateful to; as every time I watch this movie I latch onto something new in it. If you haven't seen it, this is one of the best two hours you will spend watching a movie on the predicaments we face. At the 55:30 mark in the movie is Part Three: The Locomotive Power. This section deals with how we arrived at this point in time in the first place, a necessary part of coming to terms with where we are and what we can (and can't) do about it. Rationalizing, storytelling, and narrative-generation is all part of the program. It all starts with the technology of agriculture leading to civilization and population growth, caused by the reduction or removal of negative feedbacks which once kept our numbers in check and in balance with the rest of nature. I'll delve into more about this next week. 

Once one digs deeper into the predicaments we face, one begins to notice more and more systems that we humans built, and that they are all unsustainable. Shane Simonsen points out the flawed logic of EVs in this interesting article about the roads we use. What keeps me grounded in acceptance is the constant deep digging I do to make certain that I keep up with the science. It's very important to me that I continuously update my understanding of the facts. This also keeps ongoing grief to a minimum, which can be a concern to many. I see grief as a necessary part of the mass extinction we are within. How anyone can ignore the ongoing destruction of life on this planet is beyond me. Out of sight, out of mind I suppose - many people simply choose not to look at it. In fact, it is this very ability of ours to compartmentalize and/or deny completely the very facts surrounding us that is part and parcel of how we can continue to behave the way we do and yet while doing so may reduce cognitive dissonance within us, it changes little to nothing outside of us. Internal change is what is required in order to produce external change, and with a repeat of the necessary acceptance of wise words from the quote above, once again:

"It is time for us to stop thinking in terms of fixing things that can’t be fixed. It’s time instead to begin imagining the best ways to live happy, caring, cooperative, altruistic, mindful, joyous, and even sacred lives in the midst of a world we have defaced forever." 

Until next week, Live Now!