I'm sad today

yet absurdly optimistic

Photo by Paris Kain

I feel sad and disappointed by the immediate response to our upcoming seminar, Embracing Our Emergency. I would love your help to understand what you felt when you read the description of the course (if you did) and how you responded to the basic idea of the seminar. What are the blocks that kept you from signing up right away? What is missing or wrong? What can we do better?

Please let me know in the comments — let’s discuss it. I am hoping this will be an event that everyone, especially you, and you, will join. I am willing to do whatever I can to make that happen. I am inspired by the speakers and collaborators who have joined us so far (Bill McKibben, Jane Fonda, Marianne Williamson, XR founder Gail Bradbrook, Thom Hartmann, Jamie Wheal, and many more).

We just published Seven Essential Tools For Surviving - and Thriving - in a Time of Climate Crisis, a free download available here, which gives a sense of what we hope to achieve with the seminar. Pick it up and let me know what you think of it in the comments.

I heard from a few people that the price was too high, so we just lowered it 20%. Also, as stated on the website, we are totally open to giving people partial or even full scholarships — anyone who needs it. Please write to us directly if that is you: hello@liminal.news . Anyone who is struggling to survive in this Capitalist doom-buggy can pay what they can — just message us and let’s work it out. Here is the link again to sign up (with 20% off, first week special):

I am getting a flashback to how I felt when I published my book How Soon Is Now in 2016, with introductions from Sting and Russell Brand (who was seen as a potential savior figure for the Left back then, not yet an Alt Right hustler working the algorithm). That book was the laborious product of ten years of thinking and research. I persevered because I believed we needed a generalist overview, from the perspective of a monistic idealist and occultist, on how we could redesign our civilization to deal with the ecological and geopolitical emergency we are facing as a species. I naively thought the book would have a big impact. Instead it sunk without much trace.

I suppose, in retrospect, I was “spoiled,” to some degree, by the impact my earlier books made and the amount of attention they generated. I felt that people would be excited to follow me into a dissection of the societal and technical forces that we needed to address to avoid, as much as we could, catastrophic collapse. I had not reckoned with the force of inertia around this topic.

The ecological crisis tends to freeze people or put them in psychological paralysis. The problems are so massive and our capacity to do anything seems very tiny. Generally, we don’t want to be reminded of this. We just want to live our lives, suppressing the sense of impending doom hanging over everything, or approaching it with gallows humor.

Many people — most young people, it seems — feel that the world is coming to an end. The rapid disintegration or “simplification” of the biosphere unleashed by modern industrial society is only one aspect of this. There is also the growing threat of nuclear war and the possibility that AGI will escape human control and make us extinct. We’re also seeing micro-plastics accumulating in our organs, and all kinds of new, vaguely defined illnesses as a result of environmental toxicity and manmade viruses. What’s happening in Gaza with the intentional starvation of a mass population is horrifying in itself, but also, I am afraid, it feels like a harbinger of what’s coming as droughts, deluges, and temperature spikes negatively impact food harvests. Meanwhile, tech companies are developing AI-powered drones and robots that will be able to kill with no oversight. I’m scared for “surplus populations,” climate refugees and migrants.

I am sorry — I feel guilty, ashamed — to be writing about all of this negativity — because, truly, in my heart, I remain a total optimist and idealist!

As a result of my shamanic and occult experiences, I feel quite certain our transitory existence on Earth is a strand of a much greater story. Whatever happens to us here and now, my personal belief is that we belong to much larger cycles of reincarnation and renewal, with destruction leading to cosmic re-creation. As individuals, we give expression to the unified field of consciousness that undergirds space and time. Everything happening now — even the worst of it — is a necessary, inescapable part of the mythological coming-to-presence of the divine perfection. If we have been put in position to witness mass fanaticism, violence, and descent into idiocy, then our souls have unfathomable reasons for this: It is knowledge we must have.

As many readers know, I wrote a book on prophecies, looking at indigenous, Mesoamerican, and Hindu ideas about great cycles of time and transformation. I correlated these beliefs with the Apocalypse tradition found in the three monotheisms, and connecting that to the exponential technological, economic, and population growth of modern civilization. I continue to have the uncanny sense that we are in the prophetic matrix. Even so, speaking personally, I admit I don’t find it easy to know what to do in our current circumstance, which seems, in many ways, like a phase of accelerating disintegration.

What feels good to me is to bring people together in seminars like Embracing Our Emergency. This is what one participant said about our last seminar, Building Our Regenerative Future: “The course gave me room to reexamine many facets of my experiences, interests and passions and spurred me on to get my act together! Inspirational speakers and material delivered in a focused and authentic manner with a lot of humility, love and passion for a new way of being.” Here is another testimony: “I experienced renewed hope for humanity by witnessing this grand tour of existing solutions, paths forward to a livable future, and people already doing the work.” I hope these seminars can help redirect collective energy toward new social movements — although I admit I am not sure how to do that yet.

These days, people tend to toggle between two extreme, incompatible ideas: That some new technology (like nuclear fusion or carbon capture) or a number of them will suddenly appear to rescue post-industrial civilization and make it possible for us to continue our resource-intense lifestyles and keep growing our economies exponentially, or we will see the “end of the world” and go extinct due to nuclear war or some deep systemic disruption to the web of life on Earth. There is another option worth exploring, which is that we will undergo, instead, an inevitable decline into a lower-energy and resource-scarce world. People will learn to make do with less, materially, as they have in the past.

This prospect is explored in John Michael Greer’s Dark Age America. Greer notes, this is what has happened to many civilizations and empires in the past. He writes:

The fantasy that today’s industrial societies are destiny’s darlings, and therefore exempt from the common fate of civilizations, needs to be set aside. So does the equally misleading fantasy that today’s industrial societies are the worst of all possible worlds and are getting the cataclysmic fate they deserve. The societies of the industrial world are human cultures, no better or worse than most. For a variety of reasons, they happened to stumble onto the reserves of stored carbon hidden in the Earth and used most of them in three centuries of reckless exploitation; now, having overshot their resource base, like so many other societies, they’re following the familiar trajectory of decline and fall.

I find this a prospect most of us haven’t considered seriously — and it is not at all hopeless. As cheap fossil fuel energy becomes more expensive and less available over the next decades, what might happen is that massive federal, military, and Big Tech projects (like AI) simply become impossible to undertake all over the world. Promothean efforts get discarded. Power devolves back to local and bioregional levels, as humanity scrambles to reinvent itself to survive and thrive in a “post-technological” world. This is one of the future scenarios we will explore in Embracing Our Emergency (I invited Greer to speak but haven’t heard back from him; Jem Bendell and Nate Hagen, with similar views, may join us).

This future possibility also validates the importance of today’s activist movements: Anything we can do to preserve the integrity of the biosphere now will give our descendants more of a shot at building and maintaining regenerative systems that support life. From this vantage point, we might redirect and reset the various radical political, social and environmental movements that haven’t attained critical mass. As Jared Sexton noted in our recent interview (he is excellent by the way), America has no Left because the Left was targeted and systematically destroyed by government and corporations over the last sixty years. We are now subject to a different set of conditions — and we may see a Leftist resurgence as a result of factors like the rise of AI, which is eliminating millions of jobs held by knowledge workers or the “cogniteriat.”

I realize this is getting long. Please let me know what you think of the current seminar in the comments — what causes resistance — and please join us if you can.

Thriving in Climate Chaos