693. Jem Bendell

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Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We've done nearly 700 of them now. If this is new to you and you would like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P,

and look under the past interviews menu. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on the website and a page that explains alternatives to PayPal. My guest today is Professor Cem Bendel. He is a world-renowned scholar on the breakdown of modern

societies due to environmental damage. Downloaded over a million times, his deep adaptation paper is credited with inspiring the growth of the Extinction Rebellion movement in 2018 and created a global deep adaptation network to reduce harm in the face of societal collapse. He completed his PhD at the University of Bristol and his geography BA with honors at the University of Cambridge. For decades he has worked on sustainable development as a researcher and

NGO manager as well as a consultant to businesses, political parties, and UN agencies. One of his His specialism since 2011 is pro-social currency innovation, with his TEDx talk from that year explaining reasons for Bitcoin and similar. In 2017, he co-led the development of the UK Labour Party's communications plan for the general election and co-wrote speeches for their top politicians.

Although recognized in 2012 as a young global leader by the World Economic Forum, Cem has has been increasingly critical of the globalist agenda on sustainable development. Away from that work, he is partner in an organic farm school in Bali, and supports meditation retreats at the main Buddhist temple on the island. You may think that that last sentence I read is the reason why I'm having him on Batgap, because usually we're talking all about spiritual things, but there's more to it than that,

you'll see as we get into this conversation. Incidentally, his latest book you can see over his shoulder there, Breaking Together, I listened to the entire thing as an audiobook, it's about 18 hours long, thoroughly enjoyed it. I listened to the introduction twice, the introduction alone took over an hour to listen to. But there's a whole background in my thinking and understanding of why this idea of societal collapse is pertinent, and I'll elaborate that as we go along.

but I want to give Jim a chance to say hello and introduce himself and give us the elevator talk of What he's all about let's pretend There's a societal breakdown happening and they were stuck in an elevator for two hours And you can give us the talk but we can start with a more condensed version Thanks for the introduction Rick. Yeah, and those who have joined us. That's good or watching later. Hello I'm joining you from my

I'm back in my dad's apartment back in the UK. I don't live in the UK, but this is where I spent quite a few months Particularly last year Writing the book in fact, so I'm actually looking almost with a bit of nostalgia around the room Just that process of writing the book for example. I open the book talking about my dad's parents my grandparents and

The way they used to chat and that's because I've got pictures of them I just that was basically why I did that because I was sitting underneath a picture of them as I started writing and you have to start a book somewhere and That was why an elevator pitch about me or the book of the book Okay, the book's called breaking together and it has a twofold hypothesis First is that um the foundational systems of modern industrial consumer societies are

breaking, they're collapsing into each other. So we're already within that process that can't be fixed and therefore I make the case that collapse is the accurate word for that even though collapse is an unfolding process will go on for some time and it will be experienced differently in different

places. But the second part of the thesis in breaking together is that we can break together rather than apart in that context by which I mean the fact that all the systems, the institutions are breaking, it's somewhat of a judgment on their legitimacy and that therefore can invite us to rethink all our previous assumptions, preoccupations, things which kept us busy, stuff we hoped for or

believe might happen one day. It brings us very much into the present moment as rethink our values, how we choose to live in this time, who do we want to be. So that bigger societal breaking leads to an inner breaking which can actually allow us to be something incredible. And so in the second half of the book I talk about lots of people who I'm impressed by and the way they're responding to this. So that's also why the subtitle is a freedom loving response to collapse.

I recenter human freedom, personal and collective, as important to a value to maintain as things get tough because the thesis in the book is that it wasn't human freedom that led to this carnage but the fact that we have been manipulated from birth to death through something I call imperial modernity pumped up and maintained by an expansionist monetary system basically encouraging us to behave in ways where we feel numb about the damage in the world

and we are tough with ourselves, with each other and with nature. We feel life is tough and I go into great detail about what I call the money power and how it's promoted those dynamics and fed those aspects of ourselves that we wouldn't consider to be that great, that positive, to an extent that it then hit ecological limits and ultimately is collapsing the societies that it's helped build. So yeah it's promoting something what I call

eco-libertarianism. So it was an attempt to make, what should we say, an offer of a political philosophy and framework for an era of collapse, one that's a political philosophy that's solidarity based because I see a lot of authoritarianism, a lot of nostalgia politics, conservatism, all sorts emerging as people get more and more nervous about their lives becoming more and more difficult and the future looking more and more bleak.

So I wanted to offer something else into the mix as we try and make sense of this new era of collapse as I call it. Okay, let me give you my perspective which I already did in an email. I think you agree with some of it and not with all of it but we can play back and forth and try to arrive at a common understanding.

As many of my listeners will be aware, a lot of people who would consider themselves spiritual or interested in ancient traditions, the wisdom traditions of the world, have been feeling that we're due for some sort of big upheaval, that the current systems are not sustainable.

You know, many of them believe that this upheaval will be necessary and that on the other side of it, we'll have some better world, you know, some more enlightened world, and so on. I've been thinking this way since the 70s, not as a certainty, but as a theory of how things might unfold.

And I see all, like you mentioned, monetary systems, I would consider all systems, political, monetary, agricultural, technological, everything that's a product of human beings, to be a reflection of the mentality or the ambient level of consciousness of the people in the world. And obviously, some people are more powerful than others, more creative in producing things than

others, but basically, it all reflects human mentality or human consciousness. And what people think, what various prophecies have predicted for many years, going back to the Babylonians and the the Hopis and the Mayans and so on, is that some kind of big shift is going to happen in collective consciousness. And when that happens, and I do believe it's happening now, all these systems won't work anymore because they reflect a lower level of consciousness.

It's like a kid who's growing quickly and trying to keep wearing the same clothes, they get too tight, he has to bust out of them and it destroys the clothes. That's my view in a nutshell. I've been meditating, as many people know, for most of my life, and I've been interviewing hundreds of people, all of whom are undergoing really profound

shifts in consciousness and their awareness. And I buy into the notion of collective consciousness, perhaps reminiscent of Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious, but that consciousness is not just a product of the brain, it's a field, and brains are more like sender-receivers that interact or tune into that field, and I believe a shift is happening in collective

consciousness. Perhaps not so much created by people, but actually people are more like surfers, they don't create the waves, they ride the waves if they're able to do so, or they wipe out if they aren't able to do so. And I think you're correctly predicting and explaining in detail how a lot of structures are wiping out, but there are others who are skillfully surfing the waves and actually experiencing a kind of a spiritual renaissance within their own lives as a result of

this upwelling of, you could say, enlightenment in the world. So that's enough of that and let's have your response to it and I'm not in the least bit sensitive if you want to disagree with any or all all of it. Yeah, thank you. You've covered quite a lot. So I'll start at the end.

What you just said that a lot of people are experiencing some kind of spiritual upwelling, renaissance, whatever, precisely because of their recognition of the amount of trouble in the world and possibly if they're unlucky they've been through a hard time because of ecological damage and various different implications there from because we know that hurt, we know the tragedy, we know

the grief and despair even can be a very powerful means of people letting go. So in psychology the theory is called positive disintegration which is actually about oddly the even the benefit of proper clinical depression in part of that spiritual transformation and that's as you say you mentioned ancient wisdom So even in the Tao Te Ching, they talk about the path to illumination is through the dark. So you can find it in all spiritual traditions, the importance of this dark night of the soul.

So yes, I would say that's happening a lot. The guy who introduced us, Reverend Michael Dow, that was a big part of his message and that was what he really was dedicating the last years of his life to. He passed away recently, very recently and very suddenly, unexpectedly. It's amazing to see how many people really were impacted powerfully by him.

The clarity of his post-doom message that you can't avoid the despair once you realize how much carnage has happened already, happening now, going to happen, why it's been done and how we knew for so long but didn't change. all of that pain. You can't just sidestep it and make it go away.

But there's something else on the other side of that, the pain of that realization, which is, yeah, to live in wonder, gratitude, recommit to service, creativity, live your life, try and be the best ever person you can be, precisely because you have that feeling of essentially mortality on your shoulder. Again, back to spiritual wisdom, Ram Dass talked about

living with death on your shoulder and love in your heart. So just at the end of what you were saying I just want to connect with you on that and say absolutely at an individual level that's something I'm noticing and then therefore at a community level because a lot of those people are connecting to help each other and to realize that people can respond not necessarily in that way that I've just described but just some kind of ego transcendence

because of this realization. People can respond almost like with ego affirmation and psychologists call it worldview defense. There's something called terror management theory, I don't know if you come across it, but whereby where people feel threatened, they feel their safety threatened, they therefore feel their identity and worldview threatened and they can double down on it and become

quite illogical about it and ultimately violent. And the theory arose from analyzing the rise of religious fundamentalisms but I think it applies very much to looking at people within modernity than, for example, some scientists who are very committed to the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, doubling down on how good it is, that methodology, and how perfect it is according to scientific norms, despite current temperature measurements.

Which methodology are they doubling down on? The desire for consensus. IPCC there's a desire for consensus where there needs to be a preponderance of information published, peer-reviewed, for it to then be considered acceptable. However, what that means then, for example in my book I talk about it, it meant that in 2014 in their big report they were talking about future sea level rise and the lowest range of the projection was actually lower than measured sea level

rise from satellite measurements that year. And that was because there had been dispute over how much melt from glaciers on land was going to contribute to sea level rise compared to other things, basically thermal expansion of the oceans. So because there was dispute about how much it would add, they disregarded it altogether. So that is one example, but it shows you if there

wasn't consensus, they would disregard it. And there's huge complexity, for example, around tipping points and therefore very difficult to agree that and so a number of positive, so-called positive and self amplifying feedbacks were also set aside, not all of them. But it's that desire for consensus. So the thing is, now, September's was 1.8 degrees Celsius above pre industrial average temperatures, which is

decades ahead of official consensus scientific projections of the past. And yet we still have some people in the field of science doubling down on their view that people like me, and there are many people like me who five years ago said, this looks really bad and much worse than what the IPCC have been telling us.

They're doubling down on that we were wrong, we were reckless, we were unscientific, we were naughty, we were upsetting people unnecessarily, and that we should just stick with the consensus

establishment science. They're saying that now even though it's obvious. I'll say as plainly as that, people like me who were trying to spot what was most salient, so for example I was looking specifically what the oceanographers studying the Pacific were saying, but we were right and the people who were slavishly following IPCC

were wrong. Now that doesn't need to just be seen in terms of vindication. Science, when it's siloed and institutionalized, it's self-restricting in how well it can understand what's salient to society. There's a huge amount of literature on that. So, about consensus. Obviously, science is supposed to work by consensus, but scientists are all very siloed because they have to specialize in their little niche in order to advance the field,

and a lot of them just don't communicate with each other. And scientific consensus, even if it's broad, can be wrong. For instance, the predominant paradigm is that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of brain functioning, whereas a growing number of people like David Lormer and the Science and Medical Network and many others feel that consciousness is fundamental and everything arises from that. And if they're right, then the whole scientific edifice is upside down.

And you talked about the Pacific just the other day, a tropical storm turned into a Category 5 hurricane in 12 hours and devastated Acapulco. And yet, half the politicians in the United States won't admit that climate change is a real thing and don't want to do anything about it. Trump said it was a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to gain some economic advantage. And occasionally I hear

from some climate denier who brings up Judith Currie. I don't know if you've heard of Judith Currie, but she's this woman who has credentials and who says that there is not a like 99% agreement that climate change is being caused by human beings, but that scientists are cowed into towing the line in order to get funding and stuff. And if they were to dispute the predominant narrative, they would lose their careers and so on. So anyway, that's a few different random points.

When I was talking about this issue of what terror management theory tells us about worldview defense, and there can be this doubling down on your worldview and identity in ways that become illogical and quite aggressive. And I said, that's not just religious fundamentalists. That's also or it can be climate scientists, and we're beginning to see

that. So the reason I was making that point is that the response to the terrible situation we're in for the world's biosphere and the implications for societies and ourselves and everyone we love, the terrible situation we're in can lead to the ego transcendence. It is a spiritual invitation and some people can respond to that invitation. However my view is and my experience of that and also psychology research I believe shows that. That's not

certain at all and in fact I published in a psychotherapy journal on this. In fact it's when people feel very unstable and threatened they can also become authoritarian because what you do is you try and find a new identity structure, a new form of safety, a new kind of belonging. You have this generalized and anxiety, you're told where to run to and who to trust and who to hate, who to blame. So Hannah Arendt and others say that that was what was happening through the Industrial

Revolution and changes to society which led to fascism rising in Europe. So we could see some of those same potential responses today. So not only the breakdown of societies, but the recognition of just how bad it is, the terror associated with that deep existential terror. The loss of a sense of meaning can be either a moment of spiritual transformation or it can be a moment of derangement, being manipulated by populist authoritarians, becoming aggressive and leading to lots of

violence. So I believe there is a role to play for people who've done their own work, who can find a way of being calm within this storm and help people through this and so yeah with the deep adaptation forum that I started we kicked off I think in March 2019 I worked with it for about 18 months and then left it but very much it was focused on how can we help each other be with this really emotionally tough realization rather than rush to oh we'll fix it with nuclear power or I don't

know a billionaire will fix it or we can't do anything blame the Chinese or it's a hoax yes just hoax they just want controls. We just wanted to help people be in the pain, support each other, work through the emotions and think what the options for the future for them, their communities might be. So

that was the initial focus of that. And that was why. So you can see already that no, I do not agree with you that this will make almost like an inevitable collective transformation of human consciousness to a higher level. Now I didn't use the word inevitable, by the way, but

continue. Okay, but some people do, some people do. So what I see is that there are different ways of responding and part of the way I can feel okay with my understanding of the world as I see it, the way I can feel okay is to try and help more people respond curiously, kindly, creatively, bravely. That gives me a sense of meaning and a sense of joy and I don't think I would have any other way of

of responding. So I want to go back to what you were saying about poppy prophecies and the idea that we're going to go through a lot of trouble, but that's just almost like a rite of passage basically, like a maturing of the human species in our consciousness to emerge into a spiritual and ecological civilization perhaps. For some reason I was reminded of Rudyard Kipling's poem, "If", you know, "If you can

keep your head while all about you are losing theirs". As you were saying that, I was on a boat ride with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1974 and he was talking about this phase transition, as he called it, that was going to happen. And it was sounding a little scary and someone said, "Well, how can we survive this?" And he said, "Hold on to the Self." And by that he meant kind of capitalist self, you know, in the Advaita sense of realize your true nature.

So I think this is where spiritual practice comes in because you were talking about how different people react to societal chaos in different ways. Some go scampering to the

dictators and others find it as a catalyst to spiritual awakening. I think that whatever else one does, and I believe you follow this advice, if you have some kind of effective spiritual practice or orientation or something, it's going to help because you'll experience that there's a deeper dimension to life that is unperturbed by the chaos that happens on the surface and it'll help you whatever happens, even if you die, it'll be good to have that inner presence as an anchor, as a foundation.

Yeah, so I've found a number of things helpful myself.

I learned a lot through doing a Vipassana and doing it with a monk who really, it was was just a wonderful experience because I think there were only about six of us and we had quite a while every day then in dialogue one-to-ones with the monk and this unpacking, this disaggregating of stimulus, reaction, emotion, thought, new emotion, disaggregating all the stuff that goes on and then realizing wow I I can have different mind states which will make me more able to just witness and let go.

A calmer, open, more loving and gentle to myself and to the world mind state. Or I can have a more fearful one or a grumpy one and how that all influences that chain of events between stimulus, feeling, thought, feeling, thought, action.

I guess another way of talking about it is just recognizing the extent to which we ourselves and everyone is a bit bonkers and if you can just slow down the process so that we breathe and we can witness what's going on then within that there's a chance for more wisdom doesn't necessarily mean there's more wisdom but there's the chance for it so obviously yeah mindfulness meditation and also for me discovering something called authentic relating and

circling and I use that a lot in my teaching on these topics because it's basically doing meditation but in dialogue because you're witnessing what's going on with you as you're engaging with another and in Buddhism

it's also as some people call it insight dialogue these techniques. I was blessed to have discovered those two processes in order to therefore not just be consumed by my feelings and I've had periods of panic looking at some of the science over the last five years and then looking at the news of what's happened with more, I don't know, 30 degrees in the Arctic Circle of tundra

forest fires and permafrost melting and stuff. It does trigger in me often these waves of a kind of panic but at least I can witness it and see it as these things are just happening to me. The other stuff of course is any spiritual tradition invites us into a different sense of time. So we're not so bothered with either like what am I doing this year or what am I going to achieve in my life even. It's just realizing there's an eternal flow so that sense of expanse of

reality can also help. In my case and in many people's cases there is what is known as faith to many people which is that no matter how bad things are, no matter how unnecessary the amount of suffering and destruction that's happened and is happening now and is to come, there's some kind of deep ultimate rightness and it's a faith which is not super logical, it's experiential, it's

connected to mystery and wonder and just going wow isn't it bizarre and amazing to be alive and that existence exists. So for me that's a faith which is also sustaining and I know that can sound a bit odd to some people like oh that's just your privilege speaking when you're really suffering is that really going to be there but I hear from people who've had terrible suffering that that faith

has stayed with them so connect immediately on that point. But you mentioned some other things there are two things you mentioned you mentioned Judith

Curry and current denialism, do you remember? And you mentioned ancient prophecies and the fact that there are lots of people who have since the 70s realized that we're living in an unsustainable industrial consumer society and there will be a collapse and there will be a transformation and yet they've had this in sort of a way of this is what we need to go through and then we'll reach the promised land perhaps in the end. And then you mentioned, what an amazing phrase to say

that you were on a boat with Maharaj. Great, anyway, that one. Okay, so I'll just start with Judith Curry because that's the least interesting. Should we get that one out of the way? You have a good memory, by the way, I appreciate that you recall all these points and you're coming back to them.

So actually, Judith Curry is a bit right and a hell of a lot wrong. She's a bit right that there is institutional pressure on climate scientists who want to succeed and get funding and climb up the career ladder and that they have had what's called carbon tunnel vision.

She and John Christie and others are right that there was a huge attempt to make it all about carbon dioxide and play down other factors that influence not only climate in the past because of course climate was influenced by all manner of things before humans influenced it, but also to play down other possible impacts on climate right now and in the future.

So my chapter in the book actually says yes you're right Judith Curry and John Christie and the others that there was a little bit of massaging of the data sets in order to produce the hockey stick graph to make the medieval warm period not appear and to ignore the fact that actually prior to human influence, temperatures rose, global average temperatures rose, hundreds of years prior to carbon dioxide levels in

the atmosphere rising. So this is called the carbon lag and they hit that. Now that doesn't mean that we don't have a massive problem. It means the opposite. It means the problem is far worse. It means that because we put more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 50% CO2 in the atmosphere in the last 200 years, it is without doubt a gas which

traps infrared heat and will warm up the planet. But what that means is we've done that, we've raised temperatures and what the paleontological records show is that means we have committed carbon, meaning as the oceans warm up they will release more carbon dioxide, as the soils warm up they will release more carbon dioxide, as as the forests get hotter and drier and more diseased, they will burn more and they will switch from being sinks to sources of carbon dioxide and that's

being shown already for many of them world's most important forests. So it's a lot worse than what mainstream climatologists say. So I say to the climate skeptics like Curry and Christie and the rest, you're right and therefore it's a hell of a lot worse. So it's not what you're saying it The other thing is the carbon tunnel vision meant that we didn't focus on the hydrological cycle and how it's very clear that forests now play a global role in seeding clouds.

So for example, the pollen and the bacteria given off by the Amazon will not just seed clouds above the Amazon through evapotranspiration locally, but will actually seed clouds in Tibet.

And what this means is that the world cloud cover is influenced by the amount of forest cover on the ground. And we have trashed forests. We've cleared as much in the last 200 years, I think, as in the previous 9,000. And this rate went up massively since the 70s through economic globalization and basically spreading consumer capitalism around the planet since the 1970s. And so that correlates with a rapid rise in temperature.

And so, yeah, in my book I talk about how we need to broaden our understanding of the climate emergency. It's not just carbon, it's also methane, it's also forest cover. And we have to accept that actually it might well be totally catastrophic for life on Earth, including our own species already, and we can't do anything about it because of the committed carbon,

because of the amount of heating that we've already started. We're already looking at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial in 2023, decades ahead of when the official projections were. So a lot of people hear that and they think immediately because they maybe haven't disaggregated the thought, emotion, reaction, mind state and critically analyzed their culture

because they're totally wedded to consequentialist ethics. They think, well, that guy who's just said that he's telling me to give up he's telling me not to try and cut carbon draw down carbon restore ecosystems no I'm not I'm not saying that at all I'm saying don't do that with any fairy tale that we're fixing the climate and we're getting out of this mess so do it absolutely let's do as much as we can but don't be attached to the outcome and most people if they allow the despair

I'm talking about environmentalists who work on this stuff allow the despair. They don't just quit then I say I don't care anymore I don't want us to you know Cut carbon or restore wetlands and forests and get toxics out of our food chain and whatever

They don't they go back to it. They go back to it with a passion, but without being so attached to stories of techno salvation everything getting fixed so that's my answer to Judith Curry and all that lot and that's why I really recommend people who are interested in climate change read chapter 5 or listen to it

Like you did for free on SoundCloud or download it for free. You can gem bend all comm EPUB, so you can put a link to it on your back at pace So I'm a contrarian on climate because in the same way we talked earlier about the problem of institutional and siloed or any science it has its limitations and there are silos there are hierarchies there's cultural influences so yeah I am persona non grata with people like professor Michael Mann who Curry and Christie hate because they were I think

fighting with him in the early days of the IPCC stuff about all this and he won basically and they lost and so they're pissed off with him but yeah Michael man hates my work because he wants to keep it, you know, this is a gradual warming. And as long as we have the right technologies and the right policies and the right entrepreneurship, the right leadership and all the little people do as you're told, then we'll fix it. That's probably

believes that. Well, that's been his narrative and I have not talked to him. I have no idea what he really believes, but he maybe he absolutely believes that I have no evidence to say doesn't believe it. You know what I wish? I wish that there were public debates properly moderated so people aren't just shouting at each other quite lengthy like this interview on various issues, you know, COVID vaccines and climate change and gun rights and abortion and all the issues that

are tearing society apart because otherwise it's like, you know, here in the states some people are listening to the extreme right-wing media, others to the extreme left-wing media, and they they just get their assumptions reinforced, but there's no communication. And there is probably some truth on both sides, although as Stephen Colbert puts it, I think he said that the truth has a liberal bias, at least that's my bias.

But in any case, I wish there were public dialogues where people could engage in really learning and hear both sides and give people ample time to rebut each other. That would be so healthy.

I agree and we've got the opposite of that as you said and what's extremely painful for me having spent almost three years working on this book, so the first 18 months were commissioning research papers from specialists in various areas and then working with them because it's covering all manner of areas of scholarship and then a year writing it,

is that for example there's a whole chapter on free will. I spent a long time looking at that and that's also based on previous years of interest and reading on it and someone will send me a one-minute tick-tock video from someone who I may have finished her undergraduate but she labels herself your friendly neighborhood neuroscientist who's saying no there's no free will because a study shows that it there is no free will yeah because they measured that there was a

impulse from I don't know in the arm to tell the hand to move before the brain and send it to the arm and I have I talked about that study yeah I talked about that study just last week in my interview with Ruth Kastner who's a physicist that study has been thoroughly rebutted and totally rebutted and yeah it doesn't take you very long you could just type in to Google that what was the study you could use AI now what was the study that showed this it would come up

with the name of the study and then you just go to Google Scholar even you don't even have to use any in the morning you were scholar and just type it in and then see who's referenced it. And then you'll see the number of rebuttals or people who tried to do the same study or proved how it was wrong. And no one else has managed to do a good

neuroscientific study disproving free will. And it's precisely because no one have managed to create a good study, experimentally disproving free will with neuroscience, that people keep referring back to that one, which is old and debunked. And guess what? No, it's fresh now has got a million hits on tik tok. And I'm being sent this by my friend. It's like, since when did you decide that this is how you're going to learn about the universe? Which is kind of cute. Oh, is that why?

Okay, well, I'm probably not going to be a TikTok star. I'm not cute enough. So yeah, we are going in the wrong way in that

sense. But what I've realized is, if you are more than an armchair observer, if you are engaged in any issue of public note current affairs, more than just wanting to feel good about yourself, get a dopamine hit, get a few likes on Facebook, you're more involved in it than wanting to feel angry and self-righteous in order to have a bit of escape from your general anxiety or dull feeling of

meaningless life. If you're more involved in an issue, whatever it is, than those reasons, want to know, you want to dig and inquire, you want to hear differences of opinion, you want to check and double-check your understanding and therefore for me the people who've most committed to really understanding this are the people who

have decided to risk arrest and going to prison. The climate activists in Extinction Rebellion, five years ago when they decided that they were going to glue themselves to trucks or whatever, they had to really convince themselves of what

they were doing was based on a fair analysis of the science. And they really, really looked into it properly. And they were right. And what's amazing is three of the exile co founders extinction rebelling co founders just published a letter saying, well, they should have just said is, Hey, everybody, we got it right. And all you sort of careerist climatologists who slagged us off in the mass media made us out to be extremists

who got the science wrong. Well, you were wrong. But no, they were basically saying we got it almost right but we had a bit of carbon tunnel vision, we should have been thinking about aerosols, we should have been thinking about forest cloud seeding, we should have been realized that ocean health matters massively to the climate, we should have realized it was a broader agenda, we tried to talk about it as a broader agenda, the ecological crisis not just climate, we tried to stick to the

idea that this is a near and present danger for us and our loved ones but we had all these climatologists with all the power of sitting on IPCC committees, and all this sort of "we want to help you, we want to help you be more scientific" and we watered down our analysis and our message and we shouldn't have done because

actually they were wrong and we were right. So yeah, there was a public letter and then in response to that 70 scholars from around the world, 16 countries, I was one of them, we signed a letter saying the scientific community needs to learn from its mistakes. It needs to realize also when it's badly disparaged scholarly activists now who are facing prison and an apology would be the least

way of making amends. As far as I know the many many climatologists who've said many derogatory things about climate activists in the last five years haven't come out and apologized and said actually they were right and I was wrong. I agree with what all these climate activists are saying and I agree with what you're saying, and who am I to agree, but based upon my paltry understanding, I think you're right. But I do take issue with throwing tomato soup at artworks or gluing

yourself to stuff. I mean, that just makes these people seem crazy, and I think it weakens their credibility to most people. Do you agree with those tactics? I mean, surely it makes headlines, but it makes headlines like, "Wow, these people are nuts." So, yeah, well the tomato soup wasn't actually on the artwork itself. They chose the ones that had glass pane covers. Oh, that was nice of them.

Yeah. The thing is that many... I mean, that's the Just Stop Oil campaign, a spin-off to Extinction Rebellion. Many of the activists in Extinction Rebellion do many, many things. And it is interesting that the ones we've heard of are the ones you've mentioned. Now, would you have heard of all the other things that they've been doing if the ones didn't throw the tomato soup on a glass-covered painting? This is the problem with the way our media communications are in the world.

These stunts seem to be the only things that you'll get to hear of. So if they didn't do it, you wouldn't hear about what Extinction Rebellion is doing otherwise, really. I don't waste my time.

I don't participate in those kinds of nonviolent direct actions, disrupting sports events and stuff, it's not my bag, but I am aware of, and I acknowledge, I acknowledge the argument of people like Roger Hallam, who say that people like you, Rick, and people like me, if we really believe this to be an existential

crisis, that will fundamentally change everything and damage everything and cause awful, awful, already is but will cause a lot more awful problems in society. His message is get out on the streets and okay do something else but it's non-violent civil disobedience and the only reason why they're doing these high profile stunts is because there aren't enough of people like you and me alongside people on the streets causing havoc in a peaceful way.

That's his message, I acknowledge it and I believe it's equally valid to my view which

is I don't think there's much point in doing that. I'm much more interested in getting ready in communities for the collapse which I believe has already begun so I'm more interested in turning to neighbors who where I live to try and prepare for the breakdown of industrial consumer way of life and to learn from this and to resist authoritarianism in all its forms and I actually think some of these activists stunts actually sort of help legitimate authoritarianism

because it means leads to more draconian policing, more draconian laws, more I think undemocratic use of the court systems by judges. I can't go into that too much because those ridiculous behavior of judges in the UK to restrict proper trial by jury. So yeah I acknowledge his argument and I disagree with it. I'm choosing a different path. Okay should we go back to those prophecies and whether... Yes, good, you read my mind.

Anyone today in a Western, or even though let's not even say Western, anyone today in a modern urban culture reading about ancient civilizations and their prophecies, reading about or learning about indigenous peoples and communities alive today, any of us looking at that, we're bringing our own mental models from modernity and that means although we think we might be learning we're actually projecting from our culture on to their own forms of wisdom. So I talk

about that in the book as well. Some of the habits of modernity which are very deeply ingrained is this idea of anthropocentrism or anthroposupremacy the idea that somehow reality exists with us at the center. That's one thing. Another is that we're always progressing either materially or in some other way. So like what is new can be better, will be better than the past. So just let's

just take two of those things. With that you can end up coming up with the ideas in conscious evolution where it's like, well, it's our destiny as humans to evolve to a higher consciousness. And I think the opposite could be what's happened because there is such incredible wisdom in indigenous societies. And also, I think about it, I think I may have

mentioned it in my email to you, I can't remember. I'm working not with that many, but with a few farmers in Bali in my organic farm school and they don't have all the education and they don't really know about all manner of things. It would be weird to talk about a planetary future for the whole Homo sapiens and that's

all just weird blah blah. I don't think they are any less awake. In fact I think there might be more awake than the people who write blogs and send emails about a global brain awakening and planetary consciousness emerging. I really don't like what I think is the implicit modernity and patriarchy, anthroposupremacy, that's sort of lingering in that worldview, that we are all going to come together in a global consciousness that's awakening and progressing.

Yeah, it's patriarchal. It's like, no sod it. Why can't you just be happy that... What is really frightening, I think, for a lot of people in Western modern culture is that, no, it's our culture that is omnicidal. That humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years without screwing up the planet in the way that we've done in 200 years. And even today, 4% of the world's population is indigenous and where they live, there's over about 80% of the world's biodiversity. Now, what does that tell you?

And if you look again, it's also a bit annoying to hear for some people, but so much of the archeology and anthropology of the past years has been racist. So basically it's, it's assumed that the first peoples were somehow not stewarding and working with their environments. And actually looking at it again, for example, now we know that the Amazon was not a wild untouched environment, but a wild garden one and that hundreds, if not thousands of species in the Amazon because of millennia

of human settlement. And there are many examples of that in North America, too. So no, there was incredible complexity, incredible wisdom, and trashed by Eurocentric culture, originally colonialism, but then that became this sort of what I call imperial modernity and taken to the extreme, like all of that on cocaine because of an expansionist monetary system. and a lot of people, older people, privileged people, often white, living in

the West, are attracted to stories which absolve any sense of guilt. And I think you don't need that, but I know a lot of people do. So be like, oh this was predetermined overshoot, any species would do this and it was just, what was it in the William Catton book, natural exuberance. No, not at all. That's not what

the latest scholarship shows. So just because our culture, our system, when I say our I mean modernity, which came from colonialism originally and just because of that is at fault for Omnicide doesn't mean that we sort of just get lost in self-hatred. An interest in an aversion to blame and shame is itself an aspect of modernity and the Abrahamic religions that modernity was built on. You can just

let all that go. And that's what I've also loved from my own Buddhist reading and sinking into this and this notion of pre-forgiveness because the way somebody else is, the way I am, is just the same consciousness having a different life experience. So there's no possibility of damnation of self or other in some kind

of deep level. So you don't need to worry about shame and blame. I actually believe that the stories of the problems of our time being necessary to go through to some sort of higher consciousness, I see that as culturally very specific, pretty racially and culturally insensitive and the people who like it tend to be people

of privilege in a particular culture because it makes them feel better about the horrors of what's happened and what's to come. So yeah that's my take on that and the positive side of it I would say is and how it relates to a more sort of beautiful heart opening kind of philosophy is simply nature and the universe is perfectly imperfect. We don't need to think about any transformation

to get somewhere. We label things good and bad. This is a human thing that we do but life is unfolding and we don't really understand why and all the destruction is super painful but if there is eternity then life will come again both on this planet and elsewhere in the universe and if we believe that organic life or complex life even if it's not organic is is somehow deeply meaningful in the universe then the possibility for that always existed to create what we

are today, so it still exists. So for me actually, what I've learned from my reading of Buddhism is just is this deeper acceptance of everything that we might label good and evil, good bad, dark, light, just sort of is. So I want to be as present to it and as engaged with it. I want to witness it and I want to be there for other people as much as I can be and not lose myself too much into stories of sacrifice and service. I want to also have fun, therefore not be bitter about anything.

Okay. You may be aware of Brian Thomas Swim, you know Brian? I interviewed him a year ago, maybe. He has a nice little quote, which is that you leave hydrogen alone for 13.7 billion years and you end up with giraffes, opera, and I don't know, rose bushes or something. And illustrates nicely a point which I believe, which is that the universe itself is one huge giant evolution machine.

Greater and greater complexity is arising out of simplicity. And in so doing, forms are being created through which the primordial intelligence that gives rise to the whole thing can become a living reality through you and me and mosquitoes and angels or whatever else may exist, Indonesian farmers. But everything's evolving. I would say everything's evolving. You said in your email to me that these farmers in Indonesia don't need to evolve spiritually.

That's just a matter of philosophy, I think, but I think everything is evolving spiritually, like it or not. Everything, everyone. And this thing about the ancient cultures, firstly, again, there's no inevitability. I didn't use that word. My friend Dwayne Elgin made a little video in which he outlines several different possible scenarios of how things might go. of them involves breakdown into chaos, but the first one would be continuing chaos for a long time.

Second one would be some kind of AI-driven, Chinese-style authoritarian world. And the third one would be that we do experience a spiritual renaissance out of the ashes, so to speak, and this collapse will be seen as having been necessary for that to come about, because under the current systems and structures, it really couldn't come about. To Dwayne's one, I would add a fourth, which is this idea of collapse going for a long

time. But there will be good and bad, there will be spiritual renaissances and the opposite of that, all happening at the same time. So for me, I see a future for the human race this century of there being a lot of beauty, joy, love, spiritual transformation, and also a lot of hate and violence and stupidity, ignorance, delusion, derangement. As there is right now. So many people living these blessed lives, you know, and then there's all hell breaking loose.

I talk about this in the book, is that okay, so some people say, yeah, okay, what you said

sounds right but don't you have a vision? I said well yes I do because I believe that so much of the suffering is as a result not of human nature, not as of our freedoms but because we've been so oppressed through an expansionist monetary system and the way it's shaped us and I talk about it in great detail in chapter 10 in the ways that it's shaped our experience of reality and encouraged us to behave and feel and think in certain ways and not others and

And so, yeah, my vision is that where we are freed, more and more of us are freed from that in order to be more of ourselves. Which what does that mean? Well it means to be more in discovery of what it is to be us and to be in connection with others and to be in connection with nature. And for some people that might include experiencing non-ordinary states of consciousness which which might affirm their sense that consciousness just isn't in here, but is shared.

It might include them realizing that maybe there's some sort of universal consciousness. They may label it God, they may label it the Akashic Record, they may label it an Atman or an Anatman or whatever, you know, loads of words out there, concepts, framings out there and I've got to the point of thinking that if you start getting attached to those

stories then you're back in fear, you're needing order to latch on to. Some people won't, some people will have joyful caring loving lives and they won't necessarily have had an altered state of consciousness where they've experienced we space or universal transcendent being and they will think that when they die that's it they're just skin and bones and they're gone. And then they'll be pleasantly surprised. Well yeah but also they'll just be loving caring good

people anyway? Sure, yeah, absolutely. I know people who have been meditating for decades who are absolute jerks. In fact, there's, I think, a spiritual egotism that often happens with people who think they're superior and intolerant. I had this very recently, because death of a loved one really, really helps bring this

into focus. So you know, my dad just died, what, three days ago, and I'm sitting by his lifeless body saying goodbye I said out loud so dad I don't know I don't know whether I'm speaking to you as a consciousness right here right now which is like a congruent dad consciousness and if it is I want to say this and then I don't know if you're just merged with the universal consciousness already I whoa what a trip that is so you've like rejoined like wow lucky you I mean

That's weird. Look, there I am next to my dead dad. But if that's true, wow! And then, oh, geez! But even in that way, there might be an imprint on that Akashic Record that is dad's consciousness, Peter Bendel consciousness, that will be reincarnated in a new life form. It's like, wow, you've got an amazing trip ahead of you. Or, you're just, that's it. None of you exists anymore apart from the impact you've had on people.

and the ability of people like me to now have a conversation in my head with my idea of you which I've been doing which is fascinating to find I was having this conversation with my dad in the hours before I got to the nursing home knowing he'd passed. So it was almost like he'd come alive as a being for me to talk to but maybe that's the only way that he's still alive which is so just in in people's memories of him and then I thought well if that's the case this is what I want

want to say to you. And I think even if I have more we space moments and more periods of experiencing collective consciousness and telepathy and so I've had all of those. I'm lucky I've had those in my life. I say I'm lucky because it means I know there is more. I'm not quite sure how there is more. I don't know what words are best for describing it. I don't think my dad wasn't as lucky. I don't think he ever had any of that. But I think I'd be okay with that

not knowing the way I've just described it. Because if we get attached to the stories, as you were saying, people who meditate for decades as well, I think it takes us away from being nice and kind to each other and ourselves. I think that's the bottom line. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I don't think that if somebody's been meditating for decades, it means that they're more highly evolved spiritually than some simple farmer or anybody else. We all come in at different levels.

So there was another point I was making there when I said that, which is that basically an Indonesian farmer like Kadek, he's our farm manager, his carbon footprint and ecological footprint is infinitesimal compared to the many people who will be pontificating about some great spiritual revolution after the collapse and carnage of the biosphere and modern societies which they've contributed to far more than Kodak.

Which doesn't mean they're not right. There might be some spiritual revolution even though they're polluting like heck. Yeah, but you see what I mean? It's like, well, maybe Kodak doesn't need a spiritual revolution. What I'm saying is it's a very culturally specific story. This is it. Stories, become popular amongst specific people and groups because they serve the person in some

way. And for me mindfulness can be connected to this what I call critical literacy in the book which is actually deconstructing these frames and these narratives and saying well who's being served by this and who's not. So for me I often think well a lot of these stories in the western spiritual community or now the western doom-a-sphere can actually just be helping people change nothing in their lives and carry on consuming and

just feel a bit less bad about it. So this is with Michael Dowd I was always saying very interested to explore this with him always which is that you know he's spreading the good news that actually after collapse acceptance there can be joy and he was also not wanting to pass any judgment on what that might mean for people and yet if through collapse acceptance you just want to fly around around the world and go on cruises and fly first class and drive your SUV then

for me there's something going wrong there. There's a numbing that's coming from collapse acceptance. So this is why I say there's work to be done to help steward each other and help each other through this waking up to just how bad things are and why they got this way and what our options are and how we wish to be. And it does require, as you were saying earlier, you know good critical conversations between people who are happy to disagree, not take it too

personally, not try and cancel each other if you disagree. That's what I liked with Michael because we could talk about these things and he totally got what I was saying and he was just super exuberant about the joy of collapse acceptance as well. He was actually after my interview with him his wife made an edited version of it she said you're one of the first interviewers who ever managed to slow him down enough to interject questions and things like that

because he just gets so exuberant. But I just had a thought while you were saying that your whole idea of collapse is a theory but it's a very well researched theory. You offer a lot of evidence in the book, chapter by chapter, how each individual area is unsustainable. And I would say that my notion or others notion of some kind of enlightened age coming down the pike is also a theory, and it's more

difficult to quantify. You know, you can't measure temperatures and this and that in order to provide evidence for it, but my measurement is in the realm of my life's experience, but so many conversations with people who are undergoing a spiritual transformation that might not at all be evident on the surface, but that it makes me feel like something of this nature is epidemic in the world. It's a global phenomenon that doesn't come anywhere

close to making the news or even showing up in a very manifest way anyplace. It's more of a subjective experience that's happening among growing numbers of people. But as I said in the very beginning, I think our subjective state is the fulcrum or the ultimate cause of whatever ends up manifesting on the surface. I think that if this subjective state becomes

more the norm, we used the word extraordinary earlier or something, so if it becomes more ordinary, then I think that all the surface structures of life will necessarily have to change, and as we've seen, most of the people who run these structures don't change willingly, And so there's going to have to be some kind of cataclysmic collapse in order for something new to arise. So just carrying on from what I was saying earlier then. So there's two ways I could respond.

One is to talk about the theory and the evidence for it. And then we would talk about, well, if that's happening, so what? Let's think about it. But another is to look at where the theory is coming from. Which theory? The one you just mentioned. My theory? Yeah. a spiritual awakening under the surface that has momentum. Okay, let's talk about where that comes from. So what I'm interested in, would your life feel as good if you didn't believe that?

It's kind of a moot question because my life was going to shit before I learned to meditate. I had dropped out of high school and gotten arrested a couple times and I was starting to use hard drugs. And then my life underwent a dramatic turnaround and has been, you know, had its ups and downs, but has been continually enhanced ever since over the last 55 years. And that's what has formed my opinions about many things, just my own experience. But then that could be just your experience.

And the theory that there is a spreading awakening, spiritual awakening, and there's momentum, not necessarily that it will add up to, you know, whatever, But where would you be if you didn't believe that there was this momentum, this spiritual awakening in other people and that possibly the opposites occurring? I might be sort of more depressed. I might be pessimistic.

But since I have been in touch with thousands of such people over the years, I feel like that phenomenon is occurring and it gives me some optimism. So what I'm getting at is that there is a tendency in all of us to look for what we want to see in the world according to our identity and our stories of reality and our assumptions and the culture and life experiences.

Yep. And so for example, if you yourself have experienced really tough unbearable pain, emotional, psychological, and you got through that through meditation and through a spiritual awakening, then you know that pain. So when you see other people suffering in that pain, that must potentially, you must feel it hard and it will therefore be a useful story to think that, yeah, but at least more and more people are getting out of that.

So what I'm pointing to is that to become aware of how different theories of reality are ones that we can be choosing because of what they're doing for us. But what I've got from my spiritual inquiry, if you call it that, is just to become more of a witness to like, "Oh, that idea, that appealed to me. That calmed me down. Oh, that one, I didn't like that idea."

So whenever I start to hear a theory of what's happening in the world, I wonder what it might be doing for someone and why they might like it. But the other thing is I'm also a sociologist and I'm very critical of modernity. so I'm immediately spotting the deep stories of our culture such as progress

and the idea that there needs to be or there always will be a progression and therefore that would be associated with scale. It wouldn't be just like one human out of eight billion who progresses to enlightenment. No, there needs to be scale. There needs to be progress. There's the possibility that the opposite is the natural flow of life. There is the possibility that human extinction through a degrading of the spiritual awareness of more and more humans is

exactly what was meant to happen. There's the possibility that's exactly what was meant to happen. There's the possibility with the fact that they have a quantum dance that bees are closer to enlightenment and higher consciousness than Homo sapiens and that actually the universe just needs to get rid of us.

Possibly, I'm not saying that because I don't want to dismiss all those incredible indigenous peoples who lived fantastically in harmony with nature for millennia, but possibly the natural future of homo sapiens is to become less awake, more numb, more aggressive, more stupid, more separate and fearful and more deluded in our own.

Maybe, you see, maybe. And what I'm getting to is that I don't know, but I'm okay with the not knowing and what's still true, what's still true for me, is if I can be mindful, if I can be loving, if I can be courageous, if I can be curious, if I can be creative and I can help other people that way too, and it might not add up to much. But for me, not being attached to outcome includes not being attached to the idea that humanity awakens.

Okay, let me jump in here. So yes, I think not being attached is very important. there's a verse in Bhagavad Gita which goes, "You have control over action alone, never over its fruits. Be not attached to the fruits of action, nor attached to inaction." And yet, we all have all kinds of ideas. I mean, you have ideas that you're very, quite certain of, and quite committed to, and so on. It doesn't invalidate them that you're committed

to them, nor does it validate them. It's just you have a lot of evidence, based on your experience and understanding and research and so on. So, the things you said about the philosophical, more philosophical spiritual type ideas that I've been espousing, the same thing applies. They're based upon my personal experience, my observation of other people's experience, and then there's traditional cultures who talked about these things and prophesized that this or

that might happen. In the Vedic culture, for instance, they have this cyclical understanding a history of you goes you know where it gets better then it gets worse then it gets better then it gets worse. There are various arguments as to which point in that cycle we might be.

I just wanted to make that point about in the book I call it critical wisdom which is becoming aware of our attachments to stories because we're entering a period where there's going to be generalized anxiety and a lot of derangement and so how can we be as kind and wise in that context. So one of them is to try and look at our deep stories and whether that's just, we're just thinking what cultures made us think that makes us feel better in the moment or not. So I just

wanted to make that point with that. But the other thing is, I love your theory. I love the idea that Homo sapiens, I don't like the idea that Homo sapiens and I reject the idea that Homo sapiens are the most important form of consciousness on the planet. We don't know, we just don't know. There's that bit about complexity that I mentioned earlier. A human nervous system is a lot more

complex than a bee's nervous system. Of course, the bees are essential and critical and we'd probably all die if they all died. That alone could do it. But there is something to be said for a more sophisticated nervous system being capable of greater reflection or expression of the primordial intelligence that underlies and pervades the universe.

Maybe, but also if we think of life forms as having a collective consciousness, then the capacity for interrelationship between a swarm of bees may mean that there's some kind of consciousness there, which is highly complex. I agree. I love this is a fantastic. I couldn't have this interview with a swarm of bees, though. No, but then maybe our interview is nothing compared to the amazing stuff that the swarms of bees are doing.

But there's the idea again from our culture that the brain is so important in mind and yet there's some really weird studies. Like there are individuals that had hardly any cerebral cortex. Oh yeah, I know that. They were like a coconut. There was just some brain cells around the skull and the rest of it was liquid. Yeah, and they were carrying on normal lives.

I know, but there's quite a few examples of that, which completely challenge our notion of where intelligence lies in the body, or even if it's just in the body or not. Anyway, so I'm saying yes, maybe, maybe humans are special, maybe. But also maybe we're special to create the way for the really special species, which comes after we wipe out 95% of life on Earth, which it looks like what we're doing.

And so maybe it's the future swarm of bees or colony of ants in 20 million years, who's actually, you know, that's where it's at for consciousness expressing itself through planet Earth. Who knows? But anyway, if we go with your theory, then I am a researcher and I say, well, you know, you have a little bit of confirmation bias going on because you love talking to people who like talking about these things.

And so you could triangulate that with data on consciousness that people are experiencing and behaviors and all sorts. And then there's a whole debate there about what would be the objective indicators of a spiritual awakening. That's pretty difficult. I've got one for you. I was in the TM movement for a long time. And one of the premises there was that collective consciousness is a thing and that it can be

enlivened or influenced by large groups of people meditating together. So, I participated in groups as large as 8,000 and at some point we went to various, I spent three months in

Iran, you know, with a group of people meditating just before the Shah left. And researchers did a lot of studies on societal indicators, economic and crime and various things and claimed to find, I think they had a vested interest in making TM look good, but they They claim to find a correlation between the existence of these groups and measurable changes in these indicators. And they claim that the p-value or whatever was very strong, that these studies really showed something was happening.

So I'm saying this with a little bit of uncertainty because I think there was that agenda to make TM look good, but on the other hand, maybe there's some truth to it. And there's guys like Rupert Sheldrake and some of his colleagues who tried to do research. Rupert wrote a book called Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. And they used all sorts of careful methods of controlling that the dogs had no way of knowing that the owners were coming home very randomly.

I'm pretty Sheldrake-ian, if one can... Has anyone said that? Sheldrake-ian? That's a good word. I lost my cat recently and I was very upset. I had telepathy with my cat and I know that can sound a bit wacky but... I believe it. When my cat was stuck up a tree, it was the only time in my life with the cat in two years

that I thought, "It's daytime, for some reason I need to go and look for Buki." I had to go out. And I found him, you know, 80 meters away, stuck up a tree. And that's just one example. There is weird stuff that I would just accept, "No, that's not chance. That's some kind of telepathy." So I'm not arguing against anything you've just said, but I'm saying neither of those two things are evidence that there's a momentum towards a widespread human awakening which

will affect the destiny of life on Earth or Homo sapiens. And I would be able to marshal lots of evidence. For example, in my lifetime, 50 years on Earth, over 60% of wildlife has been wiped out. We're now down to wildlife on planet Earth constitutes 4% of all mammals. rest of it's humans are pets and livestock and the carnage is extreme. And so if a spiritual awakening is somehow happening, that doesn't look very good.

Well yeah, but I've agreed with you from the outset that there seems to be a terrible collapse taking place. What we're possibly disagreeing on is what may follow this collapse and I'm saying perhaps this will be, like you said, a dark night of the soul, a dark passage of some kind, and there'll be a bright future on the other side of it, but also perhaps not.

And I wanted to make that point because you mentioned the word possibility a little while ago and I just want to make clear that I don't deal with absolutes or certainties. I take everything as a hypothesis and I give everybody the benefit of the doubt, but I also take everything with a grain of salt and proportions vary. If somebody tells me the earth is flat, and I'm actually aware of such people, that's all salt to me. The earth is not flat. There's too much evidence that it isn't.

But if they tell me some other things, like, well, maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. But I really am not wired in a way to be adamant about any particular idea, including all the points I've made today. And I think that's a scientific attitude. That's the way scientists should think. And I'm not a scientist, but that's the way I think.

Yeah, if someone comes in with the knowledge that I have, and it's not just I'm predicting collapse, I have a whole chapter, chapter one, which is talking about all the data going in the wrong direction since 2016, for human societies. The Human Development Index has been going down in the majority of countries outside the rich world since 2016. It's been going down including in OECD countries, the majority since 2019.

and some of that data is collected two years prior to being put into the index and lots of other indices show the same thing. So we're talking basics, life expectancy, morbidity before the pandemic and because it's global it shows therefore a global set of processes are

happening to cause that. It's not just like one bad leader, oh you know we shouldn't have elected him or her or whatever or that war or that was a mistake. No, this is global, it's happening everywhere. So it's happening already. Let me ask this question that came in. This is from PG Woodhouse's grandson. No, I don't know about that, but it's Ro Woodhouse from London. How long was the Holocene meant to continue before we destabilize the biosphere? Oh, a technical question about climate.

How long was the Holocene meant to go on for? Tell us what the Holocene is because... The answer could be answered by someone who looks at ancient climates and Kondratiev cycles and all sorts. What is the whole thing? Explain that. So I guess it would have been thousands if not tens of thousands of years. But I don't know. I didn't look into that. Google it. Look at how... Google it. Come back and tell us. Unless this is meant to be a rhetorical question. I don't know.

I also believe that ideas are what ideas do. Stories are what stories do. I'm always interested in the implication and so with the understanding I have that we are already within an era of a creeping collapse of modern societies. If someone over here is saying I want to tell you that this is the beginning of the age of Aquarius and we're going to have a whole spiritual up and all that stuff. Oh really? I haven't heard that before. Okay.

You know but isn't it? Then someone over here is saying this has broken my heart. I find it really difficult. I'm so sad about the difficulties that my children are going to face. I'm heartbroken that they don't want to have kids and I completely agree with them, but I'm heartbroken about

that. I want to do as much as I can to reduce as much harm as possible, to resist aggressive, authoritarian, nasty policies, to try and help have a better quality of life for as long as possible with least impact on the planet, relocalize supply chains, become less vulnerable to external shocks like a financial crisis. So we've got someone over here saying, Oh, this is just the nasty stuff we've got to get through to the global awakening and homo sapiens will finally reach their

destiny as the higher consciousness species. And someone over here who's just being a bit more ordinary, and kind and loving and heartbroken. I'm going to go over there. And I would say to that that somebody could be both of those somebody say, "I'm going to do everything I can to mitigate the suffering," and at the same time,

I think, you know, there's a good chance something ultimately good is going to happen. In fact, I think some of these spiritual teachers who've been coming out to the world in the recent decades, who actually gave voice to some of these predictions, maybe their mission was to minimize the chaos to some extent by helping to accelerate the rise in collective consciousness, to minimize the suffering to some extent. Maybe they felt it was inevitable, but they just wanted to

make it a little smoother if possible. Yes, so I'm not entirely against people being fully committed to doing all they can to encourage more and more people to awaken to a deeper and higher reality, spirituality, whatever we call it, I'm for that. But what I'm more

for is love beyond hope. And for me that was a core thing I got from Buddhism where the Buddha in one of his teachings said there's three kinds of people in the world. The man with hope, the one without, who's hopeless and the one who's done away with hope, who sees it as drawing our attention to the future and therefore drawing our attention away from the present and therefore getting bound up with stories and aversions and cravings. So I am trying to live and I'm

excited by living hope free. It doesn't mean I don't try and work out what might help. Another way of talking about it is activism and social contribution, whether that's through doing what you're doing or working in community on organic permaculture or whatever is your chosen contribution. Doing it as a gift and a A gift doesn't need and doesn't expect an outcome or a return. It's just this is me sharing what's in my heart and what I want to do and what's me being most being me.

So yeah, love beyond hope and social engagement as a gift and not being attached to outcome. And because of that, I'm a little bit allergic to some of these stories about, "Oh, this is just the trouble we've got to go through to get to the other side." Well, it's not trivial. I mean, the way you're saying that makes it sound like, "Oh, there's a little bump in the road." You could wipe out, you know, 90% of the world's population, and that's not going to be pretty.

And it's not very pretty in Gaza and Israel right now, you know. It hasn't been very pretty in Syria after the ecological disaster spurred that upheaval. And anyway, on your comment about hope, I think I might be kind of where you're at in that respect. When I'm saying these things about a possible bright future, I'm not dwelling in hope or hanging my emotions on that possibility.

It's more like a hypothesis, again, to use that word, and I see evidence to suggest it might be the outcome, but if it isn't, then it isn't. And I don't really have a lot invested in that as an outcome. It's not like the fundamentalist Christian just staking everything on going to heaven

after they die or something. We'll see how it turns out. And like the Beatles sang in the revolution, we're all doing what we can and I'm doing something I feel is having an impact and you're doing something you feel is having an impact and we can't all do everything. So, you know, we're all ultimately on the same team, I think, and we'll just see where it goes.

It's interesting you mentioned the Beatles. You know, they're reforming because Yoko Ono found a a tape recording of John Lennon singing one of the songs. Oh, yeah, they're using AI to make it all work together. And yeah, I'm actually secretly hoping it's really rubbish. Otherwise, I'll be sad that my dad who was a Beatles obsessive, missed the final. Really, really, really bad. I was a bit of an obsessive myself. I can sing all the songs and with lyrics, although not very well, and all the

harmonies. Yeah, I love the great I was there when they were some originals. He's got from the 60s just over there are singles. It was very exciting in those days. I mean, when I was in high

school, and I want to hold your hand came out all the kids would like open the car doors of their cars and blast their radios and they play that song every morning at the same time and people would be dancing in the parking lot. It was just like this cultural breakthrough after breakthrough with each new album that came out throughout the 60s. Yeah, there isn't quite that shared experience anymore. Everyone's... It's all Taylor Swift.

When I say shared experience, I mean, yeah, okay, maybe there is a shared experience for younger people musically. There is with some of them. I'm just on my own musical journey and I got to thank SoundCloud and typing in ecstatic dance into SoundCloud and putting it in there to get me to get the second half of the book done just working late into the night listening to these down tempo

electronica. You actually wrote that book? Yeah there's no words really it's just you might have some Native American stuff or some Indian I don't know. Getting a little silly here did any more question oh a question came in so we're gonna ask that in a minute. Listening to music is deeply serious. Yeah it is I just find it divides my mind unless I'm doing something really mindless. Okay. There's a couple of questions. This is from Sundaria M. in India.

Sometimes coming across people who suffer, victims, makes me suffer more than them, even though we are strangers. How to break this pattern, especially in today's world where something or the other is going on in the world? Well, I've never heard that put in that question. What was it? Sundar, did you say? Sundarya. She or he feels that they have so much empathy that they suffer even more than the person who's suffering.

I'm a bit stumped by that question because we don't know the extent of another person's suffering or another animal's or other sentient creature's suffering. We don't know, we can guess, but our suffering, meaning our emotional distress at witnessing that suffering, is actually a human virtue. It's one of the Brahma-vihara, one of the four natural ways of being.

What I loved about the Brahma-vihara set of virtues is it's not saying what we aspire to, it's saying what's natural prior to injury, emotional, psychological injury of our culture. we are naturally empathetic and compassionate. And so I would say well it's very human and okay that you feel pain, suffering, at another suffering. But there's a however, which is it sounds like you're feeling so affected by it

that it's causing you a problem and I don't know what in whatever way. So this often can be a trauma response, so there's unresolved emotional pain and and psychological injury, wounds that haven't been healed and we've all got them, but it means that we witness something and that's not making us feel that way, but it's triggering something because of our own life experience and what we haven't healed in ourselves. Because it's great to feel compassion and some pain.

The opposite would be awful, but if it's triggering a trauma response, it's becoming overwhelming, it's interfering with the rest of your life and interfering with making wise choices to promote joy and reduce suffering in the world as you can, then that's an issue. What to do about it?

The key thing is so many people are getting into doom scrolling, as it's called, as you've got a word now, doom scrolling, just paying attention to all the tragedies in the world, all the latest bad news about the climate or the hurricane here or the disaster there. And it is a way of not being present. It might feel like you're being present to the world's suffering, but it's not.

a distraction from it. And often a lot of people will doomscroll, they'll then share that stuff on Twitter or whatever and it's a way of just screaming "Ahh!" about it rather than just

"Okay, there's pain and suffering in the world, there's a lot of it to come, how can I allow that somehow as part of my reality without me becoming obsessed by it or it destabilizing me so I can't get on with the rest of my life?" And there is healing to be done in order for for one not to have a trauma response. And it may mean you need to switch off from seeing other people suffering and focus more on self-love for a time. Comes in waves.

There's only so much of the world's tragedies and suffering that we can take on board. So maybe just spend more time with self-love and healing your own injuries and traumas. And then be happy with the fact you feel pain and another's pain. - That's a good answer. One thing I would add is be an ocean. If you try to dissolve some mud in a glass of water, it just really muddies up the water. But if you dissolve a handful of mud in the ocean, it's just dissipated.

So if you can become oceanic in your consciousness, in your heart, in your inner reality, then you can feel the tragedies of the world, but not be overwhelmed by them. And you can probably contribute more to helping mitigate them in some way. Like you need to be a good swimmer to be a lifeguard. All right, next question from Petra in London. If you are saying we don't know what's for the best in the long run, then why do our best to stop the collapse? So we can't stop the collapse.

That's my analysis. It's already begun. It's a creeping collapse. We don't know how fast it will go. I'm talking about a collapse of modern societies. associated also with the rapid degradation of the biosphere, so ecosystems all around the world and the derangement of the climate and we don't know how bad that's going to get. We don't know if anything we do will make a difference. So the question then you asked is in that case, the rhetoric was why do your best, but why do anything to try and

make a difference in that case? It shouldn't be a rhetorical question. I actually think it's an example of the habit of modernity that we assume consequentialist ethics. It's normal in all wisdom traditions that you choose to do things because that's the right way to live. You try to live a good life, reduce harm where you can, promote joy and love and care where you can. You try but it may not work. So Rick, you mentioned the Bhagavad Gita. It's in there, it's in Buddhism, it's in

all wisdom traditions. So it's the rise of consequentialist ethics, so where you do something because of a story that it's definitely going to have a positive impact. That's just an issue of the dominance of consequentialist ethics is an aspect of modern culture. So I realized that doesn't help you then in choosing what to do. There's another question very, very close to the one that

Petra you asked. Is it Petra or Petra? It's P-E-T-R-A. I don't know how they pronounce it. Okay Petra. Another question is how do I know what to focus on to try to help if I believe that my way of life is breaking down and will continue to do so and when I don't know how fast that's gonna happen? Well there's no good answer to that. There's no one answer to that because we do not know in complex systems, how quickly it's going to break down and where. We don't know. So I'm not

going to give you a simple answer to that. What you can do is know what will help you be more kind, wise and action-oriented come what may. So you know that mindfulness and meditation will help. You'll know that having worked out what your sense of the purpose and meaning of your life is and your values are will help you so you know you can't just postpone that anymore. We might be in a terrible situation standing in queues for rations with a World War three on

within a couple of months even. So you can't postpone these deep questions about the meaning of life anymore so don't postpone it, get on with it. What is really important to you? How can you cultivate the way you wish to be? There's lots of things of that. How can you not postpone these deep questions about the meaning of your life and what you believe in and then okay what's next?

Well what comes next depends on those values so some people will think well I do actually want to try and give me and my kids more years of quality life that's really important to me and it's probably more important to me than helping wake up all my friends and colleagues to the predicament or it It might be, I want to do what I can to try and give humanity a better chance with climate change. So I want to help reforest the world and cut carbon emissions and draw down carbon.

And I think that maybe trying to push government to act through climate activism is what's for me. And then, okay, go and do that. But you can't skip those first two things that I've just mentioned. anyone who comes along and tells you for certain this is what's going to happen, this is what you should be doing and this is because of what the results will be, they're just talking nonsense. We're in a highly complex, unpredictable situation now apart from knowing that things

are breaking down. Yeah, and we all have roles to play, different roles as we said. Petra's question reminded me of that story of the starfish. I don't know if you've heard this one, but a man and a boy are walking along the beach and the tide has gone out and there are just thousands of starfish stranded on the sand and they're all

going to die in the sun. So as they walk along, the man keeps reaching down, picking up a starfish and throwing it in the water and they walk a few more steps, he does it again, he keeps doing that, and finally the boy says, "What difference can that make? There are thousands of them." With that, the man picks up another one, throws it in the water and says, "Made a difference to that one." Yeah, that resonates with me a lot. And as you say, people have different roles to play.

So somebody somewhere on that beach might be sitting in front of a computer trying to work out how best to get as many of those starfish back into the sea. So they may be then trying to use Twitter or TikTok to get a whole bunch of people down to the beach. And then they might be calculating how long would it take to get that many people down

and will the starfish have died? Because how long are the starfish going to live before they die, so how therefore what should be the scope of my ambition for how many

people to get to the beach? You know, someone who loves being nerdy and calculating all that will do all that and that might help too. Yeah, he might get an army of people down there and save all the starfish. Or he might be too ambitious and managed to get a thousand people from London to show up but they took till tomorrow to show up and all the starfish are dead and it would have been better for him to just join the guy on the beach and chuck a few starfish in. So, we don't know.

Good, we had a couple more questions but I'll let them go and thank you so much, Jem, for your time. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed talking to you. I enjoyed reading your book and I'll be in touch. I'll send you a follow-up email with a couple of thoughts. Yeah, thanks for the invite and yeah, to everyone who's watched this, interested, Please check the book out. I'm quite proud of it. It took a long time.

It's a free download, right? In addition to buying a physical one, you can just download the thing and read a PDF if you want to. Exactly. I prefer to listen to things and it's on audible. Matthew Slater reads it, a friend of yours, and he does a really good job. All right. So thanks for those listening or watching. And thank you, Jim. And my condolences on your father's passing. And we'll be in touch.

Thanks for all you're doing. Thank you. Cheers Rick. Bye-bye. Keep up the amazing work with this series. I'll try to bye Bye. (upbeat music) [Music]