I’m in a few spaces where there’s frequent reference to the meta-crisis, this kind of collection of existential threats we find ourselves in as humans (climate, geopolitical nuclear threats, pandemics, social disconnection, etc).
You might sum it up as “the results of structures of domination and extraction.” Much of the conversation around this is too jargon-filled and quasi-academic / post-modern academic for my tastes, but the general idea that we’ll fail by trying to solve things by doubling down on the strategies that have led us here resonates for me.
I’ve noticed the meta-crisis concept brings out the brains when my sense is that most of the actually successful things we can do to be in right relation are embodied, maybe not outright abandoning the mind (enlightenment being some kind of magical state that even the greats eventually say is not a thing– the Buddha is all like, whatever you’re calling enlightenment is of course a notion that undermines whatever experience of enlightenment you may have touched into). So we are not abandoning our thinking but as soon as things get VERY thinking-y then we’re going in a direction usually that is just a perpetuation. Stop thinking so very much and start feeling it. I wonder at this point if it’s easier to think about it or feel it, probably the former. Because it can be a social media thing, the escape by retweet, the ‘I’ve done something so now I am free to relapse into all the worst and self-destructive behaviours.’
To put this more bluntly, I sense an embodied truth that the work I do to be in integrity with myself matters much more than all the achievements I could rack up, but that perspective is terrifying in some way to the part of me that is like ‘omg you are worthless without having done anything important.’ There’s so much trust fall in being like ‘does-higher power/intuition/bigger-than-me-universe-force want me to do something important? If so it will lead me there, I do not have to create a status-seeking strategy.’
In other words, I have to become willing to not do an important thing, because let’s be honest, doing important things has been very integral to our getting to the place we’re in now. How can we extricate doing important things from the extraction and exploitation? The idea of doing important things leads us to believe other people are expendable, that the earth or resources are expendable. There’s a reason why most spiritual leaders are anti-materialist; it’s incongruous to orient around doing important things and acting from love and detachment at the same time, and of course religion is the complete opposite often, where everything goes from the spiritual freedom to materialism.
Being in myself is much harder than coming up with great ideas and talking about great ideas and debating about ideas, and I am so into the thinking and talking. I’m now noticing that thinking and talking and building and designing are possible escapes, that all those activities are simply more effective to address the ‘meta-crisis’ when they are emerging from embodied practice, from learning how to be with ourselves without the story of our worth being tied up in these activities.
This is essentially why, though there are so many big problems we may or may not be able to work our way out of, there’s just no point if we don’t do the work to be both in integrity in ourselves and in right relation with the people we’re interacting with. To do this, we have to shift our mindset away from thinking it’s somehow valuable to know all the things going on as surfaced by unimpartial algorithms, and towards being very present to what is going on in the spaces our bodies (or even our intermediated but still connected virtual bodies) inhabit. This is why we keep returning, to ourselves and to the fractal wisdom of almost all spiritual traditions, that love and responsibility are what can make a difference, we keep hearing it and feeling it, but it’s so seductive to slip back into diagnosing and solving.