Life Is The Destiny You Are Bound To Refuse Until You Have Consented To Die
You Do Not Have To Be Good: A Spiritual Advice Column, #1
This is the inaugural edition of this column. If you’re struggling with a question about life, relationships, God, existence… anything, really, send it to me at raberndt@gmail.com with the subject line “advice.” Or just reply to this email.
As I confront the issue of climate change and the massive existential dread it inspires, I struggle with knowing how to respond and what approach to take. I am a spiritual person, and yet even that often feels full of conflicting ideas and practices. I find value in a Zen Buddhist mantra of embracing hopelessness, but it seems completely at odds with my other spiritual practice of setting positive intentions. I believe in the interdependence of all beings, and am concerned for their well being, but I also eat meat (and no, it’s not always organic and free range). I am concerned that there are just too many people for the planet to sustain, but I don’t want to see massive amounts of people die. What do I do about that? And how do I stop preparing for the other shoe to drop?
Dear Friend,
You sent this to me as four separate questions, but it strikes me that they’re really all manifestations of the same eternal question: How do I, as a small and finite human being, stare into the depths of this massive and complex thicket of tangled systems and relationships we call reality and not go utterly and completely mad?
The short answer is, you can’t.
Oh, you can try. You can come up with all kinds of schemes and plans for “fixing” things. Maybe you can invent a technology that magically sucks the carbon out of the atmosphere. Convince millions of people to beam positive intentions into the crystal earth grid for healing. Refuse to eat meat or travel or have kids and let humans die out to give the poor earth a break. Block bridges and glue yourself to buildings and keep getting arrested until something changes.
We’ve been trying to solve this problem of our stinking, rotten humanity for a very long time. Whether it’s through science (Pills! Machines! Psychology!), spirituality (Self-denial! Positive intentions! Kindness!), or activism (Protest! Hashtags! Decolonization!), we are always trying to ascend to the heavens and escape our destiny, which has only ever been a one way ticket to the underworld. In the words of Lana del Ray, we’re born to die.
When I was doing climate activism in New York City, we tried really hard to embrace hopelessness. We’d listen to the presentations about the IPCC report, and watch clips of the polar bears falling through the melting ice, and talk about preparing for a world that was going down in flames. We’d let ourselves feel the pain for a good 15 minutes, and then we’d start planning the revolution.
There were banners to paint and actions to plan and always more organizing to do. And meetings. So goddamn many meetings. I’d go to insanely long meetings after work and sit outside jails on weekends and after a while I realized that we weren’t really any different from the traders on Wall Street or the techies in Midtown or any of the little ants scurrying around on the island of Manhattan. We were all just scared of dying and we needed something to take our minds off of it. We were hamsters stuck on a wheel of death, convinced that if we pushed ourselves just a little bit harder, we could somehow outrun it.
I’m not sure what the Zen Buddhist mantra of embracing hopelessness entails, but what would it look like to stop managing the fear and let hopelessness catch you in its death grip?
There’s a very long poem by W.H. Auden that I am convinced holds all the secrets of the Universe. It’s called For The Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, and while it feels a bit early for a Christmas poem, I am remembering that Our Lord and Master Jeff Bezos has decreed that Advent should begin in mid-October, so I’m going to roll with it.
Writing from the darkest days of World War II, Auden illuminates a humanity lost in a hell of its own making, all pieties and stratagems for restoring order having failed:
Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,
Dreading to find its Father lest it find
The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:
Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own,
Where now that Justice for which Flesh resigned
Her hereditary right to passion, Mind
His will to absolute power? Gone. Gone.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odoured ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.
Nothing can save us that is possible. Let that sink in. Hopelessness is not a strategy for coping, for keeping our sanity as we go about our daily business. We don’t employ it as a creativity hack to help us find a better solution. Anything that feels like it might work is not the answer.
Hopelessness is the Dark Mother. Babalon sent to choke us on our lusts and greedy machinations and plans for enlightened progress. Hekate cackling over her bubbling pot of toil and trouble. Kali Ma, She Who is Death, Destroyer. She’s knocking at your door, longing to feast on the entrails of your dignity and self-possession, your positive intentions, best practices, and right actions. You must let her have her bloody feast and strip you to the bone.
Allow yourself to be disabused of every last shred and fragment you’ve been clinging to for salvation. Surrender to the utter blackness of the void, go past the terror and to the place of pure nothingness, the Abomination of Desolation.
It is only then that you will reach the Alpha and Omega of creation. It is only in the tomb that you will learn the meaning of the womb, becoming like virgin soil; pure not because you are untouched but because you have been eaten and decayed and composted to your most humble and naked essence.
Auden says, a few stanzas later:
For the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it
Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert;
The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not be apparent,
Until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you cannot explain;
And life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die.
The miracle grows in darkness and silence; it may take some time before you begin to perceive it. It’s a dream, a desire, a purpose, whispered into your ear and planted deep in your heart from before the foundation of the world. One day you may remember a vision you had when you were six years old, or a longing that broke your heart when you were 16. Feel it, touch it, taste it, listen to it. You don’t have to understand it just yet.
Get to know it better and soon you will begin to follow it, pulling a thread as you go; over rivers and under hills, following your heart’s desire from point to point like a child led by a pied piper in an epic dance. You might chant mantras or set intentions; maybe plan protests or start an organic farm; perhaps produce spectacular works of art; or just live a simple and quiet life tending to the people you love; you will eat what you eat. You will do these things out of love and not fear. The only question will be, does this thing help me follow the song?
One day, if you are lucky, you may look back and find that all along you were weaving the world back to wholeness with the thread of your life.
This restless concern you describe is all just an externalization of the deeper disquiet you feel at the impending doom of death. The only way out is through, will you take it?
The angel of the Lord stands ready on the other side of the threshold; he would like very much to impregnate you with a miracle. Will you say yes?
Damn. That's good. I mean I don't believe a word of it, obviously, or I'd have to make some changes. But wow.
Thank you, Rebekah.
I spent a few hours this morning meditating on the issue about how do we save the earth. And l saw the arrogance of that question. And l saw the trap.
It is to do with semantics, with externalising the concept of 'Mother Earth'; The long suffering poor Goddess we trample, pollute and destroy. And we forget that we, each of us, every blade of grass, every human, every factory farmed pig; we are all Mother Earth in her many manifestations.
So don't think of saving anyone but yourself - save yourself from false beliefs and from the notion that the problem is 'out there'. Save yourself from poisonous thoughts and deeds and ambitions as well as poisonous food and stressful living and working conditions as much as you can, knowing that by creating a sustainable life for yourself, you are creating the possibility of a sustainable life for the whole of the system of which you are a part.
Perhaps it all boils down to knowing that nothing really is out there, it's all part of our shared collective awareness as well as it is part of our own, individual awareness. And those two circles overlap.