I receive daily meditations by email from Richard Rohr at the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico. They are always valuable and sit perfectly with the Transpersonal Psychology in which I am now so deeply engaged. The theme this week is ‘Apocalypse’. A definition of apocalypse in the Cambridge English Dictionary is ‘a very serious event resulting in great destruction and change’. It has been associated with ideas of the end of the world. However, Rohr points out that if you look back at the original Greek, the word literally means ‘an uncovering’, a pulling back of the veil to reveal a deeper reality. Sometimes there has to be shock and even destruction in order for us to discover that deeper truth and to give birth to something new and better. The times we live in might reasonably be described as apocalyptic and certainly the pandemic has shaken the world and left us questioning. But an apocalypse is not an ending but an opportunity for re-birth.
We also now realise more fully our interconnectedness not only with each other but with the life of our planet. We are seeing the potentially devastating effects of global warming, we are presented with images of seas of plastic floating in our oceans and killing wildlife, we see the obscene wealth which can be flaunted by some whilst others worry where their next meal might be coming from. There is continued war and terror, prejudice, inequality, fundamentalism, and intolerance. And we witness a rise in lifestyle related illnesses and mental distress. The list of things which are wrong with our world seems endless. The model of a society based on industrial growth is broken and needs replacing or re-visioning.
I have been reading “Coming Back to Life’ by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown. They describe how all these crises can lead us to fall into denial and despair. We turn away partly because what we see is so painful and also because we can feel personally helpless to do much in the face of such enormous problems. But they also offer new ways of understanding this apocalypse. There is too much to capture here in a short blog but the take home message is that individual actions count and that as individuals we are also part of a much larger whole. There is an intelligence which runs through all living systems which is self-organising, adaptive and developmental. In many ways our thinking is too small. We see ourselves as separate individuals whose impact is so small as to not really matter. Yet we are all part of this greater living whole and what we say and do counts. Our way of being in this world counts.
They present a number of guidelines to provoke thought and action. Here are just a few. (Their words not mine!)
You are only a small part of a much larger process, like a nerve cell in a neural net. So learn to trust. Trust means taking part and taking risks, when you cannot control, or even see the outcome.
Open to flows of information from the larger system. Do not resist painful information about the condition of your world, but understand that the pain you feel for the world springs from interconnectivity, and your willingness to experience it unblocks feedback that is important to the well-being of the whole.
Believe no one who claims to have the final answer.
Be generous with your strengths and skills - they are not your private property. They grow from being shared.
You do not need to see the results of your work. Your actions have unanticipated and far-reaching effects that are not likely to be visible to you in your lifetime.
Putting forth great effort, let there also be serenity in all your doing; for you are held within the web of life, within flows of energy and intelligence far exceeding your own.
Joanna Macy and Molly Brown, Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to The Work That Reconnects (New Society Publishers:2014),5
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