Deep Spirituality in an Era of Collapse

Reverend Stephen G Wright

[This essay is available as an audio, narrated by Jem Bendell]

As a follower of the contemplative-mystic Way for many decades, and written about it, guided others in it, even set up a School to ‘teach’ it, in recent years I’ve taken the idea and community of Deep Adaptation into deep discernment – to consider its impact upon my spiritual life and that of others. The unfolding ecological disaster, and its implications for our societies, is something I observe and experience from that contemplative-mystic approach to life. I have come to believe that deep adaptation will be spiritual or there will be no deep adaptation at all. By which, I mean that there will be no softening of the collapse of societies, for people or wider nature, unless more of us discover and prioritise our own spiritual response to this predicament. That is not a summons to fluffy feel-good spiritual experiences to keep the horrors at bay. It is a summons to fierce and profound inquiry, a deep plunge into the joypain of existence, and a wholly (holy!) different perspective on reality and what it is to be human in that reality. Such a Way lifts (or sinks) us into an utterly different relationship and perception of life; of self and that which is beyond the self. Without that we shall persist in limited perceptions of what it is to be human and part of all of life. Without it we would continue deploying our good intentions and rearranging bits and pieces of ordinary reality without fundamentally changing our relationship to that reality.

In my work in palliative care, I’ve nursed thousands of dying people. Now I’m one of many accompanying a dying civilisation. The diagnosis is pretty much incontestable, although the precise manner of its termination is still playing itself out. Likewise, dying people often ask “How long have I got?” We must be careful in answering that question for a figure could become predictive. Far better, beyond guesstimates, is to say we never really know. We can predict the form of the collapse from accumulating reliable data, and from what is already breaking, but there are unknowns and hidden possibilities that can come in from left field and throw the whole into further speculation. Instead, our attention can move beyond anxious assessments and calculations, to cultivate a way of being that will help during the unfolding disruptions and breakdowns.

My own experience of witnessing and experiencing disruptions, with an anticipation of collapse, is a kind of awestruckness at what is going on in all its partial horror and wonder. These past few years, I have been witnessing deeply. But that sets a red light flashing which requires deep discernment and is a common feature of spiritual life. Is this bearing witness an authentic expression of enlightened awareness or, instead, a mystical flight from the increasing pain? Is it a corruption of the quality of non-attachment into detachment (the latter being a way of avoiding the pain of the world)? Instead, I wonder how we might, in the words of deep adapter Jem Bendell, ‘rise into, not above, these times’. For such active engagement, I am more convinced that what is often referred to as ‘The Way’ has something unique to offer our predicament; to aid us through times of deep and even catastrophic transition. I will elaborate more on that in a moment, but as background, please let me offer a short story of one kid growing up in working class Manchester and whose body has survived to almost 75.

When I was a small boy, neighbours might stop by and ask, “Where’s our Stephen?” My Mum’s usual response was, “Oh, he’s gone again.” By that she meant that I would be sitting somewhere alone and daydreaming. At least that’s what my Mum thought it was. In fact, I would be in some quiet reverie totally caught up in the wonder of life about me, even the gritty streets, and a sense of being in something that was a deep Presence. I was lost in it. It didn’t take me long to learn that not everyone saw things this way. I learned to hide, to conform, until the carapace cracked decades later. But that’s another story.

At junior school we were marched down the hill, a long column, in pairs, from school to ‘Radcliffe Baths’ – a public swimming pool. Mr Sharples and Miss Fletcher kept us in line as we headed for our weekly swimming lessons. Our goal was to learn to swim the length of the pool. I still have that certificate that I did the full 25 yards. During one session, I took a deep breath and dived to the bottom, turned over, and just for a moment lay there looking up and listening. At nine years old I was awestruck by the sense that everything above and around me was a different kind of real than what I was used to, and how there was surface noise but I could lay briefly in deep silence. It mirrored some inkling I had always had that things, including me, weren’t quite what I was being told they were. My reverie was short lived when the instructor plunged down to pull me up and give me hell for such disobedience.

I felt perfectly safe while at the bottom of the pool. In some ways I still feel today like I’m there, while surface life continues. It’s not that it’s a duality, it’s just that we exist, it all exists, in many planes of reality, of consciousness. But I’ve started riffing like a mystic and risk lapsing into the incomprehension of those alienated by such talk so let me press on.

Decades later I came across the words of the mystic van Ruysbroeck: “breathing while drowning”. That it is possible to be flooded with an overwhelming inner experience while still functioning in the world. Now, I wouldn’t recommend sitting underwater as a spiritual practice. But the quality of awareness that has over the centuries become known as the contemplative or mystical offers us an opportunity: a capacity to see through the veils of reality into the Real. In my new book, Fugue, I explore what this Way might offer as the disintegration of societies persists. I believe it can help us to breathe while drowning. To live fully even while things fall apart. To act compassionately even when hopelessness gathers.

I’ve found in recent years a growing pain at the surface reality of this world. How vast amounts of human endeavour are undertaken while ‘asleep’. How so much in which we are engaged, or is reported in the ‘news’, or finds its way into politics, or the world of ‘entertainment’, or indeed all manner of human activity, is taking place noisily and destructively and pointlessly on the surface of the pool. So many of us have missed the glory that a deep dive might otherwise have given us, and the contemplation in action that would not have permitted us to come to this pass.

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One thing this Way offers us is the perspective, the truth that “This is not all there is”. It reminds us that life persists, insists, over and against our anthropocentric perspective of this one planet. Indeed, it radically shifts our perspective on what Life is at all: and there is a radical version of hope in that. Piercing the veils of deception, we may come to know that beyond the human there is more, much more. And while in the grief of our world and what human activity has done to it, we may experience despair (or denial), we may also pierce into what Mother Julian tried to explain, that over and against and beyond us, “All shall be well” – (the word ‘well’ here in her mediaeval understanding suggests a quality of being made whole, brought to fruition, healed). It is a sense that everything returns unto itself and life goes on. This is not a Pollyanna-ish descent into wishful thinking to let a certain type of hope survive in the face of adversity. It is a profound awareness of a cosmic drama unfolding of which we are a part, and this cosmic drama has infinite acts and story lines wherein we are one, and which rolls on in time until out of time.

Meanwhile we inhabit the heartbreaking, astonishing futility and destructiveness of vast amounts of human endeavour. Its superficiality. Its ignorance of reality. Its powering away over and against the Presence that is the driving force of All-that is. It could have been so different. It could be so different. And yet, and yet….in the egoic judgments of the imperfection is a kind of perfection. Of an unfolding possibility of many layers of possibility of which the five senses are equipped to know only one.

What is happening now with so many of our efforts at meeting climate change is we’re still using the old tools of action and identity, of perceptions of self and ordinary reality, that have brought us to this pass in the first place. Unless we awaken from these (and it doesn’t have to be everybody – a critical mass suffices) and act from a different place in ourselves, we will simply repeat the old patterns under different guises. We might think we weave a new tapestry from new materials, but unless there is a fundamental shift in the design, in this case a shift in consciousness, then the re-weaving is only one of superficial appearance.

Deep Spirituality, the Way of the contemplative, is an invitation to ‘see’ utterly differently (a ‘seeing’ that many have experienced, but brushed aside or been persuaded of its irrelevance). In thus seeing, we may find vast new horizons open to us about ‘who I Am’ and how ‘I Am’ may best serve in the world, while not being caged by it.

Thus, I find at this point in my life being inwardly at the bottom of the pool, while swimming around doing what has to be done. This is not detachment, which would be mere defence, but a ‘dispassion’, as Christian mystic Climacus called it, the non-attachment of the Buddha, the wu-wei of the Dao.

The suffering is gathering and will gather more like these storm clouds building over the Fells as I write. But this Way, the contemplative, must surely be one way of many that may help us live fully and lovingly while all about us, as Yeats poetically illuminated, “Things fall apart when the centre cannot hold”. And further, that it will sound banal as I write it, there is Love at work in this. Unfathomably piercing the veils that keep us from seeing the Real, yet feeding the opportunities for compassionate action in the face of annihilation. It’s this love, this thing that even while in these times, that re-minds me. It’s the thing we are drowning in, the one thing worth hanging about with and cultivating.

At a simple level, if not indeed simplistic, that has led me into sieving further the real from the false, to discern the deep from the shallow, and place myself ever more in that which is most loving and most meaningful and most engaged and most creative – whether it be being more cautious about who I choose to hang around with, what I choose to do, how I choose to live-serve…

To those who doubt the premise of Deep Adaptation, or worry about ‘giving up’, I often invite reflection on the deep transformations that such a perspective is enabling. If a wider and total Collapse turns out to be a mere construct emanating from the fearful unconscious of a few, the deep dive into the spiritual life and the profound humility, authenticity and compassionate service that arises from it, is still a better way to live. There is no loss, only gain, as it brings more people towards the contemplative Way. That is the finest approach I know, that helps us be (inwardly) still and still moving, in repose while engaged, breathing while drowning…

With love, just a bubble coming up from the bottom of the pool.

As with all Reverend Wright’s books, proceeds go to the charitable Sacred Space Foundation. On this occasion, half of the proceeds from Fugue will go to the Deep Adaptation Forum.  

I hope you find some wisdom and inspiration in these words from Reverend Stephen Wright. I (Jem) wrote about my personal collapse under Stephen’s dining table in Chapter 12 of Breaking Together. You can listen to a few minutes of me reading it to my Dad, on soundcloud.

My essay on ‘A Climate of Trauma’ is also available as an audio. It is one of my contributions to the free online Climate Consciousness Summit. Sign up to watch and respond to my interview with Kosha Joubert, which airs on December 7th for 48 hours.

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