spirituality – Prof Jem Bendell

Living Purposefully within Metacrisis and Collapse

July 18, 2026 jembendell

Last year I was dancing in a field with hundreds of people from countries across Asia. We were singing, holding hands, and moving in the ways we had just been taught. Most of the songs used mantric phrases, taken from different religions. But a couple of songs were in English, and at one point, I found myself singing…

“Why have you come to Earth?

Why have you taken birth?

Why have you come?

To love, serve and remember…”

The melody and simple message stuck with me. Subsequently I discovered it was written by John Astin. He was inspired by the words of Maharaji, who had told one of his famous pupils to “love everyone, serve everyone, and remember God.”

The song offers an answer to something really deep. Like many people, at times I have struggled with the matter of the “meaning of life”, and its related rabbit holes on the nature and meaning (or many meanings), of the cosmos, Life, evolution, humanity, or my own life. How such meanings might inform my own life’s purpose, here onwards, can also be a confusing question. Clearly, our means to understand such matters through our senses, cognition, conceptualisation, and language, is fundamentally limited. But that doesn’t mean we either dismiss the matter altogether, or adopt a pre-packed story from our culture (and defensively dismiss curiosity as lacking humility). As our old assumptions and aspirations weaken in the face of metacrisis and collapse, many of us have been returning to these deeper questions of life. Many of us are doing that as part of finding a new direction in life after ditching the old. In this essay, I want to speak more fully to that issue than before, to help you reconsider, or reconfirm, your own sense of meaning and purpose in the midst of metacrisis, or whilst considering societal collapse. It’s also because currently I am doing the same.

Talking with people who have participated in the salons and peer mentoring of the Metacrisis Initiative, I am reminded of the range of views on how to live in response to our predicament. Some are primarily focused on emotional stability, inner peace, and learning how to cope, personally, with difficult realities. Others are focused on doing whatever remains possible to reduce harm and generate possibilities for the future, without any certainty that such efforts will succeed. Many of us have been trying to find some balance between these impulses.

These conversations led me to adopt the strapline “living purposefully within metacrisis and collapse” for both my website and the Metacrisis Initiative. I will come back to the concept of ‘purpose’ in a moment. When I use the term Metacrisis I am referring to the interacting worldwide crises of our time and their deeper causes and implications. Those include ecological overshoot, climate disruption, biodiversity loss, wealth inequality, economic fragility, political dysfunction, technological acceleration, and cultural fragmentation, and the deeper crisis of meaning that shapes our responses to such changes, while being implicated in their cause. When I speak of societal collapse, I mean a significant and enduring reduction in the complexity, capacity, and reliability of systems that people depend upon for everyday life.

Neither term is a prediction of imminent armageddon and human extinction. Rather, they are ways of describing a predicament that is unfolding and will shape our lives in unpredictable ways for years to come. In my book Breaking Together, I laid out the data that suggests we are already within a process of the creeping collapse of industrial consumer societies. In such circumstances, it is only normal, and right, that people question the meaning and purpose of their lives. That is a powerful implication of collapse-awareness, which is so often overlooked by people who want us to remain positive and hopeful.

The concept of ‘meaning’ concerns how we understand our lives and experiences. It involves ideas of coherence, significance, identity and belonging. I’ve been experiencing my own ‘meaning crisis’ since 2017, as my personal sense of self-worth before then was bound up with the idea of contributing boldly to a managed global transition to a sustainable way of life. Without that, I have recognised there’s meaning for me in being more present to life in all its dimensions, with an open heart and mind. That is associated with my realisation that the meaning of life could be to simply live it more fully. What does that mean? Currently, I see it means I don’t let my fears, wounds, culture, and egoic drives push me too far from the possibilities for love, wonder, gratitude, connection and creativity. I’ll return to that later, but for now, I want to look closer at the idea of ‘purpose’.

When the concept of life’s meaning has an application and direction, we are in the realm of life’s purpose. What do we orient ourselves towards, and seek to embody or contribute through our lives? That question of our purpose is asking us what we do about our sense of the meaningfulness of life (in general, and of our own lives).

Some collapse-aware people don’t like the concept of purpose, as it seems, for them, to involve both ego and attachment to outcome. The most resilient people in terrible situations have been observed to be those who can find meaning in the smallest of things, rather than retaining a story of their activities contributing to a wider purpose. However, I wonder if they also have a sense of purpose, or underlying orientation. To devote oneself to presence is a purpose. To cultivate non-attachment is a purpose. To embody compassion is a purpose. So the distinction between being and doing is often less clear than it first appears. People commit to, and practice, ways of being present and kind in the world. Thus, we are orienting towards something, even when that something is a deeper quality of being.

We orient ourselves in this life. So we tell stories, implicitly or explicitly, about what actions matter and why. That reflects a yearning for purpose that is a deep aspect of human nature, and such purpose can be found at many scales. It would be a mistake to consider the yearning for purpose as synonymous with setting external objectives on a large scale. For one person, purpose may involve raising children with love and integrity. For another, restoring a local river or forest. For others, it can be creating music, supporting neighbours, preserving wisdom, accompanying the dying, growing food regeneratively, strengthening community resilience, or helping future generations inherit something of value. Some purposes focus on collective outcomes. Others focus on ways of being. In my experience, most of us involve some combination of both, whether or not we are explicit about it.

Before I gave up my career in academia, I was regularly interacting with people who were discussing purposes on the largest possible scales. For instance, they wanted their lives to contribute to goals such as the salvation of humanity, the flourishing of all species, or the healing of the planet. Such visions and aspirations can be beautiful and inspiring. They can also motivate extraordinary dedication and sacrifice. I inhabited such stories for decades (or they inhabited me). But in that time I also became aware of a paradox. As purposes become grander, they can become less authentic. Because they can drift away from lived reality into abstraction. They can become performative identities rather than genuine callings. Grand visions and purposes can sometimes distract us from what is immediately present and possible. We may become attached to stories about changing the world while neglecting the people, places, and responsibilities directly before us. Maybe that’s why there are many examples in history of people who were principled leaders while negligent with their families.

Being aware of this paradox does not mean that large-scale visions and purposes are wrong. It means they require humility. The larger the scale of our aspirations, the greater the need to remain grounded in the reality of our own lives and relationships. We can also be vigilant about another risk of grand visions, that no matter how laudable, they can impose a way of thinking on other people and stimulate criticism of people who do not accept them. We see that in the field of religions, where people preach dogmatic interpretations of the future for us all, and how we should live. Similarly, in the field of environmental concern, some commentators tell us we must believe in a transition to an ecologically sustainable society, or that we would be partly to blame for future failure. This process is closely connected to policing of our emotions, which sadly serves authority not democratic dialogue.

Visions can be useful at personal and collective scales. They can help us choose what to do, and what not to do. They can also help us find motivation and inspire motivation in others. However, psychological research demonstrates that such visions do not need to be grand, such as those describing the future of large organisations, whole nations, or the planet, for there to be a positive effect on clarity and motivation. Depending on the person and situation, visions can become delusional, enabling denial of circumstances and delaying difficult choices.

My own positive vision is not primarily a vision of a future society. It is a vision of more people living purposefully within metacrisis and collapse. It is a vision of people becoming clearer about the importance of love and awareness, wonder and inquiry, and how they wish to live amidst uncertainty. Within that framework, it means my individual purpose can be found in helping more people to live like that, as well as orienting myself towards that. I’ve been summarising it to my friends as attempting to be well to help well.

When I mention love, I mean universal and unconditional love. That is the quality of engaged benevolence towards all life, including one’s own. It is not naive or idealistic for that to be the foundation of personal or collective purpose, as precisely when outcomes become uncertain that returning to deeper and universal understandings and feelings can be our guide. For if, instead, our purpose were to depend upon achieving a particular collective outcome, then it would be fragile. Instead, when our purpose is grounded in love (for people, places, creatures, communities, future generations), then it can endure regardless of what happens.

To arrive at this view, I have been helped by the mystical strands of various world religions, and the people involved in them. I have also been shaped by moments of tragedy and grief, where the primacy of love cut through my daily preoccupations and social conditioning. I have also benefitted from some non-ordinary states of consciousness, which dissolved my sense of separate self, so I felt as if the most fundamental reality is itself universal unconditional love. That perspective on fundamental reality, in a physical and metaphysical sense, also provides a potential answer to the ‘meaning of life’ question – for all life, or one’s own. As universal unconditional love is the fundamental nature of being, then the meaning of life is simply that love, however it is being expressed through matter, energy and information. That is why so many mystics, from Christians, to Hindus, to Sufis, to Animists, say that the meaning and purpose of our lives is to wake up to our true natures as an aspect of the universal unconditional love which cultures label differently as sacred, divine, soul, spirit or God.

With that in mind, the way ahead involves two dimensions. First, we must include in our normal lives whatever tunes us towards a more expansive consciousness. Second, we must notice whether it is from our moments of expansiveness or contractedness that we are assessing our options in life. Fully expansive, we can await guidance from beyond ourselves, whichever way we might conceive that which is ‘beyond’. That’s why many people feel like they have a ‘calling’ to do something in life. Just as long as we don’t get attached to that calling, as a new egoic identity, it can become a beautiful motivation in life. I believe the qualities or orientations for Deep Adaptation can be helpful for that, especially the ones I labelled ‘organic meaning’ and ‘numinous adaptability’ (outlined here).

Our era of metacrisis and collapse involves finding ways of interpreting and applying ancient ideas on meaning and purpose in a novel context. Important aspects of our situation are both the certainty of material decline for the majority of humanity in the foreseeable future, and uncertainty around what could be useful to do to produce a slower, kinder, and more generative collapse. It is a time that asks us to be able to care without illusions, to remain open-hearted without reward, to act without guarantees, to be well enough to help well, and, ultimately, to love without end.

I can’t say I have been living like this myself — but more so than before. I am currently struggling with what the core ideas I’ve described in this essay mean for my choices today, in new circumstances. Those include being older, living differently, earning less, and knowing different people. That’s why I am grateful to be part of a peer mentoring group within the Metacrisis Initiative, and to also have the benefit of guidance from spiritually reflective people, whether or not they have official roles. One teacher is Reverend Wright, who joins the August 2026 Metacrisis Salon. Information on that follows at the end of this essay, for members of initiative.

Rather than share with you more ideas on how myself and other people are finding meaning and purpose in an era of metacrisis and collapse, it could be more useful to ask you some questions to reflect on. They are not as punchy as the way you’d be asked about the purpose of your life at a Business School. So I won’t be asking what you’d die for: any useful intensification from such a question can paradoxically shrink personal reflection into what might sound right according to a peer group. Instead, I have composed the questions to unpack some assumptions and open up some possibilities. I recommend making notes on them, and then sharing this essay with a collapse-aware friend of yours with a request to discuss your respective answers. If it happens, I hope you have fun!

After publishing this, I’ll be learning ‘Love, Serve, Remember’ on guitar and how to teach the moves for us to sing it in our future circles of the Dances of Universal Peace.

Questions on the meanings and purposes of lives

So much of our thinking is influenced by deep stories of what is right and wrong, admirable or embarrassing, which we have learned from our culture, family and friends. So when you reflect on the following, try to sense whether there is any of that ‘social gaze’ on how you should think and feel; if it might be influencing your answers, try to answer them again as if that external judgement didn’t matter.

Could I live fully without any sense of meaning or purpose in my life?
Is finding the meaning or purpose of my life a basic need and/or central goal of my life?
Could meaning or purpose in my life be fixed and singular, or plural and changing?
Might any potential meanings and purposes of my life be discovered by me, chosen by me, given to me, or taught to me? Does that matter to their validity, in general, or to me?
Why might some meanings and purposes for my life be more valuable than others?
Do I think (or sense) that there is a universal meaning and purpose for any human life, or Life in general?
Is it important for me to understand such meaning and purpose? To be able to describe it myself? To be able to communicate it to others? If so, why?
How do the meanings and purposes of my own life relate to a broader sense of the meaning and purpose of Life in general, if at all?
With all these ideas on general and personal meaning and purpose in my heart and mind: what might collapse be asking of me?
What could be an additional question, or a better question, to guide your own inquiry on this matter?

If you answered any of these questions using the standard language of your (sub-)culture, such as “God teaches me…” or “Karma dictates that…” or “Being a responsible parent/child means…” or “The plant medicine revealed to me that…” then I’d ask you to reflect on these questions once more, without those words and concepts, to allow your insight into what might be underneath such labels for what is true and good.

I invite you to share your thoughts on this essay, these questions, and any answers, on the relevant thread of the Facebook page of the Metacrisis Initiative. If you are a member of the Initiative please share them in the community chat, and also join the salon on this topic on August 3rd/4th. These questions also comprise the reflection exercise ahead of Meeting 5 of the Peer Mentoring. If you want to join a future cohort of peer mentors, please join the initiative.

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The image represents some Indian spiritual figures from different religions and periods, all of whom understood the joy of awakening to the oneness of reality (however we choose to label it). Over the years I’ve appreciated learning what each of them said and/or did. So the image is my celebration of the wisdom from a land which I am excited to be returning to for the Dances of Universal Peace. Do you recognise any of the people depicted here? From left to right: Anandamayi Ma, Ambedkhar, Mirra Alfassa, Vinoba Bhave, Inayat Khan, Kasturba, Maharaji, Sri Sarada Devi, Anthony de Mello, Hazrat Babajan.

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Could there be some beauty in collapse?

July 8, 2026July 5, 2026 jembendell1 Comment

Although many people are breaking apart into self-righteous factions, many people have been breaking together, whereby they allow the upsetting situation to break down their old habits, so that they become more open-hearted and open-minded in how they live their life, including the way they relate to other people. As a result, they are dramatically changing their lives to prioritise creativity and social contribution. They are worrying less about their career, their financial security or following the latest trend. They are helping those in need, growing food, making music, campaigning for change and exploring spiritual paths. That is happening because they have rejected the establishment’s view of reality and no longer expect its officers to solve any of the worsening problems in their society. After decades of greed, hypocrisy, lies, corruption and stupid policies, they are no longer waiting for any elites to rescue the planet. As they let go of false hopes that they will be saved, they can move through grief and begin living creatively again, with an awareness of how every day is a blessing. This doesn’t mean they don’t grieve, worry or feel sad and angry, but that their feelings of wonder and gratitude about life don’t immediately trigger those other difficult emotions or keep them stuck there. Instead, they are living life more fully, according to what they value. It is precisely because these people regard modern societies to be breaking down that they are living more freely. They need neither an underground bunker nor a fairy tale of a better tomorrow as they live, today, for truth, love and beauty. Who are they? I call them doomsters. I am one of them. Perhaps you are, too?

If so, welcome. There are many ways to live differently from now on, as seen in Chapter 10 of Breaking Together. (This text is a reproduction of the closing pages of that book, released 3 years ago). Any change in our way of life doesn’t need to happen all at once. In my case, I think I was emotionally knocked down onto a metaphorical canvas and took years to fully stand again. The general ethos and approach to dialogue that is described by the phrase ‘deep adaptation’ was key for my own process—and I still recommend people engage in networks that use that framework for mutual support. But some years later I arrived at a far less inward-looking orientation. I am certain we cannot wait for the storm to pass or seek to skirt around its edges—we must learn to dance in the rain. (That led me to update the Deep Adaptation framework this year).

That dance does not need to become a rave. Modern culture indoctrinates us to admire largesse and express grand aims about changing the world. Instead, we can reclaim our freedom to be small in our desires for impact, in our communities and local environments. Unfortunately, our ability to dance our own little shimmies of freedom and social contribution is under threat… I wrote Breaking Together for people who are ready to connect their work to a broader ‘ecolibertarian project’ of a great reclamation of power of all kinds and at all levels. Together, we might become a more significant force for positive social change in this era of societal collapse. We are a peoples’ environmentalism in contrast to the agenda emerging from corporate domination. Together, we might elaborate a policy agenda at all levels of governance from the local to global, to counter the agendas of those I describe as ‘fake green globalists’.

If you take on board the arguments in Breaking Together (summarised for you here) it will be like taking a green pill . Swallowing the ‘green pill’ opens your eyes to how the modern money system is a death matrix that shapes our lives, so we collectively destroy the living world. The greenness of the pill describes both our waking to the living world and the role of the money-power in its destruction. But there is another aspect to this opening of our eyes. “Our whole culture, our whole civilisation, in so far as it is involved in time and living only for a future, is nuts, it’s not all here. We are not awake, we are not completely alive now.” Those were the wise words of contemporary psymusic voiceover artist Alan Watts, who, before he died, was a teacher of Eastern spiritualities in the West.[i] E.F. Schumacher thought similarly, and suggested that “the life and death problems of industrial society… [lie] in the heart and soul of every one of us.” The ‘evotopian’ vision I have floated in this book is of a world where dominant systems don’t restrict us so much from being able to experience ourselves, each other and nature. It is a vision where many more of us are not prevented from opening our hearts and minds to each-other and nature. It is a world where more of us would feel safe enough and free enough to care for ourselves, each other and nature. Helping to promote that in our own lives is one great beauty found within the pain of collapse. “Let us truly live the beauty and responsibility of being a prophetic people,” said Bishop Oscar Romero, before being murdered by those working with US imperialists. This kind of work is not for the wishy washy…

Dancing long into the night will involve a lot more than being convinced about the science on our predicament or eloquent about its implications. It will require a commitment that comes from a depth of faith in the eternal rightness of living from universal love. Because unfolding collapse will be more of an ugly process than a beautiful one. No sugar-coating of our predicament is possible. We messed up, in the biggest possible way a species could mess up. Let alone an intelligent one. By ‘we’ I mean the modern human, with our irrational stories of self and reality. So, I can’t leave you with an upbeat ending about our ‘salvation’. Probably only deeper faith can sustain us in the years ahead. It’s where we sense the infinite powers of creation and the ultimate rightness of reality, whatever may come to pass. Human extinction? Don’t worry, it’s not the end of the world! But what strange times we are in that such jokes can be told (not that I think near-term human extinction is inevitable (please check out Chapters 3, 4 and 5 in Breaking Together))…

I am keenly aware that the youth of the world could be better helped to organise around these issues. One way that older people can help is simply by stopping gaslighting the young. Instead, we can help validate what many young people sense about their future and encourage them to discuss and experiment with creative ways of responding. One simple idea for how to encourage them came to me on Christmas Day. My Dad knew it was the last Christmas that we would have together, so his parting gift was a t-shirt with the following emblazoned across the front:

“I’m not arguing, I’m just explaining why I’m right.” Since then, I have felt a strange pride about my feeling of embarrassment as people I walk past on the street look at my t-shirt. I will be making some t-shirts in his honour, to give them to the young people I know, to help spark their conversations. I think the first one might say:

“Doomsters have more fun.” Because, why the heck shouldn’t young people have fun by living free of the habits of the stupidly self-destructive society we have left crumbling around them?

Nevertheless, I hope future generations may remember that we weren’t all so dumb. In that spirit of recognising our elders, I will close with the words E.F Schumacher used to close his own book, fifty years before I wrote this one: “Everywhere people ask: ‘what can I actually do?’ The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, put our inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.”[ii]

The previous text was taken from the closing of Breaking Together, published 3 years ago. Most of the book is available as a free audiobook.

The author was interviewed recently about the book by the hosts of Collapse Life (see video).

In the August 2026 salon of the Metacrisis Initiative we discuss the spiritual invitation and response to metacrisis and collapse with Reverend Stephen Wright. If you are a member of the initiative, then there is no need to register: just see the details and video link below, which will appear if you are logged in. If you can’t see it but are already a member, then use the email associated with your paid membership to request a password reminder, or a log in link, to your inbox. Any problems: use the contact form for this site and we will fix things for you.

You can learn about Reverend Stephen Wright from some my previous essays:

Deep Spirituality in an Era of Collapse – by Stephen Wright

They Weren’t 10 Commandments – on a dialogue between Stephen Wright and Jem Bendell

Heartfullness: The Way of Contemplation – review of book from Stephen Wright by Prof Jem Bendell

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[i] Yes, I am jesting here. I first read a book from Alan Watts in 2002 but it didn’t quite reach me as much as his ideas do now, after I’ve been sufficiently wounded by life. I recommend this video on this his and work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6lRcGxH-Mc

[ii] Schumacher, E. F. (1973). Small is Beautiful. Blond & Briggs. https://archive.org/details/small-is-beautiful-1973-e.-f.-schumacher/page/n221/mode/2up

They Weren’t 10 Commandments

June 18, 2026June 13, 2026 jembendell

by Jem Bendell

I went to a Catholic school. For boys. Run by monks. When I tell people that today, it draws some sniggers or even questions of concern. Despite some scandals which I learned of later, I have nothing salacious to report from my own time at St John’s College. The couple of friends I’m still in touch with from those school days have found their own faith, but not due to what we learned at school. Looking back, I realise we were being shown religious belief in a way that felt out-dated and restrictive. The importance of love, and of serving others, would sometimes get mentioned, but the culture didn’t feel that way. At times it was violently the opposite. Looking back, I sense we missed out on something important. As the true message in wisdom traditions is both kind and liberatory, including the message from a deeper Christianity. A recent example of my misunderstandings of Christianity from childhood, highlights the challenge and opportunity for a kinder and more emancipatory embrace of faith in today, as times become tough and worrying.

At school in the 1980s, the Ten Commandments seemed like the conceptual equivalents of our old desks with their unused holes for ink pots. We scrawled in biro across exercise books on top of those desk relics from an era that was alien to us. When we were taught about the commandments not to steal, lie, and murder, they seemed sensible — but the language around them was strange and pompous. “Thou shalt not bear false witness…” It was like being handed a tasty pasty in a rusty wooden chest. Welcome, but not with the dusty heaviness.

Only last year did I learn of a different way of hearing them. It was a beautiful summer’s day in England’s Lake District. My friend Stephen was taking me to somewhere he described as one his pilgrimage sites. When we parked just off the sternly busy A66 highway, I didn’t have high hopes. But after walking for half an hour, the rushing cars had faded into the distance and the birdsong, blue sky, fluffy clouds, green fields and friendly chatter were reassuring me this was a “nice thing to do” during my short visit to Cumbria. Walking around a hedge, we looked down into a meadow, dotted with sheep, heads down, munching away. In the distance was a building, lying low beneath a towering oak that curled over it like a protective arm. The red stone walls had been bleached into soft shades of rose by centuries of Cumbrian rain, and maybe the occasional sunny spell. The dark arched windows told me “Church,” while the grass growing around its weathered wooden gate told me “maybe abandoned.” Approaching closer, I saw its graveyard hosted waves of green grass with headstones leaning left and right, as if bobbing in between.

The Lake District is an epicentre for tourism, but visitors were not getting their lakeland kicks off this part of the A66. Although Stephen Wright is a Reverend, this Church-without-congregation was not our destination. We walked on, towards a river that curved at the back of the meadow. Its meander had created a pebbly beach from where you could walk into a transparent blackish-brown water to paddle or swim. Stephen stripped off and jumped into the river with a glee that made me wonder whether I could learn, one day, to enjoy cold water. Afterwards, we sat sunbathing and discussed the things that crop up with contemplatives like Stephen.

“Those ten sayings weren’t actually commandments – they were ten commentaries. They were describing how we mere mortals function, naturally, when we haven’t been wounded by our life or poisoned by society.” Stephen was explaining that this way of understanding the ten commandments is surprisingly old — and perhaps unsurprisingly ignored. Our conversation on the banks of the river prompted me to look deeper into this perspective on what I learned, as probably you did too, as the ‘10 commandments’. I found that there is even a clue in the New Testament. The apostle Paul wrote about gentiles who “do by nature what the law requires” because God’s law is “written on their hearts” (Romans 2:14-15). That’s partly why the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas argued that the commandments were not an arbitrary list but a restatement of ‘natural law’ i.e. a basic moral grammar we’re all born with. Perhaps they both knew something about the original texts, which is worth exploring for a moment.

The text we now call the “Ten Commandments” was originally written in Ancient Hebrew, which described them as “the Ten Words” (or ten phrases: Aseret HaDevarim). The verbs that Bibles translated as imperatives, such as “lo tignov”, on stealing, did not use an explicitly imperative tense. That would be “al”, which means “do not” (e.g., al tignov for “do not steal”). By using “lo” followed by the imperfect tense of a verb, it can be understood as describing a present or a past and continuing reality. As there is no “thou” or “you” stated in the phrases, they simply mean “non stealing,” “non lying,” and so on. As those phrases begin with, “and not” (v’lo), it connects them to the preceding sentence which describes the nature of the Sabbath rather than ordering it. Therefore, an Irish biblical scholar, A.D.H. Mayes observed these phrases are less commands than descriptions of a natural, unbroken way of being. More recently, philosopher J. Budziszewski wrote that the commandments are “what we can’t not know.” So, rather than being rules imposed from the outside, they are truths recalled from within.

Looking up at the sun drying his long salt and pepper hair, I remember it seemed like this was how the Reverend preferred to share; from a pebble beach, not a pulpit. “You know, it’s not just the commandments that were mistranslated,” he said, warming into mystic mode. “Any translation of ‘sin’ that makes us think it is something other than falling away from who we are, and ‘missing the mark’ of what we are aiming at, is not the message.” He was watching the current, as if gathering thoughts from its surface. “We are invited to remember and welcome into ourselves the sense that love is at the core of all-that-is, and that we are already immersed in it.”

“Like being in the river,” I thought, “if it was warmer.” Stephen’s voice dropped, as if sharing what the water already knew. “When we remember that reality, it shifts our relationships and behaviours towards everyone and everything. Afterall, real love isn’t lazy.” Moving up on his elbows, with a smile on his face and liveliness in his voice: “So what was translated as commandments can even be seen as promises, because they tell us how we will naturally behave once feeling the love of the Beloved.” Fortunately, I had my phone on me and recorded some voice notes about our riverside chat. His views on the commandments stayed with me for months, until I found time to read into the matter.

Looking back to that lovely lazy summer’s day, I also remembered that while Stephen was re-baptising himself in the water, I had noticed a crooked tree. From its base it had grown at a 45 degree angle, pushed sideways by a large rock, before twisting upwards to the sky. It must have been so close to the rock, when a sapling, that it had been obstructed. At the time I enjoyed looking at its unusual shape and gnarly strength. Looking back now, I also see that the tree was not in its uninjured form. It was coping with damage from the rock. I wonder if that’s like me, perhaps like you. Might we all be living in a cultural forest stunted and twisted by proverbial rocks of hurt, harm, and numbing? In that sense, the Ten Commentaries or Promises, can be heard like a tree surgeon calling into the forest, “hey guys, this is what normal and healthy looks like.”

I told Stephen it had taken a Christian youth camp when I was 15 years old for me to focus on, and be transformed by, the nature and centrality of Universal Love that was taught by Jesus. It wasn’t just my schooling that was lacking – I couldn’t find a group that focused on the true message of Jesus, and so I didn’t remain in Christian community. Instead, over the years, I explored the insights and methods of Buddhist, Taoist, Animist, Hindu and Sufi traditions. That meant what Stephen told me resonated with what I’d learned elsewhere. For instance, in Buddhism, the Brahma Viharas — loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity — are not presented as pious aspirations you try to force yourself to feel. Instead, they are regarded as the natural radiance of an uncorrupted heart and mind. When you remove the fetters of fear, tribal conditioning, and emotional injury, these four qualities, or virtues, arise within us on their own. Other religions, such as Taoism and Jainism, teach similar qualities are both aspirational and natural — a fact that is unattractively ignored by those scholars who wish to claim that Christianity civilised the world.

It is only decades after my childhood experiences, that I am rediscovering a mystical, gentle, just and joyous message within Christianity. My learnings and experiences from other spiritual traditions have helped me to see Christian texts with new eyes. It is why I am now able to hear what Reverend Wright shares as a contemplative Christian. Interestingly, then, that the other spiritual traditions are not temptations or ‘stony ground’ for the faithful to avoid. Rather, they can be a way to learn those deeper truths that have been suppressed by institutional religion, yet still smoulder underneath it, ready for our return. Considering some messages from the non-canonical Gospels can be a part of that journey, and why I believe existing Christian denominations should become more curious about them (such as that of Thomas and Mary Magdalene).

I’ve been keeping the deeper insights of wisdom traditions in mind as I design the peer mentoring within the Metacrisis Initiative. So that we know what we are encouraging in each other, it seems useful to identify some qualities or approaches to help us thrive in situations of disruption, confusion, and collapse. The challenge is that any personal quality, value, virtue, or trait, is somewhat intangible and contingent, so labelling them can give a false sense of certainty, and an unwise attachment to them as positive, whatever the context. Ultimately, there is no getting away from how our state of consciousness, with open hearts and minds, is key to how we show up positively for each other. It is why we will be centering the cultivation of what Stephen calls ‘heartfulness’ in the mentoring.

Although I am pleased to be developing that Initiative, I am aware that religions will remain far more impactful than any self-help networks in this tough age of the consequences from extractive and destructive systems of human organisation. It is important, therefore, to see the power in questioning our religious education. Reading the ‘ten commandments’ as commentaries or promises can turn the rather boring and distant Christianity that many of us learned at school completely ‘inside out’. The religion stops being a straight jacket you can choose to wear or, worse, demand others to wear. Instead, it becomes an invitation to return home to who you naturally are. Ideally, it also provides some tools and community to help. It’s why Stephen has built communities of learning and peer support, in the form of the Sacred Space Foundation, and St. Kentigern School.

With authentic religious invitations to return to our kind heartedness, we can look first at our own impediments. Where am I tight with fear? Where has culture taught me to acquire, defend and harden my heart? How can I help myself return to my true nature? Silence? Forgiveness? Dance? Collective song? A walk together with friends, or alone in nature? Helping someone in need? Perhaps making time to remember the love at and from the centre of everything?

And then we can look wider. What in our society keeps pressing rocks against so many saplings? Its speed, its status games, its lonely competitiveness, and its erosion of common wealth, all impair our ability to grow well with presence and care. A culture that wounds hearts will always produce people who seem to need commandments to behave. That means we can identify our own ways to resist, exclude, or transform those economic and political systems which steal us all away from our true natures.

Like you, I have also heard the argument that some people need rules and threats of punishment in order to avoid anti-social behaviour. That argument does not only appear in cultures with concepts of ‘original sin’ but also within those that explain how some of us are dominated by experiences of consciousness related to ‘lower chakras’. Certainly many of us are deeply wounded by our experiences and culture, and not feeling the open-hearted open-minded way of living that is our natural way. But even with this in mind, do rules and threats, derived directly from religion or through integration into law, provide a good basis for pro-social behaviour? I am not so sure. And I think there is a huge cost. Because one thing we see is a profusion of dogma-reciters with the power to finance, coerce and kill. Some of them take a line of scripture to justify or celebrate the murder of people they disagree with. Although they proclaim unquestioning allegiance to scripture, their belief that it included the commandment not to kill didn’t stop authorising the recent missile massacre of school girls or torpedoing unarmed sailors returning from an international ceremony. Instead, if we recognise “non-killing” as a commentary on how normal and whole human beings behave, then we immediately see how only a deeply damaged person would be delighting in their war crimes and citing scripture to help.

I have just cited an extreme example. But many institutional religions continue to include brazen declarations, with loud certainties, and an enthusiasm for naming who is out and who is in. Conversely, real courage requires us to become still enough to feel our own emotional and psychological injuries. Real bravery involves us living more in the uncertain space of inviting a direct relationship with the divine, so that loving action, right action, can emerge naturally within us. Universal love transcends our interpretations of scripture, our articulation of concepts, or our following of rules. So although we have grown up hearing about ‘ten commandments’, I now hear ten commentaries about you and I before we were hurt. We don’t need to wear a straight jacket of religious edicts. We only need to remember what standing rooted, tall, and expansive, already feels like. And part of that is to recognise that we are part of the wider flow of consciousness within and beyond nature, rather than merely a separate struggling entity.

With that idea settling in me as we rose to leave the river bank, my heart began to pound. It’s the feeling I get all too often, about the juggernaut of damage that continues around us. I turned to Stephen. “It’s crazy that nothing has really changed.” I said. “Right now, in the name of religion, so much nonsense is being taught, to both kids and adults. Why aren’t we demanding that officials within institutional religion admit the potential damage of misguided interpretations of ancient texts?” My old story of needing an impact began to bubble up. “Stephen, I noticed you stayed away from the strong current. Is it time to swim out of the eddy?” He smiled, raised his eyebrows, and scoffed “You didn’t even get into the eddy. Too much time in the tropics has made you a bit soft, lad.”

Returning past the Church-without-congregation, this time I gave more attention to its graveyard. In some cases it was not just grass but bushes that obscured the text on the grave stones. I pulled some branches back, to see names and years of passing. Mostly, they were people from the 1800s. I imagined someone standing where I was, in the past, cutting the grass, laying flowers, feeling sad, yet probably also grateful. Those mourners have also passed away. But now this headstone was being naturally adorned by cream-white blossoms, a kind of foam atop the grassy swells. Protruding above the meadowsweet flowers were some purple foxgloves. Could I see this as nature’s bouquet? When there is no one left to remember us, nature will lay flowers on our grave. It was then that a deeper calm settled my angst at the distortions of religion, and by religion. Despite our recurring folly, on some level, all will be well.

If there is a next time, maybe I’ll jump in that river.

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Reverend Stephen Wright will be joining us in the August metacrisis salon, to discuss the various issues arising from the spiritual and religious dimensions of collapse awareness. Registration info follows below the picture, for members who are logged in.

***“When there is no one left to remember us, nature will lay flowers on our grave.”***

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AI declaration: I used Deepseek to help me with research into where in the Bible it said about the commandments being in our hearts, as well as what the original Hebrew text said, and whether scholars had previously made the arguments I was developing for this essay. The writing is mine, so my apologies for it not being as polished as AI. Deepseek uses multiples less energy than other AIs.

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How do we wish to live in a fragmenting world?

May 21, 2026May 27, 2026 jembendell1 Comment

We live in a time when people are justifiably questioning everything, including the reality we thought we knew, and the legitimacy of what or whom we once listened to. Both the global data and news, as well as discussions with our nearest and dearest, tell us that humanity is experiencing more difficulties and disruptions in politics, economics, culture, health and the environment than in past decades. Our questioning is underlain with justifiable anxiety, whether explicit or suppressed. It is true that some fears are overblown or manufactured, but some of our fears are well-founded, such as the extent of ecological destruction and technological control. But questioning life from a state of fear, sometimes suppressed into either anger or paralysis, can lead to poor insight as well as our vulnerability to being manipulated in new ways. Instead of a defensive response, we can explore what personal qualities and approaches we would like to cultivate in ourselves, to live well and helpfully as societies are increasingly typified by limits, loss, and instability. With better ideas on that, we could then encourage positive change in the admired qualities in our societies – or at least in some of the educational and training activities that people experience. With this essay I will attempt to feed into such an agenda, by sharing ideas on positive personal orientations for these troubled times.

Initial awakenings

In 2018 I became convinced that, because of ecological and related pressures, the collapse of modern industrial consumer societies is inevitable — and not in the distant future. After I went public about that, a lot of people reached out to me for advice. My main response was to connect them with each other, and so a ‘deep adaptation’ community and movement was born. I also provided some basic advice, in the form of 14 steps in the process of making sense of one’s life after being exposed to troubling analysis on environmental and societal futures. Immediately, I wanted to encourage more loving responses from people who were awakening to the situation, and warned against some of the ‘maladaptive responses’ I believed I had begun to witness. I also noticed and listed the main ways people were responding to news of impending or unfolding societal breakdowns:

“Some people drop everything and change what they do and where they live.
Others postpone any decisions or life changes.
Others try to transition in a gradual way to a new way of life, not shaped by their previous assumptions and aspirations.
Others try to create options, perhaps a Plan B, while they continue with the Plan A of their lives, perhaps with a little less relish and some growing dissonance.
Others decide to make no changes and live the same way but with an added awareness, gratitude and sensitivity.”

Before taking a year away from my university job to study the latest climate science, my career over the previous 20 years had primarily been on environmental issues. After the shock of discovering the situation was worse than I’d known, my attention switched onto how this could have happened. What drove the destruction of our living home, numbed us to the consequences, and disabled our attempts to fix it? Answering those questions involved both a systemic focus and a personal one: I looked into how I’d been shaped by my culture to participate in the mess. The result was a summary of the deep assumptions in modern life that damage our way of relating to each other, wider nature and the sacred. For each habit of thought, I suggested a different approach. Over time, I began to regard this as liberation from systems of ‘Imperial Modernity’ (Box 1, at end).

What has helped me over the years has been meeting people whose awareness of collapse meant they changed their lives significantly in ways they became grateful for. They aren’t being apathetic because they think modern societies are doomed. Instead, they seem to be brave, caring and creative people. Many awakened to the fragility of life and the redundancy of their past deference to dominant norms. I was moved to write a chapter in my book, celebrating such people as masters, not victims, of ‘doom.’ I went on to produce a fledgling list of “Doomster Characteristics”.

Since sharing those previous reflections, I have noticed that being ‘collapse aware’ is becoming more widespread and mainstream, involving people from all walks of life, all personality types, and situations. In that context, it can be useful to explore positive personal approaches, or orientations, for anyone to adopt in this predicament, whatever their situation. That might help us help others as this way of looking at the world moves out of a sub-culture and into the mainstream.

As part of that move into the mainstream, the terms ‘polycrisis’ and ‘metacrisis’ are increasingly being used by some commentators. I see the utility of the term ‘metacrisis’ in pointing to the interrelatedness of the troubles, and to an underlying crisis in the common assumptions, values, beliefs, norms and habits of our societies. Unfortunately, some social commentators avoid that deeper critique when they use the term ‘metacrisis’ to speak of a degradation of the traditional values and economic structures which privilege people like themselves. Such a defensive reaction can be welcomed by elites, as it avoids a deeper reckoning that could lead to global political movements that challenge existing power structures. I think that would be a massive missed opportunity. Instead, we can dive deeper into what to learn from the mess. Therefore, in recent months, I explored healthy forms of masculinity and authentic forms of feminism, in a world suffering from past patterns of behaviour. Now I want to add to the conversation with ideas on the beneficial orientations towards life, from any of us, anywhere, with any identity. Clearly my ideas emerge from my own cultural and biological context, so I hope they feed into a creative evolution of ideas and approaches.

Orientations for reckoning with fragmenting worlds

Over the years, due to the kind of person I am, I have been attempting to make sense of what it is about some people I meet, which makes them able to face the shit and do something meaningful about it. I have done that as a scholar who is no longer an academic. Professionally trained in methodology, and aware of libraries-full of theories and evidence on what we work on, academics tend to hold ourselves back from sharing insights on what we learn through being reflective in life. And yet, if we are curious, well read, attuned to the nature and limits of any knowledge claims, and interested in systematising ideas, then we have some of what it takes to make sense of our everyday experience. In academia that is sometimes called autoethnography, or living theory, amongst other categories. Those methods involve significant requirements for documentation and analysis. That produces analyses which are too verbose for a non-academic reader. Yes, even more verbose than me. For the following list of personal approaches, or orientations, that I have been observing in many collapse-aware people, I don’t claim extensive systematic research. Instead, they can be treated as hypotheses. I encourage you to reflect on whether you can identify some of these orientations in yourself, whether consistent or not, and whether they feel aspirational for you.

Reality-facing: the willingness to recognise and process difficult truths without denial or premature reframing into optimism. This matters because avoiding painful realities only deepens long-term harm, whereas facing them enables genuine response. Unlike the patriarchal habit of performing our invulnerable control, a personal orientation of reality-facing means we return to the courage to see clearly even when it is uncomfortable. This quality is widespread amongst the collapse-aware movement, which is why I previously described “courage” as a key characteristic.

Emotional appreciation: developing our capacity to allow waves of difficult feelings, such as anxiety, grief, or dread, and to value what they might be telling us, without becoming dominated and driven by those feelings. This sensitivity arises from a sense of ‘compassion’ for self and others that I have often witnessed and celebrated amongst the collapse aware. This is important because unprocessed emotions often leak into blame, denial, or paralysis; learning to feel without always falling apart builds our resilience. This orientation departs from the societal norm that equates emotional expression with weakness, instead treating the full range of feelings as a source of intelligence rather than shame.

Critical wisdom: the ability to let go of past assumptions while not becoming manipulated by factions of power, through integrating four key ways of knowing about oneself and the world. Those ways are logical reasoning, mindfulness, intuition and critical literacy. That last one involves our ability to see how language shapes our thoughts in ways that reproduce systems of domination and exploitation. This is important because modern societies typically privilege a single narrow form of rationality while dismissing intuition or embodied knowing as unreliable. This capability is so important for doing anything useful after awakening to collapse, that I wrote the whole of Chapter 7 on it in Breaking Together. Since then, it has become even more important as AI is used to create manipulative content.

Kinship responsibility: recognising our interdependence – with people, sentient creatures, ecosystems, natural forces and future generations – and acting accordingly. This is vital because no one survives or thrives alone, yet societal structures often reward individual dominance over connection. Replacing the pretence of autonomous mastery with a cherishing of our interbeing and mutual responsibility is a joyful invitation from these difficult times. This shift in understanding of the self, as non-separately interconnected with all, is something I pointed to in my articulation of liberation shifts in patterns of thought (Box 1).

Organic meaning: releasing a personal identity based on assumptions of progress in favour of presence, service, self-expression, and participation in living systems. This matters because the modernist fiction of endless linear progress fuels burnout and exploitation, as well as the denial of our challenging reality. Instead, turning toward presence and participation frees us from the anxiety of always needing to become something else, whether as an individual or collective. That is why in my book I wrote about this as an actual freedom from the ideology of progress.

Numinous adaptability: the capacity to adjust our identity, aims and behaviour in response to changing realities, without losing one’s ethical grounding, and welcoming the opportunities for spiritual transformation. This form of adaptability can include letting go of plans, roles, and expectations that no longer fit, while remaining responsive rather than reactive. What makes this adaptability ‘numinous’ is that it’s not about optimisation or survivalism, but one’s integrity and awakening under changing circumstances. This is important because rigid attachment to past roles, identities and aims can make matters worse when situations change. But it is more important than that, as the challenge of these times is a massive invitation to explore the deepest truths of being. That includes not just exploring ‘how do I wish to be in these times’, but what is the ‘who’ that is asking. The ultimate deep adaptation is therefore numinous, spiritual, adaptation. Something, I will return to in a moment.

It is my hypothesis that these orientations are how we can ‘reckon’ better with metacrisis and collapse: Reality-facing, Emotional appreciation, Critical wisdom, Kinship responsibility, Organic meaning, and Numinous adaptability. I want to offer these six orientations as part of the deep adaptation framework, to complement the six questions for reflection on personal and collective changes (the 6 Rs of deep adaptation). The 6Rs give us a way to talk about responding to collapse whereas the 6 orientations can give us pointers on how, and who, we seek to be as we respond.

Heartfulness as the base

The list of orientations is not comprehensive, as other qualities and approaches to life are important. Various wisdom traditions have pointed to them for millennia. Those traditions ask us to explore a deeper source for positive ways of living in the world. That involves our state of consciousness, so we naturally live with a general ‘heartfulness’. How those heartful ways of experiencing life can occur more widely and consistently is an important question, especially as religions have a mixed record of cultivating positive behaviours in societies.

It is no surprise that as concerns spread about the state and future of the world, more people are asking themselves the deepest questions: what is the nature or substance of my being, does the universe and my physical life have meaning, why do I yearn to know such things, and am I even able to comprehend them? What comes from such searching is not necessarily a new and powerful foundation for pro-social behaviour. In the confusion and rush of life, people can feel drawn to voices telling us to believe a particular story and try to be “good” according to that story. Instead of that, I have seen the truth and benefit of experiencing ourselves as part of the flow of life.

Discussing this topic, as well as my previous essays on the healthy masculine and feminine, Reverend Stephen Wright wrote to me that: “The mystic-contemplative way awakens us to being free of our characters, even if those might be healthier versions of identities we have been given or chosen. Rather than trying to teach our characters to be more virtuous, in general or for these times, the mystic-contemplative way transforms the behaviour of the character through another means. It helps us remember and experience the depths of reality, which are made of love, which then leads naturally to compassionate action.”

Some people have concluded that belief in a divine being, or in all of life being divine, is key to inspiring a heartful approach to life. Such faith can be the way for them to experience universal love. Another way for heartfulness to arise in us is by coming to notice that the way the universe exists is demonstrating universal love. That involves reaching an acceptance and gratitude for who we are, our mortality, the mortality of our loved ones, and our lack of ultimate legacy, within a perpetually changing universe that is both wondrous and mysterious to us. It can take some time to reach gratitude, not just acceptance, for those aspects of reality I’ve just listed. Gratitude for mortality? For the mortality of our loved ones? For our lack of ultimate agency? For a perpetually changing universe? For a universe that is wondrous but by the fact of being beyond our comprehension? Gratitude for all of that? It can sound strange at first, but upon reflection, the way the universe exists, in cycles of life and death, with its joys and losses, contains the gift of vibrancy. If we regard (or experience) the world in that way, then everything about it has an underlying flavour of deep love, no matter how painful, awful, and seemingly unbearable, some moments and thoughts might be.

A key insight from the contemplative strands of the world’s religions on the matter of ‘how to be good’ in these times is that we could focus less on striving to improve ourselves and more on letting go of our past concerns. With this in mind, any positive human qualities or approaches, such as the orientations I have outlined in this essay, relate to innate human qualities that have been suppressed in us by cultural influences. Therefore, our path is not one of augmentation but of liberation. This aspect of our ‘numinous adaptability’, is something I’ll explore further in future essays. Previously, I discussed it a little in interviews, for Buddha at the Gas Pump by Richard Archer, for Reskillience, by Catie Payne, and for WiserNow with Carlota Guedes. A television documentary on my journey also explored similar themes.

Enabling positive orientations to collapse

Not everyone responds well to becoming aware of metacrisis and collapse. Unfortunately, many institutions and people who are taking collapse seriously are seeking their audiences’ allegiance to culturally-specific stories of good and bad in ways that affirm their own identity as good and thus numb their existential pain. With that in mind, our opportunity, if we choose to accept it, is to promote alternatives to such dynamics, at whatever scale, so that more of us can respond in the positive ways we know are possible. Some resources for that exist in mystic-contemplative traditions and persons today. More tools and networks could be developed to help people discover such ideas.

These days, my effort to enable positive orientations to collapse is the design and launch of peer mentoring within the Metacrisis Initiative. For that, I am building on the benefits and limitations of the professional coaching and life coaching methods I am aware of (which I explored in some detail previously).

In our next Metacrisis Salon we will discuss the six orientations I have outlined in this essay. Joining us will be Dr. Josie Mclean, who has recently been recognised among twelve global pioneers of “regenerative coaching.” I will also be asking her how, in general life, she invites herself and others into positivity, creativity, and service, beyond the paradigm of fixing things and progressing. Then we will discuss the implications of bringing such ideas into professional activity as a coach. You need to be a member to join our conversation (info follows at the end). But if you can’t join either the salons or the peer mentoring, please consider helping them to grow, by taking out a paid subscription. This work is entirely financed by people like you who decide to support it.

Box 1: Shifting damaging assumptions: escape to cosmos

The culture of ‘imperial modernity’ shapes the human experience of the world to maintain hierarchies and drive expansion. This culture involves deep assumptions which lead to habits of thought and behaviour. Our liberation is helped by recognising them and considering alternatives. The habit of entitlement involves thinking “I expect more of what I like and to be helped to feel fine…” Instead, a quality of compassion, in this context, involves sensing that “I feel an active responsibility for any of my contribution to your suffering, without expecting to feel right, better, or worse.” The habit of surety involves thinking “I will define you and everything in my experience so that I feel calmer…” Instead, a quality of openness wishes that “I will keep returning to be curious about as much as I can, however unnerving.” The habit of control involves thinking “I will try to impose on you and everything, including myself, so I feel safer…” Instead, a quality of serenity involves allowing the feeling that “I appreciate the dignity of you, myself and all life, however disturbing situations might seem.” The habit of autonomy involves thinking and feeling “I must be completely separate in my mind and being, because otherwise I would not exist…” Instead, a quality of mutuality involves remembering “as this world has produced me and societies have shaped me, I will question all my understandings and ways of relating with others.” The habit of progress involves thinking and feeling “the future must contain a legacy from me, or make sense to me now, because if not, then when I die, I would die even more…” Instead, a quality of oneness awareness involves sensing “what is important is how I live more lovingly right here and now, without needing to believe that I matter or am improving.” The habit of exceptionalism means assuming “I am annoyed in this world because much about it upsets me and so I believe I’m better and/or needed…” Instead, a quality of solidarity involves acting from the part of you that knows “our common sadness and frustration arises from our mutual love for all life and motivates us towards fairness, justice and healing.” Taken from: How do we disentangle from destructive ideology? The cosmos remedy – Jem Bendell (2020)

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