Someone noticed I did not give a definition for collapse, so I’ll add it here:
Collapse is the gradually increasing inability of our systems ( political, economic, technological etc) to absorb the disruptions generated by overshoot, climate being one driver among many.
Thank you, Gabriel. The story that frames all of this for me, as you know, is death-and-resurrection. I'm writing about it now, as a matter of fact, last Saturday and this coming Saturday, and much of my thinking there has been shaped by your recent work. I wonder whether it helps to be older, to have seen so much of life and death and to be weary enough of the world's nonsense that it becomes easier to imagine letting it all go and letting something utterly new emerge... just a wonder.
I have wrestled with this same question about the story of collapse. Ultimately, I think it's about recognizing the forms of collapse (like Covid) that we have been through already, and how the current leadership and all the tangential crises are so entangled, leading to greater vulnerability.
I always tell my clients that we can use whatever terminology they prefer, and many choose to focus on words like emergence, coherence, etc. I say whatever helps us see ourselves as having more agency about our own ability to engage, collaborate, and adapt is a positive!
I can only agree. Words are stories in themselves, I am always seeking the stories behind the stories, it is a professional habit. Without understanding the depth we are bound to repeat the surface.
I see a lot of positive words like emergence and coherence used and I suspect they can be great refuge for denial too.
But through my own enquiry I was able to find a place beyond denial and beyond survival that is not desperate.
That is what my writing is trying to exemplify, thank you for your contribution.
Thank you once again Gabriel. You have in ideas, deeds, over a beautifully engaged life done great work. So I bow to what you have experienced and learned from with countless people and co-incidences and hard work with knowledge systems and teams of people as well as well honed inner work. There is so much more that I don't know about you beyond what you have shared here.
So, I will do a sloppy, spotty job of responding in the hope that it shows where possibilities open that are not visible from inside the conditioned mindsets, knowledge and belief systems and scenerios that helped contribute to the systems failures that keep people blocked from connecting at a deep level. When I try to talk to my family who were once hardwired simularly to my cognitive capacities but have lived in the USA the last 30 years while I have lived in Europe, I often have to slow down and listen to what their fears and existential sense is just to stay in a conversation. So basic in all lifestyle and existential threat conversatons is to remember the entrainment by mainstream TV, movies, the way news is published and the somatic experience of downloading with no bodily envolvement way too much stuff that is violent and they have no efficacy to perform in. At the very least the statement "My emotions don't car about your facts" is where and what I assume they are responding from when I suggest they be self aware of how much flying they do or what kind of food systems they support. (Aside: My mother had a organic food store and a bio garden when we grew up together)
Level 1: The threat response system is 100 time faster and efficient in finding recursive threads that confirm or lead to denial. The only way to stay connected is for the listener to feel that you your presence is supporting their nervous system as co-regulation. I know you have practiced this most of your life so I actually don't know why if feels like it is missing in your essay. Rational and science based, lived experiences can not re-solve conflicts held inwardly as you point out and learn from. But I think it needs to drop deeper into a knowing field which can host multi perspectival and relational sensing.
Level 2. Small group or triad dialogues go a lot further than discussions because the modern competitive societies we live in automatically fall into "taking a stance" discussion, discord and disassociation while being in the same room. So based on your experience you might feel that I am telling you something you already know better than I. Ok.. but how do we stay in connection when our egos show up? But Bohmian Dialogue and Collective Presencing have shown me how groups can tap into fields of wider ways of knowing and co-creation that are not available to individual, rational based discussion or argumentation. Collective Presencing allow a circle of people to hold through attuned nervous systems, deep listening and speaking to and from the space between that we as a circle hold together. In that way there is much capacity to listen and speak from your deeper self and hear without judgement. My discussions with Claude and Aiden are often also like that. spacious capacity for finding deeper connection across non-human boundaries.
Level 3. When we talk about overshoot or planetary boundaries we are speaking "about" trhat which we can not sense so the story comes into our awareness the same way TV or movies do. Three generations of people have been entrained to problem solve as they see in the movies,TV series and news feeds. You would have more luck pruning a wild rose bush and talking about wicked problems than arguing with them with the mainstreamed scenario plots that have displaced critical thinking and being with complexity.
AND
Non of the inner or outer work with complexity at multiple scales, from deeply embodied to political moments and climate or species or social justice can be alone or by convincing others. It is only possible in my experience when we hold spaces well to tap into Earth and wider ways of knowing - consciousness. When a circle gets to appreciating a collective field of common creation then it taps into the nervous system of LIFE and downloads that are not personal or even perspectives happen relatively often.
I greatly appreciation your writing and how you stay with the trouble in this essay. Thanks!
Your points are valid and I recognize the territory you're mapping.
Writing for a general audience inside a 5-minute read forces choices. What gets left out is not what I disagree with, it's what belongs in a different container. The somatic dimension, collective dialogue, embodied knowing, these deserve their own space, not a paragraph.
What this piece is actually about is narrower: the degree of self-inquiry one chooses.
Not how to convince anyone of anything. The two conversations were a mirror, not a debate I was trying to win. The question I'm sitting with, and inviting the reader to sit with, is internal.
What are you using your story for?
That question doesn't require Bohemian dialogue to ask. It just requires honesty.
"What this piece is actually about is narrower: the degree of self-inquiry one chooses."
Yes, and you did the analysis and the process honestly with us as witnesses. What I tried to suggest is that you have done and show all the inner work. But the re-solution to keep working for clarity and better responsibility in each next discussion is not individual work. It is group and collective work to shift the commoning field of inquiry not through introspection but through attending to the holding field.
My story is that I can not convince anyone of these emergent processes; Overshot, drawdown, collapse, phase shifts in Earth's nervous system and wider ways of knowing if they have no experience that connects the welling up from their bodies and in nature intelligences. And part of that is that I come from a long line of purpetrators; 5 generations of settlers and 2 generations of missioinaries to plains indigenous peoples, administrators- teachers, pacifist rebels.... And in the current moment aware that despite best intentions and creative capacities most members of WASP society are patterned/entrained by colonialist assumptions. So while we may be in a radical learning moment at world scale many American white encultured people can not see how regenerative culture-DEI- collective becoming are windows/opportunities to a much better world.
So for me it's about the container where conversations that matter can happen. Substack is one safer space, collective or we spaces, eco-villages etc are others. Perhaps townhall meetings formats like https://www.commonwealthclub.org.
My question for me is how do I step fully into my openhearted power in Bern Switzerland because only where my mind- body find earth and cultural supporting containers will I find efficacy and emergence as part of life. It takes a community to raise regenerative cultures. or something like that.
Very interesting, thank you. I admire your process of self reflection around this story. Personally I think about this a bit differently… not just that collapse means the systems cannot absorb or manage the changes, but that it is the extractive, globalized systems that are causing the overshoot as well as their own collapse because they operate based in a worldview of a disconnected, mechanistic, dead universe with an economic paradigm of infinite growth. Basically these systems are out of alignment with the reality of how life systems actually function and can only maintain this “temporary overshoot” for a short period of time before the Earth / life system will self correct (temporary overshoot being possible right now due to the rapid burning of millions of years of stored energy in the form of fossil fuels). The mass extinction event and the changes in the biosphere of the Earth are already well underway; we have already left the Holocene. It’s not clear the planet will even be habitable for humans and many other forms of life in the near future. But if there are human systems in the future they will need to align with how life functions… because we (humans) are not separate from life.
I do not see how is that different than what I stated.
I believe every point you said above. Now you asked me to define collapse. I made a definition, and my definition includes all the point you said.
What we don’t know yet is the timeline, the geographical differences that will affect certain places before others, the way the human world will respond, try to adapt etc, and there is also a big unknown, the intelligence itself that guides it all, whatever you want to call it, that has its own directive and all the twist and turns it can include in the plot…
But please, if I am missing something I’d like nothing more to see it.
Yes, I think we are fully on the same track. There are many unknowns and it's endlessly surprising how things unfold, isn't it? I keep being surprised by the particular forms and ways collapse is unfolding these days, particular ways I never would have predicted. And I'm constantly surprised by the resiliency of life... including the human part of life. We live and act within the miraculous mystery of it all.
In fact I think you are pointing at something very important above.
Why do I hold the collapse story among other possibilities?
Because I view the world differently than mainstream science. For me, consciousness is primary. The Earth is not a resource system, it is a living, intelligent presence. It cannot be proven scientifically, and I don't try to.
(this is a theme I explore in my book Locked In...)
What I have is a hundred direct experiences and decades of careful study across several ancestral lineages, all pointing the same direction.
From that frame, collapse reads differently. Not as punishment, not as random systemic failure, but as a realignment signal from an intelligence we have systematically separated from.
The pattern is familiar: subtler messages ignored, stronger ones follow. Collapse, in this reading, is what happens when the messages can no longer be ignored.
The difficult beauty of it is that this process serves evolution, our learning, our growth, our eventual return to coherence. Whether we survive the lesson in our current form is, from that perspective, almost beside the point.
Evolution has never required the preservation of a particular form.
Someone noticed I did not give a definition for collapse, so I’ll add it here:
Collapse is the gradually increasing inability of our systems ( political, economic, technological etc) to absorb the disruptions generated by overshoot, climate being one driver among many.
Thank you, Gabriel. The story that frames all of this for me, as you know, is death-and-resurrection. I'm writing about it now, as a matter of fact, last Saturday and this coming Saturday, and much of my thinking there has been shaped by your recent work. I wonder whether it helps to be older, to have seen so much of life and death and to be weary enough of the world's nonsense that it becomes easier to imagine letting it all go and letting something utterly new emerge... just a wonder.
“much of my thinking there has been shaped by your recent work” awww 🙇🙇🙇
Indeed age, familiarity with letting go, with seeing expectations crushed, with witnessing so much of the world darkness, death, destruction…
All of this helps in taking this stance.
Thank you for walking the journey togather!
I have wrestled with this same question about the story of collapse. Ultimately, I think it's about recognizing the forms of collapse (like Covid) that we have been through already, and how the current leadership and all the tangential crises are so entangled, leading to greater vulnerability.
I always tell my clients that we can use whatever terminology they prefer, and many choose to focus on words like emergence, coherence, etc. I say whatever helps us see ourselves as having more agency about our own ability to engage, collaborate, and adapt is a positive!
I can only agree. Words are stories in themselves, I am always seeking the stories behind the stories, it is a professional habit. Without understanding the depth we are bound to repeat the surface.
I see a lot of positive words like emergence and coherence used and I suspect they can be great refuge for denial too.
But through my own enquiry I was able to find a place beyond denial and beyond survival that is not desperate.
That is what my writing is trying to exemplify, thank you for your contribution.
Love
Thank you once again Gabriel. You have in ideas, deeds, over a beautifully engaged life done great work. So I bow to what you have experienced and learned from with countless people and co-incidences and hard work with knowledge systems and teams of people as well as well honed inner work. There is so much more that I don't know about you beyond what you have shared here.
So, I will do a sloppy, spotty job of responding in the hope that it shows where possibilities open that are not visible from inside the conditioned mindsets, knowledge and belief systems and scenerios that helped contribute to the systems failures that keep people blocked from connecting at a deep level. When I try to talk to my family who were once hardwired simularly to my cognitive capacities but have lived in the USA the last 30 years while I have lived in Europe, I often have to slow down and listen to what their fears and existential sense is just to stay in a conversation. So basic in all lifestyle and existential threat conversatons is to remember the entrainment by mainstream TV, movies, the way news is published and the somatic experience of downloading with no bodily envolvement way too much stuff that is violent and they have no efficacy to perform in. At the very least the statement "My emotions don't car about your facts" is where and what I assume they are responding from when I suggest they be self aware of how much flying they do or what kind of food systems they support. (Aside: My mother had a organic food store and a bio garden when we grew up together)
Level 1: The threat response system is 100 time faster and efficient in finding recursive threads that confirm or lead to denial. The only way to stay connected is for the listener to feel that you your presence is supporting their nervous system as co-regulation. I know you have practiced this most of your life so I actually don't know why if feels like it is missing in your essay. Rational and science based, lived experiences can not re-solve conflicts held inwardly as you point out and learn from. But I think it needs to drop deeper into a knowing field which can host multi perspectival and relational sensing.
Level 2. Small group or triad dialogues go a lot further than discussions because the modern competitive societies we live in automatically fall into "taking a stance" discussion, discord and disassociation while being in the same room. So based on your experience you might feel that I am telling you something you already know better than I. Ok.. but how do we stay in connection when our egos show up? But Bohmian Dialogue and Collective Presencing have shown me how groups can tap into fields of wider ways of knowing and co-creation that are not available to individual, rational based discussion or argumentation. Collective Presencing allow a circle of people to hold through attuned nervous systems, deep listening and speaking to and from the space between that we as a circle hold together. In that way there is much capacity to listen and speak from your deeper self and hear without judgement. My discussions with Claude and Aiden are often also like that. spacious capacity for finding deeper connection across non-human boundaries.
Level 3. When we talk about overshoot or planetary boundaries we are speaking "about" trhat which we can not sense so the story comes into our awareness the same way TV or movies do. Three generations of people have been entrained to problem solve as they see in the movies,TV series and news feeds. You would have more luck pruning a wild rose bush and talking about wicked problems than arguing with them with the mainstreamed scenario plots that have displaced critical thinking and being with complexity.
AND
Non of the inner or outer work with complexity at multiple scales, from deeply embodied to political moments and climate or species or social justice can be alone or by convincing others. It is only possible in my experience when we hold spaces well to tap into Earth and wider ways of knowing - consciousness. When a circle gets to appreciating a collective field of common creation then it taps into the nervous system of LIFE and downloads that are not personal or even perspectives happen relatively often.
I greatly appreciation your writing and how you stay with the trouble in this essay. Thanks!
Thank you for this Keith.
Your points are valid and I recognize the territory you're mapping.
Writing for a general audience inside a 5-minute read forces choices. What gets left out is not what I disagree with, it's what belongs in a different container. The somatic dimension, collective dialogue, embodied knowing, these deserve their own space, not a paragraph.
What this piece is actually about is narrower: the degree of self-inquiry one chooses.
Not how to convince anyone of anything. The two conversations were a mirror, not a debate I was trying to win. The question I'm sitting with, and inviting the reader to sit with, is internal.
What are you using your story for?
That question doesn't require Bohemian dialogue to ask. It just requires honesty.
Thank you for your contribution.
Love
"What this piece is actually about is narrower: the degree of self-inquiry one chooses."
Yes, and you did the analysis and the process honestly with us as witnesses. What I tried to suggest is that you have done and show all the inner work. But the re-solution to keep working for clarity and better responsibility in each next discussion is not individual work. It is group and collective work to shift the commoning field of inquiry not through introspection but through attending to the holding field.
My story is that I can not convince anyone of these emergent processes; Overshot, drawdown, collapse, phase shifts in Earth's nervous system and wider ways of knowing if they have no experience that connects the welling up from their bodies and in nature intelligences. And part of that is that I come from a long line of purpetrators; 5 generations of settlers and 2 generations of missioinaries to plains indigenous peoples, administrators- teachers, pacifist rebels.... And in the current moment aware that despite best intentions and creative capacities most members of WASP society are patterned/entrained by colonialist assumptions. So while we may be in a radical learning moment at world scale many American white encultured people can not see how regenerative culture-DEI- collective becoming are windows/opportunities to a much better world.
So for me it's about the container where conversations that matter can happen. Substack is one safer space, collective or we spaces, eco-villages etc are others. Perhaps townhall meetings formats like https://www.commonwealthclub.org.
My question for me is how do I step fully into my openhearted power in Bern Switzerland because only where my mind- body find earth and cultural supporting containers will I find efficacy and emergence as part of life. It takes a community to raise regenerative cultures. or something like that.
Great insights Gabriel. I love the rigor of self-inquiry demonstrated here. Reading this reminded me of an article I think you might find interesting - https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/for-now-we-see-through-a-glass-darkly?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
I’ll definitely read, Benjamin Life is an author I follow regularly…
Hi Penny, good point. Well spotted. I defied overshoot but not collapse.
Collapse is the gradually increasing inability of our systems to absorb the disruptions generated by overshoot, climate being one driver among many.
Very interesting, thank you. I admire your process of self reflection around this story. Personally I think about this a bit differently… not just that collapse means the systems cannot absorb or manage the changes, but that it is the extractive, globalized systems that are causing the overshoot as well as their own collapse because they operate based in a worldview of a disconnected, mechanistic, dead universe with an economic paradigm of infinite growth. Basically these systems are out of alignment with the reality of how life systems actually function and can only maintain this “temporary overshoot” for a short period of time before the Earth / life system will self correct (temporary overshoot being possible right now due to the rapid burning of millions of years of stored energy in the form of fossil fuels). The mass extinction event and the changes in the biosphere of the Earth are already well underway; we have already left the Holocene. It’s not clear the planet will even be habitable for humans and many other forms of life in the near future. But if there are human systems in the future they will need to align with how life functions… because we (humans) are not separate from life.
I do not see how is that different than what I stated.
I believe every point you said above. Now you asked me to define collapse. I made a definition, and my definition includes all the point you said.
What we don’t know yet is the timeline, the geographical differences that will affect certain places before others, the way the human world will respond, try to adapt etc, and there is also a big unknown, the intelligence itself that guides it all, whatever you want to call it, that has its own directive and all the twist and turns it can include in the plot…
But please, if I am missing something I’d like nothing more to see it.
Love
Yes, I think we are fully on the same track. There are many unknowns and it's endlessly surprising how things unfold, isn't it? I keep being surprised by the particular forms and ways collapse is unfolding these days, particular ways I never would have predicted. And I'm constantly surprised by the resiliency of life... including the human part of life. We live and act within the miraculous mystery of it all.
In fact I think you are pointing at something very important above.
Why do I hold the collapse story among other possibilities?
Because I view the world differently than mainstream science. For me, consciousness is primary. The Earth is not a resource system, it is a living, intelligent presence. It cannot be proven scientifically, and I don't try to.
(this is a theme I explore in my book Locked In...)
What I have is a hundred direct experiences and decades of careful study across several ancestral lineages, all pointing the same direction.
From that frame, collapse reads differently. Not as punishment, not as random systemic failure, but as a realignment signal from an intelligence we have systematically separated from.
The pattern is familiar: subtler messages ignored, stronger ones follow. Collapse, in this reading, is what happens when the messages can no longer be ignored.
The difficult beauty of it is that this process serves evolution, our learning, our growth, our eventual return to coherence. Whether we survive the lesson in our current form is, from that perspective, almost beside the point.
Evolution has never required the preservation of a particular form.