Earth Day and its ironies.
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Hello friends,
I miss writing to you all! I've been writing a lot but for work, although I'm trying to turn some of them into blogposts too.
This week, I want to share a metaphor that I've been developing about The Matrix.
It came from a conversation a few months ago with two respected mentors who happen to be a couple. I asked them the seemingly simple question "What do you really do?"
One said "I help people navigate the matrix".
The other responded somewhat cheekily "I help people get out and back into the matrix"
What a brilliant answer from a chemistry couple :-)
Let me elaborate more.
If you haven't watched or heard about the movie The Matrix, its basic sci-fi setup is about how we may all be living in super comfy Virtual Reality Matrix world but confuse it for the Real world, which is a dystopian, resource-depleted futuristic Earth.
In the movie, the main character Neo got picked out of the Matrix world, learn some truths in the real world (and plenty of Kungfu :P ), then plunge himself back into the matrix again to do the work he originally was picked out for.
You can't just go to the Real world to learn truths & kungfu for their own sake. You learn them so that you can go back into the matrix again, better equipped this time, to truly understand the source of it all.
The most important point is that no one world is better than the other. Both worlds are connected; if you die in one world, you'll die in both.
Let's bring this matrix metaphor home.
As a young adult who's tip toeing into the World - be it the worlds of career, money, love and relationships to the deeper questions of meaning and purpose (which is a thing among privileged Millennials these days including myself), sometimes I feel a little bit awkward and overwhelmed. I know I'm certainly not alone.
Awkward as if we are just at the beginning of life.
Overwhelmed at how much we still have to learn in the seeming infinity of whatever domains we are entering.
How do you navigate the matrix then?
While you are in the there doing the Work you were chosen to do, you'll need at least
- someone out of the matrix who can pull you out once your are done or you get too damaged.
- an insider guide. Otherwise, you get nowhere near the matrix.
I'll write more about this topic in the future, but for now hopefully it gives you an useful framing, especially when you feel stuck in one world. I also wish that you'd find people who can fill those roles well, who are experienced, loving, wise and caring for you.
Best,
Khuyen
Earth Day and what to do with its irony
Reconciling digital technology and environmentalism
I found out that today is Earth Day because I read on Facebook using my Chinese phone assembled in India and shipped via ship through Amazon US.
All of this production, of course, is the reason why we need an Earth Day more than ever. What an irony.
I remember asking Joanna Macy, a personal heroine, a question I've been baffled with "How is this that techno-utopian people of Silicon Valley can live right next to environmental activists in Berkeley who felt the inevitable painful degradation of the surrounding?"
Sometimes it exists in the same person. Like me. I'm a modern city dweller doing my little part to feel less guilty about overusing plastic bags, who also happens to hang out with both environmentally conscious as well as tech-enthusiast. I'm occasionally feeling torn, but mostly I'm just numb because this paradox is just too big to hold.
I'm weary of the optimism in using technology to prevent environmental destruction. It sounds like an irony, despite whatever Elon Musk and other techno-optimists are saying and doing. It reminds of this quote by Einstein also "no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it"
So what is a different consciousness and perception? How do you bring about that?
Many people have been doing work in this field. One of them with a penchant for the written language is David Abram, who ironically writes about the deadening effect of the written word.
I read his first book, Spell of the Sensuous in Fall 2017 as I came back from Touch & Play 2017 camp and finished reading Nature and the Human Soul, both of which have had such a deep impact on my perception of the world. Environmental destruction is not even a problem to be solved, let alone by techno-wizardry. It's a reality to be experienced and an invitation for us to see the world anew. As wounded and loving partner.
“Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass.
Even David Abram writes in human language of English. He dances around with words, firmly stepping in complete coherence yet teetering on the edge of incomprehensibility, just at the periphery of virtuoso wordsmith and provocative trickstery that poke with our all-too-human sentience.
It reminds myself of Venkatesh Rao's powerful essay on Deep Play and innovation, which uses the ironic story of how Seattle's Gates Foundation serving in-the-world cause is located right next to Amazon's aerospace serving out-of-the-world desires.
I salute, and I feel pained reading this essay by David Abram.
I hope you feel the same.
As we enter more deeply into the world of ubiquituous computing, we increasingly seal ourselves into an exclusively human zone of interaction. We enter into a bizzare kind of inTRA-species incest.
- Yet it’s the alterity or otherness of things—the weirdly different awareness of a humpback whale sounding its eerie glissandos through the depths, or an orb-weaver spider spinning the cosmos out of her abdomen; or the complex intelligence of an old-growth forest, dank with mushrooms and bracket fungi, humming with insects and haunted by owls—it’s the wild, more-than-human otherness of these powers that makes any attentive relation with such beings a genuine form of magic, a trancelike negotiation between outrageously divergent worlds.
Without such radical otherness, there’s no magic. Wandering around inside a huge extension of our own nervous system is not likely to bring a renewal of creaturely wonder, or a recovery of ancestral capacities. It may keep us fascinated for a time but also vaguely unsatisfied and so always thirsty for the next invention, the next gadget that might finally satisfy our craving, might assuage our vague sense that something momentous is missing. Except it won’t.
PERHAPS IT IS EASIER to understand, now, why we’re so enthralled by our digital technologies, such that once we’re online and synapsed to the screen, it’s remarkably difficult to tear ourselves away. For all these technologies awaken something primordial in us, a biophilic proclivity layered deep in our genome, a penchant for animate interchange with bodies whose shapes are very different from our own. The renewal of that age-old animistic sense of a world all alive, awake, and aware brings an upwelling of wonder, or at least an anticipation of a wondrous possibility waiting just around the corner. And so we remain transfixed by these tools, searching in and through our digital engagements for an encounter they seem to promise yet never really provide: the consummate encounter with otherness, with radical alterity, with styles of sensibility and intelligence that thoroughly exceed the limits of our own sentience. Yet there’s the paradox: for the more we engage these remarkable tools, the less available we are for any actual contact outside the purely human estate. In truth, the more we participate with these astonishing technologies, the more we seal ourselves into an exclusively human cocoon, and the more our animal senses—themselves co-evolved with the winds, the waters, and the many-voiced terrain—are blunted, rendering us ever more blind, ever more deaf, ever more impervious to the more-than-human Earth.
Which brings us, finally, back to our initial question: What is the primary relation, if there is any actual relation, between the two contrasting collective moods currently circulating through contemporary society—between the upbeat technological optimism coursing through many social circles and the mood of ecological despondency and grief that so many other persons seem to be feeling? As a writer who uses digital technology, I can affirm that these tools are enabling many useful, astounding, and even magical possibilities. But all this virtual magic is taking a steep toll. For many long years this techno-wizardry has been blunting our creaturely senses, interrupting the instinctive rapport between our senses and the earthly sensuous. It’s been short-circuiting the spontaneous reciprocity between our animal body and the animate terrain, disrupting the very attunement that keeps us apprised of what’s going on in our locale—the simple, somatic affinity that entangles our body with the bodies of other creatures, binding our sentience with that of the local earth. Today, caught up in our fascination with countless screen-fitted gadgets, we’re far more aloof from the life of the land around us, and hence much less likely to notice the steady plundering of these woodlands and wetlands, the choking of the winds and the waters by the noxious by-products of the many industries we now rely on. As these insults to the elemental earth pile up—as the waters are rendered lifeless by more chemical runoff, by more oil spills, by giant patches of plastic rotating in huge gyres; as more glaciers melt and more forests succumb to the stresses of a destabilized climate—the sensorial world of our carnal experience is increasingly filled with horrific wounds, wounds that we feel in our flesh whenever we dare to taste the world with our creaturely senses. It’s too damned painful. Hence there’s ever more reason to retreat from the body’s world, to avoid the sensuous terrain with its droughts and its floods and its flaring wildfires, taking refuge in ever more mediated and virtual spaces. Thus do we render ourselves ever more numb. Ever more deaf to the anguished cries of other creatures, ever more oblivious to the vanishing of species, ever more inured to the steady flattening of the Real. Ever more calloused and closed to the shuddering pain of the biosphere, breathing.
The entire essay by David Abram, aptly titled Magic & The Machine can be found here, passionately narrated by him also.
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Quotes I'm contemplating this week
"If you are not, at a foundational level of who you are, enjoying life, then you are doing it wrong" - Richard Rohr in his Enneagram lecture.
As cheeky and judgmental as it may sound at first, he has a point. When we realize our existence itself, despite (and perhaps even because of) the suffering, is still fundamental an act of Love from the creator, we'll make that shift.
"When you look at the sky, it's the universe is looking at itself looking" -
The physicist Brian Swimme in this beautiful, mesmerizing interview with Charles Eisenstein.
Lastly..
For a while now, I've been occasionally flipping the book, To Bless the Space between Us by John O'Donohue. It's a beautiful gem of wisdom, with lyrical words that will continue to sing inside you for days.
For those who are contemplating change, or just beginning.
FOR A NEW BEGINNING
- John O'Donohue
In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
Khuyen
P/s: Do reach out for the Inner Critic Assessment or general conversations about life. I'd love to be of service when you get stuck.