Apathy is a state that most of us live within.
It says: ‘I can’t’. Often it means ‘I won’t’.
I’m too old, too young, too late, too stupid, too bold. They’d never accept me. I’d never measure up. What’s the point?
All apathy.
There are so many more. Fatalism, confusion, despair, hopelessness, helplessness. So often in my life, I have searched for a saviour; idealized or idolized someone who I thought would take me out of my life and bring me to the fresh greener stuff on the other side of the river bank.
Mentors are good, saviours are bad.
A fast track to finding yourself in codependent behaviours. Frustrating, disempowering, or infuriating. You’d have to get it together pretty quick and start to steer your ship.
According to David R Hawkins, in his book ‘Letting Go’:
The biologic purpose of apathy is to summon aid, but part of the feeling is that no help is possible.
That’s a double bind, a position that you find yourself in that’s impossible to fulfill. How are you supposed to summon and receive aid when you don’t believe that you can receive help?
I see this double-bind as arising from the more massive double bind of the Culture Of Separation. This describes humanity’s need to dominate their environment.
One side of them is naturally acting to summon aid, the other side of us; conditioned by our contemporary culture, is trying to dominate, control, and sublimate others to stay safe.
The very nature of trying to be individual cuts you off from the aid that you seek. So you enter a push and pull dance. Often passive-aggressive as the underlying intentions are hidden well below the surface.
Alan Watts talks about this in his book ‘The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are’:
The deeper troubles arise when we confuse ourselves and our fundamental relationships to the world with fictions (or figures of thought) which are taken for granted, unexamined, and often self-contradictory. Here, as we have also seen, the “nub” problem is the self-contradictory definition of man himself as a separate and independent being in the world, as distinct from a special action of the world.
How do you fulfill the role of conquering nature, when you are a part of nature?
You believe in humanity as separate from the ecosystem. We have made this ruse elaborate, and I could be argue that we have achieved separation, yet now our chickens are coming home to roost. We now face the decision of whether to maintain that separation, when it is so damaging to the wider ecosystem. Our impact on the planet is becoming clear; our narcissistic, childish purpose has had consequences to which we were blind.
We have taken a toll on the ecosystem.
In his recent film David Attenborough describes how we have destroyed the biodiversity of our planet, in the time that he has been a presenter, he’s watched it happen, and he hangs his head in sadness and grief.
Attenborough is 92; he’s still fighting for the planet; he openly admits that he wishes he could retire, but he can’t because his conscience won’t let him.
This situation won’t change unless we face our apathy. Like the neglected child who burns down the village only to feel warmth, we have built our funeral pyre.
If one day, the child awakes, matures, to his childish and blinkered dream, he might fathom the destruction of the very environment that could’ve sustained warmth, of a different kind. If only he had had the senses to sense it.
He didn’t, and that is a fact to be observed.
Right now, humanity is living in apathy to the changing climate. We, as a collective, cannot cooperate, or communicate adequately around it.
The fires are raging in our suburban neighbourhoods, tornadoes are ripping more ferociously, hurricanes are more frequently building off of the ocean, and it’s creating numbing and apathy.
We must give up our story of separation; the story of a stupid, cold, and empty nature, one that is only there to provide a resource to us.
Intelligence implies an intelligent environment.
~ Alan Watts ~
Life is progressive.
Consider the Earth as it formed, and each stage of life something joined; created an entirely new thing. Does that seem cold, stupid, or empty to you?
The collective ‘we’ who seek to dominate this planet have lived in competition to nature. That game is reaching levels that we can no longer control. Playing the Universe at that game has bad odds for humanity. We are seeing scenarios that are beyond our powerful reach.
A lesson for humanity.
Recognize our interbeing, interdependence, interpersonal Selves.
Turn inward, and understand how your skills can best contribute to this scenario.
A recent cover of the New Scientist magazine reads: “The Other Global Crisis — While the world’s been distracted by coronavirus, climate change has been ramping up. Here’s what you need to know”.
Now is not the time for apathy.
That’s hard to hear, it’s even harder to face the fears that keep us in apathy, or the shame and guilt of how we’ve destroyed our biodiversity, treated people unkind, or hated ourselves for something.
That’s the journey, and I’m not claiming it’s easy, however, if you need the motivation to be courageous, there has never been more.
If you’d like inspiration on how to live in the Story Of Interbeing, I’d recommend these four resources:
It’s not the only biodiversity that is struggling at this time; the monocultures that we have set up are beginning to struggle. Soil erosion is one of them. This recent film, featuring Woody Harrelson, describes it well.
We are struggling to maintain these food monocultures because we have to destroy the biodiversity in the soil to keep them functioning. The one aspect of this that we cannot control is soil health, and that’s the very thing that we need to grow the food. We dump pesticides on the crops, which kills microorganisms, and fungi systems which decompose and rejuvenate the soil.
It reminds me of Interstellar, the film about humanity’s struggle to feed everyone because the Earth turned to dust. It’s looking a little too close for comfort. We need to change our collective habits.
The higher means of production are:
- Not sustaining our hunger — because a lot of the hunger comes from emotional needs or disconnection.
- Destroying the soul and habitat that we need to be sustainable.
All of this is to say that we don’t function optimally as controllers; we are better as nurturers, or regulators.
That goes well with the philosophical question around the brain. Does the brain control the body? Or does the body control the brain?
Well, it’s neither. They work together.
There’s equal agency in the argument that the brain developed to control the body, as there is in the idea that the stomach developed a brain to keep food coming into it. The intellect performs a subtle trick to feel safe; it sells us a story that it is in complete control.
A neocortex is a vital tool that we have. It interprets and regulates the hormonal structure of the body based on the signals from the body. There are way more signals coming from the body to the brain, than the brain to the body. [link] Evolutionarily, this makes sense. The first brain to be developed was the stomach, heart, and reptilian brain, it’s millions of years older than the neocortex. The next to develop was the limbic brain, which understands emotional experience, then the neocortex, which takes the signals from the others, and forms a rational understanding of them.
David Hawkins goes on to suggest that three things keep us in the apathy space:
- Blaming externally
- Always choosing the negative thought
- The company we keep
Keeping ourselves in apathy is easy because we can say that it’s not our fault. The challenge with that is, it’s a lie. Every one of us is responsible, and accountable for our own lives, and how we contribute to the society we live in, and the Earth which provides us energy; life.
Blaming others, always choosing to see the negative, and keeping company with other people who celebrate misery, and apathy keeps us stuck. It keeps humanity in the same pattern of behaviour.
Our world is already changing perceptibly. Do we need the seas to start rising before we wake up?
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Warren Wong on Unsplash
