Do we even want to be here?
Without a willingness to look into the depth of despair and disease present in our human consciousness, we’ll keep trying for misguided solutions to preserve human life on earth.
This is the question I see burgeoning forth beneath all the conversations around environmental collapse, the arc of our species, and a “sustainable future:” do we even want to be here on this Earth?
We know the story—and you may have lived it personally—of the person uncommitted and unsure about his life that he plays with fire. Uncertain if this life is worth living so he tests the edges, leaving the outcome to fate. He isn’t ready yet to end his life, but he also isn’t ready to say he wants to live it. This archetypal character is willing to risk death of a life that doesn’t fulfill him for some prospect of one that will.
Could this be happening on a collective level? Could our species be wrestling with the question if these very lives we lead are even worth living? That may seem dire or drastic in philosophy, but I’m inviting us to take a sober look at our actions as a signpost to the beliefs and orientations beneath them.
Let’s imagine something for a moment: what if all these forces we deem as bad, as harmful to life, as misguided, maybe even as “evil”—from Exxon’s poisoning of indigenous waterways in the Amazon to Apple’s exploitation and destruction of the Congo to our everyday western insanity of consumption—were actually representing a voice in the collective psyche of our species? If you’ve ever done “Parts Work” in a personal healing setting, you know that every voice or persona within us is trying to play some role in serving our life. Even what we judge as our most shameful voices internally—beneath their expression is something that is needing attention and presence that ultimately wants to help us be more fully alive.
What if we think about these collective forces we deem as “destructive” through the same perspective? What if these forces are actors on behalf of the state of human consciousness—a reflection of what’s going on inside?
I would posit that humans are experiencing a higher, total level of suffering than at any other point in the history of our species. It’s hard to know what life was like 250,000 years ago or even 2,500, and, it’s evident to me that we’re the most disconnected we’ve ever been from the natural order of Life, and this takes an enormous psychic and spiritual toll. If we’re really honest with ourselves, how many of us can say we know more than a handful of people who are deeply well in their bodies and their beings? If any at all. I’m talking a physical, emotional, and spiritual vibrancy that is the original blueprint of our species.
There may be less violence and more food security at present than 2000 years ago (*this dominant narrative doesn’t take into account what human life was like for the hundreds of thousands of years prior to modern existence where there were many chapters of little violence and an abundance of sustenance), but we have to be the most psychically unwell we’ve even been in the modern human era (anti-depressant prescriptions are up 300% in the past 20 years, teen suicide has risen 62% in the past 14 years; autoimmune disease and chronic health conditions for kids < 12 are the highest they’ve ever been).
I would say that the emotional and psychic toll we’re carrying as humans right now is heavier than that of our ancestors who at times, didn’t have enough to eat. Collectively, we do have the capacity to meet all our basic needs, and, most of us are still feeling this lost, this dis-oriented, and this discontent with our day-to-day realties. That is a whole different kind of suffering. Most of us are not in despair because we’re going to bed hungry and there isn’t food. Something much deeper is hurting inside of us.
When we see people protesting climate destruction (raising hand: that’s me) and then return home to lives where they feel a perpetual and subtle anxiousness and lack of wellness (raising hand: that’s also been me), I think we’re avoiding the question that underlies the entire premise of our actions: is this life worth living? What kind of inheritance of a way of life are we leaving our descendants even if we did somehow avoid a 3-degree rise in mean temperatures to prolong human life on earth?
The way I see it: the greatest disservice we can give to this Earth is a dishonoring of these very lives we’ve been given. I believe She will heal from all the oil spills, from the species extinction, from the mountaintop coal removal, from the loss of 96% of her topsoil—with time, she will. But what I see as a wound cutting deeper and perhaps never mending is the pain of seeing your own child destroy their very life because they’re hurting that deeply and don’t even know it. That’s an existential pain—to give life from your body out of your own love for being alive and to see that very life suffer to the point of playing with its own existence—and yours.
We may be able to extend our runway as humans on Earth for a couple more generations with a shift in consumption or the introduction of coastal windmills. Sure. But, to what end? So we can continue to walk around in numbed and medicated bodies just trying to make it through another day? So we can bring another couple hundred species down with us as we go? So we can take those last 1,000 year old trees before our own extinction? We’re not asking the right questions when we try and “save our species.”
I want to offer that these forces of destruction so many of us are fighting are actually our allies and our guides. Messengers. If I’m an energy or a being trying to help humans and I see a species as unwell as we are, living as disconnected as we are from our original blueprint, I can imagine a scenario where I would try to help them end their suffering.
Can you imagine these forces saying: “how do we get these people free and off this Earth where they suffer? What if we dry up the Colorado River by convincing the people the military needs all the water? Or we could poison all the drinking waters and dry up the aquifers? We could erase those last few remnants of healthy culture so there was no hope of beauty to hang onto? We could get everyone really sick by feeding them highly processed, chemical-based products as “food"?” Anything to help these deep-suffering people get out of this reality.”
Through the lens of “parts work,” these voices don’t necessarily represent the ultimate perspective, but without being paid attention to, this is how they make themselves known. Why are trying to hard to stick around this place when the vast majority of us are living lives that are foundationally unwell?
What would it mean if we were allowed to sit in a circle and actually presence that pain in us that is so tired of being alive? Can we find the courage to entertain the question that maybe we don’t want to be here? Because, that’s alive in all of us. Look at what we were born into—look at the unfelt and unprocessed pain just in this country known as the United States. The vast majority of people’s unwillingness to even be with the knowing that 90% of indigenous peoples were slaughtered by our ancestors so we could be here. Or the same patterns of oppression and destruction of black and brown bodies from slavery that we now call capitalism. Our unwillingness to go into the dark is limiting us from the enormous amount of intelligence and possibility that is ready to come back into wholeness if we’d only invite it in. Can we slow down enough to say—and then to actually feel—this isn’t working?
I offer all of this, and, I happen to have an unshakable belief in the possibility of human life on this Earth. We’ve been given Eden. We’ve been given a place where everything we need to survive can grow from sunshine and water. We’ve been given these feeling centers where we can feel the most heartbreaking of loss right alongside inordinate joy and wonder. We’ve been put into a body that appears as separate with this unbreakable bond back to the Holy. We get to perceive sunrise and sunset. We get to hear birdsong. We get to touch and be touched. We get to see someone hurting and lift them up. We don’t get all of this in the same way in that resting place of Eternity where we come from. There is something so unexplainably special about getting to be in a body.
Instead of asking the question “what do we need to do to find a future for human life on Earth,” I wonder about asking the question “how can we be well while we’re here?” Because here’s the thing: when we feel wholly in love with our life, when we feel the preciousness of getting to be in a human body in all the tragedy and all the majesty, we’ll naturally find ourselves living in a way that sustains our species and sustains this Earth.
And as a part of this, I feel we have to also ask those places where we really hurt: what would you need to want to actually be here in this life? What do we need to honor, feel, and transmute that lives as this enormous burden on our collective psyche? You, destruction of everything Sacred, what are you trying to tell us? If we cut off these voices, if we cast them away, if we make them the “greedy, capitalist, patriarchs” that don’t deserve our presence, we never get to bring them back into the whole. They have some gem of wisdom to bring us if we learn to listen.
When we ask these questions and we respond from their knowledge, we begin to live into a well culture. Not the idea of a sustainable future or a concept of what is a “good human.” We bring alive in our bones that way we’re really yearning to live. That unsevered connection to the longing to be alive. That voice in us that is half-a-million-years-ancient that knows how to be a human on this Earth.