The Climate Crisis Is The Crisis Of Man’s Consciousness Within Us

In the last of a recent series of superficial articles regarding the climate crisis, the Guardian published a piece with the absurd title, “What are the most powerful climate actions you can take? The expert view.”

Don’t fall for the premise and believe in experts. Expertise is inherently fragmentary, and wholeness within the individual is what is urgently needed.

There are no experts where transformation is concerned. Each person must take that journey alone, through self-knowing. Making authorities out of experts can only make matters worse.

The decimation of the viability and diversity of the earth is both a manifestation and mirror of the crisis of man’s consciousness.

Man’s consciousness has produced the rapacious fragmentation of nature, and the rampaging stupidities of politics. And man’s fragmentation has both its source and its solution within the individual.

Of course, the climate/consciousness crisis hasn’t been produced by a single generation, but through the inward ignorance and neglect of innumerable generations.

But it falls to us the living generations, who are the cumulative result of man’s self-centered and rapacious consciousness, to respond adequately to the planetary crisis of consciousness.

Five thousand years ago, as our ancestors were leaving the Stone Age at the dawn of civilization, a hunter equipped with one of the first metal axes was murdered in the Alps.

Given the name Otzi, his remarkably preserved mummified remains were discovered in the early ‘90’s as the ice that had encased him melted. His was a time when “material wealth and specialized skills were splitting people into high and low status.”

Wounded, Otzi was chased up and down the mountains until an arrow to the back finally did him in. As one of the anthropologists who studied his body and implements said, “After 5000 years we have evolved enormously technologically, but in terms of emotion and the way we act, mankind is still exactly the same.”

Why is it that the one thing that needs to radically change goes unquestioned and unchallenged -- so-called human nature? The more that human nature is seen as immutable, the more its worst aspects dominate at precisely the moment when they need to be faced and transformed within us.

Therefore what’s urgently needed in meeting the climate/consciousness crisis is not summoning the ephemera of “political will,” or more oppositional activism, but a psychological revolution. That cannot occur as some kind of mass movement, but must be ignited within the individual at the emotional level.

In addition to the fallacy of looking to experts to show us the way ahead, the Guardian article exhibits another fallacy: the dualism of individual vs. systemic change. It cites another expert, Prof David Wrathall, at Oregon State University: “Individual action can only amount to a drop in the bucket – only systemic changes will be sufficient.”

Of course he’s referring to “individual actions” like flying less and eating less meat. Clearly that wouldn’t be enough to keep global heating under 2C, but neither will exhorting governments and industries to radically change their ways.

Again, the radical change necessary to meet the planetary challenges facing humanity, epitomized by the destruction of the earth’s viability and diversity, begins within the individual, not at systemic level of politics and economics.

I don’t mean individuals like the Guardian does, as bits of humanity. Such separate dividuals are the source of man’s fragmentation of the earth and humanity.

Rather, I’m referring to true individuals -- literally, not divided human beings. A true individual is the whole of humankind in microcosm. And wholeness in the individual is the key to meeting the present crisis.

Society shapes and conditions the vast majority of people, but only true individuals can radically change the global society. The awakening individual realizes that the entirety of human consciousness is within them in microcosm.

Movements, protests and opposition have produced benefits in the past, but the progress of the past is under threat from the disintegration of the earth. Activism will never change humans and man.

Without changing course, most climate scientists say the world will become hellish, and large parts of the planet unlivable by the end of the century.

But if only 1% of people around the world with the energy, space and time to transform themselves did so, it would ignite a revolution in consciousness that would end man’s accelerating destruction of the earth.

So what is the most powerful action you can take? Without entering a monastery or going on a ridiculous wellness retreat, take total responsibility and first question internally rather than react externally.

Martin LeFevre

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