QUANTUM PHENOMENOLOGY: The Cure for Climate Anxiety
Simple instructions for shifting your paradigm
Renowned Thinkers to Explore Our Cosmic Journey to GaiaSelf in Free Online Earth Day Summit
So say the editors of the Yale School of Environments in their Forum on Religion & Ecology. There are certainly some renowned thinkers taking part in this innovative event, such as cosmologist Brian Swimme and biologist Elisabet Sahtouris, both of whom are very popular professors/authors. While I certainly would never think to include myself in that kind of elite company, I have nonetheless been included by the organizers at Whole Life Times!
Ever heard of “imposter syndrome”? ; )>
Our portion of the Sunday summit will be discussing topics like: Cosmogenesis of the Gaiasphere; Gaian ecosophy for the awakening of humanity; Indigeneity & Panpsychism; and, the birth of the Gaianthropocene. For my part, I’ve been asked to introduce the concept of Quantum Phenomenology to the discussion, which we discussed in the last Dharma Beat.
This is going to be a paradigm-breaking, taboo-shattering Earth Day event, which will include what promises to be a fascinating panel discussion at the end of the day. I hope you can find the time to attend live, or at least register for free and watch on replay at your leisure.
Becoming Gaia
In preparation for all that, let’s take a deeper dive into this idea of quantum phenomenology, and consider it’s great potential to bring about the kind of spiritual revolution that’s being called forth by the existential threat of our shared meta-crisis. Last time, I got into the specifics of the practice, or the “how” of it all. Now I’d like to fill in the foundations of “why” it works and why it is needed.
Gaiarcadia participant Sean Kelly - yet another renowned philosopher/professor/author - suggests that we are all going through a collective kind of planetary initiation into a new kind of civilization that will transform the Anthropocene into the Gaianthropocene. Quantum phenomenology can be seen as referring to the individual, subjective experience of that kind of species transmutation - what Kelly calls “becoming Gaia.”
When we let go of who we are, we create the space to become who we are meant to be - our true, human nature. But in order to get to where we all want to be, it’s imperative to start from where we are, so as to know just what it is we are to let go of.
The phenomenon of biospheric climate trauma is easy to understand from the standpoint of our subjective experience: we can actually feel the grievous wounding of the planet in our physiology, in our heart-minds, because our porous soma is of one flesh with the planet’s biosphere. And since mind and body are interdependent, our psyche is embedded in what a ‘psychosynthesis’ systems thinker, Mark Skelding, has termed Gaia’s Psychosphere.
Makes sense, right? Just reading that, you can feel me feeling you, giving rise to the process of “attunement” or psychological coherence. And that’s because right now, as you’re reading this, our minds are commingling even though appearing to be far apart in time and space. As we learn from quantum physics, once two phenomena become commingled, they will forever remain entangled. Our psyches are enmeshed in field awareness, and the collection of all those fields comprises the biosphere of a living planet.
This fundamental truth is the beating heart of Gaia theory and is but a reflection of the nature of the cosmos itself:
The universe rests on relationship... The inner is looking out at the outer, which has given birth to the inner.
~ Brian Swimme, Cosmogenesis (2022)
However, because Western civilization has become largely disembodied and cut off from Nature, we reflexively dissociate from climate trauma, hiding behind the banal scientific terminology of “climate change." Or we reduce and marginalize what is trauma with the popular label “climate anxiety.”
It is impossible, it seems, from the perspective of the dominant materialist worldview to refrain from objectifying our climate and environment as some ‘thing’ or collection of things out there; i.e., the climate is considered other than and apart from us. We can appreciate instinctively how this might give rise to a false sense of personal security “in here.” This false sense of interiority that plagues the modern psyche serves the needs of capitalism to disembody and dissociate from Nature more generally and, ultimately, from our ideas of self — as so elegantly captured by the cultural fascination with the zombie apocalypse, the rise of the corporation as “person,” and as acted out with the opioid and meth pandemics, video games, and mass shootings.
The resulting conflation of trauma with symptoms like anxiety and depression is best understood as the misplaced expression of a more fundamental and prevalent mental phenomenon that has been active for much longer. It’s called “Cartesian Anxiety” by cognitive scientists and philosophers. Addressing these closely related anxieties as the same mental phenomenon can actually serve to relieve anxiety in a way that helps resolve the larger, superordinate trauma that ails us. It seems to me that really should be the role of the mental health professions during these self-fulfilling, prophetic “end times” that find us acting out unnatural pathologies in harmful, mostly unintended ways.
Cartesian Anxiety is just the dis-ease that comes along with the scientific materialist worldview like diapers with the baby. It’s rooted in the following binary thought: “either there is an absolute ground or foundation” for what appears to us as real (i.e., our bodies and the physical world) “or everything falls apart.” As the late, great cognitive scientist Francisco Varela, philosopher Evan Thompson, and psychologist Eleanor Rosch put it in their ground-breaking book “The Embodied Mind” (1993):
“By treating mind and world as opposed subjective and objective poles, the Cartesian anxiety oscillates endlessly between the two in search of a [firm] ground. Feelings of anxiety arise from this craving for an absolute ground that cannot be satisfied.”
We can certainly understand how climate anxiety is like Cartesian anxiety on steroids, right? The ‘absolute ground’ being a stable future, or at least the prospect of a viable future, that is being continually undermined by policy makers and fossil fuel barons.
This, then, is the fundamental problem at the root of our present existential dilemma. It’s where we start from in plotting out the transmutation of the human species in this age of ungrounded ecological and biological unravelling, which doesn’t promise to end anytime soon. Resolving our trauma at every level is empowering, unleashing liberating energy, while by not resolving it, we ‘resolve’ to pass it on to the next generation.
So we must choose to undertake this immense challenge together, both collectively and individually, so that we can prepare the psychological ground for the kind of quantum social change that will be needed for us to reverse global warming over the next 2-3 generations. It’s a matter of moral choice, really, at every level of society and culture. Of choosing life.
Fortunately...
There is a cure for what ails us!
Rx: The way to rid ourselves of this anxiety was described by Varela et al. 30 years ago, in an early portent of the mindfulness revolution to come, as engaging in the practice of communion as embodied reflection:
“The methodological heart of the interaction between mindfulness/awareness meditation, phenomenology, and cognitive science... is a change in the nature of reflection from an abstract, disembodied activity to an embodied (mindful), open-ended reflection. By ‘embodied’ we mean reflection in which body and mind have been brought together; i.e., reflection not just on experience, but reflection as a form of experience itself.”
As Zen philosopher David Loy succinctly put it in his book Nonduality (1988): “Self is finally realized to be but an aspect of or ‘reflection’ of an all-encompassing consciousness.”
I’ve come to think of this kind of experiential reflection myself as the practice, or praxis, of quantum phenomenology; that is, approaching phenomenal awareness with a worldview informed by quantum physics (holistic, integral) rather than the ‘abstract, disembodied’ paradigm of classical physics.
This makes perfect sense because the revolution of thought reflected in the quantum paradigm shift that has been taking root over the last century, and gaining momentum since the advent of the internet/information age, was prompted by the failure of classical physics to explain how it is that matter exists as a wave of potentiality until consciousness is brought to bear on it (i.e., by observing and/or attempting to measure it) - or for that matter to explain the “hard problem” of just how it is that something immaterial, like consciousness (mind), can arise from matter (brain).
How could such a startling discovery into the nature of reality NOT result in a radical paradigm shift in human consciousness? It suggests to us that the posited objectivity of Cartesian dualism is just as illusory as ‘matter’ or the solidity of objects are. How is it, then, that Western psychology continues to cling to the myth of “objective empiricism”? As if our mind is an object that can be reliably measured by another mind!
Continuing to cling to Cartesian dualism through reductionism, binary thinking, and the myth of objectivity perpetuates the cultural anxiety that haunts us and is ever present. Cartesian anxiety is chronic and obstructive because it points to the shaky foundations of our worldview. It has given rise to a mental health crisis that is unprecedented and widely acknowledged.
Simply stated, in the post-truth age we are living the Big Lie, as reflected both in individual behaviors and in our collective pathology. Just look at the political scene in America right now, which is teetering on the edge of societal breakdown and civil war because of an unwillingness to acknowledge facts; a.k.a. reality. Or look at the obsession with borders and security in a world where none can hide from the relational interdependence of climate breakdown, while all but the Indigenous and dispossessed are complicit in the breaking of world systems.
There has never been a more important time for us to define and focus on good, wholesome and holistic mental health. That’s the point of holding an event like Gaiarcadia on Earth Day. In a very real sense, we could all use a good life coach right now.
The point of quantum phenomenology is to lay the stable groundwork for personal practice as a catalyst for sparking a cultural revolution in ‘positive’ psychology that is up to the task of countering the “Great Acceleration” and social pathology of the last 70 years. In other words, ushering in the ecological era of the Gaianthropocene.
All the evolutionary pieces are already in place, but its like one of those pointillist 3D pictures that has yet to come into focus. And it is largely happening out of the public eye, because all the chaos and conflict keep us perpetually distracted.
As the Austrian mystic and collective trauma healer extraordinaire Thomas Hübl likes to point out, when we take the time to slow our thinking down, truth has a chance to emerge.
I described the methods of my own forest yoga in the last Dharma Beat (scroll down to section on Quantum Phenomenology), and discussed the critical importance of breath in this praxis of “communion as embodied reflection.”
Mind follows breath, and so we slow and deepen our breath to find a coherent frequency in our mind. It’s like stepping through a portal from the profane to the sacred.
Now I’d like to share a key pith instruction for resetting our mental perspective as we slow our breathing and movement. This visual meditation combines cosmology with quantum physics, and comes courtesy of my shamanic Tibetan teacher, H.H. Neljorma Khandro Tseringma:
Think of Earth as that pale blue dot in the picture we took from Saturn, and consider the spaciousness in which Earth is held from that perspective... Now slowly focus in on that pale blue dot until it takes on the appearance of a living planet, with blue, brown, white and green areas...
Continue zooming in until you arrive at your own body...
...and then continue to zoom in until you can see the cells of your own flesh... the atoms that comprise those cells... and as you find your vision opening up once again into the vast spaciousness of the subatomic realm, notice... there is not even ... a pale blue dot to be seen... all one vast, empty, vibrant energy...
I call this process “activation” because this is how we can actively, cognitively deconstruct the material world we’ve been conditioned to believe exists, but which quantum physics reveals to be entirely empty of any substance whatsoever.
What we are left with instead is simply consciousness itself. It manifests as our own subjective experience of the phenomenon of being aware of that pervasive, more stable reality. That kind of extra-sensory awareness is as generative as it is magical. It often gives rise to experiences of synchronicity. All of this just happens to coincide with the fundamental point made by all mystics from every tradition. Awareness is unitive.
Just as we can measure our own mind with brain waves, so when our mind focuses in on the illusion of solidity all it finds are waves of potential energy waiting to be collapsed by conscious agency. A world waiting, in other words, to be experienced as a present phenomena, not to be ‘othered,’ objectified, or constrained by linear temporal constructs.
This is the fertile ground from which holistic indigeneity emerges - as a participatory experience of the natural world.
At its most fundamental level, reality is a boundary-less, conscious communion of self and other, where ‘self’ is found to be reflected in and composed of all that is other, and ‘other’ is discovered to be none other than self-reflecting awareness.
That is the experiential, embodied worldview of quantum phenomenology in a nutshell. Adopting it as praxis, or in conjunction with our spiritual practice, opens us up to an entirely new, participatory world of quantum awareness (no objects, only relations), direct knowing (gnosis/intuition), and holistic (Gaian) agency.
Instead of seeking out solid ground, as with the futile and frantic Cartesian dualism, with quantum phenomenology we embrace a unitive transcendent ground (communion as embodied reflection) that is non-temporal, non-local, entangled, and full-to-overflowing with latent potential.
As the quantum physicist Amit Goswami observes in his book “Physics of the Soul”:
Nonlocality implies transcendence. It follows that all quantum waves of possibility reside in a domain that transcends space and time; we will call it the domain of transcendent potentia... And don't think that possibility is less real than actuality; it may be the other way around. What is potential may be more real than what is manifest because potentia exists in a timeless domain, whereas any actuality is merely ephemeral: it exists in time. This is the way Easterners think, how mystics all over the world think, and how physicists who heed the message of quantum physics think.
I think the best description of this praxis can still be found in the luminous work of Varela et al.:
We reflect on a world that is not made, but found. Our cognition emerges from the background of a world that extends beyond us but that cannot be found apart from our embodiment: organism and environment enfold into each other and unfold from one another in the fundamental circularity that is life itself.
But we must conclude this brief discussion with the description by the founder of modern phenomenology, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose pioneering philosophy has inspired millions, and the even more poetic sentiments of T.S. Eliot (from “Burnt Norton”):
The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.
... at the still point, there the dance is...
Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance,
and there is only the dance."
It is from this kernel of wisdom and practice that the holistic indigeneity of the Gaianthropocene is springing forth. By nurturning the sprouts of this sacred communion, and by honoring them with positive psychology, the mental health profession has both an opportunity and an obligation to help guide us all into a new, ecological civilization.
Nothing less is required of us.
Another tour de force! Feel like you are channelling the Gaian hypermind each time you post!