We live in binary times alright. 

It’s not just computer codes, it’s the whole hologram of modernity, it’s anyone’s opinions on just about anything and now, with extremes of fire and rain, the weather is joining in too. It seems that polarity is where it’s at, which is rather unfortunate, as the poles themselves are also surrendering to the momentum of our oven-ready planet in the great global bake-off. 

Hot town, summer in the city! If it’s getting a tad toasty where you are it may be because the neighbourhood’s on fire. Then again, perhaps your living room has been swept away in a flood torrent. Summer has undergone a dark, Joker makeover and is emerging as a time no longer to be welcomed with a beach towel and a Harold Robbins paperback but rather, a mounting sense of trepidation, some factor 75+, a fast car and/or a dinghy.

Although it’s still August, in a way it’s already November and we humans are uneasy turkeys; hamsters trapped on a Ferris wheel of our own proud construction on which the faster we run the more we fan the flames of folly. 

Our in-house idiot orchestra has been tuning up for a many a long century and now the cacophonous, bittersweet symphony of consequence is beginning to make itself heard. Covid? Why, that’s just the overture. If we’re not very careful (and perhaps even if we are) we, the turkeys who put the moronic in oxymoronic, are set to become the collateral damage of our own progress in ways inconceivable outside of a Hollywood blockbuster. Something bigger this way comes and behind our denial we know it because we created it. We invited it, we make films about it and now the intel is literally flooding in.

July told its own story of extremes involving, on the one gloved hand, heat domes, insane temperature spikes and forest fires (in Siberia, for heaven’s sake) and on the other, inexplicable deluges and flash flooding. Rainfall and heat records have been soaked and scorched into illegible submission. And somewhere in the middle is us, stretched out of shape by 18 months of you-know-what, adrift and divided in an outdated, socio-political vessel that is holed well below the water line and beginning to list badly. 

However, the extent of our ongoing distraction appears to be relative to the level of approaching danger. What clearer image is there of where we’re at than Branson and Bezos spaffing millions on an afternoon in a bouncy castle at the edge of reality while Rome (only metaphorically – for now) burns?

Part one of the IPCC report on climate change came out last week and what a jolly read it is. Whereas previous reports warned of the probable consequences of our actions and inaction, this one just smashes the alarm button. It finds us unequivocally guilty of heinous crimes against our planet or, in terms of Mother Nature, attempted matricide, on countless occasions. Name something in nature and it’s either disappearing or out of control. All infographics are through the roof or through the floor. Can’t wait for part two in February.

The head of steam generated since the industrial revolution has become unstoppable. We’ve started something that we can’t stop and it will have to play itself out. Add to this the sunny prospect of the collapse of the Gulf Stream and Greenland melting to the size of a pebble and we get a sense of the scale of change rushing towards us. But still, cupcakes and selfies, right?

It’s time to extract heads from butts and fingers from ears, if only to better witness the sensurround consequences of who are are, what we are and what we do. Like some disastrous lasagne, there are layers of reasons as to why things have come to such a pretty pass. Accumulating pollution we know all about: seas slick with sun cream, bleached reefs and shrink-wrapped fish, fracking, farming, pharming, parts per million etc. These are but a few symptoms of a far more complicated interaction between ourselves and our environment.

However fast we travel, the horizon of our unknowing always keeps its distance. Lying just beyond our current one is a non-world of impossible subtleties, of quantum wimps and neutrinos that travel faster than light, of wave and particle unity, apparent absences and invisible energies of the heart and mind. Permeating all this non-stuff is a higher science that implicates us in climate change far more than we realise or would care to admit. 

Let us briefly travel back to Encinitas, California in 1940 then, and to a talk by one of the great world teachers, Paramahansa Yogananda. This is what he had to say about the interrelation between human behaviour and the environment:

When the earth becomes very heavy with disease and evil, these etheric disturbances cause the world to give way to earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters….the good and bad karmic conditions created by man determine and influence the climate; they affect the wind and the ocean, even the very structure of the earth, sometimes causing earthquakes. All the hatred, the anger, the evil we send out into the world, and the agony and rebellion they cause – all these are disturbing the magnetic force of the earth, like static in the ether.

Where to begin with such a grand and granular perspective? It may be new but it feels like deep logic. He gives further substance to the idea that thought and emotion are far more powerful than we realise. We all know how our own and others’ thoughts and feelings affect us, but we don’t consider them in terms of elemental waves or electro-magnetic energy. But when we do, their impact potential takes on another dimension of meaning.

References, oblique and otherwise, to the last Golden Age (which peaked in 11,500 BCE) often poetically describe the earth as being so pleased with us that it gave forth its plenteous bounty without the need for agriculture. Edenic indeed and tasty food for thought in a time when the fields must hate us. But I digress.

To what extent have wars and world events since the turn of the 20^th century affected ourselves and the environment then? It’s nigh incalculable. And if you want to scroll back through the centuries and factor in more war, empires, slavery and a smorgasbord of diseases, it’s simply overwhelming. For sure though, an awful lot of negative energy has been released into the atmosphere and, like anything else, it will have its tipping points and its natural expression. ‘No effect without a cause’ may be the founding mantram of science, but behind that – far behind – it is also that of the iron law of karma.

Yogananda went on to say how humankind’s destructive power has become stronger than our constructive power and, if left unchecked, will lead to a ‘partial dissolution’ of the world, as it has done countless times before – just ask Noah. How bad it all gets then is ultimately up to us, and getting people to broadly agree and act on something even as stupidly obvious as climate change is like trying to herd cats.

Such musing leads us inexorably into uncharted realms of complexity and responsibility, territory we would probably rather leave unexplored. Yet, if we are to sort out the nice mess we’ve got ourselves into we have little choice but to begin considering our position from a new angle because it’s becoming clearer by the hour that our existing ones are dangerously obsolete. To extricate ourselves from the lower ages, we have to clear up the residue of our attitudes to each other and our home and keep it that way. This may take a while!

When things get too complex Ma Nature hits the reset button and this, in whatever form it takes, is what’s heading our way. As the karmic waves of our collective past break on the shores of our ignorance, our work will be to acknowledge, take action, learn and move on. Easy huh? Meanwhile, we’re getting an education of an intensity that we may not (be able to) fully appreciate until later on. There will be a later on and it will be much better.

Any comments to Facebook please (Ascending Arc or personal). Thanks!