“I will live free or die,”1
—Harriet Tubman
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
—Janis Joplin
In 2019, we had the privilege of watching together the movie, “Harriet,” which is the life story of the famous abolitionist, Harriet Tubman. When chased by slave owners at one point, she jumped on top of a bridge and shouted to them, “I will live free or die.” She then jumped into the river and escaped her captors.
We are writing this book as two elders who have many times escaped the delusions of a post-modern, materialistic existence. We have also been ensnared by them more often than we wish to admit, but what we have learned over the decades is that nothing is worth the price of enslavement. We will live free or die.
For us, living free is living free of both despair and hope. It is living in the Self which is calm, resolute, deathless, committed to compassion . . . and compassion in action, come what may.
You may be offended by the presumption that we are elders. We get it. What does that mean anyway? What gives us the right, and why are we taking such a tone?
After eight combined decades of inner spiritual work and fervent activism in the world, we refuse to pretend or be shy about our message, particularly at this moment in human evolution. Life experience has taught us that no authentic vision of regeneration can be born without a full and unillusioned confrontation with the appalling facts of our planetary predicament.
We now understand that the notion that humans can do anything in our lifetimes to reverse catastrophic climate change is yet another form of denial. Our species has fallen prey to a number of forms of derangement that have closed the door on that possibility.
We further believe that the most important piece of knowledge that we humans need now is the privileged treasure of the mystical traditions. That is, the knowledge that humanity is destined to be transfigured, even if not in our lifetimes. The whole of human history is the womb of this birth. What evolutionary mystics have discovered is that a transformational birth can only place as a result of a great death.
As we confront the death of ecosystems and species, spiritual seekers must be brutally honest about their addiction to transcendence and the way it is used as a drug to prevent them from feeling and responding to our devastating crisis. Likewise, activists must go beyond the resources with which they are currently undergirding themselves because the death in this birthing is going to be massively shattering beyond anything the human race has previously experienced, and they must have grounded practices to assist them and turn to a force beyond themselves to inspire, energize, guide, and sustain them. What we are confronting is not a series of problems to be solved, but an all-encompassing, unsolvable predicament to which we can only respond. And as we respond, the two momentous questions we are all compelled to ask are: What is the meaning of this dilemma, and what is it demanding of us? How we can we become strong, empowered, and illumined enough to rise to its demand?
At present, our response is drastically, and almost comically, inadequate.
On the one hand, much of the transpersonal world is largely clueless and narcissistic in relation to the severity of our predicament. Likewise, activists deliberately remain aloof from the mystery of the evolutionary birth we will be articulating in detail in this book and through that, dissociated from the kind of power they are going to need.
As elders, we are challenging the transpersonal world to plunge into the shattering realities of our dark night, and we evaluate all of the different spiritual traditions by the willingness to do so. We challenge spiritual practitioners to stop indulging in fake spiritual delusions of saviors and gurus and begin immediately taking up the challenge of humanity’s greatest mystics and prophets to put love into action. Conversely, we say to the activist: We are with you, and we have always been with you. We honor the divine passion for justice that burns in your heart, but we are asking you now to understand that all of your tactics and strategies cannot be enough for this crisis that is not only a crisis of justice, but an evolutionary crisis. You must be brave enough to expand your vision and align with the mystery in whatever way you can, and by whatever name you call it. The only strategies that could work in unprecedented chaos are those that will be given to us if and as we align ourselves with sacred reality. Accordingly, we as elders want to protect you as you advance with your honorable passion for a more compassionate world by pointing out to you that the force and passion and stamina and energy of hope and joy that you need to realize your longing for a new world can only be revealed in you, to you by simple opening to spiritual possibility.
We denounce any tendency by the transpersonal milieu to turn away from the severity of the crisis, just as we denounce the cynicism of the activist whose pragmatic perspective prevents him or her from adopting a sufficiently holistic stance in order to fully engage in the struggle. In other words, we believe that only a divinely conscious activism, aligned with the truth of the evolutionary mystics, could ever hope to be able to begin to deal with the crisis.
Everyone is in the throes of this crisis emotionally whether they recognize it or not. Within the past five years, psychotherapists have reported a dramatic increase in clients struggling with eco-anxiety and eco-grief. Countless support groups on these issues have mushroomed worldwide. In America, people report increasing anxiety about having Donald Trump as their President and about the incineration of liberty and democracy that is taking place in full public view so that now more than 50% want him impeached and removed from office. Even individuals who are only remotely aware of the global crisis report feeling as if they are experiencing unprecedented personal and cultural stress, and suicide rates continue to rise alarmingly, especially in the United States.2
And now, with the mushrooming death toll of the coronavirus pandemic, many individuals have sunk to the depths of despair, not only as a result of the carnage of a deadly infectious, communicable disease, but the fact that in the United States, the Trump Administration is providing virtually no leadership in the crisis. In fact, it appears to be perfectly content with the demise of certain populations such as elders in nursing homes, prisoners, and workers at risk of contracting the virus in the cramped, confined areas of meat packing plants.
In addition, we are witnessing massive protests against racism and social injustice throughout the world as millions reject the inequality exposed by the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
In 2017, between the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and his Inauguration, we began writing Savage Grace: Living Resiliently in the Dark Night of the Globe. That book was very prescient and forecasted much of what we are now living through. A focusing reality throughout the book was Kali, whom Hindu mystics celebrated as the shattering evolutionary force that simultaneously annihilates and resurrects. She represents both the nurturer and the devourer, the dark night and the birth being born from it. In whatever form she manifests, her relentless and unstoppable intention is transformation. In Savage Grace, we opined that “Donald Trump, agent of Kali, is now Chief Executive of the most powerful nation on Earth.”3 But what sense are we to make of Kali’s creative-destructive dance in this moment of increasingly bewildering and dangerous global pandemic?
Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? As our friend and colleague, Paul Levy writes,
I am what holocaust survivor Victor Frankl would call a “tragic optimist,” (or in my words, a “pessi-optimist”). Being a pessi-optimist, I see with open eyes and am deeply affected by the tragic and unbearable suffering, the unspeakable evil and mind-rending horror that is unfolding in our world. This causes me immense pain and distress. At the same time, however, I am still able to find the good in our world, create a sense of meaning and see glimmers of light in the darkness. This ability allows me to grow and evolve (what has been called “post-traumatic growth”) in ways I might not have been able to previously. This is related to the archetype of the wounded healer—it is by going through (as contrasted to turning a blind eye towards) the pain and darkness of our wounds that we are enabled to receive their gifts.4
The year 2020 has been and promises to be a watershed turning point in human history. At this writing, the world finds itself in the midst of a global pandemic that has visited and continues to visit death, division, and untold misery on humanity, with the highest number of cases of the coronavirus occurring in the United States. In addition, the inexorable truth of climate catastrophe and the potential extinction of life on Earth has become shatteringly undeniable. Moreover, the inextricable connection between these two tragedies is becoming increasingly apparent.
The word apocalypse literally means the unveiling or unmasking. We believe that amid our global predicament, two realities are operating above all else:
The first is the unmasking of all of the systems of inequality and the destruction of the Earth.
The second is the fact that the pandemic is like the apocalypse itself because it is revealing both the horror and the possibilities. Alongside coronavirus, we are witnessing the uprisings of Sacred Activism and the heroic commitments of healthcare workers and first responders, alongside postal workers, grocery clerks, and people who distribute food at food banks.
What is being made crystal clear is that humanity stands at a monumentally fragile threshold with two stark choices placed before it in a situation of complete uncertainty: Those choices are: 1) To continue to worship a vision of power, totally distanced from sacred reality, and therefore bring down a rain of black karma in suicidal self-destruction and the destruction of nature. 2) Or to choose the path of submitting bravely to the alchemy of being transfigured by a global dark night event that shatters all illusions but reveals the greatest imaginable possibility being born out of the greatest imaginable disaster.
If humanity chooses the second path, which is what is being celebrated in this book, then it will have trained itself in the new radical unity necessary to weather the even worse crises that most certainly will quickly follow. Seen in this way, this crisis reveals its blinding grace; nothing can be the same after it, and no one has any idea how it will unfold or what will remain when its ravages start to recede.
We can either hide from this desperate situation, or use it in noble ways to fire a far-deeper plunge than we have ever made into our divine nature and its limitless possibilities. Kali has laid down the map for us, and everyone who is awake must choose those practices and activities that lead to the creation of the second choice. Our entire evolutionary future depends on millions of us recognizing this choice, recognizing that the time for it to become completely clear has arrived, and recognizing that we must choose this option because any alternative is not radical enough to empower us for the titanic ordeals ahead.
In the following pages, you will read much about the planetary rite of passage that we believe is taking place even as we write and you read these words. We know that rites of passage unfold in three stages: A vision of possibility which is the ultimate rationale for the rite, a descent into the deeper layers of one’s humanity through a psycho-spiritual ordeal, and finally, a reconciliation or “marriage” of opposites that transforms the situation and the person experiencing it. That structure is the structure we have used for this book.
We ask you to read this book slowly and with an open heart and mind because it challenges everything you might now believe. It asks you to find the courage to confront the vast agony of our real predicament, and it asks you to listen to what may seem the outrageous and impossible possibility of an unprecedented birth arising out of an unprecedented death. Both demands will stretch your heart and imagination in ways that will seem deranging and sometimes unendurable, but such stretching is part of the evolutionary crisis we are in. And such demands, relentless as they are, spring from the truth of the situation we find ourselves being transformed by and that cannot be avoided by those who have chosen to turn up as guardians of human possibility.
Carolyn Baker, Boulder, Colorado
Andrew Harvey, Oak Park, Illinois