Read an Excerpt
Prologue: Entering the Bardo
We are in a space without a map. With the likelihood of economic collapse and climate catastrophe looming, it feels like we are on shifting ground, where old habits and old scenarios no longer apply. In Tibetan Buddhism, such a space or gap between known worlds is called a bardo. It is frightening. It is also a place of potential transformation.
As you enter the bardo, there facing you is the Buddha Akshobhya. His element is water. He is holding a mirror, for his gift is mirror wisdom, reflecting everything just as it is. And the teaching of Akshobhya’s mirror is this: Do not look away. Do not avert your gaze. Do not turn aside. This teaching calls for radical attention and total acceptance.
For the last forty years, I’ve been growing a form of experiential group work called the Work That Reconnects. It is a framework for personal and social change in the face of overwhelming crises—a way of transforming despair and apathy into collaborative action. Like the mirror wisdom of Akshobhya, the Work That Reconnects helps people tell the truth about what they see and feel is happening to our world. It also helps them find the motivation, tools, and resources for taking part in our collective self-healing.
When we come together for this work, at the outset we discern three stories or versions of reality that are shaping our world so that we can see them more clearly and choose which one we want to get behind. The first narrative we identify is “Business as Usual,” by which we mean the growth economy or global corporate capitalism. We hear this marching order from virtually every voice in government, publicly traded corporations, the military, and corporate-controlled media.
The second is called the “Great Unraveling,” the ongoing collapse of life forms and human structures. This is what happens when ecological, biological, and social systems are commodified by an industrial growth society or “business as usual.” I like the term unraveling, because systems don’t just fall over dead; they fray, at first slowly, then progressively lose their coherence, integrity, and memory.
The third story is the central adventure of our time: the transition to a life-sustaining society. This transition, which is well underway when we know where to look, is comparable in scope and magnitude to the Agricultural Revolution some ten thousand years ago and to the Industrial Revolution a few centuries back. Contemporary social thinkers have various names for it, such as the “ecological revolution” or “sustainability revolution”; in the Work That Reconnects we call it the Great Turning.
Simply put, our aim with this process of naming and deep recognition of what is happening to our world is to survive the first two stories and to keep bringing more and more people and resources into the third story. Through this work, we can choose what we want to put our lives behind—business as usual, the unraveling of living systems, or the creation of a life-sustaining society.
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Chapter 2: Grounding in Gratitude
The root of joy is gratefulness …
It is not joy that makes us grateful;
it is gratitude that makes us joyful.
—Brother David Steindl-Rast
We have received an inestimable gift. To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe—to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it—is a wonder beyond words. And it is, moreover, an extraordinary privilege to be accorded a human life, with self-reflexive consciousness that brings awareness of our own actions and the ability to make choices. It lets us choose to join the praising and healing of our world.
Gratitude for the gift of life is a primary wellspring of all religions, hallmark of the mystic, fuel for the artist. Yet we so easily take this gift for granted. That is why so many spiritual traditions begin with thanksgiving, to remind us that for all our woes and worries, our existence itself is an unearned benefaction beyond any we could merit.
In the Tibetan Buddhist path, we are asked to pause before undertaking meditative practice and reflect on the preciousness of a human life. This is not because we as humans are superior to other beings, but because we can “change the karma.” In other words, graced with self-reflexive consciousness, we are endowed with the capacity for choice—to take stock of what we are doing and change direction. We may have endured for eons of lifetimes as other life forms under the heavy hand of fate and the blind play of instinct, but now at last we are granted the ability to consider and judge and make decisions. Weaving our ever more complex neural circuits into the miracle of self-awareness, life yearned through us for the ability to know and act and speak on behalf of the larger whole. Now the time has come when we can consciously enter the dance.
In Buddhist practice, that first reflection is followed by a second, on the brevity of this precious human life: “Death is certain; the time of death is uncertain.” That reflection awakens in us the marvelous gift of the present moment—to seize this chance to be alive right now on planet Earth.
Even in the Dark
That our world is in crisis—to the point where survival of conscious life on Earth is in question—in no way diminishes the value of this gift. On the contrary, to us is granted the privilege of being on hand to take part, if we choose, in the arising of a just and sustainable society. We can let life work through us, enlisting all our strength, wisdom, and courage, so that life itself can continue.
There is so much to be done, and time is so short. We can proceed, of course, out of grim and angry desperation. But the tasks progress more easily and productively with a measure of thankfulness for life; it links us to our deeper powers and lets us rest in them. Many of us are braced, psychically and physically, against the signals of distress that continually barrage us in the news, on our streets, and in the wider world. As if to reduce their impact on us, we withdraw like a turtle into its shell. But we can choose to turn to the breath, the body, the senses, for they help us to open to wider currents of knowing and feeling.
The great open secret of gratitude is that it is not dependent on external circumstance. It’s like a setting or channel that we can switch to at any moment, no matter what’s going on around us. It’s a posture of the soul. Like the breath, it helps us affirm our basic right to be here.
Thankfulness loosens the grip of the consumer society by contradicting its hidden but pervasive message: that we are insufficient and inadequate. The forces of corporate capitalism continually tell us that we are needy—we need more stuff, more money, more approval, more comfort, more entertainment. The dissatisfaction it breeds is profound. It infects people with a compulsion to acquire that delivers them into the cruel bondage of debt. So gratitude is liberating. It builds a sense of sufficiency that is quite subversive to the consumer economy. Elders of indigenous cultures have retained this knowledge, and we can learn from them.…
