I've written before about my vegan year. It straddled 1970 - 71. The world around me was a veritable vale of tears. Everyone and everything was dark, degenerate, full of hatred, insensitivity, and avarice. Society as we knew it was destroying the world, and I was deeply affected. My mission was to save the world through compensation; it was an early and largely unconscious recognition of the role of opposites and polarities. I would be pure and harmless, and thereby restore balance and goodness. I did this for a while, then became ill. Then I got over it....
It was, put simply, a matter of projection. The world may well have been a bit of a mess, but the number one fuck-up creating the angst was little ol' me. I began to realise that I needed to start taking responsibility for my own psychological, emotional, and spiritual well-being, instead of putting all the ills 'out there'. Without this change, there would be no way I could respond appropriately to anything going on in the world around me. And this is the step which many of our climate emergency evangelists have failed to take. They haven't seen that the step is even there to be taken; and it will spoil terribly their apocalyptic narrative if they do.
Actually, I had to get over it a second time. Twenty years on, I had become something of a golden Buddhist. I ran a Buddhist centre and did lots of good things. My Buddhist name reflected the way that my life was full of brightness, goodness, and light: Ratnavira, the jewel-like hero. Then I fell into a deep black pit. It smelt pretty bad down there. I could no longer listen to Mozart, but spent all day with Lou Reed loud on the headphones. And once I emerged, I was a different and, for some, a rather problematic person. Some of those Buddhists who once went out of their way to meet and greet me, now turned away if I approached.
It was a classic night-sea journey, as Jung termed it; head-on confrontation with the Shadow.
So what is meant by 'Shadow'? It's everything that is rejected as being unacceptable by the person we consider ourselves to be; by who we feel and think we are. And you can bet your bottom dollar that, among the wreckage down there, Shiva will be lurking. Shiva, it may be recalled, is the destructive element in the cycle of how things happen, according to Hindu myth: creation, preservation, and destruction, the inseparable triplets. It's understandable that Shiva is the problem bit of the cycle, and that we might not like him at all. He's tough but true. Death, decay, decomposition, withering away, immediate unexpected terminal expiration. Our own mortality staring us in the face.
Shiva's a bit of a downer, the divine party-pooper. But until we accept his role, at least a bit, we can lay no claim to full humanity. Pre-Lou Reed, I was too light, too bright, too far on the side of eternity. I didn't invite Shiva of my own accord, so he had to gate-crash the happy-clappy party himself, with his dark tales. Puer aeternus, eternal no more.
The thing is this. Once Shiva has been allowed to sit at the table, some of his sting automatically disappears. Denial, unconsciousness, are what create the awfulness of his power. For their part, the foot soldiers of climate alarmism have, by and large, failed to accept Shiva as part of the deal of life, to look him in the eye. Thus they manifest total irrationality: bucketloads of fear and insecurity, horror and terror, which can be easily manipulated, whipped into total hysteria, by the climate emergency elites.
These 'elites, as I shall call them, probably don't really believe the script: why has Al Gore got a whopping beachside pad if rising sea levels are going to swallow it up any minute now? But the foot soldiers believe the script. Desperately. It's their way of handling Shiva - by not handling him. And their unconsciousness renders them hysterical, mad, even, as fear and horror run riot in Shiva denial.
I use the word 'mad' intentionally. Some of them appear to me as mad, quite literally. It is as if they have been possessed by a force they are incapable of managing. It is not divine possession, like Handel writing 'the Messiah', or Jesus's disciples at Whitsun, taken by the Holy Ghost. No, it is actually quite demonic. Deny a god or goddess, and they will manifest in twisted, distorted ways. Because manifest, somehow or another, they must.
Some of these hysterical climate alarmists would be better off in therapy than gluing themselves to buses - or playing tennis in Credit Suisse offices, as they were just recently, in protest at Roger Federer's sponsorship deal with Credit Suisse who, horror of horrors, lend money to the devil incarnate, the fossil fuel industries. It is to their infinite shame that the mainstream (lamestream) media gives coverage to these folk, and with such sympathy. It is no surprise, however: it's typical of how they behave. I would call it moral depravity on the part of BBC, CNN, and the rest.
And it is criminal how this psychological sickness - the world is going to end soon, kids, because of our climate sins - is laid upon children, rendering them ill with anxiety. This I find really awful, disgusting. Still, I have a weird view of education. I think it should be teaching children how to think, not what to think.
There is something that I have noticed. A good many 'climate change sceptics' and 'climate realists' are people who love nature, the natural world. They have a real feeling for it, are connected with it, and are cognisant of the ways in which the natural world works. These are the people who, the global warming narrative tries to inform us, are out to destroy the world.
Conversely, many - though certainly not all - climate alarmists are predominantly urban creatures, who enjoy little real contact with nature and its cycles and rhythms. They live in flats in towns and cities, coming out from time-to-time to protest in the city streets. For them, nature is a little bit abstract. It manifests in theories about CO2, dodgy graphs and other forms of data, and as something very hot and scary, which is about to consume us all any minute now. Nature is an idea, rather than a living, breathing, and eternally dying, thing.
Tony Heller is one of those climate sceptics or realists who truly love the natural world. His being is embedded in nature, it is obvious. He is a guy who is sensitive to how it all works. He understands that Shiva is not an enemy to be avoided or overcome. Shiva is part of the process, an essential part. He need be no enemy, but a friend, whose effects can actually be beneficial. Below is a short and beautiful video from Tony Heller which illustrates the point.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ByawpqOPPM
