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🧿 A New Way of Seeing

Episode 2 of my new podcast is out. Read on for an intro, links to listen and a full transcript.

🧿 A New Way of Seeing

There are many ways of seeing—ways of sensing and feeling.

It is possible, and a good thing, to transcend yourself, the world around you and even time. To look at all these things from the outside. To "look in," as you might say.

This is the key to resilience - the ability to keep going and not burn out. To continue to be in service. This orientation will save the world—or what is left to save. And, excitingly, it is at the core of what could be called the next civilisation.

The world will not be saved by a new morality—a wanting to be or do good—but by a new metaphysics, meaning a new way of seeing things and how they interact, how we see ourselves and the world. It means you act for the good, not to create good outcomes, but because it is good. You do it because it is a truthful and beautiful thing to do. After all, it creates what we might call a metaphysical harmony—a balance. Another way of putting this is to say you act in love because this is what consciousness is. You don't go out to "do good." You do good to come home because you are already a being that exists to do good. It is what you already are. You are not going anywhere.

Listen on Spotify, Apple, Soundcloud or wherever you get your podcasts. We've worked to improve the prison phone sound quality and each episode will come with a newsletter transcript and video version on Youtube for reading along.

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Transcript of Episode 2 - The Idea

The idea is that there is, in fact, as you might say, many ways of seeing, ways of sensing and feeling. It is possible, and a good thing, to transcend yourself—that's two words, 'your' and then 'self'—and also to transcend the world around you and even time, to look at these things from the outside, to look in, as you might say. The idea is that this is the key to resilience, meaning the ability to keep going or not, as the phrase goes, to burn out, to continue to be in service. The idea is that this ability, this orientation, is what will save the world, or what is left to save, to save it if it is to be saved. And excitingly, it is at the core of what could be called the next, the new civilisation. This then is a big idea, a big challenge. This is a big time for humanity, and as we all come to discuss, another way of putting this is that the world will not be saved by a new morality—a wanting to be good—but by a new metaphysics, meaning a new way of seeing things and how they interact, how we see ourselves and the world. It means you act for the good, not to create good outcomes, but because good is good in itself. You do it because it's truthful and a beautiful thing to do because it creates what you might call a metaphysical harmony, a balance.

Another way of putting this is to say that you act in love because this is what consciousness is. You don't go out to do good; you do good in order to come home because you are already a being that exists to do good. It is what you already are—you're not going anywhere. What I've just said is very much a first step, very much just a start, not the last word. In fact, we are not going to be interested here in last words, but you have to start somewhere, and by definition, what is said is incomplete. Though this podcast will come back and we will have further stabs at the situation, it's not now or never. So what I'm asking you to do is to mull over what I've said, to sit with any thoughts and feelings you may have. Yes, something has been said, but it's not everything, but it will be fine for the moment.

This podcast is concerned with revolution, the coming period of social disruption, which is now inevitable. The hyperobject that is called climate change is upon us; it is everywhere, and it affects everything. We are at 1.5 degrees of global heating. Within a decade or so, the world is going over two degrees, and nothing will be the same again, ever. A few months ago, the United Nations said the same thing. They said we have two years to save the world. They said they are not being, quote, melodramatic, and that economies will be, quote, decimated, and everyone in the know knows this will just be the beginning. This is not normal. This was not the case 10 or 20 years ago. It's just that we've heard it so many times you got desensitized to it. It has become something just out there, but this does not make it any less real. It will now happen. Massive destruction is locked in; there is not a chance in hell that the present political regime will be able to save itself in the next two years. This thing, then, is coming down the line; the train has left the station. This is why revolutions are now inevitable.

The real question to be asked then is what sort of revolutions. There are two meanings of revolution: one is that things completely change, and then they come back to where they started, like revolving around a circle. The other meaning is that things completely change, and it stays like that. There's a change in the spirit of society, and this new spirit is embedded in every aspect of the new society and how we see the self and how we see the world. The second idea of revolution is the big idea in this podcast, but this is the only way we are going to save ourselves—through a new spirit, a new way of seeing. I'm going to attempt to investigate this new spirit, the spirit of revolution, and see what it might look like, what it is, how it works, how we can embed it in our minds, our actions, and organizations.

It will not emerge despite the coming chaos and trauma, all the suffering, starvation, all the destruction; it will happen because of these things. This is a crucial realization: the good does not just appear; it is born in the eruption of the bad. So let's have an initial look at how this revolution might work, the spirit of revolution. To be sure, it is going to be based on new categories of understanding. We are looking for new words, new language, and through them, we can embark on a way to be and a way to act together. And through this process, we can create new organizational and institutional forms. This is about our collective life, which is not going to be about the spirit at all, and this is another crucial realization: it's not all about you. Society—our present set of social arrangements—are to be changed through disruption and dialogue, both together, getting attention and then listening to each other once we have that attention. And it will work the other way around; organizations will create new language, which creates new actions.

Things do not work in a linear way, in a straightforward line. Things are affecting each other all the time. The focus then needs to be on the flows and the processes, not on the things in themselves. We are looking to aid this symbiosis, helping to create what I would call a self-conscious, close ecology between all aspects of the human system. The things that we have been told exist in the system—politics, economics, religion, culture—are less important than the connections between them. In fact, if we look closely at these things, we find they are themselves systems of flows and processes, families of things without really a solid foundation.

"We will look more at this—how things tend to dissolve as we bring our attention to them. We find there is not solid stuff. You may be thinking, well, this is all well and good—plenty of books and videos of people saying lots of warm words, providing a vision, calling for a new society, a revolution in consciousness, all the rest of it. Nothing new there. Those of you who know me know I like to focus on concreteness—where to put the biscuits on the table before the meeting, the micro-design, as I call it. After all, this is my day job—at least before I was put into this prison cell. I did years of research on all this at King's College in London. I've spent decades, in fact, if the truth be known, umming and ah-ing about how to make society a better place or at least something that survives the present global death wish of the current elites.

There is a tension here, maybe a contradiction. I will be delving into the notions, the traditions, the perspectives, to that that do not see the world as real, and yet at the same time, I am clear that the suffering we see is real. I am clear there is a world to be saved here. This terrible situation we find ourselves in is crying out to be avoided, to be stopped. At the moment, we are going to hold that apparent contradiction. We will look at ways to possibly overcome it, but one thing is for sure—we are not going to be passive. This project is about a fusion between a transcendence of the world and a revolutionary project within the world. And more than this, the fusion will strengthen each element. The new spirit will strengthen social transformation, which in turn will strengthen the spirit. It's a dynamic thing. This is the idea: new ways of seeing will form through social events, through things actually happening, through collectivities, through people acting together.

This project was laid out in detail in my last podcast, "Designing the Revolution." We need 10,000 people in a new organisational space to engage in civil resistance combined with community empowerment and mobilization via public assemblies. This then animates 1 to 2% of the population, which changes the political regime that runs the state during a moment of social rupture. The project is twofold: to overcome the regime, to speed up its endpoint, and secondly, to create the basis for new civilization.

The point of this podcast is to come at this project from a new, complementary angle—to propose that this process, if it is to be successful, has to be imbued with a certain spirit, something which is difficult to describe or grasp but is nonetheless real. A new consciousness that we do actually engage in, seeing things are not just there. This metaphysical transformation that exists within the enactment of the plan, and it is in fact critical to its success—this is the yeast in the bread. Practically speaking then, as you listen to this podcast, you can find in the notes a link to the Organization Revolution in the 21st Century, and there you will find a Zoom link to the next international meetups, and from there you can find pathways to action, to work with others all around the world. We are in an emergency; this is not academia—you don't do this stuff in your living room. I'm in a cell recording this, remember. So we will come on to discuss how these new ways of seeing will need to replace the deep worldview of neoliberalism, the ideology of the present dying regime. We are social beings; there is indeed a society out there, and without it, the individual dies—literally. These new social forms will not be able to be understood in the old language; the old categories will lose their conceptual usefulness.

It is not about just changing the world; it's about seeing the world in a different way—not the way the dominant ideology wants us to see it. New language will be liberating because it will enable a sense of what I will call a re-enchantment of the world, where the spirit takes center place, center stage, rather than a mere knowledge of things. We could instead use the following phrase: a system of interlocking sensibilities without the pretense of some solid foundation, rigid points in time and space, and crucially, no less real for being like this. Poetry, you might say, will fuse with analysis. 

All this is going to feel a little bit unbalanced at times; you may feel a bit all at sea with all these new worlds, but after a time, these feelings will subside, and you'll feel like you're more likely to be coming home. In fact, as the classic phrase goes, you were lost and now found. The spirit will take its central space, its central place, where it belonged all the time. The old questions will not be so much as answered but will be dissolved. Anyway, don't worry—basically, it's going to be fun.

I pointed all this out in the last episode of *Designing the Revolution*. There was an intended dramatic ending to the 50-odd episodes, which were rooted in a sociological perspective. Instead of asserting that everything I'd said was right, I suggest that maybe, in fact, it was all wrong. There was an elephant in the room, something massive—the way of the spirit. What I'm doing here, then, is a sequel of thoughts, a new beginning. It does not negate what was said in all those episodes, but it does build a new world. It works from a different perspective to get the project over the line.

If we—you, listening to this, and me, speaking to you and everyone else on this planet—are going to survive the next few decades, it's going to be a group effort, isn't it? It's going to involve a variety of ways of seeing. That needs to be this re-enchantment to the world, which grows out of the rigidity and dullness of reductionism, at the same time not forgetting the everyday but doing the washing up, as they say in Zen philosophy.

So, I'd like to say something about the structure of this podcast, the episodes that are to follow. This is obviously a first iteration of what I hope to record here from prison. I will not be drawing upon an impressive array of references and going into elaborate, great depths—this is not my specialism, as you might say. But I hope this is no bad thing. I hope that what I will say will have a certain grittiness, authenticity, directness. I don't want my words to get edited into another bland, one-step-removed routine.

However, as you may notice, I will not be speaking from notes in this podcast but from a written text. This is because I hope to be more precise without being formal. I am hoping that what I write will be made into a book, but maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Who knows, this laptop could just crash—in fact, it does regularly. I could lose everything in a moment, and of course, there could, and probably are, going to be other people—they're able to communicate what I'm suggesting better than me. Nothing would please me more.

Getting these ideas out and about at this time is extremely important, so I hope what I have to say, along with contributions from others, will become a central plank in this new culture that's going to be needed to take us through the inevitable horrors and terrors of the coming years. So if you're listening to me and you think you can add to this new culture, please go ahead. What I speak about here needs to become part of a fresh ecology of communications, both through word and deed. We need a new paradigm of being for resilient resistance so we can get to where people say, "Hey, Joe, he's in prison again," and his reply is, "Yeah, that's the way we live now." No self-pity—a focus on the job, a life lived at this point in history.

I suspect that if this podcast is to be effective, then it will not be because any particular element is in itself unique or insightful, but it is because I bring together a unique combination of elements—or more accurately, a combination of elements that have not been articulated in Western culture for some time. In particular, let me be clear: this podcast is a manual for action. The enactment of the spirit is a knowing that finds its meaning through action, through the moving of your body, and conversely, it is this action that informs the knowing—what, in our new language, you might call knowing in action, all one word. And of course, this is also called praxis—theory in action, action into theory.

We are moving beyond, then, the archaic notion of the individual to a rather new social formation, which is not just a materiality, a sociological thing—what people nowadays call a movement. No, the new language describes a fusion of the spirit into social form. In other words, a spirit makes the revolution, and the revolution makes the spirit. Just hold on to the sense you have for what I've just said; it's all we need to do at this initial stage.

But this is my invitation to listen to this podcast. The one of the episodes, then, is not necessarily going to be a linear process—one thing after another, at least not initially. Each episode is going to have more of a standalone quality. I have this idea that each episode is creating a small army surrounding a citadel on a hill. Various armies will be needed to be put into place before we can head over the walls. Maybe some of you will be keen to get on with it more quickly. Maybe some of you are already scaling the walls before listening to these episodes. For others, what you hear may not be enough to give you the courage to take part, but the seed will be planted, and at some arbitrary point in the future, for some unknown reason, you'll have one of those lightbulb moments. And it could well be because the world is no longer acting as you thought it should; you find you are no longer having the privilege of the detached case. The world is upon you, and you are suddenly gasping for breath. The real is real, after all.

Then there is that moment that in past times was called Grace. The invite, then, is to see if we can get over those walls that are—sit down together, ask it. After listening to a few episodes, we will see. What is sure here, I think, is there is a certain binary, not a nature, to what I'm talking about. World is the world, right? That's obvious. And then suddenly, you go, "Oh, oh no, it is not the world; it's me looking at the world." Bang, your journey has started. Once this happens, then the empire that this world can be defeated. It's that important to realize that there are other worlds out there. This realization is terrifying and exhilarating both at the same time. Of course, we all regress and lose that sense and get dragged back into the dullness of a flat plane, and then that sense comes back in its full glory. This is not a straightforward process, but one way or another, something big happens, and then we're on our way, or rather, the way has taken us.

So, I plan to adopt a series of approaches to the Citadel. If one does not do it for you, then please persist. Each is separate, but they build upon each other. Once you have heard several, you might want to revisit the early ones and go, "Oh, right, I see what you were saying there."

Civil resistance in the The Hague against fossil fuel subsidies.

I must admit at this stage, I'm not entirely sure of the routes I will take. I will be led by the process as much as leading it. My feeling, as I speak to you now, is that I'm going to focus on several key elements. It's not meant to be a definitive scheme. As I say, part of me hopes someone will come along and put me straight. This is not my specialism, but then, is it anyone's specialism? I will start by how we see the self—our self—then we all look at the world, what is around us, and then time, this apparently linear thing you pass along. This would lead me to investigate various non-rational elements of the human experience, as I will call them—ways of being and acting that do not involve sitting down and thinking it all through. All this builds this moment of going over the walls, the overcoming of that bastion of modern culture.

The imposed separation between secular and the religious, that historically situated category division—this is the massive block to the new understandings we need at this time. I will elaborate further on this theme and then show how it's connected by what we've been told about knowing, that there is only one way to know. That's not correct; there are many ways to know. So that is the direction of travel. All this aims to desensitize us, as you might say. We are not being asked to decide on X or Y, but rather to accept that it is the option of X and Y out there. This is a bit like a psychotherapist who aims to loosen up the client who insists, "There's nothing wrong with me. I'm all fine." "I am," he protests too much, as Shakespeare puts it.

A culture at this point is where people find themselves protesting too much about the viability of our metaphysical rigidity. In other words, we sense that even if it served us well in the past, this way of looking at the world—this world, as we have been told, is real—is starting to literally crumble around us. History is moving on; it did not end. The Citadel is going to collapse. The coming of dark times creates new openings. These new ways were always there; it's just that we were not attending to them. It is at this moment of transformation that I will take us back to the sociological, to re-engage with the task of creating those new social formations, the events, the organizations, the governments. This podcast, then, will come full circle at the end. This is because, as I've said, the spirit becomes real only through action. The spirit is made flesh, to use some old language.

We need to be clear: we are organizing a revolution here. This is not another individualistic journey to personal enlightenment, a contradiction in terms. This is not about feeling a certain calmness that never leaves your head but never gets you off the couch and into the street. The spirit is the street, and the street is the spirit. The spirit is in the prison cell. The time for pretending is over. We are facing the end of the old world, and we are going to have to battle to create what comes next. This podcast gives you the arms you need.

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