From Aboriginal land stewardship practices to Pacific coast potlaches, from the asceticism practiced in religious communities to communitarian visions of shared sufficiency, many human stories can serve as counterpoints to the dominant narrative in which human activities push ever more forcefully against planetary boundaries, or behave as if those boundaries did not exist. These counterpoints suggest that our arrival at this new epoch in human and planetary history was not foreordained, and further, they provide political and cultural resources for reshaping our societies to mitigate the Anthropocene’s harshest affects. If human activities are the equivalent of that ten-kilometer-wide rock hurtling through space, re-narrating our human stories may be one means of deflecting or softening the impact. In other words, Anthropocene stories are not just about how we got here, but also about how things might have been otherwise; a way of reading the past against the grain of the present in order to open up new possibilities for realigning our values, politics, and social practices to live within planetary constraints. (8)
We read Jan Zalasiewics' survey of the many anthropogenic transformations of the earth system which might leave traces future geologists could measure for Tuesday, Julie Adeney Thomas' plea for responsible but plural stories for Thursday. In the middle came the guided meditation "Our Inheritance," which I told you about when I tried it out on the students in China. I'd originally planned for us to do it together at the end of the Tuesday class but we needed all our time to attend to the staggering scale and speed of anthropogenic mayhem, so I told students to do it on their own time, and that we'd discuss it together first thing on Thursday before turning to Thomas.
That's almost what we did. I've been asking students to contribute to an online discussion at the end of each class with some of their "Takeaways" and those at the end of Tuesday's class demanded acknowledgment. Representative:
The reality of the Anthropocene is almost absurd in a way. From the amount of chicken corpses we’ve produced to the amount of biomass lost, and the comically little amount of time we have left to fix it all… it just feels a bit surreal and insane. It’s difficult to not feel an overwhelming amount of fear.
Do we have time to create a common multidisciplinary understanding of the Anthropocene? Do we have time to disagree? There are so many complexities in the scientific, political, and cultural world that I often feel we are hopeless in unwinding what needs to be done. ...
I'm feeling very overwhelmed after the discussions in this class. On the one hand I really like what you said at the end about how we must believe in the goodness of human nature and not just that our only purpose is to consume, consume, consume. … but I find it hard to believe that we really do deserve to be here, that we deserve this beautiful world.
So I started Thursday's class reading aloud all the Tuesday "Takeaways" (without names) and opened the floor. Students described feeling overwhelmed and discouraged, misanthropic and hopeless - but the Thursday materials had helped. Thomas starts where Zalasiewics ends, with patterns of unsustainable human culture, and gives us back freedom to act. She emphasizes a humanist’s point: reality does not dictate the stories we tell ourselves (44) and proceeds to reclaim most of the human past: cumulative history necessarily ignores all the things that people did that never contributed to the forcings on the Earth System (61). It's easier to imagine a future where humanity stops despoiling the earth when reminded that most people across most of time lived harmoniously with the earth. It's not our nature to be at odds with the rest of life.
When we turned to the guided meditation, it became clear that it had helped, too, a lot. Some students were familiar with meditation, others reported nodding off, but it turned out to be a medium we could relate to. And this particular meditation, leading us to align our "breath with deep time," going back 300 million years to become part of a lycopod forest and then slowly to become coal before being rudely reacquainted with human time through miners, was just what we needed. (Doing it for a fifth time in preparation for this class I really was living that encounter from the vantage of the coal seam.)
Students reported being reassured by the experienced alignment with time spans beyond the human. One recalled the words Coal is a unique phenomenon of time and life. It may never happen again and added - so are we! Others discussed the line you have all the time of the world with which the meditation begins and ends, jarringly wrong at a time of climate emergency and yet in some other way right: ours is a part of the world's breathing. We are inheritors, and trustees, of all the time in the world. We're not in this on our own.
And yet of course we are not coal, not lycopods, not able to travel in time and across species! What on earth was the guided meditation doing to us? What on earth indeed! I played up its absurdity, then turned our conversation to how it is that guided meditations work. The "guide" speaks gently, suggesting rather than commanding. but doesn't ask our assent; their tone of voice and timing tell us what to do and we just do it. We don't ask if it's possible or if we can do it - we do it. Feel the ground through the floor? Done. Imagine a light moving up your spinal column and out through the top of your head? Done. Each of your breaths is a million years? Done!
If we allow it to, a guided meditation takes us places we wouldn't, in other contexts, think we could go or even really imagine. And even if we don't in fact become ancient forests of the carboniferous, something happens. We feel - we know ourselves to be - connected to the world beyond ourselves in ways we couldn't think our way into being. It's not delusion but discovery. The arts do this, too. Discussions of literature often refer to Coleridge's call for a willing "suspension of disbelief" but it's at work in guided meditation too. If its first gift is the discovery that we are able to suspend disbelief, another surely is that in that suspension we find ourselves alive and connected in deeper, more mysterious ways than we can quite ken.
I happened on this guided meditation while looking for someting else but am so grateful it found me. I hadn't had occasion to think of guided meditation as a genre of the humanities, or of the work of the humanities as like guided meditation. I started making the connection when relating this to the working definition of humanities I used for the Renmin course: disciplines of memory and imagination. But this time, with these students, responding not to a definition but to the vertigo of the Anthropocene, I really got it. Deep! And just in time.
