The Next Five Years – The Magical Universe

The next five years, in terms of climate change, could be brutal. Wading through the beginning of this article could also be brutal. But if you can get through it (it’s not long), I offer a way out, but it’s not your traditional way out. Using insights from Alan Watts, I offer a different way to deal with this ongoing and worsening disaster. But first, let’s see how bad the situation is.

This year we are seeing the intensifying effects of climate change. On top of that, we have a coming El Nino, the warming trend that periodically shows up, scheduled to arrive later this year, but more on that shortly.

The Current Situation

But currently, more than 400 wildfires are spread across Canada from the west coast to the east coast. The thick, dark smoke from Canada’s hundreds of blazing wildfires has blanketed the skies of the Northeast, Midwest, the Ohio Valley, and the Mid-Atlantic, triggering dangerous air pollution warnings and impacting tens of millions of people.

In addition, record heat waves have engulfed much of the planet, causing the heat index to rise to 125 degrees Fahrenheit in Puerto Rico. Asia has been suffering from a prolonged record breaking heat wave with devastating effects, and scientists are now predicting an ice-free summer in the Arctic in the next decade. Those are just some of the environmental problems we are facing.

El Nino is Coming

The above crises are all before El Nino hits. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says it’s coming. The WMO gives us a 60 percent chance of it arriving by the end of July and an 80 percent chance by the end of September.

However, because it takes time for El Nino to kick into effect, we won’t feel its full brunt until 2024.

The WMO announced Wednesday there is a 98% chance that at least one in the next five years will beat the global temperature record set in 2016 when there was an exceptionally strong El Niño. The chance of the five-year mean for 2023-2027 being the hottest on record is also 98%, the WMO reports.

The 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature rise is the critical number the 2015 Paris Climate Summit warned we shouldn’t cross. Now there is a very good chance we will reach it in the next five years, although not permanently, yet.

A special United Nations report said surpassing this number would drastically and dangerously affect the planet with more death, destruction, and damage to global ecosystems.

The Experts’ Warnings

Professor Adam Scaife, the head of long-range prediction at the UK Met Office, said,

“It’s very likely that the next big El Niño could take us over 1.5C. The probability of having the first year at 1.5C in the next five-year period is now about 50:50.”

He continued.

“We know that under climate change, the impacts of El Niño events are going to get stronger, and you have to add that to the effects of climate change itself, which is growing all the time. You put those two things together, and we are likely to see unprecedented heatwaves during the next El Niño.”

Prof James Hansen, at Columbia University in New York, said.

“We suggest that 2024 is likely to be off the chart as the warmest year on record.”

Should we be scared? Hell yes! Will it finally shake us awake? Doubtful.

What’s the Real Problem?

The real problem is not climate change itself; it’s the feelings that get conjured up in us when we think about climate change. We can’t handle those uncomfortable, helpless, and negative feelings. The question then becomes how do we handle these feelings?

Nobody wants to feel helpless and hopeless in the face of catastrophe, but ignoring our emotional state is not the solution. Climate change should be the number one issue going into our next election, but since the media ignores it, so do the people. So what to do?

We need a different approach. We can start with Einstein’s famous quote to frame what we have to do.

Einstein said,

“You cannot solve a problem from the same mind that created it.”

Alan Watts’ Perspective on Our Feelings

In other words, we cannot solve the climate change problem from the same mentality that created it, and this is precisely what we are trying to do. If the problem is not so much climate change, but how we manage our emotions in regards to climate change, then Mystical philosopher Alan Watts can give us some help here. He offers a different perspective on how to deal with our feelings. He said there are two ways to handle them.

“We can use our reason to control them, mastering them like riding a horse, or we can submit to them and become their puppet.”

But Watts then says,

“What both approaches have in common is that the person feels themself to be different from their feelings.”

To clarify his point, he gives an example of how we control our limbs.

“If you want to shut your right hand and close it around something, you don’t close it with your left hand. In other words, you don’t close it from the outside. You close your right hand from the inside. We are all of us very vague about how we do it. It just closes, but certainly, we work on it from within.”

We Aren’t Our Feelings

Unfortunately, we approach our feelings in the same way. We try to control them from the outside. As Watts says,

“We don’t feel fully that we are our feelings. We have them, but we don’t feel we are them.”

On top of feeling separate from our feelings, Watts says that’s not all we are isolated from.

“In the same way, a human being feels distinct from his own inner life, his body, his unconscious mental mechanisms, and his passions and desires; he feels himself different and separate from all things going on outside his body. Man feels himself to be this isolated ego thing.”

So we are this ego that is cut off from our inner and outer worlds, leaving us lonely and terrified. The ego’s situation is so horrible it led German psychologist Erich Fromm to say,

“What is startling to the psychiatrist is not so much that people go insane, but that they don’t, considering the lonely powerless predicament of this ego.”

Fromm on Why More People Don’t Go Insane

And why don’t more people go insane? Fromm says,

“There are all kinds of compensatory ego mechanisms like the quest for power and money, seeking of sensations, the goings on of all sorts of fanaticisms, worshipping of idols; they are all a kind of dope to keep this poor ego solaced and comforted.”

Unfortunately, this lonely, terrified ego is not only running from itself through all these diversions; it is also running the show in the world today. We need to overcome this if we want to preserve our lives on this planet.

Watts says we Need a Fundamental Transformation From Ego to Ultimate Reality

What we need, Watts says,

“. . .is a fundamental transformation not just of the theory of human beings, but in how it feels to be a human being.”

In short, we need a transformative experience so we no longer live from our egos but instead from the ground of Being or Ultimate Reality.

It’s a state of consciousness where we no longer feel isolated but instead would experience the whole world as an extension of our body. So, when we perceive that something is wrong in the world, we would instinctively feel something is wrong with us.

From Isolation to Connection

Watts describes this new perspective.

“This doesn’t feel like our ego is in charge of everything in the world. It would be an altogether new sense of selfhood. You would feel that you were no longer your ego, but instead, would feel connected to everything.”

Watts continues,

“To the extent you had transcended your ego, you would feel a corresponding drop of hostility toward the external world, and therefore, the need for self-protection.”

So, if we want to preserve our stay on this planet, we have to emerge from our ego prison by facing our uncomfortable feelings. This would allow us to reconnect to the world around us. If all of us did this, it would constitute an evolutionary leap in human consciousness and ensure our continued survival. We all have a role to play.

I titled this article “The Next Five Years” because I think that if El Nino is as strong as some scientists predict it will be, our lives will be vastly different at the end of these next five years. Whether El Nino is as bad as expected, the end of the next five-year period will only be a prelude to what will follow. It’s certainly not going to get any better.

As the cartoon character Pogo once said,