From Collapse to Collective Power

A call to rise, resist, and reimagine the world together

The Descent into Authoritarianism

Witnessing the last few months in the U.S. has been truly horrible. To any rational person, it’s clear that the U.S. is spiraling out of control into destruction, genocidal warmongering, and chaos, dragging global sanity, security, and our collective survival down with it.

It’s terrifying, threatening, and precarious. And yet–resistance is rising.

This Saturday, April 5^th, marks the first nationwide protest since Trump took office. The “Hands Off!” National Day of Action opposes what organizers describe as a hostile takeover that threatens our public services, democratic institutions, and civil rights. The primary organizers include Indivisible, the 5051 Movement, and Third Act.

While I can’t attend as I’m co-facilitating a month-long silent retreat with Kittisaro, I want to lend my voice in full support because what we need now is not just a protest but a global mass movement to confront this fast-descending consolidation of global fascism.

The last few months have been deeply troubling. Not long ago, we had more collaborative, life-affirming paths forward. Yet ultimately, the sheer weight of fear, greed, hatred, and apathy, this “dark matter,” has dragged our hopeful evolutionary arc into a hellish ditch. Perhaps this is the inevitable outcome of a system built on violent conquest and endless extraction.

Whatever the diagnostics, here we are, deep into late-stage rapacious capitalism, mutating into something even more grotesque, a violently oppressive, oligarchic, post-human fiefdom fused with a vengeful, theocratic nightmare. A “Handmaid’s Tale” with its patriarchal overlords aiming to control every aspect of our lives with the help of AI mass surveillance.

Nowhere is the “empire’s” long history of cruelty and sadism more evident than in Gaza. The fact that the U.S. won’t stop this travesty is unhinging the soul of humanity. Babies and children are being slaughtered in their thousands with the complicity of so-called democratic nations. Dissent is criminalized. Protests are highly policed. Speaking truth has become dangerous, while lies inverted as “the truth” spread like a virus. Currently, many high-profile institutions, universities, media outlets, and politicians are yielding to fascism everywhere.

They want us to look away, to accept the criminalization, arrest, and public smearing of anyone who dares hold a protest sign or sign a petition calling for an end to this travesty. This isn’t just policy failure. Its moral collapse accelerated, televised, and repackaged as politics as usual.

The horrors of Gaza are a devastating window into what this new “normal” could easily mean for the powerless or any group targeted by the elite for suppression, ethnic cleansing, or as a testing ground for new grotesque weapons and militarized technologies, especially now that global systems of moral accountability are rapidly being dismantled.

The Authoritarian Architecture Is Completing Itself

Those who dare to resist or even critique the regime now risk arrest, disappearance, deportation, or worse. How is this different from Putin’s oligarchy? His regime is built on stolen wealth and silencing dissent through imprisonment, disappearance, and assassination. Yet, Putin now maneuvers Trump and the GOP like pawns on his global chessboard, gleeful that Project 2025, DOGE, and Christian Nationalism are dismantling the U.S. from within.

Unfortunately, the most vulnerable populations are most at risk. Those who have been historically marginalized, negatively racialized, or politically scapegoated are in danger. Queer and trans communities are again being targeted. Women face not only a rollback of reproductive rights but also an impending effort to strip away their voting rights.

Every day, new dictates erode the fabric of civil society. Recently, an app emerged that allows users to report “illegals” in exchange for cryptocurrency, while Speaker of the House Mike Johnson proposed eliminating federal courts–one of the last remaining barriers to this lawless regime. The New Yorker framed the crazed tariff dictates as “Donald Trump’s Ego Melts the Global Economy.” The impacts will primarily punish the poor, disrupting and undermining lives everywhere.

Meanwhile, as the Department of Education is being dismantled, child labor laws are reverted to something resembling the 1800s. Are they planning to substitute migrant labor with child labor? Language itself is under siege. Words like “antisemitism” and “terrorist” are weaponized to silence, destroy, and cancel anyone who dares speak out against the daily atrocities in Gaza, the West Bank, and further afield.

The floodgates of a Nazi-like authoritarian state, supported by lies and spectacle, are nearly wide open. The critical threshold will hinge on whether the military complies with martial law. This could occur at any moment, using the lawful protests and acts of resistance by citizens as a cynical justification for crushing dissent.

This is the architecture of authoritarianism being constructed in real-time. However, it is not too late to resist and co-create a mass counter-movement. Everyone now has to realize just how high the stakes are.

Global Resistance Is Rising – Will We?

We’ve already seen the global climate movement increasingly sidelined, criminalized, co-opted, and silenced by the very industries driving the collapse. And while traditional protests remain vital, the truth is that there simply aren’t enough people on the streets.

To change this self-destructive path, we need millions to mobilize, mirroring the mass uprisings currently occurring in Georgia, Serbia, Turkey, Hungary, and Slovakia, where people are refusing to accept authoritarian rule as a given.

But marching isn’t enough. At this threshold, we must also stop funding our own oppression.

This means refusing to buy what they sell. We can scrutinize where our money goes, boycott companies complicit in authoritarianism and war machinery, cancel Amazon and Prime, and withdraw our subscriptions from platforms owned by malignant oligarchs. The actual cost of convenience has always been steep, exhausting the planet and trapping people in serfdom. Ultimately, resistance boils down to not choosing convenience over our collective destruction.

Now is a good time to create a plan to protect our privacy. If you intend to attend a demonstration, do prioritize safety. As border surveillance increasingly serves as a primary tool for arrest, deportation, and disappearance, take precautions when crossing into or out of the U.S. Additionally, we can educate ourselves about the rights of migrants and those who do not have citizenship to help safeguard others within our sphere of influence.

Additionally, we can disentangle ourselves from systems that profit from surveillance, manipulation, and control while educating ourselves about fascism, resistance, collaboration, and grassroots movements.

Even so, this regime will likely exploit our right to boycott and protest as a pretense for imposing martial law. In part, because of this likelihood, experts on fascist regimes stress the importance of acting quickly and decisively to prevent a rapid descent into manufactured chaos to justify the entrenchment of mass oppression.

Experts emphasize that delay is deadly. Resistance must arise early, before the walls close in, and before we confront a grim choice: submit or risk indefinite detention or worse.

It’s Time to Reclaim Power Or Lose Everything.

Ironically, Kittisaro and I spent three decades working in South Africa in a society healing from the brutal legacy of Apartheid. Now, we find ourselves witnessing this so-called Land of the Free rapidly constructing its own form of white supremacist isolationism. Apartheid, literally “living apart,” is a mad and ugly malignancy. It’s built and sustained by fear, greed, arrogance, and an endless tangle of justifications that collapse under even the slightest rational scrutiny.

As the planet burns and life stands on the edge, we can no longer afford the illusion of separation. If we stand for freedom, justice, and the sacred work of equity and inclusion, then this is the time to come together to do what we can in this moment of collapse.

In truth, however, the systems are not just collapsing. They are being actively destroyed. But the masks are off. Gaza showed us the utter venality of the empire. So now, we have only one move to make: the possibility, the necessity, of collective awakening.

This is not the end. It’s a call. In other words, collapse is not an ending. It is an initiation.

Dharma Training for the Long Haul

There are forms of power beyond brute force, power that the erasure of truth, beauty, memory, or historical reality cannot sever. This power is rooted in our deep, collective interconnectedness within the mysterious and magical sacred web of life.

There is also the power of the Dharma, with its potent medicine for the aching heart of this world, offering pathways of healing and transformation.

Here on retreat, a space for healing, inquiry, and deep insight, I’ve been reflecting on what it truly means to “retreat” at a time like this. What if a retreat is not an escape from the world, as it’s often perceived, but rather a shift in how we engage with the world? With some internal pivots and teaching frames, a long retreat like the one we’re currently hosting becomes rigorous training for these times.

At the heart of this shift is the recognition that the “world” we seek to escape is essentially a projection of the mind, a mind susceptible to greed, hatred, and delusion. With this understanding, the connection between inner liberation and outer decolonization becomes clear. Inner practices such as meditation and deep contemplative inquiry serve to strengthen us, preparing us to resist, strategize, mobilize, and endure for the long haul.

In this light, intensive meditation guided by Dharma teachings becomes a powerful tool for decolonizing the mind, liberating the heart, and releasing the deep energetic patterns stored in our somatic body. It helps us reclaim our authentic energy and clearly see the root of all domination and violence, a distorted sense of separateness that breeds repression, projection, and division. We can cultivate compassion, harness the power of protective mantras, and find a refuge deeper than suffering.

Unless we connect these inner shifts, born from clear seeing, with the urgent work of transforming outer systems, we are headed toward an unimaginably dark and violent future. But once we begin the conscious work of freeing the mind from delusion, fear, and greed, it becomes clear that inner liberation and outer transformation are inseparable. From this clarity, we can act, not out of reactivity but from alignment with what truly serves life.

The choice before us is stark, surrender to fear, propaganda, and control, or reclaim our power and swiftly generate a mass counter-movement underwritten by vital shifts of consciousness.

Reclaiming the Dharma’s Revolutionary Core

The question is can contemporary and traditional Dharma spaces rise to meet this moment? Can we extend beyond our silos and lineages to combine the substantial assets, skills, and resources available within Buddhist sanghas to actively strategize and mobilize?

Will we help save the day, or will we remain as silent witnesses while demons overtake the world?

If the silence, or at best, the lukewarm response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza and its implications for the world, is any indication, then we cannot expect this to happen in any significant way. So, what will it take? Will the sheer terror of watching unchecked power move freely, enacting the worst human impulses, finally be enough to move the dial?

Those intent on fascism won’t stop, and neither can we. So perhaps remembering two things will help us focus and prioritize.

First, the fact that this threat is now personal should capture our attention. It affects nearly all of us, our safety, our rights, our children, and our ability to live fully, love freely, speak out, and survive, let alone thrive.

Second, the Dharma has a radical and revolutionary core as embodied by the Buddha himself. It advocates for liberation beyond societal norms and power structures while opposing the hoarding of wealth and the oppression of all beings. Instead, the Buddha urged his disciples to move in all directions, driven by deep compassion, to alleviate suffering and actively promote the welfare of everyone.

What we need is a return to this courageous heart. While the mindfulness movement has brought genuine benefit to countless lives, offering tools for presence, healing, and resilience, too often, especially in the commodified explosion of mindfulness, the radical edge of Dharma has been dulled. It’s been replaced by a consumer spirituality that quietly reinforces the very systems threatening our collective safety and future.

Mindfulness, when disconnected from engaged Dharma coupled with meditation practices overly focused on self-benefit, has essentially been transformed into yet another productivity hack–a way to stay calm while functioning more efficiently within a collapsing capitalist system. This consumer spirituality fails to challenge oppressive structures; instead, it supports them. It teaches us to “cope” rather than confront. Though important, it needs to be coupled with collective resistance and liberation. Mindfulness becomes a way to manage burnout while remaining productive within the very machinery that is causing our burnout.

But Dharma isn’t about adapting to injustice. It urges us to see through it, challenge it, and transform the system as the Buddha did. Instead, the radical edge of the Dharma has been stultified, neutered, and sold back to us in digestible, soothing fragments. What was once a more revolutionary path of liberation has, for the most part, been repackaged as a self-help tool for enduring capitalism.

Let’s be real. This multi-headed monster is coming for everyone who refuses to bend the knee. We can’t afford delay. Now is the time to network, find our collaborators, and move with urgency. For that, we need a clear and unified vision—one that offers guidance, courage, and a deeper and coherent sense of collective purpose.

As Alnoor Ladha reminds us, we must stop abdicating responsibility and questioning nothing. We must interrogate the very orthodoxy of power and the belief that those in power will somehow save us.

Clearly, they won’t. So, this is our moment: to collectively strategize, organize, step up, and step out. However, to sustain that movement and fuel it with more than outrage, we need this bold and life-affirming vision of the world we’re fighting for, not just the one we resist. This vision must be rooted in interdependence, dignity, care, and justice while reimagining how we live, relate, and share power.

From Collapse to Co-Creation:
Inner Shifts That Underwrite Outer Change

A few years ago, I completed an eight-month Reworlding Fellowship training hosted by Tierra Valiente (Brave Earth) in Costa Rica, in collaboration with Imperial College London. Led by Alnoor Ladha, alongside a range of visionary thinkers, including Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, the program explored the interface between plant medicine, deep ontological shifts, and systemic transformation.

One of the frameworks we explored–which continues to evolve and deepen–outlines a set of essential shifts in consciousness to support collective evolution. These shifts can guide us as we transition from a collapsing paradigm toward a visionary, life-affirming future that we can co-create together:

• From rational logic to:
  Trans-rational awareness–intuitive, non-separative, and deeply relational.
  

• From historical amnesia and looping ancestral trauma to:
  Remembrance, repair, and reparation supported by ceremonial and somatic practices focused on ancestral and collective liberation.
  

• From separation, materialism, and soulless extraction to:
  A non-dual, Gaian/Pachamama cosmology. Nature as depth intelligence. Human experience as participatory inter-being within the sacred web of life.
  

• From the unquestioned orthodoxy of power to:
  Collaborative, co-creative empowerment. Shared responsibility born from mutual care and engaged presence.
  

• From competition and wealth-hoarding to:
  Equitable distribution. Mutual solidarity. Service in support of holistic wellbeing.
  

• From accumulation of capital to:
  Liberation of capital. Reparative justice. Fair and meaningful compensation.
  

• From transactional relationships shaped by trauma to:
  Recultivation of life force. Creative collaboration. Compassionate care. Authentic presence.
  

• From entitlement, assumed privilege, and bureaucratic stagnation to:
  Entrustment. Participatory engagement. Uplifting the unique gifts of each being in service of collective thriving.

These aren’t abstract ideals; they are positive intentions and goals that can guide our approach to governance, education, the economy, land use, and justice on both local and global scales. They partially form a foundation for genuine systems change.

These shifts arise from a deeper understanding of consciousness, inviting a shift from being pawns in a life-consuming capitalist system to recognizing ourselves as relational, participatory beings intricately woven into a multifaceted, sacred web of life.

Grounded in a Gaian cosmology of deep interbeing, this perspective honors ways of knowing that extend beyond rationality to include the subtle intelligences of intuition, somatic feeling, dreams, visions, altered states, and meditative insights.

Together, they create an evolving narrative centered on reconnection with each other, with nature's living intelligence, and with the sacred force that animates all life.

Together, We Are the Power

This is the power they fear–not brute force, but the power of remembrance.
The power of truth-telling. Of beauty that endures. Of memory that refuses erasure.
Of ancestors whispering through trees, rivers, chants, and dreams.
Of collective awakening that rises quietly, and then all at once.

We are part of something older and deeper than the systems trying to erase us.

This sacred web of life still holds us. Still pulses with mystery, with intuitive guidance, with the knowing that we belong to each other, to the Earth, to something vast and alive.

And if we can listen, not just with our ears but with our bodies, our breath, and our courage, we may yet remember what we are, why we came, and what we are here to protect.

So, we Chant, Sing, Meditate, Dance.
We grieve. We organize.
We stand up. We slow down.
We reach for each other.
We refuse to forget.
We refuse to obey.
We refuse to give up on life.

The demons may be loud. But they are not all-powerful.
And they are not everything.

We are still here.
We are sacred.
We will endure.