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Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse

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Sacred Demise is a powerful, fascinating, and very important book that provides a deep, holistic analysis of the present situation. Carolyn Baker surveys the ecological and economic disasters in the making, and concludes that, without any doubt, modern civilization is coming down. There is no longer anything we can do to prevent this; our choice at this point is either to deny the inevitable and try (futilely) to prop up the existing system, or to fully accept the enormity of this historical shift with all the uncertainty, stress, and even horror that it will entail.
Baker's central point is that the death of our cultural identity can be a spiritual opening for us, an opportunity to cast off our egocentric way of living (we are a "culture of two-year-olds," she says) and reclaim the ecocentric awareness of our indigenous heritage--a life in harmony with the pulsating vitality of the earth. This is the only way of living that has intrinsic meaning and purpose, that is spiritually and existentially nourishing, and the time has come to reconnect with it.
As with all major transitions in life, this "quantum shift" in consciousness will be psychologically difficult; the loss of "much of what we have held dear in civilization" will engender disorientation, distress, and deep grief. Sacred Demise is essentially an invitation to surrender to this emotional upheaval, to learn from it and allow it to deepen and mature us. Baker describes personal and communal practices we can use to turn cultural disintegration into a collective rite of passage, through which the limitations and mistakes of our immature worldview may be purged and transformed.
Sacred Demise draws on the wisdom of deep thinkers from various traditions; Carl Jung's insights inform much of her discussion, as do the indigenous African teachings of Malidoma Somé, the research of Jared Diamond and the spirituality of Thomas Moore and Eckhart Tolle, among others. Baker brings in many relevant and moving poems, and suggests a series of exercises for self-reflection. Weaving these elements with her own insights, Baker has given us a beautiful vision of humanity reconnecting with our ancient roots and with the Earth, finding spiritual resources to endure the coming apocalypse. For Baker, collapse opens possibilities for transformation.
I brought many urgent questions and anxieties to my reading of Sacred Demise, and Baker addresses them with uncanny directness. She writes with an extraordinary empathy for her readers, acknowledging that these are frightening times and modeling the courage and clarity of vision we will need to get through them. While the book is fortified with relevant quotes, references, and serious intellectual discussion, it remains throughout a personal conversation between a wise, deeply engaged elder and those of us who are seeking to grasp the enormity of the impending cultural transformation. Even though Baker unflinchingly discusses the most difficult and disturbing topics--massive social upheaval and the possible extinction of humanity--the book reads comfortably, like gentle advice from a caring friend.

In the rare instances where I come across a book that is a feast for the mind and soul I wrestle with it as with a lover. Pages get dog-eared, the pen comes out and notes appear all over. Great passages are underlined. There are coffee and wine stains. This marks my affair with a great book. "Sacred Demise" is the first such book I have read in many years. In spite of the profoundly disturbing topic: the collapse of industrial civilization and possible extinction of the human race; it is a book which has left me feeling joyful, hopeful, humorous and deeply comforted. It has made me love more completely and - in that process - has allowed me to be more alive in this present moment.

This isn't a mass-consumption book nor should it be. My life and experience have taught me that few humans have evolved or are aware enough to even grasp its significance. The book is like a great sacred text from antiquity that makes us love our forbears and take comfort in our connectedness to them. If intelligent life is able to find "Sacred Demise" in two or three millennia I can see it being revered as a great testament to what our potential as a species might have been... or might yet become.

"Sacred Demise" is an incredible how-to, first-aid, healing map and manual of how one can navigate an aware psyche through the emotional and spiritual challenges of collapse - to find and to give love, comfort and even great joy in the midst of pain, despair and death. It teaches and reminds us that death is not a bad word but a "parenthesis in eternity" as Joel Goldsmith wrote. I know of no one who has had the courage to address these crying needs in detail and Baker is uniquely qualified to do it. Every ounce of her heart, mind and soul were committed to this book's writing and that is clearly evident throughout. This book is an act of love. I am no different than any human in that I respond instantly and involuntarily when I see that someone has the courage to place a naked heart in front of my eyes. It reminds me that we are never stronger than when we are most vulnerable.

The book's genesis comes from Baker's clear statement that, "while many individuals will be able to physically navigate collapse, some will not be able to do so emotionally". I consider the book to be profoundly spiritual, although others may approach it as a psychological or cultural text that finally and beautifully addresses what I have seen as a crying need to deal with the emotions that collapse surfaces. Emotions ignored always return to bite us on the behind. They sap rather than enhance our strength. "Sacred Demise" is an emotional and spiritual guide for the treatment of those of us who understand what collapse means and by which we can give comfort, aid, assistance and great strength to ourselves and to those we love.

As Baker points out consistently - while fearlessly acknowledging that civilization and the species may become extinct soon - here is a pathway to choose not only which physical parts or our lives may endure, but what core values survive the transition and die-off. She reminds us that to be truly effective, "we must come to grips with our own mortality."

I have known Baker for many years. We have worked closely together and shared many painful "initiations". I am not at all surprised that she cites many spiritual books that I have long treasured and also delves deeply into Native-American spirituality for its close connection to a planet that "civilization" has cut us off from. Nor am I surprised that we have both arrived at exactly the same conclusions. What I am surprised at is Baker's Herculean research, her incredible depth and her broad, multi-discipline and multi-cultural approach. She does not confuse the reader, she refreshingly reminds us that truth and knowledge based upon harmony and balance with all life are universal truths once liberated from artificial labels and knee-jerk induced intellectual door slamming.

The book's greatest use will be in guiding and comforting those of us who are "hospice" workers for industrial civilization. Having written on the subject of collapse for almost a decade I have longed for something that would comfort me and the great many who have labored to awaken mass consciousness to the gravity of the current crisis. As on a battlefield one inevitably asks, who or what will care for the caregivers? This is that book.

Michael C. Ruppert

[Author: "Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil" and "A Presidential Energy Policy: Twenty-five points Addressing the Siamese Twins of Energy and Money"]

This book is probably the most honest assessment yet in print of our collective situation and the psychological and spiritual issues involved in facing up to and dealing with the multiple challenges of energy descent, climate disruption and economic meltdown. Carolyn Baker shows us how to face up to these tough realities while still enjoying life to the full. Especially helpful is her advice to parents on how to raise healthy kids in a collapsing world.

In SACRED DEMISE, Carolyn Baker faces squarely the corner humankind has boxed itself into. By engaging with the horrors of cultural extinction with her whole being on the intellectual, practical, emotional, and spiritual levels, she encourages us to do likewise. There is no way to turn our situation around and walk back into the known "room" consumptive technological culture has designed for us. This space is deteriorating before our very eyes, under our very feet.

Baker encourages us to look for or create new doorways, knowing that the new place into which we enter only has a chance to be a space of opportunity for deepening our humanity if we make it so with our labor and our love. She offers no guarantees, only opportunities to utilize our energies and insights to promote the possibility that humanity will survive and evolve in the very different world we are shaping.

This is not the first book I have read on the subject of changing environment, economy and our life-circumstances in general - not by a long shot. However it is the first book that discusses the internal aspects of our preparation, the emotional and the spiritual sides, and does it with impeccable research, empathy and smooth eloquence.

I have been paying special attention to the emotional preparation aspect for a few years. I am part of a men's group that believes, that the next twenty years will be completely different in our lives than the previous twenty years, and focuses on all aspect of preparation for this change. I chose emotional preparation as my focus, because I feel it connects with the quality of my life in general, not only in our particular circumstances. Carolyn Baker's book addresses this topic in a way that fills me with gratitude. Reading it, I found myself repeating "wow!" and "This is really good!" a whole lot.

Some of the main strengths of her writing are: 1) Her unlimited openness about looking at all aspect of the game without limitation; an atmosphere of sincerity exudes from this. 2) Her vulnerability; being the reader, I feel, that she is not the "expert above it all", but a fellow seeker just like me. 3) All the references; not only they are listed, but also talked about, showing the massive research the author conducted.

Few people can see that the global economic paradigm we have lived through is ending - now!
Those who say, in desperate hope, that 'this is just another cycle, so soon we will be back into endless growth' are in denial. The era of globalisation, consumerism - capitalism in fact is OVER!
Now this, for most people is going to be like dealing with death - their own, or someone close.
So now, everyone should refer to On Death and Dying by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. In this remarkable book, she sets out the five stages we go through from Denial to Acceptance - be it death, or immense change.
For all of us to face up to the looming collapse of Industrial Civilisation - if we intend to survive - we must go through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
I personally began my journey immediately after 9/11. I did not spend any time in denial - I went straight to anger. My anger rapidly increased as the truths of 9/11 become apparent.
Now I am at acceptance - about where our planet is headed. I welcome the end of the world I grew up in.
Several years back I first came across Carolyn Baker. From he writing, I quickly realised that here was an exceptional woman.
In this new book, Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse, Carolyn has filled in the spiritual blank spaces I was searching for.
Without doubt, this is an outstanding book for those who have moved beyond denial. They are on the very difficult path leading to acceptance. They are looking for guidance - they need help to get there.
This book will undoubtedly help!
Tragically, most people will remain in denial - to the very end.

I had my honey order this title as a Christmas present for me, after I saw it mentioned in the Peak Oil community's "Energy Bulletin", then saw it listed soon after in the curious blog "Peak Oil Blues" (written by a psychotherapist dealing with very upset people gradually or suddenly becoming aware that we are not in Kansas any longer.
I put it on my library shelf along with Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future, or Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture, or Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World or Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospectsand The Great Waves of Change: Navigating the Difficult Times Ahead.
Why do some of us read this kind of apocalyptic or collapsnik
book? Some might call it wallowing. It is such a "downer" and it is unAmerican, even socialist to think about "negative" things; in fact, we are often told to take medicine to avoid it. Europeans get to do it - think, I mean - but we Americans are considered wierd or whacko if we believe that things will not get better but worse, based on overwhelming evidence/data.
See, we are not going to have an economic recovery and we are running out of the ability to extract oil and grow the cancerous economy, and this - along with climate change will lead to global starvation and no water to drink not just in your grandchildren's lives or your children's lives but your life, like in about five to ten years. It will be to you like the Black Death was to medieval Europe, or the Indigenous Holocaust was to the Americas. So are you ready and can you happy knowing this?
I am not talking about End Times where the Good People get to leave their clothes and go up to a heaven. I am talking about all of us together, more like The Road, with probable cannibalism.
This is a good book. Being of a "spiritual" bent now and then, depending on the day or whether I am currently in the proverbial foxhole, I like to read others' thoughts on our place in the universe, mortality and God or the lack of It. I often wonder how others, like the millions in Haiti right now, come to grips with the reality that if there is a God or Goddess or Mother or benevolent ancestors or guardian spirits or whathaveyou, the face of that deity/spirit is more and more that of Kali the Destroyer.
Things are going to be bad for you, and it has nothing to do with whether you were a good person who recycled or made a pact with the devil or let your daughters wear miniskirts or dealt in shady mortgages.
And despite what we were told about the Secret - the Almighty Field - wanting us to be rich and own a McMansion, if we just have the right intent, like Tinkerbell, well, really God or the Secret does not care if we have that mansion or live in a slum or are trapped under concrete blocks or on an island with rising seas with no one to hear our cries.
Earth abides, but it does not care if you live on it. And the Earth apparently is better off without you or me on it. So how do you go on being a happy person, knowing that you are not so very special, and are more like vermin than the face of god? Well, actually, Rats are God in some places, right?
How do you raise your kids, knowing what you do? What do you tell them? How do you explain yourself to those who are not in the dark (i.e., those who rely on mainstream media for their facts). How do you get up in the morning and plan for the future and not curl back up in a fetal position of sorrow and fear in the knowledge that the future will be horrific?
This is a new kind of book, very much needed after a few decades of New Age uplifting feel-good fantasy (I say this, knowing that we are hardwired to believe in a spirit looking after us and that our immune systems are better off if we believe this, but alas I was despoiled by a liberal arts and science education).
Anyway, I needed to read how others were feeling on these matters who don't go to a church or have a holy leader, but like me, wander the Earth in a humanist funk. It makes me feel better to know I am not so alone in this weird, unAmerican Declinist school.
~Lesley Thomas, author of arctic novel Flight of the Goose

Having had the honor of writing the Forward to this book, I quickly found as I read page by page that Carolyn Baker is holding a mirror for us to look beneath the scientific graphs, charts and statistics of global warming, peak oil, water and resource depletion, and the economic instability that is touching nearly all of our lives. It lets us peer even deeper than the many feature stories of hardship, both real and projected, for loss of homes, jobs, species, habitats, and loved ones so common in the news today that we begin to become numb to them.
As I read I was drawn deeper into the question history is asking of each of us: Who do I want to be in this time of Transition? It is a very personal book, for a very personal set of questions we dare not look away from. But while calling for us to address these questions with blatant, unflinching honesty, Sacred Demise also invites us to do so with a caring spirit I found to be both renewing and oddly comforting. I highly recommend this book, most particularly to all helping professionals and anyone who wishes to make a positive contribution to their future well-bing and to our future on this earth

Sacred Demise is not an easy book to read. I am still reading it and probably will for a while. The reality of what we are facing as an empire in decline and a civilization is daunting yet the author uses exercises to help us get ready, if such a thing is possible. Mostly this book is like an intervention bringing one out of denial and into the reality of the world as it really is. I am grateful and have tremendous respect for the author.

The "bad' news is, if you accept Ms. Baker's thesis of inevitable and immenent collapse, our North American way of life is disintegrating into a more simple but chaotic social formation. In the grand scheme of things"bad" is, in fact, good. The crumbling systems around us will require the individual to be on the alert to readapt to this rapidly changing environment. Her advice to make the most of the priviledged way of life that is still available, seems excellent, giving us the enthusiasm for life itself to make possible the enormous effort of reinventing ourselves.
Over the past few months I've done just that: be myself, less cowtowing to expectations and conventions, with a readiness to embrace strengths that I now posses, perhaps in latent form, and reformulate myself today, for tomorrow's requirements of collapse. If Dmitri Orlov provides a mocking kick in the butt towards the cliff, Baker, perhaps in a manner that coddes excessively our spoilt sensibilities (with a consequent verbosity, in my view), sweet talks us into accepting the medicine that collapse will administer. As such, the author seems more concerned with nurturing an attitude of "yes we can," even though we cannot in the context of the present social formation.