As I dialog with readers of Truth to Power and countless numbers of other individuals around the world who are collapse-aware and are consciously navigating it, I am profoundly moved by their stories of the internal preparation that has occurred and continues to flourish as they hunker down for some of the most dramatic transitions in the history of life on earth.

Some people tell me that the notion of living simply became increasingly appealing as they found themselves suffocating in possessions, consumerism, and the overall busy-ness of advancing their careers, parenting children, maintaining properties, and living the conventional middle class lifestyle. In fact, for some, the burden became so unbearable that life seemed scarcely worth living, and as they felt progressively more devoured by the complexity of their lives, questions of meaning could no longer be ignored or swept under the rug.

For others, it was those nagging questions like "What is this all for anyway?" that surfaced first, leading them to investigate Peak Oil, climate change, and other thorny topics of transition. Perhaps marriages ended, careers crashed, financial devastation erupted, or other losses invaded their lives like emotional Katrinas, engulfing people, activities, accomplishments, or possessions that had previously offered a sense of purpose.

Whatever the scenarios that have led people to collapse awareness, the complexity that attends their awakening is never far from the simplicity they have chosen to embrace. One of my favorite writers, psychotherapist Thomas Moore, notes in his book Original Self:Living With Pardox and Originality, that "Simplifying the externals allows us to cultivate a rich inner and outer life. A cluttered existence may keep us busy, but busyness doesn't mean that we are fully engaged in what we are doing." In fact, the busy-ness serves to prevent us from being present to ourselves, our work, and those we love. Remove it, and we are confronted with deeper levels of our relationship with everything and everyone.

Something calls or compels us to live more simply, we choose to do so, and almost immediately, our inner world begins stirring. Sometimes the movement is subtle, sometimes dramatic, but merely the decision to simplify communicates to the psyche that we are giving it more space-more space to revive itself, to launch emotions, daydreams, night dreams, or creative impulses that could not be consciously appreciated by us as were engulfed by the trappings of civilization. And before we know it, a "life of simplicity" on one level becomes anything but simple on a much deeper level.

One reason I wrote Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse, was my fascination with the inner transformations that precede and accompany an individual's journey into the collapse process. Almost without exception, everything written about collapse addresses the cerebral and logistical aspects of it. A rich panoply of stories abounds of how people embarked on the journey and what they've done since then, but much less attention is paid to the machinations of the inner world that opened the door to the path and that continue to percolate as their odyssey and the collapse process deepen.

I have been and continue to be intrigued by the kind of material that surfaces from the psyche in these extraordinary transitions and what individuals do with the material. I celebrate with individuals who ecstatically report that they have completed the installation of a wind turbine or a solar hot water heater or have stored enough food to last for two years. My heart swells; you are all my heroes! And at the same time, I wonder what tears, what rage, what terror, what compassion, what wounding, and what triumphs brought you to this way of life and continue to reverberate off the walls and doors of the new home of "simplicity" you thought you were settling into.

In his wonderful article "The Gathering of The Tribe" by Charles Eisenstein, published on the Truth to Power website today and sent to all subscribers, he states: "...to fully step into one's mission here on earth, one must experience an inner shift that cannot be merely willed upon oneself. It does not normally happen through the gathering or receiving of information, but through various kinds of experiences that reach deep into our unconscious minds." What Eisenstein is talking about here is the complexity of the inner world that permits, engenders, attends, and supports collapse awareness and preparation. No amount of book reading, documentary viewing, or logistical readiness can begin or end the shift to which he's alluding. Nor once set in motion, can it be tamed. It appears to have a life of its own-and a wisdom far superior to that of the rational, linear mind.

Many writers aware of the triple crisis of energy depletion, climate change, and economic meltdown forecast massive social unrest and upheaval as collapse intensifies. While I concur with that probability, I also believe that collective rage will not be the only outcome of masses of individuals unemployed, bankrupt, foreclosed upon, and bereft of healthcare. The same complicated internal phenomenon that has brought many readers of these words to where they are today may well awaken in some of those individuals newly dispossessed, profound gratitude for the loss of civilization's trappings and the quiet zone enabled by that loss which permits them to hear the music of their own inner world. I wonder what kind of voluntary simplicity they will embrace as a result of forced downsizing, and as a result, what they will create, who they will become, and what wisdom they will have to offer those of us who have been on this journey much longer.

As I reflect on myself and our world one year ago at this time, I recall that the consensus in the moment was that oil prices were skyrocketing and the economy was going through a "rough patch", in the words of Alan Greenspan, but that by fall, everything would be back to normal. We all remember what September, 2008 brought forth-hardly the "back to normal" of consensus fantasy. One year ago today, talking about collapse was risky business because the show was still being kept sufficiently on the road so that such talk got one labeled wacko. While the consensus trance, as Jim Kunstler calls it, maintains that there's some sort of normal to get back to, most beings with rational minds and beating hearts sense somewhere in the depths of their psyches that civilization is over and that a point of no return has been crossed.

As an historian and a former psychotherapist, I have always noticed the kinship between history and psychology. History is the study of human behavior throughout time, and psychology is the study of the dynamics of that behavior. I've always been fascinated by history books, but I've always wanted to know more than simply what a particular historical figure did or didn't do. What motivated her? What was he feeling at the time? What were the emotional and spiritual consequences as well as the social and political ones? Sometimes we have primary sources that fully or partially answer those questions; sometimes, we simply have to infer the answers to our questions.

Today in the throes of collapse, encouraging stories abound: People learning to live with less, fewer miles being driven, more staycations, more shopping at thrift stores, drastically reduced consumption, more leisure time. Good news indeed, and yet fraught with countless emotions, family conflicts, depression, and stress. Thus, things become really simplified-and yes, at the same time, really, really complicated.