Healing the Hunger
Healing the Hunger
I live for you, Creator.
You came to my call when I had
nothing at all.
Looking for small crack rocks in the carpet.
Maybe one fell off the table.
Just one more beer.
One more cigarette.
One more line
before I go into that merciless dream world.
I had nothing
at all.
Your love came rushing in like a gust
of teary-eyed grace and blew away
all the pain,
all the hate
I held for myself.
The world told me I was worthless.
You told me I was your warrior;
told me to stand up again.
To live again.
And now all I see is you.
These sacred memories of all you did for me,
all the angels and gifts you sent
to help me home,
they have kept me sober for six years now.
I walk out the door light as a feather,
knowing all I need is you.
I was a vacuum, sucking up the world’s fleeting high and
never getting full.
Now I am the sun.
I find fullness in giving this blazing light inside me to all of Earth.
Your love is the star inside me.
These warm rays are not of me,
but are your truth and grace.
I dreamt I was eating both nickels and skittles.
Greed and sugar highs
cannot compare to this water that you are.
You gave us all we need.
All we need.
I was addicted to drugs and the smell of money.
A hustler in the land of shattered hearts and broken mirrors.
Could I see myself again?
The way you see me?
Your precious child?
Gently, over a span of years,
you carried me home to myself.
How surprised was I to find I was actually beautiful, like you?
That I actually had great value?
That each of us does, was
born with it?
How surprised was I to find I had not soiled myself,
but that the world put me through a battle and tried to kill me,
and I survived,
a veteran of a war still raging against women,
against so many precious sisters.
We pray for forgiveness not knowing
we are the ones who need to forgive others.
That we have done nothing wrong,
but have had wrong done to us?
That we’d rather hate ourselves,
than succumb to hate for others.
You can love yourself and this whole cruel world, my sister.
You can do this, my brother.
We can all do this, my people.
Here to tell the tale.
Healed of my insatiable desire to consumer nicotine and marijuana and beer and meth and MDMA and all those seductive swamps of oblivion.
All I need is You
and a chance to give what you have given to me.
Your love still brings me to tears,
and I live to give others a chance to feel it too.
Here to tell the tale.
The world reads my scars like Braille.
They tell a story of the unconquerable prayer.
The story of a heart that wouldn’t stop beating.
The story of the weaponry of forgiveness and self-love.
We hold fast to this precious love you have for us.
All it took was this decision that I was ready for help and
you came storming into the lower rungs of hell to find me.
You left no stone unturned as you searched for me in the night.
You broke down every door between us.
You held me tenderly until I could see again.
Now that I can see, You are all I see.
The center of every action and
it all makes sense now.
I could step out the door with no wallet or backpack
and have everything I need:
your love and this chance to serve your children.
We seek refuge from this fear.
This fear that we have failed.
That we are failures.
We hide inside of materialism,
drugs, alcohol, caffeine, work, or whatever it is.
I was sent to say that you were never evicted from
the Creator’s house of refuge.
You have done nothing wrong
and even if you did, Creator is forgiveness
so come.
Come inside by the fire of the love
we will have for you forever and always,
precious child, come under Her wings
and be held.
Climate Reports
The power and abundance of our Earth can never be overstated; what is commonly overlooked is humanity’s exploitation and neglect of its own life source. The following are summaries of recent studies conducted on the interrelationships between climate change and four distinct areas: fashion, food, the sea, and mental health. Brief and laced with sobering data, these glimpses into our intricate, reciprocal relationship with the Earth’s changing climate are intended to evoke a sense of personal responsibility and inspire informed action, no matter how humble. Humans have a continuous effect on the planet, yet an impermanent place in its history. Each of us who walks through its lush fields and drinks from its abundant waters has a duty to protect and support the Earth during the short time we are here.
Fourth National Climate Assessment
The report, prepared with the support and approval of 13 federal agencies, and with input from hundreds of government and non-governmental experts, provides a comprehensive look at how climate change will impact the United States.
These Summary Findings represent a high-level synthesis of the material in the underlying report. The findings consolidate key messages and supporting evidence from 16 national-level topic chapters, 10 regional chapters, and 2 chapters that focus on societal response strategies (mitigation and adaptation). Unless otherwise noted, qualitative statements regarding future conditions in these Summary Findings are broadly applicable across the range of different levels of future climate change and associated impacts considered in this report.
“Climate-related risks will continue to grow without additional action. Decisions made today determine risk exposure for current and future generations and will either broaden or limit options to reduce the negative consequences of climate change.
While Americans are responding in ways that can bolster resilience and improve livelihoods, neither global efforts to mitigate the causes of climate change nor regional efforts to adapt to the impacts currently approach the scales needed to avoid substantial damages to the U.S. economy, environment, and human health and well-being over the coming decades.”
Food
Climate change impacts the health of the Earth and the lives it sustains; as the Earth undergoes many environmental stressors, future access to food is a critical concern for many. The Royal Society’s update of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report provides an analysis of global studies on climate change’s impact on food production. The report indicates that although climate change has varying effects on crop yields across different geographic areas, the aggregate effect of a 2-degree Celsius increase in global temperature will ultimately decrease crop yields. This report specifically examined wheat, rice, and maize—global staples of the human diet. Since 2013, the research also has focused on crop quality. The report suggests that increased carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and higher temperatures will potentially cause crops like wheat to decrease in nutritional value.
A report by the Food Security Information Network (FSIN) provides further insight into the implications that reduced global access to food and water has for human health. Food insecurity is an intersectional crisis, with political, economic, and environmental factors playing intricate roles. Food security is determined by consistent access to sufficient quantities of food—imported or locally grown—with positive nutritional quality. Food insecurity describes a lack of access to these resources, which can lead to hunger, malnutrition, and famine. It can threaten lives and livelihoods. FSIN reports that, in 2017, 124 million people in 51 countries experienced food insecurity—an increase of 11 million people since the previous year. In 23 countries, extreme climate conditions, including drought, were a primary contributing factor to food insecurity. Areas in eastern and southern African have suffered high incidences of malnutrition due to poor harvests.
Conflict, which affects 74 million people across 18 countries, is also a serious obstruction to food security. Countries that have experienced greater food insecurity due to intensified conflict include Myanmar, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Yemen. In the midst of continued conflict and climate change, the global reality of food security is tenuous and requires international policy implementation and humanitarian efforts. 1, 2
Fashion
Accounting for 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, the fashion industry serves as a key area of research to assess potential measures to ameliorate climate change and rising temperatures. Measuring Fashion, a 2018 study from Quantis, sheds light on the effects that the global apparel and footwear industries have on climate. Due to increased global consumption and greater use of synthetic fabrics, the fashion industry’s greenhouse emissions are projected to spike 49 percent by 2030, reaching 4.9 metric gigatons. These emission levels are comparable to the United States’ total annual emissions today.
Of the seven distinct stages in a garment’s life cycle, 50 percent of emissions result from just three stages: fiber production, yarn preparation, and dyeing/finishing. These manufacturing processes, which predominantly take place in Asia, are highly dependent on hard coal and natural gases, which generate electricity and heat.
This data, derived from the World Apparel and Footwear Life Cycle Database, offers insight to companies vested in creating evidence-based plans to achieve goals related to improving their environmental impact. To effectively reduce the global environmental impact of the garment lifecycle, Quantis proposes a multifaceted approach, applied strategically to the different parts of the value chain of apparel and footwear. Indeed, suppliers and consumers have a reciprocal responsibility in implementing change. Primary production changes would include reducing the use of fossil fuels and shifting to renewable energy; improving efficiency; and using sustainable fabrics, like cotton, which require less energy-intensive processes. For consumers, the simple objective is to demand less. Sustainability is supported through reduced consumption combined with extending the use phase of a garment (through recycling, donating, and purchasing second-hand clothing).3
The Sea
From producing half of the oxygen on Earth to supporting an abundance of species—91 percent of which have yet to be discovered—the sea is foundational to all life on the planet. Currently, its ability to support life and regulate climate greatly suffers. Foresight Future of the Sea, a UK report conducted by the Government Chief Scientific Advisor, considers the health of the ocean through a lens of economic and environmental implications for the UK and its territories. Yet, the research presented in the report describes a global reality and indicates solutions that require international cooperation and action. Marine ecosystems, as well as humans, face potentially irreversible damage if the many anthropogenic impacts on marine health are not adequately addressed.
The implications of increased anthropogenic CO2 emissions and rising sea temperatures are grave for marine biodiversity. The ocean is a storehouse of CO2—30 percent of which is emitted by human activity. As oceans absorb greater amounts of CO2, the pH of waters drop, causing higher levels of acidity. The increased acidity most notably threatens reef-forming corals and shellfish who struggle to form shells in highly acidic water. According to the report, “Global sea surface temperatures have risen by 0.7°C since pre-industrial times. A further increase of 1.2°C to 3.2°C, depending on emissions, is projected by 2100.” Rising temperatures are highly correlated with species migration and a decline in cold-water species. This could result in local extinctions and the introduction of invasive, warm-water species. Warming temperatures also lead to coral bleaching, which is caused by a disruption of the symbiotic relationship between coral and algae. Algae become physiologically stressed when temperatures rise; they leave their coral, making it susceptible to disease and eventually death. Coral decline increases by up to 2 percent each year, threatening the lives it supports—more than 25 percent of all marine species.
As the ocean warms, sea-levels rise. Between 1901 and 2010, sea-levels rose approximately 20 centimeters. Depending on emission levels, the sea is projected to rise between 0.25 and 1 meter by the year 2100 due to melting polar ice-caps and thermal expansion. Sea-level rise could result in greater coastal flooding during extreme weather, potentially disrupting infrastructure and threatening human lives.
The future of marine health requires greater attention to human activity in the sea and on land. Continuously, human pollution plagues global waters. Chemical pollutants as well as “pharmaceuticals in sewage and agricultural runoff, radioactive waste, noise and light pollution” are all understood to harm marine life. The largest culprit is plastic. Humans produce 300 million tons of plastic globally each year, accounting for 70 percent of pollutants in the ocean. Plastic does not decompose; it simply breaks down into smaller pieces. Between 2015 and 2035, the amount of plastic in the ocean is projected to triple. To avoid this outcome, humans need to prevent plastic from ever entering the ocean and should encourage the introduction and use of more biodegradable products.
The greatest obstacle to protecting the health of the ocean and marine creatures continues to be human consciousness. An attitude of “out of sight, out of mind” leaves the marine environment—one of the greatest supports to human health—neglected and gravely exploited. In addition to research-based policy development and implementation, public awareness and concern are critical to enabling change that will decrease the negative human impact on the marine environment.4
Mental Health and Suicide
The impact of climate on human physical health has persisted throughout history—from the spread of disease, to incidents of heatstroke, to malnutrition and famine caused by lack of food. Climate’s impact on mental health is of equal importance, as mental illness plagues modern society. Indeed, as we transition into shorter days and longer nights, many people anticipate oncoming seasonal affective disorder. Departing from the study of cyclical seasonal patterns, a study published this year by Marshall Burke et al. in Nature Climate Change examines the impact that rising temperatures have on one of the top causes of death in the U.S.—suicide. Analyzing decades of longitudinal data of temperature change and rates of suicide across the US and Mexico—two countries that account for 7 percent, or nearly 60,000 of global suicides—Burke et al. found that a 1-degree Celsius increase in temperature corresponds to an average of a 1.4 percent rise in suicide rates. This relationship holds true in both warm and cold climates and seasons across these regions; for example, as temperatures rise during winters in Boston and summers in Oaxaca, suicide rates increase.
Controlling for age, gender, and income, as well as ownership of air conditioners and guns—two-thirds of gun deaths are the result of suicide—the relationship between rising temperatures and suicide is consistent. If temperatures continue to rise across the US and Mexico, this study projects an additional 9,000 to 40,000 suicides by 2050. Given that suicide is a phenomenon with multifaceted psychological and sociological underpinnings, the causal relationship between climate and mental health is difficult to support and cannot be considered in isolation. However, this research further illuminates the complexity of this mental illness and the intimate connection between human health and the environment.5
References
- The Royal Society. Climate updates: What have we learnt since the IPCC 5th Assessment Report? 2018.
- Food Security Information Network. Global Report on Food Crises 2018. 2018.
- Quantis. Measuring Fashion: Insights from the Environmental Impact of the Global Apparel and Footwear Industries study. 2018.
- Government Office for Science. Foresight Future of the Sea: A Report from the Government Chief Scientific Advisor. 2018.
- Burke, Marshal et. al. “Higher temperatures increase suicide rates in the United States and Mexico.” Nature Climate Change. July 2018.
The Four Nutriments
There are four kinds of nutriments which enable living beings to grow and maintain life. What are these four nutriments? The first is edible food, the second is the food of sense impressions, the third is the food of volition, and the fourth is the food of consciousness. – The Buddha
We begin our lives as voracious consumers. If we are fortunate, we receive sustenance at the breast of our mother, who is aware that what she ingests ‘passes through’ to her baby. She tries to eat healthy food and avoid substances that might cause her baby harm. Mothers understand that what they consume impacts Life beyond their own body. This is a deep insight.
One way to think about our fall theme, All Consuming!, is to remember that all living beings consume. Plants consume water, sunlight, and nutrients in the soil and convert these into food energy that other beings require to live. Ponder that last sentence. We think of photosynthesis as a vocabulary word on a science test, rather than a true miracle. We, and all our ancestors, are the products of water, sunlight, and soil.
When the Buddha spoke of edible food as the first nutriment, he likely would include today all the substances we take into our bodies—alcohol, drugs, and even the air we inhale. In some places, children wear air filtration masks simply to breathe. It’s not some dystopian future; it’s happening now. We also now have genetically modified foods and synthetic foods; the very nature of food is changing, and so are its implications. Food, water, and air are entangled with politics, economy, and justice. In her keynote, un-pick-apart-able: An Ecology of Food, Nora Bateson says:
We are going to have to pull back from all forms of exploitation to protect the possibility of breakfast for the babies. In that statement is the imperative for clean oceans, for gender equality, for protection of the forests, for human rights, and to end both poverty and wealth.
The second nutriment, sense impressions, includes everything we touch with our senses. The Earth, her flowers and waterfalls, mountains and forests, the night sky, are all very beautiful and fill us with joy. At the same time, many of the media messages we consume, ‘entertainment,’ and even certain conversations, can be quite toxic. We know, for example, that the aggregate effects on children from watching extreme violence—especially sexual violence—can, over time, have similar effects to sustained physical and sexual abuse. Our children, transfused by the Internet, are more withdrawn, anxious, and alienated. Social media has become addictive for many adults as well. We check our ‘feeds’ chronically, even though it makes us feel uneasy in ways we can’t explain. The steady diet of divisive political rhetoric has given rise to confusing terms like ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts.’ Read Glenn Aparicio Parry’s article Making Politics Sacred Again and From the Unreal to the Real by World Goodwill for insight about the messages we consume.
Volition is the third nutriment. What does it mean? Volition is what we chase, choose to believe, or desire. As a ‘permanently victorious species,’ we humans don’t have to worry too much about predators, yet we are often ‘consumed’ by worry and fear, regrets and anger. Ninety percent of the thoughts consuming us today are the same ones we had yesterday. To gain a sense of our own volition, we should ask, “What is my aspiration?” If we aspire to more material goods, more money, more sex, more fame, or more control over others, we will almost certainly suffer and so will the world. In the same way a drug-addicted mother makes her baby unwell, being consumed by our own material desires contributes to planetary harm. Many of us, like musician and yogi Jeff Finlin, have been on that treadmill. Read Consumption as The Path. The key is to harness our desire in service to something greater than ourselves. As Mark Longhust states it in The Problem with “More”:
To heal unaccountable desire requires contemplative soul work. We find healing not in libertinism or repression but in locating human desire within a larger economy of divine desire.
To be ‘consumed by Spirit’, quoting Navajo wise-woman Pat McCabe, conveys this idea. When we are consumed by Spirit, we are consumed by love, unity, justice, and peace, far more so than by our self-centered ‘wants.’
And finally, what could the Buddha have meant by, ‘the fourth (nutriment) is the food of consciousness‘? Consciousness is the fundamental substance of reality, so how can we approach it as a nutriment?
Consciousness is our awareness of awareness itself. We are the one watching the rise and fall of our perceptions. But as soon as we say, ‘the one’ or ‘our,’ we enter the realm of duality—the separation of self from other-than-self. We don’t have adequate words to express nonduality or true Oneness.
Maybe it’s easier to think of many streams of consciousness joining one great ocean: the consciousness-streams of plants, animals, minerals, and the Earth herself, as well as the cosmos. All of these streams, and many more, are accessible through meditation, contemplation, plant-medicine, music, dance, art, and other pathways.
Maybe consciousness, as a nutriment, is the stream we choose to ‘tap into.’ During political and social freedom movements, many people tap into the collective urge for equality. And likewise, the current Transition—a movement of many movements arising globally—is inviting us to tap into a stream of evolutionary advancements whose ‘time has come’. The regressive energy of dark conspiracy theories, doomsday scenarios, supremacism, and extremism are examples of toxic ‘foods of consciousness.’ We explore these ideas in more depth in The Deschooling Dialogues | Ayahuasca and Other Pathways of Perception with Alnoor Ladha and Daniel Pinchbeck.
There is much to consume in this edition of Kosmos Journal Quarterly. As always, it is the warm guidance and legacy of our founder Nancy Roof that rudders our small ship. She sends her regards and her love out to each of you. Nancy has been enjoying her days in contemplation. She embodies the deep teaching of the Buddha on the four nutriments, namely that we should consume as though we hold all the babies of the world to our breast. What is it that we want to ‘pass through’ to our children, to all beings, and to this living Earth?
Philadelphia, September 18, 2018
The Migrant Quilt
The Migrant Quilt
In the late 1990s, in Northern California, we placed a photo of Liz (my late wife) and me, taken by the renown photographer Annie Leibovitz, onto a quilt. Friends and family members gathered around and hand-sewed keepsakes of their lives with Liz into the cloth: bits of jewelry, ribbons, and personal messages.
By the time the black and white photograph, created for a national “Be Here for the Cure” AIDS campaign, could be seen in magazines and writ large on subway walls, many of the people Leibovitz photographed for the campaign would be dead: the cute guy, the sparky little kid, the strong transgender woman, and the straight teenage girl. Few would make it for the cure.
People died by the thousands while the government turned a blind eye. Families mourned, shrouded in secrecy. The closest friends I will ever have grieved for each other even as they, too, prepared to die.
America as a whole seemed to shake itself awake only when thousands of AIDS Names Project Quilts were laid end-to-end on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., forming a master quilt strewn with names as far as the eye could manage—a seemingly endless landscape of unspeakable loss and undeniable love. Visitors dropped to their knees, humbled by such terrible beauty.
Now, in my backyard, another names project quilt, The Migrant Quilt Project (seen most recently at the Pimeria Alta Museum in the border town of Nogales, AZ), was inspired in large part by the AIDS Quilt. The Migrant Quilt panels will travel across the country and the artist/activist Jody Ipsen (the quilt’s originator) and Peggy Hazard (the project’s curator), along with many volunteer makers, hope for a similar impact on hearts and minds.
Women on the border often have a different take on immigration issues: more of a ‘tend and befriend’ approach, a kind of common sense, needle-to-fabric mend. The responses of women to the Migrant Quilt exhibit define the soft heart of what it means to be human. The day we visited, we watched female visitors leaving in tears.
“Docents had to go out and buy boxes of tissues,” said Jody Ipsen. “You cannot walk away from this without being moved.”
The 17 quilts in the project bear the names of people who have died each year crossing the desert in the Tucson Sector since 2000—the year the county medical examiner’s office began documenting the names of the dead, including unidentified remains). Patched together with denim, work shirts, embroidered cloth, and bandanas left behind on the desert floor, the quilts are scrappy in design and raw with truth.
Many of the bordados (embroidered cloths) stitched into the Migrant Quilts are inscribed with endearments. Contigo en la Distancia (With You Far Away) or Duerme Amor Mio (Sleep My Love) shock the viewer with familial intimacy. These personal embroideries, sometimes used as servilletas to carry food across the desert, are often blessed then sent along with a traveling family member. The embroideries have come a long way. Now they rest alongside the names of the deceased.
Each quilt represents countless lives lost on border ground, a hundred-mile strip of geography spanning two countries. The interstitial border region has morphed into a distinct culture of its own, and the quilts, with their binational contributors, fly its flag.
On the US side of the border, volunteers create each piece according to their own inspiration. Worn material migrates through the quilts and melds in the viewer’s eye. Names of the dead rise off the surface in bas-relief like rogue wildflowers pushing up through the desert floor, commanding the same kind of attention as the white crosses we see strung with wire in and around the slats of the border wall.
“Quilts have traditionally been made to memorialize loved ones who died,” said Curator Hazard. “And also, to raise consciousness.” In the Nineteenth century, women used quilts not only to raise funds for the anti-slavery movement, but to express their feelings about slavery.
Memory is the first form of resistance, and quilt-making—a primary tool of resistance and remembrance—stands the test of time. At QuiltCon 2018, the Modern Quilt Guild’s annual convention, the exhibits were honeycombed with activist quilts. The resurgence in “truth textiles” also carries on at the Social Justice Sewing Academy, which empowers youth activists for social change.
The humblest materials can communicate what cannot be said in dangerous times, can comfort the family, and can mourn the dead. Quilting, embroidery, and applique—arts of hearth and home—remain a language shared.
Two decades ago in Northern California, our fragile but fierce community took turns stitching Liz’s favorite piece of mud cloth onto a quilt. I remember the silence that day as we worked together, united in the province of memory. Craig, Liz’s long-time brother-in-arms, his large brown eyes brimming with tears, leaned over and carefully sewed a cowrie shell onto the fabric. Craig would be the next to die.
Now, on our southern border, our neighbors continue to die crossing culture. The personal is political and the political is spiritual. Rather than ask “How do we build higher walls?” we are best served, as people, to ask, “How do we meet?” and “How do we mourn?”
The root of the word memory stems from the word mourn. The devotional art of making in the service of others allows us on the US side of the border wall to touch the essence of the Other, to offer witness, and to mourn.
The Migrant Quilt Project succeeds where rhetoric fails. Pinning and stitching, working the cloth to make sure the dead are not forgotten, these quilt-makers trust that no one turns a blind eye.
The Migrant Quilts are in an exhibit at the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts, through July 15. After that, they will travel to Michigan and to Illinois. See migrantquiltproject.org fo
All photos | Valarie Lee James
Confessions of a Recovering Catholic
Confessions of a Recovering Catholic
Mother’s Day 1972: It was my First Communion and, like all good Catholic girls, I was decked out in my white dress and veil, hands folded in prayer, and head bowed as a sign of my unworthiness. I stepped forward to receive my first taste of the consecrated host, and I was forever changed. I was no longer Lauri Ann Lumby. I was now the Bride of Christ. I belonged to someone. I had a place I could call my own and, as long as I remained obedient, I would be loved. In my excitement, I was happy to pledge my obedience. As it turns out, obedience is exactly what got me excommunicated from the Catholic Church—the place I used to call home and where I find I am no longer welcome.
What I didn’t know, in the blindness of my faith, is that there are two kinds of obedience—obedience to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and obedience to our own inner truth (that which Jesus called “God”). When the Church asked for obedience, I assumed they meant the latter, so that is what I pursued. Obedience to the Divine within beckoned me to Sunday Mass where I found comfort and peace in the silence within my heart; led me along my educational and vocational path; and called me to enter into ministry training within the Catholic Church, eventually training as a spiritual director. Obedience to this inner voice helped me understand my gifts and how I was being called to use them for the sake of my own fulfillment and in service to the betterment of the world. I listened to this voice as it supported me in guiding others to hear and heed the truth that called to them from within. So far, the Church remained happy with my obedience.
That was until the day that the voice of my truth deviated from what had been “explicitly handed down by the Magisterium,” and which the local Church eventually called “the work of the devil, witchcraft and sorcery.” I had heard the call to study, and then share, Reiki (hands-on-healing) as part of my unfolding ministry. I heard the voice to pursue this training, and I knew I had no choice but to heed it. I saw how it perfectly fit my desire to serve God and do the work that Jesus calls us to do in the world—heal the sick, give comfort to strangers. The Church didn’t see it that way. As it turned out, obedience to God was not the same as obedience to the Church. Like Jesus and the disciples after him, I chose God (the voice within) over the Church (human authority). I have spent the past 15 years recovering from that decision.
Recovery is an appropriate term to describe what happens to one who finds they must leave behind the religion of their youth for a path that more closely aligns with their truth. Having found (conditional) belonging, acceptance, meaning, and purpose within Catholicism, stepping away from my religion was akin to giving up my drug. My heart, my soul, my sense of self, my very identity belonged to the Catholic Church. When my truth forced me to walk away, like an addict in early stages of recovery, I did not know who I was without “my drug,” and I was alone in the world apart from those with whom I had shared my drug. Also similar to the recovery process, I found that I was being hounded by those still in the Church who either sought to demonize me for betraying the status quo or who wanted me to repent so that I could peacefully return to my addiction.
In the past 15 years, my recovery has been a process of unlearning all that bound me to the Catholic Church and to the sense of belonging and acceptance I thought I had found there. I had to release the habit of weekly Mass. I had to let go of the art and architecture that spoke to my soul. I had to wrest myself from the seasonal celebrations and rites of passage that had become my very lifeblood. I had to divorce myself from the hymns that at one time gave my life meaning. Most challenging, I was forced to release my need to belong. Unlearning religion (Catholicism) has been a labyrinthine journey of grieving the loss of what has been (with all the customary phases, faces, and stages of grief—shock and trauma, denial, bargaining, depression, rage, and sorrow); shedding the attachments I had formed around my religion; and going back over the process again and again and again every time the loss was triggered.
While the journey has been excruciating at times, I would not change it for the world. What I have found on the other side of the unlearning has been a faith all my own. In the letting go of another person’s truth, I have uncovered my own. I have found what feeds me spiritually (which ironically, came out of my Catholic upbringing). I have come to understand my gifts and how I am called to share them, for the sake of my own fulfillment and in service to the betterment of our world. I have come to know my own ‘God’—no longer the old-man-in-the-sky god, but something more like what Rumi describes: nameless, faceless, and placeless. Finally, I have found my own sense of belonging—not to some institution or authority outside of myself—but to my own sense of being and belonging that comes from unlearning the separation we are taught so that we can find the wholeness and truth within.
The Habits of Schooling
The Habits of Schooling
I remember sitting in the library one night early in my graduate school career. I was writing my first 20-page seminar paper on a subject with which I was wholly unfamiliar (Hellenistic painting). I had questions: about the topic, about the assignment itself, about the source material. But I was afraid. One part of me was urging the other part of me to get up, go to the professor, and seek clarity. The more fearful side of myself was anxious about being judged a fraud for being accepted to grad school at all; apprehensive of being yelled at or belittled; afraid to appear anything less than being in complete control.
My inner cheerleader was scathing. “What’s the worst that can happen? What has made you so afraid? Her job is to help you in situations just like this. You are in graduate school to seek the mentorship of these professors. What is wrong with you?!!”
I had to agree; what was wrong with me?
This internal questioning was new to me. Through all my previous years of schooling, a more timid voice controlled my inner landscape. That voice kept me on the straight-and-narrow path of good grades, high test scores, raising my hand, answering when called upon, and trying to remain unseen while getting by with minimal effort. Learning, if it happened at all, was merely a by-product. Even in my undergraduate years, I avoided any interaction with professors, took classes that I felt I could easily pass, did the bare minimum, and graduated with a degree in Ancient Greek at the expected pace of four years with precisely the number of credits I needed to emancipate myself. I did not travel or take advantage of any extras that required undue “adult” attention. I was expert at avoiding that. I listened to my timid voice.
“Stay invisible,” it said, “just do what is necessary to get a good grade. Then you can move on to the next phase of life. Real life.”
Flash forward eight years: I was 30 years old and in a prestigious graduate program for archaeology. I began seeing myself as a competent adult with worthwhile thoughts and interests. During these years, the more sensible voice started to make itself heard. At first a whisper, then a shout: “What is wrong with you? Why are you so afraid to be seen and heard?”
Eventually, I was able to answer that question for myself. There are many reasons we remain small and invisible, but my fears and self-defeating habits were rooted firmly in schooling. Since kindergarten, I was anxious about my teachers. They were judge, jury, and sometimes “executioner”—I witnessed corporal punishment—and I noticed that this fear of authority and many other ‘habits’ prevented me from thriving as an adult and were so self-defeating that I missed out on opportunities. When doors would open for me, personally and professionally, I was often too scared to even recognize them, much less walk through them.
Here are some Habits of Schooling, as I see them:
- Learning happens as a rhetorical conversation between the “one who knows the answer” and “those who don’t know the answer.” Passive learning is the norm.
- Learning comes in different subjects—like math, literature, biology, music, social studies—and those subjects are autonomous silos.
- People should only learn with same-age groups, and any learning environment with mixed ages is unnatural and weird.
- The younger a person is, the less they have to offer.
- Learning takes place indoors, in spaces with lots of books or test-tubes. Outside time is extraneous to education and only useful for “play” (not-learning) or “sport” (not-learning). Nature is a pastime.
- Grades are a competition. It is a dog-eat-dog world, and I lose if my peers win.
- Western-style education is a healthy way to learn and should be universal across cultures. Anyone not educated precisely like I have been educated is underprivileged, regardless of their culture.
- The educated elites (like me!) are at the pinnacle of human evolutionary development. We are doing vital work, bringing humanity to an intellectual utopia. It is only a matter of time.
Once I realized these axioms were profoundly flawed, I became free. I saw my schooling clearly for what it was. I also was able to set it aside and leave academia when it no longer suited me.
Charles Eisenstein speaks and writes about our cultural story and the “new story” that he and others see emerging today. He has an interest in how schooling and modern education inculcates our collective mythology and speaks about the “habits of schooling” like the ones that I identified, above. Charles takes each habit one step further, however. He notices that each habit we learn in school is a coping mechanism and comes with a mirror image of rebellion. The rebellious act— when done automatically and unthinkingly—is as much a habit of schooling as the unconscious ones.
Here are some examples:
For every habit outlined, there is a reactive habit, and um, gulp, guilty as charged. Charles calls these “Habits of Submission” or “Habits of Defiance.” One might ask: “But aren’t all these habits just part of our culture at large? Where does it all begin and end?”
Well, yes, of course, that is true. However, school is the primary way that our culture indoctrinates our young into cultural norms. Family is a mitigating influence, but schools are set up to socialize our children in line with broader cultural values. That is the primary role of our educational system. And it is based on an industrial model: training workers and citizens who can read and will accept their superiors without question—making useful citizens. Today, we are ‘manufacturing’ people who will partake fully in neoliberal capitalism and consumerist culture.
The deschooling process for me is never-ending because it requires healing from the deep wounds of our culture. The good news is, there are many people out there doing this work, people who are creating networks for reskilling, mindfulness, and a “commons” to help others do this unlearning work more effectively and more deeply. There also is a growing trend to educate kids outside of the school system so that we minimize the habits of schooling for the next generation.
To unlearn our self-defeating practices, we can begin by acknowledging that working together is not ‘cheating’; that imagination is our birthright; and that thinking for ourselves is the most fundamental skill we possess as humans.
Roots and Evolution of Mindfulness
Roots and Evolution of Mindfulness
Before reading this article, listen to a spoken introduction with Joel and Michelle Levey.
When we first began our study, practice, and research of mindfulness in the early 70s, we knew fewer than a handful of people who were involved in this path of practice. As our practice and research matured, we began to develop mindfulness-based programs in medicine, higher education, and business. In the mid-70s and early 80s, we knew of no one else bringing these methods into the mainstream. Gradually over the years, a groundswell of insight, interest, and research has emerged, creating a host of benefits and challenges, clarity and confusion, that inspires and confounds the modern mindfulness movement.
Our intent in composing this brief article is to offer an overview of some key perspectives on mindfulness. For people relatively new to mindfulness, it’s helpful to have a clearer understanding of its roots, shoots, and trends in order to access the deeper meaning, purpose, and value of this vital practice.
To the degree to which we wake up with mindfulness and learn to open our hearts and minds, the walls of our conventional, familiar, consensus view of reality become more clear, open, and transparent, revealing a deeper, vaster, multidimensional, and interrelated view of the actual nature of reality than we have previously imagined. This is why what we call mindfulness meditation is traditionally known as Vipassana, or ‘Insight Meditation.’ Mindfulness gives us access to insight and the direct, non-conceptual intuitive wisdom that liberates us from our misconceptions regarding the nature of reality and the true nature of ourselves.
While mindfulness is certainly widely adopted and practiced, our experience is that surprisingly few people are aware of its deep roots and origins in wisdom traditions—its more profound meanings, value, highest implications, and most intriguing applications. Our intent here is to offer insight, inspiration, and illumination on these facets of the jewel of mindfulness as it shines out in our modern times.
Roots of Mindfulness
Mindfulness as a technical term has its historical origins in the ancient Pali word sati used by the Buddha in his teaching on mindfulness over 2600 years ago. Sati literally translates as “memory”- as in remembering what you are paying attention to in the present moment of awareness. In an attempt to meaningfully translate treasured Buddhist meditation manuals, the English translator Rhys Davids was the first to offer an English translation using “mindfulness” in 1881, and, by 1910, mindfulness had become the generally accepted norm. Davids was inspired to use the term “mindfulness” by its use in an Anglican prayer that says, “Always be mindful of the needs of others.” Interestingly, from this initial choice to translate sati as mindfulness, there is an implication that mindfulness is also akin to a newly emerging meme of kindfulness which reminds us that we pay attention to what we care about. The widespread use of the term ‘mindfulness’ has endured to this day where we find the meaning of mindfulness continuing to be adapted, as it is incorporated into common use with an ever expanding variety of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) that are emerging within health science, corporate, and high-performance arenas of contemporary culture.
Unfortunately, the meaning of the term mindfulness also is becoming increasingly misconstrued through its association with deep relaxation without mindful awareness, creative imagination visualizations, getting a good night’s rest, ‘mindfulness chairs,’ mindful men’s clothing, or even mindful mayonnaise—all of which have little or nothing to do with the meditative practice of mindfulness. Some respected teachers in the realm of mindfulness have gone so far as to say that the word ‘mindfulness’ has all but lost its original meaning.
Roots of the Modern Mindfulness Revolution
While the teachings of mindfulness practice have endured for millennia since the time of the Buddha, the contemporary “mindfulness revolution” was propelled into modern times by the colonial thrust of the British Imperial Army invading and conquering the Buddhist kingdom of Burma in November 1885.
For centuries the Burmese people regarded their king as ‘the protector of the Dhamma‘- the liberating teachings of the Buddha which, when taken to heart, have the power to free us of our delusions and confusions by opening our wisdom eyes to directly discern things as they truly are. Mindfulness is the primary practice of these liberating teachings, and its power lies in quieting the conceptual dualistic overlay of thoughts to allow direct insight into the true nature of reality to arise clearly in the mind.
As the Brits marched into the capital city of Mandalay, the Burmese people looked on in horror as their beloved king and his family, surrounded by British soldiers brandishing rifles, were taken from the royal palace and unceremoniously loaded in an oxcart that carried them to a waiting steamship that would carry them into exile. The royal palace was then transformed into an officers’ club for drinking, dancing, and socializing!
A profound wave of concern rippled through Burmese society giving rise to an unprecedented cultural revolution that activated the Burmese people to protect the precious and vulnerable teachings of the Dhamma. Foremost among these cherished teachings was the practice of mindfulness.
Up to this time in Burma and throughout Southeast Asia, the teachings and practice of mindfulness had been mostly held within the monastic community of ordained monks and nuns, while the religious practices of the lay community focused primarily on generosity and giving of alms to generate spiritual merit, with the assumption that lay people were unlikely to actually realize enlightenment through practicing meditation.
With the advent of the British invasion and the king’s exile, visionary teachers within the monastic community, lead by the monk Ledi Sayadaw, and the householder Saya Thetgyi spread the practices of the Vipassana tradition, from which mindfulness is derived, throughout secular society. In the decades that followed, a contemplative cultural revolution spread throughout Southeast Asia giving rise to a renaissance and wide diffusion of mindfulness teachings with both the monastic and lay communities. (Braun, 2014)
Three Main Streams of Mindfulness Practice
The next wave of mindfulness revolutionaries appeared as droves of globe trotting spiritual seekers, peace core volunteers, government spooks, and mind scientists who traveled to Asia in the 1960s and 70s intent on seeking out enlightening teachers, wisdom teachings, and liberating contemplative technologies. Word of inspiring teachers and meditation retreats quickly spread through the social networks of those times drawing early waves of contemplative pilgrims to the monasteries and meditation centers of Southeast Asia to get their first immersive and transformative experiences of intensive mindfulness meditation practices, which were often presented in 10 day silent retreat formats or longer even more intensive retreats.
Through the influence of many of these early adopters of mindfulness, three principle streams of mindfulness practice have flowed into modern Western culture.
Insight Meditation: One stream of mindfulness practice came to the West through the teachings of Mahasi Sayadaw, U Pandita, Ajahn Chah, Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu, and other Thai and Burmese teachers of the “forest monastery” tradition which emphasized a blend of mindful breathing, noting and noticing of the nuances of momentary changing experiences, mindful walking, mindful eating, integrating mindful awareness into every activity, and resting in open clear awareness without grasping at any momentary experience. This lineage of mindfulness practice is widely referred to as “Insight Meditation” and was introduced to the West primarily through the influence of Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and Joseph Goldstein who co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts in 1975. Kornfield later also co-founded the Spirit Rock in Marin, California in 1988 with a number of other teachers.
The wise and creative teachings offered at these two centers alone have inspired tens of thousands of people over the past 40+ years, giving rise to hundreds of other practice centers around the globe, and playing a significant role in inspiring the global diffusion of mindfulness practice into higher education, medicine, business, military, government, sports, and other arenas of modern life. Within this stream many other respected teachers, including Anagarika Munindra, Dipama, Ajahn Amaro, Ajahn Sumedho, Thannasaro Bhikkhu, Taungpulu Sayadaw, and Dr. Rina Sircar, to name but a few, have deeply inspired the diffusion of mindfulness teachings throughout North America, UK, and Europe.
Vedana Vipassana: The second stream came to the West from the Burmese teacher U Ba Khin, the Accountant General of Burma, who founded the International Meditation Society in Rangoon in 1952 where he attracted the attention of many international students and teachers. As a lay practitioner and respected lineage holder from Saya Thetgyi of the vedana vipassana tradition of mindfulness practice, and also a respected accountant, U Ba Khin accepted the invitation from the Burmese government to assume the role of Accountant General and to assume leadership in order to route out the corruption in the Burmese Treasury Department. U Ba Khin accepted this appointment with two conditions. First was that one wing of the Treasury Department would be transformed into a meditation hall where members of his staff could come and meditate at any time. Second, was that everyone on his staff in the Treasury Department would train with him and participate in at least one intensive ten-day silent Vipassana style mindfulness retreat. As U Ba Khin said, “I refuse to work with incompetence.”
U Ba Khin’s style of mindfulness practice focused on developing concentration through single-pointed concentration on the breath, and then the close application of mindfulness by scanning or “sweeping” mindful awareness slowly through the body from the top of the head to the toes, over and over again, for up to 20 hours per day, leading to a profound state of vivid mental clarity and the purification of embedded congestion within the gross and subtle body. In this austere and intensive style of practice there is only sitting meditation, with no mindful walking, yoga, mindful eating or other practices at all.
In his later life, U Ba Khin passed his legacy of teachings on to seven teachers including S.N. Goenka (a Burmese businessman who is widely known in the West), Robert Hover (a former U.S. aeronautical engineer), Ruth Denison (a German pioneer in embodied movement practices), and John Coleman (a former British MI6 agent), all of whom carried these liberating teachings back to North America and Europe and around the globe. In particular, Goenka’s approach to teaching mindfulness has become very popular and widely available in the West and around the world, especially as the teachings and retreats are offered free of charge. After retreats, the students are encouraged to make donations and “play it forward” to freely fund retreats for future students.
The Order of Interbeing: A third stream of mindfulness teachings came to the West in part due to the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, where the monk Thích Nhất Hạnh and his community were practicing and teaching mindfulness as an integral practice in their non-violent peace work amidst the terrors of the war. As the war raged on and many of his colleagues were brutally murdered, Thay, as his students call him, took refuge in France where he founded the Plum Village international Meditation Center and the Order of Interbeing. There, he continued to teach his unique and highly accessible form of mindfulness which emphasizes the practice of mindful breathing, mindful walking, and the repetition of meditation phrases or gathas, synchronized with inhalation and exhalation. To develop deeper ease and continuity of meditation, words such as calming, smiling and arriving are used to help relax and focus the mind and quell the tendency toward discursive thoughts during meditation practice. Today there are hundreds of centers around the globe teaching Thay’s style of mindfulness practice.
One of Thay’s gifts is his encouragement to bring a gentle, heartfelt, compassionate inner smile to mindfulness practice,—“smiling to our sorrow”—in order to realize that “we are more than our sorrow.” This practice of gentle smiling has influenced mindfulness instruction and how it is often introduced and practiced in the West. Most importantly, his teachings on interbeing—the interconnection of all Life—and the illusion of a ‘separate self’ are fundamental for those who follow this teacher.
Beyond these three primary streams, there are other streams, lineages, and teachers who emphasize a variety of aspects or approaches to the practice, and there are also many teachers and centers that weave together teachings and practices drawn from these different traditions.
Kindfulness | Mindfulness Blossoms As Compassion and Lovingkindness
Being present with kindness and compassion
is being mindful.
– Jon Kabat Zinn
As the practice of mindfulness deepens and matures, it embraces and is responsive to the needs, not only of ourselves, but of all beings who suffer and experience vulnerability or injustice in their lives, society, and world. As many of the foremost Western mindfulness teachers have matured in their practice, the nature and tone of their teachings have warmed, shifting from a more austere focus on “bare attention” and taking on a more compassionate tone that encourages their students to blend mindful awareness with a merciful, warm hearted approach to their mindfulness practice.
It is becoming increasingly more common for mindfulness teachers to expand their studies and practice of mindfulness to draw inspiration from traditions that give greater emphasis to heartfelt qualities such as gratitude, genuine friendliness, compassion, lovingkindness, self-compassion, and engaged social justice action, into mindfulness education and training. This heartwarming, compassionate impulse may be integrated into mindfulness practice simply as a gentle, merciful, inner smile as one musters the courage to look within and mindfully, whole-heartedly embrace the tension, apprehension, sadness or rage found there. Or it may be intentionally cultivated as a robust practice of meditation such as lovingkindness—or metta—wishing well to ourselves, others, and all beings; or generating radiant compassion regarding and embracing the presence of suffering in our lives, relationships, and world; or activating an explicit dedication to practicing mindfulness with an intention of realizing one’s true nature and highest potentials for the benefit of all beings.
As mindfulness matures into kindfulness (Braum, A. 2016), on a societal level, we are witnessing the emergence of more university programs that explicitly include compassion science and encourage compassion-based practices as part of their curriculums. Among the most respected programs in today’s world are:
Stanford University’s CCARE Program- Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education http://ccare.stanford.edu);
Mindful Self Compassion- self-compassion.org/the-program/
The Greater Good Science Center- connected with Stanford and UC Berkeley http://greatergood.berkeley.edu
University of Wisconsin’s Center for Healthy Minds- (http://www.investigatinghealthyminds.org/cihmDrDavidson.html);
Mind and Life Institute- https://www.mindandlife.org/
Max Planck Institute’s Human Cognitive and Brain Science- ReSource Program (https://www.resource-project.org/en/home.html )
Mindfulness, Collective Intuitive Wisdom, & Human Flourishing
The world we have made as a result of the level of the thinking we have done thus far creates problems that we cannot solve at the same level of thinking (i.e. consciousness) at which we have created them… We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humankind is to survive. – Albert Einstein
Could it be that the global surge of interest in mindfulness is an evolutionary impulse perfectly responsive to the challenges of these times? From our many years of practice, research, and work bringing mindfulness to organizations and communities around the globe, it seems that the greatest value and most highly leveraged application of mindfulness may be to follow Einstein’s advice. How? By equipping individuals and innovation teams with the skills necessary to refine the level of their personal and collective consciousness in order to access the deeper intuitive wisdom necessary to bring forth breakthrough solutions to complex global problems.
As the key to accessing the most-subtle dimensions of intuitive wisdom, the greatest value of mindfulness in this age may be in its capacity to liberate us from our collective ignorance by opening our minds to the wisdom we need to flourish together in this beautiful and fragile world.
One of our most cherished visions and aspirations is to develop cohorts of altruistically motivated, sincere and disciplined individuals and teams, intent on employing mindfulness for accessing or “sourcing” insight from deeper, subtler strata of personal and collective intuitive wisdom. This is in order to bring forth the insights and innovations necessary to resolve the dire challenges of these treacherous times, while promoting human flourishing and thriving for generations to come. (Levey, J. and Levey, M. 2008)
Mainstreaming Mindfulness: Encouraging Trends
In our work and travels with hundreds of leading medical centers, universities, organizations, and governmental groups around the globe over the past 40+ years we are heartened to see an ever widening diffusion of mindfulness teachings. Here are some of the most inspiring examples we have seen:
- Contemplative Science: The rapidly emerging field of contemplative science brings together the best of technology, neuroscience, and inner technology inspired by the wealth of the world’s wisdom traditions giving rise to innovative programs and research in hundreds of universities and respected institutes around the globe. Mind and Life Institute’s International Symposiums on Contemplative Studies have brought together thousands of people from around the world to share their research on mindfulness and many other contemplative practices. (https://www.imconsortium.org)
- Leadership and Contemplative Science: While a myriad of leadership developments are being offered in our world today, few have seriously addressed the development of moral, ethical, and contemplative capacities of leaders. One of the most relevant and inspiring initiatives we have seen in this regard is the Mind and Life Institute’s Academy for Contemplative and Ethical Leadership (ACEL) that we were fortunate to help birth. (https://www.mindandlife.org/legacy-programs/acel/ )The ACEL charter states,
- Mindful Law: Nearly a decade ago Rhonda McGee took a bold step to introduce the first course on Mindfulness in Law class at Berkeley Law School. Since then, 40+ law schools have followed her lead with programs on Mindfulness and Contemplative Lawyering as essential skills for professionals in the judicial system.
- Mindfulness in Medicine: Mindfulness is an essential element of the core curriculum within the 70+ medical schools that participate in the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine.https://www.imconsortium.org
- Mindfulness in Government: In recent years, British Parliament’s Mindfulness Roundtable which involved over 120 MPs and Lords from different parties of the government who have trained in mindfulness, gave rise to the development of the Mindfulness Initiative and the Mindful Nation UK Report which encourages the integration of mindfulness in four domains of British society: health care, education, criminal justice, and the workplace. (The Mindfulness Initiative: Mindful Nation UK Report. 2015)
- Wisdom 2.0: Since its inception in 2010, the Wisdom 2.0 conferences have brought together thousands of organizational leaders and consultants from around the planet interested in the interphase of mindfulness, meditation, yoga, leadership, innovation, organizational health and performance, social justice, quality of life, and bottom-line business results. With leaders and presenters from Google, Ford, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, PayPal, Zappos, AETNA, Blackrock, Burning Man, Slack, British Parliament, U.S. Congress, and many other leading organizations to explore the many wise and helpful ways that mindfulness and related practices is delivering measurable value in our lives and world of work. (http://wisdom2conference.com/About)
- Mindful Social and Emotional Learning (SEL): With an ever increasing wealth of affirming data, robust programs are integrating mindfulness with social and emotional learning into a wide array of primary and early childhood development learning programs around the globe.
For a monthly update of compelling research on mindfulness and mindfulness based practices visit: http://GoAMRA.org
These are just a sampling of the significant and inspiring trends that we are seeing in the diffusion of mindfulness into the mainstream mindstream of our world.
References
American Mindfulness Research Association, http://GoAMRA.org
Bodhi, B. 2016. The Transformations of Mindfulness. Published in Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context, and Social Engagement (Mindfulness in Behavioral Health). Edited by Ronald E. Purser, David Forbes and Adam Burke. Springer International Publishing, Switzerland, 2016 https://books.google.com/books?id=nBFVDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=The+Transformations+of+Mindfulness.+Published+in+Handbook+of+Mindfulness:+Culture,+Context,+and+Social+Engagement+(Mindfulness+in+Behavioral+Health).+Edited+by+Ronald+E.+Purser,+David+Forbes+and+Adam+Burke.+Springer+International+Publishing,+Switzerland,+2016&source=bl&ots=Yh334UtV40&sig=HA4UeflyHZbsU9OCjYGTMouD1LI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiZ1vqN3e_ZAhUB24MKHW_dB98Q6AEILzAC#v=onepage&q=The%20Transformations%20of%20Mindfulness.%20Published%20in%20Handbook%20of%20Mindfulness%3A%20Culture%2C%20Context%2C%20and%20Social%20Engagement%20(Mindfulness%20in%20Behavioral%20Health).%20Edited%20by%20Ronald%20E.%20Purser%2C%20David%20Forbes%20and%20Adam%20Burke.%20Springer%20International%20Publishing%2C%20Switzerland%2C%202016&f=false
Bhikkhu, T. 2012. Right Mindfulness.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/rightmindfulness.pdf
Braum, A. 2016. Kindfulness. Wisdom Publications.
Braun, E., Spring 2014. “Meditation En Masse: How Colonialism Sparked the Global Vipassana Movement” Tricycle. http://www.tricycle.com/feature/meditation-en-masse
Clarke T. C., et al. 2015. “Trends in the Use of Complementary Health Approaches Among Adults: United States, 2002–2012,” National Health Statistics, No. 79, Hyattsville, MD, National Center for Health Statistics, 2015; “Uses of Complementary Health Approaches in the U.S.,” National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health.
Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine. https://www.imconsortium.org
Gyatso, T. the Dalai Lama. 2001. Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great Perfection. Snow Lion Publications.
https://books.google.com/books?id=4HqLxJRN6MUC&pg=PA254&lpg=PA254&dq=%22dalai+lama%22+Dzogchen+London&source=bl&ots=uKMkzDoubE&sig=j0UcaRAuBVMBTXSju5kDod–hzo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwizhNa_w5HWAhVBwWMKHQBKA1MQ6AEITDAG#v=onepage&q=%22dalai%20lama%22%20Dzogchen%20London&f=false
Kotler, S. and Wheal, J,. 2016. Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work. HarperCollins.
Levey, J. and Levey, M. 2015. Living in Balance: A Mindful Guide for Thriving in a Complex World. Divine Arts. https://divineartsmedia.com/products/living-in-balance-a-mindful-guide-for-thriving-in-a-complex-world
Levey, J. and Levey, M. 2008. Mind Treasure. Intuition at Work. Sterling Stone Publishers.
Mind and Life Institute ACEL (Academy for Contemplative and Ethical Leadership). 2015. https://www.mindandlife.org/legacy-programs/acel/
Mind and Life Institute—Contemplative Science Symposiums. https://www.mindandlife.org/international-symposium-for-contemplative-research/
The Mindfulness Initiative: Mindful Nation UK Report. 2015. http://www.themindfulnessinitiative.org.uk/publications/mindful-nation-uk-report and http://www.themindfulnessinitiative.org.uk
Mingyur, Y. Rinpoche, and Tworkov, H. 2014. Turning Confusion into Clarity: A Guide to the Foundation Practices of Tibetan Buddhism (Boston: Snow Lion, 2014).
National Business Group on Health and Fidelity, July 14, 2016. Corporate Mindfulness Programs Grow in Popularity.
Pinsker, J. March 10, 2015. Corporations’ Newest Productivity Hack: Meditation. Atlantic.
Purser, R., Milillo, J. 12 May 2014. Mindfulness Revisited: A Buddhist Based Conceptualization. Journal of Management Inquiry. https://www.academia.edu/8102895/Mindfulness_Revisited_A_Buddhist-Based_Conceptualization
Purser, R., Ng, E., & Walsh, Z. (2018). The promise and perils of corporate mindfulness. In Chris Mabey and David Knights (Eds.), Leadership Matters: Finding Voice, Connection and Meaning in the 21st Century (pp. 47-63). New York, NY: Routledge.
Thubten, A. 2012. The Magic of Awareness. https://books.google.com/books?id=tJofqSlqmsYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Anam+Thubten+Thubten+magic+of+awareness&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjpl5bixJHWAhVD1WMKHb7EAYwQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=Anam%20Thubten%20Thubten%20magic%20of%20awareness&f=false
Wieczner, J. March 12, 2016. Meditation Has Become a Billion-Dollar Business. Fortune.
Wisdom 2.0, http://wisdom2conference.com/About
Indigenous Worldview Is a Source We Now Urgently Need
Indigenous Worldview Is a Source We Now Urgently Need
COVER: Arhuaco Elder & 1Earth Institute Inc. Director, Calixto Suarez Villafane, © 1Earth Institute Inc. 2018
Our global reality is one of a depleted Earth, the consequence of the havoc we have inflicted through our economies onto our living support system. Are we going to live like lemmings, racing toward self-destruction? Or are we going to sensibly re-learn how to sustainably survive and thrive?
In his article on the coming revolution, “Life After Patriarchy,” Alnoor Ladha thoughtfully wrote: “Climate change, increasing inequality and rampant poverty are not ‘externalities’ of a well-functioning system, as the economists would have us believe, but rather the logical outcome of a set of rules, norms and cultural practices.”[1]
We have programmed our economic operating system with more: more extraction, more consumption, more of everything… What a misapprehension it is to believe that the economy can grow forever when our home and our support systems are finite.
Like every species on this earth, humanity must abide by the rules of the ecosystem that sustains us. As much as we might like to think it, Nature’s laws and feedback cycles have not been suspended on our behalf.
But, if we want to reprogram our economic operating system and bring in wholesale change, we need to address the root of our problems: our thinking.
This is a perfect example of the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And, needless to say, we cannot solve problems in the same frame of mind in which we created them.
We have accepted as our prevailing worldview that economics is some kind of infallible ‘force of nature.’ But we need to remember that our worldviews stem from beliefs that we have learned and have chosen to live by. We can adjust or un-choose.
Learning from Original Instructions
Who can teach us a way of thinking distinct from the prevailing concepts? Though there is not one prescribed way, perhaps we should consider that the answer may lie with our traditional cultures.
An Earth-centered worldview is what has always guided our indigenous cultures around the world. Does it matter that indigenous peoples have lived sustainably for millennia and have treated the Earth with profound respect and acted as Her custodians? Yes. The United Nations estimates that indigenous territories cover approximately 20 percent of the Earth’s landmass. This 20 percent landmass stewarded by indigenous peoples amazingly contains 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity.
As Robin Wall Kimmerer states so succinctly:
The indigenous worldview has been marginalized for generations because it was seen as antiquated and unscientific and its ethics of respect for Mother Earth were in conflict with the Industrial worldview, bent on treatment of the Earth as if what native people call gifts were nothing more than resources destined for consumption by humans. But now, in this time of climate change and massive loss of biodiversity, we understand that the indigenous worldview is neither unscientific nor antiquated but is, in fact, a source of wisdom that we urgently need. [2] [emphasis added]
Reprogramming Our Operating System
We are collectively experiencing profound disintegration and breakdown of our old structures and beliefs; we want our world to make sense again and allow decency to prevail. Our present worldviews no longer serve us. Consequently, we need to adopt a different intelligence, a different worldview, in order to adjust our operating system from the inside out.
Consider the wisdom of Chief Phil Lane:
We are all part of the ancient Sacred Circle of Life, and therefore we are all Indigenous Peoples of Mother Earth…. To embrace and reclaim our Indigenous relationship to all Life is to remember and lovingly celebrate our sacred relationship with our Mother Earth, all relatives of our One Human Family and our kinship with all Life. [3]
This reprogramming of our operating system contains two causally consistent ground rules common to the beliefs of all traditional societies.
Adjustment Instruction 1 | We Are Not Superior
Let us drop the delusion of the universe revolving around us humans. We are learning with surprise and humility that we do not own the Earth. We owe Her our survival.
It is logical, therefore, that if we want to survive, we need to reclaim intuitive ways of knowing and align our thinking with life, not against it.
Let us re-evaluate the worldview that we are the superior sentient master species on Earth and, instead, establish a relation and kinship with nature and spirit. Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us of “…the fallacy of human exceptionalism, that we are fundamentally different and somehow better, more deserving of the wealth and services of the Earth than other species.” [4]
Make no mistake; this is as revolutionary a shift in collective thinking as when Galileo debunked the geocentric model with the sun and the moon revolving around Earth. Just as our sun does not revolve around the Earth, neither does the Earth revolve around humanity. Because we are not masters, but, rather, interdependent members in a world that includes non–human beings, what hurts them will hurt us.
Adjustment Instruction 2 | We Are Not Separate
“Why does much of the world not comprehend our sacred interrelationship with Nature and Spirit?” This is what Calixto Suarez Villafañe, an Arhuaco elder from the Sierra Nevada De Santa Marta, Colombia, is often asked by his elders.
© Seth Roffman. 2017
Calixto is a director of 1Earth Institute. He also is an emissary for the Mamos majores, or chief Elders of the Arhuaco and Kogi peoples, who rarely descend from their high mountain sanctuaries and are the spiritual leaders and knowledge keepers of the people of the Sierra.
They are the descendants of the Tairona civilization, from which the Inca and Aztec also descended.
The peoples of the Sierra survived the onslaught of the conquistadors by retreating into mountainous sanctuaries in the Sierra and controlling the access routes to their retreats. Nowadays, these high sanctuaries no longer offer safety from deadly paramilitaries and the avaricious grasping of companies and landowners.
According to Calixto:
Until now, what human beings have reached for is self-destruction, the destruction of Mother Earth, of the mountains, the poisoning of the sea, of the rivers, of the lakes, and the reduction of the flora and fauna. We are seeing how we are impoverishing the planet and those who live there. Humans have strayed from their path and are accelerating their self-destruction. [5]
Calixto is signaling a call for action through 1Earth Institute: “As Mamos, we are harmonizers and guidance counselors. The Mamos are calling for a radical change, a transformation.”
Whenever he returns from his travels, Calixto drives for three hours up the Sierra and walks or rides a horse for another 16 hours to report back to the Mamos majores and receive his instructions.
You would not know by meeting them who they are, they present themselves as such humble beings. They are simply dressed: men, women, and children all in white—plus or minus a number of stripes, representative of their region of origin.
They have the distinctive indigenous features of the Tairona, some have quite sharp, angular faces. Outstanding are their eyes. They are the most beautiful, warm, dark eyes, which gaze at and through you—gentle, clear, and yet, you sense the sharp intellect and the slumbering, fierce fire of their souls. They prefer not to look at you directly.
Both sexes wear their dark hair long. Apparently it never goes white with age. The distinctive white caps worn by the Arhuaco men symbolize the snowfields of the mountain peaks of the Sierra.
The Mamos want the world to hear their warning and their deep concerns about the precarious state of all life on Mother Earth:
Our ancestors left us in this space, caring for and harmonizing the Earth and Humanity. We live in harmony with all natures beings: water, earth, fire, wind, the sun, humans, and also animals and plants, which are essence of the divine.
All life on Earth is intrinsically intertwined and interconnected, and we humans are no exception. But how do we see ourselves? As separate entities outside the web of life that surrounds us. This is reflected in Western science, which uses analysis by objective separation through dispassionate observation.
This intentional separation of the ‘knower from the known’ is pervasive throughout our economic logic and ecosystem management in industrialized nations, and therein lies the misbelief which informs our economic activities.
By comparison, most traditional knowledge systems are founded on intuitive and spiritual relatedness. There is no separation in such traditional knowledge systems: time-honored observations are firmly grounded in the knowing that all is related and interconnected, and the observer is a vital part of the system observed.
Once we accept this ‘disconnect myth’ for what it is—an erroneous belief and worldview—we will re-connect with our family of non-human beings and find our way back home. Have we not been lost and felt an inexplicable deep yearning for knowing—a reflective sense of the sacredness of creation—its cohesiveness and absolute interrelationship? “Western civilization, despite its phenomenal achievements, developed on the foundation of this fundamental split between Spirit and nature—between creator and creation.” [6]
The natural law is simple: humility to take from nature, to give back and to maintain balance spiritually and physically. For us, the Arhuaco, humility is a sign of wisdom. That is what we want to pass on to future generations. The Mamos invite us to discover again our truthful identity, our ancestors, our roots and taking care of these roots, and of the knowledge of the Mamos. In this way, we can arrive into the deepest aspects of this knowledge and transmit it to others. – Calixto Suarez Villafañe
Isn’t it extraordinary and comforting for all of us to know that the Mamos care for the Sierra, for Mother Earth, for them, for us, and that their lives are dedicated to maintaining balance? By contrast, are we aware of the forces we are unleashing? Realise, there is a hard reality edge to this for the Mamos: it has become harder and harder for them to continue their work. They need to recover their land and their Kankurwas (sacred temples). They believe we are close to reaching a point of no return.
How then can we reclaim our ‘Indigenous relationship to all Life?’ Together with the Mamos and Indigenous elders from around the world we are preparing a set of indigenous instructions on what we need to do – “to remember and lovingly celebrate our sacred relationship with our Mother Earth, all relatives of our One Human Family and our kinship with all Life.”
1Earth Institute is a global indigenous-nonindigenous partnership and believes that the rethinking of our economies involves integrating traditional wisdom ways to reconnect us to land, country, and spirit. Our view is that the traditional stories are not just tales from other worlds and artifacts from the past, but hold the instructions for our survival and our future.
Behar (Advisory Board member & CEO As You Sow)
© 1Earth Institute Inc. 2018
Gratitude
I would like to acknowledge my debt and gratitude to my dear friend and co-director Calixto Suarez Villafañe; to the inspirational Robin Wall Kimmerer; to all my elders and indigenous elders who have patiently taught me; and to all of our nonhuman teachers and family.
References
[1] Ladha, A. (2018). Life After Patriarchy: Three Reflections on the Coming Revolution, Kosmos Online, available at https://www.kosmosjournal.org/news/life-after-patriarchy-three-reflections-on-the-coming-revolution.
[2] Kimmerer, R. (2016). Harmony with Nature: Fifth Annual Conference at the United Nations, April 2015, Kosmos Journal, Spring/Summer, available at: https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/harmony-with-nature.
[3] Chief Phil Lane of the Ihanktonwan Dakota and Chickasaw Nations, Indigenous Wisdom for Compassionate Living and Unified Action, available at http://indigenouswisdomcourse.com.
[4] Kimmerer, R. (2014). Returning the Gift, Minding Nature Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2, available at https://www.humansandnature.org/returning-the-gift-article-177.php.
[5] Quotes from Calixto Suarez Villafañe are based on my personal communication with him.
[6] Baring, A. The Real Challenge of Our Times: The Need for a New Worldview, available at http://www.annebaring.com/anbar09_philosophy.htm.
The Deschooling Dialogues: Grief, Collapse, and Mysticism
The Deschooling Dialogues: Grief, Collapse, and Mysticism
This is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place on April 24, 2018 as part of the inaugural quarterly issue of Kosmos Journal. The theme of the first edition is Unlearning Together. As such, it felt appropriate to have a quartet dialogue of unlearning, focused on a complex of issues associated with the inevitable transition to post-capitalism; namely, the issues of grief, collapse and the mystical impulse of transcendence that can provide deep healing in such troubled times. One of the key questions is how we come together to explore the edge of our practice as seekers, as activists, and as advocates for a more just and loving world.
This conversation was facilitated by Alnoor Ladha (AL) as part of an interview series titled, The Deschooling Dialogues: Wisdom from the Front Lines of the Battle Against the Colonized Mind. Rhonda Fabian (RF) is the editor of Kosmos Journal; Martin Winiecki (MW) is the global partnerships coordinator of Tamera, a peace research center in southern Portugal; and Martin Kirk is the co-founder and director of strategy at TheRules, a global network of activists, writers, researchers, coders and others focused on addressing the root causes of inequality, poverty, and climate change.
AL: Thank you for bringing us together Rhonda, and for the critical work you do with Kosmos Journal. Given that this edition’s theme is unlearning together, ‘deschooling’ is the perfect place to start. And especially around grief, because in the Western dualistic mindset that we all have been socialized in, we have a tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
In fact, our moral philosophy, the dominant moral philosophy of utilitarianism and the economic philosophy of neoclassical economics is highly dependent on this premise. Part of the unlearning we’re doing is to re-contextualize and re-understand the role of grief as a mystery unto itself– not as something to avoid or to understand, but to go within and to transmute, to evolving through and with.
Grief is the chrysalis chamber in many ways and it’s necessary in some ways for the redemption for our action. On some level, we can say, “Well, this grief is not ours. It’s for the collective whole.” Yes, that’s true, and in some sense, in a meaningful sense, we are the collective whole. By working with the shadow and light aspects of grief, we are taking responsibility for the emotions that come with the actions we have undertaken as a civilization. Whether it’s collective grief or individual grief or community grief, perhaps it is not something to be avoided, but is actually part of refining our character. So, let’s start there.
MK: One thing that is challenging that I’m trying to process is that we’re not talking about the grief over a death. We’re not talking about a period of grief. At some level, being alive on this planet as this great unfolding happens is to be living in grief in a permanent sense. Because of the amount of destruction and death that is not only happening but is so very visible if you choose to look. It turns grief into a permanent type of practice. You can’t open up a newspaper without there being some event that in any normal time would be a profound story. But in this day and age, where we are so obsessed with the immediate and the dramatic and the daily political soap opera of things, we see these stories passing every single day with a normality, perhaps even with banality. Whether it’s the destruction of Arctic ice, or the extinction of pollinator species or whether it’s the concentration of ocean plastics or the increasing level human violence in immeasurable ways or whether it’s just the sense of insanity that pervades our political structures and systems right now.
It all speaks to a process of death that is underway and is going to be unfolding throughout our lifetimes at some level. It is also married to a birth, a rebirth. At least that’s the hope—with death comes rebirth. However, it seems that death is far more evident than the rebirth in many ways right now. So the question for me is, how do I work with the concept of grief in a way that doesn’t focus on its end point?
I don’t know that trying to process it away is realistic or sensible or wise. I feel I’m not very skilled at this. I feel I am having to unlearn everything I was taught. It’s a struggle. I have no answers. I’m trying to work with my emotions. I’m trying to connect with them. I’m trying to let them be. And trying to not be attached to the outcome that will inevitably pass. It is the big ‘unending.’
RF: Thank you Martin. I think what you describe is the ongoing daily practice. I’m very fortunate to live in the woods and spend a lot of time sitting with the trees and it occurs to me often that, as wars rage, the trees grow slowly.
My teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh says that a tree doesn’t run around trying to save the world. A tree only has one job, and that’s to be a tree. And when trees stop acting like trees, we’re all in trouble. I wish that I could be more like that sometimes, because when you think about it, trees filter toxins out of the atmosphere simply by their presence. They convert sunlight into food energy without discrimination. And through their mycelium and their roots, they connect to the wider web of life. And, in that same way, I feel that I have to be a good tree. To try to convert some of the toxic substances in my energy field, some of the suffering, into compassion, and to offer the ‘food’ of my presence for the benefit of all Life.
Now, all of that and a dollar doesn’t buy you very much if you’re a victim of sexual slavery, or being tortured in a Syrian prison, or your children are starving. And yet, what helps me is to remember that we are bigger than this human experience. That we’re all connected to the same Source. And we return to Source, the Code of Creation. So, in touching peace I add peace to the whole. Without that peace my activism in ineffective.
MK: I know that I should be sitting in my practice deeper. But I find that there’s an element of this grief that part of me is going slightly mad with. And it’s, and one of the symptoms of that madness is that it disconnects me from my spiritual practice.
The thought-form of Wetiko [an Algonquin word that roughly translates to cannibalism] in some sense is grief itself; it has an innate desire for grief. It has a pernicious desire within it to keep me separated from the practices that will allow me to process grief well. Maybe there’s some sense of guilt that we should suffer. After all, we are part of a civilization that has created so much suffering everywhere. Why should we be free of it? Part of me wants to suffer when it sees the suffering. Part of me doesn’t want to be freed from it. Part of me wants to go mad. Because it feels like going mad is an appropriate response, almost as if it is through the madness that one can truly see.
I think at one level I’m accepting this and I don’t beat myself up for it. No human beings have ever lived through a time like this, we have never been able to see such global suffering with such precision and clarity. We are constantly exposed to global horrors on an enormous scale. We see, in real time, the bombs dropping, children being gassed. It happens in our living rooms, in a way the wounds are still fresh and always open.
On one level we are aware of and sense the scale of this terror of global capitalism. Our human brains grew up living in small communities in a contained geographical area with a certain set of influences and inputs. So of course, we are overwhelmed. And on some levels, it is impossible to process. If you try to think about ideas like human extinction, civilizational collapse, all of these vast forces, it’s impossible that a single human mind can process it well. We’ve certainly not been taught how to. I certainly haven’t been.
MW: I would like to follow on this line. There is no doubt that we are in the midst of unprecedented moment where there is no return to old certainties. Part of this pain that we are facing in the world is a pathway toward transformation. Or will we perish in the horror of the onslaught that we are facing? The decision of how we navigate these two avenues profoundly depends on the way we actually respond to that grief that we are facing, that we are receiving, that we are feeling at this moment.
I would like to tell of an experience that for me was actually really significant in dealing with grief. I was visiting a peace village in Colombia called San José de Apartadó, which is a community of farmers who took a stand to remain outside the battle between the FARC and the Colombian paramilitary.
As part of a service commemorating the very painful history of the community, a priest- a liberation theologist- spoke for three hours telling stories of one massacre after the other. After only five minutes I realized my normal self will either collapse or I will just do the usual thing, which is to close my heart and go off somewhere else. At that moment, I made a spiritual oath to stay there in my practice with an open heart and to listen to all the stories and the details. At some point I realized I entered into what I would call a sacred space, a form of transcendence where I felt that if I am able to really bear witness fully, I could remain in a state that is beyond my normal emotional self. And I felt as if, through my heart, I was truly perceiving. I could access a deep empathic state. It was also causing tears. I felt as if there is the collective heart of humanity that wants to awaken. It felt like an incredibly pain-soothing power that wants to operate through us to the extent that we come to the point of pure empathy that lies in receiving this grief.
When I look at our global system structurally, what is keeping our current culture alive is the closed heart of the Western world which keeps us in this illusion that we are separate from each other, that we are egoic Babels that are not interconnected and not interdependent. But there is a ground of existence which is completely interdependent, an eternal realm of existence which in a way we can never lose.
AL: Thank you for sharing this. Yes, it is this state of transcendence that our current crisis can lead us to. There is this idea that is prevalent in spiritual discourse and New Age circles, which is the idea that if you’re feeling pain, you are not healthy. You are not grounded. You are not in your center. But how can we amputate our shadow or even our ego? Actually, by holding reality, our subjective reality, in its full light and its full darkness we can consciously choose how we synthesize the shadow and amalgamate the light.
I have two short anecdotes. My uncle is a Sufi scholar. He would tell us these stories when we were kids about our ancestors and about what their role was in society in ancient Arabia. That they would go into town squares in congregation and pray with a collective intention of healing. They would pray and create sacred geometry and architectures of golden light and hold the energetic force field of these places. They believed they averted war and catastrophe and death and domestic abuse and all of these types things. But they would never claim credit because they didn’t believe in linearity or in cause and effect. They just knew that this was their purpose and needed no other reward except the very act of doing it.
And then, recently, I was listening to Stephen Jenkinson speak. He’s the author of Die Wise and he runs the Orphan Wisdom School. He was speaking to a largely Western audience and suggested, “You’re all looking for purpose. But this very idea of purpose is egoic.” He went on to talk about Indigenous cultures in which there was a cycle of completion. For many Indigenous communities, there’s clear purpose. One is to take care of the land on which they lived, of which they were a part of. The second is to honor the ancestors. The question one asks within these frames is: what kind of ancestor will I be? What kind of steward or caretaker of this land will I be? And because your ancestors were buried on that land, the dual purpose was actually a single purpose. They are the same thing.
This cycle of completion really helps one to understand their purpose. And because you had a relationship with your ancestors, you had a relationship with death itself. You didn’t fear being forgotten. But in our orphaned, Western culture, we fear death because we fear being forgotten. We know that we ourselves are abdicating our responsibility of being stewards of the land and honoring our ancestors.
MK: I agree that part the fear of death is the fear of being forgotten and the fear of being irrelevant and the fear of never having been. One of the things that makes it hard for me sometimes to connect with spiritual practice is that it has to be recreated for me because I didn’t pick it up from my ancestors. I don’t have the language. I don’t have the metaphors, the mythology.
The religious imagery I was brought up with was Protestant UK. And that doesn’t speak to me, the Judeo-Christian tradition doesn’t speak to me. That’s why I cast around to re-create and re-remember truths from many traditions. Without the tethers of things like land, ancestry, access to traditional wisdom, one can feel surrounded by the pain and the suffering. We have to re-access the muscle memory.
RF: I feel your words. I don’t really have ancestral family memory. I don’t know who my father was. I left home very young, at 16, and lived on the streets of New York. And my family, for a time, became the people I met and lived with on the streets. And yet, I know that my ancestors were also present, with me in this circle right now. And yours are too.
It’s absolutely miraculous that our ancestors are right here with us. Look back say 50, 100 generations. They too endured great hardships, struggles, grief. For anyone alive today, your ancestors had to be skillful, smart and lucky for you to exist at all. And we know also that trauma is passed down through the generations in numerous ways. So we are drops of light in a very long evolutionary stream of light. I have to believe that together we are flowing toward an even greater light.
I call on my ancestors. I don’t know them by name, I don’t know what part of the world they’re from. But I ask them to help align my purpose with our highest collective purpose.
MW: Human culture is embedded in a bigger movement of life which doesn’t end at death. We are therefore not confined to this threatening border of death. I want to acknowledge this- it’s very beautiful and inspiring.
I also think that it is very much connected to the idea of tribal culture. Connection with Life requires a cultural container or a framework that actually cultivates community. Not only with the souls of my grandparents and all the generations that came before, but with all the beings that surround us, all that is fundamental to our existence.
Purpose is not just something that is a part of some separated human mind. There is a purpose that is part of life which is evolution pushing forward on its path. When we are no longer driven by the compensation for the loss that we suffered, when we don’t need to invest in personal careers but can actually ground in this sense of community with life, then our purpose is an expression of the purpose of the whole.
However, this embedment needs a foundation where people actually feel this interconnectedness on a daily basis. Right, it’s not just an esoteric buzzword and something that brings book sales for self-help gurus. It needs to be a societal reality,;otherwise, it is just another religious comfort.
AL: Indeed. Even these ideas of ancestry- in some ways, we frame tribal as strictly positive- but there’s also the shadow side where we believe our ancestors are simply the people in our blood lineage. That may be too linear of a definition. If you look at Ancient Egyptian cosmology for example, there was a school of esoteric thought that believes we have star ancestry. We have these star nations that are connected to our higher missions in some way. And they negotiate with our physical DNA line in order to achieve our life objectives.
I’m not suggesting I believe that or not. But it doesn’t have to be DNA ancestry in a traditional sense, but rather to access the notion that we may be a part of something bigger than us, as Martin [Winiecki] described, this affinity to the community of Life. Of course, a part of the world’s endowment is our collective endowment. Including all ancestry, including all life that is extinct or living.
To then go back to physical DNA, I don’t think we fully know what our relationship with our ancestors truly is. Through all the work the scientific community has done on the Human Genome Project, we only understand the workings of about 7% of DNA. The other 93% of DNA that we don’t understand, scientists call junk DNA.
MW: Like Dark Matter.
AL: Yes, it’s the Other. The Unknown. And what they’re finding now is that this DNA has an electromagnetic pulse to it. A very strong electromagnetic current. So in some ways it could be that our ancestors are living through us in this electromagnetic form.
In some ways we’re all in the business of redemption, you know? I know many Westerners, who feel the sense of being orphaned by the migration from Europe to North America wherever. They say, “I actually hate my ancestors. My ancestors were colonialists. They were imperialists. They were slave-traders.” But this is still a connection with your ancestry. And there’s a bravery in facing that as well. To recognize that the agency of our forebears in creating the reality of late-stage capitalism could be the entry point to redemption.
This leads another inquiry: how has the linearity of scientific materialism and scientism and rationalism and binary thought limited us in our ability to transcend the grief of capitalism? How could the impending collapse of capitalism be separate from the scientific method or the Industrial Revolution or Wetiko or any other historical precedent that led to this moment?
MK: First, I’d like to go back to the ancestors and that sense of time, because there’s a linearity in that logic too. They came before me, I will become one, time moves in a certain linear-stages. I take your point about ancestry not just being about direct DNA lineage. But for most people, it is an access point into a bigger concept. So, you have that easier access point.
The ground of being accessed is the emergent reality, the Source, as Rhonda said. That, to me, is a more accessible construct. And when I think about purpose, when I think about things like that, I ultimately come back to the idea that purpose is your connection to that Source of being, which I think of as Love, the force of creation itself. This line of thought helps me access concepts like death, rebirth, and even capitalism.
Capitalism, in all its gross and violent imperfections, is also a process. As such, capitalism may be its own salvation. This is a sort of Sufi thought. It is a part of the universe becoming self-aware. We are so conscious of its shadow right now because it is so obvious. However, its shadow is what takes us through transcendence. It is the power that gets us beyond it. So, it has its own perfection built into it. It is both perfect and violently imperfect at the same time.
RF: I love that we’re touching on the underlying code. When I think of that Code of Creation unwinding through all that underlies Life – the structure of atoms and solar systems- I recognize that we’re fractal manifestations of that code. And I think that somewhere along the way the scientific models made a crucial error about that code—that the basis of the code is competition, that we evolve through a neo-Darwinian selfish gene, by competition. If we can now look deeply at the code through the lens of cooperation rather than competition, things can and will go in a different direction for humanity.
MW: Indeed Rhonda. We are starting to understand what kind of current we are part of. It is very profound that we are still figuring out what it actually is. It’s important to look at the aspect of shadow and grief in this context. If I say I hate my ancestors, then I am actually saying at the same time that I allow the shadow of that story which I don’t want to face, to govern me from that part of myself which I don’t consciously integrate.
If I not only think of ancestors, but of the concept of reincarnation, then I also have to face the possibility that perhaps I was a conqueror. I was a colonialist. There is no way of stepping outside of this until we come to this point of seeing the underlying deep longing for love, which was misguided in a system that was directed against love, against the truth of our bodies, of our souls. A system which turned love, time and again, generation after generation, into hatred.
In some ways, we cannot have a humane transformation if we don’t find another relationship to love, break this eternally repeating cycle of being born, having this longing for love, being disappointed, and then living through resentment and revenge.
MK: That’s a really interesting thought. The idea that we’re all just living out—at least in the Western world—a revenge script. We just feel our expectations have been thwarted around love. I can certainly see that playing out in my life, but if you extrapolate out to the macro, you can see there is indeed revenge. There is anger. There is one-upmanship.
As Rhonda says, it’s the competitive instinct given free rein. And all the energy and all the power pumped into it. We’ve all had our expectations thwarted. We should have been given better. It is, in a sense, kicking against reality.
A conversation that is not had anywhere nearly enough is the recognition of the incredible effort and energy required to keep capitalism alive. If you wanted to put it in financial terms, there are billions of dollars a year just spent on advertising around the world. That’s a number that you can almost say is the degree of propaganda and desire invention required to push against human nature. That is the degree to which it is pushing a rock against our ground of being, against that instinct of love.
We see this with social media and the rise of the communications infrastructures. Everything about it keeps you out of deep thought. That’s the whole point of it. And I think that’s where we are. Our baser desires are primed. They’re getting all the energy, all the validation. Therefore, we can’t access the antidote which is that connection to Source. Which is that deeper spiritual silent voice of conscience that you find in silence. That you find in Nature. That you find in your spiritual practice. Capitalism is designed to de-spiritualize. In that sense it is the opiate of the masses.
Capitalism describes our collective purpose through the prime directive of producing more capital as the number one thing it has to do. This just means, “Focus on something that isn’t love. Focus on something that is purely a human construct that communicates best with your ego, not with your spirit.” Money and ego are in beautiful dialogue with each other. They are of the same nature and they feed each other. This is the depth of the age of delusion, as Buddhist thought describes it. That’s how the trick is cast. It keeps us in our shallow mind, not our deep mind.
RF: As activists, when we try to solely use our shallow mind to solve problems, we’re doomed. We get caught up in those very constructs and we think that technology and rationalism will save us. Just as we think that we’re the good guys and the other person is the bad guy. As long as we address these problems as ‘us versus them,’ we’re doomed. However, when we act from our hearts, we recognize that all beings are my ancestors, all beings are part of my identity. I’m the colonized and I’m the colonizer. I’m the one who is raped and the rapist. When I truly see that, I can begin to understand that toxic energy and how to transform it. Without that sense of wholeness and interbeing with all the energies that are contributing to the problems, I can’t begin to be a part of the solution. My anger just generates more aggression.
AL: In some ways, this is the heart of unlearning together. And in many ways, it is a re-membering. When we define ourselves in opposition to the Other, to Babylon, the Spectacle—whatever the monster may be—we then re-enter dualistic thought, a sense of superiority, and the reification of the ego.
I notice when I say that we are “entering the era of re-membering” or “we are moving from an age of independence to interdependence,” people respond with, “do you want us to return to hunter-gatherer living?” I go back to this Hakim Bey line in his essay series, “Immediatism,” where he says “We don’t want to go back to the Paleolithic, we want to be of the Paleolithic.” We want to access the vast storehouses of psychic power we have forgotten we possessed.
MK: Indeed. This is technology. I feel my practice now is to hold and not turn away from the full horror, while not being transfixed by it, like a deer in headlights. It’s a process of continual renewal inside and continual reconnection to conversations like this. I’m reminded of a quote from this British economist David Fleming. He said “Before you do anything important, consult a conversation.”
RF: I want to express gratitude for the three of you, for the work that you do. We each have our spaces to hold. Some of us can go to the front lines and get arrested and put in jail for our activism. For some, it is ours to witness, to stand and witness the horror. For others, it’s to build community and alternative realities. We all have our work to do.
MW: Yes, I’ve been reminded that unlearning happens by becoming aware of the mind-viruses that keep us hostage. As we are challenged to become aware of the programming that we are driven by, there is such a deep challenge at the moment to understand the depth of the expectation of catastrophe, and come to a place where we can confront reality and know that we are also shaping it. I can say the edge of my practice is really how can I look into the world, not suppressing what happens, and still see beyond the pain, to see the possibility of healing.
AL: Yes, we must become aware of the thought-forms, the mind-viruses, the memetic structures that hold us to that old way of being. And I am reminded of this Vedic line which is, “Our work should never exceed our practice.” And part of our practice is actually this. It is conversation. It is this communalism. It is this sharing. And that is one way to deprogram ourselves from the mythology of a dying system.
Thank you to the three of you for this conversation and your work in the world. And thanks to Rhonda for initiating this conversation. In love and solidarity.
About the Images:
Kelcey Loomer is a mixed-media artist.
“I think of my paintings as abstract maps, where the marks of time and emotion leave traces on the surface. My work focuses on the act of looking inward to feel a connection to the mysteries of life—how the connections to our ancestors, our own past, and to the present moment are all intertwined. My paintings have a unique depth to them that is akin to being in a room where the wallpaper is peeling, revealing hints of color and style from the past inhabitant. They are emotional landscapes that look inward for a sense of place…”
Find Kelcey’s blog here: http://kloomer.blogspot.com/ and her Instagram here: https://www.instagram.
Change the Worldview, Change the World
Change the Worldview, Change the World
Forty years after Thomas Berry’s “The New Story,” new generations are seizing on the power of narrative.
I was sitting in a classroom in Assisi, Italy, with one of the leading environmental thinkers of our time, and he was talking about the power of story. “It seems that we basically communicate meaning by narrative,” he said. “At least that’s my approach to things: that narrative is our basic mode of understanding.”
In that summer of 1991, Thomas Berry (1914—2009) was a 77-year-old sage; a Catholic priest—though never quite comfortably—a cultural historian, and a scholar of world religions, retired from teaching but at the height of his intellectual and prophetic powers. His central focus was addressing the deep roots of the ecological crisis.
As he spoke poignantly of what was being lost—the mass extinction of species and the accelerating devastation of the biosphere—Berry told us, “The difficulty that we’re into has come, to a large extent, from the limitations and inadequacies of our story. And what we need, I think, and what we really have, is a new story.”
As a 21 year old college student who didn’t know much, this was more than enough to radically expand my consciousness. I had never thought about the concept of “the power of story,” or that we ‘know’ things by way of story, or that our ecological crisis stems from our underlying worldview. I had felt it, but had never been handed these words and ideas as tools with which to think.
A couple years earlier, I was a teenager bored with high school when I had been caught and inspired by The Power of Myth, Bill Moyers’ series of interviews with comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. While evading homework, I read Campbell’s Myths to Live By. But Berry’s work was something different.
Where Campbell anticipated that the mythology of the future would deal with the Earth as a whole, and would likely draw on the photographs of Earth from space as a mythic symbol, it seemed to me that Berry was already weaving just such a mythos. In Berry’s view, our new understanding of the universe and the Earth—the story of galactic emergence and development which had been gradually glued together by 20th-century astronomers and physicists like a cosmological collage—could provide a new sacred origin story, a cosmological homecoming for modern culture. “It’s enormously important for us to know the story of the universe,” Berry told us in Assisi, “and it’s the only way in which we’re going to know who we are.”
For Berry, it all came down to cosmology—the basic worldview of a culture: its foundational story of how the world came to be and how it got to be as it is now, and how we, as humans, fit into it. To address the deep underlying causes of the industrial-capitalist-corporate destruction of the biosphere, we had to examine our worldview.
In Berry’s view, a central cause of the West’s ecological hostility was its separation from nature—a separation that was at once spiritual, religious, psychological, emotional, intellectual, and philosophical. The root of the eco-destruction was an anthropocentric (human-centered) Western worldview that saw an existential gulf, a “radical discontinuity,” between the human and natural worlds.
Despite being a Catholic priest, Berry (like Lynn White Jr. before him) was unsparing in his environmental critique of Christianity. The historical orientation of the Christian tradition—its mandate to subdue and conquer nature, its focus on redemption from a “fallen” world, and the priority placed on a transcendent divinity—all served to alienate humanity from the cosmic-Earth process that gave us being.
In contrast to the Indigenous and Eastern cosmologies expressed in the Native American, African, and Asian traditions Berry taught to his students as founder of the History of Religions program at Fordham, the Western worldview generally saw humans as separate from the Earth and cosmos. And not only separate, but superior, with—as Berry noted ruefully—“all the rights and all the value given to the human, and no rights and no value given to the natural world.”
When this anthropocentric orientation in Western religion and thinking merged with the “new mechanical philosophy” of Descartes and Bacon in the 17th century, in which nature was viewed as a soulless machine, the stage was set for the modern worldview. Human arrogance, capitalist logic, and industrial-scale destruction was unleashed on a desacralized planet. The living community of Earth’s biosphere, which created and sustains us, was reduced to resources for use by the human, dead material to fuel endless “growth,” profit, and “progress.”
To stop this assault on the Earth, Berry told us in Assisi in 1991, requires recognizing that our cultural story is dysfunctional. To change the world, we have to change the worldview.
The New Story
Thirteen years earlier, exactly 40 years ago this year, Thomas Berry wrote and published a groundbreaking essay titled, “The New Story” (1978). After publishing books on Buddhism and The Religions of India earlier in his career, in the 1970s, Berry’s writing took a turn. Increasingly distressed by the destruction of the planet, he penned, from his home in Riverdale, New York, a series of essays—known as the Riverdale Papers—that explored the role of worldview and spirituality in relation to ecology and environmentalism.
“The New Story” began with sentences that would become an iconic expression of Berry’s insight:
“It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The Old Story—the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it—is not functioning properly, and we have not learned the New Story.” [original version, 1978]
A decade later, “The New Story” was republished in Berry’s first collection, The Dream of the Earth, along with 15 other essays, and his cosmological vision found a wider global audience. In the words of religious scholars (and former students of Berry) Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, “‘The New Story’” was “the culmination of a lifetime of Berry’s reflections on the growing ecological crisis and what new paradigm would be essential to counteract the devastating power of extractive and consumer economies. This new story, he felt, could begin to break through the modern view of materialism and reductionism that had objectified nature primarily as a resource for human use.”
Berry’s vision—sometimes referred to as the “New Cosmology”—was part of a wider movement within fields emerging in the 80s and 90s such as eco-philosophy, ecological spirituality, and ecopsychology. Proponents of these ideas questioned the fragmented worldview of modern culture. Cosmologist Brian Swimme worked closely with Berry and expressed this new cosmological vision in his books, The Universe is a Green Dragon and The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos. Radical theologian Matthew Fox critiqued the modern sense of disconnection and separation inherited from the “Newtonian ‘parts’ mentality,” Cartesian dualism, and reductionism.
Authors and activists Charlene Spretnak and Joanna Macy emphasized the practical consequences of our faulty societal story. “In the absence of any comprehension of the sacred whole,” wrote Spretnak, “meaninglessness and destruction are as acceptable as anything else to many people,” while Macy noted the relation between politics and cosmology, stating that a “sense of connection with all beings is politically subversive in the extreme.” Sister Miriam Therese MacGillis gave hundreds of presentations explicating Berry’s perspective on ecology, cosmology, and the New Story.
After publication of The Dream of the Earth, Berry continued to travel widely, teaching and speaking at conferences, universities, religious communities, and gatherings across the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, the Philippines, and beyond. In 1992 he coauthored The Universe Story with Brian Swimme and, in his last years, he published three more collections of essays, including The Great Work (1999) and The Sacred Universe (2009). By the time of his death in 2009, Berry was widely admired as one of the most influential, profound, evocative, and effective environmental writers of his day. And “while many ignored his warnings over thirty years ago,” state Tucker and Grim, “now his insights about the religious character of the environmental crisis continue to be prescient.”
Unlearning and Relearning the Elemental Stories
Twenty-eight years after writing the essay, “The New Story,” when I interviewed him in 2006, Berry was still grappling with the significance of cosmology and worldview. “It’s not easy to describe what cosmology is,” he told me. “It’s neither religion nor is it science. It’s a mode of knowing.” “The only thing that will save the twenty-first century is cosmology,” he said as we had lunch in North Carolina on a December day. “The only thing that will save anything is cosmology.”
Four decades after Berry wrote “The New Story,” his insights may be more relevant than ever. In the years after I first studied with him that summer in Assisi, I continued to reflect on story, as well as the links between social justice, ecology, and cosmology. It seemed to me that worldview was a key in all of these areas and was one of the connections between them.
Throughout the 20th century, racist and sexist policies and practices were supported by narratives operating in families, schools, workplaces, and the media, as well as in political, economic and legal/judicial institutions. The civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, and the feminist/womanist movements of the 60s and 70s can be seen, in part, as massive re-storying on a culture-wide level.
Gender, like race, is a social construction, which is to say, a story. And the stories of sexism and racism that have cast such a pall over our history and our present illustrate the power of worldview and narrative in generating and maintaining systemic oppression. Stories become structures, systems, policies, and practices that have profound consequences on the bodies and in the lives of people in targeted communities.
Can we not see systemic racism, sexism, and other oppressions as functions of the same dominant worldview that is destroying the Earth? Settler colonialism at planetary scale? When I interviewed Berry in 1996, he told me, “If a particular society’s cultural world—the dreams that have guided it to a certain point—become dysfunctional, the society must go back and dream again.”
Yet the pervasive worldviews of white supremacy and misogyny continue to undermine our efforts to build justice, community, and democracy in the United States. Every week, as another unarmed Black man is shot by police or a woman is killed by a domestic partner, we see flawed stories turn lethal in seconds. The #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo and #TimesUp movements are challenging and transforming racist and sexist worldviews in powerful ways.
Dysfunctional dreams. Problematic stories. Distorted worldviews. Can we not recognize these at the root of not only ecological issues, but also social injustices such as white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism?
Perhaps no recent event illustrates the current clash between worldviews better than the Indigenous-led resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, North Dakota. Even mainstream media has used the word ‘worldview’, to recognize that this is not simply a conflict between activists and fossil fuel corporations, but fundamentally a clash of cosmologies.
On one side stands arrayed police forces representing the capitalist, industrial, corporatist worldview that sees nature as a resource to be exploited—a distorted dream driven by maximizing profits, regardless of consequences for people, communities, the biosphere, and future generations. On the other side is an Indigenous cosmology in which water is life, Earth is Mother, and reverence, respect, and reciprocity are paramount.
On one side is a worldview and legacy of systemic racism and mistreatment of Native peoples for centuries, in which, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “the ultimate logic of racism is genocide.” On the other side is a worldview of cosmological egalitarianism in which nature is holy and every being is sacred.
On one side is the “old story” of Western culture: a mythos of separation, disconnection, and anthropocentrism—of hierarchy and domination, in which division, exploitation, and oppression are the norm. On the other side is the “original story” of Indigenous traditions, a cosmology of community and connection.
The Water Protectors at Standing Rock challenged much more than a pipeline. They confronted the cosmology of the modern world and its destructive, unjust economy. Like the movement for Black Lives—which also is a direct challenge to 500 years of a white, racist worldview—the visionary resistance at Standing Rock may help guide our way into future. By connecting ecology, social justice, and worldview and using the power of spirituality, dream, story, art, and action, these movements bring forth—in practice and politics and society—what is needed most: a cosmology of interconnectedness.
The New Story of our times will be a multiplicity—a kaleidoscope of stories. As the writer and critic John Berger has said, “Never again will a single story be told as if it is the only one.” Long-silenced voices will continue to come to the fore. The stories needed most are emerging from the youth of Ferguson, Baltimore, Standing Rock, and Palestine rather than from the narrators of the status quo. From this diverse chorus, larger themes are taking shape, with recognizable contours bending toward justice and ecology.
We need stories that expose the lies of systemic racism, misogyny, heterosexism, colonialism, and capitalism. We need stories that stand up to fascism and authoritarianism, and stories that expand democracy.
We also need stories that connect us to the majesty of the galaxies and the depths of the ocean, stories that remind us who we are.
We need stories that stop abuse and create justice. Perhaps most of all, in this moment of widespread poverty and injustice, climate crisis, and mass extinction, we need stories that build movements.
In 2018, we seem, in some ways, farther than ever from the dream of a new story, with a level of political polarization that seems to fracture even our sense of common reality. Yet, if the possibility remains that we might heed Thomas Berry’s advice and “reinvent the human…by means of story and shared dream experience,” then now would be the time for massive, creative action. We owe it to the children of the future and the entire Earth community. As Berry wrote in his essay 40 years ago, “no community can exist without a unifying story.”