David Loy2013-06-19T16:02:36-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=david-loyCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for David LoyGood old fashioned elbow grease.Transcendence or Immanence? Balancing Heaven and Earthtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31660152013-05-13T15:05:37-04:002013-05-13T15:49:41-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/
In early Buddhism the "end of suffering" is nirvana, literally "blown out" or "cooled off." Yet it's not clear what that metaphor means, because the Buddha described nirvana mostly with negatives (the end of craving, ignorance, etc.) and other metaphors (the Shelter, Harbor, Refuge, etc.). His reticence leaves the important question whether nirvana refers to something that transcends this world -- some other dimension or reality -- or whether it describes an experience that is immanent in this world -- a state of being that could perhaps be understood more psychologically, as the end of greed, ill will and delusion in our lives right here and now.
Theravada Buddhism, which bases itself on what it believes to be the original teachings of the Buddha, understands nirvana as an Unconditioned realm that transcends samsara, this world of suffering, craving and ignorance. The ultimate goal is to escape the unsatisfactory world we now live in, by avoiding rebirth into samsara.
Whether or not the duality between this world and some otherworldly goal accurately reflects the original views of the historical Buddha, it is similar to what is found in most of the other spiritual traditions that developed around the same time, during the Axial Age (roughly 800-200 B.C.E.) that gave rise to Vedanta, Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism and Judaism, as well as Pre-Socratic Greek philosophy and Platonism.
The Axial worldview was quite different from that of older empires such as Mesopotamia and Egypt, which believed that the gods related to humanity mainly through a king or emperor at the top of the social pyramid. The authority of such rulers was as much sacred as secular, because they were the only ones directly in touch with the divine realms. The Axial revolution brought about a new relationship between the transcendent and each individual. In fact, this relationship created the individual. Instead of connecting to the divine through a priest-king, now everyone has his or her own personal relationship with God, Brahman, or the Tao. In Buddhist terms, each of us has the possibility of awakening and attaining nirvana. This also implied a circle of empathy and compassion that incorporated everyone else who has a relationship with the sacred.
The most revolutionary aspect of this new relationship was a sacred demand that we transform ourselves. It was no longer enough to fulfill one's social function by supporting the ruler's sacrosanct role: now the transcendent expected each individual to take responsibility for his or her own life. In the Abrahamic traditions this was mainly an ethical requirement that we live according to God's commandments. To risk a further generalization, the emphasis in India was more on liberation from this world of maya, usually translated as illusion. To awaken is to realize the really Real, which is something other than its appearances.
"Give me a place to stand and I shall move the Earth," Archimedes said. Culturally, that leverage has been provided by (our belief in) transcendence, which offered the reflective distance -- the alternative perspective -- necessary to evaluate and try to improve oneself. To paraphrase something Renan wrote, the transcendent is the way that the ideal has made its appearance in human history. The world we live in today -- including our concern for democracy, human rights and social justice -- became possible because of that "other world."
Nevertheless, such cosmological dualism has also been problematic. It became a split within us, between the "higher" part (the soul, rationality) that yearns for escape from this vale of sorrow and the "lower" part that is of the earth (physical bodies and emotions). As the Buddha emphasized, this world is a place of suffering and death. Much of the attraction of the Axial religions, including Buddhism, is that they seem to offer an escape from mortality. Dread of death also explains our degradation of the material world, nature, animals, our bodies, sex and women (who remind us that we are conceived and born like other mammals). We don't want to perish: We want to be immortal souls that can qualify for heaven! Or no-selves that might attain nirvana. All the Axial spiritual traditions were or became patriarchal: the hierarchy between higher and lower worlds became reproduced in the hierarchy of men over women.
The problem with those approaches today, of course, is that science has not discovered anything that supports such cosmological dualisms, which may have outlived their role.
Largely in reaction, a this-worldly alternative has become widespread in contemporary Buddhism: understanding the path as a program of psychological development to help us deal with personal problems, especially one's "monkey mind" and afflictive emotions. The aim is to gain insight into how our minds work, in order to make our lives less stressful.
Although this is a beneficial development in many ways, what we might call the "psychologization" of Buddhism tends to de-emphasize its ethical precepts, community life and awakening itself, all of which are central aspects of Buddhism in its Asian context. This is especially true of the mindfulness movement, which extracts one technique from a tradition that has so much more to offer, including a deeper transformative insight into one's true nature.
Without denigrating such practices, we need to ask: Do psychological and mindfulness approaches help to develop an awakened society that pursues social and ecological justice? How do they address the challenge of growth-oriented corporations that are damaging the sustainability of life on Earth? Is Western Buddhism being commodified into a self-help and stress-reduction program that does not raise questions about consumerism and our dysfunctional economic system, but helps us adapt to them?
Beyond Transcendence and Immanence
If transcendence encourages dis-identifying from our lives here, because focused on escaping this world, psychological appropriations of Buddhism (including the mindfulness movement) tend to accept this world as it is -- to presuppose the prevalent, Western-derived worldview about who we are, what the world really is, and our role within it.
Do both miss the point? Buddhist awakening is a profoundly transformative realization that this world as we usually experience it, including the way that I usually experience myself, is neither real nor unreal, but a psychological/social/linguistic construction that can be deconstructed and reconstructed, which is what the spiritual path is about.
The most problematical aspect of this construct is the sense of myself as a being separate from the rest of the world. Because it has no substantiality or reality of its own, the sense of an "I" that feels separate from others is inherently insecure and anxious.
Awakening, from this perspective, is not an escape from this suffering world, nor a grudging acceptance of its existential and social realities, but letting-go of oneself (Dogen calls it "forgetting yourself") and "falling into" the world, to realize one's nonduality with it. Meditation enables this process, because we let-go of the mostly habitual ways of thinking, feeling, etc., that normally work together to sustain one's sense of self.
As Nisargadatta put it:
When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that's wisdom. When I look outside and see that I am everything, that's love. Between these two my life turns.
If there is no inside (my mind), the outside (external world) is not outside! Wisdom and compassion: the two wings of the dharma.
This way of understanding enlightenment has important implications. If awakening involves transcending this suffering world, we can ignore its problems. If the Buddhist path is psychological therapy, we can focus on our own problems. But both of those approaches reinforce the illusion -- the basic problem -- that I am separate from others, and therefore can be indifferent to what they are experiencing.
Then the bodhisattva path is simply a more developed stage of personal practice. One learns to live in a way that embodies what has been realized. There is no individual salvation from the ecological and social crises that confront us today. They are just as much spiritual crises, because they challenge us to wake up and realize that our own well-being cannot be separated from the well-being of others, or from the health of the whole Earth.
David Loy advises the Ecobuddhism project.]]>The Three Nuclear Poisonstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29835342013-04-01T13:10:04-04:002013-06-01T05:12:01-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/"Because of the persistent threat of radioactive materials to the well-being of all sentient beings, the development and use of nuclear power plants is prohibited." -- The Buddha
You didn't know that nuclear power was forbidden by the Buddha? Of course there's no record of him saying anything like the above. His silence on this issue probably has something to do with the fact that he was born almost 2500 years ago in northeast India, into an Iron Age civilization.
Does this mean that Buddhism has nothing to contribute to the debate over nuclear energy? Another possibility is that Buddhist teachings have important implications that can help us understand our situation today.
Nuclear power has its own advantages and disadvantages, so the issue is how to evaluate them, and how they compare with other energy sources. What does this have to do with Buddhism? The Buddha said that all he had to teach is dukkha ("suffering") and how to end it. So one way to frame the evaluation is to ask what types of dukkha is nuclear power likely to reduce (carbon emissions into the atmosphere) and what other types of dukkha it is likely to promote (e.g., accidents such as Fukushima).
What causes dukkha? The four noble truths single out tanha "craving," but the Buddha also emphasizes the "three poisons": lobha (greed), dosa (aggression), and moha (delusion). When our actions are motivated by them, dukkha usually results.
This fits in well with the Buddha's revolutionary understanding of karma, which emphasizes the intentions behind what we do. Habitual expressions of greed, aggression and delusion often end up forming one's character and causing persistent problems.
What creates karma is not just motivation by itself, unacted upon, but intentional action. To make intelligent decisions we also need to evaluate carefully the likely results. But even here motivations are often a factor, because they influence how objectively we assess the possible consequences. Those who support off-shore drilling for oil usually see fewer ecological risks than environmentalists do, and the Fukushima disaster has reminded us that the same is true for nuclear power companies. That's why it's so important to become more aware of what actually motivates us.
What does this have to do with evaluating the benefits and pitfalls of nuclear power? It does not mean focusing on the personal motivations of the individual people involved in the industry. Instead, we are challenged to extend the basic Buddhist teachings about karma and dukkha into a new context.
Today we have not only more powerful technologies such as nuclear power (and nuclear weapons), but also much more powerful institutions that control them, which are socially structured in such a way that they take on a life of their own. And if institutions attain a life of their own, does it also mean that they have their own motivations? That brings us to the crucial question: Can we detect institutionalized greed, aggression, and delusion in the promotion of nuclear power?
In considering the possible role of greed, it's not enough to emphasize the role of the profit motive. We also need to consider the vast quantities of cheap and convenient energy that we enjoy. Why do we "need" so much? Because we take for granted an extraordinarily wasteful and (from that perspective) inefficient economic system, which emphasizes consumerism.
One of the main arguments for nuclear energy is that, although nuclear plants are prohibitively expensive and slow to build, they can most reliably supply the massive amounts of electricity we need. But a society less consumerist could flourish on much less energy. If greed is understood as "never enough," the issue of whether to rely on nuclear power is inevitably connected with greed both on the consumer side and on the producer side. Is an economic system that depends on constant growth -- that needs to expand if it's not to collapse -- really compatible with the finite ecosystems of the biosphere? And does consumerism really make us happy?
When we think of aggression (or "ill will"), it's usually some sort of overt violence that comes to mind, but social critics have coined the term "structural violence" to describe the way that violence doesn't always need to be explicit; the threat of violence can be as oppressive. Then do nuclear power plants embody structural aggression? A nuclear plant can be built without any intention to harm anyone, but what if it is nonetheless likely to cause serious harm to vast numbers of living beings in the future?
One part of the argument is that serious accidents, with horrific consequences, have always happened and will continue to happen, because the factors that cause such incidents cannot be avoided. After every Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima disaster, we always hear some excuse from the nuclear industry about why that was an exception, and that it can't happen again. Yet it will continue to happen again, because human error cannot be eliminated and the forces of nature cannot be completely controlled or even anticipated.
Nuclear power plants also produce huge amounts of radioactive waste, which threaten to poison all living beings for many thousands of years. Ten years after its removal from a reactor, the surface dose rate for a typical spent fuel assembly exceeds 10,000 rem/hour, but a fatal whole-body dose of radiation for humans is only about 500 rem (if received all at one time). There are already thousands of spent fuel assemblies, and no one really knows what to do with them because there is nowhere and no way to store them safely for such a long period of time. The United States has at least 108 sites that are contaminated and unusable, some of them involving many thousands of acres. The lifespan of some of these radioactive materials is very long: plutonium-239 has a half-life of about 24,000 years, meaning that half of it decays during that period but the other half remains as poisonous as ever. Human agriculture began only about 10,000 years ago; the likelihood that we will be able to secure such dangerous waste for much, much longer than that is not something to rely upon, to say the least.
In practice, the short-term "solution" has been to store the waste materials somewhere, put a fence around them, and forget about them. If the industry can get everyone else to forget about them too, the problem is solved -- for the time being, anyway. Let's leave it for our descendants to figure out what to do, and hope that will happen before the radioactive waste percolates into the water table.
Delusion takes many forms, but for Buddhism the fundamental delusion, at the root of our dukkha suffering, is ignorance of our true nature. The Buddhist teaching of anatta ("no-self") corresponds to the fact that our usual sense of self -- the sense that there is a "me" inside that is separate from the rest of the world outside -- is a psychological and social construct that normally feels uncomfortable because it can never secure itself. The Buddhist solution is to "forget oneself" and realize one's nonduality with the world: that I, like everyone else, am an impermanent manifestation of the whole, without any fixed reality that is separate from that whole.
Today, this delusion of separation is not only an individual problem but a collective one: the delusion that we humans are a unique species, obviously the most important of all, and therefore we can pursue our own benefit without any concern for the well-being of the rest of the biosphere. If we had a more nondual appreciation that we are an integral part of the planet -- that the Earth is not just our home but our mother, and that we never really cut the umbilical cord -- then it is inconceivable that we would choose nuclear (or fossil fuel) power over renewables, given all the long-term risks for such short-term gain.
The final irony is that the short-term gain for which we are willing to sacrifice so much (no, not our own sacrifice, of course -- we sacrifice the future!) may not be much of a gain at all. The purpose of any economic system is to help our societies flourish, yet it's becoming more doubtful consumerism is actually serving that function. Recent research by sociologists, psychologists and even economists suggests that, once a basic level of income has been achieved, what makes people happy is not more consumption but the quality of one's relationships with other people. Then why do we remain so committed to a dysfunctional economic process, which (among other problems) requires so much energy to keep producing so many unnecessary products?
If we can see through that collective delusion, the renewable alternatives to nuclear power become compelling. Rather than asking how we can generate the enormous amounts of energy that a consumerist economy needs, we need to restructure our societies according to the amount of renewable energy that's safely available.
David R. Loy is an advisor to the Ecobuddhism project.]]>Collective Bubbles of Delusiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28104992013-03-07T11:12:26-05:002013-05-07T05:12:01-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/
Like other animals, we have instincts, but, thanks to our large neo-cortex, we can gain some degree of freedom from them by choosing how to respond to them. This is something that must be learned. We are born helpless and incomplete. During our extraordinarily long childhood, when the neo-cortex is developing, we are dependent upon, and vulnerable to, the conditioning controlled by caregivers.
So the downside of our relative freedom from instinct is our susceptibility to ways of thinking and acting inculcated by others. Much of that training process occurs before we have the conscious awareness to understand what is happening, much less any ability to evaluate it for ourselves. A common consequence is lifelong subordination to authority figures of one sort or another.
The sense of self develops in relation to other selves: we internalize our caregivers' and siblings' understanding of what the world is, and our role within it. And the conditioning does not end when we become adults. Since our egos are inherently insecure, in need of constant reinforcement, we remain very concerned about what other people think and especially sensitive to what they think about us.
Why do we usually believe something, such as a particular political ideology? Not because that belief-system is based on evidence. It's no coincidence that children normally have political opinions very similar to their parents'. We learn to believe something because it is believed by others whom we respect/identify with/want to be like/want to be liked by. We are good at finding reasons to justify what we believe, but it is much more difficult to examine critically and sincerely our deepest beliefs. In fact, we are not usually aware that they are beliefs: they are not just true, they are reality. We do not normally distinguish the stories we hold about the world from the world itself.
The Buddha was aware of this problem, and emphasized the importance of not being attached to views. He applied this to his own teachings, which he described as a raft that can help us to get across the river of samsara (this world of suffering, craving and delusion) to the "other shore" of enlightenment. He warns us not to think "this is a great raft, I'll carry it with me everywhere." Let it go!
In place of the Abrahamic duality between good and evil, Buddhism focuses on ignorance and wisdom -- the insight that comes with awakening. Delusion (moha) is one of the "three fires" or "three poisons" (the others are greed and ill will) that cause suffering when what we do is motivated by them.
Because it emphasizes individual awakening and personal transformation, Buddhism has not had much to say about collective delusion. It is of some importance that my delusions are usually not that different from the delusions of other people, especially those around me. I live within a bubble of beliefs that's not separate from theirs: in fact, our bubbles normally overlap so much that we can refer to group bubbles of delusion. These collective bubbles can help us understand why the world works the way it does, especially the institutional structures that perpetuate social dukkha (suffering).
"Climate change" is a good example. (I use quotation marks because it would be more accurate to refer to "climate breakdown" or even "climate collapse.") Many people in other developed nations are puzzled that so many Americans believe global warming is a "liberal hoax." Given the overwhelming scientific consensus about the seriousness of our situation, the denial movement is a classic case of a collective delusion bubble.
This example is important in another way too: it shows how much more dangerous the problem becomes when delusion is tied in with greed (the first of Buddhism's "three poisons"). As the old saying has it, it is very difficult to get people to see something when their livelihood depends on not seeing it. What is perhaps most baffling about climate change denial, though, is that there is little if any real benefit in doing so for anyone except those who own and manage fossil fuel corporations. Denying global warming is not only an especially problematic collective fantasy; it is a false belief manipulated with expensive and clever propaganda campaigns, by people who mostly know it is a dangerous fiction, but who are more interested in the short-term profits to be made by continuing to pump fossil carbon into the atmosphere. The result is not just a collective bubble of delusion: it is a bubble intentionally perpetuated by powerful corporations and billionaires -- an example of institutionalized delusion.
In collective denial -- such as that concerning climate change -- the group bubble of delusion becomes much more difficult to dispel, or even to become aware of, when people consciously or subconsciously believe they benefit by not seeing it. That suggests a Buddhist response: by truly letting-go of one's sense of self -- the ego-self whose well-being is separate from others' well-being -- the self-interest that sustains the bubble is undermined. This is true collectively as well as individually. In the case of climate change, we need to realize that the well-being of our own species can't be separated from the well-being of the whole biosphere. Buddhists and others need to realize that the kind of personal well-being, awakening and transformation we seek will not occur if we are indifferent to what is happening to other members of our community, our society and our natural world.
David Loy is an advisor to the Ecobuddhism project.]]>Towards a New Buddhist Storytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.25451202013-02-10T00:17:32-05:002013-04-11T05:12:01-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/
Anyone who is paying attention knows that we are living in a time of crisis -- most obviously, severe ecological and economic challenges. They are interconnected: an economy based on consumerism and perpetual growth is incompatible with the well-being of our biosphere. What is less obvious is that there are also fundamental problems with the story that underlies these crises. By "story" I mean our basic way of understanding who we are, what the world is, and our role in it.
A devalued world
The modern world emerged out of the fragmentation of Christianity. As a result of the Reformation, God disappeared up into the heavens and we ended up with a secular world -- but a devalued one because God was our traditional source of goodness, value and meaning. When God faded away, we were left with a desacralized materialist understanding: a world without meaning. Much of our worldview today comes from science. Because of its concern to be objective and neutral, however, science is unable to provide the kinds of meaning and values that we need.
Yet our need for goodness, value and meaning is inescapable: we can't live without them. What then fills the vacuum? Since the late 19th century, Darwin's findings about the biology of the evolutionary process have been misappropriated to define the new industrial society. It was the Victorian Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer who coined the term "survival of the fittest." Human society came to be seen as another jungle environment where you must crawl over the next guy on your way to the top, because if you don't he will crawl over you. The value and meaning of life was reduced to survival and success. And what we've seen over the last century and a half is robber barons and capitalist magnates like Rockefeller and JP Morgan, both of whom embraced Spencer's worldview.
From a Buddhist perspective, Social Darwinism (including its contemporary versions by Ayn Rand, and populist versions of "selfish gene" theory) rationalizes some pretty unsavoury motivations, especially the greedy aggression of the separate self. Basic to this worldview is that I can pursue my own benefit even at the cost of your (or everyone's) well-being. If we look for what really motivates corporate CEOs or nation-states, we usually recognize a larger-scale version of the same worldview that prioritizes success, growth and the exploitation of others. And that is what has gotten us into such an unsustainable economic and ecological state.
Interrogating traditional Buddhism
The solution is not simply to import some Buddhist philosophy, however, because contemporary Buddhism also has its problems. It originated as an Iron Age mythology and still contains many mythological elements that shouldn't be accepted merely because they are traditional.
The most obvious challenge, of course, is how to understand karma and rebirth. But there is another, even bigger problem with the Buddhist worldview, which it shares with Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions.
The Axial Age & Cosmological Dualism
The German philosopher Karl Jaspers popularized the idea of an Axial Age (800-200 BCE). He believed that during that period the spiritual foundations of humanity (upon which we still subsist today) were laid independently in China, India, Persia, Judea and Greece. This period gave rise to the Vedanta, Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, the Abrahamic religions, Pre-Socratic Greek philosophy and Platonism.
Like other Axial developments, Buddhism basically rests on cosmological dualism. Instead of God and the created world, it's samsara versus nirvana. The Buddha himself didn't offer many details about nirvana, as if he intentionally didn't want to provide food for speculation. On the popular level of understanding, however, Buddhism devalues this world as a place of suffering, craving and delusion, and the goal of Buddhist practice is to transcend it. But what does "transcend it" mean? Escaping to some other reality, or realizing the true nature of this world?
Another implication of cosmological dualism is that my individual salvation or liberation is independent of yours. But trying to attain nirvana by escaping from this world of samsara is incompatible with the situation we face today. What is called for now is not people seeking to transcend this world but people who take responsibility for its well-being. If the fundamental problem is our usual sense of being a self that is separate from the rest of the world -- if "I'm in here, and everything else is out there" -- then enlightenment shouldn't be understood as that self attaining some other reality separate from this world. Instead, genuine awakening involves letting-go of oneself -- of one's habitual sense of self -- and realizing one's non-duality with the world, which naturally involves accepting responsibility for it, because its well-being can no longer be distinguished from one's own well-being.
The Axial worldview was quite distinct from that of the older empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt, which understood that a higher reality related to humanity mainly through a king, emperor or pharaoh at the top of the social pyramid. The power of such rulers was as much sacred as secular, because they were the only ones directly in touch with the transcendent. The Axial revolution brought about a new relationship between the sacred and every individual. In fact, this is what created the individual. Everyone has their own personal relationship with God, Brahman, or the Tao. A circle of empathy now includes everyone else who also has a relationship with the sacred.
One essential aspect of this relationship is a transcendental demand that we transform ourselves. In the Abrahamic traditions this is primarily an ethical demand that we live in a certain way. The problematical aspect is that the impetus to transform comes from something outside this world -- which inevitably involves some devaluation of this world. If God is the source of goodness, meaning and value, the corollary is that this world by itself lacks them.
In contrast to the ethical focus (good vs. evil) of the Abrahamic traditions, the emphasis in India was on awakening (delusion vs. enlightenment). The Samkhya-Yoga traditions focus on realizing that pure consciousness is separate from this material world. Brahman, the ground of reality according to the Vedanta traditions, is very different from the particular manifestations or forms we experience in this world. Such metaphysical worldviews also devalue this world. In India generally, the idea has been not to transform the world, but to realize something that enables us to become indifferent to it. This world is maya, usually translated as illusion. Wise people don't waste their time trying to fix an unreal reality. To awaken is to realize the really Real, which is something other than its forms.
Transcending transcendence
There is another aspect of maya that is more relevant today: it can also be translated as creativity. This fits better into the new story that we need now, one more consistent with recent cosmology and evolutionary theory in understanding the fundamental ground -- the basic stuff of the cosmos -- as an inexhaustible creative process of always taking new forms (matter and energy being two of the most basic forms, which enable infinite others to develop). As the Heart Sutra emphasizes, it's not simply that form is empty, for emptiness is also form. Rather than devaluing the reality and validity of the forms of this world, we can appreciate them as the (wonderful, delightful, frustrating) ways that shunyata manifests. We can embrace its confluence of processes and transformations, a field of incessant creativity that includes my own activity.
The Axial worldview fits only too well with our human yearning for immortality. In this material world, things are born and die, but if I have some self that can be "transcendentalized," perhaps I can escape death. Here, again, is a devaluation of this world and all the things associated with it: matter, nature and animals, bodies and their desires, and of course women, who remind us that we are conceived and born like other mammals (all the Axial traditions are patriarchal). We who have language assume we are superior to animals: in fact, our linguistic representations of the world are superior to the world itself, since they can control it.
Ironically, the sense of a self that uses language is itself an artefact of language -- a linguistic construct. Indo-European languages are dualistically structured in the way they distinguish nouns from verbs, subjects from predicates. To believe that words like I, me, mine, you, yours, etc., correspond to something real ("self-existing" is the Buddhist term) is to be trapped within a linguistic schema. Today we have neuro-scientific explanations of this process that are consistent with what Buddhism has been describing in its own way for 2500 years. And if the entanglement of language and our nervous system is what maintains the self, then we can appreciate why meditation is so important. Meditation enables us to let go of those dualistic linguistic patterns that largely determine our ways of thinking. Meditation helps us to transcend transcendence.
David Loy is a Zen teacher & advisor to the Ecobuddhism Project.]]>The New Bodhisattva Pathtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.21666762012-11-26T10:54:02-05:002013-01-26T05:12:01-05:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/
Yet the more we learn about our situation, the more overwhelmed and discouraged many of us become. The problems are so enormous and intimidating that we don't know where to start. We end up feeling powerless, even paralyzed.
For those inspired by Buddhist teachings, an important issue is whether Buddhism can help us respond to these crises. As Paul Hawken points out in "Blessed Unrest," there are already a vast number of large and small organizations working for peace, social justice and sustainability -- at least a million and perhaps more than 2 million, he estimates. The question is whether a Buddhist perspective has something distinctive to offer this movement.
Historically, churches and churchgoers have played an important part in many reform movements, for example, the anti-slavery and civil rights campaigns. But much, perhaps most, of the impetus in the West for deep structural change originates in socialist and other progressive movements, which traditionally have been suspicious of religion. Marx viewed religion as "the opiate of the people" because too often churches have been complicit with political oppression, using their doctrines to rationalize the power of exploitative rulers and diverting believers' attention from their present condition to "the life to come."
This critique applies to some Buddhist institutions as well -- karma and rebirth teachings can be abused in this way -- but at its best Buddhism offers an alternative approach. The Buddhist path is not about qualifying for heaven but living in a different way here and now. This focus supplements nicely the customary Western focus on social justice and social transformation. As Gary Snyder put it half a century ago, "The mercy of the West has been social revolution. The mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both."
We need both because when we do not acknowledge the importance of individual transformation, social transformation is repeatedly subverted by powerful elites taking selfish advantage of their position. Democracy may be the best form of government, but it guarantees nothing if people are still motivated by greed, ill-will, and the delusion of a self whose well-being can be pursued indifferent to others' well-being.
We need both personal and social transformation so we can respond fully to the Buddha's concern to end suffering. The Buddha emphasized that all he had to teach was suffering and how to end it. This implies that social transformation is also necessary in order to address the structural and institutionalized suffering perpetuated by those who benefit from an inequitable social order.
Is there something specific within the Buddhist tradition that can bring these two types of transformation together in a new model of activism connecting inner and outer practice?
Enter the bodhisattva.
According to the traditional definition, the bodhisattva chooses not to enter the state of perfect peace, nirvana, but remains in samsara, cyclic existence, to help all sentient beings end their suffering and reach enlightenment. Instead of asking, "How can I get out of this situation?" the bodhisattva asks, "What can I contribute to make this situation better?" Today, more than ever, we need to understand the bodhisattva path as a spiritual archetype that offers a new vision of human possibility.
Wisdom and compassion are the two wings of the Buddhist path, and we need both to fly. "When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that's wisdom. When I look outside and see that I am everything, that's love. Between these two my life turns" (Nisargadatta). Wisdom is realizing that there is no "me" separate from the rest of the world, and compassion is putting that realization into practice.
The vision of socially engaged Buddhism is to help develop an awakened society that is socially just and ecologically sustainable. It seeks to open up new perspectives and possibilities that challenge us to transform ourselves and our societies more profoundly. This brings us to the bodhisattva's path as a new archetype for social activism.
Bodhisattva activism has some distinctive characteristics. Buddhism emphasizes interdependence ("we're all in this together") and delusion (rather than evil). This implies not only nonviolence (violence is usually self-defeating anyway), but a politics based on love (more nondual) rather than reactive anger (which separates them from us).
The basic problem in our society is not rich and powerful bad people, but institutionalized structures of collective greed, aggression and delusion. The bodhisattva's pragmatism and non-dogmatism can help to cut through the ideological quarrels that have weakened so many progressive groups. And Buddhism's emphasis on skillful means cultivates the creative imagination, a necessary attribute if we are to construct a healthier way of living together on this earth, and work out a way to get there.
Yet those attributes do not get at the most important contribution of the bodhisattva in these difficult times, when we often feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenge and are tempted to despair. The bodhisattva's response? To quote the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: "The difficult we do immediately. The impossible will take a little longer." According to the classical formulation, the bodhisattva takes a vow to help liberate all living beings. Someone who has volunteered for such an unachievable task is not going to be intimidated by present crises, no matter how hopeless they may appear. That is because the bodhisattva practices on both levels -- inner and outer -- which enables one to engage in goal-directed behavior without attachment to results.
As T. S. Eliot put it, "Ours is in the trying. The rest is not our business." The bodhisattva's job is to do the best one can, without knowing what the consequences will be. Have we already passed ecological tipping-points and human civilization is doomed? We don't know. Yet, rather than being intimidated, the bodhisattva embraces "don't know mind," because Buddhist practice opens us up to the awesome mystery of an impermanent world where everything is changing, whether or not we notice it. I grew up in a world defined by a "cold war" between the USA and the Soviet Union we all took for granted -- until communism suddenly collapsed. The same thing occurred with South African apartheid. If we don't really know what's happening, how do we really know what's possible, until we try?
The equanimity of the bodhisattva-activist comes from nonattachment to the fruits of one's action, which is not detachment from the state of the world or the fate of the earth. What is the source of this non-attachment? That question points to the fruits of the bodhisattva's inner work. The Diamond Sutra says that we cannot lead all living beings to liberation because there are no living beings to liberate. The bodhisattva realizes shunyata, emptiness -- that dimension in which there is nothing to gain or lose, no getting better or worse -- but is not attached to that realization. As the Heart Sutra emphasizes, forms are empty, and emptiness is form. Emptiness is not a place to dwell that is free from form; it is experienced only in the impermanent forms it takes, the forms that constitute our lives and our world.
For the Buddhist activist these are the two dimensions of practice -- form and emptiness, personal transformation and social transformation, opposite sides of one coin. As Nisargadatta might put it, "Between these two the bodhisattva's life turns." Our world needs both.
David Loy advises the Ecobuddhism project. An earlier version of this blog appeared in Shambhala Sun magazine.]]>Climate, Evolution and the Human Spirittag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.17303482012-08-07T09:10:54-04:002012-10-07T05:12:03-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/"I would be absolutely astounded if population growth, industrialisation and all the stuff we are pumping into the atmosphere hadn't changed the climatic balance. Of course it has. There is no valid argument for denial." --David Attenborough
"The basic matter is not one of economics. It is a matter of morality -- a matter of intergenerational justice. The blame, if we fail to stand up and demand a change of course, will fall on us, the current generation of adults. Our parents honestly did not know that their actions could harm future generations. We, the current generation, can only pretend that we did not know." --James Hansen
Since Palaeolithic times at least, indigenous human cultures have maintained rituals that express a sacred relationship to the living world. Why did these spiritual-ecological instincts have survival value for our ancestors? Biologist David Suzuki has pointed out that humans are fundamentally spiritual animals who need to know that we emerge from nature and return to it when we die.
Our affinity with nature is apparent in the fascination and delight of children with plants, animals and the natural world -- an appreciation not limited to young people of course. The powerful links between a mature love of nature, the capacity for spiritual transcendence and our moral sense have an emotional resonance that can leave us lost for words. Today, however, those links are threatened in an unprecedented way.
Climate Changes Everything
In 2012 the world crossed an ominous threshold. A reading of 400 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon dioxide was recorded by monitoring stations across the Arctic. That is at least 50ppm higher than the maximum concentration during the last 12,000 years, a limit that allowed us to develop agriculture and civilization. We have already begun to experience a significantly more chaotic climate that reflects this altered composition of our atmosphere.
Extreme heat, dustbowl drought, stunted crops and massive wildfires have reduced half of all U.S. counties to an official disaster zone. Like Russia in 2010, the U.S. in 2012 is losing a large proportion of major food crops to climate change.
The eminent agronomist Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute expects the shortfall in the U.S. corn and soybean harvest to be about 96m tonnes. At home, increased costs for animal feed mean higher prices for milk, meat and processed foods based on corn and soy. Price rises on the international grain market will have a major negative impact on poor countries in Africa and South America, where many people spend most of their personal income on food.
Climate Justice
The fossil fuel industry, in collusion with the corporate media, has presided over a propaganda triumph that is devastating agriculture on a global scale. Agriculture has been described as "the quintessential human activity" so a central truth of climate change is now evident for all to see. Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu, among others, have pointed out that poor people in the Third World have been suffering these effects for years, and called for Climate Justice. But the climate wrecking-ball will not be confined to the Third World. The composition of Earth's atmosphere is a universal influence for rich and poor countries alike. What a stable climate gives, global warming takes away: first agriculture, then civilization.
Extreme weather pattern damage to American agriculture this year may amount to a $50 billion "economic event." Although that scale of loss is getting the belated attention of large corporate interests in food production, insurance, and beyond, it should command everybody's attention now. But as our most prescient climatologist, NASA's James Hansen, points out above, the basic challenge is much more than economic. Rather, it is the most consequential moral issue before us as a civilization.
Our Children Are Our Future
A natural conviction held by every previous generation is that our children are our future. How can our globalized society sleepwalk into such an unprecedented betrayal of intergenerational justice? A paper published this year in the premier science journal Nature by 22 international experts compares our current human impact on the planet with global events eons ago that caused mass extinctions and permanently altered the biosphere. We are "forcing another such transition, with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience."
We need to ask ourselves: In whose interest are we sacrificing that ancient contract with the future of our species? Why can't we wake up, find the courage to face the facts, and throw off the dominion of the fossil fuel complex? That kind of authentic challenge would re-invigorate the human spirit, rather than depleting it through a collective trance of consumerism and denial induced by the "mainstream" media.
Morality And Ethics Are Our Survival factors
As the evolutionary biologist Edward Wilson shows in his magisterial new book "The Social Conquest of Earth," human nature has three major traits, resulting from our evolutionary heritage. This triad defines the character of our species -- what we could also call "the human condition." Natural selection within a group favored selfish individualism. But natural selection between groups favoured two empathic traits -- cooperation and altruism -- that serve the "human spirit" and our remarkable social cohesion.
Within the individual and society, struggles between selfish individualism and collaboration or altruism are inevitable. The daily "news" chosen for our consumption is a repetitive story of corruption, theft, violence, warfare -- and the latest environmental "accident." These dispiriting pathologies of hyper-individualism run riot in a landscape of broken cooperation. The philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris believes "the issue of human cooperation seems almost the only one worth thinking about." Ethics and morality, he states, are interchangeable names for deliberately thinking about it.
Yet humans are the most social of animals. Our altruistic instinct is so strong that it has created large, highly valued niches for its expression, such as medicine, education and other helping professions. Altruistic activity is one of the most potent factors that can strengthen a person's immune system and boost longevity by a third or more. No wonder we honor self-sacrifice for the group with the most solemn of ceremonies. Altruism and cooperation are two key survival factors for our species.
The Human Right To A Safe climate
Climate chaos represents an enormous threat to a host of human rights: the right to food, to water and sanitation, to social and economic development. U.N. rapporteur Olivier de Schutter suggests that human rights courts should treat climate change as an immediate threat to our basic rights. They should impose a duty to cooperate on the basis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, insisting governments end their corrupt relationship with fossil fuel corporations and build a post-carbon society now. Because climate changes everything, the global emergency requires that a new article be added to the Declaration, specifying the human right to a safe climate. Let us see who would oppose or seek to undermine it.
Dismantling The Zero-Empathy Trap
The dominant institution of our age is the global business corporation. When well-documented examples of corporate behavior were examined by psychiatrist Robert Hare, they corresponded to traits of psychopathy -- in humans, a genetically-based condition involving zero-empathy. Individual psychopaths feel no spontaneous empathy, but know how to feign it in order to manipulate others for their own benefit. Their conduct is typically relentless, Machiavellian and "without conscience" -- the title of Hare's classic book on the subject.
The fate of coming generations depends on recovering our power to choose a human future. Of course, not all corporations act as if they were psychopaths. Yet the record shows that some leading fossil fuel companies possess a lethal combination of wealth, power to corrupt and destructive intent. They have spent huge sums of money to undermine climate science, control major political institutions and install "the best government money can buy." Their unregulated dominance has become our ticket to runaway global warming, collapse and mass extinction.
The alternative, as Thom Hartmann points out, is to rewrite or revoke the corporate charters of delinquent companies. But where can we find the truth and courage to dismantle this systemic zero-empathy trap? Our evolutionary biology has equipped us with special resources for survival: altruism, cooperation, love of nature and moral being. They are defining elements of the human spirit. Our species will not survive unless we bring them to bear now on the climate crisis.
John Stanley & David Loy are part of the Ecobuddhism project.]]>A Buddhist Philosophy of Evolutiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16333592012-07-17T13:01:19-04:002012-09-16T05:12:12-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/"The eye that searches the Milky Way galaxy is itself an eye shaped by the Milky Way. The mind that searches for contact with the Milky Way is the very mind of the Milky Way galaxy in search of its own depths." --Thomas Berry & Brian Swimme
"I came to realize clearly that mind is no other than mountains and rivers and the great wide Earth, the sun and the moon and the stars." --Dogen
Most religions are uncomfortable with evolution, because it seems incompatible with their own creation stories, especially when those stories are understood literally. But if religions are to remain relevant today, they need to stop denying evolution and instead refocus their message on its meaning. According to Brian Swimme, the greatest scientific discovery of all time is that if you leave hydrogen gas alone (for 14 billion years, plus or minus a few hundred million years) "it turns into rosebushes, giraffes, and humans." Might this also be the most important spiritual discovery of all time?
Biological evolution is one of three progressive processes. First was the fusion of Big Bang particles into heavier elements in the cores of stars, which then exploded and scattered them to coalesce into new solar systems. In the second stage, elements such as carbon, oxygen, and sodium provided the physical basis for the eventual appearance of self-replicating species about 4 billion years ago, including the development of the modern human species about 200,000 years ago. Last but not least were the cultural developments necessary to produce highly-evolved human beings such as Śākyamuni Buddha and Einstein.
How shall we understand these three "nested" processes? Many religious people see a God outside these processes who is directing them. In contrast, many scientists have understood the evolution of life simply as a process of random DNA mutations and natural selection. Is there a third alternative?
According to the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, evolution is neither random nor determined but creative. A tendency toward increasing complexity is hard to overlook, as is its association with greater awareness. From a Buddhist perspective, this opens up interesting possibilities. Can we understand this groping self-organization as the universe itself becoming more self-aware?
In "The Universe Story," Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry offer this view: "The mind that searches for contact with the Milky Way is the very mind of the Milky Way galaxy in search of its inner depths." According to one Buddhist tradition, when the Buddha woke up, the whole universe woke up. That might be one answer to the old question, "If there is no self, who becomes enlightened?"
Viewed less dualistically, our desire to awaken (Buddha means "awakened one") can be understood as the urge of the cosmos to become aware of itself. And "waking up" is realizing that "I" am not inside my body, looking out at a world that is separate from me. Rather, Buddhist emphasis on interdependence -- the fact that everything is dependent upon everything else for its being -- means that "I" am what the whole universe is doing right here and now, one of the countless ways that the totality of its causes and conditions comes together.
But there are complications.
Every species is an experiment of the biosphere, and according to biologists less than one percent of all species that have ever appeared on Earth still survive today. Our super-sized cortex enables us to be co-creators, and with us new types of "species" have become possible: knives and cities, poetry and world wars, cathedrals and concentration camps, symphonies and nuclear bombs. As these examples suggest, our unique creative powers have their problematical side. Nietzsche's Zarathustra says that "man is a rope across an abyss." The metaphor is suggestive: Are we a transitional species? Must we evolve further in order to survive at all?
In his book "Thank God for Evolution," Michael Dowd describes our collective problem as "systemic sin": "The fundamental immaturity of the human species at this time in history is that our systems of governance and economics not only permit but actually encourage subsets of the whole (individuals and corporations) to benefit at the expense of the whole." It looks as if we can no longer afford the delusion of separate selves that can pursue their own benefit at the cost of the whole.
According to the Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, "the Buddha attained individual awakening. Now we need a collective enlightenment to stop the course of destruction." Are figures like the Buddha and Gandhi examples of the direction in which our species needs to develop today? The "growing tip" of cultural evolution today involves spiritual practices that challenge the fiction of a separate self whose own well-being is distinguishable from the well-being of "others." Perhaps our basic problem is a profound misunderstanding of what one's self really is.
As far as we know, we are the only species that can dis-identify with every particular thing (which happens during meditation, when one "lets go" of any mental event that occurs) and thereby come to realize that the whole universe is our body. The other side of that realization is assuming responsibility for the well-being of the whole. In Buddhism, wisdom and compassion work together.
Without the compassion that arises when we realize our non-duality -- empathy not only with other humans but with the whole biosphere -- it is becoming likely that civilization as we know it may not survive even this century. Nor would it deserve to. It remains to be seen whether the Homo sapiens experiment will be a successful vehicle for the cosmic evolutionary process.
This gives us another perspective on our collective relationship with the biosphere. Isn't the global ecological crisis a spiritual challenge, which calls upon us to wake up and realize our non-duality with the Earth?
David Loy and John Stanley are part of the Ecobuddhism project]]>Buddhism and the Unconscioustag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.15747852012-06-08T23:00:21-04:002012-08-08T05:12:10-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/"My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious." --C.G. Jung
Those who see into the Unconscious have their senses cleansed of defilements, are moving toward Buddha-wisdom, are known to be with Reality, in the Middle Path, in the ultimate truth itself. Those who see into the Unconscious are furnished at once with merits as numerous as the sands of the Ganges. They are able to create all kinds of things and embrace all things within themselves. --Shen-hui (as translated by D.T. Suzuki)
At the end of his life, C.G. Jung dictated to his secretary an extraordinary autobiography, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections," whose first sentence we cite above. Earlier he had observed how human nature resembled the twin sons of Zeus and Leda: "We are that pair of Dioscuri, one of whom is mortal and the other immortal, and who, though always together, can never be made completely one. ... We should prefer to be always 'I' and nothing else." Recent neurological studies into those "twin sons" have been exploring Jung's insight, leading to discoveries that have many important implications, including how we might understand traditional Buddhist teachings today.
Neuropsychology of the Unconscious
Brain research over the last generation has confirmed the difference between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Our left cerebral hemisphere is the place where language is generated and received. It serves a linguistic consciousness with which we describe and think about the world. On the other side, our silent right brain hemisphere serves an unconscious awareness that cannot be coded in language. Non-verbal contemplative practices -- such as being quietly present in the natural world, "open presence" meditation, tai chi chuan or yoga -- elicit sustained awareness rooted in the unconscious. We are fully aware of what is happening, within and around us. Yet such experiences cannot be put into (or directed by) words because they are served by modules for sensory awareness in the right hemisphere. Focusing attention in the present suspends the usual executive functions of the conscious mind, so that the resources of the unconscious may unfold.
Those resources -- from intuitive reasoning to music, dance, imagery and healing -- are rich indeed. Curiously, unconscious capacities of the right hemisphere are equally essential for praying and a sense of humor. Especially important for our survival and well-being (including our sense of beauty) is the capacity of the right hemisphere to 'read' and delight in the textures and patterns of the natural world. This predilection, which the late Theodore Roszak called the ecological unconscious, reflects our ancestry as hunter-gatherers, which remains an important part of our evolutionary heritage.
What Is the Buddhist Model of the Unconscious?
Vasubandhu (fourth century C.E.) was one of the six great commentators on the Buddha's teachings, and co-founder of the Yogacara school. This major influence on the later Buddhist traditions of Zen, Dzogchen and Mahamudra describes eight types of consciousness. The first five are those of the eye, ear, body, nose and tongue, the sensory inputs to our neuro-linguistic "map of the world." The sixth, called citta in Sanskrit, is the conceptualizing mind.
The seventh type of consciousness (manas in Sanskrit) is described by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh: "It is the number one discriminator, whose speciality is to say 'This is me. This is mine. This is not mine.' It creates belief in a self and distinguishes self from other." Manas usually keeps a tight grip upon the eighth type, alaya (the All-base or Storehouse consciousness). A key feature of the alaya is that it stores seeds of delusion and habitual reactive tendencies, which can manifest dynamically in manas consciousness. In contemporary terms, we could describe manas as the "self-module" and alaya as the unconscious mind.
Buddhism describes a pathway of self-transformation, which includes an awakening to our true nature. Thich Nhat Hanh describes this as follows: "Manas loses its grip on the store consciousness, and the store consciousness becomes the Wisdom of the Great Mirror that reflects everything in the universe." As Tang dynasty Zen master Shen-hui put it: Those who see into the Unconscious have their senses cleansed of defilements, are moving towards Buddha-wisdom, are known to be with Reality and are in the Middle Path, in the ultimate truth itself.
The 'Enormous Spiritual Task'
Jung believed that we are a very young species, with an inflated sense of our own importance -- and now experiencing the limits of our present evolutionary path, unable to evolve further through (linguistic) consciousness alone. He concluded: "The discovery of the unconscious means an enormous spiritual task, which must be accomplished if we wish to preserve our civilization" (Letters I, 537).
Preserving civilization -- indeed, our own species -- has become the most pressing issue of the 21st century. Our technological powers and enormous population have made us the dominant animal, putting the thermostat of the Earth in our hands. Yet we seem unable to take responsibility for the situation we have created, and gamble distractedly with the future of life on Earth. Are we really a unique biological exception to the laws of nature? In his powerful new book "The Social Conquest of Earth," the distinguished biologist Edward O. Wilson describes ours as a "Star Wars civilization with Stone Age emotions," in global denial as we lay waste to the biosphere. If we continue our present course, he anticipates that half of the Earth's plant and animal species will become extinct by the end of this century or soon thereafter.
Does Wilson's observation point to a spiritual identity crisis? What kind of breakthrough might guide the collective healing of our relationship with the Earth? Einstein remarked that a problem cannot be solved at the level at which it was created. He described the rational mind as a faithful servant and the intuitive mind as a sacred gift. The servant as ruler has brought our species to this juncture -- and reconfiguring its relationship to the intuitive unconscious mind seems to have become a condition of our survival.
Of course, we need the faithful servant going forward, and for numerous crucial tasks. Two of the highest importance are distinguishing scientific facts about ecology and climate from the propaganda of deceit and denial; and implementing breakthrough technologies for clean, renewable and efficient energy. But linguistic, mathematical and technological consciousness, no matter how dynamic their productions, need to be rooted in the guidance of unconscious awareness. In Buddhist terms, the alaya needs to be liberated from manas. The bigger picture requires the whole mind.
Through individual and collective belief in a narrow self-concept generated by the linguistic left brain, we have developed an unsustainable planetary culture preoccupied with dominating and exploiting the rest of the biosphere. That map of "progress" no longer corresponds to the territory we are in. Indeed, we have driven ourselves into a wasteland, where the signs proclaim an evolutionary dead-end.
We cannot think our way out of this with linguistic consciousness alone. We must turn to the creative and ecological unconscious of the right hemisphere to generate the paradigm shift we need to survive and thrive as a species.
John Stanley and David Loy are part of the Ecobuddhism Project.]]>Buddha Nature and the Divided Braintag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.14625172012-05-07T07:26:03-04:002012-07-07T05:12:01-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a world that honors the servant, but has forgotten the gift.
--Albert Einstein
Except in the light of brain hemisphere lateralization, nothing in human psychology makes any sense.
--neuroscientist Tim Crow
An Old Tale
There's a traditional Buddhist story about a statue of incomparable value, which is lost and then forgotten. For generation after generation, various kinds of human rubbish and debris accumulate to bury it. Nobody ever suspects that anything important lies under the ground. Eventually a clairvoyant person happens by who comments: "If you dig here, and clean up what you find, you will discover something invaluable." But who would follow such advice?
Our Divided Brain
In his remarkable book, "The Master and his Emissary," neurological psychologist Iain McGilchrist provides a wealth of scientific evidence to support his contention that two opposed realities are rooted in the bi-hemispheric structure of the human brain.
Although each hemisphere is specialized, neither functions as an "independent brain." They integrate their activities to produce physical movements, mental processes and behaviors greater than, and different from, their individual contributions. With functional NMR scanners, real-time brain imaging is now routinely used to determine the functional effects of all kinds of strokes and brain injuries, and in that way we can observe how the hemispheres act together as "opponent processors."
Basically, the right hemisphere is mute, perceives in a holistic Gestalt manner and synthesizes over space. The left hemisphere, the seat of language, analyzes over time. The right hemisphere codes sensory input in terms of images, the left in terms of words and concepts. Specialization of function offers all kinds of advantages, but integrating those functions is a special point of vulnerability. When it comes to the large and complex human mind-brain, harmony can easily be lost.
The evolutionary relationship between our right and left hemispheres, McGilchrist suggests, resembles the tale of a wise spiritual master who selflessly rules a small kingdom. Seeing that it is not possible for him to personally supervise the bureaucracy of government in distant parts of his realm, the master entrusts that to his brightest emissary. As time goes by, however, the ambitious emissary prioritizes his own goals and values. Finally he gains sufficient power and position to dupe the people and imprison the master. The outcome is a tyranny that eventually leads to collapse and ruin.
In the 200,000-year history of anatomically modern humans, the cerebral hemispheres have a long history of productive co-evolution. The inclusive and empathic right hemisphere is attuned to the social and emotional sounds of speech, to music, all the subtleties of relationship and holistic processing. The great skills of the left hemisphere are linguistic consciousness (the re-presentation of life in words), mathematics and motor control of the dominant hand (hence, the making of complex tools). It is a natural competitor that can always explain its own viewpoint. One of those views is that it is the "dominant" hemisphere -- the one that deserves to speak for both. When it comes to human cultural evolution, it has generally claimed the driving seat for the last few thousand years.
A kind of power struggle between these hemispheres can be inferred in European history, leading ultimately to the industrial revolution -- a comprehensive triumph of left-hemisphere verbal thinking, computation and technology. We now live in the world the left hemisphere has built, according to its own mechanistic model. Its preoccupation with manipulation, competition and control has been institutionalized and assumed a life of its own. The right hemisphere's concern for empathic relationships and a broader vision has been marginalized.
The 20th century can be understood as the attempt of the left hemisphere to build a planetary empire on the back of an unsustainable industrial growth economy, powered by oil, advertising and consumerism. Is this the fundamental reason we find ourselves in such a perfect storm of ecological, social and economic crises?
Buddha Nature In The Empire Of The Left Hemisphere
The difference between the two brain hemispheres begs comparison with a distinction in Asian spiritual traditions between small and big self. Although early Buddhism denies that there is any such thing as a self, the Mahayana Buddhist teaching of Buddha Nature distinguishes our usual limiting sense-of-self from a bigger "original self." The characteristic of ego-self is what Einstein called the "optical illusion of separateness" -- it can easily become preoccupied with competition and manipulation. But if, as neuropsychologist Dan Siegel points out, the self is big enough to have a plural identity, then "I am more than me ... I am connected to you ... I am a member of we."
The lost statue of incomparable value in the opening story symbolizes Buddha Nature, the inherent potential for self-liberation we all have. Although covered by layers of psychological delusion and conditioning, this original self has for centuries been discovered and polished through meditation, mindful awareness and related disciplines. And recent brain research is helping us to understand how that works.
Brain Plasticity And Integration
It is a fact, says Siegel, that the mind can change the structure of the brain. When you teach people to use awareness to intentionally focus attention, you not only change the function of the brain, you change its structure. That is the phenomenon of neuroplasticity. In other words, when we meditate, the brain is re-wiring itself.
Neurological integration in the brain is the linkage of differentiated parts, and this affects the functional relationship between the left and right hemispheres. Social relationships that honor differences while promoting linkages also cause the brain to become more integrated, and that looks a lot like harmony. The un-integrated state is characterized by chaos and rigidity.
We Are The Environment
These new discoveries have enormous implications for psychology, and for all who follow a path of personal transformation. This is surely also the case for the social transformation that is necessary if civilization is to survive a global ecological crisis. Today, our society must come to the realization that its original self includes the whole living world, the Earth biosphere. That kind of empathy, based on a more holistic worldview, has become essential. We cannot have sane, healthy humans or relationships on a sick planet. As Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh notes, "We have been talking about the environment as if it is something different from us, but we are the environment. The non-human elements are our environment, but we are the environment of non-human elements, so we are one with the environment. We are the environment."
John Stanley and David Loy are part of the Ecobuddhism Project.]]>Buddhist Economic Wisdom for Falling Back in Love With Mother Earthtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13575012012-03-30T11:30:30-04:002012-05-30T05:12:01-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/The economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability. The former is concerned with the distribution of wealth on an equal basis, equitable utilization of the means of production, and the fate of the working classes and underprivileged. This appeals to me and seems fair. The major flaw of such regimes is their emphasis on class struggle -- insistence on hatred to the detriment of compassion. Their failure is not that of Marxism, but of totalitarianism. So I still think of myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist. --The Dalai Lama
Communism failed because it couldn't tell the economic truth; capitalism will fail because it can't tell the ecological truth. --Lester Brown
Nineteenth-century historian Thomas Carlyle referred to economics as "the dismal science." Today, in the 21st century, despite decades of cheer-leading for it in the media, mainstream economics looks not only dismal but unscientific and even cynical.
That's largely because most economists have been providing mathematical cover for the biggest inside job the world has ever seen: the privatization of profit and socialization of loss by governments in hock to corporate capitalism -- a key feature in our long and continuing recession. The corporate media have convinced us that hundreds of billions of taxpayer money to save reckless banking systems is an economic necessity. But investing something similar to save our planet as a viable habitat for future generations is treated as an economic impossibility.
Fairness
A primary issue in all this is fairness, highlighted in the Dalai Lama's comparison of Marxist and capitalist economics. Our evolutionary relatives among the primates, and even our best friend the dog, can keep track of this fundamental social factor. All feel gratitude for food and other favors shared. All are aggravated by unfairness, a response scientists call "inequity aversion." Unsurprisingly, that's how most of us feel about predatory bankers and their political enablers. Why do dominant 20th-century institutions like corporations and markets lack our hard-wired tendencies toward gratitude and fairness? Is our aversion to their inequity a vital warning signal for 21st century civilization?
Values
Another central concern is values. Oscar Wilde famously defined a cynic as "a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." By that criterion, our great and globalized preoccupation with economic growth is a deeply cynical enterprise.
"Externalities" is how economists define the costs and damages to society or the natural world that slip through the net of pricing. For corporate profits to be maximized, costs must always be minimized. So corporations become highly efficient "externalizing machines." As Ray Anderson has pointed out, the market does not limit the harm corporations cause, because it systemically ignores the costs they are able to foist onto somebody else. But externalizing those costs does not mean they disappear.
What about the harm done to something whose value is incalculable, like the Earth's climate, or the future generations who will be affected by its disruptions? Market economics is blind to those existential damages as well. It's fortunate for us that our ancestors didn't feel that way that about their descendants. Their values evidently included our survival.
Can civilization survive by knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing -- not even the value of its natural life-support systems? In effect, global capitalism asserts that it can. The eminent environmentalist Lester Brown concludes that it will fail, because it cannot adapt to the ecological truth that in the end will undermine it -- and very likely human civilization as well.
Putting A Figure On It
Some well-meaning economists have designed blueprints for a sustainable version of capitalism. Nicholas Stern, for example, wrote an influential British government report that described climate change as the "greatest market failure in history."
What about the "market value" of the human species? Since the market has no interest in anything it can externalize, we can only compute this indirectly. The net worth of the world's top 200 oil, coal and gas companies is about $7.4 trillion -- a figure based on proven reserves that the market expects to burn. The physics of the climate system shows us that only a fraction of that fossil carbon (perhaps a fifth) could be burnt without initiating runaway global warming and placing our survival in grave doubt.
These figures suggest that the free market prices the survival of humanity at less than $7.4 trillion. This places the value of our species at perhaps a tenth of current world GDP (value $65 trillion), or one hundredth of the world derivatives market (nominal value $600 trillion). By acting as if the fate of nature is merely an externality, the market reveals itself to be an inter-generational pyramid (Ponzi) scheme, where current generations indulge themselves lavishly by stealing non-renewable resources and a liveable climate from future ones.
Falling Back In Love With Mother Earth
Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh believes that putting an economic value on nature is not enough. Fundamental change can happen only if we fall back in love with our planet. When we recognize the virtues, talent and beauty of Mother Earth, he says, love is born in us. When we reconnect with it, we naturally want to do anything we can for the benefit of the Earth, and the Earth will do anything for our wellbeing. He continues:
"Many people suffer deeply and they try to cover up the suffering by being busy. The practice of mindfulness helps us to touch Mother Earth inside of the body and this practice can help heal people. The healing of the people should go together with the healing of the Earth ... In Buddhism we talk of meditation as an act of awakening, to be awake to the fact that the Earth is in danger and living species are in danger."
Speaking Up For What Is Beyond Price
The linguist George Lakoff uses cognitive neuroscience to understand how meaning is transmitted through language. When we try to communicate something, the way that information is "framed" is especially important, and any linguistic frame in general use will be reinforced by any subsequent discussion that treats the subject in its terms. Today a dominant "economics frame" (the price of everything) governs most discussion about our collective future. We can only break through the domination of this mindset when we insist on a "values frame" as an alternative starting point. Buddhists don't buy the tyranny of the cynical old frame. We stand for what is beyond price. We stand for all life on Earth.
John Stanley & David Loy are part of the Ecobuddhism project.]]>Buddhism, Cosmology and Evolutiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12861652012-02-26T21:26:18-05:002012-04-27T05:12:01-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/Even with all these profound scientific theories of the origin of the universe, I am left with serious questions: What existed before the big bang? Where did the big bang come from? What caused it? Why has our planet evolved to support life? What is the relationship between the cosmos and the beings that have evolved within it? Scientists may dismiss these questions as nonsensical, or they may acknowledge their importance but deny that they belong to the domain of scientific inquiry. However, both these approaches will have the consequence of acknowledging definite limits to our scientific knowledge of the origin of our cosmos. I am not subject to the professional or ideological constraints of a radically materialistic worldview. - The Dalai Lama
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. - Charles Darwin
For traditional Buddhist cosmology, the life cycle of a universe is cyclical. There is a period of its formation, a period where it endures, a period where it disintegrates and a period of void before a new universe forms from the luminous space that remains. That space, according to the Kalachakra Tantra (Wheel of Time) is inseparable from beginningless, universal consciousness.
The constraints of scientific materialism
A very different perspective is offered by mechanistic science. From its European origins in the 17th century to its final triumph in the 19th, it has insisted that matter is non-conscious stuff interacting in dead space. And these premises are not merely intellectual abstractions. They have become beliefs about reality, shared by a globalizing human culture. The structure of our subjective experience is inevitably influenced by the notion that we too are mechanisms located in a non-conscious mechanical universe.
Such presuppositions have presented no obstacle to spectacular progress in science, instrumentation and technology. They are rarely questioned within the belief systems most common in science or society. We might know that quantum physics has revealed solid matter to be forms of energy and process, but we prefer not to consider the implications of the fact that, with such discoveries, materialism is transcending itself.
From zero-point field to the world-wide web
Quantum electrodynamics is a powerfully predictive theory developed by Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. It proposes that virtual particles, electrons and photons appear and disappear from a zero-point field, the quantum vacuum that pervades the universe. This is eerily similar to how Buddhist cosmology describes the nature of the cosmos, originating within a luminous space that is the ground of consciousness itself.
An economics-driven culture like ours prefers to compartmentalize such discoveries, rather than reflect upon and perhaps be changed by them. It eagerly embraces every technological application of quantum physics -- from semi-conductors, lasers and fibre optics to computers to the internet. It bows to their trillion dollar economic impacts. The message is clear: forget the cosmology -- it's the economy, stupid!
An evolving universe
But can we really forget the cosmology, without losing the plot for our own species? We first beheld the grandeur of the evolutionary process with Charles Darwin's findings about the origin of life on Earth. And what is true for the origin of species on our planet no doubt reflects a universal principle: we live in an evolving universe, not an inanimate machine.
As Thomas Berry pointed out, if we restore the fundamental unity of spirit and matter, artificially split apart by scientific materialism, the scientific story of the universe can also serve beautifully as our new sacred story. For Buddhist cosmology, biological evolution presents no problem at all: natural history and spiritual history are two sides of the same coin. The beginningless consciousness of luminous space gave rise to this evolving universe and from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. But it is not inevitable that those endless forms will continue to evolve in a natural way.
The biggest news for 65 million years
The self-creation of the Earth over time has continued for 4.5 billion years. Biological life emerged as single-celled organisms about 3.8 billion years ago. Multicellular life forms are 1 billion years old. Our "anatomically modern" human species is a mere quarter of a million years old. As Wes Nisker writes in his Evolution Sutra, we are just the new animal on the block.
Those lineages of life forms have co-evolved through extraordinary challenges of extinction and adaptation. "Mass extinction events" took place 440, 360, 245 and 208 million years ago. The fifth took place 65 million years ago, when a giant meteorite hit the Yucatan peninsula. The dinosaurs vanished, ending the era of giant reptiles and beginning the era of mammals like ourselves -- the Cenozoic.
Biologists and earth scientists agree that in the 20th century a sixth mass extinction began, and the only one to be caused by a particular species: us. Coral reefs are likely to be the first entire ecosystem to be eliminated from the Earth by human activity. A quarter of plant and animal species may vanish by 2050, an evolutionary crisis that is related to global climate breakdown but usually overshadowed by it. In essence, our present economic model is pushing all life on Earth towards tipping points for both biodiversity and the climate system.
This is quite possibly the biggest news for 65 million years, but it barely makes the mainstream news at all, because it raises taboo questions for the industrial growth society that we have come to take for granted. We'd rather not think about the implications for our way of living today, and the consumerism purveyed by advertising and corporate propaganda encourages us not to bother. It's a lot more reassuring to keep up with the sport! But the disquieting questions remain. Why are we risking general evolutionary collapse? Aren't we here to survive and thrive? Why has our planet evolved to support life anyway?
John Stanley & David Loy are part of the Ecobuddhism Project. ]]>A Buddhist Ecology of Selftag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12335512012-01-30T10:30:27-05:002012-03-31T05:12:01-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/I saw that ordinary people believe they have a self and that everyone they meet has a self. They think of it as within the body. Because it is not like that, I have shown that the self is not there in the way it is thought to be. This is expedient means, the right medicine.
But that does not mean there is no self. What is the self? If something is true, is real, is constant, is a foundation of a nature that is unchanging, this can be called the self. For the sake of sentient beings, in all the truths I have taught, there is such a self.
-- Buddha, in the Mahaparinirvana Sutra
There are two distinct versions of the Mahaparinirvana sutra, a fundamental text whose subject is the final days and sayings of the Buddha's life. The version in the early Buddhist Pali Canon, like other texts of that tradition, denies that there is any real self. The citation above is from the Mahayana Buddhist sutra (first two centuries CE) that offers a quite different view of human self. Are these two traditions of Buddhism actually disagreeing with each other? It depends on what we mean by "the self." And that is not just a subject for introspection. It has significant implications for how we see and interact with our world.
Early life:
There is something universal and endearing in the drawings of very young children. These stick figures, box houses and animals and the relationships among them are also our first models of ourselves. They express our earliest understanding of who we are, without the rigidity of the conscious self that we acquire by about six years old, the age of reason.
Up to two years of age, an infant's brain operates mainly at the lowest EEG frequency delta waves of less than 4 cycles per second. From two to six years old, progressively more theta waves of 4-8 cycles/second become the norm. In adults, both these frequencies are characteristic of hypnotic trance. They are suggestible and programmable states, linked to the subconscious mind. Young children subconsciously model the information they need to survive and thrive in the home, in the process absorbing many of their parents' beliefs and behaviors.
We don't much employ the higher frequency beta waves of active, focused consciousness (over 12 cycles/second) until puberty. By that time we believe the emerging adolescent self is within our body. Sometimes we are painfully aware it might not actually "be there" in the way our peers seem to assume, but we're not usually aware of an alternative understanding.
Schooling does not often help. Rather than investigating what the self really is, and what brings it happiness, contemporary education has become a largely utilitarian project. It orients us outwardly to social competition for identity, job, consumer goods and a mate. It reduces the totality of the self to a narrowly-focused ego and social self.
Self-esteem vs self-destructiveness:
What about the key emotional factor of self-esteem? The Dalai Lama has remarked that our mother is our first guru. And the psychologist Erich Fromm pointed out that there is nothing more conducive to giving a child the experience of what love, joy and happiness are than being loved by a mother who loves herself. Indeed, self-acceptance and self-appreciation are the basis of self-esteem.
Neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen calls these qualities an internal pot of gold that good parents share with their offspring. What their fortunate children absorb is a lifetime capacity for empathy, resilience and love. Sadly, as everyone knows, there are other instances where the pot contains baser, or even toxic elements that become seeds of later self-destructiveness.
The ecological self:
The philosopher Arne Naess was a co-founder of Deep Ecology. He observed that people who are mature in their relationships can spontaneously identify with all living beings. He proposed that humans have an ecological self, which consists of that with which we identify. To take one pressing example, the Earth in all its splendor and biodiversity is now at risk of runaway global warming caused by our burning of fossil fuels. It will not be spared this devastating fate unless many of us realize and express strong identification with the whole community of life.
Self-realization:
Naess believed that as we develop and mature through the fulfilment of our inherent potentialities, the self deepens and broadens. This process, which he termed self-realization, is not the one-dimensional, narcissistic fulfilment of ego trips. Genuine self-realization leads us to see ourselves in others. We take pleasure in their self-realization as well as our own. In fact, there is awareness that the self-realization of others is not separate from our own.
That understanding provides a much sounder basis than moral exhortation to help us accomplish something beautiful, resilient and environmentally sustainable. It has a special relevance for our response to the global ecological crisis, because both environmental science and ethics have (so far) failed to overturn the deceits of consumerism.
The consumer self:
When "self-realization" is misinterpreted as a lifetime of ego trips, we gulibly identify with the simulated realities of the media, and the consumer goods its advertisements promote. The weaker our intrinsic self-esteem, the more likely we are to develop what social psychologist Clive Hamilton calls a consumer self.
A transformation in the meaning of consumption from "meeting needs" to a way of "acquiring identity" has been going on for decades. Contemporary advertising builds up powerful symbolic associations between products and attractive psychological states. Compelling as they are, neither the products nor their associations provide any genuine identity or fulfillment.
At the core of the consumer self is a gnawing dissatisfaction that keeps it addicted to getting and spending. Economic growth, Hamilton points out, no longer creates happiness. Unhappiness sustains economic growth. The consumer self is a victim of corporate psychopathic fiction.
The universal Self:
What the Buddha calls the real, foundational and unchanging self in our beginning quotation above is termed the Self in Advaita (non-dual) Vedanta. For the Buddhist non-dual system of Dzogchen, the Self is a synonym for the Buddha-nature and the ground of all.
Gandhi, the great proponent of nonviolent social activism, saw no distinction between non-duality and social action: "I believe in advaita. I believe in the essential unity of all that lives -- What I want to achieve is self-realization, to see God face-to-face, to attain liberation. All my ventures in the political field are directed to this same end."
Ecological philosopher Thomas Berry extended this identification to the whole universe as "a communion of subjects, rather than a collection of objects." There is practical importance in such principles. They can sustain us as we work to replace the grandiose self-destructiveness of our civilization with a new ecological modesty and wisdom. Thomas Berry eloquently expressed the appropriate sense of proportion as follows: "It is false to say that humanity is the most excellent being in the universe. The most excellent being in the universe is the universe itself." ]]>Beyond the Matrix -- A Buddhist Approachtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11709882012-01-02T16:22:38-05:002012-03-03T05:12:01-05:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/"To be, or not to be: that is the question."
--Hamlet
"Psychopaths are capable of taking the perspective of somebody else, but only to take better advantage of you. They're able to play the empathy game, but without the feelings involved. It's like an empty shell. The core of empathy -- being in tune with the feelings of somebody else -- seems to be completely lacking. They are like aliens among us."
--Frans de Waal
The Believing Brain
The human brain often functions as a "believing organ." Our beliefs develop for many different subjective and psychological reasons, and according to various contexts (family, relationships, culture, media, advertising). There is evidence that many beliefs are largely subconscious in nature. That does not stop us inventing conscious explanations for them. We rationalize, defend and fight for our beliefs -- often as if our identity depended upon it. And often it does.
If some new reality challenges our mental map, our understanding of it will usually be limited by our old beliefs. Evidently human ideologies provided some evolutionary advantage in the past. But the enormous evolutionary crisis we are now facing requires rapid creative adaptation to unprecedented realities. The believing organ is being challenged as never before.
Democracy or Corporatocracy?
At the outset of the 21st century, the dominant institution is not government but business corporations, which have learned how to manipulate the democratic process. These legal entities have an insatiable appetite for profit and work to undermine any limitations on their power to pursue it. A prime example was the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to permit unlimited corporate cash donations to political campaigns. Big Carbon companies responded to this new legalization of corruption by financing lavish advertising to capture a majority in the House of Representatives. Defying the unprecedented frequency of extreme weather events occurring worldwide -- including a record 12 events imposing aggregate damages of $52 billion on the U.S. itself -- their "representatives" blocked any attempts to address the climate crisis. They attacked environmental regulations across the board and cut the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency (which they also threatened to abolish). They organized witch-hunts of eminent climate scientists, reminiscent of the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s.
With this act of political "shock and awe," Big Carbon forced its agenda down the throat of the world's most powerful country. Although climate science shows clearly that extracting and burning the remaining fossil fuels will make global warming irreversible within a decade, such corporations are still determined to direct all political discourse and decisions to bolster their own record profits. How can they get away with making our world un-liveable? Because the top 200 oil, coal and gas companies have a combined value of $7.4 trillion, based on proven fossil fuel reserves that "the market" expects to burn.
Many people say they cannot understand how the corporate executives concerned can ignore the ecological tragedy that is unfolding for their own children and grandchildren. They are sacrificing the future of the biosphere for short-term profit. "Are they inhuman?" we ask. Like de Waal's psychopaths, they seem to lack the core of empathy that 99 percent of us take for granted. This suggests an obvious question: Does lack of empathy make it easier to climb to the top of the corporate ladder?
Zero Empathy, Institutionalized
Over a decade ago, the psychiatrist Robert Hare evaluated corporate behaviour toward society and the world by applying standard diagnostic criteria to the business practices of these so-called "legal persons." The diagnosis that fitted best was antisocial personality disorder -- in other words, psychopathy. This finding came a few years after evolutionary biologist Edward Wilson wrote an insightful essay on the global ecological crisis, titled "Is Humanity Suicidal?"
Research by Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues has more recently identified the circuit in our brain that generates spontaneous empathy for others' feelings. Unsurprisingly, it is underactive in individuals who commit acts of cruelty. Unfeeling cruelty toward others has traditionally been called "evil." Now we have a precise neurogenetic definition: "zero-empathy" is the root of all evil.
As the power of corporate institutions has increased, so has that of its ideology -- economic theory, which continues to exalt the beneficial nature of "the free market." Market forces must be allowed to wreak unregulated "creative destruction" on ecosystems, cultures, democracy and globalized society alike. Empathy erosion toward future human generations has become an acceptable norm. Today carbon emissions are permitted to increase at reckless rates by governments in thrall to a failed energy paradigm and its catastrophic infrastructure. An upsurge in extreme weather events is now treated as the "new normal," while the mainstream media -- themselves powerful corporations -- ignore the fact that such disasters have been repeatedly predicted by climate science.
Wilson asked whether our species has a suicidal tendency. The jury is still out on that question. History does clearly show, however, that war, genocide and other man-made disasters can be orchestrated by zero-empathy individuals in positions of power. How much more so, then, by zero-empathy institutions seeking "full-spectrum dominance"?
Breakout From the Matrix
Film and television are technologies that have the potential to be genuine art forms. Today, however, they are predominantly used by media corporations to create and maintain a simulated reality: the matrix of consumer capitalism. The ideology perpetuated by this all-pervasive matrix insists that happiness exists in direct proportion to consumption, "because you're worth it." Saturation advertising, which exploits the latest research into psychological manipulation, alternates with selective news, soap operas, thrillers, game shows, so-called reality shows and other disempowering trance-inductions.
The medium is also the message: virtual reality is the new norm. As we disconnect from the immediate biological world of interpersonal relationships and interdependent species, we adapt to an artificial one, where climate breakdown disappears when we don't believe in it.
"Frozen Planet" is an excellent seven-part BBC television series wherein Sir David Attenborough celebrates the extraordinary ecology and wildlife of Earth's polar regions. British viewers saw all seven episodes, the last addressing the momentous effects of climate change on the Arctic and Antarctic. Thirty worldwide TV networks purchased this series. A third of them (including Discovery Channel in the U.S.) elected to do without the "optional extra" of the final episode. In the real world, the Arctic sea ice continues its precipitous decline. While the climate models of global warming that predicted this have been ignored by governments, a comprehensive collapse has happened faster than any model could predict.
In the real world we do not get to avoid the final episode. It's time to break out of our unsustainable zero-empathy matrix. To be or not to be is now the pressing spiritual question before us -- as individuals, as citizens, as a civilization and as a species.
John Stanley & David Loy are part of the Ecobuddhism project]]>Occupy the Climate Emergency: Buddhist Reflections on Inter-generational Justicetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11167272011-12-05T10:15:06-05:002012-02-04T05:12:01-05:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and the survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate.
--James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia
You live inside us, beings of the future.
In the spiral ribbons of our cells, you are here...
You who come after, help us remember: we are your ancestors.
Fill us with gladness for the work that must be done.
--Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self
Keeping up with the world's soaring carbon emissions is not for the faint of heart. In 2010, they reached a new high of 33.5 billion tons. This was 6 percent more than in 2009, the highest ever year-on-year increase -- despite a worldwide decline in economic growth.
China's yearly contribution increased by 9.3 percent, and now makes up over 24 percent of total global emissions. America, the former world heavyweight champion of carbon pollution, is still generating 16 percent of the total. India's emissions have jumped 9.4 percent to over two billion tons, placing it third in this game of existential "chicken."
None of these leading emitters has agreed to sign an international treaty that would obligate them to cut emissions. It's uncannily reminiscent of Professor Lovelock's prediction, cited above, from The Revenge of Gaia (2006). So is the worst indeed going to happen?
Denial, Disempowerment & Depression
Some of the answers can be found at the intersection of psychology, culture and politics. According to the Center for Disease Control, antidepressant use in the U.S. has increased 400 percent over the last 20 years. Antidepressants are now the commonest type of medication taken by Americans from their late teens to mid-forties.
Clinical psychologist Bruce Levine points out that people have been taught (through advertising) to understand demoralization or despair as a medical condition that requires a pharmacological cure. They "consume" medical treatment rather than ask pointed questions about the goals and values of their society. What if feeling demoralized is an appropriate response to deteriorating -- indeed, self-destructive -- economic and social institutions?
Levine suggests that depressive symptoms like helplessness, hopelessness and immobilization might often be better adressed through political engagement and activism that challenges unjust and exploitative social arrangements. For example, about one trillion dollars of student-loan debt now rests on the shoulders of young Americans. When we understand what's actually happening, we also see that it's more an issue of inter-generational justice than a reason for young people to take antidepressants.
Showing up for your life
People participating in the Occupy movement against corporate power speak of the invigorating effects of taking action together, and how much they enjoy being involved in non-hierarchical, truly democratic discussions. Genuine human communication is more satisfying than consumerism and its corollary, climate change denial.
Happily, Occupy continues to spread because it is more liberating -- and more fun -- than the media circus and electronic cabaret that usually divert us from looking deeper at hopelessness. It asks taboo political questions that expose the nature of the corporatocracy. It creates memes and messages that ring with relevance. As one sign put it: "Lost a job and found an occupation." To occupy something is the opposite of denial. We are the 99 percent and we are showing up for our life now!
Crunch time
Environmental scientist Lester Brown points out that humanity is in a race between tipping points. There is the social tipping point for taking urgent action to halt further global change. There is also the climate tipping point, beyond which global warming becomes self-sustaining (or "runaway") and human intervention becomes irrelevant.
This will not be a long race. The head of one large establishment institution, the International Energy Authority (IEA), has just announced that fossil fuel plants being built now will produce carbon emissions for decades, creating a "lock-in" effect leading to irreversible climate change. If we do not change this system within five years, the results will be disastrous.
The governments of the largest carbon polluter nations express no enthusiasm about signing a binding treaty at the current U.N. COP-17 climate talks in Durban, South Africa. Their excuse is the difficulty of squaring the historic carbon debt of the overdeveloped world with the need for developing countries to accept universal emissions reductions now. We are told we may need to wait until 2020--a date that is clearly too late for a safe-climate future.
So, have we reached the social tipping point? The Occupy movement did not arise in a vacuum. Like the "Arab Spring", it is led by young people who have lost what sociologist Anthony Giddens calls "ontological security" -- the mental stability that depends on a sense of continuity of the world and the future. Today Buddhism and all other religions must either demonstrate their relevance to this issue, or be consigned to history. Speaking about the "awesome responsibility of this political moment," author and activist Naomi Klein points out that the solutions to the economic and ecological crises are one and the same -- because they have a single cause, the mentality of corporate capitalism. We have to determine together what we want to build in the rubble of the present collapsing system.
Here are a few things we already know. Fossil fuels are responsible for 80 percent of global warming. Large fossil fuel corporations are so wealthy they dictate policy to governments. Amazingly, the world still pays them $409 billion a year in subsidies (according to the IEA), to extract the last oil, coal and gas. A recent joint statement by 11 national engineering institutes tells us we have all the clean technology needed to cut emissions 85 percent by 2050. What is required is that governments free themselves from the grip of big carbon companies and mandate this transformation. That will also solve another big problem: the only way to create millions of new jobs now is to build the new green economy.
Something of great moral significance is needed to complete this narrative. Since our time on this wondrous planet is brief, we must consider our responsibility to all those who will come after us, whose well-being will depend on the decisions we make today. Shall we sacrifice our children, their children and the next 50 generations for a zero-empathy corporate state? Or shall we "occupy" this climate emergency instead of denying it -- until the urgent truth of our situation is acted upon? ]]>Awakening From The Illusion Of Our Separatenesstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9885902011-10-11T12:00:01-04:002011-12-11T05:12:01-05:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.
--Thich Nhat Hanh
I came to realize clearly that mind is no other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars.
--Dogen
Do Buddhist teachings offer a different way of understanding the ecological crisis? Although the Buddha lived a long time ago, there seem to be profound parallels between what he taught about our individual predicament and our collective ecological predicament today. If those parallels are valid, the eco-crisis is not only a technological and economic challenge but also a spiritual one.
In both cases the basic problem is duality: the delusive sense of a separation between myself and other people, between ourselves and the rest of the biosphere.
In contemporary terms, our sense of being separate from others is a psychosocial construct, composed of habitual ways of thinking, feeling and acting. The construction of a "me" inside is also the construction of an external, objective world experienced as outside. This duality is at the root of my suffering, because the supposedly separate self is always insecure. It can never secure itself because there's nothing substantial that could be secured. But we nonetheless keep trying to secure ourselves, usually by identifying with things "outside" us that (we think) can provide the grounding we crave: money, possessions, reputation, etc. Tragically, such attempts to solve the problem often reinforce the sense that there's a "me" separate from others.
The Buddhist solution to this predicament is not to get rid of the self, because there is no substantial self to get rid of. I simply need to "wake up" and see through the illusion of separation: I am not inside, peering out at an external world. Rather, "I" am what the whole world is doing, right here and now. This realization frees me to live as I choose, but that will naturally be in a way that contributes to the well-being of the whole, because I don't feel apart from that whole.
This Buddhist account of our individual predicament corresponds precisely to our collective ecological predicament today:
1. Like the self, human civilization is also a construct that involves separation and suffering. That civilization is our collective construct, which we can and do reconstruct, is obvious to us but was not obvious to most premodern societies, which assumed that their own social structure was just as natural (and therefore inevitable) as their local ecosystems. The distinctions we now make between the natural world, the social order, and religion did not exist for such cultures. Often they believed they served an important function in keeping the cosmos going: for the Aztecs, mass human sacrifice kept the sun-god on his correct course through the heavens.
The important point is that such peoples shared a collective sense of meaning we have lost today. That meaning was built into the cosmos and revealed by their religion, both taken for granted. In contrast, the meaning of our lives and our societies has become something that we have to determine for ourselves in a universe whose meaningfulness (if any) is no longer obvious. The price of the freedoms we cherish today is losing their kind of "social security": the basic comfort that comes from "knowing" one's place and role. What sort of world, what kind of society, do we want? If we cannot depend on God or godlike rulers to tell us, we are thrown back upon ourselves, and the lack of any grounding greater than ourselves is a profound source of suffering, collective as well as individual.
2. Our collective response to that alienation and anxiety is making things worse. Just as I try to secure my anxious sense of self "inside" by compulsively identifying with things in the "outside" world, the collective equivalent is our institutionalized obsession with never-ending "progress." What motivates our attitude towards economic and technological "growthism"? Why do we always need more? Why is more always better if it can never be enough?
Technology and economic growth in themselves may be a good means to accomplish something but they are not good as ends-in-themselves. Since we are not sure what else to value and seek, however, they have become a collective substitute: a kind of secular salvation that we pursue but never quite attain. Lacking the security that comes from "knowing" our role in the cosmos, we have become demonically obsessed with ever-increasing power and control, trying to remold the earth until everything becomes a "resource" to use. Ironically, if predictably, this has not been providing the sense of security and meaning that we seek. Culturally as well as individually, we have become more anxious and confused.
3. Just as there is no need to get rid of the separate self, because it is a delusion, so there is no need to return to nature, because we have never left it. The Earth is not only our home, it is our mother. In fact, our relationship is even more intimate, because we can never cut the umbilical cord. The air, water, and food that pass through us have always been part of a greater holistic system that circulates through us.
If this is an accurate description of our collective situation, the ecological crisis requires more than a technological response. We must recognize that we are an integral part of the natural world and embrace our responsibility for its welfare, for the well-being of the biosphere ultimately cannot be distinguished from our own well-being.
But how does realizing our nonduality with the Earth resolve the basic anxiety that haunts us now, because we must create our own meaning in a world where God has died? Like it or not, today we are called upon to serve a vital function: the long-term task of repairing the rupture between us and Mother Earth. That healing will transform us as much as the biosphere.]]>