In meditation we discover our essential unity with one another, and also the Earth, says author Jim Green*. And in this act of contemplation, or communing, our consciousness is transformed, and we both hear the cry of the Earth and are at one with it.
In the following edited extract from his online course, Contemplating Earth, Jim reflects on the crisis now facing humanity and the planet as COP28 meets in Dubai, and the urgency of a contemplative response.
When we talk about meditation and the environment, we need to be aware of the subliminal signal that this environment is some discrete entity – vaguely ‘over there’ - made up of land or sea or atmosphere. The word, like all words, creates a kind of fenced-off area in our mind, something that we can understand and reflect on, given its status as a separate something.
If we try and go wider – maybe Meditation and Nature – the problem remains. The very word carries the hidden message that ‘nature’ is something separate, over against the human.
As the British artist Andy Goldsworthy once said, protesting against the description of him as someone who works with nature, “I am nature – every second of my life is ‘nature’”. The truth is that as long as we negotiate our lives through language, which can be both prison and its liberating key, we must be wary of its limitations and misdirections.
If you read any books or articles about the current crisis of the Earth, and its implications for the evolution of human consciousness, you will soon come across the arresting phrase “thinking like a planet”. (See, for instance, a lengthy footnote to page 223 in The Uninhabitable Earth [2019] by David Wallace-Wells.) It is a key phrase in such writing, even providing the title for a 2014 publication about the ethics of climate change.
If we reflect for a moment on what “thinking like a planet” might be, we soon realise that it must be something other than having thoughts and plans which take into account the long-term health of the Earth, as we understand it – valuable exercise though that is. The limitation to this kind of thinking is that the ‘planet’ remains an object tangled in the web of our words and ideas, no matter how well intentioned.
The further step towards a transforming consciousness comes when we consider the full implications of our course title, Contemplating Earth; not as an invitation to think about the totality of our environment, but to join in with what this planet is doing, with what it is. It is a contemplating Earth. The extent to which we can fully share in the Earth’s ceaseless contemplation is the extent to which our consciousness – now with “nowhere to land” - is transforming. This is not the arrival of some shiny new super-consciousness; it is our reconnection with what has always been and always will be present at the very core of our being.
One of the ways in which Buddhist teachers sometimes encourage their practitioners is to invite them to “sit like a mountain”. Sharon Salzberg offers her students this path towards equanimity:
No matter how many winds are blowing, no matter how many clouds are swirling, no matter how many lions are prowling, be intimate with everything and sit like a mountain.
This is another version of “thinking like a planet”. At the heart of the practice, within whichever tradition of silent wisdom, is the invitation to sit like the part of creation that you are, inseparable from mountain or Earth.
When we sit in this way we are abandoning all our projects of self-creation. Like Adam and Eve, nearly all of the time we are preoccupied with ideas of how to improve ourselves and our homes – including our home, the Earth. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll see that much of this restless and anxious activity is really our secret immortality project. Trying to make things ‘better’ by accumulating possessions - whether material wealth, status or definite ideas about who we are – can be our way of denying the truth that in our human form we are finite; we are going to die.
It’s as if, in this flurry of denial, as we ransack the Earth for what she can give us to feed our truth-avoiding addictions, we choose death for the planet rather than death for ourselves. Like Winston Smith at the end of Orwell’s 1984, our failure to love becomes the ultimate betrayal. Instead of “Do it to Julia!”, though, we have been shouting “Do it to the Earth!”
Another of the teachings offered when we are learning to meditate (every time we practise) is to sit and experience our own death. The invitation is not just to entertain thoughts of personal extinction, imagining the implications of “not being here anymore” and the process of dying itself (although that is an explicit practice in Tibetan Buddhism and other traditions.) When we sit, resting all of our attention on our mantra or on the breath, withdrawing it from all the thoughts, regrets, fantasies and projections that we believe keep us alive, we will experience a kind of death, perhaps many deaths. Through this voluntary letting go – this dying – we come to discover an acceptance of who we are at this very moment: limited, human, mortal. This acceptance is the beginning of the transforming of consciousness.
In the face of humanity’s current unprecedented crisis many will see the commitment to a practice of contemplation as profoundly counter-intuitive. It is, of course, and it may be that the “counter-intuitive” is what our situation has long been crying out for. The inherent paradox of apparently doing nothing in order to fully be is celebrated in one of meditation’s few good jokes about itself: “Don’t just do something, sit there.” But the virtue of doing nothing, choosing – trustingly and patiently – not to interfere, may just be the most transformative virtue of all. In one of his presentations, the distinguished professor of evolutionary cosmology, Brian Swimme shows a slide of a swirling cloud of cosmic dust and plasma. “That,” he says, will turn into THIS!” - changing the slide to one of an orang-utan – “all you have to do is: LEAVE IT ALONE”.
St Paul encourages the inhabitants of Thessalonica – and us – to “pray without ceasing”. The instruction has puzzled and defeated many since he gave it. How can it be possible? Perhaps now we begin to see how this can happen: by thinking like a planet, sitting like a mountain, joining in with a contemplating Earth.
Community – a ‘state of being’
Within all the wisdom traditions, our teachers of contemplation warn against using the practice to achieve any self-defined goals. In the Vajracchedika the Buddha says:
I obtained not the least thing from unexcelled, complete awakening (anuttarasamyaksambodhi), and for this very reason it is called ‘unexcelled, complete awakening’.
St Thomas Aquinas seems to echo the essence of this challenging insight when he describes contemplative prayer as “the simple enjoyment of the truth”. John Main also makes it clear that meditation is not a means to a readily identifiable end, even an end as personally urgent as our own wellbeing or mental health. “We don’t meditate in order to relax” he says, “we relax in order to meditate”. The emphasis is unmistakeable: contemplation is something that it is good to do, in and of itself. As with Krishna’s instructions to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, we are told not to look for particular outcomes. Contemplation is not something to be instrumentalised.
And yet … the thorough unveiling that humanity and the Earth are now experiencing seems to be showing us a further truth. The wounding and the suffering are no longer hidden in plain sight. The stark reality of our situation now perfectly fits the words of Jesus: “There is nothing covered up that will not be uncovered, nothing hidden that will not be made known.” (Matthew 10:26) The need for healing is overwhelming; it can no longer be ignored.
This has always been the case for those who had eyes to see, ears to hear. But now there are enough of us who must see and hear, and who begin to understand that there is actually a clear purpose in practising contemplation. That purpose is one which cannot cling to any known or fixed outcome; it is beyond our reach to know what true healing will be like. (It can surely only be true healing if it is beyond our understanding.)
And yet what remains, and what can no longer be ignored, is the cry and the call that is all around us – and within us. Humanity has heard it intermittently throughout its existence. It has been dismissed by many as too far off, too theoretical, even as a dangerous fantasy. But now this call, so long turned away from, is finally being voiced to us at the closest possible quarters, by our nearest relative, the Earth and all the life upon it. This call of the Earth feels like our last chance to respond to the call of Creation itself, an expression of what many have long struggled to name: it’s the call of the Spirit, the Tao, Brahman, the call of Being. Perhaps it is also our best chance to finally realise who and where we are.
The point of contemplation is now clear. We meditate in order to join in with - to become one with - this cry and this call of the Earth. We are paradoxically blessed that the Earth in her current suffering (the ongoing groans of creation that St Paul describes in Romans 8) now emerges as our most intimate and most explicit teacher. The groaning has never been louder. This call of the Earth is the call of the Other.
Contemplation has always been experienced, and then taught, as that state of being which fully opens to “the other”. As Laurence Freeman has said, “To find oneself is to find oneself other-centred”. But when “the other” is opened to without reservation and without defence, it ceases to be the other. Then a ‘new’ mutually shared identity is revealed. It feels new, but is, in truth, birthless and deathless. This is the transforming of consciousness, the embodying of community, the work of love.
When we think of “community” the default meaning that stubbornly clings is the image of a thing or an entity. In our mind’s eye we always catch a glimpse of a grouping of some kind – usually of people. But the word carries a much more dynamic charge than that. When Thomas Berry, for instance, speaks of “an intimate earth community” or “the larger community on which all life depends” he is not conjuring up a corporate body of some kind, no matter how organic or benign.
“Community” is best understood not as an entity but as a quality, a state of being. As ever, if we want to be more intimate with the movement of reality it helps if we drop mere nouns in favour of verbs. The real heart of community is something limitlessly active: communing – an infinity of subjects profoundly knowing their essential unity.
The immature consciousness of a baby or an infant is unable to distinguish between itself and the rest of the world, indeed the rest of the Universe. It is all self, and as such, is an unreal parody of union. This state of being doesn’t allow the experience of communing or unity to manifest. The transforming consciousness – the one that sees the ego emerge and then sees through its limitations – opens the possibility of knowing unity through differentiation, and of acting from wisdom – for all its relations.
This is the movement from a power-obsessed (but ultimately powerless) developmental stage, to a condition of maturity, capable of creative activity in the world. In order to fully honour our community with Earth, there is no way back to the primitivism of a pre-personal consciousness. We must go the whole way, following the trans-personal evolutionary call to become fully ourselves.
Maturity means taking responsibility. Never before in the history of creation has humanity had such responsibility placed upon it. The urgent challenge before each of us is to wake up simultaneously to the now of our historical moment and the Now of the eternally creative moment. We need to do this as individuals and, more than ever before, with a sense of the community that links us as a species. In the closing words of The Dream of the Earth, Thomas Berry reminds us of what we must do - now more urgently than ever:
…respond to the earth’s demands that we cease our industrial assault, that we abandon our inner rage against the conditions of our earthly existence, that we renew our participation in the grand liturgy of the universe.
It is a call to understand and live – perhaps for the first time – the true meaning of ‘community.’ Happily, we keep on discovering that meditation creates community.
Jim Green has worked for many years in the field of mental health with local and national organisations, the Open University and the BBC. He has practised meditation since the 1980s in both Buddhist and Christian settings. Jim has been an oblate of The World Community for Christian Meditation since 2009. He is the author of several books on meditation and mental health, the most recent being Giving Up Without Giving Up: Meditation & Depressions, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019.
See Jim’s online course at: https://wccm.org/offerings/contemplating-earth