Quest Magazine

By Coleston Brown

Originally printed in the Spring 2009 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Brown, Coleston. "Explorations: Healing the Rift: Working with the Power of the Land." Quest  97. 2 (Spring 2009): 70-71.

Although their expressive forms are continually filtered through cultural patterns, at heart native spiritual traditions retain a unity that transcends local idiosyncrasies. Generally speaking, these traditions are rooted in a set of power centers in the land—an inner-land matrix, a unified field of forces that underlie and underpin physical reality. It is these forces that modern magical work with the land aims at contacting.

One major problem encountered by those who attempt to work with the power in the land of North America is what I call "the Rift." This shadowy layer of energy that shrouds entry to the inner-land matrix is largely the result of the sudden occlusion of the native mystery current. It is a side-effect of the forcible suppression of American Indian cultures and traditions. The Rift lies like a wound upon the land and is as real an obstruction for those who are of Native American descent as it is for those who are not—though each type reacts in a different manner.

Perhaps the most common symptom among non-Native Americans who contact the Rift is a powerful feeling of guilt, a great shame over events, actual or assumed, perpetrated by an invading culture upon the aboriginal inhabitants of this land. Often these non-Indians feel that somehow they do not really belong here, that their roots are elsewhere. Sometimes they even feel remorse for the fact that they cannot "become native." In extreme cases, some people will have a fear of being overwhelmed by powerful archaic forces, leading to a strong aversion to the whole area of sacred magic and the native traditions. Or they may attempt to imitate an earlier stage of consciousness by identifying with the immature and falsely idealized notion of the "noble savage."

Such reactions are simply part and parcel of coming to terms with a collective karmic debt. A tremendous amount of psychic stress has led to the formation of the Rift over the past 500 years or so. It should therefore be no great surprise that this tension constitutes a hefty stumbling block to further spiritual development or that it initially tends to release in powerful and unbalanced ways when one attempts entry into the deeper psychic levels of the land.

Fortunately, a number of magical groups and individuals have worked to alleviate these difficulties, particularly in the past thirty or forty years (though complete release is an ongoing and long-term process). Much of this work has involved working with sacred Dreamers, who are presences in the landscape. They are often mentioned in local traditions in connection with features such as hills, mountains, rivers, lakes, stones, and trees. Another mode of work, particularly with groups, has been to forge inner links with the inner powers and spiritual presences of native traditions in other parts of the world. Such efforts have resulted in the creation of buffers that grant access to the inner-land power with minimal negative reaction, even for relatively inexperienced hands.

Initially, this access is best gained by moving through the sacred magical and mythological patterns of our territorial ancestors. Magicians make extensive use of forms and patterns from the past, yet this should never be done in a reactionary mood; we should primarily be looking forward, not back. After all, the purpose of making this kind of contact is to regenerate and rechannel the power within the landscape into forms appropriate for the future development of a unified spiritual identity.

Forms of contact with the powers of the land range across a surprisingly broad spectrum of experience, of which there are three main bands, which we can simply categorize as individual, national, and international.

Individual contact with the land results in an awareness of being closer to nature, of being earthed and balanced. Many magical workers form elemental contacts as a means of maintaining psychic equilibrium.

Properly trained and dedicated magical workers are channels for the spiritual power in the land on which they live. And they will inevitably be called upon to mediate this power in order to help in the healing of the national soul. The inner-land power centers situated within the territorial boundaries of a nation have a potent influence on that nation's identity, helping to form its unique character. Old World mystery groups used to focus a tremendous amount of their energies on the healing and development of the soul of the nation in which they lived. Unfortunately, this kind of national healing is sadly lacking in the annals of magical work in North America. And yet, experience shows that an inadequate or an exclusive focus on the national level tends to breed a parochial, nationalistic egotism.

Fortunately, this can be counterbalanced by excursions into planetary or international magic. International magic is aimed at the healing and development of the planetary soul—that of the earth as a whole. The potential scope for international magic has been greatly expanded by the advances in world communications of our current era. It is, however, an area of work presently fraught with difficulty. Again, much of the problem stems from karmic stumbling blocks rooted in the history of international affairs. There is a further difficulty in that inner planetary work requires people to be willing and able to sacrifice a portion of their participation in the national psyche of their home country while simultaneously maintaining a strong link to the currents of power in the land. To say the least, this kind of balancing act requires a rare combination of experience and spiritual fortitude.

Be this as it may, such work does go on, and important international linkups are being made through which the inner-land powers of different countries are cross-fed and even merged into one another.

Whatever our Old World roots may be, the ancient American Indians are our territorial ancestors. As such, their traditional material can supply us with the means to forge important spiritual contacts with the land. Now I am not suggesting that you go out and take courses in Native American shamanism, perform pipe ceremonies, attend sweat lodges, or imitate other culturally specific practices. In fact, such things raise a host of issues, ethical and otherwise, that are too complicated to address here. Rather what I'm suggesting is a simple tuning of consciousness to certain places and patterns of sacred lore. One useful example of the kind of lore I mean is the legend of "The Stone That Gives All Story," a Seneca tradition that tells of "Orphan," who sets off into a forest on a journey of initiation. In the course of his journey, Orphan comes upon a glade where there is a tall stone. He sits on it to rest. This is no ordinary stone, however. It speaks, and Orphan soon finds himself listening to wondrous stories. (For a fuller account, see E. Ella Clark, Indian Legends of Canada, [Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977]). Although expressed in a specific, localized tradition, the tale contains images and motifs that are transcultural and which can thus be used as entry points to the inner-land matrix in many places.

To connect with the presence and stream of power behind the stone, you can use techniques such as recitation (ritually telling the story) and empowered vision (building the main images of the story in your imagination). I give a version of this tale in the form of a visionary practice, with operational notes, on my Web site.

You can also set up your own stone in your home or yard, or you can find one in a local park. It need not be large or obtrusive, just a focus to link you in when you do the visionary work mentioned above. These small efforts can establish a meaningful and lively relationship with the land you live on and will give you access to energies that will benefit you, your family, friends, and local community. Beyond this, if you are called to them, are acts of spiritual service to the earth and all its creatures.

Coleston Brown is the author of Magical Christianity: The Power of Symbols for Spiritual Renewal  (Quest Books, 2007). He is committed to practicing and teaching the Magical Way, which he defines as a transreligious spiritual path of personal and planetary transformation. He has a Web site at www.magicalways.com .

By Andre Clewell

Originally printed in the Spring 2009 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Clewell, Andre. "Sustaining Nature." Quest  97. 2 (Spring 2009): 60- 63.

When Nelson Mandela assumed leadership of South Africa's post-apartheid government in 1994, he was faced with two seemingly intractable problems. One was pervasive poverty among the nation's black population. The other was the rapid spread of trees from Australia—eucalyptus among them—that were planted in plantations a century earlier to augment scarce supplies of lumber. These alien trees were now reseeding everywhere and replacing native ecosystems.  Their deep roots removed soil moisture. Water tables were lowered, and farmers could scarcely grow crops as entire landscapes dried out.

Mandela's government seized an opportunity to resolve both issues simultaneously. The nation's poor were hired in a massive public works program called Working for Water. A civilian army spread out across the countryside, cutting down every invasive tree in sight. More than a million acres have been cleared. In 2005 alone, 32,000 people participated. Enough water has been saved to fill a reservoir on a medium-sized river each year.

Positive environmental stories like Working for Water are sparingly reported by our news media, which thrives on disaster stories like global warming and sea level rise. But there are other big success stories waiting to be reported.

One is occurring not far to the west of the Theosophical Society Headquarters at Adyar, India, where depleted forests have been overtaken by brush. People in many tribal villages of this region became impoverished, because their former forests could no longer sustain them economically with wood, thatching material, foods, and medicinal plants. These forests once served as natural "sponges" that absorbed rainfall that was later tapped by people for their potable water supply. Now rainfall runs off the brushland and is lost as flow during flash floods, leaving little to drink in the prolonged annual dry season. Personnel from the Forest Department of the State of Tamil Nadu stepped in with a program for people to restore their former forests, their water supply, and thus their economies.

The foresters presented workshops in every town, where citizens learned about forest degradation, the importance of healthy forests to their well-being, and how they could restore forests as community projects. People gathered seeds of native trees and grew them in village nurseries that the Forest Department established. Then teams of citizens spread across the countryside to plant these young tree sprouts. They constructed small reservoirs to retain water until the forest recovered.

The Forest Department encouraged the formation of women's groups and made small loans to them to establish local businesses. Some women's groups are collecting palm fronds from the forest from which they make handicrafts for export. This local, forest-based industry has generated much-needed income for their villages.

There is another success story from the center of one of the world's hotspots.  As rivers go, the Alexander River does not match up to the grandeur of the Nile. In fact, it would not take an Olympian to broad-jump across it in places. It begins in Palestinian hills near Nablus in the West Bank and flows eastward into Israel and the Mediterranean Sea at Tel Aviv. In 1995, it was a dirty, polluted mess, from raw sewage and residues from olive presses and stone-cutting plants.

Palestinian and Israeli citizens got together to do something about it, including some environmental professionals who volunteered their expertise. It began as a low-key affair, with civic leaders from towns all along the river meeting quietly to make plans in a back room of the German embassy, away from the hysteria of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Then citizens from these towns volunteered their free time in a massive cleanup effort. In a spontaneous display of international unity, they made the water sparkle and turned the river's weedy flood plain into attractive public parks. The rare and spectacularly large Nile soft-shelled turtle returned to the river to the delight of everyone and as an apparent symbol of their success.

These three environmental vignettes from South Africa, India, and the Middle East share a common thread. They are bottom-up, community-based endeavors conducted by the people themselves. They were assisted by the government as they took charge of their own natural environments. In this manner local people participated in the natural processes of their own ecosystems and essentially became inseparable from nature. Such participation develops an appreciation and respect for nature. In turn, nature sustains people with clean water and other natural bounties. This union with nature can lead to nation-building, as it did in South Africa, and towards world peace, as in the miracle that happened along the Alexander River.

Ordinarily, we don't consider nature and economics in the same breath. Instead, we think of economic development and the environmental destruction it brings in its wake as the very antithesis of nature. But these three vignettes are telling us something else—that nature and economics are tightly intertwined. The byword is "sustainable development" whereby we take care of nature and nature takes care of us, indefinitely into the future. We need to treat nature as if people mattered, and treat economics as if nature mattered.

"Very good!" you may say, "But what do those vignettes from halfway around the world have to do with me here in the American heartland?"  The answer is, "Plenty!" In recent years, it seems like each spring brings headlines about floods along the Mississippi River and its far-reaching tributaries. A principal reason for these floods has been well known ever since the floods of 1993 that crept into suburbs of St. Louis and onto our television screens as we watched for weeks as people clung to rooftops of flooded homes. So what was the problem?

Thousands of farmers throughout the upper Midwest had converted small headwater marshes into croplands. Previously, the marshes served to retain snowmelt and spring rainfall, releasing it in increments throughout the rest of the year in to streams that eventually joined the Mississippi. Before those conversions to cropland began, the Mississippi River swelled each spring onto its natural flood plain, but not to the point that it threatened St. Louis and gave television crews sensational footage.

What was the remedy? We built more levees and attempted other expensive engineering solutions, but the floods keep returning. The permanent solution would be to restore those thousands of small marshes throughout the upper Midwest. Land that was taken out of production in a government subsidy program can be substituted without decreases in food production and farm income. But do we know how to restore these marshes? You bet we do! The cost would be high but no greater than the property losses that were suffered in the 1993 flood.

So where's the proof that we can restore Midwestern marshes? Next time you are at the TS's national headquarters, look out the back door of the Olcott Building. Just to the right of the labyrinth you will see a patch of restored prairie that staff member Jeff Gresko installed several years ago. Its perky display of bright yellow compass-plants, which rise above the tall Indian grasses, adds a vibrant splash of color to the grounds. In terms of plant species, this is a drier version of the same kind of prairie that was removed from those thousands of acres of marshlands in the upper Midwest. If Jeff Gresko can exercise his tall, lithe, compass-plant-like frame to restore prairie at Olcott, then it can be done elsewhere. It's not hard to do. It just takes gumption.

Precedents for native prairie restoration exist all over the greater Chicago region. A restored prairie occupies much of the campus of the College of DuPage near Olcott. Two dozen large prairies grace public parks that encircle suburban Chicago. All were restored by thousands of local volunteers who began their work about thirty-five years ago. Another restored prairie sits on top of the underground accelerator at the Fermi Lab—site of last year's excursion during Summer National Gathering.

Nature sustains us, as long as we sustain nature. From a Theosophical point of view, that's another expression of the principle of oneness. When we restore nature, in a real sense we become one with nature, and we also become one with those who have joined in common effort at a restoration project site. In this way (and with apologies to Annie Besant), I suggest that all who feel themselves as one with nature restored, know they are therefore one with every other.

Andre Clewell is a Theosophist from Ellenton, Florida. His latest book, Ecological Restoration: Principles, Values, and Structure of an Emerging Profession, was published in 2007 by Island Press. Contact him at clewell@verizon.net.

By Stephan A. Hoeller

Originally printed in the Spring 2009 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Hoeller, Stephan A. "Humanity, Environment, and Spirit." Quest  97. 2 (Spring 2009): 50-53, 69.

During the last few decades, many people have become justifiably alarmed by the continuing growth of technology. In recent years this has been augmented by the concern over global warming, which may be at least in part caused by human activities. We may observe a certain anxiety arising from such concerns that impels many to defend what is paradoxically called the "environment." (The paradox derives from the fact that "environment" is a thoroughly anthropocentric term, since it defines the natural world as something that surrounds human beings).

The growth of environmentalism has come about in at least partial conjunction with the growth of a secular, i.e., nonreligious mindset in Western society. The British author G. K. Chesterton is credited with the saying that when people cease to believe in God, they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything. Thus, as support for traditional Judeo-Christian religiosity has declined, people in Europe and America have begun to look elsewhere to meet the very basic human need to revere something outside of themselves. In the comparatively recent past, Nazism and Marxism filled this gap in the lives of many people. After it had become obvious that these substitute religions were cruel disappointments, environmentalism provided a new god. The environmental writer Richard D. North gave expression to this truth in the following paragraph:

An awful lot of us just need to worship something. But in order to be able to worship, you have to be able to find something outside of yourself—and better than yourself. God is a construct for that. So is nature. We are falling in love with the environment as an extension to and in lieu of having fallen out of love with God. As it happens, it makes for a pretty deficient religion, but as an object of worship nature takes some beating (quoted in Porrit and Winner, 251-52).

Looking at this phenomenon through psychological eyes, we might present another analysis. It would seem that today we humans are suffering from a certain psychological disequilibrium. Not long ago, most people still lived in a landscape where they felt encompassed by natural forces. Such is no longer the case. Many of us live in a landscape of artificial wilderness called the city; we turn night into day with the aid of electricity; we defy gravity in airplanes. As a result, a certain disorientation has entered our psyches. We try to bring this condition to consciousness, and in so doing we employ the method of projection. While trying to preserve our inner balance, we concentrate on the imperiled balance of the outer world. We shout "save the earth," but inwardly, we desperately desire salvation for ourselves.

One of the symptoms of our psychological crisis has been the widespread acceptance of the notion that we are merely part of nature and that the human individuality that renders us separate from natural systems is an undesirable illusion. Another psychic mechanism that plays an important part in our predicament is guilt. When things go wrong, when crises threaten, we do one of two things: we blame the circumstances on others (projection), or we blame ourselves (introjection). There is little doubt that the early and powerful Puritan influence has made our country into an eminent example of a guilt culture. Today, some insightful scholars are coming to identify the pro-earth and antihuman syndrome as a new form of Puritanism.

"Here we have the essential Puritan outlook disguised as science—human beings, the sinners, occupy center stage, and cannot move a muscle without risking the direst consequences in a cosmic drama," as the noted naturalist Thomas Palmer wrote in the January 1992 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Puritanism has been ironically described as a belief holding that the devil must have invented ice cream because it tastes so good. The new Puritans of our time denounce much that makes our earthly life bearable as wasteful and irresponsible. The old Puritans thundered against us in the name of God; the new Puritans instill guilt in the name of nature and the earth.

Indeed, if one has a desire to feel guilty, one can find much justification for such feelings in the statements of radical ecologists. Humans are seen as despoilers, tramplers, the hackers and hewers who are making species disappear, who erode the ozone layer, and who perform innumerable unspeakable acts that injure the earth. Many of these accusations are made in the name of a dogma called "biodiversity." This teaching declares that the greater the complexities and diversities of plant and animal life, the more ideal are conditions on earth. Before the eyes of radical environmentalists floats a vision of a paradise frozen in time, a paradise without human inhabitants. A fact seldom recognized is that some of the most catastrophic changes that have occurred in the history of the earth had nothing to do with humans. Science informs us that vast natural cataclysms have devastated the earth on many occasions. According to an article in the June 1989 issue of National Geographic, there was one such event 240 million years ago that destroyed about ninety-six percent of all species then inhabiting the earth. And to think that all this occurred without even the presence of one member of that villainous species, the human race!

Such, then, are some of the difficulties arising from the unbalanced, quasi-religious dogmatism of the radical ecologists. Clearly the so-called "Green spirituality," in spite of its superficial appeal, cannot be considered as compatible with the traditional mainstream spiritualities of the West. These belief systems regarded the earth and the animal kingdom as strictly subordinate to the human being. The Old Testament, which is part of the authoritative sacred canon of both Judaism and Christianity, leaves no doubt on this point. Numerous passages could be quoted, but a mere two will suffice here: In the blessing given by God to Noah and his sons we read the following:

"Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth. Be the terror and the dread of all the wild beasts and all the birds of heaven, of everything that crawls on the ground and all the fish of the sea; they are handed over to you" (Gen. 9:1-2). More poetically, but very much in the same vein, we find the Psalmist exclaiming: "The heavens belong to the Lord but the earth he has given to men" (Ps. 115:16).

It may be useful to recall that none of the great monotheistic religions (Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Islam) can be reasonably said to hold to the concept of the superiority of earth and of the animal kingdom over humanity. Allowing for significant other differences, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, and most other religious traditions agree on the notion that human life is qualitatively different from other forms of life and that humans possess a spark of ultimate divinity, which is either absent from or far less developed in other creatures.

Intimidated by the ecologists, leaders of several mainstream Christian denominations have come to proclaim what they call "stewardship," whereby they mean the responsibility of humans to "tend" the earth and its flora and fauna. The scriptural justification of this thesis is taken from Gen. 3:15: "And the Lord God took man and put him into the garden of pleasure, to tend it and to keep it." This injunction clearly pertains to Adam's role prior to his expulsion from his original habitat. In a lighter vein, one might say that Adam's job as gardener was terminated when he was bid to leave paradise. Thus there was no gardening stewardship to be inherited by Adam's descendants.

Much of contemporary ecological reasoning is based on the notion that the human being is exclusively a part and product of nature, an ungrateful and sinfully prideful child of Mother Earth. This is clearly contrary to the scriptures and teachings of the mainstream religious traditions, particularly the monotheistic traditions, as we noted earlier. What is often overlooked is that such a view is equally contrary to the worldview of the esoteric or alternative spiritual traditions. Esoteric spirituality looks upon the human not as a clever animal, but rather as a spirit inhabiting a body derived from the matter of earth. Plato, the father of much esoteric philosophy, looked upon humans as strangers to this earth. His famous parable of the cave shows humanity leading a melancholy existence in a realm separated from the light world that is its true home. The Platonist vision of humanity gave rise to the corresponding views of Neo-Platonists, Hermeticists, and Gnostics who together represent the fount and origin of the esoteric tradition in the West.

Underlying the esoteric transmissions is the perception that the human being is a sort of exile, a colonist from other, nonphysical dimensions, and that this status of exile is the source of humanity's ambivalent relationship to earth and nature. It must also be recognized that humanity has brought forth a large number of achievements that upon closer scrutiny reveal themselves as unusual, unnatural, and unearthly. Even if we were to disregard the innumerable physical and technological inventions (which are regarded as sinful things by many ecologists), we are still left with the marvels of art such as sculpture, painting, music, and theater, none of which ever appeared in nature.

Oscar Wilde's witty comment "Life imitates art" may be applied here. There is little or no natural scenery in the world that can equal Michelangelo's Last Judgment. We may also need reminding that while there is much natural beauty in the universe, none of it was created by a person in order to delight other persons.

The esoteric tradition accounts for the unique, or at least different, position of humanity in relation to earth and nature through the principle of emanation. The cosmos and its denizens are not created ex nihilo (out of nothing) by a creator. Rather they are emanated by a transcendental, impersonal divine essence. Thus, in a sense, all that exists is divine. Yet in certain ways this statement is rather misleading. Many of the inner teachings assert that the emanation of the divine essence occurs not at once but in a series of outpourings. The material world represents the earliest emanation, which is followed by a later outpouring of the matrix of plant and animal life, while the last outpouring is the one that brings human spirits to earth. (Such teachings are by no means unique to the West, for they can be discovered in Mesoamerican legends as well as in the traditions of Japan, India, and Africa.) The earth is not the "mother" of humanity, according to this view, but is a temporary habitat for human spirits. Some inner traditions hold that the earth as well as its flora and fauna have undergone a radical alienation from their origins, which accounts for the darkness and imperfection present in the "sublunar realm." (The emanationist doctrine followed here is that of Valentinus, the Gnostic teacher of the second century AD.)

To summarize the above: We are not a mere part or product of physical nature. We have not grown like weeds from the soil of earth, and thus no kind of biodiversity can ever adequately account for the phenomenon of Homo sapiens. We are here on business of our own, which at times coincides with the purposes of nature but at other times diverges from it radically.

How easy it is to equate nature with the beauty of a spring morning or the song of the nightingale, the green of a meadow, or the azure of sky and sea! How much more difficult is it to acknowledge the shadow side of nature and to withdraw our unrealistically positive projections! As the Buddha proclaimed, suffering is the great existential reality of embodied existence. St. Paul agrees when he writes: "All creation groans and travails in pain" (Romans 8:22). All life lives on life, and thus living creatures kill and devour each other regularly. Almost always the death of sentient beings is preceded by a good deal of suffering. The lion's claw, the tooth of the shark, the fang of the viper are as much part of nature as the flowers in our garden or the comforting adulation we receive from our pets. (Referring to the latter, we may notice the cruel game a cat will play with a captured mouse—a game quite unnecessary for the kill!) Even more grotesque and frightful forms of behavior may be observed in the insect kingdom, where some species engage in mating and feeding practices that strike our mind as diabolical. Such considerations have motivated many thinkers to attribute not only unconsciousness but outright evil to nature. Thus the noted biologist and naturalist Lyall Watson writes:

Evil exists and seems to me to have sufficient substance to give it credence as a force in nature as a factor in our lives. It is part of the ecology and needs to be seen as such. My thumbs convince me, not that "something wicked this way comes," but that it is already here and has been for a very long time, casting its shadow on almost everything we do (Watson, xvi; emphasis added).

Perhaps more of us ought to consider the possible accuracy of the saying attributed to the Gnostic teacher Marcion: "Evil adheres to materiality as rust adheres to iron." The natural world and the natural part of the human being are riddled with unregenerate, evil forces and tendencies.

The esoteric tradition of the West, of which the Gnostic teachings form an important part, recognizes that evil is present in everything in this world. The current Green mythos would like to recognize evil only in humans and exempt the natural world. Following this reasoning, one would have to believe that the environment is always good and thus is preferable in its so-called natural state to any alterations introduced by human ingenuity. A good case in point concerns swamps, now euphemistically renamed "wetlands."

"Wetlands," so we are told, are wonderful things that virtually always should be protected from human interference. Now it is a fact of history that draining swamps has been regarded as one of the great achievements of human civilization. Rome, the eternal city, owes its existence to the draining of the Pontine Marshes; Dutch engineering reclaimed much of Holland from the sea in the seventeenth century by means of dams and dikes. The Capitol and the White House in Washington, D. C. stand on former swamps; as do St. Petersburg, Russia, and Mexico City. Any attempt to carry out such works now would meet with fierce opposition from environmental lobbyists. There is a curious spiritual significance attributed to swamps and wilderness areas by many environmentalists. The difference between ordinary intelligent citizens on the one hand and perhaps many environmentalists on the other is that ordinary citizens may enjoy a watery habitat for pleasant birds or a nearby wilderness park for deer and coyotes, while the Green folk attribute a spiritual significance to such localities that puts them into the category of sacred shrines.

Swamps are but a single example of the curious situation that we face in contemporary society. When the work of humans is categorically decried as "unspiritual" and the wild is seen as sacred, one begins to suspect that some value system is skewed.

Some issues that arise in connection with environmentalists are even more curious. The present writer has some interest in an idyllic island not far from the metropolis of Los Angeles. This island, covered almost completely by wilderness, is inhabited by wild pigs, goats, and a small number of bison. Environmental enthusiasts have on occasion repaired to the island in order to slaughter many of these creatures. The reason given was that some of the rare plant life of the place had to be "saved" from these animals. (Certainly a Buddhist would not condone this, since pigs and goats qualify as "sentient beings" while plants do not.) In other areas, large numbers of sparrows are routinely destroyed in order to "save" bluebirds. One may wonder what gives the Green persons in question the right to decide which part of the ecosystem they may exterminate in order to allegedly assist another part.

Environmentalism, it would seem, tends to become an unduly heady business. The practicalities of human and other life are eclipsed by abstract ideas that are pursued with fanaticism. The bottom of the pit of Green irrationality has been reached by those animal rights extremists who time and again liken the slaughter of chickens to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany!

All of this brings us to a final consideration. Spiritual teachers, among whom the Buddha is most prominent in this regard, enjoin the cultivation of compassion. One reason they may have done so is that if humans do not exercise compassion, no one will. Nature does not know compassion, which implies the ability to consciously feel the suffering of another. Certain animals show love and devotion to their young, and sometimes to their mates, but this is not compassion. (Other animals show the opposite disposition: Young hyenas emerge biting and clawing from their mother's womb and eat each other when convenient!) Compassion is a human quality; it may be called a uniquely human virtue. Needless to say, like other great virtues, compassion is not as ubiquitous among us as we might wish. Yet when consciousness rises to a certain level, compassion also tends to appear. It is to be doubted that compassion plays as great a role in Green consciousness as one might hope. Those in this camp are more often in love with their ideas about nature and its denizens than with the real sentient beings themselves. One cannot have true compassion for abstractions and collectivities such as ecosystems and for mental fictions such as "Mother Earth" or "Gaia."

It is right that we should concern ourselves with the environment. Making the world a better place to live in might be one way in which we might become "the salt of the earth" (a term Jesus applied to his disciples). Using an avian metaphor, only an unwise bird befouls its own nest. But the bird is different from the nest, even as the inhabitant of the house is different from the house. We are not here to serve the environment, although we may assist it in various ways when this seems indicated. We are not called to worship the world, but to overcome it. And when in the fullness of time our wanderings on this earth will be over, we may hope to have left this land of exile in not too much worse condition than we found it. The human spirit, which dwells in our bodies, will not demand more of us, and possibly it will accept no less.

References
Porrit, Jonathan, and David Winner. The Coming of the Greens. London: Fontana, 1988.
Watson, Lyall. Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil. New York: Harper Collins, 1995.

Stephan A. Hoeller, Ph.D., is an author and lecturer on Gnosticism, Jungian psychology, Theosophy, and other esoteric subjects. He is also presiding bishop of Ecclesia Gnostica and director of studies of the Gnostic Society in Hollywood, California. His works include Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing and Freedom: Alchemy for a Voluntary Society (both published by Quest Books).