Quest Magazine

VOLUME 97, NUMBER 2

Humanity, Environment, and Spirit
By Stephan A. Hoeller

Green Hermeticism
By Christopher Bamford

Sustaining Nature
By Andre Clewell

The Marriage of Buddhism and Deep Ecology
By C. Jotin Khisty

Explorations: Healing the Rift: Working with the Power of the Land
By Coleston Brown

Thinking Aloud: Blavatsky on Evolution
By Anna Lemkow

From the Executive Editor
Richard Smoley

Viewpoint: Sensitive Dependence
By Betty Bland

By C. Jotin Khisty

Originally printed in the Spring 2009 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Khisty, C. Jotin. "The Marriage of Buddhism and Deep Ecology." Quest  97. 2 (Spring 2009): 64-69.

In 2005, people all across the world sat up in their seats to watch Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth. They were stunned to see the environmental degradation and destruction that has occurred and the profound threat it poses to all life on the planet. Then, in October 2007, many of us jumped with joy when Gore and the U. N. Panel on Climate Change were jointly awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. This recognition gave us hope of a way to work through our political, economic, and environmental systems in order to reverse the effects of decades of indifference and damage to our planet.

One of the paramount reasons for this degradation is not hard to find. The organizing principle of society for at least the last hundred years has been: What will make the economy grow larger and produce greater profit? But with a new consciousness on the horizon and a transformation of the human heart all around the world, it is very likely that for the next hundred years, the organizing principle may be: What will make the planet more sustainable? This has to be the new lens through which we look at the world. After all, the voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new vistas but in having new eyes.

This article aims to explore the connections between two important disciplines: spiritual systems, particularly Buddhism, and deep ecology. Spiritual systems are more than a belief in a transcendental deity or a means to an afterlife. They are a way of understanding both the cosmos and our role in its preservation. In this way they are closely connected with ecology, which embraces a cultural awareness of kinship with and dependence on the natural environment for the continuity of all life.

Buddhism, one of the world's great spiritual systems, offers a well-developed philosophy of our connection with nature. Deep ecology is focused on the survival and self-renewal of all living beings. (It is so called in contrast to "shallow" ecology, which is essentially anthropocentric and technocratic.) Celebrating the marriage of spiritual systems and deep ecology fosters a moral and cultural awareness of the kinship of the natural environment and the continuity of life.

We hear of ecological disasters occurring around the world almost on a daily basis. Almost all of these crises are a result of human neglect, apathy, and greed. They range from resource depletion, species extinction, pollution growth, climate change, to population explosion and over consumption. As far back as 1992, the Union of Concerned Scientists, consisting of over 100 Nobel laureates and 1600 other distinguished scientists from seventy countries, warned us of the deepening ecological crisis caused by human activities on this planet. They warned that a great change in the stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required if vast misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated (Uhl, 124).

Almost all such warnings have been ignored and ridiculed by our politicians. One prominent source of disinformation about global warning, for instance, has been the Bush-Cheney administration. It has silenced scientists working for the government about the extreme danger we are facing, and has appointed "skeptics" recommended by oil companies to government positions as our principal negotiators. The world has been thunderstruck by the arrogance and ignorance of such political leaders and their cronies (Gore, 264).

The reasons for this disconnection from nature, especially in the West, are not hard to detect. Spiritually and psychologically we live inside a bubble of the "self," as though we are "in here" and the rest of the world is "out there." According to Buddhist thought, this sense of separation manifests itself in the form of the Three Poisons—greed, ill will, and delusion. Examples of these poisons can be seen everywhere in the current ecological crisis. Greed rooted in untrammeled economic growth and consumerism is the secular religion of advanced industrial societies. Similarly, the military-industrial complex promotes ill will, fear, and terror, while propaganda and advertising systems are well known for deluding the public about everything under the sun. A fundamental question of our time is whether we can counter these forces by developing attitudes of respect, responsibility, and care for the natural world and so create a sustainable future.

From its origins in India about 500 years before the birth of Christ, Buddhism spread throughout Asia and is now exerting an ever-increasing influence on Western culture. We in the West are awakening to the fact that there is a more ancient science of mind than our own. The well-known philosopher Alan Watts pointed out that historically the Buddha (563-483 BCE) was the first great psychologist and psychotherapist. He not only recognized the meaning of existential anxiety or suffering that we all experience but offered ways of treating it. Many psychologists, psychiatrists, and scientists regard the discovery of Buddhist philosophy in the West today as a kind of second renaissance (Varela, 22).

Contrary to popular belief, Buddhism is in essence a philosophy and not a religion. Buddhist philosophy over the centuries has been very carefully thought out and documented by some of the best scholars and practitioners across the world. A starting point is the central tenet concerning the interconnectedness of all life—human beings, animals, plants, birds. Buddhist ethical teaching emphasizes that this interdependence comes with a moral component. For humans, that means maintaining a sense of universal responsibility in whatever we do.

The cornerstone of all Buddhist teachings is the Four Noble Truths. The first truth is that of suffering (or existential anxiety), starting with birth and continuing on through aging and then on to the inevitability of death. The second truth is the realization that human craving and greed are at the very root of our suffering. The third truth stresses that it is possible to eliminate craving, greed, and suffering by transforming the mind. The fourth truth is the Eightfold Path, the Buddhist formula of practices for cultivating this transformation, leading to the extinction of both craving and suffering (Rifkin, 101). Buddhists assert that mindful awareness of existential anxiety produces compassionate empathy for all forms of life.

Two other concepts form the bedrock of Buddhist thinking: impermanence and interdependence. All phenomena are impermanent, because everything is in transition. Interdependence refers to the fact that everything is a part of everything else.

The philosophical roots of the deep ecology movement can be found in the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Roszak, Lewis Mumford, Rachel Carson, and others, going back to Baruch Spinoza and the Buddhist philosophers. But it was in 1972 that the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess coined the term to distinguish it from "shallow" anthropocentric and technocratic ecology. Since then, Naess has spelled out a comprehensive platform describing the meaning and scope of deep ecology, as outlined in an eight-point summary:

1. The well-being of human and nonhuman life on earth have value in themselves.
2. The interdependence, richness, and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values.
3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs.
4. Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.
5. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with substantial decrease of the human population. Moreover, the flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.
6. Policies must therefore be changed. The changes in policies will affect basic economic and technological structures.
7. Ideological change is required in order to emphasize quality of life rather than striving for an ever-higher standard of living.
8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation to help implement these changes (Naess, 68).

To imagine oneself as a separate ego, separate from everything else, locked up in a bag of skin, is a hallucination. Everything is indeed connected with everything else. Given the profound similarity of Buddhist thought to deep ecology, it is not difficult to realize that the "egocentricity" of an apparently isolated self needs to be replaced by "ecocentricity."

How can we harness this obvious interconnection between Buddhist thought and deep ecology in order to tackle the urgent problems that continue to threaten the sentient beings on this planet? As Vaclav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic, wrote: "The only option for us is a change in the sphere of the spirit, in the sphere of human conscience. It's not enough to invent new machines, new regulations, and new institutions. We must develop a new understanding of the true purpose of our existence on earth. Only by making such a fundamental shift will we be able to create new models of behavior and a new set of values for the planet" (Uhl, 307).

Like Havel, scores of philosophers, economists, and politicians have recognized that the advancing human crisis is result of the lack of deep spiritual roots, brought on to a great extent by the divorce of spiritual meaning and identity from life. But how can we wake up to face this human crisis?

Today there is already evidence of an emerging cultural shift as millions of people and their leaders are stirring, as if from a trance, to deal with these issues. Here are some possible avenues of approach:

• Collective awakening. Spiritual awakening in an individual is sometimes called the "opening of the third eye." When this awareness occurs collectively, it can be called the "opening of the fourth eye." Evidence of this collective awakening started in the 1960s and has matured in subsequent years, dealing head-on with problems as diverse as postmodern anomie, free-market globalization, and global terrorism.
• Building sustainable systems. The great challenge of our time is to build and nurture sustainable communities—social, cultural, and physical. This goal is best attained in four steps: (1) introducing "ecoliteracy" in order to understand how ecosystems evolve for sustaining the web of life; (2) moving toward "ecodesign" by promoting organic farming, energy- and resource-efficient industries, nonmotorized transportation, and low-cost housing, and by reducing energy consumption; (3) thinking in terms of relationships, contexts, patterns, and processes for ecodesign; (4) striving for resource efficiency, service-flow economy, and energy conservation in order to reduce ecological degradation (Capra, 230-32). So far the records in these areas of nurturing have been deplorable.
• Transforming the world economy. According to free-market capitalism, all values are monetary values determined by buyers of goods and services in a competitive market. The prime movers of this system are the transnational corporations (TNCs), whose economic powers frequently surpass that of many sovereign states. To grow, these TNCs must make enormous profits and consume the world's raw materials. TNCs and their advocate, the World Trade Organization (WTO), have been largely able to get what they want because of their influence in manipulating the global market for their own profit. Poor countries and the poorer sectors of the world are the worst victims of the WTO. Today, one-third of all economic activity worldwide is generated by only 200 corporations, which are linked to each other by strategic alliances. While the WTO was initially hailed by nations rich and poor as an organization that would produce huge economic benefits which would trickle down to everybody, it failed to live up to this promise, instead creating fatal consequences such as the breakdown of democracies, the rapid deterioration of the environment, and increasing poverty and alienation.
  
  
  

  Consumerism is now recognized as the most successful religion of all time, winning more converts more quickly than any previous belief or value system in human history. Philosopher David Loy has pointed out that the strategies of the WTO and the World Bank have been exposed, with the result that there are regular riots whenever their meetings are held. These two organizations are clearly ill-suited for building a just, sustainable, and compassionate society that can nurture sufficiency, partnership, and respect for life and its values. Naturally, a new kind of civil society, organized to counterbalance globalization is gradually emerging, embodied in powerful nongovernmental organizations such as Oxfam and Greenpeace.

• Transforming ethics. Activists devoted to peace and social justice acknowledge that there is a spirit of coerciveness that is present in all cultures, manifesting particularly in violence and crime. This coerciveness can be counteracted by several strategies.

Creative nonviolence in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and Buddhist ethics is one well-documented possibility. Essentially this means that one does not struggle against the opponent but rather against the situation. Political and social adversaries are seen as potential partners rather than as enemies. Satyagraha, or nonviolent resistance, also pioneered by Gandhi, is one form of such creative nonviolence. The principle of ahimsa (harmlessness)—the refusal to kill any living beings—has also been put to use in stopping armed conflicts.

It is said that when people saw the Buddha soon after his enlightenment, they were so struck by the extraordinary peacefulness of his presence that they stopped to ask: "What are you? Are you a god, a magician, or a wizard?" Buddha's reply was stunning. He simply said: "I am awake." His answer became his title, for this is what the word buddha means in Sanskrit—one who is awakened. While the rest of the world was deep in "sleep," dreaming a dream known as the waking state of life, the Buddha shook off the slumber and woke up (Smith and Novak, 3-4).

Although the Buddha's wake-up call was issued a very long time ago and has since been repeated time and time again by almost every known spiritual system, it is unfortunate that a mistaken metaphysics has led us to an alienation between us and the earth and between us and other sentient beings. It is essential that we reestablish and restore an awareness of this interdependence. Naturally, such a transformation requires profound reeducation at every stage of our lives. Private foundations, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, academic institutions, and religious organizations have an equal stake in setting priorities in this endeavor. In this context the advice of the Dalai Lama is particularly poignant:

The Earth, our Mother, is telling us to behave. . . . If we develop good and considerate qualities within our own minds, our activities will naturally cease to threaten the continued survival of life on Earth. By protecting the natural environment and working to forever halt the degradation of our planet, we will also show respect for Earth's human descendants—our future generations—as well as for the natural right to life of all of Earth's living things. If we care for nature, it can be rich, bountiful, and inexhaustibly sustainable.

It is important that we forgive the destruction of the past and recognize that it was produced by ignorance. At the same time, we should reexamine, from an ethical perspective, what kind of world we have inherited, what we are responsible for, and what we will pass on to coming generations (Hunt-Badiner, v).

---

References

Capra, Frithjof. The Hidden Connection. New York: Doubleday, 2002.
Gore, Al. An Inconvenient Truth. Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale, 2006.
Hunt-Badiner, Allan, ed. Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology. Berkeley, Calif.: Parallax, 1990.
Jones, Ken. The New Social Face of Buddhism: A Call to Action. Boston: Wisdom, 2003.
Loy, David R. A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.
Naess, Arne. "The Deep Ecology Movement." George Sessions, ed., Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century. Boston: Shambhala, 1986.
Rifkin, Ira, and David Little. Spiritual Perspectives on Globalization: Making Sense of Economic and Cultural Upheaval. Woodstock, Vt.: Skylight Paths, 2003.
Smith, Huston, and Philip Novak. Buddhism: A Concise Introduction. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.
Tucker, Mary Evelyn, and John A. Grim. "Introduction: The Emerging Alliance of World Religions and Ecology." Daedalus, Fall 2001.
Uhl, Christopher. Developing Ecological Consciousness: Paths to a Sustainable World. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
Varela, Francisco, Evan T. Thomson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
Watts, Alan. Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion. Boston: Tuttle, 1995.

C. Jotin Khisty, Ph. D., is professor emeritus in the department of civil, architectural, and environmental Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He has published extensively in the areas of urban planning, transportation engineering, and systems science.

By Anna Lemkow

Originally printed in the Spring 2009 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Lemkow, Anna. "Humanity, Environment, and Spirit." Quest  97. 2 (Spring 2009): 72-73.

Perennial philosophy is an open-ended wisdom whose meaning is expanding through the course of time and which requires continuing reformulation in terms consonant with the growth of knowledge. I believe that H. P. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine represents one such reformulation. It is, among other things, a monumental treatise on cosmic evolution or, more accurately, on a cyclic process that includes both involution and evolution.

Blavatsky saw evolution as the universal process by which all things are produced, undergo change, grow, and develop. To suggest its nature, she used a few familiar illustrations. When a seed, a minute particle hardly distinguishable from any other kind of seed, is planted, it eventuates, through stages of development, in a fully grown tree or plant with flowers and fruit unique to its kind. Again, a fertilized ovum in the womb passes through many embryonic stages until a fully formed human infant is produced, and the infant in turn develops into an adult. This, too, is a kind of evolution—a human being has evolved from a germ.

Analogously, preceding the materialization of a building such as a great cathedral, there must be a conception in the architect's mind, followed by plans, followed by the actualization of the building from those plans. Thus an edifice has "evolved" from an idea. Or it may be defined as the coming into visibility of what was invisible, or the bringing into activity of something that was until then only a latent possibility.

The point is, whatever evolves must have some antecedent existence, whether mental or physical. The seed, according to Blavatsky, has within it an ideal design or plan (as Plato would have agreed), though each of its embodiments in nature is idiosyncratic and unique, since no tree or plant or leaf is identical to any other.

One might say that Blavatsky integrated the idea of evolution with the venerable idea of the universal hierarchy of being. Thus stated, the hierarchical principle is no longer rigid; it has become the working principle of a dynamic process involving all levels of being, "a progressive development toward a higher life." In her emphasis on process, Blavatsky foreshadowed the present shift in science from static or structure-oriented to process-oriented thinking.

Blavatsky delineates a journey in consciousness, encompassing a hierarchy of levels of being of which terrestrial evolution is a small but integral part. This journey begins with the involutionary arc of world formation, in which the emphasis is upon the geological development of material substances, followed by the evolutionary arc, wherein all beings, all life forms are coparticipants, first developing individuality and a sense of self through proliferation of species, then gradually, through conscious experience, realizing their unity and oneness with the source of being, which is divine and ineffable.

More generally, Blavatsky challenged the orthodoxies of both the science and theology of her day. Her assertions (such as her view of the dynamic nature of matter) seemed implausible and even preposterous at the time, but many of them have since been vindicated by science. A case in point is her conception of evolution. An essentially similar view is now advanced by other exponents of the perennial philosophy without crediting her as their source. (She herself always insisted that she was only reiterating the most ancient—and perennial—teaching.) More to the point, ideas similar to hers have recently emerged among scientists at the cutting edge of evolutionary theory.

Blavatsky applauded Darwin's contribution as far as it went. But she rejected the idea that evolution consists of a slow, mechanical accumulation through the ages of small increments of advantage. She saw it, on the contrary, as an unfolding in progressive stages of inner or inherent potentialities that exist within the process itself. Furthermore, it was for her a dual process: the involution of a diffused and generalized consciousness into separate, specialized material forms, thereby developing the structure of the world with all its chemical and physical complexity, followed by the evolution of conscious life through the development of self-aware, self-determined, and finally self-transcendent forms. The two processes worked synchronously, every step in the evolution of responsive forms being likewise a step in the acquisition of knowledge, leading finally to conscious freedom, or spiritualization.

Furthermore, Blavatsky proposed that there are three separate but interwoven streams of evolution: the spiritual, the intellectual, and the physical, each with its own rules or inner laws. All three streams are represented in the constitution of man, the microcosm of the macrocosm (nature itself), and it is this which makes us the complex beings we are (Secret Doctrine, I, 181).

To my knowledge, Blavatsky was the first writer to regard matter not as dead, passive, and inert, but as living, dynamic, and energetic, and to speak of a cosmic evolutionary process that amalgamates the traditional hierarchical order and the scientific theory of evolution.

A number of recent thinkers have propounded views like those of Blavatsky. They include the Hindu sage Sri Aurobindo; the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who in the 1920s pioneered the philosophy of process; and the philosopher, statesman, and scientist Jan Christian Smuts, whose book Holism and Evolution was published in 1926. Still later came the paleontologist, mystic, and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose controversial writings are still anathema to many scientists, although he is proving to be one of the most influential minds of our age.

In retrospect, as far as evolutionary theory is concerned, Blavatsky introduced several new ideas, including the concepts that evolution proceeds on three different levels, each with its own rules and modus operandi, and that evolution is a cosmic process to which the development of mind is critical. Among scientists, these ideas emerged only very recently.

Anna F. Lemkow was born in Saratov, Russia, the city where HPB received her childhood education. Raised in western Canada, Anna moved to New York when she began work for the United Nations in the field of economic and social development. A long-time Theosophist and speaker at the Parliament of World Religions in 1993, Anna still resides in New York. This article is adapted from her book, The Wholeness Principle: Dynamics of Unity within Science, Religion, and Society (Quest Books, 1990).

Originally printed in the Spring 2009 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "From the Executive Editor - Spring 2009." Quest 97. 2 (Spring 2009): 44.

Did you realize that the earth as we know it did not exist a million years ago? This may sound incredible, but I can prove it to you simply and irrefutably.

I'm not saying that the world did not physically exist a million years ago. But as you no doubt recognize, the world is an inscrutable combination of what is "out there" in some absolute sense and the way our minds are set up to process our experience of this world. To take an example, consider rainbows. The particles of light and water vapor that combine to form rainbows exist, shall we say, objectively. But the colors and shape of the rainbow are due to our own visual apparatus.

The same is true of colors as a whole. There is an enormous bandwidth of vibrations, only a small fraction of which we perceive as the color spectrum. Thanks to science, we have been able to push these boundaries a bit, to the extent of knowing that there are infrared and ultraviolet colors. We also know that other species, such as bees, can see different ranges of color than we can. But to perceive color as we do requires a human nervous system. (Here's a brain twister: try to visualize a color that you have never seen before.)

When we imagine the world as it was a million years ago, what we are really imagining is the world the way it would have been if there had been creatures like us to perceive it. But there were no such creatures—at least not according to science. There were no humans with minds like ours, to see the colors we see, or to organize their experience in the way we do. Therefore the earth as we know it did not exist. Something existed—but not the earth we know, not because there was no earth, but because there was no "we."

This argument, which I owe to Saving the Appearances, a book by the British philosopher Owen Barfield published in 1957, yields some striking insights. It may cast light on Theosophical concepts of earlier Rounds and Root Races. Scientists dismiss the notion of races of Lemurians and Atlanteans and so on because, they say, the fossil record indicates no such thing. (What the fossil record does indicate is more ambiguous than you might expect. If you're interested in this question, look into Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race by Michael L. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson).

But that still leaves us wondering what these ancient records refer to. H. P. Blavatsky says, for example, that the primordial First Root Race was "nonphysical"; it had no physical form and existed only amorphously on the astral plane. She described it as a race of "pudding bags" (Collected Writings, 12:701).

What if the esoteric accounts of such races—amorphous, androgynous, and so on—are recalling the subjective experience of life in these forms, when the boundaries between self and other were more permeable? These ancient accounts would then be referring, not to these creatures as they might look in a textbook of paleontology, but to the way it would feel to be one of them. While this suggestion does not dispose of differences between science and Theosophy in a single shot, I believe it is a fruitful avenue of approach.

In any event, the earth we know is a product of human consciousness. Today when we speak of "endangering the earth" or "saving the earth," we are really talking about saving the earth as a human construct (and as a human resource). The earth as a thing in itself is mysterious and perhaps ultimately unknowable. To all appearances it long preceded our race and will long outlast us. Thus the current urge to sentimentalize and "Save" it may be misguided.

In no way am I saying that environmental concerns are to be taken lightly. Clearly they need to be taken far more seriously than they have been. But I believe that when we view the earth as a personification, say, of a wounded mother, we are projecting our own wounds upon it. As Stephan A. Hoeller suggests in this issue, there is a tendency among many to elevate Gaia to the place vacated by the Judeo-Christian deity. No doubt the Judeo-Christian God, as conventionally imagined, is too small a vessel to accommodate the sublimity of the Absolute. But I think the hypostatized earth will prove just as inadequate.

The Bible often condemns the sin of idolatry: making images of wood and metal and bowing down to them as if they were gods. Today we are more sophisticated; we no longer mistake the physical representation of a thing for the thing itself. But we have not advanced quite as far in the realm of ideas. Whereas people in the past confused their gods with the works of their hands, we often confuse ours with the works of our minds.

This is a time when we are facing hard truths and seeing dear illusions shattered. It is true that we cannot defile our own nests without paying the penalty. At the same time we must avoid the trap of believing that we can only stir ourselves to action by setting up a new idol to replace the old ones. Do we really need to construct a myth of a wounded Gaia to persuade ourselves to clean up our own filth? I suspect not. To do so is to step back at a time when we most urgently need to move forward.

Richard Smoley
Executive Editor