One
of the chief spiritual tasks for our time is the fostering of an
awareness that the Earth is an ensouled being. Whether we call her
Mother Earth, Gaia, or the World Soul - the "Anima Mundi" - a large
number of us are awakening to the realization that the Earth has
personality. For many, this may seem at first like a fictitious
fantasy. After all, we are all children of philosophical Nominalism
- the belief that only individuals are real, and that universal
realities are therefore present "in name only." We see this tendency in
some of the current pop spiritualities, where meditation becomes merely
"me and my breath," yoga is reduced to "me and my body," and spiritual
conversion is relegated to "me and my salvation." All the while, we
continue to treat the Earth as a merely dead collection of "resources"
intended only for OUR use, and sometimes even for an increasingly
devastating ABUSE.
In this context, how do we recover a sense of the Earth as ensouled? One way is to go to places we consider especially beautiful and allow them to elicit in us an altered state of consciousness, one in which joy and elation predominate. When this occurs, we will find that our emotional state becomes a kind of "heat" that "melts together" into One the contrasting realms of personal humanity (our own) and the seemingly non-personal world of Nature. Alternately, we might experience the joy as a sort of interior dance that "spins" the two into One, like a Sufi whirling dervish twirling divinity and humanity together, or a yin-yang symbol conceived as a sort of spinning top that forms solid, continuous patterns out of the two contrasting halves when the top is twirled.
When this union occurs, we experience the two contrasting realms of personal humanity and non-personal Nature beginning to interpenetrate and exchange qualities. Accordingly, we begin to feel a release from the claustraphobic individual ego-self, identifying ourselves instead with the spacious 4.6 billion-year history of the Earth - a move that helps us become liberated from our socially-induced angst and problems. Correspondingly, the natural world begins to take on some of our own personal subjectivity, enabling Her to speak wisdom to us on a regular basis during times of spiritual retreat. In any case, we experience a union with Nature that is absolutely transformative. Like John Muir, we can exclaim: "We are now fairly into the mountains, and they are into us. What bright, seething white-fire ENTHUSIASM is bred in us - without our help or knowledge - a perfect influx into every pore and cell of us, FUSING, vaporizing, by its heat until the boundary walls of our heavy flesh tabernacle seem taken down and we flow out and diffuse into the very air. I am no longer a shepherd, but a free bit of everything!" Here, joy is no merely subjective emotion; instead, it has profound epistemological value. That is, it becomes a form of KNOWLEDGE that gives us an awareness of the amazingly ensouled nature of the Earth!
Photo: Pink Heather, Picture Lake and Mount Shuksan; Mt. Baker Wilderness, WA; July 22, 2013
In this context, how do we recover a sense of the Earth as ensouled? One way is to go to places we consider especially beautiful and allow them to elicit in us an altered state of consciousness, one in which joy and elation predominate. When this occurs, we will find that our emotional state becomes a kind of "heat" that "melts together" into One the contrasting realms of personal humanity (our own) and the seemingly non-personal world of Nature. Alternately, we might experience the joy as a sort of interior dance that "spins" the two into One, like a Sufi whirling dervish twirling divinity and humanity together, or a yin-yang symbol conceived as a sort of spinning top that forms solid, continuous patterns out of the two contrasting halves when the top is twirled.
When this union occurs, we experience the two contrasting realms of personal humanity and non-personal Nature beginning to interpenetrate and exchange qualities. Accordingly, we begin to feel a release from the claustraphobic individual ego-self, identifying ourselves instead with the spacious 4.6 billion-year history of the Earth - a move that helps us become liberated from our socially-induced angst and problems. Correspondingly, the natural world begins to take on some of our own personal subjectivity, enabling Her to speak wisdom to us on a regular basis during times of spiritual retreat. In any case, we experience a union with Nature that is absolutely transformative. Like John Muir, we can exclaim: "We are now fairly into the mountains, and they are into us. What bright, seething white-fire ENTHUSIASM is bred in us - without our help or knowledge - a perfect influx into every pore and cell of us, FUSING, vaporizing, by its heat until the boundary walls of our heavy flesh tabernacle seem taken down and we flow out and diffuse into the very air. I am no longer a shepherd, but a free bit of everything!" Here, joy is no merely subjective emotion; instead, it has profound epistemological value. That is, it becomes a form of KNOWLEDGE that gives us an awareness of the amazingly ensouled nature of the Earth!
Photo: Pink Heather, Picture Lake and Mount Shuksan; Mt. Baker Wilderness, WA; July 22, 2013
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