Big Sky Mind and Perception

How often do you look up at the sky? I mean, just look at it? I am more likely to do it at night. I walk out of the house, onto the deck, and the stars are just there. Of course, it’s easier for me than for most people because I live in a rural area where the night sky is not hidden by the lights of a city. But usually, especially during the day, I look at the sky only as the distant background, like when watching a hawk fly off from the road into the sky. My mind is usually taken up by human affairs, plans, news, and the remnants of a conversation, not the empty sky.

 

But when I do look at the sky, I can get lost in it. The vastness overwhelms me and, interestingly, I then see more clearly. This can be a great lesson. When my mind quiets, my perception improves. Why does that happen?

 

There are so many questions about perception and the best ones are not only scientific but philosophical. We look at the world and think the world is as we perceive it. When we see a tree, we think it is just there, entirely separate from us. We see the blue sky and don’t feel the blue is our own artwork. We think it is out there, on its own. But is that true? And, if so, to what degree? To what degree, if at all, does what is perceived depend on the perceiver? I won’t even go into the toughest question of them all, and that is how is it that I can perceive, or be conscious, at all? Teachers need to ask these questions of themselves and their students.

 

Remember the game of peek-a-boo? It’s a common and wonderful game to play with children, who are not sure that the world, you, their parents, will not disappear when they close their eyes.  The question is, if you close your eyes, what is it that remains of what was seen?

 

To better understand the role of the perceiver in what is perceived, maybe start by thinking of a person who is colorblind. If you’re color blind, can you imagine the world full of color? Or if you’re not color blind, can you imagine how your sense of the world might change if the world was less rich with color, closer to grey and white? Or can you imagine seeing the world with four primary colors, like some fish, instead of three? Or, better yet, try to imagine you’re a dog or a cat. A cat has less visual acuity than a human, but their ability to perceive movement or see at night is far superior to your own. A dog’s sense of smell is at least 10,000 times stronger than yours and a cat’s is almost as strong as the dog’s. This sense of smell is further enhanced as the nose has the quickest route to the brain of any sense. Smell, even in a human, is also the first sense to fully develop. The messages received by the nose go directly to the older emotional centers of the brain.  The cat or dog thus moves through a world of emotions arising as scents. They move through a world defined largely by scents just like you move through a world of sights.

 

What our eyes sense is light waves, not color. Color is the way we perceive a certain wavelength of light to which our senses (and brain) are sensitive. There is so much light out there that we just aren’t equipped to see. So, the world without beings who can sense is full of different wavelengths of light, but not colors. Wavelengths of sound, but not symphonies. Floating molecules that can stimulate smells, but not the delicious aroma of liquid chocolate.

 

What we see and who sees are thus inextricably tied together. They are one.

 

So, when you look at the sky, I recommend that you just look, without any inner commenting. Or, if you’re in a room, use your imagination. Let your body settle down. Focus on breathing in and then breathing out. And let come to mind the blue sky in all its vastness. No wind, no disturbances, just an open, bright, blue sky. How do you feel when the sun is shining and the sky is clear? A wonderful feeling, isn’t it?  Just sit with this sense of openness, this clarity and spaciousness.

 

When the mind is open and spacious, then self-concern, self-description, self-commentary are all dissolved. There is not a you, here, and the sky over there, separate, off in the distance. The sky is no longer a baby blue color off in the distance on a cloudless and quiet day. The sky is right in front of your face. It is so close, you don’t see it or think of it as sky. You don’t label it, separate from it, but you do breathe it. Or, better yet, it is simply breathed.  You do nothing. Openness of sky just meets openness of mind.

 

Can this be done? Can you perceive the world and other people with such openness, with no distance, and with everything beginning with a breath?

Why Deny Science? What Do You Do When You Don’t Know?

I was reading a great article in the latest issue of National Geographic, by Joel Achenbach, on the modern movement against science. Actually, I can’t stand calling it a movement. There should be a better word for it, maybe collective delusion. The cost of denying science is incalculable. Science shows the state of the environment, for example, is degrading rapidly. Yet, if the article is correct, only about “40% of Americans accept that human activity is the dominant cause of climate change” and thus realize we can and must do many things to improve the situation. I encourage everyone to read the article.

 

The article shows that strong sentiment against science is not new. The persecution of Galileo is one good example. There was a great outrage against Darwin, that partially continues even today. The novel Frankenstein is in many ways an expression of the fear against not only technology but science. You might think that by now, when we’re in the age of information technology, which depends on science for its very existence, there would be more trust in science. But as the deniers of  global warming prove, as people who argue against teaching evolution in schools prove, scientific thinking, and maybe critical thinking, is clearly misunderstood and probably feared.

 

Why is this true? It’s certainly a great question for teenagers to think about. My students in the past had theories. Maybe the dependence on science makes the fear of it more potent. It’s easy to fear what you depend on but don’t understand. Is there a general anti-intellectual bias in American culture? Is it, as has been argued in books like The Closing of the Western Mind, a phenomenon arising originally from uniting Christianity with imperial power, or religious belief with politics?

 

Many people I know hold religion responsible for this lack of understanding. Certainly, scientific and religious explanations often disagree. And there have been countless examples of delusion by religious people claiming to act out of faith or belief. But the same could be argued regarding adherents to political and economic theories or analyses. Without any fact checking, I think I can reasonably argue that for the last 150 years, adherents of Fascism, Communism, and Capitalism have caused as much delusion and suffering as has any religious belief system.

 

The article conjectures not knowing what evidence is, which I interpret as not knowing how to critically examine evidence and bias, contributes to science denial.  I agree. However, I think the problem is also due to not knowing how to deal well with not-knowing and uncertainty. Achenbach says “our brains crave pattern and meaning.” The craving for an answer can be overwhelming; the more basic and important the reality, the stronger the craving. You perceive something and in microseconds you assign meaning. You need to know that the earth under your feet won’t give way when you step on it or you won’t be able to walk. You learn early on that certain uncomfortable sensations in your midsection are hunger pains. The good taste of food was originally there to tell you that the food you’re tasting is not poison. Uncertainty is hunger for certainty; it’s uncomfortable. How do you understand discomfort? Is it “bad”? Does it mean you are in danger and must do whatever possible to end it, including believing in what restores comfort instead of what is best supported by evidence? Achenbach talks about a “confirmation bias,” the “tendency to look for and see only evidence that confirms what they already believe.” In that case, you will not do very well with adversity or stress or anything requiring complex thinking.

 

And science demands complex thinking. The National Geographic article points out that “scientific results are always provisional,” subject to change;  “Uncertainty is inevitable at the frontiers of knowledge.” How do you hear that? Do you want truth to be absolute, simple and forever? If so, I doubt that many “truths” are like that. For example, the good taste of food indicating something is safe to eat depends on where and when you’re talking about. 10,000 years ago it might have been true. Today, thanks to pollutants and pesticides, the taste of raw foods can’t be counted on to indicate safety. Even something like the boiling point of water is dependent on elevation, amount of salt and other contents in the water, etc.. The relativity and provisional quality of truth can be disturbing. Achenbach points out how difficult it is for us to look beyond our intuitions, to see the evidence for the curves of the earth despite the everyday assumption of flatness. Although scientific studies can be distorted by funding sources and bias, the very fact that science is recognized as provisional makes it possible and mandatory that critical minds engage with it.

 

To live with discomfort and uncertainty and be able to think and act with clarity, you need first to understand that discomfort is part of learning. It is there to wake up your attention so you can consider whether to say yes, no or maybe to something. You need to know about neuroplasticity, a word meaning that the brain changes, you change, with every experience. Who you are is not set in stone; if it was, learning would be impossible.

 

You need to know how attention and perception work. Back in 2003, I started using a book called Multimind, by Robert Ornstein, in my psychology class unit on perception. Ornstein theorizes Mental Operating Systems in the brain, which process and assign value to information according to specific criteria. Information that meets these criteria is given attention and other information is ignored. The MOS has an “extreme sensitivity to recent information,” to what’s new, what’s changed. It values relevance to you and everything becomes meaningful through comparison. Something that changes gradually is lost. Global warming is gradual, so gradual that most of us don’t perceive it until the tidal wave or tornado or six feet of snow or extreme hot or cold temperatures hit you. Actually, we don’t perceive it unless we carefully study it, unless we value such studying and thus know the relevance and power of the information.

 

But intellectual knowledge is not enough. You need the intention, the commitment, the care. You need an experiential method to calm your mind and clearly observe and learn from whatever is present to you, even discomfort and pain. Constructive action is likely only when you perceive the situation clearly. Somehow, we all have to get better at cradling information, cradling the world in our arms so we can feel depths of meaning without hiding from or reacting against it.

 

*See the addendum to this blog.

**The photo is of the Temple of Athena in Delphi, Greece.

Awareness Is Political

I woke up this morning about 6 am. It was still dark. I got out of bed, walked around and almost stepped on my 7 month old kitten, Milo. Instead of being freaked out, I was happy, not only that I didn’t step on him but that I could see him, or just see, period. Maybe because of now being a “senior citizen” I am more aware of what someday I will lose. There was fear at the opposite side of the joy, fear of losing sight and my other senses. And hurt. I felt what I imagined Milo might feel if I stepped on him. He would not know why I hurt him.

 

Perception is not just about information. My seeing makes it possible to step around and reach out to pet him. As I sense him, a feeling of approach or avoidance arises, then like, dislike or indifference. Then memories, of how he rolls over to get my attention or how he chases our other cats. There is relationship.

 

Our perceptions and emotions link us to others and our world, a world from which we are never, even for an instance, separate. Yet, do we always feel this? Of course not. We can lose the sense of connection even more easily than we lose the sense of sight. Never forget that sensing connection is a sense. And we pay an enormous price for its’ loss. We pay with violence. We pay with suffering. Once painful emotions are aroused, it is easier to enact them on others. Feeling disconnected or isolated hurts and makes it easier to get angry, blame and hurt others. Thinking gets confused. Manipulation is easy. A population that is hurting is easily manipulated.

 

Empathy is the heart of connection, love and ethical action. It can take different forms. According to Paul Ekman, there is recognizing what another being thinks or feels. There’s feeling with or caring about others, and lastly, being ready to act for their welfare. I feel the pain I could cause Milo and thus shudder at the imagined hurt. Because I experience his pain, I am more careful. Some argue that such empathy will not stop violence or hurt. People often hurt themselves. Others hurt the ones they love even more frequently than those they don’t care about. If empathy doesn’t protect us from hurting those we love, when will it protect us?

 

But examine the hurt that arises with the emotion of love. To love is obviously a highly complex state that comes in all sizes and shapes. Feeling love is feeling the edge between two strong polarities. You feel entirely open and vulnerable, “connected.” You care. You feel joyous and valued. You say “yes” to the world. On the other side, you feel the possibility of loss. With love, you feel alive; you feel the moment strongly, which means you feel its impermanence. From there, it is easy to fear loss, hurt, the world saying “no” to you. You desire security, continuity, even control. When you hurt the one you love, you are trying to stop the fear. But that is the same as stopping the vulnerability, which is to stop the love. You try to protect love by ending it. It is not love that causes the hurt. It is the fear that you can’t love. Living on the edge of a sword is a highly prized skill. When you hurt yourself, instead of feeling too much, you feel too little. You hurt yourself because feeling something, even pain, is preferable to feeling nothing or feeling dead.  There is danger in feeling too little or too much.

 

So, to educate love, empathy and connection, awareness of thoughts and emotions, is a politically and socially responsible act. It makes us better citizens and neighbors. It is difficult to manipulate those who are emotionally and socially aware. It is revolutionary. I wish schools would teach it more. In the late 1960s, the slogan “the personal is political” helped rally the student and women’s movements. Maybe “awareness is political” will rally each of us today.

The Immensity of the Moment: Reaching the Other Side of Fear

All events can create unpredictable responses and results. The bigger the event, maybe the more unpredictable is what follows it⎼ the responses, the takeaways, the lessons learned.

 

This week’s eclipse had predictable effects. If we could see it, along with so many others, the moment was startlingly immense. Unavoidably present. But for others, we couldn’t see it at all.

 

My wife and I drove about 25 miles to a park on a lake near the path of totality. Earlier in the day, clouds shared the sky with the sun. But, as the moment drew closer, the cloud cover deepened. The air grew very cold. Several robins started singing loudly and then grew completely silent. And to the north, a darkness rose through the clouds. Although we knew it was coming it still defied expectations. It was black, darker than a heavy storm cloud, but only for a portion of the sky. And in 2 minutes, it was gone. Even such big events can last but a moment.

 

It reminded me, maybe most of us who made the effort to experience it, that the universe is not under human control. It’s impossibly bigger and beyond us. We felt small, maybe some of us felt humbled by it, frightened as well as awed. I imagined the terror our human ancestors must have felt at moments like this, in times before the development of science and maybe before primal people’s had their own ways of anticipating cosmic events.

 

One thing I didn’t predict was an insight into the hyperobjective nature of climate change that I wrote about in my last blog; the fact that the dangers posed by the climate emergency are beyond our comprehension, beyond what evolution has prepared us to deal with.

 

During the daytime, as we look up to the sky at the infinite blue emptiness, or we witness this eclipse ⎼ or on a clear night, when we see the unfathomable array of stars ⎼ we can feel so small, so powerless to affect the universe on this cosmic scale. And maybe one reason we can’t digest the threat posed by the climate crisis is because it entails truly believing, feeling we humans do affect the universe, or this world at least. We do have some control. We are the universe.

 

Maybe our personal effect on the universe is incalculably small, but collectively, here on earth, it’s noticeable. We can dry up or burn down the surface of the earth; we can darken the cloud cover with pollution or shake the heavens with aircraft. This isn’t quite the moon eclipsing the sun. But we can eclipse the sun in other ways, for example by burning fossil fuels we change climate patterns. And these effects last far longer than the eclipse did.

 

And I wondered why we don’t feel this immensity of sky and universe more often. How can we change this, and change our as yet inadequate response to climate change? A total eclipse doesn’t happen every day. But an incomprehensible sky is with us every day. A desire to fully embrace our lives is here every moment. The climate crisis is here every moment.

 

Sometimes, we feel regret, maybe for not getting to see the eclipse or for something we’ve said or done. But the most fortunate regret, one we might experience most often, is the regret over a half-lived or ignored moment. Or maybe any regret is a mirror of this regret. Regret over a lost past is really a realization of a lost now. A lost future. Regret over a future we might never get to see or a dread over what that future might be like for ourselves or our children. Or maybe what I’m describing is regret transmuting into grief or fear. …

 

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

Companions Who Walk with Us Moment by Moment

COVID has been devastating to our communities and culture, terrifying to so many of us. But it had one positive result for me, and others. Our relationship with other species in our neighborhoods was enriched. As we became more distanced from other people, birds, turkeys, fox, peepers, possum, deer, bear, rabbits, eagles, owls⎼ all our non-human neighbors, depending on where we lived, jumped more frequently to the center of our attention, and became, sort of, friends.

 

Of course, the bear that crushed our bird feeder one early morning and knocked on our front door was a little scary and we had to chase it away. And one night at about 3:00 am one of our cats stood up on our bed, hissed loudly, and woke us up to a raccoon coming in the cat door. The raccoon got stuck and I had to push him out with an oak cane.

 

In the spring morning, the gold and purple finches, cardinals, and red winged black birds added color and songs to the air, and later, the peepers such comfort. And taking walks with such companions as oak trees leaning against each other to speak, and ravens coughing as they flew overhead added wonders to my day.

 

But hearing about the climate emergency and the extinction crisis we face⎼ I felt so bereft. I felt such grief over the increasing instability of nature itself, weather disasters, and the loss of species ⎼ for example, frogs, peepers, and salamanders, about one-third of amphibians ⎼ 12% of bird species, all threatened with extinction, as well as ash trees which used to fill the forests near my home. We must all take this emergency very seriously.

 

These species are not just companions. They are intimate mirrors of our lives and mental state that we can see them everywhere. The deep red of the Japanese maple in the garden, which is more of a bush than a tree⎼ what amazing feeling is right there. A crow flies overhead and its harsh call echoes in our body.

 

We often think of ourselves as located behind these two eyes, a mind isolated in this shell of a body, a shell within a shell within a shell. And only within this shell can we locate what is most intimately ourselves. Or we think of the red color and harsh call as coming from “outside” us.

 

Yet, is not that Japanese maple and the crow also, in some way, intimately ourselves?

Don’t we carry those colors and sounds in us? We don’t just hear and see and feel them. We give them life. The red of the cardinal is how our mind gifts color to the electromagnetic or light waves bouncing off the bird’s breast. Color is the way we perceive a wavelength of light to which our eyes are sensitive.

 

The harshness of the crow’s voice is how our mind translates the sound wave frequencies emitted by the bird. That red, that song is intimately us. No us, no song, just wavelengths.

Because conscious perception is awareness aware of itself, it simultaneously looks within as it looks out. It is a deeply felt mystery that we live. When we stop playing the shell game, the world is most intimately ourselves.

 

*To read the whole article, please go to the Good Men Project.

 

When Sleep Eludes Us: Instead of Focusing on the Sleep We’re Losing, Notice the Moment We’re Gaining

Last night, I fell asleep around 12:30 am and woke up about an hour later. It’s not unusual for me to wake up several times in the night due to pain and other reasons. Or to wish the hour was later and the night closer to being over. Or to hear myself wishing that for once, couldn’t I just sleep through the night. Then I tire of that.

 

I look outside the window at the night sky. The trees, stripped naked by winter, form a delicate lattice pattern made visible by a graying sky. The sight broadens my perspective. And I sit down and hold both the discomfort and pain that woke me up along with the sky that surrounded me and everything else. And I go back to bed and sleep.

 

I notice the quality of the night because I’ve learned from previous sleepless moments and writing about them how important it is to do so.

 

I learned that how I responded to waking up was crucial to getting back to sleep. And to be aware of my response required a specific sort of sensing, and monitoring, a mindful, open, non-judgmental one. One that allowed me to see the reality I was facing with more clarity.

 

Pain and sleeplessness can be so awful and disruptive. But maybe the worst part of it, and what deepens it into suffering, is feeling powerless before it or not knowing what caused it. If we think our chest pain is the beginning of a heart attack, we feel the pain more intensely than if we think we have stomach gas. If we’ve had the pain in the past and seen a doctor, received answers about what’s causing the symptom and how to treat it (and that it’s treatable), it’s often easier to face.

 

And when we are ready and can face what we feel, or expand our vision beyond it, we have the possibility of transforming it. In dreams and nightmares, when we run from the monster that chases us, it gets bigger. So far in my life, almost every time I turned towards the monster, it turned away from me or transformed into something either friendly or less fearsome.

 

So how we respond to what happens is as important as the fact we experienced it. Knowing this is powerful. It can take us out of our ideas of who we are and let us return to the broader reality of what we’re feeling right now.

 

I learned from being awake in the depths of night to notice and let go of any thoughts or expectations I had about what I’d see or hear. And to look specifically for beauty. To befriend the night as much as I could. To recognize darkness can be intriguing and can illuminate what was formerly hidden….

 

*To read the whole piece, please go to The Good Men Project.

Spirit Music, and A Study in Sincerity

Today was a tough day. My body hurt in so many places and for reasons that are beyond my knowing. And the daily news is so mixed, the horrible mixed with the beautiful. Yet…

 

Even on days like today, we can read, hear, or see something that takes us someplace totally unanticipated, to a mind-state, or a universe so alive, so conscious, that moments which once seemed painful, tired, or sad are transformed into something wonderful we embrace with all our being.

 

I’m reading a book called Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape, by the poet and translator of Chinese literature, David Hinton. And I feel this. I’ve felt this in other books by Hinton, and books by other poets, and philosophers, historians, meditators, travelers, and psychologists. I’ve felt this with certain people, animals, and places.

 

Books have forever been a way to inform, challenge, and inspire us, to understand what before was incomprehensible. They allow a depth of examination that other formats don’t. For me, the internet, tv, social media all favor little sound or information bites that keep us more focused on the surface of things.

 

But the words in books like Hinton’s are spirit-music. When we read them, if we’re open to them, if we can inhabit them so we walk as the inhabitants in the books walked, we create something never seen before, yet ancient. The very air breathes us, speaks the words with us.

 

Hinton says, “Things are themselves only as they belong to something more than themselves: I to we, we to earth, earth to planets and stars…” We recognize ourselves and become truly ourselves only with others, in whatever place, time, and universe we are in.

 

The first chapter is called ‘sincerity.’ Hinton says the Chinese character for sincerity depicts a side view of a person walking or standing next to words rising out of a mouth. A lie attempts to hide the truth from others, but usually hides the universe and others from ourselves. This creates an inner tension. If we’re sincere, our thoughts are the same as the words we speak; all of what happens supposedly “outside,” in language, mountain, and sky, opens inside. And what we say unites us with where we are and who we’re with; it reveals to us that, in fact, we’re the universe itself speaking.

 

Sincerity raises us like a parent’s love, one that is absolute, yet clear seeing and adapting. We each have different loves, different doorways to the mysterious. Everything provides such a doorway if we can find it. Sincerity is the sign that marks the door.

 

When I was teaching secondary school literature, philosophy, or history, the students and I talked about finding that doorway. Children, especially teenagers, are not shy about calling out insincerity and respect the care and trust expressed by sincerity. For example, poetry can often be so difficult to comprehend. But when we read a poem with full attention, a word, phrase, or image would stand out, but which word or image did that was different for different students. And once we realized the door was there, we could feel or question our way in deeper….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

After the Celebration, Then What?

A big event occurs. You graduate from high school or college, you win the lottery, get married, and what do you expect next from your life? You imagine the joy of seeing the winning numbers going on forever. You imagine the ceremony, the parties, the honeymoon. But after the celebrating, what then? Do you imagine cleaning the house? Taking out the trash?

 

We expect the world would be changed or we would be changed. That the quality of our experience of life would be better, heightened, maybe. Or the quality of our mind would be different. And it is, but not like we expected. We are always changing. But we easily get caught up in the idea or the story we tell ourselves instead of the reality or totality.

 

Especially today, when the level of anxiety is so high due to all the threats to so many of us, and so many aspects of our lives, including our sense of humanity and the climate, our health or control over our own bodies, it is easy to expect or hope for even more from any event than it could possibly produce. For example, we could work to successfully elect a candidate we trust, or to defeat one we knew had to be defeated, and afterwards, we expect all the threats to disappear, and the whole world would be changed. If only that were so.

 

Daniel Kahneman, professor of both psychology and public affairs described this as a “focusing illusion.” When we’re thinking about the graduation or the wedding, it is big, tremendous. When we’re in school, we might think that when we graduate, life will be so different. Or we’re in love and imagine that, once the love is celebrated and wrapped in the marriage license, we will feel more secure and loved. But what we find is a new moment, another day, another call for action. We forget how we adapt to situations, to living with a spouse or a new job or whatever it is we do after a big event.

 

We forget where feelings come from. We think the achievement itself creates the thrill of success. We think the person we love creates the love. We forget that to feel loved one must love. To be touched, one must touch. Jack Kornfield wrote a book called After the Ecstasy, The Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path. We can even view enlightenment, whatever that is, in the same way. “Once I get enlightened, all will be different.” Or “If only I’d get enlightened…” If only this or that.

 

All we ever have is moments, and moments are too slippery to ever own. They are less a thing and more what or who we are. Hopefully, most will be spent with more clarity than confusion, more compassion than anger, more love than greed. We do the best we can in the moment to learn from whatever occurs, and then let it go. To perceive and honor what is there for us without blinding ourselves with self-judgments or turning a passing moment into a permanent monument to a self. Monuments don’t feel and what isn’t perceived can’t be acted upon….

 

*To read the whole piece, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

Why Is Nature Capable of Being So Comforting? We Can’t Escape the Earth or the Universe Because We Are It

Why does nature have this effect on us?

 

I take a walk in the woods and thoughts fly off like birds⎼ swallows, crows or chickadees, to be replaced by insights or a beautiful sense of quiet. Or I sit on the beach, by the ocean, and my attention goes to the seemingly infinite space over the water. My whole body seems to move rhythmically with the sound of the waves. Before I was tense, my mind and body racing. Now, as I’m sitting with the ocean, I am comforted. Relaxed.

 

Why is this?

 

I’ve used the rain, the sky, the sound of birds and peepers, crickets, and cicadas, the feel of my breath or the air on my face, the seasons, the glow of the moon in the middle of the night or the wind in the middle of the day as doors to meditation, or to calm and slow down enough so I can feel or perceive the world and myself more clearly.

 

Even an ice storm can evoke a sense of beauty; and the dark clouds of a hurricane can reveal a sense of awe⎼ right alongside the fright.

 

Being outside in nature or viewing it helps us stay healthy, happier, and recover more easily from illness. We experience less stress and pain and heal quicker in a hospital if our room has windows facing trees, streams, or mountains or there are murals of such scenes painted on the walls.

 

Something like 170,000 years ago, evolutionary changes like a loss of body hair and a subsequent need for protection from the elements led early humans to clothe themselves. Or maybe it was also for artistic reasons. Maybe as long ago as 400,000 years ago, certainly by the Neolithic Revolution of 12,000 years ago, we began to build homes, shelters from the storm, or from dangerous animals. Later, we began to build walls to protect us from our own species. We then tried to control nature or wall it away, but we couldn’t, so we walled ourselves from nature, or tried to do so.

 

Likewise, in our personal evolution, so many of us had to wall away traumas that were too much to face at the time or aspects of ourselves we didn’t know how to integrate or accept.

 

And because of this effort, of walling ourselves from nature or ourselves, the question arose: why is nature⎼ why is what we are walling away so often healing to us, despite the storms, the ice, the fires, and the bears?

 

Because nature ultimately includes everything. It’s not just trees, beaches, streams, and sky that can comfort us. Almost any aspect of nature can be used as an object for meditation and for calming ourselves, but so can almost anything we perceive. A poem, a work of visual art, a person, pet, park bench, building, a piece of paper, a question. We can use the mere act of looking to help us see more clearly, or a moment of fear to study how we construct emotions. The key is to find what comforts us….

 

 

**If you’d like more information on any of the practices referred to in this piece, click on any of the links provided, and, if possible, find a reliable and experienced teacher, therapist, mentor to be a guide.

***To read the whole blog, please click on the link to The Good Men Project.

Becoming Warriors of Presence

William Butler Yeats wrote over a century ago, in the wake of the First World War,

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…

 

We easily feel this today. One minute, I look outside my house and see an apple tree greening with spring and hear a raven’s raucous call. The next a car horn. Then, faintly, an NPR report of a bombed Mariupol, and of a GOP Congresswoman repeating Russian disinformation.

 

Which way does my mind turn? Do I relax into the calm beauty the tree and natural universe provides in this moment? Or do I get ready to battle those aiming to rip the constitutional rights and protections from my limbs and claim them all for themselves? Or who threaten to deny us the very air we need to breathe because we are not able or willing to pay their price?

 

How do we know what future will be revealed? We don’t. But we know the price we’ll pay for doing nothing is unpayable.

 

We all want an enjoyable life. One that satisfies. Maybe one with meaning. That makes the world a little better. But when the natural world itself or the sustainability of the climate is threatened⎼ and the human world is degrading so fast it’s impossible to have any idea what will happen tomorrow or if anything caring, humane, and democratic will be left for us⎼ how do we not burn out or give up? How do we live day to day without degenerating into a blubbering mass, knowing we must act but not knowing what it is we can do?

 

David Loy, Buddhist philosopher, eco-activist and author gave a talk on Friday, April 29th. He spoke about a fellow Buddhist, from Boulder, CO, Wynn Bruce, who had immolated himself on the Supreme Court steps on Earth Day, one week earlier. Wynn’s father said he did it out of concern for our world and the lack of determined action by our political system to save it.

 

Loy quoted philosopher Noam Chomsky saying, “the world is at the most dangerous moment in human history.” How do we face this? Wynn Bruce acted. But his act was so painful and terrifying. Not the most skillful of actions to take, said Loy. But Wynn’s concern, his fear is in all of us who look and see the climate emergency that is occurring.

 

Loy went on to share author, eco-activist Joanna Macy’s piece on the Tibetan legend of a Shambhala Warrior. “There comes a time,” she recounts, “when all lives on earth are in danger.” Barbarian powers use unfathomable technologies to lay waste the world. To remove these weapons, the warriors must show great moral and physical courage, and go forth to the very heart of barbarian power. (Putin? The GOP who plotted Jan 6?)

 

But since the weapons are made by mind, the way to fight them involves mind. Our strongest weapons, she says, are compassion and insight, heart, and knowledge.

 

It seems right now that we can’t look, and we can’t look away. But maybe we’ve got it wrong. Maybe we’re asking the wrong questions….

 

**To read the whole article, go to The Good Men Project.