Imaginal

So much so-called spiritual writing is about transcendence. But what are the writers trying to get us to transcend? Listen to this piece from well known “new-age” writer, Eckhart Tolle from his book New Earth: “Space consciousness represents not only freedom from ego, but also from dependency on the things of this world, from materialism and materiality.” Well, guess what Mr Tolle, this material world gave birth to us, dreamt us into existence if you like, supports us through our lives, and when we finally die, takes us back into the earth (when we become energy and food for other creatures). Why is there so much distaste for the lovely messiness of this world, and a desire for the abstract purity of “space consciousness”?

Now, I for one, don’t want to escape from this materiality, even if I could! In fact, I want to embrace if fully, and give thanks to it, and honour the material dimension of our lives. As I said in my last post, we need to see the denial of our own embodiment, animality and inclusion in the natural order as a major reason why we distance ourselves from nature.

Don’t confuse materialism and materiality. Materialism, is often the word used, perhaps incorrectly, for consumerism, our insatiable appetite for things. Materiality is the dimension in which we live, now (and this really is the Power of Now). We don’t live in space! We live on, or perhaps more appropriately, in the earth. We are not disembodied beings. And our “sensible” material bodies are brought into relation to the world around us through our eyes, ears, noses, skin, and tongues, as it has done for much of human history.

Listen to another view of earth and materiality, this time from David Abram who is a cultural ecologist, philosopher, and performance artist, the creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics and the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. David says: “If humankind seems to have forgotten its thorough dependence upon the earthly community of beings, it can only be because we’ve forgotten (or dismissed as irrelevant) the sensory dimension of our lives”. And also this: “Sensory experience … is the way our body binds its life to the other lives that surround it, the way the earth couples itself to our thoughts and our dreams.”

So, we need to acknowledge the aliveness of the world around us, and not see it as a trap for our spiritual journey. We are part of the body of the earth, not a spiritual being trapped inside a base material body. We do not need to aspire to a transcendent, abstract god (or spirit), living above us in an ethereal realm. What we really need, especially in this time of change, is to attune to the (multi-voiced and multi-faceted) spirits of the place where we are currently living – the earth, our locale, our place. We need, as David Abram says: “Practices that draw human groups into ever deeper accord with the exuberant nature that surrounds them, enabling community to thrive in reciprocity with a flourishing terrain.”

So stop, and listen: the earth is calling you. Can you hear the whispers on the wind? Can you feel the energy of the sun? Can you (will you) connect with the gaze of another animal, knowing that his or her eyes function just like yours?

Rebecca Solnit has written that the compassion emphasizes emotional generosity and the ability to respond to others. Imagination identifies what it takes to be able to extend yourself that way in the first place, to let another person (I would add another species) in.

Cleary we need a world with more compassion, for ourselves, other humans, and the species with whom we share this world. (It is of course hard to have compassion for the world and others if we don’t have compassion for ourselves.) What would it take for us to extend ourselves in this way? What does it take to imagine the earth in a hundred years from now? How can we extend our imaginations to look through the stuff we buy (and throw away) to see the impacts of each purchase and how it impacts on the world around us in destructive ways? Modern society tries to hide and ignore these impacts, so we need look deeply into these things. This takes a radical imagination.

Unfortunately, our current understanding of what it means to be human is based on a highly individualised, self enclosed and self referential ego, an ego that drives us away from connection and relationship, away from compassion for others. We currently privilege rational, abstract and heroic ways of being; ways of being that are controlling and dominating. We need to develop alternate ways of knowing, based on feelings, emotions and intuition, if we are to extend ourselves in the first place. This way of knowing is metaphoric and symbolic, and creates a new way of thinking and feeling.

So, the big question is: How do we extend our identities to include the world around us, and other species? That is, how do we create an ecological imagination in a distracted world? Can we develop the capacity to re-imagine our selves and the world in radically different ways and treat the world as alive and full of meaning, as deserving of both moral and ethical consideration?

We need to see the denial of our own embodiment, animality and inclusion in the natural order as a major reason why we distance ourselves from nature. As Val Plumwood said, “The resulting delusions of being ecologically invulnerable, beyond animality and ‘outside nature’ leads to the failure to understand our ecological identities and dependencies on nature.”

What is the first step on this journey of re-imagining the world? Here is where our empathetic imaginations are needed. As well as a bit of resistance and defiance! We need, as Val Plumwood has said, the ability to “resist and challenge the assumptions underlying our control and consumption extravaganza we so naively identify with the good, civilised life and move to a sustainable form of human culture.”

This requires homo reflectus rather than homo sapiens. We need to get of our minds and into our bodies, extend our identities, listen to nature with empathy, and reflect on our predicament. I would like to offer you this practice for your imagination. Let me know how it goes.

Environmentalism has become very shallow in these “end-of-the-world” days when the garments of nature and culture are unravelling, and wearing thin. (In earlier times, these garments used to support us on our journey into, through, and out of life.)

These days we are bombarded with behavioural requests: turn off your lights, turn off the standby! These simple minded and crude attempts at being green hardly assist us to work towards healing the chasm that exists between nature and humanity.

Rarely are feelings of intimacy with nature evoked or explored. The imaginative space of wonder in nature seem to have been lost in favour of small behavioural changes, resulting in a loss of the rich history of nature as mysterious, numinous and as a guide to personal revelation. How can we heal nature when we no longer have nature in our hearts? How can we dream our lives and souls into their full existence when the dream of the earth is denied?

We are living through an impoverished story of our place in the world, mainly through the stories of reductionist scientific rationalism, and technocratic dreams of control and mastery. We have become entranced with wires, wheels and widgets. We have removed the heart and aliveness of matter and nature, and reduced it to a backdrop and resource for the everyday world of business and busy-ness. In this reduced story, humanity seems to have no idea of its how to find a grander purpose and meaning beyond the artificially constructed consumerist drive, and its narcissistic tendencies.

What we need more than anything else are stories that situate humanity as part of nature, as caretakers for a planet under siege. We need stories of being in relationship with an alive and purposeful nature. Stories that tap the roots of our deep imagination so we can re-imagine ourselves ecologically, where nature is revered for its role in supporting our very existence.

Where are these stories? Have they been lost forever? Will you share your story with us?

At this time on earth, we seem to be rushing mindlessly into the abyss. We are now experiencing (or, through denial, failing to experience) symptoms of our discordant and indulgent lifestyles (symptoms such as global warming, species extinctions, extreme poverty, war, terror, mass starvation – should I go on?).

While many may view these symptoms as problems to be solved, there is an alternative view of of symptoms as indicating something to be experienced and felt on a much deeper level. I would like to expound an alternative idea of these symptoms, influenced by the thinking of Robert Romanyshyn.

Rather than our typically modern approach of wanting to evaluate and diagnose the symptoms in order to “cure” them (and cure them quickly), our task, I believe, is to treat the symptoms as a call to listen and give voice to what would otherwise remain silenced, to challenge us in remembering what we have forgotten.

Perhaps the symptoms are revealing that our societies need to listen deeply to what is, at core, an ethical and moral problem (dare I say “spiritual”?), and not a technical problem. That is, it is the way we live on, and our attitudes to, this earth, (our one and only home) and our failure to imagine an alternative to mass industrial society and consumer culture that is the root cause of the symptoms.

While there is much talk of sustainabilty these days, there is little talk of what it means to be human, in an authentic way, in these perilous times. While the end of the world may indeed be nigh, that does not mean we can escape the injunction to live an authentic life, even up to the end. And remember, the end is also a new beginning. So, in a sense, the world does not come to an end.

We need to make visible the pathology of the current age by challenging current dominant values, such as: rationalism; disembodiement; privileging of certain ways of knowing;domination of women, nature and other animals; belief in infinite progress; industrialism; individual privacy; hyper-seperation from the earth; scientism; and many others. We need to challenge the concept of the earth as inanimate, as resource for our use, rather than the knowing the earth as alive with intentionality, meaning and purpose.

It is our industrial way of life, and our industrial way of thinking, that needs to be challenged.

This post takes a quick look at how environmental problems are constructed and viewed, and whether the conventional approach to changing society is up to the task.

Typically environmental problems are constructed through a scientific, technology and policy lens. Such a lens minimises the need for societal wide transformation and adopts a minimalist, incremental and shallow approach, mainly through policy and advocacy (legislative change) or populist campaigns (turn off or change the lights campaigns). It fails to argue for a radical transformation in societal governance, institutions and culture. This approach adopts the mainstream values of dominant society, which are a rationalist, detached and scientific view, often failing to recognise the social, cultural and psychological dimensions of issues.

The shadow side of the rationalist approach is that it reinforces the dominant culture instead of challenging it. We have backgrounded alternative ways of being in the world, based on engagement, connectedness, emotion, relationship and nurturance. It is no accident that these backgrounded values, emanating as they are from the feminine, are hidden or denied by patriarchal approaches. We need to address the anthropocentrism (human-centredness) of western ethics and practice, and the dualisms (mind-body, nature-culture) that create fault-lines and hierarchies in our society.

If the detached observer view of the world dominates, it creates a lens, both literal and metaphorical, through which the world is viewed. This view is one devoid of sensory engagement, or in other words a disembodied one. This is a way of thinking that has taken leave of its senses (literally and figuratively) through the denial of a bodily way of knowing the world (through both the senses and a felt sense). It results in a consciousness that creates a body fit only for amusement (since it does not have a role in knowing the world), a body insatiable in its demand for pleasure, distractions and stimulations. Are our overly rationalistic approaches giving rise to lifestyles (and bodies) that are inherently dangerous to the earth? How can people think of themselves as green, when they have little or no sensory engagement with nature, and the world around them?

What we really need is for people to love and be in the world, and not treat the world as a “resource” for our trivial needs and wants. The world is NOT a resource; it is NOT there to be used (how do you feel when you are used?). It is home for other lives that should have moral and ethical standing. Other lives that have been forgotten, minimised, and trivialised.

Can we work towards a transformation of our (ego) consciousness from one that seeks domination and control, to one based on an engaged planetary consciousness, in awe of the mystery and magic of the universe? We desperately need people to see the world and all other beings with loving eyes.