The last article linked environmental protection to our ultimate survival. This article, in contrast, raises the question of whether we should consider environment as a living essence and, therefore, nourish and protect it carefully out of a shared sense of “loving-kindness” or compassion. We should be clear first of all that compassion in no way denotes “pity.” Compassion means exactly what it suggests: to feel together or along with another being. The expression, Loving-kindness, is an English approximation of the Hebrew word, hesed, also used for the Buddhist concept, Metta to denote impersonal concern and caring (love) for other beings and for the world around us.
Why is it important that we go beyond protecting our environment simply for the sake of community and ultimately personal survival? Perhaps it is so that we become fully enriched through co-existence and even exchange with our environment.* Through energy exchange we may fully recognize our human nature as part of the living community of all being. We may also recognize this community of being as extending from the level of energy being – atoms and sub atomic energies — through stages of molecular being, eventually to communities of plant and fellow animal beings. In short, we go beyond seeing the world outside ourselves as essentially dead – described in terms of “it” — to recognize that we are fully alive in a shared vitality embracing all things.
We commonly see and experience our aliveness in terms of the bodies we see, feel, smell, taste, and hear. While we may intellectually know that the source of life as represented in particle form extends beyond this perceived body, we may seldom deepen that knowledge to embrace true understanding – a knowledge involving our entire being. Our bodies begin from the uniting of polar –“male and female” — energies expressed in single-cell division that continues cooperatively until human form develops. Even though this cellular and even sub-cellular cooperation may not qualify as conscious, it is no less alive. In fact, our bodies die when it ceases. We might therefore be said to be most physically alive on the cellular, atomic or even sub-atomic level, our individual bodies being only material manifestations of that cooperative activity.
Once we see our essential aliveness as transcending bodily appearance, we then recognize our live kinship with all things. The entire universe, in fact, draws energy and form from this exact shared process of sub-particle cooperation. Once we comprehend this view, nothing around us can be seen as “dead” in the sense of lifeless. Though energy cooperation may cease within one manifestation or body, it then reorganizes to present itself through another. As the expression says: “Life goes on,” but without the implied notion that something or someone “dead” has been left behind.
Perceiving life connection with all things draws us to recognize all things as essentially one: the boundary between self and universal being begins to blur. Where is the true life after all? Perhaps the ultimate answer is “here and also everywhere,” for every part, every body, every manifestation contains the whole. We are truly inseparable from the universe around us. Life energy unites and sustains us all, from the most seemingly inanimate rock to the most delicate and ephemeral butterfly.
We then recognize care for our environment as care for life itself and, in fact, care for the same life-force that nourishes our own particular being. We are truly one with our environment, whether immediate or universal. The energy that vitalizes our particular being vitalizes all things. Therefore, to act uncaringly toward anything perceived as other than ourselves means to act in such a way as to harm our own being. In so doing we deny our true nature and indeed the nature of life itself.
The concept of relationship between environment and human energy is not new. Biblical writers describe pestilence as visited on the people because of unfaithfulness and misdeed. Later, in myth tradition reflected in superstition, environmental health is seen as reflecting the ruler’s beneficence or evil. This Tradition is best represented in Western mythology by stories surrounding the illusive “Fisher King,” found in Celtic and Arthurian legend.** In these varied stories, the land returns from desolation to bounty when the king’s festering groin wound is healed. The pure intention of the healer overcomes turbulent emotions and tormented thoughts, allowing the king, and by extension the land, to heal and to become once again fertile.
Our present realization of how we affect our environment is enhanced through growing understanding of cause and effect. We now easily comprehend the need for soil conservation, following the “dust bowl” years of the 1930s. It remains to be seen how thoroughly we learn lessons posed by the present Gulf of Mexico oil spill and how we adjust our actions accordingly.
Biblical writing and mythology both suggest a relationship between human intention and environmental health. It can hardly be far-fetched to see the current environmental disaster threatening the entire Gulf of Mexico as reflective of our collective desire for cheap and locally produced energy at the expense of all else. Intention, therefore, also has a role in how we affect our environment, at least to the extent that intention drives activity. Conversely, intention alone may not provide healing to any environment, but there can be little doubt that healing energy sent by multiple concentrated minds can only enhance healing action.
As concentrated intention is part of our nature in human manifestation, it follows that we may do much to “heal” natural disaster through focused thought. Surrounding the Gulf of Mexico and bathing its waters with healing thoughts seems only positive in the face of its present crisis. It may be healing both to us and to the Gulf environment to envision a continuous line of human beings surrounding and embracing the Gulf, hand in hand, chanting the universal “Om” of oneness and healing.
These ideas emphasize that we are all united in energy as one with our environment. Therefore, we can and do interchange healing energy with our environment through concentrated action. As we feel the influence of our environment, so may we influence our environment, healing our environment as it provides healing to us!
We are all one within the great unity of life.
© Douglas Boyd-Robinson
*See the idea of “exchange” as presented in The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery: http://www.angelfire.com/hi/littleprince/frames.html.
** A full account of the Fisher King legend can be found at: http://www.uiweb.uidaho.edu/student_orgs/arthurian_legend/grail/fisher/.
Resources for this article:
Collective energy as advocated by those at ClearWater Perspective: http://clearwaterperspective.wordpress.com/ and by Joe Norman and others at Planetary Partners: http://planetarypartners.com.
Joe Norman discusses the power collective action may have for healing both the Gulf environment and ourselves at: http://www.masaru-emoto.net/english/e_ome_home.html.
Mary Ann Reiger provides a guided meditation for healing the Gulf at Lightworks.org: http://lightworkers.org/node/106976.
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