Talk: Green Awakening

Okay, it's the right microphone, it's the right camera, it's recording to the right place, the right people are here, and we're talking about green awakening. A lot of these ideas came out of a series of workshops that I did with Deven Thomas at Buddhafield last year, so I just want to acknowledge that at the start. There's other things mixed in as well. Maybe I'll start by describing a very brief experience I had a few days ago. Satya and I started doing a vigil for the Earth every Tuesday. Satya did one every day for a year leading up to COP, and we decided to carry that on as a group. And this week it was in the middle of— it was just after one of the big storms. I don't know if it was Storm Arwen or the one after, but it was cold and windy and rainy, and it was just the two of us. And I went up to where there's a couple of trees just to check that there wasn't anybody, and because we'd been meeting around the corner from where we actually sit. And I had this impulse to check with the trees, 'Oh, how do you feel about us being here?' And to check with the rocks, 'How do you feel about us being here?' Which sounds very odd to a sort of Western materialistic mind, but The impulse came up, so I just sent that question over to the trees: how do you feel about us being here? And the rocks and stones, and their intuitive response was very happy. They're very pleased that we were sitting there, which is Ling for the earth. And I guess maybe I've been thinking of this talk and the workshop that I did with Divan Right at the end of the series of workshops, he read a poem about how to approach a tree before you hug it. And there's various— you should approach— I don't know if it was from a particular tradition or just this one person's view, but you approach from this side. When you're this many paces away, you ask for permission, and then you kind of sense, am I welcome or not? And then you get a bit closer and ask the question again. Quite an indigenous way of relating to the natural world. And a couple of years ago, when I was doing the Wild Therapy training, we were kind of playing around with ideas like this. How is it to, to relate to the world around you as if it's got a life of its own, almost as if You know, in— they say in Zen that mountains and rivers have Buddha nature. What if they have some quality of consciousness? They certainly have very vivid lives of their own. And occasionally when I was testing this out, I would walk through the woodland and had such a strong sense of all the different communities of living beings, the trees speaking to each other through the very fine fungal threads that go underneath the forest floor, bees on wildflowers, birds saying, "This is my space, don't come over here, this is my territory," or "I'm looking for a mate, is anybody free? I'm looking for a mate." And in the middle of that, I thought, mostly they don't have strong thoughts about whether I'm here or not. I just had a real sense of life unfolding that wasn't really anything to do with me. They weren't speaking to me particularly when I was wandering through the woods. They were just living their own very vivid lives. So I, I sort of am recounting those because I want to suggest that something of that way of noticing the natural world and relating to it as if it has this consciousness wouldn't be far away from how it was for people 2,500 years ago in India. To relate to the natural world. There's some school of thought that thinks these are rakshas that you hear about in the Buddhist stories, which are sometimes kind of translated as demons, but that doesn't quite fit. A better description is that they're forest spirits. They're often playful and they sometimes prank the monks and nuns. There's one that bops— I can't remember who it is— Ananda or Kashyapa on the head, or somebody like that. And he's like an invisible spirit, so he doesn't know what's happened. He's just like the Invisible Man. So there's this very playful quality to them. And you get the sense that, you know, certainly in the Mahayana canon, in the sutras, from that appear later, and in Tibet and China and so on, they're full of mythical creatures. But even in the Pāli Canon, the very oldest Buddhist teachings, which have a much more sort of down-to-earth quality about them, the Buddha appears more as an ordinary person. The world is still full of these spirits. And at one point, or several times, the Buddha instructs his disciples to respect the local shrines. And there's this sense that these would have been tree shrines, or shrines of a particular place. There was this idea that the world was alive, not just in the way that we understand it now, but that there was some sense of consciousness or beings living in the trees and the mountains and the rivers. And now I want to think about how it was for the Buddha to become enlightened in a world like that. So this is the 3 events that, that Devan pulls out of the story of the Buddha's enlightenment that I'll refer to. Now, the first is the meeting with a naga serpent. So these are— nagas are kind of mythical snakes, big creatures that are very wise often, and very old, and, um sometimes are a stand-in for sort of spiritual life force or energy. And in one of the stories of the Buddha's enlightenment, a naga stirs in its home in the deep And it's not clear whether it's kind of deep underground or deep underwater. Nagas live underwater sometimes. Sometimes they live in burrows in the earth. It just says deep underneath. It notices, oh, someone is approaching who is going to become enlightened. I better I will rouse myself and wake up and go and check out what's going on. So the serpent rises and meets the Buddha and has a chat with him. And the Buddha is a bit doubtful. He's not completely sure that he's heading towards enlightenment. And the naga becomes a bit of a cheerleader. He says, yes, this is what you're going to do. I have seen the signs. I have seen great beings become awakened in the past, and you have, you're embodying the same qualities that they embodied. You've done the same things that they did. You're walking in the way that they walked. And then the Buddha goes, yes, you're right, I am going to become enlightened. As almost as if, yes, I never had any doubts in the first place. That's what I was thinking all along. And goes towards the Bodhi tree. So there's this real vivid sense of him meeting something that has its own life and its own mind. There's also this, this idea that enlightenment is for human beings. It's not really for naga serpents. The naga himself doesn't need to become enlightened. He's lived a very long time. He's seen other Teachers come and go. Maybe he's even slept between these momentous events and just comes out to kind of witness the changes. So there's something about the natural world rising to meet the Buddha and confirming you're on the right lines, you're going the right way, you're on the right track. And maybe in your own life you've had experiences of this deep intuitive sense of, oh, I'm in the right place, I'm doing the right thing, this road is clearly the one that I should be taking. Maybe even like the Buddha, you've had doubts and then found yourself, uh, found those doubts disappearing when you go to a particular place. Years ago, I did an ecotherapy retreat with Caroline Brazier, and one of the invitations was to go to a place and ask a question of the place and just see if any answer appears. And of course, if you want to explain this in kind of Western psychological terms, you can do the change in location, maybe opening a space to some split-off parts that are, that are holding some answers that we didn't know about. But my experience was I went and sat on a track in the woods and asked this question, "Oh, what should I be doing next?" And looked up and I'm like, "Oh, here's the road stretching away in front of me." And such, from this kind of similar place of doubt to the place that the Buddha was in, coming to a very settled place of, oh, I just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other. It's like, oh, the road itself is the answer today. And I, maybe I'd have got that answer in other places or other things could have facilitated that. But in that moment, it was the landscape, me meeting the landscape that created that sense of settledness and certainty. So the Buddha then goes on and sits under the Bodhi tree. Of course, it's not called the Bodhi tree at that time. Well, I guess this is interesting. It wasn't known as the Bodhi tree before then, but the sutras describe this place as being the navel of the world. And it doesn't explain what that means. Just the— this is just the belly button of the world where this tree is. But if I think of my navel, it's right in the center. It's a place that connected me to nourishment when I was in the womb. It's that kind of place that we grow out from, you know, the tail of us and the head of us growing outward from this place as we develop. So it's important. It's a place of significance, of new beginnings. And the Buddha tries that, being in different places. Should I sit on this side? And it almost, it almost sounds like there's an experience of the world sort of tilting when he goes over here, like it's not quite— something isn't quite balanced. And then he goes to the other, another side of the Bodhi tree, and the world tilts again. And then the other side, it tilts again. And then he comes to one place and sits down, and everything is steady. It's in balance. It's lined up. So maybe there is something about this particular tree in this particular place that That is part of the conditions for his enlightenment. Maybe if he'd sat somewhere else, he wouldn't have got enlightened on the 8th of December. Obviously it wasn't called the 8th of December, 298. Maybe he would have done later on, or maybe conditions would have changed and he would have just been a good teacher but not perfectly enlightened. The sense from the sutra is this place in the landscape was an important condition to the Buddha's awakening. This time, this place, this person, all together. The Buddha isn't separate from the environment. He couldn't become enlightened just anywhere. It was this tree, not just this tree, this side of the tree. And the tree itself is, is in lots of different mythologies, is a symbol for interconnectedness. Like the World Tree in Norse mythology holds all of the different realms and is the connecting feature, um, the dwarves and the giants, the ice giants, and Midgard, where the humans live, are all joined up by the tree. So here we're beginning to get a sense that enlightenment isn't just something that's individual, it's something that is entangled, entangled in the landscape, in the time. And so the Buddha sits down and he goes through his meditations, and Mara sends the demons and the seductive daughters. And the Buddha's like, 'I don't need to pay attention to those. In fact, I'll receive them with compassion.' And when I do that, they turn into flowers. He's in such a strong state of open-heartedness and compassion that he's able to welcome all of these wayward, whether you see them as the thoughts coming up, that be, you know, these, the thoughts of ill will and the thoughts of lasciviousness that come up and become transformed in this compassionate space in his heart, or whether it really is Mara, the kind of god of death, sending things, they become transformed. The Buddha becomes enlightened. And Mara says, 'Don't believe you. Who are you to say that you're enlightened?' And they have this dialogue back and forth. And eventually the Buddha says, 'Well, I'll call upon a witness. Who's a trustworthy witness?' And the Earth says, "I will be the witness." And in some stories, she rises up half out of the ground, her kind of body emerging from the Earth and takes on a form that speaks these words. And in some, it's a kind of more diffuse sense of the whole Earth itself speaking. And she's able to witness because she's seen the whole of existence. She's trustworthy. And in the face of that, Mara goes, 'Oh, okay, fair enough. This witness is beyond impeachment. You must be enlightened,' and slinks away. And there's an interesting kind of side note here that in ancient Greek mythology— let's see if I can remember this— there's all the gods that we know about, you know, Apollo and blah blah blah blah blah, Zeus, the Olympians. But before the Olympians were the Titans. And they had a bit of a tussle and the Olympians won and became the sort of standard gods. But one of the Titans was Gaia, the earth goddess, and although she was defeated, she was trusted as a witness. So when the Greek gods were arguing, if they needed a dispute settled, they would often call on Gaia to come and affirm what, what is true in this case. And she's often depicted emerging from the earth with that half of her body coming out of the ground to say, yes, this is true, or yes, this is false. So I— it seems likely that some of the later sutras talking about the Earth Goddess were influenced by these stories that the ancient Greeks brought with them when they came to the top. Of Northern India, because in the very earliest ones the earth is there as a witness, but not in this embodied forms. Hopefully I've got that right. But again, there's this sense of the world having its own life, and both the Buddha and Mara respecting the kind of otherness of the earth and of the world around them, that the world isn't there to serve their needs. It has its own, its own way of doing things. The naga cheered the Buddha on, but then he disappeared again because he'd got his own things to tend to, his own life to go and do. And I think this is a really important point. This— the two things that I really take from this is one is the really relational quality, that the Buddha exists in relationship to all these things. He's not just a light in the darkness with nothing around him. He's in this web. And two, the respect from the Buddha to all of these other things as, as, yeah, as living beings with their own lives. I picked up a book by Bernie Glassman yesterday called Infinite Circle, just flicking through it, and in the introduction he says something like I'm paraphrasing. For thousands of years, spiritual traditions have reached for oneness. That's the work that we've been doing. But now the work is to respect diverse manifestations as diverse things as manifestations of the one. So this sense of, you know, this spiritual experience of the Buddha where everything is interconnected and he feels a great intimacy with everything and experiences the emptiness of each thing that, that it all shares this essential quality of change and of loving kindness. There's this kind of field that holds all things and this lovely experience of we're all one. But then coming back from that and, and really respecting that, oh, this thing over here which has its own life that is different to mine is also a manifestation of enlightenment. And this thing over here, which has its own life, is also a manifestation of enlightenment. And how can I really practice with that? How can I really trust that the mountains and trees and rivers are all Buddhas. Stephanie Karser, who wrote Green Buddhism, describes 4 stages of getting to know something in the natural world, and it's a kind of more secular approach, but I want to drop it in here as well in kind of contrast to this more mythic one because it shares some of the same characteristics. The first experience is the sense meeting of the world. And what does the tree feel like? What does it smell like? What does it look like? What's the temperature of the tree? And then she talks about a kind of intellectual response. What do I know about the history of this place? Where did this tree come from? Is it self-seeded? Was it planted here? Did it arrive with colonialists? What do I know about this landscape? And how is it in, in the context of, I guess, the climate and ecological emergency? How is this place suffering? What are we doing to this place that isn't nourishing it? And then an emotional response that comes out of these two different kinds of knowing, the kind of intimate knowing, which is one body physically meeting another body, and all of the stories and facts coming together, and we're moved in some way. We're moved when we see the suffering of a place. And she suggests that the thing that we're moved to is to take action, whether it's by learning to honor a place or taking up some kind of environmental action. And I guess that the, the thing that is the same about this very practical way of meeting the natural world and this much more mythical way of meeting the natural world is really understanding that it isn't there to serve me. It has its own life that began a long, long, long time ago, and it's affected by my life and it affects my life. We're entangled. But can I really come to respect it and treat it with the same compassion that I would treat a person that I care about? I'm aware that I'm sort of just placing these things in different places, and there's maybe not a strong sort of logical thread running through it, and that's partly the sleep deprivation, I think. I was really— I think I said this before the recording— so I had my booster jab yesterday, and I was really shivery in the night and awake most of the night. I just finished by saying by naming an idea that comes from a talk that Satya and I went to by somebody from the One Earth Sangha, Kristen or Kirsten Barker. Kristen or Kirsten Barker, something I should have looked up, so apologies before coming. But that she was speaking about how difficult it is to live in the world without creating suffering without consuming. We're in the system that is taking from the world. We, you know, I haven't opted out of that system. I haven't just got a robe and a bowl and gone to live in the woods. And even in that scenario, I'm still taking things to sustain myself. So she suggested that rather than thinking about reducing suffering, which we can do, but at some point becomes impossible. We can think about reciprocity, which is a feature of many indigenous cultures, that when I take something from the world, I give something back to the world, whether it's the Inuits giving a story and a dance back after they bring a polar, you know, hunt a polar bear, or. And I think this is a really lovely idea, and it really invites us to investigate what is a useful offering. What can I give back that will be welcomed? Whether it's practical or spiritual, or like with the Inuit, this kind of sense of entertaining the world as a gift. And it— for me, the idea brings me into a close relationship with the world. Anyway, I guess the upshot of this is that the Buddha wasn't enlightened on his own. He was cheered on by a snake and a very particular tree at a particular place in time and space. Innate, you know, supported him becoming enlightened, and the Earth witnessed that. He wasn't on his own. He was a creature of the Earth, supported by the Earth, and he respected that. So I guess that's simply the invitation here, is for us to really come to know and practice as if we are creatures. Of the Earth and move more and more deeply into respecting that web of life that contains us and connects us. Namaste. So I'm happy to take any questions or comments from Zoom, or maybe I'll just stop the recording