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Spirit of the
Earth
The following is an article 'Spirit
of the Earth' by John Seed first published in Yoga Journal,
Issue 138, February 1998. As in the Yoga Journal, the article below is
preceded by an essay by the late and much-lamented Yoga Journal editor
Rick Fields:
'The Time is Now'. Rick had a deep understanding of the embeddedness of
spirit in nature as will be clear from his essay below and he will be
sorely missed by many.
The
Time is Now
By Rick Fields
A growing recognition that we need a
spiritual response to the ecological devastation of our planet is taking
shape under many banners: spiritual ecology, deep ecology, Earth-based
spirituality, eco-psychology, feminist ecology, creation spirituality, Gaia
consciousness, and Dharma Gaia to name just a few. Thinking about all these
variants, it occurred to me that they can all be considered as a kind of
yoga of the Earth - Earth yoga.
Shortly thereafter, I came across an essay by
religious scholar Christopher Chapple on yogic environmentalism. The yoga
tradition, he wrote, includes resources that can increase environmental
awareness. Practice of the asanas (postures) and prana (breath) bring
enhanced awareness of the natural world, and our senses become receptive to
the elements of Earth, water, fire, and air, and to the movements of the
cosmos of the sun, moon, and stars. The ethical precepts of yoga also fit
well with environmental precepts, says Chapple. Nonviolence limits harm to
animals and the Earth, nonpossession cuts down consumption, and through the
practice of purity we become aware of pollution. And the ultimate
philosophical goal of yoga, he concludes, involves the cultivation of higher
awareness, which, from an environmental perspective, might be seen as an
ability to rise above the sorts of consumptive material concerns that can be
harmful to the ecosystem.
Dr. Chapple's essay encouraged me to go
further and think about the practice of an Earth yoga - a yoga that would
cut through our denial, awaken us to our situation, inspire a truly Earthy
spirituality, and help us defend and restore the Earth.
Just as in yoga we relax and stretch muscles
constricted by the stresses of civilized life, so would the practitioner of
Earth yoga extend his or her practice to include the body of an Earth
attacked by the multiple stresses of civilization. From the viewpoint of
Earth yoga, the body of the Earth is, like our own, a complex living
organism, and like our own, sacred. Gaia, as the scientist James Lovelock
calls her, has rainforest lungs, riverine arteries, soil for skin, rock
bones, an oceanic heart that pulses with the slow beat of the tides,
themselves pulled by sun and moon, winds that move like prana, a delicate
aura of ozone and a mysteriously evolving force and unfathomable wisdom that
creates and sustains and destroys and again creates all life, including
ours, in a cosmic rhythm we can only contemplate with awe.
The practitioner of Earth yoga seeks to know
this body upon and within which we live as we seek to know our own bodies.
So the practice of Earth yoga might best begin with that portion of Earth
closest to you, your bioregion or watershed. How many of us know, for
example, where our water comes from and where our water, after we've used
it, goes? How many of us know the contours of the body we live on? Yoga
teaches us, among other things, to care for our bodies as sacred, inside and
out. As we come to know the body of Gaia as intimately as we know our own,
we discover places that have been wounded, polluted, poisoned and that need
to be restored and healed. This is karma yoga, the yoga of work and action.
Thus just as yoga cleanses and purifies our
bodies, Earth yoga cleans toxic dump sites and polluted rivers. And just as
yoga restores our body, Earth yoga restores the body of the Earth: renewing
streams that are no longer safe for spawning salmon, replanting clear-cut
hillsides, reintroducing wolves and buffalo.Earth yoga also recognizes the
necessity to preserve and defend wild lands. It teaches us to fight as
spiritual warriors, without hatred, and without attachment to winning or
losing. In accord with the first principle of ahimsa, Earth yoga follows the
way of direct nonviolent action introduced to the world by the Mahatma
Mohandas Gandhi, developed in America by Martin Luther King, and used more
recently in defense of the Earth by Earth First! and others. But while Earth
yoga embraces action, it is based on the peace of contemplation and the calm
eye of wisdom at the center of the hurricane. There Shiva, cobra coiled
around his neck, sits on top of Mount Kailas. Wilderness retreats are an
important practice of Earth yoga. People emerge with a tremendous amount of
inner insight, wisdom, and energy, almost as if they receive an initiation
directly from Mother Earth herself, reports John Milton, who runs a
week-long retreat called Sacred Passage. And that empowers them to go on and
do things that are often unbelievable in their effects.
At the same time Earth yoga also includes the
yoga of bhakti, or devotion. Rituals such as the Council of All Beings
developed by John Seed and Joanna Macy help us identify with the Earth. Yoga
has much to contribute to the development of such rituals. The movements
developed by Seed and Macy to reenact our evolutionary journey, for example,
could be augmented by the nature-inspired asanas of hatha yoga. Earth yoga
teaches us how to stand (and be) like a mountain, or a tree, rooted in the
Earth, reaching for the heavens. Poses like fish, cobra, crocodile, lion,
and camel help reconnect us through imaginative embodiment with our animal
kin.
The gods and goddesses and myths of India can
also play a part. Hanuman the monkey god is worshiped as the servant of Ram;
Ganesh, the son of Shiva has the trunk of an elephant; and Vishnus avatars
include a fish and boar. The message is clear: Divinity can often take an
animal form and so monkeys live free and unharmed in many Indian temples.
The Jataka tales recount the Buddhas previous animal lives, and the
sacrifice of his own life to feed a starving tigress and her cubs. At its
highest level, this view leads to the radical ahimsa of a Gandhi, who
shocked European visitors to his ashram by insisting that they co-exist with
snakes, scorpions, and spiders, recognizing, as Arne Naess, the founder of
deep ecology, writes, a basic common right to live and blossom, to what is
sometimes called biospherical egalitarianism.
The root meaning of yoga, we often are
reminded, is union, joining, bringing together. And so Earth yoga: the yoga
that leads us to realize the unity, the oneness of human and Earth,
civilized self and wild Nature: the Great Mystery we have never been, and
cannot ever be, apart from.
The name Earth yoga may or may not serve us.
But as John Seed and many others show, something very like it already
exists, in vision and in practice.
Spirit
of the Earth
By John Seed
A battle-weary rainforest activist journeys
to India to renew his soul.
The long train journey from Delhi to Lucknow
passed like a dream as I watched the fields roll by through the window of
the second-class carriage: water buffalo, kingfisher, rice, mango and cashew
trees. Temples and factories, shrines and sad regiments of monoculture
eucalyptus depleting the soil and bound for the paper factories. Scenes of
ecological devastation and disaster were interspersed with temples dedicated
to God, reminding me of the two waves, spirit and the Earth that had
sculpted my life.
Through the 80s and 90s I had worked
ceaselessly to save the planet’s rainforests. My colleagues and I had
chained ourselves to bulldozers, organized nature conservation projects in
Third World countries, toured the world with a rainforest road show and a
ritual called the Council of All Beings. Being an ecological activist was my
whole life.
Now I was on my way to spend time with a
spiritual master, Poonjaji. I was hoping that meditation and satsang
dialogues with him would help me to understand the connection between my
work to save the planet and spiritual work. I felt a great need to join my
activist side with my contemplative side, and I hoped Poonjaji could help
me.
I first came to India from London in 1973,
after an encounter with LSD put an end to my career as a systems engineer
for IBM. Within weeks the practice of mindfulness had displaced
psychedelics. I learned vipassana meditation from Goenkaji at the Burmese
Vihar in Bodh Gaya, and practiced prayers and prostrations with Lamas Zopa
and Yeshe in Nepal. I returned home to Australia filled with determination
to practice and spread the Dharma.
The 60s reached Australia in the early 70s.
Lots of young people went back to the land then, especially around the small
town of Nimbin in northern New South Wales. My friends and I started
offering meditation retreats to the burgeoning New Age community, and by
1976 we had built the Forest Meditation Centre. Then, 20 of us bought 160
acres of forest nearby, sloping down to Tuntable Creek, and started Bodhi
Farm. We dedicated ourselves to caretaking the meditation center, organic
gardening, social action, and looking after each other. It was a beautiful
time. Before a hole in the sky made us fear the sun, we worked naked in the
gardens and bathed in the pure water of our creek. We planted fruit trees,
delivered our own babies, and built our dwellings. We shared vehicles. One
day a week we sat in silent meditation together, one day we met in council.
My son Bodhi was the first born there in 1977, quickly followed by seven or
eight others, including two sets of twins, and so we became known in the
district as Baby Farm.
My awakening to the Earth took place four or
five miles from Bodhi Farm, at Terania Creek, in 1979, when a couple of
hundred hippies staged what was, as far as I know, the first direct
nonviolent action in defense of the rainforests anywhere in the world. This
was the biggest turning point in my life. I think now that we were
successful because we were so naive and innocent and unaware of precedents.
A film from that period shows a policeman with a happy smile on his face
sitting by the forest having his bald head massaged by a young hippie woman.
Another shot shows a band of tie-dyed
minstrels standing in front of a bulldozer in the rainforest singing songs
of love and peace. People climbed high into the trees and lay on the ground
in front of the dozers. Hundreds were arrested, but there was not a single
incidence of violence.
Perhaps it was all the sitting. But I felt as
if the rainforest could speak to me and was asking me to give it voice. It
was as if I had been plucked from my human throne and suddenly found myself
a commoner, a plain member of the biota as Aldo Leopold called it, with a
burning desire to awaken humanity to the folly of sawing off the branch that
we are sitting on, unraveling the biological fabric from which we too are
woven. If we enter the rainforest and allow our energies to merge with the
energies we find there, I found, a most profound change in consciousness
takes place. We realize that our psyche is itself a part of the rainforests.
I am protecting the rain forest becomes I am part of the rainforest
protecting myself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into
thinking.
It took a number of years, countless
demonstrations, press conferences, leaflets, and many people willing to sit
in front of bulldozers and go to jail. But eventually 70 percent of the
people of New South Wales came to agree with us, and the government
established a series of national parks. To protect the remaining rainforests
we formed an organization, the Rainforest Information Centre (RIC).
In response to our success, however,
Australian logging companies began to look offshore, and in 1983, community
representatives from the Solomon Islands contacted RIC for aid in resisting
the same logging companies we had fought, as well as Malaysian and Japanese
companies. In the years that followed RIC volunteers provided technical,
financial, and political support to defend forests and communities in the
South Pacific, Asia, South America, and Russia. In 1984 I was invited by
Earth First! to the U.S.
After two months bouncing around in the back
of an old VW bus driven by Earth First! cofounder Dave Foreman, we ended our
tour in San Francisco. Gary Snyder read a poem about Terania Creek, and
Randy Hayes announced the formation of a new international organization, the
Rainforest Action Network.
The years that followed were full of
activity: direct action to save forests and wilderness, boycotts of
Mitsubishi and other transnationals, support for indigenous people in their
struggles. Yet it was clear that the planet could not be saved one forest at
a time. For each forest we were able to spare, a hundred were lost. The
Earth is not a rock with resources growing on it; the Earth is alive, and to
try to protect it by preserving a tiny patch of wilderness here and there is
something like trying to keep humans alive by preserving representative
samples of skin here and there.
To protect the Earth, to protect ourselves,
we had to change the way we saw both the Earth and ourselves. We had to
change our consciousness. Unless we could address our underlying spiritual
disease, no forests would be saved for long. But how, I wondered, are we to
identify and understand the spiritual malaise that leaves modern humans so
lonely and isolated and no longer able to hear the glad tidings of the Earth
which is our home? How are we to heal the great loneliness of spirit that
finds us unable to feel loyalty and gratitude to the soil, which has fed and
nourished and supported us without pause for 4,000 million years?
Searching for an answer, I turned to the
indigenous people who lived more or less in harmony with the Earth for
hundreds of thousands of years, and found their lives were marked with
rituals and ceremonies that nourished their sense of the interconnectedness
of all life. In our present situation, it seemed, such rituals were
desperately needed.
Working with the Buddhist activist Joanna
Macy, we developed a ritual to address our contemporary situation. The
Council of All Beings, as we called it, began with mourning for what has
been lost, the acknowledgement of rage and anger. Using guided
visualization, movement, and dance, we re-experienced our entire
evolutionary journey. We made masks to represent our animal allies and give
voice to these voiceless ones, invoking the powers and knowledge of these
other lifetimes to guide us in appropriate actions and empower us in our
lives. We see that the pain of the Earth is our own pain and the fate of the
Earth is our own fate.
A MESSAGE FROM THE EARTH
For many years, it had been my custom to seek
guidance from the Earth. I would lie down in the forest and cover myself in
leaves and say, Mother, I surrender to you, and deliberately allow all my
energies to sink into the Earth. In 1992, the instructions I received in
response to my prayers and meditations changed, and from that point onward,
all that I got went like this: John, finish what you've started. Don't start
anything new. Leave space for me, Gaia. I felt that Gaia was telling me to
take time to seek deeper answers to my questions about how the perennial
spiritual thirst of humanity could be aligned with the need to address the
ecological crisis. It was time to purify myself. Time to visit some of the
projects that I had helped initiate and support but had never seen with my
own eyes. It was time to visit my beloved India and weave once again the
spiritual warp and ecological woof of my life.
With all the projects that were underway, it
took me about three years to hand over the last pieces of my work and return
to India, my spiritual home, in search of nourishment and vision. Meanwhile,
all the psychological aches and pains, which had mysteriously vanished when
my Earth service was all-consuming, now returned. I finally, had time on my
hands again. So I returned to India in 1995 searching for some resolution to
the spiritual crisis that had begun for me a few years earlier. In Lucknow I
spent a month attending satsang with the 86-year-old Advaita teacher
Poonjaji. Fifty years ago he had been a pupil of the late Ramana Maharshi,
perhaps the greatest Hindu sage of this century, who had lived most of his
life on and around the sacred mountain Arunachala in southern India.
Poonjaji, or Papaji, had many Western
devotees who believed that he also was a fully enlightened master. Some 200
of us from all over the world crowded the hall Satsang Bhavan four mornings
a week, handing him letters (his hearing was failing) with our spiritual
questions which he would read and answer. Behind him on the wall were
portraits and photos of Ramana.
While with Papaji I was interested in
exploring the relationship between the human spiritual quest and the ailing
Earth upon which it is carried out. For as long as people look on the Earth
as maya, illusion, and as an obstacle to realization, how could we find the
intense spiritual will necessary to make the tremendous changes in our
values, lifestyles, and institutions in our very consciousness that would
prevent the continued destruction of the Earth?
Lucknow seemed an unlikely place to search
for enlightenment. The capital of Uttar Pradesh, Indias most populous state,
is noisy, highly polluted, and hardly conducive to a spiritual quest. Still,
some of my closest friends had reported that a great opportunity existed
there while this great sage was.
On the roof of Satsang Bhavan was a
restaurant run by and for the sangha, and I would hang out there, listening
to stories from people from around the world. I rented a bicycle and,
dodging the ubiquitous pigs and water buffalo, visited new friends, playing
music with them under the stars. Once I visited the sad remnants of a forest
nearby and prayed for direction, for renewal, for Gaia to call me once
again, but I felt frustrated and full of doubt.
I found myself fascinated by Shiva the Hindu
god of creation and destruction, and tried to find out as much about him as
possible. For Shivaratri, the anniversary of Shivas wedding, I caught the
train to Varanasi where that wedding had taken place. Millions of pilgrims
crowded the festive city, and I watched the naga babas naked, ash-covered,
dreadlocked sadhus carry their tridents down to the Ganges to purify
themselves.
While there I came across an interview with
Vandana Shiva, the Indian feminist ecologist and writer, who spoke about the
river goddess Ganga and Shiva. She said that the power of the goddess was so
strong that if she landed on Earth she would just destroy. Its symbolic of
the way we get our monsoon rain. It comes so strong, that if we don't have
forest cover, we get landslides and floods. So the god Shiva had to help in
getting the Ganges down to Earth. And Shiva laid out his hair, which was
very matted, to break the force of the descent of the Ganga. Shivas hair,
Vandana concluded, is seen by a lot of us in India as a metaphor for the
vegetation and forests of the Himalayas.
A BLESSING FROM PAPAJI
When I returned to Lucknow three days later,
I wrote to Papaji twice about these concerns. The first time his answer was
mostly mysterious to me and left me unsatisfied. So I plucked up my courage
and wrote again a couple of weeks later:
Dear Papaji, Lakshmana Swami once said that,
since God had chosen to manifest as the world and everything in it, one
could worship God by having respect for the world and all the life forms it
contains.
For many, many years, Papaji, it has been my
privilege and joy to worship God in this manner, to feel the living Earth
play my life like a musical instrument. A couple of weeks ago, when I first
wrote to you at satsang, you said this: To the man speaking of Mother Earth
I say: To help Mother Earth means you stand and shout at the top of your
lungs.
I have shouted long and hard, Papa. I shouted
in front of bulldozers and was thrown in jail. I made films and a book,
which was translated into 10 languages, and conducted workshops around the
world, donating the proceeds to the work, raising hundreds of thousands of
dollars for the protection of Nature from the Amazon to New Guinea.
For the last 15 years Papa, the Earth worked
through me and I was tireless and full of joy, but eventually the impurities
of ego and the conditioned mind began to rise again until, a couple of years
ago, the Earth asked me to hand over what I had been doing to others and
purify myself for the next task that she has for me. And here I am.
This time Papaji looked directly at me. When
you take care of your mother, he said in his deep voice, then you will get
some prize. When you are helping the Earth, then you are helping everybody
who's living on the Earth - plants, animals, and men. And now you have a
reward: that the work will carry on. You may now sit quiet, and she will
give you something in the way of peace.
So, my dear friend, he continued, your work
is very good. I bless you for this task that is in hand, and let me tell
you, both sides can happen simultaneously: Work for the good of the Earth
and the people. And for your own good do something else. They needn't
interfere with each other. Stay for some time before sleep and in the
morning and sit quietly for five or 10 minutes. The rest of the time you may
give for the world, help those who need your help.
What a blessing it was to feel Papa rekindle
the flame inside me which had been wavering and doubtful. I could not yet
know how, but I knew that from this turning point it would begin to flare
forth once more.
SHIVA'S MOUNTAIN
My retreat was drawing to a close, but there
was still one place I had to visit: the great mountain Arunachala, in
Tiruvanamalai, 18 hours south by train.
Nearly 10 years before, in 1987, I had
received a letter from Apeetha Aruna Giri, an Australian nun residing in the
Sri Ramana Ashram at the foot of Arunachala. She wrote that when Ramana had
arrived there, the holy mountain was clothed in lush forest and one might
even meet a tiger walking on its flanks. Now little grew there but thorns
and goats. Terrible erosion trenched Shivas sides, and torrents of mud
attended each monsoon. She had heard about our work for the forests. Could
we please help her to reclothe the sacred mountain?
I had composed a reply to Apeetha,
encouraging her in her efforts but pleading that we had no competence in
reforestation or the rehabilitation of degraded landscapes - our mission was
the protection of intact ecosystems. But it was no use, I couldn't send the
letter. Ramana's smiling face which I had first seen smiling from the back
of his book, Who Am I?, in London in 1970 kept popping up before me. So we
raised some money and sent it to Apeetha. Through her efforts a local NGO
was born the Annamalai Reforestation Society. The following summer solstice
I was facilitating a Council of All Beings workshop at John Buttons shack at
Sundari community in northern New South Wales. John was a permaculture
designer and tree-planter who was heading for the deserts of central
Australia to become involved in a tree-planting project. For some reason I
asked him if he wouldn't like to try this in the deserts of Tamil Nadu
instead. He asked for details, and when I mentioned Ramana, his face turned
pale and he told me that he was a longtime devotee of Ramanas.
Since that time, John and his partner,
Heather Bache, have worked as volunteers organizing the rehabilitation of
Arunachala. The space between the inner and outer walls of the vast 23-acre
temple complex has been transformed from a wasteland into the largest tree
nursery in the south of India. Hundreds of people have received
environmental education, and a 12-acre patch of semidesert was donated to
the project and transformed into a lush demonstration of permaculture and
the miraculous recuperative powers of the Earth.
Hundreds of Tamil people have been trained in
reforestation skills - tree identification, seed collection, nursery
techniques, watershed management, erosion control, sustainable energy
systems. Shivas robes are slowly being rewoven. Furthermore, hundreds more
have been trained in the techniques of permaculture, inspired by the
Annamalai Reforestation Society's model farm.
The train finally rolled into Tiruvanamalai,
and I was able to visit Arunachala myself and see the tremendous work that
had been done to revegetate the sacred mountain.Upon my arrival I discovered
that many people here believe that to walk around the base of Arunachala is
the fastest way to enlightenment, and each full moon, tens or hundreds of
thousands of devotees and pilgrims do so. It upset me to see the
indifference with which most of these folks regarded our work. Most were
oblivious, but some even complained that the newly planted trees interfered
with their view of the sunset. A great deal had been accomplished by the
Annamalai Reforestation Society, but how much more could be achieved if only
the pilgrims realized the unity of the spirit and the Earth!
What if their worship of Shiva included
devotion to his physical body, Arunachala? Imagine if they lent a hand to
the planting and maintenance of the trees as part of their devotion? The
greening of the mountain would be accelerated. I was giving talks and
lectures in the town and I began to challenge the ecological indifference I
found and to propose to the pilgrims that surely the act of worship and
respect of watering the young saplings that were weaving themselves into
robes to cover his nakedness was an even faster route to liberation than
circumambulating the mountain.
A week later I was stricken with remorse how
could I be so presumptuous as to make such claims without having even asked
Shiva? So one morning I climbed the mountain and found a quiet place among
the trees to meditate and pray and apologize. After some time I opened my
eyes to a noise. Some monkeys had appeared from the young forest. Slowly
they filed past and stood guard while scores of their tribe came into view,
and then they began to relax.
They groomed each other, they made love,
mothers breast-fed their babies, children played and cavorted, utterly
unselfconsciously living their everyday lives in my astonished and grateful
presence. I saw a newborn infant cautiously explore the ground, leaving the
safety of her mothers body for what seemed to me the first time, and leaping
back and climbing her fur at the slightest noise or disturbance. I had never
felt more accepted by the nonhuman world. I knew that Shiva had answered my
prayer, had acknowledged my efforts, and was giving me his sign of approval.
It doesn't really matter what symbols we use
Shiva, Gaia, Buddha, God. What we need now is for the followers of all
faiths to turn their allegiance to the Earth. What matters is that we refuse
to be drawn to one or the other of the great polarities: spirit and Earth.
We must neither reduce everything to spirit, from where it appears that the
material world is some kind of illusion, nor reduce everything to the
material, so it looks as if spiritual seekers are abdicating responsibility
to care for the creation.
RESOURCES
Donations to help the reforestation of
Arunachala or for other Rainforest Information Centre projects are
tax-deductible. Make checks out to Earth Trust Foundation (Rainforest
Information Centre Projects). Send to
Earth Trust Foundation,
20110 Rockport Way, Malibu,
CA 90265; (310) 456-8300; fax (310) 456-0388.
The Rainforest Information Centre's World
Rainforest Report plus information about RIC projects and John Seeds
schedule of DeepEcology workshops and rainforest road shows may all be found
on www.rainforestinfo.org.au.
John Seed can be contacted at
Rainforest Information Centre, Box
368 Lismore, NSW 2480
Australia;
phone 61-266-213294, johnseed1@ozemail.com.au
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