Perspectives (12)
For too long, too many of us have been entranced by heroes, perhaps it’s our desire to be saved, to not have to do the hard work, to rely on someone else to figure things out. Constantly, we are barraged by politicians presenting themselves as heroes, the ones who will fix everything and make our problems go away. It’s a seductive image, an enticing promise. And we keep believing it. Somewhere there is someone who will make it all better. Somewhere there is someone who is visionary, inspiring, brilliant, trustworthy, and we will all happily follow him or her. Somewhere…
Well, it is time for all the heroes to go home, as the poet William Stafford wrote. It is time for us to give up these hopes and expectations that only breed dependency and passivity, and that do not give us solutions to challenges we face. It is time to stop waiting for someone to save us. It is time to face the truth of our situation – we are all in this together, that we all have a voice and figure out how to mobilize the hearts and minds of everyone in our work places and communities.
Why do we continue to hope for heroes? It seems we assume certain things, including the following:
Leaders have the answers. They know what to do.
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Why private owners must be involved in conservation strategy
by Janaki Lenin
The lovely, dark and deep woods are home to thousands of kinds of birds, frogs, reptiles, mammals, plants, fungi, a myriad insects and much more. Moss hangs in long tendrils from tree branches. Sunlight filtered through many layers of leaves reaches the ground with a muted greenish glow. Rainforests are natural greenhouses, holding the humidity in and providing a rich culture for life of all kinds to germinate. Indeed, there is more diversity of living beings standing still, wriggling, and flitting about in one square metre of rainforest than any other terrestrial habitat in the world. The Western Ghats (the English-Hindi name means “the hills of the West”) were formed about 125 million years ago, when the supercontinent of Gondwana broke up and India split from Madagascar. This 160,000 sq km chain of hills and valleys, of grasslands, evergreen and deciduous forests, is one of the world’s 34 biodiversity-rich hotspots. Among tropical forests, it also supports the most number of people. In South India, many major rivers emerge as a trickle from the slopes of these ranges before coursing through the plains for hundreds of kilometers supporting agriculture and other human enterprise until they meet the sea.
Humans hunted and foraged in these jungles 12,000 years ago. Farming started 2,000 years ago, long before it did in most other tropical forests. About 200 years ago, large-scale clearing of forests for cultivation of tea and coffee began. Despite the antiquity of human occupation and usage, a third of the Western Ghats is still covered in forests. But the sad news is only 25% of this natural habitat is strictly protected. Some of the remaining tracts enjoy a modicum of protection, while the rest is splintered into fragments interspersed among vast acreages of commercial plantations. Although these shreds of forests may be small, they support significant wildlife.
It is still common to see large animals such as elephants, gaur, and sloth bears wending their way across these plantations, from one forest patch to another. Smaller creatures go even further, staking territories, hunting prey, and even having babies in these man-made landscapes. As Nisarg Prakash, a Masters student of the National Centre for Biological Sciences, recently found out: where there is adequate prey, crabs and other crustaceans, and vegetation cover for their holts (dens) along the banks, small-clawed otters are found in streams running through tea, coffee, and cardamom in the Anamalai hills. This is especially heartening news since otter pelt is one of the prime items in the illegal wildlife trade.
In 2010, a team of researchers led by M.O. Anand from Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) set out to understand what encourages wild animals to live in these commercial lands by analyzing 35 studies involving 14 animal groups.
Different crops need varying degrees of forest clearance. After the undergrowth is cleared, cardamom is planted in the shade of forest trees, altering the forest structure the least. Coffee requires more sunlight so some trees are removed. However, to maximize profits, wild trees are increasingly being replaced by the Australian soft-wood, silver oak, which can be harvested for timber pulp. At the other end of the spectrum, tea, rubber, timber trees and paddy completely replace the forest.
Since the landscape is a matrix of these different crops and forest lots, which of these land uses promotes biodiversity? Anand and his colleagues confirmed the obvious: crops that have totally supplanted the forest were wildlife-impoverished, sustaining the least number of life forms. Conversely, plantations of cardamom and coffee grown under forest trees fostered high biodiversity but not nearly as much as forests did. But more than any other factor, it was the size of the nearest forest block that mattered; the larger the forest patch, the richer the biological wealth of the surrounding agricultural areas.
Under these circumstances, what conservation strategy should be pursued? There is no doubt that wildlife-friendly farming practices, such as advocating coffee grown under forest trees, would help enormously. But if the forest fragments were so crucial to sustaining various life forms, they need to be protected as a matter of priority, argue the researchers.
Forests patches are owned by private companies, individuals, and the Revenue and Forest Departments of the government. In some places, communities manage wooded chunks as sacred groves. Although these stands of wilderness were originally left standing to conserve watersheds and are protected by law, local people graze livestock, cut trees for timber, fuel wood, and to expand their agricultural holdings. Since setting these forests aside for conservation would entail an economic loss to companies and individuals, incentives such as certification could offer a solution.
One such certifying agency, Rainforest Alliance, and the Indian conservation organization, NCF, are members of the Sustainable Agriculture Network, a consortium of NGOs around the world, that have developed the Sustainable Agriculture Standard. T.R. Shankar Raman and Divya Mudappa of NCF conduct training programs for landowners seeking the Rainforest Alliance seal of approval. Applicants have to abide by the Standard, demonstrating improved living and working conditions of their work force and/or concessions for wildlife conservation.
A key criterion for eligibility is discontinuing the use of internationally banned agrochemicals. Even acceptable chemicals have to be treated responsibly. Employees who spray crops are provided special bathrooms, and their containers and clothes washed in designated areas. The contaminated water is channeled to soak pits or treatment facilities.
Since large dangerous animals, such as elephants and leopards, pose a threat to workers collecting firewood in forest fragments, managers of plantations are encouraged to provide fuel efficient stoves, or even better, gas cylinders and solar water heaters.
Drawing up an inventory of wildlife found in their forests and plantations is a necessary part of the certification process, and so far it has totaled up more than 100 animal and 150 plant species, including many endemic and threatened species, in the Nilgiri and Anamalai hills.
Smallholders, usually coffee plantations with no forest fragments, have the option of obtaining group certification. For instance, neighbouring farms can get together and stop coffee pulp effluent from contaminating streams; instead, it’s diverted to treatment facilities. They can also protect community forests or cooperate with the Forest Department to prevent poaching and fires in National Parks and Sanctuaries. By goading landowners to do more for their workers and the environment, these certification programs, in effect, turn them into better land stewards.
The incentive for making these changes is the increased prices that certified commodities fetch in the export market. Conscientious buyers of certified tea and coffee pay between Rs. 7 to Rs. 21 per kg. more than the average price. Disappointingly, should these Rainforest Alliance approved products enter the domestic market, they fetch no more than the rest. Creating awareness and demand for such produce in India would go farther in encouraging landowners to be ecologically and socially responsible.
Safeguarding fragments of forests will provide greater mileage not only for the biodiversity of adjacent farmlands but protected forests such as parks and sanctuaries. Such protected forests make up only 9% of the land area of the Western Ghats. Since they are too few, small and far between, and animals move in and out of them, conservation management cannot stop abruptly at its boundaries. By including private players in the overall conservation strategy, there is a good chance of retaining nearly 40,000 unprotected sq.km. of natural habitat, an area almost three times larger than National Parks and Sanctuaries. As India moves rapidly up the population and consumption ladder, people, in the Forest Department and conservation world, with the protected area fixation better wake up and smell the coffee.
‘This article was first published on Firstpost.com
Tao is about following ‘the Way’ – finding it, losing it, finding it again. The Tao is the way of balance and harmony, between male and female, masculine and feminine, between human kind and the rest of Nature, between life and death, between ancestors and those yet to be, between microcosm and macrocosm, and between the energies of Earth and stars. It is rooted in Nature and universe, and was experienced and perceived by ancient Chinese sages through passive-receptive and active-receptive meditations – opening to oneness and avoiding the seeming dualities of body and mind.
Tao involves humility, discipline, wanting little, questioning assumptions of human self-importance, being participant – observers in Nature’s cycles, and delighting in the interplay of the Chinese elements – Earth at the centre, air/metal, fire, water and wood to the four cardinal directions. Being close to feminism and to shamanism, Tao has for long periods of time been persecuted and driven underground and then, for the exact same reasons, has bubbled up again.
Indeed, Tao in me has at times been driven underground and then bubbled up again. It has no immediate relevance to my work as a psychoanalyst and intellectual, so keeping alive such an ancient and ‘culturally other’ philosophy has at times been strange, impossible or disorienting – and I’m only a beginner. I ask myself, what is this oriental ‘call’, in languages I cannot understand, with myths more remote than those of the Greeks? After all, there is love of Nature in rich seams and running waters in my occidental roots. My answer is that it is the oriental disciplined use and appreciation of the physical body, as temple for the breath, and as giving ways to access Nature and Spirit in their own terms, with no ideological clothing or aversion, that draws me back, again and again, to Tao.
Ours is an increasingly secular, diverse, plural and slowly more pagan era, and urgent desires are emerging, wanting to connect directly with Nature and to know what that might mean.
Many, vaguely wanting to reduce their carbon and eco footprints, fear how empty their lives would be if they did. In Taoist perspectives, they fear the wrong kind of emptiness, but if they could bear it they would find sufficiency in emptiness beyond their present reach.
As an engaged citizen in a noisy, somewhat implausible ‘normal’ business of market-led social democracies, I do not find this path easy, yet disciplined participation in Taoist meditations helps me to undo the shackles of Western late-industrial intellectual arrogance. This essay is my attempt to delineate a stance by which to survive psychically in these times, which, I believe, are more troubling than collectively ‘we’ yet realize. It is not about the sublime reaches of mystical rapture, but about the rugged struggle to connect where we encounter limitation in the field of desire, and where we need to bow to greater forces.
We need to address the lack of balance where there is a cascade of dominance: male over female, human species over Nature, and the consequent ill effects. Sigmund Freud studying hysteria – a condition designated as being of the feminine – distinguished male-and-female as genders from masculine-and-feminine as psychical qualities. He considered the life force to be sexual in nature, named it the libido, and observed its course from the depths of the bodily unconscious. But he also considered libido to be masculine, in either gender, thus consigning women to a position of passivity.
Although Freud made an enormous contribution to rescuing women from the tyranny of the male gaze (and from being sexually dominated), he generated confusion as to the feminine position, which is not one of passivity but of receptivity. Ancient Tao, by contrast, distinguishes yang/masculine: hot, quick, bright, and expansive, from yin/ feminine: cool, slow, shadowy, and nourishing, and teaches that both are necessary and complementary aspects of chi, the life force.
There are many teachers and traditions of Taoist arts and practices available to us. One well-known is Master Mantak Chia, best known for his work with sexuality and for teaching practices to strengthen and clarify in the interests of enhancing balanced, loving intercourse between yin and yang energies of the body, rooted in Nature, with head in the stars.
Contemporary fast-moving, prurient excitement about all things sexual would misread Chia’s contributions as being confined to rather peculiar ways of achieving greater satisfaction. Instead, perusal of his many books leads to the realization that he is setting sexual experience, in the context of disciplined, detailed, shamanically informed practices to bring alive the relations between yin and yang in and between ourselves, and in Nature too.
The core practice is to generate the “micro-cosmic orbit”, or “small heavenly cycle”, a circling of energy from the perineum up the spine and down the front, round and round. It begins by being imagined, and becomes more and more real. This practice in “micro-ecology” – circling and conserving energies within the body – encourages self – sufficiency, helping to defeat what Buddhists call craving and psychoanalysts call lack, which otherwise seems to be filled by spurious appetites. Chia himself comes across not as an “expert’ but as ‘master’ of his subject, deeply versed in chi kung and tai chi, a Taoist doctor with many specific techniques and meditations for various ailments which, in keeping with the traditions of Chinese acupunctural medicine, he perceives as due to imbalances in body’s energy systems. Born in Thailand to a family of Chinese origin, he is apparently from a long line of shamans broken only by his father who became a Christian priest.
Kris Deva North is Chia’s UK representative and founder of the London Healing Tao Centre, All Chia’s teachings are taught there, contextualized for Westerners, with links being made to the practices and medicine wheel of the Amerindian peoples, with whom Kris has lived and studied. The practices are energetic dynamic, and intended to open the participant to the inner energy body. They are also very safe, because all Taoist practices and meditations are to do with generating, conserving and deploying chi with love, in wisdom and for healing.
The practice of the inner smile, for example, may seem weird, but it becomes very invigorating and cleansing. Imagine the sun (yang) in your brow, flooding the inner body with warmth and light, and the moon (yin) in your kidneys. When we smile, gratefully, to each of the main internal organs (heart, kidneys, stomach/spleen/pancreas, liver and lungs), we are immediately confronted with what is our normal lack in our awareness in taking these organs for granted.
Tao is ancient China’s gift to the world, and the Tai Te Ching is its classic text – one of subtle nobility opening hearts to wanting less and realizing that less is more. It is said to have been composed 2,500 years ago by a Keeper of the Imperial Archives whose legendary name is Lao Tzu, meaning ‘old philosopher’. His job gave him the opportunity to reconstruct the paths of many sages who preceded him, until, retreating to a cave, he finally composed this luminous text, proposing a way of life in keeping with Nature.
With Confucianism it forms a double helix running through the diversity of Chinese cultures. Whereas Confucius sought an ethical philosophy by which to regulate relations between individual, family and State, Lao Tzu was ambivalent about and reflective upon all such regulations, acknowledging their necessity but also seeing through them to our roots in Nature and her celestial origins. The Tao Te Ching has generated scores of translations and libraries of commentary – yet do we know what it means? Not without our self that reads it being put to the sword.
“In gathering your vital energy to attain suppleness, have you reached the state of a new-born babe? In washing and clearing your inner vision, have you purified it of all dross? In loving your people and governing your state, are you able to dispense with cleverness? In the opening and shutting of heaven’s gate, are you able to play the feminine part?” Lao Tzu calls on us to find again the charmed timelessness of the new-born babe, without regressing from our adult capacities for concern and subtle action.
There is not the slightest hint in Lao Tzu of democracy as a concept or a desirable end in itself – there is the Sage, the Ruler and the people, and the best way of ruling is to keep the people happy, their bellies full and their minds uncluttered and without desire. He taught a way of life somewhat subversive of imperial and religious control, proposing for all – including future generations and their rulers – a walk on the wild side in communion with forces and presences that inspire creation. “See the simple, embrace the primal, diminish the self and curb the desires.”
Thus it links with the interests of the oppressed wand with ethnic diversity. The ‘noble man”, in Lao Tzu’s classic, is not only the nobleman by imperial reward or acquisiotion of power, but one who lives in harmony with the natural order, delighting in physical vitality, and resisting and bypassing the enormously disturbed appetites which has opened up in us between intellectual development and the basic needs of the physical body.
Do not fear, says Lao Tzu, to live quietly, achieving nothing, with your ear to chi, the life force, and your way of life true to basic requirements – because achievements leads to excess and destruction. “When the world is in possession of the Tao, the galloping horses are led to fertilize the fields with their droppings. When the world has become Taoless, war horses breed in the suburbs.”
As we advance and Nature recedes, we turn her into a kind of simulacrum, a simulated likeness, of herself – and end up as simulacra of ourselves. Satish kumar has pointed out that we are caught in the consequences of conflating ‘ecology’ and ‘environment’: ‘ecology’ referring to the interdependency of the whole web of life-systems; and ‘environment’, to the world around us seen from our human point of view. Extending our manicured environments at ecological cost, instead of the wild we will have specimens in parks, simulacra of what they were. Like vanished stars whose light only now reaches us, the film of the tiger reassures us because it seems she’s still there.
The human race has gone absolutely global. We are an incredibly successful species, brilliant in our exuberant creativity, but we have been caught in the shadows of our success. Working psychoanalytically, watching and reading ‘the news’, and listening to friends, I am aware how preoccupied we are with our own immediacies, relating to, with, or against each other, in pursuit of our needs, wants and desires, largely to the exclusion of Nature as a presence in herself. We relate ‘about’ Nature rather than ‘to’ Nature. We have largely lost the natural intelligence of Indigenous peoples who live close to the Earth, flexible in their turning from human-specific activity into communion with Nature, and back again.
This, for me, is where Tao comes in. When I listen to many who say we need to consume less, respect the Earth more, and realize that wanting less is desirable as an end in itself, I wonder how people are to achieve that state of grace. We don’t seem to have the cultural means. In my view, we need to engage with the split between our thinking and the rest of our physicality.
Once you have crossed the threshold into communion with Nature, there is no going back, and it is from there you witness our human condition, wondering at our dangerous absurdities. Listening to Nature whilst in the midst of this, the sixth great extinction of species, and knowing it has been caused by us, it is hard to bear the loss we hear. It is then that we need whatever practices we have found, earthy, invigorating and spiritual, to keep us grounded, informed by the courage of far-reaching breath.
Despite the fact that our best efforts towards sustainability may not make the crucial difference, Lao Tzu, Christ and Spinoza all say the same: once you see something truly, you are obliged to be true to it. That is the underlying ethic. And, in practice, we need to find enjoyment in the ways of the body attuned to and at one with Nature, for then it is easier to embody the low-carbon journey, consume less and establish our earthly integrity as a simple good in itself.
At the dawn of modern science, in the age of Descartes, stood Francis Bacon, Lord High Chancellor of England and amateur scientist. “We must put Nature to the rack and extort her secrets,” he wrote. As R.D.Laing subsequently and ironically observed, “That’s no way to treat a lady!” But her being racked and extorted still proceeds at full tilt, including in our finding ever more ingenious and astounding ways to save us- or rather, our lifestyle – “because we’re worth it”.
It seems to me to be all about subjects and objects. By subjecting Nature to our will, we turn her into a set of malleable objects. Where subject dominates object, there is no balance. If we could make the natural turn from our species-specific self – absorption towards Nature and listen to her beauty, strengths, losses and fears, we would less want to do things to her and would become wiser in the ways of this Earth – and more sufficient precisely where we stand, going nowhere.
A soulless proliferation of wind turbines, photovoltaic panels and other technological fixes will not do the trick because they are all on the yang side of the equation and will merely lead to further implausible demands on natural resources. Whatever else, it is a change of orientation that is called for. Ask Lao Tzu: “The spirit of the fountain dies not. It is called the mysterious feminine. The doorway of the mysterious feminine is called the root of heaven-and-earth. Lingering like gossamer, it has only a hint of existence, and yet when you draw upon it, it is inexhaustible. If we would hold true to sufficiency in the moment, knowing that wanting less is more, and would diligently practise to generate and conserve chi, we would hold the whole world in our hands.
This article is published with permission from Resurgence Magazine, UK.
For Mantak Chia visit www.universal-tao.com, Quotations are from Tao Te Ching, trans. John Wu (1961)
Illustration by Sarah Klockars-Clauser
The Transition movement is one of those unexpected phenomena in human culture, capturing and mobilizing an energy that rarely emerges but is deeply significant for social, political and economic change. This radical movement is grounded in the stark realization that dramatic transformations are occurring in the Earth’s climate due to humanity’s use of fossil fuels and the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, causing global warming, and that the supply of these cheap fuels, particularly oil, has reached or soon will reach its peak and decline ( the ‘peak oil’ phenomenon), potentially creating an economic and social crisis compared with which the present ‘credit crunch’ is a gentle warning.
Awareness of the inevitability of a transition in our culture to alternative, resilient ways of living that are not dependent on the economic growth paradigm led Rob Hopkins to explore ways of facilitating this move when he was living in Kinsale, Ireland, in 2005. His vision was for communities to “go local” in food and energy production and housing and that they should initiate this transformation themselves. It is the positive sense of empowerment this gives to people that overcomes the challenges of such fundamental change. Hopkins then moved to Totnes, South Devon where he started the local initiative called Transition Town Totnes in 2006. This began with public talks on fossil-fuel dependence and how to find alternatives through collective action in the community.
From this modest beginning, the Transition movement has exploded in the most remarkable way, not simply within the UK but worldwide. The seed planted in Kinsale and then in Totnes has produced a plant that has grown like Jack’s beanstalk with a network of Transition initiatives of different types and sizes. The latest count is 150 in fourteen countries and the number increases weekly. This represents a phenomenal rate of growth in less than three years. The Transition movement could indeed make a fundamental difference to the planet.
Co-coordinating these and ensuring some uniformity of process has been the hob of the Transition Network Ltd, a legally constituted charity that oversees with a light touch the different forms of transition that seem appropriate to different scales of action: towns, cities, counties, countries. It’s stated intention is to “inspire, encourage, support, network and train communities as they adopt the Transition model in response to peak oil and climate change, building resilience and happiness”.
In 2008, The Transition Handbook, written by Hopkins, was published by Green Books, and it has become the guide for communities seeking to participate in the transition to sustainability. Because our dependence on cheap, plentiful energy has become not simply a habit but an addiction, the Transition movement recognizes that some deep work has to be done for people to face the difficult choices confronting them. This takes the form of group engagement in a change of consciousness from focus on the individual, a primary characteristic of Western culture, to opening ourselves to interdependent relationships and community. The first stage of transition is for interested people from a community to form an initiating group that will then go through the steps of awareness-raising and laying the foundation with other existing groups in the community.
The recognition of interdependence engendered is not simply with other people but with the natural world, acknowledging that we are all embedded in the creative web of life that has emerged on Earth through 4 billion years of evolution, giving us the miracle of our living planet. Our co-dependence with the other species with whom we share the Earth is the foundation on which the Transition movement is biologically grounded, and it is the source of the basic concepts that shape the vision.
One of the remarkable features of the Transition movement is that, despite the gravity of our situation, there is a sense of empowerment and excitement that results from inviting people to discover their own solution to the problems we face. They are not being told what to do. Threats and blame do not liberate people; invitation to participate in designs for radical transformation does. This is a truly bottom-up movement of deep change which people recognize is increasingly necessary.
At the very core of the Transition message about cultivating new, sustainable lifestyles is the belief that human cultures must develop patterns of relationship in community that have the properties of natural ecosystems: they must become resilient, capable of responding adaptively and creatively to shocks and changes such that flexible responses lead to the emergence of new sustainable patterns of living.
Basic to this vision of resilient communities is the localization of food production, renewable energy, transport and housing. Each community is encouraged to design its own Energy Descent Action Plan whereby it decreases dependence on fossil fuels over a period of fifteen to twenty years. To facilitate this localization process, local currencies and banks can be developed that transform the economic system from debt-dependence and continuous, unsustainable growth to resilient local trading networks that are creative and adaptable. Local currencies already exist and serve community cohesion and stability in countries around the world, including Switzerland, Sweden and the U.S, while Totnes and Lewes in the UK have issued their own currencies to facilitate local trading. Local currencies typically flourish in times of economic hardship – for example in America’s last Great Depression – and, given the state of the world economy, there’s every chance we’ll see their ascendance again.
Accompanying these localization initiatives is the development of local governance, education and health care and the integration of practical skills, arts and crafts into learning process so that children acquire directly the know-how for living a sustainable life in community that is harmonious with the rhythms and patterns of the natural world. Implementing these changes does not depend on instructions from some central authority but on local decision-making that is self-organizing and participatory rather than top-down and hierarchal in its authority structure.
How can such radical change in the organization of contemporary society come about? This is another core component of the Transition movement: developing a bottom-up participatory process for all major decisions in the community. The Transition Network suggests a list of seven principle of transition that enable a diversified response grounded in the local context. These are:
Positive Visioning: Transition initiatives are based on a dedication to the creation of tangible, clearly expressed and practical visions of community life beyond dependence on fossil fuels.
Trust and Empowerment: Transition initiatives are based on telling people the closest version of the truth that we know in times when the information available is deeply contradictory and then empowering appropriate responses.
Inclusion and Openness: Successful Transition initiatives depend on the unprecedented coming together of diverse sections of society.
Sharing and Networking: Information sharing and learning are key principles of resilient ecologies that are central to transition.
Building Resilience: How communities respond to shocks is critical to the transitional path beyond fossil-fuel dependency. The movement is explicit in its intention to build resilience across key economic sectors (including food, energy and transport) and across a range of appropriate scales – from local to national.
Inner and Outer Transition: Transition is a catalyst to shifting values and unleashing the energy and creativity of people to do what they are passionate about.
Subsidiarity: Self- organization and decision making at the appropriate scale are key principles dawn from resilient ecological systems.
Many attribute the success of the Transition movement to its emerging holographic structure, which mimics cell growth within living organisms. The network aspires to simultaneously maximize local autonomy and maximize coherence at the macro-level through shared learning and purpose.
It has become clear in recent years that the economic system is intrinsically unsustainable and inequitable. It is destructive of ecosystems and cultures alike in its homogenizing impulse, destroying the diversity that is the foundation of resilient natural and cultural systems. However, the structure and properties of trading and exchange systems are ours to choose. Our recent experience with the toxic properties of unregulated capitalism has made it clear that we need to find other ways of carrying out exchange and trade that are more in line with the properties of natural ecosystems.
A primary source of instability in our current economic system is continuous growth, which uses up the Earth’s resources inefficiently and is driven by the monetary policy of lending with interest. This makes growth necessary to recover debt. However, there is no reason why community banks should not provide loans to savers without interest, which is a principle used by a number of successful banking schemes in Sweden, Switzerland and other countries. An economy that does not enslave people to debt is one in which they retain their freedom and empowerment.
Since natural ecosystems remain in balance with the resources available to them and with one another, we can ask if there is some regulatory principle that is natural to human communities so that they could likewise maintain equitable harmony in their bioregions. It appears that there is indeed such a principle, which could balance quantity of goods traded with quality of life. The basic idea is that as trading activity increases, facilitated by money, people’s basic needs become satisfied and there is an opportunity for them to find lives of meaning in relation to one another in community and with the natural world.
However, if trading activity becomes dominant, people spend more time working than experiencing wellbeing in family and community. Then the quality of their lives decreases and this is experienced as a loss of meaning and quality of lived experience, which people are encouraged to compensate for with more quantity of goods and money. This is the retail therapy that is notorious in our culture: a desperate attempt to fill the quality gap with quantities of consumer items. Because community has been destroyed, people often fail to notice this because of an absence of the relationships required to evaluate quality of life.
This positive feedback loop leads to the disintegration of society as people search desperately for ways of finding meaning, usually through the accumulation of money. This inevitably fails. The first step in restoring the natural balance between freedom and responsibility, people and Nature, is to recover community, which is precisely what the Transition movement focuses on. It is people’s hunger for meaning and quality in relationship that seems to be driving the Transition movement along a path to social, political, economic and ecological transformation.
As we move into the unknown territory of post-peak-oil economies, how can we be sure that transition ideas will create more sustainable and resilient ways of living? The answer is that we can’t, and we need to recognize that Transition is a social exploration somewhat along the lines of Nature’s evolutionary experiments, which continue all around us. Transition’s playful seriousness encapsulates this experiment and lack of certainty with this “cheerful disclaimer” from the Transition Towns website: “We truly don’t know if this will work. Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale. What we are convinced of is this: if we wait for the governments, it’ll be too little, too late; if we act as individuals, it will be too little, but if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.”
The human spirit goes beyond the violence and meaninglessness of a fight, when the way of fighting also becomes a beautiful expression and a search for self-realisation. Most people think that Martial Arts are only for wartime effort – but apart from helping its practitioners play a functional role in society, they help them stay fit, and can become a path of personal fulfilment.
Martial arts in India, based on the Samkhya Philosophy, was born around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. Kalaripayattu in Kerala is called the mother of all martial arts. Ancient martial arts were focused on internal health, which meant the health of the 5 primary organs – the heart, lungs, liver, pancreas and kidneys. There was, therefore, a lot of focus on developing the muscles around the core, with little or no focus on the shoulders and the arms. All the power needed for thrusting and fighting was generated from the core. The movements were modeled on the ‘Big Cats’ with the legs kept well-trained for optimal springiness.
The martial arts give importance to warming up with work on joints, circulation, and most importantly the endocrine system, as this is essential for the experience of wellness. The endocrine system varies according to the environment and the person's mindset – hence meditation also is integrated into the practise of martial arts. Meditation regulates the kind of hormones secreted by a person and keeps them balanced and healthy.
Basic Principles
Alignment: The first thing that a martial arts student develops is “alignment”. The feet were always kept parallel and the shoulders and arms were kept close to the body to be able to engage the ‘lats’ (Latissimus dorsi – the muscle on the lateral posterior part of the back), below the shoulder.
Martial arts gradually became more sophisticated – artists realised that practising a strike with full speed right from the beginning was going to cause some misalignment. So they started training their students in basic locomotion. A concept called ‘antagonistic isotonics’ helps to explain the importance of this. Muscles always exist in pairs and function such that when one is compressed, the other relaxes. However, most people are not aware of this basic physics of locomotion and can quite often be seen tensing both muscles while moving, lifting or even walking. Through martial arts, students realise that a muscle needs to be kept tense only 50% of the time. This even helps the person relax emotionally. Bad posture and locomotion are responsible for compressing the 5 main organs - often enough to impair their proper functioning and not release the correct hormones; they can also make a person overweight which causes the joints to become weak. My teacher used to say, “Age is not how much hair you have on your head – it is how much you can run, jump and play”.
Breathing: The next thing a person learns is “how to breathe” – to spend enough time retaining the breath for it to reach the various parts of the body. A slower breathing pattern enhances health, brings down heart rate/blood pressure, and every part of the brain gets oxygenated, helping the thinking to become clearer. You can see how everything is connected and you start thinking in-depth. Breathing is considered important to see beyond what is apparent and form an an appropriate mature response.
Generation of Power: The next step is “generation of power”. There are normal aerobic or glycolic circuits that people use to generate power. Then, there are anaerobic circuits within the body, which do not need oxygen and that can generate power in a flash (called Fajin in Chinese), in the process producing many toxins, which are washed out by a healthy circulatory system. The anaerobic circuits help because they increase immunity. The body is now constantly able to flush out toxins.
The Journey
Once the student has understood correct muscular alignment and proper movement, the next thing to do is to learn to ‘break out of the illusion’, and to ‘connect with the unchanging or immortal within you’. The changing or evolving part is discarded as unreal by all three schools of thought connected with the martial arts - Daoism, Buddhism and Yoga.
When illusions are destroyed and the martial artist connects with the unchanging reality, he gains strange powers, inspiring students to take up the path, even if their aspirations could take many years to be fulfilled.
Through martial arts, we learn to appreciate life. The most valuable thing that the martial arts can do for a committed student is to eliminate his fear. Fear is replaced with understanding, awareness and compassion. When I understand someone well and I see myself in his shoes, I realise that I would act the same way in that situation. It is not him, it is his conditioning. I don’t hold it against him but if possible try to remove that conditioning.
The Martial arts teach people to align themselves to a wholesome life, get their health back, to learn to breathe properly and invest in inner growth. If they can achieve these things, they can increase their lifespan, have a sense of clarity and self-worth - which will help them make a positive contribution to society.
This is the big question I found myself pondering one evening three years ago. I'd just spent four years studying economics – a period during which I hadn't once heard the term 'ecology' – having signed up for the course with the intention of earning as much money as possible. That was until, in my final year, I read a book about Gandhi which convinced me to put my training to use in the organic food industry, instead of the world of high finance.
But after six years of managing various ethical businesses, the answer to my big question that autumnal evening was an unequivocal 'no'.
I was discussing the world's major issues - environmental destruction, sweatshops, factory farms, wars over resources - with a friend and we were wondering which of the many causes we should dedicate our lives to helping. Not that either of us felt we could make much difference; we were just two small fish in a hugely polluted pond. But it was then I realised that these symptoms of global malaise were not as unrelated as I had previously thought and that the common thread of a major cause ran through them: our disconnection from what we consume.
I realised that if we all had to grow our own food, we wouldn’t waste a third of it as we do now in the UK. If we had to make our own tables and chairs, we wouldn’t throw them out the moment we fancied a change of interior décor. If we could actually see the look on the face of the child who, under the eyes of an armed soldier, cuts the cloth for the cheap garment we are tempted to buy from that discount High Street chain, we’d probably give it a miss. If we could see the conditions in which a pig is slaughtered, we’d probably pass on the bacon butty, and if we had to clean our own drinking water, we sure as hell wouldn’t pollute it in any way.
The tool that enables this disconnection – this vast degree of separation between us and that which we consume – is money. Without the functionality it provides, we would have to have a much closer relationship with the products we use and the people who make them, giving us a deeper appreciation for the embodied destruction, energy consumption (human and fossil fuel) and suffering in the things we currently buy. To not, at least, consider this reality is to bury our heads in the sand. As long as the degrees of separation between the consumer and the consumed stay so wide and for as long as our only connection comes through the emotional filters of a fibre optic cable and television set, then can we realistically foresee the changes that need to take place to the extent they need to?
This tool (money) doesn’t just enable the liquidisation of the planet's natural assets either; it also destroys communities. The very way our money is created today; as debt, through private corporations known as banks, has been designed to create a spirit of collective competition, not cooperation. It has also come to replace community as most people's primary source of security in life. And it doesn't stop there. It allows us to easily and imperishably store the profits that inevitably arise from the economies-of-scale that it enables, such as flat-packing rainforests and turning them into e-money, all without any regard for the consequential ecologies- of- industrialisation. Not only does money endanger our physical survival, it hinders our spiritual evolution to boot. Not money, per se: but the whole concept of exchange.
beyond exchange to what I call 'pay-it-forward' economics, the philosophy that the Freeconomy Community was founded on. Prostitution is to sex what buying and selling is to giving and receiving. Paying-it-forward requires no exchange, just a desire to give what was never yours to begin with in the confidence that you'll organically receive whatever is needed, when required.
But whilst intellectualising the need to evolve beyond money was one thing; doing it, was another. As Gandhi once said, 'be the change you want to see in the world', whether you are 'a minority of one, or a majority of millions'. I decided to try living without money for a whole year, to see how it would feel physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Not that I was sure that in a world driven by the need to accumulate ever more of it, this would even be possible. How would I eat, brush my teeth, cook, wash, keep warm and dry, get from A to B, communicate, wipe my bum, write, read, clothe myself and – most importantly – have a lot of fun in the process, without it?
My book, The Moneyless Man, traces my sometimes exhausting, but usually magical journey into the unknown; exploring deeper the reasons why I wanted to do this, reliving the many life-affirming experiences I had along the way and describing the practicalities involved, before honestly sharing the lessons I learned about myself, nature and society in the process. Mixed throughout are tales of love, pain, friendship, happiness, disbelief and above all else, hope.
This journey has changed my life irrevocably; what started as a one year experiment has become a life's work. Plans to scale it up are already underway, as I now truly believe that until we give as Nature does - freely and unconditionally - we will never live in harmony with ‘Her.’
This article is published with permission from Resurgence Magazine, UK.
not even notice it. We give our own overlying air-ocean so little respect that we even describe anything that is full of air as being empty.”
Gabrielle Walker, An Ocean of Air
When thinking about the health of humans it is vital to think about the health of the elements around us which aid us in maintaining our energies. What for me began as a search into the health of the soil very soon turned into a quest – to see what we would leave behind as our “legacy”, a hundred years, two hundred years and also a million years from now. It has been the most challenging task I have undertaken - and even now, I am only slightly less confused.
‘The Earth After Us’by Jan Zalasiewicz was the book that I read and re-read in my attempt to understand what we were actually leaving behind. The opening scene of the movie Wall-E kept coming back to haunt me during my attempts at comprehension. Without stretching the imagination too much, we can envision a hot, barren world, where perhaps even a cockroach would not survive. A romantic would envision a world full of life, green trees and butterflies. I am certainly happier being a romantic!
No matter what stance we as humans take with respect to balancing ecology and development, we can never really disconnect and look at the earth as separate from us and our needs. For, we are in more ways than one, a part of the soil. The soil is alive – the many layers and layers that have been added over millennia and that will continue to be added long after we are gone. Past landscapes are preserved in the land under layers of rocks and sand and soil, as are the many fossilized remains of different kinds of creatures.
On a very elemental level, our bodies are made of the same components that made up the bodies of the dinosaurs more than million years ago, which have been left behind as fossils in the land. We are still made of the same elements that made up the very first single-celled organism and we are the very same elements that are found in petroleum. I believe it safe to say that the earth and by extension its parts, clay, sand, mud, rock and gravel are the most important structures for this support of life on earth. Zalasiewicz says this about mud, “Mud is indispensable to the functioning of the Earth’s life support systems, because of the importance of the numberless clay particles to the Earth’s geochemical cycles. It seems also to have been indispensable to the origin of life on this planet, for the reactions by which amino acids react together to form more complex organic structures proceed far more quickly in the presence of clay minerals.”
Mud, however, is more than clay. While clay is as complex as the minerals within it, it pales when compared with the richness of mud – with its dark and rich compost, which the bacteria constantly feed on. The number of bacteria is not few, there are millions of bacteria – of various types, each performing a different unique function, all of which are integral to the life-giving property of the soil.
It is therefore important to understand that mud is one of the world’s greatest carbon stores or as Zalasiewicz puts it “a planet-spanning communal tomb for the composted remains of many generations of living organisms”.
The complex hydrocarbons which form the shells / skin / stems of plants and animals above ground become buried, heated, and compressed, and then the complex hydrocarbons break down into simpler hydrocarbons which migrate underground, in some places accumulating as underground reservoirs of oil and gas (which we would then extract). Or, the liquid hydrocarbons may leak back to the surface, where they are absorbed and reborn into new generations of living organisms, thus keeping the circle of life going. These mud-derived carbon stores also act as a crucial control on climate, not least when occasionally exploited by energy-hungry civilizations.
While researching other arguments that did not hold a solely anthropocentric view of the earth and the soil, I found that there were very few in which the soil was mentioned or the land. It was mentioned when the questions of property arose – how we could acquire it, to whom it belonged, but never talked about the soil as an entity. Was it inevitable, the human blindness to the connection between soil and ourselves?
So, I asked myself once again “What will we leave behind?” Our mortal remains, no doubt, but what else? Dams that we build to control the flow of water, chemical fertilizers that we put into the soil, which accumulate over time and then acidify the soil? The layers of acidic soils, rich in minerals, but which contain little to support life – is that our legacy? Large, imposing structures to contain our growing need to shop? What happens to our oceans? It may be safe to assume that, even if we do not leave behind our fossils for study by aliens or our future generations,we would leave behind our elementary particles – and possibly hope that we are leaving behind a world, perhaps not an exceptional world, but one which will not be unstable and which still contains life, as we know it.
Zalasiewicz has this to say, “Take away the top predator dinosaurs, and the Jurassic ecosystems would have been a little different, to be sure, but no less functional. Take away humans, and the present world will function quite happily, as it did two hundred thousand years ago, before our species appeared. Take away worms and insects, and things would start seriously to fall apart. Take away bacteria and their yet more ancient cousins, the archaea, and the viruses too, and the world would die.”
An intense wish that humans were less anthropocentric and less self-centred, I realise, makes me ruminate along with Zalasiewicz on the compulsions of our civilisation and the legacy we would leave behind. Paradoxically, I also realise that this concern with legacy is very anthropocentric too…
The yogi T. Krishnamacharya had said that it is not bodily contortions or exceptional breath control that determines progress on the path of Yoga. He said that the key indicator of progress on this path is the quality of the relationships the person engages in. Of the eight different aspects that make up the totality of yoga practice, the first that is listed in the Yoga Sutra is yama - right relationships. Right relationship with not just other people, but right relationship with people and things external to the person.
Yama—right relationship
The first principle outlined under yama is ahimsa, non violence – to be non violent in one’s actions and one’s relationships with people and the world around you. The concept of ahimsa has played a major role in winning India its independence and since then has been India’s great gift to struggles around the world. But though this quality has the power to bring down governments and to change mindsets, it is a power that must first begin with the person. Like charity, ahimsa must begin at home, within each individual. It requires the individual to slow down and observe and be attentive to feedback.
There are four more qualities covered under yama that a person needs to awaken and culture within oneself that will bring the internal environment into perfect balance. These are:
Satya—truth:To seek the truth and accept and come to terms with it while keeping oneself open to new interpretations. This is in keeping with two fundamental philosophical ideas in yoga – sat vada, all that exists is true; and parinamavada, all that exists is changing.
Asteya—non coveteousness: To not steal is the primary injunction but its underlying cause is coveteousness. When the person has refined himself to be happy with what he has and whatever comes his way through honest effort, the quality of asteya automatically follows.
Brahmacharya -- discipline: Without discipline there can never be sustained growth. In fact, any growth realised or attributes acquired will very soon be lost without discipline. To be disciplined at all times requires that the person joyously embraces discipline. When this is the case, the quality of brahmacharya is always present.
Aparighaha—to engage, experience and enjoy to a degree appropriate to the person: To know what is appropriate to receive, whether in relation to material things or in relation to experiences and to stop with that is aparigraha. What is appropriate can vary with place and time. ‘When I was a child, I spoke as a child, understood as a child, thought as a child: now that I have become a man, I have put away childish things.’
Cultivating yama
The attention, right effort and rationale that is brought into play while doing a course of asanas and pranayama becomes a model to be used when engaging in any field of thought or work. For example, if a person were to push, strain or force to achieve the final form, the principle of ahimsa would be violated. The work done could no longer be considered to be yoga however perfect and beautiful the final form may be to an onlooker. Having brought these qualities to the fore in one’s practice, they are then easier to access at other times.
These qualities are not easily accessible in our daily lives given the pulls and pressures we are subjected to or which we subject ourselves to. It requires a constant culturing of the mind and a nurturing of these qualities as they become available. While there is an end goal of the ideal state of mind, the option available to most of us is to make the best efforts to stay on the path that leads there; to keep polishing and refining the different aspects of ourselves and to make our lives a work of art.
“No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
Make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
Or music, that we should begin
With the simple exercises first
And slowly go on trying
The hard ones, practicing till strength
And accuracy became one with the daring
To leap into transcendence.”
(Adrienne Rich, Transcendental Etude)
Breath as a tool in Yoga
The beautiful aspect of Yoga is that it offers a way to the realisation of its ideal. Among its different means is the chief one – the breath. There are many avenues through which one can work on our inner ecology, as it were. Music, friendship, family, sport, work…the list goes on. But in Yoga the breath is given pride of place for two reasons. First, it is something that is available to every person, everywhere, and at all times. Second, in Yoga it is believed that the breath is linked to the mind and the quality of the breath influences the quality of the mind. Relaxing the breath, relaxes the mind; controlling the breath, controls the mind; sensitising the breath, sensitises the mind. What food is to the body, the breath is to the mind.
Abhyasa and Vairagya
Once on this path, there are two things that help us stay on it – abhyasa and vairagya. Abhyasa is the continuous, uninterrupted practice of all that helps stay on the path. Vairagya is the avoidance of all that will take you away from the path. These twin observances have been likened to water flowing through a canal. Abhyasa is like the forward flowing water that must keep moving till it reaches the place where its presence will give life. Vairagya is like the walls of the canal that help channelise the water and prevent it from spreading out in all directions and thereby drying out well before its intended destination.
Between the two it is vairagya that is the more difficult to observe as the pulls that test it can be subtle and silken making us unaware of our succumbing to it. The story below gives one example of how this can happen.
The kingdom of Magadha was ruled by a king who was powerful and feared. His affairs of state were well managed by his Prime Minister who was learned and wise. People all through the land recognised the Prime Minister as the wisest and most learned man in the kingdom. In keeping with his position, the Prime Minister enjoyed power, wealth and status exceeded only by the king. The Prime Minister was also intelligent enough to recognise that even though all the land acknowledged him as the wisest person in it, he was exceeded in knowledge and wisdom by one person. This was his friend with whom, through the years, he had studied, learned and debated.
Riding on his prime ministerial palanquin back home from the palace, his thoughts turned to his friend whose mind and companionship he missed due to the duties of the court which left him little time for study, contemplation or friendship.
Sitting high in his palanquin, thinking of his friend, he suddenly spotted him and called to the palanquin bearers to change direction and go towards a large tree in the distance. Under the tree was his friend. Sitting relaxed, wearing the barest threads for clothes, he was having his lunch which was the most simple and basic gruel. Alighting from his palanquin and then sitting by his side, the Prime Minister took in his friend’s tattered dress and bare sustenance meal and sighed wistfully and said, ‘My friend, if only you could put up with the king you wouldn’t have to live like this.’ His friend replied, ‘If only you could live like this, you wouldn’t have to put up with the king.’
Ahimsa in action
Ahimsa, of all the five qualities of yama, is the one which is the most beautiful to behold in a person. The Yoga Sutra defines the highest level of ahimsa as one where in the presence of a person who manifests it, even two enemies will give up their hostility to each other.
We have been fortunate to have had in our times a living example of this level of ahimsa through a man who has become synonymous with the term – Mahatma Gandhi. In one instance, in Bengal, during the days of the Partition, he heard of a clash brewing between two groups of Muslims and Hindus. He went straight to the location and placed himself between the two groups and appealed to them to return to their homes. And they did!
But one man alone can do only so much. What he and others like him have shown to us is that these qualities are attainable in ordinary people. Through the cultivation of these qualities in every individual the ideal of peace among all people can still be realised.
It all started for me as a kid accompanying my father - my interest in communities. My father had a deep interest in the region where he was born. He constantly worked with empowering the communities he grew up with. He was a Director of Lighthouse & Lightships, but was committed to working with the fishing communities at Mannur, using his engineering skills to build better catamarans and other infrastructure. He vehemently opposed the use of agri-chemicals and conducted workshops on how they endangered health and ecosystems for the farming communities in Prakasam District in Andhra Pradesh. As a kid I used to ride the high tides of the coastal waves with no fear, as I felt that the catamaran built by him would never fail. He was my hero and he had successfully sown the seeds of my deep-rooted interest in communities at a tender age.
I grew up with the banalities of mainstream education and its competition but this interest he instilled in me, though latent for many years, kept me in deep search for alternatives. My interest deepened when during my stay in the U.S. I found the space to experience and experiment with various communities. I worked with friends there to create farming cooperatives. With the arrival of Rea, my daughter, I participated in breast feeding campaigns, started an alternative food movement to create awareness and oppose infants being fed with bottled pureed food. Later, I spent a couple of years teaching at an alternative school and participated in many more such activities that helped me strengthen my understanding and interest.
A Festival of more than Music
After coming back to India, I took some time settling down and the keenness to engage with communities dimmed for a while; until the Kabir fest - a festival of Music to celebrate the poetry and philosophy of Kabir was held in Bangalore. I met Mir Mukhtiyar Ali, a Sufi singer at this festival and the mystical experience I experienced during his performance remains etched in my being - I had to meet him and understand his background. I discovered that he belonged to the 25th generation of Sufi singers from the Mirasi community. On deeper questioning, I was told, that the oral tradition of Sufi music in this community was on the verge of extinction. I traveled to his hometown Pugal, Rajasthan, to understand how the survival of such a rich age-old tradition had become endangered and if I could play a role in keeping it alive…
I embarked on a journey - and little did I know that it was a journey of a life-time, when I started for Pugal, a border town, 60 km from Pakistan. It took us three full days to arrive at Bikaner, the district headquarters from where we took a cab for the final stretch of our journey. It was a moonlit night and the vast expanse of nothingness as we traveled lent me a strange feeling of perplexity - who would listen to a great singer like Mukthiyar Ali in these desert sands? Finally, we reached Pugal close to midnight on that very cold winter night in December. I was welcomed by his family into his modest home. I struggled to sleep that night, and many other nights too, as I became aware of the state of many artistes in India.
The Meaning of Community
The next morning I met his 85 year old father who was a store house of knowledge. He told me stories of all the trials and tribulations of his community. I understood that the Mirasis survived through sheer grit and determination of its members who valued their identity. Defined by the spirit and intent, rather than just music, they could challenge homogenization and standardization which threatened to take over. Their collective knowledge and their ability to translate this knowledge into resources and practice helped them overcome livelihood challenges in the past.
A Folk or Artisan community is not just an ideal or philosophy. In a sense it is ordained by Nature, providing within itself an ecological place for every human being. Interestingly, there existed a system of barter in the rural society. Vasiyat Khan (Mukhthiyarji’s father) talked of how in the rural community, different groups specialized in specific occupations and had an elaborate mechanism for exchange and interrelatedness of services within the community. In this system, the artisans were paid annually in grain at harvest time, provided with clothing and residential facilities in exchange for their service during all ceremonies. With the fall of such traditional systems the artisan communities are left struggling for survival today.
Modern Times?
The mass migration in pursuit of economic security has turned rural hamlets like Pugal, into ghost towns. Tiny farm plots lie fallow, their modest homes shuttered. The owners have gone to cities – probably as unskilled labour. A great number of village artisans, craftsmen, weavers, artists and skilled operatives are thrown out of their age-old occupations and are virtually forced to join as marginalized agricultural laborers, thus further increasing the already heavy pressure on the meager amount of cultivable land. But, eventually, unable to sustain the burden of the present agricultural policies and the chemical intensive farming practices, they find their way to the dirty city pavements. Apart from a few like Mukhtiyarji who are willing to face hardships to continue as artists, the rest unfortunately take up jobs that they do not like to do. Their children are attracted to the promise of modernity in life in the city and struggle for admission into mainstream educational institutions.
We live in times when, knowledge acquired by rational faculties and logical deduction has taken over experiential knowledge, which is based on authority, intuition and insight. In oral traditions like that of the Mirasis learning by the next generation takes place through direct oral communication where the young have a strong sense of affiliation to their families as well as their community. Great systems of articulate folklore emerge in communities only if such affiliation, personal authority and also convention are an accepted way of life - and today, along with the denial of convention and experiential learning in modern learning systems, we are facing the denial of communities.
Traditional communities are not just about shared spaces, but about shared participation: they are about shared faith and common culture; about generating and regenerating people physically, morally and spiritually. Culture in this sense is sustained through the community. The culture of the modern society, with its emphasis on the market as the organizing principle of life, is the exception to the link between culture and communities. Market culture undermines traditional communities where ever it penetrates – just as it has now undermined the Mirasi community at Pugal.
When communities are lost and uprooted, for an artist it is not just a loss of economic opportunity but the loss of all bearing, the crumbling of values, culture, familiarity, mutual-respect, affection, support and meaningfulness, leading to a sort of existential angst. Thus the artist’s or artisans attachments, their web of relations which give meaning, all come to be disrupted.
To Belong…
Anthony Giddens describes the characteristic disruption of space and time engendered by globalization, itself the consequence of industrial capitalism, which destroys the sense of belonging, and ultimately the individual identity. The continuities of space and time are closely related: the loss of sense of place gradually threatens identity, whether personal or cultural. The sense of place is not just where he lived but also where his forefathers did and his children will continue to be. Continuities of time are disrupted as the traditions that embody them are undervalued or discarded, as ways of thinking and behaving change. With globalization, such change no longer happens at a pace that culture can absorb them but happens rapidly, wiping away the past.
This change leads to increasing urbanization and fragmentation of social bonds within communities, leaving us feeling less and less as if we belong anywhere. This kind of living becomes machine like arousing psychological anxieties and conflicts. ‘Belonging’ comes from the same Old English word ‘langian’ which forms the root of ‘longing’. In our struggle to find belonging, it seems like we seek gratification in joining the band of habitual consumers of everything – food, money, things, even relationships.
The Beginning
There may be myriad reasons, socio-economic, political and others, which thwart the continuity and sustenance of communities. Despite the challenges, it is an extremely rewarding experience to work with such communities - while engaging in processes that help them rejuvenate, regenerate and reconnect with their identity – we may ourselves touch deep experiences that make life worth living. For me, after connecting with the Mirasis, I realize that my journey has just begun with Pugal.
Why Climate Change Requires a Consciousness Change...
by Duane Elgin
Einstein famously said that we cannot solve problems with the same level of perception that created them. We have to step up to a higher and more inclusive level of seeing what is going on in order to understand and solve great challenges. Certainly climate disruption represents one of the greatest tests humanity has ever faced because it is a much higher level problem than the actions which have created it: countless local actions (driving cars, running factories, etc.) have produced global consequences that respect no national boundaries and that imperil our collective future.
Here is how James Speth, former head of the Council on Environmental Quality and a top Washington policy maker, describes the up-leveling of perception required: “I used to think the top environmental problems facing the world were global warming, environmental degradation, and eco-system collapse..but I was wrong. The real problem is not those three items, but greed, selfishness and apathy. And for that we need a spiritual and cultural transformation.” The transformation that Speth speaks about is a shift to a higher level of attention and seeing the world from a more objective vantage point with a witnessing or reflective consciousness.
Simply stated, what is required is a shift from an “embedded consciousness” that is locked inside the habits of our thinking mind to a more spacious “reflective consciousness” that enables us to become a fair witness or objective observer of our lives. This does not mean we stop thinking; instead, we stand back and, without judgment, simply watch what we are thinking and how we are relating to both the world and ourselves.
An up-leveling of our attention to a more reflective or witnessing consciousness makes an important difference in the flow of our lives. We are less bound by habitual and pre-programmed ways of perceiving and responding when we are consciously watchful of ourselves in the process of living. As we witness ourselves moving through daily life, we begin to cut through confining self-images, social pretenses and psychological barriers and begin to live more voluntarily and choicefully. The ability to witness the unfolding of our lives is so ordinary that it is easy to overlook. An old adage states, “It's a rare fish that knows it swims in water.” In a similar way, we humans seldom recognize the power and importance of a witnessing or reflective consciousness. To clarify, let me to ask: Have you been conscious of sitting here reading this blog? Did you unintentionally allow your thoughts to wander to other concerns? Did you just experience a slight shock of self-recognized when I inquired? What does it feel like to notice yourself reading while you read? To observe yourself eating while you eat?To notice yourself talking while you talk?
As our familiarity with this mode of attention increases, we get lost in thought and worldly activities less frequently. This is not a mechanical watchfulness; rather it involves making friends with ourselves and accepting the totality of who we are with all of our faults, foibles, and unique gifts. In living more consciously, we are able to notice our habitual patterns of thought and behavior, both personally and socially. We are more able to penetrate through the political posturing, glib advertisements, and cultural myths that sustain the status quo. We are also able to respond more quickly to subtle feedback that something is amiss. We do not have to be shocked or bludgeoned into remedial action by, for example, massive famines or catastrophic climate disruption; instead, more subtle signals suffice to indicate that corrective actions are warranted.
A reflective or witnessing or consciousness also promotes a feeling of connection with the rest of life. We begin to see and sense our intimate relationship with all of life and this, in turn, naturally fosters feelings of compassion and caring. As we expand our interior learning to match our technological advances, we develop an inner maturation that is more equal to the enormous technological development that has occurred over the last several centuries.
Returning to Einstein's insight, climate disruption and other crises are moving the capacity for a reflective or witnessing consciousness from the status of a spiritual luxury for the few to a social necessity for the many. This simple though profound transformation in consciousness is not confined to our personal lives. The human family is acquiring a witnessing or reflective consciousness at lightning speed as the growth of television and the Internet enable us to become a collective witness to our own journey. By joining the deep but fragmented communication of the Internet with the broad but shallow communication of television, we are transforming our global capacity to witness our collective behavior and future. Working together, these tools are creating a broad and deep capacity for attention and collective conversation as a species. With the combined power of our communications technologies, we are fostering a new level of collective consciousness that can overcome our apathy, selfishness, and greed and enable us to discover a common future of sustainable prosperity. We are a witnessing species. Assisted by the communications revolution, we are becoming more fully awake and able to respond with to the supreme test of climate change from a higher level of perception and understanding.