Earth Day: April 22, 2018
I am not contained between my hat and boots.
— Walt Whitman
On spiritual retreat with me in California during Holy Week, I passed my new friend Scott walking in the conference center grass one afternoon. Scott is a fund-raiser living in the Logan Square area of Chicago. He was barefoot. Pointing down at them, he said only,
“I live on concrete all week now.”
I understood. Walt Whitman may or may not have intended that idea, but if the shoe fits . . . (couldn’t pass it up). Like Alan Watts used to say, “Just like flowers bloom, the Earth peoples.” We arise out of the Earth. We are an extension of the earth below, an expression of the sky above, an emanation of the space around us— an emanation of God, you could say. We are the universe, and the universe is us.
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
— Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
Because the “biotic community” contains everything and everyone in an interconnected universe, and certainly in an alive planet, Leopold’s quote makes a really great ethical guideline for contemporary humans.
Leopold’s quote is from a fascinating essay in the anthology, Interactive World, Interactive God: The Basic Reality of Creative Interaction. In that essay, biological scientist Paul Heltne’s “Honoring God, Honoring Earth,” he describes all those “icky” little things that create a life-sustaining process in that soil that my friend, the concrete-Chicagoan Scott, was walking upon.
I discovered on my retreat how even our ideas about how thoughts occur are limited by beliefs in our individualistic sense of self. So I was intrigued by another essay, neuroscience professor Michael Spiezio’s “Brains, Minds, and Persons: Interactions Within — and Among — Individuals,” in which he provides “alternatives to forces of mistaken individualism in describing the human person, our brains, our evolutionary history, and our possible future.”
Noting such recent “brain research” topics as “connectomics” and “second-person neuroscience,” Dr. Spiezio makes the ironic case that the concept of modern individualism “is ultimately opposed to accurate models of individuals . . . within their embedded networks.” That’s one key: we live within “embedded networks,” not as isolated objects among other isolated objects.
I won’t even try to explain those two neuroscientific concepts except to quote Spiezio on “second-person neuroscience,” only five years old as a research topic, that its “basis is a claim that a full understanding of how the interactions within the brain-body-mind system of an individual organism contribute to social interaction requires inquiry that foregrounds individual organisms and persons in pairs.”
I take this to mean that we actually can’t understand our own internal brain-body-mind system without our relationships to other humans, and by extension, to our total environment. The professor himself urges resistance in “popularizing” this emerging science but for the very unscientific-minded me, it really seems to provide more evidence for Thich Nhat Hanh’s recognition of InterBeing as the defining characteristic of our relationship with and in the universe.
Let’s see whether we can find anything that doesn’t lean. We will be looking for something that stands alone, something that isn’t influenced by other elements or dependent upon causes and conditions. Do you think you can find such a thing? In the 1960s and ‘70s the cosmologist and astronomer Carl Sagan challenged the notion of autonomy with a statement: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
— Elizabeth Mattis Namgyal, The Logic of Faith
There is a section of the anthology on “Interactions in Theology,” with interesting essays by theologian Ted Peters, “Can We Hack the Religious Mind? The Interaction of Material Reality with Ultimate Reality in the Human Self,” and by religion professor Mary Gerhart on “Notes Toward Understanding the Mystical Dimension of Divine-Human Interaction,” but the purer modern science writings amplified for me what futurist Duane Elgin calls “humanity’s most urgent challenge:”
The most urgent challenge facing humanity is not climate change, or species extinction, or unsustainable population growth; rather, it is how we understand the Universe and our intimate relationship within it.
— Duane Elgin, “We Are Bio-Cosmic Beings Learning to Live in a Living Universe,”
Kosmos Journal, Fall/Winter 2017
“Humanity is being challenged to turn from the familiar path of progressive separation to an unfamiliar path of global caring and cooperation,” says Elgin. He quotes Plato, who mirrors Whitman and Leopold and Sagan and Namgyal above, “The universe is a single living creature that contains all living creatures within it.”
The futurist Elgin calls us into a “Remarkable Invitation: Just in time, a pathway [into the future that is truly remarkable, transformative, and welcoming] is being revealed by insights converging from science and the world’s wisdom traditions. We are discovering that, instead of struggling for meaning and a miracle of survival in a dead Universe, we are being invited to learn and grow forever in the deep ecologies of a living Universe.
There’s so much in the way of accepting this kind of reality, supporting us in never challenging the belief that we are each separate entities — it’s a natural block: our entire human and social development begs to differ as well as modern materialistic reductionism — so we need to be gentle with ourselves on this path, yet persevering.
But I’m convinced that’s the path we need to tread at this time in our earth history. Maybe it’d help on the path to just take a springtime walk in the grass . . . barefoot.
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Rev. David Hett is the Spiritual Director of The Burkhart Center
