Welcome to the exploration of infinite connectedness…
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The ecology writer Wendell Berry once wrote, Here is a place to explore and to deepen |
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A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR -- MAY 2011
Dear Visitor,
Welcome to EcoBodhi's evolving web site. EcoBodhi is an interfaith community-without-walls inspired by many of the ecological, psychological and spiritual teachers of the present and of the recent past, especially Joanna Macy, Thomas Berry, the Dalai Lama, Donella Meadows, Alan Watts, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and Gregory Bateson. We are inspired by the Bodhisattva ideal in Buddhism, the Christian Sermon on the Mount, and the Native American tradition of Mitakuye Oyasin (Lakota Sioux for "All My Relations"), among many sources of inspiration. The several aspects of EcoBodhi include:
- A daily practice of compassionate resilience: EcoBodhi includes and invites a practice of hourly meditative prayer throughout the day. These meditations focus on opening to the heart's deep energies of transformative kindness, and on embracing all people and all life as our kin. There are large streams of hatred, greed and confusion at work in the world that would tend to drive a person toward rage, depression and despair. These contemporary insanities include wars that continue year after year for reasons that no one can explain, nuclear power plants built on top of earthquake faults, and global military expenditures in the trillions of dollars when a billion people go to bed hungry every night and two billion are desperately poor, to name only a few. The approach of EcoBodhi is to understand one's entire life as a journey toward compassion, courage, truthfulness, creativity (and related deep strengths), and to re-understand the pain and confusion of the world as a challenge and invitation to deepen our embodiment of all those strengths, so that we might be more completely present as agents of compassion, healing and reconciliation, no matter how bad things get. In Gandhian terms, being the deep change we want to see.
- An open community: EcoBodhi includes a loose network spiritual friends who are practicing the above or similar meditations and who are seeking to bring the energies of beautiful aliveness out of the meditative state and into their work on such issues as nuclear weapons, chronic war, climate change, species extinction, and social/economic oppression. The EcoBodhian community is an interfaith circle of peers. As we develop I imagine that we will use Quaker meetings and 12-Step programs as models of a cooperative community of mutually supportive equals.
- A powerful idea: EcoBodhi is a philosophy of life and a spiritual path based on our growing understanding of how deeply our lives are interwoven. We are interwoven in countless ways with one another as human persons, as symbolized by the way we continually breathe in one another's outgoing breath. And we are interwoven with the life of the Earth, on which we absolutely depend for our lives. The truth of interwoven-ness has been articulated in many spiritual and intellectual traditions, but especially so in Systems Theory, Native/Aboriginal cultures and Buddhism. We honor the Buddhist contribution by using the words, Bodhi and Bodhisattva. EcoBodhi is "deep ecology" with spiritual roots, and seeks to offer support and community to people who are seeking to extricate themselves from the greed-is-good individualism of our time.
- A beautiful experience: The term, EcoBodhi, also points toward moments of personal awakening to endless connectedness. These moments, as recorded by many mystics and nature lovers, fill a person with deep gratitude, love and a sense of beauty. We celebrate these moments in our Interfaith Cathedral in Cyberspace. Opening to a deeper beauty in life can, paradoxically, also fill a person with overwhelming anger, disgust and fear for the future of life, as we observe humans destroying entire species of life, and turning larger and larger parts of the Earth into toxic wastelands. One of the deep tasks of living in this time of crisis is to continually find our way back to the love that is underneath the anger, disgust and fear, a transformational theme pioneered by eco-philosopher Joanna Macy.
- A bringing together of the different dimensions of our lives. As you scan the horizon of groups and organizations that exist today, among the many possible clusters you will find these four large clusters:
>> groups focused on helping people find personal fulfillment;
>> groups focused on encouraging people to take action to care for others;
>> groups focused on caring for (and not destroying) the land and the Web of Life; and
>> groups helping people relate more deeply to a Higher Power, variously understood as God/Allah/YHWH/Christ/Buddhamind/Great Spirit/The Way of Nature/Ancestral Presence/(and others ways).
EcoBodhi presents one possible way of weaving together all these four dimensions of ourselves both in life and in politics, in contrast to the usual practice of needing to "park" some dimensions of ourselves in order to attend to others. Many of the issues we are working on today, such as nuclear waste, are going to go on for centuries, so we can't "park" significant parts of ourselves for the duration of our involvement.
In the balance of this "Welcome" article, I will do a bit more exploring and explaining about these various meanings.
EcoBodhi means awakening to one's connectedness with everyone and everything, an awakening that sets in motion widening circles of caring, concern and delight. EcoBodhi is a new and awkward word, one that I felt I had to invent in order to express a vision of awakening-to-connectedness in a world enchanted with the idea of isolated and self-sufficient individuals. Awakening to connectedness is a theme running through many spiritual traditions, and it is a theme we very much need today for our own survival, sanity and fulfillment. One of the great paradoxes of life is that the most defining element of ME, is how wide is my circle of YOUs, and how deep is my love for all of you. The radical individualism of our time, which is killing the web of life on which we all depend, invites us every day in a thousand different ways into a radically diminished personhood in which we imagine that we can be happy MEs surrounded with possessions and not connected to any YOUs.
EcoBodhi is also an East-West word, combining "eco," meaning ecology and coming from the Greek word for household, and "Bodhi" a Sanskrit word meaning awakening to the profound interdependence of all things and all persons. (For the cause of life on Earth, EcoBodhi seeks to celebrate and draw inspiration from Earth-cherishing ideas and practices wherever they may be found.) The EcoBodhian meditations offered on this site express a deep celebration of the goodness and connectedness of life, a theme summed up by the phrase "beautiful aliveness." I was driven to explore, over many years, the hope and possibility of living in beautiful aliveness by my living through a period of many wars, assassinations, nuclear meltdowns and family tragedies. These experiences taught me that the uglier the situations I have to confront in life, the more deeply I need to cultivate clarity, kindness and compassion in center of my being, the more I need to "walk in beauty," as the Navajo express it.
A spiritual jailbreak. The meditations that I have written, practiced and offer here celebrate the beautiful possibilities hidden in each life. But they also express a deeply personal compassionate resistance to the two great plagues of the modern world, and of our lives. The first is what Joanna Macy has called the "industrial growth system," a system that is emptying the seas of fish, emptying the mountains of trees, and pushing the world toward ecological, social and economic collapse. (If you doubt this, just visit the empty factories and thousands of abandoned houses in Detroit, Michigan.) The second plague is a global political system whose elites are addicted to war and military spending, a waste of resources on a colossal scale, which kills millions of people every year and keeps many more millions in poverty as public funds around the world are diverted away from real needs.
How to stay together when the world is falling apart. These destructive systems want us to live our lives in their mental chains, feeling ourselves as empty and therefore in need of the fulfillment that can only be found through buying more and more stuff; feeling ourselves threatened by enemies, and therefore needing the safety that can only be attained with more and more aircraft carriers, fighter jets, cluster bombs, land mines, lethal drone aircraft and guns in the closet. There are elements of madness in these patterns, and meditative prayer is one of the methods people can use to stay centered and creative in the middle of such desperate confusion.
Dennis Rivers. I am a writer and teacher of exploratory forms of meditation and prayer, now living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My life of meditation, prayer and affirmation (three overlapping categories of spiritual practice) began around 1960. My life as an anti-nuclear activist began in the late 1970s. I have spent a lot of the past thirty years seeking to understand the spiritual and emotional challenges presented by nuclear weapons, nuclear power/waste, and other life destroying technologies spawned by out-of-control industialism. For example, I am convinced that nuclear weapons deaden the hearts of those who possess them and prepare to use them, long before they kill the bodies of their intended victims. They even burden the hearts of those who campaign against them.
Hidden strengths. The intense ecological and political crises that confront us today, with thousands of species going extinct each year and millions of people dying in war and of starvation, demand that we develop new depths of compassion, kindness, patience, perseverance, and a deep gratitude for the gift of life that can allow us to keep going when future looks bleak. There is not much in popular culture today to help us develop those virtues, so I am convinced we need to help one another. Both spiritual traditions and modern brain research tell us that we have resources inside of us that we have not yet cultivated and made fruitful. The question is, how would a person go about unfolding those deeper strengths?
One path of many paths. The meditation practices that I present on this web site are one of many possible answers to that question, a summing up of all that I have learned from many inspiring teachers and years of practice. The inspirations for these meditations and prayers include the tradition of "Praying the Hours" in Christianity and the five prayers a day of Islam. Traditions of regular hours of prayer reach back to the early centuries of Christianity, and even further back to the period of the Babylonian Exile of the Jews. Committing yourself to the well-being of all people and the web of life is an inspiration that I have received from Buddhism.
I will be deeply pleased if you find that these meditative prayers help you become the kinder, more aware, more forgiving, more creative person you were meant to be. I will also be deeply pleased if you find the material presented here not to your liking, but are motivated to continue your quest to find a spiritual path more in keeping with your needs. And finally, I will be deeply pleased if the prayers and meditations presented here inspire you to write your own prayers that express similar intentions to bless and to serve the web of life.
In keeping with many spiritual traditions, the core documents of the EcoBodhian approach are presented free of charge, and have been placed in the Creative Commons so that they may be reproduced freely. We are committed to assembling a large online library of free materials, and to developing webs of interaction, study circles, and mutual support groups that are free of charge, in which we participate as sisters and brothers, rather than as sellers and buyers, or as experts and laypeople (both of these latter are perennial difficulties in large religious/spiritual organizations). This emphasis on peer-to-peer encouragement is very similar to the decentralized "house church" movement in contemporary Christianity. You are welcome to start a study/prayer/meditation/action/mutual support group in your community based on the materials on this site. You are also welcome to use such a support group as a way of participating in a traditional peace, social justice or ecology organization as a circle of friends rather than as an isolated individual. (Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Earth Island Institute, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, 350.org, Pachamama Alliance, Rainforest Action Network, and so on.)
How to participate. We invite you to join us at the turn of each hour of every day and night, throughout the year, and throughout your lifetime, in the meditative recitation of as much of the EcoBodhisattva Prayers as feels right to you. We also welcome people of all spiritual traditions to join us at the turn of each hour in praying/meditating in the forms of their own traditions, for the universal awakening of awareness, compassion, forgiveness and creative peacemaking. The EcoBodhi Meditation Circles, just getting organized, hope to emphasize "belonging with" rather than "belonging to," in order to bear witness to the understanding that we all already belong to the Web of Life, to the Earth, to the Milky Way. Restricted senses of membership and "belonging to" one group and not another have caused so much pain in human life that I am convinced we really need to invent and celebrate new forms of belonging. The EcoBodhi community-in-the-making hopes that by organizing our movement around participation rather than formal membership, we will allow all who cherish the web of life, in every faith and culture, to "belong with" us, and allow us to "belong with" them.
The more deeply you practice and live out the EcoBodhisattva Prayers, or any similarly intentioned meditations, blessings and prayers, the deeper will be your participation in the evolving edge of life and in changing the mind of the world. Participants in the EcoBodhi community happily acknowledge that we share "green" spirituality with everyone who embraces all the peoples of the Earth, and all of Nature, as their beloved kin. As the Native Americans put it when speaking of the natural world, "all my relations." "Green" spirituality belongs to everyone. Our task is to help it blossom wherever we live.
We also share with many spiritual communities the topics we explore and the kinds of meditation we practice and teach. These topics and practices are the contemporary expression of the work and lives of countless spiritual aspirants across the centuries. The inspiring and informing figures of my life include Buddha, Jesus, St. Francis, Gandhi, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., John Muir, Joanna Macy, Rachel Carson, John Seed, Thomas Berry, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Paramahansa Yogananda, Charan Singh Maharaj, Archbishop Oscar Romero, Raimon Panikkar and Walter Capps, among many. Inspired by these and similar great souls, EcoBodhi encourages study/action groups to serve and expand the topics of resilience, gratitude toward the Universe, sustainability, deep listening, forgiveness, kindness, and respect for the integrity of life, now and in future generations (and other topics as well). If we serve these topics well, then more people will be inspired to explore them, and the world will become a better place. By sharing all our ideas and resources, we hope to repeat, on the spiritual plane, some of the amazing cooperative successes of the Open Source software movement.
Please feel free to write to me with any questions or suggestions that come to mind, using the form on the CONTACT page. If you would like to have a personal conversation about your life of prayer / meditation / blessing / celebration / gratitude / eco-activism / protest, I am available via Skype at dennisriversonskype. In keeping with many spiritual traditions, I offer these conversations free of any charge.
Many Blessings -- Green spirituality belongs to everyone!,
Dennis Rivers and friends
Inspiring video of the month: What is green spirituality all about?
Aho Mitakuye Oyasin....
All my relations.
I honor you in this circle of life with me today.
I am grateful for this opportunity to acknowledge you in this prayer....
To the Creator, for the ultimate gift of life, I thank you.
To the mineral nation that has built and maintained my bones and all foundations of life experience, I thank you.
To the plant nation that sustains my organs and body and gives me healing herbs for sickness, I thank you.
To the animal nation that feeds me from your own flesh and offers your loyal companionship in this walk of life, I thank you.
To the human nation that shares my path as a soul upon the sacred wheel of Earthly life, I thank you.
To the Spirit nation that guides me invisibly through the ups and downs of life and for carrying the torch of light through the Ages, I thank you.
To the Four Winds of Change and Growth, I thank you.
You are all my relations, my relatives, without whom I would not live. We are in the circle of life together, co-existing, co-dependent, co-creating our destiny. One, not more important than the other. One nation evolving from the other and yet each dependent upon the one above and the one below. All of us a part of the Great Mystery.
Thank you for this Life.
(Traditional Lakota Sioux prayer. Source: Wikipedia)
Illustrations courtesy of Meganne Forbes
