Calendar of Retreats

Ernst Haekel coined the word "ecology" in 1873. The work of Alfred Wallace, Darwin, and others had already pointed to a new way of understanding the world of biological communities as systemic and interconnected. Ecology became a sub-discipline of biology, in which species were studied within the context of their physical environment.

A century later, the Norwegian Arne Naess coined the term "Deep ecology", implying that not only biological communities but all local and global communities, biological, human, non-human-in the past as well as in the present-are interconnected. The apparently quite different areas of economics, religion, theoretical science, biological science, psychology-in short, all disciplines-are also interconnected.

This is hardly a new instinct. It is a common thread of understanding running through the world-views of most non-"western" cultures. Nor is it an accident that such a term starts to enter common parlance at a time when the possibility of global climatic-economic-environmental catastrophe is in our face. Does it really require a cataclysm of world-wide proportions for us to return to the fundamental instincts of our ancestors?

The teachings of Deep-ecology and the teachings of Buddhism both point to experience rather than to theory; to action and personal transformation rather than to merely abstract thought. A biologist aware of the matrix of interweaving patterns that hold together all life forms on the planet cannot help being changed by that awareness: her actions are informed by it. By its nature then, biology has an ethical component as important as what we have called "pure" science. The same becomes true for all other disciplines and activities.

Far from being a burden, this is the promise of our human life. We can make choices. And all choices are essentially ethical in nature, in that they affect and influence others. This is the basic premise of Buddhist practice: EVERYTHING IS INTERCONNECTED AND EVERYTHING WE DO MATTERS SUPREMELY. This is also the implication of the work of Deep-ecology.

Both Buddhism and Deep-ecology invite us to revise our view of our "self" as independent and autonomous. Both invite us to practice living as a part of the world, not divided from it by skin and our ideas of a separate self.

On the face of it, Buddhism and Deep-ecology emerge from very different worlds. One is Asian in origin, one European; one quite new, the other two- and-a-half millennia old; one emerging out of the crucible of Euro-American academia and the written word, the other unwritten for centuries, handed down by word of mouth in the forests of North India. Yet they both draw on instincts that seem to exist already within our bones, however hidden they may have been at certain times.

Those instincts emerge most fully in our capacity to feel the suffering of others, to touch and be touched by others. Is it not this that makes us most human? All Buddhist traditions point toward the cultivation of unlimited love, kindness, and compassion as a principal goal. They invoke the joy and serenity based on the understanding of our interconnectedness that can support such boundless love. They invite us to put ourselves in another's place, to see life from their point of view, to let go of our fear of being right or wrong.

The Buddhist traditions also point to the actions which emerge from love. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, "All Buddhism is Engaged Buddhism. But we have the term to remind ourselves."

Deep-ecology points in the same direction, and there are those informed by the sensibilities of it, whether or not they have heard the term, who are putting their life on the line for the protection of what they see as not separate from you or me or themselves - in old growth forests (Earth First), on the oceans (Greenpeace), in schools, prisons, in nonviolent peace movements throughout the world, in grassroots environmental movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

On retreats at Manzanita Village and elsewhere, in addition to our primary focus on meditation practice in different forms, we make use of interactive processes by which we create a safe space to learn that it's important to feel what we feel. Our grief, anger, and fear about what is happening in our own life, as well as about what is happening in the life of the world, are essentially the same.

Mindfulness, awareness, has no limit. On some level, we choose our life. We choose to take on our human existence-miraculously, our of the co-creation of innumerable circumstance, over unimaginable eons of time. To come to life now, to come to awareness, when there is so much destruction and suffering around us, may seem like an awful burden, a big disappointment, when we wanted so much for things to be idyllic and carefree. We may feel that we got a raw deal; but it may be that the living we do, and the qualities that such living brings out of us in these times, is the greatest of all possible gifts-for ourselves and for our communities as well as for those to come. It insists that we wake up to the consequences of all our actions.

In awareness, not reacting only out of fear, with support from those we love, the circumstances of the world become a Dharma-door, a means to our truth- telling, a means to our freedom, a way to actions carefully considered, born from understanding and compassion.

As the poet Senri Uyeno said:
"Thanks to lamenting over the pain in the world I am able to become laughter when my life is happy . . . "
and as the child on a once familiar poster says, clutching the globe to her: "Not with my planet you don't!"

Fierce, focused, filled with laughter and tears. Meditation is not sedation. The world invites us back to life.

The Environmental Justice Reader

Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, Rachel Stein

The Spell of the Sensuous

David Abram

Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory
Joanna Macy

Is it Painful to Think?
Arne Naess

Bodhicaryavatara: A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life
Shantideva

Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism
Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft

Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World
Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown

Thinking Like a Mountain
John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming, Arne Naess

Dharma Gaia

ed. Alan Hunt Badiner

Deep Ecology for the 21st Century

George Sessions