Enviroment

Having just moved out to the country I am enjoying nature. I have a garden for the first time in ages and after meditation i walk around it or sit in it. Yesterday i bought a load of seeds to plant and my partner got some herbs. With all the talk of the enviroment at the moment and all the fear about it, it can be hard to see what is going on. One of my thoughts is that the collective soul is at a point where we are suffering so much from being alienated from nature that we feel close to a crisis. As usual our culture literalises this crisis fantasy into an enviromental disaster. I am not disputing climate change or the efforts we are making to reduce carbon emissions and so forth, but what i am saying is that i beleive there is an equally important issue of loss of soul connection to the earth which the mas media is totally uninterested/unaware of. It seems to me that our current situation and therefore how we think about practicing Dharma needs tot ake into account this alienation from nature. Included in this is alienation from body, emotions, inuition, what is termed the feminine. When i first came across Richard Tarnas' book Passion of the Western mind I was struck by his view in the epilogue that a rebirth of the feminine is the way out of our Western pain. I am slowly beginning to understand why he said this and how this lack of the feminine in our culture manifests. Also how the longing for it's presence manifests.

As well as turning our washing machine down to 30 we need to be looking more holistically at how we can bring nature back into our lives.

Dukkha

If the mind is intrisically open and pure, is it fair to say that between where we are now and the full unfoldment of that open awareness lies a layer of dukkha? Then dukkha is almost a fundamental quality of life. Being omnipresent in one form or another. It seems to me that the trouble arises because it is so hard admit just how much things hurt. Our response to pain is almost always one of trying to shut it down and to crave for an alternative, pleasant experience instead. So the pain which inhabits our bodies (I am mainly talking about emotional pain) is hardly ever fully felt. The irony being that just this loving awareness of pain is what is required to heal it. Hence in dependence upon dukkha faith arises and so on. But the mind being what it is would rather create one of another of the six realms to avoid taking reponsability for dukkha. Another problem is that we have no concept of 'skhanda dukkha' in the west. This is the grief we inherit simply by having a body and not being free of delusions. This is felt often as a causeless, inexplicable but very real suffering. I believe that without cultural acknowledgement that being alive hurts and that this is not a personal failing, we are prone to despair. How easy it is for the mind to claim that there is really no valid reason for us to be feeling as we do, so we fight the pain and whip the heart up into a deluded frenzy. So inhabiting the body of dukkha which we carry around with us slowly begins to make us genuine and human.