An Ecology of Love (Part 1 - Introduction)

I'd like to begin by asking you a couple of questions. I am well aware that these are not easy questions to answer, so it's a little bit unfair of me, perhaps, a little bit naughty. But I'm asking them to probe a little bit into an aspect and dimension of our lives, and also of our relationship with the world and with nature, that often doesn't get probed into and opened up. So hopefully there's something in these questions, despite their difficulty, that can begin to probe and open up an inquiry and a conversation at a certain level and in certain directions.

Here are the questions. If, as I hope you do, if you say or think or feel, "I love the earth. I love nature," if you say or feel or think that, what do you mean, exactly? "I love nature. I love the earth." You may not have articulated that, but if you feel that, what do you mean, exactly? In other words, what is it that you love? I don't mean give me a list of specific trees: "I love that big turkey oak at the front of Gaia House," or "I love this particular stretch of beach, this place," whatever it is. I don't mean that. I mean what is it about the earth or nature that you love? And what do you even mean when you say or feel or think 'the earth' or 'nature'? These are not easy questions; they're kind of awkward, and a little bit unfair. It's very difficult to answer, very difficult to probe in that direction. What is it you love, and what do you mean when you say 'earth,' 'nature'? Just take a little time right now to see what comes for you with that, to probe a little bit. What do you mean? It's not easy, these questions. But just see what comes up and how you would frame it, how you would articulate that for yourself.

I'm extremely interested to hear everyone's answer, but obviously that's not possible. For the sake of time, we'll move on. I should have given you more time. But let me say something about that, or rather, add to those questions. Did beauty have something to do with your answer, with what you love? If so, what exactly do you mean by 'beauty'? Do you mean pretty sights, nice colours and arrangement of colours in a nice sunset or sunrise? Do you mean pleasant sounds, pleasant, sweet melodies of birds? Pleasant sense experience? Is that what you mean by beauty? Again, I'm not being very fair here, but I want to open something up through the questioning, so just bear with this. Is it pleasant sense experiences -- pretty sights, pretty sounds, etc., touch of the breeze on the cheek or whatever? Nice fragrances of flowers?

Is it wonder? Is that part of what you love? Is there wonder at the biology of it all, the intricacy of the biology of nature, the diversity of that biology, the mechanisms of its evolution, the staggering complexity of that? Is there wonder at all of that? Is that part of what you love? Part of, even, what we mean by 'earth' and 'nature'? Wonder, also, perhaps, at the dynamics of either self-regulating ecosystems or evolving ecosystems? The wonder of that intricacy and the dynamics of that?

Do you love and do you mean by 'nature' and wonder at the fact of the interconnectedness of all these biological processes? The fact of the interconnectedness of these biological processes, is that part of it? Is it a love of the support that you recognize, that the earth's biological processes, the biological processes of nature provide for you, for us? The sustenance? Mātrīx from māter, 'mother,' Mother Earth, the matrix of support provided by the total intricate net of biological processes? Does your answer to these difficult questions, does it involve amazement and wonder? I imagine it does. There's no right and wrong here. Again, just probing. If it includes an appreciation of the support that the earth's biological processes provide, does it also include an acknowledgement of the danger and potential harms of that very totality of biological processes, the power of nature in very different ways to harm and cause danger for us and for other beings? Is it all of these, these little half-answers I've given?

Whatever it is you articulated in response to those difficult questions, "What do you love? And what is earth, what is nature?", I wonder if now you can, so to speak, step back from your articulation, from whatever you formulated as an answer, and kind of hear it, hear your own answer, but not so much from inside it -- almost as if you were hearing it afresh and just sort of appraising that answer, if that's possible, to the extent that that's possible. Because what I really also want to ask in all this is, if you can hear that statement, so to speak, more from the outside, not being wrapped up in it, is there something missing from whatever you articulated, from the statement that you articulated to yourself about your love and about what nature is? Is there something missing? Has your answer captured, completely, what it is you love, and what the earth and nature is? Or is there something missing from what you articulated?

You know, love always and in many ways involves view. By 'view,' I mean an idea of something, a sort of intellectual idea, whether it's conscious or not, or articulated or not, verbal or not, and also the perception, the view, the way of looking, the sense of something. Love always involves view of what we love. In other words, when I love, I'm looking at something in a certain way. When I look at something in a certain way, it is part of my love and it affects my love. Love always involves view. This is a big part of what I want to talk about today. Always and in many ways. And we can view things in many ways. Other views are possible, other ways of looking are possible. So these questions I asked you have to do with love, and to do with view, which always go together in complex ways, as I want to kind of elaborate on and expand.

But if I come back to this question, "Is there something missing from whatever you articulated in response to those kind of unfair questions about your love of the earth and love of nature?", was sacredness, a sense of sacredness, a part of what you articulated? The sacredness of the earth, the sacredness of nature? Was that a part of your articulation? Is that a part of what you love? Is that somehow an integral aspect of your love and of your sense of what nature is and what earth is? 'Sacred' is a difficult word these days, as I'm going to go into a little bit. But really there are many -- actually infinite -- possible kinds of experience of sacredness for us as human beings. Infinite. There is no end to the reach and the variety of the sense of sacredness, the perceptions of sacredness, the kinds of sacredness that we can feel and sense.

So I certainly don't mean to prescribe any kind of particular sense of sacredness or idea of sacredness at all. Sometimes the sense of sacredness would obviously be heard and appraised by someone else as 'sacred' -- perhaps nature as a face of the divine, an expression of the divine, something angelic, what's called a 'theophany,' an appearance of the divine, a face of the divine; something as obvious as that. Maybe it really includes, for Dharma practitioners, a sense of the emptiness of nature. I'm going to come back to all this. Or maybe it's much less obvious than such sort of blatantly sacred kind of language. So, no prescription. But is sacredness a part of your love, a part of your sense and view of what earth and nature is? And then, if sacredness is part of it for you, do you voice it? Do you voice that sense of sacredness in your activism, in your engagement with environmental issues and engaged Dharma, etc.? Do you voice it, and how do you voice it if you do? Is sacredness a part of it, or is it there but somehow it's not something that comes out in your expression, in your voice? These are the kind of things I want to go into.

In modernist culture, if you like -- the culture that we live in these days in the West; what I call the culture of modernism is the dominant view and way of understanding and thinking and feeling things. In modernist culture, this is dominated by what we could call secular humanism. Or actually, it may be more comprehensive and accurate to say it's increasingly dominated or characterized by a seeming abyss between secular humanism and narrow religious fundamentalism. That's characteristic of kind of modernist culture these days. You only need to read the news or the debates that go on, or really don't go on because there is an abyss there, and the conversations are not being had. This kind of abyss between secular humanism and narrow religious fundamentalism, which sometimes have far more in common with each other as poles, polarities, than either end of that polarity would like to admit.

But in this culture, dominated by secular humanism, by this kind of abyss between secular humanism and narrow religious fundamentalism, there seems very little appeal in the discourse around climate change or environmental crises that we face, very little appeal in the discourse to a sense of nature and the cosmos as sacred, it seems to me. And even from religious institutions and traditions, or spiritual institutions and traditions, very little, very cautious or minor in relation to other points they might make, points about political equality and caring for the poor (all of which is hugely important). But this aspect of sacredness seems shrunk or exiled from the discourse, cut out. Is it taboo? Are we afraid that it will be mocked, dismissed, regarded as irrelevant? Do we regard it as irrelevant? Have we lost a certain vocabulary over the centuries? Lost the vocabulary of holiness, of sacredness, of invoking that? Have we even lost -- not everyone, obviously, but as a culture, what's pervasive in the culture -- have we lost even the perspective and the sense of sacredness? Has it gone from our view, from our sense of the world?

Historically, of course, there came at some point in history, following the Enlightenment, the Western Enlightenment, etc., the separation of church and state, gradually, slowly. It was a very good thing, taking away power from what were sometimes corrupt institutions. The separation of church and state, so-called, a very helpful separation that occurred in Western history. But with it, also, perhaps, came a separation of not just the institutions of church and state, but a separation of the sense of sacredness from the economic, political, public discourse.

That's a huge generalization, I know, and in some areas of the West that's definitely not the case. But as a generalization, that may be something that happened. The sense of the sacredness often became, if it was there at all, if it was left at all, didn't dwindle and wasn't eroded completely, became something private and personal and separate from the public discourse on economics and politics and civil life, civil society. Just recently, not too long ago, Jeb Bush -- younger brother of George W., and son of the elder George, ex-presidents -- I think he's governor of Florida, and I think he's still running or intends to run for the Republican presidential nomination. I can't remember, but anyway. He said, "I don't get my economic policy from my bishop, cardinal, or pope." He said that in response to comments by the pope about the obligations of Catholics and also of politicians in regard to the environment and climate. There's this separation. He is a Catholic, but even for him, separating economics, politics from whatever he might consider or sense as sacred in his life.

In this eroding and denigrating or exiling or dismissing of the sense of the sacred that has happened over centuries now in the West, it's created a void. Where there was sacredness, there is now a void, an absence. Of course, things either rush in or get thrust into that void to try and fill it. Of course. One of those things is love, and particularly romantic love, the rise in Western consciousness of the primacy and importance and kind of hype around romantic love. It has become a kind of secular god, if you like, for us in the last 150 years or so -- slowly; gradual, these things. Humans must love. In one way or another, we must love. But what I partly want to go into today is how, and is our love constrained, constricted? We talk a lot, we're a little bit obsessed by love, and especially romantic love or family love, loving your children and all that. But is our love, and our very notion of love, and the possibilities of our love constrained in different ways?

Even in relation to something like climate change -- it's started in the last few years, this campaign, "for the love of." You may be aware of it. It's sort of asking people to express and write in and share, and share photos, etc., of what they love that is at threat from climate change and environmental degradation, etc. There's something very lovely in that, because it's good to, instead of just critiquing and just a sort of rage and anger and negativity that can so much come in (I think it has a place, but), come into the discourse around climate change and environment -- I mean, it's good to include and emphasize the emotions, but also the positive emotions of love. But then you get people writing in saying, "I love chocolate." Chocolate is actually one of the things that's threatened with climate change because of the cocoa plant and what it needs to grow, etc., the kind of ecosystems it needs to grow. "I love chocolate. I looove chocolate." What's happened here? I mean, I actually do like chocolate. [laughs] But what's happened in this kind of absence of the sacred, the hype of love, the movement of that into the discourse, and then what? There's still the absence, it seems to me, of the discourse of sacredness, of the view and the sense of sacredness. I could be wrong here.

Even writers like George Monbiot, who I have huge appreciation for -- I actually enjoy his work -- seem not so much to include that dimension, the sense of sacredness, in the discourse, in the conversation. I don't know if it's a shyness, as I said, or a fear of judgment, or it's just not there, or what. So partly what I want to do is open this up, this question of the sacred and the sense of the sacred, the perception and the idea of the sacred, open it up. Is it possible to reintroduce it into the whole picture? And also, as I said, if it's there already for you, what can be done to support the courage -- and it does take courage -- to invoke it and to voice it in one's activism and in what one expresses in the world, to others in society, about climate change and about the environmental crises that we face, to voice it as part of the whole way of seeing and sensing nature?

Because if our love -- and that could be love for anything, but we're talking about nature and earth now -- if our love is constrained by our view, by certain ideas or conceptual frameworks or just the sense that we have of things, then that has consequences. It has all kinds of consequences. That constraining of love by view has consequences, will create absences or voids in our love and in our action. Particularly, and what I want to get into and explain as we go on is, if love is constrained by view, then what I'm going to call the 'erotic' elements and the 'vertical' elements -- I will explain these -- will be missing from our love and our view. The erotic and the vertical dimensions will be missing from our love and from our sense of what we love (in this case, earth and nature). And that has consequences. That will have consequences.

The novelist Jonathan Franzen (this is from a Guardian article I read earlier this year), he writes that climate change has achieved what none of the madnesses of the twentieth century could, the final defeat of human reason.^[1] He writes, "The great hope of the [Western] Enlightenment -- [the hope] that human rationality would enable us to transcend our evolutionary limitations -- [that hope] has taken a beating from wars and genocides, but only now, on the problem of climate change, has it foundered altogether," he says. We can hope to address environmental and climate change issues rationally, and hope that we can be smart enough technologically and all that to figure it out, but as he implies there by the problem, the limits of human rationality applied to something like this when it's applied alone ... do we not need to perceive and feel differently? Not just to think differently, and figure something clever out in terms of solutions. Of course that's important. But do we not need to perceive and feel differently? Perceive the world, earth, nature, self and others, perceive and feel them differently, all that? Is there not a need for us to re-enchant the cosmos? A cosmos that has, over the centuries, lost its enchantment for us; it's kind of disenchanted. We live in a flat cosmos, as I'll go into in a bit more detail as we go on. Is there not a problem with our world-view, our Weltanschauung, our seeing of the world?

So in this talk, as I said, I want to talk about the interaction of love and view, and how view might limit or open love, and also vice versa -- the interaction of love and view, and what that does, either by limiting or opening. The political aspects or dimensions of the conversation around climate and environment, the economic, the scientific aspects -- obviously important, crucially important. But really, in this talk, I want to address another level of the whole thing, come at things from another angle, what I see as an important piece of the whole, a necessary piece of the whole conversation, the whole opening up that needs to happen. Because climate change and environmental crises, they're not just crises of technology, crises of politics or capitalism or economic systems. Climate change and the environmental crises, multiple environmental crises we face, are crises of values. They're crises of values. And values are rooted in what? Where do we get values from? We have a crisis in our values. And values are rooted in what? That's a complex question, but part of what values are rooted in are views, beliefs, perceptions, sensibilities. Of course, values influence these things, so it's mutually feeding. There may be, too, something about heart capacities, and just what we're capable of letting ourselves value, for fear of the stretching of the heart that's involved there, and the, perhaps, depth of grief and emotion that are involved. But for now what I really want to emphasize is the rooting of values, the conditioning of values, by views, beliefs, perceptions, sensibilities.

Before I get into all this, just to say something or stress something to put this talk in a context and say a couple of things about that. Firstly, my agenda, if you like, or my intention for the talk, is hopefully to open up a range of possibilities generally and in all directions, to sort of hopefully plant seeds, maybe just scatter seeds, in terms of views, ideas, communications, the inflow and the outflow of activism, what flows into our activism and our engagement with these issues, and what flows out of that. That's my agenda, really to open that up more and more, generally and in all directions. So I'm interested in a plurality of ways of doing that. I'm not interested in just saying "this is the one thing that's important" at all. I'm very interested in different approaches, different directions, and different tones, too, different styles of communication. There is a place, I think, for criticism and stridency, even rage, and there's a place for cool analysis and poetry and all of that.

So that's my agenda, opening that up in multiple directions, and this talk is part of that. But you have to find, as a listener, what you personally resonate with. That's up to you. That's the scattering seeds; they grow where they will, and that's completely fine. So that's what's important, is that you resonate with what resonates for you personally. Now, you will hear that I have a leaning and a personal preference in all this, and particularly in what I'm talking about today. But that's not my agenda. I don't want to thrust that on anyone, and certainly not in any particular form. It would be futile of me to pretend that I don't have a leaning and a personal preference, and to try and keep that out from the way I express things and what comes into the talk. I can't help -- I lean towards the mystical, I lean towards the sacred, I lean towards a sense of a radical emptiness and what that opens up in the possibility of perception, and the sacredness and the mystical sense of things that that brings. So that's my personal preference and leaning. I'm just freely admitting it. But that's different than my agenda. So hopefully, if you do hear that, my leaning and my personal preference, you won't confuse that with my agenda, which is actually more just this opening up.

There's a second question or statement to the context here of a talk like this, which is, what do you need in regard to your activism and your engagement? What does your heart and soul need? It's interesting, knowing activists -- some long-term activists can get kind of hardened, embittered, etc., through the course of years of activism. Maybe what's needed is for them to reconnect with their heart, with the love that was the origin of their activism. Some of them actually need not to reconnect, but to connect in the first place -- somehow the heart was not something that was opened enough or received enough attention or healing or whatever in the first place.

So that might be a need in the whole conversation around activism and engagement, what you need. Some activists need what we could call emotional skills, or the skills of working with and navigating the heart, the heart's responses to the tragedies that we face and the disasters that are unfolding, the pain and the suffering of all that. The emotional skills, the meditative tools, etc., to work well with what that does in the heart, and the heart's responses to all that. That includes learning skilful responses, how to address burnout in activism (that's a part of it); both address it in the heart and the mind and the body, and also just practically, in terms of how one is approaching activism. Some activists, what they need is courage, they need en-courage-ment to communicate what they love, or they need to learn the skills to communicate love, so that the love that they feel can pour through their communication, their activism. There are many, many aspects of activism and places where we are at different times in terms of what we actually need. So again, this talk, it's one piece in a much bigger pie, if you like. One slice of the pie, one level, one tack, one approach.

What I want to do is open up and explore our perception, our view, our sense of earth, nature, and particularly of the sacredness of that, or the possible views, sense, perception, of the sacredness of earth and nature. And also open up and explore our ideas, views, perceptions, senses of what love is. So what is involved in love? That word, 'involve,' related to 'revolve' and 'revolution,' from Latin. What turns in the field of love? What are the elements that mix together and turn together, and fertilize and interact within love, so to speak, that either grows that love, or takes it in different directions, or opens it in a certain way, or colours it, or limits it? What is involved in love? That's part of the original difficult questions I asked you: what is it about nature that you love, and what do you mean by 'nature'?

So, exploring in this talk love of nature as a basis for our activism. We're talking about an ecology of love -- love of nature as a basis for activism, and also it's a basis for ecology, for understanding or our idea of what nature is. The love of nature becomes part of the idea. It must influence the idea of what nature is. So love of nature as a basis for activism and ecology, and also this exploring love and how it works -- in other words, the psychological and spiritual ecology of love, if you like, the study of the dynamics of love, the inner and outer dynamics of love (mostly the inner today -- actually both). In the title, An Ecology of Love, you can hear there's a double meaning. Just to confess, I seem to like putting double or even triple meanings in titles to try and get the most meaning and most expression out of limited time, limited words.

Anyway. Let's go into this. This poor word, 'love,' a four-letter word, has become so stretched, and has been made to try and do so much work in so many different directions and dimensions, and more and more so in recent centuries. But let's just start with a statement, and say 'love,' the word 'love,' is undefinable. I mean, ultimately, it's undefinable. And admit that. But nevertheless, though it's undefinable, if you just shrug and walk away from kind of exploring it, it's still explorable, and there are still aspects or dynamics and dimensions of love, or ways of thinking about it and breaking it up, that can still be very fruitful in our lives, and in our expressions, and fruitful for the psyche, for the soul, for our being.

We can say many, many things, despite the undefinability of love, but right now, let's say a few things. Firstly, and especially for this talk, what I want to emphasize is, when we say 'love,' I want to include two aspects or currents or kinds of love. One is mettā. Many of you will know this Pali word, mettā. It's usually translated as loving-kindness. In a way, that's something very, very simple: we can define that as universal and unconditional well-wishing, wishing well for all. It's just that. So whoever -- including oneself -- whoever you are, or this being is, I wish it well, in everything that that word, 'well,' means. I wish it well. Mettā is, ideally, universal. It spreads without leaving any being out, and it's unconditional in that way. It's not dependent on what this thing or being can do for me, or whether I like it or not, or it's pretty or not. So that's mettā: something very simple, this unconditional and universal well-wishing, wishing well. Today I want to emphasize one thing: love includes mettā (that's one kind of love), and also what I'm going to call 'eros.' It's a Greek word.

Eros is not simple. Mettā is simple. I'm not saying mettā is easy in its sort of fullness and ideal, but it's simple. Eros is not simple. Eros is also undefinable, I would say, ultimately speaking. Eros was a god or a kind of god in Greek mythology. Gods, by definition, are undefinable, if you like. They are infinite. We cannot plumb or encapsulate or capture them in any definition. Nevertheless, again, we can start, in relation to eros, with what sounds like a modest, sort of small, working definition. We can start with something like that, and see where it takes us in this whole investigation. So, by 'eros,' I certainly include within eros the sexual and sexuality, and sexual desire, and sexual feeling, and sexual energy, and all that. I include that. And actually, just as an aside, there is a very potent possibility for meditators to use the sexual, the erotic, skilful meditative use of the sexual erotic-imaginal, in a way that ends up spreading to sacralize, to make sacred in our perception, the sense of the world, of nature, of the whole cosmos. But that's certainly worthy of at least one other talk. So I include all that, including the sexual.

But right now, start with something that sounds much more general and a kind of more modest definition: eros as the desire to connect. You may need to think about that for a while. Eros as the desire to connect. With mettā, there's the desire for well-wishing: I want you to be well. If we say that mettā has any desire in it, there's a wholesome desire. But it's not a desire to connect. I may or may not interact with this person that I'm wishing well. What I want is for them to be well. I don't need an interaction, a connection, a knowing of their particularities.

Let's start with this: eros as a desire to connect. I'm going to come back to this and amplify it a little bit more. Included in love are both mettā and eros, and they're different. They're different levels, streams, kinds of love. Now, both mettā and eros will always involve a view (in other words, idea and sense) -- always when I use the word 'view,' I mean 'idea' and 'sense,' conscious and unconscious idea, verbal and non-verbal, articulated or not -- always involve the idea and sense, the view, of both self and other. Both mettā and eros always involve the view of self and other. It's intrinsic to mettā and to eros, intrinsic to love, as I was saying earlier.

Now, one of the things that's crucial, absolutely crucial and vital to understand about views, is that they're not fixed. They're not fixed. They change. Our views change. Hopefully they do. Our views can change. We just need to look around and see: culturally, views change. Of course, we can fix views. What I mean to say is, views don't have to be fixed, and they tend, at times, to get fixed, and they tend also to change. But culturally, if you look around us, views change. It's obvious, from culture to culture, from one society's period to another period in the same society. In relation to nature, the view of nature, the view of earth has changed, just culturally.

This is from Adam Corner, also from a Guardian article, in fact:

Over the course of millennia, the way that people have imagined and perceived the natural world has changed repeatedly and often dramatically.... The concept of "nature" is subjective, dynamic and culturally constrained. [Culturally conditioned, you could say.] The classic example is smallholder agriculture: what was once, many thousands of years ago, considered the height of mastery over nature, is now an archetypal image of humans living in harmony with their environment.^[2]

So smallholder agriculture was once, many thousands of years ago, considered the height of mastery over nature, and it's now an archetypal image of humans living in harmony with their environment. It changes, culturally, the view of nature. It changes. Just to put a tag here on words in what he wrote, noticing 'imagined' and 'perceived,' because that's a lot of what I want to go into: the imagination is part of perception. And also the use of the word 'archetypal.' I'm going to come back to these things.

So views are not necessarily fixed. They change through and in the culture. They have changed. Views of nature have changed many times. And they will again. They will again, culturally. So they change culturally, but also as a Dharma practitioner, it's really important to recognize how views are dependent basically on, we could say, facets of the citta, facets of the mind and the heart, dependent on the mind state, dependent on practising different ways of looking. You're actually practising a different view, and the sense that I have of something -- whether it's the world, the nature, the cosmos, the self, the other -- that changes dependent on facets of the citta, dependent on different ways of looking. That's something we can practise.

So in other words, things -- things that we perceive, including nature, including earth -- are empty of any real, independent way that they are. When you really go into this question of view, you realize it's not that things are a particular way, nature is a particular way. It's that all we have is views, and those views are dependent arisings. We can view in different ways, as I said before.

So all things, including nature, including earth, are empty, empty of any kind of real, independent way they are, independent of the way we look at them. Therefore, because they're empty, they can be viewed in different ways. That's one way of understanding what practice is. It's not a very common way of understanding what meditative practice is and what the path is, but it's, I think, a very fruitful way of looking. Meditation, practice, the journey of that, is practising skill in different views, and seeing what that does.

As we just said, the view of anything -- in this case, of nature and earth -- view is a dependent arising, dependent on what's dominant in the culture, we absorb from the culture; dependent also on so-called inner mind states and factors of the mind and the heart and ways of looking. So view arises dependently, and also is itself part of dependent origination. It conditions other things. Other things are dependent on view. In other words, it brings consequences. Any view that we have has certain consequences. One of the consequences, as I mentioned before, is its consequences on love. Views will affect love. They will cause love to deepen or grow in certain ways, or they will limit it, constrict it in certain ways. So love and view have this mutual reciprocity, mutual informing, mutual influencing, mutual dependency. Mutual dependency of love and view.

I really hope you can hear that this is not abstract. I hope that, as we go on in the talk, you can really understand how totally crucial this is. I'm talking about experience here, I'm talking about our life, what comes out of our life, and how we sense our life.