An Ecology of Love (Part 4)

So I keep saying eros involves -- in the meaning of that word, in the fullness of the meaning -- eros involves psyche and logos. In that, infinite, there's an infinity of possibilities of view and perception and experience and kinds of love, etc. But to point out a few things. In the way that it involves psyche and logos and view, and in the infinity of possibilities, it will always include a view of self. Or rather, included in that whole dynamic is always included a view of self and of the other -- whatever the other is; in this case, predominately in this talk, the earth or nature. So always included in this co-fertilization of eros-psyche-logos is a view of self and a view of other, at any level of perception, at any stage to which it arrives at or opens at. The view of self and the view of other, these will be important factors, as I said right at the beginning of the talk. Views condition. Dependent on views, doors open or close, and specifically in terms of the action and how we behave and the styles of engagement or activism. Or not -- whether we somehow don't engage, are not active, do not respond to the crises of the earth. Wrapped up in all that is the view, not just of the other, of the earth, but the view of the self as well. They go together, and they're part of the whole kind of dynamic of eros-psyche-logos.

So just to say a little bit regarding self-view in all this. As I just touched on, it's going to be part of it. Listen to this from Wendell Berry. In regard to this whole dynamic and ecology of love, and that with respect to activism and all this, listen to this, and then in respect to the self-view involved in activism, the self-views possibly involved in our activism or in our non-activism. This is Wendell Berry, the poet:

[A] protest that endures [he writes], I think, is moved by a hope [far] more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's [own] heart ... that would be destroyed by acquiescence.^[1]

In a way, he's turning around, turning on its head sometimes, how we think of activism. It's not so much of achieving this or that in the world, he's saying, but the hope of preserving qualities in one's heart that would be destroyed by acquiescence. Something is holy here, in my heart, and I'm going to act and speak and stand up in a certain way because that is holy and I cannot bear to think of those qualities being destroyed. There's beauty and divinity in those qualities, in the self, in the heart. A certain orientation towards, leaning towards, emphasizing of the self, of the view of the self, and of what's in the self.

Confucius, obviously many centuries before, but in a way, kind of elaborating on something, pulling that out a bit more. This is what Confucius said or wrote:

You follow your conscience not in order to change the world but in order to be a noble person. You are prepared to go against all norms, conventions, dictates and decrees, even to risk your life in order to remain true to yourself.^[2]

Beautiful. Strong, strong words. Again, not to change the world, this following of our conscience, but in order to be a noble person.

Now, we can talk about self and all this, what both Wendell Berry and Confucius write, in terms of qualities of heart, in Wendell Berry's phrase, which would be a traditionally Dharma way of speaking about things, in terms of qualities of citta, qualities of heart. That's possible and helpful, definitely. But when we start talking about things like nobility -- which, by the way, is also, of course, a word the Buddha emphasized a lot -- nobility, kind of as a word, as a concept, it already draws in, it can't help but drawing in image and fantasy. There's a kind of logos with nobility, of what that means. But specifically what I want to emphasize is image and fantasy of self.

What resonance do these words have in us, nobility, or what Wendell Berry said, or Confucius? The resonances are soul-aspects, soul-resonances of the psyche, through image and fantasy. The very idea of nobility gets seen through image and fantasy, and that colours the image and fantasy of the self. Now, this is something I've talked about in other talks, so I don't want to dwell on it in this talk. In other talks, I've talked about how very easily, without realizing it, the image or the fantasy or the archetype of the self gets limited in different ways and for different reasons, and sometimes limited through different cultures, whether that's Dharma culture or other culture, so that certain, if you like, images of the self are kind of not allowed into the sense of the self, into the view of the self. The warrior, the revolutionary, rage as a force empowering the self, giving power to the self's actions -- these are all kind of put aside or ignored or somehow not okay. Many of us, we could mention as well, what often has become dominant is an image or a fantasy or an archetype of the practitioner or the self or of the awakened person as equanimous, cooled, to borrow the Buddha's words -- nibbāna is in relation to 'cooled.' Equanimous, cooled, not engaged. There's an archetypal image operating that does not allow other archetypal images of the self and the practitioner and the person walking the path and the awakened person. There's a constraining on the image there.

[7:06] Luc Jacquet is a filmmaker. He made, you may know, March of the Penguins, which got an Oscar. Then I read -- I haven't seen this film -- but he recently made another film called Ice and the Sky. It's about climate change. This is also from a Guardian article. It's a lot of Guardian stuff. You may get the wrong idea of what I spend my time reading! But anyway. I do read The Guardian, but not that much. [laughs] So this Luc Jacquet spoke in an interview of the moral compulsion he felt to address climate change caused by humans. To not do so, he said, would be "criminal." It's a strong word, criminal. He goes on:

I could make endless contemplative films about the beauty of nature. But it would not have been right to do so. We have to deal with this; it's our duty. It's like the war. You want a quiet life with your family but you have to say: I cannot accept this. You have to get out of a comfortable area and into the political. You must participate in the society in which you live.^[3]

So again, strong words. But again, can you hear, wrapped up in the words, there's the sense of an imaginal or fantasy sense of the self and, if you like, the duty of the self? That word, 'duty,' is also a word that can be imbued with the imaginal.

So there's a self-view, an archetype, wrapped up in what he's saying, and then this sense of the duty to that. So when we dare to experiment with and practise with and open up to different self-views and more archetypally imbued views of the self, and play with all that, and open it up, and allow it, and allows its force and its current into our life and into the way we sense ourselves, then we can feel, very often, a duty to these imaginal figures that come through. They demand something.

This, again, I've talked about this before, but just to mention it. It's interesting: sometimes when there is a sense of duty to an archetypal image or an imaginal figure that has a kind of archetypal quality to it for us, then that can bring a lot of activation in the being.

I was talking with someone. Someone was telling me they were about to engage in an act of civil disobedience in relation to climate. She was saying, "Gosh, the adrenaline beforehand," and the anxiety. She had just assumed, of course -- very natural or normal, given the culture -- assumed that the anxiety was in relation to the possible consequences: "I may go to jail, I may ..." all kinds of stuff. Of course, some of it's to do with that. But there's also another aspect. It's more to do with the imaginal and the soul-dimension of what's going on. Because when we feel a duty to an imaginal figure that has an archetypal value for us, when we feel a duty to that, and we allow that to fill the self-view, and we feel a duty in our life to that image, the sense of that -- because of the other dimensionality of that and the hugeness of it and the divinity of it -- the sense of the human being having to hold and carry and let that flow through them, that in itself causes a lot of adrenaline. There's tremendous energy and the sense of duty wrapped up in that. It's not just the adrenaline about the fear of possible consequences.

That was a little bit of an aside. But the point is that self, too, the sense of self, the view of self, is also given verticality through the imaginal and through fantasy. It's ensouled, if you like. And potentially, in this eros-psyche-logos dynamic that we're talking about, the view and the image of self is also endless in its potentiality. It can be forever opening; there's not a limit there to how we can see the self.

Some self-views, I've already alluded to, will kind of block engagement. So for example, the archetypal view of the equanimous one, the cool one who is not engaged that way. But also other ones, less obvious. I know several people who -- although they don't actually think at all imaginally; that's part of the problem -- are kind of enthused by or enthralled by or live their life by the archetypal image of what we might call the simple man, or the simple man of nature, or nature man, or something like that. Living close to nature in the old ways, and very simple and renunciate and in touch with those elements, seeing oneself in a certain way.

But often, at least in the couple of people I'm now thinking of, wrapped up in that image is, and actually the logos, the limited logos of physicalism, of this one-dimensionality, and somehow, it doesn't translate in terms of engagement with regard to the natural world. One person I'm thinking of engages a lot with some other issues, but not in relation to the natural world. Interesting. So what one would think of as, "Well, that kind of person is obviously going to be an environmentalist, and obviously going to be engaged in environmental ..." No, not necessarily. It may be partly because wrapped up in that for them is this one-dimensional view of physicalism, maybe.

So where there is mettā -- if we go back to this mettā and eros thing -- where there's mettā, the views of the self tend towards dissolution, tend towards a sense, as the mettā deepens, of dissolving the self in union, in oneness. It's the way the self-sense transforms, at times of strong mettā and deep mettā. The self-sense basically dissolves, or dissolves in oneness, or dissolves in this sense of universal love we were talking about. There are other ways of it dissolving through other practices, dissolving in awareness, all kinds of stuff. But in other words, one way that the views of the self can be wrapped up in this sense of other dimensions is through the sense of the dissolving of the self into some kind of oneness, a non-fabricating of the self-sense at any time. Versus -- in the erotic kind of love, and when there's eros -- the archetypal views, the imaginal views, the fantasy of the self, get actually heightened. So the view of self, again, is infused, impregnated, with the imaginal, complicated and enriched with the imaginal. And the sense of other dimensions, of the self, in this case, and the sacredness is through the particular, and through the personhood and the personal. So one dissolves self, the way of mettā, and the eros actually does not dissolve self -- it complicates it, enriches it, and retains their particularity and the personhood, and the sacredness is through and in the particularity and the personhood, not the universality.

[15:41] So there's the involvement of self-view. We should also mention here, there's also the involvement, in all this in regard to activism, of the view of what Dharma is -- the conceptual structure or limits or framework of what the Dharma is, and our imaginal sense, our fantasy of what the Dharma is. Those two always go together, logos and image, concept and fantasy concept. So our view of the Dharma also has a big impact on whether we engage, how we engage, what our activism looks like or whether it exists at all, etc.

So one way is in relation to our belief of what the Dharma says about self -- so relating it to what we just said about self-view. Some people nowadays, it's quite popular, hold on to the view that the Dharma teaching is always towards not-self. It's always in regard to, "There is no self, or self is something to be let go of, etc., not engaged." Or, for instance, "What the Dharma teaches is the self is just a process, and the more you can kind of see self that way, the better. You try and see self that way, and that's a kind of Dharma perspective to hold on to."

But actually, if we have an understanding of a much more radical level of the emptiness of the self and of all things, emptiness is not just saying self is a process. It's saying something much, much deeper than that, in terms of what it means to say the self is empty. It's radically empty -- 'radical' from the Latin word radix, 'to the root.' There's no root to the self. It's completely and thoroughly, utterly empty. All the elements of it, all of it, all that process is empty. Process does not ultimately exist.

Knowing that fullness and radical depth of the emptiness of self actually allows us -- seemingly paradoxically -- to come back and play with all kinds of views, fantasies, and images of self, knowing that they're empty. So that's one way a view of the Dharma, through its view of what the teaching is about self and not-self, might constrain or not, or free up the activism. I can play with the image of the Dharma practitioner as revolutionary, as troublemaker, as warrior -- all these other archetypes and imaginal senses or views that get kind of shunted aside or disallowed often in certain Dharma spheres.

So that's one way. A second way that the view of the Dharma, the concept and image of the Dharma, can constrain activism, is in regard to our conception of the Four Noble Truths (suffering; there's a cause for suffering; there's the possibility of ending the suffering; and there's the path to the ending of that suffering, a way towards that ending of suffering). There are two ways here in regard to the Four Noble Truths. The first is simpler, in a way. It has to do with whether I view it purely individually and internally, if you like. Do I conceive the Four Noble Truths teaching, do I allow it to include the suffering of other humans and animals and the suffering caused -- Second Noble Truth -- by institutions and ideologies and systems, economic or otherwise, political, etc., and views that pervade our society and our culture that basically cause suffering? Am I allowing my idea of the Four Noble Truths, and thus of the Dharma, to actually open up to include all that?

So that's something that, I think, slowly, I hope, more and more so-called Buddhists are opening up that view. For some people, it's a kind of no-brainer -- how could you not? How could you exclude all that, and talk about suffering, and then not talk about these crazy tragedies of institutions and systems and ideologies that cause so much suffering that's so entrenched in our society? A lot of people, I've heard people say, "It's ridiculous to conceive of a Dharma and ethics of the Dharma that doesn't include all that." One teacher I heard said, "Climate change doesn't concern the Dharma at all. It's not involved." Someone might hear that and say, "How completely ridiculous. You're making the Dharma irrelevant to modern life." But if there's this opening up of the sort of range of what's included in the Four Noble Truths and what it applies to, then out of that there will be care for the earth just because one is moving in the direction, through the Four Noble Truths, of minimizing suffering, wherever that suffering occurs and wherever that suffering has its origins, whether in my mind or in institutions or systems or ideologies, conceptions, assumptions, political systems, whatever.

That's one way the conception of the Four Noble Truths can limit or open. Another way is -- what should we say? -- deeper, in a way. There's often what we might call, I don't know if it's the right usage of the term, but a kind of cognitive dissonance, I think, in Dharma practitioners. Very, very common: a cognitive dissonance around the whole teaching of non-clinging and letting go. This is so common. I run into it all the time. It's almost like one hears the Four Noble Truths, one hears the teachings about letting go and non-clinging, and the centrality of letting go of clinging in the Four Noble Truths. It's almost like, "Clinging causes suffering. Letting go of clinging causes freedom." That's the kind of nutshell version of the Four Noble Truths. And the Four Noble Truths are so central to what the Dharma is, especially in Insight Meditation circles, etc.

So a person actually, either consciously or kind of by default, is somehow engaged in trying to live a life of non-clinging. Trying to live a life of non-clinging, or that's somehow an ideal. And of course, it's impossible! Even the idea, if you reflect on what that would look like or what that would mean, it involves itself in all kinds of sillinesses and contradictions. It's just not possible. If I really go into what that means and what it would look like, it's kind of a bit of a ridiculous notion. And yet somehow, that's held up as an ideal, and then I fail, and somehow it doesn't get questioned as an ideal. Maybe a little bit we play with words like 'clinging' and 'craving,' and craving is okay because it's momentary, but clinging is not, and that kind of thing. But there's still some kind of -- something doesn't really work and make sense in that as a life, and especially in a life if one wants to include eros and one wants to include other aspects of life, relationship and love of one's children, love of nature and all that. It just doesn't work as an ideology.

Implicit there in the understanding of the Four Noble Truths is this non-clinging, and then maybe a goal -- if one even talks about goals, and some people hate that word -- but the goal is of less stress, or less depression, if you're in the kind of mindfulness modalities. That's kind of the goal, although one is very careful with words like 'goal.' Or it might be that implicit in that understanding of the Four Noble Truths is the kind of ideal of 'being present to life.' Some may give that all kinds of different language.

But the whole thing there, the kind of aspiration of trying to live a life of non-clinging, of being present or whatever it is, all of that is taking place in a world of unquestioned reality: "The world is just what it seems." We acknowledge, of course, that things are impermanent, though we may not like that. We acknowledge the interconnectedness, and can kind of see that more. But basically, the world, in that kind of narrowness, really, of that conception, practice is taking place with a backdrop or in the context of a world that's basically what it seems to be to the dominant world-view, the dominant modernist world-view, the Weltanschauung. Basically, it is that. Yes, impermanent, yes, interconnected, etc., but basically it's that. That's a very, very common way, even if a person doesn't really think of the Four Noble Truths and all that. Somehow wrapped up in all that is this kind of ideology, really, without maybe a person even thinking it's an ideology. It's a conception of what the Dharma is, what the Four Noble Truths are, and what they're for, and where they move to.

[25:48] Now, compare that with a different conception that really picks up this piece of non-clinging or letting go of clinging that's there, implicit in the Four Noble Truths, very strongly, very centrally, picks it up and really starts practising with, meditatively, in all kinds of ways, at all kinds of depths and subtleties, and in all kinds of directions, but to a lesser or greater degree at any moment in time, practises letting go of clinging -- to different degrees, and at different depths, and at different ranges of subtlety, for a period of time, and then letting clinging come back. Just exploring this movement of more or less clinging, into greater and greater depths of non-clinging, and greater and greater subtleties of what that even means, to cling.

So the practice becomes a kind of meditative exploration of sliding up and down, deliberately, this spectrum, if you like, of how much clinging there is. I realize for some of you this is going to sound really, really strange, and I've filled this out elsewhere, so I'm not going to elaborate too much. But just to say, if one practises that way, and views practice that way, then it opens a completely different door. One starts to see that as one lets go of clinging, or in the moments when one meditatively lets go of clinging more and more deeply, the perception of things, self, other, world, is fabricated less. To the degree that there's clinging in any moment of perception, there is more fabrication. To the degree that there's less clinging in any moment, there is less fabrication.

One sees this relationship between clinging and the experience of self and things and objects and the world. The exploration of letting go of clinging, to different degrees, at different times -- not as something to hang on to: "I'm trying to continuously non-cling somehow in regard to everything," but this more meditative, nuanced, subtle and much deeper movement of exploration in the direction of non-clinging, and more clinging, and non-clinging, and different kinds of less clinging. One sees the intimate connection, the dependent co-arising of perception and clinging, the fabrication of perception (meaning the fabrication of experience and appearance) with clinging.

One starts to see, "Oh, perception is fabricated. Oh, it's fabricated to a much greater, more pervasive and deeper extent than I thought." My sense of things, I begin to understand they are empty. I perceive them this way when I look in this way and when there's this kind of clinging. I perceive them that way when there's this very, very subtle kind of clinging. I perceive them this way when there's nothing left but just the subtlest clinging. What's the 'real' way? They're empty. Things appear dependent on the way of looking, and central in that, it's dependent on the degree, if you like, and the kind of clinging that's there.

This way of understanding the Four Noble Truths, it's a kind of key to the exploration of the fabrication of perception, and from that, our sense and our understanding of what things are -- self, other, world. And the sense of the world then begins to open. I understand it's empty. World, nature, is empty of inherent existence. My perception, my sense of it, depends on clinging. It depends on the way of looking. It depends on how I'm looking. And it becomes more open because it's empty. It can be seen this way and that way. All kinds of possibilities of perceiving nature, perceiving world, open up for us through this practice and through the exploration of this sort of sliding scale of subtleties and depths of clinging in any moment. So the whole thing is actually oriented in terms of understanding experience, understanding perception, and what that does is it opens up this understanding of emptiness, which opens up the very possibilities of perception of what self, other, and world or nature is/are. That becomes much more open, an open playing field, really. So that's one consequence.

[30:24] The second consequence implicit in all that is clinging is not an enemy. It's actually possible at times -- and of course, just think about it, just feel into your life: of course you need to cling. One of my teachers used to say, "You know, you need to cling to ethics." For a while, at least. You need to cling to certain levels of understanding in order to open to others. You need to cling to cultivating good qualities in order to kind of give practice a possibility even of this kind of depth and power. All kinds of things you need to cling to just within the Dharma, and then you think about other aspects of one's life. Can we view the Dharma in a way that strangely -- it might sound strange -- opens up the validity and possibility and legitimacy of clinging at times? And also opens up a place for eros? Rather than the suspicion of eros, and either the denigration or just ignoring of the erotic and the sexual, it actually has a place, because I'm approaching the Dharma and conceiving it in a very different way.

So, in this way, then, the Four Noble Truths and the teaching about letting go of clinging, the teaching about letting go of stress, is not so that we can 'be,' whatever that might mean, but so that we can see more. It's not so that we can be. It's so that we can see more, sense more emptiness; know more emptiness of everything; we can see more levels in the perception, if you like, dimensions; we can see more sacredness. There is an openness and an opening of the perception through this way of approaching practice. To me, there's a much greater freedom there, a whole other level of freedom. It's a much more open, a much richer way of viewing the Dharma.

But in a way, this talk today, I just mentioned these things, but this talk today is really focused on not so much the self-views -- I've talked about that -- not so much the view of the Dharma, and the way the view of the self and the view of the Dharma are involved in all this business about eros and psyche and the dynamic there. But actually primarily for today is the view of an other, or any other, and particularly of nature and earth, as we started off with.

We've said already quite a lot about this, but just to return a little bit to it: in the so-called Enlightenment in Western civilization, that was a gradual thing like these things are, seventeenth century sort of, and the Scientific Revolution, which happened at the same time -- these things were interpenetrating, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment -- there was a, I don't know if you'd call him a philosopher or scientist, or both, or a writer, Francis Bacon. Very, very influential in the Scientific Revolution. That whole movement, that whole revolution that came with the Scientific Revolution and with the Enlightenment, brought about, as I alluded to earlier, this kind of one-dimensionality. It's like the shaving off of the sense of verticality, of multiplicity, of dimensions in our perception, our sense, our view of things.

You cannot overestimate the significance and the consequences of this. All kinds of wonderful consequences, and really helpful, of course, but like all things, brings with it a shadow, a blind spot, a constriction. The philosopher Owen Barfield has written about this quite a lot. I think it's from an essay called "The Rediscovery of Meaning." He talks about, he makes a distinction between scientific method. He says that's what really started back then with Galileo and others. It's really an introduction to kind of a way of observing nature. Owen Barfield points out, I'm quoting him a little bit, "Meticulously observing the facts of nature and systematically interpreting them in terms of physical cause and effect" -- so in other words, this one-dimensionality; I'm only interpreting things in terms of physical cause and effect.^[4] That was introduced as a method, brilliant and revolutionary and important as it is.

But it grew as a method, and grew in a way that, at some point, almost -- well, in many cases unconsciously, but in other cases more deliberately -- became a sort of entrenched belief, an assumption, dominating the culture, pervasive in the culture, the belief and the assumption of physicalism or materialism, using those words interchangeably. Sometimes it was kind of enshrined as a philosophy with positivism, if you know a little bit about this. So something that started as a method became a belief, an assumption, that actually that method of interpreting the facts of nature -- purely interpreting them only in terms of physical cause and effect -- was not only just a useful way of doing things, but actually the only possible one, and the only legitimate one. So it became a belief, and something of a sort of entrenched and often hidden dogma that pervades our culture, and the culture and the view of modernism. It's an assumption shared by most people in the culture, and it's become the dominant cultural view of matter and therefore of nature.

[36:56] On top of all that, Barfield points out that people believe that that view itself is a scientifically established fact. [laughs] In other words, the view that the only possible way of looking at things is the scientific one is itself scientifically proven. (A) It's not, and (B), just logically, it's impossible. It's outside of the loop or the system of the relevant terms of the logic involved there. Something has happened culturally. What started as a method became a predilection and an emphasis on that method, and then that became a view of what was legitimate, and that became entrenched as a belief, an assumption shared in the culture, and then it was even believed that that was, itself, established by science somehow -- and science being the only legitimate way of establishing anything. In and through all that, you know, culturally then, has there been a dying away, a starving, if you like, of our ability to perceive these other dimensions? All that affects how we sense things, not just the ideas. I'm not talking about intellectuality; the sense, the very experience of nature. Culturally, has it become rare, I don't know, this sense of the other dimensions of things, this sense of things are more than just matter?

So the other extreme, I think we mentioned this before, is a divinity, a sense of divinity, that's cut off from materiality in the world, and perhaps that was dominant before the Scientific Revolution. Divinity is just something transcendent and materiality is something separate, the world is separate from God -- that would be another extreme view. There's a verticality there, but no connection between the dimensions of the vertical, on the vertical spectrum. And it's dualistic. So one of the things about eros is that it connects horizontally -- it connects me to this other that I love, that there's an erotic connection with -- but it connects vertically as well. It connects the dimensions, so there isn't this dualism or split or divinity cut off. It connects the dimensions through this eros-psyche-logos, because it's wrapped up in perception and ideation and the sense of things, infusing our very sense of things, our very image and perception of things.

So it connects horizontally. Eros helps to connect horizontally, and also vertically. It connects these dimensions of perception, and it does it in, as we said, in and through the particulars. So mettā also connects dimensions, but it does it through universality, and so it's infinite, if you like, in a different way. As I said, it tends to fabricate less, and through fabricating less, gradually, as you get deeper, there's the sense of this infinity of love, and then some people are able to take that further, if they know how, if they're taught how, into the Unfabricated. But there aren't the infinite varieties of perception possible that come through the erotic kind of love, the erotic strand of things, with this mutual impregnation and insemination of eros and psyche.

Something else relevant here about Francis Bacon and the Scientific Revolution and all that. Francis Bacon wrote about knowledge. One of the things he wrote about was knowledge. And he made a very strong and actually extremely influential statement, what became very influential and significant. It had significant consequences over the centuries. In his exposition, knowledge was valued for its instrumentality -- in other words, for its practicality in re-engineering nature, and in giving humanity power over the elements of nature. So for him, if knowledge wasn't instrumental and practical in that sense of the way we can dominate and reconfigure nature and use it for our ends, it wasn't a worthwhile knowledge. It wasn't even knowledge at all in his book. He wrote knowledge without such practical applications is worthless, or worth-less.

Something else to point out here, because knowledge was also wrapped up with measurement. In other words, in his view, if you couldn't measure something, it wasn't really real. Only what was measurable was real. That was absolutely integral and fundamental to the ideology of the Scientific Revolution. Only what was measurable was real. So that began, very much, to spread its influence in our very sense of what the cosmos and nature was made of. It's only made of stuff that's measurable, and anything you talk about that can't be measured cannot be real and cannot be really what the cosmos and nature and earth is made of. Massively influential! These can sound like intellectual ideas, but they so infuse our ways of thinking and our sense, our perception, of things, of others, of nature, of the world, and our sense of what's real. Pervading the culture.

Now, measurement and instrumentality are actually inevitably tied together. I don't know if that's obvious. But if you want to see, "Is this instrument able to do something?", I need to measure what it's doing and how much it's doing and what I want it to be doing. Whether I do that with a slide rule or a microscope or some kind of calibrated measure, or whether I just look at it and say, "Yeah, that looks pretty good. That one does better than this," measurement and instrumentality are inevitably tied together.

Now, all this, I'm harping on about it not just because of the views that come of it, but also in relation to activism. Understandably and importantly, how often in relation to our activism we want to measure the effectiveness of our activism. In other words, we want to measure its instrumentality: "Is what I'm doing ultimately affecting, say, a government, so that ultimately, for instance, the measurement of CO~2~ parts per million in the atmosphere is reduced or limited or stabilized?" We want to measure the effectiveness, the instrumentality, of our activism, directly or indirectly.

And of course that's so important. It needs to be there as an element of what's going on. But can there be, sometimes, an overemphasis on the instrumentality of our activism? Of course these questions, "What will be effective? What will effect a change in society, in politics, in the natural world? How can I measure it? How do I measure whether what I'm doing as an activist is helping?", of course that's really, really important. But if I exclusively focus on instrumentality, or overemphasize it, might that very overemphasis actually, strangely enough, reflect and be a symptom of the kind of one-dimensional view, the physicalism, the lack of other dimensionality, the lack of verticality, that's pervasive in the culture and that started with the Scientific Revolution, and that had such, as well as so much good that's come out of it, such dire consequences? The lack, also, of soulfulness and eros that came or that grew out of the kind of Western Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution ideology, when it became entrenched as a kind of limiting belief, dogma. And then the whole view of modernism and the way -- in so many ways -- that constrains the possibilities for soulfulness and eros.

So sometimes, understandably, we can overemphasize or exclusively emphasize the instrumentality of our activism. Obviously it's important, but again, asking, "Is it enough? It is enough for the psyche? And is it enough for the whole complexity of the situation, of climate change and environmental crisis, and the multilevelled nature of that complexity of those crises?"

[47:08] So we look more specifically at how this applies to activism itself. And, you know, just to point out, it's kind of obvious, but it needs saying, it's worth saying, I think: human activity is part of ecology, but human activism is also, as a human activity, part of ecology. So for better or worse, human activity and activism are part of the ecology of the whole planet, of the earth. You can't remove a study of human activism and activity -- you can't remove that from a study of ecology. It's all, of course, it's integral.

But the point I want to make within that is really about styles or thrusts or levels of activism. So we can talk about the instrumental level, if you like -- the practical or the effectual, and the emphasis on that as a kind of style or thrust or emphasis, a level of activism. We can also talk about what we might call the soulful or the spiritual or the imaginal or symbolic styles/thrusts/levels of activism. This is not either/or -- there's an 'and' here, and I think it's really important to include both, or to allow, within the spectrum and the range of activism more widely (whether it's you as an individual, me as an individual), allow, recognize, they both need to be included. That whole range needs to be included. They're not even, actually, totally separate. You can't really separate them.

We all have both of those levels of our being, if you like. Of course we're concerned with practicalities and effects and instrumentality. But we also have a level of our being that is concerned with soul and with image and spirit and that. Why do we have funeral services and memorials for people who die? Practically, you might say, "Well, it's hygienic. Just stick them in the ground or burn them so it doesn't rot and smell and infect. Do that to the body." That's purely instrumental. But we need something else. Why bother to have a memorial service? It's something the soul needs, a funeral service. The soul needs the image and the fantasy. Something in us needs that level of engagement, of activity, in relation, in this case, to a death. It's not practical. It's for the soul.

Or, you know, I heard this story about when the Titanic was sinking. I never saw that film, by the way, with -- what was his name? -- Leonardo DiCaprio and I don't know who else. Never saw it. But I heard that in reality what happened was the ship was sinking, and there weren't enough lifeboats, or enough space in the lifeboats, for everyone. So certain people got into lifeboats and got away, and a lot of people didn't. Those people who were left on the ship, as it was sinking, knowing that they were going to die soon, knowing that the ship was going down, they began singing hymns, hymns to God. And you think, "Well, what's the point? What does that do?" It doesn't do anything; it doesn't help the ship not sink. There's no practical efficacy. It's for the soul.

This is a dimension also, when we talk about climate change and the massive challenges and possible devastation that we face as a species, and look at other species on the earth, and the tragedy of that, and the horror, really, and the sadness that can come up with it, there's an element here of -- because people often say to me, "What can I do?" or "I don't think we're going to turn this around." And that's true. In a way, holding, allowing, that very real possibility -- whatever that means, because it's also not black and white, is it, either there is destruction or not. There's already a certain amount of destruction. But holding that possibility of failure, if you like. Failure of the activism, of having gone beyond tipping points and edges and the kind of collapses of ecosystems and civilizations that might ensue there. Holding that as a possibility. I'm not saying that will happen or won't happen, but it might happen. And then what happens with that? Do I then give up activism, or get bitter about the whole thing, or regard it all as futile, my activism, my involvement? Or, like those people on the Titanic, is there then a kind of soul-level that needs to get incorporated, brought in, included, activated, brought alive there, in relation to that side of the possibility of activism? And also, of course, we need to ensoul the more hopeful and positive side, because we can make a difference, and we are making a difference.

But between these two, of course, different personalities -- the two of the instrumental, the practical, the effectual, or the soulful/imaginal, etc. -- different personalities seem to incline or prefer one over the other, to the other. It's interesting as I meet different people. And of course, different situations or predicaments need an emphasis on one or the other, the instrumental or the soulful. I would say the totality of the complexity of what climate change is and the environmental crises, and the complexity and the totality of the complexity of the underlying matrix of its causes and conditions, it demands of us both, it demands both kind of levels of activism there, I would say. That would be my view.

And I said it before, but I'll say it again: I feel very strongly, and I have for years now, that there's such a complexity to the psychology involved in climate change, involved in people's reactions to climate change, or non-engagement, or activism or non-activism, what causes climate change or allows it in the first place -- such a complexity of psychologies to all that, plurality there. There's not one tack or one thing or one realization or one change that's going to address all the different kinds of psychology that are operating in different people, that dominate in different people, or even in one person that kick around.

So to me, recognizing that complexity of the psychology involved here, to me it calls for -- as I said much earlier in the talk -- different tacks, different approaches, different directions of entry, different levels of the conversation, and different tones as well. So that's something that, in just a very, very small way, I've sort of been interested in doing and trying to do over the last years, is just each time, approach it from a different direction, with a different sort of flavour and tone and level and aspect of the whole conversation. Because the psychology is so complex, there's not one thing that's going to convince everyone.

And, you know, when we think in terms of what makes climate change such a seemingly intractable issue for us as human beings, seemingly so unsexy and so uncaptivating and so hard for most people to really get to grips with or address or engage with, partly it's because it's not acute. It's a chronic issue. It's a long-term issue with its effects way beyond our lifetime. And human beings are generally better at acute things; we prefer acute things. We prefer, if you're a helper or a carer, we prefer someone to have an acute illness. Chronic illness is difficult. It's difficult to sustain, certainly for the patient, but also for the carer or the people around who care. It's difficult to sustain interest. Acute is dramatic, and you can get in there and do your helping thing, and feel good about it, and then it's over, and you feel good about that. Chronic is hard to sustain. I think Ken Wilber, in his book Grace and Grit, I don't remember -- I read it years and years ago -- I think he makes this point. It's hard for us to sustain interest in chronic illness, unless it's ours. And even then, it's sometimes hard to relate to it.

So that's an aspect of the environmental crises and the climate change that make it difficult to relate to, make the psychology difficult. Another is there's not the same gratification that you might get in engaging or helping in other ways. Engaging in action around climate change, for the most part, it's not a matter of then encountering lots of grateful faces after you've done your thing, and the gratification of that, because it's a long haul. Sometimes you're not even dealing with people so much. So there isn't that gratification that we get back from others' gratitude. Or the gratification, even, say, being with someone dying in a hospice, and the sense of how beautiful that can be, and how poignant, and in a strange way, gratifying -- of that letting go, and the death, and the grace that can be there with that. There's a kind of gratification and beauty in that. Somehow even that's not there in relation to something like climate change and environmental degradation.

There is a place for bringing these things in and allowing them and finding them, but often they just can't be there by the nature of what we're dealing with, and its trajectories in time, and where it affects the earth and people. The results, like the causes and conditions that give rise to climate change, the results also are diffuse, both the results of the environmental crises and climate change themselves, but also the results of our activism. They're diffused, hard to really see them and concretize them and capture them. And they're complex. You can't think so simplistically in terms of monistic cause and monistic effect: "This caused that."

So given all that -- and a lot more we could say about what's difficult and complex about something like climate change -- okay, how then, given those difficulties and those challenges and the complexity of it, how then, what are the ways in which we can open up the relationship and the view, the way we're seeing it all, both the crisis itself and our activism? How can we open all that up, the relationship, the view, the way of seeing, in a way that will be helpful?

Last thing, and in a way, to sum up, in relation to this ecology of love. Or maybe just to leave you with some thoughts. Do we love the earth? Do we love nature deeply when we do? Do we love it and nature deeply because we sense it as sacred? That when there's a sense of sacredness there is, implicitly and automatically and organically, a love, a deepening of the love? Do we love the earth and nature deeply because we sense it as sacred? Or is it that in loving it (whether that's through mettā or through eros, but particularly now emphasizing the eros in this talk), that in loving it, we open up, or the perception of it is opened up to what I'm calling other dimensions, this verticality, vertical dimensions, levels? The perception is opened up through the imaginal, through the fantasy, through actually fabrication involving psyche and logos, as we said, and that opens it up till eventually it is opened to a sense of the sacred, and then more and more, and different kinds of sacred. So do we love nature because we sense it as sacred, or in loving it, does it become sacred? Do we discover its sacredness and give it its sacredness? Or both? Obviously I would say both.

This is the ecology of love, that this opening up of the perception, of the levels of perception, the enrichment of the sense of what it is that we love, creates more love. And the love opens up the richness of perception. The mettā and the eros do that in different ways. They open up different dimensions in different ways from each other. Then, in turn, in this ecology of the love, the different dimensions -- the perception, the experience, the sense of the different dimensions, the different richnesses and levels of what it is that I love, in this case the earth -- those perceptions feed back to the mettā and the eros. When I see/experience this thing differently because of the mettā, it feeds the mettā. Because of the eros, it feeds the eros. And so the whole thing can organically grow, as we've talked about.

So self, other, world, eros or love, sense of the sacred, or sense of the profane -- all of that is co-constellated, co-fabricated. And it can be skilfully fabricated, if we use a Buddhist terminology. The ways we see and experience self, other, world, nature, love, sacredness -- we can fabricate that in skilful ways, and there's no end to that. Deeper and deeper, more and more beautiful, more and more soulmaking, soul-enriching. And knowing the emptiness of all things actually allows that more, allows that play with the fabrication, legitimizes it, gives it room. Part of the logos, the larger logos there that allows.

So then in all that, in the skilful fabrication, other dimensions of the object -- in this case, of nature -- come into the perception. And that allows other dimensions to our love, and therefore to the fruits of that love in action, in our action and engagement, and the possibilities of action and engagement. Opening up, opening up. So we're really interested here in opening up possibilities -- possibilities of perception, of experience, of knowing, possibilities of love, and possibilities of engagement. All of this is tied together. What does it need for that not to get locked down, limited, constrained, fixated? What does it need that that can keep growing into more and more beauty, more and more depth, more and more richness, more and more soulfulness, more and more love and action? This is, for me, why this is all important, why all of this is important. It's important for the soul and it's important for the earth.