Awakenings

Our main chance as a species is to awaken. How can I believe this? And what do I mean by it?

Throughout history, there have been calls to awakening, and claims that the world was about to end. They were premature. But there is good reason to think that we have, in the early 21st century, entered the time when they are premature no longer. By now few thinking people-and no reputable climate scientists-would disagree with the claim that we have started to change the Earth's climate in fundamental ways. We don't know what the results of those changes will be. We only know that they will make life for the people who come after us more difficult. Perhaps hugely more difficult. Perhaps catastrophically so.

What do we do about all this? Few of us have really let ourselves feel the emotional impact of the coming changes. When we do, most of us go through a period of hopelessness, even despair. We feel we are powerless to stop the plunge. We feel that our society will not make the needed changes. And yet there is hope. There is always hope.

We can greatly change the scale of the changes, making them less harmful. Doing this would ease the lives of our descendents. It might even be what saves us as a species. But to diminish the impact of the changes we are bringing about is no simple matter. To do so, our society will have to shift some of its central ways of thinking and behaving. When we do this in our own lives, we call it awakening.

For our society too, it would be an awakening. An awakening of the group mind. How could this happen? It takes us awakening as individuals. This is something wholly within our power to effect. While our individual control on climate policy is limited, our ability to awaken is unlimited.

If we awaken to help other people, if we awaken to help save our species, we are following in the golden footsteps of the boddhisattvas. The boddhisatva vow, and the self-concept of the boddhisattva, is to "save all sentient beings." In our world, in which we can see that global change threatens all human beings, we need to awaken, and help. If we choose to awaken to help make things better, to move society away from the brink of collapse, and to move our species away from threat, we are taking the boddhisattva vow. What we might call the vow of love, the vow of service from the heart, the vow to help others see how they can help themselves, the vow to move beyond self-interest to species-interest. If we choose to awaken in this way, we are being very radical, very contemporary boddhisattvas. But perhaps that is the only kind there ever are.

What guarantee do we have that if we dedicate our life to awakening, that we will effect change? What guarantee do we have that things will be better as a result, that the dangers we see will be headed off? None. Absolutely none. In a way, that is the beauty of it. I we had a guarantee, there would be no challenge. If we knew we would succeed, we might not even try.

Those who see deeply touch into hopelessness some time in their lives. Perhaps this is happening more frequently in our culture. Statistics show that depression is rapidly rising among the American population, despite the largest growth in prosperity in history. Whence the source of this depression? Is it that many of us feel that we are headed in the wrong way? If so, there is a seriously positive side to this depression-for it is in looking into hopelessness that we choose hope.

When we look into hopelessness as into a mirror, one view of life emerges clearly: the view that the game is already over and we have lost. That we might as well never try, we might as well end it all. When we look steadily into this mirror, we see it isn't good enough. We see that life is better than this. That life must be better than this. We see that we can insist it be better until we discover how to make it so.

When we decide to awaken for the sake of others, we shatter the mirror of hopelessness. The reflection that begins to come back to us is quite a different one: we see that we have it in our power to awaken. We see that within awakening lies the power to do the best that the Universe seeks to achieve through us.

Not just the best that our own psyche, mind, and our will can dream up, but the best that the Universe wants to do through us. If enough of us do this, we will have the capacity to reduce the suffering of future generations by changing the way we behave as a group. It's as simple and difficult, and inspiring and open-ended as that.

What I'd like to do in these columns is look into the nature of awakening, and how we cultivate it. We will look at how we integrate awakenings into our life. We will see why some people who have awakenings still act badly. We will look into the changes in perception, in our sense of self, and in the brain, that awakening brings about. We'll do all this because awakening is so interesting in itself, and so important if we are to help others. So please stay tuned, and also send in your feedback, which will be most helpful in shaping the direction this column goes.