Within the Heart of Chaos:
Environmental Catastrophe and Global Awakening

by James Thornton

When I suggested to the Dalai Lama that the greatest push toward spirituality will come from the catastrophic results of global climate change, he was quick to agree. So let’s investigate together the connection between global climate change and human spiritual experience. Is there light within the heart of the chaos?

The Coming Storm

Imagine this: Everything you find familiar and comforting in the world, from your home and family to your job. From walking the dog to having a cup of coffee with a Danish pastry while reading the Sunday papers–all wiped away. Imagine your life turning into a nightmare scenario worse than when the Visigoths sacked Rome. Let yourself see the coastlines disappearing under water, tens of millions of newly homeless refugees in America and Europe, as well as everywhere else. Picture 2 billion people wandering, looking for food and shelter. Picture tropical diseases rampant throughout the first world. Imagine the breakdown of civil society, as agriculture and transport, electricity and sanitation collapse. Your companions become war, strife, famine, plague, and death on a global scale never known by human beings.

Is this scenario a science fiction plot, a politician’s nightmare, a misanthrope’s dream? No. It’s the kind of thing that may befall our world in about 50 years unless we put the brakes on global warming quickly, through massive structural changes in our economy. (footnote). Are these massive changes likely to happen quickly? No. Are whatever changes we do make likely to reduce the worst impacts of global warming? Even though blunting the worst possible impacts is the best we can hope for, even that is not likely unless we have a global awakening. An awakening that would let us rapidly and by consensus change the way we do things.

So in about 50 years we are likely to face chaos and catastrophe on a global scale–the only question is how extreme it will be. What are now thought of as "environmental" problems will become the dominant fact of human life. At the moment, environmental problems are at the bottom of everyone’s list of problems, except for a small group of environmental activists. In every government, in every newspaper, environmental issues are seen as the lowest priority of all issues.

Why is this? Environmental problems seem remote to people. Remote because they are complex, long-term, large-scale, and often diffuse in their effects. It takes time and training to tune the human mind so that it registers such problems emotionally. The more local and immediate a threat, the stronger the response from our emotional hardwiring. And this is important, because we as human beings never act from reason. We always act from feeling.

Returning to the scenario of global catastrophe–where do you personally turn to find strength during times of crisis? And where to you turn, if you believe such a crisis is likely, to try at least to reduce its impacts? When we ask these questions, we begin to see the connection between spiritual practice and environmental problems.

I’ve been cultivating the field of spiritual and environmental practice for more than ten years now, and it has taken a long time to admit to myself that, as I said above, environmental problems are at the bottoms of most people’s agendas. While surveys indicate popular interest in environmental protection, as a society we move largely in the opposite direction.

What is also true is that most people are not interested in spiritual awakening, including many who claim to be. When my old Zen master Maezumi Roshi certified me to teach Zen, he said, "you have what everyone needs, but you will find that almost no one wants it." Few are the souls who are willing to drop their habits, dramas, and fantasies in order to experience the real. Many claim interest; few are willing.

Neither awakening nor environmental protection is wanted by many in a deep way since both threaten the status quo. And when you look at the overlap of the two, and ask how many people are interested in both, you find a very small audience indeed. And yet awakening into a better relationship with the Earth is our most important task as human beings.

Awakening As a Culture

If we awaken into a better relationship with the Earth we can substantially reduce the degree of catastrophe human beings will have to suffer as a result of global climate change. We are bringing the change about; we can lessen the impact, if we discover the strong motivation that only an awakening into relationship with the Earth can bring. If we really do awaken into this relationship we will have evolved into a new race, one I call Homo gaians. Unless we awaken in this way, we will never move quickly enough as a species to change our behavior enough to mitigate the catastrophes in any significant way. As a culture we have habit patterns–an addiction to excessive energy use–that rational policy arguments will never change. Rational arguments have never changed an addiction at the level of society any more than they have ever moved an alcoholic to stop drinking.

What is required is a shift in consciousness, a spiritual conversion. Deep habits and addictions are immune to reason, but can yield to the emotive force of spiritual conversion. In the case of our culture and its addiction to patterns of consumption that drive global warming, we need to experience a spiritual conversion as a culture. One that teaches us to think like the Earth, feel like the Earth. One that lets us feel as intimate with the Earth as we ever could with a lover, with our child, with our mother. But before looking at how to effect that shift, let us look into our motivation for experiencing the conversion.

Before anyone is willing to awaken, they need to feel the motivation to do so. The inertia of habit is strong, and much energy must be put into the system before we are willing to step over the threshold of fear that stands between us and awakening. We can only find the needed psychic energy if we are deeply motivated to do so. Often this motivation arises in a life when our old habits create so much suffering for ourselves that we seek change, no matter how fearful that change seems. I myself began Zen practice only when life had become so painfully meaningless that it seemed like the last door to try.

Desperation fuels the search for truth. We know in our bones that a truer understanding will always lead to new ways of being, ways that may reduce our suffering. Within the heart of the chaos we are creating for ourselves through global climate change lies hope. It is the hope that, fueled by the desperate circumstances we have put into motion, we will awaken. Awaken to our responsibility for the catastrophe around us, and awaken to a new relationship with the Earth.

I don’t doubt that human beings can awaken in this way when forced to. There is a big question, though, about just how dire the circumstances will have to become before the awakening occurs. If we wait long enough, as we imagined at the beginning of this article, we will have to start afresh, building a new society, for ours will have collapsed more thoroughly than Rome. If we awaken and act more quickly, there will still be chaos and tragedy, but less. In either case, environmental chaos will be the prime fact of human life, the central impetus to awakening, and the most important shaper of future human society. Moreover, climate change is a long-term business–when the real change starts, it is likely to carry on hundreds of years, no matter how much we shift our actions.

So human life will change completely, and it will change permanently. There is nothing we can do to prevent it at this point, though there is much we can to reduce the level of chaos. But again, even significantly blunting the worst impacts takes thoroughgoing restructuring of our economy, and there is no movement at all in this direction. Quite the contrary. As I write, the Herald Tribune reports that the industrialized nations are arguing about whether to cut carbon emissions by the super-trivial 5% starting in the year 2008. Not enough to make a real difference. And the magazine New Scientist reports that an industry group designed to put out disinformation about global warming–in other words to try to convince the public there is nothing to worry about–now spends $1 billion in industry money per year. Not exactly movement towards awakening.

So there is no significant sign of social movement toward reducing the impacts of global warming at present. Such a movement would require foresight. If we have the foresight we reduce the ensuing chaos. If we wait to act, we maximize it. The question becomes: how do we assist the awakening of our culture? How do we as a culture start thinking like the Earth? How do we evolve ourselves into Homo gaians?

Our Need for Story

Story is helpful here. Recall that it’s hard for us to have an emotional response to environmental threats because these are complex, large-scale, long-term, and sometimes diffuse. What can we use to understand these kinds of threat? A story can help. It mediates between the emotional and the external. One can say a story is a model for the heart, much as a theory in physics is a model for the intellect. When a story makes the external world intelligible on an emotional level, it becomes myth. When it is also consistent with the best science of the time, it is real myth, vital and living.

We lack a myth of this kind in our culture. We don’t have a story that connects us to the environment, and to the whole vital living Earth. Our ancestors had such stories, but the growth of science sidelined them. No new stories have emerged that are both consistent with our science, and moving to our hearts. So while we’ve benefited from the science, we’ve forgotten the need to story.

Let me suggest such a myth for our time. A story that participates in our best science yet connects us with the living Earth in such a way that it opens doorways to awakening. It is the story of Gaia, and our relation to her. Gaia theory is now a branch of science called Geophysiology, the physiology of the living planet. It studies the interconnections of all the living things on Earth and of the planet’s inorganic parts as well, and does so to see how it all fits together. For the fantastic thing is that all the life on Earth acts as if it were conspiring together intelligently to keep the conditions right on Earth for life. Regulating the temperature, rainfall, balance of atmospheric gases, and so on.

The system works to keep its conditions stable. Life proliferates, evolves, builds networks of interdependence ever more varied, subtle, stable. When something changes, Gaia compensates, up to the limit it can, to correct the imbalance. At some point though, if the change is too large, the whole system shifts into a new balance. The ice ages were such a shift. Imagine that the Sun increased its heat output by 40% due to a shift in its own internal dynamics. For a time Gaia, the whole living system on Earth, would be able to keep its current balance. But not for long. The tremendous amount of extra energy entering the system would destabilize it, and so there would be huge global storms followed by a general warming of the Earth. Would we survive a 40% increase in solar output? Perhaps not, but other life would, other species would evolve through time, and Gaia would go on. Life would flourish after our departure from the stage. Our type of consciousness might emerge again later on in the course of the play.

Gaia’s purpose is the preservation of life, not the preservation of our life. I like to think of the mind of Gaia as an emergent property of the whole Earth, all of its living and non-living systems functioning together. Because Gaia acts to keep the conditions for life, it’s easy to think of Gaia’s global mind. This is where story turn to myth, because it touches the heart of humankind.

Think of the entire living earth from space, impossibly big compared to the frailty of a human body, though but a single cell in the body of the Universe. Think of Gaia’s mind, always working to keep conditions fit for life. Like a mother, she nurtures. Like a tough mother, she disciplines. Like a universal mother, she will wipe out any species that violates the rules of her game. Her perspective, her consciousness, is already 4 billion years old. The consciousness we are so proud of having does not impress her. Her mind, fully awakened to Universal Mind, is waiting patiently for us to awaken as a species. She is patient but not infinitely so. She watches as individual humans awaken like beacons of light in the darkness and she celebrates with each and every one of them–one body and one mind with them.

But she waits while humankind staggers along slowly towards the possibility of awakening. We have acted like biomass since our birth as a species and still do. Any bacteria will reproduce to fill a lab dish until all the nutrients are converted into copies of itself. When the nutrient is exhausted, the bacteria dies. In Nature, there are checks and balances. Every species tries to reproduce as much as it can, tries to turn as much of the Earth as it can into copies of itself. Each species would turn all of the Earth into copies of itself if it could. Predators, disease, climate, and so on prevent any species from succeeding.

But we have changed the rules, varied the balances. We have killed all our predators, controlled our ecosystems like no other organism does, pushed back the threat of disease. We are succeeding more than any other species ever has in turning all the Earth into more of ourselves, our crops, and the things we like to buy.

The problem is that we are still doing it with the mindless enthusiasm of the bacteria in the lab dish. We have improved our longevity and capacity to reproduce, deepened our science and augmented our culture. But we have not increased our wisdom. We have not improved our relationship with Gaia, we have yet to search out Gaia’s rules of the game of life on Earth so that we could voluntarily bind ourselves to them as we reached for global dominance.

Gaia has such rules of course. In global climate change, we will experience Gaia shifting the balances in the way she feels is called for by the atmospheric changes we have made. We may or may not survive, depending on the scale of the changes. What can we do to avoid Gaia’s wrathful face? Gaia does not care if we survive as a species. Species come and go and so shall we, just as all of us come and go in these embodied lives. We can increase our longevity as a species by becoming the first animal to stop acting as mere biomass and start acting consciously.

Becoming Conscious

Perhaps it comes as a shock to you that we do not act consciously as a species. But we do not. Sometimes we act consciously as individuals, but even as individuals we often act unconsciously. As a species, we have never acted consciously. Herein lies the new spiritual challenge. Here lies the frontier of what it means to be a human being.

Several thousand years ago when the great religions formed, the challenge was different. The challenge was to discover how individual humans could awaken and realize their true nature. The inner technologies for doing so are now well understood. Any person can use them and, with proper guidance and diligence, awaken.

But knowing how to awaken as individuals is child’s play compared to waking up as a species. And yet waking up as a species is the only thing that will save us. How do we do this? How do we wake up as a species? There are five areas of activity that are crucial. They form a survival plan for human beings as a species, and an owner’s manual for how we can evolve into the next species, Homo gaians, a human whose thought, feeling, and action are completely in tune with the Earth.

The Myth of Gaia: It’s critical to have a story that connects how humans feel with the realities of Gaian life and dynamics. Gaia works as if it were a conscious entity. It can be understood as an entity through the kind of myth outlined above. The myth is a teaching tool. A tool that allows the hardwiring of the human mind and emotional system to respond to a vast and complex system as if it were a single intelligent entity. Human beings throughout history have created gods that have a resemblance to the Gaia myth that I’ve outlined above. So it’s a myth that will fit our innate programs. It’s a useful one because it can guide choices and learning about how to behave responsibly within the community of all life on Earth.

Esoterically, the myth of Gaia can be understood as becoming one with the Body of the Earth. This can be conceived of within the mystical architecture of any spiritual system, and can significantly aid in achieving individual awakening. One might say, for example, that one is entering directly into relationship with the embodiment of the Divine that the Earth represents. That the Earth is an entity older and greater than humans, of which we are a part, and that by acknowledging in practice our relationship with the whole, we grow into its wisdom, its mind, its knowledge, until we feel, think, and act like It.

The Science of Gaia: The young science of Geophysiology should become a central focus of governmental funding. We need to understand much better than we do how the systems of the living Earth work, so that we can conform our actions to them. The highest science investments are currently placed in such fields as genetics, cancer research, and defense technology. What is far more important than these is knowing the global physiology of the living Earth, if the species is to survive. Investment in such science would be a highly strategic investment in the long-term survival of our species, much more so than our current highest expenditure categories are.

Re-Designing Society: The current systems of thought we rely on for societal decision-making, such as economics, psychology, and law, are all antiquated in their fundamental structure, based on outdated perceptions of the world. All of them come from a time when we could not yet conceive of the Gaian systems with any degree of analytic rigor. Economics and psychology in particular rely still on mechanical models of conceiving the structure of the world and the interactions that take place in it that were cutting edge a hundred years ago. They tend to perpetuate the wrong kind of decisions. I expect that until we completely restructure them along natural systems lines, that no correct results in our social decision making are possible.

Economics is by far the worst form of thought that we use as humans, and it is by far the dominant form of thought. Put simply, our economics fits the clinical definition of psychosis, in that it makes decisions about the world that ignore the most basic reality of how the world works: that it is a single great mutually interdependent ecosystem. Economics instead treats the entire living world as an expendable and replaceable input, so that we can cut down all the rainforest, use all the fresh water and so on, replacing them with other inputs when they are exhausted. Sadly, economics has it backwards: we are the resource that can be replaced by Gaia, if we are destroyed, not the other way around. Some work has started on redesigning economics, in particular the interesting field of bioeconomics, but it is only beginning, and remains very marginal.

Psychology needs also to be redesigned to take account of two factors that it now ignores. One is our critical dependence for mental health on intimate contact with the natural world. The second is that there is a progression in our psychological understanding as we mature into awakening and the integration of enlightenment experiences into our ordinary consciousness. So we need a psychology of enlightenment that builds on the insights of Western psychology. While there is some preliminary work in ecopsychology that looks at the first of these two needs, there is no work that looks at both of these factors, needed for an adequate psychology.

Law is an inherently conservative descriptive and prescriptive system, outlining rights and forbidding their infringement. It enshrines always the gains that people with power have made, upon the argument that social stability requires the predictable maintenance of those gains. Unfortunately the systems of ownership and acquisition that we currently employ also enshrine the human tendency to act like biomass, acquiring as many resources as possible, and turning them into more humans, land modified by humans, and more objects of the kind we like to have. The most obvious alternative to our current system, communism, has proved to be even more destructive both of human beings and natural systems. We need a law project that begins to imagine what a system of rights would look like that would conform to good Gaian principles. A system that would encourage diversity and variety, evolution within both the human spirit and the natural world. This work, radical within a conservative profession, has not begun. The need for it has not been stated, insofar as I am aware, except by me.

Individual Awakening: An important part of the awakening of the human species is the awakening of individual people. The inner technologies of awakening are reliable, and experiences of awakening can be had by anyone who will do the needed work.

A key feature of the Gaia myth is how it relates to awakening. Consider this: Our minds are part of Gaia, since we are part of the web of life on Earth. Recall that Gaia uses all of itself to regulate the conditions on Earth, making them fit for life. Recall too my claim that by awakening we can change our behavior as a species and better conform to the rules of behavior that ensure our continued survival within the Gaian game.

Add to it a revolutionary idea, an idea that I struggled for years to birth: Gaia will assist us in awakening. Why is this idea crucial? Consider this: in many cultures there have been saints that awakened, and yet the cultures act no better than any other. Japan, India, and China, for example, have had traditions of enlightenment, and are no models of responsible environmental behavior. No, the awakening needs to be both broad and deep: it needs to be broadly distributed in the society, as well as deep within the experience of the individuals who access it.

What makes us able to awaken in this broad and deep way, if other cultures that were dedicated to awakening failed to do so? That is the strength of this revolutionary idea: what is different now is the need, and because of the need, Gaia will help us to awaken. Why? Because it is easier for Gaia to bring the Earth back into balance by helping us awaken and so improve our behavior, than by more dramatic changes. But only if we take the trouble to awaken, and do it quickly.

Turning Despair into Hope: A final step we need to take towards the awakening and survival of our species is to become aware that despair lies ahead of us. We live in a time in which Americans feel themselves globally dominant, in which the monetary impulse has triumphed over the impulse to justice or the common good, in which those with wealth have spent the last two decades vastly increasing their wealth, and increasing the disparity in wealth between themselves and the disenfranchised. There is an unreal sense that we will blithely continue as we are, all will be well, and the wealthy will keep getting wealthier, ad infinitum.

It’s much more likely that everything will cross a cusp and collapse. How do we deal with the despair that will come when we start accepting as a society that this is a likely outcome? How do we deal with the despair that will become current when people in general start to accept the likelihood of global climate change? Once again, the inner technologies of awakening provide answers. Despair properly understood is a form of thought and feeling, a form of energy, one that can be worked with skillfully and moved through the system. This is, of course, spiritual work. Much of it will be needed.

Conclusion

A time of choice as human beings is coming upon us. Because we are creating the circumstances for our own apocalypse, we also are creating the need to awaken as a practical way out. We can find hope, reduce suffering, and create out of chaos the conditions for our own evolution. In choosing instead to move ahead as we are now doing, we choose madness and certain, widespread death. But we can also choose awakening. The choice is ours to make. That the choice is stark will, I hope, help us make the right choice. If we do, we will choose to act for the first time as conscious beings, not biomass. And if we do so consistently, the difference from what we are now will be such a great divide, that we will deserve the new species name of Homo gaians. When we choose awakening as an individual, we experience within ourselves the growth of compassion.

When we choose awakening as a culture, we begin to create the possibility of a sustainable society. Sustainability is to the group mind as compassion is to the individual mind. Let us do everything we can to cultivate both.

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footnote: The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has recently issued a draft special report saying it is equally likely that by 2100, our global CO2 emissions will be 5 times higher than they are today, as it is that we will manage to reduce them. And in an editorial in the Sept. 10, 1999, International Herald Tribune, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan observes that as a result of climate change and deforestation, two thirds of Bangladesh was inundated for several months last year, leaving millions homeless. He goes on to say that "natural disasters," brought about by climate change are increasing rapidly, and that the term "natural disaster" is no longer appropriate, as they are of our own making. We can expect the number of refugees from such disasters to exceed those from war on a permanent basis.