Posted by This is part two of a reflection given at the Blayney Eco Hub, NSW on November 11, 2023.
What is happening now, in this day and age, is a consequence and a reminder that the practice of leaving self behind has not been practiced by enough people. Its value has been lost.
As we move into this time of climate change, of bio-diversity collapse, the abuse of nature as a resource, and the larger consequences of consumerism, we see playing out before us the consequences of actions done (at best) independent of an awareness of their effects on Creation, and (at worst) actions taken with enough knowledge of their impacts, and taken anyway.
We have lived, collectively, too long as if we are independent of nature, living in ways that damage and kill nature without any real appreciation that, in this, we affect our place as part of Creation. We have forgotten our common union, our communion with nature. We are a part of Creation.
Meditation is a practice that turns attention to that part of us that has not forgotten our communion with nature, that part of us that lives that communion. In meditation we take what might seem a risk: a turning away from a self that would prioritise above all its own preservation. In doing this we discover that life need not be about the protection of scarce resource and the accumulation of profit.
When enough of us attend to the other the assumption of scarcity and the fear of losing out are depowered. Community grows.
What is this other? Other people, yes. The Divine Other, yes. And also, the other as nature, as Creation, that other in which we live, of which we are a part, in which we come to know our divine origins and destiny in a New Creation of which all of nature is a part.
Separateness is, ultimately, a kind of unreality that passes away. Any healthy spiritual practice will develop in us a capacity to see past any short-sighted separateness of us and them, into the deeper human reality of common union, of the communion of all. All we need do is commit to the practice.