Posted by In July this year, I helped run a five-day retreat at Campfire In The Heart near Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia. The retreat, ‘Christ as Country: Creation Infused With Grace’, looked at Australian First Nations values and Western/Colonial values, as well as Christian Celtic and contemplative ways of life, as an answer to the current multi-crisis of ecology, economy, and politics. What follows is the text from one teaching session. Each session on the retreat began with a period of meditation.
God is not separate from nature, from Creation, from Country. All the universe has come from what we are calling God. God is not Creation, God is Creator. All matter and life, in all our created and evolving distinctiveness, remain fundamentally in union with the God-Life that is in and with all life and matter.
So, what has happened? Why aren’t we living more of this reality?
Our Judeo-Christian tradition gives us the story of Adam and Eve to help answer this question. As we know, Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In this eating, Adam and Eve became self-aware.
This is a mythological story, no less true, that tries to describe the split in consciousness at the centre of our psychology: consciousness and self-consciousness; we are aware and self-aware; we are a spiritual self and have a psychic ego, an ego with a tendency to go rogue in word and action.
This split in consciousness is a fault line in our psychology that reinforces an illusory separation from the very Creation that we are a part of. This split manifests itself in our actions, and so in society and culture.
During the last 300 years or so, this manifestation has grown, at least in the West, to unprecedented levels.
Because of this split and our actions in light of it, life on this planet is now under threat at a global level. Planet Earth is now responding. The Great Correction is underway.
Because global temperatures are increasing too quickly, weather is becoming more extreme.
Back in 2021, the Swiss Re Group, a global re-insurer that insures insurance companies, announced that if global temperature increased to 3.2 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2050, the world economy would lose 18% of its GDP. The pre-industrial level of global temperature is what the temperature was before 1850, before the Industrial Revolution took hold.
It has been estimated that this 18% loss of GDP would mean a global population decrease of around 2 billion people.
The European Copernicus Climate Change Service has recently estimated that the planet will reach 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels at the beginning of 2029. Australia has already passed 1.5 degrees.
Back in the year 2000, Copernicus estimated that the planet would reach 1.5 degrees by the end of 2041, not their recently revised 2029. So, warming has been accelerating. There is every chance that 1.5 degrees will be reached before 2029. So, we’re almost halfway to a 3 degrees global average now, with no real sense of slowing.
What has happened in the culture of the West, since around 1850, to create all this? How have we lived this split between the conscious Self and the self-conscious ego as our modern societies have developed?
We need to go back a bit, to the beginnings of the Western Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason. From the early 1600’s, the European approach to thought and life became more focused on the rational at the expense of the intuitive. Going forward, humanity became more and more reliant on an emerging scientific method that focused on what could be seen and measured as a way to explain nature and reality.
During this period, Europe was coming to the end of a time of sustained religious and political conflict, which compelled thinkers to seek philosophical alternatives to politics and religion with their then propensity towards unthinking compliance.
In short, the Enlightenment took the West from an over reliance on societal external authority to an over reliance on a rational and individualised authority.
What this rational individualism did not value or measure was the intuitive and spiritual union inherent in all nature, and our part in it. And because the idea of ego is essentially rational and separate, the Western person generally began to, over time, see themselves as separate from the planet we are not separate from.
Add to this The Great Plague which hit England in 1665 and 1666. London lost at least 15% of its population, about 52,500 people. There were no vaccines. There was little control over the spread. Isolation was key. It can be argued that a fear of the natural world, from whence the plague came, reinforced a lived separation from nature.
The Industrial Revolution, with its reliance on factories, urbanisation, and mass production, reinforced this psychic separation from nature in the Western mind. Starting around 1750 in Britain and extending globally into the twentieth century, the industrialisation of production – taking it from the home, the family farm, and the shop and into industry and factory (for a cheaper price) – made cities industrial heartlands with populations that relied less and less on the environment and more and more on the city, and those whom they worked for: the owners of industry.
From around 1850 came increased mechanisation and the industrial engineering of life. What ensued for the many was a cultural divorce from the natural world. Too many of us were no longer reliant on it – or so we thought.
In 1788, the Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution (as it was then) landed on the shores of a largely unknown Great Southern Land: Gondwana, or Australia.
A culture that was learning its ways of taming nature and keeping it ‘outside’, met a culture committed to adaption and the care of nature, of Country and Creation, living intimately with it.