LAURA SEVIER INTERVIEWS GODFRI DEV
ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NATURE
Why is a connection with nature so important? Living in Italy up a hill in the middle of nowhere for 3 months in a tent was the strongest experience I’ve ever had of it. Is that something you’re doing on purpose?
It has been yes. We are nature. If we don’t allow ourselves to express and honour that on a regular basis then things go wrong. The problem is that we don’t recognise that need nor its lack. Yet we don’t feel ok and we want to know what the cause of our disquiet is. Not knowing what it actually is, alienation from nature, we have to invent a cause, a problem. Then we have to invent a remedy. So we become psycho-behavioural hypochondriacs. We’ve invented all these solutions to the problem which is just one of alienation. Our alienation from nature includes alienation from other people. Because we are nature; we are the fruit of nature. We are nature’s most hard won fruit – human beings. We need the nourishment of that contact. To me that’s really obvious but what’s also obvious is that we can cope – or appear to cope without it. By which I mean we feel that we’re doing fine without it. I can see that in myself. When I lived in Ibiza I slept on the earth every night and when I would go travelling I couldn’t sleep and it was really obvious why. Because I was cut off from nature. Now that I don’t sleep on the earth every night I’ve got over it I can sleep anywhere. But I can feel the lack, the deprivation. So when I go home to Italy it’s the wildness of the mountains I need and long for. Even if I am living in a small village it doesn’t really matter because nature rules and reigns there. Everybody that lives there is totally engaged with nature one way or another. Old ladies still wash their laundry in a trough that catches the mountain water as it passes by. They gather herbs by the roadside. Herbs that I don’t even notice.
I think that it’s a much bigger issue than people realise because, as a culture and society, we’ve been progressively alienating ourselves from nature while apparently getting away with it. Apparently, but not effectively. Yet at the same time we do know we’ve got lots of problems. But we don’t connect the two. When people have the opportunity that you did they’re sometimes really shocked by what it can do to sleep in a tent. Sometimes people have come not really realising what was going to happen. They have been saying ‘I can’t do this; I won’t do this’ and then they leave and say ‘when can I do this again’? They have suddenly become aware that something had been missing all along that they hadn’t even realised had been missing. And that that thing they’d been missing they’d even been frightened of: contact with, exposure to nature.
So I think it’s a huge thing. People need much more contact with nature. I don’t’ mean just going for a walk in the countryside, though that’s something. I mean really interacting with nature. So that you get to know its rhythms and details a little. If you sleep in it that’s a really good way to do it. But working in it is a simple way is a great way too. Picking berries and cutting your finger on a thorn. And not being bothered by it. That’s the kind of thing that bothers people. You know, getting dirt on your trousers or dirt in your mouth. People can’t handle that. They’re so scared of dirt and in the countryside dirt is nature. In the countryside it’s not oil or toxins that’s dirt – it’s earth and water that people don’t want are repelled by. Its totally neurotic.
And darkness too – no light pollution.
Yes, people are afraid of what might be in the darkness. And what’s in the darkness is nature. They know that it’s nature in the darkness. Spiders and ants and bears and wolves, mud and swamps. It’s scary. Its scary because they are no longer familiar with it. Fear of the unknown.
What do you think are the implications of everyone living in cities and being so cut off?
I think cities as we know them are an inevitable recipe for suffering. Cities being the way they are. I’m not saying the concept of large numbers of people living together in close proximity to each other is intrinsically anti-natural. It’s just the way that we’ve done it. Cities don’t have to be anti-natural. It’s just the way that they’ve been developed without enough thought about it. I think that we need cities in one sense. It’s human culture and the needs which have been created by that in us. We can’t go back. What is life without cities? Life without cities is a nomad’s life. There isn’t enough space for that anymore for a start. Agriculture leads to cities because of the surplus that it creates. So it’s a question of more deep urban planning. But that’s just theory because the reality of the situation that we’re facing now is that we have an urban problem of massive proportions. I don’t see how a transition could be made from the urban situation that we have now to something that could be sane that did not have some kind of cities at its heart. There are too many of us for any other option.
People have a very narrow view of what nature is. Everything is nature really: even plastic. We call it unnatural and this can make us forget that it still originates in nature. We depend on nature for everything. Every moment of every day we express that dependence in our breathing. We express it more actively in eating. We cant survive without food. Science Fiction aside. Food is nature. If it were true that we don’t need nature then we wouldn’t need food, we wouldn’t need air and we wouldn’t need each other. We need all those things. Everybody knows we need food and air but we also need each other much more than people are willing to acknowledge. But we need more than that. We need earth and grass and rain and sun and the wind on our cheek as well – definitely.
Do you think the pagans got it right – more emphasis on celebrating the seasons and having more reverence for the cycles of nature, the trees, the elements rather than external Gods?
Well to me that split is a false and unnecessary one. Imminence and transcendence to me are not different things. I lived in a community in Scotland 30 years ago and that was part of what it was about – celebrating the Celtic seasons. We put a lot of effort, time and thought into those celebrations Lammas, Beltane the Solstices and Equinoxes. We were trying to find a lost connection. We felt it through drugs but we wanted another way to feel our connection to nature. But actually we were just playing, for us it was a game. It wasn’t like it was for the ancient Celts themselves. For them it was fundamental to their sanity. I don’t think that kind of dramatised conceptualisation is so important now. I think what’s more important is that we recognise the nature of the relationship between an organism and its environment. That we see and feel the interdependence. Whether or how you celebrate it I think is secondary. I don’t think you need to overtly celebrate things that you appreciate. I think that you can appreciate things silently. I don’t think that ritual and form necessarily indicates anything of higher value. I think it’s more how you choose to live.
The problem is for most people, that they don’t have any choice. Most people would like to live in a little cottage in the country: or at least to have a nice back garden. I think that’s something that people sometimes don’t compute. People organically recognise their need for nature. Everybody loves going to the beach and spending a day in the sand and sun. To me the magic about the beach is that all the elements are there. If you go into a forest it’s more narrow in a sense. If you go to the beach you’ve got earth, water, wind, you’ve got sun. They’re all there; they’re all meeting there. I think that’s the magic of the beach. People perhaps don’t realise it’s the magic of nature that’s pulling them. It’s raw, balanced nature that draws people to the beach. To me that’s a clear indication of our need for nature but also a clear indication that we haven’t gone mad yet. The time we need to worry is when people don’t want to go to the beach anymore. That’s when we’ll have really lost contact with nature. So even though most people are not living in nature the need for nature is not lost. Everybody loves to go to the beach, yearns to go to the beach, fantasises about going to the beach thinking that it’s about the sun, sex and pina coladas but I don’t think it is. It’s something deeper than that. The atavistic need for the elements.
How does yoga amplify that? Does yoga increase sensitivity to that?
Yoga only increases sensitivity if it’s done with sensitivity. In that sense it’s not an amplifier of anything in particular. When we say yoga done with sensitivity that’s not an abstraction. Yoga done with sensitivity means that you give your practice to sensation – that’s nature. Sensation is a direct expression of nature. So you’re giving your practice to nature. Very many people approach yoga in a transcendent way. I’m not talking about that – that fucks people up.
Wanting to leave the body...
Yes, believing that there’s something better, something more than the biological. The tortured belief, that if I they can just perfect whatever it is that they’re trying to do, then they will reach something better than the here and now, more real than the physical. The Metaphysical divide. wanting something beyond and better than the physical plane is a very deep sickness. It doesn’t work. We are nature. We are cells. Our cerebral cortex that comes up with those phenomenally seductive ideas, is a cellular functioning, a direct expression of nature. What yoga does, if done with sensitivity, is it brings us back to feeling comfortable with nature as our body.
To me the split between biology and something else, something better is not a real one. However its about to sound like I’m making that split. The division that I’m about to make is a conceptual one. We’re not just biology; we’re not just the chemical mechanics of tissues. We’re also consciousness. I would refute totally the idea that consciousness is a by-product of the sophistication of cellular development. As somebody who has spent his life becoming intimate with my body and with consciousness, it’s obvious what the relationship between them is. That consciousness is not a by-product. In fact its quite clear to me that life is consciousness, that biology is intelligence. The fundamental mechanism by which life has found its way out of the primeval swamp is its ability to discriminate. Life survives on a cellular level by discriminating between safe and dangerous stimuli. All life is cellular, no matter how sophisticated its differentiations, specialisations and organisations may have become. And in us they have become incredibly sophisticated. Yet we are still cellular organisms. Our cerebral intelligence is driven by our more fundamental cellular intelligence. Our self-consciousness rests upon the consciousness that allows individual cells to discriminate and survive. Consciousness is not an afterthought.
The need that we have to be intimate with nature is also a need to be intimate with consciousness: by which I don’t mean the mind. So it’s the same as the fact that we all have a need to be alone. It’s not to just be alone with your thoughts; it’s to be alone without the need for thoughts. It’s not to indulge your own thoughts. We indulge our own thoughts much more when we’re with other people than when we’re alone. We need to be alone so we can become quiet. So we can recover a deeper sense of our own centre, our own nature. I think that yoga is a coming back to our nature. On the one hand it’s nature as our body, our cells with all their collective needs and demands. But on the other hand it’s coming back to consciousness which has no demands and no needs. Consciousness is taking care of biological needs. This is why we can make a pragmatic, though not innate, distinction between consciousness and biology in the experience of being human.
Mother Nature is like consciousness in that it actually doesn’t demand anything of us. As our bodies it does, but as our environment it doesn’t. The demands of nature come only from within us. I think that is what is so nourishing about yoga and about nature. When you go into nature – you go for a walk in the countryside, the trees don’t ask you for anything. They’re not demanding anything. So I think that for people to get back to nature the first step is to become intimate with nature as your own body. There are two elements to that. One is what you put in it. Eating. For that I don’t mean that there’s a natural or a non-natural way of eating in a generalisable sense. But to recognise that every single body has its own sensitivities, preferences and needs. It’s got nothing to do with cultural trends. I think that’s important.
The other element is having some process like yoga – not necessarily yoga – that allows you to deeply encounter the richness of nature as your own body. I think many things that people might automatically think could do that don’t because they have another more overt agenda. Like dancing, or sex. Those are of course both an encounter with your body but what they are is an encounter with a certain aspect of the body’s capacity. What yoga is is an encounter with the body’s nature: which means it’s an encounter with nature in the form of your body. So I think there aren’t a lot of things like yoga although I can see that tai chi or chi gung and maybe other things that I’m not aware of could be the same. What we need are bodily practices that have no other end other than hanging out with the body. That means hanging out with nature which means hanging out with consciousness. To me there’s no difference - nature is a manifestation or an expression of consciousness. It’s not a split and I think that in a sense that’s what we really need. We need to encounter nature as consciousness. Not nature as a resource.
That’s what we’re wanting when we go to the beach or woods...
Yes – the surface level is nature but the deeper level is consciousness. Of course what I’m about to say now is very controversial. Scientists, and their acolytes who have turned science into a kind of religion. have become obsessed with their interpretations of Darwin within which nature becomes ruthless, dangerous, a battleground. At the same time they pay lip service, and even hide behind Einstein. What does it mean that E = MC squared? What does it actually mean? It doesn’t just mean that you can make atom bombs. It means a lot more than that. What does the general theory of relativity mean? What does it mean that time and perspectives are all relative? What Einstein realised it means is that the future has already happened. For time, motion and perspective to be relative the future as we call it must actually, intrinsically, coexist with the present and the past. Just as TS Eliot suggests in the opening of the Four Quartets. This is a far cry from the accepted scientific perspective. Yet most scientists look to Einstein to support their need to despiritualise life. It’s also a far cry from the conventional, common sense perspective that we all function within. We all know the future as what hasn’t yet happened, and the past as what has already happened, and the present as what is actually happening. Yet according to Einstein the future already exists, it has already happened. So if the future has already happened then the fundamental argument of evolutionists that consciousness is an epiphenomenon that took time to generate crumbles. What happens if there’s no time? That means that consciousness, even self consciousness, was, is and always will be present. Just like everything else.
The problem that we’re really facing is a lack of perspective. It’s not a lack of knowledge. The knowledge that we need is here but it’s knowing how to look at and understand our knowledge that is lacking. Our knowledge can’t be used effectively if it’s not put into context and that’s perspective. The problem is that everybody’s dogmatic about their own perspective and if they are clever and educated enough they can justify it. If you hear an argument between a religious person who believes in God in a particular way and a scientist like Richard Dawkins who regards himself as a rational, objective Darwinian, they’re just arguing their own prejudices. The scientist says ‘everything has to be based on reason’ and the Bishop says that some things can only be based on faith. Those two perspectives can never meet. What I’m saying is: why do they have to fight with each other? They’re both here. They can both be justified by their own criteria: even if they can’t be justified by each other’s criteria. So whose criteria are right? Each side can equally justify their own criteria, but only with more criteria. Eventually you reach, on each side, a point of assumption, prejudice, belief, faith. Scientists put their faith in reason, Religious people put their faith in something else.
Is it not possible that there’s a perspective that includes them both? That contextualises both the scientific and the religious perspective and resolves them both into a deeper understanding. I think there is. I like to call it a Radical Ecology. Radical Ecology is what emerges from seeing clearly the indivisibility of wholeness. Scientists are still looking for wholeness, for the unified theory. They haven’t found it yet, and they are unable to recognise anyone else’s version of it. Religious people do have a sense of wholeness: they call it God. Yet they usually cant quite see how that wholeness functions and embraces all apparent contradictions and paradoxes. Yet there are those who are not caught in the contradiction. I think Einstein is one of those. His God was not a narrow one, not an anthropomorphic one. But his sense of the wholeness that he couldn’t quite explain pushed him to use the word God. One of the things he came to see from the depth of his remarkable perspective was “Time and space are modes by which we think. They are not conditions under which we live.” If you can get a clear sense of where he was coming from to say that you are feeling the roots of a Radical Ecology.
What he’s saying is that time doesn’t exist unless you think it does. If time doesn’t exist unless you think it does, what’s the big deal about the future? What’s the big deal about the future of the human race? What’s the big deal about the future of planet earth? The big deal is that they are already here. We just haven’t noticed yet. Just as as we sit here in Bedford, London is still here, even though we are not noticing it. In the same way: what’s the big deal about evolution? Evolution is about time. If time is an illusion does this make evolution an illusion. No it doesn’t. Because from Einstein’s perspective, of Relativity, everything is an illusion. Which doesn’t mean that nothing really exists. It just means that we all see it in our own way. And that way is intrinsically delusional. While, unless we are clinically insane, being totally workable, totally functional.
This is not to say that evolutionists are wrong. Of course they are right. From the perspective of time they are right. But it’s from a limited perspective. A perspective that gives the impression that consciousness is a latecomer on the scene. Actually they are not talking about consciousness the way that I’m talking about it. They’re talking about conscious intelligence – rational intelligence, and the self awareness that results from the massive cerebral development that we enjoy and suffer from. I’m not talking about that. An amoeba in a primeval swamp is consciousness. It distinguishes between primeval stimuli. That’s what I mean by consciousness. Nature is consciousness. They’re not separate and I think that that’s what we need, that’s what we most want – the silence that is consciousness, that we find in nature. Because consciousness doesn’t say anything. It just hears everything. When people go into nature, that’s one of the big things they recognise – the silence. Sometimes that disturbs them. Sometimes they know that yes, that’s what they want, but they don’t really understand it in the way I’ve just put it. That it’s much more than just an absence of sound. The silence. The longing that we have for nature, for silence.
And space...
Yes, they’re all the same.
Do you think that we can access that anywhere?
Yes – in your own body. That’s what yoga is about – for me anyway. The journey is a very very simple one and it’s got nothing to do with prowess with the body. You can be in a wheel chair in which case you just feel the body within its restrictions. Of course if your body is not happy you can’t go very far because it’s unpleasant, so the body has to be in a pleasant, comfortable condition. That’s why people do the things they do in yoga- to give that possibility to the body. So when the body’s ok and you’re feeling the body, you’re feeling sensation. Feeling sensation means you’re feeling the response of cells to the situation that they’re in. But at the same time you’re interpreting. Your mind is interpreting the presence of your body as sensation.
So as you encounter your body you’re encountering your mind. As you encounter your body and your mind you’re encountering their relationship. And the boundary between them gets totally blurred. Then you realise that actually there’s no experience without the mind and there’s no experience without the body. Eventually you realise there’s no experience without consciousness. That’s true for an amoeba no less than you or I. So you realise that distinctions between mind and body and consciousness are mental ones. They’re functional ones, they’re usable ones. It’s not that they’re wrong or anything like that, but it’s just that their being distinguished in that way is a function of a limited perspective. What yoga does, and what being in nature does, is that it completely dissolves not only the distinction between them but it dissolves the interest in such distinctions. I think that’s what nature does. It calms you to a point where you don’t give a shit about how anybody could explain it or define it. You’re happy with it, you’re being nourished by it and it doesn’t matter.
I lived in Ibiza for a few years. In many people’s minds it’s a toxic hell. Psychologically, environmentally, emotionally, pharmacologically it can be a terrible place. I can relate to that, I can see all of that. I don’t live there anymore and you could say my not living there anymore is a response to that. But at the same time I could lie on the beach with people making music, talking about sex, smoking drugs and it not matter because nature was there. There was an experience of being held, nurtured, contained by nature. By the sunlight and the wind, the oxygen and the hydrogen. In this room you don’t notice that- it’s happening but you don’t notice it. Because the static, continuous nature of all the stuff in this room creates a sensory barrier. You start to ignore your environment because it isn’t changing. But when you’re in nature there is no sensory barrier. Sensory data is constantly changing so you’re constantly having to deal with it. Although of course most of that is unconscious, but your brain is hard at work down there.
Do you think that for that reason we lose a sense of self? That I am this person because it’s easier to be absorbed into something bigger.
I think what you’re saying is right but you could say it the other way around. That when we’re out of nature we lose the bigger sense of ourself. We think that we’re just our passions and our ambitions and our anxieties. But when we get into nature it’s not that we lose those things – it’s that there’s an expansion. So those things are ok then: they lose their weight as they get contextualised. They become less relevant. They lose the absoluteness, the tyrannical authority that they get in our urban isolation. In this room you and I are being stimulated only by you and I because the rest of the information is constant. But if we were in nature it would be totally different. The input coming from you to me would be coming in with constantly changing input from nature. So it would be a much softer thing within which I would be totally different and you would be totally different. In this situation it’s like a spotlight is on you and a spotlight is on me and what I do, you do suddenly becomes really important whereas in nature it’s not so important. And so then my peculiarities and yours are not so important. So in a sense I am not so important, and you are not so important. The whole has become important. The whole of which we are only a part. The wholeness of nature.
I’ve noticed that it changes the way that I talk – when I’m walking in nature it’s easier to express my self, to just be.. In an enclosed space it’s harder to access that.
Yes. It’s like there’s a pressure when you’re inside. The pressure is on you, and on me. It creates a sense of self in a defined and therefore vulnerable and needy sense. When you’re in nature there isn’t that pressure. You’re just part of something much much bigger. Your thoughts and feelings are part of something much much bigger. Then your thoughts and feelings don’t have the same weight. They’re not such a big deal. When we’re cut off from nature our thoughts become the whole movie. They are the only moving part of the scene. It’s just our thoughts that are moving. Otherwise we’re sitting in a room and the stimulation is constantly the same.
And they get too loud... and we need more distractions as well. I noticed when you’re living very close to nature you don’t need TV...
Because you’re getting the changing stimulus. When we’re in a building we feel deprived. We are deprived. We are deprived of nature. But on a more concrete level we’re deprived of stimulation. We’re deprived of constantly differing sensory stimuli coming through our skin. We feel deprived so we need to do something about that. So we create our addictions. I think addictions are to a great extent a substitute for nature. This is not to say that rural communities don’t have addicts. Of course they do. But how many crack addicts are shepherds? Of course it’s very easy to romanticise nature, as a concept. But what I mean more is action, activity in nature. That is what we need. Direct engagement with nature. Working in nature especially. We need to experience the transmutation of the elements of nature into human culture. We need to be a part of that. Even if only occasionally. Most human beings are no longer participating in the roots of human culture, in the roots of our existence. They’re just recipients of the garbage, almost. So there’s a deep dissatisfaction that they’re not expressing the creativity that’s implicit in all nature, and not least in the awesome sophistication of the neocortex.
Agriculture – farming has just become about chemicals and machines.
I don’t know that that’s a universal. Agriculture is still very varied. In Ibiza people will plough a field the size of this room which they’d never do in England. They’ll make that effort. Where I live in Italy it’s definitely changed a lot. Also almost every person in my region was a farmer a generation ago. Even though most of them are not anymore they are still deeply connected to nature. They know the land and they still grow vegetables. They pick herbs and cut wood. They have to act differently when its snowing to when its raining. So I think that that’s not lost. Agribusiness is not the whole story. Even where it is dominant, nature is still there. Its still coming from nature even through all the mechanisation.
I have a friend in Northumberland I’ve known since I was 7. When he was a child his father was very wealthy. My friend is not wealthy; the situation has changed a lot. I went to stay with him for Christmas a few years ago. On Christmas Eve he said to me as we went to bed ‘Godfri when you wake up make me some breakfast’ and I said: ‘Does it matter what time?’ And he said ‘No, just as soon as you get up cook me some bacon, eggs and sausages and then come and find me’. He was getting up at 5am to work. I found him underneath a tractor with a spanner in his hand doing God knows what at about 8.00 am on Christmas morning. And I thought how far have he and I gone apart? We’ve known each other for 45 years; and he’s living totally in nature and he’s totally at home in it. That evening, Christmas day, drunk of course being a farmer, he said to me, ‘Go into the shed there’s a lamb there whose mother has died. See if you can give it some milk from the bottle there.’ I went and tried but I couldn’t. The lamb wouldn’t open its mouth. I came in and I said: ‘I can’t handle it, I can’t get it to do it.’ And he said ‘oh it doesn’t fucking matter.’ And it died.
That shocked me. How could you say ‘fuck it, it doesn’t matter when you know that you could go out there and stick the bottle in its mouth.’ But actually it didn’t matter. How many hundreds of little lambs has he had to let go and die. He’s in nature in a non romantic way. There’s a healthiness and a robustness about him that comes from that. He abuses himself in terms of alcohol, tobacco and drugs. But because he’s living totally in nature he’s very alive, very responsive. That morning, Christmas morning, he was out there in the dark and the wind and the snow on his back against the cold earth with a growling stomach. That blew my mind. Here I was sleeping in a tipi every night and getting off on nature but he was being truly intimate with it in a way I cant even imagine. And it was nourishing him so that he can handle a huge input of toxins that would destroy me.
Do you think we romanticise it because we’re cut off from it?
Yes. We romanticise it because we need to. Because we need to not forget about it. We need to remember. So we romanticise it. We give an eternal soul to every animal. When there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that even a human being has a an eternal soul. That’s just idealised wishful thinking well demolished by the teaching of the Buddha more than two thousand years ago. People can talk about one, think about one, dream about one. But no-one has ever found one. No one ever will. We only need an eternal soul because we have lost touch with nature. We only need eternity because we cant be intimate with what is actually happening right here, right now.
What I did in Ibiza was kind of uncivilised, let’s say, but it wasn’t really being intimate with nature. I wasn’t converting nature into my life. Somebody else was doing that for me and I was paying. I could walk around bare foot and naked and sleep on the earth and wash and shit outside. So my romanticising it did nourish me a little but I don’t think that’s the same kind of nourishment as actually working in nature. Working in nature I don’t mean just farming. I mean being involved with the elements of nature within your means of survival. It could be as a harbour master or fisherman, or a landscape gardener or a tree surgeon. Nature is real to these people, it directly effects their daily decision making process and their daily experience of being human in an immediate, tangible way. They can’t afford to idealise, romanticise it.
We pretend that nature is kind and compassionate. But it isn’t. Nature is pretty ruthless really. Life is pretty ruthless. It depends entirely on death. There is no life without death. There is no joy without suffering. Those who would like to eradicate death, whether its human death or animal death, don’t even know what they’re trying to do. They’re not just trying to turn nature on its head. They’re trying to eradicate the roots of life, the roots of joy. Of course it’s immoral to exploit human beings and animals. But it’s not immoral to survive. You need to have a hierarchy of perspectives if you want to enjoy genuinely skilful action. I know some animal activists that condemn all meat eating indiscriminately. If you eat meat you are immoral. Certainly you are unspiritual. Well if they with their self righteous and unacknowledged prejudice are spiritual you can count me out of that bandwagon. I’ll go with nature any day rather than any self righteous and self justifying idealism.
I remember watching David Attenborough about this little red crab that’s born a rocky island on an island in the Pacific. Millions and millions and millions of these seething crabs go into the sea. A little while later about 100,000 – the only survivors – come back to breed. Nature is ruthless to the individual. We’ve become obsessed with the individual. I recognize that there’s great danger in saying that. I don’t mean to endorse totalitarian exploitation. I’m not saying that therefore the individual doesn’t matter and that people can starve. Be compassionate, take care of people but be realistic and don’t assume that you can politicize against the way things are. Political solutions just cause more problems: sooner or later.
If you want a different political and economic system then you have to have different people. That’s the way I see it. I think that is possible. I think it is possible that we can lose our rapaciousness and hostility and mistrust in each other. Because that originates in our mistrust of nature and ourselves. If we are able to consider the possibility that nature and life are actually trustworthy then we can lose that hostility, that impulse to exploit. As long as we see nature as a battlefield we will find it hard to trust and care about strangers. As long as we don’t take time to be intimate with nature, especially as our bodies, we will find it hard to really trust the ones we love: including ourselves. Any political alternative would have to rest on that. It would need to rest on trust in nature, trust in life, trust in human beings.
When I was in Mexico looking at butterflies – the scientist was explaining how butterflies knew how to go from Canada to Mexico thanks to their sensitivity to environmental signals. They’re so finely sensitised to these signals – it’s that which is moving them. I was just so in awe…
Except they don’t know where to go in the way that we know what day of the week it is. They just go. It’s their nature. That’s nature. That’s what we’ve lost. We get lost in the cerebral cortex and we have all of this knowledge that we think is ours but it’s nature’s knowledge functioning in us. It’s a legacy. We’ve just lost touch with natures interdependencies, its indivisible wholeness. As a human being we have those same sensitivities– every cell in our body that’s not corrupt or dying has that exquisite sensitivity to its needs. If we don’t’ fulfil those needs we start to die. So we haven’t lost our sensitivity. We've just lost touch with it. I think that the beauty of yoga done with sensitivity is that you have to encounter that sensitivity directly and deeply. You become in awe of the intelligence of life taking care of itself in and as your body. Through cellular intelligence, biological sensitivity. Of course as a yoga teacher I’m going to be prejudiced in this. I think that awe, reverence, or at least appreciation of nature is what we need more than anything else. First of all though we need to trust, respect it as our source and sustenance. We need that individually to not go insane, and we need it collectively to not destroy the planet.
I think awe is the best word because respect can be something like a cloak you can put on. I respect the police, the government because I have to, because they have power over me. I don’t feel it in my heart, my bones. I have to follow the line. But that’s actually what’s going on with a lot of environmentalism. It’s not respect for nature; it’s not awe for nature; it’s fear. And that’s not a very good recipe for creativity – fear. I think the primary environmental issue is establishing a love of nature. I don’t mean recognition of its complexity; I don’t mean recognition of the intricate interweavings of mutual interdependence. I mean love of it. I mean “wow, man its fantastic.”; Not “wow isn't it sweet”.
That’s what the director of this movie said – the aim is to get people to fall in love with it. With these creatures.
But it has to be more than that unfortunately. I could fall in love with you, Laura, and still hate women. Do you see what I mean. So it’s not the specific; it’s not the particular. We have to fall in love with the abstract essence, the heart of it, nature itself. Life itself. That’s very difficult for people to do because it’s an abstraction. To fall in love with a certain amount of the particularities is not enough. It’s not enough. You have to see the wholeness, the indivisible wholeness behind it. And to realise that that’s actually what’s functioning. When I’m talking to you, what’s functioning? I couldn’t even begin to start describing it. Our love of yoga is underpinning our knowing each other. The dramatic cerebral development of the neocortex is providing the means for us to talk to each other. The long slow drift towards vertebral verticality is behind this conversation. Cellular respiration is a necessary precondition for our existence. The love of oxygen for hydrogen, water, is functioning through me talking to you. The strong and weak nuclear force and gravity are supporting us. Everything that’s involved in the evolution of life is expressing itself through this phrase. Totally. And that word, this gesture depends upon all of that. This is what people have to encounter deeply for there actually to be any possibility of environmental recovery. Otherwise it’s just a tax we’re having to pay.
Targets to be met..
Yes, “fuck it, I’ll take one less flight this year because otherwise my grandchildren…..” That’s not going to work. It has to come from the heart. Also there has to be a change of values enough to bring about a change of motive. You have to really, really not want all this distracting consumer accumulation. To not want that strongly enough means you have to want something else so badly that you can see the false shine on all that stuff very, very clearly. Clearly enough to let go of your self deceptions, to let go of reassuring yourself with your carbon offsets. Stop using aeroplanes! Or admit that you are one of the destroyers.
You have to want intimacy with nature, with others, with the elements. If you don’t want those things badly enough then the gap that’s left by not having them will drive you into consumerism. All those gadgets are substitutes for nature as trees and dirt, snotty shitty animals and other people. You have to want to be intimate with all of that. With the totality of nature, and all of its apparent and adjacent details. Otherwise you’ll just try to drown your longing with gadgets and special experiences. Especially spiritual experiences. Most of which are no more meaningful than a walk along the riverside: probably less.
So we’re back to where we were. We have all these things, we need all these things, we want all these things because we don’t have nature. So we have to recover a genuine love of nature. To get to the love we have to first find to the connection. But to find the connection we cant’ go into the wilderness because the wilderness isn’t available to us. So we have to go into the body, because the body is nature. It’s our most intimate and precious resource – of nature. That’s yoga! Only yoga can save the planet! Ha ha ha!!! But only yoga done with sensitivity of course. Yoga is generally not done with sensitivity, excpet as an unexamined slogan. So even yoga doesn’t usually bring us to nature. It drives us further away from it and deeper into our need for something else, something beyond, something transcendent. Something that actually doesn’t exist.
Our culture as a whole has become so alienated from sensitivity, which means from nature. Because that’s what nature is, sensitivity to sensation. Nature is an exquisitely sensitive evaluation device. Alienation from that means that no matter how intrinsically sensitive yoga is by design, it isn’t in practice because it becomes what we bring to it, like anything else. A couple of years ago I was in a class in Paris talking about sensitivity and this woman said: ‘but I don’t want to be sensitive.’ I said why not? She said: ‘Because it will hurt too much.’ That was like a rocket for me. I realized: “of course, that’s what people are going to think”. Not only is that what people are going to think but that is going to be an element of what they experience. It’s not going to be the whole of it but they don’t know that. So they may think “If I get more sensitive I’m going to feel more pain and more sadness”. Well that’s true. But they’re also going to feel more joy. But that’s not how the mind works. Even if you say the cure for environmental decay is yoga with sensitivity there has to be an initial impulse of trust. I don’t mean that the trust has to be fully there but the openness to the possibility of trusting life has to be there because why would you want to be sensitive to something that you can’t trust? So where most people are starting from is that you can’t trust life; you can’t trust nature and its dangers. For thousands of years civilization can be seen as and is often called the conquest of nature. Within that there is fear of nature and within that there’s mistrust.
Of ourselves too – we fear our own moods so take drugs to change them
Our own cloudy days…
Like mood swings – I had a friend the other day who was telling me I should be on mood stabilisers because I told her I had lots of ups and downs and she said ‘have you considered mood stabilisers?’ But that’s typical. She’s one of loads who see it like that.
Yes, more and more. That same friend or the equivalent could be doing her carbon offset to sedate her conscience. It’s nonsense.
She was saying in order to keep your job and not have panic attacks, there was a justification for taking it. This sense of flatten everything out and making it neutral. Like concreting over nature. It’s the same ethos applied to our state of mind.
Yes. That’s the conundrum. We talked ourselves round a circle and we haven’t been able to find the entry point. That’s it. As a yoga teacher I’m facing this all the time. How do I get people to abandon ship? How do I get them to make that tiny little shift onto another conveyor belt. It doesn’t matter where. They just need to get to the point where they’re willing to go: ‘maybe I can trust.’ I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know if there is an answer. I just know that I carry on. I see things. I see people seeming to go in that direction. I also see that it’s not necessarily an easy ride for them. But I don’t see any other way. The change has to come from very deep. It is not enough to change our beliefs and values, to put on an acceptable uniform, to pay carbon offsets. We need to change what we consciously want. Not what we want as an ideal or a dream or a hope. We need to change what we want to do and feel right now. Only then will our behaviour change. I don’t see a political solution. Clean clothes on a dirty body just get dirty very fast. We need a deep change in the way people think. Not concepts, but desires. We have to choose different things because we feel how much we want them, need them. How much we need to nestle in the roots of a tree, run our toes through sand and look each other in the eyes.
The environmental crisis is deeper than politics. Its deeper than economics. We are not going to get an economic or political solution. The crisis is one of desire. We want things that wont and cant satisfy us. So we keep banging our head against a brick wall: the brick wall of consumerism. I don’t see a social solution. I see only a psychological solution. People’s motives have to change. That people have to want intimacy more than things. That’s it really. Intimacy with nature, with consciousness, with their body, and with each other. Not jut wanting that – we all want that – but realizing that we want that. And that the other things we want are fine but they aren’t going to give us what those will give us – intimacy with body, mind, consciousness, others and nature. Intimacy with organic life, natural life is what’s needed. The radical course of action that needs to be taken is the one that b rings us to that. Back to yoga again.
I don’t mean to say the environmental, social, economic, political actions that people take shouldn’t be taken. I’m just saying that those are going to come to nothing if they don’t rest on something deeper. Our political actions must be based on loving and trusting life. Not on fear of destruction, or guilt about destroying. Of course we need political and social changes. But they must rest on changes in the individual psyche. It’s not an either or. Life is recycling its units so very quickly. There has to be a deep change in human understanding. We need a change of consciousness. Something very deep has to happen. Maybe something already is. I’m not suggesting that somebody has to come up with an idea. Maybe the idea is already expressing itself; we just haven’t quite recognized its fruition. People talk about critical mass and tipping points. Yes, sure we know these things happen. Yet of course you can’t tell that it’s tipping until it’s tipping. You can’t tell the waters about to boil – it’s just getting hotter. All of a sudden you know it’s boiling because it’s steam.
I’m not worried. The reason I’m not worried is that I love life more than I love Godfri. I don’t even know who Godfri is. But I know what life is. People always suffer. Suffering is the secret face of joy. I think to try to avoid human suffering is foolish. That’s never going to happen, that’s never going to come. People are making a lot of fuss, and I don’t mean to belittle the fuss, about economic and political exploitation. The 760 billion dollar bailout. Of course, I agree, it sounds ludicrous, nonsense. It’s just one more example of elitist exploitation. But show me a time when the few were not riding on the labour of the many. Just show me! I don’t see such a time. Except outside the history and thrust of so called civilisation. In the African savannah or the Amazon rainforest perhaps. But civilization as we know it is based on surplus. Surplus means accumulation. Accumulation means concentration. Concentration means exploitation. As long as it is based on mistrust and fear of nature. As long as we fear for ourselves we lose touch with our compassion for others. This has always been the flavour of so called civilization. We need to rise above that fear, that mistrust. It doesn’t take effort to do that. It takes intimacy. With our bodies, with each other, with nature. Most of all it needs intimacy with the indivisibility of wholeness. This is not so hard to come by. This is yoga. Only through intimacy can we come to the trust that we need to live in peace with each other and nature.
It’s interesting what you say about trusting yourself, trusting life, the wisdom because so few people really do…
They don’t even recognize that life has its own wisdom. Some people might give it intelligence but of a very basic kind. They don’t even recognize that their conceptual intelligence comes from life. It comes from the specialised differentiation of cellular intelligence, cellular sensitivity. The sophisticated circuitry of the cortex is just cells. Not realising this is alienation. An alienation from nature that forces us to hope for something more, something other, something out there, something mystical, transcendent, metaphysical. It isn’t there. It just isn’t there. But still the hopeful keep tying themselves up in cords of hope, frustration and despair. But this alienation is easily remedied. We only have to become intimate with our bodies. As we do so we become intimate with our mind, with consciousness. All along we are becoming intimate with nature. Within this intimacy a deep trust in and love for nature can not help but be born.
Just for an example, for some reason recently I’ve got this weird fear that when I have a child I’m not going to be able to cope…
That’s not a weird fear. I think that’s a natural impulse. It may just have taken on unrealistic dimensions because it’s all in your head, because you’ve not actually got that child. But that’s an expression of the fact that that child is going to need you to protect it and so therefore you need to be aware of the precariousness of it. But because you don’t have a child you can’t act so you’re left only with that impulse – it’s exaggerated!
Almost to the point when I think – maybe I shouldn’t have children…
But then you’d be able to do something about it so it wouldn’t matter.
Maybe it’s because I’ve got to the point when life is saying: ‘start having children’ or it’s kicking off that impulse. It’s partly a lack of trust and partly it’s natural.
No I think the two go together. Life can only continue if it recognizes its precariousness. So it’s not lack of trust to recognise that life is a state of vulnerability. It is a state of vulnerability. Your body’s cells are dying all the time. Death is a part of life and life has to recognize that. As a mother, even as a father, it comes in. You get this magnified sense of the vulnerability of life when you have children. I remember when Bindu was born. The next day I had to go to the airport to pick up a friend. The form that the panic took was that I kept looking towards the horizon to see if I could see smoke coming from the house. I was afraid it might be on fire. This was just a distorted expression of my instinct to protect my child because I wasn’t actually there to be able to do so. I’d gone an hour away in a motor car and my cells couldn’t handle it. They generated that paranoid story. But actually that paranoid story was wisdom.
Do you think it heightened your awareness of vulnerability as well driving at that speed?
No, it didn’t bring that to my attention at all. I’ve felt this a lot as a father, as a father who has been away from his children a lot. In a way it’s been the most difficult thing to come to terms with. I will not be there if they need me. That’s been very, very difficult to come to terms with. Not intellectually but organically. The anxiety and sadness that are associated with a purely conceptual conjecture that while I’m 2000 miles away working my child might break their back in a riding accident and I won’t be there even though that’s the one thing that they’ll be wanting and needing. I think that this is absolutely natural and healthy. It’s the way that we’re living that’s not natural. My job is to protect the mother and the children. When you know that you can’t ,your body knows that you can’t, and it disturbs you. Then you have a choice. You either allow yourself to feel disturbed, which is the choice that I make. Or tell yourself you’re not disturbed, organically. So you drink or smoke something or you fuck someone or whatever. That’s how our culture deals with its alienation from nature, by driving itself further away from it through desensitisation.
Well that helps me in my own way…
Once a mother has a child, life becomes very simple in that sense because the genetically programmed hormonal circuitry kicks in and that’s it. Your world becomes your children and it has to. But the reality for most educated people like you is “well I still need a career and my own time and space.” This is all nonsense. This is not rue. That will only drive you mad, or your children insecure. But it becomes very powerful, destructive nonsense. Then you as a mother also expect something from the father. This is right, this is natural. And of course the father’s don’t know that they’re supposed to do that protecting thing anymore. So the mothers get angry. But actually this is a natural response to being abandoned by the energy of protective paternal presence. Mother is for the child and father is for the mother. It’s really really simple but in the world that we live in that’s not clear anymore. The father has to go to work. He’s for the boss now. And there’s no way out because the only way that he can actually take care of the child in this system is to be the employee. To abandon them. The nuclear family is a terrible thing. It’s a social power mechanism that deepens our collective and individual alienation from nature and each other and drives us into the arms of Sony, Apple, MGM, Gucci, BMW and the rest for comfort. But it’s the only option now if you want to have children. And it doesn’t work. It’s a disaster. So that’s why you have anxiety about having children – of course you do. That’s coming from your rational mind. It’s not neurotic, it’s not paranoia. That’s nature, the cortex. To recognize that – that to pull it off in a nuclear family you’re going to have to be so fucking lucky. Not least in your judgement of the man, his skills, everything.
That’s why I’ve got anxiety now – I’m at the point of having to choose between several options who it’s going to be!
Let life choose. Let the wisdom that’s deeper and knows more about this than your cortex decide. That’s what I would say. You can’t decide those sorts of things rationally, though it has to play its part. You’re never going to make a more important decision than whose sperm you let make it with your eggs. It’s a decision that has misfired for most people we know. For most people in the so-called developed world. How many thousands have divorce, unhappy marriages, children confused because they don’t see their parents loving each other.
That’s where I come from – I don’t see the happy thing at all. I’d like it.
But this is nuts. Because family is a happy thing. But not a nuclear family. It’s not right. The domestic burden is put all on the mother. The economic burden is put all on the father. Even if the mother goes out to work it just means that she’s sharing the economic burden and the domestic responsibility is being shelved and hidden within the economic one and that doesn’t work. So you have to have some form of extended family but you can’t. It’s so hard. That’s what the hippies tried to do but it all failed. How many communes survived? Most of them turned into religious nut houses. So something radical is required.
People have to understand what interconnectedness really is. They have to come to a deep understanding of what we are. That we are one. That interconnectedness doesn’t mean that there are strong bonds binding us all together. We have to understand that interconnectedness means that we are all one and that we can’t live for ourselves. We have to live for all of us. But that can’t be a concept or a dogma. It has to be something that arises organically inside you and the only way that that can happen is that you taste that indivisible unity within your own organism. You need to come to understand the relationship between the movement of your little finger and the fluttering of your diaphragm and all of those things. You need to realize the distinctions that are conceptually, functionally and pragmatically made are being made up by the mind. They don’t actually exist as far as the body is concerned. As far as the body is concerned it’s an indivisible unity and the price paid by one part is paid by the whole. And that’s what we have to know in the world as well. We have to deeply experience that organic unity from our bodies into the world. Not just society but into the world. We have to know that its not just our body that is an indivisible wholeness. We have to know that family is an indivisible wholeness. We have to know that society is an indivisible wholeness. We have to know that nature is an indivisible wholeness. We have to know that life is an indivisible wholeness. We have to know that existence is an indivisible wholeness. This is deep, radical ecology. Knowing that what we perceive as multiplicity is an indivisible unity.
Its not enough that we understand all this intellectually. It has to inform our fundamental disposition and shape our values and motives, our wants and needs. It seems to me that we each have a fundamental disposition that sets our values and interests and motives. I don’t know where it comes from, DNA, karma, prenatal experience. I don’t know. And I think it is possible for it to change. But it needs very powerful experiences, good or bad, to really change. This can include clear, lucid insight. It can include rational enquiry.
Our fundamental disposition often conflicts with our intellectually derived beliefs, values hopes and dreams. Everybody who thinks about it is an environmentalist, in their thinking, in their conceptualised values. But not in their actions. Not in their psychological values. We are what we are. And it is not necessarily what we think we are, what we would like to be. Where there is a conflict what we actually are will win. What we want to be will just be pushed aside by our deeper values and drives. We can pretend to be something that we are not, but we are still actually just what we are. We can tell ourselves to be environmentally conscientious, but this wont be enough. We have to change the way we feel about ourselves, about nature, about each other, about life. We have to trust. Without deep, organic trust we wont save this planet. Fear will not save this planet. Regulation will not save this planet. Only the love that comes with trust can save this planet. Not romantic love. Not sexual love. Love of life. Not love of my life or your life. Love of life itself. Love of life as a whole. Love of the role that death plays in life, that suffering plays in joy.
I don’t really care if the human race does die in its own waste. I’m not ashamed to admit that. I have learned at quite a price that honesty is only the beginning of its own reward. I know we are taking a lot of other species with us, but we’re going to do that even if we survive. Time is the great accumulator. There isn’t room for all species to succeed and accumulate. Something has to give. It can be us for all I care. But I don’t say that out of disgust or shame. I know a lot of conscientious people are ashamed fo what we, the human race, have done, are still doing. I know quite a few people who are ashamed to be human. Who are ashamed to be members of life’s most sophisticated and creative self expression.
I don’t have anything against the human race. Actually I think we are fantastic. I know how deep our capacity for stupidity and insensitivity is, but I love us nevertheless. I love the human being as an impulse and expression of nature. I love the depth of us, our amazing capacity to love and to create. Which of course means our amazing capacity to destroy. But I’m not attached to our continuation. There are lots of reasons why I am not an environmentalist in terms of action, why I am not an activist. Why I don’t offset my carbon consumption. I can remember 1977 was when my environmentalism crystallized conceptually. I started to make conscious decisions about buying organic which wasn’t very easy – 32 years ago – and in taking a political position on everything. Clothes, transportation, economics, everything. It was a natural thing. It was something that moved inside of me; I had to do it. It isn’t inside of me now. Although the legacy is still there. I don’t let the taps run when cleaning my teeth, and I recycle my garbage. But I’m not an activist. I find myself almost completely disinterested in environmental action. This is something emerging from deep within me. I have to honour that without necessarily being able to justify it or explain it. Specialisation is a natural, indispensable function of sophistication, complexity. In our interconnected, indivisible unity, each of us has a specialized function. For some it is to take environmental action. For some it is to precipitate the crisis. It could just be a healing crisis for all we know. I’m not saying it is; I’m just saying it could be.
In the 70’s and the 80’s I thought people who weren’t environmentally aware were bad. I wouldn’t have said it quite like that but I would definitely have said that they were stupid, they didn’t care, that they were irresponsible. I can’t see that now. I think that’s blind, ignorant prejudice. I think that that can only be said when you can’t see the indivisibility of wholeness. Maybe you see the wholeness and you care about that. But you don’t see the indivisibility and all of its implications. You take sides. You go to war with that wholeness in some of its expressions. This is what causes the problem in the first place. I am no longer at war with the people who are destroying this planet. I have the clarity and honesty to see that I am the people that are destroying this planet. And that I don’t mind. I don’t fee bad about it. I don’t feel guilty. My trust in life, in nature is total. I don’t trust its potential. I trust it as it is. And as it is it seems to be undergoing a radical and quite violent transformation with human beings as its primary instrument. I am not saying that I like that. Nor am I saying that I enjoy it. But I am cool with it. I trust it. I trust life. I don’t have to know where its going. I don’t need it to know where its going. Its been going about its business a long, long time. Most of it without our participation. It doesn’t always need us. Though clearly it still needs us now. As long as it does we will still be here.
Whatever actions we take out of fear, out of mistrust are bound to generate more problems. Only action that is based on love can nurture love. Only action based on trust can nourish freedom. If we cant trust existence we cant trust life. If we cant trust life we cant trust nature. If we cant trust nature we cant trust each other. We have to be able to trust things the way they are before we can participate effectively in changing them to something that we like and understand more easily. Because by trust I don’t mean either like or understand. Nor do I mean anything fatalistic. I am always changing things, and always will. From continuously rehehydrating my body, to every now and then changing the location of my home. Trusting doesn’t mean complacency, indolence or passivity. It means acting and choosing from a different place. From a place of trust that is not conceptual. From knowing deeply the indivisibility of wholeness. From knowing beyond any doubt or logic that everything is in its own place: and that that is the right place. That everything has its own place, and that it is in that place. All the time. Without exception. Even not excepting the things we don’t like and cant understand. Human action can not stop. So human decision making cannot stop. Decisions are based on judgements, assessments. These can not stop. They can however be more fully grounded in the indivisibility of wholeness. Then they act as expressions and deepenings of trust.
What about our inclinations?
Well as far as I’m concerned a decision is a condensation of inclination. That’s all. We make a big deal about what a decision is but actually it’s just a condensation. It’s a critical mass being reached in our inclination complex and action has to be taken to relieve it and so off you go. It’s like going into your body in yoga and seeing how much is involved in a simple action. How everything is participating in a single decision. That’s the key to trusting life and to accepting the diversity of life and then just doing your thing. You have to see the indivisibility of wholeness functioning in and as everything. Then you go off and do your thing with a light heart and a generous hand. Whatever your thing is…
At that time
Yes. Everything changes. I see my thing as ‘radical ecology.’ I’m a radical ecological activist. I don’t get involved in direct environmental action. I’m interested in presenting the viewpoint of trust. Of trusting life. I don’t know and I don’t mind what’s going to happen to humanity, the shape of life on this planet. But I do know that life has more than enough resilience to withstand the worst of human destructiveness. I have a predisposition to be optimistic. This is not something I have achieved or learned. It came in with me. I believe in life because of how it feels to me. And don’t think I haven’t tasted suffering. My third son died in my hands. I’ve been imprisoned, beaten up, abandoned, betrayed along with the best of us. I believe in life enough to not need an afterlife, a transcendent realm, a metaphysical promise of peace and glory to come. My conviction is that life can be, must be trusted. My activism is to promote that, suggest that wherever and however I can. Not only, though mostly, through teaching yoga.
I see that when people trust life they stop exploiting life, or at least much less. At the very least they recognize their exploitation and they stop pretending that they’re not doing what they are doing. We are all of us destroying the planet. We were born to it. We cant help it. It’s a social thing, not just a cultural thing. Its built into the time, space and number factors of the here and now. Its important that we stop pretending that we aren’t. Not necessarily important for the future of the planet but for our own sanity in this moment where we always find ourselves. In letting go of that pretence we are given the option to let go of other things too. I used to love fast cars. Now I’m not interested. I’d rather drive a slow car. This is not something that I’ve decided I should do to make me a better person. It’s just here now, and I don’t know where that attraction, that addiction that I used to have was coming from. You could say ‘all young people are like that.’ But no, some old people are like that. I think it was an expression of not having found myself. And finding myself is nothing to do with Godfri’s particularities. But finding the indivisibility of life. Finding my big self, my true self, what I most deeply am. And that is everything. Which is why it feels like nothing. Which is why it is so easy to miss.
You don’t have to find your uniqueness to be at peace. You have to find your place in and as the wholeness: then you will have found yourself. To me indivisibility is a very different word to interconnectedness. Interconnectedness implies separate things joined up. Indivisibility is something much more than that. It has profound consequences to deeply and regularly encounter the indivisibility of wholeness. When you experience it very deeply, when that experience becomes your norm, your daily bread, then you start to have a light footprint. No matter how much carbon you’re burning. Not just environmental footprint. You have a lighter presence altogether. You don’t need to take so much. You don’t need to get so much. You become part of the giving rather than the getting. Without necessarily wanting, needing or trying to do that. It just happens to you. You lose your animosity, your hostility because you’ve lost the underlying fear that comes from feeling alone, cut off, separated. I used to be so elitist, so against straights and materialists, conservatives and socialists, smokers and drinkers, meat eaters and women haters. Now I’m at war with no-one and that’s not a copout. And I’m not at war with the person who says it’s a cop out. I’m giving my energy to life. Life is making me to do that in my own way that it is shaping. And I am going along with it without friction, without resistance, without pride or shame. And I’m taking this out to you, to my students, to others. Back to the world that has given it to me. I’m saying to people all the time: “look within, maybe you can trust life”. This is my activism: radical ecology. I’m not trying to save the world. I’m not trying to save the planet. I’m just trying to ease the suffering that I experience, that I encounter. Wherever it is. In me, or in you, or in the next person. This is natural. This is nature. To ease discomfort. To release pressure. It’s not so hard. Really.
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