INVEST IN LOSS: RETHINKING WIN-WIN
LOSING THE ILLUSION OF SEPARATENESS
Addressing the Ecological Crisis
by Opening the Heart’!
By Trent Thursby Alvey

To practice transcending opposites for the purpose of understanding commonality with our perceived opponents and the rest of the natural world, we must look to the contemplative sciences. By understanding that that which we resist is also part of the natural world and therefore part of ourselves, we can begin to extend ourselves beyond our own skin and to have compassion for everyone including those who still believe that they are separate from their surroundings. We will see a heightened awareness of ourselves and our responsibility for the planet.

We create this world with our consciousness. By becoming more aware of this creative involvement we can become compassionate activists, enabling a healthy, life supporting, nurturing planet.

THINKING LIKE A MOUNTAIN: UNDERSTANDING THE ULTIMATE NATURE OF THE WORLD

This spring I attended a board meeting for Round River Conservation Studies, an environmental research and teaching organization based out of Salt Lake City. Michael Soule, the originator of the concept of conservation biology and a Round River Board member, proposed that “science, tempered with compassion” opens up a new way of living in the world. A new relationship between science and other ways of knowing can make the scientific data dynamic by combining it with the spiritual motivation of compassion. This new utilization of data will move us towards sustainable practices. In the words of Gary Snyder, quoting Dogen in Practice of the Wild, we need to start “thinking like a mountain.” We are the mountain, so we need to start being the mountain. If these words make sense to us, then we understand the underlying truth of the world. One can say that the cure for our present environmental malady is to think like a mountain, or think like a droplet of water, or think like a blade of grass. The holistic nature of the universe allows us to understand the nature of the ‘whole’ by completely understanding (realizing) any of its parts. Buddhists sometimes begin their meditation practice with object-meditation — meditating on any object — to gain one pointedness of mind, the ability to focus on the nature of one thing in order to understand the ten thousand things (the world of phenomenon).

To become the mountain and begin to change our destructive environmental habits, we may need to let go of some of our closely held concepts. Winning may require us to invest in loss. We often hear the phrase ‘win-win’, until now we may have never considered the concept of lose- win. To understand win, we must understand its opposite, lose. Contemplating dichotomies can help us understand that separateness is an illusion; to know one we must know the other. Win and lose are the opposite ends of the same stick. Lao-tzu says, “Success is as dangerous as failure. Hope is as hollow as fear.”

Elaine Harding, a conservation biologist at James Cook University, has described in her article “A Conservation Koan: If data is the answer then what is the question?” that science (objective thought) and spirituality (subjective thought) need to come together to define how we are to live appropriately as human beings on the planet? By bringing win and lose concepts together when seeking to resolve ecological ills, we will see solutions that were not obvious before. For, if we constantly approach a conservation situation with a plan in which we are previously invested, how can we see new creative solutions? By losing the ego (need to win), we gain new insight.

Compassion is the vehicle to arrive at a new understanding of opposites. By bringing opposites together, we can begin practicing compassion. We can lose the many disturbing emotions and open our hearts. It is in the process of opening the heart that we begin to understand our relationship to the ten thousand things. By attempting to understand our own ignorance and practicing compassion for our opponent, who is also suffering from ignorance, we may transcend our divergent thinking and arrive at solutions that will not only preserve life on the planet, but also restore the joy that we have lost in a highly technological and consumer-based world.

The purpose of this article will be to practice thinking in terms of lessening or eliminating the intellectual gap between opposites for the end result of distilling truth about the ecological dilemma in which we find ourselves at the beginning of the twenty-first century and what we can do to effect change.

Industrialized countries in the decades since the 1950’s have been convinced by corporate marketers that “win-win” is not only possible, but also expected. We have been taught that we can have our cake and eat it too. The first thing we need to lose is our deeply engrained sense of entitlement. Seeing how people in third world countries manage to survive on so little and seeing how much of the planets resources are used by Americans and other industrialized nations, we can simplify our own lives by starting to reap the benefits of invest in loss. As Harding, addressing the “illness of materialism,” states, “science is failing to alter consumptive human behavior by just pointing out the resulting degradation of the planet.” Something more needs to be done to awaken us to the damage we are posing to ourselves and all life, and to our diminishing quality of life as we continue in the direction of obliviousness.

CONSCIOUNESS SHAPES THE WORLD

We can become more aware of our participation in the consciousness of the planet by looking again at how ancient wisdom used the interplay of opposing forces to define the world.

“ Ancient Chinese wisdom teaches that the world wasn’t created by a god who made laws but by the mutual dynamic interaction of two opposite forces, yin and yang. It is interesting to contemplate how our own consciousness shapes the world. This concept is reinforced by quantum physics experiments of the early twentieth century,” Matthieu Ricard describes opposing forces in his book Quantum and the Lotus.

Noble Prize Winner Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, (1927) should have drastically changed the way we understand the nature of reality. It tells us that we cannot predict the behavior of an electron, that we cannot know both the velocity and the position of an electron at the same moment, and that particles can materialize without the slightest need for cause. Trinh Xuan Thuan (2000-a), professor of astronomy at University of Virginia, explains it this way, “This unpredictability does not stem from our ignorance, nor is it due to our inability to build sufficiently sophisticated measuring instruments; rather, it is an intrinsic property of Nature at the atomic level.”

Einstein thought that quantum uncertainty, the concept that there is a dualistic behavior of particles and that every particle has a counterpart with whom it behaves in tandem, must include a deeper, intrinsic determinism. “Einstein thought that a particle’s speed and position, which defined its trajectory, were localized on the particle without any observation being necessary.” (Thuan, 2001-a)

In 1935, Albert Einstein, Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolsky devised the “EPR” experiment to affirm that classical theory was defining a local universe, a one to one correspondence between every element, but the results were inconclusive. Then in 1964 John Bell, an Irish physicist, devised an experiment to resolve the EPR paradox. The experiment tested pairs of photons and found that at thirteen yards apart, “photon “b” always knew instantaneously what photon “a” was doing, and reacted accordingly.” (Thuan, 2000-a)). Einstein was proven wrong by quantum physics. Bell was forced to conclude that physical reality is non-local. The implications are that cause and effect, as we have known it, does not describe the true nature of reality. There is a dialogue between seemingly separate entities over time and space that can only be described as non-local, global connectedness.

Non-locality, the phenomena of spatially separated particles communicating instantaneously over a distance, is described by Menas Kafatos and Robert Nadeau, in their book entitled Non-Locality. (1999) “In conducting experiments, we do not cause the past to happen or create non-local connections. We are simply demonstrating the existence of the part-whole complementarity in our efforts to coordinate our knowledge of the parts. What comes into existence as an object of knowledge was not created or caused by us for the simple reason that it was always there— and the “it” in this instance is a universe that seems to exist on a primary level as an undivided wholeness.”

The magnitude of this information is difficult to internalize, but it has monumental implications in our practice of focusing only on observation and data collection without a deeper consideration of scientifically observing ultimate connectivity.

“ What Is Life? We could have very well emerged in a universe in which every physical phenomenon in a given place would be so intimately connected to the rest of the universe that it would be impossible to study it without understanding the entire universe. Everything would be so intricately interwoven that no simple law could ever be deducted. Our understanding of the universe would then be a matter of all or nothing. Instead, science made it possible for us to catch bits of information without knowing the entire plot, to hear a few notes of music without grasping the whole melody. The mystery is all the more puzzling since the available evidence suggests that the universe forms a highly interconnected whole. The EPR experiment showed us that the reality of elementary particles is not local but global,” (Thuan, 2000-a)

Particle / wave duality is the most obvious example of how the anticipation of the viewer affects the results. Experiments reveal that a particle can decide to be either particle or wave from moment to moment, a compelling argument for the energy potential resulting from opposing forces. This is what is referred to as the complementarity principle.

The nature of consciousness is believed by Buddhists to be “born from preceding instants of consciousness and continuing without a physical framework,” (Ricard, 2001). It seems reasonable to teach scientists to work contemplatively, to investigate the nature of their own mind and therefore the nature of the conscious mind. According to Ricard (2001), “Fundamental science is theoretical knowledge, while technology is utilitarian knowledge and contemplative science is liberating knowledge.” Is it time for science to expand its repertoire and use introspection as a tool of understanding the interrelated effects of our own thoughts — our collective consciousness — on the observed manifestation of reality? Now that science has observed phenomena for hundreds of years, it needs to accept input from the science of contemplation and forge a new path that will start to narrow divergent views into a new level of enlightenment.

OBSERVATION CREATES THE PARADOX

The potential for this new level of enlightenment, described by Trinh Xuan Thuan as follows: “As long as we do not observe it, a subatomic particle can be here or there, and everywhere. In other words it is the observing itself that creates reality. In a manner of speaking the external world is defined by the questions we ask ourselves about it. It is as though Nature waited for an observer before deciding between the two alternatives.”

Some seventy seven years after the uncertainty principle was introduced in physics, we are finally coming to grips with its implications; no matter how much data we collect, we have the distinct feeling that we are getting no closer to ultimate knowledge or even knowledge that people will listen to and internalize. We have come to the realization that the answer may not be more data, but more introspection, more self-reflection, more transcendence of reason — so that, ultimately, we can return to reason, collection, comparison, with a new understanding of its place in this world of phenomena. The paradox is that the act of observation brings duality into effect.

According to Buddhism, chasing phenomena is a cruel trick of our minds. We chase our tails, keeping detailed records of each change and nuance we perceive; but if we were to look up for a moment — transcend our condition — we would immediately see the futility of our dogmatic-ness.

“ No other species seems to suffer from the delusion that they can manage information,” Margaret Wheatley observes in her book Leadership and the New Science. “Instead, they stay alert to what’s happening all the time. It seems ironic that even the simplest forms of life often seem more self-aware than we humans do.”

We seem to think of things as one or the other, but not both at the same time. British physicist, David Bohm described “an unbroken wholeness underlying complexity as that which we cannot discern is the ‘Implicate Order’ out of which seemingly discrete events arise.”

LISTENING DEEPLY TO YOUR OPPONENT

Science seems to be scratching the surface of deeply understanding the connectivity of complex systems in literally every aspect of the planet. In the eighties, Michael Soul´e and Paul Erlich brilliantly described and developed the concept of interrelatedness into the new field of study called, conservation biology, which is now being taught in every major college in the United States, Australia and Canada. We still are in the infancy period of internalizing this concept, however. We are learning to say the words: interconnectedness and consilience. As well as, phrases like, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. But we need the contemplative science, meditation, to allow our minds to not-think in order to arrive at a full understanding. This is asking scientists to do the opposite of what they are trained to do, to trust rather than analyze: We need to achieve a balance between thinking and trusting if we are going to allow the Earth to choose her own wise solutions. We then simply need to follow the path of being responsible for ourselves.

The problem, of course, is opposition coming from government, industry, and the all-greedy corporations. But aren’t all of these entities made up of individuals? Can’t we think of the ultimate solution epicenter as the heart of the individual? My subtitle for this article started out as, Addressing the Ecological Crisis By Opening Your Heart. Buddhists speak of a direct experience in which one reaches a moment of enlightenment when one is able to truly open one’s heart to compassion. Compassion does not mean that we lie down in the face of opposition. In fact, one of our greatest world peace activists, Thich Nhat Hanh says that taking care of other sentient beings is in turn taking care of ourselves. Hanh practices deep listening to be more effective in his efforts toward peace. Deep listening is listening to our colleagues with a free heart. Then follows compassionate dialogue, which engenders strong collective insight to support wise decision-making. In an address to the United States Congress after the World Trade Center bombings, Hanh said the community — in this case Congress—needs to transform itself into a compassionate community, in order to be more effective at bringing about a more peaceful world. As environmentalists, we may be ineffective in our conservation efforts if we are not using deep listening in our strategy. While we know that action is needed to protect the natural world, we must also realize that a liberating power can be realized by combining all of our insights and experiences into a solution of collective wisdom. If we are unable to listen to our colleagues and opponents with a free heart, if we only support ideas from our own camp, solutions to our problems will remain illusive.
Indeed, it is the same idea in martial arts. The words ‘invest in loss’ come from the long lineage of marshal arts practitioners. My teacher, Sifu Gardner brought me to the realization that if I were not listening to my opponent I would get knocked on my ass. Sifu Gardner demonstrates sparing techniques as described in this part of a poem that I wrote some years ago.
In Tai Chi practice Sifu Gardner says, Invest in Loss.
Finally my body taught me what that means.
While sparring Sifu says, grab my arm,
When I do the arm becomes a snake and slithers away.
There is nothing to hold to and in addition the snake
Uses my energy to knock me off balance and send me flying.
Sifu invested in loss. He gave no resistance, but
Redirected my energy, which I aggressively gave away.
The act of resisting is futile, unless you are a rock.
Even then it’s useless, you can still be worn away by water and wind.
Water invests in loss. It flows to the lowest place.
It doesn’t try to control, but ultimately it has great effect.”
During martial arts sparing, if we are thinking about ourselves rather than being aware, we will lose the match. If we, as activists, are thinking about ourselves, failing to listen, failing to invest in loss, then we will fail to reach insightful solutions. Therefore, investing in loss means losing our personal focus to gain a heightened awareness of what is going on around us, most immediately with the opponent that is facing us. The urgent opponent that I am speaking of is ecological doom; species extinction, loss of habitat, global warming, threat of nuclear proliferation. Investing in loss is to begin the process of collective insight and to begin to form a compassionate community where the solution may reveal itself.
CUTTING THE ROOTS OF IGNORANCE
Among the many Tibetan Buddhist deities, one of the most powerful is Manjusri, who wields a blazing sword in his right hand to cut the roots of ignorance. Manjusri cuts the roots of ignorance within himself. As we become more aware of ignorance we can see that the enemy is within our own hearts. When we have cut the roots of our own ignorance we can begin to invest in loss and practice compassion. Then, as individuals in a compassionate community, we can begin to effect real change in our society to actively restore the planet.LOSE DUALITY: GAIN NEW WHOLENESS
To begin our exercise in contemplating “lose-win”, let us think about the following opposites as an exercise to free up the left-brain and encourage creative thinking. We want to look at old problems in a new way, for, as Bohm says, “Creativity is the ability to see new differences and new similarities.” Let us read each set of words very slowly, allow ourselves to slow down and think about the following dichotomies until we begin to see that they are not contradictory, but complementary.
subject object
hope despair
matter energy
win lose
science spirituality
contemplation action
particle wave
information wisdom
action contemplation
knowledge experience
here there
order disorder
linear nonlinear
physical locality non-locality
closed system open system
being non being
This simple exercise in freeing our mind of concepts helps us understand that opposites are just two sides of the same coin and that balancing the coin on its edge is the best way to see new solutions. It frees us from taking a position of winning and losing (heads or tails) and may allow new insight.
The ability to understand complementarity has been essential for the emergence of new science, which began at the turn of the century with physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg who shifted our thinking, moving from classical Cartisan physics into a new area of quantum theory, filled with uncertainties, interconnectedness and paradoxes at the atomic level. Quantum physicists are no strangers to paradoxical concepts: matter being immaterial, disequilibrium that leads to stability, chaos that is ordered. Any definition of one must involve the opposite as its complementary construct. For example “The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next,” according to James Gleick, author of Chaos.
In this article I refer to opposites and say to lose one thing, you gain another. I don’t mean to eliminate the first completely, but only to balance one with the other. To learn to look at the microscopic and then the cosmic; to look at the organism and then the body; to look at the individual and then the system, alternately, so that, eventually, we can conceptualize both simultaneously. It is an exercise to help the brain become more agile at combining the opposites. LOSE STUFF: INVEST IN NON-MATERIAL GAIN
If we stop to consider the fundamental questions of our existence, we may well make simpler consumer choices.
Quoting Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk and coauthor of The Quantum and the Lotus, “What matters most in life is not the quantity of information that we can acquire, but the answers to questions such as, why are we alive? Why do we die? Why do we suffer? Why are we happy? Why do we love? Why do we hate? . . . There is now so much data that its vastness sometimes makes us forget that science is incapable of answering basic questions about existence.”
Science, of course, has never attempted to answer these questions; its purpose has been to provide us data about our world, hoping that we will see the impending environmental crisis. Why don’t we, as a society, concern ourselves with impending catastrophes that science points out to us? “Science has set up confusion between what is possible and what is desirable,” Ricard comments. “Technology has made a great many things possible, and society has many times chosen poorly.” Greed has made us believe that we can replace simple happiness with quantity and complexity. Spirituality has been lost in the race to consume. Lose thoughtless consumerism; gain contentment and a healthy environment.
We like to believe that it is corporate greed that is to blame for wantonly destroying our environment, but the corporation would wilt on the vine if we started using our vast scientific knowledge and common sense to simplify our lives again. We could drive less. Eat more wisely. Consider the origin of everything we purchase, from food and clothing to cars and houses. Find out who made the shirt we are about to buy. Fix and repair instead of buying new. Grow food in community gardens. Teach elementary school children how to eat wholesome food.
The founder of Chez Panisse Restaurant, Alice Waters, with the help of the children from Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley, CA, dug up the parking lot of their elementary school and planted an organic garden. The children began to make new connections between themselves, their health and wholesome food. Waters believes that becoming more involved with the growing and cooking of our own food will solve most of the world’s problems. (Peggy Orenstein, NY Times Magazine, March 2004). She believes food is the vehicle for social change. Waters says, “…if Americans would choose seasonal, organic food grown through sustainable techniques by local farmers, if we would serve caring meals at the family table rather than scarfing Happy Meals in the minivan, we would restore family values, transform our communities and stabilize the environment. We would also enjoy ourselves more.”
This all requires abandoning most time-saving marketed products, losing our appetite for out-of-season foods, exotic fish, fruit, and other delicacies that have to be shipped across the planet daily, and boycotting manufactured items that result in toxic by-products. It requires us to go backward to a more reasonable way of living on the planet: giving up coal-burning produced electricity for energy produced from solar and wind; losing convenience to improve our lives; and beginning to regain clean air, clean water, and nourishing food.
The British Columbian international campaign to save old growth forest, launched by Greenpeace in 1997, was focused on convincing large corporations like Scott Paper Co, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Home Depot, to quit selling products made using old growth forest. It worked brilliantly. Once the corporation understood that it would lose money if consumers boycotted their products because of their irresponsible environmental behavior, the corporations were quick to change their ways. They invited Greenpeace to sit at the negotiation table to arrive at a solution. We will always be consumers so we must learn to be responsible consumers.
INFORMATION IS NOT WISDOM: WE NEED BOTH
When we give up wanting to know everything, we can make great leaps in understanding. Science made its greatest leap in physics when it gave up wanting to know ‘everything about everything’ and embraced the uncertainty principle of quantum physics.
Lose the obsession for data (scientific dogma) and embrace other ways of knowing. Lose your desire to know everything. Gain a more rich and full understanding of the whole: the whole life, the whole relationship, the whole community, and the whole planet.
“ We are still thinking like ‘good Newtonians’ when we build up elaborate system maps, which are ‘influenced by a quest for predictability’. We seem to be drowning in information, but instead of gaining clarity, our search for quantification leads us into infinite fogginess.” Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science
The culture of science has dogmatically insisted that we should have no belief systems that cannot be proven by scientific methodology. This sense of superiority has led us to a very dangerous precipice. Technology has arrogantly insisted that it can find solutions to almost any problem. It has deluded us into thinking that we don’t have to alter our consumptive ways, or limit our numbers, because technology will fix it. This has come about in a contradictory manner. Even though scientists warn that we are heading for disaster, science itself has attained the status of all knowing, and therefore we assume technology can fix anything. We have forgotten much of the wisdom that ancient civilizations embodied as a guide for joyful living. Science has told us that this is not reliable information and that we should trust data over cultural knowledge. It is time for science to start a dialogue with the ‘science of contemplatives.’ We have centuries of knowledge available to us to help us understand the workings of the mind in connection with the conscious universe. Ancient wisdom reinforces the underlying physics principles of non-locality and the principles of non-linear dynamics, the ebb and flow of chaos and order in a self organizing, open system. In both disciplines, things are not as they appear upon observation. Our experience as macro-level perceivers (rather than micro-level) may lead us to resist the phenomenon of non-locality and continue to think of particles as separate, rather than parts of a whole system. Scientific observation, data gathering, system analysis and probability mapping cannot reveal the whole picture. If science incorporates intuitive ways of knowing, we can learn to balance our future research with a combination of science and the ancient ways, a combination of information and wisdom.
“For fragmentation is now very widespread, not only throughout society, but also in each individual; and this is leading to a kind of general confusion of the mind, which creates an endless series of problems and interferes with our clarity of perception so seriously as to prevent us from being able to solve most of them . . . The notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion.” David Bohm

LOSE ORDER: GAIN DYNAMICS
Change preserves a living system. Any individual, organization, or community needs to be transparent and permeable in order to stay viable. An open system — a plant community — for example will gather information about its viability, especially at the borders, by exchanging information with its surroundings, and by being alert to any changes in the environment that may affect effect its survivability. Plants will not produce excess seeds if they deem the environment unfavorable. Producing seeds takes a lot of energy, so the seasonal information about water and weather will affect the plant communities’ behavior. In the world of microbiology, the immune system is the open system most sensitive to the necessity for change. It is constantly looking for irregularities that might pose a danger in the body. It is the model for the importance of being alert and ready to change strategy at a moments notice. Buddhists likewise believe that, since the body is so permeable, we cannot prevent harmful substances, poisonous emotions or harmful ideology from entering. But we can allow them to flow through the body. We simply acknowledge that they are there and then let them go, rather than attaching ourselves to them. This, by the way, does not guarantee any certain result, but it does take away the fear and apprehension that distract us from living a full and present life. By example, the best pilot is one who monitors the weather, instruments, fuel level, her own condition and ability to make new decisions every moment based on the changing conditions.
Ilya Prigogine’s study of thermodynamics took the scientific community from the concept of system structure to system dynamics and demonstrated how disorder prevents the demise of a system. A new relationship to disorder developed. A closed system is unaware that there is anything happening outside its own border. It is, in effect, arrogant in its hope to sustain itself without any outside exchange. Breathing is the best example, demonstrating how the exchange of gases allows the continuation of life from moment to moment. Impermanence is the only constant.
Being aware of change and how it affects us, then being open to adopting new solutions, I believe, is the model of creativity. Corporations and organizations are open systems. They need to look to nature for clues on how to stay fluid and dynamic, allowing information to flow readily and be willing to change and adapt quickly. Chaos theory is used to study varied disciplines such as economics, history, linguistics, music, the stock market, urban planning and the weather.
In these non-linear systems, slight changes, even indiscernible changes can amplify into completely unexpected results. A non-linear system can take off in unexpected directions or respond in surprising ways. Our entire planet can be viewed as a non-linear system. This is the primary logic for being aware of slight changes affecting our planet. As part of the open system we call earth, humans are the caretakers. We could think of scientists as the immune system of the planet. As such, they actively monitor the condition of the earth. We must be ready to change, if we see our behavior is harming the earth. As an open system, there is no separation between our bodies and the body of the planet. The danger alarm has been sounding for the last 30 years and we have failed to respond.
LOSE URGENCY: GAIN NEW CALMNESS.
We see real urgency in environmental issues, but reactive behavior, the quick fix, is not the answer either. We will see the wisdom of place, in context of the planet when we slow down and start contemplating the planet. We will see how to begin to reverse the damage we have done. During a meeting of scientists and environmental groups discussing the environmental campaign for Cape York Peninsula, John Ward, a First Nations Tlingit Elder from Atlin, British Columbia said, “Lets slow down. We have plenty of time.” Just the sound of his voice replaced urgency with calm. The vibration of his voice was rich and his simple words were full of wisdom. This is when scientific data starts to become less imperative — when it is matched with wisdom. When we are calm, lucid, and aware, we can see and feel the path that makes sense and start to improve our situation. One person can be very important in influencing others, by their calmness, by their way of living in the world, by being a teacher.
LOSE SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS: GAIN HUMILITY
“The value of any activity, even such respectable ones as science and religion depend entirely on our motivations,” Matthieu Ricard. Environmentalists seem to be passionately righteous in their altruistic mission to save the last great place. In the words of Jack Turner, “Like psychiatry, criminology, and clinical medicine, conservation biology is a theoretical discipline that seeks control in pursuit of a morally pure mission: to end a crisis.” Humility provides an opening of the heart and mind for creativity to enter. We should remember that creativity is scientific, as it allows us to analyze data and make new and insightful comparisons resulting in solutions that sometimes have been right in front of us, but were obscured by self-righteous subjectivism.
Just by calling ourselves environmentalists, we are implying that we are good because we are trying to save the world and that they are bad because they are not trying to save it or, worse, are working to destroy it. Thus we have set the polarized atmosphere of resistance. Jack Turner has written about this concept in regard to designating parks and wilderness. The act of setting aside wilderness actually creates a diminished wilderness because the area is now designated, described, mapped, specified, signed, analyzed, opposed, photographed written and thought about in a different way than before the designation.
“ I believe that science has become somewhat ineffectual, because of its authoritative position, to point the direction necessary for real healing and preservation of the planet. The conservation community has likewise positioned itself as the savior of the wild and now believes that they must control the outcome before the impending disastrous events unfold. While there is a great deal of wanton destruction of wild places that needs to be prevented, it may be the “control mentality” that is exacerbating the issues. Nature’s talent for self-organization is much more sophisticated than our “control solutions”. Jack Turner
LOSE ATTACHMENT: GAIN TRUE WILDNESS
Understanding the Buddhist concept of non-attachment is a perfect example of how to invest in loss. Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying says that, “Although we have been made to believe that if we let go we will end up with nothing, life itself reveals again and again the opposite: that letting go is the path to real freedom.” Usually we believe that if we love someone we must possess them, or if we love something we must own it. We often mistake attachment for love. Love and passion is spoiled by attachment — insecurity, possessiveness and pride. As we realize the impermanent nature of all things we learn to overcome attachment and are slowly released from its grip, from that release comes a great feeling of compassion that fills the heart. Embracing change and impermanence is the way to become an effective activist. Becoming a warrior according to Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche means that, “we trade our small-minded struggle for security for a much vaster vision, one of fearlessness, openness, and genuine heroism.”
If we want to attain the ideal wilderness, that of a ‘self-sustaining system’ as described by Gary Snyder in Practice of the Wild, then we need to learn to manage less and allow nature to self-regulate more.
I would suggest that this enormous potential scares us. The thought of letting go is the antithesis of stewardship. We can’t bring ourselves to trust completely. We don’t have complete faith in nature. Scientists don’t really want to give up their authoritative position, even to the wisdom of nature.
“The issue is not the legitimacy of science in general, nor the legitimacy of a particular scientific discipline, but the appropriate limits to be placed on any scientific discipline in light of limited knowledge. To ignore these limits is to refuse humility and undermine the foundations of the preservation movement. Accepting these limits and imagining a new conservation ethic based on wildness and humble, careful, non-intrusive practice would unite Thoreau’s insight that ‘in wildness is the preservation of the world’ and the traditions of ancient wisdom with the intuitions of our most radical wilderness lovers, ecofeminists, and cutting edge mathematicians and physicists. This is as consoling as it is charming.” Jack Turner
LOSE EGO: GAIN OPEN DIALOGUE
Ego prevents us from really listening to others. We all feel attached to our beliefs and we resist hearing anything that could come between our closely held, self-righteous thoughts and ourselves. This is true all arguments. Ego is the simple, but monumental boundary that prevents people from talking to one another. The more open we are the more we actually begin to listen.
The land in the west has suffered under the stewardship of local people in the last 200 years. Conservation groups and economic development specialists focus on ranchers becoming bed & breakfast proprietors in the wave of tourism, encouraging the ranchers to give up trying to make a living using unsustainable grazing practices. But tourism is an ambiguous solution to economic development. Rural people generally do not want to see their communities diluted by “sophisticated transplants,” (tourists who move in) who have money and expertise, but no sense of history of the place. Mark Austin, a twenty-year resident of Boulder, Utah (a relative new-comer to the community) calls this the “dilution solution.” It can be a solution as long as it stops before it decimates the genuine local persona. So often, an influx of influential outsiders dilutes a small rural community by bringing about the equivalent of a relocation ethnic cleansing. Local people are priced out of their own community with rising taxes and having their previous economic base replaced with a tourism economy in which they cannot find a desirable position. Then within a decade any resemblance to the original community is not only diluted, but also replaced with homogeneity. It’s been termed “Aspenization” of a community.
We can imagine bringing the rural west into communication with the environmental community? I had a recent experience in Escalante Utah, a town called by Edward Abbey, “The meanest little town in America.” I traveled there with my friends and family for the First Annual Escalante Arts Festival. One of my good friends, Ken Sanders, who is a rare book collector in Salt Lake City and was a friend to Ed Abbey, went along. I introduced Ken to several friends of mine in Escalante as they extended their hospitality to the visitors in town. Later I heard Ken commenting on how much he liked meeting these individuals. Initiating a conversation about conservation and other sensitive issues is a long process that is started in the community with a personal introduction. Seeing Ken Sanders, arch eco-warrior, and Arnold Alvey, third generation Escalante father shaking hands and visiting, seemed a solid beginning for community-based communication.
It is obvious why local people’s perspective has been largely ignored in the quest for wilderness designation. Local people usually don’t see a need for designating something that has been previously “unused or little used.” Wilderness has become more about usage designation, than about wildness. Especially now with the off-road-vehicle contingency being organized on a national level we see wildness come down to a decision of motorized versus non-motorized.
In Canada and Australia, more than in America, First Nation Peoples have been recognized recently as having valuable knowledge of the land. Similarly, open and honest conversation with local, non-native rural people may prove that they are closer to the ideals of preserving a place than had been thought. Dennis Sizemore and Round River have spent six years developing the friendship and trust of the Tlingit First Nations elders in the Taku River area of British Columbia. Now they have jointly written a wilderness plan for thirty million acres that make up the Tlingit traditional territory.
How did environmentalists get on the opposite side of the argument with rural people in the first place? Most local ranchers and loggers do have an attachment to the land and can be brought to a discussion about the ecological, spiritual, and economic components of their backyards. Both sides must first lose their sense of being right — ego or entitlement — for an open and creative discussion to occur.
In the words of Terry Tempest Williams, “The next Buddha may not take the form of an individual, but the form of a community.” It will take input from both sides for a community to define wilderness, grazing, extraction, economic development, and tourism in a sustainable way, but the dialogue can be opened up if both sides can clear their agenda. “If we are all part of the same oneness and everything is interconnected, then when we fight each other we are fighting ourselves,” EO Wilson.
LOSE COMPLEX THINKING: GAIN NEW UNDERSTANDING
“All the essential ingredients needed to produce even the most complex behavior already exist in elementary rules,” according to Stephen Wolfram, “A New Kind of Science.” In our quest for understanding the complete picture of diversity of complex adaptive (open) systems, Wolfram suggests that the scientific community should “look at the simple underlying programs from which those systems originated.”
The Buddhist concept of dependent origination suggests that all phenomena comprising the world (the world of things) burst forth from the emergence of our own consciousness when the first thing was conceptualized so that all things came into existence. Trying to unravel the complexity now, from a lateral position makes it mostly unfathomable.
Einstein has said, “No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.” This statement clearly points out that the way to understanding the apparent complexities of ourselves and of our world must come from another way of knowing. We must make a quantum leap of understanding. A leap that cannot be solely facilitated by science, but can only come about with the help of spirituality.
Stephen Wolfram reasons that “It is this equivalence between us as observers and the systems that we observe that makes the behavior of such systems seem to us complex.” The computer revolution was launched by the concept that a universal system with fixed underlying rules can be built to perform any possible computation. “The phenomenon of universality is vastly more common and important — in both abstract systems and nature — than has ever been imagined before,” explains Wolfram. In the search for universal theories, whether The Theory of Everything (the highly desirable theory that will resolve the differences between cosmology and subatomic physics) or a new theory unifying biological principles (explaining how so many organisms exhibit such great complexity), it may be that when encountering complex phenomena, instead of assuming that its underlying mechanism is itself complex, we will discover that it “originates from a conspicuously simple program”. “I have increasing evidence that thinking in terms of simple programs will make it possible to construct a single truly fundamental theory of physics, from which space, time, quantum mechanics and all the other known features of our universe will emerge,” Stephen Wolfram.
Wolfram has approached this research like a naturalist starting his research with a class of programs known as cellular automata, then expanding from there, adding colors to the original black and white cell algorithms, resulting in great complexity, but overwhelming similarities in the types of overall behavior produced. Wolfram promotes using simple computer programs, rather than complicated mathematical solutions, to unlock the secrets of complexity.
Wolfram also experimented with completely random initial conditions resulting in the findings that “many systems spontaneously tend to organize themselves, so that even with completely random initial conditions they end up producing behavior that has many features that are not at all random.”
This research should help us trust in the conscious wisdom of the self-organizing wilderness and strive to manage less.WIDENING OUR CIRCLE OF COMPASSION
Investing in loss — losing ego, cumbersome complex thinking, urgency, control, perceived order, material gain and excessive information — frees us from a prison of ignorance, emotions and expectations and allows us to gain new understanding of ourselves in relationship with the whole. Gaining Compassion is gaining the wisdom that we are integrated of the whole and to save ourselves we must save all of it.
“ A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security”. Albert Einstein Autobiographical Notes, 1959)
Compassion is the practice of investing in loss. Compassion is allowing ourselves to let go of long held and guarded concepts, lose old habits and ideas, then to open ourselves to new ways of seeing, widening our circle of compassion.
. Compassion transcends dichotomies. Compassion is the path to a healthy and unified planet. Collectively we can generate a great energy to see beyond win and lose. When we can see beyond the dichotomies, we can realize that compassion allows us to transcend our smaller needs and get in touch with the larger workings of the conscious universe. We can do this by observing our own behavior by contemplating it. Through contemplation and meditation we can begin to understand compassion — the desire for all beings to be free of suffering and its causes.
As we are trying to maintain wild places, mitigate the damage from industry, alert the world to practices that are eliminating certain species or making people sick — these are compassionate acts, as long as they are done with the right motivation. This means having compassion for the perpetrators and understanding that they are operating from greed and ignorance. We are all operating from ignorance according to Buddhist doctrine. Ignorance is the ‘failure to understand the phenomenal nature of reality’. In other words, reality is illusory and impermanent. Until we all transcend this reality it is very much real. When we are cut we bleed. When we are poisoned by industry we get cancer and die. When all of our wild places are gone, we choke on the clouds of pollution. In the world of the knower and the known, (subjective and objective), there is a perceived separateness that will remain until we all gain enlightenment. Until then, our reality will continue to exist in duality but we may strive to keep our world healthy. The paradoxical nature of this argument does not change our commitment to action.
Whether we are consciously participating or not we can do something quite extraordinary in order to stop the destruction of our planet. Again this essay addresses the paradox of non-duality / duality: We need to view the world and our existence in it from a place of contemplation / action. Saying that we should contemplate the universe from a collective viewpoint, as scientists, artists, citizens, etc. is really a non-issue. In fact we are doing just that, as we reading this essay. Because of the way the universe works, we are acting as a part of the larger consciousness, even though we may not be conscious of it. Our whole consciousness, made up of individual minds, is a powerful tool in the healing of our planet. By bridging the gap of the myriad of small conservation battles going on for the continuance of life systems, we can simultaneously generate a great power to see beyond win and lose, good and bad, subject and object, to time/place — where our consciousness literally promotes the health and unity of the planet. We will see ourselves as the planet. We are the Blue Mountains Walking. (Dogen)
TECHNOLOGY OF COMPASSION
Describe the Buddhist practice of Tung Lung, as described by Sogal Rinpoche, the author of the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. It is literally a technology for learning compassion, healing and creating change.
HEAL OURSELVES: HEAL THE PLANET
When you consider the three living entities that comprise the world — the individual, society and nature — it is the individual who begins to effect change. But in order to effect change we, as individuals, must have personally recovered. We must be whole. Since this requires an environment favorable to healing, we must seek the kind of lifestyle that is free from destructiveness. Introspection into ourselves and into our environmental practices are both necessary. It seems that they must happen simultaneously. Again the paradox is that it is difficult to change the environment if individuals are not aware and if individuals are not aware the environment cannot heal. From the mental health point of view, efforts to recover our humanness should be given priority. “If we knew how to deal with our self and with our fellow human beings, we would know how to deal with nature,” Thich Nhat Hanh
We have discussed the perceived separation between subject and object. Now we must consider the process in between, the act of the subject relating to the object. The Buddhist concept of ignorance has precisely to do with this concept. Somehow in the process of dependent co-arising (interdependent origination of the world of phenomenon), we believed ourselves to be separate from the object. We conceptualized I’m here and that is there. But, in order to reconcile ignorance we need to bring subject and object back together. The three are actually one, subject, object and the relationship between them. Because of dependent co-arising we should be acting from a sense of responsibility arising from our co-participation in all existence, instead of exhibiting ignorance in believing ourselves to be separate.
THE PARADOX OF CHANGE
Change is a paradox because once we have healed ourselves, change will occur naturally. It will not have to be engineered. No one will have to be convinced it is a good idea. Until then Margaret Wheatley points out one of our most obvious paradoxes,
“ We need to lose our paradoxical relationship with making money through destroying our environment.”
The first order of business in the process of becoming more conscious is to look at our relationship with making money. This need not be a blood sport. There is nothing inherently wrong with making money. Some of us have a natural ability. There is something wrong with making money at any cost.
We Americans have set the corporate model for the rest of the world’s industrialized and newly technological countries to follow. Our corporations are made up of shareholders, employees and corporate executives. The idea of the conventional corporation is to make money for the shareholders, provide jobs, make a shit-load of profit for a few top executives, and do it any way that you can, regardless of damage to people and the environment. Company profits push up the share price and stock market trading returns profits. The corporations behave as though they were a “closed system.” So long as the individual shareholders acquiesce to this corporate model they are not fully committed to changing the cycle of destruction caused by the corporate model. Most Americans are making money in the stock market (or were until the recent technology overvaluation bubble burst) and thus face the unspoken paradox: to keep up the status quo and keep making money or to voluntarily sell stocks in destructive companies or demand that they clean up their practices. If the groundswell of accountability came from within the company we would see rapid change. If the corporation can’t produce a product or service without environmentally destructive results, then they should not be in business. Again, it is up to individuals to be mindful of where they invest. If a company or a government behaves as though it is a closed system, and feels no accountability to the rest of the world, there is reason for concern.
There are no closed systems in nature. A closed system in science is a system in which entropy is high and chaos is low. It assumes that external influences can be controlled. As long as we believe that we have control either individually or on a corporate level, we are delusional. The persistent view, a hold over from the Newtonian era, is that chaos is bad and order is good. New discoveries in non-linear dynamical systems, has proven that there is an order in chaos, even though we may not be able to perceive it. Murray Gell-Mann explains it this way; we should evolve toward “a world in which humanity as a whole and the rest of nature operate as a complex adaptive system to a much greater degree than they do now.”
Companies will start to move from the conventional economic company defined purely by profit, to a learning company and living company, designed to live and thrive, based on characteristics of biological systems, according to Arie de Geus, a former Shell executive in his book The Living Company.
The greed of top executives is a reflection of the distribution of the wealth of the planet. A few countries have an inappropriate share of the wealth, while undeveloped countries are literally unable to feed their populations. The present model looks like this: Inequitable Global distribution of wealth, Inequitable National distribution of wealth, and Inequitable Corporate distribution of wealth. By redesigning the corporate structure to a more self-organizing entity, we will see a more wise use of resources, a more equitable distribution of wealth among employees, executives and shareholders, and the emergence of the United States as a more responsible global participant.
We are co-creators of our world. We have created this world. If we can envision a healthy world, we can create it. According to Margaret Wheatley “Everything comes into form because of relationship.” We need to lose our paradoxical relationship of making money through destroying our environment. We need to see new, more healthy relationships for making a living in a living planet. Taking what we need rather than profit taking. Both nature and business can share the same dialogue. Both are composed of complex adaptive systems just trying to live long and prosper. In both there is a healthy balance of competition and cooperation. Conventional corporations ignore their relationship to the environment and sometimes to other corporations. The eminent threat of global warming is a result of many corporations ignoring the outcome of their own irresponsible behavior, while collectively the damage is becoming catastrophic. Since the responsibility is spread around it is easy to delay seeking a solution. The earth has been so forgiving during our fifty thousand year evolution that we expect that there are no limitations to her ability to adapt to our irresponsible and greedy behavior.
It is time to start listening to the urgent messages that are becoming more and more frequent. It is time for citizens to take action. We cannot wait for governments and leaders because they are caught up in the old way of thinking, that the planet can sustain any amount of abuse that we heap on it. The true leaders of the planet are those who are telling us that we need to start now to change our destructive ways. Doing something now is the wise choice.
John McCain said about global warming in a recent interview in NRDC’s Onearth talks about Global Warming, “Until enough citizens who are voters care, then these special interests will be able to block any meaningful policy change. It’s as simple as that.”
Presently scientists have revealed that we are too slow in reacting and that we may be in a period of mass extinctions second only to the mass extinction of dinosaurs. “Over the next 100 years or so as many as half of the Earth’s species, representing a quarter of the planet’s genetic stock, will either completely or functionally disappear,” according to Stephen M. Meyer in a recent article entitled End of the Wild. Meyer further believes that many species will lose their ecological value as they fall into categories he calls relic or ghost populations. He believes that much of the diversity will be lost to homogeneity.
WE HAVE SEEN THE CORPORATE MONSTER AND IT IS US!
The environmental movement was created from the need to resist the increasing excessive and destructive practices of, government, industry, corporations, and special interest groups. Practices that were sustainable a half-century ago have been abandoned for excessive and damaging practices due mainly to the pressures of an increased world population and to the singular motivation of greed.
In the1950’s the Forest Services’ timber extraction was done selectively. The forester went out and clearly marked the individual trees that were to be cut by hand by small local companies and then pulled out with horses. Later, during the Reagan years, wholesale clear cutting emerged as a corporate practice for making large profits at the expense of the natural resources. Timber is a renewable resource when practiced locally and selectively, but it is not renewable when government allows industry to write the actual bill that is to be passed by Congress that is purposed to regulate that industry.
The Bush administration erased most environmental protections that were in place so that the extractive and manufacturing industries can experience maximum profit taking. This is done with the most blatant doublespeak — the ability to say one thing while doing the complete opposite and holding a straight face — ever seen in the history of our government, as demonstrated by The Healthy Forests Initiative, The Clear Skies Initiative and the No Child Left Behind Initiative. The man directly responsible for this verbiage is Dr. Frank Luntz, trusted pollster, advisor and wordsmith to the Bush Administration and other powerful republicans. Luntz explains that Americans don’t want the full understanding of an issue, but just words that coincide with their emotional response. He has perfected what he calls “instant response” sessions for corporate and public affairs clients, in which he simplifies emotional responses into sound bites. We as citizens seem to absorb simple sound bites that we want to hear, without much further inspection. So, when legislation comes up with a name that sounds idyllic we don’t want to examine it further; we just get a generalized, fuzzy feeling about its implications, thereby allowing legislation that does the exact opposite of what we would actually want if we examined it. It seems that we may be getting exactly what we have asked for.
Government passes legislation allowing for unethical practices by participating industries with the intent of increasing profits and raising share prices for corporations at the expense of the environment for the end result of the wealthy becoming wealthier.
Why do we, as an American population, not find this unethical behavior so unacceptable as to oppose it with outrage? Could it be because we are all getting marginal benefits from the practice? As shareholders, we are not experiencing profit like the corporate principles and CEO’s, but the majority of Americans are looking to make some bucks in the stock market. Also, the residual effect for most of us has been trickle down profits experienced because of a growth oriented, consumer-based economy. According to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, in the article The Irresponsible Investor written by Michael Lewis in The New York Times Magazine, corporate fraud, sweatshop abuse, and no charitable giving are all the fault of the shareholder. They say that the investors aren’t victims of corporate greed, but perps. They even go on to say that maybe we should pity the poor CEO of the company. “The atmosphere created by investors for investors requires him [CEO] continually to mollify these awful greedy little people who have done nothing but put up some money and who care about nothing except next quarter’s earnings.” No one is holding the government/corporation responsible because we are the corporation, and as long as we are all making money, who wants to protest too loudly? We will complain about the CEO making obscene amounts of money, but as long as some of it trickles down, then we are quite content to whine passively. It seems to be ok to “gouge consumers, cheat employees, poison the environment, lie to the public markets — just do it all sufficiently artfully that it doesn’t dent my portfolio,” according to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. This is the hypocrisy that permeates the fabric of American business. In the article, Matt Endriss, C.E.O. of Birkenstock is interviewed: “The highest moral standards have a price and most investors do not wish to pay it. Making money is essential for the economy, but just don’t make a fetish of it”. The paradox is that so long as we are entangled with the corporate organism, we cannot see the way to fix it. The Irony is that we as shareholders have the power for change, but have not yet realized our huge potential.
This potential can transform into the martial arts equivalent of the sword of no sword, when two masters face each other one will lay down his sword because he knows that he will not win. Corporate America may see before the battle even begins that they cannot win if the shareholder is not behind them. To avoid slumping sales they will alter their destructive habits. But, if we must fight, if the compassionate community sees that the corporation is set on continuing to take profits to the detriment of our quality of life, then fight we will, but the fight must be with full awareness. The fight may start by all of us demanding that corporations clean up their practices. If they don’t answer the demands of a compassionate community, then the corporation will cease to exist because they have too few shareholders to continue. Thus, we will have invested in loss by selling our offending stock.

LOSE POLARIZATION: GAIN COMPASSIONATE ACTIVISM
Opposition is an obstacle in equilibrium. We recognize it in all social and interpersonal relationships. As long as we continue to identify an enemy and react against them, we will battle endlessly with no positive results. We cannot remove opposition, but if we can balance it with openness toward our own neighbors, then we can carry that concept to the larger regional, national and international issues. We live in a reality of opposing forces, but it is the way we perceive the opposition that counts. If we see them as a separate and opposite force on one side and ourselves on the other, then we are practicing the model of separateness. If we begin to see the opposition as an extension of ourselves, or the opposite end of the scale of our own ideology, then we begin to see the dynamics of how change must come through cooperation, as well as, competition.
In many regional wilderness fights, there is the larger battle over political ideology and legislation, but there is also the more intimate battle between neighbors. Sometimes it involves activists from cities against rural residents. Sometimes outsiders move into small towns and become activists for change. Activism can turn into war against neighbors. So, when you hear an activist criticize the national policy of war, you see that they are in a war of their own. How can we, as a nation, expect more global responsibility from our leaders, when we are engaged in our own small war? Ideologists systematically dehumanize their opponents in a war of concepts. The mentality is the same as war; it becomes more about winning and loosing than about the actual core issue. Polarization is the least constructive way to a solution. We see it and read about it everyday as the Bush Administration continues to isolate America from the rest of the world, by opposing international arms control and refusing to effectively address issues as immediate as global warming. America is seen less and less as a member of the global community. In fact we are now seen as the enemy by most of the rest of the world.
A catalyst is needed to make us stop and observe deeply. We need some event to make us open our hearts and listen deeply. Then we can see ourselves in the context of the conflict and see that the only way to a solution is to understand the position of our perceived opponent. We had such an opportunity on September 11. Our President failed us by leading us into a zone of fear, rather than using it as a catalyst for understanding the causes of the extreme hatred for America.
To be an activist carries a large responsibility. Being an effective activist means being a compassionate activist. Thich Nhat Thuan is one of our greatest activists today.
As effective environmental activists, we must rise above polarization and try to bring deep listening to bear on the problems.
What is required is a one-world call to action. It may begin with only a few individuals, but will soon become a ground swell that cannot be ignored. The ground swell will engage in non-violent boycott of wholesale fear being dispensed by governments, and the boycott of greed, which solely powers the consumer society in which we find ourselves. We can imagine a society that quits playing by the rules of greed. The corporate greed machine depends on the conspicuous consumption by its citizens. What would happen if we start buying as many things as possible locally, from community gardens and farms? If we just cut back twenty percent in our consumption habits it will be noticed in the economy. Then we need to make our voices heard above the patriotic rhetoric. We can write, protest, organize small groups and make it known that we are not in agreement with the destructive practices. In the words of Gary Snyder, “The State is greed made legal, with a monopoly on violence; a natural society is familial and cautionary. A natural society is one which “Follows the Way” imperfectly but authentically
CONSCIOUS FIELDS OF THE EXTENDED MIND
My martial arts teacher, Sifu Gardner would ask us to ‘feel the spaciousness of our mind’ after meditation and before beginning practice. “Practice freeing your mind from the self and allow it to encompass increasing larger and larger circles until it encompasses the entire universe of time and space.”
This essay has been an exercise in transcending opposites for the purpose of understanding solidarity with rest of the natural world. By understanding that which we resist is also part of the natural world and therefore part of ourselves, we can begin to extend ourselves beyond our own skin and to have compassion for everyone including those who still believe that they are separate from their surroundings. By extending our minds we will realize that deep ecology is going to require deep listening and that by practicing it ourselves we become the larger consciousness. Winning ecologically may require letting go of some of our closely held concepts. Winning may require investing in loss.

Bohm, David - On Creativity, London: Routledge, 1998
Gell-Mann, Murray - Quark and the Jaguar, Murray Gell-Mann, 1994)
Hanh, Thich Nhat - The Path of Compassion, Parallax Press, 1988
There is no Path to Peace. The Path is Peace, Shambhala Sun, 2004.
Einstein, Albert, Autobiographical Notes, 1959
Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science, New York: Viking, 1987
Harding, Elaine - James Cook University, Cairns Australia
Kafatos, Menas - The Non-Local Universe, Oxford University Press, 1999
McCain, John - article, Is This Guy for Real, by Bill McKibben, NRDC’s Onearth, 2004
Nadeau, Robert - The Non-Local Universe, Oxford University Press, 1999
Page, Larry and Sergey Brin, article The Irresponsible Investor, The New York Times
Magazine, June 2004
Ricard, Matthieu - Quantum and the Lotus, New York: Crown Publishers, 2001
Snyder, Gary - The Path of Compassion, Parallax Press, 1988
Sogyal .Rinpoche - The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, San Francisco: Harper
Collins, 1994
Thuan, Trinh Xuan - Quantum and the Lotus, New York: Crown Publishers, 2001-a
Chaos and Harmony, Oxford University Press, 2001-b
Turner, Jack – The Abstract Wild, University of Arizona Press, 1996
Waters, Alice – Food Fighter, article, New York Times magazine 3/2004
Wheatley, Margaret - Leadership and the New Science, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler
1999
Williams, Terry Tempest, RRCS Board meeting quote
Wilson, Edward O. - Consilience, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998
Wolfram, Stephen – A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram LLC, 2002“We are not single persons operating with a small agenda, but we are a larger consciousness attempting to contemplate ourselves.”
Emily Carr