It sometimes happens that I wake up in the middle of the night to a feeling of anxiety about edging ever closer to the “end of the world.” Thoughts about the climate crisis, wildlife extinction, ecological collapse, and the breakdown of civil society occupy my mind, filling me with dread.
Apparently, I’m not alone. An American survey in 2018 suggested about 70 per cent of the population is worried about climate change and just over half feel helpless to do anything about it. There’s even a new term for this malaise: Eco-anxiety. The American Psychological Association describes it as a “chronic fear of environmental doom.”
Psychologists give sensible-sounding advice about how to cope: talk to others about how to take effective action; volunteer with an environmental group; adopt a greener lifestyle; write politicians and corporate leaders; educate yourself about the issues; connect with nature; know when to disconnect from media, cultivate resilience, and so on. There’s more about that here.
This is good advice but one piece is missing, for me: Spirituality. That can mean different things to different people but to me it’s about living from an understanding of the nature of this “self” and its relationship to everything else. My dharma mentor Sharda Rogell calls it “getting the who right.”
“Getting the who right” can be seen as part of the Buddha’s teaching on Right View. Right View is not a doctrine or statement of belief. It’s more like the realization we come to when we see things clearly.
There are many doors to Right View in the Suttas, including the Four Noble Truths. Right View can be summarized as looking at experience — especially the experience of dukkha (suffering, unsatisfactoriness, stress) in terms of cause and effect.
Ajahn Sucitto describes it like this: “Right View says we can purposely live in relationship, but not entangled with this world…even if you are not exactly clear about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, you can feel the generosity, the cruelty, the greed or the forgiveness well up in you and you follow that with bright or dark results. If you are tuned into that, aware of that impulsive energy, a pragmatic form of wisdom arises: You know that bad things make you feel bad and good things make you feel good. This may seem obvious, but we don’t always get it!”
Meditation teaches us to be mindful of our harmful internal impulses. These can be summed up as three unwholesome roots: greed, ill-will, and delusion/ignorance. When we are clear about how these impulses drive us personally, we can be clear about how they drive us as a society. And while we may not have control over collective outcomes, we do have it within our power to make personal choices that arise from wholesome roots, such as generosity, kindness, and wisdom.
When we are grounded in dharmic understanding — Right View — our actions no longer arise out of blind impulses. Our actions arise from clearly sensing into our deepest longings, which can be felt as a desire for truth, selfless love, and joyful connection with life.
When we connect with that longing, the Dharma (or whatever terminology works for you) is like the lodestone the ancient mariners used to find their way across unknown seas. Or like the mysterious instinct which migrating birds follow to find their way home.
When grounded in dharmic understanding, we don’t get resentful when we ride the bus and our neighbour drives his SUV. We don’t get angry at climate crisis deniers, short-sighted politicians, and greed-driven corporate leaders. We don’t sink into hopelessness and defeat when solid evidence is dismissed as fake news.
With dharmic understanding, we see that human nature is, after all, nature. Humanity is part of the law of cause and effect.
Denial of reality is dukkha. Denial is a defence against having to feel pain.
One of the biggest mistakes we make as human beings is that we think we can overcome suffering by avoiding pain. It is our very avoidance of pain — through distraction, denial, immersion in sensory experience, clinging to our views — that feeds our suffering.
And so…it sometimes happens that I wake up in the middle of the night to a feeling of anxiety about edging ever closer to the “end of the world.” And I am filled with a sense of dread. On better nights, I ground myself in body and breath, returning to mindfulness, to sati, to remembering. Sometimes I feel a stirring in the heart that is not dread, not denial, not dukkha. It’s like a lodestone, a compass, an instinctual pull, an ancient memory of home. I call it Dharma. And I know that so long as I follow that, I will be OK.
—Nelle Oosterom