Today, we are in a very different age than when I first looked at a computer printout in 1965. Information, disinformation, and “infoshum”—or “information noise” that aims to maximize clickability while minimizing actual information—is generated and disseminated in a mind-moment over our laptops and cell phones.

We are in a global race around the development and deployment of AI technologies, driven to a great extent by capitalistic and power-hungry interests as well as our own inherently competitive mindsets; the greatest benefits accruing to the individual, corporation, or country that dominates the race for political, military, economic, or ego power.

Some headlines are asking about another race as well. A recent Harvard International Review article begins with the headline: “A Race to Extinction: How Great Power Competition Is Making Artificial Intelligence Existentially Dangerous.” In the midst of various rushes to adopt burgeoning technology, one critic has even asked, “how can we fill up the depleted reserves of trust and reason in our world as we see the debilitating impact of the digital world on our individual and collective psyche?”

It is clear to many of us that we have a moral responsibility to understand and inform ourselves to the extent that we can about the benefits and burdens of AI. As many are pointing out, persuasive technology is quickly degrading our sovereignty, commodifying our identities, and is further handicapping the agency of the so-called “useless class.” 

Basically, AI is a double-edged sword. For example, Marc Andreessen, in his AI manifesto, seems assured that AI is the panacea for everything from child care to warfare. On the other hand, various leaders in the AI field [have been warning that AI could usher in the end of the human race as we know it].

Both might be right, with deepfakes, privacy violations, racial and sexist algorithmic biases, AI priming market volatility, autonomous weapons, fraud and disinformation, social surveillance and manipulation, and identity commodification. AI hallucinations can lure one down the rabbit hole of a potentially dangerous and deluded unreality. 

The slipperiness of AI points to an interesting Buddhist perspective: the illusory nature of the phenomenal world.

There are also extraordinary benefits to AI, including accurately diagnosing various diseases, protecting biodiversity, dealing with issues related to climate change, predicting the spread of infectious diseases, detecting guns in schools, helping the speechless speak, slashing energy consumption, and more.

In sum, we are in a new information landscape primed in part by humanly flawed data, compounded by extractive economic interests, and furthered by adolescent drive, with not much thought to the social, environmental, moral, and ethical harms that we are currently experiencing and which are bound to be even more problematic in the near and far future. 

In the mid-1980s, I watched a startling interview with a top general in the US military. It was about the deposition of nuclear waste. In the segment, he made it clear that, from the dawn of the US’ embrace of nuclear power and materials, there was never a plan in place for how to get rid of radioactive waste. Today, most of us know that nuclear waste is piling up around the world with consequences that are truly scary to consider.

My sense is that we are not in a dissimilar situation with AI, regarding how to deal with the exponential and pervasive accumulation of fractured-trust-waste that is contaminating our society and psyche. There doesn’t seem to be a clear plan forward in place for recovering the broken trust caused by AI, and a lot is at risk. Yet, we can still shift this narrative before it is too late.

You may be asking yourself, what does AI have to do with Buddhism? Curiously, the slipperiness of AI points to an interesting Buddhist perspective: the illusory nature of the phenomenal world. What can we really believe in, after all? What really is real? From the Diamond Sutra: 

“Thus shall you think of all this fleeting world: A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.”

Yet most of us need to think that what we experience is not entirely a dream in order to properly function in our society. Imagining the world as fixed makes us feel secure, even though, from a Buddhist perspective, reality seems to be just as slippery as AI. In the midst of this slipperiness, however, rest issues related to serious harm and deep suffering.

I have to ask myself: Can Buddhist teachings really serve in terms of mitigating the harms generated by AI? Can meditation help? Are we too far gone? Will this just be the landscape where we do charnel ground practice in the future, charnel grounds being a place where bodies are left above the ground to putrefy, and this is where we practice? 

There have been some Buddhist suggestions that we might mitigate the harm caused by AI through introducing into AI the ethos inspired by the bodhisattva vow to awaken and end suffering. Some have even proposed the slogan “intelligence as care” to try to revise the current definition of intelligence and to point to a better way forward.

I ask myself: can there be such a thing as artificial wisdom or artificial compassion? Maybe yes, maybe no. If yes, then perhaps AI could be created to include within its framework a Buddhist ethic of virtue. Frankly, I think not, and the idea to reframe intelligence as care might be seen as too little too late.

Another Buddhist perspective that comes to my mind is the term “appamada,” usually translated as vigilance or conscientiousness. Stephen Batchelor translates it as care. Appamada means to live by the vow not to harm, to be diligent about this commitment, and to be heedful of when we engage in harm, and choose to correct course. Could appamada be trained into AI systems? Or is appamada up to us? Can we bring the spirit of appamada, vigilance, conscientiousness, and care into how we approach AI as developers and consumers? One also has to ask: how? I think this is what Tristan Harris and his team at the Center for Humane Technology are endeavoring to do: inform us so we can make informed and sane choices and be responsible providers and consumers of the technology. 

From philosopher and neuroscientist Francisco Varela’s perspective on the enactive view, AI is already embedded in the context of our lived experience; it is coextensive within all aspects of our lives, whether we are accessing technology or not. In fact, it is not so much a matter of our accessing it: it has accessed us. It is now a part of our psychosocial biome, whether we know it or not, or like it or not. To put this more nicely—in Thich Nhat Hanh’s words—from the point of view of codependent arising, we inter-are with AI; our views have colonized it, and it is colonizing us.

What might Buddhism offer in the midst of the tsunami of AI development? What we have to offer is subtle but important. I appreciate what Roshi Norman Fischer has called the “bodhisattva attitude,” an unshakable attitude of clarity that reflects our very character; this is our stance, our point of view, it is the internal atmosphere that colors our way of seeing the world, of seeing reality: it is an attitude saturated by appamada, by conscientiousness and compassion. As global citizens and consumers who care, we have an important task before us. Amid the bombardment of persuasive distractions on our mobile devices and elsewhere, we are called to give attention to what we are doing and to ask truly why we are doing it and how this enables the extractive, capitalistic self-interest that is driving the wholesale development of AI.

We also need to remember that evolution has endowed us with new brain competencies that can enhance our capacity for being intentional as we meet the complexities of our world. We can be deliberate about our actions; we can choose to act conscientiously, and we can strengthen those capacities within us that make it possible for us to engage with our world with fundamental integrity.

We can make good trouble, and we should; we shouldn’t wait.

It is important to remember why we are really here, which is not about “mindfulness washing” or “wisdom washing” in order to look like we are super aware and altruistic as opposed to being genuinely mindful and ethical. I believe that it is imperative that we strengthen the conditions that make our actual motivations visible, and deliberately cultivate an intention that is free of self-interest and fundamentally nontransactional. This involves sensitivity to what is present, the capacity to perceive present circumstances clearly, and the will and wisdom to consider the deeper downstream effects, or what we call in Buddhism, karma.

We so often see that personal preferences, self-centeredness, greed, fear, and distractibility distort our perception of reality, and this influences our values, motivations, intentions, and behaviors. From the Buddhist perspective, intention is a mental factor that is directional and deliberate. Our motivation, on the other hand, might not be fully conscious to us. To put it simply, our so-called good intentions can be driven by unconscious, ego-based, self-interested motivations, and lack fundamental integrity. A related issue is understanding that our unconscious motivations can be the cause of preconscious moral suffering, including moral injury, or a sense of subtle but pernicious shame or deep regret. 

Please understand, I am just a Buddhist teacher, who right now is inundated with AI articles predicting doom or liberation. Perhaps none of us, including the developers of AI, can know fully what the downstream effects of AI will be. But we do know that the velocity of the development of AI is stupefying, and the opinions are numerous regarding this powerful tool that has our socially and culturally biased intelligence woven into it while seemingly lacking any real wisdom.

It could make a significant difference if both developers and consumers approached the development of AI with the attitude of the bodhisattva, with vigilance and conscientiousness (appamada), being deliberately free of capitalistic self-interest and hedonic curiosity. We also have to become more discerning and responsible about what and how information is delivered, and, as consumers of information, have the awareness to recognize that there are attempts to spin us, manipulate us, undermine us, and hijack our fundamental faith and confidence. 

As it stands now, the capacity to resist the harms of AI is mostly accessible to the more privileged among us. From the point of view of socially engaged Buddhism, privilege confers responsibility, responsibility to raise up the so-called less privileged, but more importantly to deconstruct the very systems that confer privilege. 

In the end, whether AI is life-affirming or life-denying depends on all of us. To paraphrase Thich Nhat Hanh, we, as developers of AI and consumers of AI, should engage the soft technologies of self-correcting practice and developing healthy, transparent communities as the sane instruments with which we experiment with truth. Both sides of this equation need to actualize appamada—that is vigilance, conscientiousness, and care—in how we deploy and use these emergent technologies. If we are in an institution that is developing AI, we can bring “wise friction” to these institutions to decenter and decolonize AI’s embeddedness in a Eurocentric capitalistic worldview. We can also advocate, with indigenous consent, for diverse knowledge systems to be a fundamental part of the AI landscape, as per the work of Sabelo Mhlambi. We can legally call for the decommodification of our very identities. We can further commit to disrupting the systems that foster structural violence reflected in AI systems. In other words: We can make good trouble, and we should; we shouldn’t wait. Ultimately, can we foster an AI landscape that is not only seemingly rational but also genuinely relational and rehumanized, where dignity, human rights, and the rights of nature are valued. 

And we have to be unflinchingly honest as we embark on this profound journey of developing new forms of intelligence. Instead of leaving the fractured-trust-waste for later, let’s deal with it now. Facebook acted like big tobacco in its formative years, knowingly sowing social distrust and psychological trauma in young people, while denying it all the while. We can’t allow ourselves or our friends to act in such bad faith this time around.  

We should make sure that these big-brained mammals who are driving the development of AI form a CERN-like relationship of cooperation and ethics to ensure that AI is a positive contributor to a sane and possible future. And, most importantly, all of us must endeavor to live by the values and vows that relate to ending harm through technology. 

With gratitude to Abeba Birhane, Randy Fernando, Sensei Kozan Palevsky, and Soren Gordhamer for their help in reviewing this piece. 

The post What’s Buddhism Got to Do with AI? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This conversation is an excerpt from Tricycle’s second annual Buddhism and Ecology Summit, a weeklong event series focused on transforming anxiety into awakened action.

Sam Mowe: Rebecca, in Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility you describe the climate crisis as being, in part, also a storytelling crisis. What do you mean by that? And would you also describe the climate crisis as a spiritual crisis?

Rebecca Solnit: I think the spiritual crisis and the storytelling crisis are the same crisis. Capitalism would like us to believe that we’re basically selfish individuals. Private individuals. And that what we most want and need are things money can buy—lots of stuff, plus maybe some sex and some family and lovers in our immediate vicinity. What other views of human nature tell us is, in fact, the things we most yearn for are broader connection, community, meaning, purpose, hope, and awe—these other things that capitalism is very bad at, which is why it would prefer we forget them. 

Then there are stories about how change works, which suggest that change is something that the powerful hand down to us. That’s a problem. Another problem with the story of change we often get is also a kind of capitalist story I call “instant results guaranteed or your money back.” We have a demonstration on Monday and if the powers that be don’t fall to their knees on Tuesday, people too often go away expecting that if nothing happened, then it didn’t work. Whereas change is actually often very indirect. There are ripple effects. The story we’re told about the nature of power is that it exists among the officially powerful politicians and the wealthy. But ordinary people, massed together, can be more powerful than anything else. 

Storytellers have the ability to change the story. With climate itself, there are just so many ways the story can be told differently. We see a lot of defeatist stories: that it’s too late, we have no power, there’s nothing we can do, nobody cares. I saw somebody on social media saying the climate denialists and the defeatists are telling us the same thing: don’t do anything, there’s nothing we can do. But of course, there’s not only so much we can do, but there’s so much already happening right now. The more closely you look, the more exciting it is—the energy transition, the research on new, better materials and energy sources, the growth of the climate movement, and the success of its ideas, which have become part of what the majority of people around the world, believe, support, care about, and think is urgent. 

There are so many ways in which how we tell the story conceals or reveals what’s possible, who we are, what we desire, what constitutes a good and meaningful life, or what the future can hold.

Roshi Joan Halifax: Our stories represent our views. And our views are deeply embedded within our society and also how the economic structures, as Rebecca has pointed out, shape our experience. We’ve been, in a certain way, colonized by late-stage capitalism. And we are in a process of decolonization, if you will, from the stories that have contributed not only to toxifying and mortifying the earth, but also the psyches of people all over the world. From my point of view, the value of practice to look deeply into reality, to see the truth of impermanence, to understand the power of the realization of pratityasamutpada, of co-arising or co-dependent arising, interconnectedness, interdependence, interpenetration. To understand there is no inherent self in the absolute sense, but that we are composed of all of the elements, and in a way, we are inhabiting each other there. Our subjectivity is coextensive with all of life. So being able to have the quality of mind to perceive reality deeply will make it possible for us to actually shift our view of reality—not the distorted view of reality that is promulgated by the economic systems that are in control of so much of our world today. It takes determination. The Buddha said, “my dharma is swimming upstream.” And this is kind of an upstream swim, quite frankly. But you know what swimming upstream does for us? It makes us a heck of a lot stronger if we manage to navigate against the current of the times toward a reality that is sane and compassionate. 

“What are the stories that are constructive and liberating?”

Talking about stories, I think it is important to understand the role of myths in society. We know that myths have had a tremendously important presence in culture for thousands of years. And in a way, we’ve jettisoned the typical myths that would guide our culture toward greater integrity. Myths come out of both the social structure and the psyche. The social structures that we live in are reflected in the psyche and the psyche influence our social structures. And those structures are reflected inside of the stories that are told through time, but also point toward timeless truths. Much of my work is, how do we actually come back to narratives that are generative? What are the stories that are constructive and liberating? 

Rebecca Solnit: One familiar story is that we’re constantly told we live in an age of abundance. And some of us do live in material affluence and comfort. But part of that story is the idea that what the climate crisis requires of us is renunciation. I learned once from a Buddhist leader, or maybe a Catholic person, that renunciation can be great when you’re giving up something terrible. But the idea that we’re now living in abundance and must go to austerity, I think can be turned on its head. Look at the ways that we are austere in meaning, purpose, hope, social connection, justice. We’re impoverished in clean air, clean water, healthy topsoil, in the survival of so many species, and the health of the ocean. We either feel it as a kind of moral injury, or we experience a kind of moral numbing. 

We can look forward to an age of abundance in these qualities we’re currently austere in, but first we have to find the language, imagination, stories, and cultural structures to recognize, name, value, and make them central to who we are. Right now, I feel like we don’t see nearly enough how poor we are in so many ways. We find it so normal to live in a world so poisoned by fossil fuels. Two-hundred-thousand people in Thailand were just hospitalized for particulate matter, air pollution inhalation, and more than eight million people a year die of air particulate matter from fossil fuels primarily, which is more than in any recent war. And yet we normalize this and think everything is fine. And that we have to give stuff up. What if we’re giving up poison? What if we’re giving up loneliness? What if we’re giving up hopelessness? Those are the stories I’m trying to tell and the stories that I think will make us brave enough to make the transitions we need to make.

The post What If We’re Telling the Wrong Stories About the Climate Crisis? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a troubling time frame for global warming that pointed to a catastrophic and unavoidable temperature increase of 1.5°C by the year 2040 due to global carbon emissions. A dizzying parade of emergency alerts followed. Wildfires, heatwaves, droughts, floods, and superstorms pummeled the planet at an unrelenting pace. It felt as if this blazing, brutal season offered a glimpse into the approaching abyss. 

These are fraught and anxious times. It seems obvious that no amount of meditation will forestall the disasters that are already baked into the climate equation. Yet, much remains to be salvaged and transformed, including in our own hearts and minds. 

The breakdown of our ecological and climate systems poses many questions for Buddhist practitioners. What is the most appropriate response given the nature, scale, and pace of the crisis? How does one stay grounded when it feels as if the ground beneath us is giving way? What can Buddhism offer us at this overwhelming time of fear and loss? 

Tricycle asked three dharma teachers—David Loy, Roshi Joan Halifax, and Mark Coleman—to share their wisdom for responding to the challenges of the climate crisis.

***

David Loy calls for engaged activism 

Zen teacher and Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Center founding member David Loy says the climate crisis might be the greatest challenge Buddhism has ever faced. “If we can’t respond to this,” he says, “Buddhism will become irrelevant.” Loy’s recently published book Ecodharma explores the relationship between the Buddhist path and the ecological crisis.  

Though the Buddha’s original teachings don’t directly address climate change, he believes the dharma, particularly the path of the bodhisattva, is a rich resource for activists and all those answering the call for change. Our task now, Loy says, is to do the very best we can without knowing if it will make any difference whatsoever. To vow to save our planet despite knowing that it is impossible to alleviate all of the harm we’ve already inflicted. “We can’t be attached to results. We should act because it’s the right thing to do.” 

Loy calls for a more capacious reading of the teachings where social transformation through activism is as important as anything that happens on the cushion, and believes the communities we form through engaged activism will serve as our strongholds. “We need to address and challenge the institutions of incredible complexity and power whose policies impact the environment and climate,” he says. “Individual action isn’t sufficient. Just as it’s not enough to focus on our own carbon footprint.” 

To anyone feeling outrage or anxiety about our teetering ecosystems, Loy offers a three-part contemplation to prepare people with tools for engagement as the challenges deepen.

1. Ruthless Self-Evaluation. Make a thorough assessment of all you have to offer the world. Consider your education, skills, interests, abilities, languages, life experience, networks, geography, assets, job, health, and age. 
2. Realistic Opportunities: Explore all possible opportunities for engagement and service that align with your assets, identity, and skillset. 
3. Recognize Passions Use contemplative tools such as meditation to tune into your heart’s desire. Reflect on which possibilities for engagement make you come alive and feel passionate. If you follow the energy of the heart, you’re less likely to burn out. It’s important to find some joy in the work in order to develop resilience and sustainability. 

Roshi Joan Halifax says show up with compassion 

When Roshi Joan Halifax, founder and abbot of Upaya Zen Meditation Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, became active in the social movements of the sixties, she says nobody ever anticipated that our problems would be as widespread, problematic, and conflicted as they are now. “We thought a lot about personal responsibility,” she explains. “We didn’t think in terms of global responsibility. We never anticipated the scale of what’s now happening with the climate catastrophe and the political turn across the globe.

Her Buddhist practice and decades of hospice work have helped her cope and respond to this new era. As a former hospital chaplain, Halifax sees all forms of death as a sacred rite of passage that merit our tending. She believes we can bring a quality of presence, dignity, and service to our work with grief and loss around the climate crisis. “In hospice care, there’s this notion of coming alongside. That’s what a chaplain does,” she says. “It’s not a matter of going into emptiness or falling into futility. Compassion means to attend to things as they are, to be present, to experience concern, to consider what will really serve.”

She considers this current moment in time a profound apotheosis and opportunity to “come alongside” the suffering around us. “We can no longer bypass what’s happening to the planet,” she says. “We’ve been sheared off from the old way of life in a radical and sudden way. This process of separation and dissolution is an incredible opportunity to show up with compassion and turn toward the truth of suffering and its causes of greed, hatred, and delusion.” 

Buddhism can be particularly powerful at this juncture, she says, because it offers us tools to track our moment-by-moment experience and course-correct even in the most difficult of times. “We can continue to ask ourselves what we’re learning and how we can use that knowledge to deepen and grow,” she says.

To develop skills for sustained compassionate service around social and ecological transformation, Halifax teaches a practical intervention with the acronym GRACE to help practitioners remember the sequence.

1. G stands for gathering attention. Here we use the tools of mindfulness to ground in the present moment. The quality of our attention is essential. Our attention should be panoramic, inclusive, unperturbed, non-judgmental, and reflective like a mirror. 
2. R reminds us to recall intentions. We set your focus on the area of concern and create clarity around our purpose. Our intentions should ride on a felt sense of connection and concern for the wellbeing of others. 
3. A signals us to attune to our own embodied experience. The body is a repository of so much information that we often disavow. Take a moment to connect with the sensations of the breath and the physical body, the affective stream of feelings emanating from the heart, and the mind’s thoughts that come in the form of aversions, attractions, and biases. 
4. C asks us to consider what will best serve. Determine the most appropriate response based on unselfish intentions. We can touch into our vulnerability with an attitude of humility to take perspective and see a variety of causes and conditions. From there, we sense into what might best serve. 
5. E suggests we engage in ethical action. We do our very best to engage, serve, and act for the greater good, while letting go of selfish concerns and any attachment to outcomes.

Mark Coleman encourages a deeper relationship with the natural world 

Mark Coleman, a senior meditation teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and author of Awake in the Wild, responds to the ecological crisis with the assumption that people work to protect what they’ve grown to love. For over a decade, he has led wilderness retreats with the aim of helping meditators foster a loving connection with the natural world. One of Coleman’s upcoming “Awake in the Wild” retreats, scheduled to take place at Mount Shasta, had to be relocated suddenly due to wildfire concerns, underscoring the urgency of this work. 

“In California, we can’t go outside without seeing evidence of the fires. Everywhere I go, I think it’s going to burn,” Coleman says. “This is the reality now. We have to be fluid and resourceful in order to cope and adapt.” 

He hopes that his retreats help foster a deepening love for life on Earth and usher in a sense of stewardship, care, action, and concern. He finds the principles of dharma almost effortlessly accessible when he brings retreat participants into natural settings. Examples of impermanence and interdependence are abundant and obvious once we step outside, he says. In nature, we have more access to both grief and gratitude, which helps build resilience and connection at this time of great upheaval. “It’s harder to access our grief sitting indoors,” Coleman says. “We need to be able to feel and process the emotions so we don’t become paralyzed. Nature helps provide the container to feel and work through those feelings.” 

Practicing outdoors helps us experience more prosocial feeling states such as intimacy, wonder, awe, reverence, and, ultimately, love. “We may find ourselves falling in love with a hawk, or a caterpillar, or a rock, and our hearts open,” he says. These states help us cultivate a sense of inner stability so we don’t simply drown in negative news. “The data can be paralyzingly bleak,” Coleman adds. “If we exist in a mind state of despair, we’ll miss the beauty of a blue bird’s wing or the small jasmine flower. We may forget there are still daffodils in the spring.” 

Coleman shares a few practices from his book to help us step outside and deepen our relationship with the natural world. 

1. Lovingkindness Nature Walk. Go for a walk in the woods, a park, or along a shore. Approach that which draws your attention, perhaps a maple tree, lupin, flower, waves on the shore. Notice what attracts your interest. Let yourself be fascinated and absorbed in relationship to the subject of interest. Attune to your breath, your footfalls, your heart rate, and the temperature of your skin. Recall the classic mantra of lovingkindness. May you be safe. May you be healthy. May you be happy. (If you wish, you can also create your own mantra tailored to your specific intentions.) Send these wishes of lovingkindness to a beloved honeysuckle, bullfrog, or cherry tree. Allow everything you see to open your heart in this way. Finally, offer yourself the same blessings you offered others on the path. 
2. Become an Engaged Participant. Find a quiet place outdoors to contemplate, perhaps a meadow, or on a log beside a stream, or a stretch of beach. Take a moment to regard the place as a casual observer. Walk around with your headphones on or let your mind make lists or plans for later. Note how that detached experience feels. Then remove your socks and shoes. Feel your feet and toes on the earth. Register the pressure and density of your body on the ground. Feel the subtle shifts in weight, the temperature of the soil, the grasses tickling your skin, your toes sinking into the sand. Now dig your hands into the earth. Note the texture and smells. Like a child, let yourself play with the soil, the sand, the grasses, the stones. Draw or make shapes on the ground with a stick. Observe how your senses come alive. Now sit with that open sense of awareness. Drop all agendas and stories in your mind. Reflect on how this sensual and intimate contact has changed your relationship with the life around you. 
3. Attune to the Song of the Land. This is a practice to help you develop intimacy with your favorite place in nature. It’s helpful to spend time in this place each day or at least once weekly. Visit the place like you would a good friend with whom you’re having an ongoing conversation. During your visit, listen to what the land might be saying. For example, tune into the sound of birdsong in the canopy or skittering on the forest floor. Observe animal tracks or skat on the trails. Experience the place with your eyes both open and closed. Lie on the ground and gaze skyward. Note the changes in light, weather, temperature, seasons. Feel the energy of the place and trust your response to it. Take your time there, without rushing. Sit with the silences between the sounds. As you sit, notice what you bring to the relationship with this place and how that might change or deepen over time.

The post How to Stay Grounded and Motivated in the Face of Our Climate Crisis appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

What Buddhist book has had a significant impact on your practice?

I don’t quite remember how Kosho Uchiyama Roshi’s treasure of a book, Opening the Hand of Thought, came to me. I had heard about Uchiyama Roshi, heard he was a plain rice roshi, someone who valued “just sitting,” shikantaza.

Uchiyama Roshi was the abbot of Antai-ji, a small practice center near Kyoto. I never met him, but his life, his perspective, his writings, and his direct way of practice met me like an old friend. On my first read of Opening the Hand of Thought, I felt that Roshi had captured my experience not only of zazen but also of life, with words that were transparent, rendering reality accessible. He was sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking, and always wise. He also was unrelenting and encouraged unrelenting zazen. He made it clear that practice starts right where we are, and where we are year after year for ten, twenty, thirty years. Through him and this wonderful book, I came to see that zazen was not a passing fancy but all of life and full of life. So I folded my legs under me, set my spine straight, and just sat. No sauce, no gravy, just plain-rice sitting.

The post Turning Word appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I grew up in the South, and one of the people I was closest to as a girl was my grandmother Bessie. I loved spending summers with her in Savannah, where she worked as a sculptor and artist, carving tombstones for local people. Bessie was a remarkable village woman; she often served her community as someone comfortable around illness and death, someone who would sit with dying friends.

And yet when she herself became ill, her own family could not offer her the same compassionate presence. My parents were good people, but like others of their generation, they had no preparation for being with her as she experienced her final days. When my grandmother suffered first from cancer and then had a stroke, she was put into a nursing home and left largely alone. And her death was long and hard.

This was in the early sixties, when the medical establishment treated dying, like giving birth, as an illness. Death was usually “handled” in a clinical setting outside the home. I visited Bessie in a plain, cavernous room in the nursing home, a room filled with beds of people who had all been effectively abandoned by their kin—and I can never forget hearing her beg my father to let her die, to help her die. She needed us to be present for her, and we withdrew in the face of her suffering.

When my grandmother finally died, I felt deep ambivalence, sorrow, and relief. I looked into her coffin in the funeral home, and saw that the terrible frustration that had marked her features was now gone. She seemed at last at peace. As I stood looking at her gentle face, I realized how much of her misery had been rooted in her family’s fear of death, including my own. At that moment, I made the commitment to practice being there for others as they died.

Although I had been raised Protestant, I turned to Buddhism not long after my grandmother’s death. Its teachings put my youthful suffering into perspective, and the message of the Buddha was clear and direct: Freedom from suffering lies within suffering itself, and it is up to each individual to find his or her own way. But Buddhism also suggests a path through our alienation and toward freedom. The Buddha taught that we should practice helping others while cultivating deep concentration, compassion, and wisdom. He further taught that enlightenment is not a mystical, transcendent experience but an ongoing process, calling for intimacy and transparency; and that suffering diminishes when confusion and fear change into openness and strength.

My grandmother’s death guided me into practicing medical anthropology in a big urban hospital in Dade County, Florida. Dying became a teacher for me, as I witnessed again and again how spiritual and psychological issues leap into sharp focus for those facing death. I discovered caregiving as a path, and as a school for unlearning the patterns of resistance so embedded in me and in my culture. Giving care, I learned, also enjoins us to be still, let go, listen, and be open to the unknown.

As I worked with dying people, caregivers, and others experiencing catastrophe, I practiced meditation to give my life a spine on which to hang my heart, and a view from which I could see beyond what I thought I knew. I was grateful to find that Buddhism offers many practices and insights for working skillfully and compassionately with suffering, pain, dying, failure, loss, and grief—the stuff of what St. John of the Cross has called “the lucky dark.” That great Christian saint recognized that suffering can be fortunate, because without it there is no possibility for maturation.

Through the millennia and across cultures, the fact of death has evoked fear and transcendence, practicality and spirituality. Neolithic grave sites and the cave paintings of Paleolithic peoples capture the mystery through bones, stones, bodies curled like fetuses, and images of death and trance on cave walls.

Even today, whether people live close to the earth or in high-rise apartments, death is a deep spring. For many of us, this spring has been parched of its mystery. And yet we have an intuition that a fragment of eternity within us is liberated at the time of death. This intuition calls us to bear witness—to apprehend a part of ourselves that has perhaps been hidden and silent.

Giving care to a dying person and his or her family is an extraordinary practice that puts one in the midst of the unknowable, the unpredictable, the breakdown of life. It is often something that we have to push against. Physical illness, weakness of mind and body, being in the crosshairs of the medical establishment, losing all that the dying person has worked to accumulate and preserve—all these issues can be part of the hard tide of dying. A caregiver can be there for all of that, as well as for the miracles and surprises of the human spirit. And she can learn and even be strengthened at every turn. As we give care, we can enter onto a real path of discovery—if only we let ourselves. Whether caregivers are family or professionals, they walk a path that is traceless, humbling, and often full of awe. And like it or not, most of us will find ourselves on it. We will accompany loved ones and others as they die.

If we are fortunate, we will be present for our own death. A dying person can meet the precious companions of truth, faith, and surrender. Grace and space can enter that person like a river flowing into the ocean or clouds disappearing into the sky. For practicing dying is also practicing living, if we can only realize it. The more truly we can see this, the better we can serve those who are actively dying and offer them our love without condition. YEARS AGO, when I visited Biosphere 2 in Arizona, I asked the scientist taking me around why there were wires tied to the trees and attached to the Biosphere’s frame high above us. He explained that since there was no wind in the Biosphere, the trees had nothing to resist. As a result, they had grown weak and needed to be held up. Like our body and bones, we need something to resist against to make us stronger.

How then can we let the process of dying tear us apart and, by so doing, strengthen us? How can we truly be with dying, this invisible road of initiation that will open for all of us?

A spiritual practice can provide stability, which is as important for caregivers as it is for those of us actively dying. It can give us a refuge, a shelter in which to develop insight about what is happening both outside ourselves and within our minds and hearts. It can cultivate wholesome mental qualities, such as compassion, joy, and nonattachment—qualities that give us the resilience to face, and possibly transform, suffering. And a spiritual practice can be an island, a place where opening to uncertainty and doubt can lead us to a refuge of truth.

One dying woman described the experience of her meditation practice as being held in the arms of her mother. She said she wasn’t escaping from her suffering when meditating; rather, she felt met by kindness and strength. As she let go into her pain and uncertainty, she realized the truth of not-knowing in that very surrender. This experience gave her much greater equanimity.

Our own feelings can be powerful and disturbing as we sit quietly with a dying person, bear witness to the emotional outpouring of grieving relatives, or struggle to be fully present and stable as we face the fear, anger, sadness, and confusion of those whose lives are going through radical change. We may want to find ways to accept and transform the heat or cold of our own mental states. If we have established a foundation in a contemplative discipline, then we may find stillness, spaciousness, and resilience in the storm—even in the storm of our own difficulties around dying.

Following the breath for a few moments is the best way I have found to settle the mind and body and prepare for any more complicated or potentially arousing practices. Often I use the breath as the object of my attention, because this very life depends on it. Furthermore, you can discover your state of mind by the quality of your breath—is it ragged or tight, shallow or rapid? Often you can calm yourself by regulating your breathing. Whenever things get fraught or scattered, you can always return to the breath for as long as you need to ground yourself again.

A meditation practice offers us the sister gifts of language and silence, gifts that often come to us arm-in-arm to help. Language brings crucial insights, while silence is necessary for tapping into that deep concentration, tranquility, and mental stability within us. Contemplative strategies using language and silence prepare us both for dying and for caregiving. Some involve silence, focus, and openness, while others involve nurturing a positively oriented imagination, or cultivating wholesome mental qualities.

Often we feel that silence and stillness aren’t good enough when suffering is present. We feel compelled to do something—talk, console, work, clean, help. But in the shared embrace of meditation, a caregiver and dying person can be held in an intimate silence beyond consolation or assistance. When sitting with a dying person, I try to ask myself: What words will benefit this person? Does anything really need to be said? Can I know greater intimacy with her through a mutuality beyond words and actions? Can I relax and trust in being here without my personality mediating our tender connection?

One dying man told me, “I remember being with my mother as she was dying. She was old like I am now and was ready to go. I used to just sit with her, hold her hand . . . will you hold mine?” So we sat together in silence, with touch joining our hearts.

Where silence can hold a great intimacy, communication and words can serve to provide wisdom. We may rely on the gift of language—whether prayer, poetry, dialogue, or guided meditation—as a way to reveal the meaning in moments and things. Listening to the testimony of a dying person or a grieving family member serves the one speaking; it all depends on how we listen. Maybe we can reflect back in such a way that the speaker can at last really hear what he’s said. And bearing witness like this also gives us as listeners insight and inspiration. Language can loosen the knot that has tied a person to the hard edge of fear and bring one home to compassionate, heart-opening truths.

LEARNING ABOUT DEATH isn’t only for the dying—it is also for those who survive. Indeed, dying is not an individual act. A dying person is often a performer in a communal drama. Like our last will and testament, a legacy that materially benefits our survivors, we also leave a legacy of how we experience our death. And the bulk of that legacy comes from how we transition through the ultimate rite of passage—how we are able to be with our own dying.

Several years ago, Martin Toler, along with many other miners, died in the Sago Mine accident in West Virginia. Slowly dying in the thickening air of the mineshaft, the oxygen wicked up with every breath, Toler used what precious little energy he had left in his life to write a note of reassurance to those closest to him—and to the millions of us who later heard about it, too.

From deep inside the earth, Toler addressed the entire world, beginning his note: “Tell all—I see them on the other side.” He promises his kin to meet them in eternal life, in the place that is deathless. He expresses for all of us the deep human wish that our connections will transcend the event of separation we suffer at the moment of death. “It wasn’t bad, I just went to sleep,” the note continues, and scrawled at the bottom, with the last of his ebbing strength, are the tender, unselfish words “I love you.”

I have often sat by the bedside of dying people with their relatives close at hand, waiting for those last words of love and hope. Being on the threshold between life and death gives an aura of mystery and truth to the final utterances of the dying. We feel we can somehow penetrate the thin veil between the worlds through the words of the dying one; those so close to death might know what we all long to know.

Toler’s last words honor the noblest lessons from our human connections: that life is sacred and relationship holy. Through the darkness, he reached out, not only to his family, but to the rest of us through his abiding and compassionate words. For, as the Buddha told his cousin Ananda: The whole of the holy life is good friendship. Our relationships—and our love—are ultimately what give depth and meaning to our lives.

What message do we want to leave behind when we die? When poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning died, she uttered the word “beautiful.” “I am not in the least afraid to die,” exclaimed Charles Darwin. And Thomas Edison said only, “It is very beautiful over there.” These wise people on the threshold of death carry a message to the rest of us that death is our friend and not to be feared. What have they seen that we wish we could know? What is this mystery that all of us will enter?

All of these last words teach us how we can give over our spirit to the experience of dying—and how we may live in the meantime. They are testaments to the power of the human heart to transcend suffering and find redemption by encountering death fearlessly, and even beautifully. Thus, we come to understand the truth of impermanence, the intense fragility of all that we love, and that, in the end, we can really possess nothing. Yes, we may meet each other on “the other side.” Yet we may also ask ourselves: Can we meet each other now? Knowing that death is inevitable, what is most precious to us today?

We cannot know death, except by dying. This is the mystery that lies beneath the skin of life. But we can feel something from those who are close to it. Martin Toler said, “I love you.” He said, in effect: Everything is okay. In being with dying, we arrive at the natural crucible of what it means to love and be loved. In this burning fire we test the practices that can hold us up through the most intense of flames. Please, let us not lose our precious opportunity to show up for this great matter—indeed, the only matter—the awesome matter of life and death.

Exercise: How Do You Want to Die?

In teaching care of the dying, I often begin by asking questions that explore our stories around death, including the legacies we may have inherited from culture and family. Looking at our stories may reveal to us what we believe will happen when we are dying, and open new possibilities for us.

We begin with a very direct and plain question: “What is your worst-case scenario of how you will die?” The answer to this question lurks underneath the skin of our lives, subconsciously shaping many of the choices we make about how we lead them. In this powerful practice of self-inquiry, write it all down, freely and in detail – how, when, of what, with whom, and where you’ll die. Imagine your worst-case scenario. Take about five minutes to write from your most uncensored, uncorrected state of mind, and let all the unprescribed elements of your psyche emerge as you write.

When you are finished, ask yourself how you feel, how your body feels, and what emotions or sensations are coming up for you – and give yourself a few minutes to write down these responses as well. It is crucial at this point to practice honest self-observation. Then take another five minutes to answer a second question: “How do you really want to die?” Again, please write about this in as much detail as possible. What is your ideal time, place, and kind of death? Who will be there with you? And a second time, when you have finished, give some attention to what is happening in your body and mind, writing these reflections down as well.

If you can, do this exercise with someone else, so you can see how different your answers are. Your worst fears may well not be shared by others, and your ideas about an ideal death may not be someone else’s. My own answers to these questions have changed as time has passed. Years ago, I felt that the worst death would be a lingering one. Today I feel that it would be harder to die a senseless, violent death.

At a divinity school where I taught several classes on death and dying, one-third of the class answered that they wanted to die in their sleep. And in other settings where I have posed these questions, more people wanted to die alone and in peace than I would have guessed. Quite a few wanted to die in nature. Among the thousands of responses I have received to this question, only a few people said they wanted to die in a hospital, although that is in fact where most of us will die. And almost everyone wanted to die in some way that was fundamentally spiritual. A violent and random death was regarded as one of the worst possibilities. Dying painlessly and with spiritual support and a sense of meaning was considered to be the best of all possible worlds.

Finally, after exploring how you want to die, ask yourself a third question: “What are you willing to do to die the way you want to die?” We go through a lot to educate and train ourselves for a vocation; most of us invest a great deal of time in taking care of our bodies, and we usually devote energy to caring for our relationships. So now please ask yourself: What are you doing to prepare for the possibility of a sane and gentle death? And how can you open the possibility for the experience of deathless enlightenment at this moment and when you die?

Being With Death: Four Basic Practices for the Caregiver

No matter how busy you are, you can bring simple contemplative elements into your being-with-death practice that will help you fearlessly follow the dying person’s lead. Here are four basic practices to help you be with dying:

1. Share prayer

Sharing prayer or another contemplative practice with a dying person also serves the caregiver’s well-being. When you find yourself caught up in the events around you or in your own hope and fear, slow down. Even stop. Cultivate the habit of attending to your breath continually; use the breath to stabilize yourself.

2. Say a verse

You can also use words to generate a state of presence and self-compassion when you are with a dying person. For example, every line of the following verse is like medicine to me. I use it in my own practice, and share it with other caregivers and dying people. On the inhalation say to yourself, “Breathing in, I calm body and mind.” On the exhalation: “Breathing out, I let go.” Inhalation: “Dwelling in the present moment.” Exhalation: “This is the only moment.” I learned a version of this from the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh many years ago. It has been a good friend since.

3. Come to your senses

Another way to connect to the moment is to use your senses. Let them take you beyond your story into a bigger picture where you can follow the lead of the dying one and stay open and fearless. Look out the window at the sky for a moment. Listen attentively to the sounds in the room. Touch the dying person mindfully. Take a few sips of cool water. Breathe deeply and relax the tension in your body as you exhale. Remember why you are doing this work.

4. Practice motherly love

Tibetan Buddhists say that we have all been one another’s mother in a previous lifetime. Imagining every being as your mother isn’t always easy for many of us who have conflicted relationships with our mothers. But I can imagine a being who has given me and others life, protection, nourishment, and kindness. When I’m giving care to a dying person, I try both to give and receive kindness as if I were the dying one’s mother and to see the dying one as my mother, saying silently to myself, “Now it is time for me to repay the great kindness of all motherly beings.” Thinking of all beings with motherly love is a good reference point when I have fallen into automatic behavior, am feeling alienated, or am having trouble opening my heart.

The post The Lucky Dark appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Plum Village, the community founded by the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, lies in the old and fertile Dordogne valley in the south of France. After a recent dharma talk there, Thich Nhat Hanh invited people to put photos of their deceased relatives in a book placed on the altar. It was in Plum Village that I began to question our relationship to the dead. I wondered if it was possible to see beyond personal histories of grief to an autobiography that includes the loss of forests and rivers. I wondered if we can look at what has passed from life on this Earth, and see how the absence of so many species touches us at this very moment. And I wondered if somehow we can redeem these dead and prevent the ending of blue sky and bright wind.

Practicing Buddhism is about discovering ourselves to be in a great, flowing river of continuities. Just as our mother and father live inside us, so do generations upon generations of mothers and fathers before them. Part of our task is to discover how all our ancestors inform our lives—and the same holds true for all forms of life, for we have been shaped not only by human ancestors but also by the environments in which they lived.

This area of southern France has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years. Paleolithic peoples worshiped in its caves. Neolithic peoples farmed its rich land. Today, orchards, vineyards, and fields of sunflowers cover these old hills. As I sit in daily meditation on a bright ridge overlooking this history, I feel the ancestors of the Dordogne making themselves known to me—the land itself, the wind and light rain, the oaks and berries, and even the brown viper hiding in the thorns.

Tribal peoples often venerate their dead, sometimes to appease the spirits’ sorrow or anger at being separated from the world of the living. At other times, the dead are honored for the protection that they offer or the gifts they bestow. By venerating the dead we can experience the fullness of our own souls. Losing touch with these ancestors, we lose touch with the soul, both theirs and ours.

I believe that the psychic retrieval of the souls of the dead is about our own soul retrieval. Earth can be redeemed only if we reach through the veil of this loss to touch what now seems beyond us. Venerating the ancestors of all life forms returns us to the river that flows from the past into the present.

Near Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, dwellings that were inhabited by a vital culture a thousand years ago are now abandoned and crumbling. In this part of the world, the indigenous people know that the ancestors, when not forgotten, are changed into clouds that nourish Earth with rain. As I write this, in southern France, there is no water flowing out of the taps. There has been a drought here for several years and now, in the ceaseless heat of summer, the water supply is low. When I was in New Mexico a month before, open fires were not permitted because of drought conditions. I try to remember that according to Pueblo peoples, when we venerate the ancestors, the rains fall. When we forget the ancestors, the rains cease.

We are connected to the dead in ways not commonly remembered. The bones of the ancestors lie in the body of Earth and are transformed into the bodies of plants and creatures, including ourselves. The Dineh, who live in and around Chaco Canyon, know that they are directly connected to the mountains which gather the clouds, the green that gives rise to the clouds, and the mist and rain that nourish all that grows. In all of these forms, the ancestral continuity confirms our true identity.

The mountains, I become part of it.
The herbs, the fir tree
I become part of it.
The morning mists, the clouds, the gathering waters,
I become part of it.
The sun that sweeps across the earth,
I become part of it.
The wilderness, the dew drops, the pollen
I become part of it.
—Dineh (Navajo) Chant

The great trees of tropical and temperate forests, by feeding on the decaying remains of countless plant and animal species, literally translate the past into our atmosphere. The destruction of these forests is an attack on one of the most vital ways that the ancestors express themselves to Earth—as the very air we breathe. In old Earth cultures, the shaman is the servant of the people, the ancestors, the gods, creatures and plants, and the elements. When the world is out of balance, the shaman redresses the disequilibrium. In these cultures illness, planetary or personal, is understood as a loss of connection—an existential alienation. This alienation expresses itself as a divided self, a self that has forgotten and abandoned the infinity of its being.

We think that the ancestors are behind us, but they also go before us—a vanguard, a spirit wave, pulling us along. When the Hopi enter the kiva, they go into the past to ensure the future. We, too, must seek initiation and search the darkness of the past for a light that has been hidden by time. For thousands of years, initiation has served to establish the individual within the continuum of all existence. To see ourselves as part of the body of interconnecting, interdepending, and interpenetrating members—past, present, and future—is one of the functions of Buddhist meditation practice. And until we give birth to our ancestors, Earth cannot be redeemed from its suffering. To exclude, consciously or unconsciously, any species from the continuum of existence is to deny a part of ourselves.

The post Giving Birth to Ancestors appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.