As I write this there is smoke engulfing my home city, and ash falling like fine snow over the land.  I usually spend most of my days outside, whether sitting, exercising, or riding my bike around town on errands, but today I’ll stay inside.  My throat started burning during morning qigong – I can imagine the difficulties for those with asthma or other health limitations.

The source of the smoke right now is from a large fire burning in the nearby and beloved Columbia Gorge, but there has been smoke off and on all summer in this and other cities up and down the West Coast. Right now the entire Pacific Crest, basically, as well as much of the Rockies, are on fire.  From British Columbia down to Southern California, and east to Colorado, Utah, and Montana, this unprecedented fire season is but one aspect of a sudden and alarming increase in the manifest signs of the climate crisis.  Massive flooding – another face of climate emergency – is simultaneously all over the news:  just as a devastating storm finished wreaking its havoc in Houston, an even more powerful hurricane, the strongest ever recorded in the Atlantic, is hurtling towards Florida.  There is another one right behind it.  And, at the same time, a much less reported (here), but greater tragedy is unfolding in South Asia where a record breaking monsoon has already killed thousands and displaced millions.  Everything seems to be happening at once.  And it’s scary.

Most of the mainstream news media are bending over backwards to avoid any mention of the climate crisis, at least initially, but those of us with at least a little awareness know what’s up.  But what to do?  It’s fine to talk about long term political strategies and economic incentives when the crisis, at least in the safer-seeming corners of the privileged world, still seemed abstract and in the future.  But when you’re actually breathing smoke, or chest deep in water, or simply out of food amidst parched, withered fields, the reality of what we face slams into us, and desperation and hopelessness can take root.

Sitting in my weekly meditation circle a few days ago, under the dull red orb of the sun floating ominously in the middle of a dark sky, we broached the subject.  As spiritual practitioners guided by the aspiration to work for the ending of suffering of all beings, how can we be truly responsible – “able” to “respond” – in an authentic and effective way to such a massive problem?  And how much of our life energy are we willing to give to this most profound spiritual calling?

This vow to free all beings from suffering – called the Bodhisattva Vow and made explicitly by those in Mahayana Buddhist traditions, but existing at least implicitly, I would say, in many other spiritual paths – is acknowledged as the fundamental guide and direction of our lives, for those of us having taken such paths.  Perhaps we might say it is as well for anyone who sincerely wishes to live an ethical life, or even for all human beings in the depths of their hearts.  The climate crisis, in many ways and like few other events, challenges us to examine how seriously, and how extensively, we are willing to follow this noble aspiration.

It is relatively easy to understand and apply the Bodhisattva Vow when it simply involves improving behaviors that our cultural norms already encourage us to do – being more polite, making a greater effort to listen, trying to accommodate the wishes of others for the sake of social harmony.  But the climate crisis was not caused because our social graces were not fully refined – it is, instead, the direct result of passively accepting a way of living that we have grown up in, that we rarely question, and that our culture actively celebrates – a way of living that uses and wastes an incredible amount of resources, and produces an incredible amount of pollution.  We are now being hit by the repercussions, which have the potential, even likelihood, of causing more suffering for more beings than any other phenomena (with the possible exception of nuclear war or nuclear accident, which themselves could be triggered by the events of climate chaos).  Are we willing to take the steps of radically simplifying our lives and reducing our resource use in order to lessen the worst impacts of the climate crisis and its associated suffering – even when that means challenging cherished habits, assumptions, and modes of life that we are used to and cling to, and which, in fact, make up the patterns of our egos?  I believe the compassionate awareness in our hearts demands it of us.  As Buddhists, or spiritual practitioners more generally, with meditative practices to support us and teachings that guide us to let go of conditioned habits, we could, in fact, be the best suited to become pioneers in this movement.  It seems clear, however, that this kind of transformation is proving very difficult for many, and, in my view, most contemporary sanghas are falling far short of demonstrating the model we have the potential of promoting, or of even putting this challenge in the front and center of our practice lives.  It is not nearly enough to hold a retreat or conference with discussions of climate change and the grief we might feel around it (however useful that might be) – it is much more about whether we get in a car and drive to such a retreat,  whether we drive to a restaurant afterwards and maybe order some animal products, or whether we choose to fly to our next vacation spot (or Buddhist gathering, or even environmental conference!)

Contemplating radical non-dual philosophies might be a little unsettling for some, and developing the discipline to meditate regularly has its challenges, but nothing, in my experience, directly threatens to uproot the foundation of our egos like the prospect of substantially changing the daily life patterns we are used to, or departing from the behavioral norms of the society we feel a part of.  Because of this threat to our self-idea, the defenses that emerge when this prospect is raised are clever, strong and numerous – collaborating to show why we don’t really need to change.

One is the narrative that personal change is really meaningless because it’s effects will be so small – the bulk of carbon pollution, after all, is clearly made by large corporations and governments (or both working together), so why bother with our personal lives?  This argument, I think, can be quickly seen through.  Corporations and governments don’t do their carbon-spewing work just for fun, on their own, in some kind of isolation from the general population.  They do it to make products to sell to the public to make money, and the public supports it when they buy those products (or services, or fuel).  The vast majority of these products are unnecessary for survival, and most of them, I would argue, are unnecessary for deep enjoyment or true satisfaction in our lives, either.  If we stop purchasing them, they will stop being made, and the pollution and resource depletion will also stop.  For those things we feel we really need, we can ask, or forcefully demand, that more ecological alternatives are offered, and more ecological processes are used – petitioning the government, or corporations directly, to make this change is an essential kind of activism that has an important place in our movement.  But, one way or another, we need to stop supporting the unnecessary products of our hyper-consumerist, throw-away society, and radically reduce those things we think we need whose production is tearing apart the ecological balance of our home, whether alternatives are provided or not.  Our lives need to change – it might be through voluntary choice, or coercion through government regulation, or some combination, but they need to change if we are to preserve some remnants of life-supporting ecological integrity.  To demonstrate that this is possible (even desirable and potentially joyful!) by showing it in your own life, is an essential catalyst for society-wide change.  One individual’s way-of-life transformation is, certainly, just a drop in the bucket – but buckets are only filled with the accumulation of many individual drops (even when they come at once in a torrent), and massive, society-wide movements are made by the force of numerous individual transformations.  (By way of encouragement – there is a sociological observation that if only 2-3% of a population embodies a new direction with deep conviction and confidence, there is great potential that it will catch on as a mass movement and become a new accepted norm.  Buddhists make up at least 1% of the US population at the moment, and about 10% of the world’s.  And those on other contemplative spiritual paths would boost it up quite a bit.  Just to consider…)

There are other rationalizations for avoiding deep personal life-way changes that are uniquely Buddhist.  One is a recourse to the principle of the “Middle Way” – understood as meaning that the Buddha recommended avoiding all “extremes” in one’s lifestyle, and choosing “moderation.”  Since the life of resource-simplicity needed to dramatically reduce carbon pollution is significantly different from the high resource habits most of us have grown up with, such a change might be considered “extreme”.  But with a little reflection we can see that it is pretty absurd to think of the “Middle Way” as a lifestyle recommendation that is infinitely relative according to what we happen to be used to, with the Buddha not having any standards in mind to guide us.  If we came from a social circle where everyone we knew had  between two and five houses, would the middle way be to have three or four?  The Buddha and his early followers actually gave us a pretty clear picture of what he meant, practically speaking, by the term the “Middle Way” – avoiding all luxuries and possessions unnecessary to survival (which, like us, he was quite familiar with from his privileged upbringing), while at the same time avoiding austerities that damage our health (especially intentionally inflicted ones such as the fasting he had practiced).  The Buddha’s middle way was based on the actual physical and psychological needs of a healthy body and mind, with anything superfluous dropped away.  It included enough food for moderate but regular eating, enough clothes to protect the health of the body (in his climate, just a few rectangles of found cloth), and a very few practical possessions like a bowl, a water filter, a razor.  He and his closest students lived intentionally homeless, kept no money, and walked everywhere they went, accepting simple shelter when offered during rainy weather.  This was the middle way that he lived and promoted.  Very few of us can imagine matching this level of simplicity in our own lives, but if we would aspire to at least move in such a direction, the way of life we might embody would still provide an impressive model for healing our climate-disrupting habits.  We need to see the kind of simple life that can actually be sustained on our planet as “moderation”, and the kind that leads to its destruction, no matter how familiar, as “extreme”.

Another defense against the proposition to deeply change our lifestyle that’s uniquely Buddhist is a recourse to non-conceptual philosophical interpretations of the Bodhisattva Vow.  Since it’s not practically or rationally imaginable to single-handedly free all beings  (infinite in number) from all suffering, and yet we take a vow to do just that, it is sometimes implied that fulfilling the vow has more to do with dropping conceptual categories than actually doing anything practical to help beings.  (or at least needing to do anything outside of one’s comfort zone).  This, I feel, is a very unfortunate misunderstanding, or even abuse, of the experience of the non-dual or non-conceptual.  Certainly the experience of going beyond the limitations of conceptualization and duality has an essential place in our meditative evolution and realization – but that is precisely because it can free us from the confining conventional assumptions about who we are and how we might live – opening us to a wider vista of possibilities and capabilities in our compassionate aspirations.  We can work endlessly for the liberation of beings instead of just for a limited amount of time, and in infinitely varied ways according to conditions, instead of being hemmed in by predetermined fixed parameters that we have been conditioned by.  Non-conceptual insight is not an excuse for avoiding practical service or personal renunciation, it is a freedom to enter into deeper, more pervasive, and endless ethical exploration.  True non-dual realization, and the freedom from rigid mental categories that it allows, opens us to more clearly and effortlessly respond to the needs of the beings around us, instead of dwelling in a self-absorbed bubble of religious complacency.  And the needs of beings all over our planet calls urgently, right now, for a turn towards a genuinely sustainable way of life.

Just what does a truly sustainable life look like?  How simple do our ways of life have to become?  Like the “Middle Way”, a sustainable life can only be meaningfully discussed if we have some actual, practical standards that we can establish to characterize it – it would be useless if we just left it to the infinitely varied whims of personal opinion (usually generated by what we’re conditioned to find to be comfortable).  Some kind of reliable standards, based on scientific evidence, are actually pretty easy to discover.  There are websites with much of the relevant data already collected, that if you input the details of your daily life habits concerning resource use, they will calculate for you how much of the earth’s available resources, and capacity to absorb pollution, you are using (if everyone lived like you – how much of the earth would we use up?)  Most of us in highly industrialized countries, unfortunately, will find that, if everyone lived like us, that we would need two, three, or even four planets to sustain such a lifestyle.  We would exceed the capacity of the earth several times over.  (As it actually is – with much of the world’s population living with much less resources than us by necessity – we are already exceeding the planet’s renewable capacity for resources and pollution absorption by at least a third – and the “developing” world’s consumerism and resource use is rising quickly).  This might make some feel hopeless and question whether it is even feasible, in our current cultural state, to reduce our resource use enough to bring it down to the capacity of our single planet.  I can confidently report that it is.  It’s not even feasible, it’s fairly easy, physically speaking, and it still allows a fairly comfortable and leisurely way of life.  It’s much less restrictive than the way of life that the Buddha practiced and advocated, and he still seemed to enjoy himself.  I have been practicing it for decades right in the middle of modern urban America.  

Here’s how to do it – stop driving cars (or dramatically reduce) and bike or walk instead (or use public transit if necessary); stop eating animals and their secretions (the animal industry has a gigantic carbon footprint, larger than transportation, and, as a bonus, you’ll be ending your participation in enormous animal suffering); stop flying, or greatly reduce (travel closer, stay more settled, or take more time to get there); turn your heat down, or off, in winter and put on a sweater; and stop buying unnecessary things (and just about everything we buy besides food is likely unnecessary.  All consumer products have their environmental cost in resources and pollution – the biggest, after cars, is probably computers and electronic gadgets).  That’s the bulk of it – no real surprises here, I think.  If you add to that buying your food as local as possible, and with no packaging (buying only bulk food in re-used bags and containers), and buying organic, your harm to the planet shrinks down to nearly zero.  You can still dance and sing, meditate and exercise, create art and walk in the woods, have sex and enjoy delicious food.  As a bonus, you use less money so you don’t need to work as much, freeing up more time for spiritual practices, activism, or whatever calls to your heart.  These changes to a simple life aren’t hard because of any significant deprivation, or because of any skill level needed to achieve them.  But they may be very challenging psychologically or emotionally.  We resist them because they are not what we are used to, and, perhaps most crucially, because they are not what the people around us are doing.  We are social creatures after all, and the need for tribal support is still with us.  So maybe we should try our life changing practices together with a community.  (Sangha is a treasure for a reason!)  We know from our practice experience that habits are hard to let go of.  But we also know, from this same experience, that we can let go of them.  Especially when we know that we have to, if we are to be true to our hearts.  Some of us might change dramatically, all at once; others more gradually, reducing their ecological impact in steps that seem workable.  Together with the support of community, and through whatever personal process, we can begin to take these life-way changes as our new precepts.

If we can find the courage to let go of excuses, and drop the defensiveness we feel around the idea of changing our daily lifestyle, we might realize that those of us on a spiritual path, and perhaps particularly those of us in the Buddhist tradition, are unusually qualified to be the inspiring vanguard of a simple living revolution.   We have the practices that, if properly engaged with, can give us the mental clarity, openness, and confidence to let go of habits and old conditioning, and face each new moment of life as an open field of possibility  – allowing us to choose the step that is most beautiful, most helpful, most liberating to all beings, instead of the well-worn road that is “safest” or most “comfortable”.  And we have teachings that clarify for us that true joy does not reside with excessive material comfort or the stimulation of entertainment, but with clear attention and appreciation for the miracle of the present moment – and with the compassion for all beings that naturally emerges from such attention, as we recognize all beings as our own wholeness and source of belonging.  Finally, we have the example of the historical Buddha and the practical manifestation of his own realization: the abandoning of a life of privilege and consumption (much like our own) and a dedication to a life of simplicity and non-harm in harmony with the natural world.

We all are in different stages of our spiritual path, and come from different karmic backgrounds, and so our encouragement of each other needs to be infused with tolerance, openness, and kindness.  But we also need to to recognize the urgency of the present ecological crisis, and not evade the call for change – in ourselves, and just as crucially, in our communities.  This is now, clearly, the one most important issue of life on earth, and we need to recognize that.  All our decisions need to reflect our awareness of it.  Those we choose as our teachers and guides, if they are true “elders” on the path, should naturally be models of simplicity and ecological harmony in their own lives.  If we don’t find that to be so, we might hold them to account and find out why they appear otherwise.  This is not the time to be complacent with teachers that are simply charismatic or entertaining speakers, and who say those things that are easy and comfortable to hear.  If a genuine teacher happens to be unaware of an ecological or moral issue that our lives touch, it should be easy to inform them, and easy for them to make the quick change that is naturally called for, no matter how much the informer is a novice.  This is the flexible and supple mind of maturation.  But if we run into defensiveness, perhaps couched in a claim of non-conceptuality – such as defusing the compassionate concern or renunciant aspirations of a young student with the rebuke to “not be attached”, we should be very careful.  Is attachment really the issue, or is the teacher simply unwilling to give up what is wholesome to give up – and unwilling to be upstaged by a young student?  The reality might be a complicated mixture, but we need vigilance with our spiritual authorities, and we have an obligation to demand high standards from those we allow to guide us, especially in these times.

The extreme weather events now shaking the world will hopefully be a wake-up call for the entire global community, but certainly we can make them one in our own spiritual communities, and use the fear, and even despair, that will naturally arise to re-evaluate the depth and practical effectiveness of our chosen paths.  How can we meaningfully respond to the vastness of this issue, and the pervasive suffering it will bring?  Certainly we will need the vastness of an open, clear and awake mind, the honesty that emerges from this clarity, and the compassion that it allows to flow in.  We don’t know how events will unfold, what physical changes we can or can’t still prevent, or how much of a healthy ecological home we can save.  But giving our life energy to a deep, wholehearted, fully engaged response, with compassionate attention, and dedicated to this most beautiful step right here before us – is all we can do.  And it is the way to fulfill our true spiritual vow for all beings, and manifest our highest potential as human beings.  Ultimately, we can’t control our physical world, but we can find a joyful path that transcends our unstable conditions by responding fully to the call of our compassionate natures, and not holding back in fear.  As practitioners we have the opportunity, and the responsibility, to shine a light as best we can through these storms for the sake of our planetary sangha.

~ Satya Vayu