A new essay, based on a lecture from Varsana Swami, published at Elephant Journal
I
n 1965, teacher and scholar A.C Bhaktivedanta Swami transplanted
the culture of Bhakti, or the yoga of devotion, from its roots in the
ancient culture of India to the Western world.
Bhaktivedanta Swami was “ahead of his time” in the realm of
living ecology. A few years before the modern ecological movement found
its ground, Bhaktivedanta Swami was teaching his young students the
ideal of “simple living and high thinking.” He encouraged them to break
out of their industrialized and technological conditioning of mass
consumption to return to a less complicated way of being, in order to
free the mind for spiritual enlightenment. His students imbibed his
audacity, starting farm communities in the model of the Vedic village
culture in numerous places across North America, Europe, Africa, South
America, Australia, and back to India.
They understood that what they were trying to do was, in a sense,
both revolutionary yet eternal. The spiritual ecology and culture of
the Bhakti tradition and of the Vedas is nothing new, yet to understand
its precepts could bring profound auspicious change to our human
condition, and to our increasingly fragile relationship with our Mother
Earth.
We stand on the cusp of an abyss. We can see, with the correct lens
of vision, that our collective reliance on machine and industry, on
hardware and software, on an exploitative relationship with Mother
Earth, has created the prospect of a total collapse of the comforts and
easy access to resources that we take for granted.
Over the last forty years — beginning from the crystallized aesthetic
beauty of the famous “Blue Marble” picture of our Mother Earth taken by
the astronauts of Apollo 17 — we have come to understand that we all
share the same planet, the same air, the same soil. We carry within us
the strong, yet mostly unconscious inkling, that the Earth is our
collective mother and our collective psyche.
The degree of our forgetfulness of this is the degree of pain we now
all share at the breaking of our symbiosis with the planet which
shelters us, nurtures us, and gives us everything she has. What would we
do if the fragile relationship we have left with Mother Earth
shattered?
What would we do if the chain of easy flow and access to the consumer goods and resources we take for granted broke down?
In an article by Mike Adams at Natural News, (
How Fragile We Are: Why The Complexity of Modern Civilization Threatens Us All) the author bluntly states:
“
There is almost no slack in the systems that deliver your food, fuel,
electricity, water or consumer products. That means if something goes
wrong, even for a little while, you’ll need to depend on yourself to
provide these things. Yet how many people have the ability to provide
all these essentials for themselves — disconnected from the grid — for
even as little as one weekend?
Few, it turns out.
They have unknowingly bet their lives
on the reliability of just-in-time delivery systems and complex
infrastructure interdependencies. When the water stops flowing, or the
electricity goes off, or the gasoline runs out, they literally will have
no idea what to do.”
We must also understand that this problem
cannot be inherently solved by the same mechanisms that created it.
Technology and science cannot be assumed to be the cure for the same
problems they caused. Contemporary philosopher John Gray has written:
“Science
is a tool for problem-solving…but it has this peculiarity, that when it
is most successful it creates new problems, some of which are
insoluble. This is an unpopular conclusion, and it is not only those who
believe technology can overcome mortality that resist it. So do Greens
who support renewable technologies and sustainable development. If
humans have caused climate change, Greens insist, humans can also stop
it.”
This is not to say that we should abandon the innovation and
enthusiasm to create scientific and technical tools which can help to
reverse the tide, but Gray suggests that we not exclusively worship at
the same altar to the same gods who gave us what we asked for.
There is another ingredient to be added to the recipe for solution which we must consider, which is our inherent divinity.
We must go to the ground of our being, to the level of our
consciousness, our thought patterns, our actions, our aspirations, our
desires, to the engine of our inner psyche,
towards our soul and towards God,
to understand why we do what we do, and to understand why we have
chosen exploitation instead of integration, dissonance instead of
harmony, affluenza instead of illumination, in our sacred relationship
with Mother Earth.
This platform of consciousness,
where we can understand our relationship with the Divine,
with God, is where we can properly begin to understand the reality of
true eco-ethics. Eco-ethics is the proper protocol of thought, action,
obligation, and responsibility between organisms and their collective
shared environment or ecology.
Any purely materialistic angle of vision of approach to eco-ethics
will reach its limitations unless we include the perspective of
universal, divine wisdom. This wisdom, or
dharma,
is from the transcendent realm, well beyond even this material world,
yet intrinsically pervading our individual and collective consciousness.
Dharma is the codices and well-worn common-sense which allows us to
understand our intrinsic spiritual nature, and our link to God through
understanding our function and duty as beings in relation to universal
law.
The key aspect of dharma in Vedic theology revolves around
actualizing the full nature of our personality and our relationships.
The core concept of dharma is known as
sanatana-dharma, which
describes the constitutional nature of our soul in the mood of loving
service or devotion (Bhakti) to God, creating an all-inclusive matrix
that takes in and fulfills the obligations of our relationship to
family, society, humanity, and our ecology.
Those who understand the Earth as our Mother, and who really value
that relationship in their heart and in their actions, approach our
crisis and its potential solutions from the heart of this universal
dharma, which extends across all spiritual cultures. This relationship
is not to be understood in any kind of purely mythological or vapid
manner. Instead, the theology of Vedic culture explains the link between
our actions, and what the Earth is divinely inspired to give us.
This science of action revolves around the culture of selfless
action in the mood of sacrifice. Sacrifice, in its purest form, means to
give up something in order to please someone else, which is the essence
and heart of all real relationships, and the heart of the Bhakti
tradition, in which one tries to offer all of the fruits of one’s
efforts to please God.
It is the great blessing of our Mother Earth in that she
wants to give her gifts to us in order that we may offer them in return
to God who has supplied her with her natural bounty.
Photo: Just Karen
When this cycle of receptivity, abundance, and sacrifice is fully
adhered to, harmony in our ecology is fixed. The temple of our personal
and collective mind, body, and soul stands strong. She is happy to
provide for everyone, if everyone is utilizing her gifts properly. This
traditional model of agriculture meant that, on the natural level,
everything that came from the Earth went back into the Earth. This is
the true synchronicity of God’s arrangement.
Any
organic farmer
can experience this, using manure as organic fertilizer for example.
What is the contrast? What goes back into the Earth through factory farm
agriculture? Blood meal, bone meal, and chemical fertilizers, all boons
of the so-called “Green Revolution.” We also have synthetic nitrogen,
which comes from petroleum, saturating much of our valuable soil,
killing the needed microrganisms in the earth, which then creates the
need for more and more chemicals to get more and more yield from the
dying soil.
The classic Vedic text Mahabharata tells us that agriculture is the
most noble of occupations. That we have lost sense of this, speaking
from the perspective of my own experience and my own generation, is a
painful knot in the heart.
I do not want to generalize here, but a personal anecdote may
suffice. I spent the better part of two years at a Bhakti community in
the hills of West Virginia, living as a monk, and one of my services was
to assist with our organic gardening projects. I began with great
enthusiasm, until the degree of effort and hard work required hit me
like a ton of bricks. I relayed my difficulty to resident sage Varsana
Swami, who had spent decades at this project creating the natural
infrastructure, and he said that my experience was not uncommon.
He had seen many people come to work and serve there with a sense of
romanticism towards the tilling of the land, and he came to see that
this romanticism was not a sustainable fuel for the sacrifice that was
really needed to gain access to the integrity and determination needed
to give life to the land. I took this to heart in my own experience and
it was a harsh lesson for me to learn, but it is one I strive to deeply
imbibe and carry within me to purify my heart, so that I may be able to
understand and participate in the true nobility of the community of real
agriculture, on the material and spiritual level.
This sublime culture has two pillars at its core: the culture of
brahminical knowledge and the protection of one of the most dynamic
living beings we share this planet with, the cow. At its core,
brahminical culture means knowing the difference between matter and
spirit, between our eternal nature as souls and our temporary situation
in these material bodies, and living our lives in an according way to
actualize that knowledge.
The cow, also one of our dear mothers, helps to give all the
essential gifts of proper sacrifice and offering to the Divine.
Ayurvedic science tells us that milk, particularly in its natural, raw,
unpasteurized state, is a tremendous boon for physical health. It also
helps to develop the finer tissues of the brain, which are conducive to
the development of deeper spiritual understanding.
[1] The cow’s masculine counterpart, the bull/ox, was primarily responsible for tilling the land in traditional Vedic culture.
It was this abandonment (and eventual exploitation) of the cow, bull,
and ox, and the conversion to tractor power which played a large part
in ruining traditional local farm economies in India, America, and
across the globe. Eventually from this, multinational corporations
could co-opt the chain of command as to how we ate and what we grew.
Most of the foodstuffs we mainly have access to in our local shops
come from California and other far-flung places. Having the food supply
in the hands of big agribusiness creates, by and large, a situation of
exploitation. The sacred relationship and the nobility of agriculture
becomes long lost.
Because the sacred art of agriculture always returns us to the
essence of relationships, to the knowledge that we are inter-dependent
on others, from our fellow earthlings, from the mercy of God, for our
sustenance, we get a sense of its magnanimous heart. Agriculture
encourages cooperation, whereas technology and industry tend to
encourage competition. The nature of competition, and the envy it
produces, is destructive to the relationship between the individual and
the whole. It encourages the perversion of selfishness, that the whole
should be serving the parts.
Real health is when the parts are serving the whole-serving the root
of everything material and spiritual, giving one’s love to God and being
imparted from Him the art and actions of love and compassion.
Understanding our predicament from a spiritual perspective begins at
the level of desire. We confuse our legitimate needs with our
illegitimate desires. We are conditioned to believe that material
prosperity is the only route to happiness in this world. Real
prosperity, guided by the light of transcendent eco-ethics, means access
to wisdom, health, and real progress towards the goal of life, the
re-establishment of our loving relationship with God through
self-realization.
God has created a perfect synergy for us to have access to. He is
deeply pleased when we cooperate and sacrifice together. Our efforts
combine to create a conduit for His mercy, to create an abundance that
truly sustains us. We want to feel that we are part of something greater
than ourselves. If we can develop our relationship to this Divine
arrangement, to the Earth as our mother, goddess, and supreme teacher,
through gratitude, humility, and prayer, she will help us to understand
and open our heart to our relationship with the Divine, to become
channels of real change in this world, unfolding the solution in every
step we take.
Sources:
[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=milk+finer+brain+tissues&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
