Highlights
I think all environmentalists have had an awakening where they realize that the meaning of their own lives comes from their desire to serve the greater sense of self and that greater sense of self for many of us comes from this understanding that on a very practical level there can be no humans without nature. We are part of nature and this idea that we are somehow superior to nature has been the cause of so much harm.
The Bodhisattva vow, when we imagine it and when we are visualizing how we embody that vow, for me there is no greater embodiment than trying to literally save all life on Earth … and when I ground myself in the Bodhisattva Vow then I feel very very protected from hopelessness because I find myself in this space of awe, really there is no other term than saying I’m blown away. I’m blown away by how magnificent life is on Earth.
It’s not that Injustice happened by chance, actually these systems are deliberately designed to be unjust so that people who don’t have power, the throwaway people, bear the burden. The injustice is the point of these systems because then what happens is the people who created these systems can continue to control and thrive while making the majority of the global population bear that burden. And those impacts have only intensified. A lot of people, especially in North America, love to talk about colonialism as if it happened 200, 300 years ago. It’s active right now. What is globalization? What is neoliberalism?
We have been, in the global South, fed this fantasy that this is what economic development is, and on an individual level success is having two cars, two houses, five houses, 10 houses, right? It’s never ending, this idea that growth just keeps happening forever and ever and ever. And I think those of us who are in the global South, who’ve come from the global South, understand very deeply that it is at our expense that this wealth has been amassed. It is at our expense that the global North gets to keep acting like these problems are not happening.
This idea of what success means, this idea of what development means, I think there is no group that is better suited in many ways than Buddhists to ask this question. We who’ve already understood that life is impermanent and the self is impermanent, who better than us to demand an answer to, well if life is impermanent and our life expectancy is 80 years at best, why is the model of success something around land ownership? Why do we have a model of extraction where what we leave behind is actually terrible in real terms, terrible for all life on Earth, terrible for new generations to come?
I suddenly woke up and realized that the environmental movement I was in was using incredibly militaristic terms. It was just part of our everyday life. We would say we are in a climate war and we’re losing the battle. Still, you hear it everywhere, it’s in the headlines all the time. And I woke up thinking, what if we weren’t adopting this dynamic, what if we were not coming from a place of fear but coming from a place of love. When we come from a place of love we’re immediately in a space of plenty, in a space of enoughness. We’re no longer saying resources are scarce, everyone for themselves, let’s protect who we can.
When I was younger I thought change happened if you worked from the inside but after all these years of being part of campaigns and designing campaigns the one thing I’ve learned is that you always have to have people agitating outside the building. Even when you have people that are going in to negotiate, the people agitating outside of the building create a kind of pressure that forces powers that never want to give them up to negotiate.
I think imagining a world that is just, imagining a place that comes from Dharma principles that also gives us a lot of compassion in return, and that compassion has to come from understanding that we might not get there in our lifetime. We’re building the path to get there, we are part of a chain, we are building a world that is more just than the world we inherited and we’re handing it to the next generation.
This is Part 1 of their conversation. You can find Part 2 here: Indigeneity, the Sacred Feminine and Buddhism
This interview was primarily aimed at Dharmadatta’s Latin American community and you can also watch this in Spanish on faceBuda, their Spanish-language YouTube channel here.
