Earth Wisdom: Let It Begin With Me

My eco anxiety reached crisis point long before I’d even heard of climate change. It was the late 1980s, and I’d become alarmed about such issues as extinction, deforestation and the rights of indigenous people. Then my concerns had widened to include the rivers and seas, toxic waste and air pollution. I’d been campaigning to raise public awareness of these threats, and had even dressed up as an aerosol spray to draw attention to the hole in the ozone layer. But learning about these interlocking challenges and the need to transform our systems began to feel overwhelming.

We needed to change our whole way of thinking about the planet, and I wondered how we could do that. How had our relationship with other life-forms become so out of balance? What made us feel separate from nature, and why were we at war with it? And how could we end the war and come back into ‘green peace’?

Partly in the quest for answers and partly to heal my heart-ache, I started to look within and explore psyche and spirit. I tried a few things ­— wisdom traditions like Buddhism and Taoism and various schools of psychology. Eco-concern wasn’t recognized in the mainstream, and when I spoke about it with a therapist, he asked, “Yes, but who is ‘Rainforest’?”  Then I came across a lineage of Earth Wisdom that included our relationship with plants, animals and planet, and it made me feel more at home.

Since then I’ve been on a long journey with Earth Wisdom Teachings. This tradition has an ecological ethos that honours the sacredness of nature. It has helped me understand that we humans are part of the vast web of life. All things are interrelated in the web, and all energy has consciousness. This lens — that all energy has consciousness — has brought me into closer intimacy with myself and life.

The lineage I follow uses a circular ‘map’ to guide the journey of self-exploration. This map shows eight aspects of consciousness that are innate in all people and are based in our relationship with the Earth. Earth Wisdom uses inner technology — techniques of consciousness rather than machines and gadgets — to access our infinite potential and activate these eight realms of consciousness. They help us to expand out of ordinary ways of thinking to experience a greater connection with the Universe.

Our consciousness includes creative inspiration, emotional intelligence, the body-mind and intuition, our dreaming and heart-knowing. All of these faculties are expressions of universal intelligence and are on the map. They are informed by our relationships — with sun and stars, Earth and planets, plants and water, ancestors, animals and so on.

Understanding came like a bolt of lightning on my journey when I realised that ‘sensing’ is not the same as ‘thinking’. ‘Sensing’ means perceiving directly through the ears, eyes, nose, tongue and touch of the skin. ‘Thinking’ is when we interpret or label these sense perceptions. These two faculties work together, but it’s through the sense organs that we touch the Mystery in the moment, and the Mystery touches us. 

Directing our attention to the sense perceptions brings us into deeper presence. Presence leads to stillness of the mind, and stillness opens up spaciousness. Through spaciousness we expand awareness and can come into a state of oneness. This is peace consciousness.

We can also come into stillness of the mind by noticing the gap between thoughts. An announcement on the London Underground tells us to “Mind the gap”. It means the gap between the train and the platform edge, but I like to think the voice is reminding us to mind the gap between thoughts. The part of us that notices the gap is not the thinking mind. It’s stillness, the silent knowing that knows silence. This stillness of the mind is the doorway to the Great Mystery. It can open us to peace consciousness.

There’s nothing wrong with the magnificent grey matter we all have in our heads. We need our brains for memory, intention and rational thought. But we need awareness to notice where our thoughts are leading us. If necessary we can then interrupt and change them. Without awareness, thinking dominates our waking consciousness and we may forget our other faculties and our relationship with Life. Thinking can convince us that we’re a separate ego that needs to compete to avoid missing out. It can tell us we’re not enough and need to extract and acquire more than we need in order to fill a feeling of lack or inadequacy. This is the consciousness that can lead us into war.

A needed part of our collective healing is the recognition of our relationship with the Earth and all its systems and expressions. ‘Mother’ Earth is a being of vast energy-consciousness. She gives birth, grows and sustains countless forms of spirit life-force. All this diversity — animals, plants, rocks, fungi and so on — is of the spirit. We can learn to love this diversity in nature, just as we can learn to love the diversity in ourselves and in the human realm. We depend on diversity for our wellbeing and evolution.

We humans are a collective field of consciousness on this planet. In ordinary waking states we experience ourselves as separate individuals, but we are also part of a river of energy consciousness that includes the souls of all humans that have lived, are living and will live. You can see collective fields of consciousness in other species such as hives of bees, shoals of fish or flocks of birds. It’s marvelous to watch a murmuration of starlings: the individual bird and the flock are one. It’s the same with us. The individual affects the field, and the field affects the individual. So when we come into peace consciousness we emanate peace into the field and this helps others to begin to resonate with peace.

Black Elk was a Lakota holy man who had a vision of peace. He called it “mending the sacred hoop”. He said that for peace in the world we must first come into peace in the self. Peace comes when we know our relationship with the Universe and all its powers, and when we know that the Divine is in all things and in everyone. This is the first peace, he said, the source of peace between people, between nations and peace with the planet.

Peace consciousness is not passivity. It doesn’t mean we don’t stand for what is life-affirming and seek to transform energies that are life-diminishing. But when we come from wholeness within ourselves we create wholeness in the world. A sustainable relationship with ourselves goes together with sustainable relationships with our Earth.

We are in an unprecedented global emergency and we can’t afford any complacency about the threats we face. But I am confident — more so now than I used to be — that we can access the inner resources and rise to meet these challenges. We are evolving into an ecological consciousness of relationship, and that evolution must start within each of us. As peace activists used to say in the 1960s and ‘70s, “Peace will come. Let it begin with me.”

Carlos Philip Glover has trained with teachers from different traditions, among them Ehama Institute of New Mexico, for more than 40 years. He is the co-leader, with WindEagle, of Evocative Leadership Mastery in Spain and for more than 20 years has served as the Dance Chief for the UK Drum Dance. Carlos is the author of Earth Wisdom Teachings: Practical Guidance from the Eight Directions of the Medicine Wheel.  The founder of Earth Wisdom Teachings, Carlos lives in Devon, UK.