Staying Sane in a World out of Balance

While civilization has brought comforts undreamed of in human history to a wealthy minority, it has wreaked havoc on life itself, polluting, extracting, and heating the atmosphere and the oceans to the point of mass extinction. Greed, ill will and the delusion of separation reign.
How can we recover our interconnectedness with each other and with nature, and realize our collective capacity to join in the necessary work of our time? Is individual spiritual practice, now mostly separated from the natural world, still valid?
Dale talks with #DavidLoy, Zen teacher, and author of a multitude of essays and books including EcoDharma, #Buddhist Teachings for the #EcologicalCrisis, and founding member of the Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center
Edited by Mike Coe
For more about the Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center at:
rmerc.org/retr...
For more about David Robert Loy
www.davidloy.org/
For more information on the state of our planet, visit the FacingFuture Library at facingfuture.e....

[@TankGump96]

Great guest. Thx

[@user-go3ew2yf9v]

Good to hear clarification between grief and despair and how grief (as with tears) can bring clarity. We do what we can in a world that may seem grotesque and deranged, just as our personal self involved egos seem like so many deranged clowns. Woke up thinking about several personal relationship issues which shrink to the absolutely nothing that they are in light of global issues discussed here. May we all turn our attention towards unity versus destruction and fragmentation.

[@sheilalaffey6]

Thank you Dale and David for a most thoughtful and much needed conversation. Back to critical basics here. As philosopher/mystic Oscar Ichazo says unity is essential for the jump in humanity's consciousness. A deeply spiritual understanding can start a trickle down effect to intellectual, emotional and physical realms!

[@Jag4biz]

Thank you, agreed, so needed. Dale mentioned her own religious background. It reminded me of a researcher/scientist I’ve been recently following in terms of mining/mineral considerations. After providing a detailed mathematical analysis - to paraphrase - he wondered why with the data so clear if in fact people actually unconsciously ‘believe’ that they or others ‘deserve’ what is coming. It was, I felt, a candid rarely heard comment by a researcher/scientist. He felt no other way to explain fighting against some unseen ‘force’ Indeed, as you say above, unity is essential. Unfortunately, many ‘religious’ are heavily invested, committed to the spiritual core of their existence in a duality which depends on judgement…from it a God or spiritual conceptual model that is one with domination, we and they, evil and good. A belief of course far from unity as the very goal, that simply does not include everyone or all living things, let alone the non-living. A Franciscan, Richard Rohr, has brought out the bifurcation, and hope, in detail vs the Christian religion. Sobering at first, however, of course the seemingly intractable difficulty in more quickly dealing with the weather and climate crisis goes well beyond politics but to one’s belief of the nature of God and salvation. Therefore, unfortunately, a spiritual aspect or understanding doesn’t necessarily mean a unity of view of ‘creation care’ or view of the biophysical blessings of the earth and their relationship to it. Frankly, after a career in technology and experiencing what others called ‘miracle’ I have and continue to believe the technical problems can all be solved in a timeframe that matters…humanity’s consciousness, not tech or economics surely is the fundamental impediment.

[@hipser]

Great Work.

[@jamesstrickler620]

Thank you for this conversation.

[@mecdrum7]

Look at SGI Buddhism it’s the religion of inclusiveness which is environmentally religiously . Relative happiness and absolute happiness is you me and environment. We practice 2 and 16 th chapter of lotus Sutra of Nichiren Daishonins Buddhism

[@caterthun4853]

Thought you were interviewing Tom Jones the singer. But " It's not unusual"

[@Mark-cd3vd]

end of ignorance

[@sjeffi]

Everybody goes to heaven, all souls will go back to the light. But if your soul is full of shadows, when you have been an asshole all your life, being in the light will be hell because your shadows cannot bear the light. That's what all religions are about, to keep your soul pure and transparent.

[@___.51]

That sounds horrifying, I'd rather sleep thanks.

[@NeverCryWolf64]

No heaven, no hell, no soul. This is all we got.

[@georgepotter1820]

Evolution or extinction? Are we able to learn to live in harmony with each other, nature and technology including AI? Sustainability not profitability. Mindfulness and self love, respect not exploitation. Our species faces a major die off, the population is passing the peak, passing a tipping point where our population goes from exponential growth to a transition to a new sustainable relationship with the ecosystem that has sustained us up until now. That downward curve can be as steep as a cliff which falls to zero, extinction, or it can begin steeply and recover as it returns to historic levels of sustainability, pre-technology levels such as pre-Columbian America. This could lead to a selection pressure that would produce a new species of hominid, speciation. The curve could be more gentle and could include technological solutions that would level off at a population that could both live more harmoniously with nature and each other and incorporate technology that would represent an evolution into a new species of technologically enhanced humanity, cyborgs. Taking life to other planets, terraforming and evolving new species of humans who could survive other planetary ecologies is another path that will require technologies including genetic engineering to reach for the stars. Managing these changes in a moral and humane way brings hope to a future that appears very scary from our selfish and ethnocentric perspectives. Keep up the good work or as John Perkins says "Dream True" instead of living like the hero of his book "Confessions of an Economic Hitman." Be blessed, you are a blessing. Aboriginal cultures have much to teach us.

[@gregorymegbert9086]

Well put Dale bravo

[@markschuette3770]

lets just fix the problem- no need to add a some anchient religious type practice. TAX all types of pollution and TAX the rich who got wealthy on the public's natural resources.

[@donniemoder1466]

I stopped watching when they started talking about Buddhism. I need info on climate change.

[@jennysteves]

Tune into ‘The Great Simplification’ (Nate Hagens) for a systems and energy perspective on the deeper causes of climate change. Great interviews. Then, if grief about our shared predicaments becomes especially difficult to bear, come back to this episode.

[@Jag4biz]

Yes, well, as i tried to indicate in the reply to @sheilalaffey above…it is about climate change perhaps one of if not the most important dynamic impacting the result. That said, I quite agree with Jennystevens7226, Nate’s programs are informative. If you only have time for one, Sir David King’s was recent interview is packed with information.

[@gregorymegbert9086]

50 years? Make that 5 . Any knowledge of what about to happen makes that 50 year reference rediculous

[@alanj9978]

Some countries maybe. North America probably has another couple of decades.

[@aum82]

@@alanj9978Why?

[@alanj9978]

@@aum82Because we export a lot of food, we have lots of fresh water relative to population, and we still have plenty of domestic energy and mineral sources. And we can defend North America from invasion if we ever decide to, so most of the Asian and African refugees won't be able to get here if we decide to lock it down. I'm definitely counting Canada in this as I assume the US will just annex Canada once the food and water situation in the US gets bad enough.

[@juliebarks3195]

Is that you Guy.?

[@Jag4biz]

@@alanj9978there is no well stocked ‘fortress’ no matter how big or well stocked that can deal with what’s coming in my view. Always recall, we’re dealing the result of having disrupted the biosphere itself. The day of ‘fortress ANYWHERE’ is at least 50 years in the past. No army or expanse of water can protect from wide spread radiation, toxic or airborne biological agents, global chaos in ever extreme weather conditions. Let alone internal societal dynamics that unfortunately with not unrealistic assumptions, in some scenarios, would lead to the young in future generations having staring roles in a real life ‘Mad Max’ society…more likely…all to say, one can be very miserable long before extinction. That is why we work everyday to help maintain what are, we believe, critical pillars of societal continuity. Even if MUCH simpler and hopefully much closer to earth. In my my view, please forgive me for saying so clearly, simply thinking, ‘ok, millions or billions will die or suffer grave dislocation but here, we’ll be OK’ is well beyond unrealistic or immature. We must work today for a distributed energy system, it is the thread by which, probably the only one, that has a hope of tying the many layers of issue possibly into a ‘civil’ result. …just as a centralized model of fossil fuels has brought the entire world with all attributes included - religion, spirituality, economics, politics, law…you name it, all is impacted by the ‘energy river’ carrying all of us and, the centralized fossil fuel system having brought us all, the entire world society and all religions and governments, to this point.