Ecology of the Heart Part 2

In my last blog post, I ended with talking about the need for a culture of nurturing. Meditation is just such a culture. We place the mind of fearfulness in the cradle of loving kindness and we do it over and over. It takes a lot of time and a lot of energy, and it doesn’t happen overnight, but it does gradually transform our perceptions. We can feel this, we know this, and so we all keep coming back to meditation. We wouldn’t do it if it didn’t do something for us.

Let’s look at this view. I laid out a little bit of it already, this sense of nurturing, patience, humility, of wow, we’re in a giant single globe, this single entity, and it isn’t possible for any one little part of it to control the rest of it. And that is probably good. Whenever people try to do that, it seems to go terribly wrong. 

Maybe a better approach that is slower and more humble as I call it, and it’s humble because we have to realize that we can’t control others. It wouldn’t work anyway, even if you could control everyone. As soon as you stopped controlling them, they would just go back to whatever they wanted to do anyway, because we haven’t addressed the root of the problem.

In Dharma, or teachings on meditation, they talk about this, that we want to address the root of the problem. We don’t want to address the resultant situation and just tend that but never really look at the causes or the root of it. 

If you look at Indigenous wisdom traditions around the world, regardless of how incredibly far apart they were and disconnected geographically and even culturally, they maybe didn’t have any social interaction in certain cases, they all developed similar practices and ways of looking at their relationship to the world. 

We would say, as people in the modern world, that they lived in nature. I’m generalizing, not everyone says that, but that is a general idea that many of us might say. In the Indigenous traditions they didn’t conceive of it that way, they didn’t feel like they were in something, they felt like they were part of something. Isn’t that interesting?

In my next post, I’ll share some of the prophecies made in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition that turned out to be pretty precise.

This blog post is part of an ongoing  series:

Ecology of the Heart Part 1
Ecology of the Heart Part 2
Ecology of the Heart Part 3
Ecology of the Heart Part 4
Ecology of the Heart Part 5
Ecology of the Heart Part 6
Ecology of the Heart Part 7
Ecology of the Heart Part 8
Ecology of the Heart Part 9
Ecology of the Heart Part 10
Ecology of the Heart Part 11
Ecology of the Heart Part 12