• emptiness
• reality is empty (shunyata)
• the visible is the tip of the iceberg
  • past lineage and future events of the localized appearance are hidden from view, as are other past forms associated with its history

• The Great Simplifcation
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE39xfNRRyw

Description

• Nate hosts this discussion on what constitutes an ecological civilization with guests
  • William Rees
  • Rex Weyler
  • Nora Bateson

Reflections Overall,

• an insightful discussion on the polycrisis and
• reflections on what is in store for civilization.

• what we are experiencing has been decades in the making and
• the solutions-oriented approach to solving problems has only treated the symptoms and indeed has made things worse.

Rex

• emphasized the folly of human exceptionalism that has been socially normalized and which
• continues to create the major separation that fuels the polycrisis.
• Not recognizing that we are nature, not recognizing our animal nature
• we look upon nature with an attitude of controlling nature, rather than flowing with her.
• advocated Taoism as a more consistent way to frame nature rather than the reductionist, control methodology that separates us from nature.

Nora's perspective is the folly of abstraction that generates fixed preconceptions of aspects of nature that we then reify.

• The fixed preconceptions are solidified but they are an oversimplified version of reality,
• and that oversimplification leads to actualizing the cliche"a little knowledge is dangerous" into civilization
• in other words, the continuous manufacture of progress traps.

William sees our impending crash as not only inevitable, but natural.

• In this, he concurs with Rex's perspective.
• Human beings are simply another species and like them,
  • we are susceptible to population explosions when negative feedbacks are removed,
  • which can lead to nature self-correcting with mass dieoff when resources are overconsumed.

• BEing journey
  • I think this is also part of our sense of who we are as humans, as ourselves,
  • and the idea of the self, the individual, and even the humans as this individual species,
  • these divisions are arbitrary.
  • I don't stop at my skin.
  • I'm breathing air.
  • I'm drinking the water.
  • I'm eating food.
  • I'm eating an apple.
  • When I eat an apple, when do the molecules of the apple become me? -When I'm chewing it in my mouth?
    • when it's in my stomach?
    • when my system has broken down the nutrients?
    • when is that point that nitrogen molecule becomes me versus the apple?
  • I would propose that apple is me when it's growing on the tree.
  • I think of the blossoms of the tree and the bees.
    • The blossoms of the tree,
    • the tree can't reproduce without the bees.
    • So is the bee part of the tree?
    • The bee is part of the reproductive system of the tree.
    • So the bee is part of the tree,
    • the tree is part of the bee.
    • The bee needs the tree.
    • The tree needs the bee.
  • This is just one simple relationship,
    • but it's not simple at all because
      • the bee needs a lot of other things,
      • and the tree needs a lot of other things.
      • And the mycelium and the soil.
  • We talk about a tree and the soil and the atmosphere and the bee as if they're all separate things.
  • And that's convenient because our language has nouns that mean certain things.
  • So we want to talk about trees.
  • It's nice to have a word for tree,
    • but we get it in our head that the tree is separate from the soil,
    • which is separate from the atmosphere,
    • which is separate from the bee.
  • And I'm saying no, those divisions are indeed somewhat arbitrary,
  • but we use them for convenience.
  • But the soil's not the soil without the relationship with the tree
    • and the tree's not the tree without the relationship with the soil and the atmosphere.
    • And the atmosphere is not the atmosphere without the relationshi to the tree, to the bee, to me and the soil.
  • So to me that's the essence of ecology.
  • And that we have to expand this sense of self,
    • individual self as well as
    • the species of humans.
• And this isolated self, I think is a socially reinforced construct, - but we get sucked into it.
  • And we talk about relationships in ecology and we talk about the value of all living things,
  • but in our actions we come back to the individual self.

• Zen and deep evolution: The optical delusion of separation

• Fred W. Allendorf

• 2018

Source

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6099813/

Abstract

• The Buddha taught that everything is connected and constantly changing.

• We are living in a time of unprecedented rates of extinction.

• However, the problems underlying extinction generally do not result from a lack of scientific understanding, -but they rather result from an unwillingness to take the needed action.
• I present mindfulness and meditative aspects of Zen practice
  • that provide the deeper “knowing,” or awareness that we need to inspire action on these problems.