I love gulls. I watch them wheeling and soaring, effortlessly riding the winds above the waters of the old docks where I live. Whatever the weather, the big herring gulls are always at one with the wind, responding with outstretched wings to every nuance and current of air; their intelligence distributed through their whole feathered form as they ply their multidimensional home. In the late afternoon, they spiral up and up, swirling and communing together high up in the heavens for what looks to me like the sheer joy of flying. I share their joy and feel transported up into it. Their classic piercing calls harken to the sea, our greater home.
The gulls live with me, with all of us, in the Earth. No, that isn’t a spelling mistake. I mean in the Earth rather than on the Earth. It was ecophilosopher and anthropologist David Abram who pointed out this crucial difference and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Much as I loved David Attenborough’s magnificent Life on Earth TV series, Life doesn’t actually only exist on the outer earthly crust of the planet. Our planet is spinning around constantly on its axis at around 1000 mph and if we were really standing on the very outer surface of the planet, the clouds would whizz by constantly at a speed almost too fast for the eye to see. Yet, on a still day, you can lie down and look up, watching fluffy white clouds motionless, high above in the blue firmament. This is, of course, because the whole atmosphere, for a number of miles upwards, is also spinning as an intrinsic part of the planet.
The air is not just nothing, a void. It is full and is a life giving elixir created by the myriad lives of creatures and trees, grasses, algae, waters, geology and Mother Earth herself. We breathe this spirit deep into our lungs, and are sustained by its nourishing oxygen; breathing out, we exhale carbon dioxide. In a wonderful reciprocal relationship, we interbreathe with all the green beings of this earth: the trees, grass and all plants take in our exhaled carbon dioxide for their growth, and gift us with air enriched by precious oxygen.
This atmosphere is definitely not nothing: not a lack, but rather a fullness, a plenitude. So we live right in the Earth, miles under its edge, so to speak. Just shifting our perspective like this, can help counter our cultural assumption that we are somehow apart from Mother Earth, alienated souls scrabbling around on the outer surface.
These days, many people feel that our Western culture has become far too materialistic and they understandably point to our grossly unsustainable hyperconsumerism. But strangely, I would argue that we are not materialistic enough. We don’t value the materials we use so wastefully, behaving as if everything were expendable. We don’t relate to the world as if we were intrinsically part of it. Being overly detached and removed, we treat matter as just disposable ‘stuff’ or ‘things’, as if we were outside and not part of it.
This extends to our own bodies, which we often don’t appreciate, feeling as if stuck inside, imprisoned in our own materiality. And this is in spite of the fact that our bodies – these miraculous sensuous organisms – are the sole means we have for sensing and relating to the whole of existence. We look to escape the confines of materiality, perhaps subconsciously fearing death. No wonder our propensity for the mental realm of abstractions as well as the burgeoning virtual world hold such attraction for us.
If we really were to identify with our materiality, we might then realise that we are a piece of the Earth, which is our larger body, and our relation with the so called ‘environment’ (conventionally seen as somehow exterior and apart from us) would naturally have to change radically.
Many religious approaches as well as much modern East meets West spirituality have long tended to downplay our materiality and the body to varying degrees. As a long term meditator myself, I’ve often pondered on the attention given in New Age spiritual approaches, to focussing on a non-dual dimension, seemingly beyond and deeper than the material world. There’s often a New Age wish to spiritually transcend the physical plane entirely.
What has perplexed me is how this desired non-dual consciousness, which is seen as a goal, often seems to exclude most of existence and is reduced to an internal sense of non separation or “not two”. Strange as it seems, many spiritual but not religious approaches can end up, in effect, supporting a view that downgrades the material world in a way that is not dissimilar to those folk who view the world as being merely a storehouse of resources to be exploited for human benefit.
In this way both some so-called ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’ attitudes can all too easily continue without too much concern for their effects on the Earth’s living systems. Both views tend to distance us from the actual living breathing world and the care for this, our only home. (And just to say, I’m well aware that there are more nuanced and subtle spiritual views which do really attempt to exclude nothing, which could be characterised as embracing the non-duality of duality and non-duality).
The poet Rilke says it more eloquently,
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
Much of the misunderstanding around this in modern Western society seems to me to arise from our unwitting and pervasive anthropocentrism, whereby we assume that we humans are the only real locus of intelligence on earth, and this inevitably leads to our weird sense of isolation from the life of the earth. In contrast, it’s well established that virtually every known indigenous oral culture just doesn’t make this kind of distinction between animate and inanimate matter.
Mind is not a human property: it’s a quality of the Earth. As we begin to loosen up, to allow the life of the things around us, and to speak accordingly, we start to notice that this awareness we thought was ours does not really belong to us. It is the earth that’s really intelligent, not humans apart. Along with the other animals, the plants, and the drifting clouds, we are bodily immersed in the mind of this living world.
David Abram
I wander along the summer dockside where the gulls wheel above. I feel the cool breeze off the water caressing and cooling my bare arms, curling around my skin sensuously. From my sensing body’s perspective, there is no doubt that I am being touched by and in relationship with the living wind; my abdomen expands, the cool breath entering deep into my lungs. I exchange greetings with a passerby. Again, it’s the mystery of the wind: breath from our lungs modulated by our vocal cords becomes our speech, words; particular ripples travelling through the etheric medium between us, in which we are immersed.
I reflect on how even our modern term ‘atmosphere’ derives from the Sanskrit term Atman, which stood for ‘soul’ as well as the ‘breath’. It’s no wonder that indigenous peoples saw the wind, air and breath, as a sacred power, as spirit, as that which joined humans to all other creatures, plants and the mountains and seas. We are all intimately entangled, interbreathing together in this invisible living medium we swim in, like fish in the sea.
I came to realise clearly that the mind is not other than mountains, rivers, the great wide earth, sun, moon, stars.
Dogen 1200 – 1253, founder of the Soto school of Zen
