Know Yoga Ireland

Quite literally, philosophy means love of wisdom. We seek to understand fundamental truths about ourselves, others, the world, and so on. What is free will? What is the mesh? We are the mesh! What might it mean to live a good life, given this. The ecological emergency demands that we need to pay attention to what is critically and urgently emerging. 

This is an extract from my book, "Love is Green: compassion as responsibility in the ecological emergency". I've read a short section here on how we might understand entire systems rather than just individuals, or individual humans, as having a 'good' of their own in the Kantian sense. This means that we can meaningfully extend our respect, but more, our compassion, not just to other individuals but to entire systems, like forests, oceans, and even the great Earth itself. I hope you listen to and think about these questions and come back to me with your own thoughts. 

An important idea that is central to Dōgen Zenji's Shōbōgenzō, practice realisation summarises an approach to existence which recognises that what we do, from cooking to cleaning, from conflict to communication, is an expression of our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to existence. When we become aware of this, we can shift how we approach each action, seeing ourselves as engaged in the process of awareness, and even awareness-raising, even as we go about our everyday tasks. This is essential if we are to shift from the blind inevitability of cause and effect to the possibility of becoming agents for the values and beliefs that mean the most to us. This is practice realisation. 

There is no easy way out of the predicament we are in: we are in an ecological emergency, and we are inevitably going to die. There are some similarities between our responses to these two inevitabilities!

In this episode, I link our understandable desire to avoid thinking about what we are, and how we've come to be conscious, self-aware creatures (with the capacity to reflect on our own demise) with our own determination to be in control, to possess, to see humans as the be all and end all of the evolutionary project. Instead, I suggest we reflect on Asmita, the yogic concept of ego, and also on Brahmacharya. I use the latter in a broad sense to mean self restraint. I link Erich Fromm's insights on how we conduct ourselves in dialogue. In short, there's a lot in this episode. I'm happy to have a chat with anyone about these ponderings, and I hope my ECOnnect Patanjali students in particular get a chance to reflect on this episode, and do the exercise at the end. Happy listening!