July Newsbyte

After a break, I’m looking again at the six maxims  suggested as ethical preparation for climate catastrophe, teasing out some links with the Dhamma.

Instead of focussing on the horrid side of climate change, the fourth maxim asks us to embrace our good fortune to be living through this crisis. This parallels with the Dhamma teaching on Transcendent Dependent Arising.

“Dependant Arising” refers to a step-by-step process by which one thing leads to another; the first step lays down the conditions for the second and so on. Many of you will be familiar with this teaching, showing how ignorance leads to dukkha (usually translated as suffering but including even minor irritations). Transcendent Dependant Arising completes the process, showing how awareness of dukkha sets off another chain of conditions which culminate in liberation. 

This teaching is better known in Jhana schools but also applies in vipassana, though it needs some steadiness of attention to discern the links. I’ve found it helpful and encouraging at times of distress and thus an apt support for this maxim.

There are twelve steps in the process, though we may repeat these a million times before we reach the end of suffering. For simplicity I’ll focus on the earlier stages.

The starting point is dukkha. The anxiety we feel as we contemplate climate change is an ‘astonishing and unique opportunity’ to cultivate the path to transcendence.

This may seem fanciful, naive. How could drought, wildfires, social breakdown and the like facilitate transcendence? And yet there are countless examples of how acute suffering led people to spiritual renewal.

Our usual mistake is to keep suffering at arm’s length, fretting about how awful things are, comforting ourselves with food, alcohol, escapism. Transcendence requires intimacy with the sensations and feelings of dukkha. As we explore these mindfully, we find something within us that refuses to capitulate, insists that we will somehow find a way through these troubles.

Thus, dukkha, examined mindfully, becomes a condition for faith in our innate ability to overcome dukkha. This is the second link in Transcendent Arising - faith that we will find a way through difficulty.

Luckily we have access to the Dhamma. Faith can find refuge there, knowing there are teachings, practices, and a sangha to guide us. In these supportive conditions, the determination to overcome dukkha can be experienced as a form of joy – a positive, life-affirming energy that carries an intuition of goodness.  Thus, faith is a condition for joy, the third step in the series.

I’ll stop here for now, describe some following stages next month. If this teaching is new to you, I hope you’ll examine it, see whether it could be a helpful support for your troubles, whether these centre around climate change or more personal issues. Reflect on your practice with dukkha and whether this has or could stir faith; whether faith could be a source of joy in life.  

To help the teaching sink deeper, try to spot these links in vipassana. First settle yourself in meditation, then bring the difficulty to mind; does the distress overwhelm mindfulness, or can you feel the feelings? How might you describe whatever keeps you practicing? Would it be the faith that mindfulness will somehow show you a way through?

Well done if you’ve managed to make that first link in the path to transcendence. If not, try again tomorrow. If and when you can perceive faith arising from dukkha, explore this. Does faith have an energetic manifestation in the body, are there associated feelings, tensions? Practice meditating on faith itself.

In subsequent meditation sessions, as you get more confident that dukkha, observed mindfully, leads to faith, it may become possible to detect joy within the experience of faith. Not an excited giddiness, but the joy at having the courage to be mindful in the face of dukkha. Learn to relax with this joy, feel its energy within the body, how it affects the breath. We may still seem far from transcending dukkha, but we can enjoy the path thereto.

Although the problem of climate change remains as a real existential threat to humanity, this teaching helps us make the best of a bad situation, appreciating this astonishing and unique opportunity to forge a path to transcendence.