{"id":2435,"date":"2021-11-22T07:31:49","date_gmt":"2021-11-22T07:31:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regenesis.org.au\/?p=2435"},"modified":"2023-09-25T04:52:46","modified_gmt":"2023-09-25T04:52:46","slug":"the-ecology-of-revelation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regenesis.org.au\/2021\/11\/22\/the-ecology-of-revelation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ecology of Revelation"},"content":{"rendered":"
Insights from Tibetan Buddhism<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n The Buddhist scholar, Antonio Terrone (JSRNC 8.4 (2014) pp. 460-482), has explored how the Tibetan Buddhist terma (treasure) tradition of revealed teachings is based on forming an interdependent exchange between humans and the land they inhabit.\u00a0 The terma tradition is associated with the 8th century mystic Padmasambhava who is credited with bringing the tantric form of Buddhism to Tibet, at the invitation of King Trisong Detsen of the Yarlung Dynasty, to help with the establishment of Tibet’s first Buddhist monastery at Samy\u00e9, on the banks of the Tsangpo River, south of Lhasa.<\/p>\n Padmasambhava, who became known as Guru Rinpoche (Precious Teacher), is the foundational figure in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.\u00a0 Known as the ancient lineage, it brings together different elements that define Tibet’s Buddhist culture:<\/p>\n Terrone concludes that as a result: “The source of the Treasure becomes a place deserving respect, protection, and devotion on both religious and ecological levels. I call this phenomenon \u2018the ecology of revelation\u2019, and I maintain that this is a fundamental socio-religious ethic characterized by respect for the environment and awareness of humans\u2019 connection to it.” He suggest that Tibetans\u2019 interactions with their environment are rooted in indigenous understandings of their landscape as a locus of human exchange with the divinities that inhabit it for both this-world material gain (good harvest, livestock health, well-being, etc.) and transcendental purposes (revelation, spiritual realization, favorable rebirth, and so forth) – Terrone, 2010.A Different State of Consciousness<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n In my memoir, Call of the Dakini<\/em> (2021), I discuss how it was my immersion in these mythopoetic ways of knowing, through engaging in tantric practices and the mystical practice path of guru yoga, that I began to see parallels with the nature of Australia’s First Nations knowledge systems, and that of many other First Nations people’s who have retained a profoundly eco-spiritual relationship with their natural world. It is an entirely different state of consciousness than that which is enshrined in modernity, with its focus on individualism, individual rights, and progress as rising material wealth.<\/p>\n These First Nation knowledge systems cut through the deeply entrenched binary nature of modern thought that privileges the human species over all others, which sets us on one side of the ledger, and all other lifeforms and the natural world on the other.<\/p>\n This binary construct is found in the very foundations of the monotheistic Abrahamic religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.\u00a0 In its foundational myth expressed in Genesis 1.26: that God created man in his image and gave him dominion over the Earth and all its lifeforms.<\/p>\n Then God said, \u201cLet us\u00a0make mankind\u00a0in our image,\u00a0in our likeness,\u00a0so that they may rule\u00a0over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky,\u00a0over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a<\/a>]<\/sup>\u00a0and over all the creatures that move along the ground.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The Genesis myth provides a religious\/spiritual justification for the logic of ‘extractivism’\u2014that human wellbeing is based on our ability to extract wealth\/value from the Earth and all its lifeforms, that other lifeforms have no soul and are therefore little more than biological ‘machines’, as can be seen in the logic of the factory farming of animals, the use of ‘lab rats’ for medical experimentation, and the casting of those humans we exploit as ‘no more than animals’ or ‘sub-human’, ie: not truly human\u2014an idea long projected onto the people of Africa and other so-called primitive people.<\/p>\n This foundational myth of human exceptionalism has led to existential loneliness in our profound alienation from the world around us. We seek to transcend this by having some creatures as our domestic ‘pets’ with a quasi human status through emotional attachment, to set aside some areas of nature as ‘national parks’ and ‘protected wilderness areas’, to seek to revive our spirits by going hiking or camping in the bush, swimming in the wild untamed waters of the ocean.\u00a0 But these attempts remain fragile.\u00a0 We remain pervaded by a sense of existential angst. Pets are abandoned when inconvenient; national parks vulnerable to the discovering of important minerals beneath the ground; wilderness areas left untended to become the sources of huge infernos in raging bushfires.Green Nativism and Eco-Fascism<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n While denial of the climate\/environmental crises currently enveloping the human species has long been the preferred strategy of the business elite, particularly those dependent on the resources sector such as in Australia, a more worrying trend is now emerging in the form of Green Nativism, an environmental populism that reverts to earlier tropes of the eco-fascism that pervaded Nazi ideology.<\/p>\n Will human exceptionalism contract to protecting ‘our people’ in the face of the swelling tide of refugees expected to be fleeing climate related devastation and violence?<\/p>\n Will we see a new version of neo-malthusian and ethno-nationalist thinking shaping right wing populism against the ‘other’, the ones who are not us.<\/p>\n In Spain, Santiago Abascal, leader of the populist Vox party, has\u00a0called<\/a>\u00a0for a \u201cpatriotic\u201d restoration of a \u201cgreen Spain, clean and prosperous\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n France\u2019s National Front, once a bastion of derisive climate denial, has founded a green wing called New Ecology, with Marine Le Pen, president of the party, vowing to create the \u201cworld\u2019s leading ecological civilization\u201d with a\u00a0focus<\/a>\u00a0on locally grown foods.<\/span><\/p>\n\n