World As Lover;
World As Self
Seeing the world as oneself - or as a lover - transforms ordinary
reality and provides a greater sense of purpose
by Joanna Macy
One of the articles in Exploring Our Interconnectedness (IC#34)
Winter 1993, Page 22
Copyright (c)1993, 1996 by Context Institute
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Spiritual traditions have tended to look at the world in four major ways:
as a battlefield, as a trap, as a lover, and as the self. The first two
- as a stage set for our moral battles or as a prison to escape - are probably
familiar, and have in many ways contributed to our lack of care for the
world. But what of the other two? Might they shed some useful light on life
in an interconnected world?
This is the focus of Joanna Macy's wonderful book, World As Lover; World
as Self, published by Parallax Press, from which we have taken the following
excerpts. Joanna Macy is a scholar of Buddhism and general systems theory.
She is known in many countries for her trainings designed to empower creative,
sustained social action.
The way we define and delimit the self is arbitrary. We can place it between
our ears and have it looking out from our eyes, or we can widen it to include
the air we breathe, or at other moments, we can cast its boundaries farther
to include the oxygen-giving trees and plankton, our external lungs, and
beyond them the web of life in which they are sustained.
I used to think that I ended with my skin, that everything within the skin
was me and everything outside the skin was not. But now you've read these
words, and the concepts they represent are reaching your cortex, so "the
process" that is me now extends as far as you.
And where, for that matter, did this process begin? I certainly can trace
it to my teachers, some of whom I never met, and to my husband and children,
who give me courage and support to do the work I do, and to the plant and
animal beings who sustain my body.
What I am, as systems theorists have helped me see, is a "flow-through."
I am a flow-through of matter, energy, and information, which is transformed
in turn by my own experiences and intentions.
To experience the world as an extended self and its story as our own extended
story involves no surrender or eclipse of our individuality. The liver,
leg, and lung that are "mine" are highly distinct from each other,
thank goodness, and each has a distinctive role to play. The larger selfness
we discover today is not an undifferentiated unity. Our recognition
of this may be the third part of an unfolding of consciousness that began
a long time ago, like the third movement of a symphony.
In the first movement, our infancy as a species, we felt no separation from
the natural world around us. Trees, rocks, and plants surrounded us with
a living presence as intimate and pulsing as our own bodies. In that primal
intimacy, which anthropologists call "participation mystique,"
we were as one with our world as a child in the mother's womb.
Then self-consciousness arose and gave us distance on our world. We needed
that distance in order to make decisions and strategies, in order to measure,
judge, and to monitor our judgments. With the emergence of free-will, the
fall out of the Garden of Eden, the second movement began - the lonely and
heroic journey of the ego.
Nowadays, yearning to reclaim a sense of wholeness, some of us tend to disparage
that movement of separation from nature, but it brought great gains for
which we can be grateful. The distanced and observing eye brought us tools
of science, and a priceless view of the vast, orderly intricacy of our world.
The recognition of our individuality brought us trial by jury and the Bill
of Rights.
Now, harvesting these gains, we are ready to return. The third movement
begins. Having gained distance and sophistication of perception, we can
turn and recognize who we have been all along. Now it can dawn on us: we
are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can
come home again - and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible
and poignantly beautiful way than before, in our infancy.
WORLD AS LOVER
It is my experience that the world itself has a role to play in our liberation.
Its very pressures, pains, and risks can wake us up - release us from the
bonds of ego and guide us home to our vast, true nature. For some of us,
our love for the world is so passionate that we cannot ask it to wait until
we are enlightened.
To view the world as lover is to look at the world as a most intimate
and gratifying partner. We find some of the richest expressions of our erotic
relationship to the world in Hinduism, for example in Krishna worship, but
this erotic affirmation of the phenomenal world is not limited to Hinduism.
Ancient Goddess religions, now being explored (at last!) carry it too, as
do strains of Sufism and the Kabbalah, and Christianity has its tradition
of bridal mysticism.
It also occurs outside the religious metaphor. A poet friend of mine went
through a period of such personal loss that she was catapulted into extreme
loneliness. Falling apart into a nervous breakdown, she went to New York
City and lived alone. She walked the streets for months until she found
her wholeness again. A phrase of hers echoes in my mind: "I learned
to move in the world as if it were my lover."
Another Westerner who sees the world as lover is Italian storyteller Italo
Calvino. In his little book, Cosmicomics, he describes the evolution
of life from the perspective of an individual who experienced it from the
beginning, even before the Big Bang. The chapter I want to recount begins
with a sentence from science: "Through the calculations begun by Edwin
P. Hubble on the galaxies' velocity of recession, we can establish the moment
when all the universe's matter was concentrated in a single point, before
it began to expand in space."
"We were all there, where else could we have been?" says Calvino's
narrator, Qfwfq, as he describes his experience. "We were all in that
one point - and, man, was it crowded!" Given the conditions, irritations
were almost inevitable. See, in addition to all those people, "you
have to add all the stuff we had to keep piled up in there: all the material
that was to serve afterwards to form the universe ... from the nebula of
Andromeda to the Vosges Mountains to beryllium isotopes. And on top of that
we were always bumping against the Z'zu family's household goods: camp beds,
mattresses, baskets. ..."
So there were, naturally enough, complaints and gossip, but none ever attached
to Mrs. Pavacini. (Since most names in the story have no vowels, I have
given her a name we can pronounce.) "Mrs. Pavacini, her bosom, her
thighs, her orange dressing gown," the sheer memory of her fills our
narrator
"with a blissful, generous emotion. ... The fact that she
went to bed with her friend Mr. DeXuaeauX, was well-known. But in a point,
if there's a bed, it takes up the whole point, so it isn't a question of
going to bed but of being there, because anybody in the point is also in
the bed. So consequently it was inevitable that she was in bed with each
of us. If she'd been another person, there's no telling all the things that
might have been said about her. ..."
This state of affairs could have gone on indefinitely, but something extraordinary
happened. An idea occurred to Mrs. Pavacini: "Oh boys, if only
I had some room, how I'd like to make some pasta for you!" Here I quote
in part from my favorite longest sentence in literature, which closes this
particular chapter in Calvino's collection:
"And in that moment we all thought of the space that her
round arms would occupy moving backward and forward over the great mound
of flour and eggs ... while her arms kneaded and kneaded, white and shiny
with oil up to the elbows, and we thought of the space the flour would occupy
and the wheat for the flour and the fields to raise the wheat and the mountains
from which the water would flow to irrigate the fields ... of the space
it would take for the Sun to arrive with its rays, to ripen the wheat; of
the space for the Sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gases and burn;
of the quantities of stars and galaxies and galactic masses in flight through
space which would be needed to hold suspended every galaxy, every nebula,
every sun, every planet, and at the same time we thought of it, this space
was inevitably being formed, at the same time that Mrs. Pavacini was uttering
those words: "... ah, what pasta, boys!" the point that contained
her and all of us was expanding in a halo of distance in light years and
light centuries and billions of light millennia and we were being hurled
to the four corners of the universe ... and she dissolved into I don't know
what kind of energy-light-heat, she, Mrs. Pavacini, she who in the midst
of our closed, petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, "Boys,
the pasta I could make for you!" a true outburst of general love, initiating
at the same time the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself,
and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making
possible billions and billions of suns, and planets, and fields of wheat,
and Mrs. Pavacinis scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading
with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms and she lost at that very moment,
and we, mourning her loss."
But is she lost? Or is she equally present, in every moment, her act of
love embodied in every unfolding of this amazing world?
Whether we see it as Krishna or as Mrs. Pavacini, that teasing, loving presence
is in the monsoon clouds and the peacock's cry that heralds the monsoon,
and in the plate of good pasta.
For when you see the world as lover, every being, every phenomenon, can
become - if you have a clever, appreciative eye - an expression of that
ongoing, erotic impulse. It takes form right now in each one of us and in
everyone and everything we encounter - the bus driver, the clerk at the
checkout counter, the leaping squirrel.
As we seek to discover the lover in each lifeform, you can find yourself
in the dance of rasa-lila, sweet play, where each of the milkmaids
who yearned for Krishna finds him magically at her side, her very own partner
in the dance. The one beloved has become many, and the world itself her
lover.
WE HAVE MET MANY TIMES ...
The following stories grew out of Joanna Macy's experience living and
working with Tibetan refugees in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains.
One afternoon at his residence in Dharamsala, India, I told His Holiness
the Dalai Lama how Buddhist teachings have inspired my work to empower social
and environmental activists. I told him how they help us experience our
interexistence with all beings. In Northern California, for example, in
direct actions on behalf of the old-growth forests, they help us confront
the loggers and lumber company executives without fear or blame, because
we can remind ourselves now of our deep interconnections throughout our
former lives.
"How can Western people know this if they do not believe in rebirth?"
His Holiness asked.
"For rebirth we substitute evolution," I said. And to illustrate
I took his hand and led him on a two-minute evolutionary remembering. "Each
atom in each cell in this hand goes back to the beginning of time"...
to the first explosion of light and energy, to the formation of the galaxies
and solar systems, to the fires and rains that bathed our planet, and the
life-forms that issued from its primordial seas. ... "We have met and
been together many times."
"Yes, of course," he said quietly. "Very good."
DEEP COMPASSION
Another lesson that summer also occurred casually, in passing. In order
to help the Tibetans I wanted to tell their story to the world - a story
I was just beginning to discover. I had stunning photos of the Tibetans
in exile, of their faces and crafts, and the majestic lama dances of their
lineage. I envisaged an illustrated article for a popular periodical,
but to hook Western sympathies and enlist Western support, such an article,
I figured, should include the horrors from which these refugees had escaped.
Stories of appalling inhumanity and torture on the part of the Chinese occupation
had come to me only peripherally, in snatches, from laypeople and other
Westerners. The Rinpoches themselves were reluctant to describe or discuss
them.
I presented my argument to Choegyal Rinpoche, the most accessible and confiding
of the tulkus. He had been a mature thirteen-year-old when the Chinese invaded
his monastery, and he had his own memories to tap.
Only when I convinced Choegyal that sharing these memories with the Western
public would aid the plight of Tibetan refugees did he begin to disclose
some of the details of what he had seen and suffered at the hands of the
Chinese before his flight from Tibet. The stories came in snatches of conversations,
as we paused outside the new craft production center or walked over to the
monastery in its temporary, rented quarters.
Many of these elements, the forms of intimidation, coercion, and torture
employed, have become by now, over a quarter of a century later, public
knowledge. Reports now available through agencies like Amnesty International
and the International Council of Jurists, may not have the poignant immediacy
of Choegyal's words, but they give the gist.
The lesson I learned, however, and that will stay forever with me, is not
about the human capacity for cruelty. I was standing with Choegyal under
a rhododendron tree, the sunlight flickering on his face through the leaves
and the blossoms the color of his robes. He had just divulged what perhaps
was the most painful of his memories - what the Chinese military had done
to his monks in the great prayer hall, as his teachers hid him on the mountainside
above the monastery. I gasped with shock, and breathed hard to contain the
grief and anger that arose in me. Then I was stilled by the look he turned
on me, with eyes that shone with unshed tears.
"Poor Chinese," he murmured.
With a shudder of acknowledgment, I realized that the tears in his eyes
were not for himself or for his monks or for his once great monastery of
Dugu in the land of Kham in Eastern Tibet. Those tears were for the destroyers
themselves.
"Poor Chinese," he said, "they make such bad karma for themselves.
"
I cannot emulate that reach of compassion, but I have seen it. I have recognized
it. I know now that it is within our human capacity. And that changes for
me the face of life.
MY MOTHER, MY CHILD
One day, after my morning time with the children, I was walking down the
mountain to meet again with my Khampa friends. On the way I accompanied
my oldest, eleven-year-old son to a Dharma class for Westerners at a school
for young Tibetan lamas. The English-speaking nun in charge was teaching
and she said, "So countless are all sentient beings, and so many their
births throughout time, that each at some point was your mother." She
then explained a practice for developing compassion: it consisted of viewing
each person as your mother in a former life.
I played with the idea as I walked on down the mountain, following a narrow,
winding road between cedars and rhododendron trees. The astronomical number
of lifetimes that the nun's words evoked boggled my mind. What a pity, I
thought, that this was not a practice I could use, since reincarnation hardly
featured as part of my belief system. Then I paused on the path as the figure
of a coolie approached.
Coolies, or load-bearing laborers, were a familiar sight on the roads of
Dalhousie, and the most heavily laden of all were those who struggled up
the mountain with mammoth logs on their backs. They were low-caste mountain
folk whose bent, gaunt forms were dwarfed by their burdens, many meters
long. I had become accustomed to the sight of them, and accustomed as well
to the sense of consternation that it triggered in me. I would usually look
away in discomfort, and pass by with internally muttered judgments about
the kind of social and economic system that so exploited its own population.
This afternoon I stood stock still. I watched the slight, bandy-legged figure
move slowly uphill towards me, negotiating his burden, which looked like
the trunk of a cedar, around the bend. Backing up to prop the rear of the
log against the bank and ease the weight of it, the coolie paused to catch
his breath. "Namaste," I said softly, and stepped hesitantly
toward him.
I wanted to see his face. But he was still strapped under his log, and I
would have had to crouch down under it to look up at his features, which
I ached now to see. What face did she now wear, this dear one who had long
ago mothered me? My heart trembled with gladness and distress. I wanted
to touch that dark, half-glimpsed cheek, and meet those lidded eyes bent
to the ground. I wanted to undo and rearrange the straps that I might share
her burden up the mountain.
Whether out of respect or embarrassment, I did not do that. I simply stood
five feet away and drank in every feature of that form - the grizzled chin,
the rag turban, the gnarled hands grasping the forward overhang of log.
The customary comments of my internal social scientist evaporated. What
appeared now before me was not an oppressed class or an indictment of an
economic system, so much as a distinct, irreplaceable, and incomparably
precious being. My mother. My child. A thousand questions rose urgently
in my mind. Where was he headed? When would he reach home? Would there be
loved ones to greet him and a good meal to eat? Was there rest in store,
and songs, and embraces?
When the coolie heaved the log off the bank to balance its weight on his
back again and proceed uphill, I headed on down the mountain path. I had
done nothing to change his life, or betray my discovery of our relationship.
But the Dalhousie mountainside shone in a different light; the furnishings
of my mind had been rearranged, my heart broken open. How odd, I thought,
that I did not need to believe in reincarnation for that to happen.
SHAMBHALA WARRIORS: A PROPHECY
There is a prophecy that arose in Tibetan Buddhism over 12 centuries ago.
I learned it from my Tibetan friends in India when, in 1980, I heard many
of them speaking of this ancient prophecy as coming true in our time. The
signs it foretold, they said, are recognizable now, in our generation. Since
this prophecy speaks of a time of great danger - of apocalypse - I was,
as you can imagine, very interested to find out about it.
There are varying interpretations of this prophecy. Some portray the coming
of the kingdom of Shambhala as an internal event, a metaphor for one's inner
spiritual journey independent of the world around us. Others present it
as an entirely external event that will unfold in our world independent
of what we may choose to do or what our participation may be in the healing
of our world. A third version of the prophecy was given to me by my friend
and teacher Choegyal Rinpoche of the TashiJong community in northern India.
There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. In this era, great
barbarian powers have arisen. One is in the Western Hemisphere and one in
the center of the Eurasian land mass. Although these two powers have spent
their wealth in preparations to annihilate each other, they have much in
common: weapons of unfathomable destructive power, and technologies that
lay waste our world. In this era, when the whole future of sentient life
seems to hang by the frailest of threads, the kingdom of Shambhala begins
to emerge.
You can't go there, for it is not a place, it is not a geopolitical entity.
It exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors - that is the
term Choegyal used, "warriors." Nor can you recognize a Shambhala
warrior when you see her or him, for they wear no uniform, or insignia,
and they carry no banners. They have no barricades on which to climb to
threaten the enemy, or behind which they can hide to rest or regroup. They
do not even have any home turf. Always they must move on the terrain of
the barbarians themselves.
Now the time comes when great courage - moral and physical - is required
of the Shambhala warriors, for they must go into the very heart of the barbarian
power, into the pits and pockets and citadels where the weapons are kept
to dismantle them. To dismantle weapons, in every sense of the word, they
must go into the corridors of power where decisions are made.
The Shambhala warriors have the courage to do this because they know that
these weapons are manomaya. They are "mind-made." Made
by the human mind, they can be unmade by the human mind. The Shambhala warriors
know the dangers that threaten life on Earth are not visited upon us by
any extraterrestrial powers, satanic deities, or preordained evil fate.
They arise from our own decisions, our own lifestyles, and our own relationships.
So in this time, the Shambhala warriors go into training. When Choegyal
said this, I asked, "How do they train?" They train, he said,
in the use of two weapons. "What weapons?" I asked, and he held
up his hands in the way the lamas hold the ritual objects of bell and dorje
in the lama dance.
The weapons are compassion and insight. Both are necessary, he said. You
have to have compassion because it gives you the juice, the power, the passion
to move. When you open to the pain of the world you move, you act. But that
weapon by itself is not enough. It can burn you out, so you need the other
- you need insight into the radical interdependence of all phenomena. With
that wisdom you know that it is not a battle between good guys and bad guys,
but that the line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every
human heart. With insight into our profound interrelatedness, you know that
actions undertaken with pure intent have repercussions throughout the web
of life, beyond what you can measure or discern. By itself, that insight
may appear too cool, too conceptual, to sustain you and keep you moving,
so you need the heat of the compassion. Together, within each Shambhala
warrior and among the warriors themselves, these two can sustain us as agents
of wholesome change. They are gifts for us to claim now in the healing of
our world.
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