S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 2 2 3 7 Samuel Bendeck Sotillos 2 Human Psyche as a Mirror of the Environment To be clear, there can never be a sharp delineation of humanity’s welfare from the concerns of the planet and its life forms. The lack of harmony between us and the natural environment is a reflection of the lost equilibrium between person and Spirit. It is crucial to recall that “[w]e often refer to an environmental crisis, [note: but] the real crisis lies not in the environment… but in the human heart” (Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew 2012, 172). This predicament arises from our flawed engagement with reality: the way we think, the way we see ourselves, and the worldview we construct. The uniqueness of the person can be better appreciated if we see humanity as a “bridge” or pontifex – thus a “bridge-maker” between heaven and earth. The human being’s true purpose then is to live in accordance with the Sacred and to better integrate our outward and inward dimensions. In fact, a flourishing environment depends on the stability of the human psyche: “The state of the outer world does not merely correspond to the general state of men’s souls; it also in a sense depends on that state” (Sirāj ad-Dīn 1996, 21). Prior to modernism, the ecological knowledge of the world’s traditional cultures viewed human beings as the intersection of the horizontal and vertical dimensions: which is to say, as both geomorphic (of the earth) and theomorphic (of the Spirit). In fact, as Kathleen Raine (1908–2003) observes, “the sense of the holiness of life is the human norm” (1991, 28). Although the intertwined nexus between humanity, the natural world, and the Divine has been a central insight of all sapiential traditions, contemporary psychology still does not fully grasp this essential relationship. The discipline does not realize that it is the very loss of a sense of the Sacred that lies at the core of the environmental degradation that fuels the spiritual crisis of humanity. Theodore Roszak (1933– 2011; 1972, xxiii) addresses this crisis as follows: What, after all, is the ecological crisis that now captures so much belated attention but the inevitable extroversion of a blighted psyche? Like inside, like outside. In the eleventh hour, the very physical environment suddenly looms up before us as the outward mirror of our inner condition, for many the first discernible symptom of advanced disease within. 3 The Loss of Sacred Vision All religious traditions are in agreement that it is the obscuring of our transpersonal faculty, of the Intellect or the “eye of the heart,” that is the source of our spiritual illness. This is a mode of perception that discerns the Divine (or our true Self) in all phenomena. According to the Bhagavad Gītā, such a vision “sees the one Indestructible Reality in all beings, inseparate in the separated” (18:20). With the eclipse of the Intellect, all other faculties and modes of knowing become fragmented and myopic, for “the soul of man has become hardened” (Standing Bear 2006, 172). Such a view fosters a distorted vision of reality, which inevitably leads to innumerable problems and immense suffering: “Where there is no vision the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18). Because of this, our noetic faculty is reduced to a one-dimensional or tunnel-like vision, which makes us forgetful of who we truly are, and of our fundamental relationship with all that is. The limited scope of our vision has been described in the following manner: “They know only an outward appearance of this lower life” (Qur’ān 30:7). This ubiquitous darkening of the “eye of the heart,” coupled with an exclusive reliance on reason alone, has done us great harm. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882; 1836, 91) addresses the need to look within to restore the human psyche to health, in order to truly see and relate to the natural world: The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opaque. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. What we need to do, according to Lewis Mumford (1895– 1999), is “to restore a human balance upset by our patholog[y]” (1962, 217). As Laing points out: “The condition of alienation… is the condition of the normal man” (1972, 28), in the modern world and correspondingly, “the corruption of man must necessarily affect the whole” (Sirāj ad-Dīn 1996, 21). The imperative task at hand for any valid “science of the soul” is to restore our transpersonal vision to recognize that the ecological environment, from which we are inseparable, is sacred and very much alive. We are called to see the Divine everywhere, which is to see everything through the Divine. This is, most assuredly, not pantheism. The spiritual traditions view the Divine in all things, yet the Divine – while imma-
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MzgxMzI=