The spiritual dimension of the climate crisis

What if the dominance of materialist science in our educational epistemologies is holding us back from the rapid changes we need to make to survive and thrive in the 21st century?

Although this post feels risky to me, it is a necessary risk: it opens up the topic that has driven my research over the past several years as I looked for spiritual guidance on how to understand and deal with climate disruption. For reasons which I will unfold in this blog and my forthcoming book, I believe that the destabilization of the Earth is a physical problem that has a psychospiritual dimension; it must therefore be tackled from both physical (scientific) and metaphysical (spiritual) perspectives. The dominance of materialist science in our educational epistemologies is threatening the wellbeing of all life forms on this planet. These are complex ideas that will need multiple posts to unpack; this is a first pass. I know that most readers who are currently part of educational institutions will have an ingrained (that is to say, indoctrinated) bias against the idea of “spiritual Teachers” outside of a conventional religious frame of reference. If you care to read on, please keep an open mind.

In my post about education as a practice of love, I pointed to the opposition, made famous by Freud, between the “drives” of Eros and Thanatos. In one of his last books, Civilization and its Discontents, Freud said that war and aggression are due to the human “death drive,” which is constantly battling for ascendancy over the “love drive” (what impels us to procreate and collaborate). On the eve of World War II, he saw Thanatos winning this battle, and thought that humans’ innate aggressive nature was to blame.

Freud was very much a product of the binary mindset of his time and place, seeing opposites and opposition everywhere. Contemporary ecological theory teaches that Eros and Thanatos are part of the endless, harmonious spiral of life, with death a necessary stage that prepares a fertile bed for new life to blossom.

What does this have to do with education for the 21st century, you might ask?

I believe we need to talk more, and more carefully, about Life: its purpose, its meaning, how it comes to be. And to do this, we need to talk more expansively about the spiritual dimension of embodied life as we experience it on Earth. This means that we need to talk more, and more carefully, about Death.

Particularly in the Covid era, a great fear of death has arisen. The fear of death has always been strong in western countries, and perhaps especially in the US, with its cult of endless youthfulness, and its health care focus on prolonging the lives of sick people, rather than on keeping people healthy—a topic for another post.

Death is still that final frontier, which medical science has not been able to penetrate—and we tend to fear what we don’t understand. While science still thinks of death in purely materialist terms, as the breakdown of the body with no persistence of consciousness, religions have always thought about death in spiritual terms, promoting various ideas of the afterlife. People who come back from near-death experiences consistently report ecstatic conscious experiences of rejoining the Light.

In my study of mystical and esoteric literature from various cultures, traditions and time periods, I have found an astonishing consistency in messaging about death and the afterlife from metaphysical Teachers and their human channels. There is widespread agreement that human beings, along with all other sentient life forms on Earth, reincarnate multiple times. When we die, our individual spirit returns to a larger Soul family, which fields many incarnations in any given time (hence the uncanny feeling of connection we get with certain people we meet and feel like we’ve known “forever”). Although some traditions see an end goal to the reincarnational cycle (when we have finally become enlightened, we are freed from the need to return to embodied life), others see it as endless; and some of the wisest Teachers I’ve found agree with quantum theory that time is not linear, and there are endless multiverses playing out multiple possible existences at every moment.

If we can wrap our minds around this larger view of Life and Death, and see it all as a marvelous dance in which we are privileged to engage, what does this do to our perennial and pervasive sense of fear?

Two influential nonphysical Teachers, Penny Gill’s Manjushri and Jane Roberts’ Seth, agree that one of the most important developmental tasks for humanity is learning to work with, and release, our fear. The problem with modern fear is that it is so generalized. It’s not the rational kind of fear that propels us to run from a tiger or seek shelter in a lightening storm. Instead it’s a diffuse, nonspecific anxiety that becomes paralyzing and depressing. In our age, the media feeds our anxious awareness of potential threats lurking around every corner, and too often they become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we fear, the more our fears are realized, through psychic processes that I’ll discuss in another post.

Of course we are all going to die, the body can only last so long. But our Spirits are immortal, and death is a magnificent release back into the light-filled energetic dance of the cosmos. It is nothing to be afraid of, though we may want to delay it so as to stay with beloved people, places and passions in this lifetime.

I am not saying that we should shrug in the face of atrocities like murders and wars. Young lives cut short will always be a tragedy, and our grief at these losses is a measure of the openness and depth of our hearts.

But let’s face it, we are going into a century that is already shaping up to be a time of dying—that is to say, a time of transformation. We are living through the Sixth Great Extinction, the largest die-off of species since the dinosaur times. Climate change is ramping up, and humans are going to suffer and die as droughts and storms disrupt agriculture and energy infrastructure, sea levels change coastlines, and climate migration leads to political tensions.

Yes, of course we need to talk about—and implement!—solutions. But we also have to be clear-eyed about what is happening and recognize that our historical period of rapid change is part of a larger, longer Gaian cycle of Love/Death/Renewal. In the face of the enormous population growth of this hugely successful species, Homo sapiens, Earth must restabilize herself. Climate change is how she can and will do it on her own.

But there is another way, and we humans are smart enough to know what it is. We know that we have exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth because of our wasteful, rapacious style of living. We know that if we cut back on our consumption of fossil fuels and forests and dedicate ourselves to stewarding our environment wisely, we could restabilize the Earth more gently, leading to a softer transition back to a balanced system.

The future is calling on those alive today to get over our paralyzing anxiety and get to work on reimagining our relationships with each other and our planet. Understanding the larger spiritual dimension of existence can help us release our fear and open our hearts to the magic and wonder of being alive at this important time.

It is not fair, and maybe even cruel, to restrict education to a purely secular, materialist outlook. I would never advocate for religious schools. But science, as Freud recognized, is the modern religion. What if the scientific taboo on spirituality is part of the problem of our time? What if opening our minds to the larger metaphysical dimension of Life—acknowledged by quantum science as well as a wide spectrum of mystical teachings—is necessary if we are to survive and thrive on this planet in the 21st century and beyond?