What Is Green Meditation?

I first introduced the term "Green Meditation" at a talk I gave in Manhattan last fall, but since then I’ve said very little about it in public, even when people have asked to have it explained. The reason for this is simple: Green Meditation overturns pretty much everything we know (or think we know) about our existing religious practices and beliefs. Or, rather, it reinterprets them so radically that they aren’t recognizable any longer to most people.

For all that, the basic idea is easy to understand: Green Meditation tells us that all theology (interpreted broadly to include any religious teaching) is ecology. Where it isn’t, theology has gone astray. Nature is never wrong.

 

For instance, Green Meditation sees God as virtually identical with the planetary ecosystem that gave rise to life, currently sustains life in all its myriad forms, and into which all life returns at death. It sees the “body and blood of Christ” as ways of talking about the reality of “eating” and “being eaten” that underlies all biological existence and thus serves as the model for all true modes of salvation, since nothing can be excluded from that reality, and all is redeemed (literally, “reclaimed”) by it.

Green Meditation tells us that when Shakyamuni Buddha was sitting under the Bodhi tree and Mara, the “tempter,” came to challenge his right to sit upon the seat of enlightenment, the Buddha bore witness to the Earth, rather than the Earth to him, as the traditional story tells us. Green Meditation teaches us that our enlightenment lies in bearing witness to the Earth as beings whose origin, existence, and ultimate destiny are the Earth and nothing but the Earth.

Green Meditation sees doctrines like heaven, the Pure Land, and nirvana as evidence of humanity’s ongoing effort to think its way outside the box of Nature—as if there were any outside of that box. It sees natural selection as entirely wholesome, but regards the idea of humanity as an arrow pointing forward toward some evolutionary perfection as deluded to the core—and possibly even evil. It recognizes the belief that the world was created for human beings as the mother of all suffering, and the belief that human consciousness is the point of the universe as the father of every lie.

In short, Green Meditation teaches us that we have no future and no point apart from Nature. Nature is where we find the meaning and value of our lives.

If anyone is interested, I can write something along the lines of “How to Learn Green Meditation” at some later point—with the understanding, of course, that Nature is the teacher. One person can’t teach another how to Green Meditate any more than we could instruct one another on how to make hearts beat or hair grow. Nature is the teacher and the master of all such things.

(By the way, if you're on Facebook, we have discussions on this and other related topics as part of the "Prayer Medicine" group. So feel free to also join us there.)