Whole Earth God

How to Learn Green Meditation

In my first post about Green Meditation, I suggested that all true theology is ecology. Where it isn't, it is because theology has gotten off track. Next, I promised to write something on how to learn Green Meditation. But really, that is just a matter of applying this same basic principle to every aspect of human activity until its meaning is inescapably clear.

The current imbalance between theology and ecology (which weights the value of human culture more heavily than the Earth) is at the root of our 21st century ecological crisis. That crisis was at least 10,000-12,000 years in the making, so it won't be righted in a day. The rebalancing of a species that has lost its niche in nature is necessarily a lengthy process, just as it took a very long time for us to lose that niche in the first place. A certain kind of thinking got us into this problem, and it will take a very different kind to get us out of it again. But it won't happen in a small way. And it won't happen fast. That is mostly what I mean when I speak of Green Meditation. "Green" doesn't refer to the emphasis of our thinking, its focus, or to its "color." It indicates an altogether different scale of mind.

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.

Talking to the Whole Earth God

Recently, a lot of people have been asking me the same question: "If God is virtually indistinguishable from the planetary ecosystem, how do I get prayer out of that? How do I talk to that?" Fair enough. But I can't answer that question in a traditional way, because "Whole Earth God" isn't a traditional model.

There are no experts when it comes to the Whole Earth God. There are no priests, no masters, and no saints. There is no ideal to fulfill and no wise formula to follow. There aren't even any guidelines or suggestions. No one is going to be abandoned  by Whole Earth God based on what they do or fail to do. And we don't talk to that God in order to be included in his plan of salvation. We already are. Everything is. We talk to him in order to widen the range of our own understanding--to bring that understanding into alignment with the Whole.

In HOW TO BELIEVE IN GOD, I used the image of tossing a thimble into the sea. If you go down the to shore and scoop up a thimble's worth of seawater, it' true that you have a little bit of the ocean in your thimble. But if you then proceed into an ashram, a mosque, a synagogue, or a church, and you say to the people there, "Come witness the majesty and power of the ocean," well, then, the only thing sadder than that would be if the people there believed you and never made the journey to see the ocean for themselves. A better model is to take that thimble--that tiny vessel--down to the shoreline and throw it into the sea. There it is contained by the very thing it couldn't contain within itself. There, at last, if finds the answer to its questions and its home.