An afternoon on Mars

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B_6K-splRU

This panoramic view from the Mars Rover is oddly beautiful: a reddish, stony landscape with a variety of rocks, the hilly crest of the crater, ancient, dry watercourses, sand, and more rocks and stones.

And nothing else, no matter how far the Rover will drive across the surface.  Nothing else.

No sound but occasional random gusts of wind buffeting the surface of the rover.

And people want to travel there, and set up a research station?  Why?

Of course I understand--the lure of the unknown, which has drawn our relentlessly curious species over the next horizon for hundreds of thousands of years, since we first developed brains big enough and the vocal apparatus needed to share our thoughts--and our questions--with one another.  But all the earlier explorations on our own planet found more life--more people, animals, plants, cultures--just beyond the horizon. On Mars, they've found nothing like it--and even if they are looking for possible biosignatures of ancient microbes on the apparent delta deposit leading into the crater, these microorganisms--if they existed at all--will have been dead for billions of years.

I have no problem with these explorations; in fact, like most other curious humans, I find them fascinating. But I can't get over how appallingly lonely--how ultimately boring, despite the variety of rock formations--it must be on Mars, with no animals, insects, grasses, flowers, trees, watery oases, even mosses or lichens to enliven and transform the dusty surface.

How incredibly lucky we are to live--to breath oxygenated air, drink fresh water,  listen to the rustle of the trees or the call of birds, and contemplate wildflowers up close, on this wondrous, life-sustaining blue planet! As William Blake said, "Everything that lives is holy." 

If nothing else, these stark and barren new images of Mars can serve as a reminder of the fragile, sacred miracle of life, right outside our doors.

Gaian Enumerations

 Throughout its history, Buddhists have used enumeration as their most frequent Dharma training technique for young aspirants, whether monks (Bhikkus) or nuns (Bhikkunis) or laypeople.  Hence these aspirants are taught to memorize these, including the Four Noble Truths, the Six Paramitas, the Seven Factors of Enlightenment, and the Twelve Links of Codependent Origination (to name a few). And having such enumerations readily at hand, they can practice and internalize the Dharma teachings more easily. 

Over the years since I first embraced the Gaia concept as the epicenter of my worldview (starting in 1981, when I first discovered Lovelock's Gaia theory), I have found myself--without any knowledge or intent--emulating this practice, by organizing my Gaian thinking around just such enumerations, mostly threes and fours. So here are a few of these enumerations that have organized my thinking:

 The Two (antithetical) Worlds: Glomart and Gaia. By "worlds" here, I refer to complex adaptive systems of which we are an integral part, and on which we depend for our survival. Glomart (my own coinage) refers to the money-based Global Market Economy; Gaia refers, of course, to our living planet: the biosphere as structurally coupled with our atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere. We utterly depend on both--Glomart for our livelihoods and possessions; Gaia for our very lives. Yet the production rules of Glomart (based on the maximizing logic of money--"More is always better") are fundamentally incompatible with the production rules of Gaia (based on the optimizing logic of living systems--"Enough is Enough.")

The Three Survival Values:  Health, Competence, and Resilience. These are common to all living systems, from bacteria to human beings to whole nations and Gaia herself. Health is internal homeostasis; Competence is ability to thrive within a stable, predictable niche; Resilience is ability to adapt to unpredictable changes in one's niche.

The Three Levels of Identity: Self, Community, and Planet. From these, coupled with the Three Survival Values, we may derive the Gaian Categorical Imperative: Make every decision based on what promotes the health, competence, and resilience of ourselves, our communities, and our planet. Any benefit to a subsystem (self or community) which is detrimental to its larger support system (community or planet) is ultimately self-destructive.

Garrison Keillor's Generic Daily Agenda: Be Well, Do Good Work, Keep in Touch. These can also be seen as a good way to enhance our own health, competence, and resilience.

The Three Aspects of Dharma:  Principle, Precept, and Practice. That is, the Principle of codependent origination; the Precept of universal compassion; and the Practice of meditation.

The Three Injunctions of Meditation: Breathe, Observe, Let Go. These form the foundation of any meditative practice. 

The Four Aspects of Gaia: Myth, Model, Metaphor, and Movement. These pertain, respectively, to Gaia as apprehended in the subjective, objective, cultural, and social domains.

The Three Core Ethics of Permaculture: Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share.  There are variants of the third, of course; it does not mean "redistribution of wealth" (which scares a lot of people) but rather, it means "reinvesting the surplus back into Earth Care and People Care."

My own Three Permaculture injunctions: Grow Gardens, Grow Community, Grow Awareness. Each of these enhances the other: By growing gardens and sharing food and techniques, we grow community; by doing both, we grow awareness of our embeddedness in, and dependence on, Gaia.

My Four Gaian Life Goals: Learn Gaia; Teach Gaia; Heal Gaia, Create Gaia. These, of course, are self-evident. They encourage us to keep learning all we can about our embeddedness in Gaia, to teach what we know to others, to heal our threatened biosphere in whatever ways are necessary, and to create a human culture that is symbiotic with, rather than parasitic upon, Gaia.

The Four Useful Attitudes

The Four Brahmaviharas, roughly translated as the "Four Abodes of God," are an essential Dharma teaching that can be found both in foundational Hindu texts like the Upanishads and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and throughout Buddhism as well.  In Buddhist teachings, they are also called the "Four Immeasurables" or "the Four Immeasurable Minds," but I prefer to call them, more colloquially, the "Four Useful Attitudes." They refer to four dispositions of mind that seekers of enlightenment should strive to cultivate and revisit on a regular basis, and they are as follows:

1. Maitri (in Pali, Metta): Often translated as "loving kindness" or "benevolence," including gratitude, this should be our default attitude toward all other living beings. It denotes the consciously cultivated disposition to be friendly, open, and generous to all whom we encounter; to wish them well. It is, in effect, our baseline for relating to others (and to ourselves as well). It is well encapsulated in a mantra that the Dalai Lama recently shared with us: "Breathing in, I cherish myself; breathing out, I cherish all beings."

2. Karuna or compassion: This is a logical extension of Maitri toward all whom we encounter, or hear of, who are suffering or in distress. It is not simply "pity" (which is often condescending); rather, it is more precisely understood as empathy, the cultivated ability (and willingness) to heal others' pain by feeling it as if it were our own. It thus entails a disposition to action--to taking care of everyone, and abandoning no one.

3. Mudita or selfless joy: We can visualize this as the feeling that arises spontaneously when we first see a newborn child, whether our own or that of someone we love, or even someone we never met. It is also, for example, the feeling we get when we watch young people at a graduation ceremony--whether we know them personally or not--overcome with joy, excitement, and pride as they receive their diploma. And finally--like the others--it can be consciously cultivated when we look at a flower, at buds opening up on a tree, at a beautiful sunset over a lake, or a magnificent snow-capped mountain appearing in the distance. It is, in short, a joy that takes us out of ourselves--the joy of life itself.

4. Upeksha (Pali Upekkha): This refers to equanimity--the cultivation of patience, even in the face of adversity. This should not be confused, however, with indifference. It harmonizes, that is, with the other three Brahmaviharas, and it could be seen, for example, in the quiet, serene imperviousness of the Civil Rights activists when subjected to sneers, insults, and abuse from white racists in the South.

As Swami Satchidananda points out in his beautiful translation and interpretation of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, these four attitudes, or dispositions of mind, constitute a comprehensive repertoire of attitudes we can take toward anyone we meet.  We start with Maitri--benevolence--as our default attitude toward everyone we encounter; if the person is suffering or in distress, we shift to Karuna, or active, engaged compassion; conversely, if the person is smiling, we smile back with Mudita, or selfless joy; and finally, if the person is a complete jerk, we return to our breath and cultivate patience, or upeksha.

So how can we best cultivate these four useful attitudes? There are, of course, many practices for achieving this, but one I have developed is as follows:

As you settle into formal meditation, try associating each of these dispositions of mind with the following mantra--on four complete breaths to start with:

1. BREATHE with benevolence and gratitude (Maitri);

2. OBSERVE with compassion and empathy (Karuna);

3. LET GO with selfless joy (Mudita);

4. ABIDE in equanimity (Upeksha);

You can start with a whole breath, in and out, while contemplating each in turn. Thereafter, if you wish, you can condense them into one breath: On the inhale, breathe (with benevolence) and observe (with compassion); on the exhale, let go (with joy) and abide (in equanimity).

Then, if you wish, you can shift from "Breathe-Observe-Let Go-Abide" to "Om Mani Padme Hum"--the classic core mantra of Buddhism. These seed syllables evoke the same basic attitudes: gratitude, compassion, joy, and equanimity. But of course, they take it all to a deeper contemplative level. As the Dalai Lama points out, this mantra encapsulates all the teachings of the Buddha.

--and as always, once your mind is focused, you can forget these mantras completely, calmly abiding in Samadhi, or what Huston Smith aptly characterized as "Infinite gratitude toward all things past; infinite service to all things present; infinite responsibility to all things future."