Climate Change, Duality and The Triune Truth

I have been doing Climate Change organizing for 7 years.  It is hard work because it is a depressing subject that most people wish to avoid.  It very easily evokes in people feelings of good versus evil, and a great deal of discouragement about the ability of David to beat Goliath.  However, in my spiritual life I have come to regard duality as a false consciousness, so this creates an interesting tension for me.  Neale Donald Walsch writes very interestingly about the falseness of duality and how there is always a third possibility.  I quote:

"This Triune Reality is God's signature.  It is the divine pattern.  The three-in-one is everywhere found in the realms of the sublime.  You cannot escape it in matters dealing with time and space, God and consciousness, or any of the subtle relationships.  One the other hand, you will NOT find the Triune Truth in any of life's gross relationships. 
   The Triune Truth is recognized in life's subtle relationships by everyone dealing with such relationships.  Some of your religionists have described the Triune Truth as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  Some of your psychiatrists use the terms superconscious, conscious and subconscious.  Some of your spiritualists say mind, body, and spirit.  Some of your scientists see energy, matter, ether.  Some of your philosophers say a thing is not true for you until it is true in thought, word, and deed.  When discussing time, you speak of three times only: past, present, future.  Similarly, there are three moments in your perception - before, now and after.  In terms of spatial relationships whether considering the points in the universe, or various points in your own room you recognize here, there, and the space in between.
   In matters of gross relationships, you recognize no "in-between".  That is because gross relationships are always dyads, whereas relationships of the higher realm are invariably triads.  Hence, there is left-right, up-down, big-small, fast-slow, hot- cold, and greatest dyad ever created: male-female.  There are no in-betweens in these dyads.  A thing is either one thing or the other, or some greater or lesser version in relationship to one of these polarities.
   Within the realm of gross relationships, nothing conceptualized can exist without a conceptualization of its opposite.  Most of your day-to-day experience is foundationed in this reality.
   Within the realm of sublime relationships nothing which exists has an opposite.  All is One, and everything progresses from one to other in a never-ending circle."
Conversations with God: Book 1  p.30-31

What Walsch writes is so helpful to me because of my own spiritual path.  I feel I have come to earth to work on issues of violence and injustice.  Yet in both, it is so easy to quickly get caught up in good versus evil sorts of ways of thinking which I have come to see actually perpetuate "enemy think" and the continuation of the spiral of violence and injustice.  So it has become clear to me that part of the path forward is to step out of duality, and yet I find that in many of the things I feel most passionately sort of pull me towards some sort of right wrong thinking.

This past week I went to a "dialogue about climate change".  Obviously this is a topic which brings strong feelings: fear, despair, grief, anger, etc.  It is not a dispassionate subject.  After showing a very depressing TED talk we were divided into groups of three and asked first to share our feelings about the statement: “Things are getting worse”, then about the statement “Things are getting better”, and finally about the statement: “Things are perfect as they are, or things are as they are”.  During the first part you could hear  words like destruction, grandchildren, politicians, species loss, etc. whirling around; it was somber in deed in the room.  This was the "easy" part.  I think for many of us the second part was most challenging - how to be with it without feeling like we were going into denial or whitewashing what is happening.  For myself I can both notice various solutions and initiatives people are taking that are indeed hopeful - and yet I know if we do not get the political will quickly to implement these things they are all pointless.  From a cyncial point of view I can say "Well Gaia is healing herself; she is throwing off the leaches that suck her dry and poison her.  She will live in the much longer span of the planet even if all human and mammal life perishes." 

My first gut reaction upon hearing the word perfect anywhere around climate change was “bullshit”.  But when I just sat with the sentence, I found it was a huge change in perspective.  It was like a lens that moved me out looking at the earth as big marble and at our past, current, and future time.  From this perspective I could notice we are each individually learning lessons both personal and collective.  We are playing roles both personal and collective in the fate of the earth.  It took me back out into the mystery...into all that we do not know.  A man burned himself in the Middle East and it spawned the Arab Spring.  Who could have predicted that?  Humans have accidentally discovered all kinds of technologies and all kinds of love and all kinds of ways of organizing ourselves.  In the face of crisis they have suddenly behaved differently.  Who are we to know what the experience or the meaning will be of a global crisis shared for the first time in history by every person on the earth.  And honestly we have no choice but to live into the mystery.

When we returned to the whole group the woman next to me commented that the first two questions were the polarity, but that the third question took us out of the duality.  In fact I see the third question is what Walsch calls the Triune Truth: there is the getting worse (or the Great Unraveling as Joanna Macy calls it), and the getting better (Or the Great Turning as both she and David Korten call it), and then there is things as they are (which Joanna might call non-linear time).  As long as we deal with the political issues before us in the language of "gross relationships" (as Walsch calls it) rather than the sublime which transcends polarity then we continue to beat our head against a reality in which we just take turns playing bad guys and good guys.  I think many of our answers will be found in the third space.

An example of this has to do with good guys and bad guys.  When we believe in a world of gross relationships then we are duty bound to fight the bad guys often engaging as President Obama has in actions that create bad karma for oneself and enrage others who then arise against us as the “bad guy” and the circle continues.  Whether you believe in reincarnation and your own string of past lives, or simply in your ancestors and know enough of their stories to know: you will then observe that each of us is enmeshed in centuries of being both oppressor and oppressed, powerless and powerful, kind and cruel, and that we contain within us all of these experiences and possibilities.  Part of the heart of non-violence is to call out to that other set of possibilities that exist within the person currently acting as oppressor or “wrong doer”.  We can really only do this however, as we drop the righteousness of wielder of Good and meet the other on the plane of the Triunal Truth…where we are all one and share the same fate.  I think as we face climate change this way of approaching the issue will become increasingly necessary.

Rippling Rings

We toss a stone in a creek and the rings go out from stone. The first ones as they reach some other object, then beginning a new backwash of rings.  The first rings we can follow, but as smaller ones still eminent from the stone and as they begin to interact with the backwash rings a third motion begins, and it becomes impossible to keep track of all that is set in motion from the one stone we drop in water.

This is not unlike the effects we have in the world.  One reason I will always appreciate the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" is because it so profoundly makes this point.  George Bailey thinks his life has come to nothing because he has not realized his dreams and is currently overcome with problems.  But he is shown that events that he had completely forgotten from his childhood had kept a good man out of prison, and also by saving his brother saved a whole carrier ship of US soldiers during the war.  This is not to begin to account the qualitative better town he has contributed to because people own their own homes rather than living it debt, etc.  Each of us lives this way, setting in motion a chain of circles and loosing complete track of how they interact with other forces and how they impact others.  If our intentions are good they let loose a positive motion in the world.  When our actions are filled with anger and fear they set loose yet another set of energies that reverberate through our world.

I think our words are particularly powerful in this rippling way.  Have you ever had the experience of someone coming back to you days or even years later to let you know they really thought about something you said, that the words really moved them?  I have.  But the most interesting example of this was that after I was divorced and feeling rather down, I received a post card from someone who had taken my workshop literally YEARS before.  The person said "just wanted to drop you a note to let you know how life changing my workshop with you was.  Thanks".  This was a ring that had gone out further than I could see it, and then came back to touch me at a moment I needed it!

Several years ago my Meeting had a worship sharing on "memorable messages".  We just shared messages that we had had heard in Meeting for worship at some point in our life which had touched us deeply enough to still be holding the message.  Think about it - this does not even come from us, but from our faithfulness.  The message is from God, but someone has to be faithful enough to the quaking to get up and deliver it, and because they do it is held for decades in someone else's mind!  And I have to say the sharing of them was a "covered worship" for it went deep.  In how many other ways can we make deep waves in the world by being faithful?

I invite readers to post here the messages you remember still.  Let the rings wash out far.