“It took modern humans tens of thousands of years to reach a population of seven hundred million and then we tapped into millions of years of stored energy known as fossil fuels. Our human population exploded. It increased by ten times in a mere two hundred years. Our consumption has also exploded: on average ten times per person and many times more in the Western world,” notes Jeff Gibbs in his controversial and highly criticized film. “You put the two together and the result is a total human impact one hundred times greater than only two hundred years ago. And that is the most terrifying realization I have ever had. We, humans, are poised for a fall from an unimaginable height. Not because of one thing, not climate change alone, but all the human-caused changes the planet is suffering from.”

Right after this reflection Jeff Gibbs goes on to interview a social psychologist and writer Sheldon Solomon about the predicament different environmental movements face when trying to solve the immense human-caused threats that face our planet. The most interesting part of that conversation is that they go beyond technological solutions and talk about underlying issue at the core of the human psyche — our denial of death. Towards the end, Sheldon Solomon notes, “If we’re to make progress, whatever that word means, or even to persist as a form of life, we’re going to need to radically overhaul our basic conception of who and what we are and what it is that we value. Because the people that you referred to earlier both on the left and the right that think we’re gonna be able to discover more oil or solar panel ourselves into the future where life looks pretty much like it does now, only cleaner and better, I think that’s just frankly delusional.”

So what can we do to prevent the inevitable fall of our own and of our planet? The answer is complicated and multifaceted and requires global human cooperation that is highly unlikely in this day and age. But on an individual level, we still have the power to help our planet notes environmentalist, poet, and writer Wendell Berry in his revitalizing volume titled The Art of the Commonplace.

Wendell Berry writes:

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world — to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity — our own capacity for life — that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled.

We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

Complement this portion of The Art of the Commonplace, a refreshing read for our fast-paced lives, with Richard Louv on the spiritual necessity of nature for the young, Henry David Thoreau on why he went to live in the woods, and then revisit Deborah Underwood and Cindy Derby’s watercolor meditation on our inseparable link to the natural world around us.

“In normal everyday usage, “I” embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego,” writes Eckhart Tolle in his book A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. “This illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not only into the reality of space and time but also into human nature, referred to as “an optical illusion of consciousness.”

When we start our meditation practice, for many of us it’s astonishing to realize that we live with a constant inner dialogue. It’s not that we didn’t notice it before, but that we were unaware of it being there as a separate entity, the ego. This is what Eckhart Tolle calls being spiritually unconscious. Majority of people, when told there is a voice in their head that never stops talking, say, “What voice?” or deny it altogether. They do not recognize that is the voice, is the thinker, is the unobserved mind speaking through them at that very moment. So what does it mean to be awake for the first time? It’s a brief moment we become disidentified from our thoughts and experience a shift in identity from being the content of the mind to being the awareness behind it. It happens in various ways and comes in a number of forms to different people. What follows is an account of Eckhart Tolle’s own experience presented here as an audio and text excerpt. Please enjoy:

THE VOICE IN THE HEAD
by Eckhart Tolle

That first glimpse of awareness came to me when I was a first-year student at the University of London. I would take the tube (subway) twice a week to go to the university library, usually around nine o’clock in the morning, toward the end of the rush hour. One time a woman in her early thirties sat opposite me. I had seen her before a few times on that train. One could not help but notice her. Although the train was full, the seats on either side of her were unoccupied, the reason being, no doubt, that she appeared to be quite insane. She looked extremely tense and talked to herself incessantly in a loud and angry voice.

She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she was totally unaware, it seemed, of other people or her surroundings. Her head was facing downward and slightly to the left, as if she were addressing someone sitting in the empty seat next to her. Although I don’t remember the precise content, her monologue went something like this: “And then she said to me … so I said to her you are a liar how dare you accuse me of … when you are the one who has always taken advantage of me I trusted you and you betrayed my trust….” There was the angry tone in her voice of someone who has been wronged, who needs to defend her position lest she become annihilated.

As the train approached Tottenham Court Road Station, she stood up and walked toward the door with still no break in the stream of words coming out of her mouth. That was my stop too, so I got off behind her. … My curiosity aroused, I decided to follow her as long as she was walking in the same general direction I had to go in. … Soon we were within sight of the imposing structure of Senate House, a 1930s high-rise, the university’s central administrative building and library. I was shocked. Was it possible that we were going to the same place? Yes, that’s where she was heading. Was she a teacher, a student, an office worker, a librarian? Maybe she was some psychologist’s research project. I never knew the answer. …

I was still thinking about her when I was in the men’s room prior to entering the library. As I was washing my hands, I thought: I hope I don’t end up like her. The man next to me looked briefly in my direction, and I suddenly was shocked when I realized that I hadn’t just thought those words, but mumbled them aloud. “Oh my God, I’m already like her,” I thought. Wasn’t my mind as incessantly active as hers? There were only minor differences between us. The predominant underlying emotion behind her thinking seemed to be anger. In my case, it was mostly anxiety. She thought out loud. I thought — mostly — in my head. If she was mad, then everyone was mad, including myself. There were differences in degree only.

Complement this particular portion of A New Earth, a must-read for any spiritual seeker, with Eckhart Tolle on the true self rooted in being, three mental habits that make us unhappy, what boredom can teach about us who we are and who are not, and three powerful ways to overcome challenges in life.