“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.

“The simplest definition of poetry is that it is what poets write,” pointed out Mortimer Adler in his book about the most important life skill that our schools absolutely fail to teach us. “That seems obvious enough, and yet there are those who would dispute the definition.”

Among those who oppose such simplicity, Adler notes, are people who are convinced that poetry is something more inexplicable and hard to define. It is, they say, a “spontaneous overflowing of the personality” which is not strictly limited to the written word but can also be expressed as a physical action, musical sound, or just a feeling. And I, personally, agree that there is something beautiful to such a description. Indeed, one can’t deny that the poet goes deep down inside to reach the mythical “well of creation” from which poems spring into this world.

On the flip side, however, such an approach makes most people believe that they can’t read or comprehend modern poetry. They think it is often obscure and demands too much “work” on their part. While it is true that a good poem can be re-read and thought about for the rest of one’s life, it also doesn’t have to be complicated. We can analyze the poem word by word, study the life of the poet, the historical context, philosophical influences, or we can just read the poem while enjoying the flow of words and the sentiment that it arouses inside of us. This is exactly what Bill Murray does in the video below when — as a thank-you to the people who built Poets House — he reads “I Dwell in Possibility” included in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Please enjoy:

I DWELL IN POSSIBILITY
by Emily Dickinson

I dwell in Possibility —
A fairer House than Prose —
More numerous of Windows —
Superior — for Doors —

Of Chambers as the Cedars —
Impregnable of Eye —
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky —

Of Visitors — the fairest —
For Occupation — This —
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise —

Complement “I Dwell in Possibility,” an indispensable part of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, with the growing collection of deeply stirring poetry readings that include Pablo Neruda’s “I Like for You to Be Still,” Billy Collins’ “The Lanyard,” Gregory Orr’s “This is What Was Bequeathed Us,” and Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man,” and then watch another video about why Bill Murray gets up to recite poetry every year:

“The Buddha taught that even your happiness is dukkha — a Pali word meaning “suffering” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is inseparable from its opposite,” wrote Eckhart Tolle in his classic guide to spiritual awakening. “This means that your happiness and unhappiness are in fact one. Only the illusion of time separates them.”

To the extent we seek happiness, we also find unhappiness. It seems these two go hand in hand, and we delude ourselves by thinking we can have one without the other. Still, we get so lost in the pursuit that one day we look around and see that our life has turned out the complete opposite of what we wanted. Lost in despair, what can we assume about our life tomorrow, except that it will be what we don’t assume, what we don’t want, what happens to us from the outside, reaching us regardless of all our efforts? So close, yet always out of reach, the very notion of happiness mocks us in the face and traps us in endless cycles of discontent. “Why do people have to suffer?” asks the young man — perhaps too young to think about this question — in the video below as if reading our minds, and letting the wise teacher give him, and all of us, the pointer in the right direction:

Thich Nhat Hanh continues his thought in his book No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering by remembering his peace activism work during the Vietnam War. Many people turned to him for consolation, and one can only imagine how much strength it took to give them a truthful answer that would inspire hope and heal at the same time. Thich Nhat Hanh writes:

We have to learn how to embrace and cradle our own suffering and the suffering of the world, with a lot of tenderness. … When I lived in Vietnam during the war, it was difficult to see our way through that dark and heavy mud. It seemed like the destruction would just go on and on forever. Every day people would ask me if I thought the war would end soon. It was very difficult to answer, because there was no end in sight. But I knew if I said, “I don’t know,” that would only water their seeds of despair. So when people asked me that question, I replied, “Everything is impermanent, even war. It will end some day.” Knowing that, we could continue to work for peace. And indeed the war did end. Now the former mortal enemies are busily trading and touring back and forth, and people throughout the world enjoy practicing our tradition’s teachings on mindfulness and peace.

Complement this timeless kernel of wisdom from No Mud, No Lotus with American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron on what to do when things fall apart, and then revisit spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle on three powerful ways of overcoming challenges in life.