Inscape: Caterpillar as Zen Master
The hope was that by paying total awareness to one square foot of earth, you're experiencing in the natural world what you do contemplatively when you give total awareness to the inner world -the "inscape." One woman came back and told a story of how she had sat with her square foot of earth which was full of grass and it took twenty minutes for her to quiet down to the point where she noticed a small caterpillar that she had in fact been looking at for twenty minutes. She remembered the instructions that if a question was coming up from your heart, to simply allow it to come and in fact to direct it to the creature that you were sitting with.
Out of her heart rose the question for the caterpillar: "will you teach me about metamorphosis?". The caterpillar responded rather like a tough old Zen master: "Why should I teach you about metamorphosis?" She said,"because you will be going through complete metamorphosis and turn into a butterfly - who better to teach me about it?" He said, "you don't seem to understand - most of us don't make it to butterflies.
Either we don't find the right food plants and die or we're eaten by predators.
There's no guarantee at all that I'll become a butterfly. On the other hand, you, as a human being, experience metamorphosis all the time. If you want to know about metamorphosis, study yourself."
Looking at our own experience as humans on the Earth in the last, say, fifty years, we've gone from being a species with generally localized impact to a species that has very significant global impacts. We've become the dominant species, we control much of the biomass of the Earth, and are beginning to change the climate, the atmosphere, and so on in a significant way. But we haven't had a shift in consciousness consonant with our shift in status as a dominant species. My sense of how to bring about that shift is a simple and humble one - if enough people are willing to experiment and experience a shift in consciousness, then Earth itself, Gaia itself, ... can push on our consciousness, accelerate the process and a global shift in consciousness becomes imaginable..
This excerpt is from the interview of James Thornton, author and an eco-activist turned ecopsychologist. He devised a psychological technique of inscape– exploring the inner ecology.
The hope was that by paying total awareness to one square foot of earth, you're experiencing in the natural world what you do contemplatively when you give total awareness to the inner world -the "inscape." One woman came back and told a story of how she had sat with her square foot of earth which was full of grass and it took twenty minutes for her to quiet down to the point where she noticed a small caterpillar that she had in fact been looking at for twenty minutes. She remembered the instructions that if a question was coming up from your heart, to simply allow it to come and in fact to direct it to the creature that you were sitting with.
Out of her heart rose the question for the caterpillar: "will you teach me about metamorphosis?". The caterpillar responded rather like a tough old Zen master: "Why should I teach you about metamorphosis?" She said,"because you will be going through complete metamorphosis and turn into a butterfly - who better to teach me about it?" He said, "you don't seem to understand - most of us don't make it to butterflies.
Either we don't find the right food plants and die or we're eaten by predators.
There's no guarantee at all that I'll become a butterfly. On the other hand, you, as a human being, experience metamorphosis all the time. If you want to know about metamorphosis, study yourself."
Looking at our own experience as humans on the Earth in the last, say, fifty years, we've gone from being a species with generally localized impact to a species that has very significant global impacts. We've become the dominant species, we control much of the biomass of the Earth, and are beginning to change the climate, the atmosphere, and so on in a significant way. But we haven't had a shift in consciousness consonant with our shift in status as a dominant species. My sense of how to bring about that shift is a simple and humble one - if enough people are willing to experiment and experience a shift in consciousness, then Earth itself, Gaia itself, ... can push on our consciousness, accelerate the process and a global shift in consciousness becomes imaginable..
This excerpt is from the interview of James Thornton, author and an eco-activist turned ecopsychologist. He devised a psychological technique of inscape– exploring the inner ecology.
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