Extract from Yoga Scotland Magazine May 2009
Climate Change, Collective Consciousness and Chaos - Yoga Connects
By Alexis Beddoe
The following words from the book, The Tao of Zen (by Ray Grigg), are
intriguing:
Carl Jung relates Richard Wilhelm’s (*) story of the rainmaker of Kiaocbau.
An old Chinese rainmaker was summoned from another province to end a devastating
drought. He asked for nothing but a quiet little hut. There he locked himself in
for three days. On the fourth day the drought ended. When Wilhelm asked him how
he changed the weather the old rainmaker denied direct responsibility:
‘I come from another country where things are in order Here they are out of
order and I also am not in the natural order of things because I am in a
disordered country. So I had to wait three days until I was back in Tao and then
naturally the rain came.’
Climate change is now a pressing global issue. Some conclude that only
science can rescue the climatic situation. Others conclude that science, while
failing to take account of the subjective role of consciousness and mind (and
thereby discarding the very findings of quantum physics), adds fuel to the fire
of chaos: a case therefore of damned if we do and damned if we don’t. But the
words above seem to offer a third way: a science inclusive of mind as subject in
both internal and external world, and a harnessing of that mind into stillness.
It is perhaps not surprising that the world is awash with evidence of the
parallels of mind - and climate- chaos. Water and consciousness are the bringers
of, and bearers of, life on earth, and their movements govern climate and mind
activity respectively. Bearing in mind the classic Yogi’s words, that ‘I am the
world’, why should one not deduce that psychology is to soul as climate is to
anima mundi. Such deduction suggests that one cannot be tamed without the other;
that a sensible approach to the climatic problem therefore lies within. And
after all, what practitioner of yoga would disagree that with progress in
practice, the inner world increasingly turns out to be a reflection of the outer
world (and needless to say vice-versa).
But let us not decry conventional science too readily; for science has
relatively recently stumbled into chaos theory that appears to be hoisting in
all disparate sciences (including that of economics - one has only to take note
of the title of the book Butterfly Economics published in 1999), and which finds
that in all fields of investigation, order repeatedly dissolves into, and
emerges from, chaos.
So, with climate gathering
apparently objective forces seemingly to submit the mind to self-surrender, the
settling of the mind that yoga offers might, as a matter of absolute necessity,
be on the verge of establishing itself as the supreme science. And if it is,
bear the following in mind when you next gaze at what the skies have to
offer:Tat Tvam Asi - That Art Thou. And bear in mind too, that beyond the
climatic chaos on sensual offer, the skies have no limit, stretching out as they
do to eternal cosmic order. Tat Tvam Asi.
* Carl Jung was the psychologist who famously hauled the collective
unconscious into conceptual thought and dialogue, and Richard Wilhelm conducted
perhaps the most celebrated translation of I Ching (with commendable foreword by
Carl Jung)
