Paradigm shift. Earth as a stakeholder
Una Meistere
An interview with Mumta Ito, one of Europe’s leading experts and advocates for rights of Nature
Mumta Ito is one of Europe’s leading experts and advocates for rights of Nature, an advisor to the UN General Assembly, initiator of a European Citizens Initiative to put rights of Nature on the legislative agenda of the EU, and founder of the charity Nature’s Rights.
A former structured finance lawyer (at top-ranking global law firm Clifford Chance in the City of London, where she advised governments, multinational corporations and investment banks) turned public interest environmental lawyer, Ito set up an NGO in the Caribbean to create a people’s movement that successfully saved an island of global ecological importance and to bring about legislative change. She also holds a degree in zoology, is an award-winning public speaker, and has facilitated systemic constellation healing workshops around the world. Her focus is on realigning law – living and written – with the universal laws that govern all life, and facilitating inner and outer transformation.
Mumta Ito is of South African and Indian origin and currently lives in Scotland. She began our conversation with a presentation that she gave summarising the core essence of her proposal in the EU’s European Economic and Social Committee 2020 study titled Towards an EU Charter of the Fundamental Charter for the Rights of Nature, which she co-authored with academic colleagues Massimiliano Montini, Silvia Bagni and Michele Carducci. You can watch the presentation in the video attached to this interview.
The goal of the study is “to set a framework for the legal recognition of the integrated Rights of Nature in the EU legal order, as the fundamental basis of our human right to life, from which all our other rights and freedoms emanate. This recognition forms a prerequisite for a different and improved relationship between human beings and Nature – one that reflects the interconnectedness of all life.” Currently, according to law, unlike corporations (which are inherently a form of property) and people, Nature and other living beings are given the status of object; the law does not recognise a relationship between us and the rest of Nature – which allows for its exploitation. This paradigm has not only led to an attitude of separation, but also serves as the oil that greases the myth of unlimited growth that goes hand in hand with the destruction of Nature and, in many situations, the impossibility of protecting Nature through existing legislation. Ito’s conviction is that a powerful way to radically change the current paradigm of humanity’s relationship with Nature and its consequences “is to shift the fundamental basis of the way the legal system deals with Nature because it will force systemic change. Law is the vehicle for encoding the collective consciousness into action – it is like our societal DNA. Therefore, if we want different outcomes we need to change the source code.” This process involves, among other things, healing the multiple layers of intergenerational trauma – both for each of us as individuals and for society as a whole.
“Quite often you get people talking about the need for systemic change. But a lot of people don’t realise that if we want our societal systems to operate differently, we cannot achieve this with the same legal structure that we have, because the law is rules by which our societal systems operate and also the vehicle for carrying the consciousness or the paradigm into action. And so the laws that we have come from a particular paradigm which comes from a particular type of consciousness, and so in order to produce a systemic change, we need to work much deeper, where we have more leverage. At present we have hardwired separation consciousness into our societal DNA. With recognising the integrated rights of Nature in law we are reprogramming our societies for a regenerative culture” says Ito.
The fact that we have cut our primordial link with Nature has historically resulted in intergenerational trauma that is then reflected onward from the individual level and into our social systems. “If we look at the legal system, this trauma has given rise to the separation consciousness and the kinds of trauma seen in Europe in terms of our relationship with the Earth. We’ve had mass clearances of people off the land when property law was first introduced; the burning of “witches”, i.e. the mass killing and genocide of medicine women in Europe – which went on for centuries – and this has brought a deep seated fear to people in this part of the world.
“Before property rights came in, there was the idea that Nature belongs to no one. But the logic that came in along with property rights is that if Nature belongs to no one, then it’s there for the taking. And if you can exclude others from using the land, then it’s yours. This is how the enclosures or mass clearances came to be – people were driven violently off the land and the land was taken for the benefit of a few who we now celebrate as “nobility”. That idea was then exported as colonialism, and so the same trauma perpetuated itself – people were disconnected from their place, disconnected from the land. This idea was entrenched and encoded into law – that all of Nature is property, it is separate from us, it is something that we have dominion over and that we can master. This is the origin of all of this, the silo systems and the structures and the fragmented structures... We have a legal system that is based on trauma, and that entrenches the trauma in its mechanistic and adversarial mode of operating, way that it pitting one person against the other.
“The law protects financial interests over life. And it manages the externalities of the system without changing how the actual system operates. Also, there is no access to justice because it’s a money paradigm as well; access to justice is only available to those who can pay. So this gives rise to degenerative structures and systems such as the concentration of wealth and power on the back of property and corporate rights, an economy based on infinite growth based on consumerism, energy that depletes Nature faster than she can replenish, and systems that operate in isolation from one another and with no accountability as to its impact on the whole. And the laws also operate in isolation leading to degenerative outcomes which then entrench even more suffering and trauma. And more trauma leads to more separation consciousness through greater fragmentation.
“We need to change the paradigm, transform the system and embody the change. One aspect of embodying the change is the implementation of redesigning our societal systems to operate in harmony with a legal paradigm based on the interconnectedness of all life. But there’s also the personal level, because if we are talking about changing a paradigm in the collective consciousness, we also need to each change our own individual paradigm. We need to embody these ideas because our connection with the earth is an embodied connection. Wisdom comes from an embodied intelligence, not just an intelligence that sits in the head. Our entire intelligence is resonant with the intelligence of the earth and cosmos. And in order to have a society that works on the basis of interconnection, we also need to feel interconnected on an individual level.
“I see it as the start of an evolutionary process of law that comes from a completely different paradigm – the first step moving us into a society that operates with whole human beings in a way that aligns with the energies of life. In this more evolved co-creative paradigm, the law must be based on interdependence in order to scale up solutions. When Nature has legal personhood and rights, this legal basis will make destructive industries illegal. This type of lawmaking tackles root causes; it protects life over interests. In the current paradigm, it’s just managing externalities, leaving the destructive extractivist machinery of the system intact, but now it’s beginning to tackle the very root by encoding unity consciousness into action.
“You can’t just take Nature’s rights and drop it into the existing system. If we were to drop it into the current sustainability model, you may end up with a situation where Nature’s rights are not enforceable against corporations because they’re deemed to operate only in private law, like human rights. Human rights are only enforceable against governments and not corporations, which is part of the problem. And if Nature’s rights are in an adversarial relationship with the rights of people and corporations, that is utterly ridiculous because that conclusion doesn’t, again, recognise the context of our existence – i.e. that both humans and corporations exist only because Nature exists in a form that is able to sustain human life. So we need a reform, a complete reframing of the way rights are conceived and held in our society, from an adversarial to a synergistic, ecosystemic and relational view of rights, which brings it closer to the ancient wisdom concept of “right relationship”.
“In this new paradigm of law, access to justice must be guaranteed for all because it would not work otherwise – and Nature must be represented in economic, political, social, and legal decision making as a stakeholder in its own right. This will then give rise to regenerative outcomes like thriving biodiversity, thriving ecosystems, climate resilience, health and wellbeing, pandemic resilience, regenerative economies, food security, and so on. And then that leads to a greater feeling of security and well being, which in turn reinforces the healing of trauma and the unity consciousness, so we end up with a regenerative cycle that aligns with life.”
Nature’s Rights. Mumta Ito is convict that a powerful way to radically change the current paradigm of humanity’s relationship with Nature and its consequences is to shift the fundamental basis of the way the legal system deals with Nature because it will force systemic change. “Law is the vehicle for encoding the collective consciousness into action – it is like our societal DNA.”
My first question correlates with what you said about trauma. We all know at the deepest levels of our souls that we are Nature and that we are completely dependent on this whole system that we call Nature. Why is this so difficult for us to acknowledge even now, when we as humanity find ourselves in the epicentre of a pandemic and ongoing environmental, climate and social crises?
I feel that we carry so many layers of shock, and this shock is being constantly exacerbated by the media. When I go for a walk in Nature and I connect with Nature, I am attuned to the earth; even during the height of the pandemic, Nature told me that everything was fine. And I deeply feel, with my whole being, that at the most profound level everything in the universe is fine.
Life exists and will always exist in its myriad of forms; there is nothing really to be afraid of. Yet in our society we have outsourced death; death happens somewhere where we cannot see it. And the pandemic has really brought that to the fore – the fear of death.
A virus appears and a small percentage of the population who are already suffering may die if they get it, or they may pull through. This has always been the case, and there are so many viruses out there that we have not even discovered yet. There are so many mystery reasons why people die every day. There are fit and healthy people who suddenly have an accident or suddenly have a heart attack.
Death is very much a part of life. And I feel there’s sort of a subliminal trauma being inflicted every time we see the news – there is something more to fear, something more to protect against. But that attitude also comes from trauma itself because when we are traumatised, the connection to the highest centres in our brain is cut off. Then the reptilian brain kicks in, which is all about survival. It’s a very contracted mode. Instead of using the pandemic as an opportunity to become more connected and aware, this is what we saw happen.
You know, I’ve never known our governments to be so concerned about old people as they were during the pandemic. Prior to that, old people were dying all the time as usual. But it suddenly became unacceptable for old people to die.
We are so focused on the Covid crisis that, even though it may be the most pronounced one, it is clearly not the only pandemic we are going through now – there is also a mental health pandemic, a cancer pandemic, a pandemic of heart attacks, etc. And there is no one-pill or one-surgery solution. Recognition of the mind-body connection is becoming more important than ever, especially as we are finally starting to realise that depression and anxiety have roots in the physical body as well.
Exactly. We could look at the crisis and see that there is also an opportunity here. People are beginning to embrace the thought that – I cannot live like this, one nervous wreck after another, one fear after another... I say: enough. I want to heal, I want to embrace life, and I want to embrace death. I want to face my own inner fears. I feel, personally speaking, that if we become extremely quiet within ourselves, and extremely connected with the Earth, all of the wisdom we need to solve our problems will reveal itself within us.
I feel, personally speaking, that if we become extremely quiet within ourselves, and extremely connected with the Earth, all of the wisdom we need to solve our problems will reveal itself within us.
There is a great book by Indian novelist Amitav Gosh, titled The Nutmeg’s Course, in which he speaks about history and the emergence of a modern worldview in which Earth is inert. As he recently said in an interview with Emergence Magazine: “They trace it back to certain philosophers like Descartes, if you like, and other European philosophers of that time, Locke and so on. But in fact, I think that this philosophy rose out of human conflict. It was when Europeans began to see the incredible effect that they were having upon the peoples of the Americas and also upon Africans; when they began to enslave Africans on this vast scale and began transporting them across the Atlantic to the Americas (...).” It’s rooted in the genocide of indigenous people... And this is a trauma we are still carrying on with.
I’m sure it’s also something deep within the human psyche that probably happened... I was speaking with a friend who is an archaeologist and has studied the Neolithic and Mesolithic periods in archaeology, which is when the ancient stone circles were built and such things were taking place in Europe. She said that back then, the consciousness of the people was a completely different. Here in the British Isles there is a Celtic revival going on. But she said that in archaeological terms, the Celts actually started the patriarchy that brought in metal and war. Before that it had been a society that was very peace-based and was more concerned with large planetary cycles.
Definitely with Descartes came the idea that non human beings are “soul-less”, which fuelled the mechanistic paradigm view of the Earth as non-living and its subsequent institutionalisation in the form of property law. This paved the way for the enclosures and colonialism, and forms the ground for the exploitative and extractivist modern day Corporation. But now we see that extractivism is reaching its limits and we need something new. Something that aligns with a modern ecosystemic perspective rather than 17th-century science and philosophy. Having said that, on a personal note, history is just someone’s story of what happened so for me there is always the curiosity – what actually happened? What is this life truly about?
Definitely with Descartes came the idea that non human beings are “soul-less”, which fuelled the mechanistic paradigm view of the Earth as non-living and its subsequent institutionalisation in the form of property law.
What is this life truly about? I suppose that was the reason you put a pause on your successful career as a lawyer and followed your own spiritual path – to find an answer to this and other existential questions by training with some of the most accomplished teachers and healers of our time. I know that you spent a couple of years with Amma, one of India’s most renowned teachers and humanitarians. Could you elaborate on how this came about and what sort of changes did you personally undergo? Because as we know, all changes in the world must start with changing oneself.
Definitely. I was born into the Indian spiritual traditions, into a family that respected these traditions. My father was very much a seeker of existential truth. I had a slightly unusual upbringing for someone raised in the West – I was exposed to a lot of the traditional rituals and ceremonies when I was young, and I absolutely loved it. Things like mantra, meditation, agnihotra, puja, bhajan, ayurveda, yoga, all of this was there in my childhood.
My father’s curiosity also led him to explore all the different world religions and their practices experientially. Through this exploration, I found that, actually, the essence of them all is the same. They’re all saying pretty much the same thing. And then, like most people during their teenage years and young adulthood, I lost interest in those practices from my childhood and I became very interested in the outer world and exploring money and these kinds of things. And that took me onto this journey of becoming a lawyer. When I became a lawyer, I remember thinking that I wanted to explore the world of money, but I didn’t want to go into business because I didn’t know what I could do with it if I decided it wasn’t for me.
I was very impressed with Mahatma Gandhi, and he was a lawyer. Other inspiring figures, like Nelson Mandela, were also lawyers (laughs). My thread of thinking as a teenager was – I’ll become a lawyer, and if that world is not for me, I’ll use it to benefit humanity in some way.
So I became a lawyer and worked in the City, which is London’s equivalent of Wall Street. I was at the top firm in the UK and representing investment banks, governments, multinationals. But I found that as I was becoming more and more outwardly successful, something inside me was dying. It was as if I could no longer find this essence that I recognised as myself. I would look at myself in the mirror and think – who is this person staring back at me? I had become something else.
It was around this time that my father took me to go see an enlightened spiritual master from India based in Germany – Mother Meera. To be honest, I wasn’t interested at that time. But my sister was very ill and my father wanted to take her, and he said she wouldn’t go unless he could somehow say it was a family trip. He said to me: Oh, you don’t even have to go and meet her. Just come with us, and if you don’t want to go, don’t – just go sightseeing instead.
When we got there, of course I went to see Mother Meera; I couldn’t just go sightseeing. I received healing from Mother Meera. She has this incredible ability that she can look directly into people’s eyes and to me it was as if she could see all of my energy pathways, all of my past history, everything – intergenerational, karmic, all of the patterns – and she gave me a transmission of light that then organically moved through me to take me to the next level in my development in the human journey. It was a profound turning point in my life. I spent the weekend there receiving this healing, and when I came back to the office, it was as if I was on a theatre set. And that was it - the show was over, the curtains have closed, and I wondered – what am I doing here? This has got nothing to do with me.
Then the path opened for me to rapidly come out of there. I did come out, but I was still in a state of confusion about what to do now. I had become really highly trained in law, and suddenly I have no interest in it at all – what do I do now?
What I did know was that I was deeply curious about energy and about healing. I wanted to delve more deeply into it. And the road was really opening up for that because I found that wherever I went, people would say, oh, have you tried this or have you tried that? And as I tried one thing, it would lead to another thing and to another... And I found that there were two things happening: a dissolving of the old, of everything I had built around me; and also a lot of fear around money as a source of security.
Now I look back and I see it was irrational. I had this fear of, oh my god, now I don’t have a paycheck coming in every month, my whole world is going to crash. And, you know, it took a while of being in that uncertainty to realise that actually, okay, one year has gone by, two years have gone by, and still nothing is crashing around me. I’ve managed to reorganise my life.
I find that this kind of money paradigm, that whole addiction to money as being synonymous with survival or life, well, in my journey it was something that I had to break. It required courage to do that – to be able to develop trust and to see that, actually, when we start moving in the direction of our hearts, life then reorganises itself around that to make it possible. But it requires trust – there’s no guarantee. Often people come to me and they want to volunteer for Nature’s Rights, but they want to be paid in order to do something... Somehow, it’s the opposite way round – you’ve got to take a stand, you’ve got to show up and take action, and then life will start to reorganise itself around you. The more certainty you have, the more your life will support you.
This is what I found for myself, but it was a process. That process was radically accelerated after I met Amma. I spent three years travelling with Amma deepening my understanding of healing and being completely immersed in her way of doing and perceiving things – being in her energy matrix, I would say. It affected me on so many subtle levels in so many deep ways and, of course, even afterwards, when I continued with the practices that I learned there in my everyday life.
I would say I am still learning to fully embody and express what I received in those years. It’s like I received so much and the body and psyche has its own timing, and for me, it is a continual journey of deepening – a continual journey of evolving. And I feel that we are all on this path; we can take a very, very slow path or we can accelerate our path a little through our association with the great ones who are successfully navigating these waters. And I found that by learning from some of these incredible beings that we have here on the planet, and in encountering them and interacting with them, that there has been a quickening and an acceleration of my own path, which has made my life so much more delicious and beautiful than working in a bank, or in a law firm representing a bank or a corporation in return for money. On the one hand, you can have this empty “glittering palace”, but on the other hand, you have the juiciness of the vast and intricate interconnected web of life.
I guess this is also a mirroring of the question that all of humanity is being faced with: what do we value? Do we want to isolate ourselves within the empty “glittering palace” and all of life dies off in the process, or do we want to be breathing and living, and deeply interconnected in this amazing, energetic matrix of life? Do we want to be deeply alive?
Nature’s Rights is my exploration of how we can bring these interconnected perspectives to inform the structures in our society. How can we insert this dream into a society that has laws that come from a completely different way of seeing the world. We should at least start with interconnection. I feel that changing the framing is just an intermediate step that we can do right now, and then future generations, as they become more healed and more embodied, will come up with ways of governing our human societies that are way beyond our imagination.
So, yeah, I feel that on the one hand, something is falling away. On the other hand, something is being created, and this is how it has always been.
What do we value? Do we want to isolate ourselves within the empty “glittering palace” and all of life dies off in the process, or do we want to be breathing and living, and deeply interconnected in this amazing, energetic matrix of life?
If we look at India’s spiritual leaders, many of them are taking an active part now in discussions towards climate change and a more conscious planet. For example, a few weeks ago, Sadhguru launched his global Save the Soil initiative, which aims to engage more than 3 billion people into driving political change in all democracies to revitalise soil and increase its organic content. As part of the initiative, this March Sadhguru will travel 30,000 km across Europe.
I think that’s great. I love the way Sadhguru translates ancient wisdom into a language that can connect with people who are very much in their head. I feel he is a real master of communication. I mean, there are so many incredibly realised masters in India, but not all of them are able to articulate in the way that Sadhguru does in the English language. As with the Aboriginal elders, their paradigm is so different, as is their knowledge of how the universe works – for them, all of our comings and goings are just a blip - like the interference on a television screen. But Sadhguru really engages with the people and really tries to make this bridge. I think it’s beautiful.
We definitely have to develop our energy systems, and from that development comes the embodied wisdom. And when the embodied wisdom comes, we naturally feel the bliss of the interconnectedness with all of life. And then it’s a no-brainer.
Speaking about Nature’s rights and the need of a paradigm shift, you mentioned law as one of the instruments with which to achieve this. Could we really change the way we think – could we change our psyche on a deeper level with law?
I feel it’s a two-way process: consciousness informs law, but you can also use law as a vehicle to drive different kinds of ideas into consciousness awareness. I feel that law has this function of being normative – it takes values and makes them normal in societies. At the moment, this radical idea of owning the earth (the very notion of owning the earth was very radical when it first appeared hundreds of years ago), as well as the idea that a fictional entity called a Corporation could have rights like a human being, have personhood like a human – these huge radical ideas have become norms. Now we don’t bat an eyelid – oh, who owns that river, that land… that’s my property... – it’s second Nature – even though the land or river will outlive us.
Yes, we can take something which at the moment is supposedly a radical idea, although, you know, I would say it’s not actually that radical because it’s true. The examples I gave you take a radical idea that is not based on truth but which has nevertheless been put into the legal system, which in turn became a norm that fuels more separation. If we take some basic truths and we entrench them in law, like the interconnectedness of all life, I feel that we can start to create new norms. When it becomes normal to think: the tree is a living being and I have a relationship with the tree, and if I harm this tree, I’ll be harming myself and all future generations, we have a shift in consciousness that leads to a shift in values and behaviour which gives very different results.
If we take some basic truths and we entrench them in law, like the interconnectedness of all life, I feel that we can start to create new norms.
Although it is hard to believe from a 21st-century perspective, our laws are still based on an outdated 17th-century paradigm that is anthropocentric and separates humans from Nature.
Exactly. They haven’t even been brought up to date with modern science. Historically, law and science have always moved in parallel to each other, but in about the last century and a half they parted company, with the sciences having acknowledged that the natural world is radically interconnected. In the new physics that we have, we’ve discovered that we are 99.9% space – matter is the fiction. And yet our laws are still stuck in the 17th-century paradigm because it suits vested interests. So, I feel that in a way, all we’re doing is just updating, bringing law into alignment with our modern understanding of Nature.
In the new physics that we have, we’ve discovered that we are 99.9% space – matter is the fiction. And yet our laws are still stuck in the 17th-century paradigm because it suits vested interests.
Many scientists and philosophers today speak about the earth and Nature as living beings, but unfortunately, most economists do not.
That’s because the entire economic paradigm is founded on the idea of property and infinite growth. They don’t want anything that interferes with that. I mean, at least the ones who are not creative and who have no imagination, because there are many economists who are very creative or very imaginative, and who can see that we are working with a flawed model. They see that the neoliberal constructs that we have today are based on flawed ideologies that don’t stand up to science or moral conscience. Traditional economists defend vested interests who don’t take a long-term view, and we have governments that listen to these voices rather than common sense. But I feel that as the numbers of people who align with what needs to happen grow, the more those people [who are in control] will not be able to ignore us.
Actually, there are precedents in the world – some rivers, such as the Yamuna, Whanganui and Ganges, have been given legal personhood and rights. How has this worked in real life? Has there been any noticeable impact from doing this?
This is why I started working on a model for the integrated rights of Nature, because, as you’ll notice, a common criticism is – oh, it doesn’t work in practice. That’s because we have dropped rights of Nature into a meta system that doesn’t operate in the same way, making it difficult to implement in practice. Additionally we’re using an adversarial model where Nature’s rights, human rights and corporate rights are in competition with each other rather than operating in synergy. This is exacerbated by the fact that when we recognise only the rights of a river, we’re seeing the river as a discrete separate entity that is separated from the banks of the river, from it’s source, from the mountain, from all of the wider ecosystem that it’s part of. Actually all of Nature is indivisible so the rights of the river is indivisible from the rights of the wider ecosystem but the rights of the wider ecosystem are yet to be recognised. This is why I advocate for legal changes to be made at a fundamental level and integrated throughout all the policy areas to ensure implementation. Instead of saying it doesn’t work so let’s abandon the idea, it’s wiser to ask why isn’t it working or what do we need to do to make it work in practice – and there we will discover that for the rights of a river to be upheld, the whole way that society operates must change too – which is what we are advocating.
I think it’s good that people have brought these movements forward – it is important to seed these new concepts in the legal system as law usually evolves through precedent. But for it to really work, we need a reframing of how rights are held and construed in societies. There needs to be a hierarchy of rights so that the rights of the river aren’t working against the rights of the people, or the rights of the corporations aren’t working against the rights of the river or people. We need a nested hierarchy of rights that follows the natural orders in life in which industry has to change in order to support the rights of Nature; where human activity needs to change in order to support the rights of Nature; where governments support people in having a livelihood that can meet their basic needs without having to infringe upon the rights of Nature. It’s a much more holistic way of implementation, one that involves changes higher up in the legal system and integration throughout the legal system. In fact, if we are to really enforce the rights of the Yamuna and the Ganges rivers, we need to change how the agricultural system operates. We need to change how the energy system operates. We need to change how consumerism – the production and consumption system – operates. And in order to do that, we need deeper changes in the law such as the rights of Nature – integrated rights of Nature, an upgraded model of sustainability that is integrated across all policy areas. This is what I’m raising awareness of.
You know, for those who say it doesn’t work, yes, it doesn’t work because it’s the very first step of seeding a new idea into the legal system. If we want it to work, we have to go deeper with it. It’s a big structural change. It’s not a bandaid, you know – it’s not like environmental law with which we protect one river but the whole system carries on the same way. No, we are dealing with something very fundamental that is missing from our legal system; what we add to the legal system will have to change everything. And so for that, you have to have it in the country’s constitution, and integrated across all policy areas. And we have to phase out subsidies to these industries that are causing the destruction as part of upholding Nature’s rights. We have to give a timeline for them to transition over to different ways of operating. Yeah, it’s a lot of work, but it’s the work that we have to do if humanity is to have a viable future...
We need deeper changes in the law such as the rights of Nature – integrated rights of Nature, an upgraded model of sustainability that is integrated across all policy areas. This is what I’m raising awareness of.
As humans, we have become used to making everything into a resource and explaining and justifying it all with statistics. How can we restore Nature’s primal, original voice which has been hidden under these statistics? Is there a role for storytelling in this process, a role for culture and the arts? If we look at indigenous cultures, their ancient wisdom was based on storytelling, right?
Absolutely. It was the oral tradition. This embodied wisdom was transmitted when one elders spoke with the others. So somebody who embodied the wisdom spoke, and in the very vibration of how they communicated, that wisdom was received by those who listened, who then embodied it themselves and could in turn pass it down.
Today our knowledge transmission system has become disembodied. I feel that the arts and culture can be very instrumental here because, like you say, we are now a society that has made everything into a commodity. And yet, what human beings seek most deeply is connection. I would say the deepest connection is spiritual connection – that longing to be connected to the whole, connected to the source, connected to everything in the universe.
This is where I feel art can help us connect, as can music, poetry, storytelling. For example, in ancient cultures like in India (and as I understand, in other aboriginal and indigenous cultures as well), they had an understanding of what we could call “sacred law” – a set of principles that if transgressed, would bring disaster upon everyone. And these laws were taught in the form of stories. The stories often told to children were about people who transgress these laws, often innocently, in pursuit of power, fame and fortune, and inevitably meet their downfall in some way.
If we look at our society at the moment, we think we’ve become so intelligent and advanced, but we can see ourselves in the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Mahabharata War – all of these ancient legends. I mean, human nature has not changed. It still encounters the same pitfalls. It’s still the same archetypal stories, the same challenges. I feel modern-day storytellers can do a great job in bringing ancient wisdom into modern scenarios, and just wake people up.
I feel modern-day storytellers can do a great job in bringing ancient wisdom into modern scenarios, and just wake people up.
Do you think it’s a realistic hope that we could, in our lifetime, assimilate with Nature again? Is it still possible to restore our relationship with Nature in a profound way? We now live in “boxes”, our streets are straight lines...
I think it’s realistic. I mean, it depends on the form. When you mentioned straight lines and boxes, I immediately recalled how I felt when I was still working for the law firm and Mother Meera had shown me a dimension that is beyond that. And there was something in me, a wild spirit that wanted to come out, break out of these boxes. Once that wild spirit in each of us is awakened, we cannot restrain it within the box anymore. It breaks out, and sometimes the more we try and suppress it, the more messy the breaking is, which can then lead to psychological breakdowns and all kinds of disasters. The more willing we are to be able to flow with it, the easier we can move forward. But it does involve a lot of messiness. Nature is messy, you know – when you have a shoot breaking through the earth, you know, creepers crack through solid concrete... When this force awakens, you cannot hold it down; if you try, it will become worse and it will be more painful.
Once that wild spirit in each of us is awakened, we cannot restrain it within the box anymore.
I can’t say whether within our lifetimes we are going to live more connected with Nature. I can say, however, that within my lifetime I will make my best effort to live more connected with Nature. And if each one of us does that, then we are already paving a more connected path for the next generation. And hopefully, in seven generations’ time our work will be done.
There’s a great book by philosopher David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, in which he describes how under the guidance of a monk/mystic in the Himalayas, he learned to awaken the spirit of the raven within him and see the world through the raven’s eyes. As a thought experiment, if we imagine the planet Earth or Gaia as a living being, how would Earth view the current planetary crisis from the perspective of a person?
This is a very interesting inquiry. Sometimes when I do a constellation in which I represent the earth or ecosystems; it produces a surprisingly radical non-anthropocentric view. It is not at all what human beings think Earth’s perspective would be.
We did a constellation for the still ongoing Chevron case – the US oil company that is responsible for massive pollution in the Amazon that took place more than 20 years ago and which has still not been cleaned up, and due to which whole ecosystems are still dying and people are being poisoned. In the constellation, when the representative for Pachamama (Mother Earth) was asked what she thought about this, she answered: “I’m fine. It doesn’t bother me.” – which is not what we imagine the Earth to be thinking. And yet, looking at it from the immense geological timeframe of the Earth, it is simply a blip and Nature will continue to evolve around it. Whether human beings and other species can is a different question! Nature can operate without us, but we can’t operate without Nature.
We have to be open to understanding that other life forms don’t see as we see. And our human bubble is exactly that – it’s only a human bubble.
We have to be open to understanding that other life forms don’t see as we see. And our human bubble is exactly that – it’s only a human bubble. It’s just a very small, limited perception of a much bigger whole that we don’t really understand as we are limited by our sense organs and organs of perception. But what we can do is take steps to not harm ourselves and to not harm others. To live with a sense of connectedness and try to have the humility to put ourselves in the position of another living being. I feel that where we are at the moment in our consciousness is almost like a kindergarten stage. And people think that our ancestors were a lot more primitive... I think they were a lot more advanced.
I think the story has been rewritten to make it look like we are more advanced now, but I really do believe that we may have had all kinds of technologies in the past. As a child, I often used to think that if there were to be some huge disaster that would wipe out everything, all of our civilisation, so much of our knowledge is intangible – for instance, everything that’s in computer code. And say that somebody far into the future found the remnants of a computer motherboard from our long-extinct civilisation – they might think that it’s an interesting artwork or piece of jewellery.
I often wonder about all these artefacts and things from the past that we now look at – how correct are our interpretations, how much are we seeing the full picture in terms of what previous civilisations were about? No one from those times is now alive to tell us.
I feel that where we are at the moment in our consciousness is almost like a kindergarten stage.
You mentioned that our consciousness is at a kindergarten stage. Actually, we still don’t understand what consciousness is nor where does it reside.
You know, to me it seems almost like our human society is running around and chasing its own tail with ideas and theories, while in the meantime it is forgetting what is most important.
And what is most important?
Our connection with the source of life, with each other, with the earth. To live wholesomely, to be expressions of love – to feel love, to give love, to receive love. I mean, these are the most valuable things for a human being but we seem to have forgotten.
To me it seems almost like our human society is running around and chasing its own tail with ideas and theories, while in the meantime it is forgetting what is most important.
Even harmony sounds a little bit out if this world. We all speak about it, but we don’t know what it’s like to live in harmony.
Exactly. You know, I’m not saying that all our intellectual endeavours are useless. What I’m trying to say is that we have forgotten a lot about the essence – we have become uprooted. Spirituality has been kicked out of the equation, and we need to integrate all of that. If we can bring the head, the heart, the guts, and our earth all together, we can be more integrated for each other and for the web of life than we are at the moment.
It’s almost as if science and wisdom have become divorced from each other. And when we have technology without wisdom, we have a problem. We have ethical problems. Technology has to go hand in hand with wisdom, and I feel at the moment that our technological capacities are outstripping our wisdom, because we’re not investing in developing our human systems of embodied intelligence. We’ve almost dismissed it because we cannot see energy fields physically with our eyes, and a lot of us have lost the capacity to perceive and feel them. Yet they exist.
So really, with this endeavour called Rights of Nature, we’re trying to bring law and wisdom together, because law is the rules by which our society operates. And by trying to bring some wisdom into that, we hope to create a counterbalance in which technology is used in service of the whole rather than being co-opted by vested interests who operate from separation consciousness.
With this endeavour called Rights of Nature, we’re trying to bring law and wisdom together, because law is the rules by which our society operates.
To end our conversation, I think that we, as a civilisation, need grounding at the moment.
Definitely. Big-time grounding. Recently there’s been a whole wave of awareness around trauma and taking a trauma-informed approach, and I really feel we need to heal intergenerational ancestral individual trauma as well as reconnect with Nature. The two of these together will help us start becoming more grounded and embodied.
Thank you!
