It’s daunting to talk to knowledgeable, insightful people who are so sure things are going to fall apart, and also sure that a little better version of the same old thing won’t be enough. Yet each of them, and each of the many people they cite, sees promise. Not a dewy-eyed, mushy kind of promise, not love without power, or a grand ideology to rally round, but a realistic promise that in crisis we will find resilience, that we will be thrown back on ourselves and our communities and what counts. That’s the way of nature, including human nature.

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This is a short excerpt from the Shambhala Sun article Why We Need New Ways of Thinking.
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What I find striking is how close their view is to the core Buddhist principle of interdependence, the teaching that there are no self-sustaining, permanent, inherently existing entities; that everything emerges as part of a great web of interlocking relationships. Suzuki Roshi referred to it as the interplay of “dependency and independency.” Environmentalist Stephanie Kaza wrote in the March, 2007, issue of this magazine that “the experience of a systems thinker, who brings awareness to all their relationships with specific human and non-human beings” is equivalent to what a Buddhist might call the “penetrating experience of interdependence.”

In Buddhism, however, the philosophical understanding of interdependence is coupled with the practical understanding that we need a mind discipline to break the habit of treating entities as permanent and independent. To get us out of our mess requires more than an intellectual understanding of what’s wrong and what’s right with civilization.

Mindfulness-awareness meditation, which allows us to quell the anxious roiling of our mind and to see the world and ourselves in all of their slow-creep splendor, is precisely the tool to cultivate Homer-Dixon’s “prospective mind,” to help us act “emergently,” and to attune ourselves to the rhythms of our surroundings and our fellow community members. Frankly, it’s hard to conceive of how we can genuinely change our view and way of acting without such a discipline. Without it, how, in the face of chaos, uncertainty, and fear, will we not fall back into fighting for dominion over what we imagine to be “our world”?

Read the entire Shambhala Sun article Why We Need New Ways of Thinking here.