Your Self-awareness has wide implications and impressive consequences. It is truly explosive. When you see how vastly different you are from what you had been told, you begin to see how vastly different your world is also. You and your universe are inseparable, and it must follow that, to be at all real, your enlightenment is necessarily suprapersonal and indeed cosmic. The tradition that the Buddha’s enlightenment meant the enlightenment of all creatures has a sound foundation. It is as true of your awakening and mine as it was of his. To wake up is to wake the world up.
What, then, is our universe like when, clearly seeing whose universe it is, we start living from that beatific vision? Does it make sense? Is it a well-ordered and reasonable whole, or is it fantastic, the wild and woolly product of the mystic’s disordered imagination?
In this chapter I put it to you that, now you see who you really, really are, your universe is much more reasonable and well-ordered than it was. Moreover—to put it mildly—altogether more habitable and lavishly furnished and welcoming, a home at once more homely and more grand, more accessible and more astounding.
I have a further aim in what follows. It is to show that, even if one isn’t yet willing to see into one’s true nature, the nature of the universe is already revealed to any open-minded and thorough investigator. In fact I would say to such a one: “As an encouragement and prelude to “personal” enlightenment, try “cosmic” enlightenment. It may lead you to conclude that they amount to the same thing.”
Every age has its world-picture, its taken-for-granted view of the universe and man’s place in it. Ours is supposed to be based on science, and no longer on religion or superstition. But is it really the growth of science which has made a cosmology like Plato’s or Shakespeare’s incredible, and our own the only sensible one? Is our modern, educated layman’s estimate of the universe really founded on facts or on prejudice?
It is certainly unlike the old estimate. Men used to think of the universe as full of life, of the Sun and stars and even the Earth as visible deities, and of the blue sky as the country of the blessed. Priests and astronomers pointed up to the same encircling heavens, to celestial realms whose divinity was proportional to their distance from man at their center. Physical height matched spiritual status.
All of this has now, we imagine, been finally disproved. Instead of a universe of concentric spheres we have a centerless one, a cosmic potato instead of a cosmic onion. Instead of an aristocratic universe we have a leveled-down one, whose principalities and powers have long ago lost their influence and their life. Instead of awesome star gods looking down on us we have so many firecrackers or blast furnaces blazing away in the night sky. Instead of a tremendously alive universe we have an inanimate one in which sentient beings, lost like the tiniest of needles in the vastest of haystacks, manage to scrape a brief living. Instead of a meaningful creation—a proper place for man—we have a huge expanse of mindless space in which living things are the rarest accidents or anomalies. And, in the last resort, even they are accidental collocations of molecules.
Such, more or less, is the new world myth. This is how most of us educated non-scientists—plus many or most scientists, in fact—regard the universe. And we are under the impression that science rules out any other view.
Does it do so?
First let us note that, truly speaking, there is nothing about the universe which forbids our taking this Earth—or the Sun, or our favorite star, or Number 10 Downing Street, or any other convenient spot—as its center. On the contrary, we have only to look to see that the given universe is always arranged as a nest of concentric regions—occupied by such things as pipe bowls and spectacle rims, hands and feet, people and animals, clouds and aircraft, Moon and Sun and stars—around the ever-central observer. To discount this eminently verifiable fact in favour of some theory (which is really no better than a convenient fiction) of uniform, potato-like space is in the truest sense unscientific, unrealistic, and therefore asking for trouble. If we are honest, the dead and centerless cosmic potato is invariable found to be a cosmic onion, whose observer-core is the very focus of life and mind.
As for the outer layers of this onion-like universe, it is most improbable that they are lacking in life and mind. True, we have direct evidence of only one heavenly body—our own Planet. Nevertheless, according to recent scientific theories, a significant proportion of stars are likely to have developed into solar systems resembling our own. Furthermore, a significant proportion of those systems are likely to contain planets that are suitable homes for the living. And wherever the right conditions arise—the right ingredients and temperatures—there, scientists assure us, life will follow. Consequently the number and variety of inhabited worlds no doubt beggars imagination.
It follows that we have much better reason than Shakespeare and Dante for feeling, on starlit nights, that we are gazing up into heavens replete with life, some of it far surpassing our own. To find the more superhuman of these inhabited worlds, we should need to probe further and further from our Earth-center. For the realm of the planets plainly holds far less promise (if any) than the remoter realm of the stars—the hundreds of millions of stars of our own Galaxy, containing who knows how many planet-encircled suns. Nor is this exalted realm a millionth part so rich in celestial probabilities as the still remoter realm of the galaxies, with its unthinkably great star population.
Thus science itself not only points to the existence of the superhuman, but links it with distance from ourselves. What’s more, we are warned that the more advanced of the worlds above is likely to be influencing us all the while in unsuspected ways—say by telepathy. The laboratory evidence for this faculty is impressive: and, it seems distance is no bar to its operation.
In short, we are already back to something like the ancient world-picture, which science was supposed to have destroyed once and for all. The joke the irony—is that it is science itself that has led us back to that picture and done so much to verify (and, of course de-mystify) what was mere guesswork.
Clearly, then, we laypersons cannot claim the support of science for our pseudoscientific world picture as a vast haystack in which we are scarcely so much as needles. But consistency is not our strong point. For instance, we talk as if it were somehow to our discredit that our universe is on so splendid a scale, and as if we had lost instead of found ourselves in it. We think of ourselves as mere pinpoints in the universe, as if our inability to weigh more than one or two hundred pounds apiece were somehow more significant than our ability to weigh the stars. Again, we speak of this vast expanse of mindless space as if it were anything but our life’s source, saturated with and saturating our own mind if no other. As for the human self-portrait as “an accidental collocation of molecules,” and one moreover that walks around blandly describing itself as such—now there’s a delightful spectacle! If this is a sample of what our idiotic universe can throw off accidentally (whatever that could mean), think of what it could do if ever it got around, by some particularly happy accident, to doing it intentionally. And, in fact, we don’t have to go far to find intention in what it does. It does us, who are bursting with intention. We certainly intend ourselves, and a good deal besides. And so, presumably, does every other star dweller who isn’t on the point of suicide. How this universe can be so steeped in intention, yet remain merely accidental, we don’t explain.
Evidently we science-invoking moderns think of “living matter” as if it were somehow freakish, irrelevant to the nature of the universe. Yet science insists that the physical ingredients of inert objects such as heavenly bodies are the same as the ingredients of the creatures that come to life on them, formed of their substance. The difference doesn’t lie in the raw material, but in its organization. Thus the lowliest particles everywhere are capable of assuming the highest living forms. Potentially all the stuff of all the stars is alive, purposeful, and indeed superhuman. And even if such exalted functions were to emerge only for a moment in one spot, they would still reveal for all time the hidden nature of all matter. One small flower is enough to identify the biggest plant. There remains no sense whatever in our description of the universe as lifeless and mindless.
The scale of this gigantic thing is what tricks us. We are not deceived when we look at a creature of handy size. We take its whole life history into account, and most of all its later and more developed stages. Thus the plant is a flowering plant, even as a seedling. Thus the caterpillar is no mere worm on legs but a gorgeous butterfly in the making, even if it should perish before coming out in its true colors. Flower seeds, mosquito larvae, human embryos: the higher stages are always the definitive ones for us—provided our specimen weighs no more than a few hundred tons and survives no more than a few hundred years. Our unhappy cosmos lacks both qualifications. Because its scale is wrong its higher functions tell us nothing important about it. We see it as defunct, and only infested with life. No matter how unimaginably prolific it may be, no matter what myriads of living worlds and species and individuals our universe-tree may put forth, no matter how luxuriant its blossoms of mind and values (all arising naturally, we are told), we still reckon it a flowerless tree. Worse, it is no tree at all. It’s not even a magnificent branching vase in which we, mere cut flowers, are tastefully displayed, but their indifferent or threatening background. Thus, idiotically, we human flowers deny the life of our cosmic plant because it’s not all flowers, but also enormous leaves and stem and root.
The analogy is a misleading one. It doesn’t go half far enough. You could say that a rose plucked from the bush is still a rose, but you must admit that a man plucked from the universe is an absurdity. Yet this absurdity lies at the very core of our modern myth, which sees man as his clue to what the universe is not like.
To say the least, then, the ancient notion of a living cosmos is neither ridiculous nor inconsistent with modern science. But whatever we think of the universe as a whole, the great majority of us are quite sure that none of its bigger parts is alive. The bulkiest organisms we recognize are the big trees of California and Oregon and the blue whale.
This is rather odd. For here we have, extending from particles and atoms and molecules and cells up to man who includes them all, a well-filled scale or hierarchy of unitary things or beings: and then, immeasurably above man, the Whole of things and the Being of beings. Why this cosmic gap? If the vast interval between man and his minutest particles is filled by a series of increasingly subhuman parts, surely the principle of Nature’s continuity suggests that the equally vast interval between him and the Whole may well be filled by a series of increasingly superhuman wholes. If these have escaped our notice, couldn’t that be because we have eyes only for our equals and subordinates in the hierarchy?
Have we ever looked for our superiors? Would we recognize them if we saw them? It is notoriously difficult to find a thing one has no idea of. So warned, let’s assume that this gap in the natural order isn’t empty. Let’s posit a creature who outbulks a man as a man outbulks a cell, and ask how such a giant would have to differ from ourselves in order to live at all.
Apparently there are limits to the size of a terrestrial organism. If it is too big it is unlikely to survive. In that case we must assume that our hypothetical giant takes flight from his parent heavenly body and sets up as a heavenly body on his own account. Then he not only can be very massive, but needs to be. Otherwise, he can neither incorporate his own atmosphere and water supply, nor keep a firm gravitational hold on them. And without water and oxygen, and atmosphere shells to protect him from dangerous radiation, he cannot make the heavens his home. Nor, once there and thus enwrapped, can he just wander at will, but must attach himself to some star for warmth and energy, keeping a safe distance and turning continually, like meat on a spit, to avoid burning in front and freezing behind. And he’s certainly a lucky giant. As soon as he starts spinning and circling round his star, the laws of gravity and inertia obligingly see that he goes on doing so without effort or deviation.
As for his physique, what would he want with legs or arms, hands or feet, or even wings? Nose and ears, a mouth with rows of teeth, a stomach and bowels and an anus—anything of the sort would be an encumbrance and laughingstock in the heavens. We are left, then, with a vast spherical body, its whole surface drinking in solar energy.
And supposing there were no convenient star to feed on? Well, if our heavenly giant cannot find what he needs he must be it. He must incorporate a starlike source of energy, a great blazing heart to sustain the physique we have described.
To sum up: if we greatly enlarge the creatures we know, adjusting their anatomy and behavior to their size and their very different environment, what do we get? We get creatures that are indistinguishable from the heavenly bodies we look up at. If our celestial giant and his fellows exist, they are a familiar sight, though unrecognizable at this distance. For all we know, many a star shining in the night sky could in fact be a tremendously alive and exalted being, a fit inhabitant of the heavens. And so the scale of creatures doesn’t culminate in humans. The seeming gap is likely to arise from a defect in our vision rather than a defect in the cosmos.
This tale of heavenly giants isn’t so much a fairy story as a detective story, the solution to which must wait till later in this chapter. Meanwhile, it’s time we came down to Earth again, to the life we know for sure.
But do we know it? A living thing (scientists tell us) is an organization of nonliving things. The salts of our blood, the acid of our stomachs, and the calcium of our bones are clearly not alive, but neither are the atoms comprising our living cells. What is physics or chemistry at one observational level is a human being at another level, and at once alive and not alive. All depends on whether we take the thing to pieces or not.
But if the pieces, as pieces, are lifeless, where shall we set the boundaries of the living whole? If by the whole man we mean one who is independent and self-contained, we can hardly leave out the air in his lungs and the sweat on his brow—at least nobody has pointed out where these cease to be organism and start being environment. And if they are caught up in the living whole of him, why not the tools without which he would starve to death and the clothes without which he would freeze to death? After all, he is far more dependent on his shoes than his toenails, and upon his good false teeth than on his bad real ones. They have become part and parcel of his life.
That may not be how he describes them, but it’s what they feel like. He identifies himself with his possessions and is not himself without them. He may be more vain of his facade than his face, and more hurt by the loss of a few tiles than many hairs. Until he feels himself so all-of-a-piece with the clothes he wears, and the horse he rides, and the financial or political power he wields, that they no longer seem outside him, he has still to learn their use. The expert is one who, having incorporated his tools, is unaware of them. They have temporarily vanished into his physique. He doesn’t sit on a seat in a boat that sails the sea. He sails, he is at sea. He doesn’t grasp a handle that holds a blade that cuts bread. He cuts bread. That’s how a man speaks because that’s what he is—an endlessly elastic organization of “dead” parts, mostly outside his skin. Thanks to them, he can drink at the lake and browse in the field while attending a concert on the far side of the Earth all without setting foot outside his own front door. Instead of going out to these places, he grows up to them. In the well-developed citizen the world’s machinery springs to life and makes him what he is. These organs of his are all the more organic and lively because they are built, not of protoplasm but of all sorts of metals and plastics and so on, and can be amputated painlessly and at will when a new embodiment is needed.
Nor do these artificial but vital extensions complete his physique. Far from it. To cut a man off from his own and other species is homicide. You could say that a man is other men. And other species also. Species neither occur nor survive nor develop as separate entities, but in great interlocking patterns of mutual interdependence. Just as our own blood cells make no sense without our muscle cells and all the other kinds, so the bee’s long tongue makes no sense without the flower’s deep nectary. And so on indefinitely. The more you study one bit of life the more you must take the others into account, so that really to know one would be to know the lot. If, then, we seek the living whole, the Specimen that is truly self-contained and self-maintaining, nothing short of the entire network of terrestrial organisms, growing up as one living thing, deserves such a title. And even this huge biosphere is still far from being complete. For without its core of rock and water and topsoil, and its envelope of air, it is as dead as the least of its ingredients. In short, nothing less than the whole Earth is truly alive. Here indeed is a visible goddess. One of the tribe of giants we were detecting in the heavens was down here with us all the while!
Whose life is in doubt? Hers, or ours which is hers or nothing? The only complete living organism of which we have direct and inside knowledge turns out to be a heavenly body—our Earth.
Of course the behavior and build of such a creature are, to our minds, so odd that we need a new word for this very high-level vitality, this superlife which is at least planetary. Oddity, however, must be expected here. The living cell is a very different story from one of its molecules, and a man from one of his cells. It would be strange if the living Earth were not, in turn, very different from her human and subhuman parts or organs.
All the same, she is no foreign body living some mysterious life apart from ours. Admittedly her life-preserving maneuvers in the sky are less varied than ours in her, but if to act deliberately is to know with scientific precision what you are doing and why, then her behavior is much more deliberate than any man’s. She sees further and more clearly into her past and future than we could ever see into ours. Of course her beginnings were unconscious and unpromising, but so were ours, and now who can match her adult complexity—all her own unfolding and no invasion? For eyes, observatories whose binocular (or rather multi-ocular) vision enables her to judge the distance of her companions in the sky more accurately than we can judge the distance of our companions on Earth. For special sense-organs, she has receptors tuned in to all sorts of cosmic influences. For intellectual exercise, her science of the heavens and her own constitution and behavior there. (I say her science, not our science, deliberately: here it is a planetary rather than a human function, and it is in our planetary rather than our human capacity that we engage in it. A human is much more and much less than human: all depends on what he is up to (or down to), on what company—superhuman, human, subhuman—he happens to be keeping.) We hang her portrait on our walls along with ours, and close-ups of her wrinkled face—ever-changing, luminous, with a beauty all her own are familiar to all who take off from her surface.
This is indeed no alien godling. She is the full extent, the filled out body-mind of each of her creatures. For there’s nowhere to live but the heavens, and no way to live there but hers.
To be more accurate, even she isn’t suited to the hard climate of the skies. The smallest complete creature fit for this universe is no sunless planet but a star—a fully developed sun, a solar system whose “living” planet is a mere organ. And even such a star depends on all its fellows in our Galaxy, and on the Universe of galaxies. Only the Whole is a genuine whole, and therefore altogether alive.
So we have found what we were looking for—a superhuman hierarchy of wholes and parts to match the subhuman. Here, neatly filling the gap above man and counterbalancing the orders below him, are celestial beings planetary, sidereal, and galactic—in which higher rank means more independence achieved and more “dead” material raised to life. And in truth all these hierarchical levels hang together, are totally interdependent. The life of man is the indivisible life of the entire hierarchy, or no life at all.
Is this view of man too speculative? Then let us imitate the scientist whose business is unprejudiced observation of what’s on show (with a view to economical description and prediction and possible control). Let’s try observing man objectively, for once. What precisely are you, when examined in this way?
What we make of you depends upon range. At six feet we see a human body, a little closer a face. But the superficial view isn’t enough. Our instruments take us nearer and nearer, to places where we find tissues, cell groups, a cell in detail, giant molecules, and so on down to particles. So much for the near view. Let’s now move away from you. This time we find, in turn, a house, a city, a country, a planet, a star (our solar system), a galaxy.
You may object that these objects are nothing like you. Of course (I reply) they are very different from the human you. But this is begging the question. We come to our investigation with an open mind about what you might be. We can only take what we find—namely, the whole scale of creatures from particles to galaxies. And this confirms our conclusion that you are incomplete, not yet yourself, till you are built to this awe-inspiring design.
Again, you may, with some show of reason, protest that the distant view includes so much that isn’t you, provided you add that the near view excludes so much that is you, and that the middle view is altogether too superficial. But again this is question-begging. What are you, really, really? If our investigation is serious, we can afford to ignore no view of our material. Only unprejudiced observation from every angle and every distance could reveal the astonishing totality and all its metamorphoses.
You might reply that this merging and emerging, this cosmic elasticity, however true of your bodily or outer aspect, is untrue of your “real self.” Primarily you are a subject, not a mere object. And as such you find yourself to be “only human, after all.”
To find out what’s really going on, let’s listen to this “real” self. You talk of this pore, this organ, this body of yours, this house, district, country, planet, star, galaxy. Clearly what is felt as here varies all the way from this aching tooth to the Milky Way, and what is felt as there varies all the way from all the other teeth in your head to all the other stars in the sky. “Here” and “there,” “now” and “then,” “fast” and “slow,” “present” and “absent”—these little words are always giving us away. We would do well to listen to them and their message. Anyone who can seriously talk of near galaxies and the far side of the room, of old men in a new world, of giant atoms in a dwarf star, is either totally elastic or else beside himself.
Far from deceiving us here, language is only underlining the facts. A sick man may so identify himself with one organ of the body that the rest are treated as alien or even hostile. Conversely a healthy man may so identify himself with his family, or country, or planet, or even his star (witness the popularity of Star Wars), or his God, that he thinks for them, and is hurt when they are hurt, and makes their good his good, and lives and even dies for them with little thought for his private welfare. In fact, anyone who lacked all such expansive feelings would be an intellectual and moral imbecile. The idea of the self (I’m not referring to the One Self of all, our ultimate Identity, but to all the identities that fall short of it)—the idea of the self as constant, as a unique, permanent, separate, immiscible something or other, won’t bear examination. The facts—they include the evidence of multiple personality, religious conversion, amnesia, telepathy, and so on, not to mention the insoluble problem of biological individuality—make nonsense of the private and merely human self. Nor does this nonsensical idea work. Quite the contrary, it is madness. To the extent that we cut ourselves off from other selves we are out of our minds and dispirited.
The truth is that this illusion of a separate self and the illusion of a dead universe are halves of a whole, segments of one vicious circle. The universe seems dead because I seem out of it, and I seem out of it because the universe is dead. Till the total mind in man rejoins its own total body—the many-leveled universe—he is not himself and the universe is not itself. But when at last they coincide, this is at once his own enlightenment and the universe’s enlightenment.
Short of that goal, his elastic mind matches his elastic body: here and there grow and shrink together, subject takes on the rank of object, you and I belong to the same hierarchical level. It is a human that greets a human, a ship that hails a ship, a star that signals (or tries to signal) a star. And just as it’s not a hand that puts forth a hand to shake hands with you but this man who does so, so it’s not a man or a country that puts forth a space-probe to study Mars, but Earth who does so. She is our astronomer—no mere man being equipped for the job—so that, in fact, there is the world of difference between the “I” in “I see a man” and the “I” in “I see Mars.” Again, when the general (note the noun) says he will outflank the enemy, it is the army that does so. And when the atomic physicist (note the adjective) says he will smash the uranium nucleus, it is neutrons that do so. Yet he doesn’t feel shrunken, any more than the general or the astronomer feel bloated. It comes so naturally to be at one moment tiny, and the next moment huge—to ascend and descend the cosmic hierarchy, taking shape as this member and then that, suddenly and at will—that we never notice the transformation.
To return to Earth, then, we have every reason to celebrate her life. It is an immensely important aspect of our own infinitely elastic life. But this leaves her peculiarly vulnerable. A word is enough to polish off this great but sensitive creature.
For we (I speak for the great majority of moderns) have only to decide, in the teeth of all the evidence, that she shall be a lifeless ball of rock, then no matter what limb she flourishes, or eye she opens, or Song of the Earth she sings—nothing she will ever get up to will persuade us she’s alive and kicking. And why? Why because it’s all, by definition, not hers. It’s alive, and therefore alien or parasitic. Never shall the life on Earth be the life of Earth. How blind can we get? Treat ourselves thus, and what are we but cellinfested skeletons? Examine in this spirit the world’s liveliest organism till we know it inside out, and we will find nothing but a patterning of particles. Earth is one of the most important and least recognized victims of our fatal habit of reductionism. Really it’s time to admit that the most significant of geological specimens is the geologist.
And of course the Sun—come to life as our Solar System—gets the same raw deal. We have only to hand over the whole of his natural history to physics and astronomy (as if his men and beasts were unnatural and his flowers artificial) to reduce this star god to star dust.
A solar myth as curious as this doesn’t spring up overnight. It, too, has a natural history.
To our early ancestors the Sun was simply alive, as you and I are, only brighter and more divine. But gradually the animating spirit was distinguished and divided from the gross body and turned into a god or angel steering the solar fireball from outside. Then science came along and reduced particular star spirits to general laws of Nature, to tendencies and forces. Till eventually, coming down to our own day, even these ghostly remnants are seen as man-made and subjective, and so exorcised. Heavenly bodies are no longer impelled or guided in their courses. They only take the line of least resistance. And while the solar life and mind are thus being wiped out, the body itself is being quietly carved up and disposed of. The Sun’s colour and brightness and warmth and beauty are drawn in from the observed object over there to the observing subject here, to the eye of the beholder. Even his apparent motion across the sky is really ours. Finally, and just in case any miserable remnant of our victim should remain, physics dissolves his substance into space, dotted here and there with inscrutable particles.
Here is the murder story of all time—nothing less than cosmicide committed over millenniums, and still going almost unnoticed. Fortunately, however, it’s only a tale, a piece of solar crime fiction. For we could get rid of the solar life, by shoving it into our heads, only if our heads were lethal containers, or else made off with their contents to some other star. All that’s happened, in fact, is that the life of our Sun has suffered an internal shift. It certainly hasn’t gone. Quite the contrary. Doubtless it is only by thus shamming dead that a planet-ringed star can wake in the end to a fully selfconscious life and its full potential. After all, our pseudoscientific myth of a lifeless Sun must be seen as a solar rather than a merely human myth. As, in fact, a necessary stage in the natural history of our star, and no mere aberration. Only let’s not mistake this brief (very brief, it’s to be hoped) and somewhat crazy episode for the whole story.
And let’s not mistake indifference to this story for neutrality. The universe which isn’t seen as living is treated as dead. There’s no half-way house, no sitting on the fence. We can’t avoid taking sides. In practice, rejection of the ancient picture of a living universe amounts to acceptance of our modern picture of a virtually lifeless one, with its immense consequences for that cosmic anomaly called mankind.
To sum up, then. We have found our modern myth, this life-denying world picture that we imagined was scientific, to be nothing of the sort. Instead, we have found science pointing in the opposite direction, towards something like the old cosmic hierarchy culminating in the divine. To the onion universe instead of the potato universe.
The outcome for you and me is as far-reaching as we care to make it. Already we have seen that, once we breach the wall that parts our little selves from the hierarchy of our greater selves, the walls are apt to go on falling till we come up to the One Self of All. It’s the first step that counts. Once we admit any life and mind above the merely human, we are likely to find ourselves admitting more and more, till we come to the highest Life, our total Mind, where we are safe home at last and outside no creature. Here we lose ourselves and find Ourself in a deathless world whose divisions and opacity have finally vanished, and where everything is indescribably weightless and open and brilliant.
To some of us this is danger signal enough. Our separate egos will defend themselves to the death. To others, here is a renewed invitation to the toughest and most adventurous adventure of them all, whose culmination is variously called awakening, liberation, enlightenment, the kingdom of heaven, the beatific vision, the mystical union. Numerous roads lead towards that goal, and the road I have mapped in this chapter is certainly not everybody’s. To the thoroughly Westernized mind, however, whose preoccupation for centuries has been the “conquest” of Nature, this approach is strongly to be recommended.
In any case, there exists for none of us, not even for the most “spiritual,” a merely human or personal liberation which leaves out the natural world. There’s no such thing as a true enlightenment which doesn’t light up every creature on Earth and in the skies, however grotesque or remote or unlovable. How could we begin to disentangle ourselves from any part of the One in whom we live and move and have our being? Enlightenment is cosmic or an illusion.