Joanna Macy talks about the "Greening of The Self" in a chapter in Engaged Buddhist Reader, where she describes how the sense of a bounded, separate self has been eroded in recent times by ecological awareness. With the sense of crisis that we are facing with the natural environment, there is a corresponding sense that people are not separate beings in the universe. They are deeply interconnected with the natural world, particularly in the sense that there is a continual feedback loop happening between what humans do and how the environment responds. One of my favorite quotes from Macy's essay reads:
Many have felt the imperative to extend self-interest to embrace the whole. What is notable in our situation is that this extension of identity can come not through an effort to be noble or good or altruistic, but simply to be present and own our own pain. And that is why this shift in the sense of self is credible to people. (p.175)
I think Macy's idea is quite fascinating, because it parallels a shift in how I have felt about meditative practice. While I started meditating with the thought that I am doing it to develop specific 'virtues' I wanted to have for myself, I have recently found it more valuable to see meditation as a process of looking into or owning deep or twisted knots of pain. The tree imagery here is not accidental, because like a tree, pain is organically connected to the unique history of a self living in a complex world. Roots don't grow straight up: they need to meet the rocks and soil as they arise, as well as plenty of other hard or bumpy surfaces that make growth more circuitous.
It is also equally interesting to reflect on how an experience of pain can bring a person closer to something that is genuinely shared between more than one being. Pain is rarely experienced in isolation from others. For example, there is always a source of pain somewhere, and it can reverberate over many people. If parents experience the heaviness or frustration of raising children, children will also experience a parallel pain. Pain can be contagious: even though only I can experience the pain of losing someone or being in a dire state of health, that same pain emotionally impacts others.
Macy's emphasis on pain is not accidental, because she is taking a quite direct and visceral sensation as a basis for seeing the true nature of interconnection. Whereas focusing on 'being noble, good or altruistic' is often based on a supposedly measurable notion of how one should be, it is rarely something that can be share d outside of the abstract concept of striving to be good. I find it interesting that these 'virtues' are less contagious than pain, because they often give rise to a corresponding sense of alienation. If someone around me is on her or his best behavior, I often have difficulty relating to it, unless I can find a similar motivation in myself at that moment. While pain is much more direct and easier to feel, 'virtuous behavior' is harder to feel or even to share among people. I wonder if this is why people sometimes feel resentful when they are with people who are always striving to display moral virtues. Is it a jealous feeling, or is it simply the sense of disconnection: of admiring something from a distance, but not knowing how to experience the emotional motivations of that state of being?
Macy's emphasis on being present and 'owning our own pain', creates an interesting shift in how people "do" ethics. While traditional ethics tends to focus on developing qualities through one's own initiative or will power, perhaps a more ecological ethics uses emotional awareness as a starting point for how to engage the world in a caring way. The more I can accept my own pain, the less need I have to push away the sources of pain or to isolate a self from pain. The knife that cuts me is no longer 'the enemy', but it becomes a part of my experience of totality, not to be rejected. With this 'ethic', there could potentially be a move away from clear delineations between people based on preconceived views, and more a shift toward the sense that things are intimately connected and equally in need of care and tenderness.
Macy, Joanna (1996), "The Greening of the Self". In Engaged Buddhist Reader: Ten Years of Engaged Buddhist Publishing. Berkeley, California: Parallax Press.
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