Climate Change, Nihility and the Religious (Spiritual) Quest
In my last article I wrote about the difference between knowing from the mind and knowing from the heart.
I talked about how knowing from the mind or reason detaches us from the subject we are investigating. Reason is the intermediary between us and the subject matter.
When we experience something from the heart, we know it directly. It is unmediated. We experience it with no filters.
Mind and Heart Understanding
I talked about watching a video about the horrible effects of climate change.
Looked at rationally we can detach ourselves from the immediacy of the issue, claiming that we already know the material, or nitpicking its contents. We can use reason in many ways to deflect an immediate engagement with the issue.
But when we watch the video with our hearts, we experience the pain, the suffering, the heartbreak, the senselessness, and the cruelty, directly.
Climate Change is the Issue!
Climate change is our make or break issue. It alerts us that our modern worldview is flawed and is leading us to potentially devastating consequences. It is the issue that will tell us who we are both collectively and individually.
The problem with climate change is its threat isn’t immediate, but distant. Even today, as I write this, it is a beautiful sunny day with birds chirping away. What could be wrong?
But if we look beneath this calm and beautiful surface, a lot is wrong.
Two Recent Climate Change Articles in NYT
Just today in the New York Times, there were two separate articles on the effects of climate change.
One said the level of carbon in the atmosphere has reached 421ppm, the highest level in the past four million years.
Remember when scientists told us that 350ppm was the breaking point. Despite all of that, no country is close to meeting the goal set in Paris of getting the planet to net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
To add to the problem, the Ukraine war is causing oil prices to rise, propelling the administration to enhance oil production to slow down inflation. Is anyone paying attention?
The other story was about a three-month heatwave affecting India and Pakistan where temperatures have surpassed 110 degrees, forcing many people to stay inside most of the day.
The government has also encouraged schools to close early and businesses to shift their work schedule, but these measures have taken their toll with shorter school days and people working less. The heat is also stunting crop yields.
Birds Falling Out of the Sky
They even reported that overheated birds were falling out of the sky.
What will it take to wake humanity up because it is only going to get worse. Are we ready to see birds falling out of the sky on a regular basis? Are we ready to spend most of our days inside? What will that do to the economy when it will be literally too hot to work?
Perhaps the Japanese philosopher, Keiji Nishitani can offer us some insights here.
What is Nihility?
He talks about a concept he calls, nihility—which is that which renders meaningless the meaning of life, a realization we must have if we are to save our planet.
Nishitani says this is a state we all must traverse through if we are to find true meaning in our lives.
Nishitani states,
“But it is in breaking through that ordinary mode of being and overturning it from the ground up, in pressing us back to the eternal source of life where life itself is seen as useless, that religion become something we need—a must for human life.”
Ordinary Life Structured to Avoid Nihility
Generally, we don’t have this experience of nihility in our everyday lives. In fact, Nishitani says, our everyday life is geared so we can avoid such an experience. We can stay so wrapped up in our day to day activities that we never have a chance to explore ourselves and the meaning of our lives more deeply.
Nishitani states,
“Normally we proceed through life, on and on, with our eye fixed on something or other, always caught up with something within or without ourselves. It is these engagements that prevent the deepening of awareness. They block off the way to an opening up of that horizon on which nihility appears and self-being becomes a question.”
Face Nihility in Tragic Situations
We generally only experience nihility when we have suffered a tragedy that renders our normal everyday lives meaningless. This could be the loss of a loved one, a serious illness that brings us face to face with death, or a turn of events that makes the life we are now living untenable.
It is then that Nishitani says we face nihility. In this state none of the platitudes we used to console ourselves or others in times of trouble will suffice in this situation. Firm religious or philosophical beliefs or principles offer no comfort.
Nishitani states,
“We become aware of religion [spirit] as a need, as a must for life, only at the level of life at which everything else loses its necessity and its utility. Why do we exist at all? Is not our very existence and human life ultimately meaningless? Or if there is a meaning or significance to it all, where do we find it? When we come to doubt the meaning of our existence in this way, when we have become a question to ourselves, the religious [spiritual] quest awakens with us.”
Nothing can help us now as we face reality devoid of all our preconceived notions. This is when we confront reality directly with no filters or defense mechanisms.
This is when we engage ourselves at the deepest level, and witness the paucity of our thinking mind alone to offer us anything of value.
At this moment of nihility, we engage reality directly in a full body/mind experience.
The Questions We Ask Facing Nihility
The good news is, if we don’t shy away from this experience, Nishitani says, this is when we begin our true “religious” quest, asking the big questions like Why am I here? Why am I existing? Where did I come from and where am I going?
These are questions we pursue on this religious quest, and the answers we discover are very personal. Each person has to take their own religious quest to find their own answers.
According to Nishitani, only the religion that is made personal is a real religion. Only this type of religious quest allows us to engage directly with reality at its deepest levels, and discover the reality of who we are.
Nishitani states,
“By the self-awareness of reality, I mean both our becoming aware of reality and, at the same time, the reality realizing itself in our awareness.”
He stresses that man’s search for true reality in a real way is not theoretical or conceptual, tactics we would use in our ordinary lives.
So, in other words, he is talking about pursuing true reality, not through our heads and our conditioned thoughts, but through our hearts in a direct experience with ourselves and our true essence.
Nishitani states,
“This fundamental conversion of life is occasioned by the opening up of the horizon of nihility at the ground of life. It is nothing less than a conversion from the self-centered (or man-centered) mode of being, which always asks what use things have for us (or for man), to an attitude that asks for what purpose we ourselves (or man) exist. One when we stand at this turning point does the question “What is religion?” really become our own.”
Only after that direct experience can our thoughts enter to make sense of our experiences, always understanding that the direct experience is primary and the thoughts secondary. This is counter to our ordinary lives where our thoughts are primary and our experience is secondary.
Climate Change and Nihility
So I bring this up because climate change is the issue that needs to push, not only each individual and the whole of society, but the whole of the world into nihility to see how our “sleepwalking” through our lives is leading to a nightmare of unimaginable consequences.
Enough of us must face the nihility of our everyday lives and be able to transcend it if we are to survive into the future.
We need to fundamentally change who we if we are to pull ourselves out of this crash landing.
We have to be willing to see through the veil of our ignorance.
To learn more: Click this link: The Magical Universe.
Photo by Compare Fibre on Unsplash
