Deep Ecology Practice: Interbeing
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We underestimate ourselves — Arne Naess
The Earth is our larger body, and our larger mind. When we breathe, we are part of the Earth breathing: the exchange of air among trees and soils, winds and oceans, animals with fur or wings, on two legs or six. When we eat, we draw energy from the plants, who drew it from the soils and sun. Moving, we celebrate bodies evolved over millions of years in conversation with the solar system’s gravitational dance, spiralling DNA through generations of living beings, across species and continents. To be alive on Earth is a great gift and an invitation to adventure. You belong within a story of astonishing, vivid creativity.
We exist with all that lives on Earth, not as separate beings connected to others as nodes on a net, but as interacting expressions of our world. Symbiosis, mutual support shared between beings, is the world’s life energy, and so it is ours. The trees are symbiotic with human foresters, with jays and squirrels, with mycorrhizal fungi in their roots, with the sun and rain.
Symbiosis may be easiest to recognise in a forest or a coral reef, but it also creates us. Our bodies are communities of human and non-human cells. Our minds, of which humans have been so proud, also interact beyond the human. Wild animals with their strong limbs and sharp senses fill our imaginations with ways of being in the world beyond our own direct experience. Perhaps you may not feel your connection with a snow leopard, hidden in the Himalaya, but without her existence on Earth, you would be lessened.
Thich Nhat Hanh adopted the word ‘interbeing’ to describe how all beings live in togetherness with all beings. We become ourselves together. Thich Nhat Hanh says, ‘The whole planet is one giant, living, breathing cell, with all its working parts linked in symbiosis.’
Shifting into a mindset of radical connection is a revolution. Mainstream modern society has long told a different story, of the isolated ego, who sees scarcity and competition. The human individual is no more than a carrier for some DNA, doomed to non-existence after a short struggle for survival. With this belief there is little more purpose to life than to get ahead of your competitors, but ultimately even that is futile.
Are you tempted to dismiss interbeing as wishful thinking, or unscientific?
Born in the early 1980s, I grew up with a story of the universe that says everything is arbitrary and meaningless, an accident, in which humans were chance products of competition in a world that favours ferocity and selfishness. Today I know that this story is partial. It was constructed by and for a certain culture (imperialist, capitalist, patriarchal). However, it still has a strong force for me.
Can it be true? Is interbeing wilful self-delusion? Asking myself this, I become contracted.
Then I think of a forest, and how the roots communicate between species, with information networks formed of mycorrhizal fungi. Or I think of my own body, made up of more non-human cells than human, home to bacteria who have been part of my moods and experience since birth. I might think of how vast and beautiful the universe is, and open into spaciousness.
There is increasing scientific evidence for interbeing, as the complex interactions of Earth’s ecosystems, large and small, become better understood. Methods of scientific enquiry are not opposed to this way of thinking of the world. Scientists are human and their institutions are embedded in societies, so research findings never shake completely free of culture, but together scientific discoveries and cultural narratives are today changing in the direction of interbeing. This is happening as those of us in the west experience a vast and world-altering shift in perception. Human impacts are now so great that we all face large-scale ecosystem collapse and climate disruption. Tragically, this is stark evidence for our interbeing.
Meanwhile, there are and have always been cultures in which interbeing is a foundation for identity, especially within ancient wisdom traditions. It’s there in indigenous beliefs worldwide, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, shamanism, yoga, Jewish Kabbalah, Christian mysticism, Sufi Islam, Wicca and beyond.
We also have experiences of interbeing in our lives, especially joy in nature and human love, which quietly widen our being.
The self is intrinsically related to a wider existence, mind and muscle, inter-existing with other humans and all of the natural world, co-operating in ongoing creation. Experiencing this, life is abundant and meaningful. Every person is a continuation of ancestors and the Earth. Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess writes:
We underestimate ourselves… We tend to confuse [the self] with the narrow ego. Human nature is such that with sufficient allsided maturity we cannot avoid ‘identifying’ our self with all living beings, beautiful or ugly, big or small, sentient or not… The ecological self of a person is that with which this person identifies.
Arne Naess founded the philosophical movement of Deep Ecology. The movement expresses the principal that there is intrinsic value in all life, and that diversity, symbiosis and complexity are values at the heart of nature. According to Deep Ecology, humans are part of nature, but we have become so powerful that we have a special responsibility towards the Earth, and need to change our mainstream culture and society to identify with and support living nature.
Forget the misconception of ecological living as one of sacrifice and deprivation. Consumerist society uses this idea, because in the current economy our function is to consume. But who really wants to be a consumer, a user-up of stuff? Ecological living is full of joy and purpose, and a liberating widening of the self. As Naess says,
You are much greater, deeper, more generous and capable of more dignity and joy than you think! A wealth of non-competitive joys is open to you! … Now is the time to share with all life on our maltreated Earth through the deepening identification with life forms and the greater units, the ecosystems, and Gaia, the fabulous, old planet of ours.
This understanding lies at the heart of deep ecology practice. Any practice we can find to push aside the myth of separation and wake up to interbeing nourishes this world. A walk, a conversation, a meal, an embrace, a breath, a haiku, a painting, a planting: the possibilities are boundless, as are you.
Practice 1: I and Thou
In philosopher Martin Buber’s work on relation, I and Thou, there is a mesmerising moment when he looks into the eyes of a cat, and briefly the cat is looking with him. The cat is no longer apart. Buber and the cat enter a mutual relation of I and thou, in which beings have existence through relation. According to Buber’s philosophy this is the nature of our relation with God. Buber’s insight is brief, ‘this almost unnoticeable sunrise and sunset of the spirit’, before the cat resolves back into a separate being.* The deeper truth of the moment lingers, but cannot be grasped.
Could you try it? Choose a being, and look into it. Look deeply with concentration. You may find that you create a story at this point, a speculation about what it is like to be this tree or dog or rock. Buber says there is no need to give up any of the ways in which we consider another being. Nothing needs to be shut out. Rather, maybe with deep, concentrated attention the being will reveal something of its nature, and you ‘become bound up in relation to it.’* You feel your interbeing.
Practice 2: Interbeing Meditation
Meditation can guide us to an experience of interbeing. Begin with a simple breathing meditation, noticing the air that enters your lungs and circulates to the living cells of your body, leaving with each exhale. In breathing experience, without grasping or strain, interbeing with the breathing planet. Filling your lungs, returning the air, you are effortlessly in rhythm with the world.
Notice the sounds close to you, your own breathing, noises in the room or in nearby rooms. Expand your listening to notice sounds further away: a voice in the street, birds, rain, a plane or car travelling, wind. Sounds come and go, as you listen with awareness and without effort, not judging the sounds or putting stories to them, simply present and receptive. How astounding, to notice how life touches us in sound. We become shared being.
Release your focus on listening, and allow yourself to become aware of awareness itself. Thoughts will come and go. Perhaps you can allow your mind to be without clinging, open and spacious, aware and at rest. Diana Winston calls this natural awareness. She shares a beautiful image to contemplate:
Our mind is like the sky, vast, open and spacious; thoughts are like clouds floating by.**
Resting in natural awareness, there is no need to do anything, and there is no problem to solve. You are enough, complete, whole, simply being. Just as the breath flows in and out of your body, and sounds come and go, also your awareness is vast and open, expansive. It is part of a much greater whole, the living Earth, our larger body, and our larger mind.
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More deep ecology practices are listed at the end of this article. Follow me on Medium for updates.
*Martin Buber, I and Thou, (Continuum, 2004; first published 1937), p. 75, p. 14.
** Diana Winston, The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering your Natural Awareness (Sounds True, 2019), p. 36.
