Four Noble Truths for the Meta-Crisis Age

Deer Park Transmission

“O monks, just as a goldsmith tests gold by rubbing, burning, and cutting before buying it, so too, you should examine my words before accepting them, and not just out of respect for me.”

This one wrote itself, in communion with a tree in Deer Park, Sarnath. Funny how that works!

After his awakening, the Buddha wandered in noble silence for seven weeks, convinced that there was no way to convey the profundity of truth he’d realized under the Bodhi tree. It’s interesting that he ended up breaking his silence here in Sarnath, at Deer Park - was he on his way to the ghats, perhaps?

As a long-time Dharma practitioner, whose karmic predecessor was a Tibetan cave-dweller, I am finding it to be quite a moving experience to walk around on this sacred ground in a surprisingly natural setting, with an abundant diversity of birds inhabiting large swaths of forested canopy and, down here on terra firma, more cows than cars, more bicycles than motorbikes. Children are still children here, untethered to electronic gizmos, endlessly entertaining themselves simply, naturally. One can almost imagine the Buddha walking down one of these dirt roads today.

Maybe that’s why the question occurred to me as I took my seat beneath the shade of a sprawling old tree in Deer Park the other morning:

Given the immense suffering our species is visiting on the world, how might Buddha spin the 4 Noble Truths to be more responsive to the human scale of the meta-crisis?

Buddha was only concerned with suffering and its cessation, after all. But 2500 years ago, suffering did not occur on the scale it does now. Surely, that would be the focus of his concern in today’s world. Not just human suffering, but human-caused suffering, at scale. The immense power we now are now wielding towards bringing to an end the drama of all higher life forms on planet Earth.

So...

Thus did I hear in response: Noble ones, there are four truths describing the meta-crisis, it’s origin, cessation, and the pathway out of our collective crisis.

Listen...

1. The Truth of Trauma

This cuts right to the very heart of life’s great mystery.

When people really learn to appreciate this truth, trauma will go from being a taboo subject to being the thing cool people talk about and concern themselves with. We might even see Trauma Cafes!

The Truth of Trauma is actually Two Truths, because there are essentially two primal sources of trauma at play in us:

• somatic/epigenetic trauma

• psychophysical/predecessor trauma

The first is the trauma each of us carries forth into the world. Because life begins with the trauma of child birth itself, because unresolved generational trauma is written into the genes we receive from our father, and because our bodies store traumatic experiences that our psyches are unable to process - such as being whipped or otherwise physically abused as children - there is not a single human being on Earth who does not carry trauma around in their body.

But what of the mind?

The second trauma is generally not acknowledged in Western society. Owing to our dominant scientific-materialist worldview, we have no problem identifying with our genetic ancestors. But what I learned in Zen Hospice is that we are not our bodies. In fact, there is overwhelming empirical evidence (2500 cases over the past 50 years from the oldest university in the U.S.) that we come into being as a confluence of the body we inherit from our parents and a mindstream that enters that ovuum, either at the moment of conception (flash of light) or at some point thereafter.

The continuity of our mindstream explains not only our tendencies (e.g., why identical twins have different temperaments), it also carries the imprints of significant traumas from prior lives not associated with our current bodies. Indeed, the most convincing cases of children remembering past lives involved traumatic endings to those lives (e.g., the case of James Leininger).

It is also not unusual for adults who become skilled practitioners of meditation, and who loosen the grip of self, to recall their prior lives. Speaking personally, at the age of 43 on a retreat after receiving teachings, blessings and empowerments from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, I reached what was, for me, an unprecedented level of mental quiescence where thoughts largely subsided. Then one day, sitting next to a stream listening to the water, quite suddenly vivid memories of the end of my previous incarnation surfaced.

This was shocking at first, but in the end it had a clarifying effect on my spiritual path, giving me a broader perspective as well as providing access to deeper levels of my mindstream, or “tantra” (literally, thread of continuity from one life to another). While I had questioned the idea of reincarnation before that, it became received knowledge for me thereafter.

2. Cause & Effect: The Truth of Karma

So if everyone carries trauma, and if these traumas are the source of all suffering in the world, then how does trauma arise in the first place? How did we get into this situation, in other words, and why do we perpetuate it at both the individual and collective levels? Trauma is caused by our dissociation (dis-association, or uncoupling) from Nature & from Human Nature.

It’s just that simple.

Our natural state is free from trauma. It is a state of love, or communion. This universal love actually permeates all contrary and complimentary appearances. It’s always there, just beneath the surface of phenomena. But to the extent we’re dissociated from it, we are unable to perceive it. We even erect barriers to this reality, because it threatens our identity. We contract (‘dukkha’) around our wounded sense of self, imagining it to be uniquely us. That is the basic trauma response of our parasympathetic nervous system. We shield and protect the very wound that perpetuates our suffering!

When we act against our own true, or better nature, and/or when we act out in derogation and destruction of Nature, this creates the cause and the conditions for trauma to arise. Trauma is anti-life, and it is, ultimately, highly unnatural. We all know this at the level of our intuition.

For example, it is not natural for an adult to sexually offend a child, or for a child to torture an animal. It is also unnatural for one human being to kill another. Were it not, there would be no such thing as “perpetrator trauma,” and soldiers would not come home from wars with PTSD.

While it may not be unnatural for a human to cut down a tree for shelter, it is highly unnatural to clearcut a forest, damn a mighty river, or level an entire mountain. Digging up all the fossil fuels in the world and burning them at a highly compressed timescale? Unnatural.

As is filling the oceans with plastic or flooding our brains with nano-plastics - which unlike micro-plastics are able to invade our cells. Recent studies show that the average American has 5 bottle caps worth of nano-plastics in our brains!

There is nothing natural about that. It is not just invasive, it’s traumatic. As are micro-plastics and water soluble insecticides in our mother’s amniotic fluid, blood and milk - which potentially explains the rise in neurodivergence and sexual dysphasia.

Exponential population growth is not natural - whether it’s humans or cows. Factory farms are highly unnatural, having been modeled after Hitler’s killing factories.

And it goes without saying that attempting to assert control over the basic forces of the universe, such as with nuclear fission bombs and nuclear power plants that produce an unmanageable waste stream that persists for tens of thousands of years, is trauma-inducing.

Just ask the people of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Love Canal and Fukushima.

The entire petro-chemical age, dominated by the military-industrial complex President Eisenhower warned us about as he was exiting the Oval Office, is unnatural and traumatic at scale.

Just ask the whales (please). Or the people of Syria and Gaza.

Do you see what a clarifying lens trauma-informed reasoning is? This is why it is a noble truth.

What we in the West have reluctantly come to know as trauma, in the Orient has always been known as karma. Actions have consequences. When those actions are unnatural, such as anger (based on exaggerating faults) and violence, there is a kind of rupture (zhigpa) in our mindstream that ripples out in our lifestream and, especially if repeated, creates patterns of behavior that bring like results in our future experience. It’s like we create the trauma-fields that we and others inhabit.

As collective trauma healer Thomas Hübl puts it:

“By the turning of this wheel, karmic suffering repeats, and trauma is transmitted from one generation to the next — until it finds space and presence and clarity; until it is owned so that it may be healed.”

3. The Truth of Reconciliation: True Cessations

This is the good news. Since trauma has a cause, it can be resolved. This is the very reason for our existence, in fact. It is the only thing, really, that gives life meaning in the end. I’ve seen this play out repeatedly in hospice settings. Trauma blocks our ability to experience universal love, while resolving trauma releases that natural flow of connectivity we call love.

As revealed in his “Red Book,” published 50 years after he passed (2012), Carl Gustav Jung believed that the dead are more alive than the living. Shocking, I know. He reasoned that it’s because at the moment the mind separates from the body, we see in how many ways we acted against nature and our better nature, and our afterlife is then characterized by regret. Because of this, the dead - who outnumber us by a lot (approx. 108 billion humans have walked the Earth) - are constantly seeking redemption through the living. They have our ears, though we tend to think it is our own thoughts that we’re hearing.

Whether literally true or not, it’s a great way to think about generational trauma. As the poet John Glenday puts it in his haunting poem (Walkers) about the war dead returning home:

Forgive us for coming back. We didn’t travel all this way to break your hearts. We came to ask if you might heal the world.

Simply stated, broken relationships can and must be repaired. This is true at the level of the individual (see, e.g. 12-step programs based on Jung’s advice to A.A.’s founder) and, even more so, at the level of the collective reflected in what Jung termed the unconscious, or the archetypes that animate waking consciousness.

In other words, the meta-crisis that defines our age is a crisis of relationship. There is no other effective, salutary way to think of it. We exist in the cumulative rubble of broken relationships that’s been greatly accelerated by industrial civilization and industrial warfare. Fortunately, these are still relatively recent developments for which corrective measures clearly exist, if we can just collectively come to our senses:

We are called to come back into proper relationship with ourselves, first and foremost, due to our dissociative states; with our close others, commensurate with the harm we’ve caused by not being there for them; with and within our relevant communities; and, at the same time as all of these, with Earth, beginning at the ecosystemic level and then naturally spreading out to our bioregions and Gaia’s larger spheres.

“Proper relationship” means what accords with nature, what is natural. This is what defines universal values. Nature. And in the end, we are part of Nature, not apart from it.

Even though we have to begin with ourselves, it isn’t really a sequential process. Because, for example, what we tend to think of as our ‘selves’ is full of others. When we look within, what we really see is all our relations. That is the beauty of Native American wisdom. We are relational referent points. And this is what Buddhism means by “emtpiness of self” - not that the self doesn’t exist; but rather, that it is empty of not being full of all that we label ‘other.’

This is the crux of the paradigm shift we are being compelled to undergo by the cumulative force of unresolved trauma.

We exist as fractals - totally interconnected, interdependent and interpenetrating. Consider: every atom of hydrogen in our body comes from the birth of a star somewhere in the cosmos, while every atom of oxygen comes from the death of a star; and, the carbon we release with every exhalation will reach every living plant on Earth within one year. That’s how enmeshed we are with life and death in the cosmos!

So coming into proper relationship is a multivalent process of healing, or becoming whole again, from our current, fragmented states that society deems “normal” and “productive.” That is the paradigm shift that has the potential to save all life on Earth.

4. There is a Path Away from Trauma: The Noble (if inconvenient) Truth of Reparations

Stated simply, reparations is how we come into the proper (holistic) relationship, as defined by the Third Noble Truth of the Meta-Crisis. While the idea of reparations is nothing more, really, than a law of nature, it has come to take on significant political ramifications. Thus it is instructive here to consider, by way of poignant illustration, the case of genocide.

How are we, the dominant culture perpetrating climate trauma at a global scale, to come into proper relationship with those we’ve committed genocide against without inquiring of them how we might repair their broken cultures and lifeways? Because the real ‘inconvenient truth’ is that we can not come into proper relationship with Earth apart from Indigenous people.

Related to this inconvenient truth, how is the Global North to come into proper relationship with Earth without coming into proper relationship with the Global South, which we have relentlessly exploited and who are suffering the worst effects of climate trauma even though they’ve contributed the least to global emissions and extinctions? It is only by ignoring this question that we are able to pretend that we are justified in walling them off from entering the very countries responsible for the suffering conditions they are fleeing.

This obsession with ‘border security’ is a repercussion from the immense and unconscionable traumas unleashed on the world by The Discovery Doctrine, which were effectively imprinted on our national psyche by Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story.

Story served on the high court for over three decades, and was renowned for his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833). In that legal treatise, he set forth the overtly racist rationale for the Supreme Court’s seminal ruling on Indian Law a decade earlier:

“The Indians were a savage race, sunk in the depths of ignorance and heathenism... They were bound to submit to the superior genius of Europe... The Papal authority, too, was brought in aid of these great designs...”

Story is referring here to a 1493 Papal Bull issued, he says, “for the purpose of overthrowing heathenism, and propagating the Catholic religion.” It provided moral authority for taking possession of the “new lands” from their inhabitants, which of course is codified in property law and title today.

Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, bearing a strong resemblance to Ebenezar Scrooge.

The “superior genius” Story boasted of included: the abomination of slavery, a holocaust that lasted four centuries; mass genocide; and, the mass extinction of wildlife species, including exterminating 60 million buffalo, in favor of factory farms.

It has culminated in an existential threat to the future of all life on the planet. Superior? How can something that is anti-life be considered superior to what is natural, including creation?

The Catholic Church has fared no better - as we’ve become painfully aware of in recent decades - and is only now beginning to atone for its sins, including the cultural genocide of border schools for Indigenous children ripped from the bosom of their families and beaten into submission - if not killed and buried in unmarked, mass graves.

And yet this attitude of superiority still finds a place in the very idea of “American Exceptionalism,” or MAGA, used to justify the continuing exploitation of the Global South and its Indigenous people. It has perhaps found its greatest champion ever in Donald Trump, whose favorite president was Andrew Jackson, popularly known by the moniker “Indian Killer” in his own time.

As an aside, Trump and trauma are practically synonyms. We have his parents to thank for that - and, I’m sure, their parents, etc. But he has risen to prominence at this particular time for a reason; that is, he embodies the collective shadow of colonialism. He is forcing us to come to terms with ourselves.

The traditional ecological knowledge and natural lifeways of those “heathen savages,” meanwhile, are now widely viewed as a true kind of “superior genius.” According to both conventional science and international consensus, it is needed now more than ever in addressing the existential threat that settler culture created with its clearly inferior lifeways and hypocritical, deadly morality.

Racism is not, after all, true religion, is it. In fact, it is the very opposite of religion. It is darkness, not light, based on ignorance, not reason, since it has been genetically proven we all trace our lineage back to the same tribe in Africa, with skin color being nothing more than an indication of how far a splinter tribe settled from the equator.

The conclusion is inescapable:

Climate racism calls for climate reparations.

Truth Will Prevail in the End

I hold these truths to be self-evident. That all human beings are, by nature, good. Nature is good. And that it is only by acting against our human nature, and by desecrating Nature, that suffering results.

This is the Truth of Trauma.

Let Earth be my Witness.

By collectively awakening to this truth at this pivotal time in the development of the human species, we can set about the most meaningful task of resolving trauma through truth, reconciliation, and reparations.

There is no other way.

We can come back into proper relationship with ourselves, with one another, with life, and with Earth - our life source.

That is the truth of relativity. And here is the ultimate, esoteric truth of climate trauma:

Earth is awakening through us, because of the trauma we have inflicted upon Her. It is a reciprocal relationship that defines us as humans, becoming aware of the larger organism we are part of and not meant to be apart from.

She is us, together with the great community of life, and we are Her.

God is dead. Long live the Goddess!