A colleague suggested I view a conversation with Deepak Chopra and Vananda Shiva; Seeds of Love.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WarbGqmMig8

I have had brief encounters with both. Deepak noted in the dialogue:

The environment is our extended body. The air is our breath. The sun is the source of life. The Earth is recycling as our physical body. The rivers and oceans, and even the puddles are our circulation. The trees are our lungs. So, we have a personal body; we have a universal body, and they are both equally ours. And, unless we have this emotional, spiritual shift, then the war will continue. What we need is a critical mass that can see reality as it is--that you, as a biological organism, are not separate from so called environment. In fact, you are a product of that; you are an activity of that.

Quite right. My collection of essays; Where do we go from here? linked below, addresses what Chopra is describing by revealing why we don’t live in the reality that we are not separate from the environment. Below is my correspondence to both.

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Deepak Chopra, MD and Vandana Shiva

February 7, 2020

Re: Seeds of Love, Extinction or not? Where do we go from here?

Dear Deepak and Vandana,

Time is short, a decade, perhaps two. If the attached; Where do we go from here? resonates, perhaps we can collaborate and meet this challenge together.

Deepak, we met years ago at the home of Ken Blanchard and shared a drive to the San Diego airport. As a documentary filmmaker, I began my friendship with Krishnamurti, David Bohm, Joseph Chilton Pearce and other visionaries in the mid-’70s. No one has documented Krishnamurti as thoroughly or as long. Enclosed is Always Awakening, Buddha’s Realization Krishnamurti’s Insight, with Samdhong Rinpoche, the first Prime Minister of Tibet in Exile, one of the Dalai Lama’s closest colleagues and the only person with his training to spend years meeting with Krishnamurti. The Krishnamurti Foundation in Ojai will publish my book, Unconditionally Free, the Life and Insights of J. Krishnamurti, this year. Vandana, you and I shared in a small symposium at the Krishnamurti School in the Rishi Valley, exploring the works of Jerry Mander. In the mid 90’s I founded Touch the Future, a nonprofit, focusing on the unprecedented changes in the environment we call childhood. As you know, we are that changing environment. See www.ttfuture.org. David Bohm notes:

We are faced with a breakdown of general social order and human values that threatens stability throughout the world. Existing knowledge cannot meet this challenge. Something much deeper is needed, a completely new approach. I am suggesting that the very means by which we try to solve our problems is the problem. The source of our problems is within the structure of thought itself.

As David Orr shared; ‘it is not education but a particular kind of education that will save us.’ As Bohm, Samdhong Rinpoche, and Krishnamurti explored; ‘Our challenge isn’t thought but a particular kind of thought.’ I spent the past thirty-five years with leaders in the field of human development, how we become what we are. Joseph Chilton Pearce was a friend and mentor for twenty of those years. Piaget described the ‘absorbent mind of the child,’ how they ‘accept and become, without question, the models given.’

For most of human existence the model given was nature. Approximately 50,000 years ago, the neocortex emerged with its astonishing capacity to imagine, and with it evolved extended memory, symbols, past and future, psychological thought, ego, and culture. So powerful are those images that psychological imagination became the false altar of intelligence we worship, the mirror children see themselves in and become. Without question, children absorb and become thought-ego-culture, which emerges from the same core capacity; Maya, a false reality that looks like reality.

Implicit in this false-reality is a false identity, a false bond, a false self-world view that blinds children and prevents them from experiencing, embracing and expressing their true, authentic nature, which is nature. In the simplest of terms, children bond to imagined-culture instead of their true nature. Of course, we need thought, imagination, and culture, but we need not identify with it. That is the first key.

Because we don’t understand our own thought process, at the root, which is the second key, David Bohm described how the mechanical and reflexive nature of thought reifies its images, falsely treating what the image represents as an independent reality separate from the process that creates the image. The distortion this creates disturbs everything we do, now quickly sliding towards global extinction.

David notes; ‘Something much deeper is needed, a completely new approach.’ I submit that this deeper response emerges from awakening from the spell of culture and a re-identification or bond with our true source as our core identity. The question is; how can this awakening be achieved as digital technology submerges the global psyche more deeply in this enchantment?

Krishnamurti described such a ‘state-specific’ awakening his entire life. If our identification with thought-ego-culture is suicidal, asking that identity to solve the problems it creates is folly. An intellectual response to the rising threat of extinction is not what Krishnamurti called, ‘living the teachings’. Sitting in the same identity-state and eating an organic menu for lunch will not save us. Something much deeper is needed. Perhaps we can meet this challenge together.

With appreciation,

Michael Mendizza

Seeds of Love Transcript
Deepak Chopra and Dr. Vananda (31:20 – 35:40) February 8, 2020

VS:     What I want us to do together is work on a world that is one hundred percent organic, one hundred percent bioverse, in our gut and outside—that we have poison-free food and farming, beginning with a cafe like this. Our communities in India, community by community, farm by farm, plate by plate, until by 2050, we say good-bye to extinction.

DC:     So, a couple of things come to mind, as Vananda now is speaking and she says that this is a spiritual quest that we’re on. One of the problems I’ve always had with the very word environment is that it’s alienating; it says there is me, and then there is the environment. This is not the way our shastras work, right?

VS:     No.

DC: The environment is our extended body. The air is our breath. The sun is the source of life. The Earth is recycling as our physical body. The rivers and oceans, and even the puddles are our circulation. The trees are our lungs. So, we have a personal body; we have a universal body, and they are both equally ours. And, unless we have this emotional, spiritual shift, then the war will continue. What we need is a critical mass that can see reality as it is--that you, as a biological organism, are not separate from so called environment. In fact, you are a product of that; you are an activity of that.

Have you ever watched . . . you don’t live here, but I’m sure everybody here is familiar with watching network TV, and watching every ten minutes there is a commercial break. It’s usually a pharmaceutical that’s being promoted . . .

VS:     And the footnote saying that it could be dangerous to you!

DC:     No. The footnote; the first sentence is, “Ask your doctor to prescribe this.” You have a happy couple, dancing in the background, with beautiful music. Then it starts: You could get sexual impotence and you could die, and everything in between, but ask your doctor to give you a prescription. And people go ahead and do it, anyway! So, this is the amount of denial we are in at the moment. Anything that is processed, manufactured, refined, has chemicals, antibiotics, petroleum products . . .

VS:     All fossil fuel derived

DC:     They are all fossil-fuel derived.

VS:     The packaging outside and the rot inside!

DC:     And we don’t talk about food being the biggest culprit in climate change.

VS:     Yes.

DC     And we don’t talk about the fact that it’s reversible. How many times have you heard anyone say that this is reversible? Food is the problem, and we can reverse it just by bringing these seeds back to life. In every seed is the promise of thousands of forests, and with those forests, the promise of life, for the entire interdependent colonizing of sentient beings.

VS:     Absolutely.

DC:     Unless we have that spiritual shift, I think it’s going to be a losing war. Since we are on the media right now, I think our battle—or shall we say non-battle—our quest for spiritual transformation.

VS:     Our Dharmayug.

DC:     Our dharmayug. So, anybody understand that? “Yug” means epic battle. “Dharma” means in the interest of our common dharma, which is to align ourselves with the elements and forces of the universe. When you do that, you are victorious and you will be victorious, irrespective of all the special interest groups. But, since we are on line, and right now, many people are watching us, I would ask everyone to actually participate in this movement through social media, through education, through entertainment, through music, through poetry.
Visit the website of www.navdanya.org.