One of the major inspirations for this project was to augment the Buddhist dialogue regarding climate change. That is to say, my hope has been that death contemplation could be helpful to climate activists as well as to those who are skeptical but brave enough to look with open eyes.
My experience as a teacher has given me the perspective that sometimes saying less is more. This is especially true when I don’t really know a subject very well. I say this to show you my hand: I am not an expert on climate change. I’m a psychotherapist and meditation instructor who has a very strong interest in death contemplation practices, and who saw a possible way I could help.
What I do know about climate change suggests some issues that death contemplation can help with regarding climate change denial. The issues (and potentially helpful contemplations) are:
- Climate change is difficult to understand. People don’t have reference points to consider something so large and complicated as the global ecosystem. Consider contemplation of life as fragile and life and death as shared by many.
- People have intense emotional responses and/or denial about frightening ideas, such as climate change. Consider the third series of contemplations.
- People have complicated systems of justification for their lifestyles and safety that precludes seeing climate change and its causes clearly. Consider [the first series of contemplations.
I think death contemplation can help with these issues because these same issues arise when people are confronted with death. Contemplating death and grappling with the unknown, emotionally intense, and unjustifiable reality of death is similar to grappling with climate change.
Similarly, for activists and other people who already accept the reality of, and care about, climate change, some issues arise that I think death contemplation can help with:
- Thinking about climate change can bring up intense fear, especially regarding the unknown aspects of how particular elements of climate change will play out personally, socially, and environmentally. Consider the third series of contemplations.
- Attempting to organize social and political responses to climate change can engender feelings of frustration and hopelessness. Consider the contemplation of death as ever-present, death as the great separator, death rehearsal, and the contemplation of this brief moment.
- Seeing others’ behavior in the face of climate change can engender bitterness, impotent anger, and jadedness about humanity. Consider the contemplations of life and death as shared by many and life as finite.
Again, these issues are not dissimilar to those that people confront with death. Death contemplation can provide practice and a model for facing these same issues that climate change responders and activists face.
In Buddhist circles, the teachings are considered like medicine. The idea is that if you can find the right dharma and apply it the right way, it’ll heal what ails you. I wish I could teach practices that could cure climate change itself, but that’s beyond my skills. Instead, I hope these practices help us all see clearly and act wisely to respond to this crisis. To this end, on nearly every page, I use a phrase like, “Regarding climate change…” to say something brief and pithy about the practice and how it can be applied to the climate crisis – whether to help someone intuitively understand the urgency of climate change, or to help activists weather the storm.
Clearly there are also other reasons to practice death contemplation than my pithy explanations. Death and climate change are parallel tracks in each of our psychological lives. They both represent the “end of the world as we know it.” All this said, I hope you do the practices and find all the benefits of these practices for yourself.