Natural spirituality, ethics, care: how to protect the end of the world – Leonardo Boff

Leonardo Boff*

The crisis of our way of life on this one planet envelops us all, even the imperial nations. Who knew that in the United States there would be a severe erosion of democratic values? The original American dream, its best repeat, “implied a new world in which the people lived free to realize their dreams, within a social environment that generated enlightened, responsible and committed citizens, with a passionate concern for dignity and rights.” individuals and others in the perspective of the common good. Evidently that was the dream of the population, not of the government bodies and the military security apparatus that sought and continue to seek by all means, including war, the monopoly of world power. For these the dream was and is different.

What has been happening since the 60s, tells us Steven Rockefeller, from the Rockefeller family of billionaires, one of the creators of the Earth Charter, of Buddhist option, one of the most dialogic people with whom I was able to live at work. of the writing of said Charter, is that today’s youth has forgotten the aforementioned values, lives focused on its own self, despises its own country and has lost the sense of solidarity. He concludes by saying: “America is a nation in search of its own soul” (Spiritual Democracy and our Schools, N.York 2022, p.15).

What is said about the United States is valid practically for all or for the main countries, also for ours, since we are all interdependent and hostages of the culture of capital, accumulator, materialist, consumerist, exclusive and insensitive to the fate of the poor majority. . As a teacher and pedagogue, Steven Rockefeller wrote the aforementioned book “to renew the American spirit through education from earliest childhood.”

It handles three categories with which I identify and with which I have worked for years with a view to a new paradigm and another style of education: spirituality, ethics and care of the Common Home.

Steven sees spirituality as an essential dimension of the human being with the same right of citizenship as the body, intelligence, will, and psyche. That’s why it’s natural. It is not about identifying spirituality with religion, although there may be interrelationships between them. Natural spirituality is innate. Religions are born from it as cultural channelings of this original spiritual dimension.

As philosophy, deep psychology and neuroscience have shown us, says Steven, “spirituality is an innate capacity in the human being that, when nourished and developed, generates a way of being made up of relationships with oneself.” and with the world, promotes personal freedom, well-being, and the flourishing of the collective good” (p.10). Natural spirituality raises the inevitable questions of human beings: why we are in this world, what awaits us beyond this life and the perception of a Supreme Reality. It is expressed by unconditional love, by reverence before the Universe, by solidarity, by care for everything that exists and lives and by compassion for those who suffer.

This understanding makes me remember the words of Mikhail Gorbachev when closing the drafting of the Earth Charter at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris in 2000: “If we want to save life on the planet, we need new values ​​and another spirituality.” That is to say, our material goods and technoscience are not enough. All of this must come imbued with the values ​​of the heart, the seat of love, affection, empathy, ethics, care and spirituality. Only in this way can an emotional and supportive bond be established with all beings and with the Earth and thus save them. Every being has a value in itself, beyond human use. Natural spirituality allows us to feel all this, it is a kind of natural organ of our life that no other part of our nature can adequately perform. Quantum physicist Danah Zohar and her neurologist husband, I. Marshall, demonstrated that we have within us what they called “the God point in the brain.” Whenever the Sacred and the Spiritual are approached in an existential way, there is an acceleration of the neurons in a part of the brain. It is a kind of internal organ through which natural and innate spirituality captures that powerful and loving Energy that sustains everything and that also works within us (D.Zohar, Or be quantumRio 1991).

Natural spirituality refers us directly to ethics, in the classic sense of the Greeks: the well-kept House (ethos), now the Common Home, the Earth. The “ethos” seeks to live well. “Ethics”, the forms and ways of achieving good living, through the virtues of love, justice, fair measure, beauty and other virtues, according to the feelings of different cultures. From the earliest age and in the educational process, the natural spirituality that is always supported by the ethics of good living must be clarified.

Today more than ever, care is urgent, understood as the essence of all living things, especially human beings, according to the Roman myth of Hyginus, explored by philosophy and anthropology (cf. L. Boff. Knowing how to care: ethics of the human-compaixão pela Terra, Voices 2023). Left to itself, no living organism survives without care.

Currently two paradigms are being confronted: that of podry that of careful. That of current power as domination characterizes modernity. With this power, people were subjected, many enslaved, nature, matter, life and the Earth itself were ruthlessly exploited, today in search of sustainability. The care paradigm renounces power as domination, establishes a friendly relationship with nature and respects the Earth as the Great Mother and Gaia. Currently, faced with the devastation of modernity, the paradigm of care is imposed if we want to ensure the ecological conditions for our survival.

Humanity finds itself at a crossroads: either it follows the path of power that implies unlimited exploitation of natural resources to the point of having affected the balance of the Earth, given irreversible climate change; path that can lead us to an ecological armageddon. Or follow the path of care: humanity stops, reflects on the dangers to survive and defines a more benevolent course, marked by care for nature, for each other and for the Earth. Otherwise, says the Earth Charter, “we risk our destruction and the destruction of the diversity of life” (Preamble). Pope Francis says nothing else in the Fratelli tutti: «We are in the same boat, either we are all saved or no one is saved” (n.24)

There is little time left to change our common destiny with the Earth, we are going to survive and inaugurate another way of inhabiting the planet, with a feeling of belonging and with the awareness of being its faithful guardians.

Education has this messianic mission of unraveling from birth natural spirituality, Earth ethics and care for creation. Through that path there will be salvation.

*Leonardo Boff has written Taking care of the Common Home: how to delay the end of the world,Voices 2024.