How New Thought Can Restore Our Relationship with Mother Earth

By HARV BISHOP

New Thought teachings often speak of scarcity consciousness versus a consciousness of abundance. But there is more to those teachings than the size of your bank account.

Michael Bernard Beckwith, spiritual director of Agape International Spiritual Center in Los Angeles, said these teachings hold the key to healing the relationship between human beings and Mother Earth.

“Any spiritual community that does not embrace the planet as a living entity, something that is sacred — which would include our environmental concerns, how we treat the oceans, how we treat the rainforests, how we treat the soil — is not really at the cutting edge of where we need to be as spiritual communities,” Beckwith tells me.  “Caring for the environment and seeing the Earth as being sacred are extremely important.

“Over the years, people have looked at the planet as a dead substance and thought we could do whatever it is we want to do with it. The concept of throwing something away, of course, disappeared a long time ago, because there is no away. As a person, as spiritual leaders and as a spiritual movement, we have to embrace our planet and Mother Nature as sacred entities.”

HB: How will that change our relationship to Mother Earth?

MBB: “Whatever we see as sacred, we have a level of reverence for and we have a tendency to treat it better.  In terms of embracing environmental justice, New Thought needs to be on the cutting edge of articulating what the world would look like if that would happen.

“Now, a lot of these issues dovetail, they are intricately connected. For instance, look at how we use nonrenewable resources. Oil in particular, coal, fracking, how we treat animals in terms of factory farming and the methane that is released in the air. You look at all of this and then you look at tornados. People fail to realize that a tornado is one of the ways that the Earth cools itself. When the equator gets too hot, it releases tornados; it is the way the earth sweats. There is a direct correlation between the rising temperatures that humans produce and the number of tornados. There is a relationship between how we treat ourselves, how we treat the Earth and how we treat animals and some of the so-called natural disasters that take place on the planet.

HB: I’ve heard you say there is a strong connection between scarcity consciousness and our ecological problems.

MBB: “Look at what we teach in New Thought! We live in a field of abundance and plentitude. The Bhagavad Gita says ‘You can take abundance from abundance, but abundance still remains.’ We can also say it scientifically: Energy is never created or destroyed, it just transmutes itself.

“We live in a sea of abundance and that is what New Thought teaches: abundance and more abundance.  Now we are on the verge of society that is built upon renewable resources: solar power, wind power, heat from the Earth, global, thermal. You are talking about actually living in an age where our economy is built upon renewable resources, which allows us to tap into the abundance that is already here.

But right now our economic model is immature. It is based upon a nonrenewable resource, which means it has a hole in it so it is always going to be operating from a deficit. It is based on oil, how much oil is available, how much oil is released and the cost of oil. So everything that comes to you, every food item, every clothing item, has something to do with oil. It is either being transported or created with oil.

“When we start moving ourselves to renewable resources we are tapping into the field of abundance that New Thought talks about. Now the hole in the economy is closed and we are living in a world in which there is an overflow.

“In New Thought, when we begin to describe a kind and just global society, when we begin to describe a world that works for the highest and the best within us all, we are speaking about the Earth being sacred, resources being sacred. We are talking about moving toward renewable resources so the economy matures.

“Now we are talking about an overflow of real abundance, not a false abundance of which a very small group of people get to participate in because they control the commons. They control the use of water, they control use of oil, they control the release of electricity. That which should be common to all is controlled by a few people. Therefore, the gap between the rich and the poor keeps expanding, which is a society based upon lack and scarcity, greed and avarice.

“As a New Thought teaching, we embrace a kind and just global society, justice for the planet, justice for people, justice and right conditions for all living beings. The issues that we are facing are interrelated with how we treat ourselves, how we treat the planet, how we treat animals. You can’t take one thing and look at it, and not see that it is connected to all the things that we are experiencing.”