Of Soil, Soul and Society

Last night in Kyoto I had the humble honor of being in the presence of one of the great philosopher-activists of our time, Mr. Satish Kumar of India. He is currently on a speaking tour of Japan, and I was fortunate to have attended his lecture here to several hundred Japanese audience members. It was a real spiritual boost for me, offering much inspirational food for thought and shining a light of hope in these uncertain times.

Kumar, a former monk of the Jain religion in India and follower of the nonviolence teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, is perhaps best known today as a peace activist, ecologist and editor of the magazine Resurgence based in England, where he lives with his family.

Yesterday’s event started off with the showing of a promotional DVD (video clip here) featuring Kumar in conversation with some well-known Japanese personalities. He then took the stage with interpreter Shinichi Tsuji, a Japanese university professor of cultural anthropology and a proponent of the fledgling “slow food” movement here in Japan.

The 77-year-old Kumar tends to teach in spiritual “trinities,” and he summarizes his ecological worldview with the triple concept of “soil, soul and society.” It goes something like this....

Soil: The first step in each one us making sense of our place in this world begins with the earth, our natural mother in every respect. We have lost touch with what it means to walk on the planet as a human being. The best way to get back to that is reconfirm your own personal, individual relationship with nature. That can mean spending time gardening in your yard, taking long walks in nature, hiking, farming, whatever. In the process, you make nature a part of you again. Take soil in your hands and feel again what it means to be connected to nature and the wider natural world.

Soul: Find out those things that spiritually fulfill you, make you feel whole, put your heart and mind at ease and at peace, and work them into your daily life. That can mean meditation, prayer, fasting, yoga — whatever helps you to go inside of yourself just a little deeper and find out what makes you tick on a very soulful, spiritual level.

Society: While we are finding our way back to nature and back to our own selves, it is important to participate in life and not shut ourselves off. We take steps to nurture the relationships around us: family, friends, communities and so on. Your natural and spiritual growth go hand-in-hand with your social life, with your strengthening of relationships in society.

I was amazed to hear Kumar put that so clearly; I have often felt the same way. It brought to mind the closing lines of a poem I remember jotting down a few years ago....

The social is the spiritual
The spiritual is the social

Another trinity that Kumar used in his lecture last night was that of “head, heart and hands” as a way to mentally, emotionally and physically create new things in our lives.

“We have become shoppers and consumers, and are no long creators and makers,” he told us: Our educational systems need to be changed to include more creating and making of things — more kitchens, more gardens and more arts — instead of just memorizing facts out of books or from computers. Kumar’s own experiment in this, an alternative school he founded in Britain called The Small School, seems to be a successful alternative model for education.

Kumar also had a few words to say about Shinzo Abe, the extreme right-wing politician who was recently reinstated as prime minister of Japan. Abe promises to push ahead with nuclear power development in Japan even after the Fukushima nuclear accident of 2011 and despite current public opinion that stands high against nuclear energy.

“The real change, the real leadership, is not going to come from Mr. Abe. You are the real leaders. There is no hope for leaders” to do what is right, Kumar said. “...You all have to become an activist and say to people, ‘We need a new way forward’.”

Personal empowerment in the face of often-dehumanizing technology and Big Money was a theme Kumar turned to again and again in his lecture:

“Do you want to be a free man or woman, or do you want to be a slave man or woman? If you want to be a free man or woman, then learn to use your hands” to create things in life.

“You are the CEO of your life, and your job is to be happy.”

“Money is not wealth; money is only a means of measurement. The real wealth is your skills. ...Let’s not put money in the dominant position. ...Economy becomes money because it destroys imagination and the skill of human hands.”

As Kumar spoke, I tried to instinctively, intuitively gauge how the Japanese audience as a group was feeling and reacting. After all, Kumar was here speaking in a workaholic society, Japan, where technology and money reign supreme and shape every facet of our lives, not to mention Japan’s place in the international community.

At some points in the lecture, I could just feel the Japanese audience contract or resist, such as when Kumar encouraged young Japanese people to forget about going into the job market after university (!) and instead go out into the world beyond Japan’s borders and “experience life as an adventure.” Uh-oh, I thought, smiling to myself.

At other times, the audience laughed uproariously at what were sincere suggestions for social change by Kumar; perhaps the ideas seemed too far out there to take seriously. I could just imagine the inner reaction of some audience members: “Well, that might work over in India or the UK, but this is Japan. We’re not like that. That just wouldn’t be practical here.”

While it is true that Japan can be resistant to new ideas and new ways of doing things, it is also true that right now, Japan as a society is starving for spiritual direction. The rise of “new religions” — cults, essentially — in Japanese society in recent decades is a scary thing, though certainly understandable. After all, several other rich, materialistic societies, especially the United States, seem to have this spiritual starvation among the people as well.

Overall, the audience in Kyoto last night seemed warm and receptive to the bold ideas that Kumar shared, and I thought that that kind of spiritual hunger and a need for some kind of hope after Fukushima may have been one reason why. In any case I was glad that many young Japanese people in the audience were hearing such new ideas. Would those ideas take root in some of those young people’s minds and embolden them to change for the better the course Japan takes in the future? I dare to hope so.

I returned home uplifted, inspired and impressed last night from the words of this humble yet passionate teacher from India. But more than that, I somehow felt that I had rediscovered an inner place of my own from which to work, both idealistically and realistically, for the future. I’ve finished a book of Kumar’s that I was reading, Spiritual Compass (highly recommended) and have watched a few videos featuring him, including the beautifully made documentary Earth Pilgrim, which was aired by the BBC, Britain’s public broadcaster.

Change can be a complicated thing if we let it be, or change can be simple. If Satish Kumar is to be believed, social change and spiritual change begin with a simple act of reaching into the soil. What happens after that, of course, is up to each one of us.

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