Climate Consciousness

By William T. Hathaway

To paraphrase Mark Twain, everyone talks about climate change but no one does anything about it. No one, particularly those in power, wants to make the necessary sacrifices. The latest round of international negotiations served mainly to postpone decisions and action. The Japanese government announced that their CO2 emissions would be increasing rather than decreasing as promised. The US government still refuses to comply with international environmental agreements.

Clearly we need a global reordering of priorities, away from short-term economic gain and towards long-term sustainability. But we've known this for decades, and the problem continues to worsen although scientists insist we could solve it if we had the will. Generating the will to make these changes, both in our personal lives and in the economic structures we are caught in, is going to require a change of consciousness.

My novel Wellsprings: A Fable of Consciousness approaches ecology from that dimension. The book is set in 2026 as the earth's ecosystem has broken down under human abuse. Water supplies are shrinking. Rain is rare, and North America is gripped in the Great Drought with crops withering and forests dying. In the midst of environmental and social collapse, an old woman and a young man set out to heal nature and reactivate the cycle of flow by using techniques of higher consciousness. But the corporations that control the remaining water lash out to stop them.

In the story water is analogous to consciousness. People are out of contact with their own inner wellsprings of consciousness, so their lives are withering. And their ignorant actions have driven the earth's water deep underground, so nature is withering. Human life and the earth's life are trapped in suffering. The book shows the two main characters evolving their consciousness to a level where they can sense the water and restore its natural flow for humanity and the earth. A blend of adventure, ecology, and mystic wisdom, Wellsprings: A Fable of Consciousness is a frightening but hopeful look into a future that is looming closer every day.

The story opens with Bob, 18, and Jane, 77, meeting at a California hot springs and setting out together on a quest. Jane is convinced North America's water has retreated into a deep subterranean aquifer, and she is searching for the place where it comes close enough to the surface to access it. She teaches him Transcendental Meditation, and their visions help them find the cavern that connects to the water.

A selection:

Jane and I drive around to the north side of Mt. Shasta, hoping to be able to sense the subterranean springs from there. In the moonlight the mountain looks like a silver pyramid soaring up from the horizon into the starry purple night. The ancient volcano is lord of all it surveys. Veils of clouds are blowing around its peak.

We find a grassy glade in the forest, but the grass is dry and brittle and the tree branches droop from the drought. As we are spreading our blankets out to meditate, motion on the other side of the clearing catches our eyes. Out of the trees steps a black-tailed doe. She sees us and pauses, one foot raised, sniffing, listening, looking. Jane and I stare enthralled. As the doe gazes at us, our eyes join across the space, across the species. Communication flows between us: cautious curiosity about a fellow creature. She breaks contact, begins nibbling, then looks back at us as if saying, As long as you stay on your side, it's OK.

We watch her in delight until she trots off, then we close our eyes to meditate. At first my mantra goes with my heartbeat then slows and goes with my breath. The sound stretches out into a long hum floating through me. I seem to be beyond my skin, filling the whole clearing. I feel like I'm sinking into the earth. I want to hold on, to keep from disappearing, but something tells me to let everything go. I free-fall through space, then realize it's impossible to fall because there's no down. I'm hovering ... like a dragonfly over water. The sound fades away, leaving me without thoughts. I seem to expand beyond all space and boundaries to unite with everything. For a moment I know I am everything, the whole universe, but as soon as I think, I'm everything, I'm not anymore. I'm just Bob Parks sitting on a blanket over cold ground.

I start the mantra again. Its whisper clears my thoughts away, and my mind becomes quiet. Part of me is watching the quietness of my mind and enjoying it. I never knew I had this watching part before. It doesn't need to think. It's just there, aware of everything but separate from it — a wise old part of me.

I realize I'm off the mantra, drifting on thoughts, so I pick up the sound again and follow it as it gets fainter and finer until it becomes more visual, pulsing light behind my closed eyes. It seems to shine into something, a big cavern that's inside of me but also outside of me. The boundaries between me and everything else disappear — no difference now between inside and outside. I can see dimly into the cavern. The walls and ceiling are crystal, its facets glinting in the mantra light. Below them in all directions stretches a vast dark sea of water, its ripples gleaming. It's deep, deep as the earth, and I want to plunge in and dive all the way to the bottom. I'm sitting above it. Down there beneath me, beneath these rocks and dirt, rests the water.

I can sense this sea's immensity, stretching from California under the Great Basin of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, the parched American desert, the last place the corporate drillers would've looked. We're sitting by the tip of it closest to the surface. From here it goes deeper and deeper, soaking through strata of sand and porous rock, a huge aquifer waiting to be freed and flow again.

I want to jump up and yell, "I found it!" but that thought makes it disappear. I take a deep breath and am back sitting cross-legged on my blanket. Too stunned to say anything, I lie back and feel the ground under me, this good ground with all that good water under it.