We realize our connection to nature while meandering along the beach, hiking in the mountains, wandering fields and forests and exploring streams and ponds, experiences which can create feelings of revelation. Emotions brought forth by nature encounters engender moments of spiritual connection. These glimpses into the divine through the lens of nature have inspired writers for thousands of years across continents and spiritual traditions from America to India. Writers praise nature in words ranging from poetry and essays to texts elucidating yogic philosophy. In turn, reading literature extolling nature further shapes our attitudes of appreciation for nature.
Literature praising or describing nature reinforces veneration for the environment and validates the feelings that one experiences in the wild as being important, transformative and ethically formative. One improves oneself in nature. Emerging from nature, one feels restored and prepared, perhaps, to improve the world.
In American literature, the experience of nature appreciation has deep roots in New England’s Transcendentalist movement. The Transcendentalists’ influence endures as arrays of writers have repeated Thoreau’s Walden experiment in a variety of contexts: Terry Tempest Williams in Utah, John Muir in the Sierras, Aldo Leopold in Wisconsin, Mary Austin in Death Valley, Edward Abbey in the desert Southwest and Annie Dillard in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
This profound segment of American identity owes a debt to the yogic tradition. The classical literature of India glorifies the natural world, feminizes nature not for exploitation but for celebration and prods the individual into productive states of interior insight. The Transcendentalists read the early translations of some of this material. Emerson, like Mahatma Gandhi, read the Bhagavad Gita daily and Thoreau, author of Walden: Or, Life in the Woods, characterized himself as a yogi.
In our examination of these texts and verses, we now have the benefit of 150 years of additional studies of Indian texts and traditions, as well as a heightened realization of the fragility of nature. While Thoreau complained of a locomotive making too much noise, his disgruntled commentary critiques a problem that pales in comparison with the current issues facing our own relationship with nature. These include the melting of the Arctic sea and the Antarctic ice shelf, not to mention the extinction of countless species and the array of social ills that accompany wasteful contemporary lifestyles. Thoreau anticipated the tenor of these problems and the loneliness and alienation of modern people in his now-cherished essays.
Emerson’s oft-quoted words in this 1836 essay Nature provide support for the emergence of an American love of nature along with a possible antidote to modern alienation through connection to the divine via the natural world.
Standing on the bare ground,
my head bathed by the blithe air,
and uplifted into infinite space--
all mean egotism vanishes.
I become a transparent eye-ball.
I am nothing. I see all.
The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.
I am part or particle of God.
The Indian literature that inspired writers such as Emerson and Thoreau provides instruction vital to our current state of alienation from nature and even ourselves. These texts describe yogic philosophy and practices that teach a person how to cultivate a state of inward focus (pratyahara) and thus an understanding of the core of one’s being. Yoga, bringing serenity to the body-mind continuum, allows one to feel deep connections with the breath, the senses, the elements and consequently the natural world. This literature emphasizes the interiority and the immanence of God. In this view, the realm of spiritual experience does not reside in outward worship but in states of meditation and contemplation on the natural order inspiring reverence for the earth.
The earliest of India’s sacred texts, the Rig Veda, celebrates creation through Agni as the god of heat and light, Indra as the deity of the thunderstorm who releases of waters of each year’s monsoons and Soma, the creator of a special herbal elixir. The Vedas also extol Dyaus, the Lord of the heavens (referred to by the Greeks later as Zeus), and Prthivi, the goddess of the earth.
The later Atharva Veda acknowledges that all works and endeavors rely upon the earth, and that medicines arise from the earth. Its verses praise Mother Earth:
On her body food is grown everywhere
and on her the farmer toils…
the earth is home to cows, horses and birds;
sacred are your hills, snowy mountains and deep forests.
You are the world for us and we are your children.
Without the beneficence of the earth, all would perish.
The Upanisads praise the body and senses, and in particular, they honor the power of the breath. They redefine the self as beyond name and form, introduce methods of yoga and meditation and discuss the operations and functions of the elements, the body and the emotions in relation to transcendental consciousness.
The Markandeya Purana explores another aspect of consciousness by making correlations between the senses, the elements and the chakras, or the body’s energy centers. It outlines an ascendant interiority similar to that found in Emerson’s writings. Beginning with the earth and increasing in subtlety through the elements of water, fire, air and space, this text suggests that one enters into full understanding of one’s thoughts and one’s soul, correlating a chakra to each of these seven steps it elucidates. Like Emerson, who in Nature stood with his feet planted on the earth while rising into infinite space, the yogi of the Markandeya Purana begins the journey with the muladhara chakra and disappears at the seventh stage into supreme bliss.
The Yogavasistha is the sage Vasistha’s discourse on Nirvana. Vaisistha saves the story of his own spiritual journey for the very end where he watches the goddess (named variously as Kali, Devi, Sarasvati, Laksmi, Jaya, and so forth) as she dances into existence the landscapes of hill and plains, rivers and ponds, the warming rays of the sun and playful breezes. As he contemplations her munificence, he witnesses the transformative powers of Kali in his own body. Vasistha ascends from earth through water, fire, air, into space and then returns, continuing his work in the world. In a verse that echoes centuries later in the writing of Emerson, Vasistha proclaims:
The netherworlds were my feet,
The earth my abdomen,
The heavens my head.
I was spread in all directions everywhere at all times
And I did everything. I was the self of all. I was all.
Yet I was pure void.
I experienced being something and being nothing.
By rooting ourselves in the earth, letting our breath take us inward and allowing our thoughts and emotions to bring us upward, yoga becomes a tool for personal and social transformation. We can simultaneously hold and celebrate nature while acknowledging her fragility. The direct lessons learned from nature can energize, instruct and inspire students of yoga. Once we learn the lessons of nature and experience the freedom she brings, we can walk in renewed commitment to honor and support the natural world.
Dr. Christopher Key Chapple is the Navin and Pratima Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA.
