I find that somehow, by shifting the focus of attention, I become the very thing I look at, and experience the kind of consciousness it has; I become the inner witness of the thing. I call this capacity of entering other focal points of consciousness, love; you may give it any name you like. Love says “I am everything.” Wisdom says “I am nothing.” Between the two, my life flows. Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am both, and neither, and beyond both.
—NISARGADATTA
The views were of vast, distant peaks dusted with snow, clouds curling their fingers into the valleys below us. The sky seemed just inches above our heads, the air brilliant. The silence was a honed edge broken only by our footsteps.
This region of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the mountain range that towers above Colombia’s northern coast, is sacred to the indigenous Arhuaco people. They do not allow outsiders who don’t appreciate the significance of these mountains, where the creation of the universe began, to use the trails we were walking. The fact that we were there was a mark of their trust. I still had no idea why I was there; all I knew was that they had asked me to come.
I had been invited to Colombia to speak to the faculty of the Universidad Del Rosario in Bogotá about the work that I was doing at MIT with the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values. Del Rosario has been at the heart of Colombia’s political as well as cultural life for three and a half centuries, and a great many of the country’s leaders, both historically and today, are alumni. The university was interested in the experiential learning pedagogy in ethics and peace building that the Center had developed at MIT, and we were beginning to explore how it might be adapted to the particular challenges that Colombia faced.
One generally knows what to expect at academic meetings of that nature. What I did not expect was the message that the dean conveyed to me. He seemed as surprised by it as I was. A delegation of Arhuacos had arrived from the mountains, sent by their leaders, known as Mamos. They are elders who are trained from childhood in a complex cosmology and intimate understanding of the natural and spiritual worlds that guide their decisions on all aspects of their community’s life.
The Arhuacos’ isolation might suggest a primitive tribal culture but in fact they, along with three neighboring groups that are closely related, are a substantial remnant of a continuous civilization that survived the Spanish conquest. They have also survived every intrusion into their territory since then: the continuous encroachment of settlers from the lowlands, the clearing of forests for the marijuana trade and then for cocaine, and the violence that followed in the wake of these crops, including violence to the land—the laying of land mines to protect the crops, the spraying of fields to eradicate the crops—and the shifting factions of guerrillas, military, and paramilitary. With each new incursion the indigenous people have been forced higher into the more inaccessible, and less productive, reaches of their mountain range. Secrecy and isolation have for centuries been part of their strategy for preserving their culture, but in recent years they have also learned to work proactively with Colombia’s legal system and international organizations to advocate for their rights and environmental protections.
Apparently an elder Mamo had a dream that someone they needed to talk to could be found just then in Bogotá, someone who had come from the East and wore red cloth. The university was their connection to civilization, so that’s where they sent the message. The dean put two and two together. No one else fit the description. Would I be willing to meet with them? The Mamos never leave their sacred territory in the mountains, so we would have to go there. The dean was reluctant to impose, he said, because our schedule was tight and the journey to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta would be no simple matter, but since the messengers themselves had come all the way to Bogotá…
This was how I found myself on this path walking through an extraordinarily beautiful mountain landscape, accompanied by Dean Eduardo Barajas Sandoval, the Arhuaco messengers, and a handful of faculty members. There was an anthropologist, Angela Santamaria, who had been studying the Arhuaco for many years; Patricia Acosta, a professor of urban studies and planning whom I had met when she was on a fellowship to MIT; and Raul Velasquez, a professor of political science who was extremely skeptical of this bizarre diversion from the work we had planned but was intrigued enough to join the expedition.
The trip was indeed daunting. We flew from Bogotá to Valledupar, and from there we drove for several hours up into the mountains. The road became less and less of a road, dissolving into a rocky track that edged ravines and cliff faces and crossed rivers that were fortunately shallow at that time of year. Nabusímake was the end of the road, as far as vehicles were concerned. This was the spiritual center of the Arhuaco universe, the spot where the sun was originally born from the realm of pure thought. It is also the site of the Capuchin mission that worked hard to erase the old culture, until the Arhuacos rose up and expelled the friars in the 1980s. The village, with its mud houses roofed in steep thatch and gardens like small forests of fruiting trees, now seems barely touched by the modern world. It is idyllically quiet, absent of the noise of engines and amplified media that would be crackling in the background of an Indian village today.
From Nabusímake we walked. We left behind paddocks enclosed by low stone walls and hiked deeper into the mountains for almost three hours, the path alternately dipping into forest and then opening to broad slopes of grassy alpine meadows. I hadn’t come to Colombia prepared for hiking, and the only shoes I had brought were deemed inadequate defense against mud and snakes. Some rubber boots were found that almost fit, but after hours of walking my shins were rubbed raw.
We finally arrived at a compound with a few thatched huts. I gathered that the Mamos were inside, but before we could enter the area, the Arhuacos who had accompanied us from Bogotá said we should sit and prepare ourselves. So we sat on the rocks nearby, quiet with anticipation. The only sound was of each man softly tapping a stick on the small gourd that he carried at all times, rotating it around and around. From time to time they would dip the stick into the gourd and then into their mouths, mixing lime with the coca leaves they were chewing. The handling of the gourd, all the tapping and turning, was said to increase their wisdom. The motion and sound, and its constant presence, reminded me of prayer wheels in the hands of elderly Tibetans.
We sat like this for more than an hour. Some women came out of the compound and sat with us quietly, and then a handful of older men came and welcomed us. They tied a knotted thread made of agave fiber around my wrist, the same agave fiber that their domed white hats were made of, which were said to represent the snow-covered peaks of the mountain range. The men each carried a woven bag of agave fiber with a pattern unique to their family. They all wore the simplest clothes, all more or less identical, of a homespun white cloth.
We then walked a slight distance from the compound to what they called a sacred hill, where the meeting would take place. The anthropologist confided that she felt a little envious, and puzzled too. In all her years of working with the Arhuaco, they had never invited her into that area. The three Mamos were sitting in front of a round hut made of straw. They wore the same homespun white clothes, the same snowcap hats as the other Arhuaco men, and there was nothing that marked their authority beyond advanced age and a certain gravitas in their bearing. I asked if there was any specific ritual for entering the space. I noticed that the Mamos were barefoot, and I mentioned that in India we would never enter a holy place without taking off our shoes. Everybody agreed that it would be a good idea if it wasn’t inconvenient. I was only too happy to ditch the rubber boots and let my feet feel the earth.
We all sat quietly again for a while on wooden stools and flat stones set in front of the hut. Once again the only sound was our own breathing and the gentle tapping of sticks on gourds, with the Mamos now joining in too. And then, without introduction, Guneymaku Chaparro began talking. He was the eldest of the three, perhaps in his midseventies, though it was hard to tell age on skin made leathery by the high-altitude sun.
Chaparro spoke in an indigenous language that everyone referred to generically as lengua. He led the conversation and the other Mamos joined in intermittently. One of the younger Arhuacos translated into Spanish, and my companions then translated from Spanish into English for my sake. At least that was how it started. Chaparro began by answering the question that had followed me all the way from Bogotá: Why on earth was I here? He explained that three hundred years ago they had received a prophecy of sorts, a legend that looked to the future rather than the past, saying that someone would come from the East, wearing red cloth, and that they should share wisdom with this person. He had had a dream indicating that the person they were waiting for had come to the city, and so they had sent their representatives to Bogotá to bring me here.
As the translation came through, Eduardo gave me a look that said, “This is insane!” And yet I could also see that he was moved by the setting and the seriousness of the encounter. The Mamos explained that they had stayed awake all the previous night, out in the open, in preparation for our meeting. They looked a little tired—it was now almost evening again—but not as tired as I would be at half their age. They had spent the hours, they said, asking for guidance from nature and from particular spirits as to how they should welcome me and what they should discuss.
I thanked them for inviting me. I didn’t want to probe the story of the prophecy. It seemed more worthwhile to focus instead on whatever it was that they wanted to share with me. Chaparro began to speak about relationships. What he expressed carried a profound sorrow. He was grieving for his brothers in the outside world who had lost something terribly precious. That loss was as hard as a death, and so he was mourning, because what they had lost was the very nature of how to be human: an understanding of how to be in relationship.
He spoke of the Arhuacos’ relationship with this land, about their responsibility as guardians of the health and harmony of these mountains and how the mountains were a mother that had so unselfishly provided for their needs. That relationship he described as the original law, and all of their understanding of nature evolved from relationship. It was not only this region they knew so well and their own needs that mattered. Because the entire universe was first created right here, in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the health of this region was key to the survival and health of the whole world.
The Arhuacos perceive the world as a single living body, the rivers and streams its veins and arteries. The health of this body consists in a precarious and dynamic balance—a literal homeostasis of the organism—that the Mamos are responsible for monitoring and for mending when needed. Even the most mundane activity, life by its very nature, the taking of a breath, the eating of a meal, a birth or a death, shifts the balance in subtle ways. A dispute in the village, an illness, an accident, a family torn by jealousy—these are ailments in the organism, strains in relationship that the Mamos tend to with care. Building a dam is like blocking an artery. Traditionally, when the health of the system is threatened, they repair the natural order through spiritual work, through guidance in the community, and making ritual “payments.” The destruction they were witnessing today, the selfishness of their brothers in the cities, the hatred and killing they inflicted on one another, and the extraction of resources from their mother’s body, all shifted the balance catastrophically, beyond the capacity of the Mamos’ powers to correct. The messages from nature that they intercepted foretold much worse to come: the threat of the oceans flooding the land and the sun burning the earth barren.
At some point in the conversation I became aware that we had left behind our support system of trilingual translation. Chaparro was speaking in the indigenous lengua and I was speaking English. The understanding was immediate and instantaneous and we were responding to each other without waiting for the translators who trailed behind us. What I heard in the Mamo’s voice and read in the shadows that crossed his face was a deeply empathic concern for the suffering that this failure of relationship had caused. “These mountains, they are in pain,” he said. He spoke gently, but with emotion as tender and raw as if his own child or sister or mother was dying. The relationship he was pointing to was real, not metaphor.
Walking back to Nabusímake, I was processing all of this. I was walking slowly, the rubber boots once again a torment. Raul, the professor of political science who had been so skeptical on the journey out, kindly held back to keep pace with me. He too needed to process, having shed his skepticism in favor of a free-flowing elation, and his processing was verbal. Finally I said, “Raul, would you mind just enjoying the nature and walking silently together?” He offered instead, “Would you mind if I play Tchaikovsky?” It was a good compromise, so the transcendent views and the weight of the Mamos’ message had a cinematic soundtrack from his phone for the remainder of our hike.
The very brief glimpse I had into the Mamos’ world shook me profoundly. It had not occurred to me that there are ways of relating to nature that are far beyond the realm of my own experience. I’ve had the benefit of an excellent education in the natural sciences, long periods of contemplative solitude in nature, and the pleasure of countless hours spent framing nature’s glorious displays through a camera’s eye. None of this prepared me for what the Mamos were trying to communicate. I have deep-rooted memories of my own family’s ties to the land of Vaishali, the quiet bond that elders shared with the earthen goddess Bhu Devi, and the practical rhythms of farming life. But compared to the pulsing umbilical cord that links the Mamos to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, our ties to the land are attenuated. We have divided our attention for generations.
And yet I remember as a child watching an elderly man planting saplings in our village. These would be mango trees one day, he said, and I was eager to know how long that would take. It would take three or four years, he said, before the first fruit appeared. But the fruit of the first year was never very good, so maybe in five years the mangoes would be ready to enjoy. That seemed a very long time indeed—I was maybe seven or eight years old myself, so it was most of a lifetime.
“Baba, how old are you?” I asked.
His smile bared a single tooth hanging from his gum. “I am ninety-two years old!” he said proudly.
“Baba, will you still be here to enjoy the mangoes?”
“I won’t, but you will be.” He was more than content, even proud, to invest his efforts in a future that wasn’t his own. He had the same leathered skin, and wore the same kind of white homespun cloth, work-stained and sun-bleached, that the Arhuacos wore, and his face had appeared to my mind’s eye for a moment as I listened to Chaparro. The unselfishly long view that both those men embodied should not seem mysterious to us. Every day we reap the benefits of previous generations’ foresight, but we seem to have lost that faculty ourselves.
The Mamos’ view of relationships made a profound impression on me. Their own self-interest and their very urgent concerns for their own people seemed secondary to a larger, holistic concern for the whole world. It was a concern that was practical, grounded in the most fundamental of physical needs and a livelihood of bare sustenance. And yet it was also a transcendent and unselfish expression of love, shining in contrast with the way that our own relationships—and not just our relationship with nature—lean toward the transactional. Our culture has taught us to weave meaning and magic around relationships that mask the reductive calculations we make consciously or unconsciously. We can become entranced by rituals of reciprocity and the satisfying dance of give and take. We spin stories about how these relationships are loving and deeply caring, but the roles we play are rarely as selfless as the stories would have us believe. At the end of the day, love that is truly offered freely shakes off the bonds of self-interest and self-cherishing. However it begins, it moves beyond the constraints of a transactional, calculating mindset.
Bodhicitta—that impulse that draws us toward enlightenment—offers a clear-sighted view that cuts through the stories and sees into the deeper nature of reality. It sees who we are as sentient beings and understands that we are capable of purely loving, caring relationships, where nothing is expected in return. Nothing is even hoped for, except for others’ well-being. There are those who claim that such unselfishness is impossible, that even if we expect nothing in this lifetime, we have simply offloaded our expectations of reward to an afterlife. They insist we are still checking the balance of our account even if the merit is supposedly spiritual. They have never imagined themselves in the seat of an archetypal Bodhisattva. Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion, is not worried about his next lifetime, or a merit-driven higher rebirth. He’s made the choice to stay behind, available in this life until we are all enlightened, and not one sentient being is left behind. That is not a finite task. We won’t become Bodhisattvas unless we learn to identify and abandon motives rooted in transactional calculation, to practice cherishing others more dearly than ourselves, and to extend the same openhearted compassion and unselfish love to all human beings equally, including those far outside our natural circles of affinity.
Why not extend the boundaries of unselfish relationship beyond other humans, beyond even the handful of animals who appeal to our anthropomorphic imaginations? Suppose we could expand our circle of care to encompass all forms of life and the whole of the environment? I would care for a tree not because it has some utilitarian function, giving me shade, food, timber; not even because it’s beautiful and I desire the pleasure of gazing on this tree. There is a different kind of pleasure, call it an “aesthetics of relationship,” that appreciates the larger whole in which the tree and I are equally participants. We understand how objectifying another person dehumanizes them, makes them less than they are. Can we learn in the same spirit not to objectify a tree?
This aesthetic response to a more holistic view of our relationship with nature begins with the premise that we are all interconnected. We recognize that we need one another for our survival. Yes, we have needs and desires, but we don’t translate our needs and desires into utilitarian models that become a filter for perception and assigning value. Instead we recognize that because we are interconnected, our sense of well-being—our health and wholeness, the very integrity of our existence—is tied to the health and wholeness of other beings. That sense of profound interconnection might sound like a naïve and romantic projection, but the fact is that other models haven’t worked well for us. The way we have framed the world thus far tends to devolve to exploitation and oppression.
By the time we reached the village, I was eager to wash. There was no indoor running water. Instead, our Arhuaco companions showed me to a shallow stream and gave me a lesson. There was no container to collect or pour water, and no need for one. You lay down flat on your back and let the stream run over you, then turned over and lay on your stomach while the stream washed over your back. Soap up and repeat to rinse off. It was icy cold but it was effortless, and there was something in the molding of one’s body to the stream bed, the melting of resistance into the melted snow, that seemed to echo the Mamos’ message.
I returned from Bogotá to MIT as if I were carrying home a most precious and fragile living cargo. What the Mamos did by reaching out and asking me to hear them felt like a profound gift of trust. That relationship brought with it responsibility.
There was a big conference in the works and the Dalai Lama would be participating. The theme was a global view of ethics and a long-term view of ethical responsibility as a framework for addressing climate change and the array of challenges that will ensue. VUCA is the label that the corporate world has borrowed from military jargon to describe the state of this world: volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. In practical terms, a long view of ethics and our responsibility to future generations is the only path that makes sense in the time we have left to act. But a long view also matters in spiritual terms. Right now whatever energy we are putting into staving off environmental catastrophe is driven by fear. It’s a usefully motivating fear, to be sure, but fear by its nature is selfish. If we had a true understanding of our intimate ties to all other human beings and to the natural world—the understanding of relationship that the Mamos embodied, our actions would be driven instead by a deep sense of love—not by fear but our care for this vast family.
I dedicated that meeting to the Mamos and told their story, which is now part of the story of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. I tried to explain to His Holiness who these people were that had so inspired me. Their way of life was even simpler, I told him, much simpler than the Tibetan nomads had lived traditionally. I wasn’t sure he understood until I gave him the gift they had asked me to give to my teacher: one knotted strand of agave fiber, just like the one they had tied on my wrist. That simple piece of string was as humble and as precious a gift as the thread that Khunu Lama had pulled from his fraying coat, and it conveyed a similar message: The truest blessing is that we are tied together. We are small threads woven together into a vast web. Nothing has value in isolation. Even our transactional calculations of what seems valuable here and now are narrow intimations of a deeper truth—that our only value and purpose is in relationship to one another, if we could only stop counting the threads and see the glorious patterns in this intricate and infinite fabric.
I wake up every day with the memory of my teachers’ compassion, with the joy and wisdom that so many remarkable individuals have shared with me, and I ask myself how I can manifest that same compassion in action. Talking about it doesn’t seem to be enough. The real challenge is not the ever-escalating threat of change. Change always looms, if rarely so dramatically as now. The real challenge is to bring this scattered family together, to reach across the boundaries of our separate beliefs, with empathy and a shared understanding of ethics, to learn to care for one another.