action is the ultimate explanation of human existence

Art of Becoming, No. 76

Previously, Week 10

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Welcome to Week 11 of Art of Becoming.

Today is the sixth of this seven-part contemplative series on sustainability.

In this series, we’ve begun to open the aperture to seeing sustainability less as a problem to solve but rather, a story to inhabit—one etched into the strata of human choice, ecological reciprocity, and the unrelenting passage of time. Today’s practice, the sixth in our seven-part contemplative series, arrives at a pivotal moment for this collective inquiry. Having traversed the terrain where language becomes experience (Week 1) and experience becomes world (Week 2), grappled with Hans Jonas’s assertion that life itself is “a task of preserving life’s possibility” (Week 3), wandered Aldo Leopold’s Sand County to witness science as an ethical compass (Week 4), and navigated Christof Koch’s systems-thinking labyrinths (Week 5), we now turn to history—not as a record of what was, but as a mirror for what is.

We find a fascinating revelation in Paul Warde's examination of sustainability: like many concepts we take for granted, sustainability wasn't a timeless virtue but a historical invention with specific origins in 18th-century anxieties about resource management and control. This pattern mirrors what I've observed studying technological progress—concepts don't emerge fully formed but evolve through the interplay of material conditions, institutional structures, and intellectual frameworks. Where Jonas framed preservation as existential imperative, and Leopold sought an ecological ethic grounded in scientific literacy, Warde dissects for us the myth of sustainability as a premodern ideal, exposing its birth in the 18th century’s fervor for control and measurement. Reb Anderson, meanwhile, reframes karma not as cosmic ledger but as the architecture of attention—how our moment-to-moment narratives (“I am here; the forest is there”) sculpt the physical and moral worlds we share. Understanding the intellectual history of sustainability helps us see it not as an eternal truth but as a cognitive tool developed by societies grappling with new awareness of their relationship to natural systems.

So, this practice invites you to wield historiography as a contemplative tool. To ask: How did we get here? not as an academic exercise, but as somatic inquiry. Warde’s critique of blame—the futile search for “great social forces” to indict—echoes Anderson’s teaching that “the person who resists the vow is one of the beings we must start being gentle with.” Both demand we confront the uncomfortable truth: sustainability’s failures are not failures of technology or will, but of imagination. We have mistaken the map (industrialism! capitalism!) for the territory, forgetting that every system is the sum of countless human gestures—medieval peasants rotating crops, Enlightenment botanists cataloging species, Silicon Valley engineers optimizing algorithms.

As you engage this piece, consider how history invites us into meditation, by making something bigger than ourselves the object of attention. It is a practice of *turning toward—*a way of expanding attention beyond our individual stories to witness the intricate feedback loops between thought, action, and consequence across time, revealing sustainability as a dance of metanoia—a mind turned back upon itself to see its own patterns. History invites us not to blame but to understand; not to conquer but to cultivate. Just as Anderson’s practitioner learns to “rest in the gap” between stimulus and reaction, Warde’s historiography reveals how these representations—whether 18th century forest management policies or modern carbon markets—accumulate to shape material reality. When we study sustainability historically, we transform the instinct to “fight for the planet” into something more subtle and perhaps more powerful: a patient, attentive presence that can hold complexity without collapsing into simplistic causality. The historical consciousness becomes not so much a weapon, but a garden tool—allowing us to distinguish between ephemeral trends and deep patterns, to prune what no longer serves while nurturing what might yet flourish.

Next time, we conclude with a final contemplation on consciousness as sustainability’s substrate—the ground from which all ethics and systems spring. But today, let Warde’s and Anderson’s insights be your compass in the liminal space between past and present, where every act of care—whether a 1740 forestry law or a breath taken before speaking—becomes a votive offering to futures we dare to seed.

Culprits for environmental destruction are legion: ‘industrialism’, ‘capitalism’, ‘Western thought’, ‘science’, ‘ignorance of science’, and so on; we have already seen some blaming above. Often these concepts are helpful in framing questions and analyses about our present and past predicaments.

Yet I do not think the problems we feel we face today can be reduced to them. Too much of this blame game assumes that there is a simple relation between some great social force and the thought of the time in which it emerges, whether as a legitimation of it or as a response to the challenges and problems that arise. Such a line supposes that people will eventually wise up and change their minds when confronted with reality (in the second case), or that transformation can somehow be effected by a great collective change of heart (in the first, if our current behaviour no longer seems justifi able). An agrarian society looks after the land; an industrial society is addicted to consumption and squandering resources heedlessly. The wisdom of the former can save the latter (yet – how did we get from one to the other?). I am hardly the first historian to point out that it is a lot more complicated. Certainly, the idea of a correspondence between economic structures (‘relations of production’) and the prevailing thinking of an age is a powerful idea worth entertaining; thought does not soar unbound from the world which it comprehends, and people like to have an explanation for doing what they feel compelled to do. But that is where the research begins, rather than the conclusion of the story, not least because thought is varied in any age. The proposition that thought (the ‘superstructure’, in Marxist terms) is linked in some causal way to the socio- economic ‘base’, however one sees the direction of causation, is no answer in itself, and is possibly neither true nor untrue. It is like asking whether light is a wave or a particle. But unless we choose our tools and set up our observations, we can say nothing about the nature of light at all.

-Paul Warde, The Invention of Sustainability

In the spring of 1713, Hans Carl von Carlowitz, a Saxon mining administrator, published a treatise called Sylvicultura Oeconomica—a work that would later be heralded as the first articulation of "sustainable yield" in forestry. Yet Carlowitz wasn't motivated by what we might call ecological ethics; he was responding to a crisis in timber supply that threatened the mining industry. His vision wasn't of forests as sacred ecosystems but as managed resources for human use. The irony hangs in the air like woodsmoke: our modern environmental consciousness emerged not from reverence for nature but from anxiety about scarcity. And this paradox sits at the heart of Paul Warde's remarkable historical excavation, The Invention of Sustainability.

What Warde reveals with painstaking precision is that sustainability wasn’t discovered like some eternal truth waiting in the forest primeval—it emerged, much like phenomena in nature, through processes of invention, negotiation, and adaptation. Its contours were shaped by centuries of European discourse about resources, governance, and human flourishing, where early modern thinkers debated not how to preserve wilderness but how to maintain the conditions that allowed human economies to function. And here is where historical insight invites us to consider what lies beyond the limits of historical scaffolding.

Let’s take a momentary detour to consider a revelation of the man who invented the future, Claude Shannon—that information is fundamentally a measure of uncertainty resolved. For us, this unearths a radical truth: what we call “answers” are merely the exhausted endpoints of curiosity, while questions are the living engines of discovery. In Shannon’s framework, entropy quantifies the “surprise potential” embedded in a message—the greater the uncertainty, the richer the information. So, here we have a clue to help us gain more ground on the essence of sustainability: even as a concept, it thrives not in fixed solutions but in the fertile tension between human ingenuity and ecological constraints. Like a dissipative system far from equilibrium—whether a hurricane feeding on warm ocean waters or a society metabolizing resources—sustainability as a form of thought emerges when structured inquiry (Shannon’s “signal”) navigates the noise of competing needs and unintended consequences. The beauty—and burden—of this lies in a kind of thermodynamic inevitability. Warde’s historiography reveals that every sustainability “answer” (18th-century forestry laws, modern carbon markets) generates new questions, new uncertainties. Shannon’s fundamental theorem teaches us that reliable communication requires aligning data rates with channel capacity; analogously, sustainable systems demand aligning human ambition with the carrying capacity of attention—both cognitive and ecological. To ask “How much is enough?” is not to seek a number but to engage in recursive relevance realization: a dance of inquiry where each step reveals new horizons of both possibility and restraint.

Today, we position historical insight alongside Zen teacher Reb Anderson's contemplation of karma. "The world is formed by karma," Anderson tells us. "The world is formed by action. And it is transformed through our understanding of it." Deceptively simple, it carries the weight of an entire cosmology. For, in the grand meta-narrative he alludes to, human intention scaffolds the very reality we inhabit. Karma, as Anderson reminds us, is not an abstract force; it is the story we tell ourselves about our relationship to the world, a story that ripples outward to shape both individual lives and collective systems.

The Saxon mining administrator cutting timber allotments, and the 18th-century German forester planting oaks were bound by a shared perceptual architecture that would condition possibilities for generations. For the forester, laws that weaponized arboreal patience for imperial ambition were designed to ensure timber for future navies. But those same laws birthed forests that later became Romanticism’s muse, even as those same ships they supplied accelerated colonial extraction. So, we might see frameworks—whether policy or narrative—as more than static intellectual structures. They are dynamic systems, alive with feedback loops, shaping and being shaped by our engagement with the world. And like any living system, they can be dismantled and reconstructed—not through abstract theorizing alone, but through what Reb Anderson calls the techne of attention: the skilled practice of noticing how our stories about the world create the very worlds we inhabit.

Yet this reconstruction is no straightforward task, for karma does not follow a linear trajectory. Its path is more akin to what Daoism calls wu wei—effortless action, where intention flows indirectly, bending like water around obstacles to reshape landscapes over time. As Mark Spitznagel observes in The Dao of Capital, such apparent sacrifice represents “becoming soft and weak now in order to be hard and strong later.” The forester’s karmic seed—a vow of intertemporal patience—embodied this principle. The consequences of their actions flowed outward across centuries, seemingly yielding to natural rhythms while ultimately reshaping ecosystems and empires alike. This is the paradox of karma: every vow carries both nourishment and poison, every framework both possibility and constraint. To plant a tree is to gamble with time; to design a system is to embrace the non-linearity of cause and consequence, where solutions often outgrow their foresight but remain bound by the stories that first gave them form.

So, do you see how Warde's historiography becomes contemplative practice? By tracing how sustainability emerged from specific anxieties, specific power structures, specific scientific epistemologies, he invites us to examine our own contemporary stories about environmental crisis. What if the culprits aren't the cartoon villains we've sketched—"capitalism," "industrialism," "Western thought"? What if the relationship between social forces and ideas follows the wu wei path of "excess leading to its opposite"? Even historical consciousness itself could embody this Daoist principle—not charging headlong into blame but circling around, yielding to complexity before advancing toward understanding. The Dao De Jing suggests that, "The farther one goes, the less one knows"—a reminder that our environmental narratives might benefit from the strategic positioning (shi) that comes from attending not to abstractions but to the specific karmic configurations where intention meets consequence. So, we find possibility beyond moral relativism, and an invitation to the greater precision that comes from swimming with rather than against the currents of reality, bending like bamboo in the winds of historical contingency rather than superimposing rigid ideological frameworks.

In today’s dharma talk, you’ll hear Anderson offer us a geometrical metaphor to guide our techne: concentric circles of intention. The outermost circle contains our moment-to-moment desires—I want to drive to work, buy this product, cast this vote. But at the core sits our deepest vow—the Bodhisattva vow "to open to all beings." Between these circles lies the territory of practice, where momentary choices either align with or undermine our foundational commitments. The medieval peasant stealing firewood from the lord's forest and the contemporary consumer buying carbon offsets both inhabit this territory, navigating the tension between personal need and collective impact. There’s something radical about what’s on offer here, too. Implicit in the practice is a refusal of the most seductive environmental narrative: that pre-industrial societies lived in harmony with nature until modernity's rupture. Warde demonstrates that pre-modern resource management wasn't driven by ecological wisdom but by necessity, fear, and pragmatic adaptation. Medieval peasants didn't rotate crops because they understood soil chemistry; they did it because famine loomed if they didn't. The sustainable practices we romanticize emerged through what systems theorists call "homeostatic forces"—the brutal feedback loops of starvation, disease, and conflict that constrained population growth and resource use.

So, Anderson's teachings offer us a way to metabolize this uncomfortable truth. "Continuously cultivating an awareness of karma, of action, of intention, and an avowed is the key to realizing the vital path of individual and worldwide transformation." The key word here is continuous—not a one-time awakening but an ongoing discipline of witnessing how our stories about resources become material conditions. The Zen practitioner bowing to a floor they'll never own and the historian tracking how 18th-century cameralism shaped resource governance are engaging in the same essential practice: paying exquisite attention to the relationship between intention and consequence.

At the heart of historical consciousness and contemplative practice lies metanoia—the ancient art of turning the mind. Far more than a pivot of attention, it demands a fundamental reorientation of how we perceive the relationship between self and world. When Reb Anderson urges us to “study our storytelling, our intention, our volition,” he invokes an archaeology of attention—a meticulous excavation of the karmic layers that shape our reality. This mirrors Paul Warde’s historiography, which unearths sustainability not as a moral absolute but as a contested construct forged in the crucible of 18th-century resource anxieties. Both disciplines compel us to suspend the hunt for villains or salvation and instead trace the subtle patterns that ripple across time and consciousness. What emerges is a relationship to sustainability that transcends both despair and naïveté: we begin to see systems not as monolithic “social forces” but as intricate lattices of intention. The industrial food network, for instance, is not an abstract behemoth but a living confluence of countless intention-circles—the farmer weighing soil health against debt, the logistics manager plotting fuel-efficient routes, the chef reimagining waste as resource. Each actor, consciously or not, contributes to a collective story about humanity’s place within nature’s web. To practice metanoia is to recognize that every system, however vast, is built from these granular choices—and that each choice, in turn, is a votive offering to futures we may never see but must nevertheless dare to shape.

This mode of perception invites us into a "participatory knowing"—a way of engaging with the world where transformation begins not in perfection but in the honest acknowledgement of complexity. History becomes a practice not of applying reasonable judgment (as chesterton’s fence suggests), but of re-cognizing karma as part of the unfolding cosmic architecture. Likewise, the ecological activist is no longer trapped in the labor of self-reference—as a savior battling corporate villains—but instead an agentic node in a web of intentions that includes both the objects of protest and the rivers they defend. And this brings us to perhaps the most challenging aspect of Anderson's teaching: "the person who resists the vow is one of the beings we must start being gentle with." In service to our participatory knowing of sustainability, we can reimagine resistance to ecological commitments, not as a character flaw to overcome, but as a future possibility to hold with compassion. The part of us that clings to convenience, that rationalizes consumption, that flinches from sacrifice—this too must be included in our circle of care. Not as an excuse for inaction but as the very ground of authentic engagement. Our ecological awakenings won't come from perfecting our environmental virtue but from honestly confronting the tensions between what we vow and what we do. The gap between intention and action isn't a sign of failure but the fertile soil where transformation takes root.

In medieval alchemy, the maxim solve et coagula—dissolve and coagulate—described the process of breaking down a substance to its essential elements before reconstituting it in a higher form. It is a powerful metaphor for contemplative historiography which dissolves simplistic narratives about sustainability’s past and future and coagulates them into more nuanced, embodied understandings. We dissolve the myth that pre-industrial societies were inherently ecological; we dissolve the fantasy that technological innovation alone will save us; we dissolve the comforting belief that our individual consumer choices determine planetary fate. Each dissolution clears away illusions that obscure deeper truths, allowing us to confront complexity with clarity.

What emerges from this process is not a single answer but a practice—a practice of attention that embraces both the vast scale of civilizational transformation and the intimate texture of moment-to-moment attention. It is a recognition that karma—the stories we tell about our relationship to resources—is not confined to individual intention but ripples outward, shaping worlds within the sphere of collective responsibility. This practice demands that we hold the gravitas of ecological unraveling without turning away or becoming numb, cultivating instead a willingness to plant metaphorical oak trees whose shade we may never sit beneath. And in this practice, we might discover that the most sustainable resource of all is attention itself—the capacity to witness how our intentions shape worlds, and to adjust those intentions in light of what we see.

The world is formed by karma. And it is transformed through our understanding of it.

Forming and Transforming the World

A Dharma Talk by Reb Anderson

Action is the ultimate explanation of human existence. And the physical world. In this tradition. The world is formed by karma. The world is formed by action. And it is transformed through our understanding of it. Continuously cultivating an awareness of karma, of action, of intention, and an avowed is the key to realizing the vital path of individual and worldwide transformation.

Meditation Practice: Cushion vs. Life

The mind’s turbulence during formal practice and the chaos of daily life are not separate domains—they’re gradients of the same landscape. When you sit, you confront agony: the raw friction of restlessness, the itch to flee the present, the seductive pull of thought. This is the work of the cushion. But when you rise, the real test begins.

Here’s the instruction: Treat off-cushion suffering as a mirror of seated practice. When frustration arises in traffic, boredom in a meeting, or grief in solitude, don’t pathologize it as “ordinary.” Instead, recognize it as the same phenomenon you meet on the cushion—waves in the ocean of awareness.

1. Pause. Let the trigger (a harsh word, a looming deadline) become your meditation bell.

2. Feel the somatic signature. Locate the tension in your jaw, the heat in your chest. This is agony in street clothes.

3. Note the story. Observe how the mind spins narratives—This shouldn’t be happening—and see it as mere chatter, no more substantial than background noise in a coffee shop.

4. Rest in the gap. Between the stimulus and the reaction lies a sliver of freedom. Breathe into it.

The cushion trains you to tolerate discomfort without becoming its hostage. Life demands you deploy that skill in real time. Suffering off the mat isn’t “ordinary”—it’s the curriculum. What you call “agony” on the cushion is just a concentrated dose of the existential itch that pervades waking life. The difference? On the cushion, you signed up for it. Off the cushion, it signs up for you.

Either way, the move is the same: Stop conflating pain with problem. A stubbed toe hurts; ruminating on why it happened or how unfair it is compounds the hurt. This isn’t spiritual bypassing—it’s precision. The path isn’t about erasing suffering but seeing it clearly: transient, impersonal, and workable.

So when life’s version ambushes you, don’t reach for a strategy. Reach for the meta-skill you’ve been honing all along: the capacity to be undone without coming apart.