The Eclipse of the Soul and the Rise of the Ecological Crisis

For many of our contemporaries, there is no more pressing issue than the acute ecological challenges facing the planet. Environmental degradation has reached a tipping point, but how have we fallen into such a predicament? At a deeper level, this critical situation can be seen as a mirror that reflects the spiritual crisis gripping the soul of humanity today. This commenced with the secularizing impetus of the Enlightenment project, which has led to a diminished understanding of the human psyche and the cosmos itself. The anomaly of modern Western psychology is that it stems from the same desacralized and reductionistic outlook. By contrast, a deep-seated connection between sentient beings, the environment, and the Spirit has been recognized in all other times and places, throughout humanity’s traditional civilizations. By a resurrection of a “science of the soul” via a rehabilitated sacred cosmology, the spiritual roots of the ecological crisis can be restored and seen in a proper light. This essay examines the metaphysical dimension of the environmental crisis. The framework employed for this study is the “transpersonal” perspective of the perennial psychology—an application of the insights found in the world’s great wisdom traditions. The objective of the study is to propose a more holistic approach to understanding the essential relationship between our humanity and the natural environment—in all of its boundless and complex variety—seen as a manifestation of divine reality.