I remember the fervor with which I believed that recycling my water bottles could help change the world. As a child, it was presented as the pinnacle of eco-warrior practices.
Now, although the major forces that far outweigh my carbon footprint and that do so at an unfathomable pace have become clear to me in adulthood, I still recycle. I recycle for the ritual.
In the very justifiable climate of despair and doom, a small ritual may seem like nothing more than a way to placate some gnawing guilt or existential anxiety in a controlled microcosm of our lives. But I believe that ritual as a means of cultivating certain modes of consciousness has power beyond that.
Usually when one talks about an act being “symbolic”, it connotes a sense of performativity that lacks interior substance. In the current age of social media and dishonest politicians, we are hyper aware and hyper skeptical of empty symbolic gestures.
But for most of human existence, symbols have been the opposite of empty forms. Symbolic gestures and “performance” has been weaponized precisely because of their functions in representing interior realities; A political leader makes an Earth Day post to signify that they have the experience of caring for the environment. An influencer posts a beach vacation to signify an experience of luxury, happiness and fulfillment.
A symbol serves to connote an interior reality.
Traditionally in human history, rituals have been repetitive acts imbued with symbolic meaning. But their power does not come from what the ritual “represents”, but rather, what inner state of being the act, through continual practice over time, cultivates within us.
Our lives consist of repetitive actions; brushing teeth, eating meals, getting dressed, showering, watching tv before bed, doom scrolling on the toilet, etc.
The difference between these reoccurring acts and ritual is often intention. As such, ritual usually allows us to carve out a space in the “auto-pilot” state of consciousness that we not only often live in – but that insidiously perpetuates the exploitative and disharmonious status quo of our culture.
Intention allows us to create a direction in our consciousness that transcends the default directionality given to us by our culture – a directionality that passively perpetuates the systems it finds itself embedded in.
Choosing to recycle not only reinforces a self- narrative of caring, but when intentionally enacted within the context of a system that is so overwhelmingly bent towards a seemingly hopeless trajectory, it cultivates a way of relating to the world that refuses to concede. Its a reclamaition of our power from its default investment into insidiously-constructed narratives of what the future may look like.
It is not to say that we literally think the act of individual recycling will shift the balances of the world, but by investing a little bit of our behavioral effort into inconveniencing ourselves, we cultivate a consciousness that does not passively acquiesce to convenience above all else… a consciousness that is – at least in this small way – oriented towards intrinsic values rather than extrinsically immobilized.
In addition to large, forceful attempts at rectifying our collective situation as humans on the brink of bringing about ecological collapse, we must supplement these with small, daily, acts of resisting the many little ways that consciousness is coaxed into passivity in our culture. Looking at what actions we want to weave into (or out of) the fabric of our day to day lives through the lens of how they orient our consciousness can be a deeply supportive and holistic mode of such defiance.
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“Maintain the View as Spacious as the Sky, yet in Conduct of Actions and their Effects, Be as Refined as a Grain of Flour.” – Padmasambhava