Global Warming & Anger

“Pollution denotes the truth of faith defiled.” (Swedenborg 4504)

Years ago, a friend said she didn’t want to see me ever become a ‘Green-peace-er,’ meaning she never wanted me to believe that pollution was outside of us. Spiritually, pollution is a reflection of our polluted thinking and feeling patterns.

From a spiritual perspective, pollution is caused by a lack of charity, failure for us to ‘love our neighbor as ourselves.’ During incidences of road-rage, we can feel the temperature of our blood rise, and we know it’s our thoughts and emotions expressed as a lack of charity. Our negative response to others  fuels anger, getting us all wound-up, but it is the unwinding that contributes to the polluted thinking and feeling patterns.

Because anger makes us want to only associate with others that will agree with us, it creates groups of similarly minded polluted thinkers that can be easily angered as a group that leads to war. It starts when one group sets an intention and starts the intention as a whirling motion, getting all wound-up, and rising in opposition to another group. Although we can see pollution as being the result of a lot of gunpowder, it is the immature direction of the whirling motion that is the real cause of global warming.

Just as poverty is caused by a lack of truth, justice is an excuse the rich use to avoid giving to the poor. Their ongoing strength requires keeping others uneducated to perpetuate the illusion. However, when justice is not balanced with charity — more specifically, with the affection that charity causes in us — then justice is essentially, just the projected whirling motion of anger.

First, we learn to wind-up the affection of love, and use it to “love our neighbor as ourselves.” When we can judge fairly, then we can use the power of love to wind-up the affection of goodness into a center, to experience it unwind, bringing real solutions to poverty, hunger, and global warming.