The Sciences that Widen Our Spirituality

The subtitle of Breathing with Trees is Connecting Science and Spirituality to Reawaken to the Roots of Happiness. Here is what this subtitle is getting at.

Our major spiritual teachings come from great teachers like Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed. Their Earth awareness was from a time that was long ago in our history. Since that time, science has expanded our awareness of our own makeup and the makeup of all the other living beings around us, below us inside the Earth, and above us in the Heavens.

In Breathing with Trees, my search for true happiness has found many connections that we have with all the other living beings around us that our great spiritual teachers were not aware of. These findings widen their teachings for happiness to consider all the other non-human living beings around us. And this widens our feelings of love, compassion, empathy, gratitude, and care which are now needed if we are all going to live together on a life-supporting planet.

Looking back on this book’s realizations, I see that they are based on 24 different sciences that are helping us understand what is going on:

Psychology, Sociology, Plant Physiology, Mycorrhizal Ecology, Forest Ecology, Electromagnetic Biology, Comparative Genomics, Primatology, Paleoanthropology, Anthropology, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Neuroscience, Biologic Physiology, Opthalmology, Optometry, Neuroscience, Vision Science, Electroesencephalography, Neurophysiology, Biology, Ecopsychology, Environmental Neuroscience, Botany, and Mycology.

I am grateful for all the scientists who have worked in these areas to widen our awareness so that our spirituality can now include love, compassion, empathy, gratitude, and care for all the other living beings on Mother Earth.