It is crucially necessary to develop understanding of and relationship with Earth. This is a path for individuals and, though talent and vision are unequally distributed, persistence and patients are needed by all, and some level of vision is possible for anyone. The teachings of Don Juan are books by Carlos Castaneda. They record the long struggles of a Western scientist to change his outlook and to learn from a native American shaman. “Black Elk: The Sacred Way of a Lakota” is also a helpful book, as is “Braiding Sweetgrass”, by Robin Wall -Kimmerer. There is no standard pathway or teaching, and there are native teachers from many traditions today.
Awareness of Earth as a living being has survived in Western civilization itself in three ways. A prior book to the current one, called “Who Is the Earth?”, comes from the mystic Sufi tradition of Islam. It shows that Sufi masters have known Earth as a living being, as this vision leads to the higher levels of the Divine Feminine.
The tradition of Sophia, or the Divine Feminine, has been a flickering light in Christianity ever since Mary Magdalene became one of Jesus’ main disciples. Her work was known for a century or two, and then it was suppressed, returned, and then was suppressed again in the 16th century when she was equated with a prostitute. She was reinstated as a full disciple of Jesus by Pope Francis in 2016. She has been studied in the 20th century through recently discovered Gnostic texts, and the study of the Divine Feminine has grown alongside.
In the 12th century, German abbess Hildegard von Bingen respected the divinity of Earth and Nature. A few mystics and scholars in later centuries, like 16th century Jacob Boehme, brought the awareness into more recent times. Today there is a vibrant and growing community of Sophia scholarship, mostly women, in the Christian Church and in academia.
Marsilio Ficino, the seminal spirit of the Florentine renaissance, inherited the idea of the living Earth from classical texts, but he actually worked with it in his own spiritual practice as well.
Lastly, there has been new revelation of Earth in the New Age movement. The Findhorn community, in Scotland, grew in great abundance from a small group of non-gardeners who were guided by spirits of both nature and particular plants. They were told by these spirits that their work would become a new human compact with Nature. This community has thrived and grown in the last decades. Movements like these have a deep distrust of reductionist science, which is paralleled by a similar distrust of many scientists by the spiritual community. Study of sustainable indigenous culture teaches that the spiritual awareness of Earth arises from a deep and careful study of ecology. The two approaches are actually not divided, and for the sake of our current problems, ought not to be.
The awareness of the living Earth must be pursued by individuals, who make their own understanding. We are all explorers.