While meditating on the “climate emergency” not long ago, I had the realization—perhaps obvious to some and no doubt controversial to others— that the Earth itself is not in crisis. After all, the planet has been transforming incessantly for nearly five billion years, and the changes wrought by human beings are minuscule compared to the upheavals that have roiled the environment in eons past. According to some scientists, we’re entering the sixth extinction in Earth’s history, the culmination of the Anthropocene, the era dominated by our species. But some of the previous extinction events have been far more dramatic, including the “Great Dying,” when more than 90 percent of all species were wiped from the globe. In other words, Earth has known cataclysmic change, and this phase will not be the first or the most extreme.

No, the crisis we lament is not the planet’s, but our own— the impending demise or radical downsizing of the human presence on Earth. Of course, we may also lament the rapid extinction of other species in the wake of global heating. Indeed, species are becoming extinct at a rate 500 times faster than before the Industrial Revolution. The Earth we have grown to love over tens of thousands of years, the Earth that our senses have evolved to find familiar and comforting—the sounds of the birds, the buzz of the insects, the rhythm of the seasons, the blue of the sky, the green of the forests, the predictable rounds of hot and cold, wet and dry—this Earth is dissolving before our eyes.

But on its own terms the Earth itself does not have a problem; it is simply changing shape, as it always has done, altering its rhythms and chemistry, shedding some life forms and gradually developing others. Even the plastic and other pollution will be digested and metabolized in a tick or two on Earth’s clock. Though we may anthropomorphize her as Gaia, she isn’t a victim, but the context or backdrop for a drama playing out in the ongoing conflict of our species with itself.

I would suggest that the problem we face is rooted in the very qualities that have made us great on our own terms: our ability to abstract, objectify, analyze, and hypothesize. As the poet Robinson Jeffers once put it, our brains are like the tusks of the sabertooth tiger, “hypertrophied and terrible.” Our tragic flaw, as expressed in the Old Testament and other creation myths, is our capacity for self-consciousness, and with it a narcissistic self-regard, which has led us to separate ourselves—from nature and from the ground of being—and exploit the very earth on which we stand until it has begun to crumble beneath our feet.

This quality has allowed us to forge the technologies of which we’re so proud and on which we so rely, for the purpose of benefiting our own species and exploiting the rest. But more of the same will not solve our current dilemma. Rather than moving forward with ever more sophisicated technological “solutions,’ which only continue to deplete the planet’s resources, pollute its air and water, and further separate us from nature. we’re being called to take the backward step and reconnect with our deeper ground, our oneness with all of life. Out of this imperative has arisen the burgeoning interest in a spirituality independent of the religions that have largely contributed to this crisis—and in particular to the journey of awakening to our original face, our true nature, our natural state of harmony and peace. We have the deep apperception that something is amiss, not just practically, in how we inhabit the Earth and avail ourselves of its resource, but in our relationship with the truth of our being, and we’re moved to find the solution there.

Let’s be clear: From the perspective of Consciousness or Spirit, which is the heart, source, and essence of what is, there has never been a problem with manifest reality, of which human beings are an integral part. In the limitless depths of right now, we can savor the essential perfection and completeness of being. Contraction and expansion, life and death, rise and fall, are just the inevitable rhythms of life, humans included. Our participation in these rhythms, though out of sync with the rest of the natural world, are just as much an expression of nature as any other. Consciousness does not have a stake in whether humans survive and will remain ever awake and delighting in the lila, the play, without intervening, even as the last person is expunged from the Earth.

I suggest that rather than distancing ourselves from our current predicament by calling it a climate crisis, we give it the name it deserves: a human crisis, the most pressing and possibly the last we will face as a species. Unfortunately, the way we’re responding to this crisis does not bode well for our continued survival. As the Earth heats up and threatens to destroy us—by water or fire, or both—human beings, rather than reaching out to bridge the boundaries that separate us in the name of a greater common purpose, are retreating into old, narrow tribal loyalties and identities. Populism, nationalism, and xenophobia have replaced genuine democracy and global cooperation in some of the largest and most technologically advanced countries—the US, the UK,  Russia, India—and made the prospect of solving this crisis through collective action ever more remote.

In the decades remaining to us—and personally I can’t imagine we’ll make it through the end of this century in anything approaching our current form—those of us who are called to serve the path of awakening will have our dedication intensified by the increasing suffering that surrounds us. May our devotion to truth and compassion help break down the boundaries and ideologies that separate us, and may we and all beings realize the peace and happiness of our essential nature, which is pure and undefiled yet expresses itself through these imperfect human forms. What a mystery! Emaho!