26 November - The Power of Mind to Change the World - Andy Wistreich

Start: Tuesday, November 26, 2024 at 6:00 PM GMT

End: Tuesday, November 26, 2024 at 7:30 PM GMT

A link to attend this virtual event will be emailed upon RSVP

At the end of the winter, sea ice in the Arctic starts melting and swirling. The mesmerising shapes are formed as the sea ice, suspended in the highly salted sea water, is transported along the dynamic currents. This image acquired by a Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite shows these melt dependent characteristic swirls off the eastern coast of Greenland. Date 21 April 2020 Author: European Union , Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery

Andy Wistreich has been practising Buddhism since 1980. During the eighties, Andy was spiritual programme coordinator at Manjushri London Centre (now Jamyang) and has been teaching since that time. He describes his relationship with activism as follows:

‘In 2006 I was sent an article from New Scientist reviewing James Lovelock’s book The Revenge of Gaia. I hadn’t ever considered myself an environmentalist but had taken nature for granted. What moved me in the article was the projection for an increase of four degrees in the world’s average temperature above pre-industrial levels. There was a world map depicting this, a copy of which now sits on my desk to regularly remind me. Agriculture will become impossible in most of the world.

I had been working at the bodhisattva path for about a quarter of a century. The thought came to me, ‘How can you wish to save all sentient beings from suffering and ignore this?’ I began to bring this issue into my daily meditation practice. It was a reawakening of my engagement with the world.
Since my twenties when I got disillusioned with social transformation through the failure of the revolutionary path I’d followed for seven years, I took a nosedive into inner work, and found Buddha Dharma. With my reawakening in 2006, Dharma and activism started to come together in my consciousness. It was in February 2019, with the emergence of Extinction Rebellion, that this again translated into action on the streets when I participated in a meditation outside Barclays Bank to protest at their funding of fossil fuels’ extraction. Later that year I joined XR Buddhists, and have been with them ever since.

I went on a journey of reeducation, reading extensively around the causes and possible solutions for the planetary crisis.  I have become actively involved with an international forum called Deep Transformation Network, where the roots of the metacrisis in human consciousness are discussed and explored extensively, and certain online group practices are hosted. I was most pleased when Jamyang London organised the Planetary Crisis Summit in April 2024, as I discuss in this blog article Dharma + Activism: responding to the planetary crisis with compassion and wisdom – Jamyang London Buddhist Centre

I feel that it is our responsibility to find our personal way to contribute to the transformations that need to take place in order to create a future worth living in for ourselves and our descendants.'


You can find other upcoming talks by Andy on Dharma Activism and the Bodhisattva’s and Tantric Yogi’s responses to the planetary crisis here:

https://jamyangleeds.co.uk/event/dharma-activism-a-talk-with-andy-wistreich/