Environmental Ethics

Author(s): S M Jain
Publisher: Prakrit Bharti Academy

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action, after analysing causes, is necessary. History is replete with instances that people wasting time in devotion and not preparing and taking action to meet a particular situation suffered miserably from atrocities of invaders. It is plain and simple escapism and inaction. Many religions advocate it fervently. It is responsible for negative cognition of world or cognitive distortion that world is full of bad things and events, miseries and is not worth living. This triggers psychological disorders. As a matter of fact world is beautiful offering numerous bounties for happy and peaceful life unless distorted by superstitions and by lack of symbiotic behaviour patterns. Simultaneously it gave rise to a damaging concept of extreme individualism that each one is alone and neither he or others are mutually concerned. Such a dangerous concept is being prayed in numerous devotional songs and prayers. This negates the basic aspect of nature, symbiosis and mutual cooperation. It obfuscates all the relationships like that of mother and child, teacher and students, employer and employee, soldier and army, individual and society and nation and all that manifests in daily cores of life.
Illusory hypothetical Concepts :
The height of such escapism is the concept that all the existing real world, the matter, the earth, oceans, rivers, mountains, living beings are illusions and unreal and that the questionable, imaginary and only the articulated Brahman or 'God' is real. Whatever be the conceptualisation it is the mind and body that feels pangs of hunger, thirst, desease, violence, cruelty and not the so-called god or its derivation the immortal soul which is supposed to be impervious to any sort of harm or pain. Many socalled saints pretend to see 'God' and experience ecstatic happiness in complete surrender. These are mere hallucinations and illusions and are now established as mental obsessive compulsive disorders. In the near death experiences when brain is starved of oxygen the person can see himself out of body. He
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