Aldo Leopold, in his A Sand County Almanac book published in 1946, said, “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” And “The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: ‘What good is it?” This is his subtle way of telling us how disconnected we are from the connectedness and process of life. He also said, “We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” And also, “The Land Ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land… In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.” Leopold for all his poetic narrative was talking about spirituality. In the past two posts I have begun a esoteric trip to link in what we know from a scientific perspective of the need to create community again from a spiritual perspective. It’s all about connection, but that word ‘connection’ is quite vague until it is put into some concrete context – hence my little esoteric trip in the rabbit hole. Until we know who we really are and why it is really important, we will always be thinking of ourselves as separate and disconnected. It’s the illusion we live within that is promogulated by the hierarchy.
Our ancestors knew, and many surviving indigenous groups today know, how to live well together and that they were merely part of the whole web of life on Earth. They were not saints and they did manipulate the environments in which they lived to make life more predictable -the food mainly. In every society were the Shamans that were the spiritual leaders and teachers. Shaman – “Meriam-Webster Dictionary: a priest or priestess who uses magic for the purpose of curing the sick, divining the hidden, and controlling events.” I love the word they use ‘Magic’ that conjures up something unreal and fantasy based like Harry Potter. British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated three adages that are known as Clarke’s three laws, of which the third law is the best known and most widely cited:
- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
- The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
As an affront to modern science, I will assert that the third of Clarke’s laws is what our ancestors knew about – they understood the universe much more clearly than we do today and that knowledge is only now becoming known through quantum physics. Their knowledge of astronomy, mathematics, and the ability to survey across vast distances of the planet is astounding. So much so that only today have we reached the same capabilities as they did thousands of years ago. Our ancestors understood that the universe isn’t mechanistic, it is comprised of quantum energy. What is life about? Who are we? We are so fixated on materialism that we think if we could create anything with ‘magic’ it would be ‘stuff’ we can use. But maybe, the purpose of life is something more deeply profound. The question, “who are we?” and “Who am I?” consciously or unconsciously guides everything we do in life. How you answer that question frames the base perception for everything you do and how you will behave and treat everything in your life. If you get into modern spiritual readings, names like Marianne Williamson, Robert Fulghum, Thomas Moore, Ram Dass, and many more, have teachings and advice for living well from a spiritual perspective. Since I want to focus on the more scientific aspects of spirituality, I have some ideas from Gregg Braden I will share here. The world as it is today is based on some false assumptions of who we think we are. We think are random chemical accidents living in a disconnected and separated world with millions of other species, with a simple linear history line in which we are vying for control of limited resources, and in which competition, conflict, and struggle are natural components for survival. That pretty much describes our modern world and of the past 5000 years (since Sumer). What if, and new discoveries are showing this clearly, the earth is not as random as we would believe, that our relationship to our body and everything in the world is more connected energetically, that our human history is more cyclic than we believe, and that the natural order of things is more about cooperation and mutual aid! Two very different perspectives that would drive two very different ways of living. The former is the conditioning of existing beliefs that don’t seem to have worked very well in a globalized unsustainable world. The latter, is one of possibilities and beliefs that create a sustainable world that can happen NOW!
As an example showing how our beliefs have misled us so far – Our notions that civilization is only 5000 years old and agriculture began about 10,000 years ago after hunter gatherers made the transition is now shown clearly to be a modern fallacy, yet our textbooks still propagate this myth. Indeed, when one looks at what is known, but not included in education, the ‘truth’ is staggering. For instance, Golbekli Tepi in Turkey was built 11,400 years ago (and this seems to be the date it was abandoned) and then deliberately buried to protect its message. New evidence shows that the Egyptian Sphinx is at least 9000 years old (probably older) and predates the pyramids, which dating them now pushes them back to a similar age. In the Gulf of Khambhat is a submerged city which could only have been built during the last ice-age when sea levels were lower (water tied up in the ice-caps) – perhaps more than 12-13,000 years ago. This is not stone age cultures we are talking about, these are recognized as technologically advanced cultures, even if their technology is not what we would identify as our mechanistic technology. There are places around the globe that are dated even earlier and it looks like we are pushing the date of human civilization back even further. Many researchers now dub us a “Species with Amnesia” because we have lost our roots. But have we? All around the world, there are repositories of ancient knowledge that date back beyond the great Library of Alexandria, where it was said the knowledge of humankind was kept and then burned to the ground. In Buddhist library temples in Tibet, under the jungle canopies of south America, buried under the sands of the Sahara, through the records of the Indian sub-continent, and back to the ancient texts of Sumer, archaeological finds of ancient texts and stone glyphs are revealing an ancient knowledge of human history that is so different from who we think we are today as to be transformative. Our roots may have been forgotten, but today they are ignored because they do not fit the story we want to believe. Nearly all societies have a ‘Garden of Eden’ myth of some kind. I won’t take the genesis version as the best one to describe what it may have been (it has been so twisted over the centuries), but in general, they all talk about a past when humans lived in harmony with the world, before the ‘fall’ – but what exactly was this fall? (yet another post sometime). Living spiritually is not dependent on religion. Indeed, I would argue that while many religious people might be spiritual, there are as many atheists that are as spiritual. It is really about expressing compassion, love and a connection to everything – see my Education and Steady State post. Maybe I’ll do a post soon about the theological underpinnings of our modern world and how that has screwed us all up. So much to talk about – I feel as though I’m opening a flood gate. But first, I’ll get back to our energetic connections.
0 Comments