“Grapes must be crushed to make wine. Diamonds form under pressure. Olives are pressed to release oil. Seeds grow in darkness. Whenever you feel crushed, under pressure, pressed, or in darkness, you’re in a powerful place of transformation and transmutation. Trust the process” Lalah Delia.
You are not responsible for everyone. Indeed, you are only responsible for yourself and your decisions. Having said that, it is too easy to cop and say you are not acting because you cannot make a difference. I observe too many people in these trying times with all manner of excuses for not being the best person they could be. Do you want to be an active part of this big change that is now before us or just tag along with whatever happens? Because, as I have said many times, there are major influences on this planet to keep us on a decaying cycle of mere existence where everything inexorably gets worse until we finally realize too late where we were being led. We are at the tipping point now and now is the time for everyone to wake up and make decisions for a better world. Waking up simply means being consciously aware of your own thoughts all the time. Not the endless mind-chatter that goes on all the time, but the conscious observation of each thought.
We talk about things on the social media going viral, which really means that certain news, memes, egregores, etc., spread exponentially. We see something that triggers us, either positively or negatively, and then seem to run with it as a support or disconfirmation of our beliefs and share it with people we see as sharing our views. This ‘contagion’ then expands to cover more and more people with fear and other related negative emotions to depress people, or with hope to bring compassion and positive emotions to inspire people. I tend to see the former rather than the latter. Both can occur but what we choose to focus on is what is crucial. You can be in a negative stream of information but still choose to remain in a positive frame.
This is important because once the biases and polarizing set in, we mentally connect with our ‘tribes’ and eventually vilify those we see as the others. It’s how the media and the algorithms have been set up to influence us. American humorist and writer Will Rogers (I never met a man I didn’t like) whenever he arrived in a new town with its own newspaper, said about the paper, “My father would like this newspaper, it doesn’t confuse you with two points of view.” Until we start to see each other as being similar but just having different perspectives that we can discuss rationally, we will continue to see our differences and we will never be truly connected. The same is true of our connection to nature in which we see nature as part of ourselves or as something apart from us.
Diversity within humanity is just as important as ecological diversity in the natural world, which is an enormously complex system reliant on all its interrelated parts to do their jobs, however humble those jobs may seem. And global humanity has to accept at some point that it is a part of that global system, not apart from it as is increasingly practiced. It is not that we are disconnected from nature, but I do think we severed the link from our spiritual connection to the natural world and to each other. I think the further disconnections forced upon us by the C-19 lockdowns are starting to show many how connections are important to who we truly are as a species, and how we are really interconnected to the whole ecosphere.
It’s all about getting beyond fear and control to find your sovereign self. Are you choosing separation or actively choosing to ignore those factors that keep us apart and choose interconnectedness? Interconnectedness is choice that is natural in nature. Proponents of Neo-Darwinism, which has been used for many decades to support social-Darwinism, erroneously emphasize the competitive aspect of nature to justify dominance theories. In reality, modern ecological research now shows that while there may be observable individual competition, the role of species within the greater ecology is to be collaborative. Indeed, species are so interconnected that keystone species (a species that helps define an entire ecosystem) are more the norm than the exception. While ecology textbooks love to name the Wolf and Otters as typical keystone species, they exist at every level in the taxonomic charts of life – almost invisible soil organisms are especially crucial.
We humans like to believe that our brains make us unique and therefore able to competitively manage our global ecosystem. The biosphere, however, is so intricate and complex in its interconnectedness, it resists all our efforts to control what is happening as we continue to the abyss of our species extinction (taking along with it more than 50% of other species). Substantial ecological research shows that nature best regenerates itself when we leave it alone and just cooperate with natural processes. Until we get past the notion of being managers of the planet and get back to understanding that we can still live well by collaborating with natural systems nothing will change. Thinking interconnectedly is not about management, it is about observing what works well and then as smoothly as possible work what we need into the existing system.
I wrote the final paragraph for another blog site recently, which is pertinent to this post: For millennia, human cultures acted as if what they did was inconsequential to the planet, and to our growing chagrin, acted with impunity towards the natural world. Conservation philosopher Aldo Leopold emphasized this through his ‘Land Ethic’ (A Sand County Almanac, 1949): “We abuse land because we regard 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, “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land.” To whom or what are we responsible? Do we have rights or obligations? We have to start acting as if we are part of the system. This critical aspect of our connectedness and our role in the world becomes crucial as we ponder the future of humanity. And that interconnectivity is perhaps more spiritual than it is intellectual (see earlier post The Non-Solid Universe 2 – Human Societies Before Civilization – Deep Spirituality {March 2018}}.
In an earlier post I mentioned the term communitarianism (New Ways of Living Together 6 – Community as the Glue of Humans Living Successfully {Sept 2018}) but asI prefer to use the term, I like to think of it as being the sovereign individual collaborating, not the subjugation of individuality, which it can mean. Maslow explained simply how our focus depends on having our basic needs met (see previous post PERSONAL SOVEREIGNTY 3 – Overcoming Life’s hurdles and Becoming Happy and Free yet still Connecting, Contributing and Creating Positively {Nov 2018}), but other needs hierarchies show that we can still be self-actualized (the complete realization of one’s potential, and the full development of one’s abilities and appreciation for life) whatever the immediate stage we find ourselves experiencing at any given time. We are at the point of being able to transform the world, but can we break out of the conditioning to do so?
To Be Continued ………………….
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