”We possess a biological craving to connect with the living world. When you completely sever a [human] population from nature, you introduce a deep, baseline anxiety that no amount of material consumption can ever cure” E.O. Wilson.
When I talk about the need for a more spiritual approach of life, I need to state that the key is to be kind and compassionate. There are a lot of spiritual and metaphysical personalities out there, but knowing about metaphysics and even having metaphysical abilities doesn’t automatically make someone a kind and compassionate person. There is also a lot of spiritual egoic stuff out there – people who have this arrogant atitude that they are more ‘enlightened’ per se. Anyone who brags about being enlightened usually is more knowledgeable but their bragging signifies too much ego. They’re still seeking approval. They haven’t yet gotten to a place of unconditionality and no judgment.
It’s that fine line between needing to control everything and just letting life flow in a harmonious way, letting things be as they are. Planing ahead is still good, it’s what ego’s are really for, but thinking you have all the answers and others must listen to you shows insecurities. We all have insecurities, but the kinder people are willing to listen to a diversity of ideas and are willing to scrutinize beliefs to assess which are truer and which are just opinions handed through socio-cultural conditioning.
“The author David Foster Wallace gave a famous commencement speech. In it, he told a story about two young fish swimming along. An older fish passes them and asks, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The young fish swim on for a bit. And then one turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?” The point is the most obvious, important realities are the hardest to see. They are right in front of us, but we are so immersed in them that we don’t notice. These habits are your water. They are the environment you create for yourself. The daily systems that determine your experience. You don’t need to escape your present way of life. Or start over. You just need to adjust the water you swim in. Start today. Start small. Start now” Thomas Oppong.
“Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a matter of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the Earth, the Earth heals us. No one need wait” Joanna Macy.
I frequently get the question about why I don’t focus more on sustainable technology. I could and have done within this blog, but if we are to live sustainably we must act sustainably in our own minds and souls. It’s like the Dalai Lhama’s quote about peace. The way to peace is to be peaceful. Likewise the way to sutainability is to be sustainable in all ways. Material-comusmerism is just about extraction, expliotation and profit making at all costs. Sustainability is about harmony – a completely different mindset altogether.
“The ‘economy’ is ultimately our material relationship with each other and with the rest of the lving world. We have to decide whether we want that relationship to be based on extraction and exploitation, or on reciprocity and care” Jason Hickel. Poverty and obscene wealth is a sign of our economic system – exploitation – derived from paradigm based on fear and scarcity. If we make the transition we will still have an economy, but it will work for us all and not just the controlling few. Recognizing this controlling system is akin to the young fish recognizing the water they swim within.
Something I speak abut often is being Authentic. For the vast majority of us, we were rasied as charcters in a global story that never make sense, but we pushed through trying to find some semblance of sense within it all. When you stop being a character reacting to someone else’s script, you start to write your own life script. Now that is a place that feels unbelievably amazing. Authenticity is reclaiming your autonomy. We lose it so gradually we barely notice it happening – we become work-slaves to an uncaring system. “Just having some damn control over your own time and your own choices… when you lose agency, even easy things feel like soul-crushing labor. But when you have it — when you get to decide what you’re working on, or even just how you spend a free Wednesday afternoon — life suddenly feels like your own” Mona Lazar.
I find myself in an interesting place where I feel alone – not lonely, just isolated from connections that fit with my expression of being sustainable. I had a lot of like-minded people in my life that have become so caught up in trying to ‘save the world,’ they became entrenched within the exiting paradigms of economics, politics, and material conusmerism, trying to tweak solutions. They express my ideas ideas verbally but most seem unaware of the ‘water they are swimming in.’ I keep getting messages that “we need to get together.” But it never happens because they are always too busy to find time to do it. My favorite excuse they often give me is that they don’t want to inconvenience me. I’m retired. Who exactly is being inconvenienced? How much autonomy do they really have? Retirement does however, give me the time to reflect on the content and quality of all my relationships over the years. What I now seek are balanced and reciprocal relationships with like-minded others to build communities where sustainable living is a reality and not just a concept. And that will mean big changes, not tweaking broken systems.
“Society is nearing a point at which we will no longer be able to live in the contradictory space between capitalist growth and ecological sustainability. We can either consume what’s left of our planet in a quest for the last bits of extracted wealth, or transition to an ecological society based on community, mutual aid, and collective production. We cannot do both” Ben Lockwood.
Unlike the E.O. Wilson quote that I began this post, I don’t think we have severed our connection to the natural world, but have become so distracted, it feels that way. The consequences of our actions to nature are the same. And the global anthropogenic systems we live within have the same effect on our own connectivity with our fellow humans. And I mean true connectivity, not the social media click the icon ‘likes’ kind of interaction. “I mean real connection: being seen, heard, understood, accepted, and loved” Mona Lazar.
Our realities are built and contained completely within inside our heads. We literally exist witin our mind with ‘out there’ being our mind’s sole interpretation of it. And our senses feed raw data into our brain’s, which then construct the best ‘estimate’ of what we believe we expect to see and experience. And everyones reality is somewhat different in how they contruct it and expereince it. Nothing new there. Yet despite science and spirituality telling us this, “most of us spend our days trying to change the external world. Change people. Change circumstances. Change the odds. When what we are actually interacting with, moment to moment, is a projection generated by our own mind’s underlying program. Here is the part that trips most people up. Your subconscious mind functions like a programmer feeding instructions to your conscious awareness. But it is not designed to hand you what you want. It is designed to hand you what it expects.” Atlas R (blogger).
Your subconscious is your ego survival mode, it tries to predict the world for you; because certainty and familiarity is comforting, even if it is likely wrong much of the time. Left on auto-pilot (as it is for most people) it overrides your conscious desire to be an authentic and creative being. “This is where most people get stuck. They try to renovate the outer circumstances of their life while the internal program, the part of you actually doing the rendering, stays untouched. And an unchanged program can only ever project more of the same result” Atlas R. Change requires you to disengage from auto-pilot and ponder the water you’re swimming within!
So do I have some real tips on how we reach the promised land – true sustainability?
To Be Continued ……………..
0 Comments