For thousands of years people in Western
cultures have been wrestling with the illusions we've spun from our dualistic
mindsets and beliefs. It's like we've been dreaming a shared nightmare
together, grounded in the mechanistic ways our society has been organized,
rooted in how we live and think.
Across the centuries, the very foundation
of our so-called "Civilization" has been based on ideas of separation
and superiority- men here, women there, Kings here, peasants there, humans
here, Nature there. Walls of separation in our hearts and minds, a sense of sin
and abandonment, believing that our entire species was "thrown out of
Eden."
With linear thinking came an emphasis on
time, our consciousnesses locked into mental projections of a feared or desired
future, an imagined and idealized history.
When lost in these projections we become
less aware of the magical nature of each moment, blind to the beauty, value and
mystery of the HERE and NOW. This is how schools teach our children to think
and feel, how our ancestors were dazed and hypnotized.
From this mindset grew Civilized man's mad
circus of history, the hostile cultures of race and nationalism as identity,
religion as truth, militarism as method, materialism and acquisition of wealth
as the organizing goals of our institutions, the unquestioned values guiding
our way of life.
It manifested with the rise of wealth
obsessed empires seeking power and dominance. Dualistic thinking led to the
Witch Hunts during the Renaissance, to Europeans coming to conquer the
"New World" - thinking themselves superior to the Natives, stealing
their land. Then going to Africa where they kidnaped and enslaved the people,
dragging them across the oceans.
Over the centuries reductionistic thinking
has given rise to all our most difficult problems- to racism, sexism,
nationalism, slavery, human trafficking, organized crime, alcoholism, drug
abuse, obesity, prostitution, genocide and all our wars.
For thousands of years now, individual
artists, poets, prophets and sages have been trying to help us wake up from our
delusions. From Jesus to Buddha to Lao Tsu, from Shakespeare's "Romeo
& Juliet" to Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," Whitman &
Blake's poems, Van Gogh's paintings and forward thru time to the "Wizard
of Oz," " Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" and James
Cameron's "Avatar"...
There was a great creative burst of
realization in the 1960s, but still the spirit crushing institutions, selfish
lifestyles and unquestioned mechanistic assumptions of the past continue to
exert a powerful hypnotic force.
With the rise of new technologies and
industrialization our consumer lifestyles have overpowered the rivers,
mountains and forests that surround us. Over the last hundred years we have
been destroying Nature's ecosystems at an astounding rate.
Why has it been so difficult for humans to
change?
In part, I think, it is because the
"Civilized" Matrix will do whatever it can to avoid a shutdown. Our
dominant institutions are designed to maintain control, to defend, expand and
perpetuate their existence. Like the immune system of a body, attacking these
systems directly only strengthens them, leads to hostility and violence.
Mostly however, I believe that we have not
changed because too many of us are still hypnotized. Primarily identifying our
sense of self with names, career, race, religion, gender, political perspective
or nationality. Seeking pleasurable experiences, wealth, status and material
possessions; mistakenly believing that these will bring us happiness and that
the only way to solve complex problems is to "defeat the opposition."
What most of us have failed to see is that
we are not these social and cultural roles we imagine ourselves to be.
We are Life, in human form. Ancestors of
the stars and galaxies, children of the oceans and forests. We are creative
expressions of Nature, as much a part of this planet as the rivers, trees,
mountains and butterflies.
As more and more of us wake up to that
deeper sense of identity we will be more easily able to transcend old thought
patterns and beliefs. Observing Nature's Systems closely, studying her ways, we
can re-write and delete old programming.
To truly bring an end to the nightmare- to
really transform the world- a deeper wisdom has to first arise from within. We
must "be the change" as Gandhi put it. We have to free ourselves
first, transform our ways of thinking, feeling and behaving.
Then take the wisdom of our wholeness and
apply it to everything we say and do, to all fields of human activity.
Economics, entertainment, education, law, medicine, transportation, energy
technologies- they all can (and must) be transformed.
We are not the solitary individuals we have
believed ourselves to be. We are expressions of Universal life, Children of our
Galaxy. We are the "leaves of grass" Walt Whitman spoke of - the
Awakening voices of Eden, instruments of the great turning.
Nature's Agents of Transformation- The
Global Butterfly Effect...
Christopher
