As I have written elsewhere on this site the way humans see and experience life inside and outside of themselves has changed over time. Prior to the Renaissance people saw in two dimensions, in other words they didn’t see so much in subject and object or in perspective. There was still a connection with what was around and inside themselves, an embeddedness in the world of nature and in their psyches. Yet they lacked a certain self consciousness. So the further development of ego awareness since then has gradually created a separation or disconnection of me the subject from you or nature being the object. This separation also occurred between our egos and our inner world or psyche. As Carl Jung has said we have been quite successful in using our subject object separation to be able to build a civilization and technology outside of ourselves. Yet this separation is now leading us down the path to our own demise because we cannot remember or see or feel our connection to nature and to our natural inner life.

This blog is about helping all of us to remember these connections.

In my previous blog I tried to provide a story and picture of the experience of relating to nature differently. The first thing that happened to me was that I was able to still my mind by getting out of the chatter of my ego and other inner voices. So a first step in reconnection is to be able to still our inner voices/thoughts long enough to be able to open space in ourselves to allow a different story or way of seeing to arise. This can be done through a variety of different forms of meditation. It doesn’t require one to sit for hours. Simply develop the skill to notice when your mind is quiet. Another way in to this state is to feel with the passion of the heart. In this way our heart leads and the ego and sundry voices fall more or less silent. A caveat here. I do find sometimes that the passion of the heart can be so intense it will not allow the quieter reflecting required to connect with the “other”. If one can bring heart-mind to this process all the better. Opening ourselves like this takes practice. So I would suggest that one work on first becoming aware of the ” I” voice inside yourself. Once you can create this awareness without looking at anything in particular practice with something that you can simply observe or contemplate. See if you can let your mind remain fairly quiet. Then go outside and find something in nature that calls to you and try be still inside now that much more is going on around you.

When we attempt to do these activities our egos will want to start separating when we start to look. By this I mean, describing, comparing, categorizing, defining, thinking about “texting”, etc.,. All of this activity separates whatever we are looking at from us. We are no longer in an equal relationship to that something.  Over time as we have become more egocentric, more of nature and our inner world became other. With the ego dominant our hearts no longer can be heard telling us that something is terribly wrong.

After some practice what I experience when I go through this process is that I begin to see differently, a kind of true clarity and I have a feeling of a light, open heart. I guess one could call it seeing and feeling without judgement or preconception. This creates space for something else to arise. I sense that it is the beginning of a reconnection of my repressed natural inner human with nature. In the moments of this remembering and reconnection I feel an expansion of myself that encompasses me and the former object. From this place the energy moves into a heartfelt sense of joy. I sense that something in what I am relating to is also trying to reconnect with me and I feel love blossom. The separation has dissolved into interdependence and the beginning of a felt sense of wholeness. I feel life.

At no time do I feel that going out and being in nature in the “old” way is now passe’ or not good enough. Any connection is helpful to us and to nature. I am attempting to deepen the experience so that we might heal the wound created by our separation. Heal our own souls and the soul of the world, Anima mundi, together.

In the next blog I will talk about intuition and its relationship to reconnection.

 

 

 

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I have pasted the last blog from my old blog site here because I would like to start a series of blogs about an intuitive step-wise approach to opening oneself to the experience I describe below.

The other day I was sitting on the front steps of my partner’s house. She was gardening and I was sitting down because of a back injury. It was sunny and hot and I was relaxing where I was. My mind emptied and I sat there taking in what was happening around me. At first I noticed the small reddish brown ants scurrying back and forth among the sidewalk bricks. Then a bird flew overhead. My eyes drifted down to the right and landed on a small patch of bachelors buttons in bloom at the bottom corner of the steps. I noticed their colour first-a cobalt  blue fringe with a white body on each petal and a grape coloured centre. I felt my body soften and my heart began to open in curiosity. As I gazed at the flowers I noticed some small insects hovering around the flowers. Now and then they would dart in and land for a few seconds sipping something from the centre of the flower. Next a few bees came buzzing in moving slowly from one flower to the other gathering pollen. As I continued to watch a few ants climbed carefully up the stems of the plant inspecting the flowers at the top. Then they would walk back down and go up another stem. By this time I was quite fascinated by what was going in this little patch of flowers. And then to add to my amazement a brown beetle and then a greenish beetle with a triangular shaped body climbed into the bottom of the plants.

I became aware that time had virtually stood still as I sat there engrossed with what was happening near me. Listening quietly to myself I sensed a lightness in my body and heart. I felt a quiet kind of joy in my whole being, my back pain had diminished. Here was something on the surface so mundane, so insignificant and yet so deeply moving. This was a profound moment for me. As I sat there contemplating all of this it moved me to consider how I had opened myself to an experience of nature as part of me, as part of my inner experience. I realized that this was a relationship, that I had opened myself to “be” with nature. Or was it the other way round, or both?

Here was a felt resonance between a human being and nature. It was like a waking dream perhaps foretelling in a way how we might invite nature into our own inner family. Imagine for a moment if we could be in relationship like this always. Could we treat what has touched our core, our heart, our soul in this way as we have before? I can’t, not now. To include nature as an important part of our inner family requires us to see in a different way, to open ourselves to experiences that are like dreams yet we are awake.

In my heart I now understand that if we can see and appreciate nature in this way, in the deepest parts of ourselves, the part of ourselves we barely talk to, that we couldn’t do what we do to the world, to nature, to ourselves.

 

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I have a confession to make. I am a nature racist and I have slaves. More later…

For thousands of years civilizations have risen and then fallen. The causes have been pretty much the same each time. They are typically some combination of:

1. Destruction of the ecosystems that support growing food, the availability of water and that provide a safe environment for people

2. The rise of powerful religious and political elites in the society,  the changing or amplification of religious and political “laws” that concentrate power and  wealth for the elites.

3. The society’s development becomes increasingly complex causing decreasing marginal returns from the use of the society’s diminishing wealth

3. Climate change creating increased uncertainty about the availability of food, water and weakening the population

4. Wars or conflict over increasingly “scarce” food and water

5. Wars about cultural/religious symbols, i.e., my story of the world is the correct and only story of the way the world is.

6. A destructive lack of responsiveness of the elites to the gathering crisis

We are now in the same situation but on a global scale.

Who am I? Just an “average middle class” Canadian. And yet herein lies the problem and why I and many of my fellow humans in developed countries and many past humans are nature racists. A nature racist in my opinion is a person or really a culture of persons who deliberately or passively use nature as a resource with little to no consideration for the effects of that use on the plants, animals and the remainder of natural ecosystems they are part of. Nature is ours to lord over and use, except we say, steward and manage. Same effect, just the use of language to distance culpability. For example the United States navy has applied to the U.S. Department of Fisheries and Oceans to incur 33,000,000 million incidents with living creatures in the world’s oceans where it tests its technology and weapons. The meaning of incidents is the killing and maiming of living beings in the ocean and destroying the places they live. The estimate is considered low by some writers and will occur over the next 4 years. 33,000,000. Another example. Humans have used farm animals for their labour for thousands of years. Many of these animals were abused, misused and then killed. Consider that in many cases they could have been seen as important beings with rights in and of themselves and treated in a way that is humane and given a decent retirement.

How do we get around the thorny issue of our own survival being put before the survival of the ecosystems that we are deeply embedded in and interdependent with? As far as I am concerned we are now beginning to truly reap the full reward of our folly of being nature racists. If we live in a story where we cannot relate with our hearts and minds to the content and effect of what we do, and in fact deny and repress our true guilt in these matters, then I think we are doomed as a species. In essence through our religious dogma, narcissistic politics, free market economics and deadened language especially that of materialistic science, we have made up a story that nature is relatively soulless. Soldiers are put through grotesque training regimes to kill or deeply repress the soldiers connection to his/her heart and soul to be able to kill. Often a story is woven about the “enemy” to make them appear soulless and evil so that they can be killed without guilt. Given that our story of nature being soulless has been around for hundreds of years our ability to kill nature with barely a glance back over our shoulder is a piece of cake. Most of us do this. To me this sounds just like the way people of different races have been and are treated by imperialist nations in order to be able to enslave, use and kill  them without much internal disquiet for the slave owner. This story is ongoing and permeates most everything we in developed countries consume.

As I mentioned above I am also a slave owner. I do this in two ways. The first as a consumer of goods produced by the slave labour of people in developing countries supposedly the fruits of globalism for me to enjoy but generally hidden is the poverty, repression and murder of those workers. The second according to Andrew Nikiforuk in “The Energy of Slaves” is that I control the equivalent of approximately 300 energy slaves (machines) to do my bidding so that I can live the middle class lifestyle that I do. I have gradually awakened  to the stark, staring in my face fact that my consumption contributes to the degradation, enslavement and death of nature and human beings that I will never meet just so I can be comfortable. With the greater consciousness that I have come to over a number of years and the present state of affairs on this planet I can no longer continue to live as I do now which is not excessively consumptive from our societies standards. If I must kill other living beings to live this way just doesn’t square with what I feel in my heart anymore.

So I ask  just where does the knowledge that our form of consumption is likely enslaving and killing other living beings especially in nature go in you? Where does it go in your heart?

AND

Can you open your heart to more fully feel what our consumption is really all about? Are you able to deliberately look at what is hidden deep in yourself and behind the veils of our good life? Recycling and other conservation band aids are useful in small ways but do not address in any substantive way the story our racist and slave holding tendencies, our unconsciousness destructiveness or our emptiness.

 

 

 

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