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.

In a number of his talks Gabor Matte speaks about the need for an individual to move past their ego and become re-connected to their deep true essence as a human being. This essence tends to be lost as we grow out of our childhood because of the nature of our upbringing. Our parents were imbued with the old cultural stories of self-interest and separation and our educational system promotes this way of being as well. Our social culture, what I call the distraction culture, also promotes self-interest and separation from nature. As a result people grow up not really knowing that they’ve lost connection to their essence. And so it usually takes some series of crises in a person’s life, repeating patterns of behavior, repeating life experiences and crises in the world like the degradation of our oceans or devastating storms to begin to wake the ego up to the sense that perhaps it isn’t the only thing inside ourselves that is actually aware. Often one’s soul begins to speak as we grow older especially in middle age and as death begins to be seen in the distance we begin to wake up. Things like nightmares, body problems especially chronic ones, potentially even some form of disease will all be aspects of an attempt by one’s body and soul to get our ego’s attention about the lost connection to our essence. Certainly this reconnection isn’t an easy process for any individual. For those individuals who are most wounded, particularly those who haven’t been able to develop much ego strength, going into past wounding to recover one’s essence feels literally like dying. Depth psychology attempts to strengthen the individual’s ego so that it can withstand the difficult descent down into the depths of oneself to discover one’s essence. The strengthening of the ego also allows what might be called an observer ego to develop. The observer ego can begin to stand back from the individual’s life and start to see patterns of behaviour, repeating patterns of body symptoms, repeating patterns of dreams and then begin to understand that there is a connection between those patterns and ones feelings and one’s life. Now this isn’t for everybody. Another way to and through the doorway to one’s essence is with the imagination and creativity of art. Creativity seems to open the ego sufficiently so that space is created within oneself to begin to be able to perceive one’s inner and outer world differently. This new non-egoic space is where a new story or stories can be heard and worked with within us. In this space our lost true nature can be re-membered.

I’ve been thinking about creativity and energy for a while now. It seems to me that our cultures dominant stories of self-interest and separation from nature have a tendency to stop the flow of life energy or cause us to attempt to draw certain aspects of this energy inappropriately to ourselves. I was sitting in a parking lot a few weeks ago. I was there with my partner and we were talking about how in many respects our North American culture is creating more and more ugliness. We were looking out on an empty field which is surrounded by an industrial area. Certainly if one worked at it you could see beauty in the snow on the field and in some of the bits of grass poking up here and there through the snow. But in the main when one really looked out on this industrial area it was a reminder of the rape of this planet. We were also talking about how our heavily materialistic culture produces things that we consume that are quickly thrown away or are designed to become rapidly obsolete. As a result there is at a soul and heart level a felt deadness to this kind of matter. In fact to me it seems to literally draw the life force out of one and into itself. I think this really goes hand-in-hand with the whole aspect of self-interest and separation. The flow of creative energy from one’s essence is blocked, distorted and consumed.

So if we are focused on trying to get more for ourselves, consuming many objects that draw energy from us, then this circle will require us to consume even more. It becomes very hard for us to even begin to see that we are moving farther and farther away from our essence. And so the more we ignore the inner call of our essence the greater the psychic charge that is building in ourselves. And as I said this leads to all sorts of calamities in order to get our attention.

I think from what is happening to people and to our world it is quite evident that many people are not connected to their essence. If they were the world would not be going in the direction that it is. So if most people are not connected to their essence then as Gabor Matte suggests they become addicted to something to fill the emptiness that the loss of connection leaves. It is a dark hole that can never be filled by our present way of being. This pit can be frightening to contemplate. We can begin to see how our “modern” world has been built by individuals who are not connected to themselves in a deep way and answers why we are in the predicament that we are.

Samsara is the Sanskrit word for suffering. What corporations in particular and government in some instances have done is a brilliant selling of samsara to us as individuals. As one wise man put it, the brilliant selling of samsara and its barren distractions attempts to fill the emptiness that we all feel deep in ourselves when we are not connected to our true natures. When we are told that there is no real truth in the world and in ourselves, that truth is a lie, even that truth does not exist, this leaves us no choice but to become addicted to something to fill the void. And because we are addicted we will want our “preferred substance” be it power over others or ice cream to be there always and to have more and more of it over time. This creates human beings that are anxiety ridden, self-interested and separate from the natural cycles of the earth. And we suffer. Then the brilliant sellers of samsara tell us that this state of being is our “true” nature and the whole circle of the lie is complete. Yet consider that we are not addicts deep in ourselves and we are not to blame for not fully understanding this lie. But it is time that we woke up to what the lie is and what it does to our lives and to the planet.

Stories are all around us in a variety of forms. They come from inside us too. Generally they inhabit us. Simply by living we weave these outer and  inner narratives together to form a tapestry of  images that we relate to consciously and unconsciously in order to navigate in our lives. These images provide the ground we stand on. We all experience lives that seem to go in directions that we don’t expect, where our behaviour surprises us or old patterns repeat themselves. These experiences relate to living in a tapestry that is in some respects disconnected from our true hearts and souls. In fact the tapestry we carry might be seen as our fate. The two dominant stories of separation from nature and self-interest that I mentioned earlier in “Story Mind, Play, Creativity and Wholeness” are deeply woven into our individual and social tapestries. If we carry them to their ends then we will fulfill our fate as a species. In order to get out of this mess requires the creation of new stories and new ways of being and living in the world. My experience in depth psychology has been about teasing apart the threads of my own personal inner fabric so that I can become more conscious of the unconsciousness stories in myself and in the world. In Natures Spark http://www.naturesspark.blogspot.ca/ I tell the tale of my own reconnection to nature, my soul and my heart by walking on a trail in the river valley where I live. I also describe in somewhat vitriolic terms my feelings about corporations and politicians. I realize now that although we need to be aware of some groups or individuals trying to have more and more control over our lives I needed to see that reacting as I did put me in a position of being the ‘good’ in good versus evil which is part of the whole separation story. Take a look at the blog by Charles Eisentsein “The Lovely Lady from Nestle” at http://www.charleseisenstein.net/category/news/ for an expansion of this viewpoint. As I walked in the river valley I began to reconnect to my roots, to open myself at first to the feelings that came alive in me when I was a child. Becoming aware of what I was experiencing was another step in changing my own story. Deepening this experience felt very important to me so I began bringing my camera along as I walked. I explain this in more detail in my earlier blog. Looking back at what happened I can say that I started to play, to play seriously. The camera was there to record the reconnection of my soul to something that was trying to speak to me in and through nature. Call it spirit, Anima mundi, Gaia it doesn’t matter. The point was that my heart opened and I experienced joy through this creative experience. The old stories loosened a bit more.