“There is no reality aside from your definition of it.” ~ Bashar
There are two ways to look at life. One is that everything is happening TO you.
In this perspective we become unsuspecting victims of our circumstances. We are affected by change or other people’s behavior and we have no other choice but to blame things outside of our self for anything from our bad moods to the reason that we aren’t fulfilled, abundant, or at peace with our existence.
In this instance, the actor becomes the character he is playing, so much so that he forgets he’s playing a part in a movie and starts to believe that not only is he the character that he is playing, but that he has absolute zero control over how he is experiencing the circumstances that come his way.
This character is often negatively affected by unplanned change, or anything that he himself has defined as a “negative circumstance.” Perceived negative circumstances must be indicative that life is hard, life is terrible, or that nothing is working out for him.
The second way to look at life is that everything is happening FOR you. Through this lens, we find that every single thing that comes our way can only be coming to strip from us something else that we are not (limited beliefs about ourselves or life), or to move us on to bigger and better people, places, and things.
This person not only sees himself as the actor in the movie, but also the director, the casting agent and the observer of the movie too. Note that both people will undoubtedly experience unplanned situations and even unwanted situations, but the difference is that the first character will define every challenging circumstance as proof that things aren’t going well for them.
To him, circumstances that were not planned symbolize the difficulty of life and reinforce their belief that they are a victim of their circumstances. The second person instead uses any adversity in their lives to symbolize how WELL things are going for them.
Your life is your movie, and here are a few ways to create your movie
Challenges and change must mean that they are once again growing and evolving and moving on to situations they are better suited to who they are. This is the secret of co-creation.
We decide what things symbolize and by doing so, we not only change the way we experience our movie, but we align ourselves with timelines that carry within them more and higher vibrational possibilities.
“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” ~ Bill Hicks
At one point in my life, I was beginning to wonder why I was attracting so many life-altering circumstances. It seemed as though ever since I started my spiritual journey my life has been one huge life change after another.
While everyone else around me seemed to be living somewhat comfortably, with very little change in their lives from month to month, year to year, my life was becoming one big roller coaster of ups and downs.
Relationships were coming and going and the pendulum between having money and not having money was swinging back and forth from one extreme to another. The deeper I went down the rabbit hole and traveled inward, the more my outer reality was falling apart, and then together, and then apart again.
What was I doing wrong? Then, one day the realization came. I was constantly evolving and growing, the person I am today is COMPLETELY different from the person I felt like even a couple months ago, let alone a couple years.
Radical Transformation
Perhaps, the radical transformation I was undergoing internally was constantly attracting to me newer and more transformational experiences that were only furthering along my emotional growth and spiritual maturity.
The fact that I was changing so much inside was only ensuring that I would keep drawing to me more challenging situations to get through. And the irony of the whole thing is, as time went on, the less “stable” my circumstances seemed, the more peace I felt inside.
Instead of using instability and change to symbolize how “wrong” I was doing things, I decided it could only symbolize how transformed I was becoming. Instead of using the number in my bank account to symbolize how abundant or not abundant I was, I decided to change my definition of abundance from solely meaning how much money I did or didn’t have, to instead encompass every single thing I came across.
I have clothes on my back, I am not starving, I have a roof over my head, and a cell phone to use if I need to call someone… who’s to say I’m not abundant? By simply changing the way I defined myself and my life’s circumstances I was able to change my experience of life.
And instead of deciding that unplanned change must symbolize that there is something that I need to fear, I instead decided to openly accept it as yet another chance for me to grow into a better version of my former self and use it as an indicator that things can only be getting better for me.
“When something goes wrong in your life just yell ‘plot twist!’ and move on.” ~ Unknown
Question Yourself
Every once in a while it’s important that we take a step back from reality and really question how we are defining ourselves and what things symbolize to us.
Are the characters in our movie symbolizing how powerless we are? Or can we use our interactions with them as catalysts to discover yet another unconscious aspect of ourselves that is trying to make itself known through them?
Do the things we own and the numbers in our bank account symbolize how much we DON’T have? Or do they instead symbolize how many things we have to be grateful for? Does pain, heartbreak, fear and loneliness symbolize how terrible we must be doing at life?
Or does it symbolize how wonderful we are doing and how the Universe trust us to be able to overcome such amazing challenges?
Every single thing in your life experience can symbolize how amazing you are and how awesome you are doing. You are the director or your experience… your life is your movie. And in doing so, the movie of your life not only becomes considerably more enjoyable but radically transformative as well.
“The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow, and loses today… The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.” ~ Seneca
If you’re not careful, such sacred energy will be nothing more than a passing placation, a lulling into the very stagnant waters in which it swims against, a poltergeisting between too-moral and too-immoral without considering the Amoral Now, The Immediate Dynamic, the Current Importance. “Now” is all we have.
Courage is what makes “now” an adventure. A sense of humor is what makes “now” tolerable. And the trickster archetype is what makes “now” a revelation: a surprising disclosure; a shocking exposure, an eye-opening exposé.
Here’s a second-person inquiry into the trickster-self, to reveal how we may or may not be playing like we’re not God:
So you wake up to a charcoal sky with a hint of sunken sun. Flummoxed and fluxed, your destiny is still muddy, but it’s becoming clearer. Your mind is a dark mystery attempting to solve itself, even while the universe smashes up entire galaxies in order to maintain its own symmetry.
You feel small, but you feel blessed to be a thing that feels at all. Your comfort zone is stretching. The horizon is no longer a distant thing. It is a recalibration. It is the Peripheral You diagnosing the parochial condition of morality and what it means to be a moral being in an immoral world that’s evolving through an indifferent universe.
It is you orienting yourself with your innermost amoral essence: the trickster-self, the aspect of you that has the power to turn the tables on the concept of power itself.
As trickster, your compass is multidimensional in your hand, mysterium tremendum et fascinans!
You look over the world of men, through their unsustainable buildings and creaking machinery, upon the steely juggernaut of the bustling city, splitting the fog with its artificial stink. All-too-serious in their sloth, they bolt the horizon and bar the sky.
From your precarious perch, you watch oil-mongers feast. You watch the world-conqueror’s gorge, whispering to each other: “conquer, control, destroy, repeat,” as the world bleeds and dies at their feet.
You watch them shove, elbow, and press up against each other like cannibalistic sardines, cramming roe into can’t-shut-the-fuck-up mouths. And oh, the O-shape of their horribly overindulgent mouths, over-eating, gormandizing, glutting and gutting the world like a flayed fish flopping around on the dark table of Father Capitalism, while Mother Civilization is being kept alive by all sorts of life-support machines, with her crimson-red murderer’s mouth raping the virginity of the earth.
They say we’re born to be consumers. They say you should just fall into line. And yet their toys flash a false fire: nothing more than improved means to unimproved ends.
You see Plato’s words blazing like red letters tattooed to your retinas: “Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” But you don’t care. Something’s got to give!
You are everywhere surrounded by puppets, patriots, and sycophants boiling like cow-eyed frogs in an unhealthy cultural soup. Their master is each other, perpetuating the inside-looking-out confabulation of tyranny disguised as freedom, naïve and kowtowing to the next peer-pressure masturbation, en masse; the next material-fix.
They are drugged commercial-narcissi wearing suits and snorting gas through star-spangled straws while the rest of the world shrinks into dried-out wastelands. They have forgotten what it truly means to be courageous.
Born, as they were, into a prescribed-state, a state of hand-me-down ideals and spoon-fed ideologies lacking in any depth. They have forgotten that courage means transforming fear into love.
They are prisoners padding their jail cells. Born and raised in captivity, only a few of them can even see their prison bars. Like the row upon row of crouched figures in Plato’s Cave, they’re simply unable to see the shadows for what they really are.
But you can see, can’t you? You old trickster, you…
You see how they have been left behind by nature. Or rather, how they’ve unwittingly and mistakenly left nature behind. Their unsustainable culture, the culture of the inert, is a giant nostalgia of disconnect, a gross system of empty sentimentality, where nothing really happens except hollow reminiscence and cheap entertainment meant to lull everyone into a false sense of security.
But they are not secure. Not at all. They are floundering in the abyss of a collective inhumanity, grasping for meaning in a culture that just wants to entertain and consume itself to no end.
Their culture doesn’t offer a meaning to life. Rather, it chases the questions about life’s meaning out of the mind through over-consumption. There is no place to reflect on the sense, or even nonsense, of things.
They’ve been denied their connection and the meaning that nourishes them. They have grown small and stunted in the shallow soil of their oppressive culture. It is time to revitalize the ground beneath them. They don’t realize: they can do so much better than empire.
But you do realize, don’t you? You old trickster, you…
Like Alan Watts said, “You’re playing hide and seek with yourself. You’re just passing eternal time with adventure. You forget who you are really. Every now and then You make like you’re just a John Doe or a Mary Smith, or a butterfly, or a worm, or a star and that you’re lost in the middle of a big, big, outside world that isn’t you, that you don’t understand and that you don’t control. Of course! There has to be something else … something other … to bring out the feeling that You are you. And so that You can feel really you, that outside world has to feel really strange, different, weird. You old trickster … deep down inside, You know the whole bit. And therefore, what You want is a surprise. So you have to let things get out of control. You have to feel lost and lonely to know You as you. You play the thing out by inventing lusts and loves, fears and terrors, gnawing anxieties and screaming mee-mee’s… But our secret is… as we say… Tatvamasi… You Are IT. You are running the show, by not letting your right hand know what your left is doing. By making life as a whopping great split between what You DO and what happens to You.”
And so here you are, with your bulging trickster-heart stretched clean around the universe like a giant skin on a giant drum, tapping out the eternal beat of itself, yourself, un-confusing your left hand with your right, and bringing it all back into sacred alignment.
So now your way of taking the world seriously is to disrupt it sincerely and then give it a new form. Like the Heyoka of old, you are prepared to poke holes into all the things they hold sacred. You’re willing to become Taboo itself.
Your each action is a means toward being the change you wish to see in the world. Each dollar given away, each experience stowed, each “buck-stopping-here,” is you in full-frontal deterrence to the one thing that is destroying the world: the anti-nature of men.
But are you capable of cutting the fuse before it’s too late? Will you be able to jump off cliffs before you’ve learned how to fly?
Deep down you know it: “Now” is all we have. Under layer upon layer of fear, curled up like a multifarious onion reeking of cowardice, is an insurmountable courage. Deep down you know this courage is the only thing that will make “now” an adventure.
Beneath all the doubt –psychological, cultural, and cosmic– there is an underlying sense of humor blazing like a fiery beacon of hope. Deep down you know this sacred sense of humor is the only thing that can make “now” tolerable. And deep inside your primordial makeup, propping-up the thousand-and-one faces of God, is the sacred trickster archetype.
Deep down you know that this archetype is the only thing that makes “now” a revelation: a surprising disclosure; a shocking exposure, an eye-opening exposé. You are ready to be surprised, to be staggered and astonished by revelation, by providence. The world is ready. It’s time to show it your true colors: the glorious hue of your Trickster Apocalypse bursting like fireworks over the stagnant and ordinary. Stop playing like you’re not God.
The universe is unfolding itself and revealing her secrets. She is whispering to you in a language older than words: “You’ll reap no evolution if you don’t sow a little revolution.”
“He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.” ~ Edmund Burke
Just because it’s easy to theorize about learning everything we need to know about ourselves from what irritates us in others, doesn’t mean it is in practice. There is one step beyond the mirror. One step beyond the rational.
One step beyond the abrasive nature of acquaintances and insensitive comments from family members, one step beyond there is something more, something deeper that means karma is at work and that it’s going to be a difficult one to get out of… those rare individuals who we love and feel eternally connected to who, unfortunately, antagonize us to distraction.
There’s a reason why there’s one in every story. The antagonist is usually the epitome of everything we despise but who pushes us (in our desperate attempts to avoid our shadow selves consuming us while we react to them) to those peaks and troughs that are the stuff of intensely felt and authentically expressed life stories.
Much like the art of story for the sake of entertainment, the antagonist reaches in and yanks out the hero lurking within each of our souls. Our antagonist, despite being the devil in disguise, breathes into us the opportunity to become extraordinary, whether it is to be a tale of triumph, or one of tragedy.
The ‘Evil’ Antagonist
“Remember that when you meet your antagonist, to do everything in a mild agreeable manner. Let your courage be keen, but, at the same time, as polished as your sword.” ~ Richard Brinsley Sheridan
The archetypal Villain or Nemesis is, like any antagonist, always acting on their own strict set of moral codes and the greater good that they perceive to apply to everyone. Those who appear to be threatening society, the crowd or the family unit are usually set upon by the ‘good’ parties… but how can we be so sure that they deserve it?
At the heart of every antagonist is suffering; an escalated problem or misunderstanding that has pushed past the boundaries of reconciliation and become revenge.
Sounds like the stuff of story, but how close have you ever been to ringleading or simply playing along with the downfall of some perceived enemy?
As social creatures humans have the tendency to draw together their own stories and conclusions, often bringing down someone who could’ve benefitted more from loving compassion and an attempt to understand their suffering rather than condemn them for it.
In a world where the binary opposites of good versus evil is prevalent in most plots and cultural narratives, it can be all too easy to forget our humanity and chug at this fear-inducing teat of locating the threat and calling for the pitchforks. Next time you feel threatened by a supposedly ‘nasty’ character, take a step back and ask yourself if there is a more loving way to approach them.
The Subtle Antagonist
“…You find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you’re estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.” ~ James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling
But I don’t see what’s wrong with them, are you sure it’s not all in your head? The maddening exclamation of the witnessing party, one who has no idea how much this person rubs you up the wrong way and in fact goes to great lengths to minimize the drama. They are, of course, probably right.
You are making a big deal out of it, but what you need to do, rather than neutralize and ignore the antagonist at work, is to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes them drive you so absolutely crazy.
It will probably be a story of love. Either you recognize something within them that you desire, or perhaps you wish they loved you more. Perhaps you are their antagonist and they are misinterpreting your treatment of them as aggression or jealousy or any number of other ‘negative’ interactions. It’s time to grow up and become responsible for ourselves.
You could be the one to change everything. You could make this person’s day, week, year, even decade. By reaching up into the higher love and reacting to them with great care, you could solder your name onto their heart forever and break the unwelcome bonds that are binding you to them; the past, present and future could ring out with the wedding bells of karma rejoicing at the gracefulness of your disconnection.
Karmic freedom feels pretty darn good. In fact it’s resplendently blissful. Your soul craves it – do it justice and disconnect yourself from gossip and complaining. Soar above the problem and see it for what it is. The subtle antagonist is usually the petty antagonist, but could become destiny and darkness if you let it.
When You Become The Antagonist
“A stage play is basically a form of uber-schizophrenia. You split yourself into two minds – one being the protagonist and the other being the antagonist. The playwright also splits himself into two other minds: the mind of the writer and the mind of the audience.” ~ David Mamet
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The time has come to begin really melting the lines between what we believe to be good, and what we believe to be bad. Many times in our lives – especially if we chose it – we become the antagonist. It can be a life-calling.
A dangerous one, sure, but a transformative one all the same. You become a catalyst for change, you become the person who fights their own demons whilst reflecting back to everyone theirs. That’s not to say that you need to seek it out. Many an empath and sensitive light being probably has exactly this as their work; threading out the details and questioning the depths of the soul.
When did you stop believing in others? When did you decide to shut the world out and be the bad guy? Is this a role you have been playing for centuries? Is it about one-up-manship or tired tales of greed? Don’t you think it’s time to stop competing and holding onto your superego of survival?
Times are changing, and we must change too. The person who hurts you envies you. They are scared of themselves, terrified of being seen by the world, flaws and all. Let’s ride out together and embrace the whole. We wouldn’t be complete without each other.
To chose antagonism means to bravely step up and open the cupboard under the stairs with the acceptance that you’ll be bumped over the head and stuck with cobwebs. It’ll be a dark night, but in each jar of shadows we can reach out safe in the knowledge that it’ll be a release of the old.
So step up and break those karmic ties with style. It’s time to find your antagonist, near or far and give them a cosmic hug, for they could just save your soul. Once and for all.
“The individual no longer needs to exist in separation, and becomes instead the all. The First Breath is the thinnest line on the horizon between the all and the nothing.” ~ Daniel Stone, The Dreamer Who Dreams You
It’s rare that you come across a piece of writing or writer that is able to make you sing with higher frequencies. For me, Osho is one of them. Though much disputed as a charlatan and largely discounted due to his questionable hobbies and intentions I still find his books and talks incredibly… well, enlightening.
Reading his words is a meditation in itself. Eckhart Tolle is another one, Deepak Chopra. Today I found another gem, typically in a charity shop for one pound (I live in the UK). Its cover was calling to me as was the obscure sub title ‘The Shaman, the Buddha, and the Conscious Dream.’
The book is a personal journey and collection of teachings that make one’s skin tingle.
Going to the desert, the ritualistic death of the ego has always fascinated me as has this breed of hermit-nomadic-like existence… dropping all material possessions to solely focus on your spiritual path and supping from all the world’s shamanistic practices, becoming one with nature.
Being in nature during my childhood was a very powerful experience for me, and these meditations help to revisit those moments submerged in wild grasses or brambles when the veil between the worlds momentarily lifts and you get to see what real magic feels like.
These meditations help with our conscious dreaming, and I’d like to share them with you.
Breath
Like all spiritual paths, the way of the Shaman starts with Breath. Seeing it as a time for yourself is the first step in opening up a path with your breath meditation, the path to conscious dreaming.
Breathing is focused on because it is unconditional, much like the presence of nature and the fact that we are already free. ‘The breath is given without any expectation. It is unconditional. There are places we can reach through the breath where everything is given for nothing’.
All you have to do, is sit and breath. For those who are familiar with meditation already, they will know that such a simple instruction can lead to hell on earth. Simply breathing is incredibly difficult because we try to make it perfect and judge each meditation in dualistic terms; the old chestnut of good and bad.
Accepting the breath as being like nature, we can begin to accept the true nature of it and quieten the busy mind. ‘Sand in the desert is picked up by the wind, and when the wind passes, the sand gradually settles back into the earth. The vision opens by degrees, through war and peace, and the mysteries in the breath of the universe are revealed.’
Start with 15 minutes and slowly increase to an hour. Sit with a comfortably good posture and close your eyes. Stay with the natural breath, don’t try to change it.
Don’t beat yourself up when your mind starts to wander, just patiently bring yourself back to the breath.
“The beauty of the breath can be experienced at its fullest when there is acceptance.”
Try tying in the breath in a rhythm as you walk, or stand on the spot and move your body very gently from one side to the other. Inhale on one side and exhale on the other or mix it up. Or simply sit. You could try peaking your awareness in the gap of the inhale; that moment of gap between the inhale and the exhale.
Or the gap at the pit of the exhale. Actually that’s an Osho meditation. By meditating on the peak of the inhale or the peak of the exhale you can gain very different experiences. What do you want to do? Relax or gain energy?
Experiment. Do this for a month at least before proceeding to the next step to enjoy the depth of this practice.
The Mask, Projection and Seeing Form
The second meditation the writer talks about has a lot to do with speaking out of the back of the head in the act of projecting. Holding an object with the gaze for a long time in order to begin to break down the walls of illusion.
Roald Dahl writes about this in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar when the greedy protagonist uses this practice with cards in order to see through the back of a card to the suit and number hidden behind it. In the end he spends years practicing mind over matter, so much time and effort that it changes him and (spoiler alert!) dissolves his greed and lifts him to the new spiritual heights of love and compassion.
The sequence of this meditation goes like this; ‘The dreamer intends to see, the dreamer focuses the eyes like a long lens camera, the dreamer sees, (and) the dreamer has to relax the attention.’
After about ten minutes of breath awareness, focus on a point on the horizon or an object (close enough to see clearly but far enough to gain the perception of distance) and keep your gaze fixed on it for at least fifteen minutes.
Once that time is up, close your eyes again. Now try to see the object you had focused on behind your eyelids by returning to the same spot and trying to hold it. It will be more difficult as the mind will want to race, but be patient, and practice practice practice.
The Triangle of Shiva (or Shakti?)
This is where the book steps up to visualization techniques where the meditations can get quite powerful. Personally I would advise to take it really slowly and deal with the stuff your breath awareness might’ve brought up first before taking the next step. We are all responsible for our own spiritual path, but of course when we gain knowledge from these sorts of meditations we also gain power, and therefore a greater responsibility.
Having practiced breath awareness and the intention to see, now you can move on to triangle meditation, a meditation that is mobile and can be practiced on the train. Having done 10 minutes breath awareness, focus on your object or point in the distance and imagine or draw a triangle around it (‘dream a triangle’).
When this is fully established, try to make it three-dimensional by drawing a line a making it into a pyramid. ‘It may also help to put your hand on the second chakra area’, the sacral chakra of balance. Apparently this is particularly helpful when your energy is out of sorts and needs grounding.
‘The breath and the triangle. These are two roots and our gateway to the dream of the universe. When we are sure of our breath and sure of the point of power, there is no chance of getting lost. We are ready to travel.’
I’ll stop there as that’s probably more than enough to be getting on with. I guess if you’re hungry for more you can buy the book but these alone will probably open all sorts of doors for you. The book goes on to explain meditations to find your own living medicine wheels and interact with the elements as living, conscious expressions that bring signs and open up loving dialogues with the land.
“Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. To-day I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity – I belong to the earth!” ~ Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Welcome to the Anthropocene: an epoch that began when human activities had a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems. We live in precisely such an epoch. The Holocene is staggered. We live in a world of aggrandized egos and unsustainable technologies.
Our hyper-masculinized, overreaching culture is systematically destroying great swathes of the biosphere. Our heightened sense of individuality is haphazardly creating excessive divisiveness between nature and the human soul.
It walls us off from nature, fooling us into falsely believing that we are above it, while disguising the fact that we are nature, and nature is us. The majority of us are simply incapable of understanding that we are interdependent beings within an interconnected cosmos.
As Firmin DeBrabander said, writing about Spinoza, “To be human, according to Spinoza, is to be party to a confounding existential illusion — that human individuals are independent agents — which exacts a heavy emotional and political toll on us. It is the source of anxiety, envy, anger — all the passions that torment our psyche — and the violence that ensues. If we should come to see our nature as it truly is, if we should see that no “individuals” properly speaking exist at all, Spinoza maintained, it would greatly benefit humankind. There is no such thing as a discrete individual, Spinoza points out. This is a fiction. The boundaries of ‘me’ are fluid and blurred. We are all profoundly linked in countless ways we can hardly perceive.”
Our tendency toward ecocide is a psychosocial schism of hyperreal proportions compounded by a psychological cognitive dissonance that keeps us clinging to our unhealthy preconditioning.
We all intuitively sense that there is something fundamentally unhealthy and unsustainable with the way our human cultures pollute and destroy the planet, but most of us do not have the moral courage to admit that we’re part of the problem. Cognitive dissonance too easily slips in and pacifies us against the discomfort. And so the vicious cycle continues.
This dissonance is so powerful that it compels people to remain ignorant to a great many things. The majority of us think we know the way the world works, when really we have forgotten that everything is connected. This can be extremely dangerous.
It leads to personal complacency, intellectual laziness, and existential ennui; a disrespect of the sacredness of the interconnectedness of cosmos; a gross imbalance between nature and the human soul; and corruption at all levels of human governance. In short: it leads to a plague of fact-resistant anti-intellectuals.
Unfortunately, these fact-resistant humans have become the majority. They resist facts because they are scared that the truth will reveal the lie at the heart of their unhealthy lifestyles. They cling to the outdated, parochial views of their forefathers, unable to accept that “time makes ancient good uncouth.” They are anti-intellectuals because they fear change and the personal responsibility and accountability that comes along with changing for the better.
But above all else, they fear the peer-pressure of the all-encompassing status quo. In a fundamentally unhealthy and unsustainable society, those who stand outside the norms of society, who are embracing a healthy and sustainable lifestyle, are ridiculed most of all. Like Krishnamurti said, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
But there is a solution: champion new, healthier, more sustainable avenues of human development. Lifestyle is a personal choice, and there is nothing saying our lifestyles must be the same as everybody else’s, especially in a “profoundly sick society.”
Teach interdependence and how it can exemplify and heroically incarnate independence. Understanding the interrelated nature of everyone and everything is the key to diminishing the passions and the havoc they wreak. Like John Muir suggested, “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
Cure your own nature deprivation. Converse more with nature. Relearn a “language older than words.” Do as Louis Agassiz suggested and “go to nature; take the facts into your own hands; look, and see for yourself.”
Take into deep consideration what you learn there, dare to give into the transformative crucible of meditation and solitude, and then bring that sacred fire back to the tribe and teach others how to use it. Like the Bard said, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”
Discover a moral question. Attempt to answer that question as best you can every single day. Rekindle the lost link between Nature and your own soul. Discover a sacred place in nature where you are free to converse with the Cosmos.
As Henry David Thoreau suggested, “You must converse much with the field and the woods if you would imbibe such health into your mind and spirit as you covet for your body.”
Reconnect the disconnect by shedding fearful invulnerability and revealing courageous vulnerability. Realize that you are nature, and nature is you, and neither can be commoditized, no matter how much our cultural conditioning says otherwise.
Like Aldo Leopold said, “The land is not a commodity that belongs to us; it’s a community to which we belong.”
It’s high time we rediscovered the sacredness of community.
Above all: recondition the precondition. You, and you alone, have the ability to un-become an ecocidal maniac. The noose dangling around your neck is tied with a Gordian Knot that only you know how to untie. It will require Herculean courage and Nietzschean overcoming, and a shedding of multiple layers of unhealthy cultural conditioning, but no ask is more important, as it stands.
Here on the precipice, between Holocene and Anthropocene, between self-destruction and survival, between healthy evolution and unhealthy devolution, we have the potential for creation or destruction. We are both parasitic and symbiotic; both bee and locust.
Like John Sawhill said, “A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy.” Will we choose the healthy, sustainable, progressive evolution of the harmonious honey bee, or the unhealthy, unsustainable, regressive devolution of the destructive locust? Ecocidal maniac or eco-centric hero? It’s our choice which.
“And hark! How blithe the throstle sings! He, too, is no mean preacher: Come forth into the light of things, Let nature be your teacher…
One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the ages can.” ~ William Wordsworth
