We know so much and have our heads in clouds of concerns that are tiny, invisible, against a rising ocean. We've forgotten where we are. A planet talking back at us. A planet saying enough plunder, no more digging deep, stop poisoned wastes. Enough thoughtless selfish greed of only one of millions of species.
I live on a volcano. Yes, we know earthquakes. We know lava flows running like mud or like water, burning everything in its path. We respect life on this dangerously alive island that has two peaks at 14,000 feet, sometimes snow in winter although we are in the Tropics.
Now is the rainy season that used to be wet at night, sun at noon. Today the temperature has not risen above 69 -, no rain but wet air, no wind. All fruit trees either a month ahead or six months behind the usual seasons. Maybe tomorrow it will be hot and sunny, and the day after torrential rain. My favorite kind of passion fruit climbs and winds in the brances of the trees circling my little house. In previous years it made fruit predictably. Now I find one ripe fruit and ten green ones. The red orchid that flowered the year around before now has stopped even growing. We used to have many clumsy bumble bees. Today saw one, the only one in two months. Oh yes, my world is changing rapidly. Of course the reality of climate crisis are everywhere.
In my thinking, what we don't know is that our world is not only material. We are so locked into the view that anything and everything that is to be studied must be matter, measurable, visible. We know our anatomy, we invent chemicals to do what we want fixed or changed. We have observed and measured every organ. We have machines that locate activity in our brain, where and how much. We can and do measure behavior, but does that explain belief, for instance? Have we ever understood the amazing power of the devotion of Tibetans? We accept that the women (mostly women) who have spent life times learning about apes, know the behavior of apes. But do we know how they communicated with apes and apes with them? We have measured some energies that go with meditation, but naming is not knowing. And maybe not knowing is for the best because with our present mind set we use knowledge to make money and manipulate reality without wanting to know the consequences. Our passion is control.
The one thing we cannot control is spirit. By ignoring spirit we may change matter but we destroy reality. Ther term Mother Earth is not a cute old-fashioned name, it is the true name of a planet that has born us all. The stuff that we are made of, the stuff we live on, live among, is matter but it also has something else. I call it spirit. I don't mean ghostly spirits, or spiritual. But a something that goes with life, anything that is living. Bacteria and elephants and plants and trees have spirit that makes them alive.
The objects we make have no spirit. Cars can be spirited but they have no spirit. Buildings have no spirit. To my thinking anythng that has straight lines cannot be spirit because there are no straight lines in nature.
On this planet plants have the miraculous ability to breathe in carbon dioxide from the air, use the energy from the sun, adding water, and breathe out oxygen. All animals, and that includes humans, breathe oxygen in and carbon dioxide out. All animals and all humans need plants to live, and all plants need animals, including humans, to live. Yes, I am undoubtedly simplifying, but it is the essence of life on this planet.
Yet we have destroyed half of all rainforests of this planet, the lungs of the planet. We, with the largest brains in relation to our size, have done, and are doing, the most stupid things any species could do. No species deliberately extinguishes itself, knowing what it is doing.
All humans everywhere have rituals and beliefs that strengthen their cohesion as a cooperative community. Only we, Westerners, modern humans, have beliefs so grandiose and unreal that we are literally endangering our own survival and the survival of a good portion of all other species. I cannot escape the notion that is because we know so much of matter and so little of the spirit that is the essence of life.
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