Written with Meredith Hall
To be alienated from Nature is to be alienated from the Self, both the individual self and the universal Self manifesting as the world. As the Hindu Upanishads sing:
It is above, it is below
It is, indeed, this entire world
And when one knows this,
One knows bliss in the
Self and in all worlds are free.
"It is the entire world," simply means you within everything else and everything else within you. Everything in the world speaks to the Self--your self and the universal Self. This is why Nature means birds, bees and coconut trees as well as Essence. Nature IS the Self.
Today natural Nature has been overtaken by a cancerous growth of highways, deforestation of wild lands, and the pollution of waters, land and air. This is the result of corporations and individuals seeking a model of never-ending growth. To these people, there are no limits to profit or growth. It is interesting to note that the ultimate definition of cancer is growth without limits. Thus, where there is a cancerous growth in the body, it devours tissue to the point that its host organism dies. The cancerous growth is further revealed to be healthy cells whose growth has gone crazy. In other words, our corporate and civilized behaviors are the result of normal cells, i.e., human beings, who have taken their technologies and desire to conquer the world to the point of destroying the planet.
All of this is about attitude. As much as the Earth is polluted, then so are our minds. Our attitude is polluted by a false paradigm that our true Nature won't support, leaving us blind to our own destructiveness. In essence, we have created a desert of shopping malls, big box stores, highways, empty lots void of life and sky scrapers due to an attitude of growth-without-end. And, if someone comes along and says, "we need to limit growth," the result is often an admonishment based on the belief that saying we should limit growth is the worst of all evils. In other words, if you aren't cancerous like us, you must be the most pitiful being walking on this planet.
God forbid! Cancerous cells simply do not want anybody to get in the way of their feeding frenzy, which is the result of their own desertification. They have deserted the whole of the body and , thus, paradoxically their own well-being. This self desertification then causes the desertification of the host body. Thus, when we gaze upon the Earth and the monoculture cropping of billions of acres of land, and the miles of standardized houses infesting areas that used to support living forests, we are looking upon areas in which we have supported the growth of deserts. Indeed, even when we look upon (and perhaps admire) expanses of green lawn, we are looking only at virtual green supported by fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides that are destroying the soil. Lawns are a mirage covering a desert! And, that desertification of the land mirrors the desertification of our mind that is bent upon profits and growth without limit.
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