Not Like the Animals...rats!

We are the only species - that starts off a sentence like this.  That is to say, we are fond of distinguishing ourselves apart from the other animals and everything else that is "savage" and natural ( -except when we buy 'natural ingredients' in our food and soap, etc.). We are advanced and sophisticated, so thinking we are apart confirms in our minds that we are God's chosen.  If the God that created everything in such beautiful harmony would then want to impose an outside landlord over it,  the concept of stewardship isn't going to ever be realized.  It's like the absentee owner who is only interested in getting the rent on time without a care for the property.

Why are we compelled to make ourselves seem so special to us?  It's the basis for our survival instinct, the defining image we project into our story, the character of the starring role we've written.  We must be special if we can make choices over the existence of everything else.  Just like God, except that the results of God's choices seem to last a lot longer. So far, the results of our choices are lining up to point in an unsustainable direction.  The screenplay we are writing is for a short run production.

So, we're not quite like God and we've declared we are no way like those dirty, savage animals.  That leaves us caught in the middle - truly apart.  This is a perfect image of falling out of Grace.  One can pursue in a quest the Grail of recaptured paradise, but it's certainly a futile journey, an ever-receding mirage.  We can't achieve God status (not here in the physical sense) and we can't return the "gift" of the knowledge of good and evil, that is, we couldn't be like the animals, even if we wanted to.

Speaking of gifts, evolution seems to have given us something of a Trojan Horse for a victor's trophy.  We developed superior weapons, and other means for winning the survival of the fittest contest, and the prize (of getting to procreate willy nilly) came with an unremovable tag on the package: The Ego.  The Ego makes everything human possible, and regrettable.  Greater minds have nailed down its definition, but in a nutshell, it is an abstract image created in our minds to play an intermediary, narrating role.  It's primary impact, if not it's most important function, seems to be deception.

A deep-thinking author by the name of Tai Carmen puts it this way,

"Metaphysically speaking, the Ego is a false construct of the mind that is not rooted in ultimate being. It is self-centric and lacking a natural sense of connectivity. In the living moment of the present, the Ego holds no power. Because the Ego itself  is imaginary and unreal, it can only hold dominion in the imagined and unreal moments of the past and future."

The reason we seven billion find ourselves in a planetary pickle is that we can't focus for very long on the present moment, in any unvarnished sense, without soon drifting forward or backward in imagined time to write and re-write some sort of narrative.  We're completely occupied with the business of self-deception and the result of that practice is that we will pretty soon be 'voting ourselves off the island', as it were.

At this point, we might wonder, would we see any sort of promise in giving ourselves over to doing things differently, if we could?  That is, through the practice of meditation, where we stop the incessant and inane script writing and simply behold our being, can we actually see an impact around us for the better?   Well, to enter meditation with a goal like that won't work, because that's a kind of script writing itself.  That would be to set up experiment in cause and effect, and it couldn't be conducted in the "Ego vacuum" of meditation. (We would have a conflict of interest, being too strongly invested in one outcome over the other.)  Secondly, it's never been tried by enough people to know either way, so like other unknowable things, it's hard to say.

Still, it might work.  We tend to try other solutions that completely illogical.  It seems we think having more than one or two children is a good idea.  We try burning garbage rather than burying it, but we haven't really tried reducing garbage.  We think overconsumption of biofuels will somehow be better than overconsumption of fossil fuels. Mass practice of meditation is no crazier than any of these.

I could advise we all take up meditation, but I would have to first have the practice rock solid for myself.  Besides, I don't think others' advice is too often effective, or followed, much less appreciated.  Almost everything of significance in one's life seems to come about through self-discovery.  That includes discovering love, small natural wonders, or the writings or teachings of spiritual leaders.  If they, who are credible, were in the business of giving advice, they would suggest we all take up meditation.

Meanwhile I would suggest you click on the following link to more of Tai Carmen's ideas:
http://taicarmen.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/the-world-in-a-grain-of-sand/

Abel - the first "Good Shepherd"

I tried staying away from writing for a month and I just about made it:

Having a Nice Day™?  That certainly seems to be the sincere wish of just about every convenience store clerk I’ve ever met.  Well, not wishing to go against their wishes, I’d say if you are having a Nice Day, you should probably skip reading this.  Seriously, these ideas (like a few of the more recent posts) are beyond just politics - pretty far beyond, actually.  I suspect this general subject is not really ready for prime time, but (to change metaphors) dancing around on thin ice is one of my specialties.


So, with that cautionary note, venture forth if you are strong or already bummed out for the day:

It’s not a day brightener to consider that our species, although increasing in number, is actually in decline in several key aspects.  We are realistically looking at, and at some point should give strategic consideration for, the end game for our kind.  But this really doesn’t have to spoil your day.  Everything’s fine, keep shopping.  We may not be able to change the outcome much but we have time to think this through.

We evolved, for better and worse, to possess a brain that outfoxed itself and we seriously botched the management of all our affairs related to species survival.  We sense this, and we try different solutions, but they seem to just create new problems.  (e.g. biofuels, cap and trade, carbon credits, etc.) We have exploited and overused the resources we depend on, spoiled the environment with waste of all kinds, and thoughtlessly mistreated members of other species, as well as our own.  We’ve been doing all this for several thousand years and the consequences are now showing up more frequently and urgently than ever before.

We can hang our heads in shame, but that's not an answer.  Also, while we are complicit in a crime so vast it can’t be fully appreciated, we can reasonably argue that there could not have been any other possible outcome to our evolution- but that still doesn't justify apathy.

At some point, we were simply tired of being eaten by saber toothed tigers, and we also wanted to more efficiently kill woolly mammoths.  And, we also wanted to kill those bad guys in the cave next door before they kill us, and do it from a safe distance.  Because we wanted these things, we made it happen with sharp sticks and rocks instead of clubs and fists.  In fairly short order, we had stealthy nuclear weapons and here we are.

In fact, humans evolved to be self-limiting.  (If, by the way, you believe in Intelligent Design, can you point out which is the intelligent part? ) Darwin pegged the motivation - survival of the fittest, period.  The fittest is us, but our fitness didn’t include the ability to project the distant future that holds the logical consequences of our “advanced” survival behaviors.  The distant future only stays distant for so long, and then it’s imminent.  Seven billion and counting....

. . . . .

I'd credit someone for the following if I knew the source(s):

There is an ironic take on particular aspects of the story of Jesus, the Savior, that illustrates some anthropological parallels for the development of man:  Because Jesus had such an uncomfortable message, and because he consistently delivered in the faces of the wrong people, he was persecuted and put to death.  But by killing him and silencing his message, we cut off our path to salvation.  (That was the path where we actually had to change our behavior to be like his.)  Luckily for us, there's the other path to salvation.  In his encore as the Holy Spirit, he offers a kind of a plan B route.  This route assumes no change is going to happen, so we can still find grace by simply praying for forgiveness.


(There's a joke going 'round the internet about this:  "I prayed to God to give me a bicycle, but then I remembered He doesn't work that way.  So, I stole a bicycle and prayed for forgiveness.")

In a symbolic sense in this metaphor, Jesus is the stand-in for our actual savior.  Our real savior is not an individual, but an archetype or at least a generic representative of a sort.  That is the prototypical "indigenous" human, of late Stone Age vintage, from any given inhabited region.  


In the Old Testament, Abel is a symbolic, Biblical precedent of this: one living in grace.  He stands for the kind of heathen that we despised and persecuted, not in the dramatic single event, or over the course of a week or so, but over millennia.  Civilized and settled man (descended from the surviving brother, Cain) is largely self-defined by his distinctions from, and his presumed superiority over, the hunter-gatherers.  It turns out they had the grace-filled, sustainable lifestyle about right, except for the fittest for survival part.

(In a double ironic twist, it is believed by some researchers that a period of climate change about ten thousand years ago may have forced hunter-gatherers to take up farming in the first place.  Eventually, they evolved to climb up on diesel-gulping combines to harvest the GMO corn that we enjoy today in our breakfast cereal, while we read the newspaper stories about the current climate change.)

We’ve systematically purged our planet from practitioners of a way of life that was our means of salvation.  We cut off our path back to an actually sustainable way of being.  Why?  The same reason they killed Jesus, and the same reason Cain killed Abel:  Those responsible (which could have included any one of us) didn’t want to be reminded of the way they had fallen from grace.  In our case, we didn’t want the natives to remind us of our own fall from grace, our lives of excessive greed and fear.  Eliminating those still living in grace was and still is the easiest way to assuage our guilt.  Kill the last of them and then swing by the mall for the clearance sale.

So, where does this all leave us, besides screwed?  It leaves us to finally and fully embrace reality on an individual basis.  Reality is that we should love one another, just as Cain should have loved his brother.  He was, and we are, our brother’s keeper.  At this point, love for one another is about all we have left, and in truth, that’s all that ever was important.  Jesus died trying to point that out.

(Hiatus)

I'll take a break for the month of October from any new posts.  There are sheep still out in the pasture, wondering which way to go to get back to the barn, but they'll have to wonder as they wander for a while until I get back in the shepherding business. I'm working on a couple of ideas but the call of autumn is too insistent and it overwhelms all non-practical thinking.  It beckons all able-bodied folks to get their affairs in order and gird their loins for the interminable, frozen siege.  I'll be only too eager to resume writing as I contemplate the icicle-refracted morning light.