Hi again Brian
Thank you so much for your thoughtful input. I didn’t understand clearly everything you said, and what I have to say here is not directly responsive, but you provoked a lot of thoughts that I really want to express.
I think it is a very good step for all of us born into the civilization to acknowledge fully that of course we are complicit in the ongoing destruction, and have been all day every day since birth—not because we ever intended it, but because, all unawares, we were relentlessly trained into a physical dependency on the ways of the civilization, along with the very narrowed-down mental focus that goes with it. Only after years of such conditioning do some of us gradually become aware of how deep is the shit we are in, along with the whole rest of the world. Then we face the very serious dilemma of how to disentangle ourselves from our own daily contribution to the destruction.
What I want to say more than anything here is, I have come to believe that the absolutely only way to know what to do is to ASK. Ask the world—this world that we have been conditioned to believe is a collection of objects and forces without consciousness except for that which is contained within ourselves and a few other more or less sentient beings kind of inserted into the “environment”. We have to get it that that is not true! Of course, we have so thoroughly convinced ourselves of the lie that it is really hard to connect, personally, with the truth that the world all around us is alive and fully conscious. But there is no substitute for that connection. Though we may want very much to be helpful to the world instead of harmful, we cannot possibly figure out how to do that from within the ingrown consciousness that has been our training. Speaking for myself, I now feel sure that the reason I never succeeded to any great extent in my various attempts to live more in line with the world was because this one element was missing: asking. Without asking and listening, moment by moment, we have no way of knowing if our actions might be leading to more harm than good.
I believe that the work of healing is already in progress, (a very obvious example, which I turn to again and again, is the weeds in a city), and our job as civilized humans is not to take charge, but to join in. The big challenge is how to get to a place connected enough to be able to do that, and I agree with Brian that each of us will find the ways that work best for our own self.
This is my favorite of the approaches you mentioned. It is so direct, and quite effective—feeling these different shapes of living matter in all my interactions with them, trying to sense the reciprocity, yielding to their weight and balance and texture.
What is working best for me at this time is a huge change in my way of seeing the things that are supposedly “man made”. I am getting it that they are the flesh of the Earth—horribly distorted, to be sure, but nevertheless undeniably of the Earth. The civilization has nothing of its own; all it can do is distort the substance of the real world. Many of us already feel, viscerally, the horror of the clearcutting, mining, and drilling, but I for one have only recently come to the emotional knowing that that is where these things all come from. They are the flesh of the Earth–alive, conscious, and hurting. When I make the connection at gut level with my own pain as to how distorted and unhealthy I have become because of the very same sickness that has so grotesquely deformed them, then I can feel their wild origins resonating with my own, so that a little more each day I am feeling a kinship and affection for these things close around me, knowing that we are all in this together, and together we can get well. Is this along the lines of what you meant, Brian, in your 2017 post, about “the emancipation of the born from its human-shaped bondage”?
None of this means that I suddenly know how to behave very differently—there is a lot of awkwardness in these newly-acknowledged very intimate relationships. But now I can at least begin to explore this living world, as I would have begun doing long ago if I had grown up in a healthy culture, and begin to find clues as to how to change.
I hope more people here will chime in on this. Whether you agree or disagree with anything I have said, what is your own take on this subject? I believe the feeling that John Walks UK describes in “I Just can’t shake this feeling” is truly the Earth getting through to us despite our conditioning, and if we deliberately turn our attention to that voice, in any way we can, we will gradually find our way to becoming a healthy part of the whole. And it seems to me that the animistic way of being in the world is the key. Maybe many of us have resigned ourselves to the belief that only people who grew up within a healthy indigenous community can ever be in the world that way. But I no longer believe that. It is harder for us to connect with it, but nevertheless it is our birthright.
Many thanks for any contributions on this.