CAN "OVERCOMING"
THE
SEPARATE-SELF-SENSE
SOLVE THE GLOBAL ECOLOGICAL CRISIS?
The Spiritual Realist on the other hand, maintain that the
problem is in human consciousness as anthropocentrism and that the Separative-Human-Ego, which has developed itself in the West since the advent of
Judeo-Hellenic-Christian times, is in itself a fundamental error. This
anti-wholistic ego, being the source of the problem, must be overcome if we are
to establish a right and appropriate relationship with the rest of the
biosphere.
The resource “ecologist” is incapable of thinking
ecologically, which means to think the whole, precisely because the fragmented
ego is itself a nexus of self-illusions. The fact that nation states and
transnational corporations embrace “resource ecology”, at least in theory,
should in itself be enough to make environmentally concerned citizens
suspicious.
In the Awareness State “I am without attributes” the
realization is made that the self is not an isolated entity with a fixed and
continuative content, but rather that the self is the living space in which all
other life forms, beings, entities and also thoughts, feelings and impulses make
their appearance. To this extent, what we, in our culture-bound way conceive of
as ego-identity, turns out to be nothing, for its true nature is that it is
void.
But this void, or no-thing, is not an unreal nothing in the
sense of not being any part of us. It is the openness of the self to life as it
is, without the imposition of predetermined and ego-serving demands, which, in a
word, is the state of compassion.
The state of “I am without attributes’ naturally experiences
at one-ment with the whole of life to which it has become open and is able to
let things and beings be what they actually are. Yet, this
letting-things-and-beings-be is not a state of detachment, isolation or
passivity because the very openness to things and beings elicits the response of
the self to the reality of wholeness, which is a state of life and activity
which has for its “necessity” all that is in the moment or now.
The isolated ego identity is completely incapable of either
imagining or experiencing this state of “I am without attributes” because it is
only a conglomeration of attributes of Karma carried over as self-delusion from
the past. The self realizes that all life arises from the Groundless
Ground/Causeless Cause of all life. Therefore, human life, being an integral
aspect of the whole, is not more important from a survival point of view than
any other aspect of the whole, even though the human self is capable of this
awareness.
It becomes obvious that it is not our role to treat the rest
of life as resource, nor to manage and dominate it. but to let it be
what it is as the natural corollary of letting the self be what it
naturally is. The aphorism “A stone becomes a plant. a plant an animal, an
animal a man, a man an angel” points clearly to this essential unity of humanity
with all life
Presence Ecological politics, is not primarily concerned with
techno-economics as a basis for the development of culture and civilization. The
three essentials of human incarnation, from a bodily point of view, are that the
human being needs food, clothing and housing as a basis for its interactions
with the biosphere and the beings in it. Beyond this basic wealth the human
being needs to belong to a culture which reflects the essential and whole human
being with all of its capacity for compassion, wisdom and freedom. Of course, it
is exactly this natural human culture which is denounced as hopelessly utopian
by the ideology of Technotheism. The fact that so many people hold the
Technotheistic view in a value-defined society reveals the nihilism of the new
world state.
The realization of the spirit in nature on the part of the
mass of humanity belongs to the future and is to be found on and through the
other side of the technological paradigm
When everything that can be known by technological thinking and means is known
as a Theory of Everything T.O.E., the enigma of Nature
will remain to force a fully conscious encounter with the spirit in Nature. In
other words, when thinking humanity directly encounters the limitations of the
mentalist scope of the Fourth Principle, the Spiritual Reality of life will well
up as a new horizon of perception and being. The danger inherent in this
unfolding of World destiny is that humanity will fall into the illusion that the
coming “Theory of Everything”, or T.O.E.,
actually does “explain’ the meaning of life and will fall into a condition of
forgetfulness about the spirit as actual experience. This is already the
condition of the "last man".
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