From: "John Michael Greer" <Mezla@hotmail.com>
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 09:58:03 -0800In the same way, I can far too easily imagine, say, the CEO of Occidental Petroleum looking at his company's pipeline plans and saying, "Yes, this will cause thousands of deaths, send tens of thousands into hunger and misery, and destroy a vast swath of ireplaceable rain forest, but hey -- it increases the concentration of capital and thus makes possible the transition to the next stage of human evolution. Sign that contract!" As far as I can see, justifying present cruelty and exploitation on the basis of a hypothetical future good to be gained by it is simply another way of using the end to justify the means.
No, it is not my intent to justify present cruelty or ignorance. I am being with consciousness who seeks to respond intelligently to the fact of my existence. I cannot change the past anymore than I may have. I can only go from now toward tomorrow.
It is important to ask if human suffering can be fathomed, if there is a metaphysical schema which is sufficient to contain it and remain integral. Practiced Christianity allows for an otherworldly Heaven whose sweet balm shall wash away all the suffering. The big problem with focussing upon a Heaven and judgement day is that it gives you leave to trash out the Earth. I agree with you that Teilhard de Chardin's immersion in the Church gave an unacceptable "end" orientation to his concept of evolution, particularly with his "omega point" (Childhood's End, by Aurthur C. Clarke), but it did not prevent him from projecting up to that point a contagious awe for the process that has led to the present, at least to this reader.
Aurobindo Ghose (http://sriaurobindoashram.org) presents a thoroughly reasoned spiritual philosophy which places reincarnation and immortality of individual self as that principle which will alone allow suffering to enter a metaphysical schema, in a significant furthering of the sense of the Bhagavad-Gita --that does not mean it is justifiable in the sense of being ignorable or as an acceptable cost paid for "gee-gaw" progress. It means that such is the only way the universe can remain comprehensively integral to the philosopher's intelligence. Is it not logical that our fascination with science should have left us grossly ignorant of other dimensions of knowing, particularly when we try to base the entirety of that other dimension solely on books written by the hand of man twenty centuries ago? My understanding of Evolution, and I believe Aurobindo's, as a Desire unfolding from within is not the same as a direction which necessitates a goal, for a goal is predesignated while Desire must ever find its Way. This, and the idea of reincarnation, are most foreign and difficult for most westerners to "grok". The only conviction available to we brought up under the regimen of the "rational mind" is the sum of what one must call for lack of a better term "spiritual experience". Unfortunately, one's personal experience of this nature can be only poorly shared with others.
We can look at the world and say "Holy Schmoly, I wound up getting borned on the wrong planet. This is definitely not my place, with all this evil, exploitation, and ignorance obvious as the fingers on my hand." Undoubtedly, much can depend upon one's situation in life. I have been largely free from many of the common sufferings that the individual may know, such as illness, poverty, and drudgery, although I have certainly racked up some strenuous mental phenomena, such as endeavors which kept me from sleeping even a single minute for more than 10 days and nights. I do not maintain that were my condition such as that of a starving African, I would be with the same outlook. We can only be and become from where we find ourself. Some of us have more opportunity and thus responsibility.
My experience convinces me that conscious being, if one takes it in its entirety and its potential, is of a dimension quite beyond anything western scientific man conceives. The entire massing of computers will ever be but trifling tinker toys by comparison. I tell you, that I believe conscious being is capable of trashing out the trillion dollar computer based US war machine in Cheyenne Mountain, of making Jimmy Carter sit in front of a screen and see what he believes to be the end of the world, because conscious being is comprised of the Many, each with a different flame of the same Desire. You will think me a lunatic or a liar, most likely.
Conscious being is sharded by its dependence upon the separating principle of money, and thus prevented from the potential of genuinely cooperative relation with other individuals and the Earth. We are now compelled to ultimately be each for themself, to ignore our dependence upon the planet, because we have not been able to yet transcend that instrument which has so powerfully dominated the recent course of cultural evolution. It is difficult to grasp the magnitude of the change that stands before us.
There is no absolute necessity of a human dieoff, even as there is no absolute necessity for the starvation presently in existence, for soybeans could become the larger part of our diet with a minimal energy input, as "the Farm" in Tennessee has demonstrated. It would appear wise to learn how to reduce our population voluntarily, which could probably be best done by liberating women from the insecurity of existence and its derivative, the bondage of marriage, instead knowing a de facto right to life. Thus, being free to dream a different affective culture I have no doubt that women could be beautifully and wisely creative in this domain essentially theirs. (Green Child, by Herbert Read)
What looks to be most imperiled and headed for dieoff is all the infrastructure in the United States which is based upon cheap private vehicular transportation, not to mention oil based or natural gas heating. Let's be honest, and focus on the marrow of the problem. The car as "the method of transportation" is the stupidest, most indicting creation ever to result from Marx's perception of "Commodity Fetishism", or M-C-M, when you consider all that goes into using it, all that it destroys, what little was gained, and all that will go into abandoning it. But that is hindsight, and would require a different world to have been done any differently.
The question is, when are we going to stop trying to maintain the status quo and start creating an intelligent world? Let's say nobody owns nothin', there's no political boundaries, cars are the chump idea, and money will serve only to allow some order to the process of transition. Now what can you do? Do we start building a public transportation system designed to last as long as it can be engineered for, even if that means PV powered elevated maglev crossing over the Bering straits, combined with such as bicycles, horses, and walking? Do we leave great cities of the age abandoned as deserted monuments, migrate en masse to the south when cold and to the north when hot, harmonize the location of people with farmland so that they are not stupidly upon it, sleep outdoors whenever we can and eat communally? Do we build a computerized dynamic Leontieff input-output global accounting system based upon eMergy, junking every dispensable spawn of this era of commercialism? Do we build over the entire world that which is replicable, and not that which is based upon privilege of disproportionate appropriation of the world's wealth, necessarily backed by arms? Do we cherish the ability to move widely over the Earth and be welcome wherever we go, moneyless, even if ever so humbly, rather than be chained to a mortgage for thirty years? Are our tools at last sufficient so that we can leave behind this tool-making era and the severe concentrations of capital which so influenced that making? A man needs to own nothing but the clothes on his back, and then only when wearing them; everything else he need use. Novel dreams are what we need. Dreams of a Great Change.
I have slept under the starry skies too many nights, and trod the good soil barefooted. The dimensions thus manifested to me, the infinite, the eternal, and the ethereal, have so captured my being that I can only proclaim to be one with the universe, and a dweller upon the Earth forever.
--
A vortex from the future unto the present; centers of spreading change upon
a spherical surface; old wealth is mercifully swallowed to become the new.
Steve Morningthunder
immigration: Next