Talking Mountain
A Collective Vision
Where did we come from? Where are we? Where are we going?
When I am in Nature, especially wilderness, my very essence is fed. I feel happy. I experience beauty, an impeccable creation, continuing evolution and being in the presence of a Sacred and conscious force of energy. To me the Earth in all its bio-diversity is like an art gallery, and Mother Nature is the greatest artist. I see the Earth as a tremendously endowed trust that exists as a Common Wealth, a benefit to itself, and all of its inhabitants. We, human beings, are like all other species, a product of an on-going evolution. We are geological formations, made from the same basic elements that all the other life forms on Earth are made of. The Human Species is just like all of the other species in that we are a part of the design called the cycle of life. We have specific roles to play on the Earth but in a bigger sense, also in the Universe. In the bigger sense I believe our part is to be the witness to evolution, to creation and to provide the consciousness, the awareness, the appreciation, wonder and love for the Creator and Creation, one and the same. As a part of the Earth I believe we can be partners, stewards and co-creators with Mother Nature and the Creator. Our job is to take care of this Earth Creation and insure that all our different parts benefit equitably and receive fair shares from the trust of resources the Creator has provided and continues to generate. Every creature and every human being has certain rights and should get a share of the Earth’s resources, dividends that are produced from the Earth, in a Trust for us all.
Why is it that almost most everything Humans now need to survive comes from Corporations, dominating, competing, and monopolistic structures, and that in order to get what we need we have to buy from them what we need with dollars that we can only get from them? What happened to our symbiotic relationship with Nature? What has happened to our extended families and their “Household Economy.”? What happened to the “Core Economy” where communities produced most of their own goods and provided a social network to care for their own people from birth to death? What has happened to our Common Wealth of old growth forests, animal, plant, and bug species now extinct, and the vast reserves of cheap energy? We humans, have continued to evolve. We have gained our individuality, which corporations have capitalized on, but we have lost, intimacy, something that is precious and necessary for the survival of our species.
What if the next stage of evolution was that as individuals we realized our connection to the whole universe. What would happen if we all united, as the Human Species, in agreement that the Earth is a Sacred Creation, that all beings have specific rights to food, water, air, a home, a community and a village that would give expression to our own creativity and support each individual to have a decent life from birth to death.
At this point in time we all don’t agree where we came from, what our purpose is and what we are to do while we are here. Why were we born in this human body, at this time? Where are we going from here? Whether we realize it or not we are living out of our own tribal creation stories, and thinking ours is the right one. It would be great if everyone knew our common creation story, the Creation story of the Universe, and that the Human consciousness is an intentional product of that Creation. Through science and inner reflection, we are discovering who we are and, the origins, the history and the laws that govern our evolving universe.
“Nothing can live well,” said Black Elk “except in a manner suited to the way the Power of the World lives and moves to do its work.”
According to the well read and integral thinking Ken Wilber, evolution doesn’t happen to just an individual it happens to entities called“holons.” “Holons are whole and simultaneously a part of some other whole.” Humans are a part of the Holon that evolved as the whole individual, while simultaneously being a part of a family, a community, a species and a functioning part of the Earth. He shows that the way evolution works is: Holons evolve by becoming more complex while they transcend but include their preceding forms. To me this is a great relief. It portends that the future will still include Nature, beauty, and types of interdependent relationships similar to the ones we have with trees. I could not imagine a future where we get our food from some kind of energy transformer, a microwave like box where there is no need for Nature to create anything anymore. Many people don’t realize how related to nature and every other human we really are. Some people seem to believe humans are anomalies that we were placed here on Earth by God 6000 or so years ago, or maybe we came on spaceships from another planet. There is good reliable scientific evidence that human beings evolved here on the earth over the past 2 or 3 million years. There is substantial evidence for evolution, and Wilber points out that the first humans still had many characteristics and were similar to the animals they evolved from. Along with the human Cerebral Cortex, humans have a reptilian brain which is quick to react for our protection, a mammalian brain for nurturing and in the beginning, like the animals we evolved from, instincts to guide them. It is interesting that our lungs have the design of upside down trees. We breathe in what trees breathe out and vice versa. Our circulatory system, our heart, arteries, and capillaries, have a similar design in the oceans, rivers, and streams that the earth uses to move water around itself to keep all its remote parts filled with life. As our human brain evolved along with our ability to communicate to our families and our tribe, our instincts diminished and were replaced with stories, legends, and myths to guide us. During this million year or more period of our evolution we did not have a real individual identity. Life meant being inseparable members of a group, a tribe.
During this tribal period of our evolution one of the most significant developments that occurred was the development of our ability to have intimacy. Intimacy doesn’t just happen. Intimacy is the ability to get one’s needs met through partnership relationships with the other beings one interacts with in their lives. Intimacy happens at many levels. Over time structures were developed that facilitated human’s ability to have intimacy and to resolve conflict with themselves personally, with their families, their communities, their nation, with nature and with Spirit. It was through everyone’s access to the common wealth of Mother Earth and the Tribal Cultures that humans were able to create the structures that supported humans to develop and have intimacy. It was in the tribe, and at the village level of living where human communities evolved a way of living that was both sustainable and embodied partnerships with nature while each member of the tribe’s personal development of intimacy was supported as they aged from childhood to elder hood.
A very important point in human evolution was when our brains developed a dominant side. It seems pretty clear that most humans living in the Tribal cultures were right brain dominant because it was the cultures of Partnership that developed first. At some point, maybe coinciding with the development of individuality, which has only been in process over the past 10,000 or so years was the development of large numbers of left brain dominant individuals. During the last ice age that occurred the Human cultures were torn apart. Some cultures ended up living in climates that produced an abundance of the Earth’s resources while others lived-in areas where the resources were scarce. When one studies the different traits characteristic of right-brain dominant people compared to left-brain dominate people the different traits seem to correlate to the cultural paradigms which may have resulted from these very different climates. Two main cultures developed. The Left-Brain dominant culture came from the environments of scarcity. They became known as the Dominating Cultures and their core beliefs were: 1) Neither the Earth nor its Creator could be trusted to provide food for the people. 2) Since you couldn’t depend on the Earth for a regular supply of food, a dependence on agriculture and human efforts was better than relying on Mother Nature. 3) Only a few could be great. 4) The way to develop and become great was through domination and competition. And 5) Humans really are the ones who have the power of deciding who lives and dies, not the creator. 6) Human law is above natural law. If there really are natural laws, humans are exempt from them. 7) One could not be a free human being anymore, one had to become a part of the heirarchy, a cog in the machine, to grow food, to make war, to serve the royalty. One had to become a warrior, a cook, a sword maker, a slave, a farmer, a lawyer, a prostitute and so on. Left-brain dominant individuals generally have more ability to: process information verbally, understand abstract systems, including money. They respect power, authority, and power over. They have no respect for life, but they are afraid of pain and dying. They have no attachment to place or the environment, when resources are used up they move on. They would be considered takers. They have no sense of rhythm. When Nature rages around them they stay put to protect their assets and their personal castle.
The Right-Brain dominant culture, came from environments of abundance, which was what life was like in Africa where human life began. Their core beliefs were: 1) the tribe was a partner with the earth and the Creator. As hunters, gatherers and herders they could rely on the Earth’s and the Creator’s bounty. 2) Even though there was abundance in the universe, it was the Creator that decided who would live or die. Starvation happened. 3) This along with the belief that it was the creator who gave the tribe their land to live on, helped maintain a small balanced population on the Earth up until the dominant cultures began their move to take over other’s lands. 4) They believed that each member of the tribe could be great, which would then make the tribe more successful. Right brain dominant individuals had more ability to: Workl with their hands, process information visually, olfactorally through experience. They would feel connected to the land and were aware that if they care for it, hold it sacred, the environment feeds them and takes care of them in many ways. They would improve the land for themselves and consider their impact on future generations. When they got a message from Nature that says move, they would go, quickly. They feel rhythm and look for harmony. They see the Earth as Sacred and feel a natural respect for every thing. They lived communally and traded time and bartered for what they needed. The last of great Partnership Cultures in Europe was on the Island of Crete, the Minoan Culture. Through the study of archeology and anthropology, no fortifications, no weapons or drawings of weapons were found there and the gravesites were all on an equal standing with each other. No extravagant sites were found. The Minoan Culture was destroyed by the invading hordes from the north that used metal weapons and horses for making war. The Minoan Culture just seemed to open their doors to them in the same way the Indian cultures of North and South America were destroyed when they offered friendship and partnership to the dominating cultures of the Spanish and the English.
It seems to me that at this time we are near to or at the peak of the evolution of individuality. We obviously got here through the Dominating paradigm. Dominating Cultures needed to have full time standing armies. In order to finance an army there had to be taxes. In order to control people and have taxes private ownership had to exist and people had to become dependant on the ruling power. Communal lands had to be divided up, and all independent tribes had to be conquered and owned by the great kings, and ruled by their lords. To date, most of the earth has been divided up into individual parts, the land into lots and every being dissected into its individual parts. It became important to have Science for the study of all the individual parts, to learn how to control and profit from them. One of the problems this dominant paradigm didn’t anticipate was that Humans aren’t exempt from the Natural Laws. The Law that says, for every action there is a reaction, translated is: As you sow so shall you reap. In domination and competition there have to be winners and losers. There is an effect on having losers in a community and another effect from having to have losers. The biggest losers are the disenfranchised, the indigenous cultures, women, children, our elders, bio-diversity, and the Earth itself. History has shown us over and over how domination as a paradigm has always in the end destroyed the environment, the very environment that gave these Cultures their ability to survive in their own region. If we allow the dominant paradigm to continue things will get a lot worse for the environment and for the individual.
The period in time in the history of the universe we now live in, is called the Cenozoic Era. As a result of the dominant culture’s core belief in domination and competition, we have changed the chemical make up of the earth and caused the largest demise of the earth’s species since the extinction of the dinosaurs and the end of the previous Era. We are causing the end of the Cenozoic Era. Through our practices of clear cutting forests and our use of hydrocarbon fuels we have brought about global warming. We are just beginning to understand the Carbon Cycle and Carbon Sinks and by increasing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to a high level, it turns out, is a trigger for the earth to begin a new ice age. Ice ages are a cycle the earth has used over and over again for healing itself and for rebuilding its fertility. Individuals who are locked into the dominating culture are still in denial of these consequences and do not even see their own culture’s demise. They desperately believe in technology’s ability to save them and if necessary provide them with another planet they can fly off to if this one doesn’t work any more.
In essence, at this time all individuals whether right-brain or left-brain, have been stuck in their perspectives and in their respective cultures. Neither culture can have all the answers, but together they could create new possibilities. Unfortunately we haven’t yet completely evolved to having a balanced brain. We also haven’t come to an important and necessary understanding at the Species level yet. We are still living out of our separate tribal heritages. According to Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme humanity needs to have a global, unifying creation story. Brian & Thomas put together, the Earth’s creation story as a part of “the history of the universe” in their book “The Universe Story”. This new creation story provides evidence that before “the Big Bang” there was a Creative Consciousness that in those first split seconds put in place all the laws of the universe and that as a the Earth, life forms as we know them, ourselves individually and as a species, were a predictable result, an intention of creation and that we, the human species, has an important part to play in this creation.
Why aren’t we living in harmony with each other and with the universe then? Most of us never realized how much our families of origin have influence over our whole lives. What we think and how we act we mainly got from the family patterns, or our reaction to them, that we were exposed to as we grew up. It wasn’t until the 1960’s that the church and the family, which had been considered sacred, were openly talked about and questioned. People were saying openly, “nothing is sacred.” Through this opening we began to understand the abuse and the meaningless rituals that had been hiding behind closed doors. In 1973, the U.S. had its first oil shortage, just after the historical peak of U.S. oil production in 1970. We were in a meaningless war and our dominating culture was being questioned to its roots. Many began to see that nature’s resources were being mismanaged, stolen from future generations and misappropriated by powerful individuals and corporations of the Dominating Culture. Many have come to an understanding that we are mismanaging the carbon sink that the earth has developed over millions of years to remove excess carbon from the environment, so that we could have cheap sources of energy.
Cheap energy, on the most selfish level, helps satisfy our addictions, addictions many of us don’t even realize we have because we are doing what everyone around us is doing, following our cultural norms. What happened to us? In studying indigenous cultures of the world, anthropologists discovered that the Partnership Cultures that existed prior to their interaction with the Dominating Cultures had no evidence of addictive behaviors, and that every individual in the tribe felt needed, valued and appreciated. No other animal appears to have this problem. Where did these addictive behaviors come from? There is, it turns out, a source of addiction. Addiction comes from not learning how to be intimate, during childhood, in our culture and our family of origin. In the evolution of the Human Species, we exist as a result of the relationships we have with all the other beings, with our world and with Spirit. We are social animals, and as we evolved, we developed feelings, needs, and the words we used to identify and communicate them. Human Beings evolved to have our needs fulfilled through our relationships with all these other beings. Intimacy evolved out of life in the Partnership Cultures. Growing up as a member of the Dominant Culture most individuals lost their ability to identify or name the feelings they are experiencing. They were taught to be afraid of them and do whatever was necessary to suppress them. By growing up in a culture whose core belief is in scarcity, most of us discovered early on that there was not enough to go around and that it is pointless to ask for what you needed. When we don’t communicate what we are feeling and we don’t ask for what we need, we have lost our ability to be Intimate. By this definition the majority of the people of the United States are addicted and we have learned to use consumerism to suppress our feelings and to try to get some sense of satisfaction of our needs. Most of the populations of the world, because of the western world’s influence, are loosing the last remnants of influence from the Partnership Cultures. Remember, it was through our small tribal groups and our close connection to Mother Nature that supported our ability to develop and have intimacy.
We all went to school but what did we learn? Our present school system was developed during the industrial revolution and was designed by members of the Dominant Culture. Schools are designed to teach us to follow orders, to separate the left-brain thinkers from the right-brain thinkers and to create winners and losers and to perpetuate scarcity by keeping children, a substantial source of energy, out of the work force. One of the Dominant Culture’s beliefs has been, that the people of the Partnership Culture are inferior beings, still animals. This belief may well be the main source of prejudice, and ethnic cleansing, we have seen in the world. The Dominant Culture needed a way to socialize children and reward the left-brain dominant children with leadership roles in the culture, while demanding that right-brain children give up their ways and conform to what is “right,” or become one of the losers, a member of the laboring masses. The members of the dominating culture didn’t realize (maybe Hitler did) that by intermixing races there would be no more pure races. Today there aren’t, no matter what social strata families are in, one child could be right- brain dominant, have a hard time in school, be an artist, and have a natural affinity with the Native cultures. While the other child might be left-brain dominant, breeze through school to go on and be a successful member of the dominating culture.
Many right-brain dominant individuals who were born into wealthy families of the Dominant Culture used and shared their family resources to create powerful support groups, a new common wealth, which created, maybe for the first time in the Dominating Culture’s history, a possibility where individuals could be free of addictions, co-dependencies, and the patterns that we had been stuck in for generations. These newly freed individuals began to seek out new families of choice that enabled them to see more of the possibilities of creation, evolution, integrity, intention and co-creation. The division of everything into individual parts was questioned and new theories about complex systems where the whole was found to be greater than the sum of the parts. Many people began to believe that the Whole of existence, life, the Earth and the Universe is Sacred and that as individuals they needed to take a stand to protect this as an important part of who they are. They realized that if we don’t save it while it still exists future generations might never experience the beauty and wonder of creation that we have taken for granted. Being responsible individuals is acting to preserve what is Sacred for the greater good of all life, now and in the future.
These same individuals who have opened themselves to change, are now seen as members of a mass movement, “the silent majority,” “the Cultural Creatives”. There is a new evolution of the Human Species occurring now, and these individuals are a part of it. This evolution is where the individual develops a balance of the right-and the left-brain, the masculine and the feminine, and where the individual sees themselves as a necessary and important part of a greater whole, a member of the Human Species, a spiritual being in a physical body, a part of the universe, one with the Creator, and as a co-creator. We are a part of the Consciously Creative Force that moves and evolves the universe. In the next Era of the Earth, human beings will be called on to take responsibility for the damages that have occurred, to make our major work the healing of ourselves, our ability to be intimate, and the healing and rebalancing of all our earth’s diverse communities and environments. These individuals realize that they share this planet with all the other creatures and that they want to work in partnership with these other species, the planet, and the universe and take on the roles that are offered by the Creator, to the Human Species, to be stewards, caretakers and co-creators.
For many of us who grew up in the American Culture, which was like getting rained on, not a personal thing, we were presented with two things as facts:
1) We are separate individuals, anomalies on this planet, exempt & above the laws of the universe.
This is what I would call an illusion. First, we are Spiritual Beings, holons, inseparable parts of the Earth and the Creation of the Universe. We all affect each other. I can’t speak for you but I can’t fully enjoy what I have when I know there are others who are oppressed and dis-in-franchised and that I have more than my fair share. When we act out of this illusion, it becomes a delusion. We have all been hurt as a result of this delusion as we have become more and more separated from the support networks of family, community, or the tribe. Humans have hurt animals and all other of the earth’s diverse species as we have taken their habitats and made them our own. When individuals are asked what can they do to make the world a better place, many become overwhelmed and feel like victims. They feel and believe that nothing they could do will make a difference, nothing will change. The rich will retain their power and unfairly control the Earth and its resources. This belief helps keep the dominant paradigm in a position of power and control.
2) There is private ownership of everything and any individual entity can have unlimited ownership and absolute rights.
This has allowed for the wholesale robbery by powerful individuals and corporations to extract wealth and resources from the communities who are the rightful stewards of them. Even if those communities received compensation for these resources, many of the resources are irreplaceable. Once a resource is played out the communities there have lost the benefit of it. Through the destruction of unique environments we are forever loosing the genetic codes that existed there and this loss is contributing to one of the gravest mismanagements of our Earth’s trust. The lies and the addictions that corporations and our governments have perpetuated so they could continue their uncontrolled extracting & polluting practices, have led us to this unfortunate place. Corporations have extracted much of the wealth of the world and consolidated it in the hands of a very few. The Dominant Cultures have made us think that private ownership is the highest law. Capitalism equals – I have the right to own as much as I wish to acquire or can buy, with no accountability for what I do with it or how I treat it.
What if we saw ourselves as an inseparable part of the universal life force? That maybe it’s possible for us, as members of the Human Species, to have agreements as a Species that supersede any and all cultures and their governments. If we could come together, we have the power to decide who governs us. If we all understood the Natural Laws and followed them, life would be more equitable. If we translated all the Natural Laws into languages all our children and we could understand, we could incorporate them into our everyday lives.
At this point in time, I know it is possible for us to come together as a Human Species and make agreements. We have in the past. Many of us decided we were not going to be affected by Y2K. The time and the resources were committed to correct the mistakes that were made that potentially could have shut down our economic world. We did not get shut down. I believe we can make agreements, like pollution is not an acceptable consequence of human endeavor. We have the power and abilities to do anything we as a Species decide to do. We could change the direction the world is headed in. We could end war and rebuild the trust and levels of safety every creature would like to feel when humans are in their presence. I look forward to the day when the consequences I experience from living in this world are filled with a feeling of safety not fear, appreciation not hate, good boundaries not avoidance, and trust because the person before me had been a partner not a dominator and a friend not an enemy of the other co-inhabitants they met as they walked down the path of life.
Many people since the 1970’s believe in a “conspiracy theory” that certain powerful individuals, members of the Dominating Culture, are manipulating the system for their own benefit. I believe we have all been trapped in the dominant paradigm, doing what we thought was normal and what we were supposed to do. Because we are Spiritual Beings living in human bodies, we have the ability to shift at any moment, to generate something from nothing, to be a part of the solution.
In conclusion, it appears to me that we successfully accomplished the mission of developing our individuality. Everything has been separated into its smaller parts and we have advanced ourselves to the scientific and technological world we have today. Do you think that when our ancestors began this journey to discover their individuality, they realized the full extent of the cost? Do you think they realized how far our separation from each and every thing in existence would take us? That we would have to give up our humanity, our ability to be Intimate with the other beings in our world and that most of us would become addicted and dependant slaves of the few, “the millionaire/billionaires.” Did we realize that the very Planet that spawned us might reject the Human Species as if we were a virus, a dis-ease? We have lost our ability to depend on each other, on ourselves, on our families, on our communities, on Mother Nature and on our Creator. The current leadership in the Democratic & Republican parties and in many of other countries of the world today support: 1) our dependence on oil, a non-renewable resource. 2) having a global corporate economy which is free of governmental control 3) an economy solely based on the market place which uses abstract money and gains power over the welfare of the individual, the community, Nature and our Planet. 4) that everything we need we have to buy with U.S. dollars from these self-serving monopolies, including the Earth’s natural resources we were given by our Creator in trust.
When I was 22, I had a vision of being a part of a great body, a Partnership where I was not alone. The vision included the human body as an example of all the different individual parts, including the right hand, left hand, liver, the brain, lungs and poop all equally important and necessary. Each contributes their time to the whole and works in partnership for the benefit of the whole. I have kept this vision and have spent the last 34 years learning and developing an understanding of it. The creator didn’t make any mistakes. We don’t need all the middle men. Many of them have only screwed up the perfect design of creation. We humans only need a tiny amount of what we call, Money, to bring to us the resources, not geographically available, that might be needed for our optimal health. In the perfect design of the community, the village and the tribe that humans evolved over millions of years, there is a Core Economy based on friendship, partnership and trading time, that is critical to supplying all the individual parts what they need. There is a saying “ from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” In tribal cultures each individual was taken care as an important part of the whole tribe, from birth to death and the quality of life they shared in, they shared in with all their other tribal partners. The Creator’s perfect creation includes us democratically working together while individually we have the right to access and experience our natural state of being; of being in harmony, having silence, happiness, peace, satisfaction and an awareness that we are not alone but part of the Creator’s conscious creation of love. There are so many people now but I believe we can find a way for people to live again in smaller groups, in villages, in tribes? We can rebuild “The Common Wealth”, the Household and the Core Economies? We can rebuild the structures that evolved during the time we lived in the Partnership Cultures where we discovered developed and maintained an Intimacy with all beings and with our Creator. By identifying ourselves as members of the Human Species, we have access to our Earth and the Universe’s creation story. When we see ourselves as Spiritual Beings intimately connected to every other thing, we could end all the tribal warring that we live with every day. If we could, maybe in rebuilding intimacy we would take responsibility that no one was left out, that everyone had equal access to opportunities to grow and to be their best self. Wouldn’t it feel great to be needed, valued and appreciated again as human beings by all the other beings in Creation.
We as members of the Human Species have the power of Intention and Agreement, and with this power we can do anything a majority of us decide to do, independent of any Dominant cultural Paradigm. We can choose to be partners with all Earth’s inhabitatants, share the abundance, heal ourselves, heal each other and mentor the next generation to become better stewards and co-creators.
Appreciation Beyond Dualism
I am you and you are me and I can love you
You are my brother, my sister, my mother, my father and my lover
And I can love you again and again and again
I have been a jumble and I have gotten into trouble,
But I can love myself again
You are my family and I can come back home again
I honor you and the part of me that is within you
There will always be, I suppose, a background chatter
Telling me what is wrong, but right there too
All around me, is the multiplicity of your beauty
Your song, your daily labor
I want to hear your truth
I honor you and the part of you that is within me
There is nothing wrong; I can’t judge you, really
For I create you and you create me,
I am in your image and you are in mine
I love my true Self again
There are only different steps to the many beats
The beating of our hearts, my heart
Where we are One
References:
http://www.infinityfoundation.com/univ.htm The Universe Story, Jennifer Morgan
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0062508350-0 Thomas Berry The Universe Story, Powell books
http://www.ecozoicstudies.org/, End of the Cenozoic Era
http://www.ecoliteracy.org/ Systems Theory plus more good stuff
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/7187/victor.html Ken Wilber, Holons, evolution
http://www.malakota.com/addixion.html Addiction from Native American, Lakota, view point
http://www.pvbr.com/Issue_1/global.htm Ice ages triggered by high co2
http://www.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/010146tsoc.pdf The Survival of Civilization John D. Hamaker Co2, Ice Ages, over population, preventing ice ages
http://www.experiencefestival.com/Cultural_Creatives Cultural Creatives, 50 million people
http://www.transaction.net/money/community/index.html Complementary Currency Systems, Local Exchange Networks, The Household and The Core Economies
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