MOST PRUDENT ACTION (Part 2)

Earth’s main problems are not industrialization, ozone depletion, over-population, or resource depletion. Earth’s main problem is the lack of mutual understanding and mutual agreement in the anthrosphere about how to proceed with those problems. We cannot rein in industry if we cannot reach mutual understanding and mutual agreement based on a world centric moral perspective concerning the global commons. And we reach that world centric moral perspective through a difficult and laborious process of interior growth and transcendence. In short, global problems demand global consciousness, and global consciousness is the product of five or six major interior stages of development. Simply processing a global map won’t do it. A system’s map will not do it. An ecologic map will not do it. Interior growth and transcendence, on the other hand, will do it.

It follows –yes? — that the ecocrisis is in large measure the result of the continued dissociation of the Big Three. We cannot align nature and culture and consciousness; we cannot align nature and morals and mind. We are altogether fragmented in this modernity gone slightly mad. The worship of Earth is a product, and an action, of industrialization, and this worship of Earth perpetuates the empirical-industrial paradigm. It perpetuates the collapse of the cosmos. One of the primary roadblocks to an integral vision that would unite the best of ancient wisdom with the best of modernity is the embrace of the purely Descended world, the world of flatland. And this modern Descended grid is destroying Earth, because it guts the interior dimensions where mutual accord and intersubjective wisdom can actually be found. The religion of Earth is simply one of the ways the modern Descended grid reproduces itself. We might say, the cunning of the Descended grid. The modern Descended grid is destroying Earth, and the religion of Earth is simply one of its basic strategies.The essential point is that the Descended grid actually destroys each of the Big Three — destroys mind and culture and nature — because it perpetuates their dissociation, their lack of integration, so that the torn fragments continue to bleed to death. Not just Earth or nature, but also consciousness and culture are all devastated by their fragmentation and reduction.

Yet it is the integration of the Big Three, and not the privileging of any one domain, that is our salvation, if such indeed exists. It is an integral vision that holds our promise. But as long as we continue to live within the Descended grid of flatland, then this integration is effectively prevented. The back to nature solution, is thus no solution at all, but merely the perpetuation of the Descended grid, the industrial grid, and are definitely anti-transcendence.

Descenders generally believe that transcendence or Ascent of any form is evil, and they think that transcendence destroys Earth. Those who make this claim, I believe, are confusing the mythic form of dissociative “transcendence” (which indeed is earth-denying) with transcendence in general, which is simply the form of interior development and evolution of consciousness — which is the actual path of earth-saving! But once that confusion is made, then these critics do tend to become very vocal about this. Transcendence ruins Earth! Transcendence is the beginning of all evil.

What both the Ascenders and Descenders have in common is this purely industrial ontology as an ultimate reference point, and both are fundamentally oriented to flatland, to the world of empirical, sensory, objective nature, which is the “really real” world. One wants to stand back from nature and map it in a disinterested, rational, calculating, scientific fashion, wheras the other wants to get closer to nature with feelings and sympathetic communion.

Of course, individuals can always adopt an integral view for themselves. But the hope is that one would have some sort of support for this holistic and integral vision from the culture at large, some sort of widespread “post-flatland” rebellion.

To be sure, of course, there is plenty of altruism in nature, but only as an unconscious display of functional fit and genetic inclusion. A consciously worldcentric moral stance is found only in humans, and, as a matter of fact, this worldcentric stance is reached only by a relatively small number of highly developed humans.

To reach this higher and relatively rare stance of universal care, I can see I must rise above my natural biocentric impulses (sex and survival), my egocentric wishes, and my ethnocentric proclivities — and stand instead as a relatively worldcentric locus of moral awareness that insists on universal compassion. And that freedom from shallower engagements will be exhilarating, because it will have plugged me into a higher or deeper or truer self.

It is only by rising above my egocentric impulses, and my natural desires, and my conformist or ethnocentric perspectives — it is only by rising above these shallower stances, only by taking a deeper or higher perspective, a worldcentric perspective, that I will find my own highest aspirations and my own truest self.

It is only then that I become capable of universal care and universal compassion, which is a freedom from the shallowness of these lesser engagements. It is only Ascending, only by transcending these lower orders, that I rise above these baser instincts and find a more universal and tolerant stance. If I reduce reality to the world of mononature, I lose all of that!

But then how do I integrate mind and nature? How do I not only transcend but also include nature? What about this split between mind and nature? The split between Ego and Eco? Not just their differentiation but their dissociation? Because this split is also a split within my own being – my mind and my body are split as well. Mind is split from external nature and from internal nature. And what about that? Is the price of morality dissociation?

The startling fact then becomes clear, ecological wisdom does not consist in understanding how to live in accord with nature; it consists in understanding how to get humans to agree on how to live in accord with nature.

To be continued……

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