MOST PRUDENT ACTION (Part 4)

“We’re all strands in the great web.”

But we are exactly not strands in the web. We are a nature-mystic experience, not a strand in the web. We are the entire web. We are doing something no mere strand ever does — we are the entire display. To be aware of the whole system shows precisely that we are not merely a strand, which is supposed to be our official stance.

“Explaining” this experience in systems or “web-of-life” terms is a very poor way to interpret it. Ecomasculinists often prefer systems theory terms; ecofeminists generally believe that systems theory is too masculine and abstract, and prefer instead eco-sentimentalism and relationship terms: both are equally grounded in the monochrome world of simple location, the empirical or external world.

But once we’ve committed that flatland reductionism, we start to think that the way to transform the world is to simply get everybody to agree with our monological map, forgetting the six or seven interior stages the mapmaker actually had to go through in order to get to this point where we can agree in the first place.

And like the multicults, we forget all the stages of transcendence that got us to this noble point, and so not only do we bizarrely condemn transcendence itself (the actual path!), we simply collapse all those stages into an incredibly simplistic “one-step” transformation: agree with my holistic Gaia map, and I will be saved. And so, like many of the multicults, some of us folks often become rather belligerent and intolerant, claiming that all the strands in the web are equally important, but despising the strands that disagree with them.

So instead, we need to take into account the interior dimensions — we have to take into account linguistic and cultural backgrounds, methods of interpretation, the many stages of consciousness evolution, the intricate stages of moral development and decentering, the validity claims of truthfulness and sincerity and justness, monarchical degrees of depth, the hierarchy of expanding self-identity and methods of transcendence — all of those are interior dimensions, and none of those items are found on the monological and external World map!

And sadly, for just that reason, we won’t find a decent discussion of the interior stages of development in any books on deep ecology, ecofeminism, or ecophilosophy. But without those factors we’ll never make it to the new World, because we wont know how to get people into the boat and on their way. What we’ll have is a fine goal with no real path.

It’s our choice isn’t it? But without the necessary interior stages of development, and thus sufficient consciousness, a choice never exists, does it?

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