20. July 2010 by admin.

Those living the Mystery, carry a spiritual presence with them that has been able to grow because they also honor the Mystery. They have been discreet.

They have not tried to use their spiritual experience for personal gain, and instead have let it grow stronger and more intense within themselves.

You will not find this in idle dabblers or in people who are like tourists in a spiritual universe. However, you will find this in those who have had to face their own thresholds, who have had to cross their own rivers, and who have had to experience and face their own doubts and fears and the wasteful consequences of their mistakes.

These are people who are following something inexplicable that they do not attempt to define or use. Their silence is profound and inviting. They are with the Mystery. And the Mystery is with them. Through them a greater comfort and a greater power can emerge and abide. Someone who is with the Mystery can share the Mystery without words, without conversation, without debate and without self-glorification.

To attune to a spiritual presence you must first recognize a certain fundamental need within yourself. You must feel this need and separate it from other needs that may be more personal or immediate in nature. This basic need represents the yearning to discover your real purpose in life.

Along with the recognition of this need must be the realization that your many attempts to fulfill this need through love, through affluence, through excitement or through stimulation have not satisfied the greater yearning of your heart.

Something greater must be given to you to satisfy this — something that you cannot invent for yourself, something that you cannot piece together from all the various teachings and religious practices that you may encounter in life. Here you realize the limits of even your own independence, for in truth you need life tremendously. You need others tremendously. Realizing this, instead of becoming dependent, you will learn to become interdependent.

As you proceed down your chosen path to spiritual enlightenment you will value things that others do not value, see things that others do not see and know or will not know. What seems obvious to you will not be obvious to them. You will see both their gifts and their disabilities. They may see neither. You will have higher standards for yourself, but these standards will not be shared by other people. You will value a deeper experience of honesty, but you will not be able to communicate this freely with others.

Again and again you will find out the limits that other people set before you and around you. And again and again you will feel other people’s influence. You will feel yourself being pulled into idle conversation. You will feel yourself being pulled back into a state of mind that you have worked hard to emerge out of. You will feel the weight of their concerns and preoccupations, but you will not want to be encumbered by them.

Something has changed at the very core of you in a way that you cannot describe. You feel different. Your values are changing. Your priorities are changing. Your emphasis in life is changing. This steers you away from people who are not experiencing this and towards those who are. It brings you specifically towards certain individuals who share your journey. Some of them will only go a short way with you; others will travel with you for a lifetime.

You’ll find yourself avoiding many people and situations, and in fact, after a time you will look at the general activities of most people with disinterest. Perhaps you will feel lonely and estranged. Congratulations! You are beginning to find your freedom. You are starting to value something that is valuable. If this sets you apart, great. You need this freedom. You need this liberation. You need to be free of the bondage that other people place upon themselves and inadvertently place upon you.

To be continued…….

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10. July 2010 by admin.

Our inhumane treatment of livestock is becoming widespread and more and more barbaric. Six-hundred pound hogs — they were pigs at one time — are raised in two-foot-wide metal cages called gestation crates, in which the poor beasts are unable to turn around or lie down in natural positions, and this way they live for months at a time.

On profit-driven factory farms, veal calves are confined to dark wooden crates so small that they are prevented from lying down or scratching themselves. These creatures feel; they know pain. They suffer pain just as we humans suffer pain. Egg-laying hens are confined to battery cages. Unable to spread their wings, they are reduced to nothing more than an egg-laying machine.

A twenty-three-year-old federal law requires that cattle and hogs to be slaughtered must first be stunned, thereby rendered insensitive to pain, but mounting evidence indicates that this is not always being done, that these animals are sometimes cut, skinned, and scaled while still able to feel pain.

A Texas beef company, with twenty-two citations for cruelty to animals, was found chopping the hooves off live cattle. In another Texas plant with about two dozen violations, federal officials found nine live cattle dangling from an overhead chain.

Secret videos from an Iowa pork plant show hogs squealing and kicking as they are being lowered into the boiling water that will soften their hides, soften the bristles on the hogs and make them easier to skin.

The law clearly requires that these poor creatures be stunned and rendered insensitive to pain before creatures be stunned and rendered insensitive to pain before this process begins. Federal law is being ignored. Animal cruelty abounds. It is sickening and is infuriating.

Barbaric treatment of helpless, defenseless creatures must not be tolerated even if these animals are being raised for food. Such insensitivity is insidious and can spread and is dangerous. Life must be respected and dealt with humanely in a civilized society.

According to laws passed by congress, the Secretary of Agriculture is to report on cases of inhumane animal treatment in regard to livestock production, and to document the response of USDA regulatory agencies. The U.S. Department of Agriculture agencies have the authority and the capability to take action to reduce this disgusting cruelty, knowing that Congress expects them to do even better at enforcing the law, and also in their research for new, humane technologies.

Let us hope that in the future, those enforcing the law will not tolerate unnecessary, abhorrent, and repulsive cruelty to animals any longer.

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29. June 2010 by admin.

Whether we’re looking for someone to date or sizing up a potential rival, our eyes irresistibly lock on to good-looking people.

In a recent study participants, all heterosexual men and women, fixated on highly attractive people within the first half-second of seeing them. Single folks ogled the opposite sex, of course. But those in committed relationships more often eyed beautiful people of the same sex.

So if we’re interested in finding a mate, our attention gets quickly and automatically stuck on attractive members of the opposite sex, and if we’re jealous and worried about our partner cheating on us, attention gets quickly and automatically stuck on attractive people of our own sex because they are our competitors.

But this evolutionary trick is not without potential romantic peril. Even some people in committed relationships had trouble tearing their eyes away from attractive members of the opposite sex. On the other hand, fixating on attractive people of the same sex as rivals could contribute to feelings of insecurity.

Men prone to jealousy keep a close eye on attractive potential rivals, because when it came to concerns about infidelity, men are very attentive to highly attractive guys because presumably their wives or girlfriends may be too.

The Florida State researchers flashed pictures of attractive men and women and average-looking men and women in front of participants and measured the time it took to shift their attention away from the image. Surprisingly there was little difference between the sexes, and women paid just as much attention to men as men did to women.

It seems that evolution has primed our brains to subconsciously latch on to signs of physical attractiveness in others, both to find a mate and to guard him or her from potential competitors.

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19. June 2010 by admin.

“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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11. June 2010 by admin.

So it’s true that some people today eulogize the primal tribal societies because of their “ecological wisdom” or their reverence for nature” or their “no aggressive ways.” But the evidence does not support any of those views in a sweeping and general fashion. Myself, I eulogize the primal tribal societies for entirely different reasons: We are all sons and daughters of tribes. The primal tribes are literally our roots, our foundations, the basis of all that was to follow, the structure upon which all subsequent human evolution would be built, the crucial ground floor upon which so much history would have to rest.

The Ecomasculinists (deep ecologists) are particularly fond of the period of the foraging tribes, the pre-agriculture hunting and gathering societies, because they were ecologically sound. Some primal societies were ecologically sound , and some definitely were not. Some tribes practiced cut and slash and burn, and some were responsible for the extinction of numerous species, so a “sacred” outlook toward nature did not in any way guarantee an ecologically sound culture. Men and women, everywhere and at all times, have despoiled the environment, mostly out of simple ignorance. Even the highly revered Mayan culture disappeared largely through depleting the surrounding rain forests. Modernity’s ignorance about the environment is much more serious, simply because modernity has many more powerful means to destroy the environment. Tribal ignorance, on the other hand, was usually milder; but ignorance is ignorance, and is certainly nothing to emulate. The lack of means in foraging societies does not simply equate with the presence of wisdom.

Today’s existent tribes, and today’s nations, and today’s cultures, and today’s accomplishments — all would trace their lineage in an unbroken fashion to the primal tribal whole/parts upon which a human family tree was about to be built. And looking back on our ancestors in that light, I am struck with awe and admiration for the astonishing creativity — the original breakthrough creativity — that allowed humans to rise above a given nature and begin building a psyche, the very process of which would bring Heaven down to earth and exalt the Earth to Heaven, the very process of which would eventually bind all peoples of the world together in, if you will, one global tribe.

But in order for that to occur, the original, primal tribes had to find a way to transcend their isolated tribal kinship lineages: they had to find a way to go trans-tribal, and agriculture, not hunting, provided the means for this new transcendence.

I don’t eulogize either foraging or horticultural because, well, evolution keeps moving, yes? Who are we to point out to one period and say everything past that period was a colossal error, a heinous crime? According to whom, exactly? If we really are in the hands of the Great Spirit or the Great Mother, do we really think She doesn’t know what She’s doing? Tell you the truth, that seems like arrogance to me, especially when we’re three or four major technological epochs down the line, and it’s doubtful evolution will run backward for us.

The dialectic of progress, that every stage of evolution eventually runs into its own inherent limitations, acts as triggers for the self-transcending drive. These inherent limitations create chaos, and the system either breaks down (self-dissolution) or escapes this chaos by evolving to a higher degree of order (self-transcendence) — so called order out of chaos. This new and higher order escapes the limitations of its predecessor, but then introduces its own limitations and problems that cannot be solved on its own level.

There is a price to be paid for every evolutionary step forward, and our epoch will pass too. No epoch is finally privileged. We are all tomorrow’s food. The process continues. And Spirit is found in the process itself, not in any particular epoch or time or place.

It is modern science, and modern science alone — the ecological sciences and systems sciences, for example — that can directly show us how and why our actions are corroding life itself. If the primal tribes knew that by cut and burn they would ruin their habitat and endanger their own lives — if they actually knew that with a scientific certainty — then they would at least have thought about it a little more carefully before they began their bio-destruction. If the Mayans knew that in killing the rain forests they were killing themselves, they would have stopped immediately, or at least paused considerably. Bur ignorance is ignorance; whether innocent or greedy, sacred or profane, ignorance destroys the biosphere.

However, now the means have changed. Ignorance backed by primal or tribal technology is capable of inflicting limited damage. You can only do so much damage to life with a bow and arrow. An atomic bomb is something else. The same ignorance backed by industry is capable of killing the entire world. So we have to separate those two issues — the ignorance and the means of inflicting that ignorance — because with modernity and science we have for the first time in history, a way to overcome our ignorance, at precisely the same time that we have created the means to make this ignorance absolutely genocidal on a global scale.

And so if the entire internal dimension is ignored and devalued — if we ignore interiors and just rivet our eyes on an exterior “global” map of the world or systems nature — we will ignore the actual path of getting people to that global or world centric stance. We will have a goal with no path. And we will have a map that denies and condemns internal transcendence, which is the actual path itself!

It’s good news, bad news. The predicament of modernity. Finally we know better. At the same time, if we don’t act on this knowledge, then finally, we all die.

Interesting times we’re living in.

To be continued……

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