Recycling your used plastic bag wont do it. Buying expensive solar panels wonāt do it.
Buying yourself a new electric car wonāt do it either.
Not even Greta Thunberg, god bless her little bamboo socks, will do it..
I suppose that if all governments declared a state of emergency like our recent Pandemic, then we MIGHT just stand a chance.
The āinconvenientā truth is that āScienceā is unlikely to solve our burning planetās problem.
If we are honest with ourselves, we have to see that it was āScienceā that put us there in the first place.
Greed
Greed, Greed, Greed, thatās all we see. Everybody wants whatās due to them.
OK, Iāll change my fuel, carry home my groceries in a paper bag, and recycle my water bottle, but DONāT say I canāt fly away on holiday twice a year!!
You made my washing machine so crap that I need a new one every three years, and it was your fault that Cotton and not Hemp became so ubiquitous ā even though a t-shirt made of cotton uses 5280 gallons of water to be produced when hemp only requires 80 gallons!!
I want, I want, I WANT!!!
But who wants?
Letās seeā¦
Things you generally donāt know!
The Past is Past, and The Future canāt be known
We are not taught to understand the difference between Awareness and what we call Reality
We donāt understand that all our current global problems are caused by our Egoic state
In the West we have ignored the potential and power of Qi
You are NOT your Body
You are NOT your Story
Everything in Life is coloured by Death, but should not beā¦.
Whoa there Tiger! Why did we suddenly go so metaphysical when we were getting into a āgoodā (*Judgement issued by the authorās egoā¦) article about Green things?
DNA
Why do you think we have such things as The Ten Commandments?
From the earliest of days Man has been apt to steal and kill.
We hear about survival of the fittest.
From cave-man days, hairy thugs with their knuckles dragging along the ground have been pulling their conquests, by the hair, back to their caves again and again.
Rape and Pillage IS why we have such diverse DNA!
Yes, Iām looking at you Sweden, as to why I have blond hair and blue eyesā¦! We all know the reputation of your Vikings!
We are set apart from other Mammals, because we have over a comparatively short time, sprouted a pre-frontal cortex. We have grown an area of the brain that has allowed us to become conscious beings.
As this area has developed, itās become convenient for us to place ourselves in space and time.
As a Bee does a āWaggle danceā to let other bees know where the lavender patch is blooming, so we needed convenient ways to communicate.
Letās be fair, pointing must get pretty frustrating, quite fast.
I point at the deer you are dragging behind you and grunt.
You point over your shoulder and grunt.
I walk 20 kilometres without seeing a single deer, because your pointing was a little off! Now Iām a grumpy caveman. Just the word āRiverā would have made my hunting experience much better, and I could have given you 5 stars on Google maps!
The next question that comes up is āWhoās woman is that?ā as I point.
āNobodyās?ā Great, I drag her to my cave by the hair.
āSomebodyās!ā Great, that avoided me getting myself eviscerated with a sharp piece of flint!
So now we have āIā and āMyā and āMineā
Time
Did you kill the Deer today by the River, or was it last week!?
Now we have concepts of time
My cat has NO concept of āMineā or āTimeā ā although to be fair, his stomach clock is reasonably accurate!
Dolphins have no possessions; Elephants donāt hoard fruit and Monkeys donāt have to put up with cheap washing machines that are built to clap out in three years!!
We see then the use of language, the nascent understanding of times, as we start to map the season and the skies. We live together in small numbers roaming the lands.
The shift to Farming comes into our lives 10,000 years ago. Iām guessing we have always eaten the tubers and grasses as we found them, and no doubt defecated seeds and greens along the way, noticing that these plants could be made to thrive.
Some bright spark decides that heās so into Potatoes, that heād rather cultivate a crop of these, and lie around waiting for them to grow, rather than chase off after the Wildebeests ā heās the first couch potato!
He decides to give you potatoes if you bring him meat, simultaneously triggering, Markets, Money, Greed, Supermarkets, Advertising and worst of all āLoyalty Cards..ā
My friend, you have a hell of a lot to answer to!
The problem comes with āStockā ā you have lots of stock, I have none.
Either I decide to kill you and take the stock, or I try to figure out how you did it, and do it myself- The birth of Entrepreneurs, leading to multiple episodes of Dragonās Den and Shark Tank, where we watch people being eviscerated with sharp pieces of flint, for our family enjoyment!
Scale it up a bit!
You have all the Oil, I have too many cars ā welcome to Dragonās Den on an epic scale, where I sit at home, and watch as our technology eviscerates your young men, so that I can keep my car running, allowing me to go shop for yet another washing machine!
Moving Forward..
We needed to place ourselves in time and space, we needed to plot and plan our way forward.
If nothing else, we still feel the drive that pushes baby turtles down the beach, while birds gorge themselves, we are still driven like young iguanas to sprint through rocky outcrops filled with vile vipers trying to munch and crush us!
We all have the mammalian drive to survive and go forward.
In Mammals however, you donāt see turtles and iguanas killing each other to get ahead. Thatās a very peculiar human trick.
So the front of our brain has developed to allow us to plan. Itās placed us in time and space, and bit by bit we have developed the ability to understand each otherās emotional selves too.
Survival is driven by understanding if the Boss or King is in a good mood. Knowing this might be the difference between life and death!
The Ego
We developed our Egoās as a way of āaggregatingā all the information and understandings we have made along the way.
It listens and replies, it defends where appropriate (or inappropriate!) – in short it becomes our protector, castle walls and guard dog.
Itās made from all the things we have learned, felt and experienced.
Itās unfortunate, that itās not really that good a tool at all!
Itās a bit like a childās toy box, filled with shiny colourful things, many broken, forgotten and with lost parts. Itās propped up by so many old stories and childhood reactions.
One of the first things children learn to do is to get what they want. They learn how to manipulate their parents. āI want a sweetie Mummyā ā if repeated often enough will lead to getting a sweetie or getting a slap, either one builds a memory about relationships, life and techniques for manipulation.
These strategies we continue to use all through our lives.
The Ego wantās life to be more comfortable, easy and filled with sparkly new things.
The Ego drives us to get our teeth whitened and get unused chemical weapons injected into our brows to kill a few frownsā¦
The Ego makes you want what you donāt have
The Ego as a community, talks you into believing that greed is good, and that war is just an acceptable part of life.
The Ego needs new things, so it persuades you to fly on holiday twice a year, and spend the rest of the year burning down rainforests, or at least investing your hard earned cash into companies that burn down rainforests or who turn pandas into loo paper. (Iām not sure if that last āFactā is actually a āthingā ā¦yetā¦)
Ego isnāt actually āBadā ā (when you understand the flow of the Dao, then nothing is EVER really bad or good, but we wonāt get into that story yet!)
Ego is just a tool. Itās the old story āGuns donāt kill people, rappers .. American policemen do!ā
How you choose to use your ego is whatās important.
It is however an astonishingly complex tool, a bit like a Swiss Army knife crossed with a recipe to make Souffle – Essentially incomprehensible, and it doesnāt come with any training or manual..!
In point of fact, itās rather more like giving a five year child old the keys to your Tiger Tank!
(And itās a five year old who hasnāt been fed for a long while, and has lost his favourite teddy bear!)
Can you Quieten Down?
If you can find a way to quieten this gnawing, moaning, goading part of yourself, you can start to see the world as a different place.
What if you didnāt want the Rainforest to burn to the ground, what if you didnāt want the Pandas to have to breast stroke their way home with the Polar bears?
What if we didnāt have to have a new washing machine every three years, because we started being responsible for our actions?
What would the world look like if it was populated by truly conscious beings?
We are now talking about āHomo Spiritualisā- the evolution of mankind ā a new breed of individual.
Homo Spiritualis
We have had examples of āHomo Spiritualisā studded throughout our history – Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus and Mohamed to name but a few. Thatās the problem, what they were teaching is actually pretty hard to grasp.
It requires that you actually put in the hours and the mental gymnastics required to evolve yourself, and to be frank, watching Dragonās Den is much easier and often more fun (to begin withā¦)
Are we talking about learning how to act like red Indians, do we have to sit cross-legged, do we need to drink lots of South American plants and then puke all the ābadā thoughts out of us?? NO!
A simple starting point is a no-mind meditation. Sitting quietly, allowing the thoughts to drift by, without attaching to them, until they eventually subside.
The Pathway
I follow several paths and writers.
My Teacher Dr Pang Ming, (The founder of Zhineng Qigong) and one of his Teacherās ā Teacher Lu..
You might do just as well with G.I. Gurdjieff or P.D. Ouspensky.
Perhaps a little Alan Watts will point you in the right direction.
You could try Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi and his question āWho am I?ā
What about the lovely Mani originally from Ireland, and his āEmbracing no otherā Meditation?
Iām sure this is Eckhart Tolleās shtick too, but Iām not au fait with his work..
The point is that these days, with the power of the internet, there are more and more people āawakeningā ā the old spiritual paths, Shamanism, Buddhism, Christianity have all failed in their aims. Now thereās only one person left you can rely on!
Thatās YOU!
You have to do the work yourself.
You have to teach your children to do the work.
You have to be the guiding light for your community, if we are ever going to save this beautiful planet of ours ā turn the light down by all means, but whilst your at it, dim the Ego too!
When we realise that the ego is a great little tool to navigate our daily chores, but that it should NEVER be the boss of us, then our plant has a chance.
When we start to self-realise, then we could never kill each other, we would understand that overpopulation is killing our home and that the Oil is the blood of the living creature called the earth.
There is only one way for us to continue to live on this planet, itās not politics, itās not war, itās not Science, itās not farming, itās ONLY by evolving our ego-selves into fully aware humans.
I throw down the challenge to you!
I have started the process, I want you to come with me on the journey.
If you want some clues to get you started.
Meditation is sleeping, wake up IN your meditation, seek your own āglobal awarenessā ā become present in your stillness, not asleep.
Step back from the āIā thought. (I like this, I want that..) they are all constructs of your ego mind.
Try to identify the āIā that has NO object attached to it.
Step back, and try to become the Observer OF your Observer!!
(Thatās a bit crazy, but if you have ever learned to Observe your thoughts, now try observing who is this observer. Clearly, the starting point would be ālearn to observe your thoughts, if youāve never done any of this at all!)
If you want me to hold your hand, then Iām here for you.
Letās save the World, One Consciousness at a time!