Disconnect and Reconnect
Entering the “more-than-human” world releases you from the prison of your own personhood and connects you to something infinitely greater.
On a typical workday, as you travel back and forth from remote-control-operated garage to glass-and-steel office building, you need never glimpse the light of day unfiltered by tinted windows.
Drop a caveman into the same urban environment and watch the poor disoriented clod, desperate for something he recognizes from the world of nature, dash for the safety of the nearest tree (if there is one) or skitter down the subway stairs in search of a cave.
Don’t laugh at our Paleolithic friend. He’s there with you, inside your skull, wondering why nature seems to have become a mere decoration, relegated to sidewalk plantings and manicured lawns.
The modern urban environment has been reshaping your Stone Age brain from the day you were born. There’s a good chance it has even reshaped your spirituality — your sense of what is real and valuable.
When you walk through a sun-dappled forest, then emerge into a flower-filled clearing and gape at the silhouette of an immense mountain in the distance, you are struck with a sense of both how small and how special you truly are, how privileged to appreciate and contemplate these wonders which existed long before any human being set eyes on them.
If the spiritual impulse is present at all, you begin to ponder the miracle of both this landscape and your own mind that perceives it. What’s it all about?
Walk through a city, however, and your sense impressions are dominated by the handiwork of human beings. Often the only splashes of color come from storefronts and billboards instead of flowers, enticing you as a human pollinator to propagate the consumer culture.
At night, even the stars have trouble competing against the glow of electric lights thrown up into the heavens, tempting you to believe that there is no greater, all-encompassing reality than what human beings create themselves.
And during your moments at home, instead of finding yourself encouraged by silent solitude to experience the deeper, spiritual dimension of reality, you are diverted by another unseen dimension, the one which you pick up seemingly magically through your cellular or Wi-Fi connection.
The unrelenting assault of popular culture through an ever-expanding variety of technical devices is seductive because it joins you to a virtual tribe of other people who share the same experiences: listening to the same songs, watching the same shows, even accepting the same ideologies, as you eat the same McDonald’s hamburger in Kansas City as they do in Kalamazoo.
If you start believing that this is what we truly share as people, that this is what binds us together as human beings, then the media-controlled public consciousness can be mistaken for a sort of community soul, a parallel dimension that holds truth because it unites us from on high through hilltop transmitters, or through a latticework of fiber-optic cables spread across our civilization like spiders’ webs.
This network is often dominated more by The Man than by the public at large, yet it is so pervasive, so quasi-spiritual in its ability to simulate something real and greater than ourselves, it threatens to replace our connection with the truly transcendent and all-encompassing reality proclaimed by the stars and trees and mountains.
Still, the “reality” provided for our senses by The Man is a pale imitation of the real thing, so it’s no wonder that we reach out for the only natural, godly creations still readily available to us:
Each other.
There’s a reason why so many people are glued to their cell phones 24/7. When everything you see around you is artificial and therefore completely foreign to who you truly are, and when all the people you encounter on your daily rounds only stop long enough to get what they want from you, then you naturally feel an urgent need to hear from someone who has looked into your eyes and seen that you are there.
As you travel through the spiritual wasteland of your local urban landscape, that little voice whispering through the earpiece of your cell phone convinces you that you still exist.
But experiencing the natural world can do much more than give your sense of self a boost. Communion with nature is communion with your own innermost being — the stardust in your cells speaking to you.
“But nature seems so impersonal,” you might say to yourself.
And this is exactly the point. Nature releases you from the prison of your own personhood.
There are no rules of propriety in nature, no appointments to keep, no judging eyes to appease. Nothing to remind you that you are a human being. Nothing to keep you from realizing that you may be more than a human being.
Whether you are a Buddhist who believes in the interdependence of reality, a Christian who desires to feel the presence of a higher power, or a materialist who looks at human beings as so many motes of dust in the vastness of the cosmos, it is nature itself which gives you the most reliable perspective from which to view your own insignificance — and your own inherent value.
You are always, ultimately, at home. You are part of it all, with just as much right to enjoy this glorious world as anyone else. If you believe otherwise, you are embracing the illusion of life as a game of competition, a game still obsessively played throughout the arenas we call cities.
When we collectively learn to embrace cooperation more enthusiastically than competition, our cities will become true homes as well.
Just remember Pompeii and laugh at the insignificance of our folly.
And the significance of your own consciousness that experiences the wonder of it all.
