The Great Lie of Living on a Dead Planet
The biggest lies hide right out in the open. They are so pervasive that we simply do not have eyes to see them. Our brains are hardwired for novelty and difference — so we filter out common things like the nose that is always in our line of sight. No one has to conceal these things because our minds do the work for us.
Look around with fresh eyes and you will see a world teeming with life. Your skin is covered with microscopic organisms alive in the endless drama of birth, death, and renewal. Every cell in your body is a participant in the grand orchestra that is you. The air is filled with pollen and spores floating in a ballet-like menagerie of asexual reproduction. And those are just the things you can’t see.
Step outside and you’ll note grasses and shrubs, trees and birds, a veritable Noah’s Ark of living beings all shuttling through time and space on this latest journey around the Sun. This world of ours is ALIVE and we are a part of it.
And yet, the great lie lurks in every corner. Hides in every shadow. Lays in waiting to guide every action. We have been told by modern science that the Universe started as a big-bang-explosion of dead matter. That this dense burst of light came forth into being as pure energy, then particles, then atoms… and eventually the clockworks of our mechanical universe giving rise to tiny robots — machines that churn chemical soups into animate objects with the appearance of being alive.
Crazy as this may sound, this is the hidden assumption that tells us we are separate from nature. That economies work apart from (and are superior to) environments. That the Earth is our God-given territory to be exploited and consumed as we see fit.
We are told this in the political rhetoric of “life at conception” presuming there was nothing sacred in the chemical flows of egg and sperm before a spirit “entered” the body. It is what guides our corporate CEO’s as they lay waste to the planet in search of new investment opportunities to turn a quick profit, to hell with the consequences. It is what makes us feel alienated and alone in the tiny cubicles and private residences that separate us from our fellow humans and the extended family of living things that evolved together with us (and long before us) on Earth for a continuous stretch of 3,800,000,000 years.
This is why we created industrial machines that consume decayed bodies of flesh (carbon fuel) to feed our factories.
This is what compelled us to spew industrial pollutants into the air that has destabilized the Earth’s climate.
This is why we turn the other way when children “over there” work slave labor in sweat shops.
This is why we rape the land with the same voracity that we consume pornography and use sex to sell the products fabricated in these factories.
It is all connected. There is a tapestry of relationships underlying our denial of the fundamental truth that the Earth is alive and we are merely a part of it.
The great conceit of the Modern Era (and its antecedents that go all the way back to the birth of agriculture some 10,000 years ago) is that the world is made up of dead things and we — the blessed living souls — can do with it as we please.
I find solace in naming this lie.
It reminds me of something I’ve always felt in my bones, as the blood courses through my veins, and when my heart quickens at the loving touch of a friend. I know in the deepest reservoirs of my soul that I am a part of this incredible Cosmic Dance. Realizing that an unbroken chain of mothers and daughters stretches back deep into antiquity is a profound healing elixir for all the traumas great and small that I have experienced in my life or that I have unwittingly caused in others during my days of sleepwalking.
Now I am awake.
Fully awake and aware that my body is an orchestra of cooperation among billions of tiny living creatures — the cells of my body. That I am like the wave forming on the surface of a great ocean that seems solid enough as it smacks the shore. Yet closer inspection shows that this solidity of form is an illusion. In truth, the wave is a rise-and-fall motion for millions of tiny water molecules dancing together for a precious moment.
Thus is my life a cosmic dance of illusory solidness. I am a living being. I sense and feel. I know my place is among the living. The older scientific metaphor of a clockwork universe has been replaced by the systemic point-of-view that now tells us everything is a network. It is all connected. The Earth is alive!
Now is the time to update our mental frames, see the world with new eyes.
Lift the veil of the Great Lie of a Dead Planet before it’s too late. Our species has exploded onto the world stage in the last hundred years — our population crescendoing into the billions for the first and perhaps only time — a veritable wave of humanity crashing on a planetary shore. We are in the most violent moment of felt solidity. Planetary boundaries are quickly passed and the journey becomes precarious.
It is now that we must all realize we are part of this world. That it is an unbroken chain of life that can easily continue without us. And yet, we are the unique species capable of understanding and yes — of loving — the world that is our birthplace. Imagine all the awe, all the beauty, expressed in our great works of human art throughout history. Each inspired in some fashion by nature itself because we are nature itself.
Now imagine all that awe, all that beauty, going away because we were asleep at the wheel of a great soulless machine. That we realized too late that this metaphor got it all wrong. The Universe is alive. The Earth is alive. And we too, in this very moment, are alive. There is no soulless machine. there is only us and our dreams that we fabricate in the cultural mythologies of our lives.
Herein the dead planet can be magically transformed by a simple shift in perspective. And all the possibilities of creativity guided in love for a future yet-to-be-explored become viable once more.
Yes, humanity is in a precarious place right now.
When we realize that the task before us is to re-orient how we relate to the world and, more importantly, how we relate to ourselves. That is when we begin the spiritual healing that will make us worthy of being stewards on a Spaceship Earth filled with trillions of living beings whose existence has already been touched by our reckless disconnection from ourselves.
We can re-make this connection instantaneously by simply realizing that we were never separated in the first place. This is a task for each moment of the rest of our lives. It is the healing elixir for our wounded souls. And the time is now for all of us to drink from it and find the fountain of youth was hidden in plain sight all along.
Onward, fellow humans.
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