Chapter 1
Humanity as Nature
from the book Breakthrough Consciousness
by Sharon Janis
Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story
which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast.
They were discussing the possible purposes of life
as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement.
Because of their limited intelligence,
they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
THIS DANCE OF LIFE is amazing and filled with patterns, and reflections of reflections of patterns. "As above so below," say the ancient Indian scriptures. Similar patterns of organization are repeated on level after level of nature's manifestation. The same force that moves an electron to orbit its nucleus also keeps our planet on its dependable orbit around the nucleus of our solar system, the sun. The earth is spinning, the solar system is spinning, the galaxies are spinning, and perhaps the entire universe is made up of spinning microcosm upon macrocosm, all intertwined perfectly according to nature's brilliant ways.
We are an integral part of this magnificent dance of life. Within our body, so many creatures live, as oblivious to our existence as we are to theirs. We don't really like to think about our little "house guests"; because their presence violates our egocentric notion that we know and approve of whatever is inside of us. If some people get freaked out when they see a bug running across their desk, or a spider crawling across their pillow, or ants moving along the kitchen counter, just imagine their reaction if they could see the hidden legions of life moving all over our bodies — all the little dust mites having relay races across our skin, just below the threshold of our vision. So many minute creatures crawling, swimming, and moving all over and inside of us, sharing our personal space — without our permission!
Many of these inner creatures are our friends. They do all kinds of beneficial work, serving us in ways only they can. "Friendly" bacteria, white blood cells, and various other chemical components and minute creatures sweep the halls of our arteries and veins clean of other creatures and substances that are not so friendly. We are filled to the brim with them: the good, the bad, and some very ugly creatures!
There are parasites living in our intestines, viruses hiding in the ganglia of our spine, all kinds of beneficial, benign, and destructive guests milling about our house. And they are all a part of "us". They are "us", or at least our bodies, as much as we are "us", though many of us would beg to differ. Our egocentric minds like to think that we're the king of the castle here, that the body's sole purpose is to serve our petty desires and whims, to help us "get the girl" or "get the job." However, this doesn't make logical sense according to our observations of nature as a multi-faceted, profoundly integrated, intricately organized mesh of existence.
This earth is a living being, Gaia — our Mother Earth. If we little human beings are conscious entities, just imagine the vast consciousness our host, the earth, must have. Our consciousness is just a wisp within her vast net of conscious life force, a single neuron firing — connected to this massive web of human consciousness that surrounds the earth, by language, subtle communication, telephone lines, the internet, even the force of our thoughts and attention. We are active, energetic participants of this dance of life on earth, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. We are the eyes and ears of our mother earth, perhaps her very heart and soul.
On a physical level, we live upon and within the body of this planet just as the lymphocytes, red blood cells, bacterium, flukes, and other parasites live within our bodies. And the Earth, as a living being, also goes through the stages of the universal life cycle that seem to be applicable to all forms of life when seen through the lens of linear time. The earth was created, she has flourished, and she will inevitably move toward the dissolution phase of nature's life cycle, which, admittedly, we most likely will not be here to witness as a species. Rather, we are more like cells in our Earth's body, releasing the very free radicals of pollution and toxic waste that are hastening her demise — just as the same cells that keep our bodies alive can also release by-products that destroy us. This is part of what we do in the flow of nature. Even with all our good intentions, we nevertheless continue to play the role of environmental villain, releasing more and more by-products of industrial and technological waste throughout this planet every day — depleting her resources and killing our brother and sister animals. Perhaps we can't help ourselves, because we are simply following the script.
Now, I'll admit this is not a politically correct environmental proposition, because some would say such a view would foster apathy. My intention is not to give you an excuse to stop recycling your newspapers, however for the purpose of this thought exercise, we need to put aside the level within which environmental movements and political correctness have their place.
In fact, we are the earth's parasites, the earth's lymphocytes — guests in the biosphere of this earth body. We are programmed to perform all kinds of functions. Most we have no idea about, yet we continue to perform them. Our thoughts create electromagnetic fields that can even be measured on the outside of our heads by current technology. Our speech creates sound waves. Our singing, feelings of love, exercise, work, and construction of countless physical structures, nebulous organizations, and "peoplehills" all over this earth-body. These are our functions, the ways we are programmed to participate in this grand and infinite dance of energetic expression.
In our egocentric haze, we label certain things as "unnatural," "manmade," or "industrial," and consider them to be against the flow of nature. But this is based on an egocentric point of view — a ridiculous notion that somehow we, as human beings, are capable of exiting the nature that is our very existence, to create something unnatural, which goes against the flow of nature. We are the flow of nature. We cannot be otherwise.
Everything that exists in this world is natural. The human species is completely natural, and everything it has done and ever will do is a part of the same nature. Each freeway has been built according to the biological force of the universe. Every thought that has been thought, every love that has been expressed, each high-rise building that has been built, every hamburger that has been grilled and eaten — all this is as much a part of the nature of our earth as the spider web in the corner of your basement ceiling, as the grand mountains and the tropical rain forests. None of the materials we use to create our so-called "man-made" objects come from outside of this planet, or from outside of the universe, from outside of Life and Existence itself. Even the most toxic chemical substances are technically natural.
On the level of self-preservation, we try to stay away from harmful things; we try to lower the amount of poison on this planet. Yet, our species continues to increase the radiation, smog and pollution in spite of our fear of their destructive results. This, whether we like it or not, seems to be part of what we are programmed to do. We may end up being cancers in the body of this earth, but if we are able to somehow destroy her, it is because our programmed functions have included the output of gases and other toxins that pollute the arteries and veins of this earth so badly that even her "earth immune system" is not able to clear us away before we cause fatal damage.
The earth is getting older. Each earthquake pushes up the mountainous wrinkles upon her face; every volcano releases more of her inner life force. One day the earth will lie lifeless, certainly when our Sun star begins to fizzle up and out, if not before. This day is likely to be a long way off, though we never can know for sure. Perhaps our earth's immune system will identify us finally as a true danger, and send her lymphocytes in the form of fires, worldly disasters, plagues or death to destroy our race — this dis-ease of humanity. One extremely contagious and deadly viral plague could potentially wipe out human life on this planet within a very short period of time, perhaps allowing the earth to go into remission from the disease of human pollution — while still, however, continuing to age and move toward her own inescapable final stage of the life cycle — dissolution.
One explosion of a nuclear reactor — which is as much part of the nature on this earth as that anthill outside my front door — could kill countless people, pouring radiation throughout the globe that could weaken the rest of humanity, perhaps inhibiting the ability for pro-creation. A single meteorite could slam into our planet, destroying the plague of humanity as a T-cell might blast the viral intruders in our bodies. The Shoemaker-Levy comet that hammered Jupiter in 1994 would have destroyed the earth three times over. The large meteorite theory is one way scientists have come up with to explain why all dinosaur life seems to have ended at one moment in time, instead of slowly dying off. The impact of one large meteorite could have created a dust storm large enough to block sunlight completely from all the life on earth. This theory is supported by the fact that no dinosaur fossils have been discovered anywhere on earth beyond a specifically dated layer of rock.
The point is that we don't know. But even while we fight pollution and crime, even while we look for cures for disease and try to avoid disasters, it is possible to maintain a parallel, higher awareness of what might be going on here, of the all encompassing nature that manifests as everything on this planet: man-made, bird-made, ant-made, God-made. This higher awareness becomes a support for us — a refuge that allows us to take rest inside ourselves, in the awareness of oneness and perfection. To ignore this logical reality of our existence as an integral part of the infinite play of nature is simply closing our eyes to the truth for the sake of maintaining those illusions that comfort and maintain our egocentric limitations.
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Breakthrough Consciousness
