SAVING THE WORLD

Now there's a phrase guaranteed to get as many interpretations as there are people to hear it. Not only are there a myriad varieties of inclusiveness meant when the word, world, is employed, there's at least as many interpretations as to what needs fixing at each level. In the last post I tried to establish the difference in the meaning of the word, nature, when applied to the nature of the universe; the way of everything or when applied to the nature of any of its manifestations as a defining individual characteristic. To save whatever world one finds suffering with whatever malady first requires realizing one's universal commonality; one's essential connection through the nature of the universe, the Tao, to the nature of those things we have always considered to be only others.

I have often mentioned a Hindu principle of the Minahana and the Mahayana, the little boat and the big boat, wherein each individual must learn to understand the way the universe works for their own boat before they can take an oar that will benefit the big boat rather than become another hole in its hull. I have lately come to understand that the big boat is more than merely plying the course of human civilization through the vicissitudes of time, it is a reawakening of our intimate connectedness to the entire universe and a recirculation of its energy throughout our consciousness for a return to a more aware, considerate symbiotic coevolution with our habitat, our life boat and fellow passengers.

One of the confounding things about civilization's rules of communication, language, when applied to the universe is that one must identify and get detached from and outside the myth of one's civilization to see the blinding filter it poses to a free vision of life as it is and the stultifying clot it is in the circulation of original human evolutionary thinking about the vast implications of the universe, yet remain intimately conscious of the ubiquitous energy of awareness at the very essence of each part of whatever level of the universe with which we seem to have our world of problems. Acknowledging such common connections tends to dissolve the annoyed self-righteous approach of fixing other's problems for them in deference to solving our own self interested skew on the world's duty to be our surrogate source of happiness. I am not claiming that there are no problems, but the solutions up to now have been wiggling in quicksand.

I must admit my solution to saving the world is ultimately simplistic: Rather than attempting to change everything in it to suit our own desires, learn to see and respect the the way nature has always been and will be without human civilization's taming, conquering, subduing, commodifying and rearranging the environment and infant humans having fucked it up almost beyond all sense of genetic recognition and intuitive belonging. Civilization is the only element in our lives that requires survival. Just ask the world's indigenous people. Just ask the part of yourself that rejoices on vacation in natural settings.