WHOLLY PART OR PARTLY WHOLE?

It seems to me that the most important problem with living in our modern culture is figuring out what part of the bloody rigmarole is our cup of tea and what bits to avoid like the plague. The spectrum of mankind runs from those living in such close symbiosis with the nature of earth that the need for western civilization’s trappings has never occurred for they’ve yet to be “discovered”, through those to whom those same trappings are so desirably convenient as to volunteer a life of suffering for them, on to those who presume to own and deal out such goodies waving their warrant from god while herding his sheep into a planetary sweatshop — for him, of course.

Living in symbiosis with our environment is an act of acknowledging our connection to all of nature’s manifestations as co-evolutionary parts of the entire universe. Denying this has no effect on its truth; we are always a connected part, just cut off from the benefits and plagued by the conflicts.

The history of western civilization is strewn with annihilation or enslavement of the unconvertible, destruction or mutation of the inconvenient and domination and exploitation of the irresponsible. The history books about western civilization are fables made from cherry picking perusal of recorded observation by authors with an axe to grind, be it glorification or excoriation, clarification or obscuration. The myth that keeps on pumping the hot air into the bubble of our culture in the west is that mankind is either the god given recipient of earth as clay for sculpting god’s image to the theists or at the pinnacle of evolutionary wonderfulness as proved by the reduction of the planetary biomass to whatever the hell we want to eat and ourselves, to the godless capitalists intent on accumulating the last, biggest hill of beans.

So my ponder this morning is, are we as organic a part of larger beings as our cells are of us and their atoms are of them or, are we creations of a god who blessed us with life and ownership of the world but cursed us for questioning his authority by eating the fruit of knowledge leading us away from the garden into independently thinking up the hell of civilization as our replication of Eden?

The latter does have a ring of natural karma for denying the former, but I guess that is just my resonant frequency. I know I have the rest of my life to learn how deeply imbedded the theistic culture’s program has gotten up to now and how to unwarp my potential from antagonism toward it to symbiosis with nature. Each withdrawal of my energy from harming the whole of which I am a part also reclaims that for which I abdicated responsibility to external authority making me more me more whole as well.

Nature is very forgiving. Karma lets you fuck up ‘til it kills you — or grabs your attention — which ever comes first. Civilization has rules to prevent upset of its tenuous obscuration of the natural stage upon which its disastrous scenario is played out in emperor’s new clothes.