As a result of reduced travel and increasing business closure, pollution levels are dropping all over the world, and the environment is thriving. As humans everywhere are forced to self-isolate due to the coronavirus pandemic, lowering pollution levels have led to the unexpected prevailing of nature. Sir David Attenborough wrote that " Humans are a plague on the Earth that need to be controlled..." Yet many see that this pandemic is the chance to repair and strengthen relationships with each other and our planet. This down time gives us opportunity for introspection, a cardinal opportunity, to have a look at where we have been an where we are headed. For about 500 years we have been trapped in the science myth wherein anything that couldn't be weighed or measured was simply discarded as invalid. We collectively pretended that our numinous and spiritual instincts could simply be ignored. By ignoring that heroic half of our identity we have become cold and indifferent and riddled with inner turmoil while we tried to justify the trashing the environment and murdering hundreds of millions of people with our weapons of mass destruction. Individually and collectively we ignored the shadow self, by preteneding that our greed and self deceit, was acceptable in the name of progress.
“We experience ourselves our
thoughts and feelings as something separate from the Whole we call the
universe. This is actually an
optical illusion of consciousness. It's like a prison
for us. Our task is to free ourselves from this prison by widening our
Circle of Compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of
nature in its beauty. This is the only foundation for our Inner Peace
and Security”
- Phil Borges quoting Albert Einstein
It is as if nature is offering us one more chance to see what a mess we have made and understand that the unsustainable must fail. We are standing on the brink of and environmental calamity that could make the carona virus seem trivial. We must reconnect to Earth, to each other, and to ourselves with caring and compassion. Compassion may be of crucial importance for our individual physical and psychological health. Understanding compassion as a moral emotion intimately tied to the question of ethics and the cultivation of ethical sensibility. Joseph Campbell said we live in a time without an adequate mythology suitable to live by. Whether we're aware of it or not, we long for wisdom and love, and for knowledge of what seems to exist just beyond what we know as our reality. This other universe is commonly called non-ordinary reality and it is natural for humans to have questions about the forces of nature, the meaning of life, purpose, self, identity, death, and knowledge of the divine. Once every people in the world believed that the sun and moon were divine. We want to know about ancient myths aboutcreation, and the elements of water, fire, earth, and air, as well as plants and animals and the wisdom of ancestors. Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human form or other characteristics to beings other than humans, particularly deities and animals. Personification is the related attribution of human form and characteristics to abstract concepts such as nations and natural forces likes seasons and the weather. Both have ancient roots as storytelling and artistic devices. Most cultures have traditional fables with anthropomorphized animals as characters, some dating back to very ancient times.The last of several great ice ages began 2.6 million years ago at the start of the Pleistocene epoch. Roughly 20,000 years ago the great ice sheets that buried much of Asia, Europe and North America stopped their creeping advance. The Holocene is the name given to the recent 10,000 to 12,000 years of the Earth's history -- the time since the end of the last major glacial advance. The edge of the sea ice is a productive zone for the phytoplankton, and zooplankton, and as the ice gradually retreated, many other species exploit this enormous supply of food and the ice edge abounds in animal and bird life. And on land during the Early Holocene melting ice triggered the development of massive expansion of grasses and forest lands. Plants, animals and humans flourished. By learning to plant and harvest crops, hunter-gatherers became farmers. As the number and size of agricultural societies increased, they developed the first forms of government, architecture, philosophy, and religions. This also marks a very big change in the idea of ownership and property. Ownership became the central part of politics (domination and dominion). The rich began to get richer, and this trend continued until today the bulk of the World's Wealth is controlled by as few as 1% of the population. Usually the employ middle management to maximize their profit margins, which amounts to a kind of dehumanization. Society itself seems to be increasingly disconnected from our intuition and controlled by bad science, propaganda and media violence. The pharmaceutical industry has rapidly grown into the worlds most profitable business. "Magic is any sufficiently advanced technology." -Arthur C. Clarke Now that we have looked into the down side of our plight, what about the upside? The act of entering certain states of consciousness has the ability to affect the objective world around us. During the mid-20th century, advancements in theoretical physics led to a new view of reality among quantum physicists. From the 1950s the scientific study of the nervous system made huge advances, mainly because of the progress achieved in other and related fields, such as computational neuroscience, electrophysiology, and molecular biology. Neuroscientists were able to study the nervous system's structure, functions, development, abnormalities, and ways it can be altered. Neuroscience, also known as Neural Science, is the study of how the nervous system develops, its structure, and what it does. Neuroscientists focus on the brain and its impact on behavior and cognitive functions. Emotional intelligence shares the neuroscience behind what’s going on inside your head. Recent developments in quantum physics provide us with more answers as to how reality works. Apparently there is an interplay between our local space-time reality and human consciousness, and objects are not really solid. Quantum theory proves that it is the act of observation itself that causes a wave function to collapse into a particle. This is called the observer effect. An over-simplification of this discovery implies that physical reality depends on consciousness. That implies that we stand at the threshold of a revolution in thinking that transcends anything that has happened before. Bringing body-mind techniques to the forefront of modern healing practices through a lens filtered from training in a variety of physical sciences, such as biology, neuroscience, bio-engineering, and psychology. In this way science and spirituality, creates and strengthens the link between these two fields. It shares the benefits of neuroscience and ancient techniques of self-help, personal growth and transformation, and healing. Its purpose is to transcend the dullness and disenchantment which has become endemic to modern living and replace it with a renewed and authentic sense of awe and wonder and enthusiasm, and restore our sense of meaning and purpose in life. Dehumanization is the act of degrading people with respect to their best qualities - depriving them of individuality, compassion, or civility: Once certain groups are stigmatized as evil, morally inferior, and not fully human, the persecution of those groups becomes more psychologically acceptable. Restraints against aggression and violence begin to disappear. Not surprisingly, dehumanization increases the likelihood of violence and may cause a conflict to escalate out of control. Once a violence break over has occurred, it may seem even more acceptable for people to do things that they would have regarded as morally unthinkable before. Dehumanization is the psychological process of demonizing the enemy, making them seem less than human and hence not worthy of humane treatment. This can lead to increased violence, human rights violations, war crimes, and genocide. Dehumanization is also a psychological process whereby opponents view each other as less than human and thus not deserving of moral consideration - Jews in the eyes of Nazis, - slaves were also dehumanized by their abysmal condition. Science has been blamed for the dehumanization of modern life. By the first half of the nineteenth century our society was already well enmeshed in that process by means of which the strenuous activity of hard-headed industrialists and bankers, possessed by a single-minded devotion to making money and to extending their power through the production and use of complicated machines and other devices, as well as political manipulations. As a result of the activity of these people and of their twentieth-century successors a new type of world has come into existence, the world of the modern urban industrial state where practically everything is commodified to be sold to the highest bidder. We have mostly become mere employees of the system, mere “units” or objects or commodities, interchangeable, and are condemned for all our working lives to purely mechanical activities in which nothing properly human exists and whose performance is not in any way consistent with our inner and personal aptitudes and identities. The denial that man possesses a capacity for metaphysical or spiritual knowledge typifies much of what passes for philosophy in our times. Conformity is the social form which we have adopted, and it cuts our consciousness to fit its needs, its imperatives tailor our experience. Part of the problem here is that western philosophy has developed the idea of “ordinary consciousness,” of which anything beyond this range is to be labeled pathological or even schizophrenic. The various the wisdom traditions eventually became tribalism where each faith group feels superior. The church took over Pagan gods, holy places, holidays or "holy days," and customs, in order to reconcile people to the new religion, and vigorously persecuted "magic, sorcery, and superstition" of all sorts. Religious dogma usually discourages or preempts personal questioning of the rules. Even when the end of life draws near we are expected to accept on faith a set of cut and dried answers about the hereafter. Coming into being and passing away remains as the ultimate mystery for many of us. But there is a comprehensive collection of information and resources about the Near-Death Experience, which includes a huge collection of NDE accounts. But we are here and now in a time of global crisis where people are forced to live in isolation and separation. We would do well to use this time to examine the growing body of evidence that there is a connection between belief, perception, energy fields we can employ to rewire our brains and recondition our bodies to make lasting changes to live a more, compassionate, and authentic lifestyle. Links:
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Thursday, July 9, 2020
Compassion
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