d War One, extended further. When I was a child, our system of ideology and
mass media still protected that story, but in the last thirty years the incursions of reality
have punctured its protective shell and have ruptured its essential infrastructure.
We no longer believe our storytellers, our elites. We don’t believe the politicians, we don’t
believe the doctors, we don’t believe the professors, we don’t believe the bankers, we don’t
believe the technologists. All of them imply that everything is under control, and we know that
it is not.
We have lost the vision of the future we once had; most people have no vision of the future at
all. This is new for our society. Fifty or a hundred years ago, most people agreed on the general
outlines of the future. We thought we knew where society was going. Even the Marxists and the
capitalists agreed on its basic outlines: a paradise of mechanized leisure and scientifically
engineered social harmony, with spirituality either abolished entirely or relegated to a materially
inconsequential corner of life that happened mostly on Sundays. Of course there were dissenters
from this vision, but this was the general consensus.
When a story nears its end it goes through death throes, an exaggerated semblance of life.
So today we see domination, conquest, violence, and separation take on absurd extremes that
hold a mirror up to what was once hidden and diffuse. The year 2012 ended with just such a
potent story-disrupting event: the Sandy Hook massacre. Even realizing that far more, equally
innocent, children have been killed in the last few years by, say, U.S. drone strikes, it really got
under my skin. No one was immune. I think that is because its utter senselessness penetrated
every defense mechanism we have to maintain the fiction that the world is basically OK. Unlike
9/11 or Oklahoma City, and certainly unlike the horrors that go on around the world, there was
no convenient narrative to divert the raw pain of what happened. We cannot help but map those
murdered innocents onto the young faces we know, and the anguish of their parents onto
ourselves.
At the base of our Story of the People is separation, of humanity from nature, of me
from you, of each from all, and this event united everyone, of whatever culture, nationality,
or political persuasion. For a moment, we all felt the exact same thing. For at least a moment,
I am sure, most people were in touch with the simplicity of what is important; I am sure many
people had that fleeting feeling, “It doesn’t have to be that difficult, if only we could
remember what is so obvious now, that love is all there is.”
We humans have made such a mess of things, forgetting LOVE. It is the same realization we
have when a loved one is going through the dying process, and we think, “Ah, how precious this
person is – why couldn’t I see that? Why couldn’t I appreciate all those moments we had together?
All the arguments and grudges seem so tiny now.”
Charles Eisenstein
…
d I am in the world.
I am part of nature, and nature is part of me. I am what I am in my communication and communion with all living things. I am an irreducible and coherent whole with the web of life on the planet.
I am part of society, and society is part of me. I am what I am in my communication and communion with my fellow humans. I am an irreducible and coherent whole with the community of humans on the planet.
I am more than a skin-and-bone material organism: mybody, and its cells and organs are manifestations of what is truly me: a self-sustaining, self-evolving dynamic system arising, persisting and developing in interaction with everything around me.
I am one of the highest, most evolved manifestations of the drive toward coherence and wholeness in the universe. All systems drive toward coherence and wholeness in interaction with all other systems, and my essence is this cosmic drive. It is the same essence, the same spirit that is inherent in all the things that arise and evolve in nature, whether on this planet or elsewhere in the infinite reaches of space and time.
There are no absolute boundaries and divisions in this world, only transition points where one set of relations yields prevalence to another. In me, in this self-maintaining and self-evolving coherence- and wholeness-oriented system, the relations that integrate the cells and organs of my body are prevalent. Beyond my body other relations gain prevalence: those that drive toward coherence and wholeness in society and in nature.
The separate identity I attach to other humans and other things is but a convenient convention that facilitates my interaction with them. My family and my community are just as much “me” as the organs of my body. My body and mind, my family and my community are interacting and interpenetrating variously prevalent elements in the network of relations that encompasses all things in nature and the human world ...
…
Leonardo Da Vinci
Love has no boundaries or issues of
time, it has no ‘beginning’,
it has no ‘end’,
and love exists, waiting for us to
discover its essence, our essence;
to choose to be on its path.
Bravo !
…
y and oneness on us, and on all things in the universe. The world
is like a vast hologram, coded by basic patterns that “in-form” the
entire cosmic matrix known as spacetime.
There is nothing entirely random and meaningless in this world;
there are no truly chance events. LIFE itself is not a random
accident. The latest discoveries show that organic macromolecules,
the basic elements of life, are synthesized already in the physical
and chemical evolution of stars even before they emerge and evolve
as biological organisms on some planets ... (Spectral analysis of
comet ISON will no doubt eventually prove this to be the case)
The evolution of life is not a fortuitous event in the world, but
the expression of a coherent logic carried by universal laws." Ervin Laszlo
…
Added by Michael Grove at 14:22 on December 17, 2013