Reading this part from chief Seattle's speech speech made me thinking:
"Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb and wander away beyond the stars. They are soon forgotten and never return. Our dead never forget this beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its verdant valleys, its murmuring rivers, its magnificent mountains, sequestered vales and verdant lined lakes and bays, and ever yearn in tender fond affection over the lonely hearted living, and often return from the happy hunting ground to visit, guide, console, and comfort them."
Thinking of the native American relation with earth. Why do the native people in all continents, feel a real living bond with earth while the western people think of earth as a resource you should use for your ends. What makes the modern world person think of earth (as well as everything outside him, other cultures etc) as a separate being, even as an inanimate thing, that exists outside himself?
The difference between Eastern and Western philosophies lie in whether you see the earth, and all the things around you as inanimate objects that are outside of you or whether you see soul and spirit in rocks, trees, rivers or even objects.... This difference in perception shapes how we live our lives and our experience in this world.
Is it just fanciful thinking or even psychological illness to perceive the world around us a living, soulful being?
This vision/understanding/answer occurred to me while pondering on these questions:
The world around us is an extension of us, our consciousness. If you infuse this world with your own soul and spirit, if you perceive things around you as soulful beings, then they will be . Then, you can connect with these "things" at a spiritual level. You can connect and move through life more easily because "things outside of you" become an extension of you, your spirit. They start to respond to you, they become a part of you. Therefore seeing earth as a living thing, as "gaia", makes it a living being that becomes an extension of you, that makes you more, that you can connect from the core of your soul.
This is similar to the use of computers and internet technology. If you perceive your computer just as an object, hardware, a piece of furniture, then you have no interaction with it except for it occupies space on your desk. However, if you start to connect to it, then computer technology, internet etc becomes an extension of your consciousness. Not only you can interact with it, but also, you become more by connecting to it. Your thought and feeling patterns evolve to incorporate the existence of this new extension of you, the connection with technology changes and makes you more than you were before.
Another metaphore is the language. Till you learn a foreign language, it sounds like just a jumble of meaningless sounds and noise to you. But once you learn a language, then you can start thinking in different ways using the new conceptual tools in this language. It is impossible to translate one language to another in a one-to-one precise way, because each language depends on the culture it was developed in. Each language delivers different perceptions, different feelings through the words. Hence, as you learn a new language, you evolve, you become more than what you used to be, the limits of your perception grows. Your consciousness extends.
Imagine a person who never learn a language. Learning a language would make his/her consciousness to extend beyond its current limits, and the person will start to connect with the beings outside herself.
These principles apply also to how you see world around you. Once you infuse the world around you with your own spirit/your consciousness, the world becomes a part/extension of your consciousness and becomes responsive to you. It replies and colloborates with your intentions, your feelings etc.
If you see the earth, the nature, even the inorganic things as just as resources, or objects, then they will remain that way. They will be obstacles/hurdles as well as tools for you, but they won't be interacting with you.
If more and more people see earth as "resource" and objectify it, then the earth will degrade to being an empty shell without a spirit, an inanimate object, a shadow and will start to die away slowly. The fate of any soulless object is the same: they are transient illusions on the cinema screen of our consciousness Hence, that's how we are killing our earth and our life on this earth dimension. As we withdraw meaning and our spirit from earth, this dimension of earth life will not be suitable to host human life in the end,
As human bodies host our spirits, so should earth must host an extension of this spirit otherwise it won't be able to host humans. We must see the earth as part of our spiritual existence, as a living spirited being, in order this earth to be our home. We must infuse the world with soul.
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