It is just that now, like never before, we of the Technological-Scientific-World-Viewing countries, with our insatiable greed for power and materials and goods, are actually destroying Nature- the very basis on which all of life exists.

 

There are two main reasons for this. One is that we have the technology enhanced capability to fulfill our greedy desires at a never before imagined rate. The second, which lies at the root of all of that, is that we have lost our humility. As a whole culture and as a people, we have forgotten that we are a ‘hairy, shitting, dying ape’. We have forgotten to account for the fact, that like any other animal, we need a very specific environment to live in, one that is given to us as a gift. We have forgotten that we exist in the midst of a mysterious process that surrounds and pervades us. . . and we are ignorantly destroying that very environment.

 

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” - Albert Einstein

​

We do not own the sun. Our food must be grown in fields or taken from animals who appear here out of the blue, like miracles. Our milk, cream, cheese, butter and ghee, come from the excess milk of cows, goats and sheep. We need the gifts of fruit trees for our fruit. We are at the mercy of great forces and live on the basis of food and energy that are literally given to us every day. Not only have we forgotten that our life is a every day ‘miracle’ and a gift, we have also forgotten that our body sweats and dies and our shit stinks. We have lost touch with Nature and with our own nature. We have forgotten, that we are an animal. But, this is something that India has not forgotten, perhaps, because millions wipe their asses with their left hands every day.

 

Farmers notice this type of thing more than city-dwellers, because they live closer to the earth and all it represents. They sow seeds in the ground that bring all of us our food. Farmers know that they depend not only upon the seeds, but, upon a great network of elemental forces- the soil, the sun and the rain, things which are largely beyond their control. All of these things could be called 'miracles'. 

Many factors are needed to awaken the seeds and grow the plants that they eat. Farmers know that food does not come from a store. They know that milk does not come from a carton. They are vulnerable to many, many things and they know it, every day and every season. A farmer must always prepare not just for the best, but, for the worst as well. Any farmer will eventually be humbled by their vulnerable dependence on the earth and the elements.

 

Just as we can notice an awareness of a greater vulnerability in a farmer when compared to people from the urban cities, if we look at women, we will notice that they have always been more vulnerable to and more connected with the earth, than men. Women menstruate, every month in a 28 day cycle, along with the waxing and waning of the moon. A woman doesn’t wake up one day and decide to do this. It happens to her. It just starts one day when she is a teenager. Through no choice of her own, blood begins to flow from her body and continues to do so on a recurring lunar-based cycle. And, women become pregnant and bear children in a nine month period of gestation, like many other mammals. Like a field that has been planted (a very common metaphor used since ancient times to describe a unique quality of the female), women have the ability to nourish and bear many different seeds (semen) that will grow up into a baby girl or boy inside their belly.

 

But, a woman does not grow and feed a child by her will,  anymore than a man impregnate a woman completely by his own volition. Sure, he can ejaculate inside her, but, he cannot guide the sperm to the egg or cause a particular sperm to burrow into an egg, or accomplish what needs to be done there to result in a new human beginning to grow. This is all completely beyond his ‘will’. 
 

Even if there is impregnation, he or she cannot decide whether it will be a healthy fertilization, or if that child will be carried to term, or if that child will be a boy or a girl, or healthy, wealthy or wise? It is all by the ‘grace of God’, or the will of nature, or the law of karma, or some say- ‘chance’ or some call a 'miracle'.

 

 

The growth of any child is outside of the conscious control of a man or a woman. All they can do is provide the optimum circumstances for what 'they' and especially 'she' is 'going through'.

 

 

In whatever context we think it happens, it does. Consider the things that ‘happen’ to a woman- a baby grows in her belly, a child issues forth from her loins and milk flows from her breasts to feed the child; These are very dramatic events that take place over a relatively long period of time and every one of them are out of her control.

 

Women, consciously and ‘dramatically’ have the clear experience of being vulnerable and at the ‘effect’ of nature of life. They are given the undeniable role as nurturers and supporters of new life, all of which ‘happens to them’. As a result of this, it seems to me that women have tended to be more humble than men. They seemed to be closer to the earth.

 

But, if we consider the issue more deeply, we will see that men are also ‘at effect’ and at the ‘mercy’ of nature. How many of us have had a wet dream or became sexually aroused by a beautiful woman? Did we choose to do it or does it just happen? Consider this: As men, do we consciously produce and manage the millions of independent organisms- sperm, each of them independently delineated, propelled  and motivated? Do we give it a second thought, when at ejaculation, millions of these tiny living beings are sent forth to die? Perhaps, it is the largesse of our progeny and their subsequent loss, that has inured us, more than women, to death and destruction.

 

Even so, compared to the flowing red blood of a period, the months long swelling of a pregnancy, the birthing of a baby or the years long, breast feeding of a child, the obligations and things that men are caused by nature to do, seem to be less. These 'manly' events, do not happen over such a long period of time and, except for an erection and ejaculation, are just are not so physically or overtly, obvious. Because of the less 'dramatic' way he is controlled by nature, it is easier for a man to forget how vulnerable he is, at least when compared to a woman and it seems, that offered this ‘opportunity’ to forget or ignore it, he has quickly done so.

 

Women are often praised for their physical beauty, which is a thing that mostly 'happens' to them and one they play a small role in creating. Men (in the West today) are often criticized for their lust or attraction to women (or in the case of homosexuals-other men), as if that is something that they created on their own. Lust ‘happens’ to a man  as naturally as a period or her beauty happens to a woman.

 

Why is it applicable only to men, that they are responsible for their natural manifestations? In many countries, if a man and a woman are in a room together for any amount of time, it is assumed that they had sex. What else were they doing? Discussing Nietszche? It is assumed that it is the nature of men to be lusty and it is culturally accepted as obvious, that women are sexual objects, who, if they are not being chaperoned in some way, are therefore, ‘available’. It is for this type of ‘reason’ that you will see a more clear separation of the sexes in any culture that still lives as the ‘whole body’.

 

For Christian monks, the urges of the body were considered to be the workings of the Devil. They therefore denied and repressed themselves and the workings of their whole body and associated the world and the ways and desires of the world as the doings of the Devil. One of the reasons that men became celibates and attempted to renounce their sexual cravings, was to fight against 'natural' urges.

 

Because most women think that their beauty is something that belongs to them, they are obviously setting themselves up for a major letdown when they age and everything starts to wrinkle, sag and the curves and swellings of youth fade away. I am not saying that older women are not attractive and alluring, but certainly not in the same purely, physical way as a young nubile girl. It is clearly apparent, unless you want to deny reality, that the ‘hairy, shitting, ape’, both ages and dies. Except for the novelty of it and I am very aware that every variation does exist, very few men would consider a 90 year old woman as possessing a sexually alluring body compared to young woman in the bloom of youth.

 

With the increase of modern technology in the West, both men and women have been given an opportunity to break out of a small part of the eons long submission to earth and the cycles of nature. Because of this, there has grown up a general arrogance. Now, we find that the  lack of ‘humility’ is no longer exclusively located in men. In the West, both men and women, have risen up into the ‘capsule of the head’ of ideas and ideals, like never before in history.

 

In the West, we forget our shit as if it never existed. With a flick of the wrist, it ‘magically’ disappears down a hole, washed away with clear water, which flushes from our toilets and makes everything all clear again, as if nothing ever happened. We wash our hands, dry them, look at ourselves in the mirror and walk out of that private set apart, uniquely plumbed, easy to clean, tiled and small special bath room feeling clean, with fine traces of shit smeared all around our asshole. 
 

Of course we feel ‘clean’. Are we not the most advanced culture on the face of the earth? We have cars and smooth roads and traffic lights and policemen and trash removal and garbage disposals and refrigerators and abundant hot and cold water that comes out of taps and pasteurized milk that comes out of cartons and grocery stores filled with food and hardware stores filled with tools and toilet paper and cell phones and GPS and internet and computers and TV and radio and yachts and yacht harbors, planes, trains and air-conditioned movie theaters. We do not see much death or old age on the streets of the United States. We are not familiar with the slaughterhouses where our meat comes from, the suffering of the cows and their calves, or, the hell-holes that hold most of the chickens that give us their eggs and their lives. We ‘forget' about the repeated outbreaks of e-coli poisoning that occurs in everything from beef to sprouts, an occurrence that literally means that shit got onto our food. 
 

How could this be? We have put a man on the moon and sent spaceships to Mars, but, like our shit-smeared assholes, we have forgotten the dirty, shitty aspects of what we have done and are doing- Most horrible of all, we are destroying the living system of nature itself, burning off fossil fuels, as if there is no end to their supply and no cost to the environment of the whole world when we do so. We are cutting down our ancient forests and polluting our rivers. Within only a few hundred years and over the course of only a few generations, we have carried out the wholesale degradation of nature, given rise to life-changing global warming, a rising sea-level and produced life-terminating pollution.

 

In a holocaust of slaughter, we have erased whole species of animals in a mere few decades. We have even destroyed complete societies of our own human species, wiping their languages, stories and rare and unique wisdom, of why and how things are the way they are from the face of the earth. We live anxiously in fear of the total annihilation of an Atomic holocaust, in a worldwide society in which the very few have far more than they need and the vast majority do not have enough. All of these factors are obvioulsy not a good basis for peace in the world. If we were a doctor, we would say that our whole world is suffering from a terminal disease.

 

 

In the West, we are insulated from ‘seeing ourselves in the mirror’, as the poverty on our streets is mostly hidden and the terrible death, suffering and violence that occurs daily around the world is hygienically reported. The death and suffering we read about is mainly easy and quick. The gross, sad, terrible, shit smeared, fly covered, worm eaten, gut spilled, crying and wailing, long term suffering of real life is not shown in Hollywood movies. 

 

We deny reality not only to ourselves, but, to our children as well. In the West, our news is censored and we consider the stars in Hollywood as heroes. Why should we complain? The images we see are amazing and so ‘lifelike’. The only problem is that they are not. In the West, we live in a fantasy. We have risen up into the ‘capsule of our heads’ and only ‘imagine’ we have left the ‘hairy, shitting, dying, ape’ far behind.

 

Even our politics, which we think are sophisticated and evolved, evidence the practices of brutes and apes who wear suits and ties, take bribes and give press conferences.

 

There is a story of a group of people on a small boat at sea. Each person is sitting on his or her individual seat around the perimeter of the boat. One person starts to drill a hole underneath his seat through the hull of the boat. Another man tells him to ‘Stop! Don't do that. You will sink the boat.’ The man doing the drilling says in reply, ‘Mind your own business, Buster. It is under my seat, not yours’. ‘Yes’, replies the man who told him to stop, “It is under your seat, but if you sink the boat, then we all will drown.’

 

The man on the boat, drilling a hole under his seat is only doing his ‘own thing’. This represents the growing feeling mentality of everyman. It is spreading all over the world.  It is an attitude, magnified by advances in technology which is giving more and more people on the boat both a power drill and the electricity to use it. This has greatly magnified and quickened the effects of selfishness and brought the whole world to the brink of disaster in a very short period of time.

 

We are in a situation that we cannot afford to be in for very long. Individuals have become so full of themselves, so individualized, so not humble, not related to the earth, so ‘special’ and full of their rights and privileges, that the 'he' and 'she' of ‘everyman’ is going to sink the whole boat. We are not just seriously confused, we are in deep shit and about to go over shits waterfall.

 

Our very thinking has been corrupted. We mistake pipe smoking philosophers for wise men. We cannot tell saints from idealistic people. We consider lying about an affair worse than lying about bringing a whole nation to war.  We think that bad events are 'tragedy' and we think the world can be a paradise. We remove and sanitize the suffering, death and violence of people and animals from our education and news and replace them with vague and misleading statements, entertainment, cute stories, comedy, romance and erotic images.

 

At the same time that we repress sexuality in our movies, we live it out secretly, exemplified, by the nearly constant scandals of individuals and even the Catholic church. We deny the actual, realistic imagery of horrific violence in our news reporting and yet our movies are full of pseudo-sanitized, poorly dramatized violence. People seem to die without much pain or effects. Our children play fake, violent video games and when they grow up they kill strangers in other countries with little or no remorse or real feeling because they have been killing people and destroying things all their lives. 


Our last president Bush, claiming to have found weapons of mass destruction, invaded another country (Iraq) based on false information, caused the death of well over a hundred thousand men, woman and children, destroyed much of an ancient culture and never apologized for his mistake, if it even was a mistake- he could have been lying all along. But then again, we must not only blame Bush. We have not apologized as a country, even after Bush has gone. What kind of society are we? This is an outrage. We are drilling with bigger drills and more electricity than any other culture on the face of the earth. Our boat is filling with water. People all over the world are drowning.

 

Because we do not realize our own, ‘hairy, shitting dying’ nature, we have correspondingly  lost our sympathy with other animals or humans, who, like us, are at the mercy of nature. We have forgotten and no longer feel or care for others. After all, what can we do to make the necessary difference in a world that has gone totally insane? Our own country's army, navy  and airforce rage about the world with terrible weapons and destroy any who would oppose us in a variety of ways both overt and secret. When questioned we reply, "Isn't it necessary to protect ourselves? People want to destroy us". We rarely ask why this should be so.

 

We have lost our connection to ‘humus’, to the earth. We have lost our humility. We shit upon our Mother and our brothers and do not thank others for all they have borne and done for us and continue to do.

 

But, there are laws in nature. The law of cause and effect cannot be denied. No man can decide to make gravity not work. No person can deny old age or prevent death. No man can stop the tides or block up a river, forever. Like a good Mother, nature is slow to rise to anger, slow to show her reactions, but, that does not mean that she will protect us from the results of our own transgressions. She cannot. Eventually, the fruits of our actions will ripen. 

It is said that old age is the least expected thing that can happen to a person, it is not noticed, until one day we wake up, look in the mirror and it has already happened. Just like that, mankind slowly and inexorably, by his vast and steadily growing disturbance of the life-supporting patterns and systems of nature, has come to the tipping point of his own extinction and very few even notice.

 

Perhaps, in some way, we have always lived on the edge. With the slightest shrug of her shoulders, nature, or what is called in modern-day Insurance jargon, ‘Acts of God’, (a term that carries the remains of the religious, philosophical and perceptive observation of life by the ancient, hand-ass-wiping cultures of our collective past), could always and easily destroy what we call ‘civilization’. When we look back in time, we see plenty of instances where this has happened- floods, tidal waves, solar flares, earthquakes, meteorites, volcanoes, drought and plague to name a few. All of this has happened before and there is no reason not to expect it will happen again. It was a surprise each time it did happen and it will be a surprise when it happens again.

 

There is a super-volcano, perhaps the largest volcano in the world,  with a crater nearly 1500 square miles wide underlying Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Scientists say, that it just about destroyed every person on the face of the earth last time it went off. If you go to Yellowstone, you will see large lakes where the water has all spilled out onto one side of the lake, killing the hundred year old trees there by drowning their roots. You can notice this because the trees are brown and without leaves and when you look, the lake has spilled out all around their base. It seems like someone just tilted the earth, lifting it up like you would a plate full of water, spilling the lake out of its previous boundaries and this is just what has happened.