Great Nature Asks Nothing Of Us

We must demand more of the best from ourselves and each other. Our love is God's love. Sit in love for a moment, and become the loving.

We are a species that has only been part of living systems on Earth for a very short time.

It’s good to treat a mountain as if it were sacred. If anything is holy, it is the Universe. What is the Universe? I don’t know. We need to appreciate natural services and recognize that we are an integral part of complex living systems. The Earth doesn’t ask anything of us. Nature works. We tell stories. We believe. Thinking the Earth or Great Nature cares about humans always smacks of human exceptionism or supremacy.

We are the last hominid standing, and in geological time, we’ve been part of living systems for a very short time. From an evolutionary perspective, however, we’ve been here all along. Mysticism, physics, and biology are distinct domains, yet they are all part of a single, comprehensive system. The questions we must ask pertain to what it means to be human and how we must behave if we wish to be good for human health, the health of living systems, and posterity.

I am who I am.

We return to the basics: ontology, epistemology, physics, biology, domains of science, and metaphysics, with a focused commitment to inquiry on a sociocultural scale that has never been seen before. The plebs and proles must throw off their addictions and conditioning and develop wisdom through sacrifice.

One can and must imagine.

We aren’t exceptional, but it’s all about us. If we adopt the right attitudes and create a new culture extremely quickly, we will continue to be part of Earth’s living systems. If we don’t, we will go extinct, and going extinct is as mundane as dirt, not soil.

Out, out brief candle.

Amidst the joys and sublime magnificence of existence, our trials and tribulations have been very violent, painful, and full of suffering and horror. Just read “The Good BOOKS.” How bad will the collapse be this time? How much more terrible will this Third World War be compared to the Second? It’s easy to quantify the ongoing distress and bloodshed resulting from geopolitical competition. However, in general, if we take a Pinkeresk perspective, we have never lived such peaceful and healthy lives. But sadly, our old pathologies remain as dangerous as ever.

What percentage of people even think in these terms? Building cultures is many levels higher up the complexity ladder than anything we can imagine. In terms of culture building, knowing what ails us is but one step in the right direction. What we think now is one more. What we learn about how things work is yet another small step. What we do next is one more. And all of this creativity and willful action must be undertaken in concert with diverse communities for the greater good. What might that greater good entail?

What kind of culture? What do we want? Why do we want it? How are we going to get it? If we ask and answer these questions, we’d be compelled to dedicate our lives to achieving favorable results.

Once you see the stocks and flows of complex living systems with their miraculous transfers of energy, you can’t unsee them.

Who will sacrifice one addiction to develop the ability to create new choices and the agency, willpower, and commitment to make them? Do you want to wake up in a culture full of creative stewards of living systems? Being a part of a community of Life lovers seems like a lot of fun to me.

Come, lovers of living and champions of life in new days, forgiving and revelries rife.

We’ve got work to do.

Do you know how our global financial system operates, including opaque derivatives and financial markets? Modern markets assume humans are independent individuals in an Ayn Randian sense, here to optimize nature for their ends, however unwise and self-destructive those ends might be.

And please, let’s not pretend that many people have read and understood the works of our many brilliant and nuanced political philosophers. Who reads the bible with a literary critical eye or tries to understand the context and origins of John Locke’s and Adam Smith’s worldview?

What kind of people read carefully, or listen to what Great Nature can tell us?

Our economic quasi-religion assumes we have access to infinite quantities of materials and inexpensive, easily transportable energy in various forms, allowing for maximum wealth creation that flows to an elite few wealth maximizers at the expense of their service providers and living systems.

Once one understands the ultimate purpose of financial markets, one can’t help but want to abolish them. Debt can only be repaid by life. Our economic theories constitute a metastatic, terminal disease.

The predicament of modern techno-industrial civilization stems from the laws of physics, biology, and human psychology, all of which are intricately intertwined and incomprehensively complex systems with emergent properties characterized by randomness and unpredictability.

God improvises and adapts according to the whims of its nature. Omni means whole.

We barely understand how anything in the Universe works, much less our brains, complex living systems, cultures, and consciousness; in fact, we hardly know what these things are. Add to that quantum mechanics, dark gravity, and dark matter, and we are practically flying blind, a poisonous, destructive machine of our own making, into the side of a vast, dense, granite mountain.

Our end will be as dramatic and catastrophic as a moon-sized asteroid colliding with Earth, altogether caused by our stories and beliefs.

Our business model is one of creative destruction, which means inventing ever more clever ways to destroy life on Earth in the pursuit of hyper-stimuli.

We are on a hedonic treadmill that always ends in death, psychotically aiming to end life in a jealous rage because we can’t live and grow forever. We love life so much, we want to destroy it. “You look so cute, I could eat you up.”

Heaven and Earth are not good enough for us; we want Godlike control of the Multiverse.

Our ego is envious of the overall resiliency and seemingly eternal nature of living systems as a whole. Covetousness is at the root of the seven deadly sins. We want what we can’t have.

The causes of our predicament are ignorance, a shortsighted, myopic view of our place in the world, our inability to self-reflect in the broader context of living systems, a lack of imagination stemming from our lack of having an intimate relationship with Great Nature, the scale of our energy-and-materials-hungry civilization, and a hubris-fueled fear of the unknown and unknowable.

And we hate across cultures for not being good enough.

Our economic beliefs and systems are incompatible with the health of living systems, human beings, and future generations.

We do not yet know what we do.