I'm trying to become uncivilized. That's right. The word has a well-known denotation, but it also has connotations. We need an alternate word to "civilized", as that word has come to mean humane, hi-tech, industrialized, modern, intelligent, civil, and sophisticated, when it is not. It's merely "citified". "Civil" meaning "of a city".

We want an alternate word; how about "naturalized"? Can we re-naturalize ourselves while living in a city? Are vacations in the hills enough? A garden helps, surely. A sheltering set of trees.

To become disenculturated is a path to enlightenment, and also an effect of it. Any awareness of how we get isolated by our enculturation will help us see past it.

Note that the Gaia Society is not merely investigating a philosophy; we are investigating the genetic nature of the human species. It's big job, but we don't have to do it; scientists do.

We will attempt to build a compatible philosophy upon that; after. Not vice versa --trying to twist new facts to fit an old erroneous philosophy-- as has been so common.

Due to our concern with finding what nature is in the human animal, we are concerned that some of the more desirable attributes of people can so easily work against us and the planet. Our inquisitiveness and invention are running way ahead of our awareness, and sometimes --too often-- ahead of our ethics.

By the term "nature", we pretty much mean genetic influences, or is to some degree instinctive --or at least, behavior that is not countermanded by genetics.

"Nature, red in tooth and claw..." Traditional religion has seen nature as a horrible test of human endurance of misery and danger, all designed for us by a loving father. And because of the mass death and misery that nature (His design of nature!) supposedly caused, it was for us to dominate and conquer. The Gaia Theory has more respect for the (or His) design than that shown by most contemporary religions.

In reality, nature is a set of interconnected chain reactions--a dynamic system. Each new mutation or geologic event pushes one or more species into new behaviors and, eventually, into new physical forms. The changes in these species each push a few others in turn. Those species push that many more, until even the original pushers are pushed.

Nothing remains the same. There is chaos, not perfect order. Yet... there is a harmony and constant balance. Or was, until man. In nature, paradoxically, chaos is stability; simplicity is collapse.

Some people fear germs (a catch-all term for anything microscopic and wiggly), and such parts of the system they're part of. They think it's good to fear and fight germs.

The way a Gaian looks at it is this: if the micro-creature has always been there in the environment, it has been part of the checks and balances of nature. Man has already balanced against it, and in its absence, we would be unbalanced. Skin, for example, needs bacteria almost as much as our guts do. There are bacteria that have your name! They are an integral part of you; as much as your liver!

There are certain "germs" to take exception to, of course --those that produce deadly toxins. However, they usually threaten us only when another of our actions has upset our interactive balance. We should not try to wipe them out, as they probably serve other purposes.

I suppose... even mosquitoes should not be interfered with, as any interference moves it out of that perfect balance. Other life needs its activity because it's an influence that they have balanced against, or depend on for food. (Therefore, we need something like Star Trek's Prime Directive, itself a development of the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm.)

It belongs in the system, as everything else does. At least, this was so until the advent of human technology. We have upset things by killing off vast percentages of creatures that had been in balance. This is especially true in the oceans (under the rug). We've outright extincted more species than we can count or are even aware of. We've introduced exotic species like the rabbit, the starling, certain snails, and the Cane Toad. We've completely changed vast environments that have kept themselves in an incredibly complex and dynamic balance for millennia. And because "you can't do only one thing", one human disruption can cause a hundredfold effect on secondary creatures.

So; does nature/Gaia love us?" Nope, yet yup. We're part of it--it's our "mother", yet it's unfeeling toward us or any other particular species. We are one of the family, unfavored over others. Yet nature tends to eliminate the extreme species (Cheetah...). "Gaia is not indifferent to the assaults of humanity, but may be indifferent to our survival" (Lovelock), if we continue. We are undeniably an extreme species.

Humans themselves have gone off the scale --the balance scale. We've taken ourselves out of the system of the checks and balances that protects the whole of nature. From a democracy to a dictatorship, so to speak! And dictators, be they a person or a species, are almost never benign.

A psychological consideration; we may here have a simple test of what is natural and what is not. It is the natural human emotion that does not go away when suppressed, oppressed and repressed, but grows stronger as the pressure toward release and actualization accumulates. It gets more powerful and, if natural expression remains blocked, a person may eventually express it in strange ways. This is a big reason for our desire to understand our true nature--so we can avoid those wrongful repressions.

With total freedom; would we caress or strike? Are we totally selfish or totally altruistic? Or altruistic, with compromise? Some of our behaviors do good things for one environment --or person/people-- while harming another, or many others! The behavior of every person in a selfish culture will harm every other person. (There's a name in Anthropology for cultures like that, but I've forgotten it! "Highly-entropic" would be good, meaning downhill fast!)

The Gaia Society tends strongly toward the belief that we are born altruistic. To express that altruism fully, we need only to get (regain) a more thorough awareness of our individual interdependence.

A human being is an animal that is inhabited by a high consciousness; one that --in our culture-- is somewhat embarrassed by its habitation of its physical body. Doesn't know what to do with it.

We cannot help but feel that a person needs more than the primary relationship. Beyond that, we need, as layers of an onion, a circle of close friends, then acquaintances, community, state, nation, world. In older terms: the bio-intimate relationship of the family, extended family, tribe, and several area coalitions, from precinct to nation. Currently, tho much diminished, this series of steps is still numerous, so much so that when you step back to look at it, it becomes more of an upward line than a series of steps. Still, the area near each individual is too empty for our comfort.

The reasons for the coalition-desire are twofold; one: the need for security; support and safety in numbers. The second need is for contact, as shown by Harlow's monkeys. He was the father of the terry-cloth monkey-mother: the wire-frame constructions that his orphaned baby monkeys depended upon for contact. There is also the need to be part of a larger scope (Maslow's "belongingness and affection" need) that seems to be an extension of the contact-need.

Perhaps we have an innate desire to realize oneness not with just a biological mother, but a meta-mother, if you will; nature itself!

Analogy: "That [person] is free who would be the author of the laws he lives by"; a quotation I've always found very deep and thoughtful. I would now like to apply it --extend it-- to the laws of nature, and to facilitate our ability to accept them.

There are laws of nature too. Are we free, in that we would be the author of them as well? Don't be too quick to answer. Would you let the mosquito species live?!

If man can fully know the laws of nature, and know that undisturbed nature (including human nature) is the best it can be, then he is as truly free in nature as the author of it would be. I take this as a form of enlightenment, or "being at one with God".