Free Home PageFree Home PageThe healing of Gaia
It may well be important to note that Gaia is already self-healing and that we are seeing the beginings of a problem that is manifest because the activities of modern society are curtailing this vital function. When human populations stress the biosphere beyond its capacity to repair itself (cutting the forests, polluting the waters and the atmosphere, eliminating species left and right etc) this potential for healing is reduced. For all the people in the world to live at the same level as those in the developed countries, in terms of our individual consumption of resources and energy, is already scarcely possible. There are more than 5 billion people on the planet today (China 1.5, India .9, USA .35, Indonesia .2, Russia .18, all the rest over 1.5) facing the same negative fact everywhere.
Most of the wars breaking out now days are based on resource limitation.
This is assiduously disguised by the media through a process we may term "historical substitution" whereby a religion, faith or race is allocated the prime responsibility for initiating events in some supposed time-based context. As soon as people are killed, the character of those involved and still living is used to justify the original event. Resource limitation is almost never held to be to blame, and in point of fact almost any other rationalisation that it is possible to imagine, is used to "explain" the cause of the event. In Albania it was "pyramid schemes", never mind the fact that such devices were propounded to convince people that there was some "magical" way around the resource limitations they faced. In Bosnia-Hertzagovina, the first round of violence saw the immediate occupation of property by the violators along with the liberation of "capital goods". The list goes on but it is always a surety that the basic fact of resource limitation serves as the in intial spark in the vast majority of conflicts.
Collectivly, it is the human race, ourselves, which is the reason that Gaia is starting to struggle with healing. Nor can it be safely assumed that this is a "once-only trauma" to be repaired in the fullness of time but it is rather something that is more like an expanding disease. Were the Earth to be exposed to some additional stress such as the impact of a meteorite or perhaps the rain of debris from a comet-tail, the present state of affairs would be far more likely to lead to some form of disaster than might otherwise be the case.
The Problem
This is not the first time that an advanced civilization has faced imminent and self-induced destruction. Before us, Atlantis faced the same dilemma as shown by the sudden burst of carbon-di-oxide and methane, the main green-house gases that presaged a sudden and unexplained warming the end of the last ice-age around 12,000 years ago. At that time some think that there was one and only one global civilization, leaving its characteristic pyramid-shaped symbols in China, off-shore Japan, Indonesia, central and south America to name a few places only. Remnants of this high-tech civilization, possessed of the ability to perform precision-stone stone-cutting on a vast scale, are to be found today in Egypt, Baalbek (Lebanon), Puma Punku (Bolivia), Tiwanaku (Bolivia), Cuzco (Peru), Sacsayhuman (Peru) and so forth. The machined granites attest to the fact that none of these artifacts is likely to date later than the fall of Atlantis approximatly 11,500 B.P Ancient record suggest that Atlantis disappeared in around 9,560 B.C..
Spears produced by tool-making man have recently been carbon-dated in Germany from as long ago as 400,000 years before present. We know, for instance, with absolute surety, that human civilizations moved from using primitive copper tools in the middle east to the high-tech perfection of today in just 5,000 years. The cave-paintings in Lascaux and Font-de-Gaume in the Dodoyne region of France show a stunning grasp of artistic technique to an extent that these graphic scenes rival anything presently produced. One the one hand we are asked to believe that the ancients were so stupid that it took them around 395,000 years to move from primitive spear-making to the elaboration of copper-smelting Alternativly they took around 25,000 to 30,000 years to move from chipping flints near Lascaux to smelting copper. This brief tour should be sufficient to convince all but the most dedicated academic scientist that the modern world represents but one of a series of civilizations long-since passed from view. If, as some think, Atlantis fell around 11,500 years ago and humankind languished at a pre-stone-age level until approximatly 5,000 years ago we have a marker for the collapse and recovery of approximatly one half of the time taken for the cycle of the precession of the equinox.
It is true that there is some discussion about the exact instant of the turning-point that will represent the Millenium but, it may not be much different than midnight News Year's Eve 2000. There appears to be a coincidence of cycles going back perhaps as far as Atlantis. We have a Zodiac precession cycle of the equinox of 25,920 years, with 12 stages or houses all marked. Someone , a lot of someones, presumably counted that off before it became "fixed" in mind so to speak.
Theory:
The milennium is not just a word, it is a time-marker pegging an extent of human experience sufficient to take people from early-iron-age to high-tech-confusion (2160 years) [note x12=25920]. This, together with industrial-output abuse of Gaia apparently forms an end-state from which no civilization - including Atlantis, by definition, has yet emerged.
Confusion because a pure-goodness religion like iron-age Christianity (love one another, god is love) was not able to cope with the combination of intellectual training (sharpens the mind, perhaps too much ?), now required to provide successful "high-tech" citizens and the contradictions perpetrated against nature (Gaia, the substance of our existence), by the industrial estate in providing the basis of the high-tech elevation. Not to mention the rat-eats-rat mentality promoted by the population densities needed to provide the markets upon which industrial man and woman, feed.
Along with the collective and individual acts of savage violence we now have the example of "Heaven's Gate" before us. In the latter case we can see that the people involved were apparently asking "why am I here ?", "what is my purpose (in this god-forsaken mess) ?" Who among us has not asked such questions ? Many of us ask them each and every day..........................................
The approach of the millenium presents us with a fresh incentive to find a way to get off the cycle of rising, crashing and even terminating, civilizations.
Can fear be a positive motivation ?
Some will refuse to work from the fear of self-annihilation, and hold that they will not create from a basis of fear and that they do not wish to intimidate or create fear in anyone else.
This is a valid point. However, even if we transcend the fear we will not necessarily solve the problem of making Gaia self-healing to any greater extent than she already is. She will get long just fine without us but she does perhaps no longer have that option Unfortunately unless we are merely talking about die-back and eventual recovery, it now looks as if we will both go together when we go.
It appears that civilizations today are nothing more than a part of a great succession of cycles involving journeys from primitive survivors to advanced civilizations and back to stone-age remnants It seems that these cycles scratche from before the biblical-flood back into an almost forgotten past.
The new millenium extends and we do not want simply to take to the hills as the current majestic ediface of civilization crashes once agein, to then lay anew, the foundation of the latest cycle which will once more evolve, through exactly the same mistakes as we have already created. Who indeed knows how many times this cycle has already repeated itself as humanity struggles towards the light? Such a strategy would at best, merely continue the continuum of cycles. We must also consider the possibility that by itself, such a proceedure might not work even though many people are learning alternate economies and alternate lifestyles and sustainable development in preparation for such times.
This is a lesson taught by the friendly plants as many of those partaking of the ayahuasca experience can verify..(got to get out of the city,.listen to the birds tell their story,.hear the wisdom trees tell you their prophecy, taste the earth's fecundity) and it is more or less a true survival strategy. It is however, not necessarily the only one of the array from which we may choose.
As the result of operating workshops on alternate ways of doing things, conducting consciousness raising interventions and so forth, endlessly for the last 20-30 years, we can see a the concrete fact that though some practices were changed and now more people are involved, nonetheless the great blind mass continues to move in a determined manner along the road to destruction.
Positive Reinforcement
A major part of the lesson involved in learning to deal with this situation is that we must transcend fear. The self cannot be annihilated but it can stop growing. Its natural function is creation, with or without fear. The presence of fear in and of itself is no special event that one should recoil from and say "I will not do so and such" for it is by willing that one is, and we are that which imagine ourselves to be. This can be happy and joyful or it can be sombre and deliberately calculating. Perhaps a mix is necessary. Some people, appear to be of a naturally joyful disposition but the peaks of joy and the valleys of gloom are all part of the same landscape, or so it appears..
The "crash and survive" scenario for the continuity of civilizations is not an adequate answer, we have to break-out of this cycle of cycles as a minimum consideration, and not by just avoiding termination. If launching out of the situation requires joy then so be it but we must beware that since no civilization accomplished this successfull to date that it cannot be an easy task. Or, perhaps it did and those "ghost civilizations in-the-sky" continue to manifest themselves in peaceful transcendence, flitting in and out of our waking and sleeping dreams as they try to entice us down the same pathway ? Where was Atlantis anyway and what did it accomplish, really ?
Robin, Susan and Arysio.......April 1997
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