EcoChat: Spirit - Nature - Change  

Show Notes

• Archived Blog Post

  Date / Time: 10/20/2009 12:58 AM UTC

  Sacred Connections: A Companion Post
  

  I first wish to thank all of you who listened to (and will listen to) the first episode of EcoChat! An opening mic malfunction sent butterflies flying, but it's all good and I'm looking forward to next week's show and a little more wise!  I thought I would take a moment to elaborate on and clarify some of the key points discussed in tonight's show for those of you who would like more information or simply do better with written material.
  
  Our human lives are polarized. On the surface we spend our time toward surviving in our cultures, striving to meet basic needs that depend on how much money we earn.  Our sense of stability and security often are tied to our capacity to earn enough money to meet our basic needs: housing, clothing, food, and medical care--many of you listening/reading and many others who do not have access to this often struggle to meet many if not all of these basic needs. Our experience in culture often requires us to create and rely upon diverse social roles (social identities) that we can deploy within various situations and hope that our role is crafted in such a way as to provide us with the greatest chance of meeting our basic needs. Our modern way of living, indeed most of our 10,000 year history of culture, is structured so that we are always striving to reach that elusive moment when we can say with confidence we have enough. We are always reaching to the point of sheer exhaustion, and still others seem to outstrip us and rise to some ever-changing pinnacle. We live within a hierachical social society, stratified across classes where those who have can only be identified by keeping a large majority who do not have. We associate positive qualities with those who have achieved diverse "milestones" in culture as "better" and often morally "good" (regardless if they are in fact morally good), while those who struggle are seen as "bad", "lazy", and "deserving what they get". Our societies often pride themselves on maintaining this stratification ensuring competition is fierce and depleting--all the more boosting the self-esteem of those who have, while continuously eroding those who do not.
  
  When we are not struggling within our broad culture, locating and maintaining social identities, we often find ourselves struggling within our personal lives.  We do for others in a never-ending process of diminishing our energy because to not do would mean we are selfish or worse, others will inevitably leave us or hate us.  In short, without our social connections we would suddenly find ourselves feeling a pervasive and vague sense of anxiety and pessimism, clearing something would happen to us if we suddenly stopped doing everything for everyone. This anxiety has a lot to do with our innate "creatureness" (to quote theologian Meland)--our species as a social animal requires connections to the group for literal survival, without which we are suddenly vulnerable to that unknown predator in the dark. While seemingly separated from our innate creatureness, its innate ways of thinking and feeling still creep in and to combat this innate fear we throw ourselves into our relationships with others and exhaust ourselves for fear that the word "No" will equate to extorting behaviors on part of the other. Clearly you do not love me if you can't do this for me...  But our incapacity to say no, to set a boundary, to make time for ourselves, to sit with ourselves leads to our further depletion. If we have no means of returning energy into us, we cannot function--it's a basic law of Nature.  All systems, from the planetary to the individual needs ways to return energy into themselves.  When we do not nurture ourselves--and not by doing more things associated with our social role, convincing ourselves that we will have all the time to nourish us if we just put in the time now and thus postponing this--we deprive ourselves, deplete ourselves and ultimately will lose our capacity to nourish others and engage in meaningful relatedness.  So we must nurture ourselves--it is hardly selfish; it is self- and other- preserving.
  
  When we begin to nourish ourselves, by setting aside the social roles and allowing ourselves to reawaken possibilities of what we could do with our time; what we could love, we come to a place of being that transcends what we "do". No longer are we identifying ourselves with our social roles, with what we "do": Hi, my name is Katie, I'm a doctor. Instead we become ourselves, we fully inhabit our completeness. I AM Katie.  I no longer need to do any thing. My existence does not require an explanation; I exist, therefore I am.  Our identity is that which lies behind and often covered by our roles. In the broadcast, I used the analogy of an actor. An actor takes on a role--adopting the behaviors, voicings, and clothing of a specific character and enters onto the stage. At the end of the play, the actor takes off the trappings and becomes his or herself. We too are actors, as Shakespeare once brilliantly stated when he wrote "all the world's a stage" with us playing our parts, with entrances and exits, and lines. Yet this is only at the surface. This is when we engage with the "roles" we adhere to in order to make money in order to survive in culture. Yet culture is not the whole story. In the privacy of our homes, in the relationships with our friends, lovers, and children we can (and should) be able to be our authentic selves. Here we should be able to drop the costume and enter into the reality of our lives.
  
  It's hard to be authentic. Most of us have learned the hard way by adolescence that society is intolerant of authenticity, difference, and asymmetry. We must all be "normal" and "average"--we must be homogenized.  Culture hates diversity. We see it all the time in the widespread prevalence of racism, sexism, ageism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia as just some examples. Contradictorily, we also do not want everyone to be normal.  We must have those who can be identified as the outgroup, whom we can define ourselves against, whom we can exclude. We live in a state of, what Rollo May in his book Love & Will described as a "schizoid" world--a chaotic and fragmented world of competing and contradictory requirements. What is it so impossible to be authentic in culture?
  
  I think this is because Culture is not meant to be the container of human life. When you strip away our investment within culture and our sense that "culture" is a capital "C" and the definer of our lives, you find that culture is really simply a tool. It is a product of our collective brains and our tool-building strategies to optimize our survival. Clearly we've done this--our species is 6 billion strong and lives in every ecosystem in the world, including the most inhospitable areas (at least as an occasional visitor). Culture is simply a tool. It has become deceptive and encompassing, but it is a tool.
  
  Our authentic selves, however, lie beneath the manicured lawns, the high-rise buildings, the horrific human atrocities, the social chaos, the political fights, the diseases.... beneath this lies our creatureness, lies the human-as-animal, the primate who was born in the savannahs of Africa and walked around the world. At our core we are a species from the Kingdom Animalia and this should give us pause and comfort. In any given ecosystem, we find the central feature of diversity as the linchpin in the health, stability, and survival of that system and all the organisms within it. All species are critical, not one supreme species that our biologists once thought (applying their own experience of cultural hierarchies). We now seek to conserve all species to save an ecosystem and species from the brinks of a human-induced extinctions.  This should be a lesson to us, reminding us that the health of ourselves and the whole depends on our capacity to embrace and welcome diversity; to connect with all the possibilities of beingness humans exhibit. We also know that Nature does not foster purposeless individuals; all members in a group are important in their exact expression of self.  With the exception of a handful of species, ourselves included, the rest of the world's rich array of organisms is born into the world exactly who they are--there is little to no social shaping, there is little to now self-suppression. A majority of life on earth, reminds us the purpose is to stand up and be counted: To Be.
  
  This comes to the final important point. Life is not about achieving milestones or reaching some pinnacle. We are reminded that life unfolds; life on earth has rolled through billions of years, mutating and becoming. Our scientific drive to name and organize life in neat categories is ultimately inefficient and inexact as most scientist would attest to. Nature does not follow boxes and plateaus, it is a continuous process of becoming. And to this, we too need to recognize: Our lives are not about reaching this goal, it is about becoming.  We are challenged to "be-in-our-becomingness".  To live in each moment and be able to act in the world with an affirmative statement: This is who I am.
  
  Peace and blessings
  Dr. Kate
  • Tags:
  • spirituality
  • psychology
  • environmentalism
  • Nature
  • personal development
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