Situating the Species

Someone recently told me, ''Humans are animals, and as such we are meant to relate with our immediate environment through our senses, through our body.'' (So far, so good.)  Then she added, ''It's not normal, it's not healthy, for us to be bombarded with information about the state of the global economy, etc.  It's too much stress, and it brings us way up in the mind...''

This was a response to me bringing up that I would like to create space for people, to really feel the depth of emotion they feel when they ponder the current crisis.  It's an economical and ecological crisis.  (It is an ecocrisis.)  I partially agree with that comment, although from an evolutionary perspective, I am resistant to this idea that ''we were not supposed to''.

I think it was meant to be this way... and that we're coming full circle in order to embark on a new leg of our journey.

Consciousness has morphed tremendously since the advent of our homo sapiens ancestors.  The evolution of consciousness is a reality.  Look carefully and you'll see the parallels between developmental psychology and the growth of humans society!  From undifferentiation to rebellion to integration, it's a never ending process that everyone experiences.

One aspect of this is how humans have pushed technological innovations (through their imagination first, which is beyond the five sense), from the mastery of fire and the creation of the wheel, to the building of steam engines, nuclear reactors, and global positioning systems.  Each new discovery has transformed the fabric of society.  Each new invention has transformed the relationship of humans within time and space and amongst themselves.  Today we are finally remembering the fundamental fact of our interconnectedness with the entire world.  Today, we can experience more empathy for the Other. A marvelous book on the connection between the advances of technology and the grown of empathy is called The Empathic Civilization (2009), by Jeremy Rifkin.

It couldn't have been any other way.  We are social animals, who have created beyond themselves, projected ahead of time through our minds eyes.  We have imagined.  We have dreamed.  We have created.

And we've migrated and colonized, and relocalized.  Today we urbanites find ourselves uprooted, piled up in offices and lined up in subterranean mazes.
We get to see the insides of the matrix we live in.  Roads, tubes, neurotransmitters and all.

EarthRise

Complex systems are difficult to behold and comprehend.  That's why our species had to compartmentalize, first, throughout the ''mental'' (to use Jean Gebser's terminology) era.  We had to analyze, to understand, to control... to divide and conquer.  The prerogative of a great deal of ''methodological'' thinking, especially since the Enlightenment.
But the problem is that we can't and should not conquer nature, because wildness is the source of our creativity.  Wildness is necessary to our survival.

Yet it's true; beholding the present situation is overwhelming.  What can I do, now that I know the statistics: in 2010, it's an estimate of 925 million people that were undernourished, and this  in spite of the fact that, ''World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase''?   

What am I to do?

I think about... ecology, because that's how I've come to look at politics, spirituality, psychology... even the arts.  It's all interconnected.

Witnessing this incredible web of connections and relations... It humbles me, and it makes me so much greater than myself, all at the same time!

This being said, the systematic study of ecology, as a science, is a relatively new :

Ecology is a sub-discipline of biology, the study of life. The word "ecology" ("Ökologie") was coined in 1866 by the German scientist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). (wikipedia)

The greek word ''Öko'' means ''house, which means that ecology is the ''science of the house''.

It was 1968 - only 44 years ago - when the astronauts of Apollo 8 took the famous Earth Rise photograph (above) and for the first time gifted humankind with a new perspective of our home, as seen from outside.

Two generations ago, they'd never seen a picture of the Earth taken from space!  Just ponder that.

Ecology is a new field.  It's an ongoing observation of the all the complex and intertwined relationships that make up this web we call Life.  Am I to be derogatorily labelled ''hippie'' for the simple fact that I actually understand the significance of all of this? 

Yes, I care about the environment I live in.  Yes, I get emotional when I look at this mess we've created for ourselves.  It makes me wanna know the next room's occupants, my neighbors.  It makes me wanna learn their language so I can have a conversation with them around the table.

And it makes me want to localize myself and re-awaken to my five senses and my body's wisdom.  It makes me want to grow and prepare the food I eat, instead of relying on chemical fertilizers and gas guzzling transportation and plastic wrappings.  

I want to hold and celebrate the sublime immensity and of the matrix.  I want to send my roots down so that I can bear my fruits, in time.  That's what I mean by coming full circle.  We don't need to roam anymore.  We don't need to hurry either.  We have each other plus myriads of other living friends to get to know better.  Here, now.