Spiritual Ecology: Notes from Ed Lantz's April 5th Insight Talk

What is Good Ecology? What would it look like for Humankind to be in balance with the Earth?
1. Balance, harmony, in-tune with the natural order of things
2. Sustainable, organic, thriving
3. Non-polluting, non-toxic, promoting biodiversity
4. Ecology of love
5. Good ecology – living in harmony and balance with nature.
a. Material world – the biosphere
b. Cultural world – interactions, community, relationships
c. Inner World – our inner state of affairs

Spiritual Ecology – Inner Balance, Outer Balance
1. Good Ecology in Nature
2. Harmony of our inner state of affairs
e. Mind, body, spirit, emotions
3. Evolution of consciousness
f. Humanity is evolving
g. Transcending old paradigms, bringing in new vibration
h. Overcoming mental and emotional pollution and toxins
i. Good inner ecology = harmony, balance, emotional and mental hygiene
4. Inner harmony leads to outer harmony
j. Higher order emerges from groups who are “in tune”
i. Flocks of birds, schools of fish, herds of animals
ii. Ecosystems exhibit natural order
iii. Humans are part of nature… but we have a choice as to what we radiate into the world
iv. Communities of humans who are in love – what would this look like?
k. Outer harmony requires communications, action, interaction,
i. Internet and media convergence is leading edge of this
ii. Speaking our truth, following our hearts
iii. Joining together in inter-action – affinity groups
5. Harmonious community is the key
l. Honoring the harmony that we have in the U.S.
i. The U.S. as a “great experiment”
ii. The need for the U.S. to lead
m. Common Ground as an experiment in a deeper, more harmonious community
6. Planetary Evolution
n. Humankind as stewards of the planet
o. New order organically emerging on planet earth?
p. Refer to vision expressed in intro – The ecology of love…


Elisabet Sahtouris on Gaia (from her book Earthdance):
http://www.sahtouris.com/INFO/

The Gaia hypothesis, now Gaia theory, of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis -- the theory that our planet and its creatures constitute a single self-regulating system that is in fact a great living being -- contains profound and pressing implications for all humanity.

A healthy world for all cannot easily rise from total destruction; rather it must be formed
now, in the midst of the chaos we create. Such a "new world order," I am again and again
reminded by the indigenous elders I have listened to intently for their deep understanding of sustainability, must be based on a very old world order -- on the laws of nature as indigenous people understand them, on laws they have been trying to teach us for a very long time: laws of balance, harmony, of giving back in full measure for all you take; laws designed to insure survival at least seven generations into the future.
Every being is part of some larger being, and as such its self-interest must be tempered by the interests of the larger being to which it belongs. Thus mutual consistency works itself out everywhere in nature.
In the context of our planet’s biological evolution, we are a new, experimental species. Humanity is now in adolescent crisis and, just because of that, stands on the brink of maturity in a position to achieve true humanity in the full meaning of that word. Like an adolescent in trouble, we have tended to let our focus on the crisis itself or on our frantic search for particular political, economic, scientific, or spiritual solutions depress us and blind us to the larger picture, to avenues of real assistance. If we humbly seek help instead from the nature that spawned us, we will find biological clues to solving all our biggest problems at once. We will see how to make the healthy transition into maturity.
Some of these biological clues are with us daily, all our lives, in our own bodies; others can be found in various ages and stages of the larger living entity of which we are part – our planet Earth. Once we see these clues, we will wonder how we could have failed to find them for so long. The reason we have missed them is that we have not understood ourselves as living beings within a larger being, in the same sense that our cells are part of each of us.

The same technology that permits us to reach out into space has permitted us to begin seeing the real nature of our own planet to discover that it is alive and that it is the only live planet circling our Sun.


Gregory Cajete on Native Science
(also see http://www.unm.edu/~nasinfo/faculty.html)

The guiding thoughts of Native Science are simple yet profound, subtle yet encompassing. Everything is considered to be alive or animate and embued with “spirit” or energy. A stone has its own form of animation and unique energy. Everything is related, that is, connected in dynamic, interactive, and mutually reciprocal relationships. All things, events, and forms of energy unfold themselves in a contextual field of the micro and macro universe.

In the practice of native science, the more humans know about themselves – that is, their connections with everything around them – the greater the celebration of life, the greater the comfort of knowing,, and the greater the joy of being. This relationship to space and time, and between living and non-living things is not just physical, but psychological and spiritual, in that it involves dreams, visions, knowing, and understanding beyond simple objectified knowledge of something. In other words, it is inclusive of all the ways that humans are capable of knowing and understanding the world.


Howard Bloom against Sustainability (snipped):
(also see http://www.scientificblogging.com/howard_bloom/screw_sustainability_and_cheer_up_about_it)

Mother Nature is a bloody bitch. She is the mother of catastrophe. She has given us 142 mass extinctions, 80 glaciations in the last two million years, a planet that may have once been a frozen iceball, and a klatch of global warmings in which the temperature has soared by 18 degrees in ten years or less.

Nature tosses us challenges and dares us to survive. More properly, she challenges us to thrive.

Evolution is all about breaking Mother Nature’s rules — defying gravity when a lizard stands, denying buoyancy when a fish controls its depth in the sea, and saying “no” to gravity when a bird has the audacity to fly.

That's why talk about 'sustainability' today is riddled with problems — and with the seeds of self-defeat. The lowest periods in recorded human history have come when society tried to maintain a status quo.

Our goal is not sustainability. It’s not to bow and grovel hoping Mother Nature will also freeze in place. Our challenge is to outrun nature by inventing radically new ways to deal with change. We have to be able to raise food in drought, flood or in a new ice age.

Nature rewards those who invent new ways to circumvent her, new ways to get around her old limitations, new ways to make something radically beyond the previous boundaries, and new ways to break her rules. In the end she punishes those who merely ride her periods of stability. She wipes them out utterly. She rewards those who are so inventive that they can surf the waves of unpredictability.


Brian Swimme on the New Cosmology (from website and The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos)
(http://www.brianswimme.org/)

Certainly science’s interruption in the 16th century was destructive not only of the European world-view, but of every traditional world-view with which science has had contact. But that destructive phase is now ending, and an integrative period begins. Even though science’s violent rejection of every cultural and tribal tradition has been deleterious in the extreme, end even though one can appreciate the vehemence with which fundamentalist religions around the planet reject any compromise with modern secular scientific culture, the opportunity of our time is to integrate science’s understanding of the universe with more ancient intuitions concerning the meaning and destiny of the human. The promise of this work is that through such an enterprise the human species as a whole will begin to embrace a common meaning and a coherent program of action.

One way to identify the significance of what is taking place is to say that science now enters its wisdom phase.

The cosmological discovery that shatters nearly everything upon which the modern age was built is the discovery that the Universe came into existence 13.7 billion years ago and is so biased toward complexification that life and intelligence are now seen to be a nearly inevitable construction of evolutionary dynamics. Our new challenge is to reinvent our civilization. The major institutions of the modern period, including that of agriculture and religion and education and economics, need to be re-imagined within an intelligent, self-organizing, living Universe, so that instead of degrading the Earth's life systems, humanity might learn to join the enveloping community of living beings in a mutually enhancing manner. This great work will surely draw upon the talents and energies of many millions of humans from every culture of our planet and throughout the rest of the 21st century.