For someone that has already accepted that his socio-cultural paradigm is not the only measurement to read the History of the world and the human race, the attraction ancient civilizations and cultures may exercise on his imagination is a strong one. The fact that most of those past civilizations had fascinating, meaningful, spiritual relationship to the Earth, the stars and the Gods is a proof of the vast spectrum of possibilities to embrace life. The changes in the perceptions and values, in the knowledge and experiences of reality, face us to an obvious understanding: Human Consciousness is evolving and changing shapes, Ancient civilizations rose and felled and the once strong bond between humans and Nature has deteriorate to a painful divorce. Looking backward and forward we are left to ponder on a burning question: and now What?
“ This” What” is luring us into trying to bring some of this past alive. The sacred knowledge of the shamans, the Native Americans, the Druids, the Essenes, and many other esoteric sources; all those richness and wonders of our ancestors are indeed amazing but are they mirroring our present awareness? ”
This “What” is very frightening when the time is running short as the glaciers are melting in the North Cap and the freshwater is getting scarcer and scarcer. Our basic surviving is being jeopardized by seemingly terrible mistakes. This” What” is luring us into trying to bring some of this past alive. The sacred knowledge of the shamans, the Native Americans, the Druids, the Essenes, and many other esoteric sources; all those richness and wonders of our ancestors are indeed amazing but are they mirroring our present awareness? Is it serving Consciousness and if yes, how is it serving it? Is Ecology the science of preserving what is past or a subtle dance that an amazing sentient being has with the rest of the Universe? What is precious ultimately, preserving the forms that Life takes or bringing it’s essence to Light? Those are terrible questions that we may not avoid anymore.
The way I wish to look at those questions is to try to understand what is Nature’s role in the evolution of our Consciousness and what is our role in bringing this Consciousness back to Nature.
I will use a stream of cultures that goes from Ancient India to Persia, Egypt, Babylon, Canaan, Greece, Rome, Europe-America. This stream is the stream that brought the modern day individual, as we know it. And why we know it? Because, it’s most likely us the readers of this text! We are able of Aristotelian logic, of abstractions, of scientific-experimental thinking and we are feeling very alone in the Universe because the way to the Gods seems to us, at best, as a long and distant dream. This Homo-Individualis has a natural tendency to look at the History of the human race and to presuppose that his present paradigm is the one that was as well serving the previous cultures. Of course we know that before Aristotle there wasn’t Aristotelian logic but it’s much harder to connect with what it would mean to look at external events without it! Further back in Time we go, further away we get from modern day Consciousness.
In Ancient India, in the Upanishads, and later on in the Vedanta we get a strong sense that the experience of man was in the far, far away cosmos. The Atman, the all pervading Consciousness was the only thing real; the rest of the creation was Maya, Illusion. Man was to get rid of this Illusion in order to experiment his only true place. There wasn’t any relationship to Nature; Nature was part of the Illusion and nothing more. With these principles as bases for a society we can imagine some kind of dreamy, undefined, faint awareness of the material world.
With the Persians and the Cult to the sun God, Ahura Mazda, we start to get closer to the Earth; there is a force of Light and Good and in a more dualistic way a force of Darkness, Ahriman. We are starting to get more “solid” concepts than Consciousness and Illusion. Along this, the Persians were looking at the Earth as some reality that needed to be worked at, to be dealt with. It’s important to try to accompany this movement of hardening of the thought process, because it starts to give a feeling of the forces involved in the thinking. The name of the civilizations, looked at here, is much less important than the grasping of this feeling; this is the experience I want to pass while relating all this. Because the Persians were taking a foothold on our planet they could start looking at the stars from this vantage point of view. They read the laws of the world in the laws of the stars and out of this, one of the first science was born, Astrology.
The Egyptian brought this further and developed the creative forces underlying the processes of building, developing, discovering. Human mind expanded to architecture, agriculture, geometry. We learned to read Nature, to grow it in some measures, to harvest it. The moon cycles influencing the Niles were of the first importance, the forces of the elements are studied. We rediscovered recently that even electricity was known to the Egyptians. When we look at the shapes of the Gods themselves, they are more and more humans, even though their heads are still from the animal kingdom.
Between Babylon and Caanan came the Hebrew people and the monotheistic God. A God that had a dialogue with a whole nation, a God that spoke in burning bushes and splat the Red Sea in two. A God that moves the interests of a specific people for a specific purpose. A purpose that is more important than Nature itself. A nation, the Hebrew, that is our Paleo-individual, a “many” that behaves as a “one”, a “one” that sees the world as an external thing. The thinking is entering the human body. It doesn’t work anymore only from the outside, from the Nature towards the human but as well from the within towards the out.
The time is now ripe to think the world, to define it, to search for the logic inside it. This is the birth of the Greek and the Roman cultures. The Psyche of the human mind becomes an inner world with many colors and forms. We can think the Polis and Legislate. We can value the Human and slowly cut the umbilical tread connecting us to the wisdom of Nature.
Of course this mesmerizing process never happened that clearly and linearly, many different sub-streams run their parallel courses, there were progressions and regressions. Some peoples stayed connected to more antic streams; in the countryside, forests and deserts, on the mountains and on the seas by force of survival and traditions, strong links were kept with the world and more harmonious ways of living were nurtured; but the civilization tread was inexorably pushing us toward the industrial revolution and the definitive divorce with the ecosystems. Man became the centre of the universe and nothing was more important. “I think therefore I am” had become the statement of our Power and of our Loneliness. Descartes pointed to the thinking quality as the defining quality of our humanness and was the Oracle of the Homo-Individualis, the smallest ecosystem known to himself. The next step was to be the studying of the human as a mechanic, responding to influences in reproductive ways. The same outlook affected our relationship to Nature and, with the industrialization of production, we crystallized the death of a Living World.
This brought us to today and the question: and now What?
Well, first of all I think it’s essential to grasp this movement as a fantastic cosmic deed, as the story of a magnificent sacrifice. Nature has been slowly sacrificing herself in order for us to think and to be conscious as we are today. It wasn’t possible otherwise. I repeat: it wasn’t possible otherwise. The simple, obvious statement that we can think is born out of this sacrifice. In the old time our thinking was coming from the Outside, from the Cosmos, the laws of harmony were the laws of the Gods and it was thinking our life for us. The leaders and the priests were helping us to translate them into our everyday life. There wasn’t any question of freedom as we know it today; knowledge was there for us to follow. The myth of Adam and Eve is a symbol of all this devolution. The knowledge of Good and Bad was in the Three and by biting into it’s fruit we brought this knowledge towards us. The price we had to pay was to be exiled from a perfect place of harmony. We fell away from Paradise but… it was our first step toward freedom.
In the light of this tremendous sacrifice, we must realize that our responsibility isn’t going to be less tremendous. Our thinking must infuse and serve the world back. We have to do the opposite movement. We have to transform Nature into Culture.
As love can’t be without a part for the taking and a part for the giving, the sense of our life is in the taking and giving.
Real Ecology would be the return of this cosmic knowledge, dead and resurrected in the depth of our inner selves. Nature can’t be as it was and never will be again as it was. An ecological man is a man that can meet the Nature through his thinking, a man that will think the forests and the fields, the rivers and the lakes, the wind and the sun. Many examples already exists and many more will come, we have biodynamic, permaculture, studies on the intelligence and the memory of water, knowledge of the macro and the quantum. But not only that, we have the understanding of our interconnectedness because of this great sacrifice, the understanding that if we know we are drinking water we owe it to the water itself, if we know the wind is blowing in our hairs we are owing it to the wind, if we know that our face is warmed by the sun we owe it to the sun itself. Our thinking is the fruit of Nature that sacrificed herself; our freedom is our duty to bring Thinking back to It.
Most of what is written here is the fruit of the studying of the work of Rudolph Steiner and the extended spiritual inquiries of Emil Bock .
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