Organic Truth Perspective VI.
Human beings and human societies are in a relationship with the Natural World,
A relationship that they didn't choose to get into, and cannot choose to get out of.


Humans didn't emerge into existence on their own power. Human beings didn't will themselves into existence; countless other forces cooperated, blended, interacted, and worked over time to bring about the expression of life that we call "man". Those many forces were themselves sprung from others, and those from others.

If you follow the multifaceted chain of human origins "back"- as well as "forward"- you find that it takes you into the earth and sky, into the void of space, into the seas and icecaps, and into the bodies of birds, beasts of prey, predators, and even into the unseen world of spirits. If you take any plant, any stone, any animal species, any spirit, or any idea, you can see how it (or they) have a similar "origin story"- all those forces, all that time, all those connections.

We human beings are in a relationship with the world that we didn't choose to get into, and we cannot choose to get out of. This is our home, our eternity. We belong here; we were made from here; we are of here; in terms of multiplicity of forces, we belong to them, we were made from them, we are of them.

This thinking must be taken up to the level of societies. Our social groups are in the same relationships. What we do can and does affect other people. What our social groups do to other social groups affects them. What we do to the world affects it. And in return, recursively, what other people do affects us, what other groups do to us affects us, and what the world does- the movements and motions of nature's processes- affects us.

There is a circular net here, an inter-twining, a series of relationships of great power. There is no leaving the game, no leaving the family, no leaving the web. There is only obeying the web's rules, living in harmony, living well, or destruction. There are no middle gears on this one, and no middle option. Destruction won't always come swiftly to those who break the rules and live poorly, but come it will.

One of the fundamental distortions of the modern mainstream religions is this idea that one will "escape" earth to gain a heaven one day, or that "God" will wipe away the flawed and lost earth, and make another, brand new earth, perfecting it, and letting people live in it again. These stories make people care less about the earth and about their relationships with the many powers. These sorts of stories encourage people to turn their backs, or lose the sense of urgency and familiarity they should have (and naturally would have) if they didn't believe them.

There is no "heaven" to escape away to. This is home, and will always be home, and this web of relationships will always be your web of life. Whether you are human, or possibly spirit of some sort after you die, or whether your life-force simply fills the world in some other way or form, here you are. The "spirit world" is not some separate space far away, apart from the natural bulk of life; as many animistic cultures have attested, it is but a footfall away, one blink away, one shifting of perspective. Others place it "over that ridge" or "beyond those trees" or "under that hill". Religions that teach "transcendence" of the world, or escape from it, are fundamentally flawed and poisonous to the well-being of all life in this world.

The escapist heaven, where everything is made "okay for eternity", has no existence outside of minds that are in denial of their responsibilities to the greater community of life, their social/systemic nature as a human person, and their pure belonging to the natural processes of reality. Despite what minds in denial want, there is no escape. All are involved in the world and in other lives and persons- all our kin and relations- all are woven in, physically, mentally, and spiritually, and will remain so.

This has been stated most simply and most universally by the statement: everything is connected and everything affects everything else. This is as true now as it always was, and always will be. There isn't even a single blade of grass that we can destroy without a real impact on the fabric of the whole; we must be wise and respectful in how we treat the things of the world, and that includes each other and all Persons, human, animal, or spiritual. The exhortation to be wise and respectful even extends to the natural and needful competition that may come up with other persons.

Distortions of truth that become enshrined, or recreated daily in one's conscious life, will bring about suffering and death. I wish to close with an example that I have always found to be enormously useful and powerful- the example of the witch-cats.

In medieval Europe, it was believed by the superstitious Christian peasantry that cats were familiars of witches; they were thought to be demonic, possibly the form that demons took to help witches in their diabolism, and thought to be ill-favored creatures in general due to these associations. The Church did little to fight this belief; and because of it, every morning in many places around Europe, when the morning church bells were rung, entire baskets of living cats were burned on bonfires in towns and villages- a way of showing the town's intolerance for evil spirits, and affirming their goodness.

As you can imagine, the population of cats in Europe was decimated. And then, one day, rats infected by the Bubonic plague made it to Europe from trading vessels. The fleas on the rats were one of the main causes of the spread of the plague, and because there were no cats to keep the rat population down, the plague spread like wildfire. Most of the population of Europe died, including royals, countless priests, many bishops, and even one Pope. What these people unwisely did to the world, to these fellow living creatures, they did to themselves.

The Church that touted itself as a receiver and promulgator of the "highest divine truths" failed to impart even the simplest of natural, organic truth and warning to the people of Europe, and it cost most of them their lives. That same organization has failed in such ways countless times, thus casting a rather large (some would say incontrovertible) doubt on their claims of divine truth, wisdom, and insight. Instead of giving organic truths to human beings, these organizations sell distorted truths and outright untruths to people who desire the ease and comfort associated with them.

The parallel lack of wisdom on the part of the nearby Muslim world- how it crushes women and homosexuals underfoot, how it destroys and consumes all non-Abrahamic cultures in its path- tells us the same story.

The day is coming when humanity will live by their acceptance of the real truths of Nature, or die holding on to illusions and fundamental distortions. Harmony inside the individual and within society, and between societies and other societies and the world is possible. Perhaps, in an extraordinary sense, the sort of harmony we can devote ourselves to persists beyond our lives and the lives of our societies; if that were the case, then living wisely within the webwork of natural forces- both those of the world that is seen and the living powers of the immaterium- is the true "path of salvation" sought by so many. Our efforts at harmony have more than just an impact here and now, that much is certain; all chains of forces and causality stretch not just back, but forward, too.


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All text is Copyright © 2009 by Robin Artisson