NOTHING IS SACRED
EVERYTHING WILL BE
CONSUMED:
How can the vast, burgeoning populations of the urban world
come to regard the Earth and nature as sacred in a world of prevailing
technology? Resource ecology, which is technology, is the final phase in the
history which began with that first yoke that was placed so long ago on the back
of the first domesticated beast. When we think of any aspect of ecology as only
renewable resource, to be dominated, organized, planned and managed as a raw
material to be put at the disposal of materialistically-driven human needs, then
we are thinking in an anti-sacred way.
Yet, resource ecology presents itself as the champion of a
new environmentalism. There are, of course, real ecologists who use the resource
argument in the media as an attempt to appeal to the basic human instinct for
survival. This is the wrong approach simply because it reinforces the
materialistic attitude that the Earth and its beings exist in order to be at the
disposal of human beings, which is the ideological source of the worldwide,
environmental crisis in the first place.
The central issue remains: having understood that current
ecological ideologies are Ecologically impotent, how does deeply understood
Ecology penetrate into ideological materialism and transform it? All our
thoughts about what Nature is are determined by what we think we as human beings
are. Placing ourselves at the head of a fragmented and dualistic hierarchy of
nature has led us into a suicidal relationship with the Earth and its laws of
life.
The resource “ecologist” intends to continue this
relationship and prolong it for as long as possible by a more efficient managing
of domesticated nature as a raw material resource. Implicit in this view is the
idea that the problem revolves around the techniques being used to farm the
wilderness of the Earth.
In the light of these facts, “the re-sacralization of Nature”
strikes one as being a romantic vision of archaism. World dominating,
Technotheism, denies the numinous and sacred in nature, simply because it is
incapable of perceiving anything as sacred. “Resource Ecology” is much more than a “renewable resource”
attitude towards forestry or fisheries. It also embraces organ transplantation,
the use of the aborted human fetus as a source of usable medicines, genetic
engineering, etc., and the mobilization of human beings as resource, represented
by the slogan “A nation’s most valuable resource is its people”.
TECHNOTHEISM
AND GAIA WORSHIP:
Technotheism is planetary karma, as the fulfillment of
decisions made long ago, and is, thus, part of the “cycle of necessity” for humanity, which must now live as technology and outlive
it into and through the coming post-technological era in which the spiritually
awakened are already living. For post-God worshipping humanity the sacred is
indistinguishable from the religious and the religious is no longer understood
as religion -- a linking back to the beginning -- but is understood as a
worshipful attitude of admiration or adoration. The newly “rediscovered” goddess
Gaia already has this condition of being a new religious image into which many
old religious attitudes and needs can be projected.
The posture of religious worship towards Gaia is the denial
of the sacred, which means to be at-one-with and within. The worshipful and
religious is always inherently dualistic. It remains outside and perpetuates the
non-sacred. It is our millenniums-long religious and worshipful culture in the
West which has led us directly to the half Enlightenment and everything that has
followed as the dominance of Technotheism since.
Whether we wish to split theological hairs and try to make
some distinction between an anthropomorphic deity and a personal deity, we still
have a transcendent being conceived outside nature as its supposed guiding
intelligence. Here of course we are amid an age old debate about “immanence and
transcendence “. Pantheism from which we get the name of the nature god Pan
means that the deity is immanent in and as all life. The deity is present in and
as all nature. There is no deity other than all that is in nature. This view of
nature as the immanent deity is also associated with various forms of paganism.
The transcendent view sees the deity as being entirely outside the creation or
nature. The deity is not in the natural world and must be sought and found outside nature. All of the
Western Judeo-Christian traditions are transcendentalist. God is perfect his
creation is a fallen world in need of salvation.
There is a third position which has been traditionally called
Panentheism, which states that the sacred is both, and simultaneously immanent
and transcendent. In this context Spiritual Realists would describe themselves
as Panentheists. But Panentheism is not the actual issue as such, there is
nothing to be accomplished by coming to a merely ideological decision about
these admittedly important metaphysical issues. It is how we understand
ourselves and how we live within greater life itself. And of course how we can
come to be and live in such a way as to directly experience the spiritual
reality of all life.
In order to enter the sacred we must overcome both religion
in all its forms and technology as a worldview and its resulting image of the
self. This separation of the self from Nature began long ago, hundreds of
thousands or even a million years ago, in the first totem cultures with their
representation of sacred Nature as image, oral history and myth. Nature then
became the Loki or sacred place in which the history of a people began as a
continuous mythic narrative through time. The appearance of the shaman as a
distinct type within totem culture points to the emergence of the spiritual
expert amongst peoples who no longer live their daily lives in sacred at one-ment
with the Earth, but have already entered the realm of religious
ritual/magical-thinking and confusion in the face of magical natures, doings and
signs. Hence, the need for spiritual experts and specialists. Only the shaman can solve the riddles of
enigmatic nature.
For the shaman, Nature already has the character of “the
other”. This otherness becomes a central issue or problem for tribal and
membership societies. There are many gods, goddesses and deities all competing,
so that victory in war is de facto the victory of the god of the victorious. The
persistent defeat and misfortune of a people would naturally mean the defeat of
their god and the magic of their shaman.
The sacrifice of animals and humans to the race god, which
predates the advent of Abraham and his god Jehovah, shows that the dominion of
man over the rest of nature had long been the accepted order amongst historical
peoples. Much as it has become fashionable amongst ideological environmentalists
to point to the Old Testament as the beginning of an anti-ecological and
non-sacred relationship with Nature, the truth is that Jehovah’s covenant with
Noah is the formalization of a situation which had prevailed amongst the peoples
of the Earth for eons of time before. This does not of course change the fact
that Jehovah's covenant with Moses is by now both redundant and fatally
dangerous, on several levels.
In order to enter into the re-sacralization of Nature we must
face a reality of near overwhelming magnitude; which is that we must overcome
almost everything that history has come to understand as the sacred and
religious in order to do this. At the same time we must be vigilant that we do
not lapse into unthinking materialism. Or fall back into magical thinking and
self deluding forms of psychism.
Since the transition of humanity from the externalization of
the Third Principle -- psyche -- to the Fourth Principle -- desire-mind --
millions of years ago. humanity has stood in the condition of otherness and
perplexity in its encounter with the enigma of the Great Goddess, later God of
Nature.
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