PONDER THE FUTURE: with NATURE, BALANCE and SOUL
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” Socrates
NATURE
“Is Mother Nature Trying to Tell Us Something?” says Alan Weisman, in the Boston Globe Magazine April 26, 2020. ”Covid-19 is a warning to brace ourselves for corrections that Nature makes when a species outstrips its environment. It’s painful, though, when your own species is the one being corrected. … The pandemic proves the planet can go on without us. Now’s our chance to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Nature is my greatest delight to enjoy, to study, and to learn how to be, to create and to build. Her lessons are the greatest in all of life’s teachings. My mother’s hobby was studying birds and telling me about them. A fascinating thing about birds, animals, flowers, etc. is that Nature puts them in categories of species within species, depending on sameness. Yet, each individual bird, animal or flower is unique, usually in some small way. Would that we humans could learn that better way to be by following her balancing act.
The lessons of the Pandemic are not just respecting and caring for Nature, but to learn Nature’s lessons in history. Nature’s lessons never fail, even when we don’t see them, and when human history lessons do fail. Dr. Christine Bradstreet 🌴, says, “Nature doesn’t hesitate to let go of what she doesn’t need” Julia Roberts speaks to us as Mother Nature in a video, “…I am Nature. I will go on, with or without you… I am prepared to evolve. Are you?”
Evolution is not something the average human being thinks about today. Very few understand what evolution truly means. Science teaches the evolution of physical beings, but nothing of the evolution of souls, even though our souls actually lead our physical beings. Evolution is continually happening in our souls since the beginning of all life.
BALANCE
“Nature knows no right or wrong, only Balance and Imbalance.” Gregge Tiffen
There are many ways to ponder Balance. Weisman talks in quantities, saying, “Nature has its limits, like other species, until fairly recently people died about as fast as they were born.” In the 1800s many achievements in science enabled the population to rise above 1 billion. Then, with artificial fertilizer, we grow so much that “all that food pushed us past 3 billion.” He continues outlining all the dangerous things we are doing to the planet, “sabotaging our future”, and creating disastrous imbalances.
I think more in qualities, and ponder the imbalances between sameness and uniqueness. So many of the masses play follow the leader, political, celebrity, educational, etc., with a massive following of sameness in consumerism. I am reminded of Henry W. Longfellow’s:” In the world’s broad field of battle, In the bivouac of life, Be not like dumb, driven cattle! Be a hero in the strife! …”
Then there is the imbalance at the other extreme, uniqueness and creativity for its own sake. In the Elle Photo 1990s, (below) the women say, “Our intentions were serious, but our clothes were playful gestures towards the utopian future we longed to inhabit. No one was selling the things we wanted to wear, so we made clothes ourselves. Anyone can grab the spirit of individuality and resistance against the status quo”.
All sense of beauty and excellence is lost, although its great when consumers create their own clothes as I say in “Evolution of Clothing”. Nature has some uniqueness in every individual bird, animal, flower, etc., but never loses her beautiful result. Art by the end of the 20th century into the 21st shows blaring creativity, but so little beauty or excellence. Evolve Artist says, “There’s Good and Bad Abstract Art, So What’s the Difference? Bad abstract art is without intent.” Ugly fashion, art, etc. is a failed attempt at beauty.
Technology builds unique gadgets, but most of them are not excellent or even useful. They are just to make money through marketing to their followers, who are like “dumb, driven cattle”. David Rothman (technologyreview.com) says, “Covid-19 has blown apart the myth of Silicon Valley innovation… Big tech doesn’t build anything. … Our diminished ability to innovate [is not] in areas that truly count, like health care and climate change.” Mother Nature designs everything with a purpose that is connected and useful to some forms of life.
Harry J. Stead, in “The Order-Disorder Paradox” talks about the balance of two opposites — two sides of the same coin — “For the Taoist life is an act of balancing the two opposites in harmony.”
Tim Denning, in “You Might Be Overthinking Your Life” says, “The balance between uncertainty and certainty is what keeps life interesting and everybody has a different balance.”
SOUL: A Search for Understanding and Evolution
The soul is becoming more “self-realized”. Rudolph Steiner, Cosmic Memory page 37, talks of “The Longing of the Human Soul”. On page 166 he says, “In the future the soul will become more visible in physical reality, especially in colors, like auras.” Clairvoyants see the soul; clairaudients hear the soul; and clairsentients feel the soul. Rudolph Steiner’s many books have meant a great deal to me, and saved me from mental health’s authoritarianism and religion’s indoctrination. His books also taught me to love my inner soul again, as my mother once taught me.
I was hospitalized in 1963, after my mother’s death, and again in 1975 when I started TM (Transcendental Meditation), and again in 1978 after my father’s death. None were experiences of suffering. Rather I was reacting to my inner soul, which was evolving through TM meditation, the books I was reading, and my parents’ souls after death — all of which did not mix well with the outer reality in which I lived. My brother and a friend were frightened by what I said and the way I behaved. So I was taken to psychiatrists, told I was crazy, and they drugged me. I tell more in my story, “Philosophy of Emotions”, and my fight against the mental health systems in, “Neurotech’s Mind Control is Scarier than Biotech’s Drug Addiction.”
In the 1980s I began searching various organizations, with a hunger to know my soul better. One of them was Edgar Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment. At one of their meetings I told another person about a strange, but strong dream I had, in which I was helping to form another physical human body, which was the consistency of soft clay. She immediately responded with, “Get Cosmic Memory by Rudolph Steiner.” Sure enough, my dream was a recall from the ancient, now sunken continent of Lemuria. And I began the greatest road of learning in my life, especially since most of what I read in all his books connected to some inner understanding in my Soul.
In my continued search to know my Soul, I went through a period of multiple personalities. They each expressed a part of me. When alone in contemplation or writing poetry they were like a family that interchanged thoughts and feelings. Looking back from today, I know it as attempts to understand my Soul. But it always seems like a fleeting bird that you cannot catch or hold. Now at 87, the search for Soul is the only purpose for the rest of my life. Although I perform respectfully in outer reality, it is the experiences within that are my true reality.
As I deepen my study there is some confusion between Soul and Oneness. The Soul, for me, is completely non-physical, and I experience fleeting feelings when meditating deeply. Oneness, however, is a non-physical feeling that can be induced by physical nature, which I feel an intimate connection with. Oneness is a term that has been mentioned a lot recently. A statement with the photo below: “Research suggests a belief in oneness has broad implications for psychological functioning and compassion for those outside of our immediate circle.” Imaging Oneness as a spiral is interesting. I have experienced in a very deep meditation, a movement pattern of a spiral within a spiral, which I could only describe by moving my hands. I later learned that a spiral within a spiral is the movement pattern of the Universe.
Deepak Chopra says: “Oneness is the coming together of all opposites. It’s always with us as the basis and underlying essence of everything.”
Steven Gambardella said it beautifully, “We Are Waves of the Same Sea.”
My feeling of Oneness comes easily to me, as soon as I turn my consciousness toward it. Soul, however, is uniquely mine, the non-physical part of self, and I want to know it deeply — while alive. Maybe it is as I say about Nature, “a balancing act?” Oneness is the foundation for each one’s unique Soul.
