Tat Tvam Asi
You are part of a greater whole. The goal of life is to connect with and embrace that whole which is our true home.
While working this morning watched a documentary about Indians in Ecuador fighting the Chinese, the Americans and the Ecuadorian government who want to drill for oil on their sacred lands. It’s just one story of many about the destruction of our earth, shovelful by shovelful, tree after tree topple, subdivision by subdivision, drill bit by drill bit.
Look at the Congo and the havoc wreaked by M23. It’s not hard to connect the dots and see they are proxies of the West and the our own desire for things, the cargo cult we live - is responsible for the horrible war taking place there. It’s all about precious metals. Our need for more, more, more … From where do these guns and bullets come? They do not grow out of the rich, dark earth.
The theme of us eating up the world, being full of hubris, anthropocentric psychosis as a culture is something that runs through so much of my own writing, essays, poems ... We Are Eating Up This World. Soon we’ll have it all ground down into sand and finally everything will be one big shiny, empty mirror that has erased diversity and made everything into a vast desert of nothing.
But why? Why are we (most of us on earth - such capitalistic cannibals, such devouring worms?
Why this urge to dominate, accumulate, to pursue "progress" and the drumbeat of more, more, more? All at the expense of our earth, our home, sustainability. Why?
The American Indians had a prohibition of never pulling up by the roots of any living thing. You could only cut it, but leave the roots there, keep life being a giving tree.
We’ve lost that, or perhaps Judeo - Christian culture never had it. Our ideology, the governing modern ideology (or religion) of our time is that God is not of us or our world (we are fallen) and God is for a time after death. So there is no need to care for others, the world. This world view now reigns. Mechanical materialism is its form in science.
In weak opposition is the culture and world view of Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy (a wonderful and necessary read). "Tat tvam asi" - "thou art that" as the Hindu’s called it and resolved the riddle of “brahman” - the supreme reality. Or as Kabir so wonderfully said,
"Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray."
It is the world view of many indigenous cultures, of the Quakers, the mystics and contemplatives of many religions. It is a timeless (egoless) vision. In opposition is us / we (the west, pro West), who destroy, dominate and conquer. We do not see God, ourselves in all things. We truly don't. We are autistic, we do not see ourselves in others, in all life and things. Empathy on a societal level is absent.
Huxley outlines the dividing line much better than I ever can. But I see it everywhere, operating and issuing out of our collective soul - a culture that is time filled and valued.
Here is an interview with Huxley. Every word he says still applies to today. The world we live in is out of whack.