Coming to Our Senses

In the book The Awakening Earth, Peter Russell gave us a remarkable concept based on scientific possibilities. In it, he outlines the difficulty that Life encountered as it went about the process of creating an environment where it could proliferate on Earth. The thing about Life is that we can’t see it. It just is. We know that we are alive only because we witness death in others. But we have never accepted that as being a necessity to the ongoing balancing that Life must do to meet the requirements whereby it can continue to exist on this planet. We see its affects everywhere: in the vegetation we eat and that surrounds us, in the eyes of those that look at us, but we do not recognise it for itself, although we talk about Life in the abstract sense, like a substance.

In Peter Russell’s book, he concentrates on the hypothesis that Life adjusted the elements that it required to get and keep itself going, referring to the many times that nearly didn’t work and almost brought the project on Earth to a grinding halt. I have mention one of these in my recent talks: the time when there was too much flammable oxygen created by vegetation, putting Life in jeopardy, until oxygen beings immigrated from the sea, just in time to bring the balance back.

But while much of his book was centered on the creation of Life on Earth, his major hypothesis was about the trajectory of its future development. He saw the development of human consciousness as essential to this Earth Awakening as a being in its own right: that we were to be the brain of the planet, and the internet the nervous system, and when enough of us reached that level, the Earth itself would awaken. Fascinating. This precis doesn’t do it justice, so I recommend it as essential reading.

This was all before Lyn Margulis and the systems theorists took a deeper look at how Life operated from a scientific point of view, seeing that in order to pull of the feat that it has it needed to be cognitively intelligent, creative, self-organising, and self-regenerating. We see this expressed in Russell’s earlier book, though the concept of a cognitive Earth was something to come, not about a Life force that already was ‘awakened’.

Meanwhile in the smaller microcosm of human existence, we bumble along making up stories about old white men on clouds, or varieties of gods, that account for our existence. It was impossible for us to do otherwise, as the whole concept that we lived within a larger being called Life that basically gave birth to everything, including us, and that was not something that happened long ago, but is being experienced constantly. Not understanding that we were part of it all, we became annoyed with the balancing processes of life, giving and taking away to recycle and refresh so that all could continue. So, we decided to challenge Life, trying to take over that process, even though, as beings recently developed in our infancy, we didn’t then nor now, understand what we were doing. It takes a long time to mature, and even in our adolescence as a species, we push against anything we feel we need control over, not realising how much we rely on those very conditions to continue to exist.

We have created a battle between our existence and that of Life itself, so unaware are we that what is good for Life is good for us too. We look for Life on other planets as if it was a mineral to mine, outside ourselves, rather than a facet of our very existence. We do not notice the very thing that is keeping us, and everything else, alive. The battle goes on. We try this and that with the purpose of ‘saving the planet’ without the awareness that we have no chance of understanding how a being as enormous as Life operates to maintain the parameters within which we can continue to exist. We have no clue. We continue on with our ’leg of the chair’ approach finding balance without the understanding of what that actually entails. There is no way we can find a solution to keeping Life alive. It’s the equivalent of the baby birthing the mother.

It's not the Earth that needs to awaken. It’s us. The moment we drop the façade of ‘knowing’, the balance can begin to be restored. Our thinking mind has become an archive of itself, continually regurgitating what it thinks it knows. Its need to justify its existence forbids it to understand its limitations, and therefore we to realise ours. We cannot continue to rely on it. Actually, we never should have. We come equipped from the very beginning with a perfectly good workable part of our brain, that we have done our very best to ignore, since we gave up the road of co-operation with Life. Calling it Nature, we put it outside of ourselves in the mistaken belief that we know what to do without it. Like someone who puts a piece of a jigsaw into a draw, believing we have no need for it, only to find out it’s essential to complete the picture.

The limbic system of our brain is that missing piece. We have called it reptilian as if it’s something we have grown out of because it is in charge of our senses and feelings. We have denigrated those feelings as being ‘illogical’, ‘irrational’, ‘immature’ and necessary to grow out of to live in an adult world. We have become an organic version of an AI, listening to nothing that the database does not already have access to, always trying to find a reference in the archive before we validate anything. But try as it might, our mind cannot access the future. Without it we are merely swimming in a sea of conjecture. Back to the Limbic system, which works in the now, taking its cues from the energy swimming around it all the time. Tuned in to the survival of the being it belongs to, it immediately picks up the energy of threats, ferried to it from the senses of the body it exists in. Its job is to pass that information to the action center immediately. No long deliberations can be afforded. No intellectual nuances allowed. Just act now for survival because the future of the organism depends on it. The consequences will unfold as and when. At that time, we will know what we have to work with, but if action isn’t taken immediately, there may be no tomorrow for the mind to contemplate ad nauseum.

This process is a very individual one. There is no time to deliberate over ethics, cultural mores, or possible consequences for others. The consequence of not acting immediately may be the demise of this organism. In this phase we join with all the other organisms in this Life force. We are at one with them on the subject of survival. This is where we are now on so many subjects. We have frittered away the resources contained with and on the planet until there is little to keep us alive, along with many other beings we have deprived of a future, all because we have allowed our minds to come up with scathingly brilliant ideas that have no basis in survival at all. Closer to annihilation now than at any other time since our creation, what are we going to do??

Yes us! Because if we don’t come to our senses soon, it won’t be the planet that we will destroy, it will be the redundancy of the human species that Life cannot afford the indulgence of keeping around any longer. Life will not allow an arrogant species that refuses to co-operate to destroy much more than it already has. Forget about all our amazing technology. Forget about our bank accounts we have relied on for survival, turning back 12,500 years to find ourselves again, tucked away in the most maligned part of us, our feelings, many of which are a consequence of our twisted way of living our lives in virtual reality. Angry and sad, we blame others. Fearful of getting it wrong when weighed up against the twaddle in our minds. We must move past all this into the reality of listening to our senses, moment by moment to find the next prompt that will tell us which way to go.

How do we do that?? Years ago, I had someone break off a relationship with me. It was a fairly regular occurrence because I insisted on ignoring my gut when making these choices, grabbing at anyone that paid me a modicum of attention. End result? Anger, sadness and fear. In that state, I called in afterwards to a friend’s place who was a bit more evolved than I was at that time. We talked for hours, while they tried to teach me about things like personal responsibility (it wasn’t her fault. I chose to be with her) and living in the Now (she’s gone and not coming back so switch your thoughts to what’s around you now, Jay Ray). Next morning, after their amazing hospitality that I only partly appreciated, I drove across Sydney to my place, gut knotted, head spinning, furious. But as I drove (it was quite a long way) I thought it might be an idea to try their solution. There were streets lined with prunus trees all along the leafy backstreets of the North Shore. Pink and white, they reminded me of popcorn. I laughed in my head as I called them my popcorn trees.

After 45 minutes of this I found something strange happening inside of me. I was beginning to feel happy. It had worked. Of course, those ‘other’ thoughts still kept popping up, but I had a solution. It took about three weeks of continued shifting of my consciousness from my mind’s obsession to the senses showing me a different world. What could I see, taste, touch, hear, and smell? This was my real world, not the desires for things that were not there in that space. That was when I started to realise the world did not exist in my mind, but in my body. It was always my body that told me the truth. It was also when I started to question the choices that I was making. It took a lot longer to educate my mind to listen to my instincts, but the more I did, the better my choices became. Not only that, but my timing improved. As I felt things, I grabbed the opportunities they offered me. They were always a lot better options, ultimately, than anything my mind could come up with.

That left me free to deal with past choices and let go of the consequences of those, ceasing to blame me or others and get on with the now in all its glory. But we live in a radically different environment now to when I was in my 30’s. As my favourite poem says, “affairs are now soul-sized”. It’s urgent! But still the principle is the same. No matter what we are confronted with if we listen to our instincts, intuitions, senses, we have a better chance of survival individually, and as a species.