Pull Yourself Towards A Higher State Of Being
Living beings find themselves interconnected in the great web of life, and this dynamical interdependence makes each life predicated on the death of some other life. Every new day of our lives costs the death of some other being, by the food we eat, the resources we consume, the pollution we leave in our wake, or simply our need to kill other beings around us. However, some people have the lightest touch on the life around them, while the existence of others is only possible with great misery as by-product, highly advanced vehicles vs. obsolescent machines running on coal.
While we tend to see a rich businessman, doing something like eating a piece of cow flown from half way across the earth, as the crown jewel of conscious being, this is only a delusion produced by our cultural context. If we look outside of our narrow provincial perspectives, taking a more universal frame of reference, these “successful” people are the least advanced lifeforms.
Beings must evolve so to minimize their negative effects on the conscious environment around them. This is not a human invention, but a general direction in the evolution of consciousness.
Those people who preside over large financial fortunes, that grow by bankrupting third world countries and burning the Amazon forest, are way behind earth worms on the ladder of living entities. These individuals have a similar “output” in their personal conscious experience as the next human being, but regrettably their bien-être costs the same as that of a million others. Much noise for nothing, just like cars from a bygone era that needed vast quantities of coal to match what today’s vehicles obtain with the tiniest amounts of fuel.
Those primitive cars cannot ride on the 21 Century roads anymore, but their human counterparts manage to get away with it just fine. They survive only because they have the power to keep this cultural system going, where moral flaw is identified as merit. Otherwise in any sufficiently advanced culture they would be recognized for what they really are, primitive minds that only know and seek to satisfy basic drives, bringing a terrible cost for everyone else around.
The bigger you are on the inside, the less you demand from the outside.
Fortunately there are among us artists, thrill seekers, scientists and philosophers, choreographers and dancers, souls who show us that we can achieve so much more for so much less. What these individuals live and feel is of a depth, richness and subtlety that makes decadent materialists look like they indeed belong in the formaldehyde jars of history museums.
Image: Dancer by Howard Schatz
