“what if we are not humans having spiritual experiences but spiritual beings having human experiences? In other words, what if the ecological crisis we are experiencing on the physical plane is itself a reflection/result of our karma and our actions on some of the higher planes of existence?”

From my POV, if we are here to have a human experience – then the plan has to include, accept and EMBRACE us being human, and ‘flawed’ and falible, and an animal, take those things into account. Incarnation, like birth, is messy, painful, and chaotic. But even more than that, it sounds as if you see a split between spirit and flesh that I don’t see, but I could be misinterpreting your words.

If what you mean by ‘what if the ecological crisis we are experiencing on the physical plane is itself a reflection/result of our karma and our actions on some of the higher planes of existence?’ that incarnation as human is a punishment, I don’t accept that. I don’t accept the ‘bean counter in the sky’ view of karma.

I DO think that there is a spritual element to everything, mind you. I see the entire universe as the manifestation – not separate creation – of the Divine. We are made of God-stuff, and are kin to the Gods themselves, I’d say. But while we are incarnate as humans, I see our Dharma is to BE human, and to deny our flesh and blood humanity is to violate our Dharma and, as it were, build Bad Karma by not learning even the obvious lesson, while learning to be fully human, embracing that humanity, etc, builds Good Karma and makes for a new set of challenges and lessons in our next incarnation.

Then again, I’m usually a heretic [g]. I also figure that it makes more sense to incarnate into ‘easy’ lives as new to human incarnation, and get progressively MORE, not LESS, challenging lives as we learn better how to be fully human.

I mentioned the “earth-as-spiritual-school” narrative as a way of looking at our situation from a different pov than the one we normally “look through” in the Peak Everything Awareness Movement (P.E.A.M.).

In other words, what if we are not humans having spiritual experiences but spiritual beings having human experiences? In other words, what if the ecological crisis we are experiencing on the physical plane is itself a reflection/result of our karma and our actions on some of the higher planes of existence?
Part of the reason I am writing about such things is for the purpose of finding a “middle way” between the PEAM and the 2012 movement. In other words, even if we are not going to achieve a planetary spiritual renaissance as the 2012 movement hopes, I still cannot disregard that there is a spiritual aspect to what we are going through.

In “dark night, early dawn: steps to a deep ecology of mind”, Christopher Bache suggests that we are heading into what we might call a Dark Night of the Collective Species Soul. The memories and visions reported in NDE research and psychic and psychedelic research concerning planetary upheavals and earth changes may be some kind of archetypal memories of such occurances here (see the book Forbidden Archaeology) or elswhere on Gaian systems throughout the Cosmos.

If DNA can travel on asteroids in space, the possibility is that some of the DNA on this planet could have developed on other planets. We could have all lived through things like this crisis many times before, here and elswhere.

Couple this with the research of people like Hancock (Supernatural) that shaman seem to be tapping into a DNA hypermedia database of esoteric knowledge and that civilization may have been “downloaded” from higher planes of existence, and the point is that there might just be much more going on here that we realize.