“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.

Half holdings required off farm work. Smallholders, who held less than a half holding, had to have an adult with a day job or work as laborers. Some had a trade. A typical small holding consisted of a cottage on a quarter acre arranged in a long, narrow lot, with outbuildings, garden, outhouse, a pen for animals and some fruit trees. The cottages were clustered in a village. The holding came with designated plow strips, for grains and legumes, in the communal open field and various rights to foraging, fishing, gathering deadfall, pasturing animals, etc. It also came with a long list of obligations and fees.

Having another adult was a necessity, although that person might be a sibling or grown child. Serfs could be forced to marry if they did not have another adult. A full holding required working half of the time for the lord, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly to raise cash for fees. Smaller holdings required somewhat less time spent working for the lord. Gies and Gies tell us that even the smallest holdings had a complicated income that was included cash and subsistence crops, value added products and cash and goods for services.

They also give us a clearer view of English feudalism, from the serfs’ view of largely self-organized and self-regulated villages whose primary interaction with the lord was through the reeve, a villager elected to insure that the lord got his due goods and services.

The more things change.. We are still marking the day in May each year when we stop working for the federal government and begin to work for ourselves. I suspect if all the sales taxes and state fees were added in, we would find that we are still working about half our time for higher organizational echelons.

A small property, whether a quarter acre or a farmlet, still requires at least one person with an off farm job or trade. And even a tiny property can produce some cash crops. Until the industrial revolution destroyed the market for women’s domestic products, women made their own cash income. Beer is always a good one, sewing, herbs, candles, mushrooms, babysitting, sell the butter from the cow and keep the goat’s milk to drink; as has been noted above, a myriad ways to generate a small cash stream.

Shira in Bellingham

I think your point about new possible narratives is interesting. I guess you’d have to persuade me that our loss of touch with the spiritual isn’t a side effect of empire and development, but an origin point, but I think that’s certainly possible. It is an interesting point.

Sharon

I’m not trying to get into a gotcha game, just trying to gather info. I’ve been in lots of groups that were born, lived, and died, and have learned a lot from looking at the process. Certainly one extreme type of group model (religious or not) includes a strong leader and no mechanism for replacement of that leader, while another extreme would be ‘total consensus’ of all needed to do anything, other extreme is to be ‘chaotic’ in structure, etc.

Not all groups have a structure that allows for change in leadership even if it is necessary. That can be for any number of reasons – one person might own the land and therefore can’t be ousted, one person might be the ‘prophet’/druid/shaman/whatever (no slam on JMG there, I’m in another Druid organization that he’s also a part of), etc. Do you think that in your group a different structure that allowed for … uh … mutany [g] or replacement of the leader would have been an option if you were to try that again?

I do suspect that you and I see spiritual goals differently – I’d like a group in which folks work towards spiritual advancement, but has a structure that accepts that we are not all perfect yet, for if we ARE all perfect humans there’s no reason for us to be incarnate as humans. We should move on other incarnations. Someday I hope to advance to an incarnation as a Cat in a Pagan home….

Fern

Take it one step further and entertain the possibility that our ecological crisis is caused by our spiritual amnesia. The human being is structurally capable of incredibly vast potential far far FAR beyond what is presently conventionally and consensually defined as “adulthood”.

The point is that our loss of our deepest spiritual identity is the cause of our Desire for fulfillment from things “outside” of ourselves, and thus greed and rapaciousness and etc.. I do not want to hurt anybody here; however, I feel that seeking fulfilment through having children is something that needs to be transcended. But again, sheer survival needs wil probably crush higher spirituality on any social-cultural level, so most of this may well be academic. So, at the least, some of what I have said may be useful for the reason I give to Fern below.

Ones spiritual path should not, in other words, be determined by what does or does not occur on this paticular planet and this paticular lifetime, since incarnation goes on and on and……….

Susan,

I believe the original source for me is Chellis Glendinning, author of:

http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no10/books_chellis.htm

and I think this theory is also mentioned – maybe by her, I do not remember – in the documentary What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire.

fern I suspect you are trying to set me up for a “gotcha-game”

I and many others left that ecovillage because the director had serious psychological problems that she would not face, despite the fact that we were all committed to help her as much as we could.

Once again, it was immature ego – on her part – that was the cause of the problem. She had serious problems with domination and would not learn from others. This is a typical problem in western culture and I have run across it for decades.

this does not, however, negate the validity of such ventures.

As for the rest of it, it is now an established fact based on the experimental and experiential evidence from comparative esoteric spirituality, transpersonal psychology and psychedelic research that human potential is light-years beyond both conventional science and religion. Compared to what we can become, I would characterize the human race as literally fetal or larval.

The general idea is that, with the possibility of billions, trillions of Gaian systems throughout the cosmos, that many evolutionary possibilities are…well…possible. If we bring in the idea of Nonlocal Mind (faster-than-light communication) and morphogenetic fields, there is the possibility of an intra-galactic Network of Gaian-DNA Consciousness-Intelligence, and that we all could actually be living many different lives in many different systems Now, or accessing “memories” about these lives and systems. Or, DNA could act as a transceiver through which we could tap into such memories, memories of DNAs aeonic migration across the Cosmos. Graham Hancock has a book out on this called Supernatural if i remember correctly.

I mention all of this because perhaps, some will be able to use such information as a disinhibiting instruction to help jolt them out of spiritual amnesia, or in other words, remembering who they really are. If you do not resonate to this particular transmission, you are free to experiment with others, of course.

Warm regards, Joseph

Howard Zinn on his commencement address at Spelman College (May 15, 2005) said:

“My hope is that your generation will demand an end to war, that your generation will do something that has not yet been done in history and wipe out the national boundaries that separate us from other human beings on this earth.”