[Reader-list] fwd: the ascent of humanity by Charles Eisenstein

[inder salim]

Enormous forces must be applied to render a human being into a killer,
someone who could cut down forests, tear up land, or kill innocent
people. To do the things we do requires that we be removed from our
natural-born state of wholeness, enchantment, connectedness, and...

the above two lines are from the essay below:
http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/chapter8-5.php

Eulogy and Redemption

What, then, of the victims? What shall we say to the men, women, and
children whose ruined lives have followed in the wake of our "ascent"?
Should we not lament the billions of passenger pigeons whose flocks
once darkened the skies? Should we not mourn the dodo, the great auk,
the American chestnut, and the millions more now following them to
extinction? What of the elder bushes, a century old, keystone species
of a fantastic ecology torn up and paved over to build a new road?
What of the forests turned to deserts? The native children shot for
sport by white settlers? The women tortured and burned alive as
witches for practicing herbal medicine? The schoolchildren today,
cajoled, coerced, and medicated into spending the Kingdom of Childhood
behind a desk, in a room, standing in line? The coal miners of
19th-century England, emerging decades later stunted, broken, and
destitute from the mines? The babies deprived of the breast? The women
raped, the men tortured and killed, the children watching the soldiers
who did it? What can we say of the concentration camps, Auschwitz, the
Gulag, the unspeakable hardship of the men sentenced to a lingering
death at hard labor? What shall we say to the victims of communist
purges, and to the families sent a bill for the executioner's bullet?
What of the black man beaten and lynched, and a picture postcard of
the event sent to his mother? What shall we say to the starving
children, past the point of hunger, bodies falling apart? And what
shall we say to their mothers? And what of the children working
working in toy factories, rug factories, chocolate plantations? The
countless assembly line workers, their human creativity reduced to a
few rote movements, producing empty consumer junk out of toxic
materials destined sooner rather than later for the landfill? The
betrayal after betrayal of the Native Americans, people massacred,
lands cheated, religion outlawed, culture purposefully destroyed? The
cancer victims of a poisoned world? The slaves long ago who labored on
the Pyramids? Contrast a life carrying stone to the life of a
hunter-gatherer, and the bargain we have made becomes clear. In this,
the first monument to the Machine, the folly and the horror of our
ascent is clear: an exchange of life for labor to erect a useless
edifice.

No authentic peace with the world can be achieved in ignorance of the
facts. Read books like A Language Older Than Words, Night, Gulag
Archipelago, The Dying of the Trees, The Lost Language of Plants,
Evolution's End, Trail of Tears, Rebels Against the Future. We must be
utterly clear about what our civilization has wrought. If we, like the
technological Utopians of the Industrial Revolution justifying the
mines and mills, maintain that the sacrifices of the victims are a
necessary and worthwhile price to pay for our ascent to a higher
state, then we must be be clear on what that price has been. The price
of Separation has been no other, and could be no other, than the
furthest possible extreme of evil.

That the Reunion I have spoken of, the rebirth at a higher level of
consciousness, could only come through resolving and integrating our
age-old course of Separation is not a justification of its evil, no
more than a criminal's remorse or a victim's forgiveness justifies the
crime. Nonetheless, there is another way to understand the suffering
of Separation's victims.

Some years ago, a man I know very well was obliged to dig up a
splendid burdock plant that grew outside his home. He had been asked
to dig it up before, and in a semblance of compliance had
halfheartedly sheared off the leaves, leaving the root intact. This
time his wife supervised him to ensure that he did it right, that he
dug it up root and all. Every moment his heart was heavy, but his fear
of his wife's anger was enough to overcome his reluctance and prevent
him from standing up for his integrity. Something changed that day; in
his words, "Our marriage has survived many onslaughts because it had a
strong, deep root, and now that is gone." The plant had kept coming
back, it wanted to grow there, but the man imposed his will, which was
not even truly his own, onto nature. He got nature under control. The
fate of that burdock plant, the process by which it was destroyed, is
really no different in essence from the worst extremes of ecocide and
genocide. In both there is a perceived necessity, a fear that
overcomes our goodness, and a destruction of the innocent. But later,
after the marriage went through a tumultuous period, he realized that
the burdock had given him an important teaching that only its
self-sacrifice could have delivered. It was a teaching about
boundaries, integrity, communication, and change, and he had a clear
sense that the plant chose to grow there precisely for that teaching.

Donna Gates, the woman who developed the Body Ecology protocol for
curing autism, once told me that she has noticed a similarity among
autistic children's households. Beyond the proximate factors of
vaccines, mercury, antibiotics and other body ecology disruptions lies
a deeper reason for autism—a purpose, not a cause. She believes that
these children have in some sense chosen to be born into their
circumstances as a way to bring a great gift to their parents and
families. Of course, few parents see autism as a gift—having an
autistic child is like having a permanent infant who requires intense
care and never grows up. In many cases, normal life becomes impossible
as the demands of the child consume all leisure time. Life ambitions
give way to the demands of caring for another being without thought of
recompense.

Reread that last sentence. Isn't that precisely the prescription for
joy that the saints have given us through the ages? Perhaps these
children are noble spirits choosing their incarnation as a way to help
us understand what is important in life. Donna has observed that
autism strikes disproportionately in households where life was
otherwise smooth sailing, in which the vacuity of modern goals and
priorities would otherwise never have become apparent, at least not
until time and youth were exhausted. Many autistic and otherwise
"mentally retarded" children possess an undeniable spiritual quality
about them: the description "special" is not merely a euphemism. When
they are healed of autism this quality remains: they are often
remarkably selfless, content, compassionate, affectionate, and
emotionally mature. In one sense, yes they are the innocent victims of
modern birthing practices, medical practices, pollution, and dietary
ignorance, but from a higher perspective they fulfill a noble purpose
in our society's healing.

We often think of misfortune as some kind of punishment for past evil,
a theme which runs through religious thought both East and West. In
the East it is the idea that present suffering represents the negative
karma generated through past misdeeds; in the West we have the image
of Yahweh striking down the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah for their
sins, threatening Ninevah for its "wickedness". However, the
self-evident fact that it is often the innocent who suffer the most
demands all kinds of theological contortions, from past lives to
original sin, from future rebirth to Heaven and Hell.i How else to
explain the sweet, innocent babies in the children's cancer wards? If
we are not to resort to blind, pitiless, purposeless chance, we need
another explanation for the innocence of our victims. Perhaps they are
great souls, meeting the huge necessity for innocent victims that our
civilization has wrought. "I will go," they say. "I am big enough. I
am ready for this experience."

We might look on whole peoples, cultures, or even species in the same
way. While we might understand the decay of our civilization as a just
dessert for the violence it has perpetrated, how can we explain the
destruction of the beautiful indigenous cultures of North America (or
any continent you care to choose)? What sin against God, man, or
nature could justify their violent extinction? True, some were
supposedly warlike and unfriendly to outsiders, but many amazed their
first European contacts with their childlike trust and easy
generosity. None of them, not even the most warlike, perpetrated
anything comparable to the human and environmental ruin that are the
handiwork of Machine civilizations. We might just as well try to
explain how three-year-olds dying of cancer actually deserved it. No,
if we are to believe in a purposeful universe, we must look elsewhere
for an answer.

The answer I offer you is that all of the people, cultures, species,
and ecosystems that we have destroyed constitute, together, a medicine
for the great disease of our civilization, the disease named
Separation. It is in the nature of the disease to destroy what is
beautiful: to convert reality into a data set and life into money,
with all the violence that such reduction of life implies. In the
process of separation and eventual reunion at a higher level, selfless
beings who already live in non-separation are structurally necessary.
They, like the burdock root, like the autistic children, have taken on
a noble and magnanimous role. The cultures, species, and people we
have extirpated have delivered to us a teaching and a medicine.

The cultures we have destroyed have not vanished without a trace.
Anything we destroy leaves its imprint on our own spirit, whether on
the personal or cultural level, automatically becoming a future
medicine when it emerges into conscious experience. Please do not
misunderstand: I do not mean to exculpate the victimizers because,
after all, the victims volunteered for it. Nor do I mean to depreciate
the magnitude of the crime or the tragedy. Nonetheless, their
sacrifice was not in vain.

Because all acts of violence leave their imprint in the perpetrator,
the perpetrators ultimately will suffer violence equal to that they
have inflicted. Perhaps that is why Jesus, facing his tormentors,
said, "Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do." He
understood what they were in for, the oceans of remorse they would
need to traverse before arriving at peace. Etymologically, remorse
means to bite back; Jesus saw that what they did to him, they were
doing to themselves. Studies of soldiers with post-traumatic stress
disorder find that the most seriously disturbed are not those who have
witnessed or suffered violence, but those who committed it. "Soldiers
who were in low-intensity battles but had killed someone suffered
higher rates of PTSD than soldiers who experienced high-intensity
battles but did not kill anyone."ii As researcher Rachel MacNair puts
it, "Despite all the killing we've done, the human mind is not
designed to kill. Portions of us get sick when we kill. Killing is
against our nature."iii

Enormous forces must be applied to render a human being into a killer,
someone who could cut down forests, tear up land, or kill innocent
people. To do the things we do requires that we be removed from our
natural-born state of wholeness, enchantment, connectedness, and
biophilia. To commit the heinous violence of our culture, even in its
muted, indirect forms such as consumerism, we must first be mangled
ourselves. We perpetrators are the end products of a spirit-wrecking
machine thousands of years in the making, that has battered and
wounded us almost beyond recognition. Our healing happens through our
victims, just as my friend's healing required that he destroy and
mourn the burdock plant.

Our Separation, our ruined wholeness, our Fallen state leads
inevitably to acts of violence. Violence is a symptom of a wounded
spirit. And the medicine for this disease is precisely the
consequences of that violence. The process of acknowledging and
mourning what we have done is itself healing. To simply withhold
opportunities for violence from a wounded person is not a sustainable
solution. Something has to bring it to the surface, and something
eventually will.

Does this mean that I can excuse myself from all the hurt I've caused
in my life, thinking, "Well, my wound drove me to it, and I needed to
do that to recover"? No. The healing comes only through the
realization, "My God, what have I done?" It is the remorse that is
healing. On a cultural level, then, it is healing for us to face up to
the crimes of our civilization, the dirty secrets of our past. Living
in denial of the bitter facts only perpetuates more violence and
prolongs our state of separation and suffering. The truth is coming to
light now, as we acknowledge what we have done to our planet, its
cultures and people. This is another sign that the Age of Reunion is
nigh. Yes, many segments of our society are still in denial, choosing
to live with the imprints of the wounds they have inflicted upon the
world, not knowing that world and self, I and thou, are not really
separate and that no amount of control can keep the consequences
eventually seeking out the perpetrator. The denial cannot last
forever. The continuing pain of the festering wounds, which cannot be
hidden forever, will eventually make the truth impossible to ignore or
deny.

Once upon a time the Great Spirit spoke to the world. The Great Spirit
said, "The world is sick. Millions of people have separated themselves
off from life, and their suffering grows with each passing year. Soon
they will utterly destroy themselves and all that is good. They need
medicine, but I warn you, most of the medicine they take they will
destroy most horribly. Who is ready to be the medicine?" And the
Spirits of the Tribes said, "We are ready." And the spirits of the
forests said, "We are ready." The spirits of the frogs said, "We are
ready." The Earth herself said, "I am ready."

Martin Prechtel once said, "The redwoods are perfectly happy to go
extinct." I know another man who described a long conversation he had
with redwoods under the influence of LSD. The redwoods told him they
were sad for the people chopping them down, and hoped they would stop
doing that before they destroyed themselves. The redwoods know the
enormous, inescapable price to be paid for destroying such a
magnificent being for the sake of mere money.

All the life and beauty that has been destroyed, cut down, paved over,
exterminated, raped, imprisoned, and enslaved has given the world a
great gift. I sometimes ponder the Trail of Tears, so named not for
the tears of the Cherokee, for there were none, but for the tears of
the crowds of whites that gathered to watch them pass dignified and
unbroken. That image is burned indelibly onto the national psyche, and
it will never let us rest until we have healed our own separation,
softened the callousing of the soul that enabled us to commit such a
crime. Nations and cultures, not just individuals, bear the
self-inflicted wounds of their collective crimes; karma is not just an
individual phenomenon. National salvation will only come when we face
up to the ugliness of our own past and feel the mirror image of the
pain of every slave lashed, every man lynched, every child humiliated.
One way or another, we must weep for all of this.

The suffering of Separation's victims is never in vain. From
separation comes violence, which then reverberates in the soul of the
perpetrator to form the seed of the separation's healing.

I hope this is of some consolation to those of you who are among the
victims (and that is all of us; we are all among the victims and
perpetrators both). Usually the eventual healing and redemption is
invisible to us; part of the suffering, in fact, is that it seems
purposeless. The victims too experience a complete alienation, a
loneliness intrinsic to all suffering. The image comes to mind of
Christ on the cross: "Father, why hast thou foresaken me?" In this
archetypal story, the Redeemer experiences the same extreme of
separation from God—separation, that is, from all that we are and can
be—that drove his tormentors. Do not think that the redwood, the
burdock, the murdered, enslaved, and ruined, go without agony. Let us
not underestimate the suffering of this world. Each of them partakes
in Christ, making the ultimate sacrifice so that we might become
whole. And you, dear reader, are no exception. Love and appreciate
yourself as a noble being, born into this vale of tears for a sacred
purpose. None of your hurts were in vain.

One way or another, we must weep for all this. What goes for the
crimes of humanity, nations, and cultures goes as well for us
individually. Even as we appreciate our nobility and tend gently to
our wounds, so also must we lament the violence, the scarring, the
ruin of the Other that has sprung from our separation, if ever we are
to become whole. The Boddhisatva Path, to remain in samsara until all
beings are free, is more than a noble sacrifice—it is an organic
necessity.

The full integration of the pain from the life of separation is what
impels us back toward wholeness. One way or another, the pain will be
felt. We can either wait for it to come to us, like an addict
determined to get a fix at any cost, or we can go to it. Perhaps if we
can see the futility of control, the futility of perpetually
postponing the consequences, then we will have the courage to face
them. It is said that no addict truly enters recovery until he or she
hits bottom; however, it is equally true that "bottom" is different
from person to person. At some point the addict decides no longer to
evade the pain of a shattered life, wrecked family, sick body, or
ruined career. He feels the accumulated agony, mourns what is lost,
tries to make amends. Sometimes he succeeds in doing so before all is
lost, before all friendship, all wealth, all health has been converted
into money for the fix. Perhaps we humans will do so as well, and
begin making amends to the world we are ruining before all beauty, all
goodness, all wealth, all life is consumed.

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