The rape of Mother Nature Essay

I am a staunch conservative. To those who know me this might come as a surprise, but in terms of ecology and environmental issues, and on account of being a shaman, I am a conservative. If plants and trees had human rights I would be speaking out in defence of them, which is what I'm doing here. So let's start by assuming that plants and trees have human rights.

I'd like to start off by giving a mention to Botanical Dimensions which is a non-profit ethnobotanist organization first established in Hawaii but now on the West Coast. Botanical Dimensions seeks to conserve shamanistic and medically significant plant species in the warm tropics which have a major influence on human healthcare which they have been doing for over four decades. This is something which is not being done by other organizations. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is busy trying to save huge tracts of rainforest but not trying to preserve or conserve shamanistic culture in those regions. It's important to understand how many important plant species transition from shamanistic cultures into medical science and healthcare. It's therefore not enough just to preserve the plant species themselves, but also to preserve human understanding of those plant species. Such examples include quinine which is an important cure for malaria, resopine which is an important tranquilizer, and many other drugs which have a significant impact in human healthcare.

Therefore it was reassuring in my research to discover that such an important and dare I say vital component of ecological work has not been subsumed into the seemingly relentless development of global socio-economic 'free market' culture. I'd also like to point out that the onward progress of such consumerist culture tends to demolish cultures and subcultures alike and levels out values. The globalizing of consumerist culture and homogenization of human society is incredibly destructive on such things as creativity, diversity and evolution. We are transforming the whole planet into a plain white bread supermarket aisle shopping centre culture. This is at the loss and eradication of every other subculture and way of living which does not conform to such values.

What I want to point out here is the sheer importance of not just a balanced perspective but also the sheer importance of partnership, symbiosis, community, empathy, humanity, and the conscious awareness which has made our species so successful in environmental terms. This is where we learn to be of service, even useful, and beneficial to other species and our natural habitat and environment. This is what I mean about being a conservative which is based on conserving and preserving our relationships not just with our natural habitat and environment but also with other species, plants and trees. I'm referring to a kind of fusion between the social and the natural. Being conservative here does not have any specific political meaning, but has everything to do with conserving the equilibrium, harmony and cohesion between our different cultures and in our relationship with the planet and our biosphere and ecosystem.

It is extremely important, nay imperative, that we move away from the structured, hierarchy-based societies characteristic of domination culture that we have been living under for centuries in the West (and elsewhere) and evolve more towards partnership styled societies in order to develop the thinking, psychology and psychic nature which is necessary for our further survival as a species on this planet. Resolving our environmental issues are not entirely based on just conserving other species of plants, trees and animals, they are also based on learning to be less abusive and exploitative and learning different attitudes and behaviours towards our environment, other species and each other.

The vegetable matrix and potlatch thinking

Fundamental to resolving such issues is developing a partnership with what I refer to as the vegetable matrix - plants and trees. Humans cannot do that much towards climate change. It is plants and trees that regulate the atmosphere, the temperatures, the oceans and so on and so forth. It is our lack of integration with the vegetable matrix and our potlatch thinking which is fuelling much of our environmental crisis.

What do I mean by potlatch thinking?

Potlatch is a ceremony characteristic of American Indians on the north west coast which involves the ceremonial destruction of wealth by giving away lavish gifts and the wanton destruction of property and material things. Houses are burned, feather blankets are burned, totem poles are burned, all done as a display of wealth. It is characterized by a huge amount of destruction of material. Potlatch is essentially an orgy of destruction. Potlatch has been fully assimilated and perfected on in our Western global 'free market' economy culture and is an underlying feature of such culture.

The whole planet is becoming a global potlatch.

We are robbing and plundering our children and their children of any sort of hope or future by grasping and taking everything for ourselves. No other society in the totality of human history has been so self-centred and so callous in values that it has condemned generations of its unborn to enduring hardship, poverty, deprivation, famine, with a natural habitat which is not going to be that much different from a desert. If you think this could not happen I do wish to point out that what is now the Sahara Desert was once, back up to as far as Roman times, completely lush, fertile and green savannah and grasslands. This is not a case of if any longer. It's a case of when.

If you think it's difficult now to keep a global population of 8 billion humans adequately fed and nourished and cared for without the chemically enhanced shite that's sold in many supermarkets just imagine what it's going to be like in a decade or so, maybe a bit longer, when we have over 10-11 billion humans on this planet to support with a great deal less natural resources available. That's even before we think about (because many of us don't) the needs for sustenance of other species on this planet.

There's something else which I have been saying for years and this comes down to the interdependence and interconnectedness of Nature. Nature is a system which is predicated entirely on very delicate balances and partnerships. This means that the more evolved a species is, the more dependent it is on other species for its survival. While there may be such a thing as domination culture within a species there is no such thing as domination culture in Nature as a whole. This is just a human illusion and misconception.

Addressing the deficit in consciousness

I'm going to give you a quote from John B.S. Haldane, a British-Indian scientist who worked in the fields of physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology and mathematics. He was also an enzymologist, which he became as a result of discovering enzymes. This gives you an insight into my own individual perspective when it comes to environmental issues (and other issues such as social issues).

Coming from my own background of the occult, magic, mysticism and shamanism I'm of the belief that an issue is only an issue due to a lack of consciousness, be it conscious awareness or conscious insight. You do not have issues when you have sufficient conscious awareness or insight. You only have issues when there is a lack of conscious awareness or insight. Usually, or quite often, resolving an issue depends on a shift in conscious awareness or insight. This is a principle which can be used not only for environmental issues, but also social issues, political issues, and even personal issues. We live in a world which is made for learning.

This is not however a widespread or widely known principle, based on what I'm seeing when I look at human society in general. Far more prevalent is an attachment to a belief or even an ideology and when that doesn't work out we either end up blaming someone else or assign someone else the problem of figuring the issue out. It seems that fewer and fewer people are willing to consider the possibility that they either don't understand an issue or that there's something missing or wrong in their perception of the issue. Indeed there is a terrible stigma involved in making mistakes, in failure, and in holding your hands up and admitting "I really don't have a clue." As a result of having such stigma, we miss out on opportunities on what I would refer to as cultural relativism, and on finding out what other people who are different to us and who live differently and think differently think.

It is this deficit in consciousness and our apparent widespread inability to turn to possibility when reality is throwing up issues which is what I want to get into here.

Indeed collectively it seems to have always been the assumption that Man's mind (please pay attention to the gender bias here) is sufficient and adequate for the comprehension of the universe. Despite the fact that this comes across as an idiotic assumption, it is not that much of a startling revelation. As recently as 1840 people widely believed that the Earth was 4,000 years old. If we go back a couple of centuries to say 1460 hardly anybody believed that there was such a thing as the New World. Back then people believed that the Eurasian landmass and Africa was all that there was on this planet. Just like flat earthers today, the notion of there being such a thing as the Americas was limited to a few nutty map makers and equally nutty sailors. Conventional thinking at the time just didn't entertain the notion of there being America.

You don't have to dig that far into our history to realize that people generally didn't know what was going on. They weren't even close. Yet we are asked to believe that from the time of Darwin to today in the 21st century we somehow have everything figured out. Really? Now we perceive the universe from the pinnacle of lofty understanding. Now we have reached the point where physics explains biology, biology explains culture, culture explains sociology, and so on, and so on.

Yet take a step back and take a good look at the consequences of all this so-called enlightenment. I mean where do we start? We have the widespread manifestation of chaos, the dissolution of values, an inability to control technology, an inability to come up with reasonable political objectives, and so on. Even if we were to pick out just one of our growing social, environmental and political issues it would be challenging enough. But we have literally hundreds of different issues, and our inability or unwillingness to try to address what issues there are means that we face even more issues further down the line.

The sheer necessity of a different power dynamic

You see when you attend a dinner party or start working for a new company in a new job, when you don't know what's going on, then the rational thing to do is keep your mouth shut and pay attention to what's going on around you. This is so that you can learn to appreciate your new environment. You certainly don't give it the big 'I am', you don't shoot your mouth off, you don't pepper everyone with your unsolicited opinions, do you?

But this is exactly what is going on right now out there in society when it comes to so many different issues. Some of the strongest opinions out there are coming from people who don't even have a grip on reality, let alone a loose grip.

Here's another principle for you to wrap your mind around. Space is reality. Space is also relationship. The principle here is giving space to existence, and it also follows that you give space to an issue. Back when you were a kid in the playground trying to get on a rotating roundabout, you needed a space to jump onto the roundabout. Otherwise you ended up on the ground with a bust head or grazed knee. Similarly skipping was dependent on jumping on the spaces between the moving skipping rope. But see to get on either the roundabout or to start skipping you had to appreciate the motion of the roundabout, the skipping rope, and the space inbetween.

This comes right back to reality being stranger than we can suppose. There are no permanent solutions. Creativity is always an unfinished, incomplete project. This means that none of our preexisting models and beliefs work simply because any solution to any issue is at best provisional and temporary. This means that any understanding of an issue will recede relative to any epistemic programming to disclose, define, explain, or categorize. This is simply because reality is in itself impermanent and constantly changing. The fallacy is believing that you are somehow involved in a finite project which will result in a white paper which explains how the wild pig ate all the rhubarb.

My point here is that reality does not exist to be explained. We have been going on with what I believe is a primary characteristic of the male Ego on the assumption that we can understand and somehow explain reality. It's assumed that the human mind can somehow work out increasing levels of complexity in reality and make sense of them.

But what I am suggesting and this is a core part of my belief is that we have sufficient social and cultural awareness to explode this nonsensical assumption and blow it right out of the water. You see part of developing the conscious awareness when it comes to dealing with an issue is to recognize the fact that sometimes, sometimes, the issue is only an issue not because we have yet to find a solution to resolve it, but it is our attitude to the issue which is what is making it an issue.

This tendency to constantly seek to find solutions where it's not necessary and to try and explain reality out of existence - a feature of male Ego - is one I would term as 'correctile dysfunction'. I guess another term for it would be mansplaining. We have been discussing and trying to find explanations for climate change for getting close to a century, but tell me, what are the examples of efficacy in direct action?

Do you really understand the answer?

Here I have to pose the question of whether you really understand the answer. The answer to understanding both reality and the universe is the exact same answer to the question "How am I to understand and explain my own life?" It cannot be understood. It cannot be explained. It is a constantly changing, evolving mystery. It is the carrot that always remains five yards further than your reach. It never conforms to the confines of rational apprehension.

There's even the statement in 'Moby Dick' that 'reality outran apprehension'.

Apprehension is the primitive functioning of the primate neural network. Therefore it's a given that any sort of environmental reality is going to go way beyond the limitations of our apprehension. Exactly what reality is is actually a mystery. It's mysticism. You simply cannot measure the depth and the complexity of a universal mystery with the neural network of a primate. There is no substance whatsoever in any assumption that human beings have evolved to figure out the universe. That is just an assumption.

Our role is not to understand or come up with explanations for either reality or the universe. Our role is to simply live and appreciate our environment. You know? Like other species are doing. Appreciation really is the key here.

We humans have an amazing capacity for finding resonance with beauty. We have that aesthetic awareness. Appreciation of form. Appreciation of how things go together. It all comes back to that one word, appreciation, appreciation, appreciation.

The inanity of modernity

This collective lack of any appreciation for being born into a vibrant, colourful, fascinating environment results in a persistent act of self-betrayal results in a lifestyle which for most people turns out to be a lifestyle centred around drudgery and exploitation, a drab, monotonous and sometimes bleak lifestyle which gradually and slowly peters out to a dreary, dusty death. This is all somehow legitimized by various models of reality which are never ever presented as models of reality but as scientific truths.

All too often we are sucking the poetry, the art, the music and the drama out of our living and being. We extract the creativity out of our being by the assumption and settling for the mundane. With it goes much of the meaning and nuance of life which from a certain perspective makes life out to be an inane pastime, from which we get the inanity of modernity.

What I'm referring to here by the inanity of modernity is the persistent crushing and flattening out of values so that nothing really means all that much. The sense of outrage over political corruption and mistreatment of the most vulnerable and underprivileged. The sense of outrage as society collectively teeters on the edge of the abyss. The sense of outrage to social injustice and widespread persecution.. It's all muted, ineffective, and eventually tossed aside by frivolous and meaningless distractions, movies, football, television, social media trends and celebrity culture. Soap operas. Daytime television.

Nothing is spared. Everything eventually becomes flattened by the inanity of modernity.

Yet we ever so persistently cling on to the heritage of the villains from the past, people such as Darwin, Hegel, Schopenhauer.. These nutters got the wrong end of the stick and they were loud and vocal about it all. What they sold us was a universe devoid of soul and spirit, where Man looms larger and larger and more powerful (once again pay attention to the implicit gender bias I'm placing here).

What does this bring us? It's very simple. Fascism.

This is not surprising because it is this calling forth the image of Man into a larger and larger perspective has been the program and agenda for monotheism for the last 3,000 years at least. It has been the relentless and peristent centralization of the human image - explicitly the male dominant human image - and in the transmutation of hellenistic Judaism which becomes Christianity the culmination or fulcrum of this viewpoint is the perspective that Man can be God. That's it.

This is often hailed as a tremendous achievement of existential validity for the human image, the greatest single stride forward ever taken in the field of human ontology. I would like to suggest to you that this was probably the greatest backward step ever taken because what it did was that it shoved Nature further and further back into the background and widened the chasm in the relationship between Man and Nature.

Man's treatment of Nature

We torment, bully and abuse Nature for her secrets. This is from Francis Bacon. We torture Nature to obtain her secrets. We believe that the world is created for Man. It is for Man to remake and remodel in his image. And yes, Mankind bends Mother Nature over the foot of the bed and he fucks her violently and repeatedly until he gets what he wants. This is what I'm referring to as the rape of Mother Nature. Rape is not so much about sex. It is all about power and the inequal power dynamic of abuse.

And no, I'm not going to stick to nice, twee, sanitized terms such as 'climate change'. I strongly feel that it's time to remove the filters and start telling it like it really is. Oh for sure such 19th century nutcases such as Darwin and Hegel would swear blind that they were anti-church and anti-clerical very much the same as your typical wife beater will swear blind that he is a loving husband and responsible father, but truth be told all that was achieved was the stripping away of Baroque decoration.

The German-Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas was very clear when he pointed out that third century hellenistic gnosticism and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger are essentially the same thing. It's just that in the gnostic version you get all the sexy demons, angels and levels, and the clash of the Archons, and of course opera. Heidegger's stuff just got down to the nitty gritty, but the message is exactly the same. Man is thrown into the unknown. Man finds himself in the abyss, lost, alone and all meaning must come from within. All order must come from an inner vision.

In the language of Heidegger we are abandoned. This is permission for pathology because this is a point of view and perspective purchased at the cost of ignoring the facts of the matter. I'm not sure about you but from my perspective this cannot be anything other than delusional thinking. It is a perspective not inclusive of the facts of the matter. It is preposterous to even entertain for even a second the possible existence of human beings without the existence of Nature.

I have even in my work in the past alluded to the fact that our attachment to gnosticism is often what blinds us to the 'stubborn reality' of our environmental issues, just as I have made clear the very real and persistent threats fascism and white supremacy pose to developing a more harmonious relationship with our environment and natural habitat during my time as a political candidate. I've written about such issues in my books and previous blog posts.

The English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead pointed out that there were 'stubborn facts'. You can reduce and reduce all you want and pursue your reductionist theories all day long but this does not change the fact that there are stubborn facts.

One such example of a stubborn fact is the primacy of Nature which was the one stubborn fact ignored by this tradition and movement.

Nature as the ground of being

I've written previously, I think a couple of years ago, about 'The Ground of Being' when I was writing about Eastern cosmology and the concept of self. I'm fairly sure that somewhere I've written about the Sanskrit words 'atman' (self) and 'anatman' (non-self) using the cosmos or universe as a frame of reference. Therefore it is possible to develop a new cosmology centred around adopting Nature as the ground of being without getting involved in any way with mental gymnastics. It's possible to see Nature as self and also your 'self' as a part of Nature.

Therefore once you accept Nature as the ground of being at a stroke you resolve the whole issue of separateness simply because there is no rational need to inflate the Ego as self, simply because self and Nature are one and the same. There is no need for any kind of gnosticism simply because the existence of Nature is a 'stubborn fact'.

In actual fact I feel that this is something which is happening, slowly, globally, in the inevitable trajectory or course of human evolution within the context of perpetually shifting and changing reality. This is where I need to amplify my own perspective on climate change. Climate change for me is in itself not the core issue. This does not make me in any way a climate change denier. Climate change was mentioned numerous times in the Tao Te Ching, written 2,500 years ago, and I'm fairly sure that it's also mentioned in the Chuang Tzu. Climate change for me is a statement of fact, and for me the issue at stake is our abusive relationship to the environment and to Nature.

This comes right back to what I was writing previously about issues and using that bit of introspection to check whether it is the issue itself which is the problem, or is it how you perceive the issue which is the actual problem? But see when it comes to issues it's also sometimes the case that if you choose to simply ignore the issue and look the other way then reality changes to force the issue from your conscious awareness into your focus of conscious attention. This is what I feel is happening and often when the issue is forced into your face, with no other options, then you are somewhat coerced into that shift in consciousness.

We are experiencing an unfolding environmental and existential crisis. However we have not quite reached that stage of anger and blame. But eventually it's going to become clear and understood who is responsible and who is to blame. It's not going to be the Amazonian Indians, the African bushmen, the tribes of Papua New Guinea. It's going to be Western male, technological, scientific, economic hubris that has taken up centre stage like a noisy, loudmouthed, bullying drunk who has then proceeded to hold us all prisoner while they've acted out a narrative that is rooted in their own traumatic birth and abusive background.

But what I'm offering up as a counter strategy is far more conditional, provisional models backed up by far more cultural relativism sweetened by far more creativity, empathy and humanity. Nature is neither mute nor unresponsive, just as, contrary to what Freud maintained, Nature is neither blind nor stupid. Freud for me is another one of those 19th/20th century nutcases who's entire heritage needs to be completely binned. He was also part of that whole toxic Man over Nature movement and legacy.

No, indeed, Nature is neither blind nor stupid, because Nature is responsive, nurturing, empathic and rooted in the mysticism of the Sacred Feminine Principle, or 'Seven'.

Guidance through numbers

So how do we address or begin to address our issues with the environment? Well first we need to understand that humans only have language, memory and conception at their disposal. This does not compare with the environment which is based on code, because that is what consciousness is, it's information. It's code. Language and code are not the same thing. If they were your smartphone would be a brick. Therefore you can do all your science and run however many scientific models you like, make all the predictions you like, but it won't do diddly squat for the relationship between human beings and the environment.

If you want to understand the environment in any way, shape or form you're going to have to get into numbers. This means mathematics. This means numerology. Primarily mathematics, secondarily numerology. This is a stubborn fact. This is a hard truth.

Science is based on inductive reasoning, which while perfectly valid is also inefficient because you're developing principles and laws from observations, experiences and hypotheses. You can have something happening 100 times and from that develop a premise that under specific conditions that something will happen for the 101st time. Much of what modern science is based on is fortune telling.

But see mathematics is based on intuition. This is why learning mathematics in formal education is so important. Figuring out something mathematically means figuring something out intuitively and doesn't leave any trails. See most of us are led to believe that intuition is something feminine, mysterious, beyond explanation, and magical. This is probably because we live in an androcentric society where the masculine is seen as default and the feminine is seen as secondary. If someone claims intuition our default position is one of sceptical doubt and "Prove it." But this does not change the fact that mathematics is based on intuition.

Many people associate science with mathematics, but this is where you need to be careful, particularly when it comes to modern science. Modern science has only appropriated mathematics, because the default in science is numerology and has been for some time. Numerology is deductive reasoning which is used by scientists to verify their inductive premises, which is how we have such things as Fibonacci numbers, golden sequences and Lucas numbers. There is also applied mathematics which is important when it comes to engineering. However pure mathematics is done in the mind, is based on intuition, and leaves no trace in its reasoning. However, and this is the beauty of mathematics, you can also arrive at deductive reasoning through mathematics.

You see you can make any sort of statement, even a nonsensical statement, and then make another statement, and then examine the relationship between two statements to see if there's any relationship. This is how mathematics really works. It has very little to do with numbers. What m,athematics is about is the conceptualizing of relationships. Then it's about exploring your intuition about these conceptions. Then after that you write a formal statement to describe your cognitive activity around your assumptions. Hopefully you can see how mathematics is entirely based on intuition. But why has mathematics been appropriated by sciences?

Mathematics has been appropriated by science simply because mathematics has an uncanny ability to describe nature. Nobody can really explain why mathematics has an uncanny and unfailing ability to describe nature, but it gives us the stubborn fact or hard truth that, in order to understand and interact appropriately with Nature, we can only do so through intuition and mathematics without the intrusion of deductive science. Using inductive reasoning strategies through science is basically a hangover of democratic thinking. This is not even outdated, it's ancient thinking - as ancient as astrology. This is all based on the reasoning that everything is conceivable and operating to known laws, which is also the major downside of astrology.

This is where I'm going to end this. Not much point in writing any more. Without a partnership with the vegetable matrix and without developing an intuitive relationship through mathematics with the environment we are pretty much done as a species on this planet. This is a stubborn fact. This is a hard truth.