This mornings internet interactions led me to recall Bruce Liptons interesting book Spontaneous Evolution. At the meta-level, its really good and probably a good way for a lot of people to get a handle on what evolution really is and how it works. A) its not a slow, continuous process but rather one of steps - rapid evolution followed by a plateau leading to crisis requiring another rapid evolution. And B) the evolution is always towards the next larger organizational system, i.e. from single-celled to multi-celled, from individual to community, and so on. At this point in the evolution of my belief system, I cant agree with everywhere he goes in that book... still, great info to assimilate. But what I think is so important to point out - the evolutionary step he sees is from national to global, i.e. human unity (each of us becoming a cell in humanity - https://youtube/watch?v=uEuGlndt1yc). One of the great points Bruce makes is, Nature doesnt care about the best human, nature cares about humanity. (So lets get over any nationalist sentiments already!). But the way I would say it is, Nature doesnt care about humanity, nature cares about life. Theres American Exceptionalism, there are all kinds of religious exceptionalisms.... They all lead towards intolerance... and there is Human exceptionalism. Its really a Judeo-Christian thing, which is interesting to note. And its funny... if you think about human migration out of Africa and all of that, most of the people on Earth chose to continue walking until they found more natural abundance than what exists in the Levant. In other words, there were a lot of people who walked past the deserts into the forests. Which is interesting when you consider that nearly all forest religions are polytheistic, and that it was of course sensible to keep going past Galilee. So essentially the Levantines were either too lazy or too stubborn to keep going... And yet it is their philosophy (religion) that were all bound up in? Anyway.... I digress :) What I think is important to get here is that until we realize that we are just a component of LIFE on Earth, we are really likely to be, shall we say, disincluded from the category of living beings here? Im all for Planetary Exceptionalism - I think I probably do live on the best planet in the universe. However, I am not convinced that my species is up to such an honor. I am tired of all this talk of a shift or an awakening.... Its always human-centric. As long as we think of ourselves as exclusively in Gods image, we are on our way out. May we find a way to earn our place here.
Posted on: Tue, 17 Jun 2014 13:59:49 +0000