Every living being is connected intimately, and from this intimacy follows the capacity of identification and as its natural consequences, practice of non-violence… Now is the time to share with all life on our maltreated earth through the deepening identification with life forms and the greater units, the ecosystems, and Gaia, the fabulous, old planet of ours.
~ Arne Naess
Iguazu Falls – photo by salko.3p, bigstockphoto.com
An updated worldview is called for that places life as we know it as in, among and inseparable from Earth itself. Humans, for instance, do not live “on” the planet, they are the planet. The terms animate and inanimate no longer serve when we view earth as a living entity. Following on, planetary psychology accepts that earth as a living planet is conscious and accepts the responsibility to investigate just how human and other than human beings share in that one consciousness.
~ David Chalmers
Cuernos del Paine, Torres del Paine, Chile – photo by Vitalylonov, bigstockphoto.com
New research suggests a belief in oneness has broad implications for psychological functioning and compassion for those are outside of our immediate circle.
~ Scott Barry Kaufman
Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens – photo by Devadana Sanctuary
We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love, and then we return home.
~ Aboriginal Australian Proverb
Matheson Lake, New Zealand – photo by pranodhm, bigstoockphoto.com
The belief that everything in the universe is part of the same fundamental whole exists throughout many cultures and philosophical, religious, spiritual, and scientific traditions, as captured by the phrase ‘all that is.’ The Nobel winner Erwin Schrodinger once observed that quantum physics is compatible with the notion that there is indeed a basic oneness of the universe. Therefore, despite it seeming as though the world is full of many divisions, many people throughout the course of human history and even today truly believe that individual things are part of some fundamental entity.
~ Scott Barry Kaufman
Purakaunui Falls, Catlins Forest Park, New Zealand – photo by henner, bigstockphoto.com
Consciousness exists in everything, but manifests itself in different ways. The scientific field of neurobiology has been effective in demonstrating consciousness in plants. Plant consciousness is evidenced by the process of bio-communication in plant cells, which means that plants are sentient life forms that feel, know, and are conscious.
~ Paul Lenda
Forest Touched by Sun – photo by Junku, bigstockphoto.com
If awareness is not the exclusive attribute of humankind—if, indeed, every aspect of the perceivable world is felt to be at least potentially alive, awake and aware — then there is an obvious need, in any human community, for individuals who are particularly adept at communicating with these other shapes of sensitivity and sentience. The shamans are precisely those persons who are especially sensitive and susceptible to the expressive calls, gestures and signs of the wider, more-than-human field of beings, and who are able to reply in kind.
~ David Abram
Atlantic Spotted Dolphin – photo by sheilapic76 – Dolphind, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16011002
Referring to the dynamics of synchronicity in nature, “…this collective order is hidden within chaotic and random motion so that radically new forms of behavior emerge at critical points, not so much from the interactions of many individuals, but through the cooperative action of the whole.”
~ F. David Peat
Waterfalls, Plitvice, Croatia – photo by twindesigner, bigstockphoto.com
To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe — to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungsthat breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it — is a wonder beyond words.
~ Joanna Macy
Jacob Hamblin Arch, Coyote Gulch, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, UT – photo by Andrushko Galyna, bigstockphoto.com
Like trees who share the same root system, we are but individual expressions of the greater whole. When we raise a revolution in our personal psyche, we are serving the quickening of collective consciousness.
~ Dreamwork with Toko-pa
Quaking Aspen Trees, Gunnison National Forest, CO – photo by dndavis, bigstockphoto.com
When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.
~ John Muir
Milky Way – photo by paulista, bigstockphoto.com
Stories, myths, and legends have existed since the beginning of humanity. They tell us about the world around us and give us a different filter to understand how things came about. For indigenous cultures who hold the longest relationship with life and natural surroundings, everything is alive and divine––even things we consider inanimate. And everything has a story of how they came to be what they are today. Even acorns.
~ John P. Harrington
Forest Owl – photo by Martin Grossman, bigstockphoto.com
Watching their cycles of growth, shedding of leaves, and re-flowering in the spring, people have long perceived trees as powerful symbols of life, death, and renewal. Since the beginning of time, humans have had a sense that trees are sentient beings just like us, that they can feel pain, that they bleed when they are hurt. Trees even look like us. People have a trunk; trees have arms. And so we innately feel a deep connection to them.
Many people say they can feel a tree’s vibrational energy when placing their hand upon its bark. With their deep roots, trees carry significant grounding energy. We naturally feel peace and serenity when walking in the shade of trees or on a forest trail.
~ Judith Shaw
Tree People of Central Park – photo by Devadana Sanctuary
TO COME HOME TO YOURSELF
May all that is unforgiven in you,
Be released.
May your fears yield
Their deepest tranquilities.
May all that is unlived in you,
Blossom into a future,
Graced with love.
~ John O’Donohue
Sunset, Cliffs of Moher, Ireland – photo by Patryk Kosmider, bigstockphoto.com
A quick look at the condition of our world shows the devastating impact of this pervasive denial intrinsic to the Western, scientific, materialist worldview, both upon the quality of life for much of humanity, as well as upon the biosphere as a whole…Our understanding of the world we live in determines the ethics we live by. Living a life based on a worldview that is an illusion can easily lead to living the wrong life. In re-visioning our idea of the world we live in, we change our perception of the possibilities available in our world, thus opening up previously unimagined pathways of creative and effective action.
~ Paul Levy
A New Dawn – photo by Dean Fikar, bigstockphoto.com
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