It’s almost three weeks since one of my favourite actors, Leonard Nimoy, died. Being “Spock” in “Star Trek”, he was one of those actors which I thought would never die.
In todays modern society, for some reason, death appears to be something like a large rhino, sitting on top of us one day and completely squash us until we are nothing more but a red mush.
Although it is addressed in vague terms by religion, our culture appears to not have room for discussing death. However, no matter how much we may try to resist, it persists. It probably isn’t a coincidence that the society, that doesn’t speak of death, is headed directly into the storm of total destruction of the plant and death of our whole species.
The question that you really need to ask yourself is: Why do we do this?
Why do we, as a society, handle death as if it is a dirty secret that we are embarrassed about, despite the fact that it is an inevitable fact of life which every individual in this world will experience eventually?
Is it possible that an intimate and open association with death might take away the politicians, advertisers and media’s power? May it be true that they use unconscious and subtle ideas of death to convince us to listen to all of their lies and propaganda? Would we be as easily scared by death, if we had a conscious and honest relationship with it?
Mitght be, it’s due to the fact that consumption ends with death? No more romantic relationships, exciting holidays or delicious meals. A culture that emphasizes consumption, even when it is facing potential annihilation, doesn’t have any place for thinking about and considering death. If you thought more about it, the pair of new designer jeans you are thinking of buying might not seem as important to you.
Or maybe it’s due to the fact that the industrial civilization that we live in has detached us completely from the realities of life and death cycles, and the circle of life appears to be merely an abstraction.
In fact, the city is the ideal symbol for perpetual life, with the economics running it based on perpetual consumption and growth as well (kind of like cancer). The death portion of the cycle is what is missing in all of this. This is the time when this system exhales and shrinks back.
By contrast, working the land as farmers used to do, results in you knowing how soil works and the importance it has for life. You learn that all small creatures, fungi, bacteria and microorganisms will welcome your human body when it is returned to the soil. This makes it not appear to be so frightening and dark, instead it is merely part of the cycle of life.
Ignoring life’s dark side manifests itself into other aspects of society and culture also.
One example is the new age “positive thinking” trend. When you try to ignore the darkness in ourselves and your culture, you choose to be unconscious. In fact, consciousness involves facing all aspects of life, whether you consider them to be light or dark, good or bad. Unfortunately, western culture has many dark aspects to it that you need to become conscious about, sooner rather than later.
Avoiding pain and conflict are other aspects of darkness that you ignore.
Conflict can be a very uncomfortable process for you to face. Usually what happens is, around halfway through this process, you have a tendency to cut yourself off because you believe that conflict, pain and darkness shouldn’t even exist. Fortunately for some people this isn’t true, still, others avoid conflict at all costs (which gets manifested instead into tense and stressed bodies).
But, if you are courageous and face the inevitability of your own death and uncomfortable feelings, then you can continue towards the light once again.
It could be that industrial culture’s impact on the planet is a cycle itself. I would agree with this to some extent. Maybe we had to go through being disconnected from each other and the land to truly appreciate what we had in the past.
However, it’s time for you and me to make a move and allow this destructive aspect of our history die out before we completely destroy our planet and life as we know it.
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