Nature consciousness will help with our political angst. We are collectively suffering right now by the feeling that things are falling apart, that our society structures are disintegrating—worries that war is going to break out everywhere. That is a big and real worry. This craziness is caused by mass unconsciousness.
If that’s true, mass awakening will help, right?
So how do we step out of the angst that’s being caused by all this unrest and become a part of a sustainable way for human beings to live on the earth? That’s what I mean by nature consciousness.
We need to step out of our divided mind, out of our feeling of division with the earth and with each other, and step into a consciousness that includes everything. That consciousness bubbles with earth consciousness because we are actually inside earth consciousness. We’re not outside looking at it.
This is what non-duality has to teach us—that there are not two things happening. There is a process to start accessing Earth consciousness.
You can’t go to university and learn it. You can’t learn it through a book. You can’t put the riddle of science together and hope to get there.
And I’m not talking about some lame belief, like “earth is our mother.” I’m not talking about chanting a few chants and trying to feel better about how we are.
I’m not talking about believing in anything. I’m not talking about believing in mother earth. I’m talking about deep, deep, total unity with all of existence so you can start seeing and listening to this and inside this.
What I did was I learned to listen. To really, really deeply listen requires going very still for a long period of time. I moved out into nature, but you can do that anywhere.
It’s a matter of regular moments of pausing and listening. Meditation, really, is listening deeply. These days we’ve turned meditation into a goal thing where we’re trying to gain mindfulness or trying to gain enlightenment. But really, it’s a moment to simply listen—to learn to listen.
Because language goes too fast through our heads. Have you ever felt that churn, churn, churn, churn inside your head? It goes so fast. We gotta slow that baby down and get to where you can listen… and when you listen, what do you hear?
You hear earth consciousness itself. You already are earth consciousness listening to earth consciousness.
I heard a recent comment that really struck me. It was from a Native American guy who was talking about the political climate today, and he said, “We aren’t so worried because we have already survived the apocalypse.”
Interesting, right?
European society came over and wiped out an amazingly vibrant society that lived here in what we now call the United States—Turtle Island. So they’ve already survived the apocalypse, and it wasn’t nice.
But think—whatever your ethnicity is, you have also survived the apocalypse.
It might be so far back in your generational history that you wouldn’t even call it that. Many of us who come from Europe—England, Ireland, places like that—were conquered several centuries ago. We don’t remember, but every single one of us has ancestors who were living a free indigenous life and got conquered by civilization of some kind.
Probably the easiest thing to think about is the Roman world—the Romans sweeping through the entire indigenous world of Europe and conquering it and bringing “civilization,” what we call civilization. We have been grappling with the ramifications of that for a long, long time.
The ramifications have been very political, what we would call political now: mass poverty, wars, huge diseases sweeping through overpopulated communities. It’s been very, very bad.
We have been taught that if we are passive and sit around and hope that everything will come out okay, then everything will come out okay. Stated differently… if we pray that everything will come out okay then everything will come out okay.
We’ve been taught to never stand up and take assessment of our own selves. We don’t take strength in our own selves and be fully awake people. We have been taught that being fully awake people is not even possible.
Right now we are having a meeting of East and West, where Western spiritual thought meets Eastern spiritual thought. A lot of good has come out of that, but it’s also increased our level of separation.
Western thought is based on the idea of a heaven. You can’t get there till you die, and you’ve got to be good to get there.
Eastern thought is: you’re not enlightened. You must have lifetime after lifetime of perfectness in order to get there.
Both of these spiritual philosophies revolve around separation with nature, the idea that human nature itself is not capable of integrated wholeness.
When you start looking at it that way, it’s like, well, no wonder we’re so crazy!
We start out with a skewed idea of who we are and who everyone else is, and then we spend a whole lot of time trying to not feel so desperately horrible about it—to not feel the angst that that kind of separation and fundamental lie causes in us.
Okay. Stop. Let’s look at it from the other way around.
If we are not separate—and if we are conscious—that means that everything is conscious. We are consciousness inside of consciousness.
I cannot be a conscious being inside an inanimate world. That’s not possible.
Everything is one, everything is a united, interrelated whole. How could I be interrelated with a world that is not conscious if I am conscious?
How can I be alive inside a universe that is not itself alive? If that was true, there would have to be a place where my aliveness stops and un-aliveness starts. It’s simple when you look at it that way, right?
You have this spark inside you, and it doesn’t matter if you spent years meditating to find it, or if you just stop right this second and notice it for the first time—there it is, right there.
There’s this spark receiving light through your eyes, and that spark could be called consciousness. It is something that knows itself.
Now spread that knowing of yourself to everything around you—the walls of your house, the trees outside, the grass outside, the air, the water you drink today.
Spread it to everything. Everything is alive and everything is conscious.
The apocalypse was when we started being told that we are a separate thing inside this world, which divided our perception in two. It turned us into a separate thing inside a dead world.
Nature consciousness—simply opens us up to noticing how alive the world is, how alive the earth is, how alive the entire universe is.
Just think how alive soil is. Tree roots grow down inside it and communicate with each other. Water flows around and through it and rains down on top of it. Trees then breathe out air. Animals like you and me—we breathe in air.
Share that pulsing aliveness—breath in, breath out. You’re sharing, sharing, sharing.
Everything we do is in relationship with everything else that is alive.
As long as we’re trying to fix our political systems using a consciousness that is not fully integrated, we’re going to create more political systems that don’t work. The natural human being is what we need to discover.
The natural human being knows how to integrate with our surroundings, to integrate with each other—we know how to get along. That is our nature. War isn’t our nature.
Destruction is not our nature. Meanness is not our nature. Our nature is cooperation and love and harmony. We don’t have to force these things to come up.
We don’t have to do a workshop about love. We all know how to do it. We’ve done it since the day we were born.
Human beings are a fabulous integration with all of reality.
We’re strong. We’re capable. We can come together in totally new ways, in ways that work consciously and harmoniously with everything around us, but we need to—let this nature consciousness grow and bubble up inside of us.
Stop for a second and feel nature inside of you.
Nature isn’t something outside of you. It’s something that’s in and out and around and through, and we are one hundred percent involved with it. We’re in relation with everything that exists.
We have already survived the apocalypse.
We are in a position now to start putting societies and groups of people together in ways that really, really work harmoniously with the earth. The fact that political things are falling apart is not a surprise. Political stuff has been falling apart ever since civilization was invented. Let’s start rebuilding it back consciously instead of continually flailing at it unconsciously.
So let your angst dissolve into a new reality. We can create harmony because that is our nature.
I have no idea how it’s going to actually happen. All I know is that everyone needs to be fully awake as a human being inside of this earth consciousness in order to start the process.