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The Way A Bee Loves A Flower

 

While in the house, I found an insect on it’s back slowly moving it’s legs in futility. I investigated and found it to be a dying bee too weak to right itself. I thought “if I was going to die I would want to be outside on the coolness of the ground under the warmth of the sun”. So I gently scooped up this little bee and went outside to put it on a clover flower. It was too weak to hold on so it tumbled off. I picked some clover flowers to place near it. The way I saw it embrace that flower brought tears to my eyes. This is the definition of Love. The way a dying bee loves a flower. The way the flower loves the sun. The way I love the bees and flower. This is Love.  If only people knew this Love at a more conscious level.

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Transmutation Of Pain and Sex

 

Transmutation is the action of changing or the state of being changed into another form. To put it another way, it is the alchemy of converting lead into gold.

Pain is inevitable in our life. We all experience pain in some form or another. However pain can be toxic to our spiritual and physical selves. One of the best ways of relieving yourself of pain is to write … and then write some more. Writing often takes the pain literally out of you and onto paper. Often when we remove the parasite of pain through writing we can look at it for what it is and often find it so trivial that it vanishes.

However there are some pains that are so entrenched that even extensive writing is no remedy. I recently experienced pain in the form of grief, sadness and anger over the destruction of a natural area of which I considered a sacred place where I derived much wisdom at an early age and throughout my life. Hearing and seeing the daily bulldozers and rock-crushers demolish a sacred mountain of which I view as family was too much for me to handle. Overwhelming pain caused a negative change in my body which manifested in physical issues such as grinding the teeth to inflame wisdom teeth and having bad accidents while working.

What was my solution?

To channel this destructive energy into something productive. To make this bad thing in my life a catalyst for something good. One of the most influential and positive things in my life was that I was unschooled and given freedom to explore the subjects that I wanted to learn. I remember this would have never happened if it wasn’t for a horrible fourth grade teacher which caused me to become so depressed my parent’s took me out of school.

Likewise for the pain of the destruction of wild-lands, I channel this energy into being a catalyst to learn environmental law. I bought myself a stack of environmental law books and enrolled myself into an online course. Knowledge is power and every time I get a twinge of painful anger I direct it into learning environmental law. I went from being disempowered to becoming empowered. If you transmute pain well enough you even become grateful for the cause of your pain. Grateful that it acted as such a catalyst for positive change in your life.

While on the topic of transmutation, we can also transmute sex energy. Sex energy is simply creative energy. This creative energy is one of the most powerful spiritual “compounds” that propels us through life. It is what can create the most beautiful and harmonious things as well as be the source for war and destruction. Too often this creative energy becomes stagnant, builds and causes issues if is repressed / suppressed. It is the equivalent of a pressure vessel full of steam with no outlet. It will cause destruction whereas if harnessed properly it can drive an entire locomotive. The key to a most fulfilling life is to not suppress this energy but to cultivate it and channel it into a variety of creative outlets. Often the act of being creative brings forth even more creative energy to use. Beyond making love with a loving partner, using spiritually fulfilling ways, we can also channel this energy into other creative outlets:

-Visual Art

-Dance

-Music

-Philosophy

Let it all out and “Die Empty”. At the end of life, will the unexpressed stories / ideas / art / dance within your mind die with you? Or will you express all that is within you?

The more you flow and more you can.

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True Love and The Many Different Forms Of Love

 

The Inuit natives of the North have 50 words for snow to describe the nuances. Perhaps it’s time for us to have more words for the umbrella term of “love”.

Many years ago I went for an extensive wisdom searching hike at a young age to find the essence of existence. I set out on this hike with the question: what comes first?

Did logic or emotion come first into existence? That is an easy answer… emotion.

But of emotions and feelings, what came first here?

According to researchers there are only four primary emotions:

  • Happy
  • Sad
  • Afraid/Surprised
  • Angry/Disgusted

But none of these feel right as to what is the first and most primary form of existence.

Being alone out in Nature asking these questions, I was overwhelmed with the answer…

Love.

A term which cannot be described but what I believe gives rise to existence itself. Without the underlying indescribable energy of Love, reality is simply a random combination of periodic elements. Love is the secret catalyst to give rise to life and consciousness.

The best way to describe this Love is “Compassionate Love”. But even this fails to describe what this core of essence is.

Everything we know has an opposite…

Night and day.

Up and down.

Right and wrong.

Death and life.

In and out.

Except one thing … Compassionate Foundational Essential Love.

I want to make a distinction between this foundational Love and many other feelings that we call “love”.

We have the love for our partner. The love for our new car. The love for our children. And while some of these forms of love are closer to Foundational True Love, they are more often superficial forms of love which contain the seed of it’s opposite.

For many people who say they “love” their boyfriend / girlfriend / husband / wife / lover, this “love” can turn to hate and grief in an instant. All it takes is for the object of affection to not behave like you want or no longer be in your life. In an instant what was supposed “love” turns to hate or grief. The good feeling of love turns to pain. The same flipping of the coin of love / pain can be seen from the material things like crashing your new car to the emotionally deep things like loosing a loved one. True Foundational Love knows no opposite. This love continues even if the object of affection hurts you or no longer exists in your life. It is a foundational concept of many spiritual people … From Buddha and Jesus to Walt Whitman.

Because Foundational Compassionate Love knows no opposite, it Loves everything. By accepting this Love, care, reverence and warmth in everything we tap into the power of pure existence and inter-connection.

The superficial levels of love are still valuable and can exist in unison with the Foundational Love, but we must distinguish the difference.

Let me tell you some of the best ways to experience a glimpse of Foundational Compassionate Love.

Look at a beautiful sunset across a rolling landscape. Do you feel the beauty? This is essential.

Listen to music without words which is so beautiful to cause tears in your eyes. Do feel it? This is essential.

Stand barefoot on grass, moss or sand upon the beach. Close your eyes. Feel your connection to the earth. You can feel it here too.

Observe how trees give fruit and bushes give berries. Acknowledge how nature has provided nourishment for us for our entire existence. The gratitude here is part of the essence.

Can you stand in awe at how a single cell of sperm and a single cell of egg can combine to create a chain reaction to create a whole new being? This awe-inspiring feeling is essential.

Can you feel the warmth of the sun even on a winter day? Know that plants love the sun as we do. The feeling of the sun is essential.

Do you admire the tenacity of weeds growing in cracks of concrete? This is essential.

Are you amazed by the fact that our skin heals even deep cuts? This is another example.

Can you sit and hear the birds singing as the gentle wind caresses your face, you hands touching the soft plants? Can you melt into nothing and everything for a moment? This is essential.

Love expresses itself in everything.

 

There is love … and there is Love.

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Environmentalism From A Purely Intellectual Perspective?

 

In deep-ecology, eco-centrism and pantheism, there is an inherent element of spirituality. There is the belief that consciousness exists outside of ourselves. That there is value to natural integrity outside of our human utilization. That there is magic in seeing the night sky without light pollution, magic in the curve of the hills, magic in the wetness of water, magic in the song of birds, magic in old-growth forest, magic in fertile soil, magic as we stand barefoot on moss and lichen.

One can be an environmentalist from an agnostic, anthropocentric and/or myopic perspective. But this leads to concepts and approaches that are not holistically ideal. For example, in wanting to prevent climate change, humans have pursued the idea of more nuclear power plants. Even ultra-small nuclear power plants sprinkled throughout neighborhoods. This replaces one problem with another problem of radioactive gene-modifying carcinogenic waste that lasts for hundreds of thousands of years as well as targets for foul play. The same shortsighted concept of replacing one problem with another also lies in genetic modification or using poison to irradiate noxious pests.

The thing that us Deep-Ecologists point to cannot be explained from an purely intellectual level. There is an emotional and spiritual element as well as inner knowing.
When presented with the logical concepts of Deep Ecology such as leaving resources, bio-diversity and natural spaces for future generations; maintaining clean air, water, and soil for our health; and preventing animal extinction. These can all be understood at an intellectual logical level.

But only true understanding will come when you see the Earth as your mother, your lover, your child or yourself. Only true understanding comes when you shed tears for the wise trees being cut down. When your heart beats with loss when you see and hear the bull dozers ripping through the ancient lands home to generations of flora and fauna like a rapists knife through skin. When your blood boils at the paving over soft fertile soil, barking dogs replacing howling coyotes, streetlights replacing stars at night, dryer sheets replacing the smell of sage on a rainy day, whizzing cars replacing the wisdom of silent wind, curvaceous hills being torn into linear lines. Only when we cry for these atrocities will we understand what the Deep Ecologists desperately try to explain. Understanding only comes when we understand the rivers as our blood, the native grasses as our hair, the wind as our breath, the stones as our bones, the soil as our skin and the seasons as our heart beat.

 

There is a distinction between knowledge and understanding. Indeed, knowledge is not understanding. This is a concept I have been exploring a lot over the past month. From the perspective of knowledge,  humans think they are superior.
Let me expand this concept further… Humans think they know best, they think they can be gods over everything else which is why we are artificially modifying the genetic code that took millions of years to create thinking that we actually know what we are doing. Our pursuit of “knowledge” but lack of holistic understanding is liable to destroy our existence and everything else. Indeed, the relativistic large hadron collider which we are using to discover the “secrets” of the universe has the very very ultra small potential to create something called “strangelets”; a particle with the ability to turn every other particle it comes in contact with into a strangelet turning the world into a sci-fi nightmare of a homogenous blob. When humans where first testing nuclear weapons, they were not sure if the chain reaction wouldn’t just continue infinitely and destroy the entire world … but despite this horrific potential they pursued it anyways. Looking to the future, our pursuit to terraform Mars will require an exporting of our valuable finite Earthly materials to this barren planet. How about we just protect the sacredness of what we have?

In understanding. In being present. In being self-aware. In observing the inner and outer worlds, we would not have the compulsion to move in a linear fashion to pursue knowledge without ethical understanding. To pursue “development and growth” without holistic respect to cycles and homeostasis.

Humans like to think of themselves as gods that know best and are superior to all other things. It is this thinking that causes our problems. When we know ourselves as Gods just like everything else — the plants, animals, minerals, air — then we will find peace, contentment and joy.