Man’s Original Psychological Separations

“They need to realize we are on the verge of the abyss…the stakes for all humanity could not be higher,” the official spokesperson for António Guterres, the UN secretary general said today.

He was reacting to a Guardian survey of the authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the top climate scientists from around the world.

Such a statement is guaranteed to fall on deaf ears. A spokesman for the spokesman of the United Nations, which has become as politically effective as the League of Nations, again called on “political and industry leaders” to keep global heating below 1.5 C, which we are about to blow by.

Most of the scientists laced their latest findings with personal notes of despair, making the report seem designed to produce even greater resignation in global citizens.

Reporting on its report, the Guardian reiterated the old refrain: “The respondents to the Guardian survey identified lack of political will as the single biggest barrier to climate action.”

Thus, by looking no deeper than the thickness of the new iPad Pro, the best of the global media demonstrates that it too is part of the problem.

The essential problem is not “political will,” which is a mindset that believes the tail wags the dog, but the psychological separations that form the foundation of man’s consciousness.

Huge differentials in wealth and power are a fact, but there is no ‘them.’ That fallacy is one of the four horsemen of the internal divisions that are driving the fragmentation of the earth and humanity.

The uncomfortable truth is that humans are still ruled by the same original psychological separations that the first prehistoric humans made many thousands of years ago. If the living generations cannot urgently address them within, and thereby in human consciousness, man will continue to lay waste to the earth.

A modicum of self-awareness attests that as humans we still operate out of these illusory separations: the self; time; the other; and death.

Think on it. In order to have a ‘them’ there must first be ‘us.’ And ‘us vs. them’ derives from the fabrication of a separate observer and self.

The measurement of time, by the sun or an atomic clock, is obviously a useful thing. But nature does not know time, and the universe, despite scientifically dating the proverbial Big Bang, does not follow “the arrow of time.”

Spacetime curves and bends according to the laws of gravity, not according to the superimposing measurements of the human mind. And the cosmos is not a clock, but is ever in the act of creation.

Death is the biggest separation. As soon as humans constructed a self, we feared the loss of its continuity, and consequently separated life from death.

In actuality, death is inextricable from life, and the ground of death -- the absolute -- gave rise to the universe. It is being recapitulated every moment within and around us.

For centuries Christian theology was based on the idea of “original sin,” the notion that man, possessing “free will,” intentionally separated himself from God. From then on, as the story of Genesis goes, we knew alienation.

That explanation seems childish now. But it contained a perception that we have yet to convert into insight. There was a primeval mistake, which continues to dominate the human mind and brain.

Could the human separative ability have been limited to the functional realm, in which reified objects in the environment were simply “removed and made ready for use?” If so, would humankind have developed scientifically and technologically, and not ended up fragmenting the earth and humanity to the breaking point?

Perhaps on Earth II, but not on Earth I. We are where we are, and psychological separation is why.

One of the climate scientists in the report muttered, “I feel resigned to disaster as we cannot separate our love of bigger, better, faster, more, from what will help the greatest number of people survive and thrive. Capitalism has trained us well.”

Even top scientists speak of “separating our love,” thereby confirming the human condition and reinforcing human conditioning. No wonder the vast majority of scientists and media people think in terms of opposing them – “political and industry leaders.”

The driver of man’s ecological crisis is first man’s consciousness, not modern capitalism. But both emanate from four elements of psychological separation.

And the consciousness of man, based on illusory separations and useless memories, is dead. It needs to fall away like dead leaves and be incinerated, without heat or smoke, in the flames of attention.

Human beings can end man’s destruction of the earth and humanity by awakening a true order of consciousness, flowing from direct perception, insight and wholeness.

Martin LeFevre
lefevremartin77 at gmail

© Scoop Media