It has not been long since I started my path on the Druid Mysteries according to John Michael Greer's the
Celtic Golden Dawn, just about a month today but something very druidical has happened to me and that is an increased awareness of trees. On my first day of doing the Lesser Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram (for those not familiar with western ceremonial magic the LIRP is in simple terms a meditation involving the visualization and calling of the five elements of the ancients, one for each vertex of a five pointed star --Earth, Water, Air, Fire and Spirit) I went outside, it was dawn already as I didn't sleep out of the increased energy it brings into your system --mixed with the excitement of beginning something I have been waiting for years now-- and I saw a tree across the street just glowing with an ethereal aura. As it turns out, or so I suspect, that is exactly what I was seeing in that lightly drizzled morning, the etheric body of the tree. I don't know if it was just the light drizzle in the morning hours or the effect of the practices, or both, that allowed me to see it but it was an experience I had not had before. The experience of The Life in things, sorry, old habit, the experience of The Life in beings, living beings as of course trees are and rocks too!
Armed with this new view about glowing trees, pulsating rocks and a galaxy that moves like clockwork I couldn't hope but to feel broken hearted when I saw an electric utility post and realizing it takes a full tree to create one of those. Strapped with artificial energy running through it in the matter of a comatose, soulless body with a mechanical respirator pumping its lungs to make his relatives (and the hospital's financial department) feel that we don't have to let go of the idea that the person bedridden is probably no longer there and it is only the shell that remains, but rather it is the even more ironic idea that we are using the beings that quite literally help us stay alive to keep alive our delusions. You don’t get the almost mystical sound of leaves brushing against each other out of that, all you get is that well known sound of high power being pumped through metal.
Bzzzzzz. What came instantly to mind was Michael Moore's recent documentary
The Planet of the Humans . In that documentary, which was banned (also known as censorship) for a few days from YouTube because it spreads “misinformation” and is “dangerous” (to the status quo of course) he starts explaining how in our attempt to keep satiating our addiction to energy we’ve turned from using that once abundant resource that took millions of years to create that powers the unsustainable and plunging plane our civilization is flying on, to start liquefying and pumping anything else we can lay our hands on: from oil, to using trees (the marketing departments call it biomass) to using animals. Yes, such experiments have been carried on, how to extract fuel from animal corpses, of course they did not ask the animals if they agreed. The nonsense...
The realization of the aliveness of beings around me not only brought a sense massive respect for whatever The Gods that put it together are --such magnificence!-- but also of gratitude and connectedness with my environment, something that our current industrial civilization makes really, really hard to notice with all the layers of insulation our modern lives are filled with. Have you ever realized that the small patch of ground that bulges out of the concrete on your nearest sidewalk where a tree might be standing, or not, is not actually a small patch of soil but rather it is the soil that is covered by a gigantic sticker of solidified ash in the form of concrete? That is no accident, and I would even say it is unconsciously intentional. If all you see outside is, well, very much dead and dirty as concrete and streets are, you will want to have thick and closed shoes; if the very air that we breathe is filled with poison coming out of rumbling machines, of course we are going to want closed environments with air purifiers, climate control, etc. Because we have slowly but steadily destroyed the very environment that sustains Life in this planet. Our bodies know it very well, after all our bodies are nothing else but soil, water and solar energy transmuted into flesh by the alchemical process of digestion so it is only natural that there is a sense of discomfort when you step outside of your city variety office space to the streets that smell like exhaust. You want to take refuge back in again and create more of these spaces, which if you are about my age in America at least, it is sadly probable that is most of what you know. Whether or not you know it is not relevant but you sense it, if you put enough attention and it really is not that much, you will feel that your body doesn’t like it.
The problem with that is that the only ones that can afford to create an artificial —and rather ugly and energy inefficient— model of what Nature already does are the same people that are actively destroying it for a profit and having everyone else to live in the barren world they are forced to destroy themselves because its their corporate masters imposed lifestyles that require to do so while they laugh it out looking down at everyone from their closed, and seriously ugly, environment-castles we now call corporate towers and elite apartment buildings. The whole thing is set backwards, you see. Instead of taking care of our environment, the one that you and me are very much a part of, we have decided as a civilization to destroy it and replace the functions it has in our lives —in the same way that John Michael Greer points out that we have done so with our own capacities— by lifeless equivalents that break often and take a lot of power to run. We now have surrogated the task of keeping us alive to the machine, as if surrogating everything else wasn’t enough, which the phenomenon of solutionism demonstrates quite well (that is, in part, the belief that every human problem has a technological solution and if I may add to it, that technology can and must be applied to problems that do not exist at the expense of using our own capacities and or skills like our own hands, our memory and lately it seems, our thinking brains) as Pink Floyd says in their song
Welcome to the Machine, if I may repurpose a few lines:
Welcome my son
Welcome to the machine
What did you dream?
It's alright we told you what to dream
No surprise people are now (are they still?) thinking their bodies can be frozen so that they can be microwaved into life at a later time. I really wonder if any of such people, if they have actually done so, had enough awareness in themselves to see on those last moments as they exhaled one last time when the fridge door closed before them and as their souls left the bodies that their attempt to hold on to life was as successful as our attempts to nurture the life within our bodies with frozen food.
This behavior is starting to sound a lot more like tribute to a hungry god that is never satisfied rather than using technology to solve real problems. And it never will be, because such a god doesn’t exist, it’s sole role in the minds and hearts of the desperate human beings that venerate it is to fill the role the Nature once did, but because Nature is now so hard to get in contact with, and the spirituality of the West has been tainted by delusions of power and repression of desires that it got channeled into the closest thing it could find, it’s badly camouflaged impostor, the surrogate Cyber-Nature.
That poses a real problem because if human beings put their trust of survival and well being into such a simulacrum and then it starts to become more obvious that it is not what you thought it was but rather it is using the real thing to feed itself, you feel cheated, and that is a strong emotion that can spread very fast. As fast as the gossip of you cheating your loving girlfriend spreads to the whole set of women in your town and nobody wants to deal with you anymore. That is to say, ironically, it takes the press of a button. It is the thing PR and marketing departments (and cheating boyfriends) have nightmares about, an idea or impression being put into the minds of the collective that trashes your image forever for practical purposes. With no surprise honestly, because what you really fear most is getting a big, oozing spoon of the medicine you’ve been giving everyone else.
These ideas are nothing new if you are a regular reader of JMG and that is what I find most disturbing, these ideas are not new at all, yet they have only survived in the fringes of society. When I first came to John's work I couldn't help but wonder. Why is this guy in the fringes? His work is genius! Way better than the stuff that I see coming out from the so called intellectuals these days. Of course it took me a bit to realize that well, that is at least a less harsh treatment than what occultists used to get back when being burned at the stake was still in fashion. Nevertheless, I can't avoid but to think, if brilliant men and woman are fleeing the formal academia to endeavor on their own; if people like me, thirsty for the real stuff could not find it where it is supposed to be, and I suspect it will happen also with other spheres of human pursuits, well the whole thing will collapse and melt like a bad fruit in the fridge does once you turn the power off and has been in there for a few months. As people, real people not the plastic variety kind, not marketing, not even the achievements or dreams of past are the pulsating life force within all of these pursuits. Once such a process finishes its transition they are all doomed to the ground once its sustaining force is elsewhere. I really wonder though how long will this last, you cannot put the whole planet into a spell and hope it remains that way forever, the spell will be broken, not long from now "when the stars are right" as the novel puts it, and the situations are such. If the efforts of hundreds of people to raise human consciousness through the decades bare fruit at the right time and I think such a thing could happen very soon now that the whole planet has been given a time to breathe, well, prepare yourself for a lot of splashed and rotting fruit.
A tree for a post to me right now feels like the most idiotic thing we can do as a civilization, not because I consider that using natural resources is bad, but because what we need right now is more trees, not less; what we need right now is not more technology but less technology, as well as less of the energy that powers it. There is a very sensible way of utilizing the resources that our planet provides and our ancestors knew it very well, because they were not insulated from their own realities. You have to do it with respect and gratitude, not only because it is incredibly generous but because if you don't, you will pay the consequences of trashing your own life which is everywhere around you, in this life or the next.
That is the problem we are in, the population of this planet has been convinced that Nature is not something you are respectful and grateful for, it is something you are afraid of, something that you exploit and only serves you as a resource, that it is something “out there” in the distant and foreign lands instead of right here, right now and this is achieved by keeping everyone busy, distracted, scared and anxious with the requirements to just keeping ourselves alive today. To me this makes the most important task that we have today as human beings to
raise the human consciousness out of the gutter that we have put it in, to break
the spell of progress that everyone has been cursed with and once that falls off, maybe we can provide everyone willing enough to experience the life that is pulsating every moment around us. Because we don't need to tell people what to do, we need to show them light so they can see. Can you imagine? Glowing trees for everyone.
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