Mirrors within mirrors Jewels reflecting jewels The drop is in the ocean the ocean within the drop In a recent article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel titled Humans Evolved from Nature, Rachel Kippen, Executive Director of the O'Neil Sea Odyssey, wrote:
"Humans evolved from nature, our mutual, ancestral web obviously linking us to primates, but also to fish, and even sea squirts, who in their larval stage of development have the presence of a notochord, the primitive origin of our backbone and nervous system. All animals and plants have the vast majority of their genes in common." As seemingly unifying as this quote reads, it nevertheless emphasizes the separation of humans from Nature rather than our unity with the natural world. Humans are not evolved from Nature, instead, we are evolving in Nature. Also, the web that unites us is not just "ancestral." We are an intricately interconnected web of relationships among all living things and all aspects of the Universe with which we co- inhabit. So how did humans lose touch with this overarching reality? When did we turn away from the natural world, deny our unity with the all that is, and come to think of us as something unique, something greater than the rest of the Universe. And worse, when did we begin to believe that the Earth was created to serve only us, that we were to have ownership and control of the entire planet and everything upon and in it? I suspect it began with language, when we started naming things, including ourselves, to distinguish them one from another. The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnamable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching In United States English, names tend to be abstract identifiers, names of things rather than actions or relationships. This is a fairly recent development as even in English speaking countries, the language tended to name places by the stories that accompanied them, and human names were descriptive of place and family relationships, e.g. Edmond ap Llewellyn (Edmond son of Llewellyn), Rodney de Monmouth, Maria Pedersdatter. In Wales and other parts of Great Britain, where small communities often had a lack of surname diversity, names frequently described a person's relationship with the community, such as "Evans the Pub", or "Tommy Two-Stroke." Over the years as Western civilization became more focused on material manipulation and accumulation at the expense of the natural world, our language has evolved to reflect our increased separation from the natural world. This does not imply that we can change a society's world view by changing its language. Understanding the relationship between language and culture, as Levi-Strauss explained, can reveal much about the underlying motivations for the perceived separation of humans from the natural world. In the physical dimensions, science is revealing the inherent connectedness of the all that is. John Muir's well-known quotation is more apt than probably he even realized. "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, one finds it attached to the rest of the world." Part of the dualism now affecting United States politics is a widening rift between those who view our society through the lens of interrelationships, and those who adhere to the view of separation between people and objects. If human societies are to continue into the uncertain future, it will be necessary to come to terms with the inescapable connections between human culture and the rest of the natural world.
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We are each the source of our own inner view of the All That Is. This is my view. Archives
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