by Martin William Fournier
"In Western culture, we live with chronic anxiety, anger, and a sense that something essential is missing from our lives, that we exist without a soul. What could be wrong with us? I believe Western culture is suffering from 'Original Trauma,' caused by the systemic removal of our lives from nature, from natural cycles, from the life force itself. This removal began slowly with the introduction of agriculture (about three hundred generations ago) and has grown to crisis proportion in technological society (which began only about five generations ago). With it comes the traumatic loss of a sense of belonging on the Earth."
* Chellis Glendinning
I believe this "Original Trauma" has now reached a pinnacle of anxiety, fear, guilt and depression in North America since the events of September 11. This truth can be seen in downtown cores across North America; they are strange mosaics of sad and "busy" individuals propelled by stress amidst a cacophonic hush-hush rustling of shopping bags and subdued coffee talk.
Beyond the fulfilment of our three basic needs, food, water, and shelter, we have become a society of bored and spoiled individuals constantly craving the next mental stimulation. We are consumed with anxiety in the absence of busyness, fearful of peaceful silence. We are afraid to stop and examine our motivations for so much purposeless and random activity. And while we live this posh life in North America, two billion human beings each day cannot fulfil the basic conditions for a healthy life. Poverty here is only relative to resource hoarding and greed, not real scarcity. The real gap between the world's poorest and richest is now 80% to 85% for the poor, against 15% to 20% for the rich, according to most world wealth distribution indexes, leaving most of the Western populations at the top echelon while the rest are scraping the bucket and resenting their conditions. Let's face it, we live a life that many nations and individuals around the world would literally kill to experience.
As September 11 has recently shown us, we must now choose a side. Are we willing to envision a world that isn't entrenched in competitive resource wars for oil, agricultural expansion, water, and natural resource extraction? Are we going to "wage war" for destruction and patriarchal servitude or are we going to "wage war" for peace and cooperation? We now have two choices. To be complacent and let fear engulf us or to acknowledge truth and courageously join the vanguard of positive change.
To embrace change won't be easy. Chogyam Trungpa, a famous Buddhist monk, writes in Shambhala, The Sacred Path of the Warrior, about the discipline required to enter the fray of change as spiritual warriors:
"The ideal of warriorship is that the warrior should be sad and tender, and because of that, the warrior can be very brave as well. Without that heartfelt sadness, bravery is brittle, like a china cup. If you drop it, it will break or chip. But the bravery of the warrior is like a lacquer cup, which has a wooden base covered with layers of lacquer. If the cup drops, it will bounce rather than break. It is soft and hard at the same time."
Our battle is a planetary spiritual one, a meeting of might between exploiters and nurturers, a life without or within nature, the choice between a steadfast denial of our sad condition, or the acknowledgment of a pressing need for healing change. Once we decide to empower ourselves, we come home. We awaken in our communities.
Our most powerful weapon is the Joy of Genuine Action; the expression of our commitment to generate life in its various forms. Our motivation for change becomes sentience growth (life growth in all its forms) within Mother Earth's Womb.
In order to contribute to sentience growth our first task as spiritual warriors is to regain personal and intimate control of our food supply so that we can be nourished from the humility that comes with growing and connecting with our food source; we can be nourished from a position of reverence rather than one of exploitation. Food is our basic spiritual sustenance for groundedness. It is our main antidote, along with sincere participation, to stress. It is time that we reclaim our food supply so that we break free from exchanging our vitality (creativity), the true currency on this planet. It is time that we feed our spirits to in turn generate economic, social and environmental wealth that serves the community of Earth.
The ones among us who have land in our communities can, for example, enter into cooperative agreements with the less fortunate to let them use a portion of their "ornamental" lawns to grow food. In exchange for "renting" their green patches they could in turn receive a portion of the produce for personal consumption. In each community, we can already find permaculture and organic agriculture specialists ready to help us enrich our knowledge of food production and land stewardship.
Once we are fed, the next task is to reclaim our collective capacity to invest in our potential. This process begins with the removal of community incomes from the central banking corporate institutes entrenched locally, and the reinvestment of capital into communal and decentralized institutions such as credit unions. Once the community is off the "corporate grid," local projects can be funded to create local employment. Such local projects should involve the fast growing alternative energy sector (solar, wind, and tidal).
Once energy is generated locally, committed individuals can get together with engineers and green business investors to design sustainable enterprises and industries, such as hemp clothing manufacturing, bio-materials for packaging, etc. Engineers and green business people can also begin collaboratively brainstorming for the design of economically viable recycling centres where excess metals, plastics, cardboard, glass and high value recyclables can be sold for production at rates cheaper than resource extraction, effectively reducing the community's reliance on "cheap" corporate products.
As locals reclaim their economic potential, political and social activities flourish. For example, an awakened earth-centred neighbourhood can form sustainability councils to legislate corporate power and support environmentally and socially friendly business. A socially beneficial activity can be the creation of cooperative forms of social services such as home-based day care centres located in the community. As more communal forms of social services arise, a new form of capital, social capital, can be quantified for food and housing. People can "socially volunteer" and create products and services in exchange for life's basic necessities.
Once a community of spiritual warriors is food-sufficient, energy sufficient, self-employed, and politically, socially, and environmentally functional, creativity is catalyzed. For example a human development service economy sector could emerge where spiritual teachers, massage therapists, healing arts practitioners, musical teachers, and philosophical counsellors could flourish to fulfil a need for individual creative development. As more individuals come in touch with their artistic power they could either stay and enrich the community or go on to other communities to teach others how to reclaim self-sufficiency.
We also have to remember that suffering is part of the journey, and that without it we will not learn. Inevitably, as the human species creatively self-designs new ways of existence, and as the natural balance is restored, Earth's human populations will stabilize. Humans will come to see death as a natural and inevitable process. This acknowledgment will be a fundamental shift in Western culture; the replacement of materialist values as fulfilment with values of blessedness for the opportunity to be alive and its reverential and joyful expression.
There is no telling how creative we will be in freeing ourselves from the limitations of our conflicting "globalized" consumerism ideology. The only certainty we have is that a brave new journey has begun and that we must trust that sincerity will be our guide.
* Sources:
Glendinning, Chellis. "Recovery from Western Civilization," in Deep Ecology: Readings on the philosophy and practice of the new environmentalism by George Sessions, Shambhala Publications, 1995.
Trungpa, Chogyam. Shambhala, The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Shambhala Publications Inc., Boston, Massachusetts, 1984.
* Sponsored by Youth Talks at the Watershed Sentinel, with thanks to the Department of Canadian Heritage. Youth Talks offers opportunities for young writers to get their work into print.
[From WS June/July 2002]