People love lists. We're always creating our own and eagerly reading those of others. Lists of things, places, people, ideas, best, worst, oldest, newest, do, don't: we love them all. The most famous list of all is, of course, The Ten Commandments. That list of admonitions, attributed to the Abrahamic God, has served as a measure of morality and a touchstone of hypocrisy for centuries.
As a new eco-spiritual consciousness blossoms across the world, however, many people are revisiting the values that define their lives. As a result, we are living by a new set of core principles. This article is my attempt to set down the principles by which I live my own life — principles I believe are widely shared within the stream of people awakening to the true state of the world and their own nature.
These are not commandments. The reality in which we live is far too complex to be mediated by such a simple mechanism. Instead, these are truly suggestions. I suggest that if you consciously adopt any of these principles you will move into better alignment with yourself and your world. Improving your alignment with reality cannot help but make your life easier, more fulfilling, happier and more productive.
You may click on each suggestion to read a short meditation about it.
I am a Canadian ecologist with a passionate interest in outside the box responses to the converging crisis of industrial civilization.
The crisis of civilization is not simply a convergence of technical, environmental and organizational problems. These are symptoms that are themselves being driven by a philosophical and perceptual disconnection so deep that it is best understood as a spiritual breakdown. The disconnection goes by the name of Separation.
Our sense of separation is what allows us to see ourselves as different from and superior to the rest of the apparently non-rational universe we live in. In this worldview the complex mutual interdependence of all the elements of the universe is replaced by a simple dualistic categorization: there are human beings, and everything else in the universe—without exception—is a resource for us to use.
The only way to keep this planet, our one and only home in the universe, from being ultimately ravaged and devastated is to change our worldview and heal our sense of separateness. Unless we can manage that breathtaking feat all the careful application of technology, all the well-intentioned regulations, all the unbridled cleverness of which we are so proud will do little to delay the final outcome, and nothing whatever to prevent it.
My desire is to find ways to heal that sense of separation, with the goal of helping us prepare for ecological adulthood.
Fossil Fuel
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