In February last year, ( 2023 ) I unwittingly began a series called Becoming Whole that carried me for most of the year. I haven’t posted often since 2024 began and I want to renew my commitment to sharing.
I am inspired by Earth Sunday, which I helped to plan for my Episcopalian community. Our rector asked four of us to share a 2 minute story from our hearts to illustrate a quote by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmerer’s quote is one many of you may already know.She talks about choosing joy over despair because the earth, though wounded, offers her joy again and again and she wants to give back for that blessing. Because our ceremony began with all that we modern, westernized, capitalistically driven humans have forgotten about our relationship to earth, I liked the idea of focusing on what we can now begin to re-member. Thus the title.
Early last October grey raw morning I gather with other volunteers at the organic vineyard nearby to do a job called Leaf Pulling.
During most of their growing season, grape vines need all their leaves to shade them from searing summer sun but about a month before harvest the grape clusters yearn for sunlight to plump, to sweeten, to thrive
I’m kneeling the grape clusters grow low on the vine Concentrating watching the conversation of my hands with the leaves some reluctant to part company with their vine noticing heat on head and shoulders the sun has burst through I look up
A grape cluster which I’ve just freed from its shady confinement is glowing as if lit from within Every nuance of color illuminated precisely nearly transparent to yellow to yellow-green with a rosy pink blush on the tops of a few
I gasp in response to such unexpected radiant beauty face smiles tears glisten body melts Joy, bliss, wonder All those words ring true but the full truth doesn’t resonate in that moment, nor in the intervening months.
It’s only in the retelling right now that I am swept with the greater significance: My giving of time and energy and receiving radiant delight are seamless, inextricable, reciprocal, relational awe-full… I experienced communion.
After 400 years of separating our rationality from all the other ways we know “things,” our wisdom has been watered down, our intelligence short-circuited.. Like animals in zoos, we have been boxed too tightly to nurture our full capacity for aliveness.
Are my friend’s experiences really delirium?
I am currently enthralled with Stephan Harding’s book: Gaia Alchemy – The Reuniting of Science, Psyche, and Soul. A lightning bolt seared a bolt of truth inside me when Harding describes how, for centuries now, reason has been considered our superior function and everything else about how we know is considered inferior. When modern science came on the scene and Christianity dominated European cultures, that schism became sharper as we pursued becoming cultured, civilized. Along with separating the head from the body, we forgot we were mammals, separating our bodies from the body of the world. If we can’t measure it, IT is called secondary. Being able to quantify validates everything, qualities are ignored as fluff. All our experiences of smell, taste, intuition, goosebumps, butterflies in the belly, etc are relegated to the broom closet, unimportant, out of sight out of mind.
Are my friend’s experiences really delirium, described as “an acutely disturbed state of mind”? ( New American Oxford Dictionary )
As Daniel Quinn points out in a speech from 2002, we modern, urban peoples still cling to at least 3 medieval beliefs. Though we humans, in general, have embraced the idea of our Earth being round – hard to dismiss if you travel in an airplane – we continue to think we are flawed, that we are meant to live the way we do, and that we humans are a different order of being, separate from the “rest of the living community.” Quinn asserts with confidence that in 200 years, people will know we belong to the web of life. The source of his confidence? “If people go on thinking we belong to a separate order of being, then there will be no people living here in 200 years”.
Are my friend’s experiences really delirium, or could they reveal something wondrous?
Years ago – back in 1980 – as a new PhD psychotherapist – I began exploring expanded states of consciousness – not with drugs but with the guidance of the 1972 book by Jean Houston and Robert Masters: Mind Games – A Guide to Inner Space. During one of the sessions my colleagues and I experienced, I learned about the two hemispheres of my brain, learned, too, that they collaborated. Viscerally, unmistakably, I witnessed a gorilla in my right hemisphere reach a long arm out to bridge the gap between hemispheres to reach a banana in my left one. The banana represented “food for thought.”
Forty years later, I’m reading a book: DMT – the Spirit Molecule – A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences by Rick Strassman, MD. In those pages I learn about the pineal gland and how its release of hormones may be a biological basis for spiritual experiences. We are hard-wired for experiences way beyond the quantifiable, often beyond words, too.
Anthropologist, Felicitas Goodman, PhD, from whom I learned Ecstatic Postures, described urbanized humans of today as “ecstasy deprived”. She attributed our addictive behaviors and rampant dis-ease to that primal hunger ( See philosopher, Bruce Wilshire’s book: Wild Hunger – Primal Roots of Modern Addiction.)
So, are my friend’s experiences really delirium? Instead, might they be evidence of a long locked door swinging open to landscapes we have forgotten, to sensory abilities that have been dormant for thousands of years. Our human species is immature. Evolution still shapes us. I know the day will come when a doctor will respond to a patient like my friend: Oh yes. We’ve heard stories like that before. Our bodies are amazing, aren’t they, our bodyminds especially! I encourage you to trust the validity of your experiences. They’re worth remembering, maybe even practicing. We’ve only just begun to explore our human capacities now that science and spirituality can move forward together. Let me know how your experiences unfold, ok?
“I think I might have a dog’s nose,” s/he said, looking amazed. “I’ve never experienced anything like this…I can smell each person’s unique scent and I don’t mean perfume or after-shave. I mean every body smells different. I asked some folks to come near me, so I could smell them up close but they didn’t even have to come close. I could tell the differences as they walked by in the hallway!
“And then the same thing happened with my hearing. I distinctly heard the conversation between three medical professionals way down the hall. The nurse in my room simply scoffed when I told her. She heard nothing at all. But I asked her to find the three and tell them what I heard to verify my accuracy. She came back a few minutes later shaking her head in disbelief.
“And then came the bliss, the love, the acceptance of everything being OK. Physically I might have been close to dying. I’d lost a lot of blood, but emotionally I felt fine, peaceful, content and eager to try something different in my life, to be of service and bring smiles, especially to kids who are saddled with life-threatening illnesses.”
When my friend shared these experiences with one of the doctors, the doc replied: “Oh, we call that ICU delirium. It’ll pass.”
I am devoted to redeeming the miracle, magnificence and fecundity of the dark, so I am always a little sad when winter Solstice arrives in the Northern Hemisphere. I might not feel that way if our summer Solstice were all about celebrating the return of the dark. But it isn’t. You know it isn’t! And that hurts because we are so out of balance, we don’t even recognize our obsession with light.
We are born from the dark, we dream in the dark, there is even safety in the dark, and our wisdom, our ability to communicate, our ability to do anything including typing on my keyboard so I can share words with you, all of that rises from the dark within us, that universe inside that we tend to ignore. Besides,we spend half of our lives in the dark. Light and dark share equal opportunities for generating aliveness.
Remember, too, light without shadow blinds us – and overheats the planet…
David George Haskell in his book: Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction says on page 373: Daylight is a mask. When the veil of a glowing daytime sky falls away, it reveals stars of such abundance and brilliance that our senses and imaginations are unearthed into a huge and humbling cosmos. Those few words – huge and humbling cosmos – elicit tears from me – the joy of recognition, a resounding YES. We humans need humbling by the cosmos and urban light pollution makes that very VERY difficult!
So today, close to dark, I take myself for a solo stroll in a nearby, familiar park. I know I have to make an artful prayer to honor this great turning of the year. Taking few materials with me – a few white beans and a beach pebble I had painted – I trust nature will provide my other artmaking materials. I’m not sure where to go. I think about traipsing up a knoll I love, but don’t. I think about going to the spot where friends and I had made a glorious full moon nature mandala in the spring, but I don’t. As I wander, I think about going to a grove of trees, made special by hosting women’s circles there with a dear young woman friend who died a year ago from cancer. But I don’t go there either. Instead my feet veer off the paved path to a little used trail that I used to visit with a kid friend of mine. She always alerted me to subtleties I wouldn’t have noticed without her! My body follows my feet and suddenly there it is. I know with certainty that a bench made of wood – sodden and darkened from recent rains – blanketed by leaves in all shades of light was THE spot. Contrast between dark and light was already there. All I had to do was … well you can witness the process in the photos.
Here are the accompanying words, flowing out now as I relive the experience.
Winter Solstice Wisdom 2023
As dusk darkens, the moon glides into greater brilliance. Have you ever noticed that the darker it gets, the brighter lamplight appears?
Nighttime sparkling glory simply obscured by sun’s daily dawning. But it’s easy to forget that Sun pulls a shade, closes a blind, draws the drapes blocking our awareness of who we are and where we are even as she makes our lives possible.
May we re-awaken to the true nature of life, full of paradox: remember light needs the dark so we can see.
David Korten challenges us with the need to choose. Do we choose love for life as our guiding principle or the love of money. He points out that the former leads to thriving and the latter to species’ suicide.
Michelle Holliday, our presenter last week in Thriving in the Emerging New World, points to the same choice. She sparkles with aliveness and presence: humble and accomplished, homespun and sophisticated, playfully serious and seriously joyful, she models thriving. It’s no wonder, since she’s spent the last 20 or so years exploring that quality. . She’s written a book, The Age of Thrivability – Vital Perspectives and Practices for A BETTER WORLD, and has an informative, stimulating website: http://www.ageofthrivability.com,
Why is thriving, or aliveness, absent in so many aspects of our modern lives?
Michelle begins by telling her story. She landed a ”good” corporate job right after graduating from college. Disillusioned by that company, she left and tried another. She found it similar: “superficial, manipulative and extractive. And I thought there must be more…” So she left that job, too, and began researching, following her curiosity, delving deep into how we’ve come to behave as we do. Based on our long history as a species, and the evolution of our ability to think and experiment, we still live by cultural values and a storyline that no longer fit our current scientific knowledge.
Michelle has arrived at a clear set of principles to guide us forward, based on recent science AND ancestral wisdom. But I don’t want to recount them here.
What impresses me about Michelle Holliday is her willingness to allow her life experience to change her thinking and thus her behavior, choosing a new way to relate to the world around her. Though still a young woman at her first corporate job, she took her dismay seriously. She respected her discomfort as legitimate. Unlike most of us, she did not deny her yearning for a work milieu that was congruent with her wisdom. She didn’t criticize herself for being too sensitive, but instead imagined that others were feeling similarly though maybe not talking about it. She imagined that the system needed change. She did not accept the status quo and decided to address it.
May each of us take Michelle Holliday’s story to heart. When have you experienced a disconnect between our cultural values and your own? How did you respond? When have the requirements of your workplace made you uncomfortable, perhaps made you feel out of integrity with yourself. How have you responded?
When have you dishonored your own bone-deep truth with silence or apathy?
How do you really want to live? This is a burning question, the fork in the road of life that all humans are facing right now. Which path will we choose? Thriving… or surviving…or maybe dying??? .
Continuing with wisdom from S/He Who Shall Not Be Named: …you cannot fight for peace…(but) even when we are peace seekers and peace activists, we still perpetuate the same patterns of war, patterns like ownership, possessions – mine – not able to share, ‘othering’ people. And this is how war stays inside of us…Part of our education for 7000 years of patriarchy…under many systems of oppression, is to internalize the notion of not sharing, not being able to see…(that) the thing that I love…can be loved by more than me.
Love is a huge energythat cannot be controlled…it is a state of mind that teaches us to be one with life…love cannot be selective…either we love all, or our love is not true…may we really stand for this level of love.
To love is a political action…The world is a hologram. It is one capsule and whatever you radiate will have an influence. So whatever you radiate, wherever you are, it will have an influence…And that’s my belief, my hope, that I can contribute to the liberation of my people, …all people, every people.
May we remember, we can choose to love. We can commit to practicing love in every circumstance. Remember every time we choose to wrap our arms around the horrors of hatred – and this may mean grieving deeply for the loss of our own aliveness, something someone somewhere somehow softens, drops a weapon, cries with remorse, makes room for life…
May we be grateful for the human heart’s capacity to bloom with courageous love.
The presenter for our 5th Session in the course: Thriving in the Emerging New World blew my heart wide open. She Who Shall Not Be Named to Protect her Life and the Lives of Those She Loves is a tribal woman, born in Palestine in the Galilee under Israeli occupation. She experienced being “less than” in every aspect of her beingness – from misogyny to persecution of every imaginable kind. As a child she knew she had done nothing to be rejected so…she was simply born into it. I quote her now because her experience strengthens me and could inspire deep reflection for you. We each can choose to love or not no matter our circumstances. She Who Shall Not Be Named said: So from a very early age, I understood that my only way to overcome all of this rejection was not to play the same game of these rejections, but to grow enough love inside of me that would raise me up beyond these rejections…I did not research it. I did not study it. I did examine it in reality, but it was just a clear insight into my young body saying, in order to survive all this rejection, your main support, your main wings, is love.
How many times have you heard the words: Love your neighbor as yourself, as if loving ourselves was the most natural thing in the world. But hatred for self runs rampant in our culture. AND hatred toward others runs rampant when we dislike, disparage, dismiss and denigrate ourselves. I’m not certain when and where such self-loathing began, but I know it’s been a heavy burden for me and most people I know. And it goes back generation upon generation. We’ve been separated for thousands of years from what matters most to humans – being close to other humans from birth onward and belonging to our world. ( See: The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, or The Evolved Nest by Darcia Narvaez )
Caught between a rock and a hard-place, I was taught to seek perfection but trained to keep my successes “under my hat”, trained NOT to share my feelings, especially the vulnerable ones, but NOT to share my joys either. There was room for neither celebration nor grieving. I was so riddled with fears about me, I wasn’t at home in my own skin. My hurting parents hurt me. I recognized that at an early age, and learned to take care of myself emotionally as best I could. But it took me years of therapy and birthing children of my own before I began to be able to love myself, to feel compassion for my Father and Mother, to re-parent myself.
I remember the turning-point.
A year or so after being divorced at the age of 40ish, I had been invited to my first party as a single woman. As I entered the front room filled with strangers, I made a bee-line for the one woman I did know. We had a lovely chat about this and that, but then to my dismay, she said she had to leave early. I looked around, felt naked, shy and ashamed, awkward among strangers, and scooted out the front door as fast as I could. Driving myself home, I began the familiar litany in my head – you idiot, you imbecile, you stupid, fearful, ugly, stupid woman, how are you ever gonna…Suddenly, I stopped. Another voice inside me had arrived. “Slow down, Missy…Why are you being so hard on yourself? This is a huge deal, going to a party after 20 years of not socializing. You’re just feeling like a scared rabbit, frozen in the headlights of an oncoming car. You need to get back to the safety of your nest. It’s ok, it’s ok…
The observing part of me was astounded: So this is what it feels like to be kind to myself. OMG. I just made a decision to be kind to myself. WOW. I can choose to be gentle rather than abusive. Holy crap. It’s up to ME! I can choose to be loving… My life changed after that.
And I am grateful for people like S/He Who Shall Not Be Named, and Valerie Kaur, author of See No Stranger and a champion of revolutionary love, who, despite the horrors perpetrated against them and their loved ones, speak out for love’s power. They have embodied love’s truth from deep within themselves. May they embolden us all!
I spend yesterday with a group from a Christian denomination. We wrestle with the future path of the church. How can we be more relevant, attract a larger community, practice our values of inclusion and service?
I am imagining that we’ll talk a lot about Caring for Creator’s Creation: How can we bring more reverence to the mystery and miracle of our planet teeming with life? How can we express our grief over the sacrilege we’ve committed and use our grieving to inspire change so we humans stop plundering God’s gifts? I’m thinking that this community will want to lead in an interfaith movement proposing that the foundation for human transformation needs to be a spiritual one for life to flourish. I am imagining that Christian churches of the western world will be ready to examine their traditions, take into account the new knowledge we have about life in general and human well-being in particular, scientific, psychological, emotional, physiological. We know now that wounded hearts have a hard time loving their neighbors, that humans need to belong and celebrate joy, grief and fear together, that the planet and our universe(s) are not machines, that our bodies are temples not garbage dumps, that matter is sacred, that head thinking separated from the bodymind leads us far astray from Creator’s Creation, and that as scientist, Jude Currivan, points out: We ARE consciousness embedded in cosmic consciousness –
Toward the end of the morning, when none of what I imagine shows up in our discussion, it begins to rain. And as our conversation remains human centered and rooted in the practical, the rain rains harder. Then the rain becomes torrential. The rain pummels the tin roof so loudly, we have to use our outdoor voices! I experience the rain as Earth shouting: Listen up humans, pay attention to how you treat me, – church can no longer be just about humans but needs to be about your human relationship with me, with the sacredness of what has been provided for you by forces and sources way beyond you! I birthed you, not the other way round.
A stranger sitting across from me at the table, whispers, “Earth is crying!” We smile with unexpected solidarity.
After lunch, I mention my experience of Earth crying to a small group that includes the rector. He responds with “that’s not our tradition…you’re talking more from an Eastern perspective, maybe pantheistic or panentheistic, but not the western Christian tradition. There is a difference between creatures and Creator.”
I say no more. His response reveals the enormity of the thinking change being called for in western churches. As our conversation unfolds though, the words spiritual grief and then spiritual pain are named. Spiritual pain hits a responsive chord with many. Varieties of spiritual pain are identified: the climate, meaninglessness, purposelessness, lack of forgiveness, anxiety, depression, loneliness, hatred…I would add to the list of pains: separation from the sacred, the numinous, the mysterious and magical, the awe, the wonder, the enchantment of this sentient world, this conscious cosmos, the divine responsive aliveness everywhere.
Thank God for Jude Currivan’s sacred science. To reiterate from my last post, she points out that science now affirms the reality of experiences we have been taught to deny as “modern/civilized/rational” humans, thus diminishing our capacities for wisdom, truth, communion, creativity, curiosity, imagination, etc. We have been torn from our ancient human origins of belonging to a living world, an extended family of kin. This disenchantment pains us in myriad ways, most of them beyond our awareness. Currivan points out that settled science (that which is no longer controversial) supports the “emergent nonlocally unified cosmology of a multidimensional Universe, which naturally includes supernormal phenomena and attributes. ( intuition, synchronicity, telepathy, pre-cognition, etc ) They’re natural to us. They are our heritage. They’re our lineage.” ( bold font mine )
Jessica Eise, scientist, wrote an article: Emerging Research Links Climate Action with Spirituality. She quotes Robin Wall Kimmerer who “‘contends, the Earth loves us and wants to care for us.’ (Eise asks:) Is this something we are secretly longing for as a society? Hope? A sense of connection? Of being loved, and loving in return? Could spirituality save us?…the time seems nigh to accept that a new approach to the science and politics of climate change is due…I want to qualify my use of the word new. There is, in fact, nothing new at all about seeing the interconnectedness of life and Earth. It is, perhaps, as natural as breathing. And maybe, all this time, we have in fact just been suffocating ourselves with an imposed and limited worldview of what science and society should be.”
I want to rephrase Eise’s last sentence: And maybe, all this time, we have in fact just been suffocating ourselves with an imposed and limited worldview of what science, spirituality and religion should be.
Say the name, Jude Currivan, and I sigh now with adoration. What a marvelous exemplar of human aliveness and wholeness: intelligent, loving, grounded, humorous, thorough, delighted with sacred science, aware and responsive, passionate about the possibilities for humanity’s conscious evolution, the possibilities for the human species to mature. She’s our 4th presenter for Thriving in the Emerging New World and her topic is: A New View of Reality.
And what a view it is. It’s not new to me, since I’ve experienced it throughout my life but I haven’t been confident in it…I’ve pushed my world view and life experience to the side because they didn’t belong in my culture which separates matter from energy, separates head from heart, separates body from earth, separates the rational from the imaginal, separates haves from have-nots, separates human from all other life, separates right hemisphere from left hemisphere, separates separates separates.
One reason I had to go back to school to get a PhD was to support my fragile ego in a world which challenged my legitimacy, my life experience. I needed to prove I belonged to respectability. I wanted to be considered normal. I am scholarly, I am intelligent, I am NOT a new-age hippie, oh nooooooooo. I belong to the intellectual camp, the upper-crust even though I came from the wrong side of the tracks. But sadly the PhD degree really didn’t boost my confidence. I moved to Montana where academia had never heard of my prestigious alma-mater. AND I kept myself hidden in the hallowed halls of one of the most academically challenging institutions because even there, I was an anomaly. Back in the 1970’s I experienced the extant psychological theories as incomplete, one-sided. Ex: during the final oral analysis of my written exams by an impartial panel, a professor told me: “I had to fight for you, Deborah. Another colleague wanted to disqualify you because you answered two questions from totally disparate points of view. He said,”No one can do that without cheating.” I said, “Deborah can!”
I was as shocked by her colleague’s reaction as I was by her support, her confidence in me. During the five years we’d been in each other’s presence, I stayed as far away from her as I could because I thought she didn’t like me. How sad is that? (This is a good example of why I write in my last post – thinking is a pain in the butt -)
So here comes Jude Currivan all these years later, testifying to how hard it is to know who we really are when our cultural world view, especially in the west, the northern hemisphere, denies belonging to a multi-dimensional body, planet, universe. After several hundred years of mechanistic science, we have forgotten what our ancient ancestors knew. We humans are embedded in 13.7 billion years of evolution, our intelligence goes way beyond the brain in our heads, that patterns in the cosmos are the same patterns in us. I remember seeing the back side of my first grandchild’s placenta – River tributaries flowed there, veins on a leaf supported green-ness there, blood vessels swollen with life nourished there, reminding me of the archetypal branching patterns of the tree of life. We belong to all of it, to all of that from conception to dying and beyond! Science now affirms through proof of non-locality and a host of other discoveries over the last 15 years, especially data compiled in just the last 2 or 3 years, that everything about us is connected to everything else. Jude describes her response after finishing her book: The Story of Gaia- The Big Breath and the Evolutionary Journey of Our Conscious Planet – “…I ended in tears. I ended in such an overwhelming sense of gratitude for our beloved planetary home and our beloved universal home; appreciation for all that we’ve come from…the universal wisdom teachings, the teachings of our indigenous family. This really can take us…to re-membering, not just remembering, but re-membering who we really are from this dismemberment of this illusion of separation.”
She points out that settled science (that which is not controversial anymore) supports the “emergent nonlocally unified cosmology of a multidimensional Universe, which naturally includes supernormal phenomena and attributes. They’re natural to us. They are our heritage. They’re our lineage.” Her list of phenomena and attributes includes telepathy, remote viewing, the power of intention, intuition, synchronicity, presentiment and precognition.
For me, her scientific corroboration is a breath of fresh air and a resounding, “YES!”
For Session #3 of the ongoing course called: Thriving into the Emerging New World, Jeremy Lent presented Transforming Pathways for a Life-Affirming Future. As hoNework, Mattie Porte, our host, offered several reflection questions. The one that captured me and relates closely to this ongoing blog series is this: “Jeremy points out that as we progress further into this century…it is becoming clear that our generation, along with the next, is engaged in nothing less than a struggle over the future of what it means to be human. What does it mean to you to be human?”
I grabbed paper and pen and began writing. Short sentences slammed onto the page –: I live. I breathe. I vibrate. I am aware. I move. I sense. I respond. I eat. I evacuate what remains. I transform matter into energy. I experience – awe, wonder, delight, doubt, resistance, courage, sorrow, horror. I create, create, create – every moment I create. I love love love and love some more. I trust, trust, trust and trust some more. I respond. I am conscious, noticing, taking in, giving back. I belong…
Yes. I belong. I am embedded in living. I haven’t always felt this way. There was a time in my life when I wished my feet would not touch the ground, because I knew I crushed civilizations beneath my weight. Now I choose to believe that my life passing through gratefully, lovingly, delightedly nourishes the land. I smile often – just because I’m so happy to be alive, to be in this body.
BUT AND THIS IS A BIG BUTT! THIS BUTT IS CALLED MY BRAIN.
The human brain witnesses, labels, categorizes, decides, explains, analyzes goodbadindifferent, overrides intuition, second guesses gut wisdom. Thinking really IS a pain in the butt; separates our heads from our bodies, claims humans as superior to everything else.
We are thinking animals –weighing options before choosing an action. We have a range of responses, maybe more than most other animals because they are confined by their habitat which is largely determined by US. We don’t have to eat huckleberries. A bear does. We don’t have to eat salmon. But for a bear carrying unborn babies, salmon makes survival possible. In general, we, as human animals, have more choice over what we eat, the region where we live, how we quench our thirst. Being an urbanized human today means we skim the surface of life. Heavy-handed. Light-fingered. We take little or no response-ability for how we use our skills, gifts, knowledge and blessings. We care little about nurturing relationships with other humans, other cultures, or the web of life on which our lives depend. That’s delusional thinking.
I doubt turtle, big-leafed maple, hyena, pheasant, trout or cat question the meaning of their lives. I doubt our ancient human ancestors questioned life either. Maybe we ask that question because we have reached a point in our evolution as a species when we’ve lost touch with our souls, with what’s important about being alive. Which reminds me of Bede Griffiths statement: “We’ve come as a human race to the moment (when) we will have to choose between adoration of the divine – within and without – or suicide.”
So, I leave you with this question: What’s important to you about being alive?
The Wisdom of Not Knowing Everything 