By Hank Edson // MP3, September 27, 2007 -- The hardest part about abuse in all its forms is that it almost always involves a cycle of repetition magnified through a complex network of co-dependent relationships, wreaking a social havoc that spreads outward in incalculable shudders through the lives of one’s community, as an earthquake shaking city skyscrapers. Such is the case with the largest scale, if not yet the most violent or egregious, case of abuse human beings have ever known, committed, or suffered: global warming. So who are the abused and who are the abusers? What is the community in peril here? Obviously, we are all touched in some way.
As a spiritual person in a scientific way, believing that there is a conscious intelligence at the quantum foundation of existence where light energy and creative intention combine, I am inclined to think of our planet as a life unto itself as an identity endowed with a sacred right to its own natural cycles, development, and evolution: Gaia.
Even without embracing the Gaia hypothesis, even without recognizing in the individual plant and mineral existences anything of the universal breath of life, there are still all the human beings and animals who live without participating in our oil-based industrial economy: the innocent ones.
And of course, there are the rest of us, the classic abusers, heedless of what we are doing even to ourselves.
We are all going down together unless we get help, unless we help ourselves.
Most of us don’t like what we’re doing. We may even be trying to address the problem. But like the planet Earth, the entities at issue are bigger than what we normally identify as individually conscious and responsible parties: We are talking about our abusive society, our abusive economy, our abusive industry. We are talking about collective societal abuse and the network of co-dependent relationships existing between individuals within society, the society itself, the international economy, and a whole host of dynamics that at present exert an enormously self-destructive magnetism.
To break the cycle of abuse, we will find ourselves compelled into a transformation that is healing and powerful on a global scale. We have no other choice. If for no other reason, this combination of being driven to become enlightened is justification for thinking of the consciousness we share in this moment of peril as spiritual in nature: a challenge to free will, a moment of decision, a crossroads clearly marked. This way doom, that way dawn....
