The sheer devastation of the 2019–2020 Australian wildfires is a poignant example of how the planet can’t stand us anymore. Since we, as a human society, have yet to reach the awareness that nature is a live organism, treating it as lifeless, thinking that we can exploit and abuse it as we wish, we thus find ourselves experiencing its harsh knockbacks time and again.
Nature, which is none less than the universe, is our home and our soul. It is superior to us, and that is how we need to relate to it for a harmonious and balanced existence. However, we currently relate to it as inferior, and thus experience the opposite: an amalgamation of problems and crises negatively affecting us in myriad ways.
Nature is a force and a thought that includes us within itself. It has given birth to us, and it cannot be that the one giving birth is inferior to the one it gave birth to.
Therefore, we have a problem. We began our collision course with the planet a long time ago, and now we are gradually starting to see its responses. The negative responses we feel today are all in order to wake us up to how we need to relate to nature: as a single whole live organism of which we are its parts. Accordingly, we would be able to undergo transformations in our attitudes to nature, developing relations to each other and with nature as do cells and organs in the human body. We would then intend to optimally benefit the whole body of humanity and nature in every single move we make.
If we woke up to the profound interconnectedness and interdependence of everyone and everything, then we would see the immense amount of harm we are currently causing the planet and ourselves. Moreover, we would see how the harm is caused primarily at the level of human relations, i.e., our attitudes to each other. We have never lived through any period in history as we do today, where overwhelming deep-seated hatred rumbles throughout all of humanity.
Nature cannot tolerate such hatred. More than any other influence we as humans have on the still, vegetative and animate levels of nature, our negative influence on each other is what causes the fiercest negative response from nature toward us.
The current Australian wildfires, together with the increasing quantity and intensity of ecological disasters we’re experiencing in our times, all embody nature’s harsh hand that aims to show us that the problem is solely with our attitudes to each other. By changing these attitudes, i.e., by intending to rise above the hatred expanding among us and positively connect, we would set off a domino effect that would send harmonizing ripples throughout nature. In response, nature’s feedback would also become favorable to us, and ecological disasters would then be seen as a thing of the past.
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