Don't believe it? Look around you at what is going on in society, around the world, and in nature. We place so much "Value" on things outside of us that our society has become mentally ill collectively. We are so easily accepting that an ideology or doctrine is "the truth" that we have checked our senses at the door and then wonder why so many people are miserable and are medicated with prescriptions let alone other substances or behaviors.
The Native Americans have a word they use for the behavior our society has embraced as the driving force of many people today. It's "Wetico" and it means a sort of cannibalism where one culture eats or destroys another culture's way of life. I think it pretty aptly describes what the Europeans did to the Native Americans when they came to North America. The basis of the meaning is that Native Americans like many peoples of the world who feel a connection to nature and the earth and all living things believe that to own or hoard more than you need to survive is a mental illness. Nature does not take more than it needs to survive, predators do not kill more than they need.
I Am, being what is wrong with humanity means we need to wake up and see what we are doing to ourselves let alone all other living beings including Mother Earth. If Human beings are living on Planet Earth 100 years from now, the term "Natural Resource" will be referenced only in teachings of un sustainability and the past. They will live a dramatically different lifestyle and think dramatically different. Darwin's "survival of the fittest" will have been replaced with a philosophy of "cooperation between species".
Herman Hesse's book Demian has a passage that sheds light on our situation today. The passage reads:
Each man had only one genuine vocation -- to find the way to himself.....his task was to discover his own destiny, not an arbitrary one, and live it wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would be existence, and attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of ones own inwardness.
Read it again, take some time to immerse yourself in its meaning. Joseph Campbell referred to a life lived less than wholly as the waste land or the inauthentic life. Collectively we are living in that waste land. There is immense wealth (not abundance mind you) held by the vast minority of the population, yet thousands of children die of starvation every hour. We have industries that are built on falsehoods that prop up "the economy". Just those two scenarios are an example of attempts at evasion and flights back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of our own power.
I'll leave this post with a passage from Martin Buber (tapped in dude) talking about Grand Will as opposed to the Puny Unfree Will:
The free man is he who wills without arbitrary self-will.
He believes in destiny, and believes that it stands in need of him. It does not keep him in leading strings, it awaits him, he must go to it, yet does not know where it is to be found. But he knows that he must go out with his whole being. The matter will not turn out according to his decision; but what is to come will come only when he decides on what he is able to will. He must sacrifice his puny, unfree will, that is controlled by things and instincts, to his grand will, which quits defined for destined being. Then, he intervenes no more, but at the same time he does not let things merely happen. He listens to what is emerging from himself, to the course of being in the world; not in order to be supported by it, but in order to bring it to reality as it desires.
He listens to what is emerging from himself (you have to go within to do this), to the course of being in the world; not in order to be supported by it, but in order to bring it to reality as it desires (we are not in this world, we are part of it).
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