Ascent of Humanity by Charles Eisenstein

Author:Charles Eisenstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy
Published: 2010-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

The Winners and the Losers

Under the sway of dualism, we have essentially sought to divide the world into two parts, one infinite and the other finite, and then to live wholly in the latter which, because it is finite, is amenable to control. We are like the frog who jumped into a well and, unable to see anything else or remember the vast world beyond, declared himself suzerain of all the universe. Our lordship over nature is at heart an egregious self-deception, because its first step is to attempt nature's precipitous reduction, which is equally a reduction of life, a reduction of experience, a reduction of feeling, and a reduction of being: a true Faustian exchange of the infinite for the finite.

This reduction comes in many guises and goes by many names. It is the domestication of the wild; it is the measuring and quantification of nature; it is the conversion of cultural, natural, social, and spiritual wealth into money. Because it is a reduction of life, violence is its inevitable accompaniment (actually I can think of no better definition of violence than the reduction of life); hence the rising crescendo of violence that has bled our civilization for thousands of years and approaches its feverish apogee as we conclude the present wholesale destruction of entire species, oceans, ecosystems, languages, cultures, and peoples.

From the weeding of a strawberry bed to the coercion of a child to the elimination of enemies in the name of national security, the cultivation and control of the world inherently requires violence. Violence is a built-in feature of our world-view; it is implicit in our conception of ourselves as separate beings in a universe of discrete others competing for survival; moreover the objectification of other beings, species, people, and the earth itself enables and legitimizes violence toward them. Violence seems not to be violence when it is only a weed, only an animal, only a savage, only an enemy, only a thing. Dehumanization of the victim is a well-known enabling device for torture and genocide, but dehumanization—turning human into object—is just a special case of our off-separation of ourselves from the rest of the world. To the extent that this is an artificial, illusory separation, the root cause of violence becomes clear. It is simply the result of an ignorance of the very deepest kind—that we know not who we are.

Thus it was that the great avatars of peace in human history counseled not more self-control, not an intensification of the effort to be nice, but rather a surrender into our true selves, which are not the separate, discrete selves of present-day science and religion. Buddha was suggesting no less when, asked "What are you?" by people awestruck at his radiance, answered simply, "I am awake." This is what a human being really is. And Jesus too was saying no less when he spoke of God's love—not for what we might or could be, but for what we truly are. Moses on the mountaintop asked the divine source, "Who shall I say sent me?" The answer: "I AM".

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