Earth is alive

At this time, when Global Warming has become the buzz of the millennium, humanity is still in a state of denial of the deeper issues behind this ecological crisis. Anthropocentric sections of both the religious and materialistic fundamentalists try to relentlessly deny that the ecological meltdown is the result of humanity messing up the planet. The religious fundamentalists would like to go to a religious Heaven, and the techno-economic fundamentalists want to trash the Earth after gobbling up all the resources of the planet and move on to colonise other planets. The advocates of the New Agist version of ‘leave Earth behindism,’ see the Earth as a low vibration and want to escape into ‘higher dimensions’ that they claim to be superior. Another Earth-weary philosophy is the dogma of the transcendentalist illusionist spirituality that dismisses the Earth and the Universe as mere illusions.

Our Earth is not an inanimate rock that spins around the Sun as the materialists would have us believe. This planet is not a low form of existence that should be left behind to escape into some ethereal dimensions or a far away Heaven. Earth is a living Being, a Divine superconsciousness with physical, psychic and spiritual dimensions – Gaia.

Though it was the scientist James Lovelock who created the scientific hypothesis, which sees Earth as a self-organising super organism, and named it after the Greek Earth Goddess Gaia, it is not a new idea at all. And Lovelock’s hypothesis, which remains within the scientific rationalist paradigm’s limitations, doesn’t see Earth as a sentient consciousness, because that is far beyond the comfort zone of conventional scientific dogma. The awareness of Earth as a Divine superconsciousness, existed on this planet in ancient times in many cultures before the patriarchal social and religious structures emerged. In ancient India, Earth was revered as a Goddess – Bhoomi Devi. Such an integral understanding acknowledges the Earth, the Sun, the physical Universes, the non-physical dimensions and the Transcendental Emptiness as equally real aspects of an infinite, integral and multidimensional Ultimate Reality. All the infinite dimensions of reality can be accessed through Gaia consciousness and Heaven can manifest right here on Earth.

The hardened scientific rationalism that sees Earth as inanimate, and the conventional religious/spiritual systems that dismiss Earth as low existence or as illusion, interestingly arose as byproducts of the patriarchal conquest that suppressed and subjugated the Divine Feminine, women and integral traditions of spirituality that revered Earth as a manifestation of the Divine.

The current environmentalist initiatives try to address Global Warming by tackling the issue mostly at a rational and scientific level. This crisis, the Earth faces, is not merely a result of the ‘assault on reason’ that Al Gore talks about. In fact, not only blind religious faith, but ideologies and isms based on reason have also contributed to this scenario. Global Warming is not just a physical crisis, but it is also a spiritual crisis. The ‘assault on intuition,’ by both scientific rationalists and the other-worldly ‘leave Earth behind’ religious/spiritual ideologies, has played a role in this ecological crisis. Humanity has lost the intuitive spiritual connection and Communion with Earth’s intricately interconnected and interdependent web of life. This disconnection has prompted humanity to treat Earth and other living beings as rubbish resulting in the self-organising systems of the Earth consciousness initiating balancing measures to restore the living planet’s integrity. Global Warming is only a symptom of this process. Economic jokes like emission trading that refuse to replace outdated development models, the attempts to try technological solutions and even the Al Gore model that focuses mostly on scientific, social and rational aspects of Global Warming, leave the deeper spiritual crisis of consciousness unresolved. That is why there is an urgent need to create awareness about the importance of restoring humanity’s intuitive Communion with the Spirit of the Earth, Gaia.