Not for casual consumption, however. This requires a long, relaxed look:
What is a human being? A human being is a nexus of relationships: the sum total of the connections among his or her cells, organs, and inner ecosystem; connections to other human beings that define the psyche; connections to the rest of nature and this living planet that allow life to exist. Modern thought, recognizing only a small subset of these as intrinsic to our beingness, offers us a much smaller self: the separate self of the selfish gene and the economic man, the skin-encapsulated ego and the Cartesian mote of consciousness. Rendered small, we are rendered sick.
We are relationship. The connected self that is the true human being has been reduced at the hands of civilization, leaving an isolated remnant that is not whole. Innumerable configurations of this unwholeness, or lack of health, afflict the members of our culture, each in a unique way. Depending on the vagaries of nurture and genetics, we each adapt differently to the onslaught of Separation. As Part 1 of this essay describes, some of us embody our culture’s self-other confusion on a literal, somatic level as an autoimmune disease, in which the immune system attacks part of the very organism it is meant to defend and on which it depends, much as we do to planet Earth.
The loss of self that lies at the heart of our civilization manifests in many less literal ways as well, physical and social. Consider cancer: cells that have forgotten their proper function, and instead devote all their resources toward an endless growth that eventually kills the host, and themselves as well. Modern humanity appears to be behaving exactly so in relationship to the earth. It is by no coincidence that the toxic byproducts of our collective iniquity are precisely what cause cancer in the individual.
By Charles Eisenstein, and there’s a lot more. Just go here.
UPDATE: I’m still reading it myself and found a remarkable quotation:
The Golden Rule was not originally a rule at all, but a description.
If the truth of this were more widely felt, a social revolution would ensue.
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