Wholeness of Nature

The Wholeness of Sacred Nature.

What we really need is for humanity to hold Nature sacred again. What does that mean, sacred? It means connected to God, dedicated to a religious purpose and thus deserving veneration. Sacred. Blessed. Holy. Or Whole.

Does our society hold anything sacred anymore? Maybe money. People venerate money and wealth. They look at the wealthy as blessed by God. Specially favored. “God has rewarded them for their efforts.” Our society treats them differently, like some societies treat monks, who have dedicated their life to service of the Lord. We give them special treatment and special laws that protect the wealthy.

Take a look at our society, and some of our many problems. We are currently afflicted with COVID, a pandemic that has resulted in lock down and social isolation, social distancing of 6 feet, the exhaustion of our medical services, everyone wearing face masks and over-using antiviral chemicals and other medical protection devices, some of which are discarded after each encounter, all contributing to more and more pollution and toxins filling the Earth. In America, we have the beginnings of a civil war, radically polarized political parties spewing hatred at each other. We have systemic racism and mass poverty balanced by an elite minority that has hoarded all the wealth, unwilling to share their hoards while homelessness and starvation take place and the middle class transforms into the lower class. I could go on and on.

But what is the biggest problem by far? It may not be the most acute problem but the problem that looms ominously over everything else is the ongoing destruction of the biosphere. What makes this ongoing destruction possible is the fact that we no longer hold Nature to be sacred, and I believe this is the root of ALL of our problems.

Our society holds money sacred, along with the capitalist system that demands the creation of more and more money which can only come from exploiting Nature more and more. Almost all great wealth is the result of exploiting natural resources, followed by the unequal distribution of the wealth that results. Theoretically, all of us should share this wealth equally, but a few extremely wealthy people have figured out how to keep most of the wealth for themselves.

But some people believe that Nature shouldn’t be exploited at all. Doesn’t matter if you can get rich. You can’t exploit something you consider sacred. Strip mining, clear cutting, deforestation, fracking; these are all forms of rape and violence against Nature. No one that loves the living Earth could knowingly participate in these activities.

The fact that we don’t hold Nature sacred is what allows our society to exploit Nature and generate all this wealth of money which can be hoarded by a few so-called powerful elites while the powerless, poor masses are left with impotent rage, which is what drives events like the protest or insurrection at the Capital and our racial problems. As long as people continue to believe they are entitled to as great a share of the world’s natural resources as their money can buy, then we will never be able to solve our mutual problems. Because we have replaced love of Nature with love of money.

The American Indians before Columbus were fabulously wealthy with abundant Nature. They took very good care of the land which was sacred to them, and the land provided them everything they needed and more. They only took what they needed because they felt no need to hoard. You can hoard money but you can’t really hoard Nature. There’s no need to. It constantly grows and replenishes if it is minimally cultivated and allowed to thrive naturally.

The Myth of Separation.

Another word for sacred is holy. Holy refers to the divine, that which has its sanctity directly from God or is connected with Him. Nature is holy. Holy also means whole. God is one. God is in everything just as nature is in everything. Wholeness versus separation. When we are separated from God we are separated from each other and from everything else. “Since I’m separate from you, you’re well-being need not affect mine.” And since we’re all separate from Nature, “the more control we can exercise over the impersonal forces of Nature, the better off we will be.” When you perceive yourself to be separate from Nature, then exploiting Nature is the obvious thing to do.

Take a look at our society and we have all these seemingly unrelated problems requiring many different solutions. But really there is only one problem: we no longer hold Nature sacred. And really there is only one solution: recognize the biodiversity of Nature (and human nature) and treat all forms of life as if they are sacred. The biodiversity of Nature may give the appearance of separation and difference, but there is no real separation between these organisms; they are all part of a vital relationship where all forms of life have a shared purpose: to maintain life. Living wholeness requires variety, variability and complex diverse organisms. Some of them may appear less valuable than others, but each species, each organism, is a link in the chain of life.

Each link in the chain, no matter how large or small, is equally important. The animate is as important as the inanimate. Plants are as important as animals. Insects are as important as birds. Rivers are as important as mountains. It’s all part of the beauty of life. It’s all part of the biosphere. All these species and organisms have relationships that are mutually important, that sustain us all.

How did we lose this vision of the wholeness of Nature? How did we enter into separation from Nature and wholeness? I don’t know when it started but I know it accelerated like crazy when we “lost” the celestial sphere. A sphere is the model of wholeness. All higher animals have an awareness of the celestial sphere. The Sun and the Moon are spheres and they appear to move in circles around the fixed Earth, which implies that it also is a sphere. For thousands of years mankind studied the heavens and plotted the movement of the stars and planets and Sun and Moon against a background of the stars known as the celestial sphere. If you follow the movements of the stars, they clearly mark a celestial sphere, which apparently spins around a celestial axis passing through the apparently fixed Earth at the center. The wholeness of the Earth is contained within this celestial sphere.

If you follow the history of science, you know what happened: Copernicus wrote a book called Concerning the Revolution of Heavenly Bodies in 1543, which displaced Earth from the center of the universe and eventually led scientists to believe that the projected celestial sphere was no longer a valid structure, leaving the Earth naked and alone, suspended in space, just a great big round rock with a thin layer of life somehow existing on the surface. We lost the celestial sphere and we lost our sense of the biosphere and our sense of wholeness. We developed a condition I call Biosphere Blindness.

The celestial sphere is an essential tool used to mark and measure the biorhythms of the biosphere; the solar day, lunar month & seasonal year. The celestial sphere is a conceptual container for the biosphere, which exists within the hydrosphere, atmosphere and magnetosphere that surrounds planet Earth. The celestial sphere is a container for the sacredness, or wholeness of the living Earth. If we want to solve all our interrelated problems, we need to find a way to make nature sacred again and we must bring back the celestial sphere, which measures and demonstrates the biorhythms of the Earth’s predominantly plant-based biosphere.

And this is where the MONAD Calendar-Clock app makes it’s entrance on the stage. MONAD restores the Earth back to the center of the celestial sphere, and back to the center of our collective attention and awareness. Anyone who uses MONAD as their clock and calendar will find it much easier to understand and visualize the wholeness of the planetary biosphere.

We need to rediscover the love and respect for Nature and plants that we had just a few hundred years ago, and once again do our part to take care of the multitude of organisms and organ systems that contribute to the biodiversity of the living Earth, and make restoration of the biosphere a priority in our personal lives and political agenda all around the globe.

It boils down to a choice between Nature and money. Which do we choose to make more important in our lives? What is sacred in our lives? Do we want a whole lot of money to fight over, or do we want to be whole again?

(Special thanks to Charles Eisenstein, whose writings inspired this article.)