By Mark Lesseraux
Yesterday morning, when I saw the latest reports on what is going on in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, I was close to being overcome by a combination of anger and a kind of frustrated sadness. Frankly I felt like I wanted to punch someone or something, or both. After chilling out a bit I sat down and wrote a piece which was both a vent and also a genuine attempt to explain what I think/feel, and have thought/felt for a while is the deep root, the underlying cause, of the various forms of violence against nature and Humanity that we have been witnessing of late. It is also an attempt to convey my belief that this dark period we are passing through is signaling the Dawn of a new planetary era. And so without further ado …
The deep root of the array of horrors we are witnessing at this pre-sea-change moment in history is not capitalism. Nor is it corrupted religions. These are surface manifestations of a deeper issue. The deep root is materialism – the belief that life, that Human life is reducible to an object, to a thing, to a body, to a brain, to a part of a body or a part of a brain, to a particle, etc. This is the core, the substratum of our individual and collective confusion, our fear, our greed and our violence.
This reification, this “thing-izing” of all life has produced a corresponding de-spiriting of nature and a dehumanization of each other. We have turned the world and each other into objects and subsequently, into commodities. Our philosophy and our science, no matter how intellectually impressive, will continue to be underpinned by ignorance, until it is dis-covered that they are all built on the infirm sands of a superstition, on the faulty foundation of the indefensible presupposition that Life, that Consciousness/Mind, is the product of inert, dead stuff called “matter” which exists independently of the very Awareness in which it appears and with which it is known.
Materialism is not just ant-science, it is a kind of madness. An insanity which posits that the primacy of lived experience is a secondary concern, peripheral to a botched, outdated concept which has never been backed up with an iota of actual proof.
Perhaps I’m expressing this too technically here? Maybe this is boring, I don’t know. What I do know is that this savage, soulless, materialist-male-dominator paradigm is coming to a close. And as it breaks down, as it dies, a new spirituality is being born Like A Phoenix Rising From The Flames Of Ignorance. It is a spirituality which is not rooted in superstition or dogma. It is a spirituality that recognizes the interconnection and interdependence of all life. It is a spirituality which goes beyond the “given”, espousing the necessity for creativity and for NEW, transformative solutions to problems which cannot be solved via the methods which have been used up until now, methods which no longer fit with the new paradigm we are entering/have entered. It is a spirituality which sees and acknowledges our (literally) shared Humanity, while at the same time celebrating Human diversity in its myriad forms. It is a spirituality which rejects violence in all its guises, be they physical, racial, religious, sexual or economic. And lastly, it is a spirituality which affirms the fact that it is by lifting each other up, ALL of us, that we will, truly, be lifted up individually.
