The Winter solstice has passed and with it the darkest day and the longest night. As the sun reaches its lowest point in the sky and begins to climb again, we celebrate rebirth and life, symbolised most often these days in the evergreens and sparkling lights with which we decorate our homes.
Often this is a time of year that involves reflection on the year that has passed and the gentle stirrings of hopes and dreams for the year to come. Our own inner process can be seen reflected in the natural world around us, our energy turned inwards, ready to emerge again with the awakening spring.
So often aspects of consciousness can be seen reflected in nature, it almost seems to me at times that we are alive within a living allegory, a story made manifest in the very fabric of the world we inhabit. And underpinning it all, the nature of our wonderful Mother Earth is not unlike the nature of our consciousness.
The Earth provides for us everything that we know or can conceive of in our physical reality. Even things that appear unnatural like the plastics and pollutants that clog our lands and our waters are made from things that come from the Earth, only the processes they have gone through have made them damaging to us and other life forms. So it is with our thoughts. Even the most horrific of thoughts arise from consciousness but have become mutilated by other aspects of mind, present conditions and collective patterns.
The Earth itself, like consciousness, just is. Things we label as good or bad, healing or poison, reward or punishment, may all be seen in it, but are not it. Both Earth and consciousness are beyond concepts of good and evil.
Too easily we characterise people, individually and collectively, as either inherently good but misguided, or inherently selfish and bad, but able to control themselves with proper limitations. The field of consciousness is a field of potential however, from which anything can and does arise depending on what is cultivated and how. The greatest kindness, the awful act of violence; the most sublime landscape, the island of plastic bags floating in our ocean.
For me, disillusioned as I may sometimes become, there will always be hope for humanity because the field of potential is ever present. Within a larger picture than our own individual lives, even in the worst conditions, new life will eventually spring again.
We humans struggle with our perceptions of ourselves as part of nature, yet alienated by our individual experiences of life. Buddhists refer to our human lives as a ‘precious human rebirth’, not because humans are seen as separate from other beings – interconnection is the foundation of much of Buddhist thought – but because humans do perhaps have an enhanced ability to recognise their true nature. The flip side of this is of course that the mind has incredible power and can lead us on all sorts of false trails, but even when mind is totally out of control, consciousness is still what illuminates it and allows it to be, just as the Earth allows everything we can see or touch.
Wishing you all a wonderful festive season, however you choose to celebrate it, and a blessed 2013.
Beautiful, there is so much here I agree with, but when you say that the earth and consciousness are beyond good and evil, it almost sounds like a license for irresponsibility, and I know that you mean nothing of the sort.
In a living universe, consciousness allows for development, evolution, learning and the choice to transcend “evil” which is just ignorance, if all things interweave each other than evil actions are just plain stupid, to harm another is to harm your larger self.
If we can choose between dreaming Hell or dreaming Heaven, then only one of those choices is intelligent. Perhaps I’m slipping into fanaticism.
Merry Christmas x
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Hello and Merry Christmas!
This is an excellent point and certainly not what I intended to imply.
Such things are always hard to capture in words aren’t they but what I wanted to say is that consciousness itself is beyond our own concepts of what is good or bad but that we can see through interconnection how damaging our actions can be when we pollute our world, our thoughts or actions. What is behind all of that is always pure – though of course the danger of saying that is that we then create concepts of pure as opposed to impure and so on! With language we always have to use words that have concepts and associations attached to them but we also have to be aware that life cannot be grasped conceptually by the mind because the mind is always functioning within consciousness, not the other way round.
Sri Ramana said something which I love, I can’t remember the exact quote but something along the lines of, ‘when we realise the truth, all good qualities arise spontaneously.’
As you say when we are beyond ignorance as to the nature of things, the causes and conditions for damaging actions to arise are not present.
Hope I am making sense there!
Thanks for your comment, I have missed your philosophical challenges. 🙂
With love x
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Beautifully aware and accepting, beautifully deep, beautifully uncontrolling, and so beautifully simple. Love to you. X
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Thank you. Much love to you also. x
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Happy New Year to you Lucinda, and thank you for the wonderful writing and images from 2012 – may next year bring us all growth and joy in abundance x
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Happy New Year Maggie! May 2013 be full of everything you wish it to be. With love x
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A beautiful post full of so much wisdom – you remind me always to step back, let go, love unconditionally. This year I have found myself trying less to push everything into the realm of “good” – but excepting things as they are, finding the lessons and the value in the darkness as well as the light. It feels so much more wholesome and real to do so. You are a wise woman indeed, and I look forward to what you will share in the coming year 🙂 XOXOXO
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Thank you my love. It is much more comfortable somehow when everything is ‘good’ isn’t it. I think our innate desire to fix what is wrong makes the things that we can’t change difficult to cope with. And so much of life is beyond our own small scope of control!
Looking forward to more of your delightful posts in 2013 too. May it bring much happiness to us all! xxx
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Thankyou for this post, at a dark time of year and a dark time in our lives it lifts me and gives me hope….
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Thank you. I wish you all the best for the New Year and everything it brings. xx
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Very nicely written. It seems like you have hope. I honestly don’t have that and thus go through lots of depression, despair, thinking about all these. Happy New Year.
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I can understand why, I too have felt despairing of the way we humans sometimes treat each other, our fellow creatures and the Earth. It is certainly not ok.
These emotions are always seen within our conscious awareness however and once we start to identity further with that state, real freedom becomes more of a possibility for us and for everyone else as the thoughts that drive us to negative actions have so much less power over us.
I hope that makes some sense.
All the best for the New Year x
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Beautiful thoughts at years’s end.
Hope you had a good Solstice/Christmas time. Very best wishes to you for the year ahead. Hopefully there will be some elevation of the general consciousness in the world today.
Bridget x.
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Hi Bridget, I hope you and your family (two and four legged!) had a wonderful festive season too and that 2013 brings many blessings.
I am sure things are shifting for the better, I see a lot of awareness in children these days which gives me hope for the future.
xx
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It is always a struggle. I tend to believe when we dwell too much in our thoughts we can be prone to negativity about the state of things, but in actions we have not time for such things and by doing become more positive.
Just my insane .02
Happy New Year!
Michael
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Happy New Year Michael!
I quite agree, though I myself am rather a fan of inaction as well! Especially if it involves lounging by the fire with a cat or two. 🙂
All the best for 2013 x
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Beautiful thoughts! Hope is the key to keep going. Happy 2013 –Renu
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