Welcome gentle being of unestimatable worth. Truly. For you are a sentient being – you have the power of awareness – you can independently think, feel, and manifest thoughts, feelings, and actions. You have, you experience, a self agency that is independent of the self agency of other sentient beings. Welcome you!
Regardless of what what you think, feel, and choose, which may be or not be similar to others, in a deep and personal way the cognizance you experience is the same as other human beings, other sentient beings. All sentient beings have consciousness, we all have awareness, we are all aware, regardless of the object of consciousness – regardless of the sentence being read, the thought being thought, the feeling being felt, or the action being taken.
In that sense one can say all human beings, all sentient beings, share at least one thing – we all share consciousness. Just as one needs light to read the words on a page, one needs the light of consciousness to cognize those words, to understand them.
And we also undoubtably share other things as well:
- we all live on the same planet
- we share the same air; to a lesser degree the same water; to a lesser degree the same soil
- we share the same gravity; we share the same view of the solar system and of the physical universe
- and we share the same weather, both in a local manner and planet wide manner.
Regardless of religion or political affiliation, we share all this. This is the common good – from the air, water, and soil to the plants and animals that are also supported by it. All that which sustains us in a living, breathing, drinking, eating sense is the ecology of the planet. The weather and gravity are part of the ecology of the planet.
As the ecology of the planet sustains us, it is us humans that sustain a monetary economy. Without an ecology, there is no us, and without a us, there is no economy. A life sustaining ecology is required for a monetary sustaining economy.
So what does the light of consciousness, awareness, have to do with ecology?
Two things. First, it has a lot to do with the limits of science. And, what exactly science is and is not. Science is the application of the scientific method. The scientific method is the principle of open, transparent, free and clear independent, observable, and reproducible results of the same experiment, same observation. It is the original idea of open source software. It is a method of discerning observable or deducible or inducible facts. But a scientific fact needs to observable somehow. Interestingly, technically, awareness itself is not actually observable – it just is. (Buddhists call this non duality – the lack of an observer and the observed, or rather that lack of mental formations, values.) Philosophically speaking, awareness is what is doing the observing even if it is observing itself – awareness is not a thing.
Once science evolved enough to discern a basic understanding of quantum mechanics – the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Schrödinger’s cat – science discovered a philosophical limitation of the scientific method – observation itself. Consciousness, awareness, the light of consciousness so to speak is not really observable.
Second, spiritual and religious paths and the realm of science need not be in conflict. The scientific method limits itself to the observable while the religious/spiritual path does not. It is a choice whether a religious/spiritual path includes the inherit beauty and art of science as it also decides to include the inherit joy of love and compassion. It is religion and spirituality that concern themselves with valuation, evaluation – the assignment of value by consciousness, by awareness. Value is an assignment – fact is an observation.
Trust God first, science second, and hucksters last.
To live in alignment with the Divine is to live well, to live rightly. To live in alignment with science is to live smartly. They are separate – value and fact – and yet both are critically important.
When the live sustaining properties of the common good are compromised, the common good no longer sustains life. When a person pollutes and poisons the air, water, or soil, they are taking, destroying, the live sustaining aspect of it. They are stealing the common good for it is not theirs to take. It never was. Pollution is about reducing, removing, the life sustaining aspects of the common good. In a deep and spiritual sense, it fundamentally is an act of theft, an act of violence against both the present and the future beings that inhabit the planet. It is an act of theft against the people alive today and those who may be alive tomorrow. And having a government say it is legal to pollute does not alter the simple fact that it is theft in a deeply religious, spiritual, and Divine manner. It may be legal, but it is still theft.
It takes a healthy ecology to have a healthy economy.
No ecology, no economy.
We live green, or we die.