Insights into Creation

Good Morning, Friends. Last night during a Dharma talk with a group of Buddhist practitioners the subject of our relationship to the Earth was discussed. I woke up feeling compelled to write about the thoughts the discussion left me with, so here it is. 

If you are like me then you grew up loving the 1992 movie Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest. My interpretation of the movie is that the fairies represent Mother Earth. Apart from us humans she has no voice, but in the film Crysta, a tree fairy, is able to show Zach (a typical American human who doesn't really stop and think about the Earth on a daily basis) that plants and animals and humans and fairies are all connected by the beauty of life and the constant act of Creation. She reminds him of his role in the act of Creation...namely NOT to destroy it.

"Can't you feel its pain?"

Plants and animals can't talk and defend themselves against the reign of terror humankind has brought upon this planet (at least we can't hear them anymore... or better yet, we just aren't listening anymore). Somewhere along the way we forgot that WE are part of everything. You may think that our self-imposed separateness is benign, but i believe it is the root cause of all of our problems: war, global warming, tyranny, injustice, mental illness, etc. Practically every Creation story I've ever heard begins with human beings being crafted from Earthly materials. Look what our own Western Christian mythology says about Our birth:

^{Genesis 7} Then the Lord God formed a man^[c] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

We seem to forget that even now the air we breathe comes from the oxygen produced by trees and other plants. God did not stop Creating on the 7th day, he merely rested. The story is not meant to be taken literally. I feel that to take it literally allows us to forget that Creation is a process. It never truly ends. Destruction itself is part of the process. Without death there can be no life. If you disagree with me try surviving without ever taking another bite of meat or eating another plant. Let me know how that works out for you...


I recently  read a book by Robert Wolff called Original Wisdom: Ancient Ways of Knowing. His discoveries while interacting with an Ancient tribe of people in Malaysia reveal that even today there are human beings in existence who haven't forgotten that way of Being. Sadly, they are a dying breed, but what gave me hope is that Wolff and others like him (I include myself in this category) are starting to wake up to the fact that even though we are technologically superior to these people we are not spiritually superior and much can be learned from them. He described their way of interacting with each other, of relating to one another, as deep and intuitive. They not only shared this connection with other people but with everything it seemed. We seem to believe that this way of being, a sort of Native American reverence for Earth and all living things, is part of our past as a species and that it holds no value in our present or our future. I'm here to advocate another way of looking at it. I'm here to beg and plead with my brothers and sisters to take a look around. Are we happy? Are we really as "advanced" as we like to think? If we step off our high horse for just a moment and admit to ourselves that in our mad dash toward progress we forgot the most vital parts of being human we might just be able to turn things around. 

^Genesis 8 Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. ⁹ The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.¹⁵ The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. ¹⁶ And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; ¹⁷ but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” 

God is talking to Adam, and Adam represents ALL humankind. He was warning humankind that if we decide WE know what is good and what is evil we will surely parish as a species. What's good for the fox, is evil for the chicken. What is good for US, is evil for something else. Once we determine that we are capable of determining good from evil it upsets the balance within Creation. Only God has the power to determine what is Good and what is Evil. It is not our place to decide, because we  will naturally only choose what is good for us and thus evil for everything else. 


Put down the fruit, my friends. We don't have to go on acting as if we have the knowledge of what is good and what is evil. That knowledge was never ours to wield. We stole it and became drunk with power because of it. If we stop eating of the fruit and go back to the tree of Life we will once again remember that even though we are the only species with the power to create cities, to go to the Moon, or to split the atom we are still subject to the same laws as every other living thing on this Earth. The law that we have forgotten is simple: everything that lives must also die so that Creation, so that Life, can continue.