Wednesday, August 15, 2012

The delicate balance of life


The Universe is constantly seeking balance. This is true at every level from the largest stars all the way down to the atoms that make up everything in the known Universe. This truth is what inspired Newton’s third law of motion that states for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Between the action and the reaction there is a moment of dynamic equilibrium where neither force is acting upon the other. It is in that space that the energy transfers or shifts and the action becomes the reaction. That is the space of balance.

Since we are a part of the Universe, what is true for the Universe is true for us. This search for balance is probably easiest to understand when you look at the level of our human existence. Take for example the rotation of our planet. At noon we are at the part of the planet that is closest to the sun. At midnight we are at the part that is the farthest from the sun. That balance is achieved by the steady rotation of our planet which is the result of the magnetic attraction and repulsion of energy around the core of our planet. We need equal attraction and repulsion to achieve the steady balanced energy of rotation.


FEEL IT FOR YOURSELF

If we scale that view up a step larger you can see how balance is achieved by our planet as it rotates around the sun. The delicate dance between the Sun and the Earth happens because our tiny planet is pulled then pushed up one side of the Sun’s gravitation field and then back down the other. Here is a fun and easy exercise to help you feel the energy of that balance. Put a small weighted round object (like an orange or ball) into a tube sock and hold the open end of the sock in your hand. Swing the ball around in a vertical circle and put your awareness on your hand. With focus you can feel the two points in your swing where the energy has to begin going up one side and also down the other to achieve the rotation. You can feel those shift points at the top and bottom of the rotation. Those two points balance each other out and result in rotation of the ball around your hand like the Earth revolves around the Sun. It is physics in action.

As a point of reference, on December 21, 2012 the Sun and the Earth will reach one of those points. Imagine the galactic center in the middle of the Milky Way is your hand and the Sun is the ball in the sock. Simultaneously to that event, our planet will reach that shift point in relation to our Sun on the exact same date. Here imagine that the Sun is your hand the Earth is the ball. The energetic shift you can feel with the sock and ball is the same shift our Earth and Sun will be experiencing simultaneously.


BALANCE IN MOTION

To take this examination to a smaller, more humanistic scale, think about our movement as we walk. For us to achieve locomotion, the movements of the left side of our body must be balanced by the movements of our right side. As one arm swings forward, the other swings back. As one leg moves forward, the other moves back. Even balancing that out top to bottom, you notice that the opposite arm and leg move together so that we can achieve a smooth and easy movement. Try not swinging one arm as you walk for a while, then try not swinging both arms and watch how unbalanced your movement becomes.

When you begin to examine any activity or action with consciousness, you’ll begin to see where balance is being sought at every level. For a moment think about what it is like to walk on something that requires us to have balance to do it, such as walking along a ledge or across a beam or log. When we are balanced there is an ease and harmony to our movement. When we are out of balance, our arms flail and we wobble trying to regain balance lest we fall. Balance is the desired state because it takes less effort and therefore less energy for us to get from one end to the other with ease.

It can be seen from the example above that the “out of balance” condition results in wasted energy, struggle and dis-ease of movement. Understanding that will allow you to begin to notice the places in your life where you are out of balance. If you feel your energy is drained, life is a struggle or there is dis-ease in your body then you know that you are out of balance in some area of your life. This is Newton’s transitive property of physics in action. If A = B then B = A. Bringing yourself back into balance (vitality, peace, health) begins with an understanding of that principle.


ENERGY FOLLOWS AWARENESS

The key to changing anything in our lives begins with having the awareness that something needs to change. We will never consciously change anything that we are unaware of. So dis-ease (struggle, emotionality, exhaustion, etc) is the alert that something needs to change. The next step is owning the fact that “I created this condition” either consciously or unconsciously. When we allow our consciousness to remain in an unconscious state, we stay in victim mode wallowing in pity and blaming the world for our condition. As our souls evolve we learn that the same power we used to unconsciously create the out of balance condition is the exact same power that we can use to consciously create the desired condition. This understanding can never be completely comprehended and fully understood while in the un-evolved victim (blame mode) mentality.

What is true for the microcosm (the parts) is also true for the macrocosm (the whole). If we raise our awareness up from the individual to the species level, it is easy to see that we are terribly out of balance there. This can be seen everywhere across the planet. We have wars raging out of control, political fighting and infighting, drought, famine, global pandemics, wide-spread poverty, skyrocketing murder rates, unregulated theft, as well as social, economic, political and environmental systems collapsing or on the brink of collapse. These are all key indicators that we are severely out of balance as a species and therefore something must change. So there is our first step: awareness.

When the list above is viewed as a whole, it seems like it would take a monumental effort focused on any one of those to begin to implement even the tiniest change. But what if rather than focusing on any one problem, we held our awareness at the species level and examined things from that perspective with the simple understanding that we are out of balance. Imagine what awareness might arise from that state of neutral observation. Remember this level of awareness requires that we move beyond our individual situations of petty day to day worries and struggles. We have to begin thinking of ourselves as one cohesive collective consciousness (humans) and examine things from that perspective.


LIFE IS LITERALLY A DELICATE BALANCE

When viewed in the light of the collective, as an entity we are out of balance with the very thing which we depend upon for life, the environment. We exist in this environment because we have adapted and evolved out of it. The condition that the environment is in is what allows us to exist. Without our environment, we would not and cannot exist. Take away the air that we depend upon to breath, the water we drink, or the land we live upon, and it is game over for our species. Take away any one of those things and our existence would not be possible. However if you take humans out of the equation, life would continue just fine without us. We are not nearly as essential as we like to think. In truth we seem to be causing more harm than good.
We are a product of the environment; it is not something we created to make our lives easier. If the environment changes too much, just like other species from the past, we will go extinct because the systems to support us are no longer present. As powerful a species as we think we are, it’s important that we remember our place in the grand scheme.

Every species which has ever existed has done so by evolving out of the system which sustains it. When the environment changes, new species arise that thrive on some output from the system. They in turn generate output that other species thrive upon. That process repeats itself over and over and remains in a constant state of flux. Within our ecosystem, new species of life are constantly emerging while others go extinct. That is the natural flow of life.


LIFE GIVES ITSELF FOR LIFE

Nature has a mechanism for keeping its systems in balance that keeps the cycle of life flowing. When one species becomes too much of a consumer, eventually either its food source dries up or a larger predator species thrives to bring things back into balance. For example, once upon a time on this planet only single cell life-forms existed. There was no oxygen, no other life-forms and no protective ozone layer. Those single-cells thrived because they had no predators. They consumed the energy available and produced their output which was toxic to them. Eventually they had over populated the planet and consumed all of the energy available. Through the process of mutation some of the single cells began to work together to create more complex multi-cellular life-forms. These life-forms then began to thrive because they consumed the single cell life-forms and their output.  

This process continued for millions of years over and over again as life evolved into more and more complex species until eventually early humans appear on the scene along with dinosaurs. They were food for us but we were also food for them which helped to keep both species in check. Then several million years ago, a large asteroid hit our planet and dramatically altered the environment as a result of the impact. Scientists estimate that 95% of all species alive at the time were wiped out. The 5% which survived did so because they adapted to the new environment in some way and they went on to repopulate the planet until the next asteroid hit and started that cycle all over again.

It is important to remember that every living thing on this planet is a consumer, a producer and a food source for life. Each species ingests other smaller species, air or water and eventually becomes food for a larger species to keep “the cycle of life” going. That cycle must logically include death to keep it going. Imagine how crowded things would be on this planet if nothing ever died.


HUMAN SEPARATED FROM NATURE

Humans are a part of the cycle of life but unfortunately we have separated ourselves out from the very thing which created us. As our consciousness has evolved over the ages, we have constructed stories and myths to attempt to explain our history, existence and purpose. We see ourselves as separate from and superior to nature. We consume our planets resources in an unregulated fashion and we are beginning to rapidly overpopulate our planet due to the lack of larger predators in our environment. As long as we remain on land, our main predators come in the form of microscopic organisms and viruses. If you put us back in the ocean or deep into the forest, the equation shifts and it again becomes survival of the fittest.

In every area of our lives, we consume. The only place we give back, as an organism, is through the carbon monoxide that we exhale and the shit that we produce which ultimately nourishes micro-organisms at the bottom of the food chain. When we die, unfortunately we take these bodies and put them in steel boxes which get encased in metal chambers and buried in the ground so that nothing can get to them. These bodies eventually decompose. At that point because they are in a closed system, all of the nutrients which they can offer back into the food chain is buried in a hole along with the fears which put them there. It is the final slap in the face to the very system which gave us life and produced the body in the first place. Cremation and the scattering of the ashes back into the environment keeps the cycle flowing.


MOTIVATED BY FEAR

Our resources are beginning to show signs of collapse because we aren’t using our evolved consciousness to work with the system from which we emerged. Because of our fear of the unknown, death, and our self-created and self-serving myths about the nature of our existence, we are draining our resources. Through our technology and the use of machines, we keep others alive who would perish if left to their own devices. We force them to languish in a suspended state of animation because those of us who are still living believe we cannot bear to live without them. Our fear of letting go causes them to live out the rest of their lives in protracted state of pain or slow decay.

The truth is that we can and do survive because eventually we are forced to let them go when even the machines can’t keep them alive. Just think for a moment of the resources (energy, time, money, people) required to keep a single human perpetually alive on a machine from which they have no chance of living without. Millions languish in this suspended state of animation just in our country alone. (I’m not talking about machines used to help us heal from temporary situations. Here I’m referencing those which languish on life-support systems who have no chance of ever regaining consciousness or an independent existence.) We keep them here because of our fears and needs, not theirs. Death is a piece of life. It is the balancing component to birth and what keeps the cycle of life flowing.

Our fears also show up as over-population. Emerging from the need to have “more of us”, most religions teach that no birth control should be used. They cloak this fear under tons of religious dogma which essentially comes down to the belief that God is expecting us to multiply. They teach that if we do something to interfere with that process (contraception or abortion) then we are supposedly playing God. But isn’t “playing God” what we should be doing? Much in the way that children “play adult” as they grow up because they know they will eventually become adults, I believe that as humans we are growing into Gods. As our consciousness evolves, we must begin to recognize that we are in fact beginning to attain the powers and abilities that we have previously been attributing to the Gods (in any religion).  If we don’t learn to consciously use the powers that we are evolving into, we’ll be nothing more than the child who perpetually lives at home with their parents because they are never willing to step into their own power and create a life for themselves.


ENERGY FOLLOWS AWARENESS

This out of balance condition that we find ourselves in cannot continue much longer. When we look at all the things which are happening on a global scale (drought, severe weather, starvation, water shortages, war, poverty) it is clear that something has to give because we are in a crisis situation. That crisis however is also the driver for our change because “crisis precedes transformation”. The good news is however that the transformation is already beginning because of emerging needs. We are learning new ways to do things which aren’t as destructive to the environment (renewable fuels, low emission vehicles, conservation projects, wildlife protection programs, pollution reduction and on and on).

There is no simple solution for our problems. If there were, we would surely have figured it out by now. The first step in solving our problems however is recognizing that there is a problem (“awareness”). If we own the fact that we created it (consciously or unconsciously) then we can learn to use that same power (“energy”) to create a better way to solve the problem that works for us all. It should come as no surprise to anyone who is waking up and paying attention that 2012 has to be a year of transformation and change and our cycle of destruction must come to a head because we simply cannot continue in our present mode. Through cooperation and communication we can make a difference. When we seek balance in all of our individual actions, we’ll begin to see balance from our collective actions. It’s not going to be an easy journey but it is time for us to wake up the human consciousness from the collective unconscious and transform our way of life as we know it now. It all begins with awareness.


Where are the places in your life that you are out of balance? What prevents you from making a change there to come back into balance with life?