To the Earth Being Way

by Hugh M. Lewis

Earth being is a state of connectedness. It is a relative condition of being more-or-less connected to the world around us, especially the natural order of things that comes before, surrounds and always serves to contextualize the man-made schemes and constructions of reality. Earth being thus serves always to put these constructions into a foundational context.

Earth being is a state of being fully connected in the present, and does not depend upon a sense of vicarious experience. Our lives are full of vicarious suggestions and illusions that have the appearance of being but are in fact based upon a chronic, and neurotic, state of nonbeing. We can turn off the channels of our vicarious experience, and we must do so if we are to fully experience earth being. The more we learn to do so the more we are able to realize a fuller state of earth being in our daily lives.

There is a deep seated sense that the earth is a unity. It is an entire system of life in which everything is interconnected to everything else. We have come to increasingly realize both the complexity of its interconnectedness and its fragility. The many depredations we are causing to our local environments are having a cumulative affect on the total environment. These negative consequences are in an ecological sense rebounding about ourselves, as we find them affecting human interrelationships, our own sense of being, and the health and sanity of our social state.

There is a sense that the man-made system which we have created by our own efforts has a logic and life of its own--one we call superorganic--and it comes to take on all the force and resemblance of being a natural state, though it remains ultimately an artificial one. It becomes our master and the author of our lives, rather than we remaining its master and its author in our lives.

In this global context, we are discovering that the pursuit of money and material gain in the short run is undermining the foundation of our being in the long run. It is a form of compulsive madness. It is a social compulsion we come to expect and demand of one another that is beyond anyone's ability to control or prevent. It's fate, our fate, becomes inexorable in a vicious cycle of negative consequences. But at the same time, we are coming to a greater realization that we can control our own states of being, our own actions in life, and ultimately cut the problem off at its source.

And with progress and its problems, we are coming to the greater realization of the possibilities of our own self-control in the world, but, more importantly, of our right and responsibility for establishing and maintaining such control in the world. The dawning of a new sense of responsibility, an earthbound responsibility, transcends and surpasses and subordinates all moral commitments that we previously entertained--archaic beliefs, unquestioned dogmatisms, false nationalisms or egoisms and petty prides that stand between us and realization of our own earth being.

Earth being, in its moral realization, thus comes to constitute a pan-religious foundation for a new world order based upon peace, tolerance, respect for nature, and the disdain of power. It is the meta-ethical foundation for a new sense of being and responsibility that no longer sees the capitalist pursuit of pleasure as the end all of making a living, an emergent sense of global-local consciousness rooted to our inherent dilemmas of earthboundness.

This new state of earth being is not really new or radical or as revolutionary as it may seem. Indeed, its foundation is primordial in the history of humankind, and in ancient religious philosophic texts such as the Tao Te Ching, which is also a socio-political philosophy, there are numerous early timeless examples of its expression. It does not require the total abnegation or withdrawal from modern values and living, to a Buddhist retreat or some remote Island ashram, in order to embrace or realize earth being in our everyday lives.

The amazing virtue of this way of earth being is that it is in essence simple to comprehend and exercise in our daily lives without radical transformations, pronouncements or alterations of our condition. We do not need a symbolic transformation of personality or a conversion experience to make it happen in our world--we need mostly just to let go of our preoccupations, our prejudices, and our perturbations. It is largely an aesthetic way, one that is filled with the appreciation for and creation of aesthetic forms and states in virtually every facet of our lives. It permeates our world in our work, our social relations, in our eating, in our sleeping, in our recreation, in our aesthetic pursuits and pleasures. It is thus a way that we owe ourselves and to one another to teach, develop and transmit to our children through their own naturalistic self-expressions.

Cultivation of aesthetic sensibilities soon eclipses baser material attachments rooted to the nonbeing of a commercialized media and industrial production. It soon abandons violence or aggression as a legitimate if unhealthy form of expression. It soon realizes earth being as an intrinsically satisfying, inherently fulfilling, and extrinsically congruent way of living. It is a way of being that is naturally and easily available to everyone equally.