Alternate Pro-Environment Religion

19 years ago

The first challenge facing any animal is to balance its autonomy with its environment, in a process known as adaptation. Much as a child must form an identity separate from its parents but still learn from them, for any self-aware species this becomes the primary means of understanding the world, in definitions of self and whole. When a species has become by its own technology self-sufficient, the struggle becomes an internal duplicate of this division, and the individuals involved struggle to avoid becoming self-referential and thus, losing sight of reality as a continuous whole.

In the modern age, humans have mastered dominion over the means of survival, but have lost the goal of adaptation, thus exist in a world of their own definition which is separated from the process of the whole. This manifests itself in seemingly irreconciliable splits between body and mind, subjective and objective perspectives, and individual and world. Without a forward goal, such as "establish civilization and survive," humans have become lost in a world created of their own thought and separated from the whole.

Continuity movement believes that if we look toward the ongoing process of the whole, instead of its discrete parts as known in our minds, we can overcome this lack of meaning and create a civilization which lacks the problems of solipsism of our own: unstated but pervasive fear of death, destruction of our natural environment, and lives spent in unfulfilling tasks with little connection (or time for) the things most meaningful to us, which are families, friends and personal achievement. No political or social agenda can make this change, since it must come from within, and as the goal of spirituality is to bond individual to world, it is here that change must occur.

Every aspect of modern life mirrors this division. In politics, there is a "left" which has an emotion of inclusiveness which runs out of control, and a "right" which responds with rigid absolutes in a reactionary fashion; neither has succeeded, over several centuries, of finding an intelligent agenda or satisfying its people. This same division occurs in spirituality and social issues. It is the result of individual humans feeling alienated from the world, distrusting it, and thus seeing themselves as (passively) at war with the world as whole, fighting for their own space and autonomy.

In this light, the divisions between mind/body and subjective/objective become more than taxonomic; they become moral absolutes which, interpreted in either an excess of emotion or rigid force, are enforced upon the world by humans, reversing their original function as being an interpretation of the workings of the world. At this point, humans become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the world in their heads does not match external reality, yet is acted upon as if it does, causing humanity as a whole to respond to the illusion and not the fact.

Our societies claim a "progressive" agenda, but in both personal development and development of civilization, this agenda consists of an ongoing war against the world and, lacking understanding of how it works, continual alienation from it and retreat into illusion. When illusion exists in the mind and is not matched by the external world, what results is this process of forcing it upon the world and justifying its inaccuracies in terms of human constructs like right and wrong, fostering an enduring neurotic state of mind among human beings.

It is simpler, and more accurate, to note that we are parts of the world, and not separate from it, but that we have autonomy and can make choices about how we craft our world. We do not have to obey absolutes written in a single word of religion, book of law or socioeconomic convention, but can observe our natural surroundings to ascertain the means of the cosmos, and then apply them to ourselves. This requires that we cease trying to create our own isolated worlds within the world as whole, supported by our social and spiritual illusions, but that we embrace the world as a whole with ourselves as a component of it.

The opposite of this view is selfishness, where one is so afraid and hateful of the world that one is unwilling to accept that it can be a meta-good, composed of both "good" and "evil" as necessary parts to achieve its balance, and it leads to internal divisions within civilization which, shattering its consensus on what the goal of the collective must be, cause it to fragment and thus collapse from within. Regardless of what predator - disease, climate change or invaders - finally eats the corpse, the civilization has died from the disease of alienation against the world resulting in irreconciliable internal division.

Much as this afflicts civilization, it also attacks the human, who in a neurotic state is unable to make decisions or be satisfied with any state in life, thus there is a constant hyper-inflated striving for wealth, power and material goods; this results in the creation of mass waste, the destruction of natural environments, and the spiritual emptiness of the individual. Individuals who feel hollow and as if life is meaningless tend to commit destructive acts and to, however passively, snipe at their neighbors and increase misery, because nothing pleases the miserable except to say "it cannot be otherwise, for all are miserable."

Humanity will either overcome this abyss of division and alienation, or be destroyed; Continuity Movement believes this state can be overcome by seeing the world as a continuous process of which we are part, and by taking our part in it and doing it well, instead of aiming for selfish ends, we can not only end our hollowness but create a greater civilization and in it, more spiritually satisfied individuals.

http://www.continuity.us/site/belief/

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