All Discussions Tagged 'David Sparenberg' - Peace for the Soul2024-03-28T15:37:06Zhttps://peaceformeandtheworld.ning.com/forum/topic/listForTag?tag=David+Sparenberg&feed=yes&xn_auth=noAt A Crossroads Before Critical Masstag:peaceformeandtheworld.ning.com,2019-11-08:5143044:Topic:2782542019-11-08T04:53:30.103ZEva Librehttps://peaceformeandtheworld.ning.com/profile/Eva
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<p>The terrible and terrifying conditions of wind and fire devastating parts of California are showing us what happens when Earth Trauma approaches critical mass. We are not yet at global critical mass, but we do continue to move ever closer. Critical…</p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 8pt;">CALI-WILDFIRE</span></p>
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<p>The terrible and terrifying conditions of wind and fire devastating parts of California are showing us what happens when Earth Trauma approaches critical mass. We are not yet at global critical mass, but we do continue to move ever closer. Critical mass relative to environmental trauma or environmental catastrophe would be when either one of two major developments occur, both of which result in cataclysm. One would be so many environmental disasters happen at or near the same time in approximate geography that the emergencies exceed social capacity to respond or recover. Two would be a convergence of catastrophic conditions resulting in a mega catastrophe, or global cataclysm, also a condition exceeding human capacity to adequately respond, if even to respond at all. Think of the California fire-storm condition or the hurricane in Haiti taking place in multiple locations simultaneously, overwhelming not only impoverished communities and nations but the wealthy and deeply resourced as well.I speak here of structures deteriorating beyond recovery and systems collapsing.</p>
<p><br/> Nobody cares for such thoughts, but we keep driving toward the event horizon of ultimate trauma and must wake up and stand up to the oncoming reality. Ominous events accelerate and the time for people empowerment and unified action is now. And now is a late hour on the world clock.</p>
<p><br/> I do not mean to be an alarmist here. Those who know me know I am not. But the alarms are sounding all around us and this is no time to play at being deaf or to refuse to connect the dots, foolishly thinking that one thing after another will pass, be forgotten and not be revisited in kind upon us. Being forgetful about what is true is dangerous and a society that encourages diversion and forgetfulness is endangering to its citizens, international relationships and down to the eco and biotic intricacies fundamental to planetary stability. It has taken billions of evolutionary years to arrive at levels favorable to mammalian life, including human life, and while our species collectively causes havoc and is forcing large scale extinctions, we barely understand the dynamic processes and structures that made and maintain the condition with which we are familiar.</p>
<p><br/> I find myself growingly convinced that we cannot assume that maintaining any form of status quo will suffice. I believe we are already moving rapidly beyond that and even the phrase “addressing climate change” will shortly prove seriously inadequate. Rather we need to bring ourselves to recognizing the fullest possible realities and necessities of this earth-humanity crisis syndrome of life on a trauma planet and ask ourselves within this most serious confrontation two questions: how much human impact becomes too much and what needs to be done to avoid reaching the terrestrial blackhole that crushes every possibility? This is a point of no return or more correctly points of no return down the labyrinth to endgame of confusion, suffering, chaos, and ultimately omnicide.</p>
<p><br/> What point of no return have we already passed, what point are we currently passing, what is just ahead and nearly upon us? Perhaps it is past due to treat such questions with seriousness and to provide a partial while yet cumulative answer each time we drive a car, waste food, trivialize existence, uselessly consume, adding to the world of junk, or cast a vote? A decision to turn in the right direction—the direction of affirmation, enrichment and evolutionary enlightenment, opposed to the direction of reduction, negation and destruction—is deciding to live within what Duane Elgin has identified as Voluntary Simplicity, which is marked similar if not the same as my own advocacy for a Prosperity of Appreciation.</p>
<p><br/> There is much in the human condition and within human identity that deserves to be changed. High speed inner or spiritual evolution is one possible answer. An answer paradoxically that we might only be able to reach within a small population, and that by slowing down and stepping back or even away from the frantic, death-wish culture of capitalistic consumer civilization. But let us assume that human beings in terms of who we are cannot become a higher, more enlightened species of humanity within the limited time frame that is in play. Then we are left with changing how we are as life forms on an endangered planet, with a steady view (focusing on intergenerational education) to a radicalization of bringing about sustainable alternatives in the who of an Earth-humanity future, where Earth is Living Earth and Living Earth is a life place of good habitation, sustainable within the healing and flourishing of atmospheric stability and bio-diversity.</p>
<p><br/> Greta Thunberg and all who live by her example and even add content are in process of demanding new standards of right living and living that is not a furthering destruction of life. There is much to be encouraged in this, for the young are not yet fossilized in the sediment of corruption, indifference and inertia. They possess flexibility and their personalities, naturally keyed into growth, have not yet become neurosis.</p>
<p><br/> The raging, wind powered fires currently uncontrolled in both the north and south of California are adjacent disasters in and of themselves. But they are also only singular examples among many.</p>
<p><br/> These two statements, the youth movement which Greta gives a face to and the present or “just next” natural disaster; as the planet warms, ocean levels rise with plastic toxicity, planetary wind currents shift, weather patterns alter, the magnitude of storms increases in intensity and frequency, world economy depends on fossil fuel and world power on war, etc. etc.; are at the two ends of the reality spectrum. The world’s people, the vast majority, the 99% of us, are between these poles, as at a crossroads, and in dire need of facing and forging the right direction. The pioneering adventure that begins with thinking outside of the box.</p>
<p><br/> After all, choices made at pivot points, before crucial challenges, throughout a life, accumulate and bring introspective and interpersonal changes to the person making the choices. I recall Nikos Kazantzakis writing that we should each examine and decide what from the past continues to live into the future and what is laid to rest.</p>
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<p><a href="https://peaceformeandtheworld.ning.com/xn/detail/u_2j2gkzzkzmpxa?xg_source=profiles_memberList" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>David Sparenberg</strong></a> is a world citizen, environmental & peace advocate & activist, actor, poet-playwright, storyteller, teacher and author.</p>
<p></p> VIOLENCE: EARTH, HUMANITY and GODtag:peaceformeandtheworld.ning.com,2011-04-03:5143044:Topic:817852011-04-03T06:12:27.642ZDavid Sparenberghttps://peaceformeandtheworld.ning.com/profile/DavidSparenberg
<p><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;">Today we hear about the violent Earth—eruptions of fire, rogue waves, tremors, quakes, mega-storms, speeding walls of ocean water, weather like a rampaging berserker. But we accept without question the violence of humanity. We do not know this Earth as experience, in relationship, anymore than we know God as an authentic and intimate relationship-experience. For most, Earth is not a living truth but a warehouse of…</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;">Today we hear about the violent Earth—eruptions of fire, rogue waves, tremors, quakes, mega-storms, speeding walls of ocean water, weather like a rampaging berserker. But we accept without question the violence of humanity. We do not know this Earth as experience, in relationship, anymore than we know God as an authentic and intimate relationship-experience. For most, Earth is not a living truth but a warehouse of resources, exploited to supply senseless and even insane addictions. God is of less importance than a credit score or the rise and fall of the price of oil. We know sports, war, the way to the mall for a shopping spree, how to surf the web, how to buy and sell online. We are convinced that we cannot afford either universal healthcare or justice to end global poverty. But we can, through indifference, come to terms of compromise with proliferating manmade dead zones, deforestation and the endgame shrinkage of wilderness habitat.</span> <br/><br/><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;">It does not cross the adjusted urban mind, incarcerated in false values, to consider the Earth alive in itself, or herself; to embody as reality that we are embedded parts in a sensitive trust of interdependence; that God, as confronting otherness, is a living presence in search of dialogue, one able to enter into personhood where response and maturity are personally present. We do not empower Earth and God to become possible. We do not want Earth or God to interfere.</span> <br/><br/><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;">Instead, we continue to gossip and to cultivate a prurient obsession with media specials and virtual blueprints of accelerating apocalypse from our pornography of destruction. Increasingly we stimulate our bored and anxious, dismembered little lives with these speculations mirroring the diseased darkness of an anticipated fate. We delight in public nightmares of Earth revenge, with no accountability as to cause, and the horrors of divine judgment as manipulated entertainment viewed through a Hollywood lens. Why? Is it because our falling off is so extravagance, our guilt so heavy under the dense calluses of denial? Nowhere, it would seem, are there significant displays of humility; nowhere are there forums for the talking tears of biotic vulnerability and mutual suffering. But all the while, human violence intensifies and with violence the blindness of a civilization of ignorance and indulgence. If the truth is told, violence is our only progress—progress that has put itself outside and aggressively opposes both the processes of renewable natural life and the revelatory dynamics of life altering dialogue.</span> <br/><br/><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;">But come, if only beginning with this moment, dare and risk enough to cross the threshold of alterity and to look at our collective placement in cosmic time and space with a wayfarer’s honesty. Sixty-five million years of Earth work in evolutionary refining; sixty-five million years creating and maintaining elemental balance and regulating a super-abundance of diversity, not once under human control, not once influenced by human interference. Couple with this the soft story of an Earth-walker God, a creative dream maker, grand alchemist of an expanding universe, walking in the quiet evening garden of a good place—a miracle of rocks and waters, of flora and fauna, of teeming air and fecund soils. Not a story of violence, not a tale easily appreciated by those who are numb and distracted, and perhaps bored in captivity to the point of mass suicide; dulled and accustomed to spiritual torture and emotional deformity. And, to speak openly of horror, picture the narrative of God, evolution, Earth and universe, against the viral and voracious tidbit, the temporal micro-particle, of reason and progress, and the four hundred year only industrial quickening out of abundance into never again extinction; of wars of genocide and the total destabilizing war, The Ultimate War Unremitting, of biocide and geocide, waged through technologies of convenience, conveyance, consumption, corruption and mega-death.</span> <br/><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;">Today we hear talk of the violent Earth. Today we accept without question or serious probing the consequences of the phenomenal violence of humanity—our loss of reverence, of relational-identity; our loss of place in the living scheme and wonderment of creation; our lack of dedication to healing acts of beauty and what Thomas Berry calls the “spontaneities within us.” The world’s politicians, whether among the better or the worst, do not genuinely address the imminent gospel of ecology, of eco-emergency and fundamental re-Earthing necessities; the world media does not report on ways to achieve good tidings of restorative ecosophy, or voluntary simplicity as a step toward eco-anamnesis and sanity for a sustainable biotic future. But the media focuses exclusively on the bloodshed, the oil spills and the leaking radiation of news as a fact sheet plotting for planetary catastrophe. Meanwhile, most of the human world stands placidly in place, waiting like masses of movie extras for the next nameless, faceless scene of victimization to be played out.</span> <br/><br/><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;">But how far must we go in our cult of violence to see the idols of violence worshipped for what they are? How stupid do we need to be before we are stuck by the stupidity of our intergenerational recklessness? If everything that was once in balance is now imbalanced, isn’t the ground itself precarious and moving dangerously under our feet? When everything is devoured, doesn’t starvation overtake the hungry? If a bear, or a tiger, or any natural entity, is attacked, will the living form not turn furiously for life’s sake, out of instinct, against its attacker? How much more than a bear or a tiger is the whole of the living Earth? How much one with the Earth, in Earth’s wounds and defilement, is the living God? And if God; whether a she or a he in each person’s vocabulary; is angry, consider how we, as species, rage incessantly against life, against creation. If Earth, responding to abuse; as a more than human mother witnessing the persecution and annihilation of her other than human children; is feverish and constricting into direful permutations, consider how we, as species, are abusers and thoughtless enforcers of dreadful changes.</span> <br/><br/><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;">Let each one take time out then and ask: Where on Earth now are my feet and how and why? Where and with what involvements are my hands? What of the soul, that has lost its eyes out of long term exile in the prison camps of the mind, in the dark exilic travail of history, but was before the seeing power of ancient shamans, prophets and poets, yet now is discredited, abandoned, even buried alive? And if not the heart’s felt-prayers of courage and humility; if not the outcry of shared vulnerability; breaking through the social misguidance of arrogance and extravagance, then what? If not compassionate affirmation, if not compassionate denouncement, what? If not an uprising of love and protest?</span> <br/><br/><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;">But go ahead! Go on! Talk objectively about the threat of the violence of the Earth, about the absence of mercy from God, as if the two were truly separate objects outside of who, what and how we are. After all, we have become dominate—dominators and yet pariah. .</span> <br/><br/><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;">Only please, do not simultaneously lay claim to innocence and think, like irresponsible adolescents, that we can play into the role of victim and attain a controlling adulthood by furthering madness; or think to find safety in narcissism, security in self-absorption. And do not keep repeating the error to absurdly believe that anyone will ever find redemption because their face is a smiley face. Earth in peril is not cute; God eclipsed is not politically correct or socially polite. There is n academic or a Disney version of depth reality. What is happening here, in our time, is not a game.</span> <br/><br/><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;">To most, these words of pleading and passion are nothing. Denial will repress feeling and without feeling the words will not register. Many today are deaf out of loss, and lost in delusions of grandeur and entitlement. For some, perhaps an emerald or an indigo minority, there remain vestiges of deep and lingering instinct and grace, traces of a spontaneity of mutuality, images of flowering back to dreaming out of the depths; weeping and crying out in pain, chanting into circulating wind needful longing and arising out of meditative peace and centering to walk the Earth with the footprints and beauty of the returning and remembering human soul. Bringing back, let us imagine, the impossible possibility of life’s mysterious desire for the sensitive, upright and articulating celebration of a maturely responsive Self-overhearing. Of a species of scribes and poets, musicians and dancer.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;">David Sparenberg</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;">27 March 2011</span></p>