Joseph Campbell, the philosopher of the power of myth, suggested that our ancestors were connected to the landscape around them in a way that we, today, can barely understand. It ran deeper than the mystical participation in which landmarks somewhat magically revealed the proper pathways to follow, It was more that the landscape was an extension of ourselves, an identity; we felt it if a bird flew past with a twig in its mouth, or an old tree fell. The decay was our decay, the growth was our growth.
The body, of course, is adapted to a specialized niche in the landscape, and is thus naturally separated from other parts of the landscape which it doesn’t sense. The brain, the human brain, separated us from other landscapes to an even greater degree. As we developed tools which became the extensions of ourselves, the landscape which once was an extension of our being, now became subject to our whim.
The human landscape has evolved faster than our ability to adapt ourselves to it. We once could put our faith in the natural landscape because we evolved with it; the qualia we sensed was tried and true. Not so with the human landscape. When the landscapes no longer provide, new landscapes must be found, and evolved with; we found our new niche in the mind, and evolved a new, inner landscape, a landscape apart from brain, body, and the outer landscapes.
Our inner qualia — emotions, thoughts, ideas, and concepts — even further separated us from the natural landscape, because they have been, almost unanimously, symbols and metaphors for the benefit of no one, and nothing, but mankind. Even the typical nature myths — say, for instance, of coyote the trickster — serve only to help people reconcile themselves to the loss of the Tao, or Way. And with science and technology thrown into the mix, the loss of our connection to nature has grown extreme.
All of our inner qualia points the way to ideals, of love, honor, religion, duty, etc., which, in main, have only been valuable to the degree that they kept us from destroying one another. Now that we are forced to use our tools to help save the planet, and all its ecosystems, the hypocrisy of our idealism has become self-evident: it never went beyond the human landscape, never pushed us to test our theories of humanity.
Yet, in this time of planetary crisis, as each ideal pops like a balloon, the mind is discovering a new purity. We are able to move beyond the distortions of our senses and the hypocrisy of our ideals. We have discovered a new concept which reveals itself behind all the landmarks and pathways, which connects us to all the landscapes. Like the best parts of our minds, this new concept does not cling to the material world. It is qualiadelic, immaterial, and, by virtue of this, all landscapes cling to it.
The new concept is ecosystems. Ecosystems reveal our connect to all the landscapes around us, to the human landscape, to nature, even to the virtual landscape.
Put our faith in ecosystems and we will survive the crisis.
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