Our lives are filled with symbols. Symbols are a blessing which we started to use long ago, when we began to notice the qualia within ourselves. The result of this conscious ritualing are the gifts of thought and imagination, which we now consume, and are consumed by, voraciously.
We may compare our consumption and our expression of thoughts with eating and waste. That we are all consumers of ideas goes without question, but what do we produce?
Well, although we can’t thumb our noses at all the products of our symbolic reasoning, quite honestly, the manifestations of the mind are mostly just plain old, stinky waste. Just consider all our useless chatter, anxiety, craving, not to mention plain, old ignorance.
On the other hand (maybe the one that we don’t use to wipe ourselves ha ha), there is qualia that we are consumed by, and, we must then ask of this qualia that consumes us, is the human landscape its waste product?
The answer is a qualified yes.
The further we believe ourselves separated from ecosystems the more the human landscape becomes a waste product – and we become food for other beings, such as viruses and bacteria. But we can change all that quite simply, by recognizing that qualia is a gift from ecosystems which possesses us with wonder. When our waste product becomes gratitude, then we will fall back into harmony with the rest of the planet.