As Arielle Essex says, “When we think negative thoughts, we release negative chemicals into our body. And those have a profound affect on how the cells are behaving, how nutrition is being used.”

Even importantly, when those thoughts are fueled with intense emotion, the body suffers even more. we think positive thoughts, we release certain chemicals into our body. But when we think positive thoughts, we release supportive chemicals into our body.

It clearly takes time to make this shift from conditioned negativity to chosen positivity. But for me, whether or not to make the choice is non-negotiable. Serenity, compassion, harmony, ingenuity, freedom, and more… are my reward, and I want nothing less. To me, this transformation is the ultimate creative act.

Happy new year to you!

All that aside, I’m deeply moved by and agree with your insight that there’s no blame, within or without… what we’re experiencing is truly evolutionary. As Joni Mitchell sang in the 60′s: “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” Perhaps the greatest consolation I feel these days is the recognition that there are others like you that also bear witness to the predicament we face; each new voice adds to the chorus that will be the only true means of effecting change.

I’m reminded of a beautiful quote by Nietzsche:

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

I often find that there are occasions when it’s all too easy to point the finger of accusation, yet in doing so we fail to see that we are pointing at ourselves (after all, who am I?). It seems that our time of turning demands an uncompromising inventory and reduction of our possessions (physical, emotional, spiritual, and otherwise). After all, where we’re headed, we need not be burdened with anything but our essence. Thoreau’s words are remarkably timely now:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Oh dear, oh dear, what to do? And to this query, there are as many reasons as to the cause itself. All of which will assist, but unless they address cause, they will only touch a mere portion of the enormous mess humanity has long thought itself into.

I speak from the perspective of a 20 year self-mastery/peak performance specialist. And within the confines of this little Reply box, I can’t begin to provide the response my work has given me to understand. However, I can say that there is no blame, no one to shout at, arrest, try, and punish. It’s vibrational and evolutionary. And the sooner we grok this, the sooner our corrective, regenerative, creative, ingenious ideas will flow.

To that aim, I urge us to reflect honestly, undefensively, and deeply into what we do to contribute to the mess, determine why we do this, FEEL the consequences of our little contribution, then humbly devote ourselves to rigorously changing our dishonoring attitudes and behaviors.

Now, having said this, I feel my heart stirring in the sorrow that often motivates me to take positive action.

I appreciate your providing this unexpected opportunity for me to leave my serenity for a few minutes, and experience my soul writhing in this reality we create and endure.

Good morning!

There were a variety of disturbing elements to it, but one stood out: how in spite of the tribe’s insistence in rejecting civilization, they still welcome rifles (for obvious reasons in facilitating the hunt). And so they assimilate civilization. This reminded me of an interchange between Derrick Jensen and George Draffan in Jensen’s How Shall I Live My Life?:

George Draffan: No, although when you bring backhoes and whiskey and guns to indig­enous peoples now, most of them adopt those tools readily. There seems to be no inherent resistance to taking on new tools once they’re offered…

Derrick Jensen: That’s only after existing social structures have been destroyed. It’s as Michel Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur noted in Letters From An American Farmer, “There must be in the Indians’ social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to be boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans.” Benjamin Franklin was even more to the point: “No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.”

George Draffan: Social life, economic life, technological culture, they all arise together. Once again, we catch ourselves trying to reify life into separate compartments as if social structures were separate from technological ones. If you bring guns and snowmobiles to an Inuit group, and give them those, then their social relationships are instantly changed. Maybe the manifestation takes five years or a generation, but it’s inescapable that the effects of the new technology will radiate out to all parts of the web.

We start using technology, which can be defined as something which separates us from nature, and gives us the ability to work our will upon nature, and pretty soon we can only see ourselves as separate from nature. Perhaps that’s the source of traditional peoples not seeing themselves as separate from nature.

You can’t add more knots to the web without everything being affected everywhere else. Nor can you cut knots away and hope to not feel the effects. It’s a question of how perceptive you are, and how long it takes for you to notice damage to the web, and whether you care enough to take care of the whole web, or just run amok ripping out the parts you happen to want to rip out. Every species we drive extinct results in other species going extinct. That feedback, or those indications, are not immediately apparent. That’s part of the problem. Once again, we’re not perceptive enough to see what’s happening.

Most of what we see is layer after layer of projection, and most of what we do is based on our inability to understand that fact. Everybody does what they think is going to make them happy, yet hardly any of us are. Somehow, though, we never make that connection, and so we keep doing this thing that isn’t making us happy, we just do it harder, faster, more. Isn’t that the classic definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results?

If what we see is accurate, and what we’re doing is actually going to make us happy, then let’s go for it, we should have even more international trade, more development, more industry. Cheaper prices. More consumption. But if you can extricate yourself from that even a little bit, you begin to see that it isn’t making us happy. It becomes quite horrifying, actually, and for most of us, for all of us sometimes, the horror is just too much. We immediately go into denial again. If we even glimpse the reality of how we’re completely interdependent on everything else, the impacts of our behavior become so shocking and horrifying that we immediately have to numb ourselves.

It operates on a personal level, when we turn away from a homeless person–or never even see them at all, standing there dying. It operates on the economic level, when we buy and consume vegetables with pesticides because they’re cheaper.

We’re stuck in our habitual ways of seeing and thinking and doing, and it’s resulting in suffering. There’s a great quote from a Canadian lumberman who said, “When I look at trees I see dollar bills.” Before we can deforest the planet, we have to change the way we perceive it. Picture a forest that had been on the continent for thousands of years. The forest was a complex and interdependent web of trees and bugs and fungus and animals and water, and all the energy and genetic material that goes round and round. Up until five hundred years ago the people in what we now call North America lived in basic equilibrium with the forest, as part of the web. Then another culture and the beginnings of the industrial system were brought in from the “outside.” Before the trees could be cut, they had to be redefined as private or public property. But even before that they had to be redefined as property at all. If I see a woman on the street and I perceive her as another being with wants and desires all her own, I will treat her differently than if I perceive her as a worker or as property or as an object for my personal enjoyment. It is the same with trees, mountains, the hours of my life. Are they alive, or are they merely objects for my consumption?

Once that projection and objectification takes place, form living being to property—from trees to dollar bills—everything else falls into place. The forest has been privatized, and the clearcuts, landslides, and species extinctions are all externalized.

Lately, life of hunter-gatherers were getting mentioned on multiple articles including the article of “The Hadza” by Michael Finkel on Dec 2009 issue of National Geographic.