Why we can't stop warring and being control freaks: reason #3

Reason #3 We can't stop warring and being control freaks because we think we live in a material universe of dead things.

Do you talk to trees? I do. I also talk to the wind, the clouds, the stars, the moon, the ocean, mountains, rain, fire, stones, plants, animals, insects, and my car. . . I think this is just as important a part of being human as praying.

Praying is a timeless way of expressing gratitude (to life,the universe, God, creator, Spirit, the intelligence of the universe), but talking to whom you share the world with is even more basic than praying. It is the simplest way of acknowledging that we aren't surrounded by dead matter but a living universe. And it is our insurance against falling into anonymity, and existential isolation. It is our insurance against feeling like we are the only thing that suffers or feels or is aware.

Talking to animals is something most of us do, but I recommend talking to things that don't have faces. Start with talking to trees when you are "alone" in the woods. After a while you will realize that the trees respond to being talked to, not by talking back but by sort of softening out to us or enlarging or letting us know that they are aware of us. (You can also sing to them.)

The feeling of being alone is simply an illusion. Unless we are in a white room with nothing on the walls, we are never alone. You can talk to a picture on the wall or a vase of flowers.

Everything is made of the same stuff that is animated by the same energy. Thanks to quantum physics, even dyed in the wool rationalists understand that energy and matter, which comprise the stuff of creation, are a mystery. It submits to being analyzed and exploded and shaped and experimented with but ultimately it is unknowable. But it is the opposite of dead. It is charged with the energy of creation.

We keep trying to analyze, isolate, describe and name everything. We use powerful subatomic colliders to smash subatomic particles into smaller particles, and when we find a new subatomic particle that we can name and describe we get excited. This is cutting edge, but there are older spiritually oriented cultures that have been merging with, and communing with the energetic mystery of creation and its human correlative, mindful awareness, for thousands of years. And they have developed practices that teach us how to tap these cosmic energies, such as qi or chi, which can be harnessed for various purposes, such as self defense or attaining an enlightened state. Though not unrelated to quantum physics, Yoga, Buddhism and shamanism do not care about explanations; they reflect a worldview that is grounded in literally countless hours of experiential wisdom, an old world view that rests on principles that have proven their validity a million times over without meeting the conditions of the scientific method of testing hypotheses.

When Jung was alone at Bollingen, his retreat on Lake Zuruck, he famously talked to his pots and pans and acknowledged the presence of ancestral and nature spirits.

Pots and pans?

Consider what I said earlier, that everything is made of the same stuff and is filled (animated) by the same energy. If we have a relationship with something, whether it is a pot or a book or our car, we have an energetic relationship with this object. (That isn't so hard to understand when we are talking about a lucky stone that we keep in our pocket or a ring that we always wear.) But, let me tell you a little story: One time I noticed that a cutting board that we always used almost every time we cooked or prepared food had developed some small cracks and we decided to let it go. I decided to toss it on a pile of wood in the yard that I had yet to stack. I felt a little sad as I lobbed it at the pile of logs, but to my surprise it struck a log and popped way up over the pile, flipped over a few times dramatically in midair, and landed without rebounding but solidly wedged upright in the top of the pile. From there it just seemed to look at me, as if to ask, Is that it? After all my years of service, I'm just an anonymous piece of kindling to you? I couldn't believe what I had witnessed. I immediately retrieved it and spoke to it with tears in my eyes thanking it for being our cutting board and helping us prepare all those healthy meals over the years. Only then did I place it respectfully on the pile, where I spoke my intention that it transform into a piece of wood that would sacrifice its form to help warm our house.

Is this kind of living exhausting? Yes and no. But it is how I choose to live. It is a much older way of living. The point is, I choose to live in a living world. I choose to live in a world of "whos" instead of "its" and dead energetically inert things. If you live in a world like that you must be lonely, but I am here to tell you that materialism is based on an illusion. If we live in a living world we are never alone, and we just naturally shed a lot of hubris. And, to come full circle, we just naturally turn from making war to, mostly, loving everything or at least having a relationship with everything.