Karl Clancy: 'Open your eyes...the longer we poison our environment the sooner we die'

“Know thy enemy and know thyself” is the way, according to Sun Tsu, to win every battle. If we change that slightly to “know thy enemy IS thyself” something funny happens.

We have to look inside ourselves to know ourselves, but when we look inside we find that we are made of the same energy as outside ourselves.

Yet we persist in being at odds with the outside world, fighting it and struggling to make headway in it, but if it is the same as inside, if we accept that there is no fundamental difference between “me” and my environment, then we come to see that we are really struggling against ourselves. We are the opponent.

We are the enemy that we must come to know.

The process of coming to know ourselves is coming to know that everything is part of the whole. Neither you nor I is separate from the whole, we are just another example of how it can be arranged, how it can be woven into subjective experience.

The concept of “wu wei” then, going with the flow, might be seen as learning not to get in our own way, to stop sabotaging our own creative process by creating an adversary outside our physical shell and instead realising that the person who is me both exists in the environment but that we also create that environment. We and our environment are inextricably bound up in each other.

In a physical sense, as we perceive the world, when we harm the environment eventually we harm ourselves. If we poison the land eventually we poison ourselves.

It’s a great work of the ego to keep us fighting our external self, to maintain the illusion that there really is a separate self that is “me” and that is unique in the universe.

The ego creates that illusion of separation from the rest of the universe to maintain my isolation and my uniqueness, in order that I believe that I am special, that I should maintain my separate identity to ensure my survival even at the expense of others.

The very last thing ego wants us to realise is that there are no others, that there is just one thing and that we are all it, while at the same time swimming in it. We are each an individual ripple, an eddy in a river, flowing along, but always still part of the river.

If I learn to Accept, I learn that you, me and everyone and everything, are all the same. If I do something that enhances your life then I enhance my own and I enrich the environment in which we both flow.

If I do something for the environment I do something for myself and for you, because nothing is separate.

If I look at the world and my place in it subjectively, as a physical person living on a round rock mostly covered with water, the process is reduced to seeing my fellow humans as the same as me, but not as external people way over there, away from me.

Each and every person on planet earth “is” me, all part of the body and mind that is what we call humanity, while all living in an environment to which we are bound for survival. We can only survive if we flow in harmony with each other and our environment.

Darwin was right when he spoke of how the fittest survive but Darwinism is not just a theory, it’s a warning. The survival of the fittest means survival of the most adaptable.

In the physical sense, our evolution as a species is being stunted, stopped by the fact that we no longer need to learn to adapt to our environment, we have disconnected from our environment seeing it as something we are forced to adapt to and so we are at odds with nature and ourselves.

That’s why we are killing her and how we are hastening our own demise.

97% of all species that ever lived went extinct. We’re not special or immune. Climate change is a temporary condition that will kill us, not the planet.

350 million years after our extinction the planet will have fully healed and forgotten we ever existed. There will be no trace of us.

Anywhere. We aren’t engaged in trying to save the planet. We’re engaged in saving ourselves but we will never do that while we are divided and while accumulation is the driving force of our societies.

See the truth.

Open your eyes to the stark reality that we and our environment are inextricable. We are part of it and it is part of us. The longer we poison it the sooner we die.

Continuing the process of wanting more, taking more and never having enough is suicide over generations. Open your eyes even more to see that it isn’t just our physical selves that require a kick-start in evolutionary terms.

We must adapt and grow our perceptions beyond our ego, beyond the individual sense of self and into the idea that we are all part of the process, the universe’s creative process of self-discovery and her own evolution.

If we can’t evolve our perception, if we remain trapped by our ego in isolation, then eventually when we shuffle off this mortal coil, we may discover that we are still isolated.

The frequency that is us will not be in harmony with the rest of the universe and we won’t be able to play in her symphony.

We become the bum notes of the universe, there but at odds with the music because we haven’t learned not to be at odds with ourselves.

Until we learn to tune ourselves to the universe’s harmonics, we stay outside, alone.

Just like we felt in life, separate and insular and looking out for number one, never realising that there is only one, and that we are merely fractions of the whole.

In Aramaic, the language of the Hebrews, the concepts of “good” and “evil” are conveyed in agricultural terms. Either something was ripe and ready to eat and therefore “good” or it was not yet ready to eat or “bad”.

The concept might be applied to us in that either we are ready to learn or we are not yet ready.

What I enjoy from this is that it gives hope that something or someone bad, can ripen, can become ready, no matter how long this takes, even if that bum note takes a billion years to get in tune with the universe, she will accept it when it does.