« Why Is There So Much Meanness in This Land of the Free and Brave? »

Just what is the source of the meanness happening across the U.S. today? Words are mean. Policies toward immigrants have become mean. Hundreds of women are speaking up, telling painful stories of sexual exploitation as they break out of the status of inferiority imposed on them. So, too, Mother Earth. Our planet’s extremes of weather protest the exploitative bullying she’s experienced even as new mean policies take aim at her ecoregions. What’s going on?

Simply put, this meanness happens when we humans turn away from our Call.

Embodied in our beings is a Call to live integrated into Earth’s community of life. Our egos resist the Call as too hard, too inconvenient. The Call, if followed, takes us beyond our egos to our greater capacities as humans. That journey turns out to be heroic in that it saves us from our weaker selves and empowers us to act on our deep yearing for a culture of life. On the journey we find the priceless treasure of being able to live interdependently in a synergy that generates life.

As a result, we live as keepers of Earth, our home. We keep it liveable. Compassion, love, sharing, and awe for every being become animated in us.

BUT, if we turn from the Call, we embrace our ego consciousness, NOT our truer, deeper, and spiritual capacities. When not following the Call, but, instead, improvising our purposes, we can’t live bravely and freely in democracy. Our thinking is small, ego-size, all about ourselves. Meanness comes out in our words and actions. Our workplaces demean others and take advantage of them. Workers are exploited at low pay. Domestic abuse increases. Chaos is fomented among nations. Species die. Egos get intoxicated with their power and get addicted to more. A chaotic civilization of death results.

Conversely, when we trust the Call and embrace it, energies of our souls beyond anything we knew existed begin to be released. These archetypal, deep energies are like time-release capsules. They release what we need as new challengers arise. Our egos don’t even believe those energies are there. That’s why we have to make a CHOICE to trust what we don’t yet know about ourselves. But trust we can. We are evolved to be compassionate, sharing, loving, and awe-filled as we interact with all other beings in Earth’s community.

When we follow the Call of our souls and the Call of Earth’s mighty processes to live as part of her ways, we can challenge the meanness. We can create the structures for the culture of life. Even as the civilization of death, with all its meanness, blows up in apocalyptic scenarios, the culture of life breaks through. All Earth’s beings following the Call see nothing easy here, but have an embodied knowing that the Call, when followed, displaces meanness and exploitation with caring, sharing, love, and awe. This is the OneEarth way.

(Note: The ideas in this blog are going into more fully in Chapter Four of my book, From Egos to Eden: Our Heroic Journey to Keep Earth Livable, 2017. The Chapter is entitled, “Turning Away from the Call.”)

Comments

[Chip Hartney]

This question of meanness has been front-of-mind for me since 2015 as the U.S. election ramped up. There seems to me a fundamental cause that I (and most others) have yet to understand. It is a maddening, yet critical quest. I will now give "the Call" some more thought in this regard ... and reread that chapter! I am also led to reread William Golding's masterwork ... as it seems to me we are on the "Lord of the Flies" island ... and, sadly, there is no "adult" navy coming to our rescue.