Truth

Humans are always on a quest for the "truth" and the answers to beginnings and endings. We live, we die, do we continue, do we inherit heaven, or do we cease to exist - questions of man. Many people tend to alter Spirituality and Religion to suit them. They say "I want the Truth", yet if they come near to the "truth" they seek, when it does not suit life as they want it or see it, they will withdraw. If it threatens their comfortable material existence, it becomes easy to convince themselves they need to continue looking.

Would you change your life for truth? Would you sacrifice for anything? Would you forsake a bed to sleep naked on the earth? No, I think not. Man is lost in materialism. Ruled, controlled, buried, dead - in the pursuit of the pleasures of the material world. We look at the wild animal and say "I am better than him, for I live in a house, drive a car, eat at a table, and sleep in a bed." But are we better? Does not the animal live free, without the constraints of material things? Does he/she wake up each day and dread what is to come? While we spend each day laboring for "money" to purchase more material items, and each night trying to sleep to go to work the next day, the animal spends his days enjoying the earth and his nights wrapped in the comfort of his mate beneath an open sky. He finds shelter when he wants, and roams free when the mood takes him. He eats, and is eaten, fulfilling a part in the balance of life. He dies - when his time has come.

Are we better than the man who lives in the desert and sleeps in a tent? Has our "civilized" ways endeared us more in the heart of the universe and earned us a premier spot in the book of life? When we think in terms of making the world a better place for all mankind, why does that thought usually involve materialistic things? When the white man came to America, they perceived the people who lived on this land as "savages". Their simple life was considered primitive. Through the years we forced our materialistic values onto these people we conquered. It was not enough to take the land; we felt the need to change them to suit our "society". If they joined in and became productive worker ants in our system, then they were allowed to live within our society.

Are we now happier, more content, and more peaceful than our ancestors who lived simple lives with simple luxuries? Are we better humans? We kill more effectively, we fight disease and old age to keep people alive longer, and we find new innovative methods to fight against nature itself, we ....progress. But to what end? What goal? What is it we are striving for?

Progression means to go forward towards a goal, an end. But life...is a circle which never ends. Our answers, our truths, have always been there - in nature itself. The depiction of a Tree of Life says so much. A tree has a main trunk from which grows many branches and on these branches many leaves. These leaves have their life, then wither and die to fall back to the earth where they become nutrients for the next season's growth of new leaves. One might say, but what if the trunk dies? In nature, a new trunk has already grown, from the seeds of the old. In this way, the tree's life never ends. In this way, left to nature, no life ends.

The earth is the most perfect creation of the universe. In nature there was a perfect balance. All things lived, all things died, yet new life came from the seeds of the old. But then man, became arrogant, obsessed with perfection, good, and evil....desiring control of the world around them. Man decided the earth was put here for their use, to benefit man, to give to man. We altered our beliefs and religions to suit this arrogance. We separated ourselves from all other living things and disconnected with the planet we live on. If you believe this earth is merely a stepping stone to a better place, or to a wonderful re-born Earth...then what need to cherish it? If you believe you will do your time here and then drift into nothingness, what need to love or preserve this home?

We decided disease was an enemy and must be combated, instead of a system of nature. We looked to nature and said "I can improve on that. I can make lakes, and roads, and tunnels. I can force animals to live in my world by my rules; I can beat death, live longer, use the earth's minerals to travel faster, stay warmer, and go further." But what have we really accomplished? What are the issues we as a world are now concerned with? Global warming, the ozone, over population, species disappearing, the list is never-ending. A list....we should never have made.

We in our arrogance never thought.... Maybe man was not what was important, the Earth was. That we were sent here to be her gardeners, not her destroyers - that we were never intended to be "supreme beings" but nothing more than simple care-takers, who were given a higher intelligence to protect and to comprehend. The "garden of Eden" was the earth and we as gardeners have failed miserably. For in a perfect, mathematical, and balanced universe, each and every planet is important to the system of all.

The Earth will be here long after each of us are gone. It has survived many generations of man. When it becomes too populated, nature provides a way to wipe it clean. A new disease, a new "disaster"....the Earth will cleanse itself. Balance will be restored and the circle of life will continue, a circle which humans are a mere portion of. As for man's truth - it is all around us. We simply need to give up our arrogance to find it and realize that balance is what we seek. You can not have life without death, "good" without "evil", light without dark, man without woman, growth without decay. We can invent, create, try to control nature, and attempt to become Gods, but no matter what we do....Nature will win.

We can argue about "souls" while acknowledging all life has a form of energy. We can argue if there is a god, while observing the "miraculous" universe we live in. We may struggle to find answers that may be so old, they are no longer remembered. When it is said that "god is everywhere" then I would translate this to mean we are all shards of the same entity...every planet, every human, animal, drop of water, and blade of grass. God is life. We can argue about where we began and where we will end...even the very identity God takes...and while we do...life...no matter what form it takes...will continue - for a circle has no beginning and no end. What we as individuals do here and now, how we live will be the final answer to rather or not we continue to be a part of that Circle.