If Yes To The Terror Of Extinction
By David Sparenberg
24 July, 2012
Countercurrents.org
It is hard not to anticipate an on rush of unprecedented suffering. There are too many of us and ill disposed toward the realities of planetary life and living planet. Even without a religious conviction forecasting apocalypse, it is hard to the very degree of impossible not to see that something is wrong with this human species and far too many everywhere are possessed by the demon of a dangerous human ignorance. A person is forced to ask if we are just made this way: one part capable of harmony, as also compassion, another part, raised up to prominence, inclined to self serving evil and the monstrous twists and folds and disfigurements of indifference.
I believe that there is good in people, a goodness of pathos and emotion to respond within the human heart. But is our goodness good enough and are we, in the weight and measure of conditional reality here on Earth, genuinely good for life? In this time as I see it—time I have hurt with learning to identify as the age of extinctions—the majority of humankind lives by ego and ego in the contemporary world of globalization and social media thrives and indulges itself with the toxic fast foods of narcissism, violence, arrogance, greed and seething rage.
By and large, the situation seems increasingly hopeless and one must, against a sunnier disposition, expect the extravagance and inflation of the technological-manipulative civilization of lies to crash down in verdict against life. For most of the human species has nothing sustaining to do with Jesus, in non-institutional essence, or with Buddha, or Gandhi or Saint Francis, Mother Teresa or love intoxicated Rumi, Isaiah or Muhammad, dialogic Buber or vision questing Nietzsche. But far too many of us, for sanity or an ecosophic safety, hold intercourse with dealers, whether they deal in drugs or guns, booze or bombs, scams or trafficking.
There is something wrong here, a defining shadow, and it is in and from us, us, and our species majority is nervous, anxiously more than nervous, but unwilling to make the radical move to spiritual awakening, to vigilance and world shift revolution.
Yet amid the cheering of decadence and the howling of despair those who have not utterly forgotten the prophetic art of listening might feel penetration sufficient to hear the still small voice of a countering difference and the whispering at the threshold of silence which is a chance, our chance, if we are ready, and a possibility, if we are courageous, for deliverance.
And from what throughout the cosmic miracle or here within the miracle of sentient Earth should we be delivered if not from the tsunami endangerment of human ignorance, if not from the murderous thingness of modern man, if not from how we accept projecting ourselves within these menacing confines, systemic with deceptions and propagandistic misguidance, limiting perception, diminishing dimension and numbing our feelings—estranging us from a feeling-philosophy— through the belittlement, eclipse, betrayal and exile of the soul?
Far, far easier to get another to repeat the mad mantra “I want,” than to experience letting go and pray integrally as “Let be.”
Only stop now for a moment, stand, if you dare, in stillness, look out, around, and honestly see life on Earth as challenging, yet as it is, in need, and ask: “Am I really so important? Am I that much more than all else? Or, as if a fallen angel conjoined to an animal without sustaining habitation and deprived of primal experience, have I allowed myself to be a detour away from the awe and wonderment of life?”
And what in overcoming and without submission to fear must I do if I am indeed a yes to the terror of extinction and part of the eradication of the otherness of life, the snuffing out of light?
David Sparenberg is an ecological & peace writer & activist; internationally published world citizen. Also, poet-playwright, actor & teacher, he is the author of 8 books including EPISODES Outcries & Meditations at the End of Time.
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