Inspired by and in harmony with Nature – what does that entail for us humans?

Nature is not simply ‘out there’ but also deep within us, flowing through our hearts and minds. For thousands upon thousands of years we humans have lived with a deep empathic interrelation embodied within Nature. Only in a relatively recent part of our Western history did we weaken our profound relation of our inner psyche and outer Nature.

What is Nature?  One hesitates to define anything so all-pervasive and undefinable with abstract words.  Perhaps one could venture by saying that Nature is an omnipresence flowing through all of creation – an ‘all-pervasiveness’, perhaps much like what Eastern mysticism has called Akasha or Tao. As we attune with Nature, we attune with our own unconscious in allowing it to become conscious.  It is what Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer, at MIT and The Presencing Institute, call ’presencing’ and what many great phenomenologists like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have explored in detail in their work. Within this presencing of the present moment, we allow a rarefying of our ego-boundaries along with an empathic resonance to occur within this all-pervasive presence of Nature. In other words, we  harmonise with Nature if only for a brief moment.  This presencing is the same as what happens when athletes, artists or musicians – and us normal folk – sense being ‘in the zone’. Here we open up our inner true-nature with the all-pervasive Nature in our midst.

So often in today’s busy, rationalised, atomised, abstract world we obscure this Nature, cloaking our own true nature in restricting the semi-permeability of our ego-self with deeper Nature, this can lead to fragmentation which create illusions of separation and scarcity which may then exacerbate into delusional projections.

From a place of presencing, we open up the innate capability we each have to heal ourselves, and also engage in right relation in all with do. This is true sustainability inspired by and in harmony with Nature. It is a wise goal for any new paradigm beyond our ego-anxiety fuelled state of cultural affairs we find ourselves in today. Emancipating ourselves from our own self-imposed (and, admittedly, culturally conditioned) imprisonment of mental delusion and distraction from the present moment is primary for any sustainable future, otherwise we run the very real risk of contaminating any well-founded sustainability initiatives with the same thinking that caused the unsustainability in the first place – namely excessive egotism, rationalism, anthropocentrism and materialism, logic that spawns from being out of tune with Nature. Our discriminating minds are so often too frantic in their analysis of the fragments to see beyond the illusion of their own making.  In becoming conscious of the unconscious presence we re-member the wave is part of the ocean; that life beyond the entanglement of rationalistic projections brings us into the heart of our becoming.

Ecology of exclusion -> Ecology of inclusion

Ecology of separation -> Ecology of emancipation

We do not need to impose another ideology or set of beliefs onto reality.  Instead, we need to hold space for opening and heightening our attention individually and collectively – this way we can allow the truth to co-creatively emerge free from dogma.  Nature within and all around us is the participating aliveness of this co-creativity – we as expressions of Nature attune as unique musical vibrations adding to the orchestral tapestry of Gaia.  There is no better time than the situation we find ourselves in for us to open our hearts and minds to Nature – this is the real beginning of any truly sustainable new paradigm: inspired by and in harmony with Nature.

To explore ‘the new paradigm’ further, join the Face Book community here