Sarah Bush, in our Gaian Commons community, posed this powerful question:
“I was thinking the other day about the fact that insects can live without humans and thrive, but humans can't even survive without insects. That fact doesn't seem to stop the insect apocalypse. And that made me think about how, if humans weren't on the earth at all, all other life would thrive.
I love being incarnate on planet earth as a human, but that's a hard thing to reconcile. Why are we here as a species, really, when we seem to be doing more harm than good? What is the spiritual logic or experiment?
As the species with the most (seemingly, anyway) agency on the planet, is the rest of the planet forced to suffer for some sort of spiritual struggle that humans must work through?”
I love this question. I would say yes. But I would reframe the sentence about “the rest of the planet being forced to suffer for some sort of spiritual struggle that humans must work through.”
I think the setup needs to be a bigger picture, one that holds the problem but can see it from a much broader deeper perspective. I am looking for possibility, a perspective of wholeness here, that might be more tolerant and accepting of humanity’s foibles. And — is there a way to explain this differently that leads to new vistas and new action?
Here is one example of an answer that gives a bigger picture, from one of David Spangler’s subtle realm colleagues. (It doesn’t exactly address the insect question though…)
The Earth is unfolding its inherent sacredness, becoming a planet of Light. This is not happening suddenly nor will it happen overnight. It is a process long anticipated, and now we are in the beginning stages. To you it may seem as if the world is plunging into darkness, but to us, it is becoming more radiant.
To abide this increase in Light, all life on earth must begin to manifest greater love, greater wholeness, greater interconnectedness. This is particularly true for humanity, whose more developed consciousness bears a larger responsibility and need for change.
This could be seen as the development of a new etheric body for the planet, and a new subtle body for human beings.
When you incarnate, you enter a field of connections as surely as you enter a physical body. This field of connections—the subtle part of your incarnation–is what is changing.
It must be more finely woven into the other fields of life that make up your world, and the division between the subtle and physical worlds must become lessened, for this, too, is part of this field of relationship.
In other words, you must become more whole with your world, (meaning more connected and interconnected) with all parts of your world—with the Whole Earth.
The need for this is clear and has been clear for centuries, even millennia. The Christ came in part to set this process into motion.
Now you have reached another stage in this great work. You can build on what has gone before—the traditions of Light, Love and Compassion that have brought you this far, as well as the tradition of Knowledge embodied, albeit imperfectly as yet, in your science.
With these as a foundation, you can now reach into the world in new ways to draw forth newer insights to shape how you inhabit the world.
Incarnational Spirituality is a design project, an exploration into how to make the shift into a body of wholeness capable of incarnating into a sacred world.
It seems to me that answering Sarah’s great question above is about coming to appreciate how our loud crashing through the cosmic underbrush is actually creating our contribution to this design project. This is a living cosmic experiment that we are part of. Our experimenting to find better ways, awkward and bumpy though it is, is serving this design project. This is what it is for.
I love the challenge posed – to see the bigger perspective of how, what, and why we Humans are learning. And how our learning itself is generating content, redesigning the possibilities of an unknown future, revealing the path of a vast mind-blowing cosmic experiment.
Another window into this cosmic experiment and our place in it comes from David’s subtle realm colleague Sarah (another Sarah of good questions and wisdom!):
For millennia, Gaia has been a crèche for humanity. It has been like a stage on which you could discover yourselves and try out different combinations of being human, but always you have held yourselves apart.
But now, it’s time for humanity to become a crèche for Gaia and to hold Gaia within yourselves in a way that allows a fuller nature to unfold for her.
To do this, you cannot be only human. You must find in yourselves the capacities to be angelic, to be elemental, to be stellar, to be Sidhe, to hold in yourselves the elements that are part of or that contribute to the whole earth. This is what you are calling the new subtle body. It is our task to fashion and to enable this blending to come into being.
….We are exploring how to give birth to a new kind of human, a Gaian human—but also new energies of angelhood, new kinds of Sidhe, new forms of elementals. This is not a project limited just to humanity. All parts of Gaia are seeking how to be birth channels for a new world.
At the same time, Gaia continues in her accustomed ways, for there are many lives that still require the “old” Gaia that can simply hold and nurture. The new doesn’t eliminate the old, at least not immediately. But the old can prevent the new, if only by its inertia.
This is a profound shift that is occurring, though different, perhaps, from what many have expected. It is asking us to revision much of what has become habitual and familiar.
We incarnated humans are asked to see the terrible problems that are emerging — and to still go beyond blaming to ask, “What is possible instead? And how can I contribute?”
I believe that guiding our lives with this question will help this profound cosmic re-design to unfold. We are all in this together. Even the insects.