Forgive Yourself: Becoming a Care-Taker for Gaia

crabapple
I‘m not strong on religions that promise to forgive you or grant you ‘redemption’ for things you’ve done or failed to do, or will do in the future. But I am a believer in forgiving yourself. That doesn’t absolve you from responsibility — no matter what conservative political and religious apologists might have us believe, it is evident to me that we are all responsible for everything our species does, and does not do, on this planet, and for every other creature who is, like us, a part of all life on Earth.

It is hard for us to reconcile the idea of self-forgiveness with the idea of such total responsibility. Maybe that’s why, at least in moments of weakness, we look to others for the forgiveness we’re unable to grant ourselves.

For three million years, humans were aware of, and had an impact on, only the small area they gathered and hunted in, their home, their community. They were utterly connected to the small ecosphere in which they lived, which for most of our history did not change significantly in a lifetime. Their responsibility was personally and immediately felt, instinctive and visceral.

Now we are part of a society whose impact is global, and our awareness of the plight of others, a plight caused directly by our own explosive numbers and our rapacious consumption and exploitation, is also global, though this awareness is now indirect. Not only is our new global responsibility so vast it is almost impossible for us to fathom, we are now so disconnected from the natural world, so hidden away inside our own minds, we have to grasp this responsibility intellectually, because we no longer (most of us) feel it emotionally or instinctively.

There are two understandable temptations when faced with such a depressing awareness: One is to tune it out or deny either the damage we have done or our responsibility for it; the other is to be overwhelmed with guilt for this responsibility and our personal inaction to remedy it. I have no advice for those who succumb to the former temptation — I cannot understand or condone ignorance, unwillingness to face, or denial of responsibility.

But for those overwhelmed with feelings of guilt and helpless fury, self-forgiveness is neither self-deluded nor irresponsible. It may even be essential to our mental health.

What’s the argument for self-forgiveness? Well, John Gray says ‘we’ are what we are: each a collection of organs that evolved a brain as a way of optimizing their collective survival and well-being:

We labour under an error. We act in the belief that we are all of one piece, but we are able to cope with things only because we are a succession of fragments. We cannot shake off the sense that we are enduring selves, and yet we know we are not.

James Lovelock has written: Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathological organism, or like the cells of a tumour or neoplasm. We have grown in numbers and disturbance to Gaia, to the point where our presence is perceptively disturbing…the human species is now so numerous as to constitute a serious planetary malady. Gaia is suffering from disseminated primatemaia, a plague of people.

A human population of approaching 8 billion can be maintained only by desolating the Earth. If wild habitat is given over to human cultivation and habitation, if rainforests can be turned into green deserts, if genetic engineering enables ever-higher yields to be extorted from the thinning soils — then humans will have created for themselves a new geological era, the Eremozoic, the Era of Solitude, in which little remains on the Earth but themselves and the prosthetic environment that keeps them ‘alive’.

The mass of mankind is ruled not by its own intermittent moral sensations, still less by self-interest, but by the needs of the moment. It seems fated to wreck the balance of life on Earth — and thereby to be the agent of its own destruction… Humans use what they know to meet their most urgent needs — even if the result is ruin. When times are desperate they act to protect their offspring, to revenge themselves on enemies, or simply to give vent to their feelings. These are not flaws that can be remedied. Science cannot be used to reshape humankind in a more rational mould. The upshot of scientific inquiry is that humans cannot be other than irrational.

So we can forgive ourselves for not trying to remake the entire human race into something it is not. If the world cannot be saved, then rather than feeling guilty we should feel free to make the best of the time we have — to live a full, joyful life and do what we can do to make the world a little better. 

What if we don’t know how to do that? I’ve received several e-mails from young readers lamenting the fact that they’ve ‘wasted’ much of their lives and don’t know what to do to make a difference, to be ‘part of the solution’. But feeling guilty for not having yet discovered one’s Passion or Genius or Purpose is as fruitless and unwarranted as feeling guilty for not having transformed humanity into what it isn’t and saving the world. Hell, I’m 54 and as I explained the other day, I haven’t yet found what lies at the intersection of What I love, What I do well and What is needed. So I’m spending my time doing stuff well that’s needed, but which I have no passion for, and doing some stuff well that I love, but which is mostly underpaid and under-appreciated. Rather than trying to develop a passion for the former, or  ‘create’ a need for the latter, I need to search harder for the work that I already love and do well that is already needed. I know it’s out there.

So now, I’m forgiving myself again — for procrastinating on all those actions and projects that I now realize aren’t quite what I’m meant to do. What I won’t forgive myself for in the future is being distracted and wasting time doing things that I don’t love, or don’t do well, or which aren’t yet clearly needed, or for letting myself get disheartened and holding back from becoming more wholly human and connected and passionate, and doing all that I can do to make this world a better place.

This is almost certainly the last century of this civilization. It has had a pretty long ride — thirty millennia by some reckonings. What the world needs now are Gaia Care-Takers — People who can make our civilization’s final decades times of important learning, each a little better than the last, and as full of love and joy and rediscovery of our connection with all life on Earth as each of us can make it. Until we forgive ourselves for understanding the Big Problems but not finding the non-existent Big Answers, and forgive ourselves for not being satisfied or truly engaged with work that we don’t love or don’t do well or which does not meet an urgent human need, we cannot become one of those Care-Takers and start doingthis important work.

Boy, you’re going to carry that weight, carry that weight a long time…
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make… (Lennon-McCartney)

Fare forward, voyagers. And take care.

Image is the flower of the crabapple, whose essence this South African florist says is a “cleanser, for self-forgiveness and self-acceptance”.

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7 Responses to Forgive Yourself: Becoming a Care-Taker for Gaia

  1. Aayush Iyer says:

    Very inspiring piece. Although you probably could try, to be a care taker hope is minimal. The people we see around us not only ruin everything, but also collectivel depress the situation of help. This article needs a wider audience to hopefully bring this to light.

  2. lugon says:

    I respectfully disagree (with Aayush Iyer), or maybe not. I do what I do, what else? One of the things I do is talk, and listen. In my listening, I do find other people who, they too, are changing.The phrase “the last decades of our civilization” is a good meme. It’s the civilization that may have to go, not us or, of course, Nature. So be it.I guess what I’m trying to say is that there are more people “ready” than we may think at first sight. I hope! :) I’m more “ready” than I was say a month ago – this I do know.It’s useless to feel alone, for we are not.

  3. Nick Smith says:

    Dave, I adore your passion and concern for the human race but I think just because we have ‘failed’ in life is not reason for despair or to resign ourselves to a sticky demise but instead to accept responsibility for what we have created, admit that we have been wrong and let this be the catalyst to change our minds so we become part of the solution instead of the problem. IMHO, the problem is not in the world but in the mind that created it – same place as the solution; and it is NEVER too late to change our minds. I totally agree with your sentiments about focusing on ‘love and joy and rediscovery of our connection with all life’ but I don’t see how this is possible in a fearful atmosphere of impending doom. This is a subject I care about deeply and not enough space here to give a full response so I’ve posted about it on my blog.Thank you for the post Dave and getting me to think.

  4. I agree we all share responsibility. The important point to remember, in self-forgiveness, is to realize the limits to the part we can play, as well as our own fallible humanity. To forgive, we must think small–exactly the opposite of what we must do in order to act with hope and faith that we can do anything in the face of so much hopelessness, helplessness, ignorance and denial–which seem to be in such great abundance these days that we can get buried under them. Even in action we can only do one thing in a given moment. That realization can become less overwhelming if we factor in one thing–humility. It’s not any one person’s place to do it alone.The Dalai Lama, leader of a religion as well as a nation in exile, makes a habit of going out to look at the stars at night to remind himself how small he is in this universe.Dave, I think you provide a great help, just by keeping this blog. I’ve learned a lot here, and I’m sure others do, too. You’ve increased my awareness more than I can measure.

  5. medaille says:

    I must say that over time, I fluctuate between thinking we are doomed due to all the people that are slow to learn around us and thinking that maybe, just maybe the tides will turn soon enough. I tend to believe that the universe is here for a purpose, and I believe that purpose is to help us learn as many of the lessons as we can. Other websites that I’ve been to in the past (Montalk.net sticks out) seem to suggest that we’re in a battle of good vs. evil entering a critical era (2012, obviously), which they attribute to an energy wave that will be passing through earth, which carries soul-energy eating aliens. The better good does the more souls that enlighten before the aliens get here. The better evil does, the more tortured souls are here to feed on. This will delay the amount of time that it takes for them to reach enlightenment. I’m not sure if that’s true, as I tend to believe that the creator wouldn’t leave everyone out to dry like that, but under the law of freewill that option might be necessary. The thing that keeps me pondering that option is that it seems like “evil” is making a hurried effort in recent times. Neocons are pushing hard. China is pushing to outdo the neocons at their own game, to which the neocons don’t really care. It seems we are ripe for a situation in which we emit lots of negative energy (which negative entities feed off of according to montalk).We certainly are on the knifes edge of dramatic climate change, at the very least which raises the stakes a lot. We also are entering an era of enlightened thinking to a certain degree in which we are capable of living sustainably. So it seems like we are in a race against time.Back to planet real, I’ve received several e-mails from young readers lamenting the fact that they’ve ‘wasted’ much of their lives and don’t know what to do to make a difference, to be ‘part of the solution’. I definitely know how these readers are feeling, as I am still very young. I’m in the process of shaking all the socially programmed crap out of head and better aligning myself with my true self, which definitely feels like I’m becoming more human. I don’t feel like I’ve wasted my life though, as I think I have a better grasp then most at the struggles that we must face to live life true to ourselves especially given the hole we have to climb out of that was given to us by society/school. I’m constantly bumping into parts of myself that I can tell aren’t who I really am, which I assume must have come from the school/society’s programming as well as choices I’ve made without realizing the lasting consequences. But they still unconsciously influence my thoughts and actions and prevent me from moving forward as fast I would prefer or as fast as I could go if my conscious was running the show completely. If you listen to Gatto, primarily his 7 lesson school teacher speech, that’s what I feel like. I feel like I’ve been programmed to be passive and submissive (basically a wage slave drone), so I’m in this daily struggle where I consciously try to be more proactive but my unconscious is dragging me back to inactivity (consumption of something to waste time) because I assume it feels more comfortable since I’m used to it. Slowly, I’m winning though, but it takes time. Today, I stumbled upon Idenics, which in my preliminary reading, I find fascinating because it seems to align with what I’m trying to do (free myself). What I’ve been trying to do is to figure out what building blocks of knowledge people have and throw them concepts that they can digest that I have found useful in understanding the predicament that I’m in and that most others are in, many others don’t wake up until they hit a mid-life crisis and some don’t wake at all, so I’ve been trying to give people the tools to wake up.Oh yeah, what I was trying to get at initially with all the religous babble is that I find a lot of peace in my life. This peace comes from my faith that in the end, despite all the struggles we’ll endure, I will return to the creator (whatever it may be). I find peace in the synchronistic signals that pass through my life and the people I draw towards me. I find peace in knowing that despite my unconscious’s strong grasp on who I am, I, my true self (consciousness, spirit or whatever) will ultimately prevail despite the weird crap my unconscious throws into my daily life. Knowing that despite my mistakes, I’m constantly becoming a better version of myself is comforting. In that respect, I really feel a sort of somberness for people aren’t awake yet. There are a lot of people in my life who aren’t even ready to understand how addicted to consumption they are, when they should be investing in themselves.Here’s one thing that really helped me find myself. I’ve always been great at analytical thinking and 3d-spatial thinking. Out of high school though, I felt emotionally numb, sort of as if I’ve been isolated from my body to a certain extent or that my brain has become virtualized like in a video game. In my third year in college, I finally got sick of feeling emotionally numb. I felt that I was missing out on not feeling the full range of emotions that people are supposed to have. At that time, I remembered watching this video clip on VH1 in high school. I remember the clip vividly. It was a short interview with Carlos Santana. He was talking about his spiritual guide (a real person) who had advised him to pray to the angels that watched over him to rewire his brain to better align it with what his God had in mind. So some 3-4 years after watching the clip, during a time when I was extremely humble and ready to let (trust) another entity rework my brain, I asked God/my higher self/any positively aligned angels/spirits to rewire my brain to more closely align to what God aspired for my to become. After that time, I started to notice odd things. I started to notice that for long periods of time (like a week) whenever I would be walking every stoplight would turn green, so that I wouldn’t have to stop and wait for traffic. After not being home for 6 weeks, when I finally returned there, I noticed that my memory of my hometown (pop. 5500) was really spotty. I wouldn’t remember where certain buildings where, which I should remember. It felt real obvious that I was a different, better person, but yet still the same person.This is what set me down the path that I’m on now, so if that’s of any use to any of you, I would highly recommend it if you are ready to move forward in your life, because the positively-aligned spiritual entities that watch over you know what’s best for you even better than you do as they are not confined with the programming and ego that we are.

  6. SB says:

    Ah, Dave — it’s a small thing, I know — but your thinking and writing holds me up.

  7. Dave Pollard says:

    What an illuminating discussion thread! Thank you all for your comments, inspirations and stories. It’s interesting how some people get agitated by the juxtaposition of my resignation about the world and my growing enthusiasm for doing something to make it better. Whenever I’ve had my Tarot cards read (three times) the Hanged Man has always come up. The interpretation is often one of resignation or self-sacrifice, but I am beginning to think it is more a sign of coming to grips with paradox, a concept that I have a growing appreciation of — and something in abundance in most complex systems. (I remember when I was a teenager a young child came up to me and told me a riddle: What is a paradox? The answer, the child told me with a laugh: A box of quackers. — a double pun!)

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