by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Book Excerpt from Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth

“There is now a single issue before us: survival. Not merely physical survival, but survival in a world of fulfillment, survival in a living world, where the violets bloom in the springtime, where the stars shine down in all their mystery, survival in a world of meaning.”
— Thomas Berry


Earth is in distress and is calling to us, sending us signs of the extremity of its imbalance through floods and storms, drought and unprecedented heat. There are now indications that its ecosystem as a whole may be approaching a “tipping point” or “state shift” of irreversible change with unforeseeable consequences.

Some of us are responding to these signs, hearing this calling, individually and as groups, with ideas and actions — trying to bring our collective attention to our unsustainable materialistic lifestyle and the ways it is contributing to ecological devastation, increasing pollution, species depletion. But the momentum of our consumer, fossil-fuel driven civilization seems unstoppable, accelerating the destruction of the very ecosystem that supports us.  

Even the concept of “sustainability” has been co-opted by our culture. Sustainability no longer refers to the sustainability of our ecosystem, its biodiversity and beauty, its wilderness and wonder, but to the very materialistic culture that is destroying it. We want to sustain our energy-intensive, resource-depleting lifestyle, whose very demands are unsustainable by our planet. As British writer Paul Kingsnorth puts it: “Environmentalism is no longer about how to save the environment. It has instead become about how we in the developed world can save our life style.”

Bill Plotkin outlines a way of reclaiming our original wholeness

It’s time to take another look at ourselves — to re-enliven our sense of what it is to be human, to breathe new life into ancient intuitions of who we are, and to learn again to celebrate, as we once did, our instinctive affinity with the Earth community in which we’re rooted. We’re called now to rediscover what it means to be human beings in a wildly diverse world of feathered, furred, and scaled fellow creatures; flowers and forests; mountains, rivers, and oceans; wind, rain, and snow; Sun and Moon.

   
Question: I was thinking of asking about the future.

Bashar: What future?

Q: About the new Aquarian Age and how it’s going to be different from the Age of Pisces.

B: Well, you already know that the idea is that you are creating peace and harmony. This is what we are calling the fourth density reality. It will be where synchronicity will be commonplace. Where you will become a little more rarefied, in that way – rely less and less upon physicality. You may eat less, you may sleep less. You may see the world around you as brighter, more colorful, more energetic, in that way. You will begin to see and hear things that are beyond your senses now, for you will expand the idea of what your senses are. You will travel to the stars.  There will be many things that will be representative of the idea of the new unity that you will create in fourth density reality that you are referring to as the so called Aquarian Age.