The Age of Awakening:

“Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffaloes are all slaughtered, the wild horses tamed, the secret corners are heavy with the scent of many men and view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires?....The end of living and beginning of survival.” ~ excerpts from Chief Seattle’s famous letter to the President of the US. 

In his book, The 12^th Planet, Zecharia Sitchin provides meticulous evidence, if one were to believe, about the shocking origin of Earth and human beings. He argues that Homo Sapiens and the first great civilisations are an anomaly to the natural evolution process which has taken millions of years to actually shift from using stones to using stones as tools like blades, spearheads etc. According to his evidence, humans were created by beings belonging to a 12^th planet in a genetic modification process which involved the genes of Homo Erectus and themselves. If one wants a bit more scientific evidence, then the theory of Panspermia says that life on Earth or the first organisms that started life was seeded from outside. This theory has the backing of eminent scientists such as Nobel Prize winner molecular biologist Professor Francis Crick and astrophysicist Stephen Hawking.

The beauty of this theory is that it answers one critical question about humanity - in a well-oiled natural machine where every species and natural processes serve a purpose and are intricately linked to each other for survival, what role do humans play? Human behaviour so far, has been more parasitical than interdepending; like the alien weeds which invade local eco-systems and result in massive ecological changes. If you take humans away from nature, nature thrives just as it would if we were inherently not part of the original blueprint of Earth.

“For so long as man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, they who sow the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.”  ~ Pythogaros

In 2013, Nestle’s CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe declared that access to water is not fundamentally a human right and therefore it should be privatised. 

In about three centuries, the definition of nature changed to mean natural ‘capital’ and ‘resources’ – nature commodified to supply us with goods and services in a blatant disregard for other life forms on Earth. As per scientists, human activities and control over nature have resulted in the sixth great mass extinction of species even before we have been able to fully understand how nature works or known its many secrets. Not only that, we have systematically eliminated indigenous tribes and their ways of life for centuries simply because they speak the language of nature. 

As the famous naturalist E.O. Wilson mentions in his latest book Half-Earth, in order to save species from extinction, we have to leave half the planet untouched. In an increasingly violent space, his radically reimagined world is but a practical impossibility.   

“Shiva (male principle, the consciousness, the medium) denotes all things positive and virile…Parvati is the Shakti (female principle, the universal energy, the creator) or the force behind Shiva. Without Shakti, Shiva is impotent.” ~ under a statue in Dakshina-Chitra (TN) – a tantra philosophy.

A similar philosophy exists in the Chinese concept of Yin and Yang (female and male energies respectively) that are present everywhere in the universe. Though mutually exclusive, they complement each other and only together they form a perfect whole. The universe, solar systems, planets, Earth, nature, life and even humans - all function in tandem to this rhythm and balance. The ‘chaos’ of nature and cosmos is mathematically structured. Beauty, whether it’s found in a human face, nature or life, is the existence of this perfect balance.

War, conflict, violence, aggression, abuse, materialism, too much stress on the self – all point to a masculine world order, moving towards a hyper-masculine world order led by 56”chests and similar anatomical features. The evidence is that men are the perpetrators of violence and abuse towards fellow men, women, children, transgender, queer, nature and animals. The evidence is that nature and humanity are on the edge of a precipice.   

And yet, as his own death drew near, Sakyamuni turned again towards the north....“Come Ananda, let us go to Kushinagar”. Like the rest of us, perhaps he longed for home  -  Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard.

In the shimmering global arena today, our economic policies and technology are rapidly changing society’s way of connecting with each other and everything around us, bringing everybody closer, eliminating boundaries and interlinking destinies. But through psychological and social manipulation, emotions and values are being externalised by endless consumption, accumulation of affluence, external approvals and setting one individual against the other.

The result is an increasingly fragile and ephemeral understanding of ourselves and our environment. The result is that we have lost our connection with Earth. The result is that we are looking at Mars for a new home.

Whether we believe in Zacharia Sitchin or Darwin or some divine origin, the fact is that we are here. In this planet called Earth. This is our home. And to create a world order that’s in perfect harmony, we need to go back to the start, reconnect with our planet, our homeland, and relearn lessons from nature. As the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh rightly said, “Cherishing our precious Earth – falling in love with Earth – is not an obligation. It is a matter of personal and collective happiness and survival.”

And perhaps then, only then can we progress from a struggle to survive to an age of awakening and love.