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Living within a living, loving planet
Archive for February, 2015
Externalising Cost of Doing Business
Feb 27th
Externalising Cost of Doing Business
I’ve just finished reading John Michael Greer’s latest blog post concerning external costs of doing business. Following is a comment I made to his post.
Early in the Industrial Revolution in England, for instance, Josiah Wedgewood and other industrialists paid their workers subsistence wages. Through various acts of enclosure, from 1660 to 1845, 14 million documented, double that if undocumented common land could be included, acres of commons were privatised. Add this to the rights of primogeniture encoded to ensure that real estate passed to the eldest son, and you find hundreds of thousands of people with no other option than to accept subsistence wages. Finally, I’ll come to the point. Thanks to this post, I now see that these pitiful wages were actually a form of externalisation because the poverty workers found themselves required support from elsewhere to enable them to maintain a healthy enough state to show up for work. It is quite easy to build family capital when you pay out in pennies and sell for pounds.
What is Planetary Psychology?
Feb 13th
A planetary psychologist is one who studies the psyche of our planet Earth. Understood is the necessity of investigating Earth’s psyche in a wholistic manner. Just as in humans, Earth’s psyche must not be separated in a dualistic manner. Wholistic study is only relevant from a “oneness” structure that sees the physical and the spiritual as two sides of the one coin. Planetary psychology must be closely knit with ecology, and the physics and chemistry of Earth.
An updated worldview is called for that places life as we know it as in, among and inseparable from Earth itself. Humans, for instance, do not live “on” the planet, they are the planet. The terms animate and inanimate no longer serve when we view earth as a living entity. Following on, planetary psychology accepts that earth as a living planet is conscious and accepts the responsibility to investigate just how human and other than human beings share in that one consciousness.
There is an ancient and on-going human tradition of non-duality. A form reminiscent of Advaita Vedanta teaches that to view ourselves as having a separate consciousness within that looks out on a world without is an illusion. There is only the looking and no looker. There is only one consciousness. This consciousness permeates the Universe. Planetary psychology limits itself to the study of how humans relate spiritually to universal consciousness as it has been expressed by the planet. All physicality expresses the one consciousness limited only by the number and variety of sensory apparatus that has evolved.
See Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism by David J. Chalmers
http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf
See Planet as Self by Sky McCain http://www.earthenspirituality.com