Waste is Not a Dirty Word!

I'm always struck by ways people handle adversity such as the apparent conundrum of whether to light the candle or not--with all the attendant implications. I don't believe that this needs to be experienced quite as ambivalently as many people seem to do.

While we learn how to think of multiple circumstances or influences as logically conflicting or competing, our reality allows for mathematics and logic but isn't only logical. We sleep at one moment and wake at the end of that moment, but sleeping and waking aren't conflicting although we can conceptually impute that conflict. Neither is the fact that we need both sleep AND activity deceptive as far as I can tell. But I agree with Darren that facing this apparent conundrum, accepting accountability and abundance at the same time, moves us towards a potentially better perspective--a richer social and psychological dynamic.

It can seem that rampant consumerism supported by an expansionary capitalist ideology and military superiority sits on one side of this conundrum while world-renouncing, medieval monks sit on the other. But we might as well throw in pagan hedonists, Talmudic Jews, Hungarian farmers, and gorillas (sure, gorillas, why not). Rather than a simple dichotomous conflict, we have a rich background to draw from and luxuriate in. The conundrum is artificial (waste is not a dirty word), but that we feel the pull of different perspectives is not. It is the same good will that motivates one towards devotion (light the candle) or thrift (save the paraffin).

Our minds and bodies thrive on diversity, but only when they are well-rested. When we're exhausted and stressed, dealing with a wide array of choices adds difficulty, mental stress, anxiety, etc. Focusing on one simple candle and one simple feeling not only reduces the stress (in a medical sort of mode) but also enriches this very moment experientially. We can feed all of the apparent conflict into one simple flame--for a while, for a moment. We need those moments just like we need sleep.

When we aren't accustomed to setting aside all of the hubbub, when we aren't accustomed to renouncing psychologically, the physical renunciation (don't light the candle) ends up being a symbolic attempt to express that good will. But we can see and feel that the symbolic expression of devotion and good will can be lighting the candle at one moment and not lighting it at another. Psychologically, the conflict involved in "should I light the candle or not" is energetically wasteful. But if this sort of psychological struggling is your symbolic expression of your desire to be good, be good.

Ramana Maharshi, when asked what is the best posture for prayer or meditation, replied that there is only one true posture--submission to the divine. Practicing moments of simplicity and moments of appreciating abundance allows us to light the candle and not light it too. If we don't look for the right or entitlement to light the candle, we can also give up any moral superiority involved in not lighting it. Then there is peace in the renunciation (not lighting), peace in the flame too.  While our practical decisions will never be perfect and complete, we can allow some moments in our lives to be peaceful.  Sometimes that feels perfect and complete.

Thanks for a very interesting article, and the pondering it generated. I too have wondered for a long time what exactly our place is.

Are we merely part of the organic stream we call "life", appearing and disappearing in a flicker of geologic time?

Are we aliens to this world, able to fashion whatever tools we might need in order to rise above (for a limited time) the gnashing and tearing of the pit below?

Or are we truly transcendent, putting on and taking off costumes of flesh, playing out roles of our own unconscious choosing before someday returning Home?

I feel myself in all three of these, and wonder which is the true...

www.flickr.com/photos/21366765@N03

My friend, you may call me Love, or The Loving Mother.

You wish to know about the plants and forests. All of these things, along with your human selves, are my children. You are born of me, and spring from me. I LIVE as you do and hold my place in the firmament as I indulge my longing for the higher virtues, the greater understandings. I, too, have questions to be answered, but I am happy to take this opportunity to answer those of yours that I am able.

Is there intelligence in lifeforms beyond those you understand to be "cognizant?" Do plants, rocks, birds, air, have intelligence? Yes, my friend, you would be frightened if you knew the scope of intelligence and that it exists in all things. But you would not recognize intelligence in all of these areas because it does not correspond to your ideas regarding that which is worth thinking about.

For plants, it is not so necessary for them, as it is for you, to express individuality. They are not as ego bound as you are. They require no such proof of their aliveness as individual achievement provides for you. Make no mistake, your path is not wrong. You are clearly designed to express differently than plants, but you would at times find comfort in being a little more like them, if only because you share a common ancestry through the earth.

And so, communing with me, Mother Earth, and with my rooted babies will feel naturally pleasant for each of you.

With regard to the future of this planet, there will continue to be earth movements, erratic weather patterns, earthquakes, volcanos, and so forth, as adjustments take place. And many will continue to predict doom. Those who require--or create for themselves through expectation--such experiences will "enjoy" them, while those focussed elsewhere will manifest a different experience. I am not really all that disturbed about the havoc you humans have wrought on my surface. It is like a case of adolescent acne. It is transient and correctable. Such is the "nature" of my work; of my larger self. You have made ugly scars upon me on a microscopic level, and you have killed my creatures in your attempts to assert your superiority, a longing created by your negating your own larger self, and a dwelling upon the outer, or physical self which is all many of you perceive as reality.

What you have caused, in your clumsy efforts to own, to command, to provide yourselves always with more of what you think you do not own--and more of what you feel will make you better, of happier persons--these things I have in abundance. My surface skin is resilient. If you drink my oil, I have more to give. If you tunnel deep within my surface, I heal the wound. Through a small hiccough I right again the things you made "wrong."

Watch a colony of ants. Their endeavours are so important to them, as their little social structures they uphold; as their hierarchies of leadership they employ; as their minute grains of food they labour to forage for their community. They seem so self important as they burrow holes through my soil and my trees, and yet they are but some of the tiniest of creatures. Watch yourselves as you make your way through your day, scurrying, hurrying, worrying about all the things that seem so important, so world shatteringly important to you. Realise you are but ants, going through the same survival processes, but for your minds which add such complexity to your doings. There is truly nothing more important in your lives than eating, creating, recreating and procreating. All else is just the lemon wedge on the edge of the glass.

Abundance is all around you. I am abundance. And this is my gift eternally to you. Even in the raped forests there is yet abundance; there is yet life. Moreover, there remains in such ruins the expectation of new growth, and as much courage, determination, enthusiasm, love, optimism and joy in the fledgling growths as in any mature forest. After all, the souls inhabiting my creatures great and small are all equal.

If the exact destiny of the world, of myself and all my babies could be foretold, it would naturally take the fun out of living! Be unconcerned, for it is enough to raise your arms in loving tribute to the Sun and to the Creator with absolute faith that love shall not lead you astray.

Thank you everybody who contributed to this delightful conversation. I am a new member on this site but I know that after the great treat I came across here today I will be returning daily.

I think many of you, including Mother Earth, have raised the valid point of man often needing the reminder that he is just another small cog in the function of Gaia, rather than a companion or co-presider of her, but I think that there is an aspect to humanity that can still be discernable from nature, at least within our scope of perception and understanding (which, after all, is all we have). I'm afraid I'm an idealist, and conceive the reality placed before us as necessarily an outgrowth of our own individual/collective perceptions. How could we have this conversation if we all actually believed that we humans care only about things that merely SEEM important to us and not to the rest of existence we know and share? What we perceive to be important is all that we can know to be important, and I believe that the fact that some of us can be gathered here today and see the organism Gaia as important enough to discuss the possible role of ourselves in relation to it is something to be accounted for. I've now caught myself rambling a bit, so I'll just finish with a quote that kind of wraps up what I'm trying to say here:

"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness." - Andre Malraux

Thanks for responding!

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Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence. -Santayana

Thankyou for this bold and well-written article. However I think there are a couple of things you may have overlooked.

"Waste" has two meanings. The first is the one you focus on in this article: inefficiency. "What a waste," we say, "that could have been put to better use." The other meaning however, specifically when applied to the stuff we throw away, is to describe stuff that has become useless. There are degrees of uselessness, of course, and throwing something away simply because it's become useless to us is a "waste" in the first sense. But as the uses to which we can put a thing become exhausted, it becomes critically important how we dispose of it as to whether it then has any further use to the planet as a whole.

When we dump all of our rubbish into a single place, this renders it all essentially useless for anything but breeding bacteria, fungi, and generating methane. As we become more conscious about separating our rubbish, recycling, composting, we increases the number of uses to which it can be put, not just by us but by the Earth when returned to it; we push back the line where it becomes useless waste.

Then, there are some forms of waste for which there really can be no conceivable use. Pollutants and radioactivity, once concentrated enough to be deadly to all life in their vicinity (in the case of radioactivity, for potentially millions of years), surely can't be justified or considered a good thing by any stretch.

The other problem you've overlooked is regarding extinction. Extinction, even mass extinction, is a natural process, yes, and new life arises to fill ecological niches, but there needs to be sufficient genetic diversity left behind in order to exploit those niches. My fear is that the rate of extinction we are witnessing today, the fastest ever in the history of the planet and getting faster by the day, is such that diversity will be so severely compromised that life may never again be as abundant as it is today.

I firmly believe that climate change is not the greatest threat either to human survival or to this planet - it may seem rapid but it's happening on a generational timescale which gives some chance for species to adapt. The greatest threat is mass extinction due to man's escalating destruction of habitats, particularly rainforest, which simply gives no time for adaptation and survival. We could easily lose most of a gene pool that has taken the entire history of the Earth to build. If that isn't a waste I don't know what is.