Nature Worship

 

I chose a provocative title for this essay to let Google to bring in some evangelical types to take note of something nice for their otherwise fearful souls.

Love your neighbours as you love yourself

We humans are creatures sharing space on this planet with billions of other creatures. The human animal is not any more special than any other. We humans are predators by nature, and as Wayists we must free our souls from this nature. As long as human body-mind does the thinking for the soul, we will be predators of the worst kind. We must free ourselves from the animal's way of thinking, think with soul-mind.

Iesous said, "...and love your neigbours as you love yourself" If you think about it, Iesous gave only two main teachings for all humankind to be freed from samsara. First, He taught the good news that we have a God, our Father in Heaven, who cares about our spirituality, who has a vested interest in our spiritual growth, and that we will be born again in Sukhavati. Secondly, Iesous taught, "...and love your neighbors as you love yourself"

We share space with other beings that are in God's eyes any bit as important as we are. We have to be good neighbours, kindhearted and conscientious citizens. They are not intelligent as we are with certain things but they posses intelligence and bio-tools that are far superior to ours on many different levels. They have higher ethics when it comes to co-habitation, neighborliness, and community organization. They do not kill unless for food. They are generally very peaceful and only pose a threat to us when we threaten their survival, their food source, their children, their living space.

We humans have a terrible rack record as neighbors. We wage outright war and commit genocide every day. We conquer their land, destroy their communities, rob hem of their food sources and drive them out. We wage chemical warfare against them. We employ "pest control" bounty hunters to arrest and kill them when they dare come back and try to live alongside us in their ancestral land. create factories to breed them by the billion each year for slaughter. We are the worst of the worst kind of predator this planet has ever seen in its very, very long history.

Our souls are paying the price. We may need to incarnate again, and again, for thousands of years lest we learn to love our neighbours as we love ourselves.

Worship through Nature

Although we say Namaste to fellow human beings, we must admit that it is often hard to see the presence of the Divine is them humans. It is admittedly easier to say Namaste to trees, squirrels, rabbits, chimpanzees, cats, dogs and gorillas. For some, it is a challenge to think of skunks, raccoons, jackal and such as imbued by the Divine presence. Nevertheless, flowers, grass, water, lakes, the ocean, insects and mammals all make it easier for us to experience the Divine in all things. What a wondrous world they created and live! What wonderful creatures they are! We just have to learn to be more like them and less predatorial, less of a bully, more polite and better neigbours.

Most humans can gain lifetimes of soul growth by simply embracing a heightened awareness and love of other species, of our neighbours.

For those of you who think it is easier to love your human neighbour as yourself, try living in my house. The human neighbour is a real challenge to like, he destroys, love, trust and nature, but the squirrels, raccoons, opossum, butterflies (and their caterpillars), mice, even the ants are better natured and a delight to share one's space.

And then there is hypocricy

Some people are "cat people" who love animals to bits. They spend a fortune of vets. The market for pets and pet food in the West has increased beyond capacity. People spend more money on pet food than on education.

Yet, they eat meat. They make a fuss when someone culls a deer and they see pictures of blood on the carcass, yet they eat meat. They make a fuss when they see in developing countries how people slaughter animals to eat, because at home there is no blood, no skin, no featers, just civilized guilt-free meat.

Three days before Christmas of 2014 I walked into a poverty stricken village in Cambodia. Villagers took us to see a household who needed urgent help. The mother gave birth to a 3-months premature baby, she was not lactating, the baby too weak to eat and they did not have money for medical help. Nurses at a clinic inserted a feeding tube into the baby's tummy and the mom injected cow milk with a syringe into little Sombat's tummy. The family lives on a septic swamp land (Government build a road that prevents natural drainage of the swamp). Talking to doctors in town, it became clear that we needed more money to help than what we had available. We needed at least $2,000 to save the child and the mother who was going septic from untreated birth trauma. We started an urgent fundraising campaign. It was bad timing, being Christmas and all because people have lots of expenses that time of year. Also, two of our friends had problems with their pets and were also looking for money. One's dog was run over by a car, broke his pelvis and he had to raise $8,000 urgently. People pitched in quickly and saved the dog, raising more than $10,000. Another's cat had been shot with an airgun and the vets needed $3,500 to remove the pellets and operate on the brain to remove a pellet from the skull. Sad to say, when Sombat died on January 6th, we had raised only $280. We managed to get some formula to the mom but did not have enough to secure a spot in a pediatric ward.

Rest in Peace Sombat