Return to Nature

“When life is simple, pretences fall away; our essential nature shines through.
By not wanting, there is calm, and the world will straighten itself.
When there is silence, one finds the anchor of the universe within oneself.”

Living The Wisdom Of The Tao
The Complete Tao Te Ching and Affirmations
by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

I am retreating more and more from the society I am supposed to be part of.
In one way it is a conscious choice based on my observation of the accelerated momentum towards things artificial and unnatural, but in another way I almost have NO choice: everything about western society makes me sick.

For most of my life, I’ve lived on the fringe of this society, one foot in and one foot out, but now I can barely participate in it or even pretend anymore.
Unfortunately working full time has been, and still is, necessary to pay bills, survive and support my son, so I can’t escape completely, not right now anyway.
The best I can do is pretend I’m one of THEM during work hours and outside of those hours, return to the simplicity of a natural life: no computers, no Internet, no TV, pure and natural food, fresh air and Nature, open spaces, slow motion, a spiritual focus, simplicity and solitude.

Eustace Conway hits the nail right on the head when he compares the circular motions that flow through a natural life and the square, box-like structures that surround and confine us in this artificial society:

“I live in nature, where everything is connected, circular. The seasons are circular. The planet is circular, and so is its passage around the sun. The course of water over the earth is circular, coming down from the sky and circulating through the world to spread life and then evaporating up again. I live in a circular tepee and I build my fire in a circle, and when my loved ones visit me, we sit in a circle and talk. The life cycles of plants and animals are circular. I live outside where I can see this. The ancient people understood that our world is a circle, but we modern people have lost sight of that. I don’t live inside buildings, because buildings are dead places where nothing grows, where water doesn’t flow, and where life stops. I don’t want to live in a dead place. People say that I don’t live in the real world, but its modern Americans who live in a fake world, because they’ve stepped outside the natural circle of life.

Do people live in circles today? No. They live in boxes.
They wake up every morning in the box of their bedroom because a box next to them started making beeping noises to tell them it was time to get up. They eat their breakfast out of a box and then they throw that box away into another box. Then they leave the box where they live and get into a box with wheels and drive to work, which is just another big box broken up into lots of little cubicle boxes where a bunch of people spend their days sitting and staring at the computer boxes in front of them. When the day is over, everyone gets into the box with wheels again and goes home to their house box and spends the evening staring at the television boxes for entertainment. They get their music from a box, they live their lives in a box! Does that sound like anybody you know?
BREAK OUT OF THE BOX!
You don’t have to live like this because people tell you it’s the only way. You’re not handcuffed to your culture! This is NOT the way humanity lived for thousands and thousands of years, and it’s NOT the only way you can live today!”

(Excerpt from 'The Last American Man' by Elizabeth Gilbert)


The seductive promises of escalating technology, fancy new gadgets, fast food and fast information have lured us away from Nature and hypnotised us into believing we are separate from and superior to Nature.
An affluent, super-intelligent society? I don’t think so.
Our spirits are starving.
What I see around me is mass somnambulism and mindless consumerism; even yoga has become tarted up and packaged as an attractive consumer item.
And most people I know are either over-stimulated or medicated with TVs and iPods and spending sprees and a continuous barrage of information that's irrelevant to their daily life.
Not to mention the advertising that is continuously drip fed direct into our bloodstreams.

Why don’t people see this?

Wake up everybody.

Open your inner eyes and look at everything you’re doing, why you’re doing it, how much and what you're buying, the culture that you’re perpetuating and supporting.

Pierce and penetrate with your laser vision into the centre of everything in your life.
Because everything we do and every small occurrence has meaning and significance and is shaping our rapidly evolving life in a whirlwind of changes; the final form we evolve into from this process will be evident only at the point of death…it will exist for one fleeting moment…then be extinguished with our last breath.

Wake up to what is REAL and ALIVE in your life right now, because it is truly beautiful, and every moment we spend unaware of this is a moment we’ve lost forever.

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
Martin Luther King Jr.