Furthering Life on Earth

The Eight Worldly Concerns identifies the marks of success within a self-centered, competitive culture. The competition game requires the self-centered players to have the willingness to harm others for self-benefit and then ignore the suffering they cause. Earth and life serve as the gameboard. The amoral game only ends with the utter destruction of life on Earth.

No individual player ever wins the game. No player ever has enough. No matter how advanced they progress in achieving success, someone else surpasses them or they get forced off the board by death or some other disabling condition.  Read more

Life always seeks to find meaning in the patterns that appear to us. Let us rediscover the patterns that tell the stories of how we can learn to interbe on Earth with other beings in ways that benefit all. Let us again see the embodied expressions of the sacred within a mountain landscape, in a thundering surf, and in those we might want to reject.  Read more

As long as we remain self-centered, our selfishness will find ways to take advantage of the sacred path. Spiritual materialism describes the ways we can make the sacred path into a hierarchy of enlightenment and a vehicle of ignorance. By accumulating different practices and speaking wisdom-talk, we display our superiority. Exaggerating what we know about the sacred path to impress others masks ignorance.  Read more.

On the sacred path, we learn the sacredness and equality of life on Earth. The Earth Interbeing has no hierarchy. Because of our roots in Western culture, we struggle with equality. We may understand it conceptually, but we do not know how to live equally. If we have had positions in Western culture in which we had power over others, we struggle with this ignorance more than others.   Read more.

Our longing to have more covers and defiles our longing for unity with the sacred. Western culture has equated happiness with material possession. We always look outside of ourselves for the solutions to our problems and for what we want. Through consumption of Earth-stuff, we seek relief from our dissatisfaction and blame ourselves for always choosing the wrong option. Like addicts at the slot machines, we never give up hope that we will find the perfect thing to make us happy and prove to others our perfection.  Read more.

Every being has their own ways of understanding a situation. The wise family respects the voices of every member to learn from others a common way forward. From this collective wisdom, the family discerns how to respond to challenging situations in ways that benefit all. In a family, we need to have a proper perception of each other and situations to know what to do.   Read more

Resistance to change challenges us on the sacred path at every step. We have temptations to back away from the unknowns of this sacred path and to stay with the apparent safety of the known ways of Western living. Yet if we succumb to this temptation, we know that we would increase our complicity with the omnicidal ways of Western culture and further threaten life on Earth. Read more

Experiencing anxiety when deciding about what to do points to a potential values misalignment. Deep within our being we know that what we want to do conflicts with an important life value, causing us distress. The anxiety makes it difficult to know what to do. If we recognize this anxiety as a warning, then we can wisely pause from acting and investigate our values concern.  Read more

At the root of envy and jealousy for the success of others we find a toxic shame for our deficiencies, of not being good enough to have what we see others having. Thus, we prove our worthiness to others through our ambitions and achievements. Titans willingly impose their will upon others and the situation to have their way. Within a highly hierarchically organized culture, we want others to see us as successful. To do that, we don’t mind stepping on those we view as our inferiors. Read more.

When we view the sacred and the sacred Earth as two sides of the same coin, we move beyond the patriarchal view of perceiving the sacred and Earth as subject and object, father and mother. As sacred beings, we seek to recover knowing our sacredness by living in ways that further life on Earth. How we live on Earth becomes the path to knowing our sacredness and to furthering life on Earth.  Read more