(Re-)Introduction to the Mind of Gaia
The term Gaian Mind has been defined by visionary ethnopharmacologist and shamanologist Terrance McKenna as “…an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set.”
-The Gaian Mind Institute is an attempt to create a holistic context for the cultivation of the self and the community, and to promote ecological sustainability. Our collective has been awakened from the artificial Matrix and is in the process of re-joining the timeless dream-like dance with the Gaian Mind. This intelligent, sentient, planetary consciousness can reset the compass of our lost species and provide the map for survival at the end of history.
-After 10,000 years of patriarchal violence, domination, and destruction, we're not looking to escape to the stars and leave Gaia a toxic dead zone. We don't seek to colonize new life, and conquer new civilizations. Rather, we'd like to “humbly go where every woman has always been..." We want to explore where the sidewalk ends; where the illusions of patriarchal superiority and control diminish into egalitarian organic chaos. Like a blade of grass breaking through concrete, we express the survival instinct innate to all life: seek the source of sustenance -despite all obstructions to freedom and wildness- here on abundant Earth. We hear the laments of our old friends, the plants and animals, who don't understand why we've turned against them after such a long (pre)history of joyous animistic interconnection. We feel that the mother of the earth and all of her other children want us to stop "playing god" and come home to the love, wisdom, and comfort of the sunrise, the rain, the forests...The spirit of wildness can be experienced anywhere, so for the many of us who are tethered to the city, we have only to greet the day with reverance and respect. We can make friends with the life-force beneath the cracks in the asphalt, open our hearts to the trees outside our windows, close all the "pop-up windows" in our false ego-minds and salvage a meaningful connection to the Gaian Mind.
-The Gaian Mind project is here to provide a safe, loving, understanding, empowering, healing zone for us to all to grow together and build the future that we want. The rice-paper prisons of negative, self-nullifying belief systems are mere compost here. With positive word magic, we consciously keep each other in a holistic collective orbit. We protect each other against the energetic parasites of alienation, isolation, and nihilism. We stand back-to-back, moving slowly through the trecherous nightmare-scape of modernity. We synergize our senses while we re-plant the dream-scape with seeds from all dimensions. As our young roots snuggle into the fertile soil beneath profane "history", we hope to honor all those who came before.
-As young people amidst the global ecological crisis, we believe that a rapid and massive shift toward "natural" intelligence must occur so that bio-regional communities can once again flourish in balance. We know that the hope for a peaceful, harmonious, and sustainable human future rests solely on our commitment to re-design our relationship with the Earth in the present moment. Many of us have had to endure much confusion and trauma to finally arrive at a point of understanding of our role in the history of Gaia. It is thus the project of the Gaian Mind collective to ensure that each new human generation, each new dance with the life-force, be less fearful and alone than we were in the process of "figuring it out." We will not abandon the minds of the youth as our once gaian-minded parent generation did with us.
-The process of reconnection to natural systems is a learning, unlearning, and relearning process. It is in a word, a "cultural" process whereby each individual sees themselves as never alone or without purpose and rather as a part of the grand narrative of the cosmos. Re-calibration to this archaic mode of percieving our relations is the only way out of despair and apathy. Alone we are dead. But together with each other, and the understanding that we are all cells of a living experience that transcends the single human life cycle, we are truly alive and proud to serve the continuum of culture. From this point of understanding we hear the whispers of ancestory and the screams of future generations. They both cry for us to wake up from the spell of the "self" and ground ourselves into the circuitry of the "whole". Across time and space they say we must equip each new generation with the intellectual, physical, and spiritual tools necessary for planetary survival. The sooner we start, the more suffering and destruction can be erased from the future. The deafening screams will begin to turn to laughter, tears of sorrow to tears of joy; prisons to paradise.
-Here is some off-the-cuff sci-fi to illustrate. Of the many possible futures, imagine two mock-ups for juxtaposition. On our current trajectory our timeless spirits can expect to see our not-too-distant physical decendents slaving in Martian mines; genetically engineered, cloned, barely living in lifeless sterile artificial colonies. They may have dreams of a blue-green ball that has something to do with their cosmic origins but they'd never know it. "Galactic history" has been axed from the curriculum because "The Company" learned long ago that introducing concepts such as "trees", "birds," and worst of all the idea that food can actually grow by itself in an "environment" that has nutrients floating freely throughout, would lead to a unexplainable desparate longing in some workers that would cause productivity loss and occasional suicide.
-Cut off from the memory and very knowledge of their paradisical Earthen origins, they might never try to signal us through space/time. They may never attempt to plant visions of their plight in our 21st century collective consciousness that would wake us up to our ways and give us the strength to fight the future. However, some of them are totally recalling their terminated birth-right as Gaians. Knowing that they'll never be able to escape their techno-dystopia to find freedom in physical space or future time, they meditate and send messages in all directions and dimensions. They believe that where ever and when ever the pivot-point is that has led to their doom, it will have enough gravity to pull in their transmissions and those who's minds and hearts are open will recieve them.
-Simultaneously signals from the shamanistic visions and voices of ancient earth plant messages directly into the dreaming minds of our time. Together with these inputs, and with our own intuitive and scientific knowledge, we are able to see the rapidly approaching precipice on the horizon of the future. The pivot point of doom is illuminated as never before and at that perceptive moment the possibility of a new future begins to bubble and pop at the quantum level. In an nanosecond, spirit containers called bodies return to the co-oridinates of the third planet from the sun by the thousands. Like rain drops the modern dreamers can hear their foot steps populating the future. The Gaian future begins to be reclaimed, and the screams of galatic mine-slaves morph into to the laughter of neo-tribal Gaian gardeners.
-The Gaian Mind is not simply the name of a place, it is a cosmology that unites all walks of life. The Gaian philosophy guides our arms to reach out to you, to the past generations, to future generations, and to all life, to create a circle of compassionate intelligence and activity. According to this cosmology, our individual minds are the day-dreams (often nightmares) within the meta-mind of Gaia. As interconnected actors within this organic planetary "matrix," We can learn to vocalize our intent and use our imaginations as paint brushes. With these instruments we can manifest transformation on the canvas of reality. We can "draw a door" out of history and return to the Gaian dream to its natural state of universal joy, well being, and equality. We hope our space can be a portal back to the Gaian Mind, where we can elucidate our collective dreams and apply them to the remaking of reality.
Thanks to Unleash for sharing this awesome quote by Stephen Harrod Buhner:
"One of the reasons, I think, that the Gaia Hypothesis has been so strongly seized upon by so many "lay" people is that it gives them permission to acknowledge something they have long known to be true : that Earth and nature are alive and that we are not alone, nor here for ourselves alone. Many scientists, professors, and scholars, even those who accept Gaia as accurate, have been disturbed by this popularization of the idea. It is as if only the formally educated can use the information wisely, understand it, or develop it further, as if it is somehow dangerous in the hands of the "uneducated". Lack of degrees or formal schooling routinely has been used as a reason to denigrate such popular sentiments ... This is a mistake. Biophilia always seeks to emerge. It will always break through sidewalks, those within and without us. Biophilia and biognosis are natural capacities of all human beings. It is not necessary to formally study, to have advanced degrees, to be in established institutions in order to develop, hone, use, or refine biophilia or deepen it into biognosis ... Sophisticated information about Earth and the interrelationship of its ecosystems and biota is available to anyone. Anyone can learn to understand the language of plants. All that is necessary is the capacity to feel, the willingness to observe in minute detail anything in nature that captures your attention, and the drive to reflect on what is felt and observed. You, yourself, can do this if you wish. If you so choose, you join a nation unbounded by time or geography whose citizens you may meet in any circumstance, a nation whose citizens are interwoven within the life web of Earth and whose work is fostering that life and its intelligence." (Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Lost Language of Plants, Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vermont, 2002, p. 248.)
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