Survival

  The Medicine Wheel, as it is presented here, represents a map encompassing all of the possible experiences that can be known by a self-aware being in this world we inhabit, and the relationship these experiences have to one another. It represents the journey from being asleep to who we really are to awakening to who we have always been. We call this journey self-realization and to know this experience is the reason this universe came into being. Evolution has always been about the creation of a self-aware being that could eventually come to know this journey. And this is accomplished by creating a planet that is cpable of producing an organism that can evolve into the self-aware being needed for this journey to unfold. But how is this evolution accomplished and what are the mechanisms that are at work in bringing about these changes?

  Charles Darwin figured this out a long time ago and we now know that this process of evolution is about the survival of a species. Organisms change or evolve as a result of changes in their physical circumstances that require them to be different in ways that will allow them to adapt to these new circumstances. This process has taken us from a single celled organism to the complex organism we call our bodies. Bodies that support the self-awareness needed for the universe to finally experience itself. A body that experiences itself as real and separate from all else in the universse. But this is not where our evolution ends, it is where it begins the last and final stage. And the mechanism at work here is the same as it has always been. We must adapt to our changing circumstances or we will not survive as a species. The difference here is that the circumstances we are confronted with are of our own making. A world so out of balance that our very survival is threatened by the forces we have put in play, by our ignorance of who we are and our connection to the natural world. The change in our being that evolution requires of us is not a physical alteration but rather a change in how we percieve the meaning of life.

  Thanks to a mass extinction event in our past, we have had access to a large amount of free energy in the form of oil and gas that has allowed us to create the modern world in which we live. From the raw material found in the earth, we have created machines fueled by this resource which we have used to transform the face of this planet in ways that allow our numbers to increase and percieved needs to be met. Houses are built to shelter us, corporate farms are created to feed us, dams are built to capture the water we need and things are made to satisfy our insatiable need for another moment of knowing how it feels to attain what we desire and experience being desireless. But because we desire the modern world  that the oil and gas allow us to create, we choose to ignor the consequences associated with using this resource. We want to deny the reality of global warming and pretend it’s just normal weather patterns. We choose to ignor the damage we have caused to natural ecosystems by our overpopulating these systems  and by our need to alter these systems in order to produce the products we think we need. And continuing  to ignor all of these consequencial events means these natural systems will begin to collapse, and since our survival depends on these systems, we will also begin to collapse. The earth will become hotter than our bodies can tolerate, the oceans will rise flooding densely poulated areas, the movement of displaced populations from areas no longer livable to already overpopulated adjacent areas will cause wars and civil unrest, and shifting weather patterns will disrupt food production, water supplies  and kill existing vegetation resulting in massive fires and insect infestations.

  All of this is simply the planet doing what needs to be done to bring things back into balance. And because we have created the imbalance and are therefore the problem, the solution is to eliminate this problem by seriously cutting back our numbers. There are those who would suggest that we are simply a failed experiment and the elimination of our species is just the way of things. The planet is then free to begin anew with another species that might have better luck than we did. But this is not what is happening. The universe has already prodced the self-aware organism that was its intent from the very beginning and what we will experience due to our ignorance is not intended to eliminate us as a species. The intent is for us to awaken from this ignorance through the suffering we will experience. We will be forced to acknowledge that we are animals that this planet has brought forth and are totally dependent on the natural world we thought was ours to command and abuse. We will have to, through observation, come to understand how natural systems work and how we need to be in this world so that these systems will continue to thrive and support us. And we need to do this because our survival is at stake.

  Evolution is at work here. In terms of the Medicine Wheel, the planet is creating the circumstances we need to bring us, as a species, out of the South and into the West. We need to come to realize that our happiness is not dependent on things outside of ourselves but rather on changes to what is happening within. Our survival depends on this happening because if we continue thinking it’s connected then we will just continue to consume the planet until we are eliminated as a species. The journey to awakening begins with figuring out how the world works because, in the process, we will come to realize that we are not actually the doer we thought we were and the question ‘Who am I’ will become a real question. Our survival has always been the impetus that brings about real change. And in this final stage in our evolution, our survival depends on our waking up from the illusion of separateness so that we can have the experience for which the universe was created. We can come to know who we really are.