How do we turn ourselves from grubs to butterflies and keep the evolving planet beautiful and healthy in the process? 

          Most people are eager to do something constructive to change their world and many are exploring alternative ways to live. Compared with the lives of our grandparents, almost all of us have already carved new realities out of old misconceptions. To change track in the human reality tunnel, we create and accept new divergent viewpoints and encourage today’s children to run free. Brick in the wall hypnotic drudgery training centers that masquerade as schools have nothing to do with education and only maintain the current course of the Titanic , the illusion of progress. We need to stop working too hard and start playing and learning with our children while they are children. We need to realise that we’re all children playing childish games together at the barbaric dawn of what will one day be a true civilization comprised of self-aware – and therefore responsible – beings. Humans are not that responsible yet. We’re all innocents dabbling at self-creation. To be aware means being aware of the programs and motives that govern our thoughts, words and actions. The destruction of our environment by agriculture and industry is only one obvious result of the blinkers we firmly clamp to the eyes of our children, ourselves.

          It’s heartening to see all the changes for the better that foresighted individuals and groups have made in the last four decades, alerting responsive societies to dire threats and they, in turn, forced their governments and industrialists to address many of them.  We’re beginning to understand the reality of being primates on a finite ball spinning through timespace. We’ve begun to stop cutting down the trees that birth us. We’ve begun to change our wasteful ways. But the best is yet to come and we all have a long way to go. We’re still no more responsible as a species – it’s just that we’ve finally realised that we’re running out of choices. We have to change our lifestyles and our beliefs. We’ve left it so long it’s hard to kid ourselves for much longer.

          The time’s here again to explore and nourish new ideas and lives; we know where the old ways will lead us - and it’s not very pretty. Alternatives are what freedom (and democracy for that matter) is all about. Is your life is an exploration of alternatives to the post-industrial nuclear family suburban nightmare? Or are you more comfortable with toxic clothes, food, air, water and houses, living active half-lives with an exhausted accomplice, hopelessly trying to do what dad and mum couldn’t? It’s impossible to be a whole being or family under the sickening  social and personal conditions most people willingly consent to arrange themselves around - and screens and climate control are no substitute for LIFE.  Neither is mindless wage-slavery, nor borrowing from the future to pay for today’s dubious wants.

          The belief systems and religions that drive our cultures have become obsolete and have led us to this impasse. What we do depends on what we believe. What we believe is up to us, but largely depends on what we encounter as children. The myths that program and direct our cultures are those we’re taught before we can speak for ourselves. They’re all we have to fall back on in new and unknown times or times of stress – the domesticated primate default settings.

          What were you exposed to as a child? What did your parents believe? Can your beliefs evolve, or are they immutably rooted in that past vision of reality? Do you believe that humans have ‘dominion’ over all other life-forms on planet Earth? Do you believe the world must be destroyed before an all-powerful God can return, or that some races are fitter to rule than others? You’re welcome to your opinion.

          What new myths can steer us to a happier, healthier future? It’s time to forget those primitive ones forged of deserts, blood and bone. A religion is a region with a li(e) in it and politicians aren’t the only ones who lie whenever they move their lips. Priests have been doing it for much longer.

          Diversity is paramount if life is to flourish. A thriving diversity of genes, memes, opinions and ideas keeps us alive and growing as a species. A diversity of differing species makes the world more pleasant and stable and the interpenetrating interweaving of their utterly different perspectives holds our world together. But many old tracts and tales are downright pernicious and lethal to harmony and global well-being.

          What we know doesn’t cause us to act – it’s what we believe. And belief is for the blind and the lost. Self-aware beings recognise belief as superfluous – they understand that they are responsible and that all externalised gods and goddesses become demons in the end.

          Can you imagine a better way to live?

 - R.A.