Shiver and say the words
Of every lie you’ve heard
First I’m gonna make it
Then I’m gonna break it
Till it falls apart
Hating all the faking
And shaking while I’m breaking
Your brittle heart
— Echo & The Bunnymen, from “Bring on the Dancing Horses”
Sometimes I don’t even know where to start. How do you remove the blinders from 10,000 years of programming from people’s eyes? If people are rattled by the idea that milk and meat are killers, not healers, and resist the fact that virtually all behavior common to our world has a destructive effect upon the human body and the planet, how will they ever come to see the deeper problem—the heartless juggernaut that drives a civilization possessed by madness?
The lies of our world are so deep. If we remain blind to them, there’s no way forward. Everywhere we look, there is tremendous suffering—on both a human and a planetary level—and yet the most that people seem to hope for are patchwork solutions for their lives of quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) desperation.
It seems that people today don’t expect much of a life at all: perhaps some relief for their depression, a few pounds lost, the suppression of a few symptoms. Otherwise, they ignore the fact that our culture is largely antithetical to life—human or otherwise—and merely soldier on.
This indicates a very deep programming. I don’t know many people who have truly seen through it. It takes a lot of effort, a deep and abiding desire to live, to see through all the rubbish we’ve been raised to accept without question.
I can’t think of anything more important than shattering the façade of our destructive world. I have such a desire to live—truly live—that I have devoted my life to discovering what’s on the other side, and my greatest ambition is to help you do the same.
It’s probably the ugliest boomerang effect in the history of humankind: a civilization is erected and expanded on the backs of slaves, and with utter disregard to the devastation of living communities the world over—only to come full circle to meet its end by the other side of its own sword.
Our civilization has bullied to death beautiful, vibrant people, cultures, and lands and replaced them with inanimate things. And even now, as it’s all breaking down into pain and chaos beneath the weight of so many missteps, our civilization ignores the truth. Rather than look in the mirror, it clings to glossy images of health and prosperity—all facades, all illusions. The truth is far too ugly to look at. So ugly, in fact, that when we really see it, the mirror will shatter!
My friend asked me yesterday, “So where do you think it’s all going?” This is how I explained it:
We have to observe how life operates. If an organism is cut off from its vital sources—fellow organisms and their shared, interconnected environment—its spirit begins to depart, eventually leaving the shell of the organism for dead. This occurs on a microbial level: the lack of sustaining elements causes the decomposer microbes to break down the organism. The more the good microbes are supplanted with the decomposers, the more this cycle of natural decay accelerates. All living organisms on this planet are thus losing their life force.
Vitality is also leaving the soil, rendering it infertile, unable to conduct the quality of life force into our produce that humans require. This does not mean you should go out and buy a bunch of dietary supplements! It means you change your worldview!
Basically, the planet is dying and the viability of human life is decreasing. This reveals itself multi-generationally: adults today are suffering from low vitality, as our parents and grandparents have, due to industrial living, pollution, smoking, medicines, and mainstream diets of processed foods. The younger generations will have it even worse. The babies to come will suffer even more dramatically degenerated (literally, de-gene-erated) fates. Each new generation is further devitalized, less able to fend off the repeated assaults of modern life on the body. In our civilization, we are not even managing to maintain the status quo; we are passing along ever more de-generation to our offspring.
The days of being able to live in relative physical balance are behind us. Symptoms will increase and the body is going to become a much more difficult place to be. While you may find such statements upsetting and negative, I hasten to remind you that our bodies have been sending out plenty of alarm bells of their own. Ignoring our bodies and repeatedly cutting off communication, generation after generation, has driven society far off course. Pointing out that a train is barreling our way is not being negative. It gives us the chance to jump off the tracks before it flattens us entirely.
Let me repeat, adults today are revealing signs of further degeneration to the human species than generations past. Not only are adults finding it far more difficult to reproduce, but their children are more prone to physical handicaps and mental and emotional imbalances. This will become even more visible and acute in the offspring of the next decade.
The “health authorities” and the media focus so much on obesity and diet, but to little effect. We need to pull out much further and see that it is an entire worldview that is in error, that the obesity problem is just one symptom of a whole life-threatening system.
I went to a fundraiser for autism recently. Normally, I would never attend something like this because it’s mostly a bunch of celebrities and bankers taking on a cause and raising money to give to researchers, which is often useless. It’s just like those breast cancer run-walks and ribbons, which ignore the true causes of cancer (see my 3/2/09 blog, <a href=”/blog-detail.php?ID=63”>Cancer: A Mystery?</a>) and perpetuate the shortsighted work of laboratories and pharmaceutical companies. The kids are the ones who end up paying, while their parents remain in the dark. But I must confess, I attended this event because it was an intimate concert with Bruce Springsteen. Okay, enough said.
Again, if this discussion strikes you as overly negative or threatening, I remind you that it’s never negative to identify a problem in the interest of fixing it. That’s actually a positive thing. This is a time for being proactive, not inactive, apathetic, or delusional—those are the truly negative postures. Simply repeating the mantra of “love and light” will not help.
As long as we’re on the subject, we must recognize that spirituality and materiality fuse together to create the human experience. It seems like people are trying to escape the here and now either by focusing on a better world in the afterlife or by repressing the truth in the name of “love and light.” We can experience neither love nor light until we’ve stripped away the lies of our civilization. Let’s stop pretending to be happy. We will never experience wellness or happiness until we’ve fundamentally changed our worldview. On the other side of the coin are those attempting to escape their pain by going deeper into materiality and carnality.
We need to recognize that humans are spiritual and material. To pursue one at the expense of the other is a death trap. Yet, today more than ever, people are puzzled by the body-spirit union. All life is spirit-infused matter; and matter, as I’ve explained in Raw Food Life Force Energy, is actually light. Therein we have the oneness we seek—so let’s come home to our wholeness, and honor that instead of ripping ourselves apart by choosing sides.
We are what we do, think, and see. We are vessels of our worldview. If we continue to treat the world—and therefore ourselves—as a machine of separate, replaceable parts, nothing will change. Of that we can be sure. We must work to see through our culture of death and reclaim our natural vitality, which predates civilization as we know it, and still exists outside its limits.
In my family, we have two Bengal cats. Of course, they would be more at home in the wild, but their lives are circumscribed by the layout of our apartment. Now, imagine how much their lives would expand and open up if they knew the forest! People of our civilization are likewise limited in their knowledge of life.
Countless beautiful communities once lived in startling and enviable contrast to how we typically live today, but we destroyed most of them in our westward expansion. If you’d like to read more about this, I highly recommend reading all of the works of Derrick Jensen, starting with The Culture of Make Believe and A Language Older Than Words. As long as we fail to understand the alternatives to our current way of life, we’ll be left with a kind of “Sofie’s Choice”—between death and death.
Our bodies and spirits will continue to suffer and degenerate until we wake up and see what’s really going on. Obesity is only one small symptom of a world gone mad. Slavery is another (if you think slavery is a thing of the past, read Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy by Kevin Bales). Child prostitution is another. The decimation of forests is yet another. The list goes on and on and on. As all of these symptoms play out on an ever larger and larger scale, who stands to win?
There is no question that the big engines of our culture are antithetical to life. The good that has survived in our culture—the love, inspiration, creativity, vitality, harmony, and beauty—exist not despite it, not because of it.
The living world is hurtling toward irreversible destruction, and we humans are asleep at the wheel. If you think that you’re somehow above it all, you’ve got a lot of waking up to do. If you think that you’ll be saved by certain social or financial privileges, or by the powers of positive thinking, I repeat, wakey wakey! If you’ve been averting your eyes, it may be the time to have a good face-to-face with your values. Believe me, I was raised on all the wrong values, too, and it took me a lot of re-education and contemplation to change them.
In Detox 4 Women, I explain how the environment has become exponentially more acidifying to the body. Radiation, GMO food, stress, low-vitality air and water, and limited exposure to sunlight in our indoor lifestyles have prevented alkalinity from conducting through the body while these acidifying elements have been pouring in. This has created a full-on devastation to the viability of the organism. Our civilization has wreaked the same kind of devastation on the planet. It extinguishes living organisms and replaces them with shrines to dead things. So the body and the planet are in a state of acidity and low vitality that may be unrecoverable. We have to face that possibility.
If we want to bring vitality back to the planet and to our bodies, we have to give it a reason to stay. For spirit and matter to unite, we have to create viable conditions.
It’s not easy to face all the lies of our world, but it’s much harder to sustain life in the presence of them. We are in the unfortunate—but, I dare say, deserved—position of having to pull ourselves up out of the muck of 10,000 years of greed and abuse of power. Our bodies are not as strong as they should be; the air and water are not the vital resources they should be. At this late stage, we have to call upon the stores of vitality in our hearts and give life a reason to come back to us.
We do this by engaging every part of ourselves: by educating ourselves so our logical minds can see the way; by cleaning our cells and maintaining them so our bodies can recognize true vitality for what it is; by envisioning both what’s wrong and how to fix it, so that we can unite our thoughts and actions in a common, life-affirming mission.
Yours in love and peace after the illusions are shattered,
Natalia
