Recognise your conscious responsibility...
Lately i got contacted by a famous Swiss bank that could be interested into sponsoring me. Great ! We talked a bit together and step by step, i successfully managed to win their trust and to let them understand that i could be a great asset for their communication and image. While talking about money, travels, conferences and so on... mainly the usual stuff that sponsors wish to get in exchange, the guy i have on the phone tells me straight :
« What we truly want is to get involved into the sea plastic affair and give into ecology. We need wonderful images with an international impact »
Putting aside the green washing opportunities they may be looking for, i softly battle to get an appointment so they could understand better the guy they're talking to ...and succeeded. I'll meet these guys in a month of now and let's see if we can work together. I need money to train and compete, they need an ambassador for taking part into the journey humanity has to go for... cleaning the seas from plastic pollution.
And then the big question came... How to clean the plastic out of the seas ??? Can i really play a rôle in that ??? I tumbled my mind in all directions and started thinking : « It's just impossible ! We'll need a century to clean our mess ! »
Well, if that's all what i got, they're not gonna like it and this sponsoring opportunity will die in the egg. So i must figure out a way to speak for the good cause of our seas and oceans, rivers and lakes, landscapes and valleys...
Be sure i don't have the solution here... also because massive problems cannot be solved with just a unique solution.
What surprised me facing the belief that this problem is unsolvable, is that i am a guy who believes that « vanishing all illusions, acquiring all knowledge, becoming a Buddha and saving all sentient beings » is an easy task. Normally, solving a problem like sea plastic should be more easy that to realise the wishes of the Bodhisattva, no ?
I naively thought that we just go at sea, collect that plastic and put it in a proper trash. Just like i may have believed that by locking myself into religion could solve my ego issues. But then i realised that this same plastic is already coming from that trash... woops ! So the problem is not in the sea but in our way to manage trash. Pushing it further i then realise that it is not trash management that is the real problem but the fact we produce trash, unfortunately in big amount, simply because we need it...plastic is convenient, ego is convenient.
Meditating the issue, i can only understand that it all lay in our own minds. To change our ways, we must change ourselves. And to change ourselves, we must create our own ways, independently and together in the same time. It's called co-creation.
...
I had a mystical experience once (well, not only once but this one may have its place here), let me count you. It's about our subject: spiritual ecology
During the 2 days break of the big summer retreat, sleepless, i went for an intense night run during which i left unconditional freedom to my thoughts. I was criticizing others, being judgmental and eventually feeling superior. The sweating triggered the explusion of rotten thoughts. At some moments during that run, i was producing to much efforts and entering a battling state of mind. The night being pretty dark i finally fell heavily down a little cliff and badly hurted my knee. How stupid... I went back to my cell walking, bleeding, trying to figure out how i could have went in such trouble. I needed to understand my karma.
Sleep
The next day, i decided to walk my run again and understand what really happend. What left me speechless, still being highly engaged into this mystical experience, is that at every place i could remember my « bad » thoughts of the evening before, i found trash. Where i produced to much efforts, i found old batteries, where i thought i was not a baby i found a baby car seat, where i felt superior, i found plastic and so on. Enlightenment came finally and i understood that all this trash just appeared out of my own mind and it took form in this reality because of the karma i produced.
In a way, all that trash was just here to let me understand about myself. I took a few hours to clean all that shit which i considered mine and once the work done i ultimately found an object that became afterwards a very potent magical tool. Bad becomes good hopefully.
So please understand that all the problems we have, including the plastic pollution, find their source in ourselves. Is it necessary to say that without us, no trash problem would be existing (that's a assumption of course... but it seems only the self declared intelligent beings can make mistakes).
So again, before to clean the oceans, we need to understand how we work and start cleaning ourselves... this is what is called here : spiritual ecology or holistic ecology.
Understand you are not your karma … just as Frankenstein is not the creature, but the doctor who created it.
Yes, our selves are our own unconscious creation and this is where or when things went really wrong. We left ourselves be guided by desires and convenience in a world we should better consider being already fullfilled and perfect.
No Frankenstein, no creature. Simple but right, no ? The underlaying problem of plastic is that it won't disappear with us. We can't just wipe humans hoping it will solve the problem...
It takes a huge amount of practice before one can understand that our true nature is to be unborn and that we are our own creation. If Frankenstein was not this out of it, the creature would never have been a problem. We, humans, are able to create amazing things, alone or together and yes we are meant to be the marvels of this world... in the worse case, we are meant to be the guardians of these marvels we can name and our selves are definitly supposed to be part of that.
« To study zen, is to study ourselves
To study ourselves is to abandon our selves
To abandon ourselves is to offer space for our selves to be revealed in all phenomenons »
We can't get rid of ego, just like we can't get rid of plastics... we can only recycle them and the cycle is infinite. One day maybe we'll realise that more simply, the cycle of plastic is almost infinite, but the plastic itself is not.
All people that are conscious of the existence of the 7th continent do have a continent of trash in their own minds. Don't hide in denial, it would be to simple to believe that unconscious people pollute the world while conscious ones blow the whissle for others to act. No, it does not go like that... only those who are conscious of a problem can find a solution and put it in application. So you, readers, being conscious of the unconscious ones polluting the world are first responsible and before we can find an overall solution, we must all recognise we have an overall problem.
So the manifest of spiritual ecology could be... it's clearly an assay :
1 – the problem one faces exists only in interdependence with the observer of the problem. Yes, sorry to say again but it's all your fault ! You will be part of the solution only if you recognise being part of the problem.
2 – start by cleaning your own and for that, as just said, one must recognise its own problem(s). Because of interdependence, this one will start suffering...
3 – discover the source of that suffering and recognise it, accept it. The true problem IS yourself.
Except maybe the Sentinel tribe, we all live in the same civilisation. We may all have different beliefs but we all have the same plastic bags, the same plastic clothes, the same plastic toys and so on... all the way to the same « plastic minds »...
4 – Rest. You are not alone. There are many people in that world that are conscious of their issues and many have already understood they must change themselves before to change the world.
5 – Start acting. Vision, startegy, action.
Wake the unconscious ones, find ways to re-use these plastics, proceed to the alchemy of transmuting trash into a valuable good that exists in abundance and become that guy that acts against plastics knowing it's anyways all about you and mostly for you and your representent that you'll be doing it.
There is no way to clean the oceans
Cleaning the oceans is the way
I'll get back to all that soon. Until then, be creative with your own.
Good luck and blessings
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