I’m trying to piece together several different strands of my recent thinking.

Of all the most recent thoughts, the most important one seems to be the connection between being alienated from the land, and materialism. People have no qualms about exploiting the land when they no longer have a connection to it.

In the last hundred years or so we’ve been moving off the land in droves and often in only a generation or so losing all of our ancient, traditional knowledge. In urban centers and suburbia we don’t ever see the effects our consumption habits have on the body of the earth. There can be no system of checks and balances without the direct feedback you get by living on the land. What we don’t see essentially doesn’t exist.

I’m suspecting that this recent trend of moving off the land is the culmination of our individuation process. The development of ego and the individual self surely started thousands of years ago, but so long as we maintained a connection to the land it could never be complete. We were still a part of nature, a participant in a richly interconnected web.

Moving off the land is the last step in separating and becoming aware of ourselves as discrete beings. It’s a sad state of affairs as we seem to be isolated dots, separate from everything else. Until this historical moment we’ve been connected to the whole, albeit unconsciously for the most part. But moving off the land has to be the last straw. As we see the devastation our sense of separateness causes (and now on a global scale) we can also begin to see how everything is interconnected. The damage we cause to one part of the earth causes a whole web of effects. It’s becoming more and more obvious the more dire our situation gets. But what an opportunity to wake up and see! We evolved out of our unconscious wholeness into isolated selves, selfish egotistical selves. Now we stand at the cusp of a higher state of awareness—a supraconsciousness, of knowing for the first time that we are an inseparable part of the whole. No longer mythically being part of the whole, without awareness, as our primitive ancestors were, but now awake at last to our reality.

When we’re all awake to that knowledge—imagine the beautiful world we could inhabit (if we don’t destroy it in the meantime)! When I think along these lines, it’s an exciting time for the earth. I just pray we can make it through the transition.