"TEACHER SEEKS PUPIL
Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person."
"Nothing threatens the future of the world more than the uncontrolled growth of our species....Population stability can only be achieved if we ignore mythology and pay attention to reality."--DANIEL QUINN " 'Man's destiny was to conquer and rule the world, and this is what he's done--almost. He hasn't quite made it, and it looks as though this may be his undoing. The problem is that man's conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we've attained, we don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world--or to repair the devastation we've already wrought. We've poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit--and we go on gobbling them up. It's hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody's really doing anything about it. It's a problem our children will have to solve, or their children." ISHMAEL "If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds, people with a new vision. It will not be saved by people with old minds and new programs."THE STORY OF B" Another conflict has been created by humans, between the essential nature of conflict, and our desire to find a life free of it. We have slowly removed ourselves from the immediacy of the food chain, to protect ourselves from the conflict of predator and prey. We find then that we still seem to need those battles, and turn against our own to find them, on streets and battlefields. We have reached to shelter ourselves from the elements—only to find that our remove from them creates a deeper conflict with our basic need to be connected to them. An emptiness of soul begins to develop inside our shelter—a conflict with ourselves.
Through medicine and other means of safety we have dedicated our narrow brilliance to removing the conflict against time and inner invaders. We are older, and in one view healthier, than ever before. And again, we find that the result is only a greater conflict between our species and the earth. Overburdened by our swelling presence, it fights back with new disease and difficulty.
The more we try to separate from each of the conflicts, the more we find new conflicts of inner soul, wondering what our purpose is, where we belong, who we are. This becomes a conflict so fundamental that it appears to be a crisis unprecedented in the history of earthly evolution. What other species has ever felt at a loss for its purpose? When every lowly fly knows what we have forgotten, how can it be seen as lowly?" Nature as a Spiritual Path, a book by Eric Alan
