Planet Patriot

Planet Patriot
The Purpose of Unity
by Ger Agrey-Thatcher

The Love of one’s country is a splendid thing.
But why should love stop at the border?
Pablo Casals


There is nothing united about nations these days. ‘United Nations’ is an oxymoron. The acronym says it all: ‘UN’. When we view a satellite photo of the Earth, we cannot see borders. Nature has an utter disregard for political boundaries Calls for the end of nations has been made many times, yet to replace them with a multinational Democratic Union is an even more preposterous solution. We must dissolve the United Nations in toto, along with the religious doctrines and bodies politic which separate us.

Individuality Revisited

To believe that we are autonomous, self-sufficient or individual is the most dangerous of delusions. If we are average humans, we die after being deprived of air for more than five minutes. After three days we perish from lack of water. One month is our limit of life without food. We cannot produce these elements from ourselves. We are wholly interdependent with Nature for our existence.
Yet we go to extremes when we choose to magnify ourselves in the face of the universe. We pride ourselves as the crown of Creation, or we invoke divine privilege to place all things natural under our feet But when we describe Nature in poetry or prose, or depict it in our paintings and scientific theory, we tread a tenuous terrain. For most of us, Nature provides us with sport and recreation; naturalists delight in portraying wild creatures at play. It is hard for us to engage in this frolic freely, because we must bear the burden of our culture wherever we go. Sisyphus has replaced Moses; we must carry the Tablets of the Law back up the Mountain every time we go camping for the weekend.

The truth is that we cannot write or say anything about Nature that is not our own ‘View’. Our literature testifies that we use Nature as a mirror to reflect our most elevated thoughts and feelings to ourselves. But when we ‘turn our mind around’, we see that Nature is a majestic and mysterious metaphor for the wilderness of our own uncharted in-scapes.

Too few humans have equipped themselves for the intimate journey. Fewer who dare to venture into that lucid void remember to leave a map for others’ explorations. All who return are quite beyond speech.

Nature speaks many languages. Humans speak none of them. It is left to poets, prophets and sundry caretakers of the soul to decipher the dialogue of the dolphins, the tongues of the trees, or the voice of many waters. One thing is certain: Nature prefers the lyricist to the linguist. No other reason for comparing robins to rhapsodies or peregrines to poetry is needed.

Imagining Evolution

When we imagine that we are evolving creatures, the issue becomes even more ironic. Nature has produced us, and has evolved a mind in us. Because we are products of our planet and our cosmos, it is madness to assume that the world that surrounds us -- and is us -- is in-itself unconscious, without its own purpose, intent or destiny.

Our environment proves to us that we are not single and separate, though we believe ourselves self-reliant. Thousands of libraries are overstocked with books by Emerson Horatio Alger, Napoleon Hill and Tony Robbins that promise to make us giants in the world or become supermagnets for money and the opposite sex. The American Dream has gone begging in their pages. Their advice has created too few real leaders, sex idols or millionaires.

These authors teach us that purpose is personal. Mother Theresa believed the opposite. Any sane CEO or successful entrepreneur instantly recognizes that s/he and the company is useless without the peak- or purposeful performance of the workforce. So the next time you attend a great movie or read a famous author, read the credits and the acknowledgements page; you will find an army of people whose purpose was on fire to get the job done.

If our solitary actions lack the ability to make any real difference, then there is only one question which demands an urgent answer: What is our purpose on planet Earth? Aneven more dramatic question is: What is the purpose of our planet? We are the passive passengers on Spaceship Earth, as it spirals after our sun through its grand galactic adventures. Have our scientists or seers even hinted at our ultimate destination? And if they did, do we care?

Sad to say, we take better care of our automobiles than we do our Mother Ship.
The only lesson we seem to have learned from history is that the victors of war are the protectors of the nation. Kahn, Alexander and Napoleon become self-anointed heroes and peacemakers through force. The Church carries an even greater cross of guilt. Religion used for purposes of political domination is the root of war. The Pope apologized for the Inquisition, yet said nothing about the holy holocausts imposed by the Crusades.

Happily, we do not need world saviors or enlightenment to take a broader, more inclusive view. We do not even need to search out our destiny, because it is already within us. It is the Covenant that Nature and the stars made with us from the Creation – or the Big Bang, if you prefer. Our Birthright is encoded in our DNA and every atom of matter, energy and life -- not only of ourselves, but the planet we call Earth.

The World Web

But here is bad news for the Gaians and Chaos Theorists. The popular image of a butterfly in Brazil raising a typhoon in the China sea is not new. John Muir described the world web in much simpler terms: “When you take anything by itself, you find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Besides, if the falling of a leaf causes the trembling of a star, the galaxy would have gone nova long ago from our bloody history of religious domination and war.

The only conclusion possible is that if we live in a holographic universe, we are the hologram. The unified field or the seamless cloth is the same substance that composes our consciousness and our cells. The common thread that weaves the web is the force that drives all of us -- as Nature itself -- toward the freedom of self-rule.

The Rule of Self

Yet the near-sighted idealists of Greek and Jeffersonian democracy have left us far short of our goal.

Thomas Jefferson wrote to Isaac Weaver, Jr. in 1807 "We are a people capable of self-government, and worthy of it." Later, Lincoln would boast that our government was “of the people, for the people and by the people.” But a governing body composed of Representatives, Secretaries, Justices, and even a President is not much of an improvement over the old English and Roman hierarchies. And if the Vote is the common denominator of a free society, then gerrymandering and the Electoral College become a mockery of a self-governing people.

Were you raised at home by democratic principles? Did you find school to be a true democracy? What equal rights do you enjoy in your job? Where is the Truth that sets you free in your Church? Are we really capable of self-rule, as Jefferson and Lincoln dreamed, or are we deluding ourselves.? Can we truthfully deny that corporations and governments are not responsible for the creation of an economic caste system similar to the slave trade that has thrived since the first Pharaohs and Patriarchs?

However, there are forces at work in society today which will drive us toward the rule of self. Sustainable agriculture and green business are trends that continue to grow, due to the supporting industries of organic lifestyles and environmental restoration. Costs of fuel – both in our homes and automobiles – will escalate eventually beyond our reach, and consumers will demand wider access to renewable resources and energy. When the people start to take back the reins of power and food production -- now controlled by corporations, utilities, and government -- democratic association will become a mandate. The decentralization of business and society preached by E.F. Schumacher (Small is Beautiful) and Frank Lloyd Wright (The Living City) will become a practical necessity, and no longer a utopian paradigm.

But these are very small social patterns that will in turn point us to larger possibilities already inherent within us. The purpose that drives us toward destiny is much greater than our personal selves. Nor does it mean that each of us will disappear into an amorphous collective. In fact, the opposite can be expected; each individual will become more powerful, more truly oneself and real than s/he has ever been before.

The Purpose of Our Unity

Religions, politics and monarchs only secure their positions by diminishing, demoralizing and dehumanizing their subjects. Both psychologists and sages have tried to show us that the gods we worship and propitiate – as well as the leaders who exalt themselves before us -- are really powers which we hide within ourselves.
We are not even born lower than the angels. They are subject to us. Christ reminded us of the gods we are. The angels are also symbols of our own endless psycho-spiritual powers.

Therefore, if our deepest purposes arise from our need to mold meaning for ourselves and others, to make the world more noble, to drive our destinies to a higher power for good – whether we act from ego or altruism – we are aligned with only one power.

In The Divine Comedy, Dante speaks of the “Love that moves the sun and all the stars”. Teilhard de Chardin wrote in our own time “Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves,” and "Driven by the force of love the fragments of the world seek each other that the world may come into being."
Dante also said “Nature craves Love”. Then our parable becomes:
If we are cosms where saints and sages play, then all our cells must shine like stars. Our soul becomes an endless day, and Love creates the art and magic or our lives.

It is plain – Love is the power of purpose and the purpose of power. There is an unbroken, seamless gradation from the lowest to the highest manifestations of Love. And there are no limits to its creations and plenitudes of its Being Love is pure Unity.

The force of Love is the power of our purpose in life, our evolutionary drive and our unity.

Our old ideas about the divisions of Love are wrong. The boundaries we create between lust, romantic and divine Love are our individual points of view. Nature does not respect our fences. We personalize a force that does not discriminate, moralize or judge us by sex, age, religion, race or species. There is proof enough in the memory of our first love, the courtship and monogamy in the wild, a mother’s unconditional love, or the spiritual adventures that transports us every time ‘the earth moves’.

So it is in the mundane realm. The harmonious functioning of the organs of our bodies is called health. When our mental and emotional faculties combine, confidence and self-empowerment take the stage. When all our senses unify, we experience a state of elation equal to that of Saints. When all our decisions agree, our desires lead us to a life driven by purpose. When all our functions and faculties act together, the confluence of power seems to expand beyond our limits. “What spirit s/he has!” is a common compliment for both humans and horses. Most everyone admires “soul” in music, art or modern psychology.

This is an adventure we must take beyond all our old explorations. If we are to destroy our self-righteous religions, bring a peaceful end to nations, write a new declaration of interdependence with ourselves, with Nature, our planet, and our ultimate Becoming, only a politic of Love will serve us. Unity is our only savior.

Our Responsibility to Freedom

Only a remnant will survive an environmental or economic collapse. Nor will our future grant us a transition without tribulations of Apocalyptic proportions. Yet there are paths that will allow us to redesign our destiny more securely than others. The end of nations has already begun with the multinational corporate economy. We can adapt their model to our own purposes of self-rule as planetary patriots.

We can propose the preposterous.

You can’t grow anything with a gun. Political solutions only create oxymorons. The plain fact is that the world needs more food. energy, shelter and self-rule, not more talk from behind a gun. An agricultural revolution and reforestation on a planetary scale will take us much farther toward destroying tyranny, terrorism and plague than any army of soldiers or diplomats.

Let us propose tractors for tanks, ploughshares for guns, and seed for bullets. What would the world think of America if it proposed to demonstrate democracy through empowerment and self-determination instead of enforcement? How far would the hundreds of billions of dollars go -- that we currently spend on war and national security – if we were to restore the dreams of our impoverished friends and enemies alike? Could we integrate the military into the Peace and Conservation Corps, create a World Sustainable Agriculture Organization that would make a Politics of Seed part of the core curriculum, diffuse the divisions between developed and developing countries, and teach spiritual discipline instead of imposing our own religious dogma?

Or create something even better?

Our responsibility to freedom is our commitment to our own wholeness, as individuals and as planetary citizens. We must regather our own forces and take back the power that we have given away. We must accept the reality of our total selves, and go forward with the faith that we have the power and the purpose to create our ideal world. We are not at the mercy of the forces. We can forge them into unlimited possibilities in the fires of Love.

Millennia have passed since the original principles were spoken in the four major religions ruling Earth. It is time to heed them:

“Ye have heard it said”, He said, “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto thee. Return good for evil.” Later, Gandhi would chide, “When an eye for an eye is the law of the land, the whole nation is blind.”

“You cannot confront evil directly,” says an older Taoist text, “for it will seek weapons and defeat you. The only way to conquer evil is through unrelenting perseverance in the good.”

A martial arts master taught, “Unless you conquer yourself first, you will face two enemies when you go into battle.”

Every war is a holy war, because the conflict arises from within first.

Muhammad himself said: “The best jihad is one who strives against his own self for Allah, the Mighty and Majestic.”

Therefore, instead of struggling to preserve a past that refuses to serve us as a United Nations, let us consider ‘UP’ instead, which stands for a United Planet.

And a more perfect union will grow from this common ground.