In the Image of God?
by Connie Burns • Black Mountain, NC

I’ve been thinking about writing this for some time, but struggled with how to encapsulate the enormity of the issue, and also my feelings about it. My feelings about what we are doing to this miracle of life, this delicately balanced living planet are so strong that most of the time I can’t bear to feel them. I slip into cynicism to avoid the depths of despair I feel when I open my heart to what is happening.

However, more and more, I find myself unable to ignore it. I am not going to try to convince anyone of the fact that we are destroying the Earth, as there are plenty of books out there that document the destruction, written by more knowledgeable people than I.

What I want to name, as a psychotherapist and observer of human nature, is our narcissism. So called civilization, our "modernized" world, West and East– relates to the world and all of its inhabitants– plant, animal and mineral, primarily in terms of how they either serve or inhibit our desires. There are a lot of individuals who relate to the world as if it had its own value apart from serving us– some of them have written for us in this and other issues of Creations. But as a culture, we exhibit incredible egocentrism.

One of the experiences that have made me painfully aware of this was watching an environmentalist on TV talking about preserving wilderness. The main point he made was that if we don’t, our children will not have wild places to enjoy. He wasn’t the first environmentalist I’ve heard say this. Now, maybe they frame their arguments for the saving of the wilderness in this way because they think it’s the only appeal that will be effective. Perhaps they fear that no one will listen if they talk about the value of the wilderness in and of itself, or even its value to all of the creatures that inhabit it. But the perspective they present completely ignores that other species have an existence that is of value completely apart from us. It fosters the continuation of our belief that all of the life on this planet is here in order for us to use or destroy it as we please– as if it has no real meaning apart from our uses. It’s like that old question, If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? That the question is even posed tells us how deeply our narcissism has penetrated.

When I look at the natural world, I know that I am observing the intention of the creative force, what I call Spirit. And when I look, what I see is an incredible impulse toward diversity. There isn’t just one kind of anything– not even humans. In a rain forest patch, there are a myriad of species– there might be 300 kinds of birds, 500 butterflies, 200 ants, 50,000 beetles, 1,000 trees, 5,000 fungi, tens of thousands of bacteria, etc. How can we think that the energy that would spark such an explosion of diversity would be interested in only one species?

The only way we can possibly believe that is to ignore the time span of history. In the life span of the planet, the amount of time that homosapiens has been here is the blink of an eye. The Earth came into form about 4.6 billion years ago. If we compared its life span to one year, Homo habilis would have appeared late in the last day of the year, and human history would have begun less than one minute before midnight! Did life on Earth have no meaning, no value before that? Was all of the time before we came into existence just "preparation" for the advent of the human species?

Notice that we don’t even call what came before our culture "history"– it’s "pre-history." Despite the fact that the vast majority of even human history came before we began recording, we act as if the only events that have any relevance have occurred since we began following our own process. Maybe around that time we as a species looked into the pool and fell in love with our own reflection. Maybe that’s when we decided that God was "up there," and that we alone on this Earth were created in “His” image. Before that it seems that humans perceived the Divine as inhabiting every stone, plant and creature around us.

We know that it is possible for human beings to live in balance with the earth, because we did it for the vast majority of the time we have spent here. It’s only since the advent of our beliefs that we are the only reflection of God and that everything is here for our use that we have begun to create such chaos. And the truth is, we have created a culture in which violence, cruelty and perversion have become common place.

As in the story of Narcissus, suffering arises from the twisted illusion of "love" that cannot see the existence or value of anything “other.” The planet is suffering horribly under our egocentric rampage, which should be enough to make us change. On top of that, once we make anything “other” and “less than,” we open the door to the hierarchy that allows racism, sexism and agism to run rampant. We continue to commit genocide on every new indigenous people we discover. One of every four women in this country (the apex of Western civilization) is raped during her lifetime. It cannot be anything but obvious that our current way of being in the world is sick unto death.
Until we see our true place in the family of things, until we come into balance with the Earth and all of her sacred inhabitants, we will suffer and cause suffering, and we will create our own destruction. My prayer is that we awaken and cure ourselves before it’s too late.

Connie Burns is Creations’ Managing Editor, as well as a body-centered psychotherapist. You can contact her at: (828) 669-5790 or by email at: connie@creationsmagazine.com