This article was written in response to the widespread and very intense wild fires in various parts of Australia over the last two months. After two to three years of extreme drought, much of the country is tinder dry, and with the dominant eucalyptus tree species being rich in volatile oils, fires burn very hot and very fast. Of course this is a global phenomenon, and it applies equally to the fires in the Amazon, Spain, California, and northern Canada and Siberia, and probably other places too.
If we create our own reality, could we have we collectively created the fires? How?
Fire – Buddha clearly stated that we all tend to be on fire with egocentric desire, and that this causes all our suffering. When we look at the past that has led to now, it is one endless chain of cause and effect, of I-centered choices, one after the other, individually and collectively, that leads us to now. To the current circumstances which we each find ourselves in, and the collective drama that we all now find ourselves in, playing out on the screen of the world around us.
Self-centered thinking leads to self-centered feeling, and these I-central passions and astral storms run our life – giving us the semblance of life, which is so easily experienced as an addiction to drama and pain. We are on fire with desire! We burn with the inexorable unsatisfactoriness of life that Buddha spoke of – dukkha – ‘all life is suffering’… unsatisfactory, because it is all a passing parade of transitory phenomena that will never satisfy the yearning in our hearts… yearning for unchanging love, for true insight and wisdom, for courage born of knowing our truth and standing in it. If only we could see clearly that the truth is that we can and will never find those things in the world out there, no matter how much we put out for it…because it is just not there to be found.
Rather, we need to look within for these timeless values, for that is the only place where they can be found. This means confronting the lie that only the physical and measurable is real. For there is a subtler reality available to all of us – invisible, yet experienced as far more real than the world around us.
And when we turn and face that possibility, and open up to that experience, letting go of all attachment to outer phenomena, we may clearly see that we need to empty ourselves of ourselves – to quench the flames of raging self-centered desire, and so find that calm place within from which our life arises.
When we find that still place within, and choose willingly to be there and come from there, to surrender to it all our self-centered ambition, then the world will be freed from the burden of our I-central projections, and its true order will eventually be restored. The fires of egocentric passions will be quenched, and replaced with the gentle fires of Love.
The rainbow is the promise that planetary change will not be by way of flood any more. Rather, it is prophesied that the next change will be by fire – the fire of the Soul, driving us to consciousness through facing the consequences of our choices.
Could the physical wild fires be connected to that in some way? Does the state of consciousness of humanity affect the atmosphere of the earth, including the weather and climate? To what extent?
Something to ponder……
