Welcome

Posted in November, 2011:

Hello. My name is Andi St.Clare …

… and I want to share with you my vision for a better world. It has very much to do with how we view nature. You see, as I see it, somewhere along the line we humans started to mistake our thinking for reality. Thinking is a world of symbols and what we experience in our thinking is only an interpretation of reality. True reality is nature herself. Thinking is good for separating things out and fitting them into categories, but from the point of view of nature there is no such thing as separation. Everything is in relationship. Earth, water, air and fire weave in and out of one another to make us what we are and everything we see.

We are all part of one earth. The ground beneath our feet is the same ground that supports the whole of life. The earth provides us all with nourishment, fuel, medicines and all the materials we need for building our homes and furniture. We take so many things out of the earth to construct the things around us, and then our minds try to say that nature is somewhere outside all of this — but she’s not. Nature is in everything that we touch and all the things we create and use, even if our minds are responsible for their form and thinks it owns them.

Water is the flow of life. It flows hidden beneath the ground and can then rise out of the earth as a mountain spring, crystal clear and pure. Streams become rivers, rivers become seas and seas become the oceans that surround all the great continents of our planetary home. Water also manifests as the morning dew and the rain that is absorbed into the soil for plants to grow. Water is essential to all life. As it flows it refreshes, cleanses, purifies, and allows everything to flourish.

The air that enters my lungs is not separate from the air that enters yours. I might think I am a separate individual breathing this air, but just imagine if someone was to take in one very big breath and say, “This air is all mine now. I’m just going to keep it all for myself”! This would be quite absurd, and this is because we don’t really breathe the air at all, but rather the air breathes us. The air breathes all life on this beautiful planet.

Fire is also essential for the whole of life. We draw its energy upwards whenever we need to heat our food and so on, but every day we bathe in the sun’s energy as it falls all around us from above. The sun’s warmth is the reason that ice melts and rivers flow; why petals unfold and trees grow tall; why hearts beat and creatures emerge from their hibernation. The sun’s light is the reason we can see and behold beauty.

We are nature and nature is us. To see this deeply is to see an end to all our conflicts. Nature never says, “I will only give my gifts to those whom I deem worthy”. She doesn’t care which religion we belong to, who we work for, what our nationality is or the size of our bank account. She reveals to us what true wealth is in the form of the very elements I’ve just been speaking of. And this wealth she distributes freely and unconditionally to all human beings, all animals, all birds, fish, reptiles, insects, flowers and trees. She doesn’t recognise international borders. She doesn’t recognise any of the divisions we create with our minds. A river doesn’t require money or a passport to move from one part of the world to another, nor does the wind or a migrating bird or any other creature. Nature is simply one life creating the appearance of diversity in order to interact with, and truly love her own beingness.

The names and labels we attach to things, including ourselves, are only symbols that we have invented for the purpose of communication. But instead of retaining power over our own invention we have allowed our invention to gain power over us. When we define ourselves in terms of our profession, our belief, our nationality, our education, our wealth, our ability or disability, our social status and so on, these are just labels; and yet we can believe in these secondary, superficial identities so strongly that we are prepared to go to any lengths to defend them. We will even go to war because of them!

Words are symbols that only have meaning for those who have agreed to their meaning. Every language has its own symbols, and its own arrangement of those symbols, but unless we are part of the agreement that determines what each of the symbols mean, the whole language will have no meaning for us at all. If I have not learnt Japanese or Greek or Arabic I will not understand anyone who is trying to converse with me in those languages. So words don’t have any meaning in themselves; it is us which provides the meaning. Essentially it is us, who has the real power over the word, but somehow we forget this and we end up giving our power away to something that isn’t real. Now if someone insults me and I get upset it is really because I have made the word more powerful than me! If we are to regain the power we have lost to the symbols we use, we must learn to see them for what they are. We must learn not to take our words so literally that we mistake them for reality. In other words we must learn to see through them. The word dialogue comes from dia, which means ‘through’, and logos, which means ‘word’. So in a literal sense the word dialogue means to see through the word.

This deeper understanding of what dialogue points to is, I feel, important. At present we tend to be very much more a debating society. We can see this especially in our government and in the media, and debate is even being taught as a subject in many schools now. But debate is something very different to dialogue. The word debate literally means ‘to beat down’ (the prefix de, meaning ‘down’ and the old French word batre, meaning ‘beat’). The objective of a debate is not to see through the word but to contest one point of view against another in the assumption that one is right and the other wrong. The direction of a debate is always towards a win+lose outcome, whereas dialogue really aims for a win+win outcome.

This isn’t to say that debate is wrong, or that debate shouldn’t have a place still in the way that society needs to work at present, but dialogue is really interested in something different. The keyword here is cooperation. Those with a strong competitive spirit will most likely prefer to stick with debate a while longer, while those who choose to engage in dialogue will generally do so because they feel it will lead to a healthier way of relating. Competition, after all, is what takes place between two or more ideas, not facts – once again it is necessary to see through the word in order to discern the fact. The reality of who we actually are is what we are really concerned with here, not who has the strongest ideas.

Debate tends to take place around specific issues where there is divided opinion, and dialogue is often thought of as mostly relevant to specific situations that require mediation. However the kind of dialogue being proposed here is being thrown open to all who are willing to participate, and it can be looked upon as a shared inquiry into who we really are in the context of the whole of life. Right now my own part in what I am offering is primarily to send out the invitation and open the door. Beyond this I cannot say where the dialogue is likely to go. It’s like a river that doesn’t decide for itself which direction to go, or how fast or slow it should travel, but simply lets the landscape decide. By coming together as a group we create our own landscape. I cannot be personally responsible; either for what people bring to the dialogue or what they take away. Nor can I claim to have no shadow or blind spots of my own which might surface during a dialogue. But the beauty of being in a dialogue circle, where any manner of things can surface, is that we have an opportunity to become conscious of our own (normally unconscious) reactions. From this we gain response-ability – the ability to respond. While my reactions are based on my identification with thought, my responses are based on my awareness of thought. The more we can learn to respond to one another, rather than merely react to one another, the greater the state of coherence we have within the group.

Dialogue therefore, is concerned with transformation, but not in the way that most of us are used to thinking about transformation. It is not a transformation that requires us to actually be different from who we really are right now, but rather one that allows us to be true to who we are. It’s about reclaiming our true identity from all the symbols and concepts we have in our minds. One could say that if I have an image of myself, or an image of you, and I succeed in replacing that image with another one, then that would count as being different; but who I really am, and who you really are, doesn’t actually need to be anything different at all, because we’re already perfect just the way we are! So it’s more about seeing and acknowledging this. If we are seeing with genuine awareness instead of merely through the veil of our thinking, then there is no more judgement about who or what is right or wrong. Even if we don’t always agree on the particular symbols we are using, it doesn’t affect the way we honour and respect one another. Our oneness has much more to do with accepting our differences than it has of trying to be the same. When we learn to disidentify with the mental images we have of ourselves and others, it is seen that who we really are is peace, and this peace pervades the whole of nature. We could say that our true nature is peace. The importance of this is obvious. If we could all come to this place of peace, one with all nature, we will have basically solved the biggest problem of the world!

***

When we first come into the world there is nothing between us and nature. We meet life fully. But then we are encouraged to make a lot of unconscious choices. We chose to agree with almost everything we are told because we are very dependent at that age and it’s important for us to feel that we fit in and belong. We choose to agree with the language, the customs, the traditions, the beliefs and so on, which characterise our particular social environment. But because these choices are made more or less automatically, and we don’t really question them, they are not conscious choices. Then as our naturally inquisitive minds want to probe the boundaries that define our social environment, our parents and teachers try to ensure, as much as they can, that we remain bound to our original agreements. A system of reward and punishment comes into play. At its core, society wants us to agree 100% with everything it tells us, because that’s what makes it feel most secure — but it is never actually going to get that 100% because what it wants us all to agree with is not the truth. As soon as we begin to see that what we’ve been taking to be true isn’t true, our attention wants to turn 180 degrees back to who we really are, prior to all of the original agreements we made. The more we question the choices we made early on in life, which we made unconsciously, the more we bring to them the light of awareness that enables us to make conscious choices instead. So a lot of this work is about helping us make conscious choices to replace the unconscious choices we made earlier in life.

Many of the unconscious choices we made during childhood can get buried very deep where they remain undetected for a very long time. Those that survive adolescence tend to feed back into society, and in this way they can get passed on from generation to generation without detection. This is why we have such a chaotic and broken society today. We have become experts at navigating away from ourselves and then just seeing little pieces of the problem elsewhere. Even if we turn our attention back to ourselves, it can be very hard to break off all those early agreements we made in life, because we have been trained so well to believe in them and to accept the authority behind them. However Dialogue with Nature seeks to provide an empathic environment that gives people a chance to see outside their inherited conditioning. The movement is towards a state of being where we feel comfortable in ourselves as we are, and can accept one another without judgement. We are in a circle because it’s a shape that honours everyone as equals. There is no single leader or teacher in the group because effectively everyone is a leader or teacher, albeit not in a conventional sense, and it doesn’t matter whether one happens to be vocal or non-vocal. There is no “good” teacher or “bad” teacher, or a teacher that is better or worse than anybody else, because everyone brings to the circle their own uniqueness which is honoured by all. There is no requirement for the circle to be a particular way (other than that people participate of their own free will) because the deep peace that resides in all of us is realised through the unconditional acceptance of ‘what is’. People are free to express whatever is true for them in the moment, knowing that all our mental-emotional states are only transitory states passing across the face of ‘what is’.

***

As a tiny drop of water hits the surface of a lake it sends out ripples that become wider and wider, interacting with other ripples as it does so. The same thing happens when we fall back into the deep peace that resides within us. This peace permeates the whole of nature. By coming home to ourselves we are in a process of creating real positive change in the world.

Never has the need for a global shift in consciousness been as great as it is today. The current political, economic and environmental problems are too vast and complex now to be solved by the old fragmented mind-set. We are all being called to break off those old agreements that have failed to generate coherence in our society, and to form new agreements that do. A coherent society, I will suggest, is one that honours and respects nature. As more and more of us around the world rise to embrace the possibility of its transformation, it can only get easier, but still it requires courage. By befriending nature and picking up the reins of our own evolution we can be instrumental in creating a new age of peace.