Tandarin

How can one save the world? This is another question I’ve posed myself often.

People tend to believe they’re too insignificant to make any difference, but I think that is a huge mistake. If one manages to free himself from the choking tentacles of most of the principles ruling contemporary society and to change himself to become a more natural human being, he will always facilitate change in his immediate surroundings.

Subtle and insignificant as it may be, it might be the little ball of snow needed to create an avalanche in the long term.

This contemporary society, deformed as it may be, consists of individuals, people who all possess the power to grow into little balls of snow, little vessels each blessed with the potential for genuine change. And yet, these deeply meandering powers of transformation are not of our own making, just like the minerals needed for a blossom to bloom are not made by the young blossom itself. They are given to him by forces deeper and older than he will ever grow up to be; forces, obscurely hidden within gnarled roots and dark soil which need the potential hidden within the seemingly insignificant blossom to express themselves in a continuous act of authentic Creation.

Likewise, Man does not possess these powers of transformation, but he can be a mediator to express them in the most creative and influencing way. Moreover, change should make one humble towards the potential he has been given; if the blossom believes he owns the powers of the tree, arrogance, self complacency and blind ignorance will fall like acid rain on its fragile flowers until it even threatens to undermine the health of the whole tree if such a belief pervades the entire group of blossoms.

Perhaps that is what is happening with this world today. The age-old wells of Creation seem to get buried deeper and deeper on an evermore faster pace. Instead of an individually unfolding inner Beauty subtly driven by a Holy Fire, a collective outer order of Ugliness has emerged, sailing chaotically on the chilling winds of the unchained yet still unrecognized forces of life.

There’s a catastrophe in the making without precedence. At its heart, this catastrophe is not due to all these external problems the world is experiencing nowadays. Global warming, environmental degradation and pollution, overpopulation, crimes against humanity, the eternal hunger in the world, corruptions of power and the delusions sprayed by the Holy Religion of Money, all these problems appear to be merely the consequences of a disease which is rooted at a much deeper level.

It can’t be found in any external things, but it hides deeply within the fathomless human soul, where the political, social and scientific revolutions of the past few centuries have created a split within the fabric itself from which Man is born.

Man did not just throw away God in the Abyss, but in his limitless arrogance and blindness he has even tried to take over His seat. Nature has lost her sacred values to become the cold, statistical game of atoms, molecules, proteins and genes. Her eternally refilling well of wisdom is slowly being evaporated by the blistering sun of an all-consuming ratio and the ignorance of a race which is still arrogantly trying too hard to blow up every bridge which still linked him with his Origin of Creation.

Man is no longer born as a Mystery which needs to be delicately unwrapped, but as a functionally complete unit, obscurely programmed for flat consumerism in an artificial world striving for technological perfection. The ancient foundations of countless, incredibly rich spiritual traditions, including all their preciously grown relations with the indescribable Mystery called Life, are threatened now, after only a few centuries, by utter annihilation as they’re forcibly dragged right towards the edge of the Abyss. It’s the choice between dying a silent yet deafening death, and being assimilated into this ever-expanding pseudo-religion of deadening Consumerism.

Man is slowly forgetting his roots thanks to the stubbornly ignorant denial of his own deep value. And he’s starting to notice it. More often than not, there appears to be something missing in his daily experience, something vital to his very survival on this planet. Not yet explicitly visible on the surface, but a creepy itch at the back of his head perhaps, hiding every time he tries to get a hold of it.

While his ego may think he is born as a complete individual standing on top of the highest mountain, in the depth of the soul he’s given he might actually be just a todler standing on top of a low dune after having lived in the depths of the ocean for many many eons.

Life is the neverending search for the path we’re individually painting by walking it. Modern man is loosing his painting skills as he has almost stopped searching. He is standing still and focuses on everything he sees beside his collective path. He is plucking the flowers by the wayside not knowing that at the same time he’s slowly yet inevitably cutting the roots of his own origins and the purpose of his existence.

The faith of modern man in his completeness makes him dry and rigid, a massive monolith of external superficialities for which each expression of true inner beauty and depth needs to be marginalized in order to uphold the integrity of his precariously constructed personality structure. Every counteraction against the essence of this rigid, artificial monolith, every serious attempt to glance beyond the narrow boundaries of this limiting world of reductionistic materialism is immediately considered as highly suspicious and abnormal.

But perhaps this monolith is also necessary for change. Because it is so unnatural, a counteraction must happen one day. Man is no monolith, but a living, dynamic and miraculously swirling dance of light and dark, turning and turning and turning…

Every unnatural behaviour is like a ball thrown up the slope of a steep mountain. At some point, the natural gravity of the place will stop the ball in his upper movement, and, whether or not he likes it, will cause it to roll the other way. Of course, we wouldn’t be humans if this counteraction would not result in an exaggeration in the opposite way, on the opposite hill. It’s only after countless up and down movements that the ball will find its rest in the darkly green, lush valley in the middle. It’s impossible to reach other mountain tops without going through the valley, but only by following this lowest path in the fertile valley can one reach all mountains.

Instead of roaming these fertile valleys, people nowadays search after the high altitudes of the mountains. Each standing on a mountain top, people are loosing touch of each other; in their deceptive yet tragic solitude they keep fighting for the highest summit, barren and cold as it may be. They are slowly forgetting about the verdant valleys below, where the mountain creeks still sparkle and the sun still welcomes the first rustles of blooming buds during the early days of spring.

How did it come this far? How could this devolution be stopped and changed? No doubt the individual has a huge responsibility in this change: he’s part of the system, thus programmed to follow the herd to where ever it’s going, even if it means jumping off the highest cliff. But if he manages to change himself radically, he can be a lantern for others, a little ball of snow becoming an avalanche, who cannot be touched anymore by the mentality of the herd.

Perhaps then the world will already be irreversibly changed..