This is my first experience with DMT. I have yet to break through, and am very scared to.
I just smoked a little and here are my thoughts.

Why am i more connected with this computer/phone/internet than i am with mother earth?

I let myself get sad when its raining outside. Its been raining all day.
I just walked outside. I felt the need to be close with a certain tree. The thought came to me. "Rain is the lifeblood of every living creature on earth" The rain brings life to all plants and animals. Its a good thing. Why am i viewing it as bad?

WOW, FUCKING WOW

I am so disconnected with mother earth. I'd like to tell myself that i'm not, but i am.
I am not nearly as grateful for mother earths abundance, love, and glory as i should be.
I have some work to do friends.

Peace and love

as synchronicity would have it...this random youtube video i was listening to while reading this thread said the word "rain..that smells good" just as i was halfway through your post. heheh

i know the feeling your talking about.. we've ALL got a lot of work to do to reconnect and tune back into nature, so your not alone

Great to hear you've come to this realization and are actually going to do something about it. There's a world of a difference between knowing something and acting on that knowledge. I wish you the best and many more transforming teachings

You need to go out in nature on a regular basis
Reconnect , I go out every chance I get . Spice in nature
Will help you connect to the natural beauty and balance .
Turn your phone off and just dig on the plants and animals .
After a while it becomes a vital part of your life , it's like going to church

Remember, technology is made by people for people. It's ergonomic, pervasive, and attractive.
Of course you have a connection to it!

That being said, I love unplugging, too. Get outside! Nothing compares to the beauty of the natural world.

And this:


is very, very true. Nature is the original church.

There are reasons we left the strict natural ways:
too hot, too cold, hunger, being eaten by predators,...

Religions were the first "official" declarations people made against natural laws. You shall not steal, you shall not kill, all laws that are utterly un-natural in the wild of nature.

Now, we romanticize nature to our liking and forget her devastating wild side for which we seek shelter in buildings, technology and ethics. We are on the run for her wild hairs, and we realize we can't keep doing that, we're just boring time under our computer made blankets, they keep you warm, they do.

You may consider that your distaste for rain is not unfounded. I'm sure the ancients who revered and were well-connected to the Earth were not all too fond of the rain during the deluge. Being in the rain too long under certain conditions can bring on hypothermia, and isn't always completely conducive to staying healthy. There's also a lot of unnatural acidity in the rain now from pollution, so it's not too surprising that you recoil from this form of "nature".

Rain is not inherently a good thing. It can be a creative force as in the case of the water cycle which sustains life on earth, or it can also be a destructive force, wreaking havoc in the form of hurricanes, monsoons, floods, lightning storms, creating traffic accidents, etc...So remember rain is neither good nor bad, or it's both good and bad or however you choose to see it, and this goes for many things you probably call good and bad throughout your life.

In hyperspace both sides of the coin are well-accounted for. The plant/animal/fungi/cellular kingdom has decent representation in hyperspace alongside the computeristic, mechanical, plasticine, metallic, electronic aesthetics as well. I don't think this is necessarily a consequence of living in a technological society either. While I can't prove it, I imagine that 1000 years ago in the Amazon, that shamans may very well likely have been accessing similar visions - at least some of them some of the time. I can still end up with a gigantic anaconda in my bedroom in North America even though that's in no way part of my daily life. Or archaic and ancient cultures may weave their way into my life via hyperspace even with no conscious knowledge of them. Then there's also just the completely weird, abstract alien stuff for which we have virtually no language at all to describe. For this reason, it seems logical that the archaic jungle dwelling shaman could very well have been seeing the technological side to hyperspace even though that's not part of his vocabulary. I believe that the technological aspect to hyperspace and to man's experience in general is sort of built into the system in a way. Getting to know technology is like another way of getting to know one's own self and nature. It is to view a grand cosmic balance of opposites.

people are still dying from extreme weather conditions, especially third world countries... having shelter or not. and people today are not killed by animal predators , but people are killed by people with the soo precious technology which is even more absurd to me.

the problem is ignorance and greed. how resources are handled. how next generations are schooled to view the world.

and i know we are dependent on technology so very much, but i strongly believe we can adapt to live even without it. we just forgot all the knowledge...people cant even plant a carrot today without reading a users manual or some guide which was common knowledge i think..how to grow your own food.

plants and nature in general can be very generous if we pay a close attention to her changes and processes.

I did nowhere say that we did it 'the right way' with technology, only saying why we fled into technology, and find ourselves in this situation.

What to choose, what to choose?
A bullet from a capitalistic disoriented maniac, or a hungry bear with long claws?
Hmm, lemme think...
Earth is a rather interesting place, isn't it?

Sorry for the sarcasm, but please stop romanticizing nature, it is utterly and uncut blood dripping brutality. Forgive us trying something else, like technology or religion, and failing to succeed, very sadly.

And oh, that stroll in nature calming you down, you just stepped on like 5 beautifull snails in the long grass, squeezing their body open under your shoe, without even noticing doing so.

Nature, how beautiful, so gorgeous!

What if we romanticize the claws and teeth too? they are not so bad, and help to keep things in balance.




Okay I'll forgive us. Can we stop now? At least take a pause, try and find a more 'right way'.



That does happen. I remember tripping on mushrooms on a beach in South America... everywhere I stepped, a hermit crab. They were everywhere, the beach a living, crunching carpet. It was a very challenging stroll. But what you are talking about here, the accidental, happenstance type slaughter of snails, crabs or otherwise--that right there is what I find offensive about industrialization. Accidental killings. Roadkill. Extinctions that happen just because a species was 'in the way'. If I were to take my teeth and my claws, or even my guns and my arrows, and end somethings life, well, that is a personal and intimate matter. It's not gentle, but at least it is on purpose and serves a purpose.



I love nature, fear nature and am reverent towards it. I don't think that I can, nor should stop romanticizing it-- claws, storms, fuzzy bunnies and all.

You are right, being afraid of nature is no solution either, we must give in sooner or later, complete surrender. That is why I practice with the plants, to learn to let go and trust feelings that cause primordial fears.

Your computer, phone and connection are as natural as a bird's nest, a beaver dam, a flock of seagulls, a light rain trickling down your nape. Too much of anything has negative consequences - think of it as a balance you need to find and stop eschewing the tech your fellow natural humans produce.

As a an inalienable part of nature, we are within a system we cannot escape - anything we do or make is natural. No escaping it. We have created a false dichotomy (us:nature) which is I believe unhealthy and at the root of our destroying the planet. Let's get over it and on top of it.


JBArk

you have good points jbark, but i think this dichotomy was created long after industrialization and technology era started. so i dont think this is the root problem.

things with familiarity create habit i.e. electronics.

as stated "get out in nature"
the sights the smells the sounds of birds chirping and bugs mating, plants bugs animals and like minded humans.

the woods/forest/fields are where man came from and where he belongs, when your amongst the trees and plants this is obvious.

Industrialization and technology are not the problem. I believe our separating ourselves philosophically from the natural world (possibly as a result of a shift in consciousness as a result of the misinterpretation of technology and industrial advances) has had, and has, profound consequences. I don't ascribe to the "let's tear it down and start all over" mentality; I believe that we are capable of shifting back to a more positive (natural many would write) way of being and of interacting with ourselves and the rest of the natural world. As long as we think we are different and define our technologies as that which elevates us above "nature", the problem will persist and deepen. The industrial revolution was natural. As was its philosophical interpretation, which has led us to the excesses of today. But natural, despite the common apprehension, is not of necessity healthy.

JBArk

i agree, industrialization and technology are not the main problem, its the people behind it, and their needs.

wanted to ask you what exactly do you mean by "tear it down, and start all over" mentality. maybe you live in a place where industry havent affected your area very badly so you dont have first hand experience from this opression by big companies and government. but in some places factories are built right next to peoples ranches, where the land is rendered infertile or poisonous after a few years. and these people have no rights of saying nor can do much about it. i think in times like this even people with that kind of mentality are needed . people who are driven away from their ancestral land without question, just because someone thought its "good" to build a factory there are well justified with that kind of attitude.

of course, in the meantime if we come up with more peaceful, organized (better) solutions, i think they will gladly accept that.

edit : im not saying technology should not exist or cant be usefull, i just think that we could make it work in tune with nature.

What I mean is this pervasive idea that everything needs to be torn down ("the system", as most people enigmatically refer to it) in order to set things right. While there is a lot wrong with it ("the system" ) it still remains (stealing a Churchill citation about democracy) the "worst... except all the others that have been tried". From a man who is also quoted saying:

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." This from a fervent believer that democracy is, quite definitively, the best and fairest organizational mode for government.

I apologize for derailing the thread - however, the ideas that the "system" (democracy/technology/capitalism) is irretrievably broken and that we have lost touch with "nature" are, I believe, linked and twined.

JBArk

I like this statement.

Hyperspace does contain all that natural plant/animal/ect stuff, as well as all that technological stuff. We also tend to see many things that we just can't explain. Maybe the ancient shamans just filed more of the techno stuff into that unexplainable catagory. More of the machine-like stuff was more "alien" to them. Correspondingly, they probably "got" a lot of the nature stuff that breezes right by us.

I'm coming into this conversation a bit late, but I would like to add my 2 cents, which may echo jbark's early post:

Usually when people say "Mother Earth", they are referring to the plants and animals that live on the earth rather than the 99.99% of matter that actually composes this rock on which we are like a mere rash. So, if by "Mother Earth" you mean natural living things, then it may help to recognize that the line between technology and life is becoming more and more blurred as technology progresses. The tools that we have created to help us manipulate matter and information will soon be doing so more than we can. When generalized intelligence in computers surpasses that of humans, these new intelligent beings will see humans as we see animals. They will be the predominant life-form on Earth and we will fade into the backdrop that is referred to as "Mother Nature".

In that sense, there is a spectrum of life, with "technology" on one end and "mother nature" on the other, with humans in the middle, but to intelligent machines of the future, they will be in the middle of that spectrum and the technology that they create will become the new end of the spectrum.

This is all just speculation, of course. The real reason you should prefer technology is that it makes things easier. If you look at every change that has ever occurred in nature, you will find that natural changes optimize time and energy. Technology does the same thing, but better. It's like Nature 2.0. Technology is Mother Nature becoming more and intelligent and, eventually, sentient.

I agree with this. As far as we have come evolutionarily, our next evolutionary step, driven by our nature, is to extend our senses, collapse geography and culture, improve our data storage capacities and problem solving abilities externally by that force of change, technology, which is as inexorable as it is natural. Technology is how we arrive at a more organized state: lower entropy. That is exactly what evolution does.

Technology is nature. If we don't see that now, our successors will.

JBArk