Listen to the Beating Heart of Mother Earth
We live our lives on the surface of a whirling ball that moves around the sun and rotates herself toward that source of light. It is a planet called Earth. We derive all the nourishments and elements needed for life from her and she graciously keeps giving.
There is a force within this planet that has been called Gaia, meaning life, the very soul of the earth. In ancient civilizations, she was revered as mother, nurturer and giver of life.
Another force, called intellect, has guided evolution on the planet. This intellect is disclosed in the precision and interconnections of all the levels of existence on Earth — inanimate, vegetative, animal and human. There is a divine perfection in all of this that plays out incessantly in our daily lives.
We see, hear, smell, taste and feel all that exists on the earth. Our nature is to live in these sensations and enjoy them. We observe her cycles and adapt ourselves to them because we are planted here. We also experience her more subtle qualities such as interconnection and balance.
Enter Mankind
It is here, in the midst of all the input from our mother, where we experience life, occupying the fourth level of existence after inanimate, vegetative and animal. Of importance is that each succeeding level holds within it all the characteristics of those that preceded it, in addition to its more advanced qualities and abilities. Those elements make up our bodies and tie us inextricably to the entirety of nature. She lives inside us, and we live inside her.
The wisdom of Kabbalah teaches that God and Nature are the same. Humans are born in an animal form, not yet aware that within us resides everything that is part of what came before. Bones are the inanimate, hair and fingernails are vegetative, our bodies are animalistic. All minerals of the earth, life energy and beastly instincts are part of who we are.
Because we are integrally entwined with all of nature, it is the purpose of our lives to act like nature, but mankind has moved further and further away from practicing the principles she shows us. Nature is interconnected and interdependent. All parts receive from and give to the others, always maintaining the integrity of the whole. The system is altruistic. Nowhere within the first three levels does any entity take anything more than it needs for survival, nor does it fail to give back. Nature is balanced, operating on the principle of the merging of opposites, and harmonious, working like a well-oiled machine. These are the laws of Nature
When we activate appreciation of all that Mother Earth gives us and devote ourselves to living fully within her, we are fulfilling the purpose of our lives — to reach an inner state in which we derive all our pleasure from caring for others before ourselves — acting like Nature. The stunning reality of this is that we can continue to exist only in subjection to these immutable laws, these principles that are the prototype for our relationships with each other. And the law from which all others derive is “Love your neighbor as yourself.”