Traveling to Heal the Soul (transferred)

 

transferred from 55 mph blot

“I share the belief of many of my contemporaries that the spiritual crisis pervading all spheres of Western industrial society can be remedied only by a change in our world view. We shall have to shift from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new consciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which embraces the experiencing ego, a reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all of creation.”   —Dr. Albert Hoffman

quoted from Parabola newsletter Dec. 9, 2011

While I think that it is not just environment we are separate from (try other people, for just one thing), I do strongly agree with Dr. Hoffman that our culture has gone astray in a fundamental way.  My trips are my fumbling attempt to find a way back to oneness--with the world I experience as I travel through plains and mountains and with the people I meet.  And through silence and simplification, with whatever comes.

We have followed the materialist, dualistic road so far as a culture that we are in terrible trouble.  I do not know what will happen as the world heats up.  We will change, whether we want to or not.  For me, my response to the crisis is to look toward the root, the separation we feel.  Others, with a different bent, may respond with political or scientific solutions.  Seeing our difficulty as a sickness of the soul, I am responding by addressing the soul.