Living… Environment… Dying

MON., NOV. 1, 1999, 2:26 PM
CONF. RM, PULLIAM

Two of your areas of interest and relative expertise during the last years of your career were environmental health and death education. You were seeing, increasingly, how these are related, but you still see that your culture is not yet willing to see these relationships AND then “take some action.” In the most harsh of terms your dominant culture doesn’t want to deal with the basic causes of environmental deterioration nor with death as a necessary part of both the human and the ecological life cycles.

You read that the human population continues to grow, even in your culture. And each generation wants all that the previous one had… and more. The elderly ecological conclusion must be heeded: “everything has to go somewhere.” Houses, other necessary buildings, and roads must be built on land that has been used for food-growing… or that was just part of the earth’s natural beauty. More people “must go somewhere.” More could come here, and those who hanker after “progress” want this… and you don’t.

Science and medicine strive for new and better ways to prolong lives, while other applications of science are designing and creating ever more powerful and destructive weapons. Occasionally an airplane goes down, as one did yesterday, and much is made of the loss of over 200 lives. Yet this tragedy, and all other causes of death did not match… or barely matched… the numbers of babies born.

You still are minimally involved in the alcohol and drug field (mostly out of friendship with Bob), and you continue to read of concern for the lives lost due directly or indirectly to use and abuse of these substances. Ecologically, you could assert that these deaths just “substitute” for others that no longer are as frequent… infections and certain diseases. Ecologically, which has minimal to no concern for individuals, there have to be causes of death, and when some are reduced, others must “take their place.” When there is an increase in human numbers (as with any form of life) the capacity to adapt becomes more central. This is beginning to be noticed in many places in the earth now. Threats persist. Threats also change. Those who can adapt to the threats (personally or with family and cultural help) survive longest and thrive best.

You recognize the truth… and the unpopularity… of the premise that maintaining the lives of poor adapters, at any age, by energy intensive means, is, ecologically unsound… if births are not diminished. And the environment, particularly the range and diversity of non-human life, also has a “life”, and it can die… or certainly can become “sick” or “injured.” Though humans are My greatest single creation, these/you are always secondary to the total web of life. This can be accepted “in theory,” but actions that seem necessary for the “web” to survive (when these don’t favor humans… or “your kind” of humans) are difficult to impossible to implement.

I am putting it increasingly in your spirit and mind that My example, as Jesus, the Christ, has a strange relevance to you… and to this present earth situation. I was a living, vital, functioning human, less than half your age, when I purposely failed to adapt to the situation that brought about My death… the death of My physical body. (It should be quite obvious that I had both human and superhuman means to avert this execution.) This is now seen as a loving, sacrifice – My physical life for your continued spiritual life. This is mystical, but you accept it, even as you don’t quite understand it all.

Out of this tragic death (which did have a bit of a suicidal quality to it) came continued life, in the spirit, for Me… and also for you. Yes, I did “give up something good for something better”… a better spiritual environment than existed before. It is more important for you, with a cause of bodily death now within you (yes, your “own cells.”) to live life fully, positively, lovingly, and joyfully… rather than just prolonging your physical time, with focus on medical procedures.