Two Wellsprings Merge

THURS., OCT. 13, 1988, 6:57 AM
FARM, STUDY

The project for which you are responsible, in lieu of teaching classes this semester, is now underway, and you have a number of marginal notes designated as HE. In your logical shorthand this means that the passage has some elements of Human/Spiritual Interaction and some of Ecological Balance. You knew that eventually you would join these, in the paper you write, but you are finding that your author has, in effect, joined them.

First, you must determine if each of these Wellsprings still has an integrity of its own or whether this “joining” truly represents a new Wellspring. I say “First,” but you won’t be able to do this until you have completed the reading and then looked carefully at statements from each of the three categories. However, I predict that you will be satisfied that the original Wellsprings hold up, and that these writings just often combine them. This will require some designation. Such will surely develop.

Human/Spiritual Interaction implies that an aspect of health is the quality of interaction among human individuals, among social institutions, and with spirit, in the many forms in which it is manifested here in the earth. Science, as described, can be merely human interaction, with scientists working together in some institution on some project about which they have little feeling. It becomes more of a spiritual interaction when the result of the scientific/technological work can be helpful to others… such as a successful vaccine against a disease or the improvement of a food plant so that more and better food will be available. Or… the interaction can be spiritual if the product can be destructive, such as work on nuclear weapons or poison gas.

And yet you shall find that the conflict shall be, often, the one I have identified for you repeatedly – spiritual actions that save or prolong human lives may result in an upset of the ecological balance… the total web of life that I have created. Will a vaccine or effective medications against AIDS be a spiritual boon to humankind or will it be thwarting a means of rebalancing the human population with other forms of earth life? Will more electricity reduce human misery and be a means to a more pleasant life or will its generation produce more waste that threatens both human life and ecological balance? Your study shall generate many questions of this nature, and these represent both a merging of and a conflict between these two Wellsprings.

You know that health results from scientific and artful balancing of many factors. There is a long term balancing, which can be called a lifestyle. Then there are many balancing in each day and week, a few of which are crucial to continued life and health and the rest merely choices, results of which are relatively unimportant to total functioning. You are just coming to see, through these writings, that these two Wellsprings often must be balanced one with the other.

Each represents an aspect of health, and if one is extended, the other is diminished. The maintenance of a single human life in a high technology hospital may be, for relatives, a marvelous human/spiritual interaction. Yet the resources that are consumed, the energy transformed, and the waste produced will have eventual effects upon humankind. Is the life being extended at the expense of those who are young or unborn? Is acceptance of death an important aspect of human/spiritual interaction? You know that I say it is.