Gratitude

One of the things that I learned recently is that our way of conceiving the world and existence today is a very particular way, that was born out of something and that is leading us into something, of course. It was born of a rational manhood that claimed in its speech that mankind was clearly the center of the Universe. And this is the same manhood that developed science as we know it, and materialism; and is the same manhood that started to travel out of their own lands to find other lands inhabited by other peoples with different ways if conceiving the world and existence, only to say those were somewhat stupid ways of thinking and that their societies, their cultures, their ways of living, were inferior, because they were not just like their own way, back at home.
And then they take those people’s lands based on violence, have them killed or tortured and slaved, and start revolving the lands, taking what belonged there, disturbing what Nature had put there and had so far been respected. And they inflict their way of thinking and conceiving the world over those lands, and inflict their structures and ways of dealing with the world around them, diminishing or erasing those other cultures.
And they do all that in the name of “progress”, in the name of “civilization”, in the name of the “superior thinking”. What they think is best, they decide is best.

And that is right where our society today comes from. That is how we were built, and that way of thinking has disappeared not at all. We were built over the most profound and absolute disrespect, and over the most profound and absolute disrespect we stand on until today.
The world as we know it today would absolutely not exist if we had respect. Respect for what is different from us, respect for other people, respect for the world around us; respect for the small things and for things that are much greater than we can see by this limited view of ours. And this world gives no room for respect, even if we want it. Every little thing from our way of life, every little object made in this mode of production, owes its existence to various levels of disrespect and we endorse them day by day.

One of the things that we are NOT taught in our culture and that I learned from this beautiful Indian woman, which I’m glad to cite very frequently, Vandana Shiva, is, I think, one of the most basic, essential, differences that make our culture as destructive and disrespectful as it is, through the lack of it. That is gratitude. Gratitude, profound and genuine gratitude, for the things that keep us alive, such as the Earth, the air, the water, the sun. The Nature, the plants.
This Indian woman tells us that in their culture – the parts that have not yet been distorted by the imposing of the western way of thinking – they conceive the Earth and the plants as our mothers, and devote profound gratitude to them.

I think the most important thing of this beautiful feeling of thankfulness is it teaches respect, it teaches us to respect these great elements that were here long before us and that give us life, they are the conditions to our existence. And through this immense respect, we learn we ought to protect these elements of life in our every step, in the smallest details, we have the duty to conserve them! Not just conserve them as for keeping us something we need, but as for simply returning to the Earth and Nature the good things they give to us. Out of pure gratitude.

And the other highly important thing about this feeling of gratitude towards Nature and the Earth, is that it teaches us a sense of humbleness, a sense that we are actually too small, faced to the greatness of those forces – and not quite the center of the Universe, as claimed the European at some point in History, for us to believe until nowadays. We need to understand how little we are, close to Nature, so we understand we can not go around messing with it, altering its courses and its cycles, transforming its elements. We can not comprehend all the complexity of its work, and the reason why things are organized the way they are in it; we should recognize our smallness besides Nature and be humble to respect it the way it was organized.

So, we had a various number of societies that had that recognition and lived in accordance with the cycles and elements of Nature; that knew how to live in harmony and balance with the environment in respectful and sustainable ways of living.
And those were some of the societies which were confronted by the European “discoverers”, only to be understood as primitive and savage, as stupid and less developed. And were eventually misplaced by the imposed extents of the European society, which established itself on those regions over a relationship of declared and pure exploitation, violence and corruption. And that is their idea of a developed and wiser society: one that exploits, violates and corrupts. A society that did not know respect. And unfortunately, I found out, that is the very same society of ours, today. We are built over exploitation, violence, individualism, and can not really escape from it while living here, because the life conditions force us the play the game.

And we still have the same unbelievable stubbornness, even if we don’t quite admit it, to think that our culture is superior, that other cultures that are more linked to the Earth are primitive and less intelligent. It is marked in our very language, in the way we refer to the “developed countries” as opposing to the “less developed countries”, or “developing countries”. As if the European shape of society, or the American shape of society, was the ideal shape, the one to be pursuit.

Well, at this first decade of the twenty-first century more people seem to be realizing that it might be not quite like that. This culture that imposed itself over the globe, and is now performing the very conclusion of this imposing by what is called “globalization”, did what it should not have done. It did, and it keeps doing, what humankind should not have done which was to foolishly consider itself a force wiser than Nature, by messing with it, by altering its cycles and courses, removing and transforming its elements, spreading sterility all over the land. And now we start to pick up that idea that we should not have done all of this as the planet begins to show the signs of the illness we have inflicted on it. The Earth has a fever we produced over centuries, which is the global warming, and we know a fever is just the external expression of how bad things are really going on the inside (or on the surface, for the Earth).

This highly-specialized technologic capitalistic society of ours is an illusion, one might say, because it is an overblowing of the Earth’s capacity, it’s absolutely not sustainable. And, just as it appeared on the Earth, it will eventually disappear, whether we do it by our own hands or not. I believe the difference is that by trying to retard the damages we’ve produced and quitting their continuity, we might be able to preserve what Nature we have not ruined yet. To preserve the environment of other species, other life forms, and not have them totally extinguished by our hands. What will not happen if we continue on this way of living, as if nothing was happening. Superficial changes such as the reduction of gas emissions will not be of much difference. The Earth should be able to breathe again. I am beginning to feel it passes through a whole new consciousness, maybe even a more spiritualized approach on reality, for those who are willing to do that; the seek of internal and external harmony and balance, gratitude, cooperation, respect and love. As for the love and the respect, if we do not practice them with all the people, with all the other living beings and with our whole environment altogether, we are not practicing them at all. I believe we should better learn with other cultures, different from this western capitalized, individualized and consumerist culture, while they still manage to survive the globalization, other ways of relating with the Earth and with ourselves.

As for a start, I recommend watching this wonderful fifty minutes lecture of Vandana Shiva, available on Google Videos at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5820797504478488
(soon available with Portuguese subtitles also P).