This is not to say that our lives today are not meaningful. Before we made this change we had two "participation’s" in life. One was to our collective, we participated in the care and nurturing of our collective survival through our earth mother. The other was our individual lives, which were not individual in the way they are now, but suffice to say there was an existence outside of the collective. This was generally thought of as family life. We participated in relationships with our spouses, children, parents, grandparents and so on. Life in this way had a very similar look to it as it does today. We lived together in homes, we laughed and cried together, we worked together for our survival and so on. These things definitely have meaning. In this way, life has not changed, but while we used to do all the same functions in family life as we do now, back then, we as families did these same functions with the collective, and the collective did the same functions with our families. This is what is no longer with us and is essentially the only difference, though it is a massive change to our basic ways living.

So we do live meaningful lives today. We still have our families; we still love and care for each other at least at the family level. And of course there is even still quite a bit of involvement with the community (though it would be wrong to even hint that there is an active collective consciousness). Yet, it is well known that we are in grave danger of destroying ourselves. This can or will happen through a number of causes: war, atomic catastrophes, environmental decay, starvation and so on.

What many of us these days portend is that this severance with the earth is the root cause of our demise, that today’s lifeways are lived in a bubble. We see, feel, experience and live as though we have meaning, but it is in a bubble. And our family lives are bubbles living within this larger bubble. The big bubble is the collective no longer knowing it is even a collective and we as individuals are inside that bubble severed from ourselves as a collective and not knowing that we are part of a collective. We have lost connection as a collective mind and as individuals. We no longer know who we are, but we think we do, because we don’t know what happened to us in the first place. We do not know that we, by choice thousands of years ago, severed our relationship with the earth mother and our collective consciousness, which she held together.

I don’t know about you, but for me, this energy crisis has seemed questionable from its beginning. How could it be possible for power to be flowing on one day and then, without an increase in demand, suddenly a state of emergency exists the next day? The darker side of me suspected that the fossil fuel powered utility companies had somehow manufactured the crisis in order to achieve two very important aims: to raise prices and to reduce or eliminate environmental controls. As it turns out, both have been achieved.

The front page of the Seattle Times on Sunday reported that I am not alone in my suspicions and the attorneys general of Washington State and Oregon, as well as a number of federal commissions and legislators, are calling for an investigation into what is now suspected as being the willful manipulation of energy supplies to artificially raise prices.

I discussed part of the story in my commentary "Energy Crisis or Greed Crisis" in my Healing Our World series on the Environment News Service last week http://www.ens.lycos.com/ens/feb
2001/2001L-02-09g.html  I have written a second part to this story, "Energy Crisis or Energy Hoax," that discusses these new developments and the suspicion of unlawful business practices by the fossil fuel utility companies. You can view it at my website at http://www.jps.net/jackieg/articles/jagfeb
12-2001.html 

Be well and I wish you success in trying to figure out what is going on. Whatever the truth turns out to be, reducing energy demand, switching to alternative energy sources as soon as you can, and not buying into the alarmist rhetoric from Washington will help immensely.

So, we are out of balance and we do not realize it, and if some of us do realize we are out of balance, in most cases we do not know why. Some of us do know why, but we are few in comparisons to those that don’t.

Living without this essential collective experience is why we are destroying our selves. We would have never allowed ourselves to get in this condition had we kept our relationship with the earth mother and our collective mind. Because we would have been conscious of each other as one being. There would have been no reason or circumstance to create self-destruction because we could clearly see each other. Loosing the collective relationship brought blindness to each other and therefore blindness to our choices. And so here we are.