The Great Chain of Being
There once was a brother and sister who were fortunate enough to live in a magical house with three generations of relatives. This house provided everything that was needed. The foundations of their house were first laid by their great-grandparents. These elders were people of strength and solidity, they loved geometry and magic, and were able to mix these two in order to create something out of nothing. This generation eventually gave birth to the sibling’s grandparents who added to the house the power of growth and light, love and sacrifice, balance and harmony. In time they also gave birth to the sibling’s parents who added to the house the unique gifts of independent motion, greater awareness, and dreams.
"What is the extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren?"
After a very long time of preparation, the house was full of hope and expectation at the arrival of a new generation that would possess all the combined attributes of their family. What they would become and what they in turn would give birth to was on everyone’s mind. But as they grew, something seemed to go terribly wrong. The boy became infected by a virus of the mind called 'separation.' This caused the boy’s body and mind to grow strong, but it also caused his eyes and ears to grow weak. He eventually grew apart from his family, because he could no longer see them as family, and he could no longer hear their wisdom.
"You are standing at the crossroads. So consider your path. Ask where the old, reliable paths are. Ask where the path is that leads to blessing and follow it. If you do, you will find rest for your souls. But they said, ‘We will not follow it!’"
The family was relentless in trying to get the boy's attention, but he could no longer notice them, unable to hear or even recognize his family’s pleas to remember the old ways. Instead he came to relate to them as interruptions that were constantly interfering with his new quest to control his environment; an environment that had become increasingly frightening with the diminishing of his sight and hearing. Eventually he decided to control these interruptions and so unknowingly he chained his sister in a cubicle and forced her to spend her life working long hours to help him in his quest for control. He put his parents in small cages, and forced them to suffer in the production of meat and milk for his own pleasure. His grandparents were put in straitjackets, and were unwillingly forced into perfectly straight rows, compelled to produce monocultural food crops to support the brother’s desire for control. His great-grandparents were trampled under his feet, stripped of their strength and dignity, forced to build and power his machines.
"It is no measure of health, to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
The family knew that their son had gone mad, and that such a destructive perspective was the fate of all who would forget the mineral, plant, and animal kin-doms that provide us with a house to live in. But they knew something else too. They remembered from a time long ago that in order to re-member, there must be a dis-membering. That to create light is to also cast a shadow, and that great heights cannot exist if there are not also great depths to give them support. The mad son was on a journey, and it was the darkness that would eventually bring him to the light.
"What was knowledge, what was truth, beauty, love, idealism, philosophy, or religion when copared to man's desire to control an infinitesimal spot in the fields of Cosmos for an inestimably minute fragment of time? Merely to satisfy some whim or ruge of ambition man would uproot the universe, though well he knows that in a few short years he must depart, leaving all that he has seized to posterity as an old cause for fresh contention."
