temporaryreality

I'm WAY behind on the Cosmic Doctrine reading, and I don't usually read ahead on the monthly CosDoc posts so I might be way off base from that discussion which seems to be on this topic, but I've been thinking about the various planes or realms and what constitutes a balanced existence.

A balanced life, one of wholeness, involves activities or endeavors on all the planes (physical, etheric, astral, mental, spiritual); the converse holds too: living too much in one plane makes for an unhealthy if not diseased life and personal/social imbalance. The basic modern-American(ized) social milieu focuses on the physical and lower astral planes, with forays into and attempts to stimulate the mental. The lower astral (the realm of the passions and of baser imaginings) is activated to serve the physical and to act as a simulacrum for the mental and spiritual. Physical existence (if you've got the means) is provided for by appealing to desires that "deserve" to be fulfilled. You put in your time, earn your coin, pay for your perceived luxuries. If you're just on the edge, the "stuff of life" is luxury enough for you! If you've not got the means, you're reduced to marshalling all your inner and outer resources just to eat and stay warm and dry. Good luck staying sane. At no point do any of these options provide for etheric health - you're on your own with that and if you aren't fortunate enough to have easy access to clean air and a view of the sky and sun, to trees and other growing things, or to landscapes that inspire and paths to roam, then oh well, at least you can see them on your computer's screen saver or the car commercials run every fifteen minutes on the TV.

Ugh, it's just so bleak! And to think that we train our young to think this is right and good and that it is the right and good order of things.

We physically contain our children in boxes for hours a day, in impersonal surroundings (until the lucky kindergarteners make enough art to put up on the walls, at least) and as they grow, we extend the time they must sit and work and decrease the time for replenishment. Creativity is restricted to approved activities, the focus is on mental work without reprieve. Out onto the asphalt play-yard (or maybe a lawn where you're no longer allowed to chase each other (at least where my kids went to school --- because somebody might get hurt!) for your momentary etheric boost. The spiritual is of course verboten since as a people the only thing we can agree upon is STEM. Note that I didn't say that religion is verboten. (Don't get me wrong, I like and appreciate science, I just like and appreciate things that science is the wrong tool for as well).

If we were doing things in a more balanced way - and if school was still necessary at that point, since "a more balanced way" might actually make school obsolete - we'd make sure young people spent ample time learning daily life skills like how to grow and make food, grow and make clothing, grow and build furniture (gee, did you notice my bias toward husbandry (animal and plant)?) and build homes. We'd explore the principles of design and beauty and everyone would engage in handwork, like sketching and crafts, while the utility of functional math would be appreciated and explored. Abstract ideas would be there for those who want to play with them, but they wouldn't be touted as the end-all, be-all of "career" directions.

We'd spend time outdoors among the plants and animals, in dirt and water, under the sun and wind and rain and snow. We'd observe the world and learn ways to incorporate elements of what we saw, tasted, felt, heard, and smelled, into the things we'd make. We'd imagine and play our way to learning to be a human in society. Reading and working with numbers would be skills by which we could approach useful concepts. Whether or not school would have anything to do with it, we'd each know we had a spirit-connection running through all we did and that it was our task to nurture it and that by doing so we would live up to the task of nurturing our community.