A new article has just been posted on the BBC website called Earth ‘entering new extinction phase’ – US study. The article describes a study tabled by Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley universities, ringing alarm bells that vertebrate species are becoming extinct at a rate 114 times faster than normal. The last mass extinction event took place 65 years ago and the current 6th mass extinction, so the scientists, will likely claim humanity as a victim even during the early phases of this extinction. As causes for this extinction the study names climate change (do you hear, Tony Abbott?), pollution and deforestation. One of the professors is quoted as saying, “We are sawing off the limb that we are sitting on” and there is warning of “dramatic decay of biodiversity”. One of the effects mentioned is for example the possibility of bee pollination disappearing within three generations.

It is my intuition since quite a while, and it is supported through a mounting collection of evidence, that humanity is drawing nearer to the chasm of ecocide, the destruction of our entire biosphere and with it us. Yesterday even the Pope presented a 192-page encyclical in which he blames human selfishness for global warming (do you hear, Tony Abbott?) and criticizes our plundering of the Earth at as we see fit. He even goes as far to say that the “violence in our hearts [] is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life.”
I believe that we will be gone in two generations, give or take a few years, unless we undertake a fundamental turn, one that makes us peacefully coexist with all creation and turns us into responsible guardians of Earth and nature as so many indigenous societies have been before us, such as the Native Americans and the Australian Aborigines. We have labeled them as brutes and primitives but history is beginning to prove us wrong. If extraterrestrial ever in the far future make their way to Earth they may judge us as being the brainless savages that destroyed the blue jewel of the universe (Earth) and they may see the American Indians and the Aborigines as an advanced civilization that maintained guardianship for Earth for 10’s of thousands of years but whom we, the savages, unfortunately were unable to understand and emulate.
But how could this turn-around look like? During the last 10,000 years we have essentially lost our alignment and harmony with that intelligence of which the entire cosmos is an expression. It is not only its expression but not less than its body. All matter, the entire universe is the body of the Divine. There is no place, no site on Earth (and elsewhere) that is not sacred and therefore also no place that we can defile by exploiting it as waste dumps, etc. There are also no beings on Earth (or elsewhere) that are the ‘others’ (such as the refugees, the foreigners) so that we can project our own inner conflicts on them and therefore hate them whereas in fact this hatred is nothing but an expression of our own self-loathing. We have to stop believing that we are separate from our surroundings and others but instead accept us as an integral ingredient of the biosphere, nature and humanity. The mere concept that proposes that I end at the surface of my skin where the environment starts, has pitched us in conflict with other individuals, other species and the entire super-organism Gaia, resulting in the fact that the super-organism needs to now look for ways to get rid of us.

But it is still time to turn around. Gaia itself and all life on it are nothing but an expression and manifestation of divine harmony. The only ingredient that has made up its mind that it can outsmart, use and exploit the rest is humanity. Yoga can play a great role in bringing us back in harmony with life. We cannot currently see the harmony and balance of nature because we are in conflict with ourselves, because we have lost the original love affair with our own heart. If through the process of yoga and all its many limbs we can re-discover this original love affair with our own heart, all conflict with ourselves will end and this will radiate out as acceptance of all others and will also manifest as ceasing all hostility towards the super-organism Gaia. It is this rediscovery and acceptance of the fact that all beings are nothing short of being manifestations of Divine Love that will prevent us from turning the planet into our own graveyard and that of 90% of all other species.