If a person’s vitality is high, a health crisis is more likely to eventual improvement rather than collapse. I am personally uncertain about the outcome of our present-day environmental crisis. Earth runs a very high fever, and the symptoms that she manifests are severe. Some specialists think that it is already too late to prevent global warming from running its fateful course over the next 150 to 200 years.
What happens after that no one knows, because at the present moment we cannot tell whether humanity will opt for life or for suicide; in other words, whether people will take decisive action to reverse (and not merely reduce) carbon emissions and in general adopt an environmentally friendly orientation.
Thus far, our species has not demonstrated much common sense, never mind the necessary wisdom required to stop the current slide into oblivion. But you never know. The big polluting nations in North America, Europe, and the East might come to their senses and institute rationally sound green policies, which everyone will have to follow.
Personally, I am not too hopeful that this will happen. I tend to agree with those who believe that humankind is slow to change when the called-for change involves a huge personal sacrifice, which would be involved at this late hour of the unraveling environmental disaster.
I am, however, open to the possibility that this planet will be aided by powers in the subtle realms, so that the Earth might survive and give a great variety of species an opportunity to evolve further. I don’t think that some alien intelligence from a distant star system will come to save humanity from itself in the nick of time. I also don’t think that a benign new era will magically constellate itself perhaps by dint of some favorable planetary configuration.
But because enlightened beings do exist both here and now and on the subtle planes and because they are by nature profoundly compassionate, I can readily envision that they will not want to see the very possibility of spiritual evolution at the human and the animal levels vanish for good. If they can, they will undoubtedly want to assist the beings struggling on our blue planet.
I know that kind-hearted spiritual practitioners of far more modest attainment are presently sending their blessings to the Earth and its multitude of inhabitants. We all ought to make this a daily spiritual practice as part of our deeply felt love for all life (biophilia).
Perhaps you will consider joining the thousands of people who every day send their loving thoughts out into the world in order to help safeguard it? As the great Tibetan yogi Shabkar urged:
We are now at the crossroad, which leads up and down—
Don’t take the wrong path!*
Note
*Shabkar, The Life of Shabkar ( Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 2001), p. 352.
© 2008 by Georg Feuerstein