The idea that the planet can sustain infinite population growth is a the new pop science and a dangerous illusion.
While accurately extrapolating any trend into the future is difficult, given new variables that can disrupt trend lines.
And there is no question that the demographics of an aging population pose challenges—economic and otherwise.
But…Earth’s ecosystems have finite resources—clean water, arable land, biodiversity—all of which are under growing strain. While humans are indeed builders and problem-solvers, we are also consuming at rates that exceed the planet’s ability to regenerate.
In 2023, humanity used the equivalent of 1.7 Earths’ worth of resources—according to the Global Footprint Network—meaning we are depleting natural capital faster than it can be replenished.
We generate waste at such an alarming rate, some of it with a half-life of thousands of years—we are running out of places to store it. There are literal islands of garbage floating in our oceans.
The economic incentive to grow far outweighs the existential need to manage that growth in order to preserve earth’s fragile ecosystem. So no, it’s not alarmist to say we have a population problem. Although I’d say the issue is more complex than just a population problem. Humans are the most efficient predatory species on earth. We have a perspective problem.
I don't think we are ever heading towards an infinite population growth. I do agree with you that we are causing damage to our planet by mining, energy production etc., though I'm very much an optimist when it comes to our ability to innovate and adapt to new realities when we need to.
Embracing Techno-optimism with a vague hope for innovation without advocating actionable decentralized regenerative solutions to these issues is a slippery slope. It is a position that hopes for someone "out there" (governments, corporations, some savior figure etc) to do the hard work for us and make everything better.
I outline some of the potential outcomes of going sliding down that slope in this essay:
What actionable solutions (which are applicable in a decentralized manner) would you suggest for those intending to move beyond passive optimism and into direct action to decrease the "damage to our planet by mining, energy production etc." ?
With respect to infinite population growth there are only three scenarios:
1) Exponential growth based on historical trends. (basic math)
2) Growth restrained by catastrophic circumstances (natural disasters, pandemic, war, scarcity)
3) Managed growth (some reduction in the number of trending births). In the U.S. this is seems to be occurring voluntarily. In China there appears to have been an over correction, which they are currently trying to reverse.
Tricky business. But denying the correlation between population growth and a strained ecosystem is not the way to go.
Hans Rosling’s Factfulness addresses this topic in a similar manner as you. I think many people, even commenters here, are missing the point. Thoughtful, pragmatic, well-reasoned and humanistic approaches are the way - NOT knee-jerk, emotionally based, control politics.
Yes, it is overpopulation — but not of souls. It's an overpopulation of biobot programs. NPC's. Earth isn’t overburdened by numbers — she’s overrun by unconscious replication loops. Consume, breed, repeat — the matrix's default code. Without connection to the Fractal Source, these bodies run extractive scripts that drain planetary life-force. It’s not just a numbers game. It’s a crisis of consciousness.
While your message is rooted in noble intent, it overlooks the repeating failure of our species: the assumption that more humans equates to more regeneration. History, however, reveals a pattern far less flattering.
Utopian visions ignore the deeply embedded behavioral programs that govern most of humanity - from religious dogma to primal desire to blind obedience. Expecting the collective to transcend these drives is like asking a lion to self reflect and go vegan.
The uncomfortable truth is - humans aren’t regenerating the Earth - we’re replacing it. Through urban sprawl, mono cultures, and consumption without end, we systematically erase biodiversity to make room for ourselves. I’ve seen it across continents. Even with awareness, I can’t walk without leaving a footprint that displaces something wilder.
More humans doesn’t mean more harmony, it means less of everything else. I, too, once believed a return to the tribe could heal this trajectory. But if anything, the spiral has deepened - further into delusion, desire, and disconnection.
And while I hold no reverence for the UN or its scripted crises, the best propaganda always weaves truth with control. If overpopulation were truly the issue, there would be no need for the UN’s Migration Replacement Strategy. You don’t replace what’s in surplus. What we’re witnessing isn’t compassion... it’s demographic reprogramming under the guise of salvation.
The hard truth? Our species may be the only one that sees reproduction as a moral virtue, even when it’s the root of our ecological collapse.
RE: "Even with awareness, I can’t walk without leaving a footprint that displaces something wilder."
That is inaccurate and based on a Eurocentric and mechanistic viewpoint of nature and our place within it, and it looks at a forest as something that exists outside of a human community. That is a failure of imagination and the result of not knowing the history of many indigenous peoples.
If you do not understand history, you are doomed to repeat the same failures of our human family of the past.
The verdant abundance, diversity, healing and dense old growth forests of Turtle Island (and other places) were not the the result of the lack of human presence (as mainstream propaganda would have you believe) rather, in reality, those forests were anthropogenic forests, tended and designed over millennia (by indigenous peoples).
If you are not a robot or a white supremist with delusions of superiority and entitlement, and you have a genuine intent to educate yourself, I invite you to read books like 1491, The Dark Emu, The Dawn of Everything, The Largest Estate On Earth, Tending the Wild and dissertations such as Lyla June’s Architects of Abundance: Indigenous Regenerative Food and Land Management Systems and the Excavation of Hidden History.
In truth, modern botanical, geological, archeological and anthropological studies have confirmed that much of the most dense, abundant, biodiverse, water cycle enriching and mesmerizingly beautiful and restorative forests here on Turtle Island (aka “North America”) and in “South America” are in fact Anthropogenic forests (manmade food forests created via the intentional shaping of the landscape over centuries of careful work on the part of an array of horticulturally advanced indigenous peoples).
Here in Canada researchers have now discovered a 7000 thousand year old food forest on the northern west coast (yes that is right, seven thousand). These food production systems were designed, installed and tended reverently for centuries to millennia until their creators and stewards were forced to flee.
Indigenous people were cultivating these food forests (that actually enriched soil depth, biodiversity and provided a diverse array or crops) before wheat farming began in Egypt.
These food forests still persist and produce abundant food today.
That is a form of horticulture and social technology we should all be striving to learn from and apply locally.
(more links to others examples of ancient food forest configurations from around the globe we can learn from, apply locally and build upon to increase the beauty and fertility of the Earth while also raising a family below).
More examples below so you can see what I am talking about:
Gavin, thank you for your passionate and well-researched reply. I did read your original article, and I deeply respect your work with refugia and food forest restoration. My disagreement isn’t rooted in ignorance of the past, but in the fact that I’ve walked a very different path and arrived at conclusions shaped by direct experience as a Buddhist monk, a clinical nutritionist, and a soul who has moved beyond the illusion of human exceptionalism.
Your article essentially says: "get more fertile and keep breeding." This is where our paths diverge.
Let’s address the discomfort at the root of it all: regeneration is not the same as reproduction.
Your narrative, while noble in intention, still clings to the most ancient programme in the Homo sapiens operating system: the unquestioned imperative to split cells and multiply. What you’re describing isn’t divine regeneration; it’s a neurochemical loop. Rubbing nerve endings together for a dopamine spike, followed by an oxytocin surge mislabelled as sacred purpose. This isn’t enlightenment. It’s addiction wearing legacy as a mask.
You reference Indigenous cultures that tended forests, and yes, many of their systems were profoundly wise, harmonious, and regenerative. But crucially, they were not overpopulating. They weren’t exporting techno-utopias to other planets. They lived within natural limits, something modern humanity has consistently failed to do, regardless of how many permaculture manuals it reads or ancient maps it reveres.
And we must resist the temptation to romanticise history. Some cultures, such as the Māori of New Zealand, hunted species like the moa into extinction and deforested vast landscapes long before industrialisation. Human hands have not always healed. Sometimes they have harmed deeply and irreversibly.
The uncomfortable truth is this: humanity in its current form is not regenerating the Earth, it is replacing it. More humans does not equal more harmony; it means less of everything else.
I’m not advocating extinction, I’m advocating humility. The rare, radical choice to exit the loop. To reclaim reverence, not through reproduction, but through presence.
Some of us, such as monks, are choosing not to create more humans. Not out of nihilism, but out of faith, that if new life is to emerge, it must come from Source, in a purer form. One not distorted by conquest, consumption, and chronically unmet needs.
You have your truths, and I honour them. But this is mine: You can’t stand against the machine - if the Matrix wants your land, your water, your forests, or your genes, it will take them. No amount of stewardship will stop a system built to extract. Conscious life does not multiply itself into extinction. It transforms. It ascends. It returns to stillness. And from stillness, true regeneration begins.
PS: Link-dumps are not a substitute for clarity. If a concept can’t be explained simply in a comment, it probably isn’t understood clearly in the first place. The last article I read from you essentially said: "Here’s how to get fertile, keep breeding, and eat more garlic." Garlic, by the way, is a powerful antibacterial. It doesn’t just target pathogens — it can also wipe out beneficial gut microbiome bacteria along with the bad.
Any pictures or videos of you the human being, "monk and nutritionist" living life and doing your work?
The repetitive nature of your remarks have a chatbot feel to them and some of the other content in your comments that is fallacious and seems to be the result of poor summarization and/or glitching (aka "AI hallucinations") also makes me wonder.
No I do not tell people to "get more fertile and keep breeding.", that is an invented quote and not my words.
I tell people that if they feel bad about starting a family, than do as some pre-statist indigenous ancestors did and increase the fertility of the land where they live (and by extension the biodiversity there as well). Big difference. I did not advocate endless population growth, I suggested we should not internalize anti-human propaganda, when humans are capable of being a gift and asset to the living Earth (as evidenced in the so called "link dump" you referenced).
That may be your uncomfortable truth, and it may be how you live, but for those of us developing our ecological literacy and planting food forests, we are not engaging in consumption and replacing nature, we are propagating what you would perceive as "wild places", living within them, and allowing them to feed both more humans and other beings.
I am well aware of the imperative of doing inner work and meditation is one of the things I suggest people engage in through my book and blog.
RE: "You can’t stand against the machine - if the Matrix wants your land, your water, your forests, or your genes, it will take them. No amount of stewardship will stop a system built to extract."
And passivity and meditating in an attempt to engage in escapism is a squandering of your God given gifts as a human.
Despite the disheartening behavior of billions of confused, lost and egocentric human beings, I draw hope and inspiration from observing the irrepressible regenerative capacity of the living Earth.
I strive to further align my own daily actions with her regenerative capacity and hone where I give my energy to fully reflect my acknowledgement of the sacredness of all life.
I choose to have faith that many of those who choose a path that is devoted to and grounded in love, perpetual learning, humility, compassion having the courage to strive to protect those that cannot protect themselves, giving a voice to those that cannot speak for themselves and taking steps to embody that which one would like to see manifest on this world for future generations will be guided through the storm ahead to find a fertile place to plant their seeds for a new way of living to set down roots when the time is right.
And when my awareness of the seemingly endless ways in which humans are wreaking havoc and scheming about how to dominate, enslave and kill each other starts to get to me and my faith wavers I take a step back to look at this life from the the more holistic perspective of my soul.
From the perspective of my spirit I remember that there is beauty and meaning to be found in impermanence. From that knowing, whether or not my efforts in this life send out clearly observable multi-generational ripple effects or not becomes irrelevant. After all, within a broader cosmic cycle, the inevitable natural result for this world will be end of all life on Earth. Planets only live as long as their stars burn, and eventually our sun’s life will come to an end as well, at which point all that ever was created by humans on this Earth will eventually be turned back into the stardust from once it came.
Does that inevitability make living a life where one chooses to be creative, kind, courageous, hopeful and curious any less meaningful?
In the end, whether its 1 more day, a couple years or a 100, it always comes down to the question:
How do I want to spend the time I have left on this Earth?
Does planting a seed in the Earth and tending it to grow, providing poetry for the senses, food for pollinators and nourishment for the soul have any less value because of the impermanence of that individual plant only living for a single season?
Do the fleeting expressions of form and color in a sunrise or a sunset make it any less beautiful or worth being present and aware to cherish and appreciate?
Asking myself these questions allows me to regenerate the faith, hope and sense of purpose in my heart and mind despite the corrosive onslaught of a world full of humans that have lost their way.
You speak of transforming and ascending, but inner work is only the beginning, and if you stop there, what you are really doing is stagnating and squandering your time on Earth.
Earth’s surface population behaves less like a thriving civilization and more like a self-replicating virus — unconscious of its host, caught in feedback loops of consumption and reproduction. True sentience is rare.
The idea that the planet can sustain infinite population growth is a the new pop science and a dangerous illusion.
While accurately extrapolating any trend into the future is difficult, given new variables that can disrupt trend lines.
And there is no question that the demographics of an aging population pose challenges—economic and otherwise.
But…Earth’s ecosystems have finite resources—clean water, arable land, biodiversity—all of which are under growing strain. While humans are indeed builders and problem-solvers, we are also consuming at rates that exceed the planet’s ability to regenerate.
In 2023, humanity used the equivalent of 1.7 Earths’ worth of resources—according to the Global Footprint Network—meaning we are depleting natural capital faster than it can be replenished.
We generate waste at such an alarming rate, some of it with a half-life of thousands of years—we are running out of places to store it. There are literal islands of garbage floating in our oceans.
The economic incentive to grow far outweighs the existential need to manage that growth in order to preserve earth’s fragile ecosystem. So no, it’s not alarmist to say we have a population problem. Although I’d say the issue is more complex than just a population problem. Humans are the most efficient predatory species on earth. We have a perspective problem.
I don't think we are ever heading towards an infinite population growth. I do agree with you that we are causing damage to our planet by mining, energy production etc., though I'm very much an optimist when it comes to our ability to innovate and adapt to new realities when we need to.
What are your thoughts on clearcut logging? (for more info: https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/death-by-a-thousand-clearcuts )
Embracing Techno-optimism with a vague hope for innovation without advocating actionable decentralized regenerative solutions to these issues is a slippery slope. It is a position that hopes for someone "out there" (governments, corporations, some savior figure etc) to do the hard work for us and make everything better.
I outline some of the potential outcomes of going sliding down that slope in this essay:
https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/are-there-limits-to-growth
What actionable solutions (which are applicable in a decentralized manner) would you suggest for those intending to move beyond passive optimism and into direct action to decrease the "damage to our planet by mining, energy production etc." ?
With respect to infinite population growth there are only three scenarios:
1) Exponential growth based on historical trends. (basic math)
2) Growth restrained by catastrophic circumstances (natural disasters, pandemic, war, scarcity)
3) Managed growth (some reduction in the number of trending births). In the U.S. this is seems to be occurring voluntarily. In China there appears to have been an over correction, which they are currently trying to reverse.
Tricky business. But denying the correlation between population growth and a strained ecosystem is not the way to go.
Hans Rosling’s Factfulness addresses this topic in a similar manner as you. I think many people, even commenters here, are missing the point. Thoughtful, pragmatic, well-reasoned and humanistic approaches are the way - NOT knee-jerk, emotionally based, control politics.
Yes, it is overpopulation — but not of souls. It's an overpopulation of biobot programs. NPC's. Earth isn’t overburdened by numbers — she’s overrun by unconscious replication loops. Consume, breed, repeat — the matrix's default code. Without connection to the Fractal Source, these bodies run extractive scripts that drain planetary life-force. It’s not just a numbers game. It’s a crisis of consciousness.
Each human is capable of being a blessing and an agent of regeneration on the Earth, it is all a choice, available to each of us, each and every day.
I explore that truth further in this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/gavinmounsey/p/fertility-and-reproductive-health?r=q2yay&selection=7019544d-1e25-463f-9422-12235b4e4d6c&utm_campaign=post-share-selection&utm_medium=web
While your message is rooted in noble intent, it overlooks the repeating failure of our species: the assumption that more humans equates to more regeneration. History, however, reveals a pattern far less flattering.
Utopian visions ignore the deeply embedded behavioral programs that govern most of humanity - from religious dogma to primal desire to blind obedience. Expecting the collective to transcend these drives is like asking a lion to self reflect and go vegan.
The uncomfortable truth is - humans aren’t regenerating the Earth - we’re replacing it. Through urban sprawl, mono cultures, and consumption without end, we systematically erase biodiversity to make room for ourselves. I’ve seen it across continents. Even with awareness, I can’t walk without leaving a footprint that displaces something wilder.
More humans doesn’t mean more harmony, it means less of everything else. I, too, once believed a return to the tribe could heal this trajectory. But if anything, the spiral has deepened - further into delusion, desire, and disconnection.
And while I hold no reverence for the UN or its scripted crises, the best propaganda always weaves truth with control. If overpopulation were truly the issue, there would be no need for the UN’s Migration Replacement Strategy. You don’t replace what’s in surplus. What we’re witnessing isn’t compassion... it’s demographic reprogramming under the guise of salvation.
The hard truth? Our species may be the only one that sees reproduction as a moral virtue, even when it’s the root of our ecological collapse.
I do not overlook the past failures of some groups of humans, you obviously did not read my linked article.
Nor did I say anything about how "more humans equates to more regeneration"
RE: "The uncomfortable truth is - humans aren’t regenerating the Earth - we’re replacing it."
Speak for yourself, I am personally creating refugia ( https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/designing-bio-cultural-refugia ) locally (and empowering people to create them globally) and we are indeed living as agents of regeneration.
RE: "Even with awareness, I can’t walk without leaving a footprint that displaces something wilder."
That is inaccurate and based on a Eurocentric and mechanistic viewpoint of nature and our place within it, and it looks at a forest as something that exists outside of a human community. That is a failure of imagination and the result of not knowing the history of many indigenous peoples.
If you do not understand history, you are doomed to repeat the same failures of our human family of the past.
The verdant abundance, diversity, healing and dense old growth forests of Turtle Island (and other places) were not the the result of the lack of human presence (as mainstream propaganda would have you believe) rather, in reality, those forests were anthropogenic forests, tended and designed over millennia (by indigenous peoples).
If you are not a robot or a white supremist with delusions of superiority and entitlement, and you have a genuine intent to educate yourself, I invite you to read books like 1491, The Dark Emu, The Dawn of Everything, The Largest Estate On Earth, Tending the Wild and dissertations such as Lyla June’s Architects of Abundance: Indigenous Regenerative Food and Land Management Systems and the Excavation of Hidden History.
In truth, modern botanical, geological, archeological and anthropological studies have confirmed that much of the most dense, abundant, biodiverse, water cycle enriching and mesmerizingly beautiful and restorative forests here on Turtle Island (aka “North America”) and in “South America” are in fact Anthropogenic forests (manmade food forests created via the intentional shaping of the landscape over centuries of careful work on the part of an array of horticulturally advanced indigenous peoples).
Here in Canada researchers have now discovered a 7000 thousand year old food forest on the northern west coast (yes that is right, seven thousand). These food production systems were designed, installed and tended reverently for centuries to millennia until their creators and stewards were forced to flee.
Indigenous people were cultivating these food forests (that actually enriched soil depth, biodiversity and provided a diverse array or crops) before wheat farming began in Egypt.
These food forests still persist and produce abundant food today.
That is a form of horticulture and social technology we should all be striving to learn from and apply locally.
https://www.science.org/content/article/indigenous-tribes-engineered-british-columbia-s-modern-hazelnut-forests-more-7000-years#:~:text=Hazelnut%20pollen%20found%20in%20layers,tended%20and%20cultivated%20them%20here.
(more links to others examples of ancient food forest configurations from around the globe we can learn from, apply locally and build upon to increase the beauty and fertility of the Earth while also raising a family below).
More examples below so you can see what I am talking about:
– https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/ancient-indigenous-forest-gardens-still-yield-bounty-150-years-later-study
– https://www.science.org/content/article/pacific-northwest-s-forest-gardens-were-deliberately-planted-indigenous-people
– https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2025047118
– https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.2806
– https://academic.oup.com/aob/article/132/4/835/7277223
– https://web.archive.org/web/20120408154238/http://www.daviesand.com/Papers/Tree_Crops/Indian_Agroforestry/index.html
– https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-permaculture-food-forests?
– https://web.archive.org/web/20180816141812/https://returntonow.net/2018/08/01/the-amazon-is-a-man-made-food-forest-researchers-discover/
– https://www.sdvforest.com/agroforestry/the-fascinating-story-of-human-made-forests?fbclid=IwAR3OVHhCywwzOiCSBMWyk6_Bdy_q-GRRN2N7-525iqdnYmc_BqtKeyu6Wz4
– https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol26/iss2/art6/
– https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26395916.2022.2160823
– https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.1601282
– https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440322000693
– https://www.sdvforest.com/agroforestry/the-fascinating-story-of-human-made-forests
These posts will provide further clarification:
https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/are-there-limits-to-growth
https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/death-by-a-thousand-clearcuts
https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/the-monster-of-modernitywendigo-thinking
Gavin, thank you for your passionate and well-researched reply. I did read your original article, and I deeply respect your work with refugia and food forest restoration. My disagreement isn’t rooted in ignorance of the past, but in the fact that I’ve walked a very different path and arrived at conclusions shaped by direct experience as a Buddhist monk, a clinical nutritionist, and a soul who has moved beyond the illusion of human exceptionalism.
Your article essentially says: "get more fertile and keep breeding." This is where our paths diverge.
Let’s address the discomfort at the root of it all: regeneration is not the same as reproduction.
Your narrative, while noble in intention, still clings to the most ancient programme in the Homo sapiens operating system: the unquestioned imperative to split cells and multiply. What you’re describing isn’t divine regeneration; it’s a neurochemical loop. Rubbing nerve endings together for a dopamine spike, followed by an oxytocin surge mislabelled as sacred purpose. This isn’t enlightenment. It’s addiction wearing legacy as a mask.
You reference Indigenous cultures that tended forests, and yes, many of their systems were profoundly wise, harmonious, and regenerative. But crucially, they were not overpopulating. They weren’t exporting techno-utopias to other planets. They lived within natural limits, something modern humanity has consistently failed to do, regardless of how many permaculture manuals it reads or ancient maps it reveres.
And we must resist the temptation to romanticise history. Some cultures, such as the Māori of New Zealand, hunted species like the moa into extinction and deforested vast landscapes long before industrialisation. Human hands have not always healed. Sometimes they have harmed deeply and irreversibly.
The uncomfortable truth is this: humanity in its current form is not regenerating the Earth, it is replacing it. More humans does not equal more harmony; it means less of everything else.
I’m not advocating extinction, I’m advocating humility. The rare, radical choice to exit the loop. To reclaim reverence, not through reproduction, but through presence.
Some of us, such as monks, are choosing not to create more humans. Not out of nihilism, but out of faith, that if new life is to emerge, it must come from Source, in a purer form. One not distorted by conquest, consumption, and chronically unmet needs.
You have your truths, and I honour them. But this is mine: You can’t stand against the machine - if the Matrix wants your land, your water, your forests, or your genes, it will take them. No amount of stewardship will stop a system built to extract. Conscious life does not multiply itself into extinction. It transforms. It ascends. It returns to stillness. And from stillness, true regeneration begins.
PS: Link-dumps are not a substitute for clarity. If a concept can’t be explained simply in a comment, it probably isn’t understood clearly in the first place. The last article I read from you essentially said: "Here’s how to get fertile, keep breeding, and eat more garlic." Garlic, by the way, is a powerful antibacterial. It doesn’t just target pathogens — it can also wipe out beneficial gut microbiome bacteria along with the bad.
Can you prove you are human?
Any pictures or videos of you the human being, "monk and nutritionist" living life and doing your work?
The repetitive nature of your remarks have a chatbot feel to them and some of the other content in your comments that is fallacious and seems to be the result of poor summarization and/or glitching (aka "AI hallucinations") also makes me wonder.
No I do not tell people to "get more fertile and keep breeding.", that is an invented quote and not my words.
I tell people that if they feel bad about starting a family, than do as some pre-statist indigenous ancestors did and increase the fertility of the land where they live (and by extension the biodiversity there as well). Big difference. I did not advocate endless population growth, I suggested we should not internalize anti-human propaganda, when humans are capable of being a gift and asset to the living Earth (as evidenced in the so called "link dump" you referenced).
That may be your uncomfortable truth, and it may be how you live, but for those of us developing our ecological literacy and planting food forests, we are not engaging in consumption and replacing nature, we are propagating what you would perceive as "wild places", living within them, and allowing them to feed both more humans and other beings.
I am well aware of the imperative of doing inner work and meditation is one of the things I suggest people engage in through my book and blog.
RE: "You can’t stand against the machine - if the Matrix wants your land, your water, your forests, or your genes, it will take them. No amount of stewardship will stop a system built to extract."
And passivity and meditating in an attempt to engage in escapism is a squandering of your God given gifts as a human.
Despite the disheartening behavior of billions of confused, lost and egocentric human beings, I draw hope and inspiration from observing the irrepressible regenerative capacity of the living Earth.
I strive to further align my own daily actions with her regenerative capacity and hone where I give my energy to fully reflect my acknowledgement of the sacredness of all life.
I choose to have faith that many of those who choose a path that is devoted to and grounded in love, perpetual learning, humility, compassion having the courage to strive to protect those that cannot protect themselves, giving a voice to those that cannot speak for themselves and taking steps to embody that which one would like to see manifest on this world for future generations will be guided through the storm ahead to find a fertile place to plant their seeds for a new way of living to set down roots when the time is right.
And when my awareness of the seemingly endless ways in which humans are wreaking havoc and scheming about how to dominate, enslave and kill each other starts to get to me and my faith wavers I take a step back to look at this life from the the more holistic perspective of my soul.
From the perspective of my spirit I remember that there is beauty and meaning to be found in impermanence. From that knowing, whether or not my efforts in this life send out clearly observable multi-generational ripple effects or not becomes irrelevant. After all, within a broader cosmic cycle, the inevitable natural result for this world will be end of all life on Earth. Planets only live as long as their stars burn, and eventually our sun’s life will come to an end as well, at which point all that ever was created by humans on this Earth will eventually be turned back into the stardust from once it came.
Does that inevitability make living a life where one chooses to be creative, kind, courageous, hopeful and curious any less meaningful?
In the end, whether its 1 more day, a couple years or a 100, it always comes down to the question:
How do I want to spend the time I have left on this Earth?
Does planting a seed in the Earth and tending it to grow, providing poetry for the senses, food for pollinators and nourishment for the soul have any less value because of the impermanence of that individual plant only living for a single season?
Does the impermanence of this man’s art make it any less beautiful or worthwhile in creating? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEpz8Z2BMAc
Do the fleeting expressions of form and color in a sunrise or a sunset make it any less beautiful or worth being present and aware to cherish and appreciate?
Asking myself these questions allows me to regenerate the faith, hope and sense of purpose in my heart and mind despite the corrosive onslaught of a world full of humans that have lost their way.
You speak of transforming and ascending, but inner work is only the beginning, and if you stop there, what you are really doing is stagnating and squandering your time on Earth.
I explored the over-population propaganda in a discussion with James Corbett here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/corbettreport/p/enhancing-fertility-naturally-solutionswatch?r=q2yay&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web×tamp=943.5&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Earth’s surface population behaves less like a thriving civilization and more like a self-replicating virus — unconscious of its host, caught in feedback loops of consumption and reproduction. True sentience is rare.