ALL MY RELATIONS (Mitakuye Oyasin)

Tell me something, have you ever looked around at your family and taken it one step further to feel like you don’t even belong on this planet?

Well, you’re not alone.  So don’t get all comfortable in your misery here. I am here to help you to understand: you ain’t alone, baby. In fact, you are part of every living thing on earth … the world and everything in it is related to you.

I didn’t feel much like I “belonged” to my family. I have one powerful childhood memory that I dash around the corner every chance I got, where I’d sneak in behind a low bush and wait for my tribal family to come and get me. I envisioned them riding up in feathers and robes, leading a spare pony just for me. I always wore a piece of clothesline tied tightly around my waist. This wasn’t usually a problem, except the days I was in crinolines for dress-up & the parental unit would get cranky about having just ironed the dress… then things got a little Italian around the house.

So many of us feel estranged from our immediate family and it’s popular to say “your friends are your family” or, as I’ve seen it recently: “God gave us friends to make up for our relatives.” But time has proved to me that Desmond Tutu put it well when he said, “You don’t choose your family, They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.”

After being on Starship Earth for a while, we begin to see there are common threads that bind us all together. Our foods are different, our languages, our clothing…but that’s all detail. Basically, the same emotions apply: Who doesn’t want material success with a place to live well & in good health? Who turns away from good luck, plenty of money? Who doesn’t complain about their politicians or the rebelliousness of their youth?

In my online world, I keep seeing the phrase “Unity Consciousness” to denote this common thread of thought. We want fairness to prevail, we want to be safe in public places, we want our taxes to make a noticeable difference for PEACE in the world.

The continents may be drifting apart, but the regular people on them are uniting together insofar as their thinking less of war and more of peace.

The original title of Charles Darwin’s 1859 bestseller was On The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.  Its primary topic was the scientific theory that populations evolve over generations through natural selection. This was not acceptable to the Church of England which felt species were unchanging parts of a designed hierarchy and that humans were unique, unrelated to other animals and, unfortunately, many times to other humans. While Darwin says ‘survival of the fittest’ twice in that book he uses the word “love” 95 times. I’d say that’s a terrific basis for a theory of evolution and one which is proving out!

He wrote:  “Let it be borne in mind how infinitely close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other.”

He also spoke of inter-species cooperation. If you think about it, our pets today prove that out. And not too many years ago we all lived with animals; if you kept chickens you got to have an egg hunt daily. If you wanted to go anywhere off the property, you saddled up the horse or hitched up the buggy. Our wake-up call was cattle lowing in the barn to be milked. We looked to our four-legs as co-workers, as guardians, as helpers and even as our mental health professionals as they’d listen to a lot more than we could tell anyone else… One life supported another, just as one life fed another.

Species cooperate in the wild pretty readily: In the southwest, pronghorn antelope regularly grab sage with their teeth to tear off leaves for lunch. When this happens, the sage sends out a chemical signal which triggers the tobacco plant next to it. The tobacco plant then breathes out – and it emits an odor that the antelope don’t like. In protecting itself, the tobacco plant is also protecting the sage. With such a beautiful and complex dance of life, it behooves you not to declare for your limitations by focusing only on the box step. Think your way out of that particular construction, pretty please!

Where does life come from? Is it just conception and procreation that brings in new living beings? In the early 1900’s, many experiments were done in Russia which proved out that life can arise from nonlife, and the cooperation of life with life is ever ongoing. Gurvisch was one scientist who was intrigued by plants growing upward no matter what. He theorized that there is a “life force” which was  undeniable, and enormously powerful. He saw plants growing even through concrete so he decided this life force came out of the TOP of the plant. He experimented with onions. He pointed the top of one onion top at the side of another, while running a low electrical current through them both. He was amazed and gratified to have his theory proved out when the onion being pointed at started to grow a big bump in response to the pointing onion. This gives me hope we can get to the life-level of onions. That we can point to one another, send the electrical current of our thoughts and the higher-voltage current of our prayers, at each other and create new life.

In the 70’s, I read a book called The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Chris Bird. You may have heard of it? Some of the book is based on the research of a man named Cleve Backster who was an interrogation specialist for the CIA. On a day at the lab when he didn’t have enough to do, he hooked up the polygraph to a dracaena plant. Amazingly, the plant registered on the polygraph with a spike on the readout tape. So he started talking to the plant. He began a kind of whole earth movement toward “biocommunication” – play music for the plants, tell your plants you love them and then stand back & watch ‘em grow!

Tompkins & Bird took Backster’s data a little farther and hooked up houseplants to an oscilloscope. Later, they proved that if you gave a plant a way to generate an electrical current, it would open your garage door for you when you got home.

You’ve probably heard about the researchers who set up cameras to find out what pets do at home all day. What they discovered was that when the owner THOUGHT about heading home, their dog went to sit at the door to wait. (Cats, however, headed for their food dishes.)

In 2000, Professor Pacheco (a neurobiologist) heated beach sand to luminescence, killing all lifeforms that might have existed in it. He poured this sand into a test tube partially filled with distilled water. He sealed the tube & autoclaved the test tube as a double measure of killing off anything alive in it. He placed this sterile test tube next to one with DNA in it, ran a low, 7 Hz current through them both – that same 7.3 Hz current Gurvisch ran on the onions. After 24 hours, a thin layer had appeared on top of the so-called “sterile” beach sand water – and the scum was filled with DNA! There are other experiments on the books as well, primarily out of Russia, which have also shown a case for this. It’s called “spontaneous generation.”  And Pacheco was replicating prior experiments. He wasn’t the first to do this.

I claim firsthand experience with spontaneous generation when the last banana in the basket births an entire cloud of flying dots which seem eager to be inhaled, for some reason. There are a number of experiments which proved life generates from non-life, they just didn’t agree with the mainstream belief system – remember the Church of England blinders? Power structures don’t like challenges.

Nature’s SO not stupid. The bacteria that form spontaneously in nuclear reactors eat radiation. Microbes form where they are needed. There are microbes in 99.9% of all space dust. What does that mean? It means what we have supposed is cold, empty, dead space is alive with potential.

We stand on one rung of the evolutionary ladder. We like to think it’s the top rung. I’m not sure it is. When I see the poetry of a horse running through a field, or the fabulous understanding of a service dog in the pediatric ward of a hospital, or even a flock of starlings wheeling in some grand ballet against sunset sky – I have to pray we can achieve this kind of Unity Consciousness. If you think world peace is a challenge, try getting people to agree on the channel to have on at the Laundromat!

Kinesiology (muscle testing) can show us that thinking a negative thought about someone weakens them. Even something as simple as, “I don’t like those shoes!”  Even when that person doesn’t know about the thought. If negative thoughts disperse energy, guess what the positive thoughts do? There’s a reason the Pope waves his hands towards him…and the Dalai Lama waves them away, redirecting that appreciative energy back to his audience.

I don’t think Mother/Father God made us and then wandered off. I think when we found out just how powerful we were, we shooed them off, saying “We wanna do this ourselves now! You can go.” But it’s now time to invite the divine back into our lives and recognize each other’s divinity. Recapture that unqualified recognition that a loving parent has for even the most stubborn child. In order to do that, we need to acknowledge ourselves, each other, our beautiful world, from the vast ocean whispering a lovesong with every wave, to the smallest junco whistling a little song before grabbing up a seed on our patio. We need to start hearing the beauty of the world, tasting the glowing colors our eyes see, speaking to others the words we would ourselves love to hear someone say to us.

It is up to our generation to start. Somebody has to be the first to beat that sword into a ploughshare, after all. There’s a reason we are called to speak living words.

I have every faith we can shift the entire world once we acknowledge our relationship with its every aspect.

Feel free to test the world’s relationship with you. I took a two-mile hike once in a forest. About the time I ran out of energy I also ran out of trail markers. I stopped to figure things out. And because I trust the world is looking out for me, I looked up and told God “I need a sign here.” Two seconds later the tiniest yellow moth wobbled by, going left. I said, “Thanks!” and turned left. The parking lot was fifty feet away. Let the world show you, let it be your active ally, not just scenery out there. Trust your perceptions!

The world is here to heal you. Won’t you return the favor? If you think about your relationships with your family and feel they may not be either friends or well-wishers…don’t give in or give up; simply reach for a good thought, even if the best you can muster wouldn’t win any Nobel Peace Prizes.

The beautiful name for an intelligent cosmos which constantly adapts to life is “Auto poetic.” The truth we have been taught about life only being available through evolution-based reproduction, or some random mutation effect is only a small part of the information available now.  Be vigilant for your world. Pay attention so that your ears are the first to hear God’s message through the world directed to you, and your heart to be the first to perceive its wholeness.