Planet Earth

Somewhere in a far-flung, remote region of the unimaginably vast Milky Way galaxy, a blueish ball of life floats gracefully around a star. That star is our magnificent Sun. That blue ball of life is our planet Earth. On our planet Earth, life flourishes. We are part of that life.

This planet of ours has been around for a long, long time. And for all of its more recent history, it has played host to great variety of life. The continued support of this life has been, and is dependent upon a fine balance of environmental conditions. The biosphere maintains a large number of variables that all work together in a complex manner, to create just the right conditions for us to live here.

Our own human bodies also contains a great variety of life. Each cell is a living organism with a small life of its own. These cells are organized together into units that eventually make up our bones, muscles, nervous system, organs, glands, blood vessels, skin and brain. Our bodies, like our planet, also maintains a fine balance of environmental conditions for these cells and units to live. Yet we are unconscious of most of those automatic processes that keeps our physical bodies alive. People have a vague sense of the importance of their “health”, which encompasses all these things.

The way that our perception works is sometimes a hindrance. Specifically, we tend to struggle with recognizing the innate conscious intelligence of our bodies. In the same way, we rarely become conscious of the innate, conscious intelligence of our planet Earth. Many people see the Earth as a dead lump of rocks with a favorable atmosphere. Most people don’t even think that far. Modern society has enough distractions to occupy man’s rather limited attention span.

Our planet Earth is very much alive. It has a consciousness of its own. That consciousness is much older than ours, and in some cases much more developed than our own. That might be a challenging idea for some. Think about ants. The small ant does not easily fathom the mind of the human being, if at all. When ants eat our food or come into our houses, it is easy to poison or squash them. We don’t have a moral dilemma every time we kill an ant. But consider our planet Earth. In some instances, it might regard a specific activity of ours is unfavorable. Perhaps it sees testing nuclear weapons on its surface as quite unfavorable. Yet it has not done anything to get rid of the human race, let alone harm us in any substantial way.

Our planet Earth is in harmony with nature, which includes our solar system and the universe. Similarly, the plant and animal life here is in harmony with the Earth, and therefore nature. Consider these two simple examples. When migrating, many birds have subtle senses to migrate between favorable seasons. These subtle senses are calibrated to work with the Earth’s magnetic field. Most other animals sense pending natural phenomena like earthquakes in advance, and move to safety long before they occur.

The humanity of modern society have apparently lost this harmony with their habitat. As a result of this, there are two interesting symptoms to consider. The first is what has been called “global warming” and later “climate change”. It assumes that less than 200 years of modern industry can have a significant impact on a biosphere that has maintained itself for billions of years. Earth has seen major events like asteroid impacts and super volcanoes that dwarfs anything we can inflict by orders of magnitude. Change and upheaval are natural in the biosphere. Our planet Earth also has amazing ways of healing itself when needed. These points are by no means an excuse to treat our habitat with a lack of respect or caring, though.

The second symptom is the multitude of end-of-the-world religious prophecies. These shortsighted prophecies usually contain the common elements of some catastrophe coupled with a spiritual salvation – but only for those that followed the rules. If you were to compare the life of the planet with a human lifespan, these prophecies have been around perhaps a millisecond or two.

An unfortunate side effect of these two phenomena is that they can create a perception that planet Earth is somehow pitted against us. It is similar to saying that you are pitted against the well being of the cells in your own body. Despite such man-made illusions, we do not live in a hostile world. Nature is ultimately geared for success – a success in which life in the physical world can grow and flourish.

Gravity is something taken for granted. Science can observe, explain and measure the effects of gravity. Yet science is at a loss to describe how or why gravity works the way it does. The gravity of Earth keeps us firmly grounded so that we don’t float of into space and suffocate. But what is gravity? Perhaps the force of gravity is a physical manifestation of the force of Love. Perhaps it is the force of Love that keeps us firmly on the ground, as it keeps the Earth revolving around our solar system’s Sun.

From that perspective, it comes as no surprise that many of the ancient civilizations – that are today called “primitive” – had a sacred respect for planet Earth and the Sun.

Here is a beautiful video of our Planet Earth from the International Space Station. Enjoy…