TRANSCRIPT
Humanity is a virus. Human beings are growing at an exponential rate. The curve of the growth of human population over time went like this for so long. It was so flat, like a virus that hadn’t taken off. And then boom! The last 100, 200, 300 years, growing up like this. Exponential growth up to 8 billion, 9 billion. Where is it going to stop? 10, 11, 12 billion? On a planet of limited size, that’s a lot. Like what a virus does in a population, like the coronavirus in the human population, spreading massively, spreading inside a body. Even within the body, massive exponential growth of virus until the body fights back, until the body develops enough antibodies, enough T cells to kill it off. And whoo! The number of virus cells goes way down, plummets, even disappears.
And also, maybe the coronavirus pandemic in this planet, somehow it’s going to go up, up, up, up, up until it doesn’t. And then it’s going to crash. That’s what happens to viruses that are out of control and species that are out of control. I think about that story of rabbits in Australia, an introduced species, and how they had no predators. And they just went up, up, up, up, up in terms of their population until they introduced a biological agent. They did biological warfare. They actually introduced what I believe either was a bacteria or a virus, mixed with myxomatosis, that went and infected these rabbits and it made them blind.
So their populations would be out of control, viral numbers of rabbits, and then myxomatosis would spread among the population and they’d all go blind and wander around and get hit by cars. It was absolutely disgusting from people that I talked to that saw it. And then the numbers would plummet until it went down. And then there would be some rabbits that either didn’t get it or were immune to it, and eventually those rabbits would breed, breed, breed like mad, and it would go up again.
Well, I see humanity as being like that. We’re doing this right now. We’re going up, up, up. Will we crash? It breaks my heart to think about it. It breaks my heart to think of the destruction of humanity, especially the destruction of individuals. Each individual being a beautiful thing, having so much potential to grow and heal and be real. Of so many children who have the potential to manifest without being traumatized, of each one having the potential to become a genius, to become brilliant, to know themselves, to be an honest vessel of truth in this world. And yet that so rarely happens.
Part of what makes us a virus is that we crush children. We crush the truth out of them. We force them to be shut down, to be false, to be not even real in their relationship with themselves, to follow ideas that don’t make sense, to follow the norms of the family system and the norms of the culture, sometimes very weird religious norms even. And then I think about the main religion in this country, the religion of my mother, Christianity. My dad was Jewish, and I think it actually came from the Jewish religion originally, where God said, “Be fruitful and multiply, spread to all corners of the earth, tame nature.” That was the mandate from God to humanity.
Basically, what I hear is that is a mandate for humanity to go forth and become a virus, spread exponentially, take over everything. And then I think about my argument about humanity as a virus, really from the perspective of the wild earth, from the perspective of nature, from this perspective of the trees and the coyotes and the deer and the box turtles that live in this forest and the frogs that are hopping all around me. Actually, I see them out of the corner of my eye as I do this video. What is their perspective on us?
Yes, there are some songbirds that like us, and we put out bird feeders and they can eat, so we can look at them and take pictures of their beauty. The finches and the cardinals and the blue jays and the squirrels that live close to us, and they live on the edges of our world, and the raccoons that eat our garbage. But then I think of the species that don’t like us, that we’re their enemy. It’s so obvious. We’re killing them out. We’re making them go extinct. The meadow larks and the Baltimore checker spot butterflies that were all around when I was a little boy learning how to collect butterflies. And then at a certain point, our pesticides took them out. We took over their lands, we took over their fields, we took over their forests, and suddenly there weren’t so many.
And the luna moths that withdrew further and further and deeper into the forest because they didn’t like people, they didn’t get along with people. I think the lake that I grew up next to when I was a child, one of the Finger Lakes in Central New York, I grew up drinking that water. And then at a certain point, they told us there’s too much pollution in the water. There’s too much agricultural pesticide runoff in this water, too much fertilizers, too many nitrates and things like that. The water is no longer good, it’s no longer fit to drink. And it was like, oh.
And then I remember swimming in the lake sometimes and swimming deep. Sometimes I would take a swallow of the water and think, am I gonna die? Am I gonna die because of what humanity has done to this water? And then we drank filtered water after that, and water we bought in the store, and water that we carted in, and water that we put through all this ultraviolet filter and charcoal to take out all the nasty things that we had put in.
And then I thought about all the animals that lived in the water, the turtles and the ducks and the loons. They were drinking this water, they were living in this water. This was their home. And I thought, we’re creepy. We’re not fair. We really are a very destructive species from the perspective of nature.
And for those of us who are more aligned with nature, who love nature, who grew up in nature or learned to thrive and survive in nature, who have become nature, who have released our human nature by healing our traumas and returning to the true nature of us, we realize that humanity is not a friend of nature. So often, humanity as it is, and often I think what we call humanity really isn’t even humanity.
Oh, it’s human to make mistakes. It’s human to screw up. It’s human to do horrible things. I often think all these horrible things that people do, that humans do, that humans do as a whole species, this is not the work of humanity. This is the work of inhumanity. This is the work of traumatized, split-off, shut-down humanity. Humanity that doesn’t love its own self cannot, because of that, love its children and cannot love nature.
And the end result is the more that we crush nature and take it over, subdue it for our own purposes according to biblical mandate or whatever unconscious mandate people do that kind of stuff for, we’re actually destroying our own habitat. And the more that we destroy it, the more that we actually are destroying ourselves.
So humanity, I think, is not just a virus against the nature of the world. We’re a virus against the true nature of ourselves, and we are killing ourselves as a species. And yet, from what I’ve seen, using myself as a case study of one, an anecdote that I know to be true and yet that I’ve seen in many, many, many other people to varying degrees and sometimes to great degrees, people can heal their traumas. There is hope. I certainly have gained hope in my life.
I was a very, very shut down person in many ways. I wasn’t even a person by the time I became 20. I was largely a persona. I was a false, false self. I wasn’t very authentic. I was fake, and my family and my world largely loved me for that because I was normal. That’s how they trained me to be. That’s how they traumatized me to be, to be fake.
And when I started in my own small private way, in my mind, in my life, breaking out of that, becoming more real, really looking inside myself and figuring out who I really was, I started changing. And a new thing started living in my body, and that new thing was me. The me that had always been there but had been…
So repressed and buried by my traumas in my family and my school system in my society. And when I started inhabiting me, I started having that thing called hope. I started living differently. I started living more sustainably. I started living more respectfully toward other people.
When I thought, learned in school about that massive population curve, I realized, you know, I do a service for the world if I don’t have children. And anyone who doesn’t have children, who doesn’t procreate in a time of the human virus, is actually someone that I respect more.
And often what’s so sad is the people who didn’t have children, from what I saw, were the people that probably would have made the best parents because they were the most respectful. And also, they were the ones often who were devoting themselves to their own personal evolution, to becoming more conscious, to becoming more free and honest.
And what I see is that freedom and that honesty, the truth of people being embodied people, that is the hope for humanity.