THE HAIRY, SHITTING, DYING APE

“If you really will look into the Mirror, to see your reflection there, you will see that you are actually a hairy, shitting, dying ape! That is what is actually reflected in the Mirror Itself.

In Reality, your preciously maintained self-image-always beyond all bodily hairiness, all that is repulsive and unattractive and all of the immediate death- is pure imagination. . . ."
– Adida Samraj

The representation of a Jain Siddha, or perfected being. He is represented as ‘Digambara’ (clad with the sky) empty of form.

"Life in India has not yet withdrawn into the capsule of the head. It is still the whole body that lives. No wonder the European feels dreamlike: The complete life of India is something of which he merely dreams. – Carl Jung¹

It is only when we dream the ‘dreams’ of a Western person, go to a zoo, or have a dog or cat, or when we visit a third-world country like India that Westerners begin to experience the ‘whole body.’ This is a vision of life, unlike the one we usually live in America. Here, the mortal, hairy, shitting vision is alive. In the West, we have repressed much of it from our conscious waking life. as well as our culture. As Carl Jung wrote, this ‘complete life’ is a world in which we live only in our dreams and imagination, or, as he experienced, in India.

Touching Shit

Since April 2011², I have been living in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, South India. This morning, like every other morning, I touch shit, my own shit, but shit nevertheless. I touch it with my left hand after I squat over the Indian toilet, which is a porcelain bowl with a hole in it, level with the floor, in the same room as I have my shower.

Floor toilet in my house in India

After I have finished shitting, while still squatting and while I can still faintly smell it, as unlike America, the shit does not fall directly into the water, but, rather, temporarily sits there in the bowl beneath me, I take a dipper of water and pour it out on my lower backside, feeling the water running on the back of my ass and down to my asshole. Then, using my left hand, I ‘scoop’ the running water and wash my ass. I can usually feel the very fine remnants of shit as they are washed away by the water. The water runs off of my ass and hand and down into the hole, and then, by feel and by touch, I know it is all done.

Then I take a bucket of water, which has been filled by the same faucet, and dump it into the hole, washing away my shit. I need to make sure that I dump enough water to totally flush everything away, or I will be able to smell shit fermenting in the over 105-degree tropical heat, as I have already experienced and wish to avoid in the future.

Right away, you can see how everybody would eat with their right hand in India. It is a major faux pas not to do so. It is also a health concern; You can also imagine that just about everyone who lives here, although I am sure there are many exceptions, touches their shit every day. There is no toilet paper in most Indian toilets (in Modern-day cities and buildings, this is changing). For an adult who does not have a baby or is not nursing someone, this touching of shit with the hand is nearly unknown in the West. In the West, we all use toilet paper. Of course, the fact that using toilet paper, by its very nature, smears the shit around your asshole just does not seem to bother most Americans. We smear until we don’t notice any shit on the toilet paper, and then we consider the whole thing finished, and throw that paper in the toilet and flush, and that is that.

But think about it: How would you clean a pot? Just wipe it with a cloth? Of course not. Everybody knows the dissolving power of water, and ancient cultures, such as the one here in India, use that principle and think that Westerners are quite non-hygienic not to use water. I know of only the French in the West who share a similar approach to cleaning up after shitting in the toilet with a bidet, a device that visiting Americans usually consider a urinal and sometimes use as such.

People here in India also know that squatting when you take a shit is the very best way to do it. One can sit on the ‘seat’, but the mechanics of the body, the way our physiology is constructed, the way the puborectalis muscles relax and the shit easily comes out, is clearly obvious and far superior when one squats. In addition, you do not touch the seat with your ass and thighs when you squat. It is beneficial for hemorrhoid sufferers and pregnant women and helps with constipation, and it is far easier to clean up afterward, as your butt cheeks are more spread out when you squat. But of course, you have to test this yourself to know it. Otherwise, it is only philosophy and what seems a primitive or strange idea to a Westerner. However, in my experience after living in India, trying to shit when sitting on a seat is clearly unnatural, a strain, and definitely 'second class’ once you have become accustomed to squatting.

Squatting over an Indian toilet gives a person a much closer relationship to their shit. Many Westerners might snort at that, but the Ayurvedic doctor I studied with was nicknamed ‘Malavaidya,’ or the doctor or knower of ‘mala’ or waste. He was skilled in the ability to diagnose a person through their shit and piss. Shit is an exquisite indicator of what is going on with any animal. Remember the scene in Bertolucci’s movie- The Last Emperor, when the doctor examines the shit of the boy Emperor of China? Brought to him in a golden bowl; he looks at it, smells it, and then exclaims, "More bean curd today and no meat!".

Chinese doctor to the Emperor of China smelling the young boy’s shit

Examining the shit and urine of people has been used in Ayurveda, Tibetan Medicine, and Chinese Medicine for thousands of years. Of course, we (Western Medicine) also do ‘urine or stool tests,’ using very small and minute amounts of shit or urine, but these are all very ‘scientific’ and done by people in white lab coats, masks, and latex gloves, working on floors you could eat off of. We recognize certain diseases that way in the West. But, in India, you can analyze and know your state of health and digestion (as well as disease) and even learn what to eat- just by examining your shit. It is done every day and is very humbling.

The word ‘humility’ comes from ‘humus,’ meaning ‘earth.’ To be humble is to be closer to the earth, and that is what shit used to be called- 'dung' (excrement) or that which is eliminated and falls upon the earth. Now, I am not saying that every single person in India is humble just because they wipe their ass with their left hand and touch their shit every day, but, as a whole and painting with a broad brush, living in this South Indian environment where everything is hot and fermenting immediately after it dies, there is a much closer relationship to the earth, animals, agriculture, trash, poverty, old age, disease and death and every single one of these factors is humbling.

In the midst of all this, the everyday ‘touch’ of shit reminds every person that he or she is a ‘shitting. ape-like animal.’ It prevents anyone from rising easily into the ‘capsule of the head,’ into the realm of ideas and language, where we escape from the earth (humus) and the flesh and the death and the shit. Wiping your ass with your left hand every day goes a long way to ‘keeping it real’ and dealing with the ‘whole body.’ I attest to that from experience.

Now, leaving this discussion about shit aside for a moment, I want to make clear that India is a profoundly intelligent country. It has produced some of the greatest philosophy, philosophers, science and scientists, great beings, and religious ideas of all time. It has given birth to Krishna, Buddha, Sankara, Mahavir, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Ramana Maharshi, Mahatma Gandhi, the great mathematician- Ramanujan, Ravi Shankar the musician, Ravi Batra the economist and Vandana Shiva the ecologist and environmental activist, to name just a very, very few. It is the oldest continuous civilization on earth.

India is the birthplace of Ayurveda, the oldest medical system in the world, and the medical system that is at the root of nearly all the systematized medical practices in the world. This ancient culture is overflowing with musical traditions, dance, drama, epics, stories, and architecture that have endured for thousands of years. India swells like a vast ocean, filled with schools of philosophy and sciences, in numbers and variations that very few Westerners have ever heard about, much less studied. They are the source of amazing seashells that have washed up on beaches around the world.

India has produced some of the most significant advances in science, many of which are ignorantly and arrogantly claimed to have been discovered by the West. For instance, the Pythagorean theorem, the discovery of atoms, surgery, the understanding that the earth and the planets revolve around the sun, and an accurate determination (within a few miles) of the speed of light were written about thousands of years ago in India, long before toilet paper was invented.

I sometimes wondered if the reason India never sought to dominate the whole world, as the multinational corporations and governments of the West are attempting to do so today, was because they wiped their ass with their left hands. Now, on this last point, I am joking. There have been plenty of cultures that did not use toilet paper and also sought to dominate the world.

Atilla the Hun, ‘the scourge of God’

It is just that now, like never before, we of the Technological-Scientific-World-Viewing countries, with our insatiable greed for power and materials and goods, are actually destroying Nature- the very basis on which all of life exists.

There are two main reasons for this. One is that we have the technology-enhanced capability to fulfill our greedy (wanting more than we need) desires at a never-before-imagined rate. The second, which lies at the root of this, is we have lost our humility. As a whole culture and as a people, we have forgotten that we are a ‘hairy, shitting, dying ape.’ We have forgotten to account for the fact that, like any other animal, we need a very specific environment to live in, one that is provided for us as a gift. We have forgotten that we exist in the midst of a mysterious process that surrounds and pervades us. . . and we are ignorantly destroying that very environment.

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” - Albert Einstein

We do not own the sun, and yet all life depends upon it. Our food must be grown in fields or taken from animals who appear out of the blue, like miracles. Our milk, cream, cheese, butter, and ghee come from the excess milk of cows, goats, and sheep. We need the gifts of fruit trees for our fruit. We are at the mercy of great forces and live on the basis of food and energy that are literally bestowed on us every day. Not only have we forgotten that our life is an everyday ‘miracle’ and a gift, but we have also forgotten that our body sweats, ages and dies and our shit stinks. We have lost touch with Nature and with our own nature. We have forgotten that we are animals. But, this is something that India has not forgotten, perhaps, because millions wipe their asses with their left hands every day.

Farmers notice this type of thing more than city dwellers because they live closer to the earth and all it represents. They sow seeds in the ground that bring us our food. Farmers know that they depend not only upon seeds but upon a great network of elemental forces- the soil, the sun, and the rain, forces, and things that are largely beyond their control. All of these could be called 'miracles.'’

Many factors are needed to awaken the seeds and grow the plants that farmers eat. Farmers know that food does not come from a store, and milk does not come from a carton. They are vulnerable and grateful for many things, and they know this every day and every season. A farmer must always prepare not just for the best but also for the worst. Any farmer will eventually be humbled by their vulnerable dependence on the earth and the elements.

Just as we can notice an awareness of a greater vulnerability in a farmer when compared to people from the urban cities, if we look at women, we will notice that they have always been more vulnerable to and more connected with the earth, time, moon, and seasons than men. Women begin to menstruate during their teens and continue to do so every month in a 28-day cycle, along with the waxing and waning of the moon. A woman doesn’t wake up one day and decide to do this. It happens to her. It just starts one day when she is young, through no choice of her own. During this time of life, women can become pregnant and bear children in a nine-month period of gestation, like many other mammals. Like a field that has been planted (a very common metaphor used since ancient times to describe a unique quality of the female), women have the ability to nourish and bear many different seeds (semen), when inseminated by men. The union of their egg and his semen will grow into a baby girl or boy inside their belly.

But, a woman does not grow and feed a child by her will any more than a man impregnates a woman completely of his own volition. Sure, he can ejaculate inside her, but he cannot guide the sperm to the egg, cause a particular sperm to burrow into an egg, or accomplish what needs to be done to cause a new human being. All of this is completely beyond his or any man’s or woman’s ‘will.’

Even if there is impregnation, he or she cannot decide whether it will be a healthy fertilization, if that child will be carried to term, or if that child will be a boy or a girl, or healthy, wealthy, or wise. It is all by the ‘grace of God’, or the will of Nature, or the law of karma, or some say- ‘chance’ or some call a 'miracle'. The growth of any child is outside of the conscious control of a man or a woman. All they can do is provide the optimum circumstances for what 'they' and especially 'she' is 'going through.'’

Consider the things that ‘happen’ to a woman- a baby grows in her belly, a child issues forth from her loins, and milk flows from her breasts to feed the child. These are very dramatic events that take place over a relatively long period of time, and every one of them, once she is impregnated, is out of her control.

Women, consciously and more ‘dramatically than men,’ have the clear experience of being vulnerable and at the ‘effect’ of the Nature of life. They are given the undeniable role as nurturers and supporters of new life, something which ‘happens to them.’ As a result, it seems to me that women tend to be more humble than men. They seemed to be closer to the earth.

But, if we consider the issue more deeply, we will see that men are also ‘at effect’ and at the ‘mercy’ of Nature. How many of us have had a wet dream or become sexually aroused by a beautiful woman? Did we choose to do it or does it just happen? Consider this: As men, do we consciously produce and manage the millions of independent organisms- sperm, each of them independently delineated, propelled, and motivated? Do we give it a second thought when, at ejaculation, millions of these tiny living beings are sent forth to die? Perhaps it is the largesse of our progeny and their subsequent loss that has inured us, more than women, to death and destruction.

Even so, compared to the flowing red blood of a period, the months-long swelling of pregnancy, the birthing of a baby, or the years-long breastfeeding of a child, the obligations and things that men are caused to do by Nature seem to be less. These 'manly' events do not happen over such a long period of time and, except for an erection and ejaculation, are just not so physically or overtly obvious. Because of the less 'dramatic' way he is controlled by nature, it is easier for a man to forget how vulnerable he is, at least when compared to a woman, and it seems that offered the ‘opportunity’ to forget or ignore it, he has quickly done so.

Women are often praised for their physical beauty, which is a thing that mostly 'happens' to them and one they play a small role in creating, although with makeup and facelifts beauty can be temporarily created. Men (in the West today) are often criticized for their lust or attraction to women (or in the case of homosexuals and other men) as if that is something that they created on their own. Lust ‘happens’ to a man as naturally as a period or beauty happens to a woman.

Why is such condemnation applied only to men? Why should men be responsible for their natural manifestation of sexual arousal? In many countries, if a man and a woman are in a room together for any amount of time, it is assumed that they had sex. What else were they doing? Discussing Nietszche? It is assumed it is the nature of men to be lusty, and it is culturally accepted as obvious that women are sexual objects who, if they are not being chaperoned in some way, are, therefore, ‘available.’ It is for this type of ‘reason’ that you will see a clearer separation of the sexes in any culture that still lives as the ‘whole body.’

For Christian monks, the urges of the body were considered to be the workings of the Devil. They, therefore, denied and repressed themselves and the workings of their whole body and associated the world and the ways and desires of the world as the doings of the Devil. One of the reasons that men became celibates and attempted to renounce their sexual cravings was to fight against such 'natural' urges.

Because most women think that their beauty is something that belongs to them, they are obviously setting themselves up for a major letdown when they age, and everything starts to wrinkle and sag, and the curves and swellings of youth fade away. I am not saying that older women are not attractive and can be alluring, but certainly not in the same purely physical way as a young nubile girl. It is clearly apparent, unless you want to deny reality, that the ‘hairy, shitting, ape’, both ages and dies. Except for the novelty of it, and I am very aware that many variations exist, very few men would consider a 90-year-old woman as possessing a sexually alluring body compared to a young girl in the bloom of youth.

With the increase of modern technology in the West, both men and women have been given an opportunity to break out of part of their eons-long submission to Earth and the cycles of Nature. Because of this, there has grown up a general arrogance based on illusion. We find the lack of ‘humility’ is no longer exclusively located in men. Because of the rise of technology and the ability to control our environment more than ever before, both men and women have risen into the ‘capsule of the head,’ the abode of ideas and ideals like never before in history.

In the West, we forget our shit as if it never existed. With a flick of the wrist, it ‘magically’ disappears down a hole, washed away with clear water, which flushes from our toilets and makes everything all clear again, as if nothing ever happened. We wash our hands, dry them, look at ourselves in the mirror, and walk out of that private set apart, uniquely plumbed, easy-to-clean, tiled, and small special bathroom feeling clean, with fine traces of shit smeared all around our asshole.

Of course, we feel ‘clean’. Are we not the most advanced culture on the face of the earth? We have cars and smooth roads and traffic lights and policemen and trash removal and garbage disposals and refrigerators and abundant hot and cold water that comes out of taps and pasteurized milk that comes out of cartons and grocery stores filled with food and hardware stores filled with tools and toilet paper, mirrors and cell phones, GPS and internet and computers and TV and radio and yachts and yacht harbors, planes, trains, and air-conditioned movie theaters. We do not see much death or old age on the streets of the United States. We are not familiar with the slaughterhouses where our meat comes from, the suffering of the cows and their calves, or the hell-holes that hold most of the chickens that give us their eggs and their lives. We ‘forget' about the repeated outbreaks of e-coli poisoning that occurs in everything from beef to sprouts, an occurrence that literally means that shit got onto our food.

How could this be? We have put a man on the moon and sent spaceships to Mars, but, like our shit-smeared assholes, we have forgotten the dirty, shitty aspects of what we have done and are doing- Most horrible of all, we are destroying the living system of Nature herself, burning off fossil fuels, as if there is no end to their supply and no cost to the environment of the whole world when we do so. We are cutting down our ancient forests and polluting our rivers. Within only a few hundred years and over the course of only a few generations, we have carried out the wholesale degradation of nature, given rise to life-changing global warming, a rising sea level, and produced life-terminating pollution.

In a holocaust of slaughter, we have erased whole species of animals in a mere few decades. We have even destroyed complete societies of our human species, wiping their languages, stories, and rare and unique wisdom of why and how things are the way they are from the face of the earth. We live anxiously in fear of the total annihilation of an Atomic holocaust in a worldwide society in which the very few have far more than they need, and the vast majority do not have enough. All of these factors are obviously not a good basis for peace in the world. If we were a doctor, we would say that our whole world is suffering from a terminal disease.

In the West, we are insulated from ‘seeing ourselves in the mirror’, as the poverty on our streets is mostly hidden and the terrible death, suffering and violence that occurs daily around the world is hygienically reported. The death and suffering we read about are easy and quick. The gross, sad, terrible, shit-smeared, fly-covered, worm-eaten, gut-spilled, crying and wailing, long-term suffering of real life is not shown in Hollywood movies.

We deny reality not only to ourselves but to our children as well. In the West, our news is censored, and we consider the stars in Hollywood as heroes. Why should we complain? The images we see are amazing and so ‘lifelike.’ The actors we see die in this or that moive rise again and continue to live. The only problem is that they are not immortal. In the West, we live in a fantasy. We have risen up into the ‘capsule of our heads’ and only ‘imagine’ we have left the ‘hairy, shitting, dying ape’ far behind.

Even our politics, which we think are sophisticated and evolved, evidence the practices of brutes and apes who wear suits and ties, take bribes, and give press conferences.

There is a story of a group of people on a small boat at sea. Each person is sitting on his or her individual seat around the perimeter of the boat. One person starts to drill a hole underneath his seat through the hull of the boat. Another man tells him to ‘Stop! Don't do that. You will sink the boat.’ The man doing the drilling says in reply, ‘Mind your own business, Buster. It is under my seat, not yours.’ ‘Yes,’ replies the man who told him to stop, “It is under your seat, but if you sink the boat, then we all will drown.’

The man on the boat, drilling a hole under his seat, is only doing his ‘own thing.’ This represents the growing feeling mentality of everyman. It is spreading all over the world. It is an attitude that is giving more and more people on the boat both a power drill and the electricity to use it. This has greatly magnified and quickened the effects of ignorant selfishness and brought the whole world to the brink of disaster in an ever-shortening period of time.

We are in a situation that we cannot afford to be in for very long. Individuals have become so full of themselves, so seemingly self-sufficient, so brazen, not humble, not related to the earth, so ‘special’ and full of rights and privileges, that the 'he' and 'she' of ‘everyman’ is about to sink the whole boat. We are not just seriously confused, we are in deep shit and about to go over shits waterfall.

Our very thinking has been corrupted. We mistake pipe-smoking philosophers for wise men. We cannot tell saints from idealistic people. We consider lying about an affair worse than lying about bringing a whole nation to war. We think that bad events are 'tragic'’ and we think the world can be a paradise. We remove and sanitize the suffering, death, and violence of people and animals from our education and news and replace them with vague and misleading statements, entertainment, cute stories, comedy, romance, and erotic images.

At the same time that we repress sexuality in our movies, we live it out secretly, exemplified by the nearly constant scandals of individuals and even the Catholic church. We deny the actual, realistic imagery of horrific violence in our news reporting, and yet our movies are full of pseudo-sanitized, poorly dramatized violence. People seem to die without much pain or effects. Our children play fake, violent video games, and when they grow up, they kill strangers in other countries with little or no remorse or real feelings because they have been killing people and destroying things all their lives.

President Bush claiming to have found weapons of mass destruction, invaded another country (Iraq) based on false information, caused the death of well over a hundred thousand men, women, and children, destroyed much of an ancient culture, and never apologized for his mistake, if it even was a mistake; he could have been lying all along. But then again, we must not only blame Bush. We have not apologized as a country, even after Bush has gone. What kind of society are we? This is an outrage. We are drilling with bigger drills and more power than any other culture on the face of the earth. Our boat is filling with water. People all over the world are drowning.

Because we do not realize our own ‘hairy, shitting dying’ nature, we have lost our sympathy with other animals or humans, who, like us, are at the mercy of Nature. We have forgotten and no longer feel or care for others. After all, what can we do to make the necessary difference in a world that has gone totally insane? Our own country's Army, Navy, and Air Force go about the world with terrible weapons and destroy any who would oppose us in a variety of ways, both overt and secret. When questioned, we reply, "Isn't it necessary to protect ourselves? People want to destroy us". We rarely ask why this should be so. Such a need has become the nature of the world.

We have lost our connection to ‘humus’ to the earth. We have lost our humility. We shit upon our Mother and our brothers and do not recognize or thank others for all they have borne and done for us and continue to do.

But, there are Laws in Nature. The Law of cause and effect cannot be denied. No man can decide to make gravity not work. No person can deny old age or prevent death. No man can stop the tides or block up a river forever. Like a good Mother, Nature is slow to rise to anger and slow to show her reactions, but that does not mean that she will protect us from the results of our transgressions. She cannot and will not. Eventually, the fruits of our actions will ripen.

It is said that old age is the least expected thing that can happen to a person; it is not noticed until one day, we wake up, look in the mirror, and it has already happened. Just like that, mankind slowly and inexorably, by our ignorance and lack of humility, has disturbed the life-supporting patterns and systems of Nature. We have come to the tipping point of our extinction, and very few even notice.

Perhaps, in some way, we have always lived on the edge. With the slightest shrug of her shoulders, Nature, or what is called in modern-day Insurance jargon, ‘Acts of God,’ (a term that carries the remains of the religious, philosophical, and perceptive observation of life by the ancient, hand-ass-wiping cultures of our collective past), could always and easily destroy what we call ‘civilization.’ When we look back in time, we see plenty of instances where this has happened- floods, tidal waves, solar flares, earthquakes, meteorites, volcanoes, drought, and plague, to name a few. All of this has happened before, and there is no reason not to expect it will happen again. It was a surprise each time it did happen, and it will be a surprise when it does so again.

There is a super-volcano, perhaps the largest volcano in the world, with a crater nearly 1500 square miles wide underlying Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Scientists say that it just about destroyed every person on the face of the earth the last time it went off. If you go to Yellowstone, you will see large lakes where the water has all spilled out onto one side of the lake, killing the hundred-year-old trees by drowning their roots. You will notice this because the trees are brown and without leaves and when you look, the lake has spilled out all around their base. It seems like someone just tilted the earth, lifting it like you would a plate full of water, spilling the lake out of its previous boundaries on one side of the lake, and this is just what has happened.

The ‘tilting’ of the earth at Yellowstone is killing trees

This is because a vast mass of molten lava is building up under the ground of Yellowstone. The ground has been rising at about 3 inches a year for a century now. When scientists examine history, they discover that this supervolcano has erupted every 500,000 -800,000 years or so. The last time it erupted, it buried the largest collection of dinosaur bones ever discovered in Kansas under 15 feet of ash.

Image of Magma beneath Yellowstone

The explosion left several feet of ash in New York State. That volcano could blow any day now, give or take a few tens of thousands of years. No one disputes that it will blow again. It will happen, and perhaps it will happen in what we call ‘modern’ America.

Growing up as a white, middle-class, American Jewish boy in suburban Washington DC in the ’50s and ’60s, it always seemed that wars and massacres, Super-Volcanoes, and tidal waves always happened somewhere else in the world.

House in Takoma Park. MD, where I grew up

I saw no signs of overwhelming destruction in the air. I saw pleasant houses and neighborhoods, shopping malls and cities, superhighways and airplanes, universities and gas stations. I knew aunts and uncles, grandfathers and grandmothers, shopkeepers, lawyers, professors, housewives, girls in pigtails, and cheerleaders. Nothing seemed to suggest that we all lived on the edge of life, perched on the cliff of catastrophe. It was just the opposite. Everyone and everything seemed to say, ‘Relax, enjoy. The goods of the earth are spread out before you. Take them and enjoy’.

Storefronts in Takoma Park

I certainly heard nothing about a super-volcano that threatened to destroy the United States and most of the world. I never saw anyone die. I never saw war except on TV. I never saw anyone killed or murdered.

My family was strongly idealistic and active humanists; they walked the walk of good people and spent their lives serving and helping others. From the Civil Rights movement to the fight against the war in Vietnam to the successful blocking of an interstate highway through the middle of our neighborhood on the outskirts of Washington, DC, my parents fought against social injustice, prejudice, environmental degradation, and war. I was brought up to believe that these things had to be fought for and my experience was that these noble fights would eventually turn out for the best. After all, in nearly every single cause that my parents fought for, they were on the winning side.

My father refused to pay a certain portion of his taxes as a protest against the Vietnam War. The IRS then came and planted a sign on the front lawn of our property that said, “Seized Property.” My father then made up his own large sign, wrote out what he was doing and why, and stuck it on a pole right next to theirs. The local papers photographed the two signs and published the photos. Within a few days, the IRS removed their sign.

What my parents only vaguely realized at the time was that there was an unnoticed plague spreading through the world. Like the enormous underground caldera of the Yellowstone Volcano,³ it was not seen for many generations. Its breadth and scope are only now just beginning to be recognized- I am referring to the humanity-caused breakdown of the natural living interconnected systems of the earth.⁴ Such ‘ecological’ happenings are only beginning to be measured and are still not widely understood. Like the Yellowstone caldera, the problem is so large that it may not be comprehensively seen with our present technology and understanding. But, I believe, along with the preponderance of scientists in the world, that as we study the matter, we will see that our time has grown late.

Do we think that Nature has forgotten the earth? Nature is the earth. Nature is our bodies, our shit and our food, our fish and our fruits, our rivers and oceans, our fruit trees and bees, and we have ravaged them as surely as the invading army of the Greeks plundered, pillaged, and destroyed ancient Troy. There will be some 'hell to pay' for all this. Every action has its effect. Nature will restore balance, and in that process, what we call ‘massive catastrophes’ will probably occur. The body has already fallen off the cliff. It has not yet hit the ground. The bullet has left the gun; it just has not yet struck the target. We are in that brief, ‘in-between’ land, where the weather is sunny and warm and the forecast is hurricane.

Even without a man-made catastrophe, there have been many instances of Nature-born events that will destroy the whole world as we know it. Do we think that the Universe and Nature have decided to get all ‘modern’ and forget all this dinosaur, volcano, and meteorite stuff? Do you think that any people or animals were prepared when catastrophe struck them, whether from a tidal wave, a meteorite strike, an invasion, a plague, or a World War? The last time most of this happened, we were a ‘hairy, shitting, dying ape. Last time I checked, we still are.

"As an expression of the Free Position of Spiritual Realization, some highly evolved beings sit around on piles of shit. Why do they do this? What is the real meaning of it? It is an acknowledgment of the truth of the food body, that it is an eliminator, not an accumulator. These guys sit around naked on piles of shit and own nothing. They seem offensive to us because, in our neurosis, we do not find one another attractive as eliminators. We find one another attractive as accumulators or owners. This attitude has become the design of consciousness everywhere, and we have become consumers and owners, associated with attributes, clinging to forms, substances, states, imageries. We release nothing, and we are not free.

There seems to be no shit around in our society, at least nothing people would generally acknowledge to be shit. Yet there is nothing else but shit around, but it appears in the form of some consumer product, something ownable, something attractive. Everybody tries to look attractive, yet people are not eliminators. They turn all their shit into gold, into TV sets and automobiles, and beautiful clothing and jewelry. They renounce nothing. There is no freedom in them.

Somebody who is free and who is an eliminator begins to be offensive. To break the chain of one’s impulse toward ownership is to perform an act with which people in the world, in general, do not feel comfortable. They feel that the renunciate is violating some great principle, whereas the body itself is designed to be a renunciate, an eliminator, a releaser. The body wants to simply stand free in a state of equanimity. It cannot accumulate and stand free at the same time, however. As soon as the body starts accumulating, it becomes out of balance, toxic, and diseased, and its diseased state is manifested in every dimension of the being, psychological, psychic, and spiritual."

– Adida Samraj

1. Jung visited India in 1938

2. This was written during the years I lived in India.

3. Although soil samples had determined that the source of the massive volcano was Yellowstone, it was not until NASA had sent back photos taken from space that the immense size of the Yellowstone caldera was determined. It was so huge that scientists had been walking around in the middle of it for years and never noticed it was there.

4. There is a breakdown of our interpersonal relationships, governmental system, and world peace as evidenced now in 2025. There is also an increasing decay of the lack of morality.