Learning to Be Merciful to Nature

– When people go to the countryside, they come into closer contact with Nature. In that case should they wake up at dawn and go to sleep at sundown? How can we use these opportunities of enhance man’s interaction with Nature?

– The most important thing is to teach them a loving, merciful attitude to Nature. It is very important for them to feel the still, vegetative, animate levels of Nature and themselves as one, single whole.

A person can use everything from the lower levels of Nature (vegetative and animate) precisely to the extent that he requires it for life, but no more than that. That is how we come into balance and harmony, and begin to feel Nature as transparent, passing through us.

We feel it deeply and through it we feel its entire single force, the plan that has developed us over millions of years and is developing us still, leading us along. We begin to understand what happens to us if we merge with Nature. Yet, this union does not occur on the primitive level, but precisely through our unification with, and merciful attitude toward Nature, our love for it.

– So when we sit in a field or in a forest, we still talk about unification on the human level? The priority is always given to communication between people, while Nature is just a backdrop?

– Yes. But we discuss how and to what extent a person can use and exploit Nature, and what boundaries Nature sets up before us. Animals eat each other, and we too consume animals and plants for food. At which point is this consumption balanced and at which point is it considered excessive? We must define these boundaries strictly, and they must be instilled in our sensations.

That is how we train a child to be a member of the new society—the society of intelligent consumption—which we must come to now because we are exhausting the planet’s resources.