Gaia Consciousness & Saying “No” - 06.17.10

Student Question: I have two questions which have nothing to do with one another. One of them is that sometimes I find I am in the child’s period of saying “no,” and I am going through everything that I don’t like about society and about people that surround me and about things I have done in the past—everything negative. I feel like I have identified what I don’t want to be. But I have not yet found what I want to be. Is this a normal transition? And the other question is, I know very little about the “Gaia Theory,” and I wanted to ask you if you think that nature has consciousness, and if that has anything to do with the Gaia Theory.

“Yes of course. Everything is consciousness,” reminds Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Nature is the realization of the omni-centricity of consciousness. All apparent beings are part of a Single Consciousness. That Single Consciousness is not localizable in one particular place. So you could say, Gaia has no ego, but Gaia is beyond ego, not before ego.”

And, in regards to the second question, “Yes, negativity is the basis of consciousness—and this, by the way, is the theory of Hegel. If you read Hegel it’s all about how wonderful negativity is, and we’re not negative enough. . . . . So it is important—but it’s important to be the witness of the no-saying consciousness and not identified with it so that you can raise it to the point where it goes beyond that ‘no,’ into a recognition of its ability to say ‘no’ even to its saying ‘no.’ And once that happens, then it can say yes to all possibilities.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 17, 2010.