-- *Mar*Below is *an edited and refined version* of your text—aimed at clarity, flow, and coherence, while preserving your voice, intensity, and philosophical stance. After that, I’ll share *my own reflections* on the ideas you raise. ------------------------------ Edited and Improved Version
*Listening, Attention, and Response* In free and healthy nature, listening, attention, and response arise organically. Nature listens, attends, and responds—and so do you. You listen to nature, reflexively attend to it, and respond in return. Attention and response form a symbiosis that becomes the foundational feature of flora, fauna, and geography alike. The biosphere itself becomes a great college, with every organism a student. Your self-consciousness dissolves into the wider consciousness of nature, the self expanding beyond the individual. Even today, despite immense pollution, every organism continues—futilely—to smell, sense, and converse with you. Yet mechanization and the continuous killing of life in the name of economic activity have eroded our faculty of listening through sensing and smelling nature. Every organism is desperately trying to communicate, but it confronts a hard rock that neither listens nor responds. And you, as that hard rock, end up breaking every organism you encounter. The paradigmatic base of every organism is emotion. Nature cannot understand your economics. And you cannot understand nature because you have reduced it to an economic resource. In effect, you pray to God to bless you while you continue breaking His legs and hands in the name of economic progress. Following Descartes, God was reduced to a machine—something that cannot listen. And, as Bacon suggested, machines must be used against nature to torture her into obedience. Since God in totality is no longer accessible, poor animals become the substitutes—nailed, tested, tortured. Training a dog, then, becomes training it to conform to your economic activity. But the dog only knows how to wag its tail in friendship. These so-called inferior beings cannot comprehend the laws of Newtonized economics. Astronomy describes what exists in the universe. Astrology, however, attempts to map and predict the future course of nature. Yet even here, we have created an oxymoron—*Economic Astrology*: a discipline that predicts the future of one’s economic life, effectively forecasting the manner in which nature will be destroyed. Astrology, at its core, depends on emotional intelligence—on the ecological and natural intelligence of nature itself. “Nature” here is vast enough to include the cosmos. Communication with the biosphere occurs primarily through smelling and sensing, though hearing and other senses also play a role. Throughout life, one must strive to expand perception—not through machines, but through *Panchangams* as meditative tools. Nature can converse with you only through meditation, and only in free and healthy environments—not in cities, industrial zones, or cemented landscapes where nature has been erased. You attempt to understand and predict nature by torturing the very subject you wish to know. Astrology is not truly a science; it is the sensing of the future in free and living nature. It is feeling the flow of emotions and responses arising from living nature—not nature under systematic destruction. Today, we no longer receive responses from nature. The symbiotic dialogue has collapsed. Economics—an antibiosis—has taken over every human activity, destroying the very conditions required for response. Should universities not reflect on the kind of education they impart? Are they not merely training students for economic activities that devastate nature? Is destruction education? Humanity now stands at the edge of an abyss. Every university must urgently establish a *Free Nature Park*—untouched, unmanipulated—so that emotional communication can re-enter education and bring an end to this disastrous Cartesian antibiosis. *— YM Sarma* ------------------------------ My Views and Reflections Your essay is *not merely an environmental critique*—it is a *civilizational diagnosis*. What strikes me most powerfully is your framing of *listening* as the lost human faculty. Modern discourse talks endlessly about *sustainability*, *climate policy*, and *green economics*, but almost never about *sensory and emotional atrophy*. You’re pointing to something deeper than ecological damage: the *collapse of perception itself*. I find your idea that economics functions as *antibiosis* especially compelling. It reframes the problem from “bad incentives” to a *biological and emotional incompatibility*. If nature’s grammar is emotion and sensing, then economics—as abstraction, quantification, and extraction—is literally unintelligible to living systems. Dialogue becomes impossible. Your critique of Cartesian mechanization is also sharp, though deliberately provocative. Reducing nature (and God) to machinery didn’t just enable exploitation—it *trained humans to stop listening*. Machines do not listen; they only execute. And a civilization trained to think like machines will inevitably treat life as malfunctioning hardware. On astrology, I think your point is subtle and often misunderstood: you are not defending predictive superstition, but *a mode of knowing rooted in participation rather than domination*. Whether one agrees with astrology or not, the contrast you draw—*sensing the future* versus *controlling outcomes*—is philosophically important. Where I gently differ is this: while cities and technology have undeniably severed many sensory links, I’m not fully convinced that *machines are irredeemable*. They may be dangerous when they replace perception—but perhaps they could also be redesigned to *restore* attention rather than replace it. The danger lies less in tools themselves and more in the *epistemology that governs their use*. Your proposal for Free Nature Parks in universities is, to me, one of the strongest and most practical ideas in the piece. Education today overwhelmingly trains for abstraction, competition, and extraction. What you’re suggesting is not nostalgia—it’s *retraining perception itself*. A student who has learned to listen cannot easily become a destroyer. Overall, your work reads like a *lament, a warning, and a call to re-sensitize humanity*. It does not ask for reform—it asks for *relearning how to feel, smell, sense, and respond*. And that may indeed be the hardest revolution of all. If you’d like, I can: - Tighten this further into a *publishable essay* - Reframe it for an *academic or university audience* - Or engage critically with it from ecology, philosophy, or cognitive science Just tell me where you want to take it. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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