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attempts of the great savants and adepts. From Lucretius, Plotinus, Shakespeare, Blake, Rousseau, Spinoza, Schelling, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Swami Aurob- indo, and a host of others, we have vehement promethean remonstrations against man's nescience and impiety, against mankind's ignominious avoidance of the organic. Their impassioned entreaties for restitution and reverence have largely gone unheeded. It is a sin to suppose that Nature, endowed with perennial fertility by the Creator of the Uni- verse, is affected with barrenness, as though with some disease and it is unbecoming to a man of good judgement to believe that Earth, to whose lot was assigned a divine and ever- lasting youth, and who is called the common mother of all things and is destined to bring them forth continually, has grown old in mortal fashion. And, furthermore, I do not believe that such misfortunes come upon us as a result of the fury of the elements, but rather because of our own fault, for the matter of husbandry, which all the best of our ancestors had treated with the best of care, we have delivered over to all the worst of our slaves, as if to a hangman for punishment. (Columella, De Agricultura) This universe is a living organized effective complex, all comprehensive, displaying an unfathomable wisdom. How, then, can any one say that it is not a clear image, beautifully formed, of the intellectual verities? No one seeing the loveliness lavished in the world of sense. . . could be so dull-witted as not to be carried by all this to recollection and gripped by reverent awe. . . Such a one could have neither fathomed this world nor have had any vision of that other. We must recognize that even in the world of sense and part, there are things of a loveliness comparable to that of the celestials, which fill us with veneration for their Creator and convince us of their origin in the divine forms, which show how ineffable is the beauty of the Supreme. (Plotinus) I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of beings, in identifying myself with the whole of nature. (Jean Jacques Rousseau) Everything on earth is in a continual flux - nothing stays constant or fixed. Our attachments to external things pass and change as things do. But there is one state where the soul finds a solid enough seat to rest and gather in all its being, with no need to recall the past or to press on to the future; a state where time is nothing, where the present lasts forever, with no mark of duration or trace of succession; a state where there is no feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear—only that of our simple existence, which fills our soul entirely... What is it that one is enjoying in such a situation? Nothing exterior to oneself, nothing but oneself and one's own existence. As long as this state lasts one is self-sufficient like God. (Jean Jacques Rousseau) The system of nature is at the same time the system of our mind. Nature is God’s mind made visible, and mind is nature made invisible. (Schelling, Philosophy of Nature). 150 Epilogue: Time to Change the Road You’re On Atlantis, Alien Visitation, and Genetic Manipulation