This section of Direct Action Great Turning (DAGT) focuses on travel experiences but is not an attempt to upload traditional travel log videos.   The videos published here focus on nature’s beauty and more on the hiker’s “phenomenological experience” (that is, his or her conscious experience and how it reflects his or her spiritual experience and the nature of reality).  Current event tie-ins to various experiences in nature will also be covered as relevant to the place or experience that is the subject of the video.

Muir’s quotes above bring up a couple of points that are interesting for discussion.  Anyone who has traveled America’s national parks post-pandemic knows how Americans flocked to the parks in droves making them crowded sometimes with limited visitor access.  Americans have sought our parks as refuge and medicine, much as Muir notes.

As well, Muir may not be speaking just poetically about the phenomena of people experience nature or one’s own body singing at the cellular level.  This type of experience is reported from a lot of different people in different walks of life, sometimes under the influence of DMT and sometimes without it within normal meditational experiences and trances.  

There are accounts from shamans that nature or “Mother Earth” is screaming for relief from the pollution encroachments of “civilization.”  This is especially notable at the present time since there are proposals to revert to renewable energy in mass for energy supplies.  This will require mass levels of mining in previously pristine eco systems around the world, including the oceans.  Renewable energy is purported to be the solution to getting energy from petrochemicals, though renewables themselves, at least at this point in time, might not even cover all the electric energy needs of surveillance infrastructure deemed necessary by Fourth Industrial Revolution proponents.  

Ironically, in all of recent environmental discussions, any consideration that maybe societies should live differently, without all this relentless  transformation of raw materials into “things,” never is deemed as alternative to what civilization does now.   Could we not create a society without all this violence and ruthless exploitation of each other and nature?  Of course we can!!!, yet we can see in what has happened to Indigenous cultures, who first told us about this problem, all of what “civilization” has to offer to anyone who points this out is oppression and genocide in its many forms.

“Psych Hike” blog posts will always be about current events, spiritual experiences, consciousness, the experience of beauty, and reflections about nature, rather than traditional travel blogs on the place in question and trail reports, etc.