I am sitting on my deck, soaking in the gorgeous sights, sounds, smells of the (more or less) natural world in my back yard. It occurs to me that a lot has been written about just that, from carefully planned and maintained yards, gardens and parks, to not so controlled wilderness – mountain, forest, or sea. Much of it romanticizes nature (I do that myself!), and there is an implicit distinction between the object of our attention, which we call “nature” and ourselves.
But we are “nature,” too.
When we really look closely at this natural world, we find beauty and ugliness, gentleness and brutality, peaceful cooperation and violence, that which inspires awe and that which evokes our horror. And all degrees between the extremes. Just like us.
If anything sets us apart, it’s this very ability to “see” and reflect on it all. We assign meaning to everything! It would seem to be our job.
So if this is our job, how would our evaluation turn out? We have accomplished a lot (not all of it useful, some very destructive). In fact, we seem to be sliding into some very serious dysfunction, based on that very mis-comprehension about our place in the order of things.
According to physicist David Bohm, this job of making meaning can be evaluated according to how coherent it is with the real situation. Our insistence on believing in our separateness and difference from everything else is actually incoherent enough to be threatening our survival!
If I cut off my hand because it annoyed me, I would suffer pain, possible infection, maybe even bleed to death. If I trashed my house and had no other option, I would probably not survive the elements. Such actions would be incoherent, and I am smart enough to know this. As a species, however, we’re not quite so smart.
Why don’t we get smarter? There’s always a price for more smarts. Animals suffer as much as we do, but at least they don’t worry about it in advance. We lost that Eden when we ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. What would we lose if we bit into the idea that we are one with everything? Certainly our specialness. Entitlement. Rescue.
But what might we gain (besides survival)? Peace? Freedom? Equanimity? Joy? It just might be worth a try!
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