Our Place In Nature

We are highly evolved species; I'm sitting here behind a keyboard writing today's article, and you're going to be reading it on a high definition screen, both powered by a seemingly ubiquitous electrical grid. We've even reversed the rules of evolution and no longer adapt to our surroundings, but have conquered all surroundings with science and technology, and adapt them to our needs.

There's no doubt that we are moving forward fast in that sense; self driving cars and true artificial intelligence seem but a few decades away; not nearly as soon as Elon Musk would have you believe, but relatively soon nonetheless. But if we take a peak under that shiny surface of speedy progress, we suddenly see the price we pay for such unbounded material progression in the form of constant warfare, if not by gun, then by coin in trade-wars, pollution and the destruction of nature. As a species we grew up in nature, as part of nature, but in so called modern societies we seem to have forgotten where we all came from.

When or where we lost our touch with nature, I don't know; it's most certainly been a slow process over many generations, and the great monotheistic religions will have played their part to, by picturing the planet and all its creatures as a gift from God for us to rule over and do with as we please. I live in the city, as most of the inhabitants of modern civilizations do, and I can't even gaze at the stars at night, because most of them are obscured by light-pollution, there's no great plane for me to look at any kind of natural horizon; a city is the perfect place to completely forget where you actually are, which is on a globe spinning through space with an oasis full of living things that's replicated nowhere else, or at least as far as we know...

We're boxed-in, visually but also spiritually; there's no time to contemplate my place in the universe because the enduring "I" that is my consciousness, is constantly occupied by the demands posed upon me by the artificial constructs of modern life. Constantly checking the clock, living in the frantic rhythm of today's around-the-clock-economy, trying not to lose my place in that bee-hive of humans called the city. In the rare moments I do have to take my mind of those modern demands, I often think about these things and I'm always amazed at how we, as a species, can be so smart and so awfully ignorant at the same time. Live is a miracle. It's the greatest miracle in the universe, yet we don't take the time to really appreciate our sharing in that ultimate miracle.

Not just human life, but all life is miraculous, heck, everything is miraculous. The biggest mystery is why there even is anything, as opposed to nothing. What's the reason all this stuff exists? Is there a reason? And on top of that, there's life; in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, life creates order in an ever more chaotic universe. And on top of that there's us, consciousness that can think about all this; we don't have all answers, but we're intelligent enough to formulate the questions, so we're smart enough to know how miraculous our living experiences are.

Why then, are we so indifferent about life, even our own lifes? I think it's because of the double whammy I described earlier; modern life occupies our minds with the constant daily fight for survival or riches, and literally blocks the view on our true place in nature and the cosmos. Regular readers know that these are my favorite subjects to think, learn and write about: nature, the universe and our place in that universe, and how life and consciousness relate to all that. I've often written about my developing perspective on consciousness, and today I'm delighted to share with you a TED talk about being in touch with nature, by the indigenous Amazon Indian Nixiwaka Yawanawa. Don't you just love that name?

At one point Nixiwaka says that their shaman healer still has the ancient knowledge about medicinal plants, and still uses that knowledge to heal the people of the tribe. Now, when the shaman cuts a plant, or pulls it out, he never does so without warning the plant in advance. He says to the plant: "I'm going to use you to heal my people," probably followed by some words of thanks or forgiveness. But the important thing is that this ritual, although it may seem primitive in our city-minds, actually is just an admission of the obvious: we are dependent on what the planet provides, and together with the planet and all of its biosphere, we form one great interdependent system of life, a tiny living and breathing speck in the black ocean of nothingness that surrounds us.

So please watch this talk, I enjoyed it immensely and I feel for these people; they still have some rain-forest left to live in, but I don't know how much longer that'll be permitted by the ignorant civilized world...

The above is a redacted version of a post I originally released on Steemit in December 2018

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