Thursday, April 14, 2022

Excerpted from Thoughts and Reflections Regarding Life's Journey

 

I seem to be in the midst of struggling with the prospect of ageing that dominates the horizon of my remaining years.  It is no easy matter to find accommodation with the ineluctable reality that body is no longer as capable of doing the complete bidding of my wishes and desires.  In regard to my intrinsic abilities I can no longer trust them as completely as I used to.  Of course, this comes as no great surprise, and to resist this reality is, of course, futile.

To me the only sensible course is acceptance.  Furthermore, a recognition of individual mortality has an additional benefit.  That benefit resides within an increased and more acute awareness of the wondrous qualities and subtleties and intrinsic beauty that imbues every passing moment.  The world presents me with a remarkable array of details and perspectives present in the simplest of experiences if I choose to open myself to them. 

In my mind, if I allow myself to be caught up within the intricate fabric of distractions produced and sustained by the modern world the unfortunate consequence is that the precious moments are lost within the crazy-quilt miasma of contrived existence.  It is, after all, an inventive and intricate shadow world that envelops the modern human world that constantly demands our complete attention.  Much of this shadow world is wrapped in the comforting domain of the pursuit of material possessions.  The potpourri of images and manifestations of objects that are continually fed into the sensory apparatus of the thinking brain are presented to us as palpable vehicles designed to enhance our chances for individual happiness whether it be a shiny new car, an ensemble of fabulous clothes that would improve our sexual appeal, all manner of so-called “hygiene products” that have become our necessary companions in the social world, labor-saving devices that are guaranteed to free up our time and bring us even more happiness, and on and on – the list is seemingly without end.

Moments lost to these distractions cannot be regained.  Life cannot be rewound.  Life proceeds moment to moment through a continuum of choices.  Modern living demands heightened unquestioned passivity to the multi-faceted norms that have been carefully constructed for mass consumption.  This intricate structure is indeed a reality of a kind, but it is not representative of the natural world and by its nature is impermanent and can readily implode upon itself.  Many examples exist of such an internal collapse have been reported through the course of history of human civilizations.

 

We are representatives of a sentient species – our home is planet earth.  We are by no means the sole inhabitants on Spaceship Earth, although we often behave as we should be and possess a seeming determination to make it so.  What we will accomplish, however, if we do not awaken from our collective stupor, is to craft an environment that will ultimately be unable to sustain us.  This is the height of stupidity, for we seem to relish the idea of killing each other over issues that are more contrived than real, undermine our collective future by our continued raping of the natural world, and endanger our future rather than embrace peace, harmony, and real and substantial social justice.

Without the presence of Homo sapiens, the earth will continue to spin on its axis, revolve around its sun and move through time within a vast and wondrous cosmos.  Our continued existence as a species is not required and is certainly not a necessary component of the working universe. 

As products of our collective imagination, the panoply of gods, ethereal beings, spirits, demons, apparitions, etc. will all vanish when humans are no longer extant.  They have no substance outside the realm of the human brain.  The universe, however, is real, time is substantial and each moment is transient.  Within this fabulous matrix our individual selves are created and move on time’s ineluctable trajectory until our individual brains cease to function and the molecular organization that sustains us unravels joining us once again to the chaos and ferment of creation.  We may pretend that this is not reality; we may put our faith in fabulous ideas of other-worldliness, but it is not matter for it changes nothing.  Self-delusion may provide comfort but it changes nothing.  We may choose to embrace death with the belief that there is something more, but it changes nothing.  Reality has no need of either our acquiescence or resistance, for when the brain ceases to function, as individuals we are no longer.  It is that simple. 

 

In my thinking, if I choose delusion over reality, I choose to engage the pretend version of existence and fail to appreciate the vivid reality that surrounds me.  What I do know is that while I continue to have a conscious existence it is my responsibility to fully appreciate that I am a living witness to the wonders around me no matter how brief my sojourn.  I am, after all, grounded to this Earth, lungs filled with the air that sustains me, a body that moves me through life and the marvelous organ of the human brain that is me.

If I can embrace myself so thoroughly and completely than I can embrace everything.  Once stripped of the array of filters that distort existence in order to fit into prescribed limits, it is then that I can truly see and understand what it is to be human.  There is an inseparable bond between the ability to see with clarity and love, compassion and understanding.  We are all, in fact, flawed creatures, imperfect on account of the evolutionary path of our species, mortal by design, contained within the architecture of our brains, yet we are collectively capable of so much more than the disastrous and unsettling choices we have made to date.

 

Think of the world we could craft if all humans were to fully incorporate the truth that we are all (the eight billion of us) members of the same human family rather than continuing to pursue the current idea that we are somehow intrinsically separate based upon contrived differences in race, belief systems, political ideology, sexual preference etc.  Think of the world we could craft if we finally stopped killing each other for no good or apparently justifiable reasons.  Think of the world we could craft if we seriously began to be responsible stewards of our earthly home rather than actively undermining the natural world that sustains us.  Think of the world we could inhabit if we finally took full responsibility for our collective fate rather than allow ourselves to move about in a delusional reality of our own making that presumes that a super-human being(s) is “watching over us.”  If we were to bring about our own self-destruction tomorrow, the cosmos would be completely unaffected and the movement of time would be unimpaired.  The human species is not a required component for the running of the universe machine.