What are we doing here ?
We enter the exponential peaking of the global population curve. Everything is taken with it.
We are the biggest biomass on land after our cows (jump to global biomass of species Wikipedia). This goes hand in hand with the disappearance of species and their numbers, pollution, and the destruction of environments. We see extremes in urban development and life-style (commuting, inequality, services, number of laws etc). Individuals, families and communities are stressed. It is hard to see a meaningful future beyond our “daily grind”.
What’s going on ? What are we ? Where are we headed ? Does anybody bother with such questions ? I think most do, but don’t have a meaningful or fruitful place for such questions – they might make us stop or give up. And so we are burdened, alone, and underneath it all, depressed and made anxious by them.
They are age old questions, a part of the human condition. We may reflect on them after the more practical issues of survival and reproduction are addressed, reflected upon and plan for action or what to do. We have this capacity, to not only engage with the world but to set ourselves back from it and reflect on the past and possible future outcomes. But the questions about our existence, “Why do we live but also die ?”, “What is our purpose or reason ?”, “Do we actually exist ?”, do not have the satisfactory answers we expect of planning what to do and making sure of results.
Our reflective planning for action and future outcomes, useful for problems to fix or for work to be done, seem to collapse when turned to the existence of things and in particular ourselves. We get stuck in our thoughts. This threat of inaction and withdrawal is opposed by creativity which becomes more and more dependent on appreciation by other people as natural needs such as clothing, housing, rearing and feeding are surpassed. Our cultures have developed to urban and technological expression of this avoidance of the existential “why”s and the appreciating of one another, but to such a degree that the medium that is technological and the appreciants who are urban and anonymous dominate the content that is our cultures.
The existential questions are also exposed as the “splat screen” that is our engagement with the world we may experience, is splatted with the exponential consequences of humanity indicated in the population curve. We can no longer deny the consequence of human activity, nor our own involvement. The people apparently in charge are in institutions, monitoring and gnawing at aspects of their specialty. They too reflect, the human condition faced and focused on an aspect of reality. No body seems to be able to address reality or entirety, nor themselves.
While we are alive and the Earth sustains our life-styles, we may address our selves, rather than just go along with, stuck in the traffic of humanity. For existing and being something there are questions. It may seem easier to be no body. There’s a lot to be said for acceptance and humbleness. But much is avoidance, putting up with what cannot be changed. The quiet scream of the suburbs of the 1970’s has turned into the mass conformity of the post-modern work force.
What is there beyond survival and reproduction ? Surviving well and prosperity ? Is there anything that answers for futility and mortality ?
Questions go with our state of being and our reality. A solution must go beyond an answer to the question but address the condition that bears the questions. Our questions arise of our identity identified with what it experiences as reality.
I have repeatedly stressed that our reality, both our self and what we experience, are created and placed, or projected, by the whole body in reality. There are different, deeper and variable parts to us, but the general tendency throughout them is to an exclusive identification with our self and what we experience, “I’m it” and “that’s the world out there”, that denies the whole body and our possible relation with the one who projects our all.
Nothing is denied of our parts but validated for what they are, projected parts. The difference is that we can be more of an integrated part, and the whole being is more integrated with more integrated parts. Thus we are also more a part of reality.
We may be closer to other wholes if other identities can also relate with their whole, closer to the rest of reality and the real world for being more integrated and related with the whole body, closer to the spirit, the essence of All creation and the whole body at his or her core (see nothingness, emptiness and the spirit https://realityhc.wordpress.com/2014/05/04/emptiness-nothingness-and-the-spirit/).
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