Today's Sermon
I don’t want to die. I want to exist forever. And I will. I always have. Every molecule is eternal, until the universe itself ceases to exist.
I don’t really like being in this form. I know it’s temporary, thank goodness, and I know that my attachments to “like” and “don’t like” cause me to experience emotions that are felt as pain or distress, pleasure, joy, all of that, the whole human emotional spectrum, energy that flows through the body, subject to/filtered through interpretation and alteration in the mind (brain and everything else?), filtered through the subjective individual “consciousness.” And since we exist in groups, there is also a group aspect to this, where experience is filtered through the group and the group has responses. Both the individual process and the group process drive our behavior. When I say I don't like being in this form what I mean is...it will be great to become other things. This cohesive consciousness will dissolve most likely, maybe not, certainly these molecules will become other things, I like that.
There are so many aspects and interpretations of what it is to be human. Suffice to say that if you aggregate all the philosophies in their purest forms, without dogma or doctrine, from Atheism to Zoroastrianism and everything in between, you can see that we are energy, matter and electricity, and something else which we cannot quantify. It is often called spirit, or soul or consciousness (these terms are not necessarily interchangeable depending on your belief system). There are other words. The point is, this is what we are. And if you are reading this, odds are you know enough about the planet Earth to understand some of the biology, the ecology, the interconnected of all the life forms as a system.
OK, humanity, here we are. These beings with all that consciousness stuff going on. On this Earth.
Humanity is like french fries. Batch after batch goes into the hot oil to be removed when done, and then eaten. That’s pretty much how human life works. By the batch we come into this world, and we are changed by it, and eventually we die and are transformed (eaten) and become whatever we become, our bodies going ultimately into the earth to become more growing things. What happens with the other part, the ineffable, remains a mystery.
Maybe it’s amazing, maybe there are billions of other examples in the cosmos, but we have this thing we call “free will” which is that we are capable of acting as an individual regardless of the direction of the collective, or of other individuals. Exercise of free will as action requires something that motivates, and some kind of thought/emotion process.
We know that thoughts and feelings can be mitigated by instincts, so if a person is in a fear state, perceives danger to their existence, survival will dominate their thinking and their feeling, they will be in a constant state of reaction, and so analytical nuance may be reduced as energy is channeled into discerning the danger and how to survive it; fight, flight, freeze or fawn.
We also know that there are people and agencies who exploit human instinct, who manipulate the group with disinformation which is designed to keep them in reaction for the purpose of political and economic manipulation.
Put all this together and it’s a mighty complex system of interconnectedness. Now we think in terms of multi-dimensionality, so look at reality with the actual physical aspects, all the thinking and feeling going on in all the people, driving all our actions. Add in awareness of the free will of each person and how it functions, and the group mind responses. Add in all of the electro magnetic fields we are surrounded by, both naturally occurring and human-made (arguably naturally occurring since we are part of nature and we make them). Etc.
All of this to say, ok humans, what do you want to do with this? Do you want to rebalance how we exist on Earth? Leave Earth behind and take our circus elsewhere? Die off or become much smaller in number? We have choices. Some folks are all for leaving Earth and are already working on making that happen. Some want to rebalance things here. Some favor a smaller number on Earth to be more in harmony ecologically. Maybe all of these things are possible.
I started out saying I don’t want to die. I don’t. I don't want to be in this form forever, and I won't. None of us will. However living within the current circus, even at the periphery, sucks for a lot of humans. Billions of us are subject to the aforementioned political and economic manipulators. Humanity as a group has not yet learned to combine prioritizing the common good with the free will of the individual, rather then posing them in opposition to each other.
Let us also address the issue of human violence. Violence has created trauma which has been passed down through thousands of generations. We see the results of that trauma in human behavior around the world. However the instinct to survive, through the lens of trauma, goes awry and becomes a fear-driven greed, which can lead to violence. Violence can be physical in the obvious ways but it can be structural through societal or cultural institutions that maintain unjust social conditions. Poverty is structural violence, just as war and rape are physical violence. In order to stop our own violence against each other and against other life forms, we must, as a group (through individual and group process) make violence taboo, unthinkable, obsolete.
Caring for the individual AND the group, not one or the other, must become part of how we view ourselves. In order to do that we must address our collective trauma so we can stop perpetuating it. In order for humanity to step into a sustainable future we must stop traumatizing each other and the Earth.
