Life, Human Nature, and the Value System
Life is a very interesting thing. It is an amazing puzzle to be solved. A tangled knot to be untangled. An age old mystery to be explored.
Life is the most precious thing we have. Without our lives, there is nothing. The Void. Or perhaps, a hope of something more... but for most, just a hope, and for many, a recognition that, "this is it".
Life, that most amazing state of consciousness and awareness. Filled with drives, emotions, thoughts, and actions. It is our most valuable thing.
From this truth comes the basis of understanding human nature, and the value system that will allow humanity to live on into the indefinite future.
Drives. Drives are what move our minds from thought to thought. These drives are part of us. Before we were even self-aware, our drives were there. An essential product of our evolution into human beings, drives are part of us. Our quest is to understand them.
Survival is the top drive. Survival ultimately boils down to the desire to avoid suffering or death. We seek out security or safety, find shelter, seek for food, and try to meet the needs of our chemically-induced emotions. Survival is essential. Without that drive, we would not eat, drink, or breathe. We would die. Survival is an essential drive for all living beings.
Happiness is the recognition of all needs being met. For most animals, meeting survival needs equates to happiness. In humans, we create other needs, such as needs for possessions, and in so doing, we delay happiness and make it an event which never can fully arrive. The search for happiness continues, day after day, even though most of us could find happiness in this moment, if only our thinking was such that we recognized that our essential needs and desires were being met.
Sex. The drive to mate. The drive to procreate. The drive to be with another and to share together in this journey of life. The need to feel connected and understood by another. The need to love, and to feel love. Affection, love and sex roll around together; teased apart at times, but often quickly intertwining.
Curiosity! That amazing aspect of our brains that causes us to want to make connections; to learn; to attain understanding. It is essential to living beings. Without a drive to learn, a burning curiosity, we could never learn how to find food, where to look for shelter, how to relate to our family, how to communicate. Curiosity is an innate part of us, and can never be taken away because our brains are literally learning oceans within our heads. Churning, and moving, and swaying, and jumping, and teaming with tiny moving signals that interact with each other in marvelous and unpredictable ways. We are curious, and there is no way around it.
Freedom. It is the state of being able to do anything one sets to do, recognizing physical limits. Freedom to do anything with or to our bodies. Freedom to go anywhere we can go. Freedom to make any sounds, noises, or words we can make. Freedom to write. Freedom to emote. Freedom to do anything. As living beings, we have freedom, and for most living beings, that freedom is only tempered by our drives of survival, happiness, sex, love, and curiosity. Those drives keep us from doing some things, and cause us to do others. We are slaves to our living nature, and yet we are free. We are most free when we satisfy all of our basic needs, recognize such, attain happiness, and then think forward to all the possibilities that complete freedom offers us.
This is the story of human nature. Life is our most valuable possession. Drives keep us alive. Freedom is being able to do anything that our bodies can physically do.
Living as one with this world, our mother Earth, is not as simple as being what we were born into. We are not single individuals, living in some garden of Eden. We are here, part of the Earth, the Earth made conscious. Billions of minds all living, with drives, and full freedom. We are the mind of the Earth.
What are our goals? What is our reason for being? How should we live?
Such questions philosophers ruminate and postulate and consider in words and in print. Each of us, in our own way and time, come to these questions, seeking understanding. Some seem to quickly accept the answers provided them by family, community, or religion. Others, driven by insatiable curiosity, seek within themselves, any beyond themselves, to understand the reasons for life.
There is no reason. It is a stark and unwelcome truth. We are the result of unimaginably long evolution stretching from now all the way back to the first molecules that formed together in a self-replicating pattern. We are the inevitable result of physics, given a practically infinite amount of time. There is no reason. We live. We are here. We exist. Yet we can find no reason because there is none to be found.
And so, we ask ourselves, after looking into the void at that far end of life, what are we going to do with this time we have? How shall we spend our lives? How will we find happiness knowing that we will come to an end, and that time for us is as finite as seconds ticking away on a clock?
I find solace in the recognition that not only are we the inevitable product of the Earth, but that indeed we ARE the earth. Every single atom in our body is of the earth. Every single measure of energy in ourselves if from the sun. We are the amazing combination of earth and sun, together in one place, at one moment in time, matter and energy made aware of itself.
We shall, in very short order, all be one with the earth again. In ten thousand years, our atoms will be spread far and wide. These atoms will be in the earth, and the seas, and the air, and the living things that have survived the follies of man.
We are like the first raindrop to meet the surface of the mirror like forest pond. We are that splash, captured in a millisecond on film. That fantastic shape. That circular crowd. Matter and energy together for an instant. The raindrop is the energy. The pond is the earth. We are the splash. The intersecting of sun and earth.
Our tiny splash of life causes ripples that emanate outward from us toward the shores. Tiny ripples of that sun energy that now propagate and radiate outwards from our lives. Those ripples move to the very edge of the pond, and may reflect back toward the center of the pond.
Billions of humans. We are the splashes of the raindrops on the pond. Our lives come and go in the blink of geologic time. Our legacies interact with each other. We change the very surface of Earth from a mirror like wilderness, to a broiling rain splashed sea.
This thought journey leads back to our purpose here, or at least a purpose that we can understand and bind to. We are the Earth. We are the Sun. We are the combination of these with the infiniteness of time. And we can choose to celebrate and recognize this amazing collision of existence, this miracle of life on Earth, by living our lives to protecting the life which has come to be.
We are but one of millions of species. We are but one of trillions of organisms. We are part of the family of life. We are one.
We humans, we individuals, we can choose. We can choose to recognize our family of living things. We can recognize that love is an emotion that has no object, but rather fills us with the ability to care for all life and all living things. We can understand that our actions, here and now, will alter the lives of uncountable numbers of our family, our living descendants, into the near-infinite future. We can choose to live our lives for the protection of life itself.
At the moment, humanity is walking another path, one that leads away from our living family of earth. We have constructed a society and its institutions that have destroyed innumerable of our living family, including shocking numbers of entire species. We have destroyed entire habitats, cutting down the forests of the world, placing our need and desires above those of all other species, and sometimes all other humans as well.
Where do we dream humanity and our fellow earthlings in the near and distant future?
My vision is a move forward to a wilderness garden of Eden that would look very much like the earth did a million or more years ago, before Man came into its destruction phase. This Eden earth, a wilderness where all earthlings could live their lives with complete freedom, is my vision of the future. This vision includes humans as they have decided to include themselves.
Will our human descendants have towering cities, rising from the trees? Will there be shores lined with elegant homes? Will there be vast fields providing food? Will humans still eat their fellow animals?
I do not know the answer to these questions. My vision of Eden Earth is vast enough to include such possibilities. The point is that we are now headed in exactly the opposite direction. We are destroying our living family on earth, and we are failing to move toward Paradise.
What are we to do? Life... Drives... Freedom... How do we work within our human nature to turn around our species so that it works toward this future Earth?
Knowledge. Understanding. Truth. Compassion. Initiative.
These are the values that must be part of any value system that has a vision of our future eden earth.
Knowledge and understanding are the key to making sense of everything in the world, how it all relates and interacts, how it has come to be over the years, and what path it will likely go in to the future. We need to understand how we are destroying in order to find the root cause of the destruction. We must understand the connections between our seemingly benign actions, and the actual impact that our combined actions are having on the world. We need to understand all of these things, if we are to be convinced of what we need to do.
Truth. We can only attain understanding by seeking truth. Truth is elusive. We will never know some things. We will never know the truth of many things. It may even be that we may never know the truth of any things. Yet we must strive to understand the world, and to seek out confirmations, and refutations, and then using logic and understanding, to make sense of all around us. Truth, the whole truth, and NOTHING but the truth. That is what we need to move ourselves forward.
Compassion. We have an innate ability, a drive, an emotion, to love and to care for others. It is what motivates parents to care for their children, and families to care for one another. It is what holds packs, and herds, and communities together: compassion and love.
Compassion is inherent to humans, and yet the circle of compassion, those who are encompassed an included in it, can be very small. We find ourselves ranking compassion, or perhaps doling it out like some limited resource. Compassion is the emotion of love made into action.
In order to move toward our vision, we must begin with ourselves, by understanding how all living things are within our circle of compassion, and indeed, that the most important in our lives are the living systems of the earth itself. We must include all animals in our circle of compassion. We must recognize the value of nature, and wilderness, and plant-life, and all that must come to live free. Our compassion is infinite, and our circle of compassion must be expanded until it is broken... Compassion unleashed on all the world. Love released to include all.
Life is the most precious thing we have. Without our lives, there is nothing. The Void. Or perhaps, a hope of something more... but for most, just a hope, and for many, a recognition that, "this is it".
Life, that most amazing state of consciousness and awareness. Filled with drives, emotions, thoughts, and actions. It is our most valuable thing.
From this truth comes the basis of understanding human nature, and the value system that will allow humanity to live on into the indefinite future.
Drives. Drives are what move our minds from thought to thought. These drives are part of us. Before we were even self-aware, our drives were there. An essential product of our evolution into human beings, drives are part of us. Our quest is to understand them.
Survival is the top drive. Survival ultimately boils down to the desire to avoid suffering or death. We seek out security or safety, find shelter, seek for food, and try to meet the needs of our chemically-induced emotions. Survival is essential. Without that drive, we would not eat, drink, or breathe. We would die. Survival is an essential drive for all living beings.
Happiness is the recognition of all needs being met. For most animals, meeting survival needs equates to happiness. In humans, we create other needs, such as needs for possessions, and in so doing, we delay happiness and make it an event which never can fully arrive. The search for happiness continues, day after day, even though most of us could find happiness in this moment, if only our thinking was such that we recognized that our essential needs and desires were being met.
Sex. The drive to mate. The drive to procreate. The drive to be with another and to share together in this journey of life. The need to feel connected and understood by another. The need to love, and to feel love. Affection, love and sex roll around together; teased apart at times, but often quickly intertwining.
Curiosity! That amazing aspect of our brains that causes us to want to make connections; to learn; to attain understanding. It is essential to living beings. Without a drive to learn, a burning curiosity, we could never learn how to find food, where to look for shelter, how to relate to our family, how to communicate. Curiosity is an innate part of us, and can never be taken away because our brains are literally learning oceans within our heads. Churning, and moving, and swaying, and jumping, and teaming with tiny moving signals that interact with each other in marvelous and unpredictable ways. We are curious, and there is no way around it.
Freedom. It is the state of being able to do anything one sets to do, recognizing physical limits. Freedom to do anything with or to our bodies. Freedom to go anywhere we can go. Freedom to make any sounds, noises, or words we can make. Freedom to write. Freedom to emote. Freedom to do anything. As living beings, we have freedom, and for most living beings, that freedom is only tempered by our drives of survival, happiness, sex, love, and curiosity. Those drives keep us from doing some things, and cause us to do others. We are slaves to our living nature, and yet we are free. We are most free when we satisfy all of our basic needs, recognize such, attain happiness, and then think forward to all the possibilities that complete freedom offers us.
This is the story of human nature. Life is our most valuable possession. Drives keep us alive. Freedom is being able to do anything that our bodies can physically do.
Living as one with this world, our mother Earth, is not as simple as being what we were born into. We are not single individuals, living in some garden of Eden. We are here, part of the Earth, the Earth made conscious. Billions of minds all living, with drives, and full freedom. We are the mind of the Earth.
What are our goals? What is our reason for being? How should we live?
Such questions philosophers ruminate and postulate and consider in words and in print. Each of us, in our own way and time, come to these questions, seeking understanding. Some seem to quickly accept the answers provided them by family, community, or religion. Others, driven by insatiable curiosity, seek within themselves, any beyond themselves, to understand the reasons for life.
There is no reason. It is a stark and unwelcome truth. We are the result of unimaginably long evolution stretching from now all the way back to the first molecules that formed together in a self-replicating pattern. We are the inevitable result of physics, given a practically infinite amount of time. There is no reason. We live. We are here. We exist. Yet we can find no reason because there is none to be found.
And so, we ask ourselves, after looking into the void at that far end of life, what are we going to do with this time we have? How shall we spend our lives? How will we find happiness knowing that we will come to an end, and that time for us is as finite as seconds ticking away on a clock?
I find solace in the recognition that not only are we the inevitable product of the Earth, but that indeed we ARE the earth. Every single atom in our body is of the earth. Every single measure of energy in ourselves if from the sun. We are the amazing combination of earth and sun, together in one place, at one moment in time, matter and energy made aware of itself.
We shall, in very short order, all be one with the earth again. In ten thousand years, our atoms will be spread far and wide. These atoms will be in the earth, and the seas, and the air, and the living things that have survived the follies of man.
We are like the first raindrop to meet the surface of the mirror like forest pond. We are that splash, captured in a millisecond on film. That fantastic shape. That circular crowd. Matter and energy together for an instant. The raindrop is the energy. The pond is the earth. We are the splash. The intersecting of sun and earth.
Our tiny splash of life causes ripples that emanate outward from us toward the shores. Tiny ripples of that sun energy that now propagate and radiate outwards from our lives. Those ripples move to the very edge of the pond, and may reflect back toward the center of the pond.
Billions of humans. We are the splashes of the raindrops on the pond. Our lives come and go in the blink of geologic time. Our legacies interact with each other. We change the very surface of Earth from a mirror like wilderness, to a broiling rain splashed sea.
This thought journey leads back to our purpose here, or at least a purpose that we can understand and bind to. We are the Earth. We are the Sun. We are the combination of these with the infiniteness of time. And we can choose to celebrate and recognize this amazing collision of existence, this miracle of life on Earth, by living our lives to protecting the life which has come to be.
We are but one of millions of species. We are but one of trillions of organisms. We are part of the family of life. We are one.
We humans, we individuals, we can choose. We can choose to recognize our family of living things. We can recognize that love is an emotion that has no object, but rather fills us with the ability to care for all life and all living things. We can understand that our actions, here and now, will alter the lives of uncountable numbers of our family, our living descendants, into the near-infinite future. We can choose to live our lives for the protection of life itself.
At the moment, humanity is walking another path, one that leads away from our living family of earth. We have constructed a society and its institutions that have destroyed innumerable of our living family, including shocking numbers of entire species. We have destroyed entire habitats, cutting down the forests of the world, placing our need and desires above those of all other species, and sometimes all other humans as well.
Where do we dream humanity and our fellow earthlings in the near and distant future?
My vision is a move forward to a wilderness garden of Eden that would look very much like the earth did a million or more years ago, before Man came into its destruction phase. This Eden earth, a wilderness where all earthlings could live their lives with complete freedom, is my vision of the future. This vision includes humans as they have decided to include themselves.
Will our human descendants have towering cities, rising from the trees? Will there be shores lined with elegant homes? Will there be vast fields providing food? Will humans still eat their fellow animals?
I do not know the answer to these questions. My vision of Eden Earth is vast enough to include such possibilities. The point is that we are now headed in exactly the opposite direction. We are destroying our living family on earth, and we are failing to move toward Paradise.
What are we to do? Life... Drives... Freedom... How do we work within our human nature to turn around our species so that it works toward this future Earth?
Knowledge. Understanding. Truth. Compassion. Initiative.
These are the values that must be part of any value system that has a vision of our future eden earth.
Knowledge and understanding are the key to making sense of everything in the world, how it all relates and interacts, how it has come to be over the years, and what path it will likely go in to the future. We need to understand how we are destroying in order to find the root cause of the destruction. We must understand the connections between our seemingly benign actions, and the actual impact that our combined actions are having on the world. We need to understand all of these things, if we are to be convinced of what we need to do.
Truth. We can only attain understanding by seeking truth. Truth is elusive. We will never know some things. We will never know the truth of many things. It may even be that we may never know the truth of any things. Yet we must strive to understand the world, and to seek out confirmations, and refutations, and then using logic and understanding, to make sense of all around us. Truth, the whole truth, and NOTHING but the truth. That is what we need to move ourselves forward.
Compassion. We have an innate ability, a drive, an emotion, to love and to care for others. It is what motivates parents to care for their children, and families to care for one another. It is what holds packs, and herds, and communities together: compassion and love.
Compassion is inherent to humans, and yet the circle of compassion, those who are encompassed an included in it, can be very small. We find ourselves ranking compassion, or perhaps doling it out like some limited resource. Compassion is the emotion of love made into action.
In order to move toward our vision, we must begin with ourselves, by understanding how all living things are within our circle of compassion, and indeed, that the most important in our lives are the living systems of the earth itself. We must include all animals in our circle of compassion. We must recognize the value of nature, and wilderness, and plant-life, and all that must come to live free. Our compassion is infinite, and our circle of compassion must be expanded until it is broken... Compassion unleashed on all the world. Love released to include all.