Life and Death
To change our minds, to shift our consciousness is to change the world. Once people see reality, they will not be able to unsee it.
How do I free myself from the constraints of modern industrial life? The death of the ego by embracing death. This becomes the first step in realizing the possibility of life.
When I am no longer here for myself, my frame of reference gets larger. If I can see reality as it is, that change in perception can change the range of options available to me.
However, the greater the number of options, the more time required to choose. This can result in paralysis by analysis.
How do we regain the ability to choose, in this state of learned helplessness?
The answer cannot be to outsource our authority to politicians and billionaires. I was so disappointed by the conclusions of some very intelligent people. Tristan Harris, Aza Raskin, and Christiana Figueres were talking about working with large tech companies. Figueres concludes her book with a call to get involved in politics.
The answer lies in nations and corporations? No, these systems that we built are the engines of social control, designed for learned helplessness, trained incapacities, and bureaucratic intransigence.
This is the mental game played by an attention economy. When the mechanisms of control are focused on the mind to direct our time, energy, and resources to build death machines, we become blind to what we are doing because the task itself is so benign. How could changing the corner radius on a button to purchase something from Amazon be an act of genocide, ecocide, and suicide?
It is the flap of a wing of a butterfly that causes a hurricane on the other side of the world. Chaos theory.
The cumulative actions of seven billion humans have a vast influence on the planet.
Now that we can perceive the effects of human activity at a global scale, we are becoming aware of our need to stop and reverse the damage.
Habits are hard to break. How have we become addicted to self-destructive behaviours? We became convinced that the Earth is winding down, deteriorating, falling apart, losing energy, devolving into chaos, leading inexorably to the entropic heat death of the universe. The greatest fear we have is of death and the scarcity of time. By the time we begin to grasp that there may be more to life than we can understand, we die. Life feels meaningless, when it is so mysterious, beyond our comprehension.
We spend our lives trying to understand. However, we have reached the limits of human cognition.
We confuse understanding how a car works with the act of driving.
We confuse understanding how the universe works with the act of loving.
Life is simple. We are here to love our neighbours. If we are doing anything else, we are failing to fulfill our purpose.
What is love?
Love is metaphysical gravity. Love is the unifying force that holds the universe together, the phenomenon of syntropy that adds energy, information, and order to the ongoing creation of life. Light is radiation that can escape the force of gravity and that facilitates the transfer of energy through absorption. Through reflection, the differences in light and shadow that our eyes can perceive become raw data for our brains to decode and sense our environment to discern qualities of colour, texture, and shape as well as quantities of distance, movement, velocity, and time.
In this medium of time, energy, and matter, we exist as physical bodies with metaphysical awareness. The physical defines the limits of that which can be perceived, measured, and quantified. The metaphysical is that which exists beyond the limits of our perception and understanding.
Faith is the acknowledgment that there is something beyond our ability to perceive and understand.
Hope is the awareness of a greater good. Death seems final, an end to striving, meaning, interaction, connection, and belonging. Hope is an aspiration for the enduring relationships that transcend death, the fulfillment of a longing for the common good.
Love is the active state of faith and hope that brings into reality the qualities of life that result in the common good. Love is the “magic of compound interest” applied to the flourishing of life.
Economics is the dead philosophy of the reduction of life to entropy, scarcity, competition, and dominance. By quantifying life, economies convert living systems into dead machines that simulate life, but are designed to replace and kill living beings.
Money is the mechanism for incentivizing living beings to work for their own demise, to build the tools, the machines, the architecture, the systems, the artificial intelligence, and the virtual realities to replace life by making life and reality obsolete.
Money gives people an excuse for spending our time, energy, and resources on killing life instead of on bringing the universe to life.
To change our minds, to shift our consciousness is to change the world. Once people see reality, they will not be able to unsee it.
Who is our neighbour? Every being that is not a self is your neighbour, the universe of life that surrounds you.
To love “God” is to love what “he” creates. These words come with the baggage of thousands of years of misunderstanding and misinterpretation, embedded in human systems of value and moral philosophy.
We are humans who perceive life through stories of the past that orient us toward the future. But we live in the now, in the present. Life is a gift.
We are life. We are living in the story of love overcoming the power of empire. Life will find a way. Love never fails.