=). ~ o ~ . ^%
Heavy Inning
Many people consider eternal physical existence to be the most desirable of possible rewards. Conversely, it’s common knowledge that there is no example of such a putative ‘blessing’. Why might the greatest gift we can conceive of be missing from every place we look for it?
Some spiritual traditions pose some version of eternal (personal) existence as a reward for perfect service, and usually, along with this, some kind of punishment (often framed as eternal) is promised for those who fail to ‘measure up’. Bliss or torture. In between? Limbo — a location roughly equivalent to being lost.
Whether or not some form of immortality is accessible, the common paradigms framed by orthodox religious traditions are largely bereft of meaningful content. In this sense they are ‘too superficially shiny’; a characteristic often exhibited by predatory caricatures of possible realities. It is the form of promise sometimes deployed by cults in the hope of compromising those who either cannot or will not apply the powers of insight and inquiry necessary to put them to rest.
Many of the methods and pronouncements of orthodox religions are ripe with threats and practically bare of evidence of enlightenment — a paradigm well-suited to harvesting converts and dominating them, and poorly-suited to even the emulation of the deep generosity and wonder which it seems to me are fundamental hallmarks of the divine. If one explores these threats and promises to some depth they reveal conflicts too serious to ignore — and some of these have to do with the idea of personal immortality — physical or otherwise. Whether associated with religion or merely with technology, the idea of living forever (as an individual) is a dangerous and (probably) self-conflicted desire.
Here’s one obvious problem with the gambit that the ‘heaven and hell’ religions propose: if eternal life was accessible, wasn’t this the case long before these religions existed? If so, it seems fairly likely that they are simply co-opting something already freely available — or at least achievable — without them. In this case, the ‘great reward’ (which they want to delimit to us as exclusive to the human adherents of these specific faiths) must have been previously achieved by people entirely innocent of their traditions, admonitions and scripture. So too with the great punishments, if indeed these exist.
Obviously such a reading of history represents a terrifying threat to every aspect of religious authority — and this authority is precisely what sustains them as ‘traditions’ within human cultures. It is also the key to converting new agents to their cause.
Another deadly problem with the Eschatological religions is the idea that Earth is merely a kind of ‘disposable battleground’ awaiting apocalyptic dissolution or transformation. This toxic position is a reflection of the similar paradigms applied to persons and souls. To some, the human body is almost meaningless, just a temporal trifle in which you pursue immortality. As such, its only real purpose is to get you from birth to death in such a way as to ‘rise above’ both of them. While the latter position regarding the body has some minor merits, it is cruelly incomplete, and when applied at the scale of the planet, the outcome is atrocity — made worse when justified by traditional interpretations of texts and teachings.
I suppose there remains some slim chance that more or less popular models of ‘heaven’ (and perhaps hell) are closer to the truth than those I prefer — but I have good cause to doubt that, and my doubt is based on more than reason, texts or intuitions. It’s based on beauty and wonder, two stalwart pillars of divine and terrestrial reality. The universe so invariably and so profoundly out-exists our wildest dreams and expectations that, frankly, I have come to expect that it will continue to do so without exerting the slightest effort.
Still, compared to the world the humans have assembled down here on Earth, the paradises of theodidactic promise that await the faithful, the assassins, and the martyrs remain somewhat attractive, particularly when compared to a life of relative or extreme poverty and persecution. But these promises do not a paradise comprise; and for many of us, our real concerns about moral error coupled with our inherent naivete render us particularly vulnerable to ideas like these.
Unfortunately, one of the more common results of the propagation of these and similar ideas is not paradise but it’s opposite — and not in the afterlife — here. Problematically, it turns out that ideas like these and the humans who are converted to their agents are most of what’s required to turn our actual world into a hell from which the exotic promises of distant theocratic authorities cannot rescue us.
{\ . ~ o ~ . /?
Way Out
But even should we grant the existence of such a prejudicial heaven, before you can get there — you have to die. And this, it appears, is the thing nearly nobody wants to do. Yet everyone has to. It seems we’ve become badly confused about birth, death, and the interval in-between — and some of our modern ideas regarding death display the kind of sophisticatedly cultured stupidity that is found only in the ideological output of our modern techno-industrial cultures.
Some modern cults would have us believe that you can avoid death altogether, and simply ‘transform’ your physical body into an ‘immortal vessel of light’ — if you can only ‘activate your cosmic DNA’ or some similarly egregious confabulation. Others would have you believe that illness is your own fault — the product of your inability to think yourself free of illness, or modulate the frequency of your chakras appropriately.
To hear these ideas born out is as insulting as it is tedious. Illness and death are an inherent aspect of birth and life as physical beings. No death? No birth — and thus — no life. I cannot help but be reminded of people who want to abolish sleep: ‘Why should I have to waste this much of my life in unconsciousness and inability to accomplish anything?’ Of course, their first error is that they are unconscious: sleep is not unconsciousness, but a vibrant state of altered consciousness. Nor is it a period of inactivity — far from it — it is a period of the alteration of the focus of activity — from external to internal. Perhaps if we could develop a richer and clearer understanding of sleep, we could more easily appreciate some of the finer points of death.
Within some of the more ancient traditions emerging from the East we find the basic claim is that life is essentially a kind of generous error that happens within a gap between other states. Crudely framed, these traditions imply that entrance into the cycle of birth and death should be — well, if not precisely avoided — eventually surpassed — along with any ‘heaven’ or ‘immortality’ one may encounter in-between. Their goal appears to be something I’ve heard described as gently erasing all traces of the self, or at least, setting up a situation in which such transformations can more easily and naturally proceed.
But I have seen something a lot more amazing than anything that’s common amongst human traditions. A way to have both, and more, at the same time. And frankly, from all I have seen of Nature and the Universe what I have come to expect is this: more wonder and beauty than any human imagination (or group of them) could hope to frame.
Given such a universe, why would we rush to trade it away for cardboard sketches formed by a bunch of highly confused and easily terrified representational primates?
Besides, nearly all the great sages sing the praises of death; and not only as an end to life, but as a teacher.
\~. ~ o ~ .}{
Death : We’ve Got It Wrong
What is death?
All verbal answers fail. But we may imagine that, while not entirely like being knocked unconscious, or being involved in an unexpected accident, it is perhaps something like the sudden ejection from all that is known and familiar.
For a complexly enlanguaged adult, this may be terrifying. For a creature who is totally immersed in the flow of consciousness (i.e. an infant), the threat cannot be made at all. The infant (for example) is already immersed in novelty. Death is just more novelty. And if there’s nothing specific on the other side of the transition? Well, that’s also a lot like novelty. Again, not really very threatening at all. Unless you bind to representations of self, other, world, &c.
You and I are mortal, and though I may have acquired some small insight, I still fear death. It seems that almost everyone I meet thinks that that death is bad, wrong, punishment, to be avoided at all costs, &c. Some of this makes a good deal of sense, since, most of those we may observe in the act of dying are suffering or badly damaged. Many wish to live, and some are terrified of death.
According to how we have conserved or developed them, our empathic capacities grant us some degree of participation in the sufferings of others — and thus the process of death is painful to the living as well as the dying. Generally, it isn’t kind or pretty— dying often equates to torture. It’s not fun. There’s no obvious reward at the end — it doesn’t make you stronger — it just kills you.
The pain we experience at the loss of physical and personal contact with those we have known and loved is often overwhelming, and it rarely resolves rapidly — or completely. I suspect this is largely as it should be, but the feelings involved are challenging to say the least. As creatures capable of richly experienced inter-being with other humans (and nearly any form of life) — we often become so deeply involved in relationships that the death of any organism we relate with affects us profoundly.
Although we presume there is a common hierarchy of value associated with who or what dies (an artificial measure of what degree of pain is reasonable) these assumptions are irreal when pursued beyond theory and into actual human experience. The loss of an animal, an insect or even a plant can move human beings just profoundly as that of a beloved relative. In many cases people feel more attached to other organisms than to humans, and this is no mere eccentricity: one of our most outstanding evolutionary and relational conservations is the broad scope of our capacity for biophillia.
The pain we feel surrounding experiences of death goes right to the very core of our emotional selves as animals and human persons, in part because our ideas of personal distinction are misfounded. These beings who we relate with are not really experienced by us as distinct individuals. Through constant or intimate relation we naturally internalize these relationships — and eventually they fold rather seamlessly into our experience of our own identity. Their sudden or gradual departures from our lives often comprises an experience analogous to amputation.
All of these matters are linked into our common concerns and experiences surrounding death. Of course, I am selecting those I consider problematical, since they appear to comprise the primary challenges that invite our exploration and growth. Death is the ultimate boogeyman — indeed, it is often found to be the very root of fear itself. Subfeatures of this fear are easily disguised to appear as distinct or extant in their own right; but when carefully traced many of their roots will be found to end where our own lives do: at death’s door.
But before we decide on what a paradise physical immortality might be, let’s take a look at one of the more interesting examples of this paradigm — an example that comes from within us.
:> . ~ • ~ . <:
“Telomeres protect a cell's chromosomes from fusing with each other or rearranging-abnormalities which can lead to cancer — and so cells are normally destroyed when their telomeres are consumed. Most cancers are the result of ‘immortal’ cells which have ways of evading this programmed destruction.”
— Harrison‘s Principles of Internal Medicine,
Ch. 69, Cancer cell biology and angiogenesis,
Robert G. Fenton and Dan L. Longo, p. 454.
Cells. Amazing little creatures. We’re made of ‘em. Animals are essentially cellular hyperstructures. Some have suggested that animals are really just elaborate vehicles that prokaryotes assembled for their own propagation and edutainment. In animal cells, both death and immortality take on a very different set of meanings and purposes from those most of us are accustomed to. Death becomes a weapon against disease; and immortality is the disease.
At the scale of the cell, eternal life is conditionally accessible; in fact, to hear it told, death by aging was an evolutionary acquisition. Microbiologists have long held that the early cellular constituents of Earth did not experience programmed death as we do — the only cause of death was misadventure — i.e. something physical happened to a cell, ending its capacity to exist and/or replicate. It took a very long time (even longer if we measure by the standards of cells rather than humans) for cells to develop to the degree that programmed cell-death became a part of the common repertoire.
We are comprised of cell types whose character and structure differ in significant ways from those ancestors (prokaryotes). Animal cells (eukaryotes) like ours undergo programmed cell death, and one of the primary causes of human aging is a decline in the regenerative capacities of stem cells, which form the primary source of tissue repair. One of the obvious reasons they are programmed to obey signals from the body whose function is to kill them is simple: as they age they mutate, and some mutations are deadly — not necessarily to the cell in question — but to the body it participates in.
A variety of methods have evolved to keep this problem in check, including cell-killing chemical signals, other cells that can detect and destroy those which are dangerous, and telomeres. Telomeres1 insure that there is a limit to the reproduction capacities of animal cells, without which we would be even more vulnerable to the production of malignancies due to the fact that a far greater number of mutations would occur and be copied. Over time, the telomeres (which are required in the DNA duplication process in cell replication) shorten. Ordinarily, when a cell’s telomeres are consumed, this is detected by the body and the cell is destroyed by one of a variety of methods.
Yet some cells are able to evade destruction and achieve the cellular equivalent of personal immortality. We call them cancers.
Henrietta Lacks is a human cellular superculture who achieved a limited form of immortality. HeLa is the designation medical professionals use to describe this achievement. HeLa is cancer.
Animal cells in some cases mutate in such a way as to ignore the common signals that cause programmed cell-death, which is crucial to animalian health and well-being. When this happens, these cells may become aggressive replicators, igniting an opportunistic agenda that involves metastasis (grabbing new terrain) and metabolic resource diversion that rapidly becomes unsustainable.
In many cases, the resultant combination of rapid replication, metastasis, resource diversion and toxic emissions from the cells in question are fatal to the animal — and thus to the cancer cells as well. Effectively, the long term outcome is suicide, but in the short term, these cells are functionally immortal. They are no longer available to the signaling network that would ordinarily destroy them, and they also adopt biological defense strategies against other bodily assets which might attack them or shut them down — but the cells themselves are functionally immortal. Like those of Henrietta Lacks, they will gladly replicate themselves forever given the appropriate vehicle. Since they don’t have to do any actual work, other than survive, the content of their genome isn’t particularly suited to anything but hogging resources and defending themselves.
Individual immortality has deadly systemic repercussions at the scale of the cell and organism. Even the cancer dies of it. The product isn’t anything like ‘heaven’ at all, and is exactly like hell. In our time the this problem is so rampant that human beings have become desperate to ‘solve’ it; but our basic relationships to language, knowledge and technology are actually radically magnifying this problem. Worse still, many of the misguided ideas which transform themselves into technologies and applications that contribute to cellular mutation and thus oncogenesis (origination of cancer cells) advertise themselves as attempts to preserve our individual health according to paradigms which are not only unsustainable, but are also aggressively self-promoting — much like the cancer that results from them. In other words, the causes of these problems — ideas, corporations, governments, and scientists — actually bill themselves as heroes to the people and the world their activity is actively assassinating.
But there is an even more startling aspect of this story at play here, and it involves matters that go deeper into the nature of cells in general, and their relationship to biocognition, and evolutionary history.
The result of successful fertilization during human intercourse is a zygote. This is a totipotent supercell, capable of differentiating into any of the cells associated with the fetus, including extraembryonic tissues. The next step down the ladder of stem-cell differentiation is pluripotency: these cells can generate any of the subtypes that are needed for human development. At each step, some of the variability is lost, and greater target specificity is achieved. As it turns out, stem cells are considered to be a primary candidate for generating cancer cells for a single reason: they live long enough to sustain the kinds of insults (DNA damage) that are required for many cancers.
Now here’s where things get slightly spooky. There is strong evidence from epigenetic research that stem cells can self-modify according not only to environmental situations, but also in relation to the thoughts, concerns, and emotions of parents — even prior to the intercourse that generates the zygote.
Although extremely controversial, and perhaps far ahead of Science’s current capacities to believe the data discovered by researchers, stem cells can apparently adjust in relation to the concerns of (future) parents in what looks surprisingly like a heuristic attempt to produce beneficial mutations in their (future) children. In one example, parental awareness of famine conditions led to mutations obviously beneficial to children born into those conditions.
What I hope to convey is this: as our species becomes more and more ‘death aversive’, we may be actually destroying crucial elements of our own evolutionary intelligence, an intelligence we have not even yet discovered and do not formally believe to exist or be possible. How? The effect of our aversion to death may well be causing our own stem cells to fail to evolve in other more useful ways in order obey our desire and ‘reach for eternal life’ — a gesture that, when successful, results in deadly cancers, rather than immortality.
Ironic, isn’t it?
/;. ~ o ~ .\\
The Gift
Now, why might an intelligent universe intentionally add death to its bag of tricks? I mean, if the original cellular ancestors2 were immortal, shouldn’t we just have stopped there? Why might they evolve into something that died based on a time-table of sorts? Let’s take a moment to examine some models whose features illustrate how physical death might be just the kind of evolutionary adaptation worth chasing.
There are many angles of approach from which we may gain insight here, but the first one I’d like to explore is a familiar one: sacrifice. To give one’s life for another is often considered the most laudable and profound expression of our humanity. Most people and cultures revere those who do so — we call them heroes. But this gift need not be extraordinary; the realities of personal sacrifice for the benefit of others are central to many of our experiences of being human, not the least of which is parenting — even if in many cases the parents survive such sacrifices (at least, initially).
The context of parenthood highlights strong foundations for personal sacrifice in human experience and evolution — but isn’t it strange that a species that so fears (and vilifies) death would (under a broad variety of circumstances) be quite happy to lay their precious lives on the line — or lose them for certain— in order to benefit a stranger (or even, in some cases, an obvious enemy)?
Although there’s no accounting for human idiosyncrasies, this sort of heroism is not exclusive to humans. Many animals have and do die for other animals, and for humans — and not just as food — but in an obviously intentional effort to protect lives not their own.
The onset of the internet and the rapid creation and distribution of electronic media has brought situations to light which we might otherwise have never witnessed; a cat attempting to resuscitate a fallen companion on the freeway, a hungry polar bear playing with (instead of eating) a wolf, an otter couple trying to gain entrance to a human hospital whilst injured, and many similar events.
Some might claim that since the animals have no representational intelligence, they do not know what death is, and therefore the comparison is wrong.Yet our seeming cognitive sophistication is more burden than boon here. Many animals are (demonstrably) aware of the possibility of death, even though they may not represent it consciously in ways akin to our own. They certainly experience a close analog of fear, particularly in situations which they know to be alien or dangerous. Inversely, it seems more likely to me that it is we who are confused about death, not them— to the degree that many of us apparently think death should be permanently avoided if possible.
This idea is selfishly toxic, and is analogous to a mind-cancer or a method of cognitive oncogenesis if you will. It’s the sort of thing one is compelled to hunt down and root out the moment that the stink of it announces its establishment.
If individual immortality was really the big reward some make it out to be, why would people all over history and the world be so willing to give up their human life for that of another person — or animal — or group?
And why would those who lay down their lives for others be so celebrated, so fondly remembered, and so enthusiastically emulated?
>?. ~ o ~ .)^
Hang Your Coat at the Door
The questions raised so far can be explored in a variety of ways, not all of which support my thesis. But there is model (or toy) of a situation I find compelling not merely because it’s shape is pleasing to my mind, elegant, and sensible: but because I find evidence of it in my every breath, every dream, and indeed, nearly everywhere I look. In science this would be seen as an absurd scope, demanding extreme evidence. But I am not a scientist, I am a child. And as a child, I am free to speculate, inquire, improvise and indeed — invent. But this is no mere invention, and in fact makes an argument for heaven, albeit one where the idea of individual immortality becomes not only absurd, but gross.
Imagine twin universes connected by a strange kind of tunnel. In one of them, there are no specific forms — and although there are ‘individuals’ in a manner of speaking, none of them are really distinct — in that what one of them experiences — all of them experience. It’s a playful place, and there’s something like death there, too. Except they call it birth. What it means is that one of the living elements leaves their universe and arrives over here — as an organism of some sort. But birth doesn’t exactly change the whole setup — in other words, the element born within the universe of form and physical individuality is still connected to the ‘everyone’ back on the other side. The new organism becomes a living satellite; constantly transmitting experience and learning back across the gap between the universes
In this way, to be born as an organism is an event something like sudden, extreme space travel — except it involves more than just spaceTime. Dimensions, language, you name it. Ours is a strikingly distinctive universe of endless specific moments, beings, and relationships. Over there, it’s just as vital and exciting — but a lot more general, vastly more directly connective, and not physical at all.
The beings over there form a unified superculture I’ll call the unityBeing. And whenever something gets born ‘over here’ that’s actually what’s getting born3.
So when you come to life over here, your sensing, awareness and activity can be said to ‘enrich’ the pool of being-ness over there. You are something analogous to a highly sophisticated learning \./ sensory array. And when this putative ‘you’ dies, the important aspects simply return to unity ‘over there’.
Now here’s the thing: if you’re an instance-element of the transentient superculture ‘upstairs’, death becomes crucial in our universe. Here’s why: the best possible situation is an endlessly evolving, highly inter-relational set of possible vehicles for exploration and expression over here. Preserving individual vehicles has some precedence, but insuring that the pool of possible vehicles is protected and developing is far more important.
If the vehicles were to be trapped in a specific physical or personal form, incapable of evolving, and unwilling to surrender themselves, the results would be catastrophic. That would create prisoners over here, who had become so isolated from their source that they confused themselves with that source. Worse still, these ‘human immortals’ would try to wipe out the mortals if only to acquire the resources that the mortals ‘were wasting’. Tyranny and atrocity would result.
But as we all know, immortality isn’t required to test this particular theory — all that’s required is the opportunity to observe a skillful businessperson with an over-inflated sense of self-importance. Can you imagine what kind of exaggerations individual immortality would confer upon such monsters?
The situation we have is vastly preferable. The vehicles naturally age and fade away, in the process insuring that a new set of vehicles with amazing new features and abilities continuously emerge. And these newly emerging vehicles can self-modulate in accordance with current conditions, instead of being cursed with an outmoded set of adaptations.
Around here, the only way you get that is physical death.
Therefore, if you were setting all this up intentionally — you’d chase physical death as a desirable adaptation, even before you went after those that seem far more compelling at first glance: eyes and hands, for example.
Finally, any ‘individual’ person who decided they wanted to live forever would immediately be known upstairs for what it is: a thief. A kind of cancer that refuses to acknowledge its unity with all beings, and demands permanent personal distinction. Someone so confused as to believe that their own individual survival is worth anything and everything. To get to this position you have to be either extremely confused or extremely selfish (or both) — precisely the sort of person it would be important to deny the ‘gift of immortality’ to.
Perhaps that’s part of why that putative ‘blessing’ of individual immortality is so obviously missing from the reality we inhabit and briefly enjoy in this particular lifetime.
I’ve only grazed the surface of this topic which must remain beyond the grasp of my reductive linguistic sketches. But one thing I hope we may together see a little more clearly is this: in a physical world with physical beings…
…mortality rules.
Oh, and one more thing. Suppose that these two universes, over extremely long periods of time, are slowly swapping places, so that, eventually, the physical universe becomes the unityPlace and the alternate universe the place of birth… like an hourglass whose bulbs exchange their sand when flipped… and whose shape symbolizes infinity.
:'. ~ o ~ .]:.
Artifactual
There appear to be two basic ways of approaching reality. The first way is that all things, ways, beings, and objects have the quality of experientially accessible being-ness. This isn’t precisely the same as being alive, but it’s similar in that they are available to living beings for relation. Always.
The other way distinguishes itself by discriminating between living and non-living in a very rigorous fashion. This latter mode has become so incredibly fascinated by artifacts (representations of or the remains of ‘dead’ beings, moments, places, or symmetries) that the planet itself is becoming ‘heavily artifacted’. These artifacts include cities, machines, and electronic devices.
Machines and electronic devices are artifacts that propagate within human cultures through their capacity represent (and in many cases replace) organismal functions. Usually these functions are taken to extremes, and their onset and rise to common dominance in human cultures toxicifies every avenue of organismal relation; atmosphere, light, sound, scent, knowledge, meaning, and touch.
Our human bodies are commonly immersed in the multi-frequency output of myriad transmission technologies, just as the toxic output of mechanical technologies have invaded our lives, our children, our bodies and our cells. While people like Dawkins repudiate the ignorance of the organized religions, they ignore the deadly contributions of their own religion — which, coupled with commerce and advertising, has acquired the necessary momentum and hubris to attack our intelligence and our minds as well as the cellular and metabolic bases of every form of life on Earth. No religion but science could ever dream of such a feat, nevermind so quickly accomplish it. But science has accomplished the toxicification of the entire organismal biome of Earth. Every single organism now contains chemical loads from the toxic emissions of industry and technology. These destroy organs, damage our nervous systems, and are directly involved in oncogenesis.
It appears that the branch of human knowledge most concerned with artifacts, is also most concerned with their conservation — at any and (perhaps every) cost to living beings. There are a number of modern researchers who actually believe that the destiny of our species is to convert all local matter into clouds of a computational substrate (nanodust) which would orbit and draw energy from the sun in place of the worlds and beings now present. But far before their kind arose, we built gigantic museums which conserve the dead instead of nurturing the living and which are, in many cases, happy to do the actual killing required by the goal of collecting.
Can you imagine living with the profusely bejeweled skeletons of your loved ones, instead of knowing them in life? Or perhaps, having known them in life, to take food from the living in order to ‘feed the dead’? Suppose that just for a single day, we had to feed -all- of the human dead. Would the living survive such a day?
In terms of feeding the living or collecting the dead — only one of these approaches results in a sustainable relationship with death, but unfortunately the survivable aspect is not as well-armed or as prone to aggression as its deadly twin.
The other is contagious, virulently aggressive, and quite prepared to lay waste to anything and anyone in order to acquire, value, and catalogue endless artifacts which ‘represent’ things, beings and events that, to them, seem dead because their seemingly lifeless forms appear to them as inanimate.
It’s a far more dangerous problem than it superficially appears.
:'. ~ o ~ .]:.
Coming Home
Let us suppose for the moment that the story of the two universes is true. In this case, those who harm worlds are actually attacking ‘heaven’ for a simple reason: in making the nurseries of sentience miserable to inhabit they are causing pain to all beings in both universes.
So the basic idea which is missing here is this: you have to treat your world, and all the beings you encounter there, as your own familiar home. One to which you may expect to return as a new being after your physical death.
There must be many worlds with living beings. Yet if everyone expected to have to come back to this world as a new being (without being precisely sure which kind) can you imagine how differently we would relate with the ecologies and relationships we develop whilst alive here? If we could simply understand that in our ‘future lives’ we must inhabit the worlds we create through our thought, activity and relation, perhaps we could finally establish a way of being human that would result in pride rather than shame and horror. In the modern moment on Earth, it is largely a source of disgrace to be human; our species is openly omnicidal — we and our favored ways of knowing attack everything that moves and most of what doesn’t — including the crucial inward capacities that could detect and alert us to this ongoing cataclysm of misrelation.
Birth and death are linked expressions of wonders whose nature, functions and character lie so shockingly beyond our primitive models as to deny them almost entirely. The primitive sketches comprised by even the most enlightened ways of knowing can never catch up to the constantly evolving miraculousness that no word or definition can hope to encompass.
One of the most important lessons of birth and death is that our world, and all the beings in it, deserve our deep respect, care, and attention. In the forests, the skies, the stars, and the living eyes all around you — we find something far more amazing than distinct individuals: a living universe of intimately shared vehicles for the expression and exploration of self-ness and experience, and the introduction of ways of learning far too profound to be limited to a single body, or, indeed, a single lifetime.
When we forget these lessons, our sciences, religions, and other ways of knowing are rendered into deadly reflections of our own hubris and ignorance, rather than the vehicles for transentient evolution they might otherwise more generously and survivably comprise.
