LIFE AS AN ORGANISM

4 Jul

In a very real sense, no person is alone, ‘no man is an island’. We are not isolated atoms, each jostling and competing against the rest in a Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest. Instead, each of us is supported and constituted, ultimately, by all there is in the universe. We are at home in the universe.

In this entangled universe, we cannot do violence to our fellow human beings or our fellow inhabitants of the Earth without doing violence to ourselves. And the most effective way to benefit oneself may be to benefit others. The realization and maintenance of self and other are thus completely intertwined.

All nature is alive with process and happenings. The totality of all that happens is a pattern of flows and influences, now diverging from one locus, now converging towards another in such a way that “each volume of space or each lapse of time includes in its essence aspects of all volumes of space, or of all lapses of time.”

Most of all we are not impotent observers outside nature, subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Instead, we are participants in the creation drama that is constantly unfolding. We are constantly co-creating and re-creating ourselves and other organisms in the universe, shaping our common futures, making our dreams come true, and realizing our potentials and our ideals. (reprint)

Mae Wan Ho

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