I remember when I was little having empathy for inanimate things. The ground, rocks, my stuffed animals, even a table or the wall. It concerned me on a deep level that no one else was seeing it. I'm not sure when "I grew out of that", but now that I'm talking about it, I think deep down, I still feel that way. I would have to say that to me, there is no difference between living and non-living systems. All of this is one living system.
I really don't know how to answer this question, I mean of course the DNA of humans across boarders is the same. I don't know why we would think otherwise. And yeah, of course society determines race. I don't really know what this article was trying to tell me as a reader.
Racial differences are an enormous truth in this world, and at this point I would hope that most of us know it's not on a biological tip, it's what society and power and greed and fear has done. But saying that it doesn't exist can be extremely detrimental. Some people might find it easier to say it doesn't exist to them, but that's trying to throw away something that has shaped the way of the world. It's negating millions of people that have suffered and are suffering on a daily basis
because of their skin color, so please believe, that shit is real.
The perspective of one living system having no difference between living and non-living systems reminds me of the Gaia theory. This idea seems so natural, an innate sense of understanding that I have a hard time thinking about the world being a group of disconnected systems. Thanks for sharing your empathetic view of the world from your childhood. Reminds me of this youtube video about empathy and what connects people ;)
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw
Is this the one you said Jason showed you? I still haven't watched it. Gonna watch it in a minute :)
DeleteRace. I don't really think it matters much exactly how we define it. Us, them, me, you, mine, yours. I think it's this process of division that causes suffering. Only by dissolving this method of thinking can we arrive at pure love, which I believe to be God. How do we strip away all this confusion to arrive at pure love? I definitely don't have the answer, but I think that's really to only way to win in this game of life.
ReplyDeleteSome quotes by David Bohm that ring true...
DeleteThe notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion. Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today. Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of nature, over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who live in it. Individually there has developed a widespread feeling of helplessness and despair, in the face of what seems to be an overwhelming mass of disparate social forces, going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it.
For both the rich and the poor, life is dominated by an ever growing current of problems, most of which seem to have no real and lasting solution. Clearly we have not touched the deeper causes of our troubles. It is the main point of this book that the ultimate source of all these problems is in thought itself, the very thing of which our civilization is most proud, and therefore the one thing that is "hidden" because of our failure seriously to engage with its actual working in our own individual lives and in the life of society.
Yeh, how do we get back to seeing everyone and everything as alive and an extension of the one living self of the universe? Perhaps we must get beyond the division of the mind, hopefully we do have pure love at our core like the mystics of old have eluded to.
ReplyDelete