To re-enter evolution, to abandon the rush towards extinction, is to accept death.
But not death at the side of the road. Not death as a by-product of mechanistic destruction.
Death accepted as a phase of life.
Such death has purpose. It has meaning. It is not annihilation. It is not the end of life.
Refusing death on life’s terms is to strive after mega-death, the oblivion of widespread, organized extinction. Not by accident, but as a direct result of our refusal.
Wonder where the power behind our denial comes from?
From our refusal to accept death. From the bargain made to conspire to cheat one form of death through an illusion, a death that is an illusion, in favor of a real and silent ending: extinction spread across the earth and giving us the only power we can aspire to, the power to destroy.
I do not experience death.
There is no I.
There is no experience:
A series of perceptions that can be remarked upon in memory; of death, for any organism.
Such a conception is illusion piled upon illusion. It is central to the incoherence of thought.
It also drives our resistance to give up on a failed conception, even in the light of all its terrible consequences as they unfold about us.
To accept this, while still under Ego’s dominion, would be to identify its extinction, the end of an illusion, with our own.
From the off-balance-pose we are contorted into by Ego’s dominion, we are incapable of making the adjustments needed. Adjustments of attitude and realizations of our proprioception that may lead us out of such a profound error.
All we see are our terrors, the fears that bind us to habitual reactions, that leave us unable to see for our selves.
Horizons of Significance 
Tony,
As much as I wish I wasn’t, I quote Joseph Stalin. “one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic”. I do not mean to be callous, my own life experience is much different than most. I have no fear, nor awe of death. In part, due to being on the farm for twenty-five years. Death can be a very practical and necessary part of farm life. It is always approached with dignity, respect and resolve.
I have also been involved with a little hospice work. When you hold the hand of someone through their last breaths, at the end of the struggle, as you feel the final release. there is a comfort about death. A peculiar warmth radiates from the body prior to an eventual cooling. It is a good thing! To that extent, I have and can experience death. The rest is just an exercise in biology.
I am in no grand hurry to die just yet, but I fear it not! It will be my last adventure. I will leave no void I have been replaced by many more.
As a species, we will adapt or die. If we continue to force adaption on the world we will also die. If we continue to overwhelm the planet we die. This is chilling and stark news. The tragedy gives way to another statistic. We are no more important in natures diversity than the honeybee. Actually less so. We are part of a declining diversity of our own making. In as much as the loss of the species “MAN”, It will just be another adventure in evolution, if we are not already at an evolutionary dead, end we will “extinct” ourselves. Or something huge will force the species to another set of adaptations.
Our awareness is what makes us unique.
Thank you for introducing me to Ishmael. I read the whole thing straight through. One of the most important things I gained from the book was the quality of the conversation. There was an honesty and quality that is missing in important conversation today. Today everyone speaks AT each other, not to each other. So much effort in confrontation, not in communication.
The vital lesson hear…….”you can’t learn with your mouth open”
John
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Thanks for this.
“Our awareness… makes us unique.”
I wonder. It seems more and more likely that we are the clueless ones! That most everything else has levels of awareness we can’t quite connect to.
Yes, Ishmael is a dialogue. A lopsided one, but a true one.
In dialogue we help ourselves and each other get out of the habits of being controlled by our identifications. The palaver we see all around us is made up of arguing poses.
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Tony,
The difference ,I think, is that we go beyond the autonomic response to stimuli that other life forms respond to. Most other species adapt to changes in their environment by following the nutrient path, and spreading themselves to find the limits to their ability to survive the elements. It is intelligence by massive non- quantitative experimentation.
We as a species, Break our attention with a barrier of rationalization. We enter environments that are inhospitable to us, and force change upon those environments that displace the resident flora and fauna that have spent eons in specialized adaptation to that particular set of circumstances.
All specialization leads to sensitivity to even the most modest change, and is causative for most extinction.
As a species we are on a different path, to the same end. As we devour the world, We strip away the thinnest of veneers of life itself. We design systems instead of living within the proven system given to us. We have shifted our faith in nature to a faith in engineering. It all boils down to the manipulation of statistic and data. Our civilization has become completely dependent on the technological.
Those of us that are not completely numbed in the process, those of us that can still feel, see, hear the inner song of our world, the hum of life, have to work to get others to stop and listen. The music is still there, to hear it is rapture, to sing it is divine.
John.
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