Mark Twain said “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” The first step to finding meaning in life is to know yourself. Life on Earth is biological. We are biological organisms. Biological life is that which brings forth consciousness and stimulates thoughts, emotions and vitality. It is the medium, if not the source, of our life experience.
Our bodies are not a single organism but an assembly of organisms that have come together in symbiotic union over millions of years of evolutionary time to form what we experience as our human body and awareness, perfectly suited to life on Earth. Plant and animal life is diverse and forever changing. Moreover no individual of any species is exactly the same as it was a nanosecond before.
The human identity has been likened to a stream. A stream is recognisable although it is constantly changing, it widens, narrows, dries up or flows. Although the content of the stream is never precisely the same, we still identify it as the stream and consider what is flowing through it to be a part of it.
In spite of widespread ignorance of life, people do still manage to keep up the pretence of being an independent single entity. The truth is that if it was up to us to keep ourselves together, we would fail miserably. Most people are clueless as to what keeps them alive or how their body functions. It all mostly works without our conscious input. In reality it is not us keeping our life together but life keeping us together. The more important point is that the host of organisms that make up our body have designed themselves to maintain homeostasis, which is the dynamic balance within a constantly changing internal and external environment. We would not exist if this were not the case. Symbiotic relationships promote survival.
We identify with our thinking and emotional selves rather than with the exquisitely complex and intelligent organisms that make us up and ignore the life-giving ecosystems in which we exist. Our attitude towards existence begs the question as to whether we actually like to live. Many illnesses can be traced back to lifestyle and dietary choices, industrial agriculture and livestock farming, pollutants, EM radiation and environmental toxins, and also to severely impoverished ecosystems. We would all be far healthier if we got our priorities right and only upheld narratives validated by our experience in the natural world.
Health systems in most countries are geared to push pharmaceutical products and medical equipment rather than promoting natural and healthy living.
The agenda of global corporations is one of over-exploitation of the biosphere that is the collective term for the planetary ecosystems. Global corporations profit from people’s unhealthy behavioural choices and myopic view of life. Industry lobbyists influence politicians in order to encourage public behaviour that results in larger profits and greater control over consumers. The ultimate objective of the global industrial complex is to have these preferred behaviours endorsed by rules and regulations that would reward compliance and penalise non-compliance.
This manipulation of entire populations directly frustrates people’s search for true meaning in life. The resulting mass psychosis provides fertile ground for the decades-old transhumanist movement. Transhumanists advocate technologies that would alter the human biological genetic makeup and merge it with artificial intelligence (robotics, hardware, software). Transhumanism could be dismissed as a fanatical view held by a fringe group if it were not for the fact that this group is exceptionally influential, well-funded and positioned to have a worldwide impact.
Author Alan Watts describes the biosphere as the “harmony of controlled conflicts” and laments the fact that “we lack the real humility of recognising that we are members of the biosphere”.
“you will not find meaning in life through technology”
In order to perchance find meaning in life we need to be in relative good health, living in thriving ecosystems and in harmony with all other species. We require moral values and belief systems that foster respect and empathy towards all of our fellow humans and the biosphere. We would be living in supportive, sovereign communities, taking responsibility for our actions. This is by all means possible. By embracing and relishing our biological heritage we will find joy, fulfillment and meaning in life. It starts with you.
“What you are living is but a fractional inkling of what is really within you, which is what gives you life, breadth and depth” Joseph Campbell
This article was published in the Senior Times of the Times of Malta on the 22nd July 2022
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