Common Ground, Good Sense
This essay is not particularly about Buddhism, or western philosophy. Hopefully it is doing justice to both by not particularizing either while being influenced by both in the broad minded manner from which all genuine philosophy finds it's sustaining ground.
The nature of the medium and the fact that I’m not such a great writer makes it likely that if I’m criticising something people might take offence, or be rattled into a defensive posture. This is not my intention. A lot of friction today I think is due to this nature of social media where short, bold, uncompromising and abrasive comments are encouraged, if not impossible to avoid making. I genuinely want to share ideas and have constructive and mutually edifying things to say, which sometimes include criticisms of ideas or positions. They’re not attacks on the people. No human ideas are alien to me or anybody else. In different circumstances we could have found ourselves defending a position we are now criticising. Or perhaps we have come through a past where we held those positions ourselves.
An immense amount of energy and anxiety is invented in questions of identity in today’s western culture. People whose lives have been made ever more difficult and precarious by the nature of the economic system and it’s attendant hypocrisy, callousness, mercenary ideal, and abuse of dearly held human traits are understandably grasping for stabilising bases to resist. This often is seen to involve notions of identity, shared or individual, be they ethnic, national, cultural, religious, political, etc.
Not to demean these things, but it is a wonder that in this day and epoch people are not looking to what is most directly in front, behind, under, and in them as the most relevant and least expendable (and so most potent) ground from which to begin and to conduct a vital stand against exploitation and destruction. That ground is the living world itself, or nature. Life, ours and everything else’s, is the foundation that cuts across and through all other divisions, whether they are genuine and beneficial or artificial and imposed.
It is not the case that there is humanity on the one hand, and there is the natural world on the other, and there is merely an interaction between them. We are part of the natural world of Earth and it is as much within us as without. But to bring it to a more immediate level; every single organism is inseparable from it’s environment. If that environment is not conducive for its living, then it suffers and dies accordingly. Look around you; what you see is an extension of the living organism you are.
It is not that, especially in the case of humanity, that the environment is immutable. Every organism exists in a system where they are both determined by their environment as well as actively determining it. It is closer however than mere interdependence of two otherwise distinct identities; the environment is immanent in the organism just as the organism is immanent in the environment. It is a non-dual identity.
When we look for differences in the world of our experience, we can find an almost infinite variety. When we look for similarities, we find that on the contrary, there is nothing absolutely dissimilar to everything else. This is especially the case if we are taking the viewpoint of life on Earth in general. When we do so, we see that every living thing, or species, or organism is inseparable from it’s environment consisting of both the organic and inorganic.
The entire planet is a grand matrix of life systems, and at the most common basic level, we all share as living beings this non-dual identity with the Earth. Go to the nearest plot of soil and dig: you will find there creatures who are sharing a more fundamental characteristic with you than any man-made distinction, or abstract identity. That characteristic/identity is life.
That identity is indeed being threatened all the time, but in ever increasing intensity with ecological devastation and climate collapse. There take your stand. All life on Earth and the possibility of future life stands with you. Nation, ethnicity, tribe, affiliation and all the fabricated phantoms and aesthetics will be represented at most by nothing more than corrupting plastic waste on a dead or dying sphere in space if the life of this world encounters it’s absolute negation.