We do not survive. The life of every individual and every species will, ultimately, end. So, what does it mean really when we talk of ‘survival’ as the ultimate arbiter of evolutionary success? Is it a matter not of who survives (because no one and nothing does) but of who survives the longest? So, a long individual life, or a species that sticks around for millennia instead of just hundreds of years has done better. This seems a particularly hollow way of judging what it means to do well. Much as I am happy to admit that I do not want to die tomorrow, when I do get to the end of my life, I hope I am able to tell a story which is more compelling than: “It’s been great! I didn’t die for a really long time”!
If we do make not dying for as long as possible our only criterion for success, we virtually guarantee ourselves a rather sad and small life, in which only a fraction of our potential for growth is realised, because we have to put all our effort into avoiding anything that might be a threat to our longevity and that means avoiding taking risks and staying within the confines of the known. There is, here, something akin to the accumulation of capital which is deemed to constitute success under our current global economic system. Have you noticed how many of the super-rich seem desperate to go on for ever, clinging to life in underground bunkers and cryogenic cells? They hoard their material wealth and their very materiality – their bodies – as if driven not only by a fear of death but by an implicit belief that if they hang on hard enough to what they have, if they refuse to enjoy any of the gifts they have received, they will always have something left in reserve – they will never die. At the same time, they will also never begin to live, ‘live’ not in the purely biological sense of having a heart that beats and lungs that breathe but in the sense of consciously embracing a mutually transformative relationship with the world.
To be alive, I think, is to be knowingly an intrinsic part of an infinite and evolving cosmos, aware of, and surrendered to, the mysterious experience of being a conscious living thing – an experience of perfect interdependence. ‘Intrinsic?’ you protest. ‘Surely you are not suggesting the cosmos could not exist without me?’ Yes, just that. Consider all the events that had to come together in order for you to be born: your mother and father had to meet in exactly the time and place that they did, and the same had to be true for their mother and father etc…and for all these coincidences to occur it was also necessary for the contexts through which they were moving to be exactly as they were and on and on…and for all the things in the future which you are set to influence to be exactly as they will be, the same must be true…and given that all these events touch each other, given that there is nowhere a gap between one thing and another thing, the objective truth (that curious phrase, an abstraction that names a unity, a oneness, that exists but that no one can see in its entirety because it is, paradoxically, infinite) must be that past, present and future are all one field stretching to infinity, making this oneness not a noun but a verb, an everything-ing, an ongoing, unending blindly faithful leaping into the dark, a ‘why not’? And just as each of us could not be the unique one-off being we are without everything else being just as it is, nor could everything else be uniquely as it is without our unique contribution; each thing things eternally – a ripple radiating out on the pond of everything. Time and the movement towards death are the subjective experiences of a thing that lives, I believe, not in order to survive but to actualise its own and others’ potential for growth which is achieved not in isolation but through the giving and receiving of light, the very opposite of hoarding, a spontaneous generosity, a holding nothing back, a radical willingness to die in each moment, to give away everything we have in the service of a love that asks for nothing in return because it knows that in this gift economy, the more you give, the more you have.
This everything-ing has no end; individuals and distinct species come and go but it carries on, twisting and unfolding kaleidoscopically, its pattern the inevitable and undivided outgrowth of what has gone before; nothing is forgotten, and nothing is wasted, everything survives to inform its own aftermath, both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, embodied in a redemptive process which has no end other than to honour the dead by exploring the potentiality of this moment ever more fully. So, although, we may wish to reject the idea of success as clinging on to life for longer, we do not need to abandon the idea of progress provided that we envisage progress as a bridge that seeks to carry the grief of what has been and the hope and fear of what may be to come with an ever greater confidence in the necessary process of our own unfolding. In the face of all the horrors that have been committed by those who believed themselves to be the architects of history rather than its midwives, we can maybe still say, with the American poet Walt Whitman in his poem ‘The Future’, ‘Amelioration is the blood that runs through the body of the universe’.
Yes To All Of It 