The explosion of that small meteor
over Russia—injuring over a thousand people and terrifying many more thousands—when
added to the close encounter with yet another planetary rock, this one an
asteroid that barely (by a mere 17,000 miles) missed another earth hit that
would’ve caused even more damage, left me pondering our place in the vast
shooting gallery we call the Universe. It is not so much that we have to fear another
cosmic collision like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. It is that these
two encounters remind us just how accidental, how truly unpredictable
everything about our existence appears to be. We are mere blips on the screen
of cosmic time. Less than blips. We appear, “strut and fret our hour upon the
stage,” as Macbeth put it, and then are heard no more. We try to attach some
sort of significance to our every “decisive” move, but the truth seems to be
that we are not even in charge of the tiniest aspects of our lives, much less
the largest, and that even if we were, what even potentates do is so paltry in
the grand scheme of things that it might as well have never happened.
There
was a zen master named Huang Po who one day, in answer to some questions from
his audience, assured his students that if he told them the truth about their
real condition, they could not stand up to it. Then he summed things up this
way: “There is nothing on which to rely. That is what you have to realize.
There is nothing at all on which to rely.” What he meant by that was what the
meteors remind us: some flying piece of rock could strike the earth, for no
reason whatsoever (though no doubt our religious leaders would try to link it
to some deep sin of ours), and if it happened to hit in the right place—New
York city, say, or Moscow or Beijing or New Delhi—it would wipe out half of our
species and all its works. To ward off our terror of such things, we imagine we
can rely on our government, or on our military, or on our scientists watching
out for such things. But the truth is that there is nothing they or anyone else
could do in such an event. We have no cosmic ray guns, no Super beings from the
planet Krypton, who could divert the thing. Nothing on which to rely. And this
works in those small everyday accidents that continually afflict us as well. Nothing
lasts, nothing is secure even for a moment, especially us. In fact, modern
physics tells us there isn’t a real, core “us” to begin with.
And
of course, the situation is even worse than that. It now appears that the very ingenious
devices we humans have been busy erecting and inventing over the past few
thousand years—safe food supplies, military and scientific weapons, fossil
fuels to power our heat, our conveyances, our mastery over space and time,
pesticides and herbicides to increase our crop yields—have been leading us down
the garden path to disaster. We thought such manifestations of human genius
were helping us, making us more secure. We thought they were leading more of us
to healthier, happier lives—about which our cheerleaders take every opportunity
to remind us. Instead, they have been leading us down a fool’s path, their very
sources of power being the engine on which we are undermining the stability of
the planet we’ve lived on for millions of years. The planet is warming chiefly
due to our pollution. The oceans are dying chiefly due to our pollution. The
very seeds of the plants we’ve relied on for a stable food supply are being
distorted and chemicalized chiefly due to our tampering to make them “secure” from
blight and disease and weeds and change. So everything we have done—thinking
that this is our grand purpose in life, to save ourselves and other human
beings and make all lives better—has been a mirage. Worse than a mirage. Not
only has it not been a useful purpose, a salvational purpose, it has been, in
the long run, a suicidal one. By trying to make ourselves last, we’re killing
not only ourselves, but possibly all the life on the planet.
So
what we are compelled to say is that if so-called “gods” have our interest at
heart, it is an interest that leads us to extinction—which, in that curious way
things have of feeding back on themselves—might well be the best thing for the rest
of creation and the planet itself.
On
the other hand, the cosmic events that we know about, or think we know about,
make this idea of purpose a very
dubious proposition. We are accidental creatures, seemingly without purpose.
We, the human species, cannot be viewed any longer as some divinely-ordained
(or cosmically-blessed) system of life that some wiser entity has directed all
existence towards. I mean, why would any rational or benign or compassionate entity
create a system, evolution, whose highest branch is occupied by a species like
ours? A species that threatens, is in fact well on the way to destroying the
whole system out of which it arose. The only logical way to look at this (and
evolutionary theory sees it precisely this way) is as accident. Everything we
are, everything we do is accidental, and can only be understood probabilistically.
We have almost no say in who we are or how we have developed or what we choose
to focus on or fight for. We are born with certain proclivities, like
self-protection and reproduction, geared to certain environments over which we
have no control. We are what we are born with added to where we happen to have
been dropped and by whom. And we are swept along by the historic and economic
and social and cosmic forces that pertain during our puny lifetimes. To think
that we can help anyone or save anyone, much less ourselves, much less the
planet, is based on sheer ignorance of the facts.
That
is, if we insist, as most humans do, of thinking of ourselves as self-directed,
self-contained, human individuals responsible only to and for ourselves. On the
other hand, if we could change our perspective only slightly; if we could come
to understand that it is not the survival of our little selves that is the
issue, but the survival of the whole grand scheme that includes life and
non-life, every animal, vegetable, mineral, planet, sun, galaxy and all it
relies upon, then perhaps something can be salvaged. Not saved. Salvaged. We might
come to see that, as the aforementioned Huang Po put it, the jewel of salvation
for which we have been turning the world upside down to find has been attached
to our foreheads all along. We, the totality of what we really are, is always
already salvaged. It relies not upon our feverish doing designed to secure us
and our nearest and dearest from harm, but upon our simply accepting the risk
of our connection to, our dependence upon, our identity with all that is.
Of course, this is
not easy. Everything we’ve been taught, everything we think we have learned on
our own militates against it. Almost every sensory and material gift we’ve been
given, everything we think we have earned on our own, militates against it. And
yet, something nourishes in us this counterintuitive truth. There is a jewel
that belongs to all, a jewel which, given how we see things, must seem
accidental. Preposterous and iniquitous. But which, in the end, may come to
seem the most inevitable, and indeed the most salvational reality of all.
Lawrence DiStasi
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