Back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when I was a graduate student in philosophy, I kept getting emotionally and intellectually stuck on the supposed dichotomies: mind vs. body, inside vs. outside, logic vs. causality, me vs. you. I knew intuitively that separation is not real; that if we could just somehow, descend below the mind, below even the “blooming, buzzing confusion” that William James claimed the newborn experiences, that we would find ourselves immersed in unity. And yet, being a typical conditioned “product” of this separatist culture, it took me years, decades even, before I learned how to sense my immersion in oneness while navigating this bifurcating western cultural illusion as a dance. Cf. Bill Hicks, as usual!
What was merely a “philosophical problem” for me back then has now mutated into an immediate global emergency, thanks to the rapacious, unsustainable, mind-set promoted by the industrial revolution on a finite planet with finite resources. And that’s not even to mention Fukushima, or climate change, or all the other signs and wonders of impending ecosystemic collapse. We, simply, must, recognize our immersion in the web of life if we wish to continue as a species on this beautiful planet.
Meanwhile, here’s a short, sweet philosophical treatise on the same subject.
via activistpost.
