Your Life is Not About You, Episode 431
What if we mistake ourselves for the stories we've been told - that life is about our happiness, that we should wrestle control from circumstance, that we're separate from the world around us? A conversation about discovering that we didn't parachute into nature but grew from it, like apple blossoms on a vast tree of generations of living things. We ask: what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to feel the fullness of being human, grief and joy and all the rest, rather than contracting around our preferences? Could recognising ourselves as nature's response, rather than isolated egos demanding certainty, reveal what we're here to do?
This week's Turning Towards Life hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Our source for this week:
Your Life is Not About You
One of the cruelest ironies of Western life is that, today, the key, unquestioned, seemingly self-evident axiom of the Western wellbeing and self-help industry is precisely that our life is about us; that we have to wrestle the reins of our life from mere happenstance and circumstance and determine its course ourselves; that we have to proactively pursue our agenda and project meaning onto it; and - perhaps cruelest of all - that our life is about our being happy. All of this is unnatural and unjustified to the point of being grotesque... Is the life of an apple blossom about the apple blossom? If not, then for precisely the same reason ours cannot be about us. And this is the great discovery of the second half of life: our life isn't, has never been, and can't ever be about us. Why would it?
We are part of nature; why would our life be about us and not nature as a whole? … Nature is, of course, impersonal. It's agenda is universal and holistic, not restricted to the petty egoic tastes and preferences of a person. It is naïve to expect a human being to be able to comprehend the … universal agenda, just as it is naïve to expect an apple blossom to comprehend what its role is in the grand scheme of apple trees and life on Earth. We are segments of nature, not mere witnesses; we didn't parachute into nature, but grew out of it. Therefore, we are nature, as expressed in a particular volume of spacetime.
Bernardo Kastrup - The Daimon and the Soul of the West
Photo by Anastasiya Romanova on Unsplash