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Podcast 12: All-Encompassing Compassion
I recently read a definition of evolution as an “increase in harmony.” I presume they mean of the individual or the species to the ecosystem of which it is a part, which in turn increases the harmony of the system as a whole, if each of its constituent parts is working better.
I like this better than evolution defined as “progress” because I don’t think it necessarily works like that. Our attitudes towards progress tend to be tainted with ideas that we have to go forward ceaselessly, rather than evaluate what truly works better.
In this podcast episode, I expand on ideas first discussed in The Ecology of the Self, and talk about expanding your singular definition of who you are to include a much greater circle, one whose center is everywhere and whose outer edge vanishes.
Some links for you to explore related to this podcast:
- “Symbiosis: Some species set an example for living together in harmony”
- “Decompiculture: Human symbiosis with decomposer organisms”
- Wired News reports: “People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid”
- The Endosymbiotic Theory of how mitochondria got to be in our cells
- William Burroughs and parasitic humanity
- “Continued Colonization of the Human Genome by Mitochondrial DNA“
- The 8 Dynamics of Scientology
- Zones and more zones in Permaculture
November 24th, 2006 at 10:46 am
We sit indoors and talk of the cold outside.
And every gust that gathers strength and heaves
Is a threat to the house. But the house has long been tried.
We think of the tree. If it never again has leaves,
We’ll know, we say, that this was the night it died.
It is very far north, we admit, to have brought the peach.
What comes over a man, is it soul or mind—
That to no limits and bounds he can stay confined?
You would say his ambition was to extend the reach
Clear to the Arctic of every living kind.
Why is his nature forever so hard to teach
That though there is no fixed line between wrong and right,
There are roughly zones whose laws must be obeyed?
There is nothing much we can do for the tree tonight,
But we can’t help feeling more than a little betrayed
That the northwest wind should rise to such a height
Just when the cold went down so many below.
The tree has no leaves and may never have them again.
We must wait till some months hence in the spring to know.
But if it is destined never again to grow,
It can blame this limitless trait in the hearts of men.
- Robert Frost, ‘There are Roughly Zones’
November 25th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
If evolution moves us all toward greater interconnectedness and harmony, and if individualism is to be valued less than some other unspecified values (as you, Tim, wrote in your post on European burqa bans), then how shall we live? Is individualism evil?
November 26th, 2006 at 1:22 am
I don’t know. But I no longer think it is the “ultimate good” we’ve been lead to believe it.
That’s up to you to decide - unless individualism really is bad, then its up for me to decide and for you to follow.
Either way, you’re fucked, right?