No World Without You

Dear Friends,

Last week we had a surprise meditation.  I introduced our central theme in the middle of the session, rather than in the email that preceded it.  This week, we'll work on that same theme but with advanced consideration:

There is no world without you.

As usual, its pronominal variations are all included:

There is no world without you/me/us/them/it.

In natural science, for all its validity (climate!), the understanding of the spiritual nature of nature is not there.  What is the earth for?  What is it really, beyond physics?  In what way does it exist?  What does it mean?These are not questions natural science can answer, and yet they are answerable.  

When we talk about the troubles of humans on earth, a natural scientific prejudice often comes out in sentences like, "The world will be better off without us."  

It all looks different if there is no such thing as a world without you.  

It used to be thought that it was cowardly to believe in reincarnation, a denial of the finality of death, and so it would be more courageous to face your own utter annihilation when this body stops breathing.  Now, with the planet on fire, it seems more cowardly to imagine that personal death is the end of you, so you won't have to come back and see what things are like in fifty or a thousand years.  But what if there really is no world without you -- reincarnation or not?  What if you are, and always were, and always will be, an ineradicable part of this and all worlds?  Then there is no total escape in death, for one thing, but also, more simply and positively:  you are an essential, constitutive part of reality.

My impression is that in what we call death there is enough relief to satisfy those (including atheists) who believe in only one physical life, but there is also enough individual  subsistence to satisfy reincarnationists.  To put it negatively: you lose enough for endless grief, and yet you have no escape through death.  And by the way, what survives of the earth itself after the sun supernovas?  Not something, but not quite nothing either.

To meditate "There is no world without  sentence in any of its forms would be to experience its validity directly and joyfully.  That will require some loosening of our sense of what a person or "thing" is: you (singular and plural), I, we, they, it.  What aspect, we might ask, of each of us and all of us, is ineradicably part of all worlds?  

with love,
Michael