BEFORE AND AFTER LIFE: LIFE Jorge Carvajal Posadas
If we could translate the meaning of the discoveries of emerging sciences into a corresponding cultural metaphor, we would have the best arguments to change our consciousness, and become the change the world needs.
We live today the effects of the hurricane wind of accelerated changes that affect from the same geophysics of the planet, to the human culture, including all the expressions of the relations between science, religion, economy and politics.
In just sixty years, since the postwar period, we have witnessed planetary transformations that overcome all the changes that have happened in hundreds of millions of years on earth. To sustain the current consumption rate of the so-called developed world we would need the resources of four planets such as earth.
We could produce food for twelve billion human beings. However, of the current seven billion billion, they are not able to eat enough to sustain life with dignity. Our health systems are bankrupt, hospital medical treatments are one of the leading causes of mortality, the economy is in intensive care, fear is endemic, the weather has become unpredictable. All the signs reveal to us that we are in a chaotic vortex, at a crucial point that precedes the catastrophe or the emergence of a new reality. On the crest of the wave of evolution, at a point of bifurcation and unstable equilibrium, we cannot We will never be what we have ever been. We are facing the greatest challenge of choosing our path and, with it, our destiny. It is not so much about how many we are, but how we live, how we interact with others and with ourselves.
Would there be any relationship between the recent earthquakes in Japan, Chile, the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe? Are the melting of glaciers, the great volcanic eruptions that in the North and the South have put in check the air navigation, the global climate change and the fusion of old separatisms and artificial borders? Does all this relate to the emergence of new cultures, economies and countries? With the tsunami that transmutes geopolitics to the south of the Mediterranean?, with the bubbles that burst the American economy or wait for it? With the crisis of the dollar and the euro and the dark gestation of new hegemonies that do not hesitate to sacrifice any hint of human rights?
Or will it be that we are just ships to the garete at the mercy of meaningless currents?
If we look at the reductionist vision that projects a progressive emergence of atoms and molecules that have been found at random, we might think that we are not coming from anywhere and we are not going anywhere. But everyday experience reveals that everything in life, like life itself, is full of meaning. I look now at the eyes of my granddaughters and it seems impossible to me that they have reached us from nowhere and by no means- I guess in his gaze the adventure of light that recreates life at the very bottom of its neuronal field. I see my past and my future merged in this second of tenderness and I discover beyond thought and emotion the sacred alchemy of a present full of meaning. Neither the reason nor the separate emotion give reason for the feeling .. But in the fusion of emotion and reason the feeling arises, deep and intense space-time, like a black hole in which we die and are being born, moment by moment, to be again
It is simply incredible that someone plays dice with us in the universe and that none of us have anything to do with all this. Looking for answers we could play the ancient game of the executioners and the victims, to tell us that they have been the others, that the current situation has nothing to do with us, that we have been there innocently, maybe looking at our navel.
But, if the rulers were responsible? We have chosen them. If they were the bankers? In their banks we have deposited our savings, our trust, we pay them interest, and from them we claim the best interests, without knowing that the bonanza will possibly come from the financing of deforestation or arms trafficking. Maybe we can now say that the chaos drifts from so many injustices committed by obscure interests. Nothing darker, anonymous and invisible than our indifference, the greatest cause of injustice and violence.
In an interconnected world, whose essence is the relationship, we could not expect changes in the economy, without changes in the relationships between individuals, cultures and countries. But these changes are simultaneously related to major transformations in the field of science. What we believed of matter and energy, of life, of the brain and molecules, has collapsed in such a way that we are witnessing a new rebirth.
We start from a conception of the earth as a center subject to the determinism of incomprehensible and immutable laws, until we discover that the earth was not the center and humanized life so that the fruitful relationship of science and art arose in the age of light. We cease to be the navel of the world and, in the humility of not being the center, we discover our human potential in a rebirth that would free us from the chains of a transcendent vision that denies the immanence of being. We discovered that, beyond faith, there was also the magic of reason. We continue our journey discovering, in the laws of evolution, that we were not separated from the great chain of life and we gratefully looked at the traces of light in radioactivity and mineral transparency and the seed program flourishing in our own humanity . And, with all this, we glimpse the rise of man from the entropy and gravity to the lightness of an ascending consciousness.
Here we are today in a crucial vertex, a crossroads of cosmic paths that converge in the speck of the cosmic dust that is the earth, to become a black hole, a singularity from which it emerges a new world.
We are in the eye of the hurricane. But we can choose to be on the periphery, in which the high winds will prevent us from living and seeing clearly. Everything depends on our attitude. We can maintain solidarity, cohesion, central union beyond peripheral interests to remain in that human center where we can live according to a scale of values that recreates the participatory presence that gives life strength?
We can sustain ourselves in that center of inclusiveness, where with the central fire of cynational love we melt the petty and exclusive interests, to be simply what we are: humans, brothers, participants in that quintessence of the collective soul, to which we are emerging without having to give up the sacredness of our individuality, our uniqueness?
We can. After all, consider us and be part of a human accounting in which everyone counts, so that together we generate the true economy of abundance: freedom?
Will it be possible to preserve the peace of the center, in the midst of the vertiginous change of events, and to feel that it is we ourselves who emerge at a new level of consciousness.
We are unique, yes, but we cannot be human if we do not consecrate our uniqueness to the concert of humanity. That each of the note. Let each one be, as Gandhi said, the change he wants for the world. May each rebel against all forms of dependence, to achieve in responsible interdependence the genuine expression of a freedom with responsibility, the creative essence of the new land.
If we could translate the meaning of emerging science discoveries into a corresponding cultural metaphor, we would have the best arguments to change our consciousness. In the last 20 years neuroscience and epigenetics have swept all our old concepts of the human being that we are. Physics tells us of multiple universes, of the fullness of emptiness, of non-locality, of the superposition of states and the deep mystery of the observer who, not only changes The observed, but you can also recreate it. Biology leads us to the poem of autopoiesis, a life that recreates itself, from patterns of information and consciousness that direct ordered cascades of molecules, participating in a concert of cooperativity.
We invent life, the brain mimics the external world and reconstructs it inside: the world we see is reflected and invented inside. It is that world that we project in our way of consuming, of being, of living. What we feel about others is what we feel deep inside us. Integrated emotion and thought produce the world of feeling, the most powerful force to transform our way of life. Being in the world is a matter of feelings.
How we feel? What do we feel about each other and about us? Do we feel loved? Do we really love Can we feel the tree, the look, the hunger, the need? When we really feel, we are, we remove ourselves from the inside, and so, moved, we are reborn to a world that is now also inside. The universe, all universes interpenetrated as a multiverse, become the uniqueness of the present in oneself. The place where to be unique we give our note, so that the symphony of the cosmos resonates within. If, beyond knowing, we felt live today that the brain rebuilds itself, that life is an invention of life that is constantly being renewed, and that in addition to the body and molecules we live in our culture, we would already be The change the world needs today.
We emerge from matter, yes, but at the same time the strength of the spirit descends and its interaction is this current of consciousness that we are. We are being born in every moment. In every moment we die. Between birth and death as two shores, the great current of life. We would not have to fear death. We would not have to fear rebirth. Dying and rebirth are the two banks of life. And life is the current that connects us to creation.
Before and after life, neither more nor less than life.
