As as a sociologist I would definitely say that there is a strong connection between the state of your surroundings and the state of your mind. There is not a direct relationship of course, but to me it has something to do with “clutter” – you wouldn’t let the clutter outside your head contribute to the clutter within.
Small insights like these are perhaps important enough in themselves, but they regard your personal life. However, as the Captain Carrot (from the Discworld series) so admirably shows us, the more you can widen this personal sphere of personal relation – the more you are forced to let those happenings that indignify and lessen the world affect you. A hallmark of many of the great men and women of history, is that they have taken the burden of many upon themselves, and held that burden upon their conscience.
The Zen idea constitutes an emotional and intuitive reason for why we should invest in one another and our surroundings. But what about intellectually? Aren’t we inherently selfish creatures whose only function it is to copy and spread? Actually the answer is no. The reason is that evolution is not a force with a will. It just simply happened. There is no more inherent meaning in our existence than there was in your average rock before live populated this earth. Whatever meaning there is in this world, we created for ourselves. And then the very source, the evil, the solution and the crux of the problem arose from the arbitrary evolutionary strand that was homo sapiens sapiens; culture.
You there! Yes you mister average reader. Are you giving up on me? I beg you, just a bit more – it will all be okay in the end.
The point is not too difficult to deal with, but we need to keep two ideas in our head at once.
1: We were shaped and formed under the assumption that we would for ever be in competition with our environment and fellow species. We worked so hard so hard to keep ourselves fed and clothed and happy. And the balance of nature was only really disturbed during a natural catastrophe.
2: Our culture usurped the balance, enabling every human being to extract more than the threshold of his lot.
You see with the power dealt to us by chance, has in a relatively short time transformed our earth. Given us the power to eradicate everything in our path. And had our technology been only a bit more advanced, we might have managed to be this earths only living life- form outside of bacteria. We would have become only the second life- form to accomplish this on this earth.
(The first species was the first). But there is one last o so foul trick played upon us. As Stephen Fry put it: “Look around, everywhere you see nature is unconditionally beautiful”. There is such inherent beauty in this world has humans could not create a lone with a hundred designers. Evolution it seems, has imprinted in us the need, the want and the will to exist side by side by these plants.
We are in essence born of this world, and inseparable from it. It is telling that one of the most powerful images the astronauts managed to provide to the rest of us, was an image of the teeny tiny earth gently bobbing in a great heap of nothingness.
So we humans are inherently – Zen. We are our world.
