Betterworld; Are we, really, inhabiting the Shell?

Dear You,

Welcome to my mind for another piece of Betterworld. Hope so far, it has been a delightful journey for you. If this is the first bead you are reading, and know that together we are creating this rainbow necklace together, I'd like to say how pleased I am to have a share of your invaluable time.

In my last bead, I have shared with you, a beautiful book by Emmanuel Coccia. And I have told you that I was going to share the waterfall of new perspectives it brought me, when I read the last page. I have :)

Now, I have started Edgar Morin's Le Paradigme Perdu: La Nature Humaine ~ you are more than welcome to share books you feel that deeply touched you, or that you feel reading it was a milestone for you. I'd like to make this an open space; let's have discussions, point out novel or out-of-the-box angles.. A text is, originally, being written when it meets the reader. Because, my favourite thing about psychology, we will never be able to understand the way its author meant for it to be perceived. That is utterly, mesmerisingly beautiful about being human.

Coccia created an entire paradigm shift in my mind, to begin with. He said what I have been circling around, but for a long while, unable to put my finger on. The last time I felt this.. I owe it to Jonathan Crary and his Techniques of the Observer - to both, I am grateful in ways I could not imagine.

Coccia sets out to create our world, from the scratch.

What is our world, earth we live, made of?

he asks.

What, really, is Life?

Based on the evolutionary perspective, we have started as microorganisms. We, the microorganisms, were mostly inhabiting the water and as they have evolved, they developed their ways of sustaining life, in water.

Then, and this will imply a quick transition but the reality was quite the opposite, the microorganism found its way to the coast. Hence, developed the mechanism to achieve movement, to be able to find food; in sum, it needed to survive.

On the basis of evolution, this led on all the way to the emergence of homo sapiens; the first models of human and thousands of years later, the intelligent human appeared in the scene. This short piece is to show you where I will be coming from, the way I learned from Coccia, to look at our world, Life, differently.

I'd like to ask you, where do you sustain life?

How do you sustain Life?

What do you think is Life?

I'm just going to leave these stimulators to slide on our waterfall.

Since I was around the age of 10, I could not find the answer of this question:

why do we, the human species, exist?

Luckily, I still can't because finding a determinate answer is like not closing, but shutting a box if you ask me. I'm glad that I do not have all the answers. The world, and my mind, would certainly become a boring occasion then.

Alright.

Do you think, as human species, we have built life on the coast?

What was the world like, before us?

Coccia says we are not the habitants of the coast, or the shell of the world.

What are we inhabiting then?

Well let's think about how the earth started out. First, it was water. Everywhere, water. Over the time, the earth built its own shell. Long before that, the microorganisms emerged and sustained a water-based living. On the shell of our earth, a new life was beginning.

The Plants.

As they breathed in and out, they produced Life. They contained life within themselves, and by their act of welcoming sun light to create sustainable packets of energy.. They actually created our home.

The Atmosphere.

Coccia tells us that as human species, we do not inhabit the coast but the atmosphere itself. Yes, you may be sitting on your chair, pulled down by gravitational force but does gravitation cause you to live?

We know that gravity it is gravity we should thank, for grounding us.. Yes, our manner of behaviour or action would have been divergent, if not for gravity.

Our breathing mechanism is based on consuming the product, the plants created for us. And as we breathe, we are contained by and contain life itself.

When we breathe, we become life. As we breathe, we are life.

Coccia states for this reason, that to study life we should begin from the life-makers. And seeing the life they produce for us.. we have moved past to talking about space.

So why not then, we are studying Life without cosmology, the nature or origin of the universe?

Our life.. We owe it to plants.. Trees.. Forests.. We really are experiencing this beautiful life, because of them.

Our experience is being contained by them.

In each breath, they contain us and we contain them; we, together, create, sustain and store life as we breathe.

And for that, I am eternally grateful to live; because with their breath we create this cycle of cosmology; entangled comprisal and symbiosis.

Hope to see you in the next diffractive bead.

With Lots of Love,

Ceyda.