21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

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different.

Then there is our interaction with nature. This too is a relationship — one that we either deny or take delight in — or somewhere between these two. This nature includes our own bodily nature as well as the nature of the planet as a whole. Here we always meet a paradox. There is letting go and there is creativity, life and death, form and formlessness. It is because all these things are really not separate — nondual — that they confound our human understanding. Nonetheless, the beauty of nature is the first source of awe, the cause of our celebration and the inspiration for being pleasure in the world.

Our own ‘purpose’ is of course circumscribed by the inevitability of our death. Ideas of leaving a ‘legacy’ are sooner or later realised to be vanity and our personal values are reconsidered in the light of this. A similar evaluation may be fruitful for humanity in general and the future of the planet. At the moment it seems that we want our species to endure forever — even if this entails the destruction of other species and possibly the need for finding new planets to inhabit. There is a certain amount of hubris in this, to say the least! It seems to step up our parochial purpose to a universal one — to create some kind of eternal, unchanging kingdom for ourselves — Heaven on Earth. Again it is the tendency towards transcendence rather than accepting the boundary of our human economy and indeed the boundary of our Earth’s ecology. Could we ever come to the point where humanity as a whole would accept the inevitability that one day we will cease to be? If yes, then perhaps our idea of what would

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