We are living in a time of disintegration and iconoclasm which the Hindus call Kali Yuga. It hurts and frightens us, but is not essentially evil. It is rather a universal Passion in which man cries, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” But it is the prelude to a Resurrection, because spiritual growth depends upon ceasing to cling to any form of life for security. Forms are not contrary to the Spirit, but it is their nature to die; their transiency is their very life, and a permanent form would be a monstrosity – a finite thing aping God. (Alan Watts, 1950)
We are stewards on this earth and our job… our primary directive is to make sure that it keeps going… that life keeps going. And it doesn’t really matter what we do so long as it is presupposed that our endeavors maintain life. And that doesn’t really matter either because - whatever your actions, contributions, or lack thereof - there will come a point in time wherein every lived memory of you will be gone. And then every written memory. Even in the digital age. Every server must eventually be purged of old information.
Even if - in your lifetime - you accomplish massive feats or perpetrate demonstrable and horrific crimes against humanity, you will eventually become a footnote to a footnote that will be contested by scholars as to whether you ever even existed. So under the existential pressure of our infinitesimal smallness in the span of time, why go on?
Because the kinetic energy of our individual actions is like a brick: is amoral. A brick can build a school or it can break a window. And in that way, our presuppositions underwrite and inform our actions and give thrust to that kinetic energy, and it is under those presuppositions that our primary directive is accomplished or not. Its foundation stones separate those who plant trees they will never sit under and those who participate through shared culpability in the banality of evil. Curious enough, we all fall into the camp of the latter... Even those who have planted trees. Each of us carries an unpayable debt to everything that has died every day before in service of our nourishment, so that we may again be hungry today... We are fed today so that we may feed others tomorrow.
And when the interest doesn’t go beyond your own pocketbook and carry the time span of more than a fiscal quarter I can assure you that life begetting life, death feeding life, and limitations driving decisions are nowhere in the algorithmic machine driven juggernaut that makes up our headfirst plunge into the Anthropocene. It underwrites our society and it undermines the natural world… Like George Carlin said “Pack your shit folks we’re going away. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of the fleas… a surface tick.”
And our world will continue. “The planet is fine… the people are fucked.” But the orations that illicit the emotional response in this capacity - in this human form - will not. It just simply will not persist.
And perhaps if the Vedic writings of the Upanishads are indeed divine cannon, when we end it all in a nuclear holocaust, every one of us will wake up together in unison… and Brahman will say as one “Well then, that wasn’t a very fun game, now was it?”