The Urgency of Love – Thoughts From a Hopeful Naturalist
It is profane to assume that any one creature deserve to be treated less than another. Despite size, refuge or [capacity for] reasoning, we all deserve to live harmoniously. For, it is our minds and our precious capacity to form thought that has created all of our separation. Yet, it is those same beautiful minds that allow us to unite and that drive us to love and create community. Those same minds stir within us the urgency of love.
What I would like to talk about here, is the fact that our inner peace is reflected within our outer worlds. The distance that lies between all of us is merely distance created within our minds. I’ll go through a bit of my most recent reading as well as some of my favorite outlooks on life and human consciousness to communicate my point of view on just how universally similar we all are.
I just finished reading Darwin: Portrait of a Genius by Paul Johnson and couldn’t help but reflect the text within our current world. Though I can’t say that I entirely agree with Darwin’s outlook and quite often I was actually appalled by his point of view, I think there is a something there that he was able to express through his actions, failures and personal notes that as an academic he was unable to conceive.
You see, Charles Darwin was a troubled man. Raised with the proverbial silver spoon descendents of polymath and genius’ on both sides of his family he was able to learn and grow in an environment that harbored success and knowledge from a very young age. His story of course is unlike what the majority of human beings could ever dream of. Yet, as most of us have figured out, having everything you think you need at your fingertips doesn’t mean having happiness in your heart.
So, why was he so troubled?
Remember the story about Prince Siddhartha, more commonly known as Buddha? Raised within the confines of his father’s palace the young prince knew nothing of human suffering, pain or death. It wasn’t until he ventured outside of the palace walls that he saw the startling disconnect between his life and the lives of the average person – the suffering and the starvation that riddled the streets. Of learning this, the young prince felt the calling to seek enlightenment to relieve himself of the burden of worldly desires.
Much like our young prince, or the Enlightened One, Darwin was living in the confines of his palace, blind to the suffering and turmoil of the outside world.
As an adult, Darwin had the luxury of joining many international explorations, with his love of botany and his reputation for gathering quality data as his boarding pass. Throughout the book and his journeys he takes detailed accounts of various animal and plant species with an inquisitive eye, always enthralled by the transformation of nature. Yet, when he talks about the people the meets along the way, the “savages” he calls them, he takes immediate note of their facial expressions, he judges their behaviors and dissects their animistic and flawed lifestyle.
Ultimately, Darwin seems to admire nature for its non-human creations, where he finds innumerable flaws within his own species.
Let’s take a trip back into Darwin’s childhood. Darwin recalls beating a puppy just to feel empowered. He recounts being called “rather below the common standard of intellect” by his masters. His very own father was to have once scolded Darwin saying, “you care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to you and your family.”
From a very young age Darwin was encouraged to make something of himself, to uphold the family name. This pressure no doubt helped shape the very man he became, but, it wasn’t all positive. As previously mentioned he had big shoes to fill and as you can imagine, this “pain body” for all of you Eckhart Tolle fans ran deep within him.
If you’re not familiar with the pain body, it’s the sadness and turmoil that resides deep within us from childhood and sometimes even from a chaotic environment or a past life/genetic disaster or suppression. It’s the jealousy and anger that sometimes overtakes you that is only quenched by more pain. Crazy, I know, but we’ve all done it. It’s not until we become aware of this pain body that we can rise above it and use it to encourage love and personal growth.
So, back to Darwin. We’ve all heard the phrase, “the hurt – hurt others” right? The pain and judgement that Darwin felt was the same pain and judgement that he expressed about the less fortunate and more often, simply the less materialistic or advanced civilizations. Yet he didn’t feel only sadness for humanity. He was said to have loved his wife Emma and his 7 children very much, stating so sweetly that,
“[Emma] has been my greatest blessing, & I can declare that in my whole life I have never heard her utter one word which I would rather have been unsaid.”
Beautiful right?
Emma bore 10 children and sadly only 7 survived. The most painful loss for Darwin, and one from which he was said to have never recovered from, was the death of his first daughter, Anne Elizabeth who died suddenly of Tuberculosis at age ten.
This just goes to show that we all – all of us have love within our hearts. Even the most critical people yearn to love and create community. We seek unity within our friendships, our families and our sports teams, and we all feel the urgency of love at some point throughout our lives.
“There is peace and contentment when a mother holds her child. There is love and joy when lover and beloved meet. There is a sense of understanding and happiness when two friends sit together. When this oneness is lacking, there is a sense of disharmony.” -Rajinder Singh (Inner and Outer Peace, 2007)
Darwin saw the flaws in humanity or the “savages” that perhaps reflected the flaws within himself. Darwin was human. If we look, we can all see things in others that we want to change within ourselves. The only problem is realizing this without creating outward pain and suffering –or in for that matter. The idea is that we can think outside of the box that our minds tend to place us in, that there is always a reason for the suffering and sadness around us, that we are all capable of the same struggles and setbacks and therefore, the same celebrations.
“If you are unaware of this larger reality, the potential for change is limited by what is allowed in your world…Now consider the opposite extreme, an existence marked by total detachment from worldly things. Someone who has arrived at complete detachment–a yogi or Zen Buddhist Monk, let’s say–has no allegiance to how events work out. Good and bad, pain and pleasure no longer generate the response of wanting more of the good and less of the bad, more of the pleasurable and less of the painful. The human nervous system is infinitely flexible, and any of us could embrace such an existence, with it’s pure, peaceful stasis, if we had a mind to.” -Deepak Chopra, MD and Menas Kaftos, PHD (You Are the Universe, 2017)
Let’s take that notion of “peaceful stasis” and picture a butterfly. The butterfly glides softly through the air, dancing on the gusts and landing lightly for mere seconds on the tips of pollinating flowers. There is no rationale behind the butterflies actions, just pure raw existence – living to pollinate and pollinating to live. There is no pain body telling the butterfly that its wings are not bright enough, that those flowers are prettier and taller therefore, better than the others – just pure natural beauty. Paul Johnson concludes that Darwin’s discoveries, (had he realized it) conveyed the idea that there are no differences between the plight of man and that of nature, that, “the differences, however obvious and seemingly enormous, are of degree, not of kind.”
All of us have the innate drive to create homeostasis and symbiosis, but rather the way at which we do so varies drastically, the manner in which we seek such utopia varies even more; that our minds have created what we see, believe and do; and that ultimately, we can use our minds to create beauty or sadness, chaos or clarity.
There is no one solution to the world’s problems. This we know. But, I beg you to think for a moment about the possibility that through unity and acceptance that we can learn to understand those around us, despite, race, upbringing, religion, physical or mental capabilities.
That survival of the fittest relies heavily on the minds of the survivors and the urgency of love.
The Urgency of Love by Denise Henry