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We are walking in the middle of a shattered world.
Virtual reality, unrestrained consumption, search for profit, dehumanization of ties and devastation of places, the list goes on to describe the current horizon of our lives.
And just as long, that of what has gradually crumbled, sometimes lost, of what nevertheless constitutes the very foundations of our presence in the world: links to the beautiful, to the just, to the good and to the Other.
The human is no longer at the heart of decisions. It has been replaced by imperatives that reduce individual and collective well-being to production and consumption, regardless of environmental quality and that of existence.
Between terrorism and ecological threats, what place is left so that human life does not lose ground? How can we reconnect with what manifests our inner nature and make our lives a way of loving the world and giving meaning to our presence?
Everything goes. Everything dies. We know it. We know the ephemeral, but rather than letting it remind us of how precious life is, it is only viewed from the perspective of the disposable, so that we experience the world in an instantaneousness that takes away the very meaning of living.
Instead of making us aware of the value of existence, the ephemeral has come to disempower us: since everything passes, nothing matters, says a society which claims to protect us from this world from which it never stops to move away.
Spinoza
For Spinoza, the human being is animated by what he calls the “desire to persevere in his being”.
Effort, will, appetite, this is how our essence is defined for him, we who are consciously seeking to become. And we are not alone in being driven by this momentum.
Nature, of which we are an intrinsic part, also tends to come to fruition and constantly produce life. But rather than contributing to this aspiration and achieving union with nature evoked by sacred texts, we use it and exploit it for ourselves, turning into conquest what should be a common quest. At the same time, we deny the value inherent in nature, and therefore in the Earth.
What is more, human beings only care about their own well-being, regardless of the place they live in, respecting it no more than protecting it. Humans are besides the only animal to defile its nest. Earth, like more recently the cosmos, would exist only for him and would have no other purpose than to serve his destiny.
Witnessing an outrageous self-centeredness, the human has thus diverted the very sense of nature and sought to subjugate it to its excessive desires and its will to power.
Love the world? This founding bond, which should be characterized by empathy, gratitude and compassion, is rather marked by tension and struggle. If we want to replace power over the Other in love with the Other, embrace the world rather than crush it, perhaps we have to return to beauty, to experience the restorative qualities that never cease to display the universe.
Human destiny could well be this quest for a passage between the outside and the inside, between the top and the bottom.
Thoreau
In 1854, a man in search of freedom, wonder and a sense of life who also respected its fundamental values defended a dream which was not that of dominating nature, of exploiting its resources or to destroy, in the name of progress, the house we inhabit. This man, Henry David Thoreau, wrote: “Money is not required to buy a simple soul kit.
Sensitive to life, to animals, trees and plants, to everything that is our mirror, would say Chinese wisdom, Thoreau embarked on this journey of transformation of his being, this immobile journey which is a dive into the heart of self.
To move in the direction of his dreams, as he wrote, and so that human life is not reduced to survival or entertainment, but is a manifestation of our essence, we know that changes deep and lasting must take place in our societies.
But the biggest challenge is to transform our consciousness. To avoid returning to the already dug out furrows, it is a new vision of the human dream that must be worked out, a new way of relating to the world, and therefore of loving it.
Our first step would then be to pay attention and love to this world by agreeing to what Buddhists call our fundamental goodness, this disposition of the heart present in each of us, which opens to benevolence, gratitude and sharing.
Is it not urgent to recreate an interior landscape in which this kindness will be exercised, to reformulate the pact between the human dream and its sacred dimension, to combine the heaven of wisdom with the land of experience, and redo the passage between the world and us?
