jonquil
July 16, 2010, 12:24am
21
jonquil:
Joseph Campbell, in The Power of Myth, said that humans are the consciousness of the earth. Goethe said something very similar in his aphorisms on nature, as follows:
Isn’t that just sublime? Isn’t it also possible that were we humans to actually know that down to our bones, we could never act any way but in accord with nature? Nature is us, so acting in opposition to it is opposing ourselves; and yet we do not seem to know it. What a great loss is that utter sense of wholeness that was our birthright.
Well an example of an opposition of nature, well there are examples everywhere. A lion naturally wants to eat you, you don’t want to be eaten, so you’re opposing a force of nature, a natural instinct or intention. We’ve got lots of religions that contradict eachother and themselves. Different sorts of energies in the universe break eachother down and colide and disipate. Reality isn’t an expression of wholeness, or perfection, or completion, or oneness, or anything else like that. If it were, it would be totally different. Thinking that wholeness is our birthright is practically a form of creationism. The fact that it is even possible for one purpose to degrade another shows that nature is not of a single plan or purpose. In fact there is largely a huge lack of purpose and plans when the universal energies are considered. Big balls of simple forces entropically decaying and not being used for anything at all. The physical plane is a dieing wasteland full of foolish insects.
True, only if the insects are human. Kafka and Samsa are almost palindromes, but not quite, though at least one of them was an insect – a beatle, according to Nabokov.