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Walk in the woods brings epiphany about our life
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LAST weekend I went to a party of musicians in Hangzhou. On the sideline, I walked in a lakeside garden shaded by a panoply of old and tall trees.
As I rambled in the shade, watching leaves waving in the wind and hearing insects singing toward each other, I suddenly came to realize that man does not have to be a better living form than trees or insects, which have their own way of communicating — a way often elusive to the human eye.
The biggest problem of man as a species, especially of modern “scientific man,” is his biased belief that only man can think, and after he dies, he becomes part of the dead universe.
Influenced by such a biased belief, man treats many lives of other forms — from plants to animals to our planet — as secondary beings of lesser or zero spiritual capacity. Hence man fells trees, extracts oil and eats animals in the name of progress and prosperity.
However, under such a biased belief, or rather, a “scientific” belief, man lives in fear of death.
In the lakeside garden in Hangzhou, a sweet feeling swarmed me as I realized how happy I would be if I could become a tree in my next life. A tree can live for hundreds or even thousands of years, or forever in a world without men with axes. Even if a tree falls under a man’s ax, its life could flourish with consciousness in another form or, in the words of US quantum physicist Robert Lanza, when we die, our life becomes a perennial flower that returns to bloom in the multi-universe.
To be sure, I do not know where I would be after death, but chances are that part of my life will turn into ashes and rot into the ground to nourish plants like trees and grass. In that case, part of me will breathe and think like a tree.
Greatest superstition
Modern man would dismiss my thinking as unscientific for lack of evidence about afterlife despite efforts by scientists like Robert Lanza. But man seldom asks this question: Can science prove that afterlife does not exist, or that trees and grass have no consciousness equivalent or superior to that of man?
The greatest superstition of today is not so much faith in a living universe — everything has life and consciousness — as faith in science that promotes the idea of a dead universe without any evidence. That man cannot see something does not mean it is non-existent. Man cannot see wind, but wind is with us from day one.
Man has lost his sense of a living universe largely because of an increasingly industrialized and urbanized society.
How could one feel the permeative vibrancy of conscious and intelligent life in bees and trees if one most often lives in a concrete forest?
I don’t have a sense of a living universe when I work eight hours a day in my high-rise office, drowned in car noises and computer radiation. But when I walked into the arms of ancient trees last weekend, I began to think differently.
Urbanization and industrialization, for all the convenience they might have brought to human life, tend to prevent man from thinking intelligently about who we are and where we are.
Living universe
Which brings me to the book, “The Living Universe,” written by Duane Elgin.
He essentially says that a farming life enabled him to see from his mind’s eye “the humming aliveness of the earth, the fields, and the sky above me.” But after he moved to the city, he “felt a deep separation from the familiar aliveness of my farming days.”
“Growing up in the big sky country of Idaho, I felt myself a small creature against a vast landscape,” he writes. “Some of my earliest recollections are of lying on the living room floor and watching sunbeams pouring through a window and moving across the rug, their golden rays bringing a living presence and nurturing aliveness into the room.”
Of his life in the city, he writes: “In 1971, I was working in Washington DC, as a senior staff member of a joint presidential-congressional commission on the American future. Thoughts about the aliveness of nature were set aside.” That says a lot about how man can lose his sense of a living universe once he changes from a farming soul to an urban creature.
In a way, globalization today is more about Americanization, and Americanization is more about urbanization which, by its very nature, leaves less and less room for farms and trees.
Is that the way China should follow?
How many more cities and high-rises do we need before we know we have gone too far in the wrong direction?
We all want a happy life, but we cannot have a happy life without overcoming our fear of death. Neither urbanization nor industrialization can help mitigate our fear of death.
The more we live on farms and in forests, the more easily we will treat death without fear, because we will know that all lives are equal and that life blooms like a perennial flower.
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