HumanityAs a human being you are nothing without your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents - indeed the whole ancestral line stretching back thousands of years into the mists of pre-history. Really you did not start in the womb but in caves. Your ancestors came down from the trees, learned to use fire, covered themselves in furs and skins, developed language, and picked up stones and wood to use as the first tools.This perspective involves stepping back to view yourself over a longer time frame. You take in more of yourself. Your individual life is but a moment in the life of Humanity and makes no sense, it could not survive, without this greater life. If we step back spatially from say twenty feet to twenty thousand feet, we see your vast and long-lived body. It looks quite different from your individual body. At this range you are now a sprawling network of roads, canals, railway lines and air routes that link cities, towns, outlying settlements. Your body at this range is made of concrete, glass, metal, wood� and it is as alive, intelligent and adaptable to its own particular conditions as any lesser body. It settles in favourable spots, arches across rivers, explores and even adapts to the very cold and very hot places on the planet. Just because it doesn't have two arms and two legs and isn't just flesh and bones doesn't mean that it isn't a living organism. It is our own narrow definition of life that makes us miss this great being of which we are part. Every day you expand to use this greater body of yours. Via the telephone you extend your ears and vocal chords, the pipe to the sewage farm is your extended bowel, the oven a preliminary stomach, the reaping machines in the fields your jaws, the library your memory bank. By such means you exercise your true human body. Looking down you see your own (headless) body.
Looking out you see people and the rest of the human scene. Where is the
dividing line between your individual body and your wider human body?
|