Since the dawn of humankind, we have tried to make sense of our existence; to make sense
of the extravagant beauty, and endless suffering, that besets us all. Why are we here? Is death
really the end? What of all the misdeeds that go unpunished? - and all the kindness that's
never recognised? Is this really it? In wake of such questions – such fear, thousands
of confident religions have ascended, each differing in detail, but all promising the
same: An escape from death. For the Sumerians it was Irkalla, the Egyptians, Aaaru. For
the Hindus, it’s saṃsāra, for Jews, Sheol. The Greeks and Romans had the Elysium fields,
the Norse, Valhalla. The Buddhists have reincarnation, Christians have heaven, Muslims Jannah, Sikhs
Sach Khand, and the New Age have holistic divinity. For whatever reason, we have always
been (and potentially always will be) absolutely petrified of our own, permanent demise; the
idea – the audacity – that we are not even a pawn in the cosmic game at play, is
simply to much to consider. But as time as gone on, we have been forced to make this
consideration. Each discovery – each advancement – has eroded our delusions of self-importance.
We found that the Earth, like all celestial bodies, is not flat; and that the sun does
not revolve around us, but us, around it. We’ve learnt that our mind (our very being)
is a product of our brain; and that our solar system is but one in an endless sea of galaxies.
But no discovery has more challenged us, than evolution by natural selection. Contemporaries
of Darwin wrote that “This time, it’s different” - and they were right. The realisation
that complex organisms, including ourselves, have emerged through natural, unconscious
processes, is the cruellest fact to have ever struck our ego. Our posturings, our imagined
self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe,
is crushed by this reality. Yet, so said Darwin, there is grandeur in this view of life, but
what he didn’t say is that to experience it, one must sacrifice their ego. With our
pattern-seeking mistakes dispelled, there is no sign that we have any significant role
whatsoever in the grand scheme of things. To the contrary, in fact, there is every sign
that we nothing… and that, my fellow apes, is perfectly fine – because we mean everything
to each-other, and something to everything.