''Back to [[SolSeed book]]'' .... see also [[Thoughts on who the SolSeed Movement is]]
=== Life is worthy of veneration ===
: ''The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.'' —Carl Sagan
Life puts atoms together in very interesting ways. One configuration of atoms gives us an ant carrying a leaf many times larger than itself. From another configuration we get an eagle slipping gracefully through the sky. Yet another configuration becomes a person who feels, thinks, and loves.
Without Life, the energy from our sun simply bounces off the planet. Life literally collects the energy Sol sends to earth, and stores it up for future use. Plants take energy from Sol and convert it into denser, more storable forms. The sugars and fats that our bodies burn are little pools of energy that originally come from our sun.
Ants carrying, eagles soaring, people loving … none of these would exist without Life’s awesome capacity for organizing matter.
=== Worthy, but not perfect ===
'''Talk about why life appears unworthy and how this view is fallacious. Finish why life is worthy right now (always has been, always will be)'''
Life is not perfect. This is obvious to anyone who has experienced cruelty or misfortune.
Although the committee was split, the results were conclusive. Chondra would not get to be conceived and born. The judgment handed down by the human committee on the worthiness of life hinged on one thing alone. Chondra was not allowed to be born because of the terrible acts of Hitler. It was clear that she would have the same potential for evil that he had been born with several decades earlier. The ruling caused a stir worldwide because it applied not just to Chondra, but to all human babies. They were not allowed to be born until the human race had grown up enough to no longer ever be cruel.
The birth of a human baby is a wondrous occasion. This view is pervasive across the entire human species, spanning vastly different cultures and material circumstances. And yet, as it grows up, every baby will have moments during which it is cruel to others. Some babies when they grow up will even go so far as to take the life of another innocent human being. Even with these negative possibilities fully in view, there is no hesitation: the birth of a child is a wondrous occasion.
Contrast this with the antipathy that a great many people feel toward the notion of earth giving birth to a family of living worlds. The objections generally point out the awful things that humans do to each other and our tremendous habits of consumption. People see wars, starvation, and cruelty as things that we must outgrow before we spread beyond on this planet. It's as if the likelihood of spreading these undesirable aspects of Life and humanity overwhelmingly tip the balance toward Life being unworthy as it currently is.
Life is intrinsically messy. There is in the wake of every living organism a stream of refuse.
As Paul Krafel says, consuming things we need and dumping our waste is an ancient and venerable part of life. This get mine attitude is an essential part of life. And yet there is more to life than just consumption. Life creates the conditions for more life in an upward spiral of ever greater possibilities. In addition to the get mine attitude it is also possible to cultivate a grow ours attitude. A way of living that considers the needs of others as if they were our own.
The fundamental attribution error that ascribes properties to something that are really a result of environmental factors contributes to seeing life as it is right now as unworthy.
Why life exists at all is a mystery. It's part of the greater mystery why there is something and not nothing.
=== The upward spiral of life ===
:Life creates the conditions for more Life,
::in an Upward Spiral of ever-growing possibilities.
::: - ''from the [[SolSeedCreed]]''
In our vast empty universe, things are running down. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that possibility will gradually diminish until the entire universe is the same lukewarm temperature and there are no energy gradients to drive the flows of matter and energy that make life possible. Taking the universe as a whole, this arrow toward decreasing complexity and opportunity is an absolute. Things ARE running down.
And yet, there is another arrow that points back upstream. This second arrow is in the direction of life. In the cosmic perspective that encompasses all time and space, this arrow of life is simply an eddy in a vast current streaming toward the heat death of the universe. But this eddy, this upward spiral of life, is the most precious thing in all existence!
Life creates the conditions for more life in an upward spiral of ever greater possibilities. And we are agents of life! Wherever we go, whatever we do, our sacred duty is to bring life with us. As we pursue the work of our life, we must create around ourselves the conditions that support us being fully alive, that help us flourish and thrive "Happy in the sun!" When we walk into a room full of other people, our task is to increase the freedom, expression, and possibility those people feel -- to help the group itself flourish and thrive "Happy in the sun!". As we live in our local and global ecosystem, our charge is to give back more than we take -- to help the body of all life also flourish and thrive "Happy in the sun!"
=== The "body of all life" ===
: ''The beauty of a living thing is not just in the atoms that go into it but in the way those atoms are put together.'' --Carl Sagan
The cells in your body don't know who you are and don't care about you. And yet, by each cell doing its own little thing in its own little context, this miraculous emergent thing called you happens!
Groups of people are more than the sum of the individual parts just as the group of cells in our body is more than the sum of the individual parts. When a group of people are talking together they will have ideas and think about things in a way that is different from what the individuals alone would come up with. To paraphrase Sagan the beauty of an effective team is not just in the living beings that go into it but in the way those living beings interact together.
Just like our body is composed of cells that each do their own different unique thing, so too there is a body of all life composed of living organisms of which we are a part. What stage of development is the body of all life in right now? Is it an infant that is yet to become self aware? Or at the other extreme, is the body of all life already senile and decrepit?
In the cosmic scale of time, conscious life is still very young. As a body of all life we're probably not even school aged yet. Imagining a human trajectory for the body of all life we expect the growth through childhood and adolescence to be attended by a growth in opportunities. The possibilities grow along with us. As we reach adulthood, we begin to make focused investments toward particular callings. As we focus and invest in particular areas, some opportunities that we chose not to focus on become unavailable.
Imagine for a moment that the body of all life is your child. What investments has your child made in its future? What opportunities lie within arms length? Given who the body of all life is right now, what do you want for your child in the future?
''juxtapose a homeless man or woman who's gone to drink against a happy family that is healthy and thriving in the sun.''
''Put together an art exhibition or some sort of creative thing that shows all kind of different visions for the future of the body of life.''
''SolSeed imagines the future for the body of all life becoming not just a lone individual world, but a family of living worlds with great diverse opportunity among them for what life can become. Each world perhaps specializing in the family. This world no longer alone in the universe.''
=== Who you are ===
: Ray of summer sun
: Inseparable from Sol
: Know yourself and thrive.
Einstein as he developed the theory of relativity often imagined what it would be like to ride alongside a beam of light. I invite you to do something similar. Imagine yourself actually as a beam of light. A ray of sunshine from our star whose name is Sol. As this sunbeam, you have several different ways that you can think of yourself. On the one hand you are a transient burst of photons that will soon be absorbed and cease to exist. On the other hand you are the Sun itself. You are the provider of practically all the energy that animates life on earth.
The ability to sometimes perceive ourselves not just as the ephemeral ray of light, but as the sun itself can add a great deal of power and purpose to our lives. This ability to identify with the larger whole is an essential characteristic of spiritual enlightenment. It offers freedom from reactive grasping and the option to proactively create our lives.
I invite you to take a moment to close your eyes and imagine that you are not just your skin-bag, but that you are life itself! Think of the possibilities!
Excesses of the non-dual perspective
Inadequacies of the simply dualistic perspective. Anxiety paralysis self-loathing fear -reactive rather than proactive.
=== Life has invested in us ===
: Every item has its use, a role to play, a thing to do. --From a SolSeed children's song
Getting a good return of investment (ROI) depends upon making good use of the thing you've invested in. If you invest in a fine Stradivarius violin, you are tying up resources in the violin that could have been used on a different investment. To get a good return from the violin you use it to play beautiful music. If you want to be sure that the investment in the violin is a total waste, you use it to pound in nails. The violin makes a lousy hammer and its ability to produce beautiful music is destroyed by encounters with the nails.
Life is a lot like a human investor charged to manage a large fund. The "fund" that Life manages is the pool of diversity and other accumulated resources of our biosphere. Just like a human investor, Life risks resources on bets that may or may not provide a good rate of return. Good bets increase diversity and possibility, bad bets do the opposite.
Right now, Life has a lot riding on humanity. Consider the myriad species that have gone or will go extinct as a result of human activity. Consider also the human consumption of fossil fuels, a large portion of Life's densest reserves of concentrated energy. We're using up pools of energy that took eons to accumulate. These are significant expenses. What can humanity do that provides Life with a good ROI on its investment in us? What is it that humanity can do for Life that is unique? Has all the expense been squandered on consumption? Or have those extinct species and precious fossil fuels purchased an infrastructure that could be of use to Life?
=== Your calling ===
Living a beautiful life
It's naïve to think that there is only one job one role that each person can play. Thinking of this way leads us to spend our entire lives searching for who we are and what our job is. Perfect is the enemy of good enough and right now. living a perfect life is impossible our goal should instead be to live a beautiful life. Is there one perfect painting one perfect meal? No! There are many great meals many great paintings and there are also many lousy meals and many lousy paintings.
: ''Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos ancient and vast from which we spring.'' --Carl Sagan
The history of life is a many branching tree and humanity is just one branch on that tree. When inhabitants of the far future look back on humanity as it is now, they will see not the pinnacle of evolution, but a transitional species that diverged into new branches in the tree of life. Our place in the body of all life is not one of special rights and privileges, but rather one of purpose and responsibility. As life's intelligent spark we are called to nurture the body of all life -- we are called to ensure that it survives and flourishes.
We are called not just to live -- not just to get by -- but to create a life that brings honor to all the ancestors who came before us and creates opportunities for all the generations that will follow us.
Borrowing a metaphor from Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough:
:: "Life is a coral reef. We each leave behind the best, the strongest deposit we can so that the reef can grow. But what's important is the reef."