Nature and Love

George Boeree


Although I don't really have a religion and generally avoid attributing anything to the supernatural, I have developed for myself a little belief system that is useful to me as I bumble my way through life.

I have two entities that I occasionally refer to as God. One is Nature, also known as the universe. Since I do believe that the contents of the universe are mental, ideal, phenomenological or what will you, and not dead, colorless, odorless, matter, this universe of mine is more along the lines of Spinoza's Deus-sive-Natura - God-and/or-Nature, one and the same. Because I am a profoundly limited creature, I often imagine this entity in a human form: Mother Nature, or Mother Earth if you like. She is all powerful and exceedingly beautiful, but she has a heart of stone.

The other entity is much, much smaller and weaker in comparison. It is not even truly outside of Mother Nature, but a part or outgrowth of her. This is Love or Compassion, or whatever you prefer, the capacity that some of us have to override our impulse to do what we think or feel is good for ourselves and to instead be concerned with the welfare of others over and above ourselves. Again, I sometimes anthropomorphize this entity by associating it with figures such as Mary or Kuan Yin, both of whom are occasionally said to shed tears for us poor mortals. They have heart. They are heart.

(The anthropomorphisms I mention are my own. You can imagine whatever you like.)

I also believe that each of us has a soul, something like the Manichaean's light within the body of mud. There is no literal life-after-death existence, in my humble opinion. The soul is just the body-brain in motion, and when the body dies, so does the soul. But, I like to believe, if you love someone, a piece of you, a sliver of your light, passes to them and will live on in them. Or a piece of them in you. Any positive act will leave its mark. If you don't love or have compassion, you will be remembered without love or compassion, or not remembered at all.

My Spinozan philosophy does necessarily acknowledge that animals, plants, and even rocks have soul. They all have minds and all have thoughts and feelings. Perhaps their minds are smaller, and their thoughts simpler, but they have them. Even a rock may have a thought. It is likely a very slow, simple thought, like "Here I am", drawn out over the life-time of that rock. And if you don't believe that animals have thoughts and feelings, you just don't know them very well. The trees, I do suspect, are wiser than any human being.

Everything I've said here is, of course, complete and utter nonsense. 😉

George Boeree, December, 2018