Embracing Our Bodies and Our Species
With Faith in Aliveness
I. The Challenge of Acceptance: Humanity and the Body
Do you struggle to feel good about humanity? How about your own human body?
Personally, I am often discouraged by humanity’s violence, environmental degradation, and cruel injustices. I am discouraged by the insatiable greed of the ultra-rich—a tragic mental illness condemning millions to privation. It's a genuine challenge to feel good about our deluded, destructive species.
As for my own human body, I fear illness, injury, and loss of function. On top of the body’s fallibility, I struggle with its decline in appearance, strength, and vigor as the years pass. Of course, it's obvious I'm not alone in any of this, which makes feeling good about our human bodies that more challenging.
These harsh realities tempt me to set myself apart:
Collectively, I can imagine myself wiser or better than other humans. Yet, my history is not saintly; it includes many instances of greedy, unfair, and ignorant behavior. And in the present day my comfortable, resource-intensive lifestyle contributes to society's problems. I am part of our collective mental illness, no matter what I imagine.
Individually, I sometimes believe in an immortal soul or a perfectible mind. It's soothing to imagine escaping Life by going to heaven or attaining nirvana. Yet, in daily living, such beliefs do little to help us feel good about the here and now. And when held too tightly, they risk devaluing Life as flawed, disposable, or even evil.
Personally, I love Life too much to rely on ideas that reject it, whether collectively or individually. What I need is a way to feel good about living—in this historical epoch, in a fallible human body, as part of an ailing society.
Moving Beyond Spiritual Bypass
In the past, when I wrote and taught about embracing our bodies and our species, I led with beauty. I highlighted the intelligence of biology, the wholeness of the biosphere, and the majesty of evolution. But ignoring ugliness risks a false positivity or "spiritual bypass."
Parasitism, predation, malignancy, pain, and decay are fixtures in Life. They must be clearly seen and deeply understood if we are to grow spiritually.
II. The Wisdom of the Flesh: A Personal Reckoning
To make these abstract concepts concrete, it is easiest to begin with the body. I’ll use one of my own struggles as an example.
As a toddler, I felt profound angst during my parents’ breakup. Shortly after my father moved out, I contracted pneumonia and was treated with tetracycline while hospitalized. The medication discolored my teeth; when my adult dentition grew in, they were a greenish brown. Painfully self-conscious, I learned to smile with a barely open mouth.
Other dental problems followed. My father discontinued my orthodontic treatment when the costs escalated, leaving me with a malocclusion. By my late teens, severe bruxism (teeth grinding) was causing broken molars and receding gums.
The self-consciousness remained painful as I approached midlife. I splurged on cosmetic veneers, only to conclude they looked fake. The expensive dentistry merely changed the flavor of my anxiety; it did not relieve it.
Now, as I move through my late sixties, that intense self-focus is finally behind me. As my body's imperfections grow ever more obvious, it seems a waste of energy to stress about how my teeth look, or even the pain and expense they cause. A wiser part of myself has taken charge, embracing this body as a hard-working organism with its own natural seasons.
III. The Double Nature of Aliveness
Through this journey, I have come to look at human Life through two distinct but connected lenses: Unchanging Awareness and Biological Intelligence. Together, they form what I call Aliveness. It is both the background of our experience and the generator of it.
1. Unchanging Awareness: The Steady Observer
The next time you look in the mirror, wonder about who is looking. Focus not on the image seen, but on the awareness that sees it.
When I do this, it becomes obvious that the aware "I" who looked at my face fifty years ago is the same aware "I" who looks now. The outer appearance has changed; the inner awareness has not. This deep inner awareness is not bothered by bodily problems. It is not anxious; it is simply present, meeting the here and now with a kind, caring attitude, without contracting around an unattainable ideal.
Contemplative practice helps us awaken to this steady background of experience. It's important to emphasize that awarness isn't a belief; it is a part of yourself that remains consistent throughout life. The more we connect with it as the foundation of everything else, the easier time we have accepting both our fallible bodies and human dysfunction.
2. Biological Intelligence: The Driving Force
Pure awareness can feel elusive. It’s often easier to observe the somatic intelligence of the living body. Consider some examples of how Life survives and heals in the face of trial:
Protection: My childhood bruxism and susceptibility to pneumonia were my biology's responses, its efforts to survive a breaking home. The emotional energy required to secure safety had the unfortunate effect of depleting my immune system, but it was a noble response. Plus, even in its depleted state, my immune system must have functioned fairly well, since I survived. Antibiotics and oxygen would not have sufficed on their own. And while the muscle tension contributed to bruxism, it too was a protective response to stress. We can feel good about the body's hard work, even when the outcome isn't everything we wanted.
Evolved Adaptations: Even with decades of grinding, my teeth held up remarkably well, because millions of years of evolutionary adaptation made them incredibly strong. And the troubling anxiety about appearance is easy to dislike, but it has its own biological roots. Striving for social acceptance was vital to our ancestors' survival.
Necessary Decline: Bodily decline with age is also supremely biological. We cannot have new generations unless older ones make way for them. Aging and dying ensure renewal.
When not confused by human ideas of what ought to be, Life has a natural capacity to meet situations wisely. Consider my dog, Penny. Last week when she was stung by a bee, she plaintively lifted her paw and lost her usual pep. Yet, I detected an immediate, wordless fortitude in her. She quickly accepted that her reality now included this discomfort—she adapted. This ready acceptance combined with a natural healing response in her body, and after a few hours she was back to normal, without complaints or self-pity. That was aliveness in action!
Unlike Penny, the human mind fights reality, wasting energy by insisting on changes that aren't possible. We blunt the power of aliveness, though in time it usually takes charge. My dental saga was simply the messy creativity of Life taking decades to drive home a simple lesson: organisms are transient and imperfect.
IV. The Macrocosm: Humanity and Cultural Immunity
Just as the deep aliveness of the human individual helps us accept the body despite its superficial problems, the aliveness of Nature can help us embrace humanity despite its escalating dysfunction.
Nature Seeking Balance
In ecology, we study ecological succession—how disrupted environments recover. A freshly solidified lava field looks sterile, yet over time, wind-blown debris settles, hardy insects make homes, and pioneering weeds take root. Eventually, a forest returns.
We see the same self-regulation in predator-prey dynamics. When rabbits overrun an environment after a burst in vegetation, predators like coyotes and hawks multiply. If overpopulation gets too dense, resource depletion and disease cull the excess. Somehow, a harmonious balance emerges out of the drama of eating and being eaten, destruction and succession.
The Blunt Truth
Humanity often imagines itself in control of the living world, but that's an illusion. Nature will respond to our excesses. The Covid pandemic, summer heatwaves, and explosive wildfires are natural corrections. Nature's corrections can cause a lot of human suffering, but they are oddly reassuring: balance will be restored, one way or another.
From the beginning, biology has involved life forms eating life forms. Because organisms resist being eaten, defenses evolved—porcupines grew quills, and mammals developed highly sophisticated immune systems to fight off parasitic life forms, rogue malignancies, and decay.
Our global society is currently facing a crisis of inadequate immune function, and both sides of the political spectrum are crying out for a remedy:
The Political Right focuses on immune failures like urban crime, terrorist attacks, welfare fraud, and excessive taxes.
The Political Left focuses on predatory pricing, laws helping the ultra-rich hoard wealth, and wars that only benefit corporations.
An effective social immune system could emerge. Back when all humans lived in small groups, parasitic behavior was held in check by shaming, alliances, and exclusion. Life created the fantastically effective mammalian immune system; it can find a way to keep predatory human forces in check. Effective immunity is mandatory for our species to continue, so social immunity will evolve if our species continues.
But what if it doesn't? What if humanity succumbs to its own destructiveness. That's not an outcome to hope for, but it would restore balance to the earth. And it would be consistent with how Life works. Most species only last a few million years. Our species, Homo sapiens, has been around no more than 300,000. Extinction would be premature at this point, but H. sapiens wouldn't be the only species with a short run.
V. Radical Compassion and the Long View
A major societal collapse is possible, and we should do everything we can to prevent it. It feels important to land on the side of immunity rather than parasitism.
But the day-to-day task is learning how to love humanity in the midst of its collective illness. I find the task becomes easier when I remember that our species grew out of Nature, depends on her, and remains subject to her laws.
Weeks ago, I passed an unfortunate homeless man on a trail. He lay quietly until I walked by, then began shouting over and over, "GET OUT OF MY LIFE!" Hearing his lament, I was filled with profound compassion. I try to hold our failing civilization in the exact same way—with understanding and compassion for an ailing life form.
If we insist that humanity must be wiser and more restrained NOW, we will live in perpetual disappointment. The alternative is to feel good about our species as it is today, understanding that unsustainable behaviors will end, sooner or later, by human problem solving, or Nature’s.
Conclusion: Trusting the Current
This perspective is about honoring both conscious awareness from biological creativity. Awareness does not stop at our skin surface; it spreads across the globe and perhaps throughout the universe. Nor is biology just about cells, immunity, populations, and so on. It's intimately connected to awareness. Aliveness is a useful term for the combined power of awareness and Life. It is worth noticing some of its key features:
It is always with us.
It remains steady and present in the face of both individual and collective suffering.
It guides us toward maturity.
Qualities like these make aliveness a crucial ally in feeling good about Life. Because of it, humanity is capable of reflection, compassion, and courage. With these wise capacities, we can create the needed cultural immune system.
It took major personal crises for me to step onto a wiser path. Perhaps our species requires the same. Whatever happens, aliveness will always work toward healing and repair, at least on some level. Perhaps circumstances will align, so sanity is restored and humanity can survive.
What if we don't survive? If the human species goes extinct? Well, that too is Life—as stern as it is beautiful. This can be accepted, though it's surely painful.
Faith in aliveness helps me feel good about being human, in this time, this body, as part of this species.