Principles of Nature

[pitchfork]

How do you reconcile the human concepts of cruelty and indifference with the laws of nature?

[pitchfork]

Nature is always at peace, even when it doesn’t seem to be, such as when a predator attacks its prey or a hurricane hits.

Do you think nature can be at peace as if it has an underlying consciousness to differentiate? When I say nature I think of matter/energy that just works its way and is not conscious of itself, so it cannot experience neither peace nor the opposite - those are human concepts.

On a different note - how do you feel about the fact that natural laws have so much pain and death built into them? Some animals are (seemingly) programmed to hunt and kill each other, we fight insects and rodents which trouble us, accidentally step on countless little creatures in the grass, and ourselves can be devoured by a wild animal unless we take precautions.

[BlueSky]

Do you think nature can be at peace as if it has an underlying consciousness to differentiate? When I say nature I think of matter/energy that just works its way and is not conscious of itself, so it cannot experience neither peace nor the opposite - those are human concepts. Pitchfork

Hi Pitchfork,
I'd like to respond to your post.............although it wasn't directed to me:
I too look to nature and see similar things but not that it is at peace either. I like your reasoning as I never really gave it much thought as to why I don't see peace.
I have stared out into nature sometime ago and was floored by what I saw.
I saw that life is always struggling, if you will, to live or to perpetuate itself. It exists to exist. It can never not exist.
It is the potential that moves everything. There is no peace. I don't even think anything in nature gets a good nights sleep...lol
That is until they become domesticated pets...lol James

On a different note - how do you feel about the fact that natural laws have so much pain and death built into them? Some animals are (seemingly) programmed to hunt and kill each other, we fight insects and rodents which trouble us, accidentally step on countless little creatures in the grass, and ourselves can be devoured by a wild animal unless we take precautions. Pitchfork

It confuses me which humbles me. It also scares me to think that life at any level doesn't matter apart from the big picture...and that the big picture seems cold and lifeless ironically. For life to exist to exist seems cold and lifeless and yet nature looks that way to me at times.
Recently I have studied the life that goes in making soil and all i can say is wow........but it depicts this life exist only to exist thing I see in nature
I don't see it outside of nature though.............James

Heres the thing

Nature has no concept of good bad, wright wrong and all that. IT reacts to an infinate amount of variables, which are done by animals and plants, water salination, weather, the sun.....

Even though it seems like nature does have a sence, thats only us giving natiure human attibutes, which nature doesnt emmulate. Nature may be consious to a level, but once again, not in the human aspect of concsiousness.

Peace and chaos are just us trying to understand it, us trying to rationalize nature. In that respect, nature is a balance of chaos and nature, it wouldnt exsist with out eachother

[BlueSky]

Yes Time but where do you feel we fit in to that. To me, we don't seem to be rightfully included when talking about nature. If we should be then I'd say we all have it way way wrong and nothing in life matters except for life to perpetuate itself.
Maybe thats why there is religion and spirituality, to avoid seeing that.
Who wants to see that!
Even if I did see that, I think I would choose to believe a lie instead...........lol

[pitchfork]

Originally Posted by WhiteShaman

Yes Time but where do you feel we fit in to that. To me, we don't seem to be rightfully included when talking about nature. If we should be then I'd say we all have it way way wrong and nothing in life matters except for life to perpetuate itself.
Maybe thats why there is religion and spirituality, to avoid seeing that.
Who wants to see that!
Even if I did see that, I think I would choose to believe a lie instead...........lol

Very true. And that is the puzzling thing - if we are 100% products of nature, why don't we ever fit in? If life only wants to perpetuate itself, why would it create an animal with a mind that would go against it?

Jesus' saying that we are in the world but not of the world seems to pinpoint this feeling.

[BlueSky]

Originally Posted by pitchfork

Very true. And that is the puzzling thing - if we are 100% products of nature, why don't we ever fit in? If life only wants to perpetuate itself, why would it create an animal with a mind that would go against it?

Jesus' saying that we are in the world but not of the world seems to pinpoint this feeling.

Yes, and I seem to remember that Buddhists also don't consider us a part of nature either.
But evolution and logic speaks pretty clearly that we are............maybe we just don't understand nature, maybe we don't want to.

James

[pitchfork]

Sort of, but even in science and evolution some things just don't click, and even more are unknown.

Like the problem of free will - experientially it is obvious to us that we make choices, however, in a cause-and-effect predetermined matter universe, no such thing is logically possible, therefore science must either declare that free will is an illusion or accept that there must be something other than matter. Once we claim that all choice is illusion, we still keep making them and living as if we did have a say. If something is fully understood to be true, it must manifest totally in our lives, but this thing, for example, never does.

What I'm trying to say is that biologically we belong to nature, but in our inner lives of consciousness we don't. We look like animals from the outside, but feel like... something else on the inside :).

[BlueSky]

[quote=pitchfork]Sort of, but even in science and evolution some things just don't click, and even more are unknown.

Like the problem of free will - experientially it is obvious to us that we make choices, however, in a cause-and-effect predetermined matter universe, no such thing is logically possible, therefore science must either declare that free will is an illusion or accept that there must be something other than matter. Once we claim that all choice is illusion, we still keep making them and living as if we did have a say. If something is fully understood to be true, it must manifest totally in our lives, but this thing, for example, never does.

What I'm trying to say is that biologically we belong to nature, but in our inner lives of consciousness we don't. We look like animals from the outside, but feel like... something else on the inside :).[/quote]

Yes and humbly after 52 years on the earth with 30 or so of them as a devote seeker, I stand here today and say that I don't know what nature is or what man is.............lol
James

[norseman]

Nature is not benign or cruel, nature is amoral. We do not figure heavily in Mother Nature's plans.