Seven Secular Sermons, Part 3: One of Us

We are rare among the stars that drift around us,

We who live.

We hold this strange and special gift this planet has to give.

Let's now unveil this gift and see it unify somehow the many games of entropy and make them one here now.

The gift of life is incarnate in every one of us who now hear,

Breathe,

And meditate between those worlds of death.

The deepening tranquility of meditative rest lets us behold the mystery with which we all are blessed.

In all of us a unity sustained by games that run in all their multiplicity makes out of many one.

Within us now the interplay of games in us gives rise to one uniting process they are part of and comprise.

It's present simultaneously in both our hands and feet and every cell within the three dimensions of our meat.

This process keeps proceeding forth through all the time it thrives in every moment in the fourth dimension of our lives.

This process ever happening until the day we die propels us onward,

Traveling through moments passing by.

The now we now experience is one ephemeral brief point in lives that in a sense are four-dimensional.

Let's feel our lives stretch out upon our lifespan as they stream past moments we remember on to future one we dream.

As simply as we breathe we know this life we now here feel has traveled some short while ago through moments just as real.

There was a moment we arrived at this place here somehow since we were there and we survived our lives include that now.

The lives we lead have streamed right through this day and so we can now trace along them backwards to the time today began.

Our lives extend beyond today beyond what's now and here.

We feel them stretch through yesterday last week last month last year.

Where have we been five years ago?

What did we feel and do in all the moments we still know and all the others too?

Our lives include these moments and yet we are not confined to single moments.

We extend and grow through time and twined through every moment we have seen a single process thrusts.

The momentary selves we've been are all just one just us.

Relaxed with mindfulness and ease we effortlessly can go past our oldest memory to where our lives began.

Still tracing back our lives escape through many days and rooms to when and where we first took shape within our mother's womb.

Before we could live separately our lives have all begun protected in a pregnancy when two lives lived as one.

Now even though these months may seem like where we came about they are only where our mother's streams of life were branching out.

The life we're feeling presently our mothers felt themselves life flows in continuity it's older than ourselves.

Now those of us with siblings know them too as branches where the gift of life that lets us grow branched out and grew from there.

Thou siblings must grow separately we also understand their branches of a single tree like fingers on a hand.

And here the journey need not end we might as well bring in our mother's mother's cousins and our somewhat further kin and they in turn had parents too and families so they give us more distant cousins who live out there now today.

To know someone is family that someone's one of us may stir a sense of loyalty connectedness or trust but families reach deep and wide the ones we each are in have branches spreading far outside their ancient origin.

Like us their branches other tracks life grows across this earth since ancestors of us had sex and gifted them with birth.

We all have relatives out there that we have never known who breathe and live their lives somewhere as real as our own.

In four dimensions we connect through lines of ancestry the life within us streams in fact through branches of a tree.

We each have lines of ancestry that reach back far and they include both slaves and royalty both predators and prey.

Each human ancestry extends through many century through long-forgotten distant lands on strange and ancient seas.

In tracing back each separate course eventually must converge in common ancestors of every one of us.

The ancestors all share why humanity is all related we are their extended family.

These ancient ties of kinship mean that everyone who lives all humans we have ever seen have been our relatives.

Descended from the same old apes who learned to cook and sing and worked towards the city scapes we're now inhabiting.

The primates we're descended from we're not so erudite but they are why we all have come to live and walk upright and they had other children too.

We've grown apart and thus they are different apes and primates who are relatives of us.

We share with them a lineage to which we owe our use of tools and one shared heritage with monkeys and with shrews.

All that's within the family of four-legged creatures who despite their huge diversity are all our cousins too.

That's still not all we're free to go still deeper if we wish.

Four hundred million years ago our ancestors were fish.

It truly is astonishing how one unbroken line of life links us with everything out there that has a spine.

Still older ancestors like warms and squishy things in shells connect us with life's oldest forms confined to single cells.

We breathe as all of them have breathed since ancient cells back then invented savored and bequeathed the use of oxygen.

Our common DNA confirms the common ancestries of all of life on earth from germs to mushrooms bugs and trees.

Our tree of life finds root in when at some primordial spot the first thing that did live began from something that did not.

That's where reaction chains once curled themselves in cycles so the root of life could grace this world four billion years ago.

Since then its offshoots never seized to spread and branch.

They won this planet every plant and beast and we now breathe upon.

Life branched and found a wealth of ways to spread throughout this world that now our meditative gaze reveals to us unfurl.

All life is one big family comprised of everyone four billion years of history of species come and gone.

So when we meet we are pretty much just parts of one big form like branches of a tree that touch each other in a storm.

In four dimensions life is one forever branching force small parts of which have now begun to understand its course.

The present seems to separate life's branches like a knife beyond it we who meditate here now are all one life.

This life that breathes in us just leads far beyond the small lives led by every one of us.

Let's try and feel it all.

Life's countless branches can be found within the boundless seas upon and deep within the ground and flying on the breeze.

What lives in them is life itself.

All plants all beasts all swarms of bugs are part of life's great wealth of evanescent forms.

Whatever living things may do they all need life to lend its ancient massive strength unto each talon claw and hand.

Whatever mouths and snouts and beaks of living things discuss it's all the same old life that speaks through every one of us.

From all our eyes one life looks out at all the games it plays.

On all our feet life walks about on paths through time and space.

With all our leaves life drinks the Sun producing nutrients.

With all our mouths it moves them on to their recipients.

So what it means to be alive is being part of this.

Of life itself that will survive ourselves and live no less.

This meditation may reveal to us now breathing here a sense of all in which we feel we are this biosphere.

Ourselves and all the lives we meet in friendship or in strife are parts of something more complete that's us as one as life.

Since we are life all lives we've known are parts of us and thus if we are one we are all alone.

There's only one of us.

To ever meet another one we'll need to journey long.

This planet Earth where we've begun is not where we belong.

Earth gave all life its place of birth but it's not built to last.

Of all the time life gets on Earth most has already passed.

In just another billion years the Sun that rules our sky grows bright,

Earth's water disappears and all life here will die.

And that means us.

We are not distinct from what our growing star will boil to death and force extinct unless life spreads out far.

In having felt the family through which we all connect we know that life is certainly a thing we must protect.

As each of us is one more face of life behind us all its need to travel out through space is truly personal.

Life must keep sprouting interlink new branches and disperse from world to world or go extinct from all this universe.

Just like our ancestors who built the world we know today we'll have the glory or the guilt of what we leave to stay.

We may destroy ourselves and doom the earth where we were born to merely be a dreadful tomb with no one left to mourn.

Or rise to meet infinity as life forms that succeed ourselves pervade the galaxy with earth as their first seed.

And if we help life spread and last its many future forms will know us as their distant past like apes and fish and worms.

So many future eons hence beneath an alien sun they might remember earth as lands of legend long since come.

How will they see their ancestry?

What shall it mean to stem from us and hold the legacy and gifts we give to them?

Whichever paths they choose to go if ever they discuss the gift of life in them they'll know they each are one of us.