WHAT IS "NATURE"?

A visitor to the hut told me I was lucky to "live in Nature." At that point I knew I've made a philosophical journey, because at first the remark seemed so silly.

For, I remember as a child on the farm in Kentucky when there was no talk of Nature at all. It wasn't a concept ever mentioned. It wasn't until the late 50s or so when we got TV that I understood from Walt Disney that Nature was pretty flowers, birds and butterflies, and Bambi.

When I began taking biology classes in college and saw a need to refine my definition, I decided that "Nature" was the forest, oceans, deserts and the like, but it ceased to exist when humans changed it in any way. Subterranean coal strata were part of Nature, but when the coal was dug out it became something unnatural, a product of human industry.

But, what's the basis for claiming that something changed by humans no longer is natural? There is none, except perhaps from a religious perspective, which I reject.

Now at age 70 it's perfectly clear to me that "Nature" is everything. That's why the hut visitor's remark confused me: Of course I live in Nature, like everyone else.

Maybe the biggest advantage of thinking like this is that when it's obvious that humans and our workings are natural, it's easier to accept that we, too, are subject to natural laws -- laws such as the ecological one that a community or individual can't endure unchanged for long while consuming more resources than the environment can provide. Just imagine how many of humanity's problems would not exist -- a big potential advantage -- if we'd all been respecting that law from the beginning.

The belief that everything is natural does not suggest that the Universe is like a big machine, and that the behavior of us natural things is mechanistic. For, there must be some kind of creative impulse that has sparked everything -- matter, life, mentality, feelings -- into existence, and keeps it evolving toward higher, ever more sophisticated states.

Nearly everything we humans see, think and do is indeed mechanistic, but those sparks of creation that brought the Universe into being, and the impulses directing the created things' evolution to ever higher levels, are sovereign urgencies doing new things right now. When we humans make a conscious effort to harmonize our thinking and behavior with that voluptuous process -- often refusing to honor thoughts and behaviors urged by our genetic programming -- we are exercising free will to participate in the creative evolutionary process. When we succumb to our genetic programming, we remain as machines.

At this point it's possible to notice something pretty: That is, it's as if Spinoza's "Nature = God" is an equation in which various forms of evolution are shifting things from the left to the right: Nature --> God.

This further sets the stage, at least for me, for thinking that maybe the notion that "All is One" is apt. It's just that the "One Thing" mysteriously has occupied Herself with dreams manifesting as us things of Nature. Gradually, as universal evolution shifts things to the right, The One Thing awakens.