The Dharma Bum

Isn't it ironic that a life must endure a death to sustain another life?

How is it that life can only sustain its self through the mutual slaughter and ingestion of its own various species?

Isn't it funny that the only reason I'm here typing this piece is due to life's bizarre arrangement that flourishes by gobbling each other up?

Of course human life is very different to other animal, plant or organic life. As we continue to harness technology, we have reached the very tip of the food chain. We seemingly continue to devour, destroy & deplete any natural resource this planet has left, and as a result, our population is swarming out of control.

We artificially create life, just so that we can then take it to ensure our own survival.

Life seems to be a system in which one life equals a death, a victory equals a defeat, or in our case 1000 battery slaughterings equals 1 human life.

One can perhaps look at this trade off in a more spiritual sense, accepting the ideal that for every death, the energy lost will then reappear in new patterns and forms, dancing to different frequency’s and vibrations. The show must always go on.

But until we endure this process for ourselves, we can only speculate.

Vegetarianism is an often chosen option, but it still means consuming a life, just in another myriad or form. Does it make it any better that this particular form of life does not have moving limbs and a beating heart? Apparently so.

To say that a plant cannot feel pain seems like an obvious statement to make, but we only assume this because they cannot articulate this fact into words.

Allan Watts once said that "deciding to live is deciding to kill", a brutal but honest and true statement that none of us really stop to contemplate.

However I sincerely believe that looking at life in this way, with its ups and downs, victories and defeats, hunters and hunted, is testament to the fact that we are indeed all part of one big cycle as most eastern religions have been teaching since the beginning.

We are all part of the cycle of death & rebirth, ‘Samsara’.