A systematic viewpoint of reality

Question from the Internet:

“Why should humans practice kindness when nature itself is cruel?”

Nature is not cruel. Nature is a system that creates and sustains life.

We see nature as cruel because we apply our inherently egocentric, subjective, and individualistic viewpoint to it.

From this narrow, self-serving, and self-justifying viewpoint, we look at nature from the existential viewpoint of a single element, or a single cell in a body, that thinks only about itself, and assesses everything from one’s own viewpoint, according to one’s own “good or bad” calculations.

From our own viewpoint “good” is what is good for us and “bad” is what is bad for us. I can’t see or evaluate what is good for the whole system, as I cannot go beyond my own, introverted “pleasure/pain” calculations.

We are born with this very limited and distorted perception of reality. As a result, we are also forced to see and evaluate everything according to time, space, and physical motion.

During our personal life — between involuntary birth and mostly involuntary death — we desperately try to attract, accumulate and consume pleasures and resources for ourselves at all costs, being locked into an aimless day-to-day survival.

In nature, there are no personal or individual calculations. There are calculations, there is goal and purpose only in relation to the whole system. The whole system is based on a finely balanced mutual integration and mutually complementing cooperation that is sustaining the general balance and homeostasis that life depends on.

When a predator eats the prey, there is nothing cruel about it. Both play their predetermined and crucially important part in the system for the sake of the whole. If we could feel our own body on the cellular level, we would also see constant chaos, destruction, and rebuilding from an individual cell’s point of view. But on the system level, it is serving our overall health and survival.

Regarding our own body — which is also a complex, integrated living natural system — we have the ability to see the whole system in its totality from a systematic point of view.

It is this total, systematic point of view that we are missing in relation to the world and in relation to the whole natural system. We have the ability to develop and acquire such a total and systematic viewpoint by interconnection with other people and sensing and seeing reality through the desires and viewpoints of others. With the resulting collective consciousness and composite perception of reality, we can start seeing the whole natural system and ourselves in it objectively, above our egocentric, individualistic, and subjective limitations, even above and independent of time and space.

To achieve this total, systematic, and perfect viewpoint of reality, to enjoy and justify existence without the egocentric and individualistic distortions of selfishness, time or space is our Human purpose in life.

Kindness or love has nothing to do with the concepts we developed with our inherent viewpoint and consciousness. Kindness and love are being selfless, unconditionally serving and mutually contributing parts of the whole system, so we could enjoy the benefits of life and optimal development in it. Our human advantage is to experience and observe this fully consciously on the systematic, “top” level.