The Story of Argon: As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul…

kobiespriggs (54)in #philosophy • 7 years ago (edited)

I have been thinking about the stories we tell and the human narrative quite a lot lately. By the human narrative I am drawing attention to the stories we tell about what human nature is, what it means to be human, how did we get here, our purpose, and where it is we need to go. I have been thinking about how these stories affect us in the bigger picture and what kinds of things do these stories naturalize and affirm in their retelling. Humans are, after all, by their very nature, storytellers. We share and show who were are through the exchange of stories. Storytelling is a uniquely human venture but why is it we never seem to tell a different story?

Every place a person turns these days there is some article written and/or shared about ascension symptoms, evolving as a collective species and individual enlightenment. It seems, since the dawn of time we have been in one way or another trying to escape our fleshy prisons. Embodiment in and of itself is a predicament to overcome much like nature herself. We have been led to believe that the here and now is some temporary spot of punishment meant to torture us with suffering until we find relief in death and some incarnation of the after life (or promise of higher being). Why is it that this thinking is so persuasive even within what is to be considered “new age” beliefs? Shouldn't the term new age assume a new vision of the human narrative and not just a redressing up of the old one? Even the idea of ascension is yet another escape from the bodies we inhabit and the planet we collectively share as a species. How is this any different than any other creation story or of that of the Christian biblical telling of Genesis?

The blog post is by no means a challenge to any spiritual beliefs but a re-evaluation of how we view our time here on this tiny and beautiful planet. When one considers all the things that needed to occur and how many conditions needed to be just so, in such a way for life here to be even possible, how can we not see that as a miracle itself? We are forever in search of the sacred it seems but what if we fail to see the sacred right in front of us? I read something a while back that has stayed with me and has disrupted the stories I have been told since my childhood. I will share some quotes from the article as well as the link to the full article below. I do ask before you read this that you bracket any personal opinions of David Suzuki and entertain what he says and its implications to our human narrative.

“He described a thought experiment by the astronomer Harlow Shapley, who noted that air is 1% argon. Shapley calculated that a single breath contains a vast number of argon atoms — about 3.0 times 10 to the 19th power. That’s 30,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms.

Because argon is an inert gas, we breathe it in and out without absorbing it. When you exhale, those argon atoms re-enter the air of the room to be inhaled and exhaled by others. A year from now, those same atoms will have circulated around the entire planet, and fifteen of them will have made their way back to you to be breathed in again.

In The Sacred Balance, Suzuki quotes Shapley as saying that "Your next breath will contain more than 400,000 of the argon atoms that Ghandi breathed in his long life. Argon atoms are here from the conversations at the Last Supper, from the arguments of diplomats at Yalta, and from the recitations of the classic poets." And from the exhalations of the dinosaurs, the whales and the sabre-toothed tigers.

Air, says Suzuki, is "a matrix that joins all life together," past and future as well as present. We inhale our ancestors and exhale into the lungs of our children. Furthermore, by befouling the air – and the water, and the earth – we very literally befoul ourselves.

Each breath, says Suzuki, speaking the precise scientific truth, "is a sacrament, an affirmation of our connection with all other living things, a renewal of our link with our ancestors and a contribution to generations yet to come."

Reading this little bit on an element called Argon changed a little bit of me . It fundamentally re-invented how I view my place and purpose on this planet and reinforced the scared sacrament and connection we have to one another. What if we told this kind of story to each other instead of ones of suffering and imprisonment? What kind of world and new story could we develop with this kind of thinking? What kind of planet could we nurture with this story?