What is reverence for life?

"Slowly we crept upstream, laboriously feeling - it was the dry season - for the channels between the sandbanks. Lost in thought I sat on the deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal conception of the ethical which I had not discovered in any philosophy. Sheet after sheet I covered with disconnected sentences, merely to keep myself concentrated on the problem. Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase, "Reverence for Life." The iron door had yielded: the path in the thicket had become visible". Albert Schweitzer

WHAT IS REVERENCE FOR LIFE?

Reverence for Life is a philosophy that says that the only thing we're really sure of is that we live, and want to go on living. And this is something that we share with everything else that lives – from elephants to blades of grass. So we are brothers and sisters to all living things, and nothing else, neither race nor colour nor religion nor sex, should be more important than this one deepest, most extraordinary thing connecting us.

The whole world, indeed the whole universe, has evolved to give us life - you and me and the rest of the living world. But only humans are aware of all this. This is some responsibility. Because we also have the ability to neglect, to destroy, to cause suffering and death. And indeed some suffering and death is inevitable. Even vegetarians can only survive by eating some living thing.

Reverence for Life is not some cranky and impossible commandment. It just says we must be aware of what we're doing. We must take responsibility for what we do when we harvest a crop of grain, when we eat the bread that's made from it, when we grill a steak, when we kill a dangerous insect.

The key is awareness. Which makes us more alive.

For life is extraordinary. Every scientific advance tells us this. We now know the billion to one chances ever since the Big Bang that have enabled life to develop and then to survive on this planet, and the extreme rarity of it in the universe. More than ever, we have good reason to feel reverence for it.

Kilde: MARSH MySpace Blog