You Matter: The Human Solution

YOU MATTER

In memory of Etty Smith, who launched me on this journey.

The challenge of conscious self-awareness is unlike anything that has occurred for millions of years. We are finding ourselves in the midst of a vast transition. How are we to respond? With respect to the universe itself, is there a reason for our existence? Is there a great work required of us?

Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker,

Journey of the Universe

Contents

An Introduction

Who Was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin?

PART one: RETHINKING THINKING

1Exploding into Life

2What We Really Are

3The Scale of Things

4Small Wonder

5The Unknown Phenomenon

6The Mysterious Gift of Existence

7Mind Inside Matter

8Consciousness: The Central Mystery of Human Life?

9Elusive Spirit

10 Spirituality Unmasked

11 A Personal Project

12 The Examined Life

13 Within You and Without You

14 Fortress Ego

15 As Yet Unresolved

16 Why Evolution?

17 Convergence: Evolution’s U-Turn

PART two: NONE OF US IS AS SMART AS ALL OF US

18 The Evolution of a Person

19 A Sense of Species

20 Solidarity: The Hidden Adhesive

21 Finding the Centre

22 Turning Inwards

23 The Process of Becoming

24 The Evil Trap

25 The Fatal Error

PART three: THE HUMAN IS THE SOLUTION

26 The Solution

27 There’s Only One You

28 Socialisation

29 Team World

30 Workers of the World

31 Covid-19: A Call to Arms

32 Covid-19: Some Reasons for Optimism

33 The Unnoticed Revolution

34 The Role of Suffering

35 Community: The Hidden Dynamic

36 Love: The Fundamental Impulse of Life

Thank Yous

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Author

An Introduction

If you know me, or know of me, you might be thinking, ‘What’s going on here?’ If you don’t know me, let me explain: my former day job was an attempt to teach a generation the basics of cooking, via books and TV. Apart from a thriving website, that’s now history, yet I have many unknown friends everywhere, and their warm responses and comments still give me a lift.

What, then, is going on here? It’s something that’s been on the back-burner for most of my life, with a long-held intention that it might one day become a book. Put another way, You Matter represents my burning desire to communicate something I’m now even more certain needs to be said, given the times we are living in.

It all began with me, aged about five, being put to bed too early. I knew it was too early because I could hear other children still out playing. So, wide awake, I began to think and reflect and daydream, quite naturally and contentedly, so much so that it became a routine thing. I was a bit of a tearaway and, much to my parents’ great disappointment, not a success at school, but I always loved having time and space for quiet thought, and being sent to my room for doing something wrong was never the punishment it was intended to be. Fast forward through the years, always needing quiet time, and I now have a name for it: spirituality. Let me quickly say that it’s nothing esoteric but, very simply, the result of an accidental prelude to a long life of reflective thought. What it involves is stillness, silence or quiet time. There are many ways of describing it, but in essence, it’s having time and space in your life exclusively for yourself, to become more aware of a natural part of human existence that expands and invigorates your view of life.

After a lifetime of thought, I am now certain this is a crucial, yet much neglected, part of human nature. The presence of the human spirit, or the term ‘spirituality’, tends to be wrongly thought of as something otherworldly, and it is sometimes even made to seem that way. It can also be wrongly written off as something that is exclusive to religion. Mostly, though, this very natural spiritual dimension gets drowned out by surface life and its frantic overload. Yet with or without religion, when a natural dimension of human nature is not fully utilised it can leave a void, which sometimes leads to mental issues or inhibits the development of inner strengths we didn’t know we had.

My thinking is that this vital, natural dimension in human life needs to be re-examined and revived. In neglecting the deeper aspects of life, we are missing out on what is probably the most important thing we should know: what an amazing thing it is to be a person and to be part of the collective human venture. This I now know with certainty, and it will be the central theme in all that follows.

Dissatisfaction with the status quo has increased since I started this project. The world and its precious consignment of life is in danger of becoming unhinged. There is no place to hide from the grave threat of climate change, as the deadly Covid-19 pandemic has reminded us. A wake-up call? Certainly, but in effect something far more – I see it as a call to arms. If things are not as they should be in our world, isn’t now the time for a new human spirit to emerge? Shouldn’t we engage in bigger, more ambitious thinking and become more aware of our roles as humans? We are at the helm, in control of how everything is to evolve and progress. We have to relearn how it’s possible for our world to progress, while at the same time cooperating with nature in preserving our precious planet. How else can we ensure that our children’s children, and beyond, have a future? If extinction is the unthinkable, well, it needs thinking about.

I have known or met some extremely talented people – some successful, some famous – who, in spite their achievements, have not really known how good or talented they are; something blocks that inside knowledge and certainty of themselves. This also applies to humanity as a whole. The common malaise is that we underestimate ourselves and lack belief in our collective power and potential. As a result, the world is in chaos: we are decimating the planet that sustains and nurtures all forms of life. The deadly Covid-19 is, I repeat, not just a wake-up call, but a call to arms. After many years of reflection, I am certain that if enough of us buy into that call and are willing to explore the deeper inner dimensions in our own lives and the world, then a new dynamic spiritual energy can emerge. It is my firm belief that, in unity with one another, human beings can achieve anything. All the wars, factions and turmoil in the world come from not sensing this reality, yet that inherent sense exists in everyone, and can be found in silence, away from the noise, in the still, small voice of the human spirit.

I have divided what follows into what I call reflections, each with its own theme. They are meant to be read individually, perhaps over time, hopefully to encourage your own thinking. I have also included writings from great minds throughout the ages, as well as an eclectic collection of thoughts from all areas of life. What I had hoped to do, back when I was writing recipes, was to help and guide people through the basics, so they could eventually move on to more ambitious things. It’s precisely the same here. There are far greater minds and writers on the following subjects, and I have included some suggestions for further reading at the end.

Spirituality is not confined to silence, but that silence permeates the whole of life and reveals new perspectives. We have much to learn and my hope is that you, like me, will discover that the challenge can be exhilarating. What follows is intended to be about you. Just as the universe is reflected in a flower, it is also reflected in you. My only goal in writing this is for you to know that you matter and are a unique part of this amazing human venture – what the biologist and conservationist Thomas Berry referred to as ‘the greatest beauty in the known universe’.

Delia Smith, August 2021

Hope is like a path

in the countryside.

Originally there is

nothing – but as people

walk this way again and

again, a path appears.

Lu Xun

Who Was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin?

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has inspired much of what follows. If, by way of introduction, I had to describe him in one word, it would be ‘colossus’. He was a man whose thinking and vision was a century ahead of his time. He lived between 1881 and 1955 and was a Jesuit scientist specialising in palaeontology and biology. His work began with geological research, studying the origins of life found in fossils and rocks. This led him to what was to dominate his whole life and thought: the mysterious existence of life on earth and the supremacy of the human.

His insights were controversial, unacceptable to many scientists and theologians, and his church banned the publication of his essays and books during his lifetime. Yet after his death, his books began to be published around the world and people like Arnold Toynbee and Julian Huxley hailed him as the new Galileo. When HarperCollins, the publishers of his seminal work The Human Phenomenon, conducted a survey of the one hundred most important spiritual books published in the twentieth century, Teilhard’s book was number one.

A book entitled The Legacy of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, published in 2011, included a quote from Kofi Annan, former secretary general of the United Nations and a Nobel laureate, who in 2007 wrote about him, ‘finally I am convinced that Teilhard de Chardin is a thinker for the twenty-first century’.

This is also my own view, and what follows here will hopefully introduce other thinkers to his challenging vision in these uncertain times. But first, some of his own words, taken from the preface of The Human Phenomenon:

I doubt whether there is truly any more decisive moment for thinking beings than when, as the scales fall from our eyes, we discover that we are not an element lost in cosmic solitudes, but that within us a universal will to live converges. The human is not the static centre of the world as we thought for so long; but the axis and arrow of evolution, which is much more beautiful.

PART ONE

Rethinking Thinking

1

Exploding into Life

When you enter the Death Zone, the intensity is either overwhelming or extraordinary in its possibilities. I have no doubt that this pre-death period is the most important and the most fulfilling and most inspirational time of my life.

Philip Gould, When I Die:

Lessons From the Death Zone

Strange, perhaps, to begin a book with death where the emphasis will be on the wonder of human life. In my own research, I have come to the conclusion that impending death can focus and sharpen the mind in a completely new energising, even fulfilling, way. A person who knows they are about to die can have a completely new perspective of their own life and the world around them. Hidden possibilities, resources and realities are suddenly revealed. It is almost as if a dying person can finally grasp the truth of what it means to be alive. This prompts a significant question: isn’t it time to explore and uncover the deeper dynamics of human existence, before we reach the end of our lives?

Philip Gould’s experience compelled him to write a book, in order to share what he called an ‘intensity’. He wanted the world to know about it. There was obviously pain, fear and unimaginable suffering, but there was also something within human life that can enable a person at their very weakest to somehow completely rise above it, to know what is happening to them and find it exhilarating.

Years before this, back in 1986, I tore from a magazine a piece of writing that moved me very deeply; it is what initially inspired the title of this book. It was written by a young woman, dying of cancer, who wrote a book about her search for meaning, from the time of her diagnosis to her death.

Her name was Dorothea Lynch and the book was aptly titled Exploding into Life. Diagnosed at the age of thirty-four, she spent her remaining four years intensively searching to find meaning and purpose in her existence. Her co-author Eugene Richards described the book as ‘a highly personal inquiry into what it means to be alive, to face the uncertain future and to accept death’. Big questions!

Even if you spent years researching the meaning and purpose of human life, it would be impossible to even attempt to synthesise the philosophies of the world’s greatest thinkers. Yet this young woman, after four years of profound suffering while facing certain death, absolutely gets it. There is no mention of religion, but she knew, she saw what she believed to be the truth, and in just a few lines expressed it with astonishing certainty and clarity. I still find it impossible to read this without feeling deeply moved:

Mystery, what a mystery this life is. The plants are filling out. The garden out back