You know, plants do not think to themselves “I am special”. Neither do birds. Dogs might, a little, but not too much.
One of the biggest impediments to life is protecting what you cannot, in the end, protect, which is your physical existence. You can perhaps protect your comfort, but no matter how far you hide, up in the uppermost recesses of the best constructed castle, death will eventually find you.
And it seems to me that the feeling of life is thus often strongest among those with the least to lose. They fear the least. Why not be spontaneous? Why not make bad decisions sometimes? Life is a chessboard where your opponent always wins.
And paradoxically, those who fear the most, I feel, are those with the most to lose, those who have the most money, most power, most prestige, the most privileges.
These are the people driving the push to Transhumanism. They cannot tolerate the idea of a world without them, without all their perks. They cannot stand the idea of leaving behind their conception of life at the top of the food chain, at the top of Life, writ large. When you are at the top, as my grandfather always said, you have only one direction left to go.
How much simpler life is when you have little to lose. Bob Seger, hardly a philosopher, wrote about that.
Each of us, if we could enter the day with the spirit of a bird which is neither worried about yesterday, or in fear about today, would live better. And obviously birds feel fear. They feel fear when danger is present. It is appropriate at that time, and they respond appropriately.
If gold, in the final analysis, is shit–and actually I think Freud found some metaphorical fertilizer here–then leaving it behind is a win, and clinging to it is a loss. You need it, to be clear, but the Bible says the LOVE of money.
Much has been written about the Ego. In general I have avoided that particular topic, but I really think it is really as simple as adopting the openness of every other form of life. It is obviously not denying the sense that you have something like a personality, or the obvious fact that you have a body and mouth and hands with which to express yourself, to think, to feel, to ruminate, to plan, and all the rest. It is simply being able to leave all that behind, sometimes, in the appreciation of All That Is. It is singing one note in an infinite cosmic chorus, and feeling in tune with it.