The Sri Chakra of Universal Healthcare

My cancer is yours. Your breath is mine. 

We eat from one bowl and drink from one stream, because we choose the same planet. 

Remarkable isn't it, how so many citizens imagine they inhabit separate biospheres, guests in private rooms of a luxury hotel, while the rest of us clean their toilets and take out the trash? 

Independence is the deepest illusion. There are no islands of private choice, private property, or private health. We belong to each another.

All health is public. Whatever I do to soil, river, cloud, whatever I burn in fire, enters your physiology. Whatever you eat becomes my land and food. Jesus said what we all must come to say, "Take this and eat it, for this is my body."

Individuality and freedom of choice are dissolving threads, interwoven in the Sri Chakra, the Great Mother's earthweb. If there is such a thing as "privacy," it has no edges.

No one is healthy or unhealthy by their own choice. No one is immune to the mutuality of the biochemical collective. Darwin wrote, "We are all netted together."

Do you truly believe that, just because you are a yogi, a vegan, a pacifist, or live off the grid, that you are immune to all disease, every tornado, or the next 9/11? That you will never wake up to discover you are old, infirm, and afraid? So God-like you will never ask anyone for help, never need emergency medical assistance, triage or transportation? Of course you will. And when you do, who will pay for it?

In the enlightened society, which is human society, we see that "health" is interdependence: therefor healthcare is cooperative. It must be part of the ancient "commons." The web of healthcare, if it is to have any moral foundation at all, cannot profit the few; it must be administered by public servants on public salaries, in a system where each citizen contributes to the good of all. I am entitled to this public good because I buy into it. I make an offering, a yagya to the Sri Chakra of universal healthcare. 

There is no "entitlement" without sacrifice, no "private" choice that does not cost the whole tribe. It takes a village to treat a cancer, to feed a child, and to abort a fetus. As in biological life, or in the life of a subatomic particle, or a supernova, so in the life of human community, we are all waves of one sea, oscillations of one field; we feed each other, breathe each other, bear each other's flesh.

"Privacy" is the aura of individualism that shimmers like a mirage over the great continuum of bio-spiritual Life.

These truths are inconvenient, but liberating. To embrace them is to be response-able.