In the Cretaceous-Tertiary Mass K-T Extinction, the death of dominant land dinosaurs made-way for smaller animals to flourish. (Scoville, 2019). Duck-billed platypuses, green sea turtles, cockroaches, lobsters, sea stars, horseshoe crabs, and others. These inherited the Earth. (Blue Planet Aquarium, 2018).
This appears to me a literal example of the wisdom of the third Beatitude:
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.” Matthew 5:5
The Taoist interpretation of this Beatitude is the difference between a platypus and a platitude. Taken as a platitude the statement encourages passivity and blind submission. Taken as a description of the effectiveness of the Tao, the statement reminds us that water moves mountains and makes rivers. The person who can act as flexibly as water in the correct timing can be surprisingly fortunate.
In my experience as a psychotherapist, cockroaches appear frequently in modern people’s dreams. The meekness of a cockroach can refer to its low social status. It takes humility to become like this survivor of the fifth mass extinction: practical, unglamorous, scrappy, and plain. This may not sound meek at first glance, but for many people, the qualities of a cockroach deeply contrast with expectations for social and moral acceptability.
For example, if Alex learned as a child to always think of others first and not pursue her own desires, then the scrappiness of a cockroach would feel ugly and reprehensible. To be scrappy would bring a feeling of shame. But morality depends on a soul’s goals. If her greatest potential would be to find answers about global warming by uncovering secrets buried in Antarctica, then she’d probably need scrappiness. To get it, she’d need to go beyond childhood training. This would take the humility (meekness) to give up the pride of feeling like a pure, unselfish person. It would mean withstanding the social diminishment of not looking proper. It would also unlock an inheritance of talents and possibilities.
Life doesn’t always favor the meek. The non-meek ancient Romans conquered the world. But the Beatitude talks about inheritance – not victory — and inheritance happens after someone dies. At the end of its day in the sun, the Roman Empire died from the inside – through moral disintegration and one-sidedness. Then the meek stepped in.
If we could go back much farther in time and converse with dinosaurs — if we could go back to the time before the Cretaceous-Tertiary Mass K-T Extinction, we could ask a tyrannosaurus rex if success would come from becoming tiny and fluffy. If that T-rex had piercing foresight he’d say, “Of course.” Modern paleontologists have uncovered this in their research. In a series of elegant steps that happened in the blink of an evolutionary eye, theropod dinosaurs – including the tyrannosaurus rex – changed from giants into birds (Singer, 2015). They went meek and traded teeth for beaks. Their species got small to inherit the Earth.
In his film “David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet,” (2020). Attenborough proposes that humankind replant forests, adopt a primarily plant-based diet, and cultivate a re-wilding of parts of the Earth. These steps would foster balance in the planet’s carbon-dioxide level essential for planetary health. This is a literal example of how humankind needs to act with flexibility and humility to continue a relationship with our amazing home.
Works Cited
Attenborough, David. “David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet.” Netflix, netflix.com, 2020. Accessed October, 2020.
Blue Planet Aquarium. “11 Living Creatures That Coexisted With Dinosaurs.” Blue Planet Aquarium, https://www.blueplanetaquarium.com/blog/fish-stories/11-living-creatures-that-coexisted-with-dinosaurs/, 2018. Accessed October, 2020.
Scoville, Heather. “The Cretacious-Tertiary Mass Extinction: The Event That Killed Off the Dinosaurs.” ThoughtCo, 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/the-cretaceous-tertiary-mass-extinction-3954637. Accessed October 2020.
Singer, Emily. “How Birds Evolved From Dinosaurs.” Quanta Magazine, 2015, https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-birds-evolved-from-dinosaurs-20150602. Accessed October, 2020.