Excerpt #12 from my book, Interconnected, Interrelated & Interdependent, Like It or Not:
OUR EMERGING REALITY
As former Rector of the U.N. University, James Hector wrote: “The key question now is whether we are capable of formulating, expressing, believing, and acting on a conception of world interdependence appropriate to the reality of world conditions . . .
“The nation-state can no longer be the principle focus of thought and action for intelligent humans.
“All major national problems now interlock with conditions elsewhere in the world . . .
“The major problems confronting humanity are not the problems and responsibilities of single nations… but of the entire world.”
Indeed, the embrace of concepts like wholeness, interrelatedness, oneness, and togetherness can serve as powerful change agents.
Nothing in this world is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. (Victor Hugo)
As a result of the growing realization that we are all connected and that life on our tiny planet is fragile, we stand on the threshold of the paradigm of oneness.
It is a model that recognizes the existence of the ordering realities of our existence.
As such, life is seen not as assured, but as problematic based upon our adherence to, or violation of, underlying realities such as oneness, diversity, interrelatedness, individuality, and interdependence.
It is an equation that directly connects our problems to our violations of or adherence to this web of realities.
The pain we endure is not the vengeance of some inexplicable cause but is rather like the pain one might suffer as a result of arrogantly defying the law of gravity.
Our fate is determined by the degree we understand and accept or reject the web of realities by which our existence is structured.
We have free will and can do whatever we want but there is a large “but”.
But we don’t have free will over the consequences of our behavior.
The consequences, like the outcomes of mathematical equations, are fixed.
Our only choice is, in fact, to honor the way life works and prosper or violate it and suffer . . . needlessly.
There are many who are awakening to this realization, who are troubled by many of our current problems, and whose voices are beginning to be heard.
It is a paradox that in a nation, like the United States, born of freedom, and very much the embodiment of freedom, there exists a new unrest.
For although we are free, we are not free.
It is the height of absurdity to consider ourselves such in the shadow of profound and complicated problems in need of resolution.
As the world grows smaller, these issues loom larger and are closing in around us.
As we slowly ebb away from the destiny we originally sought, our sensitivities alert us to the need to alter our course once again.
It is fitting that the descendants of those who gave up everything to seek the freedom that this country offered, are now called upon to be involved in this next step of our evolutionary journey, one that is more a revelation than a revolution.
Rene Dubos noted:
“We have proven our technological prowess and our ability to produce material wealth.
“We have advanced our physical capabilities, harnessed energy, shaped materials, travelled further and faster, and fabricated as many objects and substances as possible out of the raw materials of the earth.”
“Yet today we find ourselves at an impasse, we are still not free, there is something lacking.
“Thoughtful people in advanced industrial societies (have begun) to question the wisdom of further economic expansion and to state that we are approaching the end of the two-hundred-year period during which the Industrial Revolution was identified with the betterment of life.
Whereas motion, rather than direction, has been the chief concern of those responsible for economic and technological development, today the climate of opinion is beginning to change.
It is being recognized that progress depends as much on the formation of goals, which are influenced by human values, as on the development of techniques.
“While bigness and speed are still the most widely accepted criteria of success, we have come to realize that etymologically the word progress means only moving forward — and for all we know perhaps on the wrong road.” (Rene Dubos)