IT IS TIME
Our hunger for peace and security compels us to launch a new era in human history.
- We have the knowledge and technological means to reduce ignorance and suffering and to expand knowledge and justice.
- It is within our powers to restore our planet, sustain humanity, and advance our civilization.
- We can bequeath to posterity a beautiful planetary home in which all people enjoy a more peaceful and healthy life.
Our world is fraught with grotesque economic disparities, life threatening and accelerating environmental damage, violence of all manner and scale, and immeasurable suffering.
The very institutions we have organized to guarantee our security and survival too often produce the opposite results.
- Our politics are adversarial and ineffective, our industries’ toll on our natural systems is unsustainable, and our religious thought—dated and dogmatic—divides rather than joins us.
- Our always growing world population compounds and complicates our problems.
- The needs, demands, and desires of humanity exceed the sustainable yields of our natural systems.
We have set into motion complex and destructive processes that we do not fully understand, that have consequences beyond our ability to define and, at some point, could reach destructive levels beyond our ability to control.
We are the victims of our own behavior.
We’ve created a destructive and unsustainable momentum that must be arrested and reversed.
- If we are to improve the quality of our lives, sustain humanity, and advance our civilization, it is required that we enter into a new way to understand and relate to reality.
- Our window of opportunity to accomplish this necessary and monumental shift is small compared to the large obstacles within our current belief systems that must be dissolved.
- Yet, we must do this if we and all the life forms that share this jewel of a planet are to survive.
We do not have time or resources to continue to treat each other as adversaries or to further exploit and destroy our environment.
We are weary of humanity’s epic and horrific struggles that, as individuals, we experience and witness daily.
Many of us share the belief that humanity and its institutions must evolve and respond appropriately to the life-sustaining demands of reality.
The natural course of human evolution reveals vital and timeless truths that await discovery.
One such truth has emerged in our lifetime.
- It informs us that we exist as a tiny fragment of an immensely larger interlocking whole in which all of the parts are interconnected and dependent upon each other for survival.
- Simply put, everything is connected.
- Humans exist not separately, but in communion with all living things.
- Life is an interrelated interdependent phenomenon.
If we continue to live unhealthy lives, damage and destroy our relationships with each other and our environment, all of which form the foundation of our existence, our civilization will collapse.
Conversely, if we honor these relationships, we will succeed and prosper in every way.
The choice is ours.
Our fate lies in our own hands as it always has.
Today, however, we understand far more about what sustains and optimizes life.
It is time to honor and apply the knowledge that we have.
Only then, will we arrest and reverse our destructive and unsustainable momentum, end our needless suffering, prosper together, find peace, sustain humanity, and advance our civilization.
- As life is far more complex than a race to see who can accumulate the most, commerce must, above all, be grounded in respect for people and our environment.
It is time.
As we have severe, urgent, and complicated global and local problems that must be addressed cooperatively and constructively and do not have the time, resources, and energy to squander fighting with each other as individuals or nation states, politics must, above all, and with unequivocal urgency, find common ground.
It is time.
As the ancient mentality of “my truth and tribe versus your truth and tribe” has resulted in nothing but interminable conflict and chaos, religious thought must, above all, support universal benevolence and be grounded in and revere reality.
It is time.
- As exclusivity and segregation have served only to separate us superficially, social interaction must, above all, be inclusive and integrated as to mirror the interconnected phenomenon and structure of life itself.
It is time.
We are each a cell in the body of humanity.
The physical, mental, and emotional health each of us brings to our world determines our collective health and wholeness.
It is time to find comfort in our own individuality, joy in our relationships with each other, and respect for our environment.
These are the dictates of the reality of our existence.
- Our behavior must be characterized not by short-term survival instincts—like fear, greed, power, control, immediate gratification, self-centeredness, authoritarianism, and denial of inequality—but by health in all of its dimensions, kindness toward each other and other nation states, and reverence for our life-sustaining environment and the web of life.
- It matters not how much wealth we have, what size home(s) we possess, what kind of vehicles we own, how many academic degrees we have accumulated, what achievements we may have accomplished, or what is our title or position.
- Nor does it matter our gender, race, religion, age, appearance, national origin, sexual orientation, or political affiliation.
What matters is whether or not we are kind to one another.
In the final analysis, in every way conceivable, we are linked to our environment.
- We are one people bound together and dependent upon one body of natural resources.
- If we destroy our environment, we destroy ourselves.
- In time, damaged ecological systems will regenerate but we will be gone.
- Nature, which could not care less, will have eliminated us.
While it is true that we have free will to act as we please, in an interrelated interdependent world the consequences – like the outcomes of mathematical equations – are fixed.
Our only choices are, in fact, to honor that which sustains and optimizes life and prosper together in peace or violate that which sustains and optimizes life and suffer together in turmoil.
Our common destiny and sense of survival summons us to evolve and advance toward our higher potential.
Nature will go its own course with or without us. Our course depends upon our choices.
Let us, as individuals and organizations, bring forth a more compassionate, peaceful, cooperative, and secure humanity.
Let the following define the legacy of our time.
- That we acknowledge the essential oneness of humanity and life in all its diverse expressions.
- That we revere life, support universal benevolence, and insist upon sustainable industry.
- That we support an equitable sharing of the Earth’s resources.
- That we commit to the reduction of ignorance, illiteracy, hunger, poverty, and disease.
- That we seek and support a compassionate and just society.
- That we demand that our planetary resources be restored and sustained.
- That we support unprecedented international cooperation.
At this time in the evolution of humanity, all of this is within our perception and grasp.
IT IS TIME