Let’s inject some context, perspective, and time frames into where we exist, who we are, what we believe, how we behave, and how we must change.
EARTH
On the blueprint of existence, Earth, about 4.56 billion years old — in a galaxy 13.2 billion years old, in a universe 3. 8 billion years old — is at most a tiny speck.
Our planet is about 8,000 miles wide, 24,000 miles in circumference, and three-millionths the size of its sun.
Earth exists in a very narrow and fragile band — the habitable zone — of our solar system.
Our solar system, one of 200 to 400 billion in the Milky Way galaxy, is also just a tiny speck.
Even the Milky Way galaxy at 100,000 light years wide — travel 186,000 miles per second for 100,000 years to cross it — is just one of trillions of galaxies in the universe.
And even the universe, as many astrophysicists believe, may be one of countless universes in a multiverse.
HUMANS
Evolution produced modern humans in south and east Africa about 300,000 years ago on a planet that had existed for about four and half billion years.
After about 200,000 years, humanity began its migration north reaching Asia about 50,000 years ago, then west to Europe about 35,000-40,000 years ago, east and south in Asia to Australia about 40,000 years ago, and east in Asia across the Bering Strait to the Americas (about 12,000 years ago).
Humanity transitioned from one age to another — Stone Age — Agrarian Age — Industrial Age — High Tech Information and Communication Age — to where we find ourselves today.
How can we have accomplished so much and simultaneously be pointed in the direction of extinction?
Humanity has created and established a foreboding pattern of rapacious capitalism and excessive consumption driven by short-term thinking and gratification.
It’s all the consequence of two undeniable phenomena.
- The first is that many people continue to operate out of primitive tribal instincts and emotions associated with the primitive origins of our brains. This is a very problematic biological reality that drives much of our destructive and adversarial behavior.
- Second, and simultaneously, many operate of antiquated, divisive, and dysfunctional supernatural religious beliefs – human fabrications — that are products of the infancy of our intelligence. Consequently, billions of people, who live in a world of fiction and fantasy, believe they will be “saved” or better off in some future afterlife.
These primitive instincts and emotions and their complement, supernatural beliefs, are a lethal combination of behaviors not overcome easily.
Yet, they both must be overcome and abandoned if we are going sustain humanity, advance our civilization, and succeed as a species.
The bottom line is that our mental infrastructure — our mentality — is outdated for the world in which we live today.
Our primitive behavior and supernatural beliefs do not work on a tiny planet with fragile ecosystems hosting nearly eight billion of us — with the addition of in excess of 1,500,000 more weekly — and countless other life forms in the existing plant and animal kingdoms.
Simply put, if humanity wishes to continue as part of the phenomenon of evolution, it must rise to a higher level.
MIND SHIFT
How does a “rise to a higher level” — a mind shift — happen?
How does humanity transition to something that it currently is not, i.e., a stable and sustainable civilization.
Realistically, it is not in any way easy!
Humans are more inclined to respond when forced to by crises rather than by enlightenment.
Thousands of years before the Scientific Revolution, two concepts were clear. We should treat others as we wish to be treated and avoid self-centeredness.
However, self-centered and shameless, too often we have done — and continue to do — to others and our biosphere whatever we can get away with.
We have gotten away with this behavior in the short term. But, we have found that over time — and are finding increasingly — that we are the victims of our own exploitation.
For life reveals an exquisite intimacy among all phenomena.
Life also broadcasts a riveting truth from which there is no escape. I refer to it as “the reverse side of the Golden Rule.”
Where the Golden Rule suggests that we do to others as we would have them do to us, the reverse side of the Golden Rule does not suggest anything. It warns that what we do to others, we do to ourselves.
In the interconnected interdependent world in which we exist, all exploitation and oppression inevitably returns to its source.
This is evident in life’s three foundational relationships.
- Take our relationships with our environment: If we damage and destroy our environment, we damage and destroy ourselves.
- Take our relationships with other people: If we mistreat and are unkind to others, our actions return to haunt and torment us in one form or another over time.
- Take our relationship with ourself, our health: If we abuse ourself, our health, in any one of countless ways, sooner or later we will suffer the consequences.
When all of this becomes evident and acted upon, our beliefs and our behavior become fused.
Everything changes.
Our minds, unblocked by dated mentalities and theologies, become open to the reality in which we exist, and the behavior required to achieve stability and sustainability.
A new self-evident way of thinking, problem solving, and behavior emerges that is both self-serving and life-serving.
It preserves and sustains the web of life and advances our civilization.
The old unsustainable way of thinking is about separation, exclusivity, segregation, and unilateralism.
The emerging sustainable way of thinking — if we wish to continue to exist — is about togetherness, unity, inclusiveness, integration, and multilateralism.
Many people — too many — as a consequence of their life experiences and genetics, think and act in the old, destructive, and unsustainable manner. It requires unlearning.
What is it that we must learn?
We must learn that we exist as a tiny fragment of an immensely larger interlocking whole in which all the parts are interconnected and dependent upon each other for survival.
Simply put, everything is connected to everything else.
We exist, not separately, but in communion with all other living things.
Life is an interrelated interdependent phenomenon.
This is the nature of the reality in which we exist.
Like it or not, reality has behavioral demands for those who want to stick around, i.e., live.
SEVEN WORDS
Those demands can be summarized in seven words: be healthy, be kind, respect the environment.
These seven words have the power to change life as we know it.
- The way we govern; the laws that we enact.
- The way we do business; the products we create, the services we offer, how we treat our employees and our environment.
- How we treat each other.
- How we treat ourselves.
Be healthy, be kind, respect the environment.
Leaders must model this behavior, teachers must teach it, and we must exhibit it if we wish to sustain humanity, advance our civilization, and succeed as a species.
This requires entering into a completely new understanding of the reality in which we exist.
The window of opportunity to make the necessary and monumental shift in thinking is small compared to the large obstacles in our current beliefs that must be dissolved.
Yet, we must do this if we and all the other life forms that share this jewel of a planet are going to survive.
The interlocking whole in which we exist is the undeniable foundation for the architecture of life and for our civilization.
If we continue to destroy the relationships that form this foundation — relationships with ourself, each other, and our environment — our civilization will collapse.
On the other hand, if we honor these relationships, we will succeed and prosper in every way.
The choice is ours as it has always been. The difference today is that we know a great deal more about what sustains and optimizes life.
It’s time that we honor the knowledge that we have.
Only then will we improve the quality of our lives, arrest and reverse our destructive and unsustainable momentum, end our needless suffering, prosper together, find peace, sustain humanity, advance our civilization, and succeed as a species.