(This is Part 45 of a series. Go back to Part 44.)
10. Perceiving oneness of humanity & nature
In creating a sustainable world, perhaps the most important thing of all is to perceive that our divisions are illusory, that we are one. Who is this "we"? Everything, everybody, with nobody and nothing left out. In reality, we are one thing, one essence, one spirit.
The rational mind, which is always doing the best it can, is continually seeking an identification somewhere. After the primary identification—"I am a separate, personal being"—comes the secondary identifications: I am a woman or a man, I am single or married, I have this number of children, I belong to that tribe, I believe in this religion, I am a citizen of this country and so on. Our sacred identifications.
But ultimately, we are not black, brown, white or yellow, woman or man, Christian or Muslim, Western or Eastern or any other distinction. Yes, we are those things, but we're also something deeper: We are all human beings together.
In my opinion, the planet will start becoming truly sustainable when human beings perceive themselves first and foremost not as belonging to this nation or that tribe or this race or that belief but as belonging to humanity. First and foremost, identifying ourselves as human beings, brothers and sisters to all other human beings.
When we see ourselves first as human beings and second as this group or that one, this belief or that one, this nationality or that one, then, in my opinion, we're on the road to a sustainable earth. On a sustainable planet, before attaching to all such labels or beliefs we would first see ourselves as members of a common humanity. We would see ourselves and feel ourselves first as an integrated living heart, the living human heart of planet earth.
When we're inclusive enough to include all of humanity within our identification, we also begin to perceive that our identification can be widened even further, to include the mysteries and splendors of nature. It's not so much that we join nature as that we rejoin her, as in the days before agriculture, only now from a wiser, more experienced place.
Have you ever laid on your back in a woods somewhere and looked up at the blue sky and listened to the wind rustling in the trees and caught sight of birds flying in formation and just sensed deeply that it's all one living organism?
Quite apart from all the scientific demonstrations of the truth of Gaia—the earth as a living organism—it can be sensed, felt, understood. Just listen to the waves and seagulls on the seashore or look deeply at a flower or a blade of grass. This earth, this Gaia, this global biosphere can be sensed as an integrated living intelligence. And its intelligence is much deeper than ours, for it has the wisdom of being more natural.
It's amazing to study the integrated living cycles of the earth, the way everything contributes to everything else, the way that rhythms of all kinds feed into each other, the ineffable living network that maintains this planet—that is, itself—as a living, breathing organism. Ultimately, though, it's not about science teaching us: We just know. If we're open to it, we just know. The heart knows that we and nature are one thing.
Of course it's an illusion that we could exist separately from nature. If we're to survive, nature cannot exist as something to be dominated or exploited—even to think in those terms is to separate ourselves—but rather, as a partner with us, or even more accurately, as one unified energy that incorporates us. When our mind is clear and open we come into our birthright, which is to perceive ourselves as an organic part of the living intelligence that is nature.
We cannot live without nature, that is how deeply embedded in her we are. Nature is our teacher: If we spend some time in nature she teaches us about silence and majesty and transcendent beauty. She teaches us about connectedness. She teaches us about everything happening in its own rhythm and coordinating naturally in a self-organized symphony.
As Stephan Harding puts it so eloquently, "We need to sense that our every step is taken not on, but in the Earth; that we walk, talk and live our whole lives inside a great planetary being that is continuously nourishing us physically with her miraculous mantle of green and her lucious swirling atmosphere, a being that soothes our psyches with her subtle language of wind and rain, with the swoop of wild birds and with the majesty of her mountains."
And the broadening of our boundaries need not stop there. It can widen to include all of existence, all of reality, everything that is. To truly create a sustainable planet we'll need a great love affair—a great falling in love with our humanity, with the natural world, and ultimately, with all of reality just as it is.
In a sustainable world, each of us would know that we are one, that we're not separate—not from the natural world, not from each other, not from reality. Or to put the same thing in different words, not from the infinite living intelligence that infuses all things and is who we truly are.
The earth is already an exquisite garden, and someday it will be even more exquisite—a garden where we live in symbiosis with nature and each other and all of life, and where our true love affair is always with existence just-as-it-is, greeting us in every face and every sunset and every situation as our very own self, our own heart.
Joseph Campbell said this about it: "Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."
—jim sloman, 6.29.07
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