This world is built on beauty. From the smallest leaf to the stars above, reality as we know it speaks to the incredible power of nature, in the guise of atom, molecule and cell, to mold magnitudes of stunning order out of pure chaos. We on this planet still enjoy the living echo of a primordial eden, but along the way a problem has dawned. The problem is us.
You and I seem to be mindlessly engaged in tromping upon this beautiful world, its own wondrous self-regenerating nature every day being crushed down, pushed aside and replaced by something we might call human nature. In the last fifty years two-thirds of the planet’s wildlife has simply disappeared underfoot, and this is before our storm of climate change really kicks in.
Everyone who cares can see this happening, right now, today, and so big questions arise:
When are we going to stop? Is there a plan?
Aren’t we humans creating this epic story day by day, all together? Are we doing it on purpose, or are we just acting like unconscious automatons?
Can we come up with some kind of coherent vision of our rightful place in this majestic living world, in a majestic unfolding universe, that we can all agree with?
Who are we humans, anyway, and what do we really want?
This blog takes the view that an approach to these urgent questions, and to the overriding problem of the century here on Earth, the human problem, can be found in exploring human nature from a completely different angle, from the perspective of the mystics.
Most of us homo sapiens spend our time engaging with the material world. We solve problems and meet goals at this level. We respond to the world as it pushes and pulls us around at the behest of life’s challenges and pleasures. We buy what we want and need, and dump what we’re done with. This is how we spend our days, and since there are so many of us now it adds up to tremendous stress on the natural world.
The mystic sees life differently. If humans’ march of progress has turned upon itself, such that more and more now means less and less for the future, then maybe it’s time to define progress in a new way.
True progress may lie in discovering that joy and meaning originate inside us more than they reflect off the objects and circumstances around us.
True progress may mean beginning to understand that the world we think we know springs every moment from a much greater and more limitless reality.
True progress from here on out may mean spiritual growth over economic growth; fine-tuned awareness over the law of some jungle; feeling more security from the words of sages than from a lifetime of wages.
Many are starting to realize that a whole new frontier, a richer, deeper and ultimately more fulfilling area of exploration, is the vast world within each of us. There is uncharted terrain here where new dimensions of experience can manifest and astonishing new potentials arise.
The ever-present Self, the radiant gem, this is the rarest, richest treasure. Look within and find and hold it fast.
Ramana Maharshi c. 1930
The world’s mystics past and present, converging as they do upon the same mountaintop from many directions, tell us from their vantage point a mind-bending truth: that the innermost self of yourself is of the same essence as the innermost self of myself. This is very radical for societies that still tend to emphasize individual and group identities (the myriad ways we differ) above all. Yet don’t the identities we ascribe to ourselves supercharge so much of the world’s separation and strife… even as they help make up the ego, that which spiritual life is always asking us to dissolve?
So it has always been, yet the urgency of our time has many of us feeling like yelling in the town square: wake up, people! Before it’s too late. We may feel alien to each other sometimes but there’s always this deep abiding connection possible… below the surface. How can we solve our common problems if we can’t first understand, acknowledge and come to cherish this mysterious human nature that we all share?
Our deeper connection is hiding in plain sight in aspects of our physical, biological story as well if we care to look.
In terms of genetic makeup, it’s been said that each human body is, on average, 99.9 percent the same as every other. That is, our obvious physical differences amount to only 0.1% of the whole blueprint. That’s 999 parts the same to 1 part different. This well-known fact is a strong indicator of common origins, similar beingness and shared destiny but we find it so easy to overlook.
Instead we tend to magnify differences that happen to show on the surface of ourselves, along with corresponding cultural-based clues, beyond all reason. Sometimes a “different kind of person” can provoke a strong negative reaction in us at first glance, before we know them at all. This kind of pre-judgment is grossly unfair if we think about it. Every individual has their own nature far beyond and within the way they might show up. Don’t we know this for our own self?
Yet who teaches us to wait a bit and look deeper? How can we form a habit of looking for the common ground we know is there? How do we remember to start out open to another soul, whoever they are and whatever their hidden story?
Maybe our family tree can shed some light. Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s take yourself, having two parents, four grandparents, etc. and see how far back this growing number down generations past has to go… to equal the entire human population. If you do the math you’ll come up with 29 generations. Meaning that by this calculation your 536,000,000 personal ancestors of around 600 years ago equals something like the half billion humans on the planet at the time! And of course, this is true for everyone else as well.
Then to ground this insight in science, to take into account real things like the many duplications of relatives, the isolating effects of migrations, etc., we need to simply extend back farther. It’s calculated that at some actual date around 10-15,000 years ago, called the genetic isopoint, every single human alive then whose lines survived is an ancestor of every single person alive today.
This bears repeating: every single human alive at a point less than 15,000 years ago (and including all those who lived before then) whose lines survived is an ancestor of every single person alive today.
This means we are all blended together; that every one of us is related by common ancestry to every one we know, have known or could possibly know. If you want to see what your personal ancestors contributed to the world today, look at all eight billion of us. Look at the leaders and the followers, the black and the white, the strong and the broken, the outrageously wealthy and the outrageously poor and say hello to each and every one of us as your long-lost cousin.
Then we humans, including all our highly valued differences in culture, belief, clan, caste, class, race, sexuality, nationality, intelligence and outward appearance can be seen as something very different. We can be thought of as one magnificent, astonishingly variegated human organism, day by day making our collective way through this perilous era into whatever our and our planet’s destiny will be. It is only our habit of identifying with the personal self and its narrow identities that keeps us from waking up every day as first and foremost a member of the human family.
Who advocates for anything like this radical yet ultimately truthful way of looking at ourselves, other than those who experience it every day: the mystic pioneers of our world. They teach that the sacred work is to look into your neighbor’s eyes and find something of yourself there. It can be done.
I am not from East or West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not descended from Adam and Eve or any origin story…
first, last… outer, inner… only that breath breathing human being.
from “Only Breath” by Rumi c. 1260
(tr. Barks)
Miracle Soup 