Can anyone doubt today that all the millions of individuals and all the innumerable types and characters constitute an entity, a unit? Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. I cut myself in the finger, and it pains me: this finger is a part of me. I see a friend hurt, and it hurts me, too: my friend and I are one. And now I see stricken down an enemy, a lump of matter which, of all the lumps of matter in the universe, I care least for, and it still grieves me. Does this not prove that each of us is only part of a whole?
–Nikola Tesla, 1900
Tesla’s assessment says as much about himself as it does about humanity. His multiple breakthrough inventions were ultimately conceived to serve profoundly humanitarian goals for the benefit of us all. The confidence in his clarity of vision here can only come from a truly compassionate being who cannot help but sense, on some level, the universal connection he articulates above. But in the current paradigm this perspective is not at all a consensus throughout our egocentricity laden species. Though many of us fervently share his inherently heart centered outlook, we often have difficulty acknowledging the depth of derangement that characterizes the psychopaths who have interminably gripped the levers of power on Earth.
Nevertheless, virtually all of us are afflicted by the same disease to varying degrees. The Divine, as expressed in all truly heart centered faiths and indigenous practices, insists that goodness is intrinsic to our fundamental nature by Design. Yet this truth continues to lie camouflaged beneath the character of our egocentric proclivities down through the ages.
For millennia we have been held captive by a conviction of identity that insists: ‘I am ego’ and ‘ego is me’. Pure ego (unique energy signature) simply roots our sense as individual. The history of civilization is characterized by a global norm where we – from within illusory, isolated, egocentric capsules – experience phenomena outside our respective ‘pods’ as entirely separate from us. Ego-centricity is the ‘mind virus’ that has infected humanity – telling us we have a right, in our mutually acknowledged ‘cult of the self’, to get whatever we desire – even at the expense of others.
All I can hear, I me mine
I me mine, I me mine
Even those tears, I me mine
I me mine, I me mine
No one’s frightened of playing it
Everyone’s saying it
Flowing more freely than wine
All through the day I me mine
I me mine, I me mine
Our culturally fostered ‘cult of self’ has been universally accepted for so long that it routinely passes as a foregone conclusion. For example – the crux of Game Theory is that an individuals’ behavior will always be motivated towards achieving an optimal outcome, which is determined by selfish self-interest. It is acknowledged by John von Neuman et al., in his own book (Theory of Games) that the entire functioning of their model relies upon the assumption that we are governed by rational selfish behavior, and that they feel confident about this assumption since their notion of ‘reality‘ on their Map of the Universe has allegedly confirmed this purported ‘fact‘ to them.
Recently emergent insight begins to crack this shell and establish road signs and street lights that illuminate the Yellow Brick Road leading to our next paradigm:
A society that fails to value communality — our need to belong, to care for one another, and to feel caring energy flowing toward us — is a society facing away from the essence of what it means to be human…..we are steeped in the normalized myth that we are, each of us, mere individuals striving to attain private goals. The more we define ourselves that way, the more estranged we become from vital aspects of who we are and what we need to be healthy.
gabor mate; the Myth of normal
We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.
~ Wendell Berry; The Long-Legged House
We have gone from comparing ourselves to apes to now comparing ourselves with computers, there is a clear avoidance in discussing what it is to be simply human.
A Study on the Abolition of Man
By Cynthia Chung
The configuration of our current construct is imposed upon us before we have any consciousness with which to influence what said construct might be. From the moment we emerge from the birth canal – and we begin to uniquely personify the razor’s edge between phenomena and consciousness for a lifetime – we immediately find our self immersed in a crystallized status quo. Centuries of ingrained indoctrination coerce our pure ego to extend beyond its simple function of ID and location coordinates. This hereditary program directs our ego to indelibly attach itself to the minute extraction of phenomena to which it is assigned (our body), forge a phantom separation from all other phenomena, and conjure an illusory sovereign self-hood. In short, from inside an ephemeral epidermal boundary (our skin), we cling to the delusion that our entire extraction is a truly autonomous entity that becomes our always self-important egocentric ‘self’.
Our ego’s existential attachment to our mind extends to include our entire physical being as ‘self’ – anchored by our mind as its center, director, and base of existence. Once this delusional attachment is relinquished, our unencumbered pure ego is free to discover its true place within the heart. Only from the heart can we properly manifest our Design’s blueprint, wherein we realize an undeniable and perpetual sense of belonging – to one another everywhere, as constituent cells of a ‘Whole’ Humanity, integral to our living Earth, and the Universe in which it turns.
Perennial conjunction with our Whole humanity is likely a fundamental characteristic of our human experience in the next paradigm. As such, we each experience our sense of ‘self’ as a base element of our Whole humanity, equally as much as we experience our sense of ‘self’ as an individual – all from within the transitory bodily costume we occupy for a different sort of lifetime. From our current paradigm that compels us to be a separate self-serving “me” rooted in our head, we evolve forth to be both an individual and an elemental “one-of-us” – rooted in our heart in the next paradigm.
A key aspect of advancing to the next paradigm as envisioned herein, may be the discovery and/or awakening of a now dormant sense centered in our heart. This then becomes the hub of perception and interpretation that supervises such functions currently executed exclusively by our minds. That the heart’s energy field is orders of magnitude greater than the brain’s energy field, and that the heart sends more information to the brain than the reverse, is evidence that this sense is readily available to be activated and assume authority.
Our new found sense of our universal links to one another might be so empirically tangible from one moment to the next, that concepts like infliction and oppression disappear. In this divination, our sense of interconnection is so innate that the very idea of harming another will make as much sense as cutting off our own fingers in this paradigm. In this possible future that awaits us, always acting on the basis of common good as a priority is second nature. In our upgraded orientation in life, ‘We are All One of Us’ is our embodied common denominator we share throughout our experience within a coherent humanity.
Beau
The conceptual framework that we have invented to understand organisms is the deeper reason for our environmental catastrophe. We are extinguishing life because we have blinded ourselves to its actual character… The real disconnect is not between our human nature and all the other beings; it is between our image of our nature and our real nature.
Andreas Weber – the biology of wonder
Beau Says Know 