Until now, we humans have placed ourselves — and celebrated ourselves! — as the final arbiter of all living things on Earth, and organized our world accordingly. We have dealt with others, and with the Earth, under the premise that we are separate individuals, at war with one another and the world, surviving through ceaseless competition, our standards of value at the whim of ever-changing trends, caprices, manipulations, and even personal emotions and mood. Such was the limit of our value system. Such is the life that we lead today.
If human beings are too subjective and full of themselves to be objective judges of values, then what about the sciences, long thought to be objective? Or religions? Or even politics?
Relatively speaking, science can provide reliable standards to verify truth in a physical, material sense, but values are not its strength. Through study of the history of science, we know that science, like other system of knowledge, is not free from bias. And the truths of science are an ever-changing, ever-evolving body of information and knowledge. What one generation takes to be true is debunked and made obsolete by new discoveries as we proceed from partial knowledge to more complete knowledge. Any scientist will be the first to admit that despite all the great progress we have made in understanding our universe, our knowledge is far from complete.
Religions, on the other hand, purport to reveal the everlasting truth. Yet, as we all know, despite claims of universality and absolute authority, each religion, and the god or gods that it upholds, seems to have validity and power only for a certain nation or people, not for everyone. We don’t yet have a single representative god of Earth, or a religious scripture or behavioral code accepted by all peoples and cultures.
How about the concepts of justice and freedom, whose pursuit is lauded as a universal human trait? What we see in the world is that one sense of freedom fights against another and one sense of justice strikes another. This is because even freedom and justice are subject to the interpretation of a particular group or people. One culture’s “freedom” is another’s unbridled license, and one culture’s “justice” may appear as harsh and cruel when considered from a different cultural standpoint.
Thus, we see a world filled with confused and conflicting values, ideologies, and dogma that create dissension, conflict, and even violence and war, all because of the different-colored lenses worn by different groups. In a word, everything, including the self-proclaimed universal truths of natural sciences, religions, and politics, is trapped within the cage of a biased value system, conditioned by our long-worn colored lenses. We need a bigger view.
How much time did it take for human beings, descendants of monkeys with an advanced intellectual potential, to progress from their initial appearance on Earth and wondering at the mysteries of the stars, moon, and sun, to realize that they were not at the center of the cosmos? In the beginning, it was probably humiliating and terrifying to relinquish the notion that the universe revolved around them. Now this understanding is seen as evidence for the maturity of human awareness.
It’s time to once again present evidence for our continuing growth. We need another Copernican Revolution. To make such a revolution, we have to rethink our relationship to the Earth. We usually call everything that we relate to “ours” as if we have ownership over the object. Planet Earth is not an exception. With our mentality, it seems that we believe we have the right to use the planet any way we want. Do we even have the ability to protect the planet, let alone the right to use it? In the relationship between a part and the whole, if a part persistently tries to control the whole inharmoniously, it will be removed from the whole before it destroys the whole. This has happened repeatedly in the history of this planet.
If we scale down the 13.7-billion-year history of this planet to 14 years, human civilization is only 3 minutes, and the modern age is only 6 seconds. Some species such as dinosaurs had been dominant for incomparably longer periods of time than human beings. The greatest legacy of the dinosaurs for all other species, especially for mammals, was their dying, because by dying they opened up another stage of evolutionary drive for biological diversity that they were holding back for 160 million years, which is more than 50 times longer than the entire evolutionary history of the human species. If we see our relationship to this planet in a wide and long perspective, one thing is very clear: we belong to this planet, not the other way around, and the only way we can protect ourselves and thrive is by learning how to live with the whole in harmony.
We are part of the vast circle of life that inhabits this planet. At the center or basis of this circle of life is the Earth. The central standard of value for all lifeforms here on Earth should be Earth herself, not our egos, needs, wants, and prejudices. We can use Earth as the standard by which to judge all actions transacted on our planet. From such a point of view, we all are Earth citizens before we are a part of any group, nation, or religion.
If there were no Earth, then no altars could exist for you to worship your god. Even more, you wouldn’t exist, nor your religion. Without Earth, no nation would exist, nor political ideologies with which to rule a nation. To recover the purest “zero mind” and “cosmic consciousness,” we first have to attain an Earth consciousness.
The Earth is the source of life for all forms of life. This entitles Earth, the long-term health and well-being of the Earth, to be the primary value, the most important consideration that all other values should be referred to for measurement. It is the common ground for all the values we pursue in our lives, personally and collectively. Despite its obvious importance, this common ground and primary value has been unappreciated and abused, and now is at serious risk. We have to revise and recalibrate our value systems based on the obvious primary value, our Earth.
This article is excerpted from Ilchi Lee’s book “Change: Realizing Your Greatest Potential.”
