Our scientists are renowned. We know so much. But more about the universe and
about
bacteria and
viruses than we know about ourselves. Certainly, we know more than
ever about the functioning of our physical selves. We have multiple imaginations
about who we are and where we fit into the biosphere, for instance. But
somewhere we have lost ourselves as humans. We, meaning the western "we," assume
and accept that we are totally apart from the earth and all other creators. We
believe we own the planet.
Most of humankind still knows that we are
Mother Earth's children, as the President of Bolivia, Evo Morales,
said. We are not the boss; we do not own the
world. If anything, the planet
owns us.
Humans everywhere have rituals and beliefs that strengthen
their cohesion as a cooperative community. We westerners, modern humans, have
grandiose and unreal beliefs about our unlimited power to do what we want. What
we do with all our power endangers our own survival and that of many other
species. I think that is because we know so much about matter, and so little
about the spirit that is the essence of life.
We have come to think that
"spirit" is unmeasurable and therefore not scientific, not worth thinking about.
Perhaps because we think spirit is religion, and so outside the realm of science
that deals only with matter - another form of energy as Einstein formulated. The
only rational something to pay attention to.
But to me the word "spirit"
does not mean religion. Religion is the package, what we create around spirit.
Religion is a form we give spirit and we can make hundreds, thousands of forms.
It
is hard to talk about - or define - "spirit" in a culture that accepts only
matter as real. To me spirit is more real than matter. It is the awe that is at
the core of life. Spirit is in what we call love, compassion. Spirit is the
indomitable something of the people who struggled to reach the poles despite
inhuman odds, climbed the highest mountains of the Himalayas. Spirit is what
makes children surviving a cyclone in Burma take care of each other, when in the
confusion no adults are around. Spirit is what makes people all over the world
make sometimes great efforts to raise baby animals orphaned by hunters or
poachers who killed the
nursing mother tiger, or elephant. Spirit is the mysterious
something we feel on a lonely beach when happening upon an unusual, almost
unreal, sunrise on a far horizon. Spirit, I imagine, is what the first space
traveler felt when he saw the earth, the whole earth and understood the miracle
of this ball of matter that is alive, held in a trajectory around the sun by
invisible forces.
I'm not sure that only humans have spirit. I wonder
what animals feel at sunset: usually no wind, fading light, birds who chatter
loudly in a tree suddenly silent. Even the roosters here stop crowing. I
remember a time when a friend and I were at a rocky beach. Her dog could not
stop bounding from one rock to another sniffing and playing with the waves.
Until it began to get dark. When a blood-red sun lit up the sky at the far
horizon the dog sat frozen at our feet, as enraptured as we were.
Hiding,
ignoring, or denying spirit makes a cruel culture. It leaves us searching for
ideals. Something greater, more important, than the fear which drives us today.
A majority of "We the People" chose the ideals so eloquently spoken, but some
politicians did not hear and perhaps had more power through worshipping money.
The irony, of course, is that money is an illusion. A piece of paper
printed with the words "ten dollars" is not worth anything but the price of a
printed piece of paper. But seller and buyer accept the belief that it can buy
ten dollars worth of stuff. History is full of occasions when suddenly people
woke up and no longer believed the worth of a piece of paper. The wealth of the
super rich is as illusional, it consists of numbers in a computer that we let it
intimidate us.
Maybe you think spirit is as illusionary as money because
it does not buy anything. Oh, but it does! It does not buy material things, but
spirit makes us human. Spirit is what gives compassion. Com-passion:
with-feeling. Not doing to others what we do not want others to do to
us.
Isn't that the exact opposite of what our current culture does? We do
to others what we don't want them to do to us. It is a law of nature, a law of
the universe perhaps, that the more we kill others the more the others will kill
us.
But what do I know? I'm a 20th Century man, I don't understand this
century.
But I do know that a culture based on fear is not healthy. If
everyone and anyone is suspected of being a possible danger, we make ourselves
the danger. A healthy culture is based on trust. It seems to me that is what
this Republic was meant to be by the Fathers. Trusting that "We the People" were
honorable human beings, trusted to want the best for all of us. Yes, flawed
because at the time slaves were not considered quite human (although human
enough to bear half white children). But we corrected that.
Now we are
plagued with the disease of mistrusting people of another religion, another
color, other thoughts. Distrust does not a healthy society make. We have lost
the human. Humans are not all alike, humans have unique qualities and talents;
that make ours a unique and talented society. We cannot forget or ignore that
humans have spirit even when it is hidden behind one or more
masks.
Anyone remember
Dune, by Frank Herbert? Famous science
fiction of the second half of the last century. This is from that book (the
first, the original):
