Off Universality

In trying to understand himself and his existence, man naturally took up the chore of distinguishing and defining all he saw around him. He distinguished himself both from his environment and from the other men whom he came into contact with. Unfortunately, in this process of differentiating , man lost sight of the commonality of all. He has lost sight of the existence of a life force that runs through all men and through everything else around us. He lost his appreciation for the fact that we were all placed on the same planet and share the same universe.

Man’s success in individuating himself has been the single most detrimental factor to his ethical and spiritual progress. In separating himself from other men, man lost his ethical self; in separating himself from his environment, he lost his spiritual self.

The easiest way for a man to lose his ethics is for him to see himself as separate from the whole, to recognize himself as being in one way or another not only different but more worthy than the next man; to recognize that somehow, even though he shares an existence with another, he is superior and, thus, entitled to something the other is not. Once one is able to distinguish between himself and others, he is then able to ethically justify treating others differently.

The extreme of those justifications comes when one is able to enslave, kill, or injure others without an ethical conflict. The gruesome acts of history are rooted in man’s method of individuation.

The irony of man’s differentiation is that in the process of distinguishing himself, he often includes himself in a group. The group he includes himself in is usually set opposed to another group. This mentality and process of differentiation is detrimental to the progress of humanity; it has never led to a positive outcome. The list of what it has led to is grim: clan and ethnic conflict, tribalism, nationalism, and religionism, among others.

As we observe our history, almost naturally built into these lines of grouping is conflict at every step. Once we are able to remove or ignore the common thread between man, killing another man is but child’s play.

Even more tragic and basic than man’s loss of his ethical self, is the lost of his spiritual self. The separation of man from the world around him is the beginning of man’s loss of his spiritual self. In putting himself on a throne above all as the pinnacle of creation, man took a great step in his spiritual fall. In our arrogance we have failed to see the common spirit that runs through all of creation. We like to think that somehow our existence is very much separate from the existence of everything else in the universe. We have separated man from the universe he exists in and in doing so we have cut the line between us and our spiritual life. How foolish of us to deny a coexistence and dependence on our environment.

The same force that sustains our life, also powers the world around us and the universe at large. Recognition of a common spirit between man and every bit of the universe is the beginning of true appreciation for our existence. Once we can appreciate the wonder of our universe, we can appreciate our fellow man, and also ourselves. We can’t Truly appreciate how special we are as individuals until we can recognize and appreciate the universality of all existence. Recognizing the bigger picture allows us to appreciate how special we are just to be a part of that larger whole–the universality that links all existence.

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