This piece of writing is inspired by the Talks by Lee Brown and Dan Katchongva on the "Prophecies of Hopi Indians"
Thousands of years and hundreds of civilizations have passed on this planet which itself is billions of yearsold. We have grown on this planet learning to identify the differences - to know a fire from water and a tiger from a deer. Identifying differences made us develop a sense of judgment to know safety from danger and helped us survive.
While our pure animal instinct drove a lot of this judgment, our intellect helped us analyze and make a knowledge base out of it. Intellect built on instinct as a foundation and made us better than our brethren in the animal community. Using different colors, different words and different ex-pressions - we built on our animal instincts to go beyond basic ex-pression of fear, love and hunger. This intellect made us creative in ways that are quite different from a lot of other animals- in our communication and in ex-pression of our thoughts. At the root of our world today as we perceive it is the difference.
While this ability to identify differences is a gift to us as humanity, it is surely nature's gift for it chose to express itself so very differently. Without different colors, we would not be able to walk on our alleys and without different sounds and reverberations, even the bats in the dark can never know where they are. Initially a tool for survival, I believe that over time, this ability to identify differences has grown in to a mental obsession in us humans. This obsession with identifying and judging differences has sharpened human intellect and created various schools of thought, of philosophy and art forms rich with subtlety. Our words and ex-pressions grew manifold to capture this multitude of differences. So a smile is different from a simper, and a simper is different from a smirk. So it is in art forms like painting and singing and dancing and so on. And don't even get me started on the number of different animal, plant and viral species we have identified to date and the differences in how they sleep, what they eat and where they live and when they mate. That is quite an achievement by any standard that we understand the nature deeply and the myriad different ways in which it manifests all around us.
But this obsession with identifying differences has slowly transgressed and we now identify ourselves with those differences. So while it is good to have the knowledge that different persons believe in different religions, we now have started to identify ourselves with those religions. So much so that we discuss and debate which is better - an innate, not expressed, human/animal instinct to know which is safer to our survival. Identification of differences as knowledge (as is the case in animals and plant species classification) is not dangerous but our identification with the differences we have as individual humans is. So we have debates, endless justifications and arguments, tearing apart each other to identifyat what level we are different from one another. The objective is to prove that we are different, and that each individual is unique.
But I think the time has come to move on. We now understand and appreciate that all of us are unique in our own way. Any more time spent on finding and showing that we are different is useless. The time now is to identify our similarities. How I am so much like you and you like that colleague in office who you hate so much! How I go through the same emotional crests and troughs like you do. To accept each other as a part of one human race and we as humans as a part of this large diverse family that inhabits this planet. It is time we work on finding similarities, that one thing that connects all of us on this planet and to identify that similarity. Appreciating differences without identifying with those, I believe, is the new revolution in thought that is destined for this century.
All of us know how historically we have had diverse civilizations communicating sparsely with each other and the knowledge of one another only being through the travelers and tradesmen. How we fought over petty differences and an animal instinct to overpower and to exercise control on neighbors, how we resorted to holocausts and nuclear weapons. But we are being pushed to an edge now by the nature because we have failed to learn our lessons. Like a mother, for cajoling did not work, we are being threatened by nature to work towards identifying similarities - to identify and care how all of us in our own way have messed up the planet.
We are 8 years in to the new millennium and a new century and if someone asks me now what I love this century to be remembered for, I would say "While the previous century or two have been awesome in understanding the differences and myriad forms of universe and their working, this one should be remembered for us waking up to realizing the essential oneness in those forms!"I strongly believe that the long tortuous human history has occurred and worked to prepare us for this moment that we are standing at today.
This is a time where each one of us individually decides the fate of our collective future, probably not just of us but of the generations to come.
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