What will be the next step?
30/03/2008
- Opinión
The current state of humanity and the earth makes us think. The global village has consolidated. We occupy virtually all earthly space and we are exploiting the natural capital to the end of matter and life, through analytical and instrumental reason.
The question now being posed is: What will be the next step? More of the same? But this is very risky because the current paradigm is based on power as dominion over nature and human beings. We should not forget that the human being has created a death machine that can destroy us all and destroy life on Gaia. This road seems to have run out. We have to move from physical capital to spiritual capital. Physical capital has limits and runs out. The spiritual is limitless and inexhaustible. There are no limits to love, compassion, caring, creativity — the intangibles that make up spiritual capital.
This has been scarcely explored by us, but it could represent the great alternative. The core of spiritual capital is life, joy, inclusive relationships, unconditional love, and the ability to transcend. It doesn't mean that we have to renounce scientific technology. We could not meet human needs without it, but it would no longer destroy life. If instrumental reason was the engine for physical capital, in spiritual capital cordial and sensitive reason will organize social life and production. Values are rooted in cordial reason; spiritual life is nourished by it since it produces the works of the spirit we mentioned earlier — love, solidarity and transcendence.
If there had been a hypothetical observer during the time of the dinosaurs who would have asked himself what the next evolutionary step would be, he probably would have said: the appearance of an even bigger and more voracious species of dinosaur. But he would have been fooled. He would never have imagined that from a small mammal that lived at the top of the tallest trees, feeding on shoots and flowers and trembling with fear of being devoured by the dinosaurs, would irrupt, millions of years later, something absolutely inconceivable — a conscious and intelligent being, the human being, with a quality of life completely distinct from that of the dinosaurs. It was a different step.
We believe that now, though a another step, a human being can emerge marked by inexhaustible spiritual capital. Now it will be the world of "being" rather than the world of "having".
The next step, then, will be exactly this: to discover this inexhaustible spiritual capital and begin to organize life, production, society and daily activities around it. Then the economy will serve life and life will be imbued with the values of joy and self-actualization, a real alternative to the existing paradigm.
But this step is not automatic. It is voluntary, that is to say it is something that is offered for our free choice. We can welcome or reject it. It is not identified with any religion. It is something older which emerges from the reality of conscious evolution. Whoever welcomes it will experience a different meaning of life. He will also experience a new future. Others will continue to suffer the impasses of the current way of being and will anxiously ask themselves about their future and even about the eventual disappearance of the human species.
I believe that the current world crisis opens up the possibility of a new step towards a higher way of being for us. It has been said that Jesus, Francis of Assisi, Gandhi and many other masters past and present have already taken this step.
(Free translation from the Spanish provided by Anne Fullerton. Done in Arlington, VA in cooperation with Refugio del Rio Grande, Texas)
The question now being posed is: What will be the next step? More of the same? But this is very risky because the current paradigm is based on power as dominion over nature and human beings. We should not forget that the human being has created a death machine that can destroy us all and destroy life on Gaia. This road seems to have run out. We have to move from physical capital to spiritual capital. Physical capital has limits and runs out. The spiritual is limitless and inexhaustible. There are no limits to love, compassion, caring, creativity — the intangibles that make up spiritual capital.
This has been scarcely explored by us, but it could represent the great alternative. The core of spiritual capital is life, joy, inclusive relationships, unconditional love, and the ability to transcend. It doesn't mean that we have to renounce scientific technology. We could not meet human needs without it, but it would no longer destroy life. If instrumental reason was the engine for physical capital, in spiritual capital cordial and sensitive reason will organize social life and production. Values are rooted in cordial reason; spiritual life is nourished by it since it produces the works of the spirit we mentioned earlier — love, solidarity and transcendence.
If there had been a hypothetical observer during the time of the dinosaurs who would have asked himself what the next evolutionary step would be, he probably would have said: the appearance of an even bigger and more voracious species of dinosaur. But he would have been fooled. He would never have imagined that from a small mammal that lived at the top of the tallest trees, feeding on shoots and flowers and trembling with fear of being devoured by the dinosaurs, would irrupt, millions of years later, something absolutely inconceivable — a conscious and intelligent being, the human being, with a quality of life completely distinct from that of the dinosaurs. It was a different step.
We believe that now, though a another step, a human being can emerge marked by inexhaustible spiritual capital. Now it will be the world of "being" rather than the world of "having".
The next step, then, will be exactly this: to discover this inexhaustible spiritual capital and begin to organize life, production, society and daily activities around it. Then the economy will serve life and life will be imbued with the values of joy and self-actualization, a real alternative to the existing paradigm.
But this step is not automatic. It is voluntary, that is to say it is something that is offered for our free choice. We can welcome or reject it. It is not identified with any religion. It is something older which emerges from the reality of conscious evolution. Whoever welcomes it will experience a different meaning of life. He will also experience a new future. Others will continue to suffer the impasses of the current way of being and will anxiously ask themselves about their future and even about the eventual disappearance of the human species.
I believe that the current world crisis opens up the possibility of a new step towards a higher way of being for us. It has been said that Jesus, Francis of Assisi, Gandhi and many other masters past and present have already taken this step.
(Free translation from the Spanish provided by Anne Fullerton. Done in Arlington, VA in cooperation with Refugio del Rio Grande, Texas)
https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/127756
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