What if the concept of “other” is an illusion?  How much would your world, my world, our world change if we came to the conclusion that we are all part of a whole?  This idea may seem obvious to some people.  Intellectually we understand that human beings are fundamentally built the same.  We share a desire to live lives of satisfaction without active threats of violence and persecution or the passive threats of the absence of food, shelter, and safety.  The problem for most people seems to come when we begin to prioritize our own need for these things above the needs of others.  When we do this, we allow the poisons of worry and fear into our lives.

What I believe to be the greatest flaw in human nature is the inability to recognize and resist fear.  Fear is a natural response to the unknown.  In the history of human kind fear has had an invaluable role to play.  Fear makes people cautious.  What is that dark shadow lurking outside my cave?  It could be a saber tooth tiger that wants me for dinner.  Who is that person approaching our home?  He may be looking to kill me in order to take my food and shelter.  For women in particular, the question of sexual violence is even more of a motivating factor in maintaining a healthy dose of guardedness.  The problem is that fear does not empower.  Fear is the motivating factor in nearly every case of inhumanity that we perpetrate on each other.

We, as human beings, have organized ourselves into groups that share values, customs, beliefs and standards of accepted behavior.  That’s all fine.  What is so hard about recognizing the arbitrary nature of these groups?  Why do so many groups believe that they have it all figured out?  What is so frightening about the unknown?  If we could learn to embrace uncertainty instead of staking our lives on protecting our illusion of truth, what do we have to lose?  More importantly, what can we gain?  Truth can stand up to any test.  Let’s take those tests with ardor and open hearts.  How liberating it could be to not have to stand behind our fortress anymore, to understand that “truth” means different things to different people.  As human beings I believe that we are beginning to understand that we don’t have to be ruled by a negative emotion like fear.  What we can choose is the enlightenment of love.

Think about some of the great catalysts in modern human history.  Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King Jr.  These people started major social and political movements with the philosophy that fear and hate can be overcome with love and kindness.  Gandhi stopped an entire rebellion by going on a hunger strike.  People stopped hurting each other so that this man who had helped so many would not perish.  His love inspired love in others.  Mother Theresa helped to overcome the stigma of caring for and touching the ill and poverty-stricken.  Martin Luther King  helped countless people find the courage to stand up to constant and virulent threats of violence and palpable hatred to demand their civil rights.

It is my belief that each of these leaders was inspired by the idea that we all deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.  Each of us should treat others as we wish to be treated.  This is a timeless and timely concept.  Of course we all want to survive and thrive.  What many people don’t seem to realize is that in order to do that, EVERYONE has to have a chance.  You can’t survive on your own.  You just can’t.  We need each other.  Get rid of the fear and embrace the light of love.

Welcome

Looking through our own lenses in life, we see only our perspective.  We filter our experiences through our own biases and conceptions of the world.  This makes it easy to believe that we have the right way, the only way, the true way.  We own the truth.  We fear those whose lenses are different from ours.  We put up barriers to keep their false views from diminishing our truth.  But truth is made up of all human experience.  You cannot contain the full truth until you can see through the lens of the other.  Claiming to own the full truth in your own experience is like taking a tiny grain of sand and proclaiming it to be the whole beach.  A beach is made up of tiny grains of sand.  It needs each one to make it what it is.  Likewise, truth is made up of all human experience.  Each experience makes truth what it is.  Thus truth belongs to all of us.  No one person can own it any more than one grain of sand can be a beach. 

Seeking for truth is much more painful than owning truth.  I can see just fine though my own lenses.  They are comfortable to me.  But trying to see through someone else lenses is confusing, and painful.  Everything is blurry at first.  The more you look, the harder your head will hurt.  Sometimes you have to take the lenses off for a while and rest your eyes before you can look again.  Some life experiences may be so different from your own, that you will never be able to see clearly through those lenses.  But if we want to progress and gain more truth and knowledge in life, it can only be done by trying to see through the lenses of others.  The truth of the human race is the whole of each human experience.  You can’t separate the individual from the whole.  With this blog we hope to create a safe environment in the blogosphere where people can share their experiences, express their thoughts, and help to broaden our understanding of truth in the human experience.  We hope to break down barriers to the other by examining grains of sand in a lens.