At present, industrial civilisation is at war with forests, animals, and the oceans. By polluting rivers and seas, it is steadily destroying the earth’s ecological diversity
The World is never going to be perfect. Therefore,we need to see the world as perfect as it is. We can grow, transform and evolve together. Every human being deserves our love. Every bird is a beautiful living creature. Every tree is wonderful. All weathers are fine. Life is lovely as it is, warts and all. We can love everybody and everything. Everyone is my friend; I have no enemies. Unconditional and nonjudgmental love is radical love, true love.
Love gives us the gift of unity, and truth gives us the gift of diversity. Love and truth are twins. Love is feminine and truth is masculine; this is a yin-yang balance. We love first, then we are able to understand, appreciate and accept truths of all kinds. I accept your truth and then I try to understand it. Then we can have a dialogue. We can see whether we can learn from one another. In the end, we may have to go beyond right and wrong, beyond good and bad, beyond my truth opposed to your truth, and learn to live in harmony with everyone, get along with everyone and accept everyone. Hatred hurts and harms. Only love treats and heals. Love cures the cancer of fear. Love lifts us from the quagmire of conflict. “Love your neighbour as yourself” is the greatest gospel in the world.
Diversity and truth go together; love and unity go together. Diversity in truths and unity in love is an essential part of making peace in the world. The first step to practice radical love is to love yourself. If you don’t love yourself, how are you going to love the world? Every one of us is a special and a unique gift to the world. Only through self-love can we discover our true potential.
Then the second step is to love everyone else, irrespective of their nationality, their religion, their culture, their political system, or their economic system. Love everyone whether they are rich or poor, black or white, man or woman, communist or capitalist, Christian or Muslim, whoever they are, love them all.
Then the third step is to love the earth. At the moment most people see the gifts of the earth only as a resource for the economic growth. And they think that humans are separate from the earth and above and even superior to all other living beings such as trees, mountains, forest, rivers and birds. These are inanimate objects, only humans are conscious and have rights. No other species has rights. This is a fundamental mistake of the modern world view. If we want to have peace in the world, we have to make peace with our Mother Earth.
At the moment the industrial civilisation is at war against forests, animals and oceans.This civilisation is destroying the ecological diversity of the earth by polluting the oceans, polluting the rivers, polluting the air and polluting the soil. This industrial system is using the ecological gifts of the earth as if they are only a resource for making money and making profit. In order to make money, the industrial system is destroying the diversity and integrity of the eco-systems. Humanity can live a good life and it can also live in harmony with our precious planet earth.
In order to honour and maintain the diversity and integrity of the earth, we need a deep ecological perspective, which means that we should recognise that forests, rivers, animals and all the other species are living organisms. They are living beings and they have intrinsic value. We need to go beyond valuing the eco-system only in terms of how useful that is to humans and for making financial gains. We need to recognise that the earth doesn’t belong to us, we belong to the earth. All living organisms have consciousness and have rights to be and to exist. We also need to realise that humans are neither separate from nor above the other members of this living planet. We share this earth home with our other kin such as the mountains, the forests, the rivers, the animals, the birds and the insects.
Humanity cannot live peacefully, happily and joyfully if we do not have a flourishing, beautiful and biodiverse planet. In order to maintain the biodiversity of the earth, we should take from her only what is our essential need and not our greed. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “There is enough in the world for everybody’s need but not enough for anybody’s greed”. At the moment, much of the world is locked onto the path of a greed economy; if we want to protect and celebrate the diversity of the earth then we need to practice a love economy. We need to love our Mother earth and live in harmony with her. This is a deep ecological perspective.
If we wish to establish a culture of diversity as one of the guiding principles for the flourishing future of humanity and that of planet earth, then we need to introduce and teach the importance of diversity in our schools and universities. The educational system at present promotes uniformity and monoculture. Our schools and universities are in the service of industrial monoculture, endless economic growth and business wedded to financial profit at all costs. The educational institutions have very little interest in maintaining the wellbeing of the earth or that of humanity.
Much of our education is ‘head focused’. It is limited to an academic, rational and intellectual level. Schools and universities mostly focus on the subjects related to the left hemisphere of the brain, so that an army of managers, administrators and organisers are made available to lead the industrial world irrespective of the consequences for the earth and the biosphere. The world spends huge sums of money and other resources only to train just half of the brain! We need a new pedagogy which promotes education of the head, education of the heart and education of the hands, leading to the wellbeing of the earth and her people.
Our educational institutions hardly know or recognise that we have two hemispheres in our brains. As in our physical bodies we have two arms, two legs, two eyes and so on, our brains also have two hemispheres. Simply put, the left brain is rational and analytical whereas the right brain is intuitive and multi-dimensional. The right brain looks at the big picture and sees everything in its context. In other words, the left brain likes uniformity and the right brain likes diversity. In an ideal world we need to develop both hemispheres of our brains in balance which may help us find the right relationship between unity and diversity, between love and truth.
The Billion Press
(Satish Kumar is the author of several best sellers, including Radical Love and Soil)
