17th July 2016
Guest writer for Wake Up World
Our time is a time of vast danger for the future of humankind and the integrity of our precious Earth. Forces of disintegration, division, and war everywhere attack human unity and inhibit the emergence of a planetary civilization based on our common humanity. Human beings continue to cling to pseudo-realities, pseudo-realities that become extremely dangerous and tear our world apart: nations, races, religions, ethnicities, cultures, languages, corporate interests, etc. Attachment to pseudo-realities obscures from us our common humanity, our common human reality evolving out of the vast cosmic evolutionary process from the (theoretical) Big Bang, to human emergence some two million years ago, to human ascendancy over nature and colonization of the entire Earth in the past two centuries.
Since the 20th century, physics has shown us in great depth and detail that the reality (the basic nature) of the cosmos cannot be imagined by the human pictorial imagination. Unlike the old magical and mythological relations to reality that assumed that the real could be pictured and named, everything in contemporary physics reveals the world in terms of mathematical equations that cannot be translated into imaginative pictures. Physics unveils the absolute oneness of the universe and the thoroughly interdependent and relative nature of all the fields within that whole: within that dynamic, ever-flowing holism.
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The cosmos is being restored to the mysterium magnum that encompasses our lives. Physics shows that the universe is relative through and through: all things existing as fields within fields whose identities depend on the fields and their relation to one another. Rather than a diversity of substantial realities opposed to one another, what emerges is the ONE that all these fields manifest: the cosmic plenum. Not a magical or mythological relation to nature and the cosmos, not the pseudo-realities of nations, races, etc., but cosmic consciousness, the mysterium magnum of the deeply integrated Oneness of all things.
But the integral oneness of all things can emerge in our common human consciousness only when we have detached ourselves from these multiple pseudo-realities and embraced our common human destiny. The heart of the universe, God or the ONE, is becoming conscious of itself in us. This is central to our human destiny: to become a focal point, compacted like a laser beam, of awareness of the depths: the oneness of Humanity and the oneness of the divine depths actualized in the living human community upon the sacred Earth. The sovereignty of humanity cannot be separated from the sovereignty of the divine plenum of the cosmos in human life and consciousness.
Our planet is passing through its dark night of the soul in the terror of fragmentation: endless wars and destruction in the name of pseudo realities: nations, races, idolatrous religious identifications, egoistic greed: partial and parochial identities all. Becoming truly worldcentric (universally human centric) is not merely a stage in some schema of moral and cognitive growth as put forward by today’s psychologists. Becoming worldcentric, human-centric, and cosmos-centric is the giant imperative of human history—the gigantic ethical demand to become fully human and therefore transparent to the divine mysterium magnum of existence.
The realization of our full humanity does not abandon the body or nature but raises the body and nature up to their true levels and true destiny—to become transparent to the divine presence, to the Oneness at the heart of all things. Our full humanity sanctifies nature and spirit and shows their profound integration. Human beings become sovereign as the expression of the gigantic cosmic telos at the heart of the primordial cosmic explosion, guiding cosmic evolution, and coming to fruition on our precious green and blue planetary home (among other places in the vastness of our cosmos). Human beings become the community of the Earth, the expression and children of the Earth, but also the expression and children of the unimaginable and inconceivable divine. These are joined together in the sovereignty of the human community—living in love, justice, peace, and compassion in the magnificent intensity of the fullness of life become conscious of itself on our beautiful green and blue spaceship Earth.
The Earth Constitution is not the end of this process. It is however, I believe, an absolutely necessary step in the actualization of our human destiny. The Constitution brings humanity together politically and economically under the concept of the sovereignty of humanity. It recognizes our fundamental oneness, not to the exclusion of diversity (which it protects), but a oneness in which all the diverse elements (nations, races, cultures, ideologies) are raised up to a higher level of respect and protection precisely because they are now joined together within institutions founded upon our common humanity.
Nearly all things created in human history up to this point have not been consciously founded. They have largely evolved in historical struggles on the basis of natural features of the world such as geography, race, culture, language, and so-called “natural” divisions of the world deriving from these features such as nation-states. There is nothing whatsoever that is fundamental about nation-states. They are thoroughly contingent, relative to one another and interdependent with one another within our common human situation. They are historical pseudo-realities, evolving by geography, accident, and arbitrary human decision-making. There is nothing fundamentally real or “right” about them.
Only today, in the monumental 21st century, have enough human beings evolved in their thinking to a consciousness of our common humanity and our common human destiny upon the Earth. We are now for the first time ready to found, to consciously establish, a world system based upon our common humanity. In this lies the immense significance of the Earth Constitution. In consciously doing this, we move to a higher level—beyond the old magical and mythical pseudo-realities to a common consciousness of the sovereignty of humankind and our shared destiny upon planet Earth.
Our destiny is not to abandon nature and the body for some other world or through asceticism as so many historical religions would have it (even though a great non-attachment is indeed required). Our destiny is not to live in a world of allegiances to pseudo-realities of nationality, race, gender identity, culture, or class privilege. Our destiny is to elevate nature and spirit in the magnificent union of ecstatic living in joy within the absolute here and now of life on our beautiful Earth. It is to redeem nature, and ourselves, through the integration (unity in diversity) of God, nature, and humanity. Evolution and human history have been ever moving toward this cosmic fulfillment.
Our divine-human destiny is the union of mind and nature in the fullness of consciousness of the magnificent present moment. It is to simultaneously live in communion and community with all our brothers and sisters on the Earth. We must become creatures of joy in living—joy in the fullness of the living, divine present. We must find joy in these pots and pans, in this rain upon the roof, in this beautiful human form, in this loving relation with others. This is the sovereignty of humanity. It is also the sovereignty of God and the redemption of nature. There can be no separation, only integration, in the unity of the mysterium magnum.
About the author:
Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. is a professor of philosophy at Radford University in Virginia and chair of its peace studies program. Dr. Martin began his peacework as a conscientious objector to the war in Vietnam. Since then he has devoted his life to the service of world peace with justice, travelling and lecturing worldwide and authoring many books and articles on behalf of a holistic and transformed global paradigm.
Among his numerous affiliations, Martin is president of International Philosophers for Peace (IPPNO) and president of the World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA). As a result of his decades of peace activities, Martin has received several international awards, including the “World Peace Award” from the Office of the World Peace Envoy in Bangkok, Thailand, 2008 and the Gusi International Peace Prize in Manila, Philippines, 2013. He has also been nominated for the Mahatma Gandhi Peace Award. His books include Millennium Dawn: The Philosophy of Planetary Crisis and Human Liberation (2005), Ascent to Freedom: Practical and Philosophical Foundations of Democratic World Law (2008), Triumph of Civilization: Democracy, Nonviolence, and the Piloting of Spaceship Earth (2010), and The Anatomy of a Sustainable World: Our Choice between Climate Change or System Change (2013).
You can follow Glen T. Martin’s work at www.oneworldrenaissance.com
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