Global Values
A New Paradigm for a New World
by Karin Miller
I. Unity
Our diversity is a celebration of all that is. Together, we are whole.
Imagine all living things as one human body. The body started out whole, complete, and healthy, but over time it has broken down. The parts have become isolated from each other, and the whole has become fragmented. The immune system is now weakened, and the body has many diseases. War, terrorism, tyranny, climate change, pollution, poverty, and all the other maladies we are experiencing are diseases of the body of life. These diseases are putting our ecosystems— and the entire planet—under great stress. They have truly become a matter of life and death. Now, more than ever, we need to overcome the dysfunction we have created by remembering the unity, oneness, and connectedness of all things.
Our current paradigm supports and encourages separation and isolation, and it is causing great individual and global pain. The body of life is suffering, and the pain we are all feeling is its way of telling us to choose again. It is as if it is shouting at us, "Don’t do that!" as we jump out of the frying pan and into the fire. Fortunately, darkness and pain can help us learn and grow. The eventual solutions to the problems caused by our old, misguided actions will likely cause us to change our ways. In other words, when we join together in unity and act as one for the benefit of all life, we will evolve and cure the diseases of the body of life.
The way we live today is harmful for us as individuals, for other living beings, and of course for the natural world. The tapestry of life has been shredded, and it is now a tangled mess of threads. Rather than weaving our tapestry into an intricate masterpiece that reflects the beauty of all life, we have pulled it apart. The future of the tapestry depends on our intentions. We can carry on living with our tangled mess and risk the demise of humanity. Or, in unity, we can weave the tapestry of life back together again—we can create sustainable ways of being that respect and reflect the diversity of all creation, and support the whole.
Some people reject the value of unity—and unity consciousness—because they think it means losing their individuality. This is not the case. Unity is not uniformity. It does not seek to make everyone conform to one mold or one way of being, and it does not mean forcing anyone to accept a single viewpoint. Unity is a coming together of individuals to repair the tapestry of life. It is a weaving together of the many diverse aspects of creation into a cohesive whole. Together, we can support each other in a beautifully balanced society, like a cloth woven of many types of individual threads that is much stronger than any individual strand on its own.
Embracing unity will allow us to overcome our isolation and separation—as individuals and societies. When we value unity, we respect, and live in balance with, other forms of life and our environment. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet tells us that, "Today, more than ever before, life must be characterized by a sense of universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to human, but also human to other forms of life." This message is vital because we are one interconnected body of life, and our actions affect all other living things.
What sort of future will we choose to create? Will we act in fear—from our constricted, isolated, and narrow viewpoints? Or will we join with the many diverse cultures, communities, and viewpoints that surround us? By embracing unity, and unity consciousness, humanity can weave together all the dark and light threads, the coarse fibers and the smooth silks, the bulky yarns and the finest filaments to create a tapestry of life that embodies the great contrast and sublime beauty of all creation.
Many people believe that peace is the solution to the world’s problems, but peace is not a means, it is the end result of valuing and living in unity. Peace comes from a realization of the oneness and interconnection of all creation—a realization that the separation and isolation we experience are illusions—and understanding that each person’s thoughts and actions have an effect on all things. Peace is the product of unity consciousness and the love that arises from it. It cannot arise out of fear. When we act in fear we produce violence and separation, and we pull at the threads of the tapestry of life.
With unity consciousness, we can become a source of healing—repairing the rifts in the tapestry of life. In valuing unity we step into the shoes of others, see the world from their perspectives, and we respect their needs. The love we generate when we operate as one can change the world. Together, we can become whole and complete once again, and live in peace.
The Industrial Revolution and cultural individualism
The Industrial Revolution began in the late 18th century with the advent of new manufacturing processes and continued through the mid-20th century when society began to shift from industrialization to an economy based on digitized information. During that period of industrialization, society saw great innovations in the areas of textiles, transportation, and iron making (to name a few), resulting in great wealth and abundance in society. The Industrial Revolution spurred major advances in every aspect of life imaginable—technology, manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, communications, engineering, banking, medicine, education, and art.
These changes had a profound effect on Western culture, and on cultures across the world. People migrated from rural to urban environments, often alone and separated from their families. The small home office was replaced by the office building. Many workers moved from farms, small workshops, and cottage industries into large factories. However, surrounded as they were by many other workers, they were often isolated, anonymous cogs in the machines of industry. As technology increased, so did cultural individualism and the belief that we can all make it on our own if we can just work a bit harder and stay in the game.
There is no doubt that these changes allowed societies to achieve great material success, and individuals to benefit from new conveniences, abundance, and wealth. However, with these gains, society in certain respects may have lost sight of the bigger picture. Many of us have become disconnected: both from the majesty and beauty of nature, and also from the people who share our environment. Today, people work in massive business and industrial parks and huge steel and concrete towers—often isolated in cubicles. Through technological innovation we have become masters of categorizing, labeling, differentiating, and compartmentalizing things in order to combine them in new and interesting ways. While this most certainly has its benefits, these tendencies have also led to a predominant worldview based on isolation, separation, and cultural individualism. From this myopic viewpoint, it is very hard even to imagine the unity and oneness of all things.
We have scaled the heights. Now what?
Imagine that you trained your whole life to climb a mountain. You learned about mountaineering, you built-up your strength and practical skills, and you got very good at adapting to the changeable weather on the mountain. Through hard work and perseverance, you finally attained your goal. You climbed the mountain, reached the summit, and now you are standing at the peak. Surprisingly, as you look out at the panoramic view, you find that you are terribly afraid of this new height. You want to bend or sit down to maintain your stability. You were not scared during the ascent. So why are you afraid now that you have reached your goal? You realize that you were so focused on getting to the top—and ensuring the safety of each foothold and step— you did not have time to think, or look around or down, as you pushed upward. Now at the peak of the mountain, your stomach sinks. You are terrified of the height, and all you can do is look down at the ground as the wind swirls around you.
This scenario may sound unrealistic, but many of us are living in this way. We work as hard as we can to achieve success in life. We climb mountains and aim for the top. Our ability to focus on the task at hand has brought us to new heights previously thought impossible. We have reached the peak of material success, and some of us have abundance and personal comfort beyond our wildest dreams.
Our focus and determination may have served us well to achieve our personal goals. Yet, many of us with such abundance find ourselves feeling alone and isolated on our mountain tops of achievement. We have traveled so high— with such a narrow view—we have lost sight of the broader landscape. Valuing individualism has made us strong, and driven us to climb mountains, but if we forget our larger context in the body of life, we can find ourselves separated from and perhaps at odds with the whole of humanity, our environment, and all living things.
Many of us are now ready for a new approach, one that will push us to grow beyond ourselves and our past peaks of success. We may feel paralyzed with fear looking down from this height, but moving forward can be as simple as shifting our perspective. If we muster the courage to look up from the ground, we see the vast beauty of the panorama of life that surrounds us. From this new point of view, we see people who have reached the peaks of other mountains, and those who are traveling at all elevations. We see the plants and birds and animals all playing their vital roles in the balance of the ecosystem. When we look up at the night sky we see endless stars, and we imagine what lies beyond us in the greatness of the universe.
Our world changes in an instant when we recognize the vast diversity of life around us. When we take in the beauty of all life, our mental paradigm of separation and isolation begins to shift. We recognize that we are not solitary players in the game of life. We are on a giant team, and each of us, and all life, has a role to play. If we want to give our team the best possible chance of success, then we must be team players, and we must value, include, and depend on all our team members.
From this new point of view, we realize that the values that pushed us as individuals are important, but they are only pieces of a greater puzzle. With a broader perspective, we see that we all inhabit many interconnected systems— ecosystems, societies, religions, cultures, workplaces, sports teams, families—that are all part of an enormous system. In heightened consciousness, we begin to understand and value the unity and interconnectedness of the universe. We recognize that—together with all of creation—we are whole.
Is it really just a matter of changing our perspective? Yes. Is it easy? No. The shift from an individual perspective to a unity perspective is like moving from a belief that the Earth is the center of the universe to a knowledge that the Earth revolves around the Sun, our star, and that our solar system is in a minor spiral arm—the Orion Spur—of the Milky Way galaxy that contains an estimated 200-400 billion stars, many of which have their own planets. As we expand our perspective, we realize that not only does our galaxy contain billions of stars and planets, but it is estimated that there are billions of galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in the observable universe. This change in perspective from the micro to the macro—from the parts to the whole—is a monumental shift, but it is certainly possible. Just as we can expand our vision in our mind’s eye from the Earth to the whole universe, we can also expand our view of ourselves to see our lives in the context of the whole body of life.
Our individualism has enabled us to accomplish amazing things, but valuing unity will take us further. When we view the Earth from outer space, there are no boundaries between countries and people are so small that we are not even visible. Humans are minuscule in the grand scheme of the cosmos, but we have great power to create in the universe. By recognizing what we all have in common—we are all just part of this big blue marble floating through space for starters—we can unify to create and achieve much greater things than we could ever achieve or create individually. We can choose to design a better future together. When we are unified, we have the power to live and create in sustainable ways that support the whole body of life.
We are one
As humans, we appear to be completely separate from each other, other forms of life, and matter—but things are not always as they appear. Absolutely everything comes from a single source of matter and energy that was at one time an integrated whole. The atoms in us today have been in many bodies and things, and they will continue to be used in other bodies and things long after we are gone. This is also true of the energy that animates us. Energy cannot be destroyed, and the life force that energizes us as individuals will energize other living things after we die. Science is making major strides toward finding empirical proof of our connectedness, but even without getting into advanced physics, it is obvious we are not completely separate, discrete individuals.
It is theorized that in the beginning everything was a singularity—perhaps of infinite density and energy and zero mass—and the Big Bang caused a great fragmentation of the whole, setting things in motion. The original oneness inflated out into what we now know as the universe or cosmos. In the process of inflating, all the original matter separated and then joined together again to form stars, planets, moons, comets, galaxies, and everything else in the known universe. On our own planet, life arose, or arrived, and from those first cells came all life—unicellular microorganisms, bacteria, plants, and animals.
Atoms are the chemical building blocks of all organic and inorganic matter. All the atoms that make up everything on Earth were once part of a star—a celestial body outside our solar system. This means that each atom is very, very old. As Carl Sagan wrote in The Cosmic Connection: "All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star. We are made of star-stuff." Various combinations of different atoms create the molecules that make up everything, including the cells in the human body. For example: the human body contains molecules of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, chlorine, sodium, and magnesium (and trace amounts of many other elements); the proteins that make up spider silk are made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen; the primary chemical components of carbon-manganese steel are carbon, manganese, and iron; and the building blocks of wood are carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen.
Humans are made from atoms that have been cycling and recycling through the universe for billions of years. The atoms in us have been in other organic and inorganic compositions, and when they leave our body they will become part of new bodies and materials. All living beings are constantly taking in and losing atoms. Plants take in carbon and oxygen in the form of carbon dioxide and release oxygen. Every time we inhale we take in atoms of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and carbon (along with anything else that might be in the atmosphere), and when we exhale we lose carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms. We take in atoms when we eat, and we lose atoms when we expel our waste. We lose skin cells and hair during the course of each day, and we continue losing atoms after we die. Depending on our religion, societal norms, and laws, the atoms in our body will usually be disbursed after death by cremation or decomposition, and used again and again in other living bodies and things.
According to the First Law of Thermodynamics, energy cannot be created or destroyed; it either changes form or is redistributed. When a living body dies, the energy it had is not entirely lost. Our bodies are animated by energy: the sinoatrial node sends electrical impulses to the heart to keep it beating; neurons in the brain produce electrical impulses that regulate and enable everything else a body does. This energy is not destroyed when a body comes to the end of its life. It does not matter if we call this energy a soul, spirit, or life force, or if we believe it is simply the result of physical and chemical reactions. The energy continues on, like a chorus of cosmic vibrations, transferring from one thing to the next in the flow of life.
When two things appear to be completely different, it may seem inconceivable they come from, or are connected to, the same source. However, everything arose from a single source of matter and energy. We are all connected on an atomic level, and whether we realize it or not, we are all part of one body of life.
Oneness and the Collatz conjecture
When we are aware of the oneness and connectedness of all creation, we begin to notice it everywhere. What goes on at the smallest level in life reflects and is connected to what goes on at the universal level of life, and the whole is reflected microcosmically in all its parts. This is nicely illustrated by an atom. It is no coincidence that the electrons circling the nucleus of an atom look like a solar system. An atom is made up of a nucleus and subatomic particles that appear to be separate—atoms are 99.9999% space—but an atom is a single unit. So it is with us and all of creation. Despite the seeming divisions between everything, we are all connected and integral parts of a single whole.
The whole can be seen mathematically with the Collatz conjecture that states we can start with any natural number (positive integer) and get back to one. If the number is even, divide it by two. If the number is odd, multiply it by three and add one. By continuing this process with each resulting number, we eventually return to the number one. The number of times the process is repeated to reach one is the "oneness" of the number. For example, the oneness of three is seven, and it is calculated as follows: 3 x 3 = 9, and 9 + 1 = 10; 10 ÷ 2 = 5; 5 x 3 = 15, and 15 + 1 = 16; 16 ÷ 2 = 8; 8 ÷ 2 = 4; 4 ÷ 2 = 2; and 2 ÷ 2 = 1. There is no way to determine if the Collatz conjecture is true for all natural numbers without running the sequence into infinity, but the probability of it being true is very high.
In a reflection of the connectedness of the universe, the Collatz conjecture shows us that all natural numbers point back to one. The number one is the building block of all natural numbers, and by adding one to itself again and again we get all natural numbers into infinity. One creates many from one, and yet, by using a simple procedure, we can return to the original one—the single, necessary whole that natural numbers depend on for their existence. The number one represents a single set of infinite numbers in the same way oneness, or unity, can represent us as a collective whole and as whole individuals.
Unity consciousness
None of us would be here without the Big Bang—that first great fragmentation of the whole that set things in motion in our universe. Life took hold on Earth and grew strong, and cycles of life and death have been repeating ever since. All living things, with their individual characteristics and uniqueness, will follow the same path back to our source. Death is the inescapable rule of the game of life, and it is that which all living things have in common. However, it is important to recognize that whole ecosystems can perish just as individuals do. Our illusion of separation and isolation from the whole is the cause of pain, disease, stress, and dysfunction spreading through the body of life, and our survival as a species is in jeopardy. This illusion allows us to live in ways that hurt the whole, because we think that damaging something over there is not going to affect us over here. As we are beginning to see, however, this is not the case— many environmental ecosystems, political movements and economies have demonstrated interconnectedness on a global scale. With connections made manifest through new technologies, we can now realize our impact, both positive and negative, at unprecedented speeds.
If we want a healthy future for all life on our planet, we must remember that we are one. We are made of the same stuff—the same atoms, the same chemicals, the same energy throughout the universe. We are all cells in the great body of life called the universe, and we cannot separate ourselves from it. That which damages the whole also damages us.
Now is the time to come together in unity—in unity consciousness—to act together for the benefit of all life. We can take our time, and endure great pain, or we can change our minds now and evolve to a new way of being. The longer we wait to embrace our unity, the longer we will suffer. How much more we will suffer is up to us.
Our awakening from the illusion of separation, and our recognition of our oneness, will signal a distinct new evolutionary phase of humanity. Today we have the opportunity to expand our perspective and our consciousness. When we remember the interconnected nature of all life— when we understand that all life is one—we will begin to be, think, and operate in new ways. Life is beckoning us to do this for our own survival and evolution of consciousness. Together, we can weave the tapestry of life into an amazing masterpiece beyond anything we ever imagined possible.
When we awaken from the illusion of separation we know we are all interconnected and united as one, and we understand that all our actions affect the whole, including us as individuals. The phrase "you get what you give" makes sense in the context of unity consciousness because, if we are all one, our actions actually affect us directly. As previously mentioned, energy is never created or destroyed; it is only transferred. When energy is transferred from one person to another in the form of a good deed, a gap is left in the giver that attracts an equally good deed to take its place. Other people will do good back to that person. When energy is transferred in the form of hatred or greed, a gap of hatred or greed is created, ready to be filled. Another way of looking at it would be to say like attracts like. When we live in unity, with love, compassion, and understanding at the foundation of our actions, we in turn give love, compassion, and understanding back to ourselves. When we work to heal and nurture all life, we are healing and nurturing ourselves.
The good news is that unity will triumph over separation regardless of our understanding and actions. There is a clear pattern and a natural order that all things follow, whether we realize it or not. In fact, unity has already prevailed. All things are already unified as a vast body of life. It was and ever will be. Nothing we do or neglect to do will change this fact. It is just a matter of time before we recognize and realize our unity. That said, we have the ability to shorten or lengthen the time it takes for humanity to awaken to our unity, value it, and match our values to our actions. The longer we choose to take before awakening, the more suffering there will be.