Reflections on the Common Destiny of Humanity | by Moji Saberin, M.D.

As I am reading Robert Atkinson’s book “The Story of our Time; from Duality to Interconnectedness to Oneness” I am pondering the importance of meaningful conversations, such as Krista Tippet’s “civil conversations” that need to take place in order to widen the stratosphere of the mind across the globe and make the knowledge of our common humanity a realization throughout all strata of society.

If we compare the four billion years of the history of our solar system to the distance of a mile, we see homo sapiens appearing 200,000 years ago, which is equivalent to less than an inch within this mile. During this span of time our ancestors came to successively see themselves as members of a family, a tribe, a village, a city, and a nation. The process of nation building has ended, and our world has in the past century and a half shrunk to a global village. We all breathe the same air, and we have become literally inter-connected economically, financially, scientifically, as well as through transportation and instant communication. We have had the opportunity to see our common fatherland from outer space.

This realization of our oneness will have revolutionary consequences in how we view the members of our human family and how we conduct the affairs of society and the entire world. Could it be that the stubborn adherence to outdated and outworn philosophical attitudes and institutional structures that are no longer capable of sustaining a world that is crying out for new ways of thinking and living is creating chaos and confusion and preventing humanity from achieving its long awaited maturity in its collective evolution?

Once we strip away the accidental parts of our beings such as zip code, skin color, religion, ethnicity, gender, earthly possessions, and recognize that, after our short span on earth, none of that really matters, and that in the end our essence is our soul, we will not be able to accept anything short of a civilization where each human is given their due dignity and rights.

To this end, conversations between people are necessary in order to bridge the imaginary gap between what we thought to be “us” and “them”.

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

~Albert Einstein, 1950