A Call to Unity
What have we to gain?
Within the whole of human history, we find numerous stories, mostly in religious thought, recounting the emergence of a Utopia or Paradise on Earth. Each passing generation longs for a return to a time, generally before their own, in which people are gentler and times are less chaotic. If you extrapolate such a sentiment back in time, you can make your own inference the beginning of human history was much more harmonious and far less antagonistic. Indeed, religions hearken to an Eden, an idyllic place of human origins where everything was in harmony.
What we learn from all the tellings of “Paradise Lost”, humans engaged in a selfish mode of behavior causing a loss of the original harmony. The tragedy is we lost the original purpose of our lives, to live in a state of complete joy. However, we had not achieved the necessary ingredient to making the joy durable: understanding. We, like children, were unable to appreciate our role in the state of joy; the only way we could come to this appreciation is to lose it. This is humanity’s greatest triumph because the seeds of perfection were planted at the moment of our loss.
We were given the chance to rebuild Eden. What we fail or neglect to appreciate, however, that prevents us from achieving this mission, is all disharmony and chaos arise from us! In other words, what we see in our world is because we fail to unite with one another, to love one another, to see the mystery of perfection in one another. Imagine…for…one…moment. Imagine if our selfishness, our wanton greed, our unmitigated hunger for self-aggrandizement could be channeled to loving one another. What would we have?
We would no longer subject to chaos, to agony, to pain, and, yes, even to death. Perhaps I am a dreamer, but the truth of this deduction from the first principles of this essay rings very true. What if we decided to accept it for only one day? What have we to lose? Better, what have we to gain?
