Humans As Humans
"I always believe we are the same; we are all human beings, Wherever I meet people, I always have the feeling that I am encountering another human being, just like myself." "The need for simple human-to-human relationships is becoming increasingly urgent . . . Today the world is smaller and smaller and more interdependent."
-His Holiness The Dalai Lama
I have chosen to call the irreducible, primary characteristic of each and all of us "the human of our lives." It is both a shared characteristic and the deepest fact of our individual lives -beyond all polarities. And to be a human is not to be reduced to anything. (It describes, for example, as does no other concept, both our material characteristics and our participation in the transcendent.) As humans, we encompass and yet go beyond our myriad unique qualities. Take away the human, focus only on our differences, and our lives are like a broken mirror -fractured, distorted and incomplete. Our institutions become like automatons, so reflexively involved in their own roles and survival, and in their limited specializations, that they too often treat us as cogs or fragments within their structures; and even their best efforts are often ineffectual or carry unintentionally ruinous downsides. Culturally, most or all of us have habituated to identify with, and act from, fragments of "the mirror" rather than our shared humanness. The tacit condition of the human as the primary, irreducible fact of our lives underlies all of the great initiatives toward peace, prosperity, sustainability and genuine human happiness -not only at the macro (world) level but at the micro (individual, family, workplace) level. Without the human, most all of our energy is spent on the endless defense of turf and the building of fortifications against often mutually perceived threats. Through fearful preoccupation with misconceived "self-protection", which effectively translates into threats against the "other", we create, willy-nilly, an unsustainable existence for ourselves and for our planet, to the neglect of our most vital shared priorities -and even denial of our actual lives as humans.The human is thus the sine qua non of all genuine success. And yet -in the very name of success -the world's cultures, media, institutions and nation-states are so preoccupied with reflexive responses to clashing priorities that they tend to tragically overlook the human.
