Us Vs. Them: And We All Fall Down!

 

image credit: Andraz Lazic on Unsplash

Us versus them--that is the essence of the civilized, industrialized, fractured world.

It is the absolute antithesis of the pantheistic nature of spirituality and spiritual aspiration. The pantheistic sees everything natural as “us,” indistinguishable from “us” and therefore an integral part of the Universal whole and the param-atman: The Supreme Atman, the Source, the Primordial Energy from where we came and into which we will, ultimately, merge.

Sustainable development is only possible when we realize the interdependence of every atom that participates in the expanding and contracting of the Universes.

Sustainable development comes from the spirituality of the recognition of the oneness of the Universe; of the knowledge that the same string ties the entirety of creation together and that a tug here is bound to create a pull someplace else.

This knowledge is instinctive in animals and seemed to be visceral in all ancient and tribal societies. This knowledge was elaborately articulated by our ancestors and became part of our organized religions and of our traditional spiritual learning process.

The blame game of who destroyed the world and who is destroying nature’s pristine quality needs to be replaced by a loving concern for the biodiversity of the ecosystems.

We need to ask ourselves if we should be able to denude the world of its natural foliage. Can we strip it of all its natural resources just to ensure higher levels of self-gratification?

Can we bereave the world of all the flora and fauna assuming that the world was created just to make humankind happy?

Did the problem originate with organized religions which assume that the homo sapiens is God’s preferred creature and that the world’s resources were all created for the pleasure and development of this favored animal made by God “in his own image?”

Believing this, we destroy the natural habitat of other creatures as if their existence is only situational. God’s “lesser” creatures are lost and exploited and driven to extinction.

The same intolerance grows within the species as it were, and we begin discriminating against the poorer ones, the darker ones, the shorter ones, the ones with names unlike ours, the ones with facial features that look different…

The class divide, caste divide, religious divide, racial divide, political divide, the international divide between the East and the West, and the North and the South are all manifestations of a complex: the privileged are happy and they have everything to lose in allowing the less privileged to share their happiness or wealth.

Us versus Them is the mantra of success. Us versus Them is how we claw to the top of the food chain. Only, we're not satisfied just getting to the top. We must have it all. All of it. Every bit.

So much for Sustainable Development.
And we all fall down.