For those who value the personal spiritual journey over organized religion.
Excerpt
Perhaps once upon a time it seemed foolishly idealistic to imagine a truly just and peaceable world. But we are a generation that knows it to be an absolute imperative if our species is to have a livable future. We’ve learned that garbage dumped off the coast of New Jersey ends up polluting the North Sea, that injustice in the Middle East brings terrorism to new York City, that economic policy in China affects Wal-Mart prices in America, that you can’t stop AIDS in Chicago without stopping it in Uganda. The planet Earth pays no attention to national boundaries; therefore, outmoded notions of sovereignty must give way to new mechanisms for common security and global well-being.
No group has seen the imperative for new ways of thinking more clearly than those who have seen the Earth from space. They formed the Association of Space Explorers to alert humanity to what they learned by looking back at our small, blue and green planet floating against the black backdrop of space. One of them, the American astronaut, Russell Schweickart, wrote: “You go around it in an hour and a half. …You look down there and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross again and again and again, and you don’t even see them…hundreds of people killing each other over some imaginary line that you’re not even aware of, that you can’t see. And from where you see it the thing is a whole and is so beautiful; and you wish you could take one in each hand and say, ‘Look! Look at it from this perspective, look at that!’…From where you see it, the thing is a whole and is so beautiful….”
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Humanity’s next great step forward is to cultivate a sense of planetary patriotism, in which we understand ourselves to be citizens not of one country alone, but of Earth.
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Copyright 2010 Richard Watts. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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