The first stage of knowing real Peace is awakening to our innate & irrevocable Oneness … The first stage of awakening to our innate & irrevocable Oneness is setting aside our beliefs & convictions & “knowledge” — even if just for an instant — to open our minds in Humility; to consider a Universe far grander, a life far more scintillating, and an awareness thereof far more priceless than anything we have heretofore imagined.

And the first step into that required exuding of humbleness is the choice to see — to truly SEE — that we are anything but alone in our Universe, and that we are very far indeed from becoming the stewards thereof; that all our conflicts & concerns & worries & wars — all our debates & dramas & amassings & arguments — don’t really mean that much; that they are certainly not worth fighting over — and most definitely not worth killing or even hurling insult.

Yes, the very first step on the Way to Peace, my Friends, is realizing the uncomfortable Truth that — despite all our sensible doubts & reasonable disappointments & understandable furies — our lives, and indeed nothing within them, are truly not at all “about us”.

“Look again at that image of our Earth; look again and see it for what it is in the grander scheme of things: a pale blue dot. That’s here … That’s home … That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and our suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and every coward, every creator and every destroyer of every civilization, every king and every peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals and every corrupt politician, … every saint and every sinner in the history of our species lived here — on this mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” ~ inspired by Carl Sagan

“After millennia of philosophical debate, the issue was settled decisively in favor of the plurality of worlds. They might be profoundly different from our planet. None of them might be as congenial for life. But the Earth was hardly the only one … But by the nineteenth century, observational astronomy had made it clear that the Sun is but one lonely star in a great self-gravitating assemblage of suns called the Milky Way Galaxy. Far from being at the center of the Galaxy, our Sun with its entourage of dim and tiny planets lies in an undistinguished sector of an obscure spiral arm … [And today], some modern deep sky photographs show more galaxies beyond the Milky Way than stars within the Milky Way. Every one of them is an island universe containing perhaps a hundred billion suns. Such an image is a profound sermon on humility … We could not have known beforehand that the evidence would be, so repeatedly and thoroughly, incompatible with the proposition that human beings are at center stage in the Universe. But most of the debates have now been settled decisively in favor of a position that, however painful, can be encapsulated in a single sentence: We have not been given the lead in the cosmic drama. Perhaps someone else has — Perhaps no one else has … In either case, we have good reason for humility.” ~ Carl Sagan

 

Filed under: Wisdoms from the Journey by Scaughdt