I never really thought I write this essay.  But I think it’s necessary.

Look around you.  We live in an unprecedented era.  A time where our species has the ability to feed, cloth and shelter every one of its members, and live as the dominant species on the planet in peace.

Since the beginning of time, we have suffered.  Life it is basically a process of suffering to weed out the ineffective versions of a species.  We used to participate in that process.  Not that long ago, we too played on the same field as other species on this planet, and participated in the daily competition to feed.  We struggled make sure we could pass on progeny and to claim our piece of the experience called “Life” on a rock we all share… Earth.

But today, we live in a era where we are on the verge of resolving almost every problem that survival poses.  Even the ones that haven’t been solved yet are no longer and issue since we have in place a system we call Science.  This system studies and analyzes the nature and composure of the world around us, and makes logical conclusions.  This allows our species to evolve with a steady forward moving pace.  This is because science is based on loyalty to one universal imperative: logic.  Sometime in the not too distant future, we will be able to describe and understand every natural phenomenon, every natural process.

The key word in the sentence above is ‘sometime’.  Just as we had to understand the measurement of mass, the measurement of distance, mathematics and a whole bunch of other sciences to be able to send a 12 members of our species to our moon; we have to give time for our science to build on itself (with logic as it’s guide), to become masters of the understood universe.  Imagine if our species continued to revere science since the time of the Greeks, and progressed to the next level of it’s evolution rather than destroy itself over imaginary stories of who’s God is better.  Where we would be now?  Would we have travelled the Solar System?  Would we have understood how to preserve and create life?  Would we have served our Creator better by having respected and revered It’s creation so much so, that we would step up to the noble task of serving as the custodians of Life?

This is unfortunate is not what we are choosing.  In a a world where we can live without suffering, where we understand how to extract natural resources, where we can educate every person to the same level of knowledge, we choose to value gossip, entertainment, consumerism, and the abyss of ignorance (I just can’t bring myself to literally say it).  We have made the choice that which “jeans are in season next fall”, or “who is going to be the next American Idol?” is more important than feeding every member of our species, and making sure that every generation is better equipped to understand science so that it may evolve and progress to a higher state and respect our universe and this miracle called Life.

Look around you, in every corner of the world, you see death, destruction, financial issues, corruption, and someone saying that they are different or special compared to another human being.  We still haven’t evolved out of the level of animalism that doesn’t require the ego to be massaged with the expression of “dominance” to justify it’s importance?  Doesn’t that make you sad?  That without knowing it, we all participate in a game which is basically that we are all trying constantly to delineate our dominance over each other?  We buy clothes that identify us as separate individuals and care that we define our “image” to make sure we are perceived as individuals.  We use the material world that we have become masters at manipulating (i.e. Making clothing, machines that move us around, and buildings that condition our air, and boxes that preserve our food, and pills that kill infection, and on and on…) to prove that we are better than each other.  How you dress, what you drive, where you live and how you eat.  I am better than you.  And he is better than me.  Oh, and look, she is better than him.  Our simple animal minds still can’t expel this primitive notion of exertion of dominance in order to pass on our genes.

I say we have that opportunity.  But those who ask you to just believe, and not question… they are the ones who are stopping us from evolving.  They are the ones who are asking of you to stop your rightful place amongst the stars, and become an inter-stellar species.  One that serves to spread the gift that it’s Creator gave it… Life.  The “faith-pushers” are the ones who ask you to remain ignorant of how it all works.  That has been the battle since the beginning.

Whether history takes a turn to the right direction before it is too late for this species to shed this primitive and final step and evolve to the next level of “being” is yet to be decided.

The problem (I regret to inform you ) is that this decision, is actually in your hands.

You see.  You, me and everyone around us, are members of the modern era of the story of Homo Sapien Sapien.  Put your Bibles, Torahs, and Korans down and listen carefully.  Every generation has had this chance.  But obviously, none have heeded the task.

This generation can.  Imagine if every one us tried to elevate each other. Imagine a world where we learned from our atrocious past and didn’t kill each other because of our ignorance of each other?

We live in this world this way, because we choose to.  Thus our choices create the story.  If you bought a piece of clothing, in a store in America; with your purchase, you voted that it is okay to have another human being paid the equivalent of 10 cents to work an entire day in a factory, so that you can conveniently “choose” your “style” without effort or suffering.

We enslave each other friends.  We all do it, and we all silently agree that it is okay.  It is as Jean-Jacques Rousseau named it, we live by “The Social Contract”.

As I said, I would like to bring to your attention that we are choosing to sign this contract.  Thus our world today… our economies, our religious debates, our racist positions, and many of our other problems.  That is because as science has shown us, taking the time to understand a problem with logical analysis only, we are rewarded with the ability to solve that problem.  The fact that we still have these simple problems, and more, shows how we have turned back, and decided to look the other way from science, and cover our eyes with superstition and mystical ideas.

And so we head down the splendid path of “the species that could, but never did.”  Everyone has heard of stories of the people of Atlantis, a long lost civilization what was supposedly much more advanced than we are?  We hear stories of the end of the world, and 2012.  We have become accustomed to the idea that the end is coming?  Why is that?  Why isn’t it possible for us to learn, and evolve.  Use our science to figure out interplanetary travel, and spread life to the corners of our galaxy?  We did this when we chose to leave our countries on a boat made of wood to discover what’s out there across the ocean.  Why did we stop?  Did we explore the entire planet so that once we occupied every corner of it, we could build as many Gaps, Star-Bucks and McDonald’s we could?  I think not?

Something is stopping us.  Our social contract is broken and needs to be replaced.

We’ve had 10,000 years of civilization to figure this out, and we still fight and bicker and conquer each other to prove our dominance.  Don’t you feel it’s time we grew up?

Could it be possible that we wind up like the characters of the stories we hear like Atlantis?  I mean even if the outlandish idea of Atlantis doesn’t resonate with you, history presents us with 6 different “Civilizations” (i.e. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Persians, and Mongols) that ruled their worlds, and disappeared to prove that this model needs to change.

We are doing the same thing.  Over and over.

I makes me sad when I meet people and I talk about these things, that they look at me with bewilderment and amazement at the same time, and ask… “Wow… it is nice to see people who think this way are out there”.  I think to myself, it’s in every one of us.  If we only took the time to come outside at night, and look up at the stars and wonder what goes on out there, we would contemplate these things.  I’m not different than the others, I only choose to open my eyes and look.

Maybe if we all thought of our species, Life, and our planet with a different level of respect, there would be more people having this conversation and things would be different in our world right tomorrow.

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