Things have changed.  Technologic advancement is exponential.  Two generations ago, we discovered how to harness electricity; one generation ago we built tubes that emit light and deliver pictures into our living rooms; now we have ½ inch thick pocket sized devices that not only allow us to communicate via radio waves, but allow us to view moving pictures wherever we want on the planet, access the masterpiece of human communal connectivity (the internet) and carry computing power more than that of servers a decade ago in our pockets… iPhones.

Our world is a becoming a different place faster and faster.  Our consciousness is changing to adapt with these new times.  Most of what a 7 year old child who lived 3 generations ago learned, was comprised of 90% of what most of the generations before it learned.  Now, a first grade child learns to interact with devices and machines that the adults of it’s generation have a hard time catching up to and utilizing efficiently (if you wonder about this, just visit the genius bar at any local Apple store and listen in on the conversations).

The speed of our conscious development when we are children in the new world matches that of our technologic development.  When you lay out the entire modern human existence on this planet in a graph, and plot the advancements of technology in relation to time, we would observe a logarithmic curve.  As time goes by, our knowledge adds to itself exponentially.  Like ants working together, we compound our knowledge and scurry along the superhighway of technologic advancement.  We build ideas on top of ideas and merge technologies to advance our state of being in this world to a level where no other organism has.  Humans in such a short time of evolutionary development have developed the ability to (physically) travel off of their home planet and to see beyond their own star system (the solar system).  We have the ability to heal and protect ourselves from infection and virus.  We have developed the ability to mechanically do what other life forms on the planet can do naturally, i.e. fly, see in the dark, swim underwater.  We have even technologically beat the limits of travel and speed.  We have the ability to harness energy from natural resources, and to harness one of the great natural forces (electricity). 

Our brain; the unique gift that nature has given us, gives us the ability to dream and create things that other organisms cannot.  But how does this compare to the natural gifts that our fellow earthlings have inherited?  Are we that much better? 

As a scientist, an artist and a philosopher, I marvel at the achievements of humanity.  I have been fortunate to have access to an education in many of these topics.  Like most of you, I am fortunate to have destiny place me in such circumstances that I was given the opportunity to read, understand, and learn about these topics.  Learning about the inner workings of the human body, the inner workings of atoms, and chemicals.  Learning physics, astronomy, philosophy, sociology, and biology… and of course the universal language of the universe, mathematics.  These opportunities have given me the ability to appreciate the intricacies of the workings of the world we live in, and the technologic contributions we created for our lives, and their context in relation to this world. 

Almost like a connoisseur, trained to appreciate the subtleties of a fine wine; once this knowledge has been passed onto you, the way you see the world, and what it means, changes forever.

So I look into the workings of all the facets of science, and its relevance and context in how this relates to our physical world.  How are we better than other earthlings?  How have we beat them in the game of survival, and evolutionary advancement?

With every model I observe, we have intrinsically lost one very important component that other earthlings still possess… balance.  We lack balance. 

Like a viral process that cares nothing of what happens to it’s host, we replicate and lean on the crutch of our technology to save us from the disease process we manifest in our host.  We have an idea.  We develop it.  We advance because of it, and remove ourselves from one of the hardships of what is called life. Every idea we develop removes one more hardship.

Living is hard.  As philosopher Thomas Hobbes discussed, to live in the natural world is a brutish and dangerous proposition.  Any person who has lived in nature for an extended period of time without any technologic assistance knows, living as a part of the food chain, “within” the food chain, is hard.  But as we advance, we remove the stressors on our existence, allowing us to replicate further.  Like a virus that mutates, we develop “work arounds” for life’s inconveniences. 

Disease, we’re working on it. 

Life span, we’ve doubled it. 

Geographic limitation, we’ve engineered around it. 

Genetic deformities, we cracked it’s code and are now putting the pieces together. 

This all adds up to more humans, living longer, and in more places than ever before in the entire history of the planet.  No other animal can do this in such short a time.  To be able to populate the entire planet, and organism needs to pass through their natural evolutionary rites of passage for each selective factor.  This process can take generations if not more.  But we, because of technology, have access to a shortcut. 

The result is your life.  Look around you.  Look at all the things you see and use, but don’t truly acknowledge.  Think of the engineering and scientific advancements that went into your car.  Or your cellphone?  How about the vaccines that you have on board?  Imagine for one minute, having to depend on the sun, the land, the weather and your learned skill, to grow food?  In today’s world , if you are hungry, you get into a moving box (a car), which at the flick of a key, burns the remains of decomposed life-forms from millions of years ago (oil), which moves you to your food source without any effort from you (minus the effort to steer the thing).  Then you give the clerk a piece of paper (money) and in return, you are given food. 

Some of the that food is grown from the earth, and unfortunately some of it, is another earthling.  Another sentient being.  Another being that has been living, and competing in the game of life, for millions of years, just as we have.  But now, instead of having to earn the right (hunt) to consume this life, we have the technology to “grow” or raise them in captivity for our own ends.  So eating is now easy, compared to what humans would have to know and do just 100 years ago; this has significant philosophic and sociologic implications.

So we consume and adopt technology without giving any thought to how it effects our world, how it effects our sociology, or our relationship to our home.  Technology has the answer, if things go bad, we can fix it. 

We are now at a pivotal moment in history.  I have given some thought to our course in time.  Thinking about the major forks in the road for human development, for my own understanding, I have organized our time in this world into four general stages of evolution.  I also call these revolutions since each of these steps revolutionized the state of our lives in our world. 

Regardless of your religious or scientific beliefs, humanity first underwent a physical evolution.  This movement from our primate ancestors to human (if your an evolutionist), or spirit form to human (if your are a creationist), signified the first appearance of the human being on the stage of life.  It didn’t take long for us to undergo the second, and very important intellectual evolution.  This stage happened a few hundred years ago, and humanity developed a place for education, and the reverence of art (universities and museums).  We began to proliferate our knowledge and technology in an institutionalized form, schools and colleges.  This then led to the third evolutionary stage of human advancement, the industrial evolution.  This important stage is where we combined our technologic and intellectual products and our physical abilities to create machines, that world carry the burden of work for us.  No longer did we depend on the sun for light, or the ox to move the earth.  Humanity was freeing itself from the chains of physical labor.  But the fourth and most important stage is yet to come.  We have yet to experience the spiritual evolution. 

Although we have the ability to send tons of steel into the air and carry a payload of humans safely from one side of our world to another, we still cannot agree on a 2% difference of opinion in our religious views, in our political views or our economics views.  Despite this immense history of advancement, we are still primitive primates bashing each other in the head for possession of material goods, natural resources, or the right to pass on our genes.  We are still no better than our fellow earthlings.  Competing on a simple level, waging war against each other, and arguing over ideas that are figments of our imagination.  Ideas that ultimately have no real bearing on the actual world we live in.  As we fight and bicker, we forget about the damage we are doing to our host, our home, our earth. 

Despite our now complete acknowledgement of shortages of oil and the potential to run out of oil in the next generation, we justify using millions of gallons of it to power our fighter planes, our tanks, and our machinery to get our soldiers to where we need to be, to fight the wars we need to fight.  Human beings have lost balance. 

Leo Tolstoy said, “As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields”.  We have lost the connection with the very spirit that connects each and every one of us.  We have lost the ability to understand and relate to each other as a unit.  Hence our inability to see why it is not okay for us to live in a society where we spend more money on fighting each other, than we do on educating each other. 

This is not limited to our nation, but all nations.  This discussion is about the human nation.  Our beautiful, expansive, but primitive brains, cannot contain these two ideals together: technologic advancement and love each other and our world.  So we advance, we evolve, and we harm each other, and rape our world. 

I find it fascinating that not only does our disconnect from nature manifest itself in our apparent way of life, but it permeates into our death.  We do not allow for our bodies, our final, and only contribution to nature, to go back to nature.  We bury ourselves in boxes and separate our physical being from nature indefinitely.  So if you were solve the human vs. Nature equation, the solution would be one that yields a net negative for every human that was born.  Since every human that is born now, does not go back into  the natural order of things.  So our consciousness now believes this lie that we are separate from nature so deeply, that we do not question our idea of death and what happens to our bodies (exclusive of those who might want to be cremated and put back into nature).

My intention behind writing this essay is not to degrade humanity or insult our marvelous ability to create and shape tools.  Rather, it is to put into perspective the derailment that we are undergoing from our fourth and very important revolutionary stage.  To achieve our spiritual evolution, we need to cling onto the idea that despite our ideologic differences, we are one living organism.  Harming each other only harms ourselves.  We need to realize that we were given these amazing brains to observe, and to learn.  My grandfather used to tell me that we are given 2 ears and 1 mouth (although I still talk more than I should).  Our awareness of each other, not just human, but of all earthlings, needs to elevate so we an evolve past this brutal and primitive notion of fighting at every opportunity we differ.

Our fellow earthlings may lack the ability to develop technology like we do, but they understand the importance of “not extending their feet, beyond their blankets”.  Will we learn this in our generation?  Are we; YOU and I, the ones who will be responsible for giving this final stage of evolution to humankind?  Is it going to be us, that delivers humanity from it’s twisted history of fighting and bickering? 

The next time you open your eyes, and use anything that you bought, anything that was made in a factory, anything that was prepared for you, or eat anything YOU didn’t grow or kill, think about this?  Are you doing justice to the thousands of years before you that built up to having these things?  Are you acting every day in a way to spread the ideas of spiritual evolution to your fellow human beings?  Do you effect other people in a way that opens their eyes and let’s them effect other people?  Or do you live a life of a consumer... buying what is needed to sustain your life (and lifestyle), until you expire? 

We live in a wonderful world, and I urge you to take an exit once in a while, let the beauty of this world enter into every one of your cells.  I know that every person is capable of connecting with their neighbor and reprogramming their own minds from the conditioned ideas of the past.  I think living on the verge of 7 Billion human beings in the world, we don’t have a choice.  We need to wake up and wake up fast.

Ali