“Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated
yourself, and you will find that this is the shortest way to benevolence.”
– Mencius
I have
often wondered why the feeling of love among human beings is not as strong as
that among other species. We never find a large group of animals fight against
another large group with the sole aim of killing, unlike we humans do. The
animals nearest to humans on the ladder of evolution are apes; but you never
find an army of apes fighting to kill another army of apes. Occasionally you
may see a group of street dogs attacking a stray dog which accidentally
trespasses into their ‘protected’ area. But they too will not kill the
trespasser.
Every
day we hear of fights between individuals, families, criminal gangs, political
parties, ethnic groups and nations. It won’t be correct to think that the
reason for fights among human beings is nature’s dictum of ‘survival of the
fittest’. One may be inclined to think that the tendency to fight should have
been reduced considerably when humans practiced community living. On the
contrary, the feeling of division as ‘we’ and ‘they’ has emerged and grown
within all groups and has contributed much against the concept of universal
love.
The
feeling of division, I think, is not an attribute of nature. Every thing in
this universe is made of basic building blocks which we name as fundamental
particles like protons and electrons and still ‘more fundamental’ particles
like quarks and the god particles. You cannot differentiate between the
fundamental particles constituting you and the rest of the things in the whole
universe. Mother Nature has therefore built into you (and in everything else in
this universe) the basic quality of oneness.
Think
of the particles making your own body. Many of the particles in your eyes,
nose, skin, heart, brain and in every thing making your body, which you like
more than any thing else, were somewhere else on this planet some time back. To
cite just one example, many of these particles were in the ocean, before
getting converted into clouds responsible for the rain water which you consumed
to sustain your life. Go back through time of the order of billions of years.
The particles presently constituting your body were in a star in our galaxy.
The star exploded giving birth to the sun and the planets.
Now go
further back in time and think of the beginning of every thing. The particles
in your body and for that matter, of every thing in the entire universe were
concentrated, in an altogether different form, at a point just before the big
bang. What else do you require to establish your feeling of oneness with every
thing in this universe?
One
well known way of trying to unify mankind divided into various ethnic and
religious groups has been by citing the invariably red colour of their blood. A
much more fundamental point for the unification would be the extremely close
contact of the entire entities in the universe at the moment of the big bang.
How literally close and touching were you and everything other than you at the
beginning! Why should you then think of barriers between yourself and the rest
of the world?
