Life is a trip, metaphorically and literally. We are all taking a trip through the universe on a spaceship called Earth. We dropped onto this planet’s fertile plains, and we became passengers, not knowing our point of origin or our destination — almost as if we were unwilling and unaware participants in a cosmic bungee jump. But what we do know is that this trip is a journey of growth, both for our individual selves and for the collective of humanity. These are not separate.

I believe that the two most important values in the 21st century are the Earth and the human brain. The Earth’s health is the only vision that is all-encompassing enough to overcome the ethnic, cultural, religious, and national tensions that exist. Only the Earth can become the central axis around which world peace can be spun.

For the Earth to become our central value, the collective human consciousness must expand enough so that our highest common identification is as human beings belonging to this Earth, first and foremost, before we pigeonhole ourselves into different national, ethnic, gender, or any other categories. This advance in human consciousness can only be achieved through the human brain. In other words, when we change our brains, we can accept an expanded sense of human identity.

The brain is the beginning and end of our lives. As our brain waves are first activated, our lives are activated as well. When our brain waves cease, our lives come to an end. Our lives are recorded and stored in our brains as conscious and subconscious memory, our brains containing the history of millions of years of evolution as well as the characteristics and abilities unique to human beings.

Belief in the importance of the Earth is certainly not new. Many people work tirelessly to educate the rest of us about the dangers threatening the environment. To my great admiration and appreciation, they have spent their lives furthering the cause of preserving the Earth. As a result, more people are becoming aware of the importance of balancing the needs of civilization with that of the natural world.

However, I am talking about the Earth as the root of our existence, the core container of our collective values, and the source of all life. I believe that it is just as crucial to feel the Earth’s reality as it is to understand her network of constantly varying ecosystems intellectually. We must feel her beauty and her pain for our intellectual understanding to gain power and be transformed into action.

We can do this by building a bridge between our mind and the Earth’s mind. Whether we know it or not, whether we want it or not, the human mind influences the Earth’s mind, and the Earth’s mind influences the human mind. For this connection to occur purposefully, we must realize that the Earth is a living entity, an entity that can communicate with the innumerable forms of life that populate it.

You probably already know that all people of the world are brothers and sisters in our common human heritage, which cannot be broken by transitory barriers of ethnicity, religion, or nationality. By now, this is pretty obvious to almost everyone. But this knowledge itself has proved to be sorely deficient in effecting fundamental and lasting change. We need to understand it in a way that will shake us to the core of our being. We need to feel it in our hearts, our bodies, our cells, our bones. Only then will our brains undergo a fundamental transformation, translate the knowledge into action and change the world for the better.

This article is updated from its initial publication in Brain World Magazine’s Summer 2014 issue.

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