Potential of the evolving entity.

Equal human rights, civil achievements, and racial, national, and religious freedoms are all connected to humanity’s march toward its full potential. From human sacrifice to the persecution of homosexuals, from racism to all forms of prejudice and discrimination, these issues have been gradually improving, but progress has not been fast enough. Personally, I believe we are evolving and progressing in many areas, but our religions seem to lag behind.

Unfortunately, every achievement has come at the cost of human lives, as there has always been strong resistance to progress from our own kind. The lessons of history teach us that if you want to gain something, you have to fight for it. Even when something is beneficial for humanity, we still have to struggle against our conservative fellow human beings. Despite our ability to discuss and debate, we somehow fail to recognize or choose to ignore our incomplete knowledge. Unfortunately, we are often unable to stray from our ancestral beliefs, even when they have been proven wrong. As human beings, we are taught not only to believe that our ancestors couldn’t have been wrong but also that we must protect their traditions, customs, rituals, and rules. We are educated to respect, protect, and sacrifice in loyalty to our sense of belonging. Even in this day and age of equal human rights, the news is still filled with stories of racism and prejudice-related injustices.

For humanity, change has never been easy. Reaching our potential or advancing in our journey of evolution requires peeling away layers of personal and collective insecurities. Our politics, driven by a sense of belonging to a particular family, gang, community, nation, or religion, has been our downfall. If we are born into the human family as human individuals, we automatically belong to humanity, but our politically influenced education teaches us otherwise. If we learn to belong to humanity, we would realize that, in reality, humanity is one, beyond all the politics of division.

Individually, we all need to become evolved spiritual beings who can and do convert spiritual thoughts into physical actions. By now, with all our understanding of evolution and civilization, we should be able to peacefully debate and discuss our way to change, but we are far from it. Our political and religious wars are clear evidence of this. We cannot continue this way because, on one hand, we have been evolving with nuclear weaponry, but on the other, we have not evolved spiritually. An insecure individual with a strong sense of belonging to their group, yet with their finger on the powerful and destructive nuclear trigger, can be a deadly mix. Our evolution is unbalanced because we not only dismiss each other’s knowledge but also carry along our ancestral disputes. Humanity has never been able to live in peaceful times; even after all this civilization and evolution, we still can’t discuss and debate our differences in a civilized manner.

Achieving balance is not easy, even at the individual level, let alone collectively. Our disputes have largely been the result of the politics of belonging. Our social changes have never been without the influence of the politics of belonging. We have become accustomed to changes brought about by a top-down philosophy, which seeks to keep power concentrated in the hands of a few, often by force. As a result, the individual has always been a weaker participant—until recently. Today, we live in an era of democracy and equal human rights. Individuals are being educated to be CEOs of their own lives, capable of seeing and understanding the politics of power behind every tradition, custom, ritual, and societal rule. These changes will bring about a shift from the bottom up, allowing for debate and discussion, so decisions can no longer be made by a select few who have been holding special political and personal interests, using power to fulfill their personal and group-related agendas.

How and what will change in the future will depend on the awareness of ordinary individuals. Where will this take us as humanity? Will we continue to go back and forth, or will we change everything, including our ancestral differences, disputes, and related wars? Can we change and evolve from our present level of civilization? What is our potential? Since we are an evolving entity, our potential will continue to evolve with us—so where are we headed?