THE CONSCIENCE OF OUR PEOPLES

We're all one humanity

By: J. Oscar C. Jimenez-Halla

At times, I have found myself wondering why language, culture, traditions, religion, and all the environmental factors shape a human being so profoundly, making it so complex to find similarities and differences between individuals of different nations. One might suppose, at first glance, that each person’s worldview, together with the accumulation of experiences and encounters throughout their early life, translates into the sensations, thoughts, opinions, feelings, and judgments with which they face trauma or, in less extreme cases, adapt to a new external environment. Yet the matter runs deeper, since other variables (better known to psychology than to what my naïve sociability tries to decipher) come into play.

What I mean is that (speaking purely in practical terms: there are no nations made up entirely of bandits, even if their history is full of ruthless leaders and guerrilla commanders), no region of the world preserves true homogeneity. The strong tendency of people with similar traits to scatter, much like economic and social systems, reminds us that wealth and condition are in constant motion, like inhabitants of the planet themselves, rising and falling as statistical data each year or historical moment (as the scholars would call it), establishing a kind of balance across different eras of humanity (I’m only referring to a few centuries back, not too far). What I have now begun to ask myself is part of the same story that has guided my life to this day: where are we all heading? Evolution and consciousness; I've always said that I tend to worry about the future, or at least waste my time trying to get ahead of it, hahahaha.

After reading a good book on theoretical physics and having a private ramble with Bohm (D. Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Kairós, Barcelona, 1998) about the council between quantum theory and relativity, I found last month a good starting point: to stop dividing analyses of any kind, and instead think of life as a whole. (By the way, did you know Einstein recommended going to the beach to listen to the waves while lying in the sand under the shade? See A. Einstein, M. Born, and H. Born, Correspondence (1916–1955), Siglo XXI Eds., Mexico, 1999). You’ll see, my idea of why there exist elements, people, institutions, or entire nations, so different yet so close to others that resemble them more (from the “black sheep of the family” to the “cricket” causing disorder in the classroom, or similar examples), can be understood as follows: even if since birth certain “mental templates” have been instilled (parental upbringing, friends’ behaviour, TV, magazines, street culture), every element has a flow of thought that is not fragmented or divided from the rest of the world’s population.

Listening to the ideas of Islamic Hindus in various documentaries, the socioeconomic policies of the Jewish people, so persistent throughout history, or the foundations of the Cuban government (where did Fidel get those ideas? Is there no conscience in individuals of his kind?), among many other examples (which explains why it’s wonderful to know at least a bit of each region’s history... ha! and for that, I owe thanks to Grandpa Carlos Halla, may he rest in peace, with his National Geographic collection and fascinating cultural topics but I digress), I’ve suddenly had some sparks of insight. I dare share with you that, given how knowledge (or at least our brain lobes) has evolved, it seems there exists a kind of measure or standard by which each individual or nation should preserve the essence of its centuries-old history. I’m not referring to the trivial dictionary meaning of “measure.” Though somewhat abstract, I mean that the decision for religion or atheism in each being arises from the measure with which they sustain their own Self, that “Who am I?” that matters so much to my mystical vision and to that of the Warriors, like you. Yet it seems this ideal is slowly slipping away (on a certain scale and within a certain context, we all perceive it as the phenomenon of globalization). And just as scientific tradition tells us about mixing processes and how components disperse over time, think of us as “walking” through an entropic process, governed by a macroscopic Brownian motion. In the future, what will make us different from a Dutch, Nigerian, Australian, Argentinian, or Chinese person will be, essentially, only what the conscience of our people has left us, the feeling rooted in the heritage we leave behind, in the blend of many races reaching toward their wholeness.