Did you know you can turn any of the short quotes on our site into an e-card?
Simply locate the quote you'd like to send, and if it fits on our card, you'll see an option for Send as greeting on the left side of the quote.
Or, if you'd like a more classic Greeting card, you can visit our Gaia Greeting Gallery.
When I look at an ape, I see myself and all humans. When a racist looks at an ape, they see only an African man or an Asian man.
Human cultures progress through a dance of specialization and integration. The problem is that the human trait of abstract thinking has allowed our ability to specialize to outpace our ability to integrate knowledge. Thus, we know more and more details about nothing particularly relevant. Life becomes a game of trivia played between people who don't have an intrinsic understanding of who, or what, they are and who have little idea how larger social, scientific and cultural systems operate.
All the "freedom" in the world can not solve this problem, but rather leads to greater confusion. Lack of freedom throws us into panick and again causes confusion. We often seek grounding in religion or political movements, but the price of suspending our disbelief is our relinquishment of authority to others no more qualified than the rest of us. We can not afford, in our globalized, interdependent world, to turn over our otherwise intelligent minds to ideologies and theologies. We can not afford the divisiveness and arrogance inherent when one believes that theirs is the only way, the "right" way, and that other paths are "evil" or inferior even if they work very well.
If we declare our race to be HUMAN, our religion to be KINDNESS and our nature to be A WONDERFUL SPECIES OF PRIMATES, we will gradually learn to exercise rational control over our minds, our culture and our planet.
At the root of human wisdom is an understanding that we are, at once, both gods and primates.
Help
Sign In
