Humanity

What does it mean to be human?  What does it mean to lack humanity? I think a lot of people have a lot of different answers to the questions.  Its been plaguing me for awhile, those questions.  For me I grab from many different traditions of what being human looks like. Being flawed, broken, in need of enlightenment, being driven by free will and its thronging for survival.  Humanity to me seems nothing more than a competition over a glass pane mosaic that has been broken, with everyone trying to fit their piece back into the mosaic in a better position then where it was to begin with.  Humanity can never achieve the perfectness of the original glass pane, but only seek to imitate its original's form and function.  Thus, once humanity realizes, and I believe it has, *cough* Post-modernism *cough*, that the mosaic can never be the same as the original, they will seek to dominate that which it deems unconquerable.  Like a four-year old at a museum that has been told not to touch the art, it is inexplicably drawn towards that which it has been told cannot be done.  This competition is nothing but a short-sighted attempt to replace the original glass pane with another.  It's the submission of the pursuit of perfection via an infusion of human chaos.  Instead of constantly reminding ourselves that there was an original design, that the world had a purpose, a place for order.  We disguise what we think and try to deceive ourselves into thinking that through blind tolerance the world will be made a better place.  This, without actually seeing nor remembering that the mosaic was best in its original form.  And furthermore that a mosaic is not only the pieces that make it up, but a holistic and collective vision of what its creator intended it to be.

Humanity, now more than ever, is lost within a sea of chaos. Before this new era we sought order, often times through unrighteous acts of war, hate, discrimination, and genocide. We wanted our world to be a place of peace and order for selfish gain, a way of controlling the world to fit our own self-edification.  But I believe that when Martin Luther King Jr. made his speech, "I have a dream", he wanted not only the equality of rights for his people, but the equality of purpose for all of humanity.  Mr. King saw that though White people had more power then Black people, the end goal of humanity was not to fight for power forever.  But it was to achieve its purpose through unity, obtaining that which it had lost.  Reclaiming a world that had fallen. Perfection.

Though humanity can never be perfect again,  its purpose to never be fulfilled, it has a duty neigh a calling to try, yes to try to obtain perfection.  Not in the way that social Darwinist think, nor eugenicists, for they lost sight of the perfection that had been intended. They believed that by perfecting humanity physically, genetically, it would bring about the immortalization of man as the dominant species of the universe, their universe.  Spiting God for allowing us to fall, and allowing them to control the perceived chaos of their world.  They missed the point, perfection was never meant to be physical, but an entirely spiritual experience.

That if you really think about the garden, what made it so perfect? Was it that Adam did not need or want of  any food? That every physical comfort was tendered that made it so perfect?  I don't believe that this is the end of perfection, because, though Adam may have eaten, God did not provide to complete him, to fill up a lack in him.  Hunger had not been thought up nor invented, you cannot perfect that which does not exist.  So what was the perfection of the garden? Its perfection lied within what man lacked.  That man lacked a need for a moral compass, that man did not need the knowledge of good & evil, because he was one in unity with God, the creator.  The perfection lied in the absence of the need for knowledge.  And the pursuit of knowledge is a spiritual journey.  Thus, the lack of that need needing to be satiated and fulfilled, is perhaps the perfection that God had intended.

Contrast that idea with today's world, what do we see, a world busting at the seems with information, were every nook and cranny of life is recorded, analyzed, documented, and archived.  Where humanities thirst for knowledge is reaching a critical mass.  That most people think there is just to much information out there to be able to know it all.  What has all this information done to us?  Some would say that it has made us more connected, that we as humans, being able to share our collective knowledge, has been a boon for the overall well-being of humanity.  And I would be hard pressed to disagree.  We have cures for many more diseases, we grow more food then ever before, we have created systems that now span continents.  But again we miss the point, as we give in to the thirst for knowledge we seek to fulfill our own personal physical needs, never our spiritual. The Scientia that permeates the information age's society leaves humans feeling more connected physically, but more disconnected spiritually, unable to comprehend what their fellow man is going through, an epidemic of empathatic-less people.  That in our own pursuit to end the suffering of the world, we neglect a more important pursuit, a pursuit which is ultimately the most important thing you can do while on this planet.  That is to achieve a spiritual connection to the creator and to each other.

So what does it mean to be humanity?  It means that, together, we are more than just individuals, we are a purposed entity, an entity that seeks unification of spiritual connectedness, that should be striving for more than solving the physical needs of today, but striving to regain that which God gave us in the beginning, a deep an eternal love and understanding for him and each other.  A state of lacking nothing spiritually.  That is what it means to be human.