It Is All One

I think I spent 30 years of my life, the first 30 trying to become something. I wanted to become good at things, I wanted to become good at tennis and school and grades. And everything I kinda viewed in that perspective I’m not okay the way I am, but if I got good at things… I realized that I had the game wrong, because the game was to find out what I already was. 

Now, in our culture we have been trained for individual differences to stand out, so you look at each person and the immediate hit is… brighter, dumber, older, younger, richer poorer… and we make all these dimensional distinctions, put them in categories and treat them that way. And get so we only see others as separate from ourselves in the ways in which they are separate. And one of the dramatic characteristics of experience is being with another person and suddenly seeing the ways in which they are like you not different from you. And experiencing the fact that that which is essence in you; which is essence in me is indeed, one. The understanding that there is no other…it is all one. I wasn’t born Richard Albert, I was just born as a human being and then I learn this whole business of who I am, whether I’m good or bad, achieving or not… all that’s learned along the way.

The old appeals of racial, sexual and religious shovanism to rabid nationalistic fervor… are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism… and recognizes: an organism at war with itself is doomed.

Letter to a Christian Nation

"Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral - that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings. This explains why Christians like yourself expend more "moral" energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide. It explains why you are more concerned about human embryos than about the lifesaving promise of stem-cell research. And it explains why you can preach against condom use in sub-Saharan Africa while millions die from AIDS there each year."

“A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. If our concern is about suffering in this universe, it is rather obvious that we should be more concerned about killing flies than about killing three-day-old human embryos… Many people will argue that the difference between a fly and a three-day-old human embryo is that a three-day-old human embryo is a potential human being. Every cell in your body, given the right manipulations, every cell with a nucleus is now a potential human being. Every time you scratch your nose, you’ve committed a holocaust of potential human beings… Let’s say we grant it that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. First of all, embryos at this stage can split into identical twins. Is this a case of one soul splitting into two souls? Embryos at this stage can fuse into a chimera. What has happened to the extra human soul in such a case? This is intellectually indefensible, but it’s morally indefensible given that these notions really are prolonging scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings, and because of the respect we accord religious faith, we can’t have this dialogue in the way that we should. I submit to you that if you think the interests of a three-day-old blastocyst trump the interests of a little girl with spinal cord injuries or a person with full-body burns, your moral intuitions have been obscured by religious metaphysics.”