One burning question left by fateful events like the 9/11 terrorist attacks is that “where did we go wrong?”

9/11 is just one of many. History is full of wars like the World Wars, the Gulf War, the Napoleonic Wars, and many more acts of atrocities by the foreign invaders against the natives across the world. Even worse, we have a discrimination problem that crushes the souls of many living people every day, just because they do not belong to the preferred gender, race, or religion. And then there’s reciprocation, as the marginalized groups rise against the oppressors. And the loop goes on.

Let’s take a Kosmik perspective.

Missing the Moon

A Zen story goes like this:

As a master was once describing the beauty of full moon to his young disciples, one of them asked, “Master, this sounds wonderful. Can you show me the full moon?”

The master smiled and said that he will have to wait for 7 more nights for the moon to be full. The disciple waited eagerly and kept asking the master more about the moon all this while. As his restlessness grew, finally the night of the full moon came.

The master took the disciple out in the garden and raised his hand, with his finger pointing at the moon, “Behold, there is the beauty you seek.” Immediately, the disciple grabbed the master’s finger and exclaimed, “This is surreal, master! I have seen the beauty you talked about. I can feel it.”

The naïve disciple had mistaken his master’s finger for the full moon.

And most of our problems seem rooted in this mistake. Often, we take the symbol as the truth itself. For example, fundamentally religion is a way of life, a guide on “how to live well” and their stories are a compass to guide us through life. But when we forget this fact, our religion becomes merely a collection of words, rituals, quotes, and story characters. We forget the meaning they all point towards and instead hold on to them literally. As a result, we mindlessly practice old rituals without understanding and adapting them to our modern context.

To make it worse, we have an identity problem, so once we catch hold of a symbol, we latch on to it, like how the disciple grabbed his master’s finger. This desire to identify an “I” as separate from the rest makes a crutch out of the symbols that we feel attached to. And then we go to extremes to protect these symbols, as they help us feel significant, meaningful. We fight for countries defined by imaginary boundaries drawn on earth, we debate to prove our ideology superior to others, we kill for our religion and the stupidity goes on.

Ultimately, our own creations become our prison. The human in us is lost. At some point, we must stop and say, “this is enough!”

Be a Cosmonaut

When cosmonauts (or astronauts) look back at earth from space, they get a unique perspective which leads to a radical shift in the definition of “home.” It is no longer a building, city, or nation. The whole planet seems one and all our identities and futile fights over petty issues lose their gravity. This is called the “Overview Effect.”

As Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, said, “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.'”

From this vantage point, we can see our Mother Earth as a floating spaceship in the vast cosmos, among billions of other celestial bodies. And we realize that we are all that we have. If we do not take care of each other on this spaceship, there is no hope. It is this perspective that we need to adopt while living on earth itself, and not get lost in futile made-up issues.

With this, as we break our limiting beliefs and false pride, we can finally return to the child within, who knows just love. A love for all life from which springs curiosity, unbiased expression, and the power to dream without constraints. Slowly, our presence becomes the comforting corner for other humans as well since we lose attachment from expectations and judgements. A ripple of healing is set in motion, and we become limitless in our limited lives.

We conclude with the words of Carl Sagan when he saw the earth as a pale blue dot in an image taken by Voyager 1 spacecraft:

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.