Sooner or later – and at the latest shortly before death – everyone will ponder about why we are here, what keeps life going on the earth, how life started, what happens after death, why a plant grows from a seed, whether there are other «inhabited» planets etc. Perhaps we will also concern ourselves with the future of the earth and pose the question of how the many and diverse problems on our planet can ever be solved.
In order – at least to a small extent - to be able to answer such questions, it is important to know what is the actual basis for our being. The answer to this question is astonishingly simple:
The basis of all life on our planet is the equal right of all beings to live here, to develop here and to carry out their tasks here.
Does this make you rub your eyes? Are you not astonished that it isn’t a chemical formula or a physical process which is the basis of our being? Such processes are naturally an essential precondition for that which we call «life» on earth. The basis of our being however is significantly deeper. Let us therefore analyse this sentence step by step:
The above statement is a so-called cosmic law, i.e. a law which is always valid everywhere in the whole cosmos. All beings have to fit in with this rule no matter whether they wish to or not. In this book we will only concentrate however on the consequences of this basic rule for our system on earth.
All other meaningful laws on the earth must be compatible with this basic rule and may not violate it. In the following we will simply refer to this law as «the basic rights of existence».
To examine the validity of the basic rules of existence we can also carry out certain experiments. We will go through such experiments in our thinking quite soon. Another test option for us as human beings is that each one of us tries for himself to feel whether the basic laws of being are valid. Since we too are part of the cosmos, this truth must be known to each of us. Through your intuition try to feel whether the abovementioned basic rights of existence are valid or not.
As already suggested the plausibility of the basic rights of existence can be tested by simple thought experiments. Let us «test» the three statements individually:
Equal right to be on the earth for all beings
Imagine that you are locked into a house with ten other people for a whole year. You have no contact with the outside world and for a whole year you only «know» these ten people. You must share everything: Living and sleeping areas, toilet, bath, shower, food, books etc. There is however sufficient space and also sufficient food for the whole year.
If you wish to spend this year in peace and harmony is not mutual respect and mutual recognition of the right to exist of all eleven people an absolute precondition for this? The more people who refuse to do this the more difficult it will be to live together.
Now let us expand this house in our thoughts to the whole earth and then add additional human beings, animals and plants. From this perspective the mutual recognition of the right of all beings to live on this earth is a plausible precondition for peace and harmony.
The knowledge of all the inhabitants of the earth that their existence is respected, that they may be here, is an absolutely essential precondition for harmony. Lasting peace can only come when no mutual threat is present.
Equal right for all beings to develop
No one can argue that today we are a fairly long way from a world of peace and harmony. Wars are taking place all the time and thousands of people die from hunger every day, while others are wallowing in abundance. Water, air and the soil are sometimes so badly contaminated that no beings can live there any longer or the food is inedible. To improve this situation further development of today’s condition is necessary. Why then shouldn’t a being not be allowed to develop or only be allowed to develop at a slower rate than others? Who is to decide who may develop further and who shouldn‘t?
We are all at a certain point in our own personal development. Everyone wants to bring their own needs to reality. When there is competition for limited development space, there is automatically a conflict about who has the right to be the first to develop or who can develop the most. The equal right for all beings to personal development is therefore also a necessary precondition for lasting peace and harmony.
Equal right for all beings to carry out their tasks
The earth’s system is extremely strongly networked. In this network each being (plants, animals, humans, minerals etc.) has many different tasks which it performs. In this networked system intelligence is distributed locally: Each being knows its tasks and objectives from its origin or its birth. There are no foolish beings which simply wait around until a «boss» distributes tasks to them. All of them bring with them the knowledge of their life’s tasks right from their origin or birth, and they start to perform their tasks without external commands. However they do not need to know the tasks assigned to other living beings.
The only «intelligence» which knows the interrelationship of all beings is the complete «earth system» itself, in other words the union of all beings on the earth. Since we humans only represent a tiny portion of this large system, it is plausible to suggest that humans will never be able to understand the tasks and functions of all the other beings and their interrelationships on the earth (Actually it would even be a great advance if human beings would discover and realize their own functions and tasks on this earth system...).
If no being can understand alone all the interrelationships on the earth it is certainly not right for one being to presume to assign particular tasks to other beings or to prevent other beings from fulfilling their own tasks and certainly should not forbid them from doing them. It therefore seems appropriate that we should allow all beings the equal right to fulfil their tasks. In a localized, self-organized system such as the earth this is another necessary precondition for the system to function at all and finally for harmony and peace to be permanently present.
The points addressed above are indications, which are intended to arouse our thoughts on the basic rights of existence. As already mentioned there is no evidence for or against the validity of the basic rights of existence. Everyone must find out for himself whether he wants to believe in the validity or existence of these basic rights of existence or not. This can only be done via our intuition. Each of us is however quite used to trusting his own intuition in certain situations. Or how – for example – did you select your life partner? Did you arrange for scientific analyses, did you ask experts and then make a rational decision afterwards? How did you decide whether or not you would like to have children? How do you help your children in the selection of a career? How do you decide for or against a new job after an interview? There are always decisions in our lives which are strongly influenced by our intuition or are indeed only made on the basis of our intuition – however we are often not aware of this.
It is therefore left to you or your intuition to establish whether the basic rights of existence are in your opinion valid or not. Here they are again:
The basis of all life on our planet is the equal right of all beings to live here, to develop here and to carry out their tasks here.
In many works it is «unconditional love» which is described as the basis of all being, or of all being on the earth. Is this possibly wrong? – Of course not, unconditional love and the basic rights of existence describe the same thing. Whoever fully and completely respects the rights of all beings according to the basic rights of all beings – is showing unconditional love. Whoever unconditionally loves all beings on the earth will doubtless grant all beings the right to live here, to develop and to carry out their tasks. The term unconditional love and the basic rights of existence as described are therefore largely identical.
So let’s return to the bases of our life on earth: From the right to live, to develop and to carry out our tasks as shown above are derived a whole series of additional rights and duties. In the hierarchical sense these laws are subordinate to the basic rights of existence.
For example from this results the right to food for all beings (otherwise their existence would be endangered, i.e. their right to be here would be violated), to bodily and intellectual freedom (otherwise their free development and/or their right to accomplish their tasks would be endangered), as well as the right to self-determination (otherwise free development would be endangered) for all beings. As a logical consequence of the right to self-determination the duty of self-responsibility is derived for all beings (he who can freely establish for himself what he does or does not do is logically also responsible for all of his own decisions). We will come back to the subjects of self-determination and self-responsibility later.
It is almost simpler to derive certain non-permitted actions from the basic rights of existence. As a direct result of this, killing someone for example, is not permitted (such as by means of the death penalty, crime, war) or to prevent someone from having his own opinion (totalitarian regimes).
As is probably already clear from these few examples if we consider our everyday situations we soon come up against a conflict with the widespread views of our world. Is it for example permitted to intervene militarily in a country and thereby accept the killing of people so as to establish there the right to a life of freedom for the people? The answer is clearly: No.
From the basic rights of existence there comes neither a right nor certainly a duty for certain people to establish these basic rights on the earth! Because certain people have violated the basic rights of existence there is similarly no right for other people to establish them for other people – even if other human beings are being made to see «reason», i.e. being coerced into maintaining these rights! There is no justification in any of this for a «policeman of the world» with special rights!
The basic rights of existence are valid for ever and for everyone, there are no exceptions. All beings (people, plants, animals etc.) must live according to them and we should also naturally not violate them in order to establish them.
The foregoing discussion calls in the question as to who then establishes this law if it «may» or must not be established by human beings. Who disciplines the «wrongdoers»? This question is all the more interesting because we all presumably violate this law several times a day. Let us leave open this question of a judge and consider what happens when a being violates this law:
In observing the needs of people we have seen that first we try to safeguard our physical existence and only at the highest level do we seek total happiness, self-fulfilment, internal harmony and peace - or whatever one may consider the highest objective of all. We can probably assume that there is an analogous needs hierarchy amongst animals and plants, in other words that they too aim for a state of total fulfilment.
Now comes a very decisive thought: Let’s assume that we find ourselves within a system where certain rules exist which we cannot change. We also cannot leave this system and are simply there inside this system.How can I have a feeling of well-being within such a system, in which I either follow the rules or resist them – but which I cannot change? Naturally I will only be able to feel good in this system if I follow its irreversible rules as rigorously as possible1. If I accept these rules, if I «play along» with them.
This really does make sense since we have of course made the assumption that we cannot change the rules. Why therefore fight against something which we cannot change? Lets look at this with the aid of two examples:
Its easy to find other examples. It is thereby quite clear that the respective rules must be followed if someone wishes to feel good within a given system.
The basic rights of existence behave in just the same way at a global level: If we want to have a feeling of well-being on the earth – if we wish to achieve lasting harmony and calmness, peace and happiness, we simply have to abide by the rules. The better we follow these rules the closer we will find ourselves to our objective.
This possibly leads us back to our original question as to whether the basic rights of existence are actually valid. As already indicated many times: You have to make this decision for yourself personally using your own intuition.
We can also ask ourselves the question whether the law upon which our earth system is based can, for example, be changed by us human beings in our favour. Here is a brief suggestion for thought on this:
The rules governing a system are established by whoever founded the system or set it up. Whoever it was who created the earth system – it certainly wasn’t us human beings since we didn’t arrive until very late in the day! It would therefore be extremely contrary to believe that we can change the rules of the earth system ourselves.
Measured against the age of the earth and nature we human beings correspond with a baby which is still in nappies. Perhaps this comparison is not at all bad: Whoever has brought up children will certainly remember that the children in the family also want to dictate the rules of living together. During their upbringing however we force them to follow the rules of play which already exist: One eats from a plate, uses a knife and fork, dresses neatly when going out etc. Perhaps therefore the time has now come for us humans to accept the rules of play of the earth system – the basic rights of existence – and to attempt no longer to unsuccessfully try, like a child, to dictate the rules of the system.
Whoever still unshakeably believes that it is we human beings who determine or can change the foundation of existence on the earth system, must at least admit that our effect on the earth when looked at globally has so far not been very positive. The signs in fact point more to increasing problems in the future: So far we have not been able to stop environmental catastrophes, volcano eruptions, earthquakes, whirlwinds etc. any more than epidemics, sickness, hunger and war. On the contrary many of these things seem to be even worse!
1 By the irreversible rules, we mean those rules which form the basis of the system being considered and which must be obeyed by all inhabitants: In the earth system these are the basic rights of existence and the laws derived from this. This must never be confused with maintaining the laws which people have set up. We have of course drawn up these laws ourselves and consequently we can also change them at any time.
From the above thoughts we can conclude that the desired state of harmony on the earth can only be achieved if the basic rights of existence are followed one hundred percent. The less frequently we violate the basic rights of existence, or the better we live a life of unconditional love, the closer we find ourselves to our highest of all goals, internal harmony as well as harmony with our environment. If other beings violate the basic rights of existence, this only influences us indirectly at the most. We can decide for ourselves whether we wish to respect the basic rights of existence in a given situation or not, therefore the achievement of lasting harmony for ourselves and for the environment depends entirely on us! It is entirely us alone who can control how quickly, or whether, we wish to achieve the highest objective of all people. We will come back to this in later chapters.
The development towards the top of the needs hierarchy can be imagined as a study course with lots of lessons. Every lesson thereby corresponds with a characteristic or a capability, which is necessary for respecting of the basic rights of existence. The more lessons which have been successfully completed, the closer a being is to his goal and the greater is this being’s capability of respecting the basic rights of existence. The objective can only be reached if all lessons have been successfully completed.
No path can get round the basic rights of existence. Life on earth gives every being every day innumerable possibilities of following these rights or of violating them. We will also discuss this subject in the next chapters.
Now let’s return to the question of the effects of a violation of the basic rights of existence: As soon as we commit a violation, the corresponding lesson is set back again to «pending» (if it has not already been set back). Apparently we still cannot master the capabilities taught in this lesson in every situation. As a result we will again have the opportunity to respond to the law in similar situations. In other words: Due to this violation of the basic rights of existence we will be able to repeat this lesson again sometime in the future. And indeed as often as we need until we can successfully conclude this lesson and there is no acute danger of a «relapse». Possibly it is also necessary or helpful, for this purpose, to feel the consequences of a given violation of the basic rights of existence by others on your own life and limb.
Whoever keeps on making the same mistake will therefore stagnate in his own development. He gets no closer to the great objective of all beings and under certain circumstances he even gets further away from it, because this incorrect behaviour becomes habitual like an automatic mechanism. In our comparison with a series of studies this corresponds to a student who does not fulfil a necessary precondition for going up to the next level: He must wait until the corresponding lesson is offered the next time. Then he can go to this lesson and possibly complete it successfully. Otherwise he repeats the whole procedure time after time and makes no progress in his studies.
The repetition of individual lessons must not however be interpreted as a punishment in any way, but rather as help in learning. We would also not describe our schools as punishment for the ignorant student, but rather as a service or an aid so that young people can prepare themselves for an independent life.
In the same way it is also important to point out that concepts of cosmic punishment, as they are portrayed in certain religions or ideologies, (for example hell for bad people, bodily or mental suffering as punishment for earlier crimes etc.) are completely false interpretations. Through such punishments indeed the equality of rights for all human beings according to the basic rights of existence would be violated!
Another serious false interpretation has already led to the demise of many people: With every breath and every step that we take we influence other beings on this earth. It is therefore possible to draw from this the (false) conclusion that it would be better not to be here any longer and hence to commit suicide. This is of course pure nonsense since here too we have a basic right to live, we may move, take food etc. There are beings on the earth (plants and animals), amongst whose tasks it may be to feed us as human beings. All beings have a right to life, to development and to the carrying out of their tasks – in this category belong also, but not exclusively, human beings.
Since a while ago we discussed a violation of the basic rights of existence, we would now for safety’s sake mention once again the effect of following the basic rights of existence: The respective person will continue to develop personally. In time he finds peace within himself, becomes calmer and happier. Let’s briefly summarize this again:
Each enclosed system has certain irreversible rules of play, which must be followed by every participant. Whoever does not follow these rules will be corrected in one way or another.
In the earth system this irreversible rule of play is «all beings have the equal right to live on the earth, to develop themselves and carry out their tasks ». We call this rule the basic rights of existence.
All beings without exception must respect the basic rights of existence. For example the more consistently a human being „lives“ the basic rights of existence, the closer he comes to his objective of perpetual harmony and peace within himself and his environment.
Non-observance of the basic rights of existence leads to repetition of the respective lesson(s) and thereby slows down a being’s development.
The achievement of perpetual harmony, the highest objective of human needs, only depends on each individual person alone. No one can force a person to achieve this goal. In reverse it is also practically impossible to prevent someone from achieving this goal.
As already indicated we would like to show how this development actually happens in the next few sections.