The Cosmic Perspective - a way to Inner Peace

A simple but often overlooked part of human history is that much of the suffering is brought upon by the arrogance and ego of a few people. While this self-centredness had great benefits for our ape ancestors in the jungles millions of years ago, it has no place in modern society. Humanity deserves to be free of war and suffering.    

To do this, we have all, collectively, go to realise that it is not about us. It is not about what we achieve. It is about us all.    

Personally, for me, nothing has been more influential than Carl Sagan's speech about the Pale Blue Dot. In the early 1990s, the Voyager spacecraft went past Saturn and looked back at Earth. This is what it saw - a pale blue dot, our planet Earth:

 We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a  dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever  heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The  aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager,  every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations,  every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child,  every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of  morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there – on a  mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the  rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in  glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a  fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the  inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable  inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their  misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent  their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the  delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are  challenged by this point of pale light. [...] To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. 

This is what the cosmic perspective is all about. I know, this can be a very scary thought. But the trick is to accept it. To accept that you are a small, insignificant being, part of a civilisation that's infinitesimally small against the vastness of the universe - space and time.    

I don't think this makes me feel insignificant. Rather, it makes me feel liberated. It makes me realize it is not about me. It helps me be generous, kind, never lose my temper. Be empathetic and compassionate towards others, always realize there's another perspective. We are all in the very same tiny boat for a very small amount of time, and we have to cherish it together. 

So, next time you are raging at someone. Or you're tempted to take advantage of someone. Remember that we are all part of a tiny, pale blue dot. We are all in this together - all living things, we are one and the same.