Painting by Hend Al-Mansour

Stephen Parato, Contributor
Waking Times

“Never belong to a crowd; Never belong to a nation; Never belong to a religion; Never belong to a race. Belong to the whole existence. Why limit yourself to small things? When the whole is available.” – Osho

That quote is the solution to nearly every conflict on Planet Earth.

A being who does not relegate themselves to a label is free. A being who does not identify with a label cannot be manipulated by external forces.

The tactic of divide and conquer has long been used to manipulate humanity. And it will continue until we stop attaching our identity to labels. Separation is an illusion (quantum entanglement is proof of this). When you see that everything is connected; when you see everyone as an aspect of yourself, how can you possibly cause harm to someone?

Now this is one jobs plan I can get on board with! Are you reading, Congress? Of course you aren’t.

India’s Rural Development Ministry has recognized two problems: youth unemployment and bad air quality. But they’ve decided to kill two birds with one stone – to plant 2 billion trees and hire up to 300,000 of the nation’s youth to do it.

“The length of National Highways in the country is one lakh kilometer [about 62,137 miles]. I have asked officials to come out with a plan to plant 200 crore [2 billion] trees along these stretches which in turn would create jobs for the unemployed on the one hand and protect the environment on the other,” said Shipping and Rural Development Minister Nitin Jairam Gadkari.

These are exciting times we’re living in. On Thursday morning, NASA’s Orion spacecraft will launch and perform an unmanned test flight for machinery that they plan to use to bring human beings to asteroids before transporting them to mars. The project dates are set in stone.

It was announced today that Orion will bring four astronauts at a time to asteroids between Earth and Mars by the year 2025, and the first humans will likely reach the red planet within the subsequent decade. This will be the furthest human beings have traveled from the Earth.

This spacecraft launching tomorrow will be unmanned, but the cabin will be filled with more than 1200 sensors to collect information about conditions in the cabin, from radiation to heat, as well as test different systems well in flight.

You are letting loose of boundaries. Little by little, you are. It isn’t that boundaries own you, beloveds. It is that you hold on to the boundaries. It is you who own the boundaries, and it is you who keep them and keep freedom away. There is a certain ease in going along with the crowd and going along what is called mainstream for however long it lasts before mainstream changes.

How frightening is the world to you without boundaries, without rules and restrictions and some kind of imagined order. You believe with all your heart that you want to be free of infringement, yet, at the same time, you fear life without bounds. You fear you might go too deeply into the middle of the sea if there were no rope to keep you close to shore. You don’t want all those leashes to hamper you. At the same time, you don’t want to be absolutely without them. You like to protest boundaries, yet, they comfort you. At the very least, boundaries give you something to tug against or to rail against. They are very real to you, these boundaries, the idea that you can go here and not there, or only this far, and not farther. You may want to come off the assembly line, and yet you may not want to diverge from it very much or at all.

What if you are really responsible for your own life, and there isn’t anything to keep you in tow? It’s possible that you like being a rebel for the sake of it yet not in actuality.