The world we live in today is vastly more complex than the one I grew up in — and the world in which you are reading this is likely more complex still. The planet, and everything in and on it, continues its amazing journey toward the center of the galaxy, and the rapid evolution of its most amazing species, humans.

Actually, as scientists now understand, every living species is at the forefront of its evolution; the apes from which we ourselves are descended have been around and evolving as long as we have, to get to where they are now. We see it most vividly at the microbial and viral level, where every year we need to get a new flu vaccine; the viruses themselves, hovering halfway from death into life, are evolving a lot faster than we are. But we’re all equally moving forward in time.

In fact, things are speeding up, both in the sense that as there are more and more human beings, there are more and more meaningful changes occurring everywhere, and those changes themselves are unfolding in multiple and increasingly sophisticated directions. Getting a more comprehensive view of life means that we are present to this evolution, seeing things in more dimensions, and dealing with this complexity.

We also need to fully appreciate our intimate interrelationship with all that lives and exists, within which we exist, and to which we are inseparably connected. If we breathe, we participate directly in this accelerating dance of energy that we call life. And that life, on this planet, is part of a single coherent system that we call Earth.

Awakening to this reality is also an important part of our evolution as a species. At the forefront of dealing with the crises we confront is our emerging recognition of ourselves as part of a global living system which is the matrix within which we ourselves exist, and which Lovelock calls “Gaia.” We should perhaps be wary of personifying it, but the fact that we can personify it shows that it has coherence, it is a singular, integrated, self-sustaining system (if we don’t screw it up, that is). If we are fully present to ourselves as an inhabitant of this astonishing miracle that is the Earth, within the astonishing miracle that is the Universe, it’s hard to see how we could be anything but deeply appreciative of it, protective of it, and inspired by it. It has evolved to sustain a great diversity of species, including us. Why we would allow ourselves to threaten that is a question that we must now begin to ask ourselves.

Some of it, no doubt, is related to the absence of this global awareness, our being still stuck at a level of national, ethnic, and religious identity that sees others as a threat rather than as kin. Wars and violent conflicts only arise when we fail to recognize each other as related, members of the same family, an intrinsic part of “ourselves.” Just as we realize at some point that there is no “away” where we can dispose of things, there is no “them” who are not also “us.” But until we see this, we remain at war with ourselves.