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The subject of love, though, brought out also another dimension. One day we heard from a girl who had lost her entire family in the Afghan war. Her own right hand had been blown apart in a brief unwary moment when she picked up a butterfly mine that had been dropped by helicopters into remote areas. She talked about hardships, agonies, fright, and despair, and having been deeply touched by death and senseless destruction. Still, she also talked about love and about living, and about her desperate determination to go on living that had kept her alive. She didn't talk about hate, though she had ample cause to do so. She said she could no longer feel hate, as though hate was too shallow to be intermingled with the depth of her struggle, and seemed to have become counterproductive. She sensed quite early that hate was stealing a place in her mind that should belong to love and to living.
A similar notion became apparent in the speech of a young man from a shantytown on the U.S.-Mexican border where day-to-day survival is a deeply entrenched problem involving stark contrasts in wealth. "On one side," he said, "is wanton poverty, on the other side across the border are lavish rich neighborhoods that seem like paradise." Here, too, the contrast that should have caused anger and shame, didn't cause these emotions. He said the contrast was insignificant to him. He counted himself lucky to have access to the other world where he earned forty dollars a week as a domestic servant. Sometimes this 'heavenly' servitude was short-lived and he was deported back across the Rio Grande to his shanty town of Ciudad Juarez were most people were literally worked to death in the maliquadora.
Next, an elderly gentlemen spoke, a physician from a still poorer country. He spoke softly, in a dignified manner, of a silent war against hundreds of millions, that was slowly eroding the human system across the world to the point of its internal collapse, a holocaust that pales Hitler's rape of humanity into insignificance. He never voiced the names of the institutions he felt were responsible. He never mentioned any names at all, though he obviously knew, nor did he speak of politics, or the Malthusian policies of population reduction. He bore no hatred, laid no blame. He allowed nothing to surface that might have obscured the depth of despair he felt for his people that were too few to stand out in this vast sea of poverty that was officially called, The Third World. He tried to erase the notion that those people did not belong to the world at all, for which they should be deprived of the privilege to be called a human being.
His message was heard loud and clear. Everyone was keenly aware that this hidden decay of humanity was artificially orchestrated by an escalating denial of the nature of the human being that had already grown beyond all human dimensions. He received a standing ovation, but without applause. Everyone simply stood up for a minute of silence.
Ross spoke next, on the same problem, but in a vastly different context. He spoke about a war he became engaged in while founding his church. I found out that Raymond and Ross knew each other and had worked together on this project for some time. Most of Ross' speech, however, was about two contrasting processes of thinking and their consequent reactions to them. "This is an important subject," he explained, "because the leaders of governments, the leaders of institutions, the leaders of the oligarchy, and so forth, are all human beings. Their way of thinking determines whether humanity lives and develops, or whether it becomes manipulated into war and perishes. Therefore, the way humanity thinks will ultimately affect its actions. This is an important subject, right? But how do we think?"
He dimmed the lights and started up the graphics projector that had been donated to the conference. He drew a circle, which he said, represents the sun. Then he surrounded the circle with a number of lines that he said represent the sun's rays of light. He indicated that the rays of light always flow outwards, away from the sun, illumining the universe, enabling life to exist on our planet, and so forth. He converted the rays, that he drew around the sun, into outward pointing arrows. He said that this particular process is a very rich and enriching process - life could not exist without it. He also said that this process could be recognized as a model that illustrates an important principle.
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