On a Higher Human Image
We at Metta Center believe in your potential — and in the potential of all human beings to express higher capacities. As Anne Frank said, what good news this is!
If there is one leverage point by which we could “change everything,” it’s what or who we think we are — the human image. According to psychiatrist James Gilligan, who studied criminal behavior for 25 years and wrote seven major books on the causes of violence, the single greatest predictor of violent behavior is having been disrespected or humiliated in one’s home. But disrespect doesn’t happen in a vacuum or only to individuals. We all suffer from a general background of disrespect to our persons in the form of the drastically low image of the human being that has come with the mechanistic, meaningless image of life within the universe, maintained in industrialized societies since the industrial revolution.
That image of ourselves as separate machines doomed to compete for scarce resources is ripe for a change. We live at a potentially pivotal time in history when new science is overlapping with the worldview of the wisdom tradition. The picture that emerges is far healthier. We are:
body, mind, and spirit
deeply interconnected — not only with one another, but all that lives
endowed with tremendous capacities for endurance, empathy, etc. — all the qualities of a nonviolent person
free (and therefore responsible) agents — not at all limited to the influence of outside, physical factors such as hormones, genes, etc., despite what the mass media continue to report
far from fully developed, in terms of the evolution of consciousness
…take it from there!