We are all created spiritually predisposed to love and unite, but throughout human history cultures have created high walls of prejudice, mutual suspicion, discrimination and animosity. Walls have divided large groups of people along lines of race, gender, creed, class, culture and politics. Shouldn’t we seek to know these well? Which of the walls affect the most people? Which of the walls affect YOU most? Please text back your answer. I’m doing a survey…(in connection with the forthcoming 2nd Philippine Convergence for Human Synergy).

My texted question, sent to all numbers in my cell phone directory, was a content-loaded one. More so was hers. Are the walls real? Was I saying there really are walls while the others are saying there are none? Or are many people really just behaving as if there are real walls and I am about to say that those walls are just “all in the mind”?

Walls affek many pipol is Great Wall of China because billions Chinese. Next, Berlin wall but down oledi. Wall-to-wall carpet also affek because nice to see. Will think more for you, My Plen.

Obviously, he speaks of physical walls which is (or was, in the case of the European one) undeniably real on the physical plane. And such walls as these one can be plainly seen by the naked eye, by the healthy pair of eyes of the human and the myriad eyes of flies.

But not everything that produces in the brain the sensation of seeing is actually there and real; and not everything that is real can be seen. “To see is to believe”? The existence of the words “illusion” and “invisible” indicate those of us who say this should think again.

We cannot blame the great majority of people who would mistake a lush patch of grass as a million “grass plants” crowded together on the ground. After all, the single sprawling root system, though physically visible if viewed without obstruction, is almost always completely hidden under the millions of shoots of this one plant.

We only have to remember that the frequency-based electromagnetic spectrum has only a very thin band of visible light between the infinite breadths of both the invisible ultra-violet rays and the invisible infra-reds. We only have to remember the undebatable fact that magnetic compasses work, gold-leaf electroscopes work, gravity works, and heat travels – with static electricity, magnetic flux, the gravitational force and the heat conduction all being invisible. Then we can remind ourselves that there are, indeed many realities are simply as invisible as the air we breathe.

The physical and visibly formidable walls that separated people on both sides of the Berlin Wall was real on the physical plane. About a couple of decades before that wall was built there were very real and horrible but also very invisible walls that divided up the populace of that same country (and the rest of the surrounding continent) as may be gleaned from this classic quote from Pastor Martin Niemolier:

In Germany they first came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me -- and by that time no one was left to speak for me.

Wikipedia describes this quote as “poem attributed to Pastor Niemöller (1892–1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group.” Too bad those intellectuals there and then could not see with their brains the very real walls that terminated their own lives and of millions of others across an entire continent within a short span of a few years. This is the logic before the saying that “A threat to the rights of any human anywhere is a threat to the the human rights of all humans everywhere.”

And the walls built by racism and Nazi terror, though largely invisible, were more real in divisive effect than Berlin Wall where people on both sides desired to hug and mingle freely, as we saw them do after that Wall was thoroughly and passionately smashed some twenty years ago.

Much earlier, most people had nothing against slavery for as long they themselves were not the slaves! But there were never any high physical walls built between the slaves and their masters, for they had to co-mingle so that the members of one grouping can serve fully those of the other.

In my original long question texted to everyone to start the survey, I pointed at culture as having been the culprit behind the invisible but very effective walls. This refers to the homo sapiens, said to have both wisdom and free will, but freely choosing now not to use the wisdom enough, and collectively choosing to entrench in culture-based groupings the various invisible walls felt so strongly by the children of one generation as to ensure being passed on to the next ones.

Our best bet in the quest for even just the “thinnest slice of Omniscience” is collective knowledge.

In his popular but controversial book, titled The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Prof. Steve Pinker rounds up the latest results from developmental psychology and evolutionary biology and uses them to discredit modern society’s observed “obsession” with the nurture side of the nature-nurture debate. But Pinker criticizes what he perceives to be a gross imbalance between the nurture and the nurture factors viewed to be determinant in the behavior of any human or any group of humans, and he does not seek to disregard the nurture side.

A staunch believer in free will will never overemphasize the nature factor either. Humans, acting both singly and as groups, may take it as affront to human dignity for anyone to declare that another person or an entire group of persons is acting in a congenitally-predetermined social behavior, with instincts based on genes.

But in actual effect, culture comes very close to, even beyond, what is congenitally pre-determined. A single individual growing up and growing old in a preset cultural mold would be “baked” to predetermined patterns of thinking and behavior, with cultural instincts based on parental and social education by everyday example over a number of decades. Thus it said that strong mental and behavioral tendencies, including the hierarchy of values, are hereditary, where the community’s “cultural genes” are passed inexorably from earlier generations to the next ones.

We even have the words “heritage” and “traditions” to describe these “genes” of the community.

When it comes to the most common – even if physically invisible -- walls like that of prejudice, discrimination and mutual suspicions, animosity and outright conflict, cultural factors are the most obvious culprits.

SanibLakas Vice President Francis ‘Kiko’ Comendador points it out categorically in his texted reply to the question:

Culture has a great contribution in putting up walls… a culture of discrimination, bigotry, apathy, aggression, in different contexts – politics, religion, economy...

History researcher Rosabella ‘Belle’ D. Fernandez, in her own response, presents another possibility for the pluralist and mutually-enriching handling of cultural uniqueness, the more positive and more pleasant way:

Culture, the lifestyle of a people, shows an identity and a past. The uniqueness should not be a wall, rather a point of unity, cooperation, celebration.

“Divide-and-rule” strategies used by colonizers and other aggressors have worked well for the success of their conquering adventures. They either worked on milder divisions already existing beforehand or took advantage of the stage of evolution of a large populations that had not yet evolved to the level of fully developed voluntary and synergetic clustering of local communities.

This is what happened in the case of the ancestors of the present-day people of the Philippines. The application of the indigenous godly traits for self-actualization as humans (‘pagpapakatao’) and for mutual interactive dynamics of fellow-humans (‘pakikipagkapwa-tao’) had not yet covered any scale of territory even proximate to what was in the conquering plans of the Spanish and later American colonizers, who completely stunted the natural process of voluntary clustering toward nation-building. And the petty conflicts, thus played upon and worsened, have persisted up to this very day. The walls are still very much around while remaining physically invisible.

We are all affected by these walls --- as they are impeding what should be the freely flowing interaction for mutual pakikipagkapwa-tao, for teamworking in human development.

At the same time, we are challenged to stare squarely at the manifestations of these walls, in order to establish in our minds the reality of their existence. We are challenged to scan these walls – to analyze them, to scrutinize them closely, to examine well their nuances, to know where among all these lie their inherent weaknesses.

The list and accompanying descriptions of 15 “paradigms,” formulated and still being developed by the Lambat-Liwanag (“Light Net”) Network for Empowering Paradigms” for personal and academic mainstreaming, have become useful tools for such productive scrutiny.

The “paradigms” listed are:

  1. Synergism in Total Human Development

  2. Holistic Health Care and Medicine

  3. Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature

  4. Sense of History and Sense of Mission

  5. Civics and Democratic Governance

  6. Culture as Community Creativity

  7. Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education

  8. Gender Sensitivity, Equality and Harmony

  9. Reconstructive/Restorative Justice

10. Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development

11. Synergetic Leadership and Empowering Organizations

12. Appropriate/Adaptive Technology

13. Mutual Enrichment of Families and Friendships.

14. Human Dignity and Harmony: Human Rights and Peace

15. Aesthetics Without Boundaries: ‘Art from the Heart’

(A separate article in this cluster of inputs, “The Freedom to Grow and Flow,” explains the general and specific content points of these paradigms of thinking and behavior, including their nuances, and showing where the divisive walls are. Valuable clues can be had from just listening intently to how different groups of people react in widely contrasting ways to how these paradigms are titled. Click here to view that article.)

Knowing each of these well renders us less and less vulnerable to their effects on patterns of thinking and behavior. Seeing through the logical hollowness of their formidable appearances, including institutionalization of some of them in academic, corporate and government policies, we can also, with deliberate prudence for effectiveness, scale them so we can be above them and render them ineffective. How can that work? If we are above the wall, we can see both sides of the “great divide,” and chances are we will choose to refuse to be divided on such basis.

Thus we can free ourselves, at least internally, from their effects. And as we encourage a wide and open no-hold-barred exchanges about these divisive walls in many informal conversations, maximizing social and technological channels in healthy discourse, we are helping more and more people to free themselves as well and rise above these walls, thus rendering them practically insignificant, mere cultural fossils of our past stages of evolution. As Philippine Movement for Press Freedom Founder Atty. Ricardo C. Valmonte said in many conferences of his younger years,

The force of logic ought to prevail over the logic of force.

Then, finally, we can fully smash to pieces these formidable-looking wals so they can divide us no longer, so we can move more strongly and much faster in the current stage of human evolution for synergy in conscious oneness (“sycone”) of Humanity.

Chairperson Fernando Josef of the Sanib-Sining Movement for Synaesthetics envisions in his texted response that:

There may be philosophical differences of physical distances, but among people who believe in the cause, work toward inner/spiritual transformation continues until Divine Providence wills it that we all converge for a greater cause and impact. (Such) like-minded people will form no walls. Instead, a collective field always exists to connect and bring us all together.

One difference between the humans and the animals, supposedly, is self-consciousness and self-identity as distinct from other species or as distinct from the other individual incarnations of humans. From this emerges the phenomena of individual persons shielding their respective individual selves in shells or in cocoons they build around themselves.

The next stage of evolution may very well be the maturation of consciousness to really know, feel and experience collective self-consciousness, one that would give clear conceptual sense and obvious grammatical legitimacy to the word “ourself.”

To quote one of the earliest among four dozen or so texting participants in the survey, Prof. Jules Quinabo of the University of Sto. Tomas Social Research Center (UST-SRC):

Similarly, practicing artist Lia Torralba observes that “the first frontier that remains to be conquered are the walls that the ego puts up,” to which young journalist Dino Balabo’s mention of “superiority complex of some individuals” dovetails so well. Balabo adds that “society must outgrow prejudice and discrimination so that it may rise as a people to the challenges of the times.” Still, superiority complex is usually a disguise of something quite the opposite. Davao City Councilor Leo Avila III gives us a clue: “When man decided he is better off without God, he started building walls to protect himself from his own insecurities, inadequacies and fears. He grouped himself with others who shared the same fears and insecurities."

This is the vision about division – that it will all end. Nanding Josef says “walls are temporary, even non-existent, especially among people whose common goal is the improvement of the human being in his/her society.”

And the full reality of both human individual and collective identity will embrace each other, each of us, and all of us. Right now, let us resolve to seriously study all those divisive walls, in the few days that still remain before the plenary discussions of the 2nd Philippine Convergence for Human Synergy a week from now, and in the months, years and decades after that day.