Meeting The Human Diversity Challenge

Contents

1. The Cosmic Dimension of Diversity Management

2. The Age of Diversity: Chance and Challenge. Its Implication for Human Society

3. The Relativity of Diversity

Annex: Quotations Relative to Diversity

1 The Cosmic Dimension of Diversity Management

Understanding the cosmic roots of man, expanding the vision macroscopically, helps us to understand the microscopic culture slots by establishing the connection between the macro-programme and the culture programmes via the culture slots. It helps us to understand and transcend cultural programmes, even civilisations past, present and future.

We have to start by understanding the rationale of diversity. Diversity is a necessity, simply a design principle of nature. Homogeneousness rather is a pre-creation, pre-cosmic, pre-big bang state of indifferentiation, of chaos. The time-space construct, which underlies our universe implies diversification for the purpose of materialisation, whereas pre-materialization and dematerialization stages both transcend "space-time" as well as diversity and are a return to unity: with the Creator, the entity that designed for some reason of dialectical growth the diversity principle, best suited for synergy in evolution, or with all consciousness of which different stages of materialization are only different degrees of condensation of this All Consciousness, the Unified Field of Time-Space-Consciousness continuum, or with nature, the world of particles or of waves. They are metaphors of the Highest Level Programme conceivable, The Ultimate Command and Control Platform, which according to recent Nobel Prize Laureate Ilya Prigogine (Nobel Prize Laureate of Chemistry, for instance) at the interface between, physics, chemistry and mathematics is neither deterministic nor aleatory but a middle path of creative probabilism. As the highest platform it, so to speak, controls and runs phylogeny and ontogeny, of which the civilisations of past, present and future and last but not least the cultures are the diversified aspects, with the highest differentiation of the individual entity, the individual identities (the individual entities with distinctive id-entities) Dialectics, materialization and differentiation are among the commands of this, metaphorically speaking, ultimate conceivable program, the game of involution and evolution. The Cosmic Dimension is a continuum with the two poles of evolution and involution. The spirals of this ladder are the various programming levels referred to. The command lines of the programmes execute the principles of differentiation in manifestation. The ultimate rationale is eschatological in nature.

So, this diversity is natural and an a priory inbuilt and necessary corollary of existence - its sine qua non. In this sense one may say that diversity is anti-entropic, because it fulfils the principles of the cosmic dimension, the principle of life. Homogeneousness, indifferentiation would therefore be entropic, the return to the source on the evolution-involution continuum. The biological and the quantum paradigms referred to in the exposés are simply the command lines, the active principle of the cosmic dimension.

Once diversity becomes thus self-evident one has laid the cognitive foundation for not fighting it, but rather to welcome it as it humbly fulfils that law of existence in the "space-time" of our part of the cosmos. Once, this is established as the sine qua non of existence, one may understand the imperative need of not fighting it, of not turning something natural into something unnatural and thus creating a false problem. Through this lack of knowing and understanding – the ancient scholars and sages called avidya (ignorance in Sanskrit) the greatest evil of man – through this primary false assumption with regard to the nature of diversity, man creates the greater part of his problems himself. The key is in man’s awareness and consciousness of this condition. This is the “condition humaine”, the human condition, which he can manage, while others are more difficult to control. Transforming the avidya into vidya (knowing in Sanskrit) with regard to the condition humaine has been paraphrased by the prophet of the Old Testament when he referred to the transformation of the weapon into the plough. Why? Because diversity becomes a fertile instrument of life giving synergy instead of a permanent cause of casus belli, due to the ignorance of the nature and function of the diversity principle. As natural as eating and drinking, why fight it and turn it into a weapon once you have seen the universal need for it?

We have been starting out by saying that cultural programming begins from the cradle and before and that you have been given that one life via the two arms of the creator represented by father and mother. Involving the cosmic dimension is nothing neither more nor less than to consider the source and the destination, the whence and the where to. Intercultural science teaches us that one pole refers and points to the other. In this case the manifested is one pole, the non-manifested is the other. This is the continuum of life. Ignoring one pole may be considered, again, single principle imperialism, ignoring one part of the conditioning equation, the visible and the invisible, the cultural and the universal, nay the cosmic. Involving the cosmic dimension is then a logical need for holistic understanding of the two aspects, the synergies of life itself, which can be tapped by integrating the two programs, the visible and the invisible, the roots and the tree, the rivers and the ocean, the entire cycle of existence. Looking at one pole only, looking at a fragment of the entire field and space of existence there is only diversity and often incompatibility through mismanaged diversity, which often translates as inter-factional strife. But diversity is the sine qua non of the time-space manifestation of life.

[...]