Please see here Dr. Michael Wilson Fox's article
A Vision: The Kingdom of Universal Compassion

I believe that we are on the evolutionary threshold of another kingdom: the kingdom of universal compassion and loving kindness toward all beings. This includes our enemies and other sentient beings whom we fear or hate, despise or revile. Charity, humility, equanimity, and devotion enable us to cross this threshold, but above all it is our passion for truth, justice, and others’ well-being (which is our enlightened own) that are the keys to this kingdom. It is not nirvana or bliss. It is simply reality, pure and purely Being, with all its beauty and suffering; and the moments of joy we experience when we participate in helping protect and nurture the life and beauty of the natural world, and work to prevent and alleviate the suffering of other sentient beings.

Life without service is like ethics without empathy, and justice without mercy. Reason alone does not make us human. René Descartes said, "I think therefore I am." But it is what we feel and for whom we feel that defines our humanity, because it is our feeling, our passion, that influences both reason and action, and what we value and wish for others.

The major spiritual element of passion is enthusiasm, a word derived from en-theos, the god within, meaning divine or spiritual inspiration. Passion for human and animal liberation is spiritually inspired for many, whose life and work have become one. Such oneness is a source of joy, inspiration, and renewal. But for those whose lives and work do not enjoy the same degree of ethical consistency and unified sensibility, the kingdom of universal compassion may be an alien realm that appears to be imbued only with piety, suffering, and inconceivable self-sacrifice: Or else they see it as some utopian dream of anarchists, like those who fly the flags of the Animal Liberation Front and Earth First!. Many potentially caring people seek to insulate themselves from reality in a cocoon of "happiness," never able to experience pure joy in good works because they would rather not run the risk of suffering or experiencing any kind of discomfort or deprivation. But in the superficial, make-believe kingdom of consumerism and materialism, under the veneer of happiness, lies a terrible emptiness of never feeling satisfied or fulfilled. There is also a sense of purposelessness that can lead to despair, alienation, depression, self-destructive behaviors, suicide, and irrational acts of extreme violence, as in the Columbine and other recent school massacres.

There are also many people who care, but can only donate money and cannot work "in the field," because it is too painful for them to witness the suffering and bear the reality. But simply donating money and not also changing lifestyles to live more gently may have more to do with feelings of guilt than with real concern.

Dissociation – Feeling Good and Doing No Good

Some years ago, psychologist J. B. Calhoun built a "rat universe" at the National Institute of Mental Health to study the effect of population growth in a confined space, but with adequate food and water. The rat population eventually reached a point where overcrowding stress resulted in much aggression, and stress-related diseases, including infanticide and rapid aging. The most "successful" rats, in terms of remaining sleek and fat, were those who appeared to totally ignore their surroundings and other rats. They evidenced dissociation as a way of coping, much like we see in humans who continue to live the good life in a make-believe world far removed from the "real" world of bioindustrialized wastelands where our toxic food is produced and away from the less fortunate majority, who live in the slums.

While dissociation may be an almost enviable coping strategy, such disconnectedness raises a simple and fundamental question. What do people live for? By contemporary standards of materialism, consumerism, and competitive individualism, the partially and often totally dissociated, who live only for themselves and for and through their children and other possessions, may be seen as being better off, more successful than those who are community-associated, and who live for each other, especially the rural peasantry and tribal peoples. But by the egalitarian and democratic standards of a more compassionate and cooperative society, dissociation means spiritual death. The spiritual anarchy and voluntary simplicity that the animal and human liberation movements embody is the antithesis of materialist anarchy, economism, and consumerism. Renunciation of a hedonistic life that is based on the pleasure principle of conspicuous consumption is perhaps the only hope for a just and sustainable global economy, and world peace.

The Black Hole

In the name of progress and humanitarianism, society condones experimenting on baboons to find cures for society’s drug addiction problems and experimentation on other animals for society’s other problems, like obesity, cancer, birth defects, and alcoholism; and to design better car seat belts and air bags, household cleaners, new cosmetics, and biological weapons to kill our own kind.

Those who regulate and perpetrate these kinds of atrocities against other sentient beings enlarge the black hole of human selfishness under the delusion of human altruism and concern for a suffering humanity. But only the hows and whats of these kinds of human suffering are addressed by the life science establishment that condones animal experimentation, animal suffering, and genetic engineering. The whys of disease and ways of prevention are ignored. Over a billion people in the world live in abject poverty, not simply because there are too many people on Earth. Billions more are victims and perpetrators of environmental disease, as one industrial sector pollutes their food and water, bodies, babies, and minds, and other sectors profit from the calamitous health and human services’ costs and consequences.

Black holes are not something imaginary. So far as astrophysicists have ascertained, they are a natural cosmological phenomenon in the realm of matter. And in the realm of spirit, we find the analog in the human psyche. One is in the spectrum of anti-matter, the other in the spectrum of anti-life. The life science industrial complex is in this entropic spectrum, hoping for great profits, scientific and technological progress, and for the more ethically inclined, some good as well: but at what price indeed?

How profits, progress, and the social good are defined and the means by which these ends are achieved can be used to calibrate the degrees of good and evil in any culture. The more chaos that arises out of each black cultural hole, the more evil we find: wife beating and mutilation, child slavery and prostitution, violence and injustice, gross animal cruelties, all compounded by official indifference, public inertia, and spiritual corruption.

I do not believe that one can be a humanitarian – genuinely and effectively care for the well-being of people – if one does not genuinely and effectively care for animals and the environment, the well-being of which determines to a large measure, the health and prosperity of society. There are those who put free trade and material values before human rights. Others put farm animal productivity before animals’ well being, and "land development" and other forms of resource expropriation and exploitation before local, national, and global social stability, economic sustainability, and the overall public good. These examples of anti-humanitarian activities have a long history and as history informs, they have contributed to the collapse of one bioregional civilization after another.

Now our civilization is no longer bioregional. It is global and its collapse and transformation will be global. We are on the threshold of this transformation as we witness the accelerating collapse of once sustainable biocultural regions around the world under the terminator frenzy of unbridled capitalism, industrialism, consumerism, ethical illiteracy, and historical amnesia. What is to come may have no history to repeat: A new beginning and a new covenant for all of humanity with the Kingdom of Universal Compassion that is illumed by powers we barely comprehend that are all around us, within us, beneath us, and above us.

The Spiritual Whole

When we each and all can face the truth, put down our masks and accept the fact that we are all one, and that we humans are the only gateway for evil to enter and possess the world, black holes will cease to grow. To be truly human means to be a moral agent and to confront the reality of evil. Evil manifests itself in genocide, war, in the daily life of humans exploiting animals, and in the exploitation of one human by another, sexually, economically, or politically. Followers of Christ’s teachings believe that Christ-centered action is the truth that will prevent evil from spreading all over the world. In our heartfulness, there is less and less space for evil to flourish as we become part of the boundless circle of compassion’s light. But for this collective transformation to begin, we need the courage and mindfulness to live fully in the here and now. By trusting life and letting go of all our attachments to our fears and selfish desires and to our myriad expectations and preconceptions, we then become authentic and free, natural beings.

Letting go can be extremely difficult. It entails an attitude of assent and submission to the higher powers of compassionate love and understanding. It often involves great suffering through personal introspection, forgiveness and atonement, and openness to others, including their sufferings, limitations, malevolence and ignorance, as well as their wisdom and love.

Evil flourishes in the black hole of the collective human psyche so long as we remain closed to others, cutting ourselves off from being close because of some fear – of being hurt, rejected, abandoned; or fear of feeling others’ pain and distress, and not wanting to suffer empathically and care enough to help. Or perhaps we feel responsible for others’ plight, helpless maybe, and sometimes even guilty. Or we are afraid of being eccentric, radically separating ourselves from a sick society. Some over-react with violence.

People naturally don’t want to suffer, so they will avoid feeling another’s suffering. But this anti-empathy reaction severs the heart’s connection with others, which is the opposite of what all people yearn for and need in order to be well, to feel connected, secure, and loved. It seems as though the worse things get, the less people want to know. Because to know, calls for action. Also to know can evoke the intense discomforts of guilt, shame, helplessness, and despair.

Those who enjoy seeing and making others suffer are trying to obliterate their own suffering, which may be manifested in the evils of rape, murder, and of animal torture; in the lust for power and control; in the insatiable craving for status and recognition; and in possessiveness, jealousy, vanity, and various addictions and obsessions. In such states there is no heart connection with compassion, no empathic understanding, no presence of being in relationship, or of any sense of universal selfhood. Low self-esteem can lead to evil, just as evil often arises from excessive self-esteem. Love flows, and we are healed and made whole, when we esteem the sanctity of others equally with our own divinity.

Without love to give children a sense of self worth, the heart of conscience, their awareness, and their ability to consider the consequences of their actions and beliefs, cannot develop normally. Love as adoration awakens the divinity within us all, our sense that there is something sacred, not only in ourselves but in all selves. A community of conscience is a community of hope and of compassion that neither judges others nor moralizes, and is a community of benevolence whose members neither horde nor steal. Before we really love ourselves, we must first love our neighbors as ourselves, including all our neighbors from other kingdoms and domains. That is the true meaning of the Golden Rule, which seems to have been turned around in practice to mean "those with the gold, rule."

Mindfulness or self-discipline is a prerequisite of nonviolence and of not harming others inadvertently. The goal is not to suppress feelings of anger and hurt, but acknowledge the anger and not break out in anger to hurt others. To act in anger and harm others is contrary to the humanitarian ethics of humility, pity, mercy, and loving kindness. It is from the very will-to-live-core of our being -- where we suffer and rejoice in our being – that we connect through empathic understanding and compassionate action, with the same core in all other sentient beings, human and nonhuman. For the good of the entire Earth community, we must start making this heart-centered connection, because if we do not, the black hole of evil will consume the world.

As suffering in the world increases and the stresses of living take their toll on each of us, we tend to disconnect as a way of coping. Now is the time to reconnect, to rediscover and redefine what it means to be human, and to be true to our good and divine natures as we recognize the sanctity of all beings by treating them with reverence. The passion of animal, Earth, and human liberation is a call to humanity to reconnect and to be liberated from the Black Hole of human ignorance, arrogance, hatred, fear and greed.

Dr. Michael W. Fox