Yesterday—fifty-nine years ago—the world I had known for the first 17 years of my life exploded. It was blasted to smithereens, thanks to the experiences and travel opportunities that opened for me through the United States Air Force. Within just a few months I discovered that all of life is interrelated. That the world is of one piece. That people are people everywhere even though living in different lands, cultures, and religious expressions. I learned that the God I had known and experienced in the small world of my youth was not my possession, nor was that God limited to a particular country, creed, people or geography. It blew my mind! It shattered the world I had known and it has impacted every “next step” I have taken since.
Would this new world have dawned upon me if I had stayed in that little world of my childhood years? I don’t know. Shakespeare never left England as far as we know, but this new world that dawned upon me so many years ago also opened for him. This is evident in following quote:
“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?”
What was it that enabled Shakespeare to see that all of life is interrelated and that the world is of one piece? He never left his homeland. No records exist of his traveling abroad. Traditionalists argue that Shakespeare could have gotten his knowledge (awareness) from foreigners living in London or from reading.
On the other hand, there are those who have traveled all over the world, but do not see that world as I do—that all of life is interrelated and that it is of one piece. How they have missed it, I do not know. At the same time, there are those who, like Shakespeare, have never traveled the world and yet know that all of life is interrelated and that this world is of one piece.
So strange—some see and some do not.
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