Rationale
Through all of its history, the human race had a vision about the future. The toltakemin Indians of Mexico call this vision “The dream of the planet”. The dream of the planet is made up from all the different dreams of people from all around the world.
This dream is really our reality. Through our dreams we make our reality. If our dreams are about power and greed such will be our reality.
Today our dream of the planet resembles more of a nightmare. Almost everywhere, today’s reality is harsh. Wars, bloodshed, hunger, disease, unrest. The reality on the individual level is also unpleasant. People all around are looking for meaning, for support, for community ties. The individual today feels that the world is an unloving and unwelcoming place.
In order to change this, people need a new and common dream around which they can build a better reality, one that will be more hospitable for the individual to live in.
This dream needs to be one that will appeal to people all around the world and it need to be something that is available for all. It needs to be something that anybody can achieve for himself because we live in an age where everybody wants to fulfill him or herself.
After thousands of years during which the dream of mankind was directed outward- toward exploring new frontiers and unknown lands and eventually also toward outer space- man eventually came to a point where his abilities fell short of his ambitions. It will take hundreds of years until the human race will start colonizing the planets. Today, the dream of an outward expansion no longer satisfies the people’s need for a common dream or vision. This is the reason why during the last decades peoples from all around the world started more and more to look for answers in the opposite direction-not outward but inward. Today’s new frontiers are not some far out frontiers to be conquered but rather they are the frontiers or barriers that lay within people and between peoples and nations that has to be broken in order for a new dream to emerge. This dream is the dream of the universal man and my project is aimed at advancing this idea and dream.
As I see it, the idea of universal man is the only thing that can stop the wild and ruthless competition between nations and cultures that is responsible for the sorry state of affairs in the world today. We already understand that we are one global village and that we need to cooperate and learn from each other in order to advance to the next level of human evolution, but we don’t understand the mechanism by which this advancement can be achieved. This mechanism lays in the idea of the universal man, an idea that was promoted mainly by Native Americans, and that was adopted and further advanced by Jung. I took it upon myself to try and put it into more practical and understandable terms. I did it by building a model of this universal man. My hope is that people all over the world will understand, through this model, that their destiny as individuals, nations and of our planet itself is depended on our ability to learn from one another and to learn how to became, all of us, a universal people.
The universal man (and of course, woman)
There are four colors of people: black, white, yellow and red. If you mix all those colors (or peoples) together you will get the universal man. The universal man is the mixture of those four colors which represent four distinct atomic cultures. Each color represent different cultural, mental, spiritual and even physical concept of life.
I call these four groups, the four color-cultures.
Black culture
Element: earth, Trait: body (and heart)
Black culture is the oldest. As the first born, this culture is represented by the most basic element of life which is the earth itself. This identification (with earth) is true not only symbolically. Earth is identified more than anything else with the physical body. It is said that we come from earth and to earth we return. The identification of Black culture with physical traits is expressed by black domination in the fields of sports and performing arts.
Being the oldest culture, and by keeping the tradition of living close to earth and nature, the black culture have the longest and deepest memory of us as human beings. This culture embodies two of the most elementary traits of the physical body and of human constituents: instincts and emotions. The natural feel and instinct that black people have for music and singing again represent the physical awareness that is part of this culture, for music require most of all good instincts and emotional sensitivity. From black culture we should learn about physical awareness and two of its most important expressions for us as humans: dancing (movement) and musicality.
The function of dancing in the pre-historic world was to allow communication with the powers of nature while the function of music and especially singing, has always been to communicate with other people. These two forms of communicating are still of a great importance for us to learn because modern man have largely forgotten how to communicate both with nature and with one another.
In an age where people don’t pay enough attention to what their body needs and communicate, we have a lot to learn from the black culture about feeling good in and with our body. In line with the saying “healthy soul in a healthy body”, our body also should be the first thing to be taken care of. Both chronologically and symbolically black culture represent the first stage of humanity.
White culture
Element: Air, Trait: mind (and brain).
The second stage of human evolution is its development of the cortex, the ability to rationalize. This development coincides with the immigration of part of the human race to the Middle East and Europe, where the white, western culture developed much later. The western culture is known also as the judeo-helenistic culture, pertaining to the two cultures that put the basis to abstract and rational thinking. White culture is mainly about directional (opposite to cyclic) and logical thinking. It is the culture of knowledge and science. Western philosophy and science are the dominant today. The western culture is also identified with the development of social moral code as represented by the Ten Commandments and the philosophy of ancient Greece.
The concept of monotheism- of one abstract god- is strongly connected to the development of abstract and rational thinking. Western monotheistic culture which is responsible to these developments of moral code and abstract and rational thinking, represent therefore the realm of the mind.
Yellow culture
Element: water, Trait: soul (body and mind).
All of creation is based on relations between opposites. Matter and energy are the two opposing elements between which the all cosmos exists. On the human level, body and mind are the two opposing elements which constitute our existence. Body represent matter and mind represent energy.
The third stage of our development, after acquiring body and mind, was to find the balance between these two elements. The realm of this balance between the two elements is the realm of the yellow culture.
Most of the techniques that deals with this balance like martial arts, meditations and yoga comes from Buddhism and the Far East. The symbol of ying and yang is by now a universal symbol of this balance between opposing elements.
This teaching is the gift of the yellow culture to the universal man. The world has come to recognize this gift during the 20’h century and the popularity of these techniques today all over the world speaks for itself. This balance is crucial for the future development of mankind, for imbalanced people means imbalanced development.
Red culture
Element: fire, Trait: spirit.
Balance is crucial but it is not enough. Balance by its nature is a passive state of things. You balance one element against the other and create equilibrium. But this equilibrium is in danger of becoming stagnant and frozen, and thus of becoming useless, if we do not make sure that it has the ability to be flexible and to respond and change according to the changes in life and reality. By reaching the third stage we achieve an organism that is balanced but now we need the final element or power to keep it in motion, and to keep it evolving. This power is the power of fire which ignites, push and keep things in motion. The ability of man to use and harness fire to his will is considered as the ability which made him superior to all other forms of life and which made possible the development of a human way of life. The myth of Prometheus symbolizes this fact. Today as well, the ability to use the element of fire will be the key for humankind to further develop the human way of life. But unlike the first form of using fire, which was practical, the future way of using the fire element as a key to the next stage of our development is not on the practical side of using fire but on the spiritual and mystical side of it.
The fire, by its nature, is a mystical phenomenon. Unlike the other basic, universal elements (earth, water and air) it has no constant presence in our life. It appears as if from nowhere by the will of nature, and after doing its deed it disappear again. It is not a substance and it has no physical and tangible existence, yet the results of its action in the physical world are very real and tangible. The mystical and spiritual quality of the fire is analogous to the spiritual and shamanistic attitude of the Indians of both America’s to life. This attitude regard life as a total experience that includes all the ingredients of reality plus the mystical side of life without which life can never be a whole or a total unity. In accordance to this philosophy it is not surprising that it was the Hopi Indian tribe of the red people that made the prophecy that the humankind will find its way to the next stage only when it will realize that the four color-cultures must all blend together.
