What is the human being?

Who are we? Every culture, every knowledge system, and every person seeks an answer. Most of the understandings are insular, held hostage by a certain kind of viewpoint. Nonetheless, the contributions of the worldís sciences, comprised within the theory of increasing evolution, offer us complete and all-encompassing viewpoints, including us as one moment in the global, physical, biological and cultural process. But they did not silence the matter. On the contrary, they intensified it.

But, who are we? The human being is a manifestation of the basic state of energy from which everything comes (the quantum void), a cosmic being, part of a universe among other parallel ones, articulated in new dimensions (the link theory), formed by the same physical and chemical elements and by the same energy that makes up all beings, an inhabitant of the galaxy, one among two hundred billion, dependent on the Sun, a fifth category star, one among three hundred billion others, located 27 thousand light years from the center of the Milky Way, near the inside branch of the Orion spiral, who lives on a tiny planet, Earth.

We are a link in the only chain of life, an animal of the vertebrate branch, sexed, of the mammalian species, of the order of primates, of the hominid family, of the homo genus, of the sapiens/demens species, endowed with a body made up of 30,000 million cells, continually being renewed through a genetic system formed over 3,800 million years, bearing three brain levels with ten to one hundred million neurons — the reptilian brain, which emerged almost 200 million years ago, around which the limbic brain formed 125 million years ago, and completed finally by the neocortical brain which emerged about 3 million years ago and with which we organize the world conceptually, bearing a psyche as old as the body, which allows man to be subject, a psyche structured around desire, ancient archetypes and all sort of emotions, and crowned by the spirit which is that moment of awareness when he feels part of the whole, which makes him always open to the other and the infinite, capable of creating and understanding meanings and values and asking himself questions about the ultimate meaning of Everything, now in his planetary phase, steering towards the noosphere, towards which minds and hearts are converging in a unified humanity.

No one expressed the complex being that we are better than Pascal (+ 1662): "For, finally, what is the human being in nature? He is nothing in comparison with the infinite, and everything in comparison with nothingness, a middle term between all and nothing. He is infinitely severed from comprehending the extremes; the end of things and their principle are for him invincibly hidden in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he arises and the infinity into which he is engulfed." The three infinities cross paths in him: the infinitely small, the infinitely large, and the infinitely complex (Teilhard de Chardin). All this being true, we feel incomplete and still emerging. And in spite of this we feel that we are an infinite project that demands its adequate object, also infinite, named God.

And we are mortal. It costs us to welcome death within the life and drama of human destiny. Through love, through art and through faith we have a sense that there is something beyond death. And we suspect that in the final balance of things, a small gesture of true love that we have made is worth more than all the matter and energy of the universe taken together. Therefore believing and hoping in God only makes sense if He is felt as the prolongation of love in an infinite way.

Free translation from the Spanish provided by AnneFullerton@mybluelight.com. Done in Arlington, VA in cooperation with Refugio del Rio Grande, Texas.