The principle that could help us improve our lives and solve our problems

Question from the Internet:

“What is a slogan that promotes respect and tolerance of other cultures all over the world?”

I am not sure about slogans and how much they can achieve.

But there is a well-known principle that even most religions and spiritual teachings agree on: "we have to come to love others as we love ourselves”.

Now, this sounds high and mighty, and although we have known this principle for millennia, we have never actually implemented it in practice.

This principle starts with accepting and treating others as we accept and treat ourselves, or at least not causing harm to others as we would not want to cause harm to ourselves.

And even this “reduced” version of the principle (not to cause harm) proves to be too difficult or outright impossible. We simply cannot love or care for anybody else but ourselves and whoever we admit into our “close inner circle”.

We are all born with an inherently and automatically self-serving, self-justifying, individualistic and exploitative nature. Knowingly or unknowingly, we survive and succeed at each other’s expense. Moreover, we actually enjoy it when we gain and rise higher while others lose and fall.

On the other hand, as we started to understand and feel unless we build a global, positive, mutually responsible and mutually complementing human community, we will not survive even past this generation.

Thus without actually understanding and implementing the principle of “loving others as ourselves” — above and against our instinctive nature — we will not be able to solve problems and safeguard our collective survival. And in Nature’s fully integrated and interdependent system, within the “locked together” global humanity, there is no individual or national survival at the expense of others or without them.

So in order to start acting and existing above and against our instincts, we need a unique, purposeful and practical educational method. With the help of this educational method, we have to come to such tangible and visceral sensations that we are actually single cells of the same living organism.

Only then will this principle of “loving others as ourselves” make sense, since we will feel everybody outside of ourselves as our own integral parts.