All human life is valuable. Every human has the potential, at birth, to become anything under the sun. We are all under the same laws of nature and laws of the land and common law. Justice is blindfolded and equal to all. No one has bluer blood or entitlement by ancestry to any more special preference than any other person. That is the bottom line ultimately.
We may claim entitlement due to the experiences of our ancestors, but our ancestors are gone. We must stand on our own merit, every individual one of us. Leaning on the past is a cop out. We all have a bad past, most new worlds are built by our ancestors who migrated there once upon a time, out of necessity or curiosity.
The Vikings raided the UK. The UK raided the new world of the Americas. The USA raided Hawaii. This is just a small example of how life unfolds. Here in my land of birth, my ancestors from Europe settled on the south coast of Africa, settlers and colonizers. Yet the black South African also had ancestors who migrated here from central Africa in search of better grazing land. We all migrated here and live under the same laws of nature.
So who really can claim entitlement to anything based on past ancestry? It's like me saying that because my distant ancestors are white, I can automatically go claim EU citizenship. Even if those ancestors were several generations back. The EU won't take me. It doesn't work that way. We all have our lot by birth, and can better it if we choose, based on our merit. That is how the laws of nature and common law work.
Crying for retribution for past wounds that you did not even experience personally, is a child's way of looking for a cheap trick, an easy way out, free from personal effort or responsibility. This is true for South Africans, for Middle Easterners and Indigenous people all over the world.
The world changes all the time. Borders get redrawn after wars for territory, as it has always been. Claims can never be made really. We have moved on from yesterday. Some try to go back and reclaim the land their ancestors held for a time, but time is flowing, even if land sits still.
Time and civilizations move on and many are crushed under the steamroller of history and the battles of tribes for territory. Do you even know who lived on your ancestral land before your ancestors? We are all here temporarily. We should rather live on our merits now, today, not cling to the entitlement of our ancestors.
I have no claim to anywhere other than where I was born, according to the laws of the land at this point in history. Of course refugees continue to migrate and become settlers in new lands even today, as we see in the EU and USA, among others. Or here in South Africa, where migrant workers from neighboring countries come to earn a better wage. But they earn that wage on their merits and they migrate legally.
Jumping the fence or national border is illegal without the proper channels, or at least documentation, so that the nation can know how many people it holds. Controls are there for the system to work well for everyone.
If I wish to migrate, I must prove that I am worthy, I must do it on my own merit, either in proof of funds or proof of work skill. If fleeing from oppression is your motive for migrating, then that's to be done via legal process. No one is entitled to take the law into their own hands. And if the law seems unlawful to you, then change it along the proper channels where laws are made. Do it on your own merit, with your own better laws.
That is the beauty of our world. The laws of nature apply to all of us equally. No one is royal any more. Very few people give a royal person any deference just because of what their parents are. If they do, then they are under the spell of a monarchy that is outdated and has no logic to it in a merit-based civilization, which is the ethical system to practice.
There is little place left on the planet for monarchies and privileged bloodlines. Those that remain grow weaker in stature and credibility by the day. Many are symbolic and ceremonial at best. Certainly genetics does allow some to inherit traits that others may lack. That's biology. Yet the individual still needs to show by their own merit that they are skilled. The son of a high court judge can never simply take the bench in a court of law. The daughter of a surgeon will never be allowed to operate on a person simply due to bloodline. She must qualify.
Similarly the Indian caste system, where a person is condemned to life under the spell of their parent's bloodline, is misused, wrongly interpreted and totally outdated in its current use, as are all such systems of merit on bloodline alone. The proper use of any system of segregation or discrimination is by merit and qualities.
And those qualities may stem from nature or genes, but they primarily are molded by nurture, or the way in which we were raised in our formative years. Anyone, even the child of a shoemaker, can become the president of the country, if they have the qualification. And they are never disqualified simply due to bloodline. That is how is works ideally.
That said, all humans are originally good. We are born good. The potential for good is in every one of us at birth. However, it is upbringing and life experience that mold us to become bad, or to miss out on expressing our best talents. No child born should ever be condemned before they get a chance to prove themselves.
And all should get that chance. Along with the proper upbringing and education that allows for their best nature to emerge. The person is usually not inherently faulty, it is their upbringing or nurturing that is failing them if they fall into bad ways.
Everyone has a talent for something or the other, and a healthy society will know how to channel its people into productive lifestyles that can bring out the best in everyone by remembering that everyone has the potential, if they are just given the opportunity and guidance.
THE ACHINTYA BHEDA-ABHEDA TATTVA
By Jas Das Babaji
CHAPTER 7: The Ethics of No-Ego
On Morality Without the Moralist
1. You are not God, yet you are not other than God—like a drop of the ocean contains the same saltwater as the infinite sea, yet cannot claim to be the entire ocean.
2. This is achintya bheda-abheda, the inconceivable simultaneous oneness and difference that Ramanujacharya taught: the soul (atma) and the Supersoul (Paramatma) are one in quality but eternally distinct in quantity, like the sunray and the sun share the same luminous nature yet differ in magnitude.
3. Humility is not self-hatred but mathematical precision—you are a holographic fragment containing the whole image, yet you remain a fragment; you are infinite in essence, finite in expression.
4. The fractal reveals the secret: each smallest iteration contains the pattern of the infinite whole, yet zooming out shows you are one of countless iterations—simultaneously essential and humble, unique and universal.
5. When you realize you are simultaneously the wave and the ocean, ethics arises naturally—not from commandments written on stone but from the impossibility of harming what you recognize as yourself wearing a different form.
6. Yet you cannot claim to be the Whole and dismiss others as mere fragments—for each fragment is equally holographic, equally contains the divine pattern, equally deserves the reverence you would show to God himself.
7. The ego says "I am the ocean, and you are merely drops"; wisdom says "I am a drop containing the ocean's nature, and so are you"—this second understanding generates genuine equality.
8. Why not behave selfishly if there is no separate self? Because you are not separate, yet you remain distinct—like the hand that would never strike the foot, though both serve different functions in one body.
9. The Eightfold Path, the Sermon on the Mount, the Five Pillars, the Confucian reciprocity—all say the same truth in different languages: treat others as yourself because they are yourself, but differently expressed.
10. A hand that refuses to feed the mouth starves itself; a mouth that refuses to speak for the hand silences its own defender—the body functions through differentiated cooperation, as does the cosmic body of all beings.
11. Laws must protect this sacred paradox: each individual is infinitely valuable (containing the whole) yet no individual is more valuable than another (each contains the same whole)—equality and uniqueness dance together without contradiction.
12. You are small before the Source like a candle flame before the sun, yet your flame is made of the same fire—this recognition births humility without worthlessness, confidence without arrogance.
13. So act from this double vision: honor the God in every being (for they are qualitatively divine), yet remember you are quantitatively minute (and so is everyone else)—from this paradox flows ethics without the ethicist, morality without the moralist, love without the lover, action without the actor, and justice that serves the whole by honoring each irreplaceable part.
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