The value of the human being (#697)

I stand tall and strong, pound my chest and say I am human and I am alive. Why do I do this? It is to remind myself that I have value. I am not some rock or microbe of insignificance, I am a human being who is capable of thinking and acting. I am just like every other human who can think and act. It is important to have intelligence about knowledge but it isn't what is the most valuable quality. Of greater value, what I contend to be our two natural instincts, are compassion and curiosity for all. Our baseline that defines who we are is what is natural to us. All other things are the journey we travel. At our core we are defined by understanding that we care for each other and we want to know things. Compassion and curiosity are the impetus for us to begin our movement, all other things are the momentum to keep us going. Only because we have care for each other and wonder about all that is around us are we able to use knowledge and the intelligence it provides us. What gets lost in this existence and how we developed our society is that material and prestige have somehow risen to greater value than the human entity. Wars, throughout the human record of life, have been fought for less noble ideals than the value of life. We have been taught that to trade life for materials is necessary and expected. Somehow our focus had been deviated from living in harmony with all of existence into hate and fear. It is my contention that in the denial of compassion and/or curiosity lesser human traits are allowed to develop. So how did the absence of compassion and curiosity originally happen? I can only assume that our ancient ancestors were, through some act, denied their care and/or wonder by some confusion or chaos. It is by default, my position that hate and fear were learned behaviors and not instinctual. Some event must have caused the fertile ground for our now prominent lesser natures of hate and fear to grow. Only in recognizing this knowledge can we have the hope to bring ourselves back to our original instincts. This is obviously my own opinion.