Humanity will attain to a new mode of being and life through the free and unhampered interplay of pure love from heart to heart.

(Meher Baba)

…human civilization is amidst a metamorphosis that entails a dual process of breakdown of increasingly obsolete prevailing structures, and renewal through fundamental reorganization. This planetary phase shift could be the precursor to a new epoch of human evolution.

(Nafeez Ahmed)

Debí tirar más fotos... (I should have taken more photos...)

(Bad Bunny)

At age 82, I visited Puerto Rico again. The last time I was there was 7 years ago. I was walking again in old San Juan. It has been fifty years since I left. And of the previous thirty-two, I spent five studying abroad. So, 70 percent of my life, I have been outside the land where I was born and raised. And other parts of the world embraced my soul, and I learned to understand and feel what people from other cultures felt. And what once were written descriptions, images, and stories came to life.

Protesting as a student in the streets of Mexico in 1968, I would feel the Mexican national anthem in my veins. And walking through India, Kenya, or China, I identified with traditions and scenes that were incomprehensible in language and custom, yet I felt them in my heart. Not to mention the rest of the Caribbean or Latin America or Europe, where the language and vibrations resembled the rhythms of the beginning of my life, and the cultural differences were, like different points of view, from the same balcony.

Undergoing that planetary dilution, I began to appreciate the beauty of humanity's garden's diversity and to discover our common soul.

I used to go to Puerto Rico once in a while, on vacation, for weddings, funerals, or conferences, to that beautiful Caribbean island, where I was born. And I always felt its essence in me, because there I grew up, and became aware of my humanity, which I later recognized in the rest of the world, dressed in other colors, sprinkled with other flavors, and playing different musical instruments, but all was one orchestra playing the same symphony, even without knowing it.

Today, after this long life, my friends, those with whom one walks, shares, suffers, and sings, are scattered all over the planet, some living in the same surroundings they were born, and others like me, all over the place. But we are all in the same boat.

It is at our point of origin, when we are learning to play the particular musical instruments where one is born and grows, that one learns to listen to that universal song. Where the ability to tune in to the global symphonic concert is forged, and one realizes that we are all part of a single orchestra.

I revisited the San Juan that saw me born and raised. Only for three days. This time, accompanied by one of my daughters and one of my grandchildren. I do not know if it was the fact of the three generations, the depth of the different relationships, or being back with my 90-year-old sister, with close friends, some of them local, and with a dear friend from Costa Rica and her friend. But something was unleashed inside, beyond words, from that place where one listens to the inner music, the symphony of living.

On the first day, having just arrived, we went in the evening to walk through old San Juan. We walked the cobblestone streets, the same streets I walked as a child, teenager, and adult, before I left the island. And something happened to me.

I perceived the sunset, pouring magically over those old buildings, the bay, the cobblestones, the centuries-old streets, and the mixed garb of tourists and local passers-by. I felt in a multi-dimensional theater, with intermingled times, where chapters of a rerun serial film, depicting moments of my growth, were being projected simultaneously. I was reliving them from my octogenarian present, and at the same time experiencing them from my childhood, adolescence, and youth point of view. The Christmas windows when I was a child, of the González Padín store, the night rounds of my adolescence, my time living on Luna Street, the Plaza de Armas, life, and love.

I watched the film, while being part of it at the same time, realizing how that silent music of everyone in me was manifesting, how I was learning to listen to and play the song of humanity, with the instruments of the land in which I was born. I was there with my daughter, who has been living as a globetrotting gypsy like me for more than half her life, with my grandson, who has never lived there, and with my dear friend, the Costa Rican who fell in love with my country, as I did with hers.

It was quite an external and internal journey. A return and an awakening, an awareness of what I had walked and what I had learned, what I have forgotten, and what I failed to appreciate.

“Debí tirar más fotos…” When I was in that school, which taught me, not only to play the instruments available in my environment, but to recognize that music that makes us be, when we are elsewhere, even when it is played by other instruments.

Like a trip to Punta Islita in Guanacaste. Or the National Theater and the streets of San José, the streets of Coyoacán in Mexico, those of Guadalajara, Taxco, Guanajuato, Ahmednagar, Shanghai, Montreal, the Hutongs, and Tiananmen Square in Beijing. And so many, many beautiful places, Lima, Rio, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Antigua, Nairobi, Barcelona, Vincenza, and Dublin, and more. All playing at their own pace and with their unique instruments, the same song of humanity that I learned on my Island.

Somehow, I clearly realized on this trip, while enjoying the local flavor and the Caribbean rhythms, that the next stage of humanity will not follow that old model of the "melting pot", a foundry where several cultures dissolve into a dominant culture, but the model of the garden, where many traditions and cultures coexist and enrich the whole.

You can even see Australians and Japanese dancing to Bad Bunny and the rhythms of the Caribbean!

Those who analyze the evolution of human civilization, from a systems perspective, say that it is presently undergoing a metamorphosis. And that it entails a dual process of breakdown, of increasingly obsolete prevailing technology and the organizational structures of society, with a renewal through innovative technologies that are more in harmony with global ecosystems. This would require a fundamental social, organizational, and cultural transformation to co-create a new civilizational operating system, the precursor to a new epoch of human evolution.

There are already technologies and programs that would reduce the impact on nature’s systems and the ensuing disastrous effects on human communities. But as we can see, in the policies being adopted and pursued, those who are benefiting from the old extractive, energy production and mass production technologies are resisting change. Back to the past, calling scientific understanding of the impact of old technology a hoax, denying science.

But as Arundhati Roy said, the problem is not the autocratic leaders that are pushing this, but the system of selfishness and ignorance that is giving them the power to do so, by supporting them and allowing them to take over, in this crucial time of metamorphosis. As Meher Baba said, “… there can be no planned and co-operative action in economic matters, until self-interest gives place to self-giving love. Otherwise, with the best of equipment and efficiency in the material spheres, humanity cannot avoid conflict and insufficiency.”

Human societal structures, like in all evolving systems, when approaching transformation, experience strong resistance from the existing conformations. Economic industries, tied to the old system (like fossil fuels), have enormous capital invested and political influence, through lobbying and political financing. Autocratic leaders, financed by these economic interests, taking advantage of the fear and instability that civilizational changing moments bring, campaign to go back to the past, even when the past is gone and is unsustainable, and societal, economic, technological, and spiritual elements all point to an inevitable new future.

These retrograde forces of today blame the other cultures and races, as the planet connects like never before, as humanity is integrating, and dominant ethnicities and cultures are diminishing. Tribal and nationalist hegemonies are becoming things of the past. Along with production systems challenged by science, as they are undermining our global environment, the source of our life.

In my tropical sunset inner vision, I saw a new world, where connectivity and integration lead us to a planetary conversation. Where people learn the music of each other’s culture, marry across continents, maintain family ties across diasporas, and share local traditions globally. Today, humanity is beginning to share its identity beyond nationalities.

Yes, we will overcome the present labor pains associated with the birth of a new civilization. Humanity will indeed overcome its adolescence. And there will be a global human ethic, with regional cultural expressions, where intercultural families that are now growing vertiginously will function as bridges. A civilization with many rhythms and instruments, but playing a single melody.

I felt, watching the rerun movies of my youth and life, a future with a new civilizational moral belief, a humanity realizing that its survival and flourishing depend on recognizing and feeling that we are all in the same boat.

And that this feeling will spread, undoubtedly, and we will survive the current tantrums of those who are still attached to the past, and their models of selfish supremacy, and we will enter a new phase, a planetary culture, through a transformation comparable to a biological metamorphosis. This will involve new forms of collective intelligence, new cultural narratives, and new ethical frameworks based on empathy and mutual vulnerability.

And so, being and meeting with my daughter, my grandson, my 90-year-old sister, my dear Costa Rican friends, and my dear old friends from the backyard, I mixed them all in, with those old movies reruns in my mind, with scenes from San Juan, Coyoacan, Tiananmen, San Jose, Nairobi, Ahmednagar, etc., and my sick heart was healed with a new magic, resurrected by a song, that emerged from within the Silence, presaging a new human flourishing.